THE ATLANTA INCURSION Cover Art Phase #1 and Phase #2

Although my first novel The Thing in the Woods stands on its own, most of my ideas for standalone stories tend to sprout sequels. Thing is no different. I've been working on its sequel, The Atlanta Incursion, for several years now and I intend to independently publish it in the next few weeks. The complicating factors are that I'm independently republishing Thing due to changes at the publisher and waiting for the cover art to be done so I can have a full cover designed. Only after that can the print and e-book be created.

In the meantime, here's the first phase of the cover by Matthew Cowdery:

And here's the second:

I sent him some clarifications about what the Grays' eyes, guns, stargate, and other technologies should look like and he's working on them now. If you want an idea of what the finished cover will look like, here's some previous work he's done for me:

Battle for the Wastelands

"Son of Grendel" (forthcoming)

Second full novel (tentative title "Serpent Sword")

Fan Novelizations of STAR CONTROL II Online

Back when I was a wee lad, my parents bought a personal computer that ran Windows 3.1 and one of the early games I had was Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. The game had a more explicitly "fun" starship-combat simulator I remember playing with my cousins and a prolonged story-based game that I never actually finished--I just kind of wandered around in the spaceship harvesting minerals from planets to buy ships and occasionally fighting the bad aliens. Eventually, as what often happens with childhood toys, I lost interest and the original disks, if they're even still around, are buried in my parents' house somewhere.

(I eventually learned how the game ended sometime in college or post-college. I won't bore you with the details, but there is an actual storyline and sequence of events.)

Well over the last couple days I got curious about good old Star Control and did some digging online. There's actually a dedicated Wiki for Star Control and quite a bit on the almighty TVTropes. It turns out that there's actually a novelization of the game's storyline written by uber-fan Tommi Salminen. Two 400-page novels, one covering the beginning of the game where you arrive at Earth and find it under an Ur-Quan slave shield and the other covering the later part of the story, once alliances with different alien races have been made and the truth about the Ur-Quan's motivations is revealed.

Here's the first one, Groombridge Log. The second one is Eternal Doctrine. Although I'd have preferred more description of the technology, characters, etc.--that's a problem with fan-fiction, the writer assumes everybody knows what everything looks like--they're still pretty entertaining.

Enjoy!

Movie Review: Beyond Skyline (2017)

Once upon a time, I saw the 2010 science fiction movie Skyline and was probably one of the few people to enjoy it. I liked the design of the aliens, the use of nuclear weapons immediately and their more realistic effects (it's not immediate death to absolutely everything and against something as big as an alien mothership with regenerative capabilities it might not even fully work), and the unorthodox ending.

So when the sequel Beyond Skyline came out, I was willing to see it, although other things took priority and I didn't get around to seeing it until Christmas break. So here's the review...

The Plot

Police officer Mark Corley (Frank Grillo), having just lost his wife, is retrieving his troubled son Trent (Jonny Weston) from jail apparently for the third time when the alien invasion from the first film starts. Avoiding immediate abduction due to being in the subway when the harvesting starts, he and some other characters like the homeless blind veteran Sarge (Antonio Fargas) and transit worker Audrey (Bojana Novakovic) soon find themselves collected by the aliens as well. They avoid having their brains harvested to power the aliens' bio-machines and after meeting Elaine (Samantha Jean) and the alien-ized Jarrod (Tony Black) from the first movie, escape to Laos when the alien ship they're on crashes.

Now they have to team up with some martial-artist Golden Triangle drug traffickers to fight the remaining aliens from the fallen craft. Said aliens are after Elaine's baby, who might not be fully human...

The Good

*For all its foolishness--I'll get to that later--it's a very fast-moving, entertaining film. I watched this on Netflix on my Kindle in three elliptical sessions at the gym and it kept me nice and focused.

*We once again see human counterattack in Los Angeles from the first movie, including a grounds-eye view of "the little UCAV that could" (there was a funny meme about that I'd link to if I could find it) that nukes an alien mothership and temporarily grounds it. They even throw in a bit of nuclear strategy--the homeless veteran Sarge, despite being mostly if not completely blind, knows that it's a short-ranged, low-yield nuke. A military commander seeking to destroy armored alien ships the size of the Astrodome without killing the hundreds of thousand of human survivors in the immediate vicinity would start with small tactical nukes and only break out the city-killers if the city and its population was irretrievably lost and there was no other way to protect the rest of the country.

*When the Los Angeles characters meet the Southeast Asian ones and hide out in what I'm pretty sure is Angkor Wat, I liked how the Laotians describe how the temples that were once built to honor the gods are now bases to fight them. Good line. I also liked how (I assume) the children of the Vietnam War generation, when the Americans claimed they're in the middle of the apocalypse, viewed the aliens as just another "apocalypse" they could survive. The various wars in Southeast Asia, if you include WWII, lasted from 1941 to 1990 and killed millions of people. An alien invasion, at least at first, might seem like more of the same.

