Galaxis March 2019

Galaxis

SECRET ORIGINS OF EMPIRE STRIKES BACK AND GALACTICA SPACE ART REVIEWS: SLASH, SOLO SF TRADING CARDS HARLAN ELLISON

NUMBER 8

THE WORLDS OF SCIENCE & SCIENCE FICTION

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EP GUIDE: THE X-FILES, PART I BUNKY, PART II FICTION: NEW DRAGONFIRE HOWARD CRUSE

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ience c s t a e r g f lection o the best SF and l o c r u o y ents xis to Add Gala zines. Galaxis pres ifully designed ga f ut fiction ma es and art in a bea fiction magazine o ri ce science sto t makes it the scien a package th tomorrow. d today—an Get every issue at www.weimar.ws 2

Galaxis March 2019

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4 VIEWSCREEN | From the editor 6 LAUNCH TUBE | What’s next for Star Wars, the president wants a space force, new Picard, and more 11 IMAGERY | Suiting up for action 25 GAME SET | SF quiz and Flash Gordon word hunt 46 WORLDLY THINGS | Techno smarts and smart tech 47 SCREENINGS | Updates on TV shows and upcoming films 74 COMPENDIUM | What to see, hear, and do 75 WEBBED | Special SF authors edition 76 REVIEWSCREEN | Slash, Ant Man and Wasp, Deadpool 2, His Dark Materials, & more 110 NEXT GALAXIS

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16 ALL ALIENS | Are audiences tired of Alien movies?

18 ’OUMUAMUA | Interstellar visitor or space junk?

20 INTERVIEW: HOWARD CRUSE | The celebrated cartoonist talks comics and comix 26 IT’S IN THE CARDS | The late-’70s SF trading cards boom 32 SEX, GENDER AND SF | Are we still advancing, or slipping?

38 X-FILES EPISODE GUIDE | The first season 39 THE COLOR OF ART | Unique space art 54 FICTION: DRAGON FIRE, PART IV | The Plan 60 SOLO GOES SOLO | Does Solo deserve its criticism?

64 BEAUTIFUL ORIGINS | How Empire and Galactica changed before hitting the screens 67 HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY | Hitler and the bomb 70 BUNKY | Comic adventure, part II

MARCH 2019 VOLUME 2 • NUMBER 2

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hen technology prognosticators used to tell us about all of the free time we would have on our hands as technology took care of more and more manual chores, we were told that people would use that time to do what they really want to do—be artists, explorers, thinkers.

It turns out that what most people seem to want to do with their newfound free time is wage social media wars.

Harlan Ellison passed away June 28, 2018, at the age of 84. News of his death had barely broken when the Harlan Ellison Wars began. He was a genius. He was mean.

He was sweet. We’ll miss him forever. Good riddance. And on and on. From Twitter to Facebook to the blogosphere and beyond, we got stories from the late author’s friends, professional acquaintances, and enemies.

As much as he was a cyclone of controversy in his lifetime, he obviously remains one in death.

I never met Ellison in person, but I met him even deeper in my soul many times, thanks to the magic of words and paper. I think the person most responsible for getting me into Ellison’s works was his friend David Gerrold (see Galaxis #5), who started his column in the first issue of Starlog that I ever bought (#34, May 1980) with a quote from Ellison about the power of writing.

And man, could that man write.

In his short story “Pennies off a Dead Man’s Eyes,” I read the entire story not too 4

Galaxis March 2019

impressed until I got to the final paragraphs, when I was left literally open-mouthed in awe of the writing.

His accomplishments are legion. He wrote “Demon with a Glass Hand,” “City on the Edge of Forever,” Shatterday, An Edge in My Voice, “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream,” “Blood’s a Rover,” Strange Wine, the groundbreaking television criticism essays in The Glass Teat and its followup The Other Glass Teat, and many other books and short stories and screenplays. He also edited the intentionally controversial and definitely influential short story collections Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions.

I gave several friends copies of his book An Edge in My Voice. I quoted him in my own (much lesser) columns in various magazines and newspapers.

In the very early 1980s, when I was in junior high school and first getting into Ellison, there was a bit of a windfall, because Berkley Books was reissuing paperback copies of all of his books—not just the wellknown ones but even the books he wrote in the 1950s about joining a street gang. Every other Friday, after I paid my bill for my paper route, I took my remaining earnings to my local bookstore and bought a magazine or two, and I perused the book shelves to see if a new Ellison book was released; if I did, I bought it on the spot and never regretted it.

If you check Wikipedia’s entry on him, it reports that “Ellison had a reputation for being abrasive and argumentative.”

Well, yes. He was controversial. He was involved in lawsuits. He stood up for what he believed in. He did not suffer idiots.

That’s one way of putting it, and one with which I largely concur. He could go over the top with his criticisms of science fiction fans. “WHY ARE YOU SO GODDAMN WEIRD!?!” Ellison wrote in a 1980 column in Future Life magazine. “The truth is that some of you who come up to us at conventions, lectures, lunchrooms where we’re trying to eat a nice chopped liver on corn rye [with] Dr. Brown’s Cream soda, autograph parties, etcetera . . . well, some of you smell like the butcher’s mallet after a hard day bashing in horses’ brains.”

Endearing, no? Well, no. But Ellison grew up a fan, he wrote for the pulps, he wrote for the slicks (Omni, Playboy, etc.), he wrote for the comics, he wrote stories on-demand in bookstore windows. He appeared on TV talk shows, on convention panels, radio programs, early Sci Fi Channel commentaries, and more. He lived to write and to talk, and it mattered to him what was written and said.

