Recently in Science Fiction Category

When I was looking for information on the X-Gene for the mutants and race piece I'm working on, one website I was looking at wrongly cited X-Men (the 1991 series) issues 2-3 as one place the X-Gene comes up. I was immediately suspicious, because I'd just read those issues when I was thinking about submitting a proposal for Magneto's moral philosophy for the Supervillains volume (which in the end I decided not to do, even though it would have used material I've put some work into both from the political section of my ancient philosophy teaching and the just war and terrorism section of my applied ethics teaching). I hadn't seen anything about an X-Gene in my recent reading of those issues, but I decided to read them again anyway, and it led to an interesting thought process about the story, something I hadn't spent as much time thinking about the first time through.

The main plot involves Magneto discovering he was genetically re-engineered by Moira McTaggart when he was reduced to a baby. She decided to figure out how the close friend of Charles Xavier could do the things Magneto did, and she discovered an instability in his brain due to the power he was channeling. This did explain how Charles Xavier's friend could become a terrorist. She apparently saw this as hindering who he really was, so she sought to give him a second chance by removing the instability. Many people might think she was preventing a power outside his free choice from influencing him.

What generates the conflict in these issues, though, is that he has a different view. He sees it as her playing God and making every choice he made since then suspect. It's as if he thinks his choices are only free if they go naturally the way they would have without interference from someone changing his internal structure as he existed naturally. I have to say that whether she's right or not, he certainly isn't. How does removing an instability resulting from too much power being channeled through him count as behavior modification of the sort that undermines free will?

But then he forces her to apply the same process (removing an instability particular to him?) to some of the X-Men so that they will follow him and not Xavier. She does it, and they do. Huh? How can removing the instability particular to him from the X-Men who don't have it make them loyal to him and not Xavier? If they do have it, won't it stop their powers from doing the same thing to them and clouding their moral judgments? So removing it wouldn't make them like Magneto. I'm not sure what Chris Claremont was thinking with this one.

Then they snap out of it eventually, because the process only works if the subject never uses their powers. The use of powers undoes it, because somehow the powers are tied into the way the brain has naturally developed, and the genetic re-engineering gets forced back into its natural state somehow by the powers in order to ensure proper functioning. This is also a little strange, because it sounds as if the re-engineering is messing with nature and proper functioning, except the original explanation with Magneto sounded like it was restoring a natural balance that the powers were interfering with.

This was Chris Claremont's last story on X-Men, and in some ways it was a nice send-off to its longest-running writer to end on a battle with Magneto that hits some of the main themes Magneto has always differed with the X-Men on, but it's too bad that a very important premise of the story is so confused, both on the theoretical level about what's going on in this hypothetical scenario and in terms of ethical reflection on that situation. I remember not really liking this story all that much when it came out (seventeen years ago now!), as hyped as it had been with Claremont returning to start off the new X-Men teams and the new book and my favorite new artist Jim Lee rendering the visuals. The first issue is still the highest-selling comic book ever. I don't remember my reasons, but it didn't strike me as worth the attention. I wonder if this was part of the reason.

I don't know how I missed this, but Dr. Don S. Davis, most famous recently for playing Lieutenant General George Hammond in the Stargate franchise, died on June 29. Apparently when he left Stargate SG-1 in 2003, it was for medical reasons, and he was only able to do a handful of appearances on the two shows over the next five the years, culminating in his appearance in Stargate: Continuum, which comes out on DVD in a week, exactly a month after his death.

The Stargate producers have spoken fondly of Davis over the years as one of the most professional actors they'd ever worked with (always knowing his lines before his arrival on set and always delivering them perfectly), and I get the sense that his lovable character General Hammond was really just Davis himself. The part had originally been written for him to be in tension with the SG-1 team, but Davis worked himself into the role, and they had to provide other characters to play that role.

I knew of some of his other work, especially as Dana Scully's father in The X-Files, but I didn't know that he had a Ph.D. in theater and that he had taught college-level theater for years. That doesn't surprise me at all, though.

For more, see the announcements of his death at Gateworld and SciFiWire and his entries at IMDB and Wikipedia.

My mutants and race piece is in its second draft now, which I'll be sending off tomorrow. I do have some questions that I hope some familiar with recent X-Men occurrences might be able to help with. One of the comments I got back from the editors is that I was taking mutants to be literal mutants, which would mean genes mutated and led to their powers, and these genes would be different genes, genes having something to do with the abilities they end up getting. Nightcrawler's fur would be related to the kinds of genes that produce body hair. Cyclops' force beams would have some connection to genes that affect the eyes. Wolverine's healing factor would come from mutated genes that ordinarily relate to the immune system.

Well, the problem with this, according to my editor, is that the third X-Men movie has a completely different explanation of mutants. They're aren't literal mutants in the sense the term is usually used in biology. Instead, they have this one gene in common. In the movie, they call it the Mutant-X gene. At least that's how it sounds. I later found out this actually does appear in the comic books after I stopped reading them in the mid-90s, and they call it the X-Gene. So maybe it's not the Mutant-X gene in the movie but the mutant X-Gene.

This explanation is just downright stupid. How is it that this one gene explains the variety of powers across all mutants? Also, how did one gene just suddenly appear in all these unrelated people? Whoever came up with this idea knows pretty much nothing about genetics. I did some looking around in Wikipedia, and I found some blog posts about the mutant gene (including this one, which was somewhat helpful). Apparently the Beast, in House of M #2, says the X-Gene is technically a cluster of genes. That's a little better, I suppose, because it allows for different genes to be part of the cluster. Also, the X-Gene was supposed to be scattered throughout humanity but only activated in certain people, and those are the mutants. That's how humans can produce mutant children.