*There are martial-arts battles between the Asian characters (and some of the American characters who have police experience or simply use handguns) and alien infantry that, despite the ridiculousness of the whole situation (the alien infantry are armored, at least 1-2 feet taller, and at least 50-100 pounds heavier), are still quite entertaining to watch. And occasionally pretty funny.

The Bad

*During the early sequences in Los Angeles it was hard to keep track of some of the lesser characters' names.

*Too much reuse of clips from the original film. It was difficult to tell when they were doing it for the nuclear-attack sequence, but it was obvious when Elaine was talking to Mark about how Jarrod was able to retain his own personality (despite being transplanted into an alien body) due to repeated non-terminal exposure to the alien hypnosis.

*The childbirth sequence is rather poorly done and entirely too short. They could have prolonged it to build suspense--perhaps alien-Jarrod is fighting off other creatures to keep them off Elaine--but it's completed in-universe in maybe five minutes and Elaine somehow has her pants on the entire time.

*The alien attack on Hawaii is a major a missed opportunity. If Hawaii was bypassed during the initial invasion, that leaves the US navy base at Pearl Harbor untouched. That's a crapton of navy ships with long-range missiles (the submarines and cruisers/destroyers all carry substantial cruise missile complements and the subs can launch cruise missiles from underwater) that could engage the aliens from beyond visual range (i.e. their crews can't be hypnotized). The military brass in Hawaii has no doubt been sitting out there getting reports from the mainland about the aliens' strengths, weaknesses, and what isn't working and planning accordingly. Instead, all we see are some of the big warrior-aliens landing at Honolulu Airport and smashing up some buildings before the alien ship moves off toward Asia. If depicting the battle is too expensive, they could just depict the Los Angeles ship arriving to clean up afterward--lots of sunken Navy ships, sailors getting sucked up from the water, some of the alien ships damaged and repairing themselves from local materials, etc. The Los Angeles ship could simply supply some extra warrior-critters to help mop up the area around the base and then move on.

(Somebody write a fan-fic called "The Second Battle of Pearl Harbor," since I don't have time. There's so little Skyline fan-fic out there you'd be a big fish in a small pond.)

*Given Sarge's apparent age, there's a missed opportunity when everybody ends up in Laos. He could easily be a Vietnam vet and could possibly recognize the place from the smells and sounds despite not being able to see. Hell, he could serve as an interpreter between the English-speaking Americans and the Laotians.

*Just how fast is the alien ship moving? It gets from Los Angeles to Hawaii (2,558 miles) in what seems like an hour or two (an airplane flight would take around 5.5 hours) and then travels the 6,500-ish miles from Hawaii to Laos very soon after that. Something that big moving that quickly shows how advanced these aliens are (after all, one of the Los Angeles ships is able to repair itself and fly again after being grounded by a nuclear strike), but it came off to me as the writers not having much of a sense of scale. Especially the latter part. They could have had the damn thing crash in the Philippines, except even that is still over 5,000 miles from Hawaii. The Pacific Ocean is freaking big, people.

*Where are they getting the clothes for the rapidly-growing baby? She gets from a newborn to looking like a preschooler halfway through the film--in-universe that's only in a day or two. Are they stopping by houses along the way to trade clothes?

*And speaking of the baby, she becomes a Macguffin with a bunch of science so weak it would make Star Trek blush.

*There's a big time skip at the end and events taking place after said time skip that don't make a lot of sense.

*There's a weird flashback/flash-forward thing that doesn't really work that ties in with the above.

The Verdict

An improvement over the original if you don't think too hard. Will see the upcoming sequel (yes there is one). 7.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Guyver 2: Dark Hero (1994)

Although the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood did an episode on the film The Guyver on my suggestion, it didn't seem like there was much of an interest from anybody in doing an episode on the sequel Guyver: Dark Hero. Given the film's iffy quality, I can't exactly blame them. Since movies and e-books are very helpful in getting me through otherwise-dull elliptical sessions, I snagged this one off Amazon Prime for a pre-Thanksgiving workout and off we went...

The Plot

It's been a year since Sean Barker (David Hayter) bonded with the Guyver, a suit of biomechanical armor of alien origin. With the evil Kronos Corporation and its alien Zoanoid warriors defeated, the armor's urge to battle evil prompts Sean to fight (and oftentimes kill) drug dealers and other criminals. This alienates him from his girlfriend Mizki (Billi Lee) from the first film, who thinks he's going insane and has no time for his "I don't kill, it kills" excuses. Plagued by strange dreams and seeing news on television of "a werewolf attack," Sean sets off for an archaeological dig in Utah overseen by Cori Edwards (Kathy Christopherson) and her father Dr. Marcus Edwards (Stuart Weiss), a pair of renegade scientists investigating things like Bigfoot, crop circles, etc.

Unfortunately, the Kronos Corporation turns out to be involved, as are a bunch of even more skilled and dangerous Zoanoids. Sean is in for the fight of his life...

The Good

*It's a fast-moving and entertaining film--most of the time.

*The script and the dialogue, although they have their issues, represent a significant improvement over the ponderous original. Watching clips of the original on YouTube (they've taken down the full movie since we watched it for Myopia, it seems), it's clear just how clunky the original was and how improved this one is.