Following reports of Ellison’s death after a long illness, Stephen King wrote, “There was no one quite like him in American letters, and never will be. Angry, funny, eloquent, hugely talented. If there’s an afterlife, Harlan is already kicking ass and taking down names.”

Indeed, there was no one like Ellison. He was a writer, a political activist, a public intellectual, a provocateur, an essayist, a public speaker, a teacher. Do you know any other people who fit that description, and can win

PHOTO: PIP R. LAGENTA

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in the wake of harlan ellison

I still believe in the importance of public figures who urge us not to follow them or do their bidding but to be better versions of ourselves. a ton of writing awards along the way?

When I noted Ellison’s passing on Facebook, a friend commented that he had had a creative writing professor in college in Ohio who bragged about failing Ellison. I of course had heard about that professor, because Ellison had written about the professor who had told him he would never amount to anything, so every time Ellison won a writing award—and he won a lot— he would send a copy to that professor. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Ellison refrigerated his.

When I was in college, I was assigned to write about a writer who was of political and social significance. Obvious choices might have been John Updike, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and the like. I chose Ellison, and I noted that a recurring theme of his fiction and non-fiction writing was the necessity of people to strive to higher quality than what they felt comfortable, to be better people and artists and thinkers and actors March 2019 Volume 2, Number 2 Issue Number 8 www.weimar.ws ON THE COVER: Sex and science fiction, gender and science fiction—how much is a genre based on the exploration of new frontiers instead stuck in hidebound beliefs of the past, and how much should it vault into the future? Image by Kellepics.

THANKS THIS ISSUE TO: 20th Century Fox, American Institute of Physics, Atlantis Pictures, Pat Benatar, Capri23Auto, CBS, CBS All Access, Christophe, Comfreak, The Commonwealth Club of California, Howard

than was necessary just to get through life, I don’t recall my grade on the paper I handed in, but it wasn’t a great grade. Updike might have gotten me that. But I still believe in the importance of public figures who urge us not to follow them or do their bidding but to be the best versions of ourselves that we are capable of being. Impatience for excellence is better than acquiescence in mediocrity.

People do die. And Harlan Ellison was an old man who had had health issues for years. As filmmaker Robert Altman said, “The death of an old man is no tragedy.”

This is not an outrage; this death is both a sadness and a time to remember the incredible contributions he made to this genre and to our public life And no, my affection for the man and his many accomplishments does not blind me to his failings. Ed Naha, a writer who co-edited Future Life in the late 1970s, shared on Facebook his story about Ellison trying to

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get the contact information of a model who had appeared on the cover of the magazine; other times, Ellison had called at late hours to try to get Naha to go find women for, well, you can guess.

Connie Willis, the winner of more Hugos and Nebulas than any other writer, was the apparently unwanted recipient of groping by Ellison at an event in 2006. Ellison claimed it was a joke between friends; others said it was as sexist as it seemed.

Does prodigious talent excuse bad behavior? No, it doesn’t. But we’re not talking about Heinrich Himmler here; we’re talking about a horndog writer with a ton of talent.

Harlan Ellison wasn’t notable because of his interpersonal skills. He was noteworthy because of the power of his writing, because of the many brave stands he took in favor of women’s rights, individuality, and good writing, and because he believed that everyone should strive to be a hero.

John Zipperer/Editor & Publisher

EDITOR & PUBLISHER John Zipperer PRINTING: Issuu.com & MagCloud

ART DIRECTOR & DESIGN John Zipperer CARTOONIST Lyle Lahey

is issue Volume Two, Number Two, whole number Eight. Except for images by thirdparty photographers and artists as noted, all content is copyright © 2019 John Zipperer, unless noted. All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction of any part is strictly forbidden without written permission. Galaxis accepts no responsibility for unsolicited submissions, but if they are submitted, they will be considered and, if necessary, returned.

All articles in this issue are written by

John Zipperer. All images reproduced here are in the public domain or are used with required restrictions. All characters, logos, and related material represented in images—including but not limited to Star Wars, Star Trek, and The X-Files—are the properties of their respective copyright owners.

Address all communications to Galaxis, including letters to the editor and business queries, to jzipperer@gmail.com or john@ weimar.ws.

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Launch Tube News & views for today & tomorrow

The latest—and first—flight of the Millennium Falcon in a Star Wars film likely won’t be the last.

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takes selfies. So did the Curiosity rover on Mars, which took 57 images of itself that were then stitched together to form the selfie seen at right. To replicate the selfie, just travel to the Duluth drill site north of the Vera Rubin Ridge on Mars.

You know, in Gale Crater.

SPACE BALLS: After white dwarf stars finally cool down, they turn into solid spheres. That solidification had been predicted five decades

ago, but only with the European Space Agency’s mapping spacecraft Gaia were scientists able to get precise estimates of faraway stars that allowed the confirmation. According to ESA, 97 percent of the stars in our galaxy will become white dwarfs, but we’ve got another 5 billion years or so before the sun goes down that path.

HE SINGS AGAIN: William Shatner came out

SPECIAL REPORT

There’s Still More Star Wars to Come One box office disappointment won’t derail the biggest space saga of all time

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ith the relatively weak box office performance for Solo: A Star Wars Story, many people began wondering what direction Disney would go with its Star Wars property.

Has the shine g o n e off of

its expensive new space opera franchise?

Asked by The Hollywood Reporter if Disney had been releasing too many Wars films, Disney CEO Bob Iger said a slowdown was coming, but not a turnaround. “I made the timing decision, and as I look back, I think the mistake that I made . . . was a little too much, too fast. You can expect some slowdown, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to make films. J.J. [Abrams] is busy

making [Episode] IX. We have creative entities, including [Game of Thrones creators David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss, who are developing sagas of their own, which we haven’t been specific about. And we are just at the point where we’re going to start making decisions about what comes next after J.J.’s. But I think we’re going to be a little bit more careful about volume and timing. And the buck stops here on that.”