Given that mutants sometimes produce children with the same powers and sometimes end up with children with different or no powers, it seems to me that the X-Gene must not guarantee any particular powers but simply means there's a potential for powers. Without the X-Gene, there will be no powers. When the Scarlet Witch removes the X-Gene from the majority of mutants and the entirety of non-mutants, all the mutants without the gene end up becoming normal humans. So my suspicion is that this would have to be an activator gene (or cluster of genes), and what determines the specific powers is something else. The X-Gene itself is simply an activator, one that probably just isn't turned on in normal humans but is turned on in mutants.

If this is the official explanation in the comic books and the movies, then it changes significantly how my argument in this chapter will work. I think my conclusion still holds, but the argument for it is completely different from what it was in the first draft. So what I'm wondering is if this seems to fit with the recent comic books, since I haven't read any of them. I may have some of them, since I continued to buy them for a little while after I stopped reading them, and I did inherit some more even later from my brother that I haven't read. I don't think I have any House of M, though. I just looked and didn't see any, even though I thought I had some. So what I'd love is if someone could direct me to specific issues where this stuff is discussed, and then I can see if I might have them or if someone could confirm that this is pretty much the official explanation of mutants at this point. If it is, I need to focus on this. If it's not, and it's still sort of up in the air with the more traditional explanation still possible, then I can keep most of what I've written and just add some more on the new explanation.

Update: Someone else has arrived at a similar view, but it assumes one X-gene. If we trust the Beast's analysis, you could make it much more complex, with several genes contributing to activation of the powers, and perhaps all or a certain number of them need to be present. Also, the Celestials, in seeding the human populace with the necessary genetic material for mutations of this sort, might not have included anything like the latent genes to be activated or the activation genes but might simply have placed the necessary genetic materials, with the necessary factors for those eventually to reach a point where they do what happens later on. This would explain a few isolated mutants throughout history and a much more concentrated appearance of mutants in the late 20th century. I like the suggestion that mutates (who get powers later in life due to some stimulus like radiation) have something else activate their latent powers in the way that the X-Gene does with mutants.

Sophia: What are you watching, Daddy?
Me: Doctor Who
Sophia: Daddy, what kind of Doctor Who is that?
Me: That's the Third Doctor. The one you know is the Tenth Doctor.
Sophia: Oh.

(Two or three weeks passed, with no discussion on the matter during the intervening time, except once or twice asking if she wants to watch Doctor Who, with a surprisingly positive response. I was home alone and decided to pull out the Third Doctor serial I was in the middle of to finish it. Sophia came home with Sam near the end of it.)

Sophia: Daddy, what are you watching?
Me: Doctor Who
Sophia: Daddy, what kind of Doctor Who is that? I want to watch the Ten Doctor.

One of the big secrets to be discovered in the last season of the new Battlestar Galactica show is who the final Cylon is. We knew in the original miniseries that there were twelve models, and seven of those were gradually revealed over the course of the first two seasons. Then we saw no other models, and it became a mystery who the other five models were. Even the seven models didn't seem to know. Eventually one found out and got put in cold storage, and one of them really surprised her. She even apologized when she found out. But at the end of season three, four characters we had assumed to have been human all along turne out to be Cylons. The way they discovered it is that they had all been hearing the same music that no one else was hearing, and it had led them all to the same room. The producers have said these four really are Cylons, and yet they're different from the rest. The prophetic hybrid has said that they've been to earth, which must be how they all have within them the tune to a Bob Dylan song.

But what about the last model? We now know the model numbers of the first seven models we knew of. First we learned 2, 5, 6, and 8. In a recent episode this season we found out the others are 1, 3, and 4. That means the final five are 7 and 9-12. Wouldn't it make sense that the four we know about are 9-12 (as a set), and the still-missing one happens to be the symbolic number 7? It's unclear to me why Sharon would be higher than one of the five but lower than the rest, but perhaps that will be revealed, and perhaps her greater connection with the humans has something to do with it.

Here's my theory. Models 9-12 are a set. We now have seen models 1, 4, and 5 become a set separate from models 2, 6, and 8. I suspect something will happen with 3 and 7. But who might 7 be? I'm sure it's someone we've seen before, and I think it's likely that whoever it is was not on board the Galactica when the others began hearing the music, or we would have seen all five. That means it's probably someone on another ship or someone whose model we have encountered before is dead. It's probably a major enough character that it will be significant when we discover who it is, but it doesn't have to be a primary character. It could just be someone who wasn't on board the ship. Only one character stands out as important enough to be the final Cylon who wasn't on board. That's Tom Zarek. Wouldn't it be funny if the original Apollo turned out to have been a Cylon all along? The only other one not on board is Starbuck. The hints for it to be her would be overkill if she really is one, though, and these writers aren't that obvious. It's got to be deliberate misdirection.

But it might be someone who we've seen die. It could be Billy. I don't think he was on the show long enough for him to be likely, though. There's always the chance that it could be Admiral Cain. I don't think so, though, because I think they wanted her brutality to be oh-so-human. I doubt the other Pegasus characters would be important enough to get such a role, especially if it's the final one who number 3 was apologizing to when she discovered who they were. (Of course, they said things like that about Tigh and Tyrol, too, so this isn't a sure argument.) My guess is Ellen Tigh if it's someone dead, because we know she's still available for filming. She's already been in her husband's dream sequences this season, and he sees her when he sees a Cylon. So my guess is either Tom Zarek or Ellen Tigh, probably Ellen.

Of course, this is all undermined if the last five aren't a set and only the four we've seen. If that's so, then the fifth would be unrelated and thus might not have heard the music but have been there. Then it could be almost anyone.

I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.

Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.

The eleventh Star Trek film is currently being filmed, and I wanted to express some desires (some perhaps more likely than others) of a few things I want to see in it. I've had three longstanding problems in Star Trek history, and all three of them will be relevant for this film. I've actually wanted to express these in a blog post since I first heard they were doing this (which had to have been at least a year ago), but I never got around to it until now.