*The opening narration is a vast improvement over the original, which had a laughably obnoxious combination of a Star Wars opening crawl ripoff and a ponderous voice-over. Instead we get a quick introduction complete with the image of the Guyver unit flashing and doing its thing and then we cut to a bunch of drug smugglers murdering a security guard.

*Replacing Jack Armstrong with David Hayter in the role of Sean is a vast improvement given how poor Armstrong's acting was in the original film. Even though Mizki is absent for most of the film, Billi Lee is an improvement on Vivian Wu. No unintentional hilarity, hard-to-understand accents, and overdramatic silliness from these two.

*Cori is a much stronger and more driven character than the passive Mizki.

*The fight choreography has improved quite a bit over the original film. In-universe I suppose it's because Sean has had more time to train in martial arts and learn about his armor and these Zoanoids aren't just Kronos's hired gang-banger muscle, but regardless it's much less silly to watch.

*We finally figure out just what Kronos's master plan is besides "conduct grossly unethical medical experiments to turn people into shape-shifting monsters."

The Bad

*There were several parts of the movie, particularly those taking place at night or in the cave system where the archaeological stuff was taking place, that were difficult to see. This might've been because I was watching it on my Kindle at my not-as-well-lit apartment gym (the LA Fitness didn't have that problem), but I don't think I've had that problem before. Something to keep in mind.

*Toward the end of the film there are some parts where it dragged.

*Given all the crap Sean and Mizki went through together in the first film and how they're still together a year afterward despite her knowledge of what Sean does with the armor, I would have liked more acknowledgement of their relationship. Instead Sean moves onto a new love interest relatively quickly--the film seems to take place over the course of only a few days, meaning that he and Mizki broke up at most a week before. It would have been much more interesting if he'd written her a letter or called her from the archaeological site indicating that he had found Zoanoids and she followed him there, with the Kronos Corporation taking note that she's the daughter of the traitor Dr. Segawa. Given the need to keep the run-time concise, throwing in a full-on love triangle might not fly, but Sean just forgets her too quickly.

*Speaking of Sean, in the first half or so of the movie he's really self-absorbed and aggravating. Somebody really needs to read How To Win Friends and Influence People and commit it to memory.

*Given how the Zoanoid Striker (Jimmie Walker) from the first movie survived and is implied to have defected to the CIA, it would have been amusing to see him again. Although he was easily the weakest of the Kronos Corporation's minions and didn't seem overly dedicated to the cause ("JUST DOING MY JOB!"), he did rough up Mizki and I imagine Sean would not be pleased to see him again. Furthermore, given his outlandishly stereotypical antics in the first film, perhaps fellow African-American Atkins (Christopher Michael) finds him embarrassing and has forced him to get his 'hood tendencies under control, including no longer letting him speak entirely in rap.

(I'm now imagining a scene where Atkins unleashes Striker against Kronos's Zoanoids and he relapses into his ghetto persona in front of Sean. An embarrassed Atkins has to chew him out.)

*The opening credits after the battle with the drug dealers are way too long.

*There are some unintentionally hilarious slow-mo scenes and scenes where Barker is trying to yell. Although Hayter is an improvement over Armstrong, he still has his Narm-ish moments.

The Verdict

An improvement over the original, but still not exactly great cinema. Worth renting or streaming, but not really worth buying. 7.0 out of 10.

Three of My Digital Fiction Publishing Short Stories Are Now "Wide"

Once upon a time, I independently published a bunch of short stories on Amazon.com for the Kindle. Digital Fiction Publishing took a liking to many of them and bought the rights to re-publish them as standalone stories and in collections for a generous royalty package. However, since the short stories are often available elsewhere as part of collections, they and the DFP collections are not part of Kindle Unlimited. This means they can be published anywhere.

After checking with the publisher to make sure he had no plans to publish the stories outside of Amazon (having "his version" and "my version" of the stories on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc would just be silly), I have published several of my DFP stories "wide" beyond Amazon's borders. They come with their original cover art courtesy of Alex Claw, using the mighty Draft2Digital.

"The Beast of the Bosporus"-This is cosmic horror in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft, but instead of being set in rural New England (as his stories typically were) or in rural Georgia (as my novel The Thing in the Woods is), this is set in the early modern Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans have rebuilt their navy after the defeat at the (Battle of Lepanto), but the empire's decline is already beginning. What is Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha to do? It might involve a creepy book bound in human skin. Non-Amazon links here.

"Beast" also had some tie-in short fiction on the blog to go with it. One piece is a faux historical journal article about Sokollu's death that also ties in some incidents in real-history that might be explained by what happens in the story itself. I also have journalistic interviews with Sokollu himself, as well as his rival don Joseph Nasi.