So what’s on the drawing boards?

The Mandalorian: In September 2019, Disney is scheduled to launch an online subscription streaming service called Disney+ (similar, we presume, to CBS All Access, which debuted with the new Star Trek Discovery series). Disney+ will include The Mandalorian, a $100 million space opera set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. Written by Jon Favreau, the series will focus on a gunfighter operating on the fringes of the galaxy. The live-action cast includes Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Nick Nolte, Carl Westhers, Emily Swallow, Omid Abtahi, Giancarlo Esposito, and — perhaps most intriguingly—German director/screenwriter/actor/ opera director Werner Herzog.

Clone Wars: The 2008–2014 animated series will return as part of Disney+’s offerings, with a dozen new episodes added to the mix.

Star Wars Episode IX: Luke Sky-

walker died in The Last Jedi, and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) died in real life a couple years ago, but both will appear in Episode IX. Fisher’s appearances will be courtesy of unreleased footage she shot for The Force Awakens. Billie Dee Williams will reprise his role of Lando Calrissian.

J.J. Abrams returns to direct a script he wrote with Chris Terrio that will reportedly be the final installment of the Skywalker saga. This will be the last Star Wars film to feature a John Williams score. It is slated for a December 20, 2019, release in the United States.

Star Wars Galaxy of Adventures: This online series of shorts (airing on the Star Wars Kids YouTube channel and on starwarskids.com) is pitched as the way to introduce younglings to the Star Wars universe. Considering that George Lucas has said that he saw Star Wars as a movie for young people, for kids, the best way to introduce them to Star Wars is to show them Star Wars. But that’s just our opinion.

Star Wars Resistance: Disney has renewed the animated Star Wars Resistance series for a second season, to debut in the fall of 2019. A series of short videos were released in December on YouTube. Aimed at ages seven and up, the well-received series is set between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. It follows young recruit Kazuda “Kaz” Xiono (voiced by Christopher Sean) as the First Order rises and opposition forms. The second trilogy’s Poe Dameron (voiced by Oscar Isaac) recruited Kaz and makes occasional

The next trilogy-master: Rian Johnson

appearances in the series. Gwendoline Christie also makes guest appearances (well, voice appearances) as Captain Phasma.

Unnamed Cassian Andor series: Diego Luna will return to the character he played in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for this new live-action series that, like The Mandalorian, will air on Disney+. “Going back to the Star Wars universe is very special for me,” said Luna. “We have a fantastic adventure ahead of us, and this new exciting format will give us the chance to explore this character more deeply.” According to Lucasfilm and Disney, the series will be a “rousing spy thriller [that] will explore tales filled with espionage and daring missions to restore hope to a galaxy in the grip of a ruthless Empire.” Production has not yet started, and a release date hasn’t been set.

Star Wars Episodes X–XII: Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, will be in charge of the next trilogy of films, including writing and directing Episode X. Lucasfilm says this will feature all-new characters separate from the Skywalker tales. “Star Wars is the greatest modern mythology, and we feel very lucky to have contributed to it,” Johnson said in a joint statement with producer Ram Bergman. “We can’t wait to continue with this new series of films.”

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FALCON IMAGE: JAKO5D; JOHNSON PHOTO: GAGE SKIDMORE; ALL STAR WARS CHARACTERS: LUCASFILM LTD.

PHOTO: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

THE GALAXIS NEWSWAVE NOW YOU SEE IT: Universal will release a new Invisible Man movie, to be directed by Leigh Whannell (cocreator of the Saw horror film franchise).

AWARDS SEASON: Author Gregory Benford—known for Timescape and others—has won the 2019 Heinlein Award, recognizing his “outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space. Benford will receive the award at Balticon 53 on May 24.

MARTIANS DO IT DIFFERENTLY: Everyone

providing details, but it is being described as an “event film.”

ESCAPE, ESCAPE AGAIN: Fox is going to remake John Carpenter’s 1981 Escape From New York. Leigh Whannell, who is also making the new Invisible Man movie (see above), will write and possibly direct the movie. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Carpenter will executive produce the film.

His original film was a low-budget

($6 million) hit ($25 million box office) that involved hiring the world’s most dangerous criminal, Snake Plissken, to go into Manhattan—which has been turned into a maximum-security prison—and rescue the president of the United States. Full of charm, inventiveness, and attitude, the film was successful enough to spawn the 1996 sequel, Escape From L.A., which was made for $50 million

PHOTO: SKEEZE/PIXABAY

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with two new albums recently, a country music album entitled Why Not Me and a Christmas album called Shatner Claus. Might be worth checking out if you’ve memorized his immortal rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” JULY 17, 2020: Set a calendar reminder for that date; that’s when Christopher Nolan’s next movie is scheduled to open. The notoriously under-the-radar director isn’t

Americans Suit up for the New U.S. Space Force

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hen President Donald Trump proposed the creation of an American space force in March 2018, he was widely criticized and mocked. But the idea is not new, and it is slowly gathering momentum. Its final configuration might not yet be obvious, but one thing is clear: This is not something that will happen quickly.

What the president said in a speech was, “We’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space; I said, maybe we need a new force. We’ll call it the Space Force.” Considering that it wasn’t an earlymorning tweet, that constitutes nearly establishment-level planning by this president. Three months later, he signed an order called the Space Policy Directive-3, which sets up a framework for managing space traffic. In mid-December, Trump ordered the creation of Space Command, which would be the country’s eleventh combatant command and would control military space operations.

