Yes, there are pop-science writers who believe in time travel

At a recent meeting, I said that there is no such thing as time travel, unless you mean time travel of the mundane sort - 1 second per second. Or even relativistic time travel into the future via time dilation.

The response of the Straits Times is to quote Michio Kaku.

Why don't you ask him about the details about how to accomplish this? He is at least honest enough to tell you about the extreme energies involved. If you understand it enough, you will understand him saying that it is extremely unlikely.

So the right way to appreciate time-travel stories in SF is to adopt the stance, enunciated by the character of Angier in The Prestige: "You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you get to see something really special. You really don't know? It was the look on their faces."

Isaac Asimov on the end of oil

Over here at Time Magazine, SF Writer Isaac Asimov has an article envisioning a world without oil.

Yes, you heard it right. Isaac Asimov. Isn't he dead?

Well check the date of that article: 25 April 1977. In 1977, he was trying to show us a world without oil, imagined then to be ten years past, in 1997. Did he get the date right? Of course not. But consider that he was 30 years ahead of other prognosticators like James Howard Kunstler, Colin Campbell, Matthew Simmons et al.

Of course, the comparison is invalid. Isaac Asimov offers to us visions, while the others had hard data to communicate. But otherwise, chalk up another brownie point for The Good Doctor.

Nuclear Power Plants for Singapore?

Finally some hint of official consideration for a pressing problem on the horizon: Singapore to consider Nuclear Power Plants.

I would like to add my two cents worth to this idea.

The first is where to site it. Nuclear power plants have a waste disposal problem. Even if you could dispose of the waste cleanly, the site remains contaminated for years after the nuclear plant is decommissioned. In land scarce Singapore, where can you put such a power plant? My solution: locate it off-shore. USE FLOATING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS. Russia knows how to build such plants - get them to build it for us.

The next is the political hot potato that this energy option represents. Our neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia are not going to happy with this. The way to defuse this to GIVE THEM JOINT OWNERSHIP OF THE FLOATING NUCLEAR POWER PLANT. And share the power.

Don't just consider it, take it seriously for the sake of the future and looming energy crisis.

A Fresh Start for the New Year

A new beginning with a new start due largely to a trip to a place where green fields and hills still stand. This blog has been reorganized. For continuity's sake, some old posts have been retained, but many deleted.

The old me, is no more.

James Cameron's Avatar

I loved the plot and setting in this movie. Humans are invading the planet Pandora for the mineral Unobtainium. They are militarily organized and have advanced exosuits and war machines. But there is a race of people, the Na'vi, the indigenous folk who live in a biological paradise on it. The humans are trying to figure out what the Na'vi want, so that they can get to the mineral. And so for that, they project a living human person's consciousness into the a biologically engineered avatar, and use it to spy on them. Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully, a paraplegic twin brother of someone who was supposed to undergo this mission, but died before he could do it. So the military asks him to substitute for his brother. He does, carries out the mission, but switches allegiances when he falls in love Neytin (Zoe Seldana).

The ecology and biology of the Na'vi is a grand sight to beyond, rendered amazingly in 3D. You should see this to be believed. Stories about VR must blend the virtual world with the real and in this case, CGI is used not just to create the biological world, but also so that the real actor's can control computer rendered character. Facial expressions were apparently difficult to do, but no longer. And this is the impressive work of Weta.

The message is and has continued to be the staple of SF (and even non-SF books). Exploitation of indigenous peoples and waging war on them for profiteering is wrong. Especially if their biology is fascinating.

And there is a very fascinating idea. The Na'vi have communal memories stored in the trees, which communicate with each other by their network of root systems. This is a slightly different idea than in our books, where the trees communicate visually and symbolically using luciferin. In both cases, there is network of trees. In our book, we did not expound on the neural system of the trees. We decided to gloss over this bit of alien biology. But in this movie, all creatures have a biological neural interface! The scientist in me is wondering how by consciously inhabiting the avatar, a HUMAN has somehow interfaced into their their hive mind.

Thank you, James Cameron. While I do not know about precedence, I do know that you have made this SF writer and his collaborator very, very happy.

Just in case you don't understand what the pattern is, David Brin has had Surrogates cribbing his Kiln People. I have Roland Emmerich and James Cameron "cribbing" me! Wow!

This is your chance, fans, friends, acquiantances or enemies. Tell me what I should do about this. I really don't feel like suing anyone. But if I have a chance to know the studios/directors/producers/writers, even just a brief note from any one of them, it would be a great honor!

2012

Firstly the bad things. The pseudoscience is quite terrible ... why would neutrinos from the sun melt the Earth's core? For it to have any effect, the sun would have gone nova!

This is John Updike's poem about neutrinoes ...

Neutrinos, they are very small.
they have no charge and have no mass
and do not interact at all.
the earth is just a silly ball
to them, through which they simply pass,
like dustmaids down a drafty hall
or photons through a sheet of glass.
they snub the most exquisite gas,
ignore the most substantial wall,
cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
insult the stallion in his stall,
and, scorning barriers of class,
infiltrate you and me. like tall
and painless guillotines they fall
down through our heads into the grass.
at night, they enter at nepal
and pierce the lover and his lass
from underneath the bed—you call
it wonderful; i call it crass.