Picking Up Plans in Palma-This is an alternate history novelette set in my Afrikanerverse, in which an earlier Dutch settlement of the Cape of Good Hope leads to a world where the United States and the League of Democracies face off against the apartheid-like Afrikaner Confederation and its illiberal allies. You can see the mostly-completed timeline here. Connor Kelly, an American defense analyst of Irish Catholic background, has to infiltrate the Confederation to retrieve plans for an orbital battle-station. Problem: He has only the most minimal training in espionage fieldcraft and he's romantically involved with an Afrikaner emigre. This is going to be fun. Non-Amazon links here.

Illegal Alien-This is a story about a group of Mexicans trying to sneak into the United States in search of better lives, only to encounter actual extraterrestrials instead. What can I say? I really, really like bad puns. :) Non-Amazon links here.

This story also has some short tie-in fiction. One is a faux report on the aftermath of the incident from a government agency of some sort, while the other is an interview with Patrido Guzman, the story's protagonist. The latter gets into what's going on in Mexico that pushes Guzman to try to emigrate to the United States--NAFTA, the Mexican drug war, mistreatment of women in factories, etc.

Two of my remaining DFP short stories--"Lord of the Dolorous Tower" and "Lord Giovanni's Daughter"--aren't wide yet because they were first-rights purchases and don't have cover art. I'll need to commission some if I want to release them wide as well. The same applies to "Coil Gun," the first story DFP purchased for Digital Science Fiction #3: Pressure Suite, since it was never released as a standalone either. I'll let you know.

A Grimdark Alternative Ending for the 1994 Stargate

The following discussion contains spoilers for the 1994 science-fiction film Stargate, although given how the movie is 24 years old I don't know why that's important.

In the film, Ra plans to send an American nuclear warhead back to Earth, enhanced with the type of materials his advanced technology uses (in Stargate SG-1 it's called naquadah). He states this will enhance the warhead's power 100 times and claims that he created human civilization and now he will end it.

Hold it right there. Assuming that the military sent a W78 nuclear warhead through the Stargate with O'Neill, that's 350 kilotons. A nuke enhanced with naquadah to 100x its force would be around 35 megatons. That's around a third more than the 1960s-era B41 nuclear weapon. Mount St. Helens' eruption was 25 megatons of explosive power, while Mount Pinatubo was around 70 megatons. So Ra sends the nuke back through the Stargate and it detonates in the decommissioned nuclear silo that was the base of operations for the mission. Assuming he can remotely detonate it through the gateway, he's basically just caused a volcanic eruption in the U.S. Rocky Mountains, and that assumes the mountain on top of the explosion cannot contain it. After all, underground nuclear tests generally don't disturb the surface that much.

Mount Pinatubo caused a worldwide temperature drop of one degree, and that was with smoke, gas, and other crap continuously pumping into the atmosphere from the bowels of the Earth and spreading all over the world rather than a one-time big bang and, depending on what's around it, a big radioactive forest fire. Assuming the equivalent of Mount Pinatubo, Ra has just caused--maybe--a repeat of the Year Without a Summer in 1994. That would suck if it causes drought and famine in marginal areas, but it would not destroy modern civilization.

That said, there's a more grimdark possibility here. If there's a major nuclear detonation in the US, it could potentially lead to a confrontation with Russia, although I doubt President Clinton would have ordered a nuclear strike not knowing what happened. Assuming the US panicked and launched on Russia and the Russians fired back, you could have a civilization-ending nuclear exchange depending on what missiles are fired, where they detonate, etc. Bonus points if there's a nuclear winter to cause famine and ecological collapse in otherwise unaffected areas.

Ra (or some other opportunistic Goa'uld who notices) could wait a few years or decades for civilization to collapse, show up and pull his "I'm a god" trick on the debased, uneducated descendants of the exchange survivors, and assume control over Earth. I'm now imagining the Earth's surviving libraries as the equivalents of the fresco Sha'uri showed Dr. Jackson that depicted Ra bringing Earthlings to Abydos and the rebellion that ended his rule on Earth thousands of years ago.

Of course, Ra in the movie doesn't actually seem powerful to pull that off, even if post-nuclear civilization is reduced to medieval levels. He's got a couple fighter jets, one spaceship, and a few guards with armor resembling that of Egypt's gods. The basis of his rule is deception, not raw strength. He might not be able successfully take control of Earth, although one of the TV series' Goa'uld with their planetary empires, navies, etc. would.

That said, I could easily imagine him taking control over part of it. Maybe he keeps Dr. Jackson alive using the sarcophagus long enough to see him returning to Egypt and re-establishing himself as god there once more.

How's that for a Downer Ending?

ENDER'S GAME, Hive Civilizations, and STARSHIP TROOPERS

A few days ago, I hosted a guest post by my fellow writer Matthew Stienberg about how Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel Starship Troopers would make an excellent television series, which would allow for a greater exploration of the characters and world than a feature film would. I followed it up with a post of my own on how the novel's depiction of a conflict between the Merchant Marine (whose personnel don't earn the franchise for service) and the military (which does) could allow for a nuanced critique of the Federation without descending into Verhoeven-level idiocy and provide for complex storylines.