CNN cited defense officials who told the news channel that “the Pentagon is nearing completion of a draft proposal for a Space Force that would sit under the Air Force, but have many of the trap-

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pings of a separate service. According to ABC News, this arrangement would be “similar to how the Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy.”

In a roundup of informed opinion on the space force idea, Discover magazine cited one source who noted the last time a new branch of the military was formed: At the end of World War II, the United States created the U.S. Air Force, which had formerly been a part of the Army. If it is ultimately established, a U.S. Space Force would be the fifth branch of the military, after the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Russia, the only other country to have its own separate space military branch, recently merged its space force back into its air force.

In 2001, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a commission recommend how the country should handle its military activity in space. In December 2017, several months before the president made his initial declaration, U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama, proposed the creation of an independent Space Corps. The congressman believes that space operations need to be in a dedicated structure that

can have its own funding and can develop a rapid acquisition process.

Another argument for a U.S. Space Force is that the country’s government-run space program, NASA, has been increasingly underfunded and stunted in its activities, and at least as far as manned space activity goes, the initiative in the United States has been seized by private companies.

Supporters of the idea of a space force range from former astronaut Buzz Aldrin to SpaceX founder Elon Musk to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And the idea has legs. In January of this year, Matthew Overton, the executive director of Canada’s Conference of Defence Associations Institute, said that Canada should also think about establishing a space force at some point. “Thinking about space as a separate entity in itself that deserves attention and expertise, I think is a good idea,” he told CBC. Nothing, of course, stopped the naysayers. Madison, Wisconsin, radio station WJJO released a joke commercial for a “Space Force XXX Porn Parody.”

Well, in space, no one can hear you scream.

PHOTO: CASSINI IMAGING TEAM/NASA PHOTO: MAXIMILIAN BÜHN

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tar Trek isn’t finished with Captain Jean-Luc Picard after all, and neither is the man who fleshed out the popular Enterprise boss, actor Patrick Stewart. In early August 2018, Stewart announced that he would be starring in an all-new Trek series for CBS All Access, the same service already airing Star Trek: Discovery.

In a statement, Stewart said, “I will always be very proud to have been a part of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but when we wrapped that final movie in the spring of 2002, I truly felt my time with Star Trek had run its natural course. It is, therefore, an unexpected but delightful surprise to find myself excited and invigorated to be returning to Jean-Luc Picard and to explore new dimensions within him. Seeking out new life for him, when I thought that life was over.

“During these past years, it has been humbling to hear stories about how The Next Generation brought people comfort, saw them through difficult periods in their lives or how the example of Jean-Luc inspired so many to follow in his footsteps, pursuing science, exploration and leadership. I feel I’m ready to return to him for the same reason— to research and experience what comforting and reforming light he might shine on these often very dark times.

I look forward to working with our brilliant creative team as we endeavor to bring a fresh, unexpected and pertinent story to life once more.”

The series will reportedly wrap up production late this year for airing in 2020; CBS hopes to have multiple seasons of the new show. Little is known about the series concept or stories, except that it follows the later career of Jean-Luc Picard.

You’ll have to wait and see.

2018. Set 10 millennia before the time of Game of Thrones, the series will star Naomi Watts. “The series chronicles the world’s descent from the golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour,” reports HBO. “From the horrifying secrets of Westeros’s history to the true origin of the White Walkers, the mysteries of the East to the Starks of legend, only one thing is for sure: It’s not the story we think we know.”

ULTRAMAN ON NETFLIX: The long-running Japanese Ultraman series is coming to Netflix this year in an all-new animated series. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter notes that Ultra-

PHOTO: NASA/KEPLER MISSION/DANA BERRY

Patrick Stewart to Reprise Picard

and which had the same box office success as the previous film—that is to say $25 million.

ENJOY ’EM WHILE YOU CAN: Saturn’s famous rings are slowly disappearing, and in 100 million years they will be completely gone, according to a NASA study. The culprit is ultraviolet light charging the ice particles that make up the rings; the charged particles then go spinning off toward Saturn and become “ring rain.”

OVER AND OUT: On May 19, 2019, the final episode of the final season of controversial fantasy series Game of Thrones will air on HBO. A prequel series was commissioned in June

Kepler Heads Into Death

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ine years and 2,600 planets later, NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered more planets beyond our Solar System than Star Trek’s Enterprise, Voyager, and Discovery combined. The U.S. space agency reports that the telescope no longer has the fuel necessary for additional projects; Kepler will remain in its orbit, which NASA says is “safe.”

Kepler provided a constant flow of announcements about new planets being discovered near and afar. For decades, scientists and theorists had said it was extremely unlikely that our star was the only one to have planets, but none had been observed; only recently have techniques and technology developed enough to detect planets around their stars without the planets being “drowned out” by the brightness of the star.

Kepler let loose an avalanche of planetary discoveries, 2,600 in all, and many of them might be

supportive of life.

“As NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports that Kepler’s findings suggest between 20 and 50 percent of the stars that are visible in the night sky “are likely to have small, possibly rocky planets similar in size to Earth and located within the habitable zone of their parent stars.”

Imagined View from Planet Kepler 10-B; Kepler-10b orbits one of the 150,000 stars that the Kepler spacecraft monitored.

After the telescope outlived its original mission, scientists reconfigured its operation to greatly expand its field of vision. Even after the telescope’s retirement, scientists will be going through its data for years, uncovering new discoveries. In April, NASA launched its next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and in 2021 NASA, The European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency are scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the new leading space observatory.

“When we started conceiving this mission 35 years ago, we didn’t know of a single planet outside our solar system,” said William Borucki, founding principal investigator of the Kepler mission. “Now that we know planets are everywhere, Kepler has set us on a new course that’s full of promise for future generations to explore our galaxy.”

