The long Trek out of homophobia ain't over yet, apparently

Welcome to 2009 ... and business as usual. The new harddrive is on and working, even as I type this: the gizmos are backing up about 100GB of stored stuff into a corner of the Tb space. Nice. Gives one the illusion of being in control (the truth being very different).

I was wandering around on the Internet a couple of days ago, following links to and from who knows where, and came upon this, at After Elton: http://www.afterelton.com/blog/michaeljensen/star-trek-fan-boys-react-set-phasers-to-whine ... after all these bloody years, you just don't believe it can still be going on ... homophobia among Trek fans. Still. Now. Forty years down the track. Incredible, isn't it?

What goes on, you ask? Well, there's a semi-pro fourth season of the original series (with Kirk, Spock, et al), in front of the cameras. Strictly non-profit, which is why Paramount turns the provebial blind eyes and deaf ears. But it's good enough that a couple of the original actors (Takei and Koenig) have been in episodes, and David Gerrold -- out gay screenwriter to whom we can credit some of the best Trek shows, including the iconic Trouble with Tribbles -- has reworked an old script into something new -- and, from where I'm sitting, terrific -- for the current show.

The story so far (in a thimble) is that Gene Roddenberry planned a spinoff show with Kirk, Spock et all, called Star Trek: Phase II. It was nothing to do with the Next Generation, and would have been shot in something like the eary 1970s. One of the episodes developed for that show was "Blood and Fire" by David Gerrold. The show was never made, but when the semi-pro crew got going with Phase II, the producer (who also plays the part of James T Kirk in the show) had the presence of mind to contact Gerrold and ask if there was any chance of the old episode being reworked and ... filmed.

Intrigued? So was I. Now, to be perfectly candid, I haven't yet see any of the Phase II shows. The last Trek I watched was about half of Voyager, before work and travel got in the way -- I still haven't seen most of it. I also missed three-fourths of DS9 for the same reason. I've seen all the movies, and liked almost all of them. I grew up on classic Trek, but have to admit that the jingoism and Hollywood-ness of some of the 1960s-style episodes make them borderline unwatchable to me, now, today. So I'm pretty darned qualified to talk about this and say --

At last! At bloody last, after 40 years, A GAY TREK EPISODE HAS BEEN MADE! It's wonderful that this has been done; it's a tribute to Gerrold, and the producers of the show, and as soon as I have my computers set up properly again, I shall be downloading all these episodes (there are three or four so far, with Gerrold's episode being the third or fourth). But --

Right on cue, at least some of the fans responded to the gay storyline with the same old homophobia we've come to expect from Trek people. The producers, writers and actors might have dragged themselves into the epoch of human rights, but the fans are still saying things like this: "I think the episode would have been better without the gay scene. In fact, I think you could have replaced the Freeman character with a woman, and very little of the drama would be removed. Having the gay scene means, as a father, I’m not sure if my eight-year-old son should watch this episode. He’s seen and enjoyed all the others. I’ve never had to worry about screening anything Star Trek before. ... I also think the gay storyline is the least interesting thing about the episode." And this: "What the hell is with the two guys dry-humping each other?? I’m sorry, but I’ve just lost a TON of respect for the Phase Two guys. Pushing blatant homosexuality in our faces is NOT the kind of Star Trek I want to watch! >:o( Completely uncalled for and not in the spirit of Star Trek. Disgusting!!"
http://www.afterelton.com/blog/michaeljensen/star-trek-fan-boys-react-set-phasers-to-whine

Well ... shucks. Why am I surprised? So long as it's females being turned into sex objects ... for example the Borg lady with the superstructure that comes through the door ten minutes ahead of the rest of her ... it's all fine and dandy; but let a gay couple express affection, and it's "disgusting," is it? Hmmm. I wonder if this qualifies as "the language of hate."


Anyway, if you're interested, go over the the show's own site and check it out. (You can also download for free; the episodes are shared around via P2P. If you don't have a "P2P client," don't even think about paying money for a service. Download Opera: it has P2P client software onboard.)

Here's the new Trek show's own page: http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/, and here is the Opera page, to get the browser with the built-in P2P routine: http://www.opera.com/

A quick word to Aussie fans: if you want these shows, or at least the gay episode(s), get in fast, because when "the Great Aussie Firewall" goes up in about two weeks, P2P is probably going to be inaccessible to Australians. The government and critics are calling it a "BitTorrent" lockout, but "BitTorrent" is more than likely a generic term. I should think they mean "P2P" as a whole. In which case, loads of sites are going to go invisible and stay that way, very soon. Now, that's what I call disgusting.