Well, here's my third post, on how we could explore the civilization of the Pseudo-Arachnids, the "Bugs" that the Federation fights against. In the novel it's never really described, although the warrior and worker bugs are depicted as being non-sentient and under the direction of senior bugs never depicted on-page. The 1997 film gives us the Brain Bug, whose appearance I didn't really like. The role-playing game book The Arachnid Empire apparently has some description of the Bugs' history and culture, such as it is, but it's not in the free-to-read material and I don't like this stuff enough to buy it to find out.

However, if that back-story proves lacking, Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, which was adapted into a movie I enjoyed, has an interesting explanation for how a "Bug" civilization might function. Here there be spoilers...

Among the Formics or "Buggers" of Ender's Game and its spin-offs, the only truly sentient beings are the queens, with the majority of the species being non-sentient workers and drones. In the vein of Earth's insects, queens would be born in existing colonies and would leave to start a new colony. Each new colony would battle the others until one day a queen managed to persuade a daughter to work with her rather than attacking her (and only leaving to establish a new hive if she failed to topple her mother but survived). The mother-daughter pair spawned new queens that they kept as allies, pattern leading to a Formic civilization consisting of a coalition of sentient queens commanding billions of drones that defeated all single-queen nests and united the species.

The Arachnid caste system in the novel is a bit more complicated, with the Brain Bugs being the overall commanding intelligence of an Arachnid hive, to the point if a Brain Bug is killed, the colony will die with it (novel) or the subordinate Bugs will run mad without them in control (the Roughnecks animated series). However, there are queen bugs whose purpose is breeding that warrior-bugs will kill queens to keep them from being captured, which could imply the queens have some degree of sentience, or at least there's something about them while alive that makes it too risky (for the Bugs) for humans to capture them. Either way, the "ordinarily-singular sentients with masses of non-sentient slaves learn to cooperate" theory could apply, only with Brain Bugs instead of the queens.

In the Starship Troopers universe, human prisoners are discovered when the Federation invades Arachnid-controlled Planet P, which in Matt's chronology would be Season Three. That would be a good time for the viewer to learn about this, since these humans would have the most interaction with the Bugs, possibly including the leadership caste if the Arachnid leadership is interrogating them or studying them. Alternatively, if the viewers are getting impatient, this is something the Federation could learn from the Skinnies, since Matt suggested Season Two would consist of an attempt to forcibly detach the Skinnies from their alliance with the Bugs in which the Federation learns of the Brain Bugs. The Bugs might've been more forthcoming about their history with their allies than with their enemies, or the Skinnies might have found this out on their own. After all, they might be concerned that they could be next if the Arachnids triumph over the Federation.

ANNIHILATION Theories: Is (SPOILER) Human or Not?

In my review of the new science-fiction film Annihilation, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, I said one of the positives of the film was that the ending of the movie was ambiguous. There are spoilers after this paragraph, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, don't keep reading. In fact, I'll plug in an image of the movie poster below so you don't see anything by accident.

In the climax of the film, biologist and military veteran Lena (Natalie Portman) finds a burned corpse in a lighthouse that's the epicenter of "Area X," a region of rural Florida that's being warped by an alien presence known as "the Shimmer." There's a camcorder set up in front of the corpse and when Lena begins watching the video, she sees her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) commit suicide on-camera after telling someone else to "find Lena." That someone else is revealed to be another Kane. That means (or could mean) the being that showed up at her home and soon became sick and had to be transported to the hospital wasn't actually her husband, but some kind of alien clone.

Soon afterward, Lena encounters the alien force at the heart of the Shimmer that transforms into a double of her that she's able to trick into committing suicide. When she returns to the military base built to watch Area X, she finds that her dying husband has returned to full health, but when she asks if he's Kane, he says that he doesn't think so. The two embrace and both their eyes do this weird iridescent thing, implying that neither of them is human, at least fully.

I said that the ending was ambiguous, and here's why. A case can be made that the being who came home a year after her husband left was an alien creature masquerading as her husband, but a case can also be made that it really is Kane, just seriously messed up by his experiences within the Shimmer. Here goes...

Alien

*This is the most straightforward explanation. Kane lost his mind in the Shimmer and committed suicide, but not before establishing some kind of rapport with his alien doppelganger. There's still enough of him left to want Lena to not be left alone, so he tells the doppelganger (which has enough of his memories that it could conceivably play the part) to find his wife before he ignites himself.

*One of the podcasts I listen is The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy and in the episode dedicated to Annihilation, they say that when Kane returns home, he's looking at the pictures on the wall (I can't remember what they were, but they might've been him and Lena, their unit back when they were in the military, etc). He doesn't know what they are, implying that he's some other being wearing Kane's face.

*When Lena asks Kane if he's Kane, his response is that he doesn't think so.

*The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy crew thought that the way Kane embraced Lena at the end seemed more like someone needing reassurance. If Kane is an alien intelligence of some kind, he's the last of his kind on Earth and he's in the hands of people who could very easily kill him. His only possible ally is Lena.