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eighth novel in The Expanse series, Tiamat’s Wrath, has been pushed back from its original December 2018 date to March 26, 2019.

It involves humanity gaining access to hundreds of other star systems via opened star gates and the search for the truth behind the extinction of the previous star empire.

BACK TO ARRAKIS: Director Denis Villeneuve is helming a new Dune movie, which will feature Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Javier Bardem as Fremen leader Stilgar, Charlotte Rampling as the Reverend Mother Mohiam, and Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Harkonnen.

Star Wreck Climbs the Charts of SF Quality

PHOTO: JOHN SEB BARBER

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Galactica Makes Big-screen Progress

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ay Basu has a job that will either make him immensely popular in science fiction circles or will make him the target of internet trolls.

He has been given the opportunity to rewrite the screenplay for a new film version of Battlestar Galactica. According to TheWrap, which broke the news in December, he’ll rework a script draft by Lisa Joy for a film with Francis Lawrence tagged to direct.

Basu is the writer of The Girl in the Spider’s Web and has written a reboot of Charlie’s Angels, due to hit the big screen in 2019. According to multiple sources, the movie won’t be a continuation or spinoff of the 2004–2009 Syfy series, but will instead be a reimagining of the original 1978 series. It will not, thank the Lords of Kobol, be connected to the Galactica 1980 spinoff.

Hunger Games director Lawrence has been connected with the film for longer than has Basu, and he told ComingSoon.net that he likes both the original and the Syfy series. “We’re all fans of both series, so there will definitely be nods, but for it to be worth doing for us we have to have our own take on it,” he said. “What makes something interesting to do is if there’s a relevance to the world we live in now.”

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here has been no shortage of Star Trek fan series and films. CBS and Paramount have filed copyright claims against some and have allowed others to thrive, such as Star Trek: Phase II. But one of the longest-running series of unofficial Trek homages has been Star Wreck, a series of parody movies from Finland.

The film series started in 1992 with the simple Star Wreck, a fairly basic animated space battle. But they became more ambitious over the course of eight films, featuring CGI, live action, and lengthier stories. The best-known of the films is 2005’s Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, which is 103 minutes long; it is available as a Creative Commons-licensed film online for free distribution and downloading.

Star Wreck follows the adventures of Captain James B.

Pirk (Samuli Torssonen, who also produces), commander of the CPP Potkustartti. Serving with him are Commander Info (Antti Satama), a takeoff on Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data; Commander Dwarf (Timo Vuorensola), a Worflike alien; Lieutenant Swagger (Tiina Routamaa); and Sergey Fukov (Janos Honkonen), a Chekov knockoff.

In addition to poking fun at Star Trek, the filmmakers take aim (rather literally, in In the Pirkinning) at Babylon 5.

The newest entry in the se-

ries is Star Wreck: Timecrash, a short film that takes place in a dimension where the Soviet Union controls Earth. That comes to an end when “a race of demonic alien zealots, The Grind,” launches a surprise attack on Earth,” according to the filmmakers. “Only one man can stop them—Captain Pirk.”

You can follow the filmmakers online to learn more about their projects at facebook.com/ starwreck and starwreck.com; subscribe to their YouTube channel at youtube.com/user/ energiaproductions.

Clockwise from top right: a space battle results in a direct hit; the captain is greeted on the bridge; and a costume test shot for the captain.

PHOTOS: ENERGIA PRODUCTIONS; CREATIVE COMMONS

COSPLAY PHOTO: PIOTRUS / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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man’s owners are ultra-annoyed with a Chinese studio it says made an unauthorized Ultraman movie.

GLASS HALF FULL OR EMPTY? A little more than half of American adults read a book in 2017 that wasn’t required for work or school.

Most of the books read were novels or short stories, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts. Book reading has been on a slow but steady decline over the past couple of decades, from 56.6 percent in 2002 to 52.7 percent in 2017.

EXPECTING THE EXPANSE: Release of the

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he description of this image includes the word “radioactive,” a dark and worrisome word to associate with a butterfly alighting upon the face mask of a suited person. IMAGE BY COMFREAK/PIXABAY

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Imagery

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t’s time to grab your gear and get the mission going; your ride has arrived and you had better be aboard it when it takes off.

IMAGE BY HUCKY/PIXABAY

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Imagery A

fiery end for Earth comes with the moon plunging into it, turning the surface to a broken, seething mass and liquefying rock.

Oh, and utterly wiping out all life. Imagine!

IMAGE COMFREAK

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ILLUSTRATION: RULO

Director Ridley Scott has helmed three of the seven Alien films; he had plans for as many as six more, but it’s possible he won’t get any more.

Are Audiences Alienated About Alien?

The future of the film series could look very different from its past. | BY JOHN ZIPPERER

F

orget about Star Wars. You know there will be more Wars films coming your way (see Launch Tube, page 6). But what about the Alien films, the accidental series spawned by that amaz16

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ing 1979 film, Alien? Will director Ridley Scott get to complete his ambitious series of prequel movies? Will 20th Century Fox kill the franchise altogether for other more profitable ventures? Or will Alien movies go off into a different direction?

Much is up in the air at this moment, but it looks like the series will continue. How it will continue is another question.

The disappointing box office of the most recent film in the series—2017’s otherwise excellent Alien: Covenant—has reined in Scott’s extension of the series into near infinity. But the studio’s Alien appetite isn’t sated yet; even months after Covenant’s release, there were expectations that there would be one more film from Scott that will be a follow-on from Alien: Covenant.

Both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were beautiful films. Prometheus, Scott’s 2012 iteration on the mythology, shifted back and forth between being called a prequel to Alien to being a completely stand-alone film until finally Scott said it had “strands of Alien’s DNA,” in one of

the more delicately and deliciously worded movie marketing quotes of the past decade.