1. There are supposed to be Klingons in it, according to rumors. This film takes place between the Star Trek: Enterprise series and the original series. There's always been a problem with the look of the Klingons. In the original series, they look like humans. Then they get those funny foreheads. in the movies It's much cooler, but they needed an explanation of why the look changed. Now until Deep Space Nine came along with their Tribble time travel episode, they might have been able to say that the original series just portrayed them poorly, and they always looked like what we've seen since the first film. But once DS9 revealed that Miles O'Brien didn't recognize the original-series-era Klingons as Klingons, and Worf revealed that something had happened that Klingons don't discuss in public, the franchise had to offer an explanation.

I'm glad to say that the final season of Enterprise did exactly that and did an excellent job with the explanation. Klingon DNA became altered to include human DNA in most of the population, and they projected a time period for how long they'd fix the problem that matches up with how long it took. So that one's taken care of. There is the problem that by the time of the original series the crew believed that no humans had ever seen Klingons. I haven't seen that quite explained yet. If Abrams has Klingons in a film with Kirk and Spock as young officers or cadets, then we'll need some further continuity explanations or some careful avoidance of any contact with the Klingons (which Enterprise was able to pull off a few times with Romulans that the crew never met, or at least never knew they met). We'll see if it works. They claim to be paying close attention to canon so as to avoid any problems.

2. The movie is rumored to contain time travel. I have a huge problem with Star Trek time travel that happens far too often, and I really don't want to see it in this film. Why are there all these episodes that never happened? Most of the time travel episodes end with something changing the past so that the entire episode never happened. Then why did we watch it? Why did they bother filming it? And if it never happened, why did they end up at a place where the events that never happened were able to cause the state things revert to when it becomes true that it never happened?

This, of course, is not something the creators of Star Trek can really do anything about. It's just the result of a really stupid view of time travel. If someone really could come up with a story to explain why all these people keep changing the past and experiencing effects of things that never happened, while retaining a plausible theory of time travel involving a fixed timeline, then I'd be overjoyed. I'm not holding my breath, and I certainly don't think J.J. Abrams is the one to do it. But if he stays away from this problem, I'll be satisfied enough, and if he doesn't do any past-changing at all, which is a metaphysical impossibility, I'll be very happy.

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is the first Babylon 5 story in several years. It is intended to be the first in a series of direct-to-DVD releases that focus on smaller, character-centered stories involving one or two characters from the Babylon 5 universe. The first release involves one story with Colonel Elizabeth Lochley, commander of Babylon 5 since the 5th season of the original show and another starring both President John Sheridan and the technomage Galen. An effects-heavy third story featuring Michael Garibaldi was pushed to the second DVD release due to funding issues related to reconstructing the entire special effects and sets from scratch. The two stories happen simultaneously and converge at the end, even though there is no connection between them other than the fact that Sheridan and Lochley meet up at the end.

Show creator and producer J. Michael Straczynski wrote and directed these stories, and he had complete creative control. Unfortunately, however, Warner Brothers was fairly limiting in the budget they allocated to this project, and advertizing for it has almost been nonexistent. It deserved much more. The stories are excellent and very intelligent, as is typical for Babylon 5. Lockley confronts someone who appears to be demon-possessed, claiming that God has confined demons to this sector of space so that they would remind later, space-faring humans that God does exist despite their encounters with aliens. As usual, the truth is mixed with lies, and what's really going on is something far more fascinating to me and a little surprising coming from Straczynski. My appreciation for the first story was much higher once it was done, and I look forward to watching it again with a friend who loves B5 once we have a working DVD player again.

The second story involves the technomage Galen once again appearing to President Sheridan, telling him to do something urgent that will prevent some terrible consequences in the future. The only problem is that what he has to do is something Sheridan feels a very strong moral compulsion not to do. He wonders if it's really necessary for him to do it. As is often the case with Straczynski's stories, the moral issues are carefully thought-out, and the twists in the storytelling are interesting. In the end, a lot less is clear about what Galen wanted than we were originally supposed to think. I was fairly impressed with the ending.

As stories go, they are well-written and thought-provoking. I had been worried that Straczynski's Bush Derangement Syndrome would influence these stories, but he wisely stayed away from bringing any of that in here. It doesn't have a lot of action, and it seems a bit short (70 minutes total for two stories, less than two 45-minute episodes would be). Even though the special effects are much better than the original series, it still isn't as good as it could have been if Warner Brothers had been willing to fund it based on the excellent evidence they already have of the fanbase who made past B5 products a success on DVD. But they didn't fund it well. I do think it's pretty good given a fairly low budget, as B5 always was. It's not terrible, but it's not cutting edge for the time, as the original had been. I enjoyed it overall, and it's among the better examples of intelligent B5 storytelling, so I recommend it highly to B5 fans who enjoyed the more intellectual stories who can deal with less action and special effects that could have been a little better. I look forward to future installments with other characters.

According to Wikipedia's article on the Dragonriders of Pern series, Anne McCaffrey says to read Dragondrums before The White Dragon, even though the publication order (and presumably the order she wrote them) is the reverse. Does anyone know if she really did say this, and can it be substantiated? Wikipedia usually requires citation for such claims, but I see none about this claim.

Robert Hewitt Wolfe developed one of Gene Roddenberry's original ideas in the series Andromeda. It wasn't a perfect show, but it was intelligent in many ways. I liked the show a lot in the first year and a half of its existence. Then the producers fired Wolfe out of the false belief that ongoing storylines couldn't draw an audience (which subsequent years in TV have disproved pretty thoroughly). The second half of the second season had the same writing team without Wolfe, and it wasn't up to the same quality but was clearly the same show with some of the same feel and interest. But then they hired former Twin Peaks writer Bob Engels to take over as head writer for the third season. The show got worse and worse as time went on. I never got around to watching the second half of the final season.