Human

*When Lena burns her double, the flames spread through the lighthouse and all the various alien growths begin catching fire, even alien structures well beyond the lighthouse. When Lena is being debriefed after returning from Area X, the scientist interrogating her reports that an expedition has been to the lighthouse and there's no trace of the Shimmer left. We then learn that Kane, who was dying when she went into Area X, has recovered.

If Kane isn't actually human, he would have died along with the Shimmer. Instead, he recovers from the brink of death as soon as the lighthouse goes up. That would imply that he might have been in the process of mutating and dying (like the other soldier whose belly he cut open to reveal writhing, eel-like intestines), but Lena's destruction of the Shimmer aborted whatever was being done to him before it was terminal. Lena herself experienced a similar process--she samples her own blood and sees her cells are mutating--but it's her who came back from the Shimmer, not the alien doppelganger. Although the eye-thing indicates neither of them is fully human anymore, neither of them isn't human either.

*The man that commits suicide with the phosphorous grenade speaks in a very thick Southern accent. In the flashback scenes with Lena and Kane before Kane leaves on his secret mission, Kane doesn't have a Southern accent. Although it's possible that one of his teammates who DOES have a Southern accent was being "refracted" into him, we don't see interpersonal "refraction" among Lena and her team--Josie (Tessa Thompson) begins sprouting leaves from her scars like a plant is being "refracted" into her and the alligator that attacks Josie earlier in the film has a shark-like mouth, but it's not like the women suddenly adopted each other's personality traits, accents, etc.

*I'm not the only one who has reached a similar conclusion. In the WMG page of the TVTropes for the film, someone else suggested that the man who kills himself is an alien doppelganger who absorbed a lot of Kane's memories, but since may be the first time it has fully mimicked a human being (the members of the other investigatory teams might've been killed by wildlife or mutated to death before reaching the lighthouse), it went insane.

*Kane doesn't recognize the photos in his house because he's suffering amnesia as a result of his exposure to the Shimmer and the mutations his body is undergoing.

*Kane says that he doesn't think he's Kane, but the Shimmer may well have done a number on his mind. To make a Star Wars analogy, from the moment Darth Vader arises from the operating table after being burned on Mustafar and rebuilt as a cyborg, Palpatine is trying to cultivate "Darth Vader" as a distinctive personality from Anakin Skywalker. In Darth Vader #1, Palpatine tells him that Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber belonged to "someone else, a Jedi" and in one of the old Expanded Universe comics, when Vader confronts Palpatine about the Empire practicing slavery, Palpatine says that "Anakin Skywalker" and "his mother" had been slaves. The trauma of the events of the previous expedition and his near-death might have caused something similar to happen.

I admit I prefer the second option because despite the horrifyingly cynical things I say sometimes I'm a hopeless romantic. Furthermore, as a Christian I believe in the sanctity of marriage--I'd like to believe that despite Kane being amnesiac and possibly experiencing an identity crisis, Lena having cheated on him due to his long military absences and the growing intellectual distance between them, and them both now being partly alien, their relationship can still be fixed. However, sometimes there are downer endings and I recognize there is such a thing as Confirmation Bias. However, a strong case can be made that Kane is still human and the other stuff is a bunch of red herrings.

What do you all think? Feel free to comment, discuss with each other, etc. below.

Movie Review: ANNIHILATION (2018)

As those who know me in real life know, I sometimes criticize Hollywood for its lack of originality and propensity for remakes. So when Hollywood makes something original--okay, this is an adaptation of the science fiction novel by Jeff VanderMeer rather than a purely original work--it's important to support it in order to encourage more of them.

So last week I saw the film Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman. How was it? Find out...

The Plot

College professor Lena (Natalie Portman) is grieving for her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), who has been sent on a covert military operation and has gone missing. Her grief is soon interrupted by his sudden reappearance at their home. He can't remember very much and soon begins suffering from a mysterious illness. On the way to the hospital, their ambulance is ambushed by some Men In Black types, who take Lena and Kane to a mysterious base.

It turns out Kane had volunteered for a mission into a mysterious "Area X" in western Florida where an alien presence from a fallen meteor has spread throughout the nearby land--and is threatening to spread into inhabited areas. Nobody who has been sent to explore the afflicted area has ever returned--except for Kane, and nobody is sure how. Another team, consisting of Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), and Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny), is being prepped to enter Area X, and Lena persuades them to allow her to accompany them, citing her experiences in the military and as a biologist. The clock is ticking with Kane apparently dying, and Lena wants answers.

They pass through the mysterious "Shimmer" bounding the area to find a place where time flows differently and where the plants and animals are being mutated by alien forces. It's a place of beauty and horror and as the women go deeper, things get weirder and the body count rises.

The Good

*The movie is never boring. There were a couple moments where I was tempted to look at my watch, but I never did so. That's pretty rare these days. It moves along at a quick clip and between the beauty and the creepy (I'll get to both of these later), there's always something to grab and hold your attention.

*There's a lot of well-done subtext, including depicting two characters' fraying romance by showing their reading choices--one is reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the other is reading a magazine.