At a cost of $120–$130 million, Prometheus delivered $403 million in worldwide box office—a profit, for sure, but not up to the blockbuster levels expected in an age of Star Wars and superhero movies regularly breaking the billion-dollar mark. On top of the production cost, studios have to add in marketing and distribution expenses, which can eat up most of what was remaining in the $403 million, according to some industry sources.

But the numbers were good enough to green-light 2017’s Alien: Covenant, which continued the story of the android David 8 (portrayed by Michael Fassbender, who also essays the role of Walter One in Covenant). On a budget of $97–111 million, Covenant returned only $241 million worldwide. That likely meant the end of Scott’s ambitions for up to six prequel movies leading into the original Alien.

But things have gotten murkier and murkier, and now some people in the industry are saying there won’t be any clearing up of matters until The Walt Disney Company completes its acquisition of 20th Century Fox. So the continuation of the Alien series is in the hands of the lawyers. Oh, joy.

One area of the franchise that seems to be moving along just swimmingly is the gaming world (an aspect of fandom that admittedly gets short shrift at Galaxis). Fans are currently awaiting news of the next game, believed to be called Alien: Blackout.

Gaming is a billion-dollar industry, but it’s a side industry to the billion-dollar movie industry, which concerns us here.

Will fans of the movie be left bereft of new cinematic outings of the mysterious and deadly xenomorphs, left to play videogame shoot-em-ups instead?

The folks at the fan site alien-covenant. com teased with some info that leads one to suspect that Fox is considering a possible television future for Alien, which would almost certainly have to air on Showtime or HBO, unless they were to make it a sitcom. Or we might yet get a sequel to Alien: Covenant, a one-film extension instead of several more of the up to six films Ridley Scott at one point threw out there as a possibility. Or we might get a “soft reboot” of the series featuring different characters and the old familiar xeno-terror.

Ridley Scott told Britain’s Empire magazine that the original Alien was “a B movie done in an A way with an A+ cast.” That B movie cost about $9 million, and it brought in roughly $200 million at the box office.

None of its prequels has gotten anywhere near that ratio of success. Galaxis

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Experts speculate: First contact or galactic flotsam and jetsam? | BY JOHN ZIPPERER

W

hile the scientific world was still digesting Galaxis’ epic feature on first contact (see “Loving the Alien,” Galaxis #7), the rest of the world was surprised to discover that even scientists were conflicted about our latest (or first?) alien visitor.

Called ’Oumuamua for the Hawai’ian description of “a messenger that reaches out from the distant past,” the object is not like anything else found in the Solar System. It zips along at a speed of 196,000 miles per hour, and it has confounded scientists since it was first discovered in October 2017 by Hawai’i’s Pan-STARRS 1 telescope.

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A half-mile long, about 262 feet wide, and dark red in color, ’Oumuamua was misdiagnosed a couple of times. First, they thought it was a comet. Then an asteroid.

Now, some scientists think it has the possibility of being the product of intelligent life—out there.

In a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers at Harvard’s Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics went so far as to write, “’Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

The authors aren’t Twitter trolls or nobodys. They are Abraham Loeb, who is professor and astronomy chair, and Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral scholar, at the

IMAGE: ESO/M. KORNMESSER

An Interstellar Visitor Called ’Oumuamua

Smithsonian Center. CNN notes that Loeb “has published four books and more than 700 papers on topics like black holes, the future of the universe, the search for extraterrestrial life and the first stars.” For that matter, he was one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people in space in 2012, and his Wikipedia page notes that “Science magazine published a detailed article about Loeb’s career in April 2013, and Discover magazine reviewed his pioneering research on the first stars in April 2014. The New York Times published a science profile of Loeb in December 2014. In May 2015, Astronomy magazine posted a podcast of an hour-long interview with Loeb in its series entitled ‘Superstars of Astronomy.’ In April 2016, Stephen Hawking visited Loeb’s home and attended the inaugurations of the Starshot and Black Hole Initiatives that Loeb leads.”

The point being, he’s no fringe crackpot.

If anything, he’s the ideal deep-space intellectual to turn his attention to a strange object that appears in our local space.

Loeb and Bialy write that ’Oumuamua is “the first object ever seen in our solar system that is known to have originated elsewhere.” They add, “Considering an

At left: An artist’s impression shows the first interstellar object, `Oumuamua. It traveled through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system.

artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment.”

Here and Gone If ‘Oumuamua was a probe sent by an alien civilization, powered by a solar sale, and sent to investigate other planets for possible life, many and maybe most SF fans would say, “I hope so.” But ‘Oumuamua passed through our system and is now long gone, leaving in its wake scientists and non-scientist aficionados to argue until they’re blue in the face. It was either an oddly shaped bit of space junk zooming through with no interest, or maybe it was heading onward, either saving to its database its recordings of Earth life or transmitting them back to its base planet. We can only hope it missed the whole Roseanne reboot controversy.

Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, responded with an op ed on CNN that poured cold water on Dr. Loeb’s and Shmuel’s possibilities. ‘This speculation, while of potentially enormous import, is almost certainly wrong,” he wrote.

At its heart, his argument is that the artifact isn’t as mysterious as it first appears.

Though the object is moving at a speed higher than would be explained by gravity (and if your mind immediately jumped to “That’s because it’s got some sort of engine!”, then you’re not alone), he notes that Loeb and Bialy have left room for scientists to reinterpret data about the object’s speed.

Admitting that “I suppose the extraterrestrial origin is possible, but very unlikely,” Lincoln writes that he “is almost certain that this mystery has an ordinary explanation, but it is at least physically possible that the probe explanation is true.”