But Robert Hewitt Wolfe apparently kept watching, because he's written a document (officially no more than fan fiction for legal purposes) that gives some sense of what he would have done with the show had it continued. It's not told from the perspective of a writer detailing where the show would have gone, however. It's written up as a script that basically treats what happened in the show as a possible future that the Trance Gemini character was exploring, and she reveals a good deal about what her race really is, what their purposes are, what she's been up to all along, and one possible future that at least would have gotten some play had Wolfe remained on. It's not clear what he would have had be the actual future, but maybe we never would have seen it anyway.

In all, it's a very interesting read for those who liked the show under Wolfe who were disappointed with the direction it took.

Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?

Brian Weatherson links to the Unsuggestor, which uses Amazon personal profiles to match up books people have with books they're not likely to have. It's sort of the inverse of Amazon's engine for recommending books based on what other people who bought what you bought have bought. I tried a few books I've got, and I discovered some disturbing things. Consider the following sets of unrecommendations:

They have the second Harry Potter book opposed to The Gospel According to John, by Leon Morris, a fairly respected evangelical commentary on the fourth gospel. I have both books and like them both very much. Most of the Harry Potter books have several John Piper books turning up in the top five, mostly some of his newer books (which I don't have), but his earlier Desiring God turned up with some of novels by Terry Brooks, one of my favorite fantasy authors. This would again be a case of two books I pretty much like (even if I criticize Piper on a few issues here and there). Some books in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series are put up against John Piper, Josh Harris, Wayne Grudem, A.W. Tozer, J.I. Packer, and other books by evangelicals, including several books I've got or have at least spent time looking through. Pratchett's Reaper Man isn't my favorite of the Discworld series, but a lot of it is funny. Its opposite is Doug Stuart and Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, one of the best popular introductions to biblical interpretation ever written. Pratchett's much better Lords and Ladies is opposed to Knowing God by J.I. Packer, one of the most important popular introductions to theology in print. While I don't think Grudem's Systematic Theology is well-argued on the level of detailed exegesis (as in the classic tradition of Reformed systematic theologies like Hodge's), it's an excellent reference work, and I think his positions are largely correct on most issues. It's opposed to Pratchett's Pyramids, a Discworld book I very much loved. D.A. Carson's guide to New Testament commentaries, something I use all the time, lists Harry Potter book 6 as its opposite, a book that is next on my list to read. Carson's How Long, O Lord?, the best book I've seen on the problem of evil, also lists Potter book 6 as its first unsuggestion.

If you are a fan of Star Trek: TNG, Wil Wheaton, or of snarky/hilarious recaps in the style of Television Without Pity (and I am a fan of all three), then you need to know that Wil Wheaton has been recapping old episodes of ST:TNG over at TV Squad. We now return you to your regularly scheduled theology posts.

After the SciFi Channel canceled Stargate SG-1 after ten seasons, it was unclear exactly how MGM would manage to continue the story, but they insisted they would do so in some fashion. They have now announced exactly how. They have greenlighted two direct-to-DVD Stargate SG-1 movies to continue the SG-1 storyline. The first will deal with the necessary wrapup for the current Ori storyline that has occupied Seasons 9-10. The second will involve time travel.

It's unclear if the SciFi Channel will show these movies. Despite their insistence that MGM could not continue the show with them or anyone else, they had indicated a willingness to show some TV movies to continue the story. But I'm not sure MGM will want to do it. I wouldn't. These people just canceled a show that was doing ok in the ratings (even if it was lower than it had once been) immediately after a major milestone was achieved, which is something like breaking up with someone on their birthday.

The thing that makes me happiest about this is that it's not going to be online only. I don't think I'd enjoy having to watch it on a notebook computer screen, and if we have to pay for it I'd want it on a DVD with professional features. Pay-to-download is not a good option at this point except for people who can afford to build a home studio for their computer.

They're not calling it that, but the original series of Star Trek is getting a treatment something like what George Lucas did with episodes 4-6 of Star Wars when he called it the Special Edition. There won't be any deleted scenes added in or anything like that, but it will have new CG effects, stuff added in into the backgrounds, better space scenes, decent planet landscapes, more people milling around in the background in scenes on ships and starbases, and so on. They won't be doing these in order but will instead start with fan favorites. "The Balance of Terror" will be first. That episode introduced the Romulans (and maybe will have decent-looking ships for them now). The only other episode mentioned was "Miri", in which the crew encounteres a planet full of children who age rapidly and die once they reach a certain age.

We already have some sense of what this will look like, including what the ships will be like and what some aliens will look like, since they already did some of this when the DS9 crew visited the TOS Enterprise during the Tribbles episode and then again on Enterprise when the mirror universe Enterprise crew encountered the main Trek universe TOS-era Defiant. We've seen CG versions of that era's ships. The Tholians and the Gorn looked great on Enterprise, and I hope they can do the same thing for other aliens. I wonder if the new Andorian look on Enterprise will lead to some CG changes for these remasters, but it will be hard to do much given that they probably won't recast and reshoot the scenes with new actors. Since they've now fully explained the change in Klingon look, they probably don't need to do any touchups there, but the Klingon ships are in the same category of the Romulan ones, needing a major overhaul to look at all decent.

See TrekToday, StarTrek.com, and TV Guide for more.

Darren Sumner argues that SciFi just wanted to get rid of the show in a long process of remaking themselves as a non-scifi network.

Also, check out the Save Stargate SG-1 campaign. Given that this cancelation is from the network only, and MGM and the producers want to keep SG-1 going, this has a real chance of succeeding.

My original post on the cancelation is here.