*The acting, particularly by Portman and Rodriguez, is really good. Although everybody in the group goes into Area X armed, Portman, playing an actual veteran, shows that she knows what she's doing with her weapon. There's a sexual scene partway through the film where she does a good job conveying her conflict and feelings--or lack thereof--as well. I have never heard myself or anybody else discussing acting during a sex scene of all things. And as they go deeper into Area X, Rodriguez gets convincingly scarier.

*Hollywood's depiction of women is so hit-and-miss that the Bechdel Test was invented to analyze it. The film's main cast is almost entirely female, several of them are scientists, and they go into Area X on a scientific mission, so it passes the test with flying colors.

*The film is visually beautiful. The realm within the shimmer is full of color and strange life, all of which is very well-done. It gets downright psychedelic at times. The "Shimmer" has engulfed formerly inhabited areas--someone's small house by the lake and an old military base--and seeing what happens when nature reclaims human works is pretty interesting in and of itself.

*The visuals of the film convey grossness and horror as readily as beauty. I'm not going to be specific to avoid ruining anything for anybody, but there're some truly squicky bits in the videos left by previous expeditions that the women find, as well as when they find the previous expedition's members. One of the mutated creatures of Area X is quite scary, and when it opens its mouth and starts making noise, it sounds disturbing.

Seriously, the art director, cinematographer, and special effects people need to earn some awards for this.

*The ending is rather ambiguous. I'm not going to go any farther for reasons of spoilers, but it's something that can certainly generate conversation.

The Bad

*There are some moments of weak dialogue that's too on-the-nose and doesn't sound like how people actually talk. For example, a character is cheating with another and one of them asks if the other's spouse, "knows of our affair." It'd be more realistic if the character asks if the wrong spouse knows "about us" or if they "know." That bit was so poorly written that I was all, "Huh?" right in the middle of the movie.

*Sometimes the sound is too loud. The music, though it's important in making the film as trippy and mind-bending as it is, is sometimes overpowering.

*During the climax, some of the more energetic manifestations of the Shimmer look a little too obviously CGI.

The Verdict

I doubt I'll see it a second time, at least anytime soon, but it's a very weird and well-done movie. I strongly recommend seeing it, not only because it's good but because it'll encourage more book adaptations and original material from the Powers That be. 9.0 out of 10.

Some Ideas on a Small-Screen STARSHIP TROOPERS From Me

A few days ago, Matthew Stienberg wrote a post on my blog about how he'd do STARSHIP TROOPERS as a TV series. Although there's already been one ST television show (the 1990s animated series Roughnecks I watched in middle school) and there's talk going around of a remake of the 1997 film, I think we're in agreement that a television show would be a better way to tell the story. Think Game of Thrones or The Expanse in which each book is a season. Although Starship Troopers is a relatively short novel, it covers what's probably multiple years of war and has enough incidents that can be fleshed out. As Matt's post lays out, basic training to the botched Federation assault on Klendathu is Season One, the rebuilding after Klendathu and Johnny earning his officer's commission is Season Two, the planning and execution of the assault on Planet P is Season 3, etc. Although Johnny apparently dies during another attack on Klendathu, he could always be Spared By The Adaptation or the second assault on Klendathu and Johnny's death could be Season 4.

Now here's where Matt's ideas and mine differ. The Starship Troopers novel references "incidents," "patrols," and "police actions" that occurred before the Bug War, which is also considered a "third" or "fourth" space war but the first truly "interstellar" war. Matt thinks this indicates there are other human societies besides the Federation. However, large-scale space colonization seems to happen only after WWIII, the collapse of most of society, and the reorganization and rebuilding by a trans-national alliance of veterans. There's a Starship Troopers role-playing game that explores the timeline and how the Federation functions day-to-day, but it's been so long since I flipped through the manuals at DragonCon that until I dug up the manuals on Amazon I couldn't remember much about it beyond telepaths not being legally allowed to gamble or trade stocks and how the veterans who founded the Federation decided that the years of war and collapse were so violent that every adult who lived through it should be considered a veteran and allowed to vote.

(That would make the Federation's system of earning the right to vote through either military or sufficiently-strenuous civilian service a much easier pill for the surviving populations to swallow, since nobody is actually losing the franchise--it's just their children and grandchildren will need to earn it later. This RPG manual here has the entire history of the Federation, which also suggests that at least one of these "incidents" might've been a pirate raid on a new colony by the Skinnies and that off-world space colonization was something the Federation started after the unification of Earth.)

Therefore, with the possible exception of people who dislike the Federation's limited franchise fleeing and establishing colonies elsewhere (more on that later), it seems more likely that there aren't human societies outside the Federation. Who then, is the Federation fighting? If these incidents were with aliens other than the Arachnids or the Skinnies, I would think there might be some mention of that.