More on the Aussie Internet censorship here: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/christmas-is-here-internet-filtering-is.html
and especially here:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/save-internet-get-into-petition.html

Ciao for now,
MK

Writers, inspiration, and recycled ideas

I was asked a few days ago, "Do writers recycle their ideas?" And the answer is yes, they do. Do they do it at the professional level? Yup. Do they recycle the ideas of other writers? Yup! And why in the world do we do it?

Well, partly because there's no such thing as a unique idea, and when you've typed your byline on upwards of fifty or sixty novels, novellas, and short stories -- well, you're going to be very hard pressed to find a topic or treatment that's absolutely new.

And partly because some writer, somewhere, has absolutely, positively, written the same story you're about to write ... but you, your publisher and your readers just don't know it.

Take THE LION KING. Everyone's favorite family movie, right? You think it was an original idea or story? Wrong. It was lifted wholesale from a 1960s Japanimation TV series produced for young kids, KIMBA THE WHITE LION.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion

Obviously, Disney did it better (duh), but the question was not about who executed the idea better, it was about who got the idea first! I'd hope some money changed hands, and the original Japanese studio that produced Kimba was paid a fair price for having their idea redeveloped -- because THE LION KING is a clone of KIMBA in every important respect.

The same writer can also recycle an idea. For example, British TV writer Brian Clemens wrote two scripts, about 17 years apart, one for The Secret Agent, one for The Professionals ... based on the same idea -- but developed very differently, with a completely different resolution.

The reader might also suspect recycled ideas when s/he can spot various elements in a new book which reflect elements from one or twenty old books. Take STAR TREK as an example. You think it was absolutely original, in every way shape and form? You haven't seen FORBIDDEN PLANET, which was the leading SF movie about ten years before ST made its debut. Don't believe me? You'll have to watch it yourself and see the uncanny similarities! http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Planet-Walter-Pidgeon/dp/B00004RF9B

(Incidentally, the rights to FP changed hands a year or so ago ... a remake could be in the offing.

Old ideas can be recycled to great effect. George Lucas was heavily criticized, when STAR WARS came out, for lifting imagery from all parts of the spectrum. Luke Sywalker was recognized as D'Artagnon, Han Solo was recognized as the Clint Eastwood archetype ... sexual symbolism was spied in the attack on the Death Star by the X-wing fighters (think sperms and ovum, and you have it), Tatooine was instantly recognized as Dune, Darth Vader was a skull in a German "coal scuttle" helmet from World War II ... the Imperial officers are all wearing "nasty" uniforms reminiscent of Maoist China ... and as the ultimate slap on the wrist, in 1977 someone was old enough to recall having seen a Nazi propaganda flick called Triumph of the will, which was clearly the inspiration for the film's closing sequence:

	Screenshots from Triumph of the Will ... don't have a copy, but have been hearing about it since SW came out!

So, writers' ideas can be recycled over and over ... the same is true in music, too, where composers of current film scores routinely borrow theme, cadence and orchestration from the classics ... but who's going to know, since classical music is almost a taboo in today's world. Admit that you listen to Beethoven or Richard Strauss or Vaughan Williams, and you might as well wear a tattoo on your forehead saying, "Look at me, I'm a nerd."

And recycling ideas is no actually a bad thing, so long as writers don't do it ad nauseam, in place of genuine creativity.

Now, pulp fiction has grooves it gets into ... you can tell from a mile out when someone is rewriting Lord of the Rings with minor changes (heroines instead of heroes, witches instead of wizards, come right out and call the fell beasts dragons, fight goblins and 'svart alfa' instead of orks and urukhai). You can tell from a mile out when someone is "doing" TREK ... it's the United States Navy In Space, with "yessir," "nossir," and a command hierarchy that'd drive a non-military mind bonkers in one afternoon...

But when recycling is done right, it has much to recommend it. Take for instance the classic Italian cinema. For decades they made, and probably still make, more movies than Hollywood. They have their own incredible national history to drawn on, and generations of writers and directors fed swashbucklers through the cameras. A lot of them are twaddle ... some of them aren't. Some of them are little gems, founded on fantastic ideas.

Now, a fantastic idea from a classic Italian historical, made in 1962 and lost in time. Where's the harm in recycling its idea? The movie has been lost in antiquity. Few people these days even want to watch the massive Hollywood blockbusters from the 1950s, let alone overdubbed Italian movies of the same era! (And it's a great loss, because there are some outstanding movies from the time. Try Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, which boats the longest motion picture swordfight in the history of film ... not to mention that in 1952 Granger was only 39 and tasty ... very tasty ... six foot three, dark as a gysy and, uh, stacked. Or try The World in his Arms, with Gregory Peck at age 37, a schooner race to the Aleutian islands, and punch-ups galore.)