Update: This strikes me as junior high pettiness. Basically, it amounts to : "If we can't have it no one can. Well, we can have it, but we don't really want it. But that doesn't mean we want anyone else to be able to have it." They may be well within their legal rights to do this, but insisting on your legal rights is often inconsistent with basic moral decency, and this seems to be a pretty clear case of that.

I have to say that I really, really dislike the idea that people might have to have a good computer-based media system to watch the 11th season if they make it for download only. It would be pretty awful if the only way we'll be able to watch this is on a notebook computer screen with tiny speakers and no way to save them except on CDs that can't be watched except on a tiny screen. Even worse is that you'd have to pay for it beyond the exorbitant prices cable already costs. Ongoing stories would be nice, but if it's not on TV then they lose a huge audience that wouldbe able to watch them if they did TV movies or mini-series. Doing a whole season at its usual expense seems such a waste if it would be download-only.

Who besides CBS would cancel one of a network's best and most popular shows, simply because it wasn't doing as well as it was last year (but still doing much better than almost anything else they show)? The SciFi Channel has done it before without even that excuse (with Farscape when it was even at the height of its popularity), and now it's done it again with Stargate SG-1, the show that you would expect them to show some gratefulness toward given its having put them (and cable original programming in general) on the map in terms of ratings successes. It can't be just about ratings, because Atlantis is doing only slightly better.

They've made one bone-headed decision after another in the last couple years with their original programming, and now they decide to do some nice blame-shifting by canceling one of their best original shows. They decided after the good ratings of Eureka to try for original programming every night. Most of the tripe they've been showing now isn't going to last more than a couple months. A lot of it isn't even scifi, even in the broadest sense of the term. Pro wrestling? It's definitely fiction, but where's the science in it? But then they had John Edward on years ago, so I suppose that's not much different. The formula that worked was to have their best stuff on Friday nights starting at 8:00, without Monk opposite the opening show that now starts at 9:00, an hour after most people have been watching some other channel. If they had wanted SG-1 to do well this year, they could have done a much better job. This was as bad as UPN putting Enterprise opposite Stargate in its final year and then canceling it because of bad ratings (which were still better than almost any other original scifi show on cable).

This idea for this post occurred to me when reading this post, at Pseudo-Polymath, which reviews a Christian science fiction novel. I wanted to expand a little on a comment I left on that post. The novel in question involves people from Earth colonizing other planets, with no clear indication of why they are doing so. What I'm wondering is if this is in conflict with the creation mandate of the early chapters of Genesis. God gives the Earth over to humans to take care of as stewards. It's God's Earth, but humans now have the responsibility to care for it as representatives of God, which is what being an image of God primarily means. There's no indication that anything else in the universe is given to humanity to steward, which suggests to me that going beyond the boundaries of this planet is going beyond our jurisdiction. I've never been opposed to the space program, but I don't have any sense of how it's supposed to fit with the creation mandate. It seems counter to the very intent.

C.S. Lewis avoids with this in his Space Trilogy by not having the people out there be humans descended from Adam and Eve. I don’t mind scifi that has humans colonizing other planets or even with only faint memories of Earth. Firefly was exactly that, and it was excellent. But it’s a little strange to write it as a Christian novel and not even deal with the issue of God telling Adam that he was being given the Earth to steward and care for, without any indication that it would be ok to go other places and care for things not given to us. If the reason for going out is because of a failure to steward the Earth properly, that's even worse. Don't take care of what God lets you manage for him, and then go hang out somewhere else instead once his planet is no longer inhabitable. But even without that, there seems to be a serious question that Christian science fiction of this sort ought to address. Maybe there's a good way to do this without avoiding it the way Lewis did, but I'd be curious to hear what that would be.

You scored as Beast. Beast is an intelligent, politcal spokesman for the X-Men. He has a Ph.D in Genetics and is well versed in literature. He may look like a blue fuzzy monster, but deep down he's very benevolent and logical. Powers: Enhanced strength and agility Beast 75% Cyclops 70% Nightcrawler 60% Jean Grey 60% Rogue 55% Wolverine 55% Storm 50% Emma Frost 45% Gambit 45% Colossus 40% Iceman 35% Most Comprehensive X-Men Personality Quiz 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

[hat tip: Matthew]

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski and Smallville's Bryce Zabel proposed their plan to rejuvenate Star Trek a little more than two years ago. I posted on this at the time, but they released nothing of the details. Paramount went with J.J. Abrams for an eleventh movie rather than going with what we now know was called Star Trek: Reboot., so Zabel has posted the plan online. It's in this post, if you want the context where he explains it a little, but the PDF for the plan itself is here. I have to say that I wasn't very impressed when I read Zabel's description of it in his post, but the actual plan won me over. I think I would have really liked such a series.

Scientists have proposed a procedure that will prevent dust of certain shapes from emitting light, thus producing something like a Star Trek cloaking device. They haven't actually done it yet, but they've shown mathematically that this is theoretically possible. [Hat tip: TrekToday News]

TrekToday announces that plans are underway for an 11th Star Trek film. They're saying it will include Kirk and Spock in their days at Starfleet Academy and their first mission together. I don't know what to think about it except that I'm glad that Rick Berman seems to be completely out of the loop [Update: Berman's noninvolvement has now been confirmed]. The producers of Lost are involved, and since I've never seen that show I have no idea if that's a good thing. This could be very teenybopperish, ala Roswell, so I hope they think carefully about how to make it something the fans will actually like. The premise doesn't sound all that thrilling so far, and they're going to need to work hard to avoid some of the criticism Enterprise gathered due to things they did that seemed to change the past rather than anticipate what we already knew (though the fourth season entirely made up and then some for anything they did along those lines in the first three seasons). I'll watch it, of course, because it's Star Trek, but I'm going to need to see a good deal more that sounds remotely interesting if I'm going to get really excited about it. I am glad that they haven't abandoned this franchise in the film venue, as CBS seems to be forcing them to do in the TV medium. I just hope they don't flub it. It is, after all, odd-numbered, and no odd-numbered movie in this franchise has been better than any even-numbered movie. If they stick with the trend, this will at best be middle of the pack, right between Insurrection (the best odd one) and Nemesis (the worst even one). It would be nice if they could actually break that trend sometime.

