Astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy has managed to discover more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 in fact. He also is the director of the Center for Integrative Planetary Science, an entire organization dedicated to extrasolar planet research. So it shouldn’t be any surprise he has received a grant to study the Kepler data for evidence of Dyson Spheres, the mark of a Type II civilization. A Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale utilizes close to the total energy output of their star to power their culture, and one way to do that is to build a Dyson Sphere around the star for both living surface and to capture that energy. Thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission we now have a huge amount of reconnaissance of other star systems already being sifted for evidence of other planets, to reexamine that data looking for Dyson Spheres only costs some additional computing power and man hours, all the capital outlay has already been made. And we might just discover some new neighbors!
The Babylon 5 article they posted over at Tor Online, which ran under the title All Alone in the Night: When Babylon 5 Invented 21st Century Fandom is excellent, and reminded me yet again what an amazing series it was. J. Michael Straczynski created the entire story arch and wrote the majority of the episodes himself, with maybe 20 episodes written by others and few of them key. He also knew how to work the internet to directly work with the fans, as anyone who lived through those times online knows, and anyone who digs into the JMS Message Archives site will soon learn when they go back far enough. He used a lot of pre-Web tools, such as Usenet and IRC, even though the first episode of Babylon 5 did not air until 1994, by which time the first graphical Web browsers, Mosaic and its successor Netscape were already in widespread use. And he used them as a creator directly reaching out to the fan base, which had never been done before.
I still tend to disagree that he invented modern internet fandom, although he did make some major contributions on how these tools were used, because back all through the 1980s USENET and IRC were being used for fans to talk, and the first file repositories were being assembled for those who knew how to use Telnet and FTP to share text, audio, and images. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database started out being called The Internet Science Fiction Fiction Database, which was a USENET newsgroup with the name structure rec.arts.sf.written which began in 1984. If you want to dig back to the beginning and read your way to the present for a complete understanding of its evolution over the decades, check out The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive, and yes, lots of the best early SF sites were out of Finland and Sweden. And that is just a single instance; there were many more in those days, listing them out could take me the next year.
Here is a single earlier example from my own experience. One of the prizes of my personal text file collection is a moderated chat held on Q-Link back in 1985 (Quantum Link, at the time just a Commodore computer online gateway service, later rebranded as something called AOL and opened up to all computer types) with Gene Roddenberry as the guest. It was a long distance call to Vienna Virginia from where I lived at the time, and a state of the art 300 baud telco connection (I had to solder the parts together for the hardware myself from $7 worth of Radio Shack components, you could not buy a Commodore modem) meant it took me 15 minutes to read the first 4 paragraphs of the conversation, showing up on my screen one painful letter at a time. So I typed in my question, uploaded it, waited the several minutes it took to type out the confirmation the service had received the question, and went offline. Three days later I received the information that the full text of the event had been compressed and posted, so I downloaded it. What a treat to discover that the moderator had passed on my question, and he actually gave it a considered answer!
That being said, even if J. Michael Straczynski didn’t invent modern fandom like the article author claimed (I suspect Ryan is just too young to know about the earlier stuff), he did set up a lot of the principles that modern content creators use to connect with their audiences. And he also created some of my favorite content, which besides Babylon 5 includes 1990’s Jeremiah, last years Thor, and next year’s Living Dead: The Musical.
Before Dorothy headed to Oz, many others proceeded her. One of them was a circus magician later referred to as The Wizard, and coming up next year Disney is going to be telling his story, in Oz The Great And Powerful. L. Frank Baum wrote a lot of Oz books, and while this wasn’t one of them I am really looking forward to the film. It should be hitting the big screen in March of next year.
Yep, this franchise continues, and continues to kick ass in the process. While I am sure everyone knows the story so far, and what they have in mind for next, I just have to comment on how much I have enjoyed it. The Die Hard series of films is some of my favorite escapist fantasy, and I hope they keep cranking them out.
Or was it? Arpan Jolly of Sheridan college built this wonderful little video animation of the moment Sir Issac Newton figured out how gravity worked, and gave it a little twist. This was created in 2010, and is a wonderful example of what you can do with a good story and some animation skills.
There are two interesting choices this week. The genre film is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: Part II, continuing the story begun with part 1 last year. This is in somewhat limited release, so you may have to hunt around for it, but trust me, it will be worth it, especially if you managed to see part one. And if you missed part 1, no worries; you can pick it up as a DVD or BluRay for $10 or less and watch it before seeing Part II in the theater. The story did not get stale with age since it was written, the conflicts embedded here are as alive as they were when she first wrote the book in 1957. I can not believe how many amazing actors are involved in this project, since it’s 10 million dollar budget could normally only pay for one or two of them, let alone the production costs of the entire film. My guess is it was a labor of love.
The other film worth mentioning will be playing everywhere, and while it isn’t genre I am so ready for this one! Seven Psychopaths is a twisted comedy in which a struggling screenwriter’s strange friends kidnap the beloved pet of a mobster, who then puts out contracts on everyone involved. Just like this weeks other winner, the cast is an amazing ensemble and the trailer tells me there is enough strangeness to make it quite a hoot.