Some of the best ideas are buried in 50-year-old "foreign" cinema (I use quotation marks there because they're not foreign if you happen to be a native to Rome or Beijing, Mumbai or Tokyo!) and I see nothing wrong with resurrecting an idea.

Like ... do you know that Indiana Jones was lifted right out of a 1954 Charlton Heston movie? Heston was Jones, fedora, revolver and all. I've seen it a couple of times: Secret of the Incas. I wish I had a copy, but it hasn't been aired down here in Aus since before the age of video recorders, never mind DVD recorders!

Don't believe me? Got 90 seconds to spare? Watch the clip on YouTube ... when "Jones" enters the shot, walking away from the camera, you might just not believe your eyes!



So, yes, all writers borrow ideas. Good writers redevelop the material so thoroughly, however, that it's barely recognizable, and only people (like Keegan) who have looooong memories, will know what's been done. Like, the way Clive Cussler took a 1941 B&W British comedy called The Ghost Train ... and turned it into a bestselling Dirk Pitt novel, Night Probe.

And before anybody says anything smart -- no, I'm not that bloody old!! Well, not yet, anyway. My mother was a movie buff. I was weaned on classic movies that were already ancient before I was born ... and I have a very, very long memory, almost a "trick" memory, but not quite ... which is to say, I'm supposed to get four things from the store this afternoon, and ... darned if I can remember more than three of them...

Ciao for now,
MK

Groundhog Planet

You know the Bill Murray movie, where he's a network weatherman, and every day he wakes up on the day of the blizzard that isolates Punxsutawney (and yes, that IS how you spell that), and has to live the same day thousands of times over, and in the course of that time he transforms himself from the jerk to end all jerks into a nice guy, who Gets the Girl?

Yep, that's the movie. Of course you know it. Everyone knows it, and half the shows on TV have done "homages" to it. But here's the question to ponder ... is it the classic "chick flick," or is it a science fiction movie, where the cameras shut down about an hour before the sh*t hit the fans, world-wide, in a manner as dramatic as INDEPENDENCE DAY crossed with OUTBREAK?

I'm inclined to say -- the latter.

If your viewing tastes are as ecclectic as mine, you've probably seen essentially the same story on STARGATE, and STAR TREK, and several others. Not that Bill Riker is desperately trying to win the hand (fin, tentacle, claw, whatever) or this week's guesting humanoid (you notice he'll romance anything female, and species doesn't matter a darn in their world? It's gender that's the big taboo, still, even across the species line, four centuries from now -- don't get me started). But the "McGuffin" driving the story is the same.

In SF, it's called a closed time loop. When they did it in Trek (next gen variety), everyone dumped their RAM when the temporal field reset itself for the next go-around. But when they did it in STARGATE, there was a real, genuine Tardis-type phenomenon, which put Jack and Muscles slightly out of synch with the temporal shift, due to a weird alien hickey in the gate's wormhole generation mechanism and tarqet acquisition sequence, probably due to a power surge in the superconductors serving the ... yeah, right. Whatever.

The practical upshot of all this dazzling repartee is the Jack and Teal'c (see, I can spell that, too) are not only condemned to ride the 24-hour closed time loop until they can figure out how to get out of it ... they know they're doing it. They don't dump their RAM when the sequence sesets. They're aware of every tortuous moment of what's happening.

Like Phil Connors, that jerk of a network weatherman with more brains than manners. Yep ... GROUNDHOG DAY.

Now, get past the fact it was written, directed, produced, cast and acted as a chick flick. Look at it from the SF point of view. Bill Murray and Andie McDowell and company are stuck in a closed time loop, doing the same day maybe ten thousand times, before something, somewhere reset itself on a cosmic scale and the town of Punxsutawney (no, I didn't type that again; I'm using cut and paste in the interests of sanity) was allowed to get over the ruck in the fabric of spacetime and go on. Nice. Neat.

And here's where it starts to get interesting. If [ctrl-V] Punxsutawney was looping, out of phase with the rest of us, it would have absented itself from the rest of the timestream. In other words, it would have "done a Brigadoon," and vanished for years...

Did it? It might have. We never get to know this, because the picture is concentrating on the romantic aspect of the story. Bill and Andie are making nice and, having just gone ga-ga, they neither know nor care what's happening in the rest of the universe...