Update: Abrams says the report isn't entirely accurate, but he isn't confirming or denying anything in particular.

Tom Brown just left the following comment on my Moral Luck in Battlestar Galactica post. Despite many serious spelling errors, I thought it was an excellent comment, so I'm highlighting it in a post of its own.

The reality of Battlestar Galactica's characters is that there is no differecnce between Cylons and Humans. They're both sentient beings. Both are essentially human and human counterparts. Resolve this point and the storyline comes into a clearer view. The difference lies in their belief systems about each other and themselves. The differeces between them could, like one post stated, be like the difference between Nazis & Jews or Slaves and Slave Masters or or any other oppressor / opressed group but with an in teresting twist. Consider this: Give an oppressed group the power to nearly annihilate their oppressors who barely escape extinction. Throw in the mix that both oppressor and oppressed have strict black and white beliefs about the opposite group and you have the conflict of the Cylons and Humans in Battlestar Galactica. Then make it interesting by developing cracks in each group's belief system regarding the other group - then what happens? Moral Cylons emerge...or possibly Christian Cylons emerge lining their actions up with their beliefs regarding their one true God? Humans loving Cylons? Humans and Cylons working toward reconciliation, healing and forgiveness and peace where they both celebrate their similarities and differences? Maybe. Maybe not. Both groups are fragile in their character and potential for both evil amd good, herosim and despotism and everything in between these continuums. The genious of Battlestar is that it holds us to a mirror revealing us for who we really are as humans and our human nature - in that our character is on a continuum influenced by belief, experience, circumstances both in and out of our control, our thoughts, feelings and our choices. We're not as good as we think we are and we're maybe not as bad as we think we are in regard to moral comparason of each other and ourselves, hence moral fragility. In this light everything seems somewhat subjective and relative. Objectivity or relativeism in moral character comes in who we compare ourselves to. If it is to each other and ourselves it is relative, subjective and fragile. If we compare ourselves to something or someone much higher than ourselves who is perfect and unchanging in character or nature it shows that although we all may work within a moral continuum of good and evil we're all basically the same or at least in the same boat regardless of the belief system we attest to. Battlestar precicely points this fact out even if we don't want to see it this way because we want clear cut heros and villians. We all fall short. We're all capable of great acts of both good and evil just like Cylons & Humans. Who then do we compare ourselves to to get an honest perspective about human nature? Probably to something beyond humanity. Probably to something within the Christian (possibly Cylon) worldview regarding Good and Evil, sin and redemption and the perfect nature of God in comparason to our pendulum swinging, changing nature on the continuuma of good and evil, sin or redemption in the light of free will to choose life or death.

I had a few dry weeks for interesting searches, and now they're accumulating much more rapidly. Here are the least recent of the bunch:

author hebrews letter fake
Don't you need some claim of authorship to begin with for it to be fake? Hebrews never claims an author.

is ron moore a republican? galactica
I'm pretty sure Ron Moore is on the other end of the political spectrum. His few comments on politics that I've seen suggest to me that he thinks what he's writing is relevant to issues going on right now, and he thinks he's raising questions that also count as being against current U.S. policy. I think he underestimates how different the questions he's raising in the Galactica context really are, but what I've read from him suggests to me that he thinks he's putting forth considerations that might be taken as a critique of the Bush Administration, though he does insist that it's merely raising questions and that people need to make up their own minds.

reverse interracial
Wouldn't that be monoracial? I have the sneaking suspicion that you mean white man, black woman. But isn't it a little sexist to assume that one combination is interracial but the opposite is reverse interracial? Might it even be arguably racist?

if someone is light skinned does it mean they are mixed
Norwegians have very light skin. Does that mean they're mixed?

Ira Steven Behr was responsible for some of the best Star Trek episodes ever produced, particularly in Deep Space Nine, which he eventually became the head writer for. I have tremendous respect for him as a writer. I have to wonder, though, about one statement he made in this interview. When asked what super power he would want, he responded, "In addition to the ones I already have? I've been blessed with so many that I would feel like a Republican to ask for more."

I've been trying to figure out what he could possibly mean by this. Even if he's working with some nasty and uncharitable stereotype of Republicans, what could it be that Republicans are supposed to be like that even remotely resembles having super powers and asking for more super powers? If anyone has any ideas, I'm really curious, because this just makes no sense to me.

You are Simon, the young, brilliant doctor. Your devotion to your sister drove you to part with the world you knew. Raised on a civilized planet, you are not used to coping with the situation you have landed yourself in -- though you seem to be adapting well enough to suggest robbing a hospital.
"You may not believe this, but I am not all that good at talking to girls."

Which Firefly character are you?
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[Hat tip: Sam]

Stuart Taylor examines the claim that Judge Alito is outside the mainstream, concluding that he's well within both the general American mainstream and the legal/judicial mainstream. [Hat tip: SCOTUSBlog]

William Wainwright has updated his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Jonathan Edwards, originally authored in 2002. Most Edwards fans don't look at his philosophy as much as other aspects of his work, so I very much appreciate when a philosopher takes an interest in the first great American philosopher. Wainwright has done a lot to motivate thinking of Edwards as up there with the great early moderns, and I have to agree. Edwards and G.W. Leibniz are by far my favorite early modern philosophers. Edwards anticipated both Berkeley and Hume in interesting ways.