And that leads us to a possible darker side of the Federation. I don't buy the hysterical claims that the Federation's system is fascist or militarist--if it were, it would be more overtly authoritarian with a Gestapo, a Fuhrer, etc. and Johnny wouldn't talk about "the poor bloody infantry" who protect home from "war's desolation." Real fascists and militarists would think war is a positive good and not a necessary evil and there are always personality cults, suppression of dissent, etc. That's one reason I'm not a fan of Verhoeven's bastardization, which you can see in my review of the movie. If the Federation were fascist, Johnny's father would be dead or in a work camp for complaining about Johnny's classes at school. Hell, Johnny might even be so brainwashed that he'd turn his own father in. That's what real totalitarianism looks like.

That said, the fact only veterans can vote hearkens back to another historical evil. During the lead-up to the American Revolution, the British claimed the Colonies, even though they lacked representation in Parliament, had "virtual representation" because Parliament would represent their interests regardless. The Patriots didn't buy that then, and we know that politicians generally only care about their immediate constituents, not the national good. That's why gerrymandering is such a problem. Even if the Federation's citizens represent a cross-section of race, class, creed, etc. (in the book Johnny is Filipino and comes from a wealthy family), they could still put their own interests above that of the "civilian" population that still greatly outnumbers them--there are colonies where half the population are citizens, but I don't think the figure of citizens on Earth itself is that high. Imagine, for example, lavish funding for programs that only benefit citizens but civilians aren't eligible for. There's a reason our forebears pushed for "no taxation without representation."

Furthermore, in the books it's made clear that the Merchant Marine wants its members granted citizenship after service like the military and (presumably at least some of) the civil service, but they don't get it. That explains the hostility between the Merchant Marine, which makes an interplanetary/interstellar peacetime economy possible, and the armed services, that occurs in the book. Johnny and some other military recruits on liberty get into a fight with some (surface) Merchant Marine sailors in a bar in Seattle, and apparently it's not an isolated incident. The same rules might apply to civilian shippers in space, although one would think that would be so dangerous it should guarantee citizenship in the same vein military service does.

So it could be that some of these "incidents" involving the Mobile Infantry weren't conflicts with external powers, pirates, etc. but something like suppression of a Merchant Marine strike or if you want to be even more extreme, wars of conquest against non-Federation human polities. For example, if we don't use the RPG timeline for our hypothetical television show, there might have been colonies within the solar system founded before WWIII that didn't collapse like their parent societies did Earthside and might have been conquered by the early Federation (hence multiple space wars but only one truly interstellar war). Once the Federation has control of the solar system, then you start seeing the massive united effort needed for establishing colonies around other stars. The Federation conquest of the solar system would be so distant in the past it would be like the Indian Wars to the modern U.S., but the Merchant Marine issues are in the book itself.

The more I think about it, the more a suppression of a Merchant Marine strike or strikes would be something to include in a hypothetical TV series before the beginning of the Bug War. If the entire Merchant Marine went on strike until their personnel got citizenship rights, the Federation's peacetime economy would collapse and the strikers could win without violence, but if only some of them did, there's a lot more potential for mayhem. Striking (armed) Merchant Marine ships could attack non-striking or "scab" ships, while on the other end, the Federation might be more willing to physically attack striking Merchant Marine vessels if they know that most of the Merchant Marine will stay loyal. The survivors of a Federation attack on strikers or a defeated attack on "scabs" by strikers could even go full-blown pirate, requiring a prolonged campaign to defeat.

Furthermore, widespread civil unrest within the Federation could be what tempts the Arachnids and their Skinny allies to attack the Federation--Saddam Hussein invaded Iran to take advantage of the chaos of the Iranian Revolution, after all. If the Arachnids and humans are competing for a relatively small number of habitable planets, a pre-emptive strike on humans could be a matter of species survival, especially if the Arachnids are fast-breeding and need to expand rapidly to avoid overpopulation and collapse.

And if you want to generate lots of discussion on the Internet, it could be hinted that the Federation's leadership provoked the Bugs as a "short, victorious war" to end internal strife within the Federation. It would provide an outside enemy to unite the people against (much like how opponents of the Argentine junta publicly embraced them after the conquest of the Falklands) and a prolonged war could generate a lot more veterans who can vote, reducing social pressures within the Federation. Only 400,000 Americans died in WWII, but 16 million or so served in some capacity; only 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam but 2.5 million served in the war itself and many more than that were in the military at the time.

Furthermore, the old show Space: Above and Beyond featured a human polity at war with the alien Chigs that had internal problems--there were cloned humans who had been mistreated, rebelled against said mistreatment, and now had to serve alongside their former tormentors in a war, while exiled artificial intelligences who'd rebelled against what was essentially slavery are allied to the Chigs. Having recent problems between the military and Merchant Marine could provide for some really interesting episodes--say after Klendathu the military requisitions some civilian ships for raids on the Arachnids and the civilian crew hates having to work with soldiers, some Merchant Marine extremists collaborate with the Arachnids, blocked by fraternization rules from romance with Dizzy or Carmen Johnny gets involved with a Merchant Marine sailor and both of them get trouble from their friends, etc.

If a TV show followed my or the other Matt's ideas, it would be more faithful adaptation of Heinlein's work AND would provide a more realistic, subtle critique of Heinlein's Federation than Verhoeven's straw-manning.