Coryn Bailer-Jones of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy told Astronomy magazine “We don’t really know what the cause of the acceleration is, but the most likely candidate is probably some kind of comet-like activity.”

Bailer-Jones made the proof-based argument even more clearly in an email to NBC News, “In science, we must ask ourselves, ‘Where is the evidence?,’ not ‘Where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?’

Killjoy.

Galaxis

The new political magazine from the publisher of Galaxis

ZIPPERERSTRASSE

read it free at www.weimar.ws weimar.ws Galaxis

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interview

Talking past, present, and future with the celebrated cartoonist. | BY MICHELLE MEOW & JOHN ZIPPERER

C

omics artist Howard Cruse is a legend in the industry. From his groundbreaking work in underground comix of the 1970s to his long-running comic stories in the 1980s to his 1995 graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, which has been printed in several languages and has won a nice parcel of awards, he has established himself as a grand master of the field.

Readers of Galaxis might remember his work for the Starlog family of magazines.

He was art director for Starlog and Future Life magazines in the late 1970s. Following that, he continued to contribute to the publications, drawing many of the illustrations that accompanied David Gerrold’s Starlog columns, creating the Count Fangor comic for Fangoria, and writing a column for Comics Scene.

In early 2015, Galaxis editor John Zipperer and radio host Michelle Meow interviewed Cruse, learning more about his early years and the central role his homosexuality came to play in his career and his art.

JOHN ZIPPERER: Howard, you’ve been an important figure on the comic scene for decades, starting with Gay Comix, which you were the founding editor of, and creating Barefootz and Wendell. Today proba-

HOWARD CRUSE’S PATH

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bly even more people know you from Stuck Rubber Baby. With all of that I actually want to jump to the current: What are you working on right now?

HOWARD CRUSE: Well actually, on my board right now is a seven-page comic strip for a middle school textbook.

ZIPPERER: Really?

MICHELLE MEOW: Wow. CRUSE: So this is sort of a special project coming up. It’s going to be a series of books called Been There, Done That, in which various authors, most of them doing text, but they invited a few comics people, are recounting an actual event in their life and doing a work of fiction, a short story, that shows how fiction is derived from reality.

So I’m working on a little thing based on an experience I had in my high school.

MEOW: You said middle school?

CRUSE: Middle school, that’s right. So no sex, drugs, or profanity.

MEOW: I was going to ask about the content and if it were inclusive of any gay characters or lesbians.

CRUSE: Actually, this particular story is not and doesn’t have [LGBTQ characters].

It’s called “Funny Dork,” and it’s about a guy who feels dorky. Now, whether he will grow up to be [gay]—who knows what his orientation will be? But he’s young. So that hasn’t materialized yet, but of course it’s really people who feel like outsiders. It relates to that without being specifically about gays.

ZIPPERER: That’s actually a really great point there. People my age, I’m in my late 40s, I came out when I was in my late 20s.

And nowadays you do hear about a lot of folks in high school and middle school who are gay, lesbian, transgender. It is something that people I think are realizing a lot earlier in their lives, and they’re finding it possible to discuss these things earlier in life.

CRUSE: I know. It’s very different from when I was in school. Now, I’m 70, so I’ve got a few years on you. And when I was in high school, even though I went to a very progressive high school, it was still a place where I think the difficulty that your average teenage male in particular—it was a boys school at the time, it’s co-ed now—but anyway, the typical males have a lot of anxi-

ALL ART BY AND COPYRIGHT: HOWARD CRUSE; PHOTO: ALEX LOZUPONE

eties about sexual issues, and they frequently express these in homophobic ways. I sort of did not feel at all comfortable, even though I realized that it looked like this was the way my life was going and I was going to be gay.

But I couldn’t express it in affirmative ways, the way kids in many places can now.

For me, it was a terrible, scary thing that caused me huge turmoil during a lot of my adolescence. I ultimately realized that all of this anxiety had been unfounded. I had a certain amount of anger over what I had been put through, and this was part of my motivation for wanting to be part of the gay liberation movement.

MEOW: You bring up a great point in talking about, you know, through the times and how your feelings have changed, and growing up in adolescence and everything. So my question is about your work.

Through the ’70s, I think that’s when you started to gain mainstream attention in the comic book world, but you weren’t necessarily out as a gay author. When did you decide that you wanted part of you to be a part of your comic?

CRUSE: Right. Well of course, I came [from] the underground comix movement, which in contrast to your more mainstream commercial comics, was all about being honest and breaking down barriers, and

stuff like that. So it was sort of unnatural not to be open about being gay, but of course I had to be comfortable with it myself. In the early ’70s, I was in my first long-term relationship, which was so exhilarating, and I realized that I wanted to be open about being gay in my work, but I also wanted to

have a cartooning career. I was concerned that I might jeopardize my cartoonist career by being too honest about this.

From the beginning, what I wanted to do was establish myself. I found an audience without that issue being part of it, but I decided in 1972 probably that I definitely wanted to do comics about being gay. But I didn’t really have an opportunity to begin that process until 1976, after my Barefootz series had been around for a while. I had a regular character, Headrack, in the script who I had known was gay, and I finally found a good way to introduce that fact.

But I didn’t want to do what was a common trope in a lot of liberal sitcoms where they would introduce a gay character who would come in for one episode and everyone would illustrate how accepting they were, and then you would never see them again. I wanted my character, Headrack, who was already central and people already had a certain investment in the character, to then have the experience that you have in real life where someone that you didn’t know was gay, then you discover they are, and hopefully your friendship will override any tendency to feel put off by that.

ZIPPERER: So was Headrack based on any particular person? Was that a version of you or some people you knew? Or was this just weimar.ws Galaxis

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total fiction?