Brooksilver at The Lord of the Blog Rings has a nice post about Christian parables within The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I'm beginning to realize how little I remember from those books. I must have been 10 or so when I read them. I highly recommend his blog as a whole, by the way. I discovered it during his recent hiatus when he wasn't posting anything, but he's been a good friend for years, and I intend to read everything he posts now that he's back to blogging.

Two more pictures of the kids: Isaiah prim and proper and Sophia's underwear hat

Blogs4God has President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.

More Ethan pictures: Sam took him outside to play with the fallen leaves.

Proto-Kaw (the band Kerry Livgren of Kansas has reformed based on an earlier incarnation of Kansas that never released anything until this decade) has a new album coming out in February, called The Wait of Glory. We had the pleasure of seeing them and meeting them all this summer, and it was one of the highlights of the last decade for me. The lyrics for the Wait of Glory are up now. I can't wait to hear it. Everything I've heard is that it's even better than their last album Before Became After, which was one of Livgren's best works.

For some really perverse fun, see A Night at the Roddenberry. [Hat tip: The Gnu]

Speaking of the Gnu, he has a response to a few of Scott Adams's comments on Intelligent Design (see Abednego's post). I think his point about Crick and Watson is particularly interesting.

Christian Carnival XCVI is at Jordan's View.

Have you heard about the 18-year-old elected mayor as a write-in candidate? [Hat tip: Mark Olson]

Ben Witherington reviews Anne Rice's new novel about Jesus' childhood. I can't help but mention that he also gives Firefly and Serenity a thumbs up.

Here's Ethan a few years ago looking like his ducky (that's old ducky, which his mean aunties lost at the store 723 days ago; the new one has a much bigger bill, which I hope his mouth never looks like).

Ron Moore has written a tribute to Michael Piller, head writer of Star Trek: The Next Generation in its latter (and best) years. Piller died November 1 of a long battle with cancer. It gives an interesting picture of what it was like landing a job writing for that show and how writing for that show worked behind the scenes.

Piller didn't actually write many scripts, but many of the ones he did write were some of the best. His best known work might well be the two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds", in which Captain Picard gets assimilated by the Borg and then leads an attack against the Federation. He also got a story credit on "Unification", the two-part episode that featured Ambassador Spock and his work trying to reunify Vulcans and Romulans. He created Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I think was the best Trek show, and he wrote a number of early episodes of that show, particularly a number of key episodes early in the show. He left (before it got really good) to create Voyager, which he worked with for a few years, but he mostly wrote scripts based on other people's stories for that show. One key story he did write fully was "Basics", one of my favorites of the whole series, in which the Kazon manage to take over the ship, stranding the crew all on a planet, and the holographic Doctor and Ensign Lon Suder have to retake the ship. Suder was a crew member turned murderer played by Brad Dourif (Grima Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Brother Edward of Bablyon 5's "Passing Through Gethsemane", the voice of Chucky in the Child's Play movies, and if those roles aren't disturbing enough check him out in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). It was Piller's last Trek episode. He left Voyager to work on his final Star Trek script, the ninth film Star Trek: Insurrection.

Christian Carnival XCIII is up at White Ribbon Warriors.

GetReligion explains why Catholics proposing withholding communion from politicians who allow abortion and euthanasia need not say the same about Catholics who support the death penalty or war.

Bush hates rich people too!

He's gay, Jim! From what I've heard about Rick Berman's attitudes toward homosexuality, this might ruin the chances of a Sulu series or even a Sulu appearance in any further stories. [Evidence: See this from 2000, which interestingly points out that one TOS actor and one or two TNG actors are gay. There's a lot more here, but much of that goes way beyond evidence presented. See the Wikipedia entry on this subject for more. Ron Moore confirms that someone in charge explicitly didn't want gay characters, and Kate Mulgrew says it was Berman.]

Tim Challies gives an excellent argument for Christians' participation in Halloween. I think he concedes way too much to those who think the current practice of Halloween has anything to do with paganism in the religious sense, but that's what makes his argument so strong. Even if you concede that, he thinks Christians shouldn't just see it as ok to participate. He thinks it's more like a moral obligation.

Jonathan Ichikawa thinks a proposed amendment to the Texas constitution intended to ban gay marriage is going to invalidate marriage of any kind. He first pointed this out five months ago and raised the issue again recently. His latest volley sort of responds to people taking alternative views, including my comments on both those posts (to the effect that an originalist won't take the conclusion he thinks follows) and the discussion at Orin Kerr's Volokh Conspiracy post. He thinks everyone questioning his view is underestimating how serious this is. I'm not sure he's really dealt with my argument, though. Either way, it's a really funny issue, because if he's right then those opposing gay marriage on the grounds that it will harm marriage as an institution will be fully destroying marriage as a legal institution while getting rid of the possibility of gay marriage.

Well, Serenity has been out for a week, and we still haven't seen it. All reports say it's excellent. We need to find a babysitter during a time we can see it. Many a movie has gone by without our seeing it for lack of someone to watch the kids, but this is one we really don't want to miss. For those unfamiliar with the Firefly show, this is a sequel to the sci-fi space western TV show that the studios inexplicably canceled just as it was proving how interesting it would be. It's the brainchild of Joss Whedon, best known for Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Angel, but he was also behind Titan A.E., Toy Story, and Alien Resurrection, and he got his start with a short stint as a writer on Roseanne fairly early in the show. He's also working on a Wonder Woman movie for 2007.