Why bother to explain the film's premise that in 2012, there will be global apocalypse due to the Mayan calendar running out?

But I thank the writers for including two nods to me. Yes, I don't like self-aggrandisement, but there are two nods. Firstly, there is a throwaway line about the kid telling his father about how he doesn't want to know about him and his mom having sex. Could this be a reference to my story "What Debt is Due?"

And then there is a subplot about how at the end of the world, curators of precious art labor to save the masterpieces of the world. Which again comes from my story, "What Debt is Due?" in a throwaway line about the exabytes of art being lost as the galaxy falls to pieces.

Thank you.

What do I think about 2012? Well, it's good apocalyptic eye-candy. Let it stand for the other more plausible ends of the world - financial, climate, or resource.

Flashforward

I normally do not comment on TV, because I don't watch it regularly. But the recent miniseries based on Robert Sawyer's novel of the same name is interesting. Having read the book and forgotten it, it is nice to experience the memory jog.

This is a time-travel story. But the time travel is strictly limited to one single 2 minute 17 second flashforward, where everyone blacks out and experiences 6 months in their future. When they come out, everyone has a field day comparing stories. A suicidal doctor finds reason to live. A police officer glimpses clues to a future investigation and opens the case. A woman finds herself with another man not her husband. A very interesting humanistic tapestry emerges from these separate stories.

Read the book. Writer/director David Goyer has maintained this tapestry feel while changing many details. But the central story of the investigation into what caused the flashforward has been maintained. This scientific plot is what makes it SF.

I shall say nothing more about the plot except a hint: 2 minutes 17 seconds is 137 seconds.

Thirst

This is Korean director Chan Wook Park's film. It is about vampires. Like I said about vampire movies, I consider the entire premise of vampires based on superstition. They are silly creatures, however much you try to dress them up as science, as a result of some kind of viral epidemic. In science and science-fiction, you start from the fundamental premise and work out the consequences. You don't work backwards by trying to explain each and every odd piece of vampire lore.

I was going to pass by this movie without comment. A Korean movie with an Asian cast about vampires! *rolls eyes*. A Catholic priest volunteers himself as an experimental test subject for drugs to cure some horrific disease. He survives the treatment that 200 others die of, and turns into a blood-sucking vampire with the entire suite of abilities - superstrength, solarphobia, immortality, ability to fly, bloodthirst, minus the fangs. He finds that he cannot resist the temptation of the flesh. But his conscience calls, and so he compromises - he drinks only the blood of the willing, and the comatose in hospital. Then he meets the wife of a childhood friend, who tempts him into a great sin as he falls in love with her. Against his will, he turns her into a vampire like him. Unlike him, she enjoys being a vampire, preying upon humans with her superhuman powers. He vacillates from giving in to her to opposing her, and finally, comes up with the solution.

It is this solution that turns this movie into something more than a conventional vampire movie. How indeed can you stop this evil creature that you created, that has no morals, and shares none of your qualms against the taking of human life? The solution is interesting and deeply romantic: Just before sunrise, he takes her and drives out to a countryside, at the edge of cliff facing the ocean, where there is no shelter from the sunlight. She fights him of course, but eventually, resigns herself to her fate. The couple sit, viewing the sun, awaiting their death. An absolutely romantic situation.

This scene alone makes the price of the movie worth paying for. I may not like vampire stories much, but I like romantic endings!

The Time Traveler's Wife

Not having read Audrey Niffeninger's story, I was surprised by this movie. It is an utterly romantic story about how a man courts a woman, despite being cursed by a genetic disorder to uncontrollably be projected into the past or future.

The point of the story is the romance between Claire and Henry. This is handled sensitively. The disturbing aspect of and older Henry imposing himself on a young Claire as a child is defused. The resulting story is beautiful if fatalistic and serves as an allegory for the strained human relationships.

One slight flaw in this gem is the question if Henry has any control over his time-traveling. Apparently no, which leads to the general air of fatalism that runs through the story. If so, then how does Henry go back to tell himself that he is a time-traveler? How does he buy the right lottrery ticket? There is the apparent plot hole that makes the diamond flawed. Which is a pity because the concept is simple and the premise fruitful.

Moon

Sam is an astronaut on the Moon, mining Helium 3 to solve the energy crisis on Earth. He has been there for 2 years and more, and is two weeks from the end of the three-year contract ... or so he thinks. He has only a robot assistant GERTY to talk to. The communications tower has been damaged, and his link to Earth is intermittent. While trying to repair a harvester truck, he gets injured and knocked out, which is the triggering event for everything that follows.

The moon serves as isolated place for this movie to examine issues of identity all in a SFnal premise. Is Sam what he think he is? What about his wife and family? Why is there a communications blackout? Is he going crazy? This is a pure psychological mystery drama tha slowly reveals all her cards at the end, such that when you finally know all the cards, the scenario seems logical, inevitable, even if it is horrendous.

Let me give you a hint. Consider mankind sending a harvesting operation to the Moon to extract Helium 3. Who do we send? Can we send one astronaut alone? Do we even need to send him. Answering these questions will give you the key to understanding Sam's plight.

This movie is well-made, thoughtful and truly deserves to called a classic.