Meanwhile, just off-camera, fleets of US Army choppers, cargo planes, tanks, the lot, are converging on [ctrl-V] Punxsutawney (okay, I'll stop being twee), because as far as the rest of the planet knew, Punxsutawney had vanished like Brigadoon, three or five or ten years ago. Who knew which town would vanish next? Had Punxsutawney been spin-dizzied right out of here by space aliens? Had it been sucked through a wormhole into the distant future? Had it been destroyed? Would Washington or New York or (gasp) Los Angeles be next? Was this terrifying event happening in other parts of the world simultaneously?

Well, was it???!

And now, Punxsutawney just reappeared ... from a wormhole to the future, or another world? Are the people returning loaded with deadly interspecies viruses? Have they been infected with alien nano? Were they brainwashed by ETs? You KNOW the Pentagon would be down on them like a load of bricks. CDC would be in the, and probably also Dustin Hoffman's outfif from OUTBREAK (speaking personally, Dustin Hoffman can come 'round and take my bloodpressure any time he feels like it). The whole town of Punxsutawney would be under military lockdown. Gallons of blood taken for testing; CT scans of everything and everyone. Everything imaged. Everyone and his uncle psychoanalysed. Brain scans. Hypnosis, polygraph tests...

There's one other possibility in which Punxsutawney gets away scott free -- because there was no point going there with this three ringed circus ... because (!) the whole world was looping. The whole planet was stuck in a 24-hour loop. Civilians wouldn't have any idea anything had happened at all, when the ruck in spacetime smoothed out and let us go on, but --

Astronomers would know, because the stars themselves move over the course of years, albeit infinitesimally slowly, and measurably. So, about the time Bill and Andie are making nice at the end of the movie, the sh*t is hitting the fan globally. Was the whole planet hijacked by ETs? Have we been through a wormhole? To the future, the past, the other side of he galaxy? Did the Russians or the Chinese do it?!!! What happened to us while we were gone, that we can't remember? What was done to us, what were we used, or abused, for?! Are we the same people we were when we left?! How would we know if we were different?

In our paranoia, the globe's major powers would start arming themselves to the teeth, and ... oh, boy. The world goes nuclear, with ever gun aimed at the sky. Groundhog Planet.

Cool.

Oh -- last note for today. Remember yesterday's post, where the very title was designed to capture the attention of the Googlebot searching blogs? It worked. Yesterday's post, entitled 'Gay Books: a title designed for the Googlebot' is, today, ranked #1 on Page 1 of the Google Blogsearch, and here's the proof, if you needed it ... click on this to see a full-size screen capture. It works. Not bad, to rocket from "nowhere in the top 100" to #1, in one shot...




Ciao for now,
MK

Give 'em the Vulcan tusch pinch

Got a link for you: Play it again, Jim...

Yep, you guessed right.





Tell me someone who was there during the days of Project Apollo who didn't watch Trek. I mean, it's horses for courses, and in 1966-69 Trek was hot stuff.

The used to paint near-nekkid chicks bright green. They had aliens of indeterminate gender. They had geniuses who were overwhelmed by the urge to rut like mountain goats. They had great, big spaceships and space battles. And sadistic Klingons mowing 'em down. And slave girls. And a bed-hopping skipper who didn't look too bad at all with his shirt in the laundry hamper. And this dude with the ears and the eyebrows. And a black chick (woah -- black, my gods, I don't believe this!) actually on the crew. And weird drugs. And cloning, and androids. Slave planets, giant intelligent lizards, chicks in glued-on costumes, hunky guest stars with great legs, in skimpy Ancient Greek kilts (!), tribbles, tricorders, time travel, exploding planets, immortality, religion-busters, insane computers, mindgames, empathym telepathy, mind-melds, sadism, masochism, adultery, murder, sabotage, revenge --

It was hot stuff way back when. It's just that four decades takest he spit-shine off of anything, and sooner or later you have to polish it up again, or archive it.

(I had a firsthand taste of this when I went through the NARC books, from the early 1990s, to bring them up to date ... and I'm even yanking AQUAMARINE firmly into the twenty first century: it's in the nuance of the technology. How far in the future is the world of Eric and Russell? In their day, who in hell will be using disks? Yet, 10years ago disks were cutting edge and flashdrives, jumpdrives, ramsticks, where a "Say what?" item. In the universe of Jarrat and Stone, they use "datacubes," which one imagines to be something like a 10 TB flashdrive too small to see, which is housed in something about the size of a die, to make it big enough for blunt human fingers to handle without breaking or dropping and losing.)