I can't pretend to like everything he's done. I never could get into Buffy beyond the first season, for instance, and I don't think I would have liked the spinoff at all. I do think Firefly is the best thing from him that I've ever seen, and I'm sure it would have turned into one of my favorite shows if it had really gotten into the main storyline that the movie ends up developing. We watched most of the show in a couple days once we got ahold of the DVDs from a friend. It's only 15 episodes, 3 of which never aired in the syndication run and are only now beginning to show in the SciFi Channel's complete run of the show in the proper order on Friday nights. In the original run, they wouldn't even show the pilot until the series had fully aired (what they were going to air of it, anyway). Whedon really got stiffed on this one, and now he's got his chance to win over the larger audience with the big screen. It seems to be working, since it was the #2 movie of its opening weekend, though it wasn't as much as the studio had been hoping for.

You can watch the first nine minutes of the film here, and that provides the background to the show for new viewers, and you can read reviews by a professional movie critic and scifi author Orson Scott Card for a sense of what's so good about this project, but I suggest just seeing the thing. I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope it does well this second weekend out, which is what it really needs to get the go-ahead for a sequel. It's a great combination of smart writing, both in terms of plot and dialogue, deliberately unusual directing, great action deliberately in the mold of Westerns, and a plausible account of what things might be like 500 years in the future. Earth has been left behind, and a new solar system has been terraformed, with a core of civilized and wealthy planets and a frontier of Wild West style worlds on the outskirts. Remnants of various earth cultures are scattered throughout, including Chinese outbursts now and then by average Joe sorts of characters, and the real story that's only somewhat developed in the short is a conspiracy theme with the Alliance government that seems to come full head in the movie. The show is funny and serious in a way that's very hard to pull off, and the comedy, action, and grand themes disguised by very human relationships will almost certainly all remain a focus on the big screen, but now we get more expensive special effects and what looks like a really cool development in one of the main characters that has been heavily anticipated in the show.

What do you get when you cross Battlestar Galactica with the Three Stooges? [Hat tip: Unofficial Battlestar Galactica Blog]

Ron Moore, who runs the redux of Battlestar Galactica that appears on the SciFi Channel, has a blog that he doesn't often update. His latest post was over two months ago, and I've been wanting to comment on it since then but haven't had the chance to put my thoughts together. (I'm glad I waited, because the mid-season finale just over a week ago gave me a couple more elements to talk about.) He often responds to viewer comments in his blog entries, and one comment he answers struck me in how it exemplifies our evaluation of people's characters. I don't think the fact that this is fiction makes a difference. We do this sort of thing in real life too. I think Moore's response is interesting, because he seems to be insisting on a view about moral evaluation that no one really holds. I hope that will be clear once I get the dialectic going. Here is the comment he's responding to:

I'm curious as to what characters we are supposed to like at this point in the second season. Adama, Roslin, the XO, and Apollo have all been disappointments. Adama has been a non-factor due to his injury but is at the root of the martial law problem along with Roslin since they begin working at cross purposes. Roslin has turned into this Jim Jones/David Koresh type figure and added a drug addiction to it which I find off putting. The XO can't make a good decision (other than to go back to Kobol) and has turned into more of an alcoholic than ever. He's let his wife manipulate him for worse as well. Apollo seems like an ingrateful whelp with a chip on his shoulder, going against both the military and his father. Starbuck hasn't been much better, going against Adama and then tooling around Caprica reliving her old life and playing ball games. Which character has shown any redeeming values this season?

I keep getting searches like battlestar galactica september 2 and stargate september 2 For the sake of information to those who don't know to look at Gateworld or the SciFi Channel's SG-1, Atlantis, or Galactica pages, there weren't any new episodes of any of the SciFi Friday lineup. It's Memorial Day weekend, and they ran an SG-1 marathon instead.

The SciFi Channel has made some pretty bone-headed decisions in the past. Canceling Farscape was one the most idiotic things they ever did. It was an extremely popular show and one of the best science fiction products ever made. I'm glad they're under different leadership now, or I might fear that they'd do the same with the two Stargate shows and Battlestar Galactica at the height of their popularity. Their decision to run Andromeda at its lowest point was baffling, and that was the current management. But the most ridiculous thing they've ever done, in my opinion, was requiring the Stargate and Battlestar Galactica shows to have only ten seconds of credit sequences. They claim now that the reason wasn't to allow for more advertizing time, even though the initial press releases said it was exactly to allow more advertizing. They claim that they were in the process of implementing more time for the show and just hadn't achieved that, but I very much doubt it.

Well, they've recanted. They've seen just how stupid it was to remove an Emmy-nominated theme song from Atlantis, how utterly cheesy the ten-second intros seem after having such luscious themes behind such stunning visuals. They probably also got a look at the full new sequences for both Stargate shows that's been appearing on Canadian TV, which by all accounts have been even better than the previous ones. I don't know if Battlestar Galactica had already made new sequences, but if so I'm sure the British run of those, which is beginning, will have them. They had an easier time making an effective ten-second intro, and they were allowed to keep their intro to the teaser portion as well, so they weren't hit as hard anyway. The Stargate ones might as well not even be there.

As things stand right now, the first half of the season will run for three more episodes with the lame intros. Then when the second half runs in January we'll get to see the full deal.

Last week I said the following about people who make themselves feel superior by criticizing how some people use language but turn out actually not to understand the linguistic principles of the case and thus criticize something that's perfectly fine:

Those who make fun of people who say things like this are therefore ignorant about how the English language works. It's kind of ironic that it's so easy for people to place themselves as having a superior understanding of language by making fun of people who talk about PIN numbers, when doing so is actually betraying their own ignorance of how language works. Unfortunately, this sometimes goes along with a sense of superiority about being a better master of the language, and as with those who criticize President Bush's regional dialect as unintelligent it just turns out to be arrogant ignorance disguised as intelligence and superiority, a very unattractive combination.

A similar phenomenon occurs with reviews of science fiction. Those who simply don't like sci-fi sometimes speak of it as fantasy adventure stories for children and thus reveal that they themselves are either ignorant of what the best sci-fi is really like or not intelligent enough to understand the intelligence behind much science fiction.