It had to happen, sooner or later. You KNEW the adventures of Jim, Bones, Scotty and Spocko would HAVE to be brought back up to spec. All writers do this, if they're given the ghost of a chance, and when you're in possession of a Hollywood franchise like STAR TREK, you don't wait to be given chances, you make your own. (George Lucas paved the way. Can you imaging what he'll be doing for the next update on STAR WARS?)

Of all the TREK series, I do believe I kinda liked ENTERPRISE the best. It had the "down and dirty" look about it, to which I gravitate. The original series is just too quaint now ... sorry, guys. It's the 1960s jingoism, sexism, racism, whatever "ism" you want to look at -- they come through the old scripts loud and clear, and they make 2008 nerves jangle. I say this sadly, because I also know Trek was one of the front runners in the field of equal opportunity ... but they also had an uphill battle with Hollywood producers who were in the business of selling a very expensive product to existing marketplaces. The best the 1966 Trek could do was go out and break trail. They did well, in their day; but that day is long past.

NEXT GENERATION had some excellent ideas and designs, but to me ... well, their universe is so squeaky clean that I have (and have always had) reservations. Don't get me wrong: the show was extremely well done, within its own parameters; but Picard's cosmos doesn't even get dusty. (Compare this scenario with ALIEN RESURRECTION, which is happening in the same approximate, and just as hypothetical, time frame. I can *believe* the ALIEN movie inside and out; I simply enjoy the hell out of the Trek show as an interested onlookers. There's a big difference.)

VOYAGER ... I was traveling when this went to air down here, and I missed most of it. I think there's 3 - 4 seasons I still haven't had the chance to see. (Same story with FARSCAPE, incidentally: nothing personal, just a clash of time, work and place). And DS9 ... I lost track of it about two seasons before the end, so I have no idea how it finished up. It's on the "gotta see one day when I have the time" list.

So, I guess I have more than a nodding aquaintance with Trek, even though I wouldn't say it influenced my own science fiction much at all. (For example, even when I do get into the military aspect, "my" Starfleet and DeepSky Fleet are built on the Air Force, not the Navy. For the life of me, I can't see how the Navy will get itself into space. Sure, by now you (the viewer) are well accustomed to seeing the space-going Air Force model on STARGATE, but (he he he) Keegan got there first! I was doing this stuff in the early 1990s, years ahead of SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND, and any of the STARGATE incarnations, including the James Spader and Kurt Russell movie.)

And I, for one (and I'm starting to think I'm just about the only one!) am actually looking forward to seeing the old Trek scenario polished up, dragged into the new millennium, albeit kicking and screaming.

From what I've seen on a Google surf (admittedly not in any obsessive depth), when you get past the official sites, the games, the merchandising, the magazine sites, Hollywood sites, etc., etc., etc., and see what the "hard core Trek fans" are saying ...

Wellllll, here's the part where Keegan gets to play Nostradamus.

Get ready for a big stink in the Old Guard, who are going to hate the new movie with a passion. They're going to take it as a personal insult that Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and our erstwhile heroes have been recast (read: replaced) with new faces. Meanwhile the new movie will score big with the vast "gray area" of the audience which likes Trek well enough but doesn't live and breathe the original show. (For those fans, Shatner, Nimoy and company ARE the show, the characters, the magic; take them away and, they won't know what you've got left, 'but it sure as hell aint Trek.')

But the vast "gray area" in the middle of the audience will like the movie, enough to make it a financial success. Way on the other side of the audience is the Glittery end: folks who are maniacal fans of the the new movie, won't hear a syllable said against it, and will go to e-war with anyone who disagrees ... all of which usually means these new fans have fallen like a tonne of bricks for one or more of the new actors, and the cosmos is revolving (however temporarily) around their (current) magnificent obsession.

Get ready for the Trekker Wars of 2009. I predict blood. They'll make any atrocity committed by the Klingons, Romulans, Borg, Predators, Aliens AND the Go'aould (all cemented together into an alliance focused on hammering the humans into extinction) look like Walter and Grommit.

Meanwhile, Nostrakeeganus, he say, the new movie will be a great financial success; they'll do several more movies which go over nicely at the box office -- quite nicely enough to rationalize doing a TV series, which will premier in the fall of 2015, when the publicity campaign will read, "Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Gene Roddenberry's immortal Star Trek..."

Write this down somewhere, and when it happens -- in 2015 -- I shall officially hang out my shingle and charge $25 per squint into my crystal ball. Because by that time you'll know I'm psychic.

So, give 'em the Vulan tusch pinch, and enjoy the damned movie!