CRUSE: It’s pretty much a version of me in that era. He’s sort of a hippie frustrated artist, and that pretty much described me in those days.

ZIPPERER: So what was the professional reaction to this? Did publishers stop calling you for things, or did people suddenly say, “Oh hey, this is great, Howard”?

CRUSE: Well, of course an [aspect of] coming out in the real world, not the commercial world, it’s a set of stages. I was first coming out in underground comic books, in which if anyone was going to be really hostile, it would not be in the spirit of the underground. So I was off in Alabama at 22

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the time. I had not moved north yet. And so whatever reactions my peers around the country had, I didn’t really have easy access to it. The really scary part for me came a few years later when we decided to start Gay Comix. My publisher suggested that I edit a series of underground comic books. Actually when it started off, we thought it might just be a one shot, ’cause no one knew how it would sell. But we did the first issue of Gay Comix, and in order to do that I found it a good occasion to be totally open. We wanted to get gays and lesbians—a cartoonist who might be afraid to be out in their work—to feel safe. And to do that, they had to know that their character was gay.

So that gave me a good affirmative, non-concessional way to come out in 1979.

By that time I had moved to New York and I was getting a certain amount of mainstream illustration work. So I had some apprehension about whether that would be affected, but the fact is the people that I was already working for, I can’t think of anyone who backed away. I was asked to do a gay comic strip for The Village Voice, which was more mainstream than underground comic books. That was the point at which I was wondering, Okay, am I still going to get the freelance work? And it worked out okay. I’ll never know of course, how many people might have hired me but then decided, “Wait a minute, he’s gay, I don’t want to deal with that.” So who knows whether I lost work, but it’s often true with friendships—if you’re worried about your friends dropping you, the fact is that generally the people who don’t like that you’re gay will just sort of fade away. Your real friends will

Far left: Cruse invites you inside his menagerie of creations in The Other Sides of Howard Cruse; left: From Headrack to Claude incorporates various gay comics by the artist; and for a handful of issues of the horror film magazine Fangoria, Cruse provided the adventures of Count Fangor.

stick with you. My clients stuck with me for the most part.

ZIPPERER: You did something for Playboy, am I right, at some point?

MEOW: What?

ZIPPERER: Was that before or after you came out? Did they care?

CRUSE: Well, I had an unexpected opportunity around 1978. Hefner, who I’d never met by the way, but he decided he wanted to try to hitch his wagon to some extent to the underground comics world, and they were asking underground comics artists to come in and maybe do comic strips for a section called Playboy Funnies. At the time I was not out professionally, so the assumption is always that you’re straight unless you say otherwise. So I was doing stuff for Playboy.

Basically I was doing parodies with mainstream comic strips for the Playboy Funnies. Yeah. They loved what I could do for them. They hated my actual native drawing style.

ZIPPERER: Really?

CRUSE: They liked me doing parodies because then I was drawing in the styles of other cartoonists. [Editor Hugh] Hefner did not care for my Barefootz style. So anyway, I was kind of a schizophrenic about that. But I was also feeling stressed because of the fact that the assumption would always be that I was straight, and it’s so dishonest that I sort of allowed that to go on.

Once that I announced that I was going to do Gay Comix and word got around that I was gay, I guess that’s an example where I was not overtly shunned but they kind of gradually lost interest in using me.

MEOW: Howard, I want to bring it into today, because it’s awesome that you’re gay.

I think in pop culture at least, to be gay is special today. But I was talking to John earlier about LGBTQ people consuming media, and having been doing cartoons for a

little while, how do you think that LGBTQ people today, especially young people, are consuming media, and how do they react to something like cartoons? I don’t know if young people today—I feel like they take themselves so seriously with their selfies and Instagram, and all that stuff. I’m wondering how you feel about that.

CRUSE: I feel like the way that young people relate to comics as they exist today, which is much more online than in print, I don’t think there’s a lot of difference between gay and straight, or queer and otherwise. I think that the good thing about the internet is that it’s so open to anyone to do what they want to and be as honest as they want to—and that’s super. It’s kind of a golden age of creativity for starting cartoonists, whether they’re queer or not. But the downside is that nobody expects to pay for anything, and it’s very hard to make a weimar.ws Galaxis

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living. I mean, fortunately I am of an age that I can kind of get my Social Security check and not be under the gun. If I was starting out now trying to launch a comics career, I think it would be very difficult if the goal is to be a full-time cartoonist who makes money.

ZIPPERER: Right. Now, you are very active online. People follow you on Facebook and you regularly are posting new and classic Cruse comics there, as well as your website, howardcruse.com. You mentioned when you did your earliest comics in the ’70s when you’re in Alabama, you don’t really know what people are thinking about it across the country. With online, I assume you get feedback right away. What’s that like as a creator?

CRUSE: That’s very gratifying. It’s so easy for people to reach me, as it is for me to reach people I admire. It used to be if someone wanted to send me a letter about my work, they would have to send it to my publisher, and if the publisher was conscientious they would get it to me, but they might not be conscientious.

So now the flow of community is very active and back-and-forth, and that’s what I like about Facebook. I can get immediate feedback and immediate appreciation.

At a time when I had very few markets of the sort that I used to have, it means a lot to have people click the little “like” button or say something about [the artwork].

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this emotional effect on you. Howard, I’m interested on what your thoughts are when we talk about gay comics, right? You said LGBT consumption versus heterosexual people and how they consume comics, it might be the same thing and same interest.

However, if you were to author an actual gay comic and you had to draw gay characters, I think that it’s a little different for a gay audience. I don’t want to sound shallow or sexist even— CRUSE: Oh, go ahead. You can be shallow.

I don’t judge.

MEOW: But, you know, and I’ve seen some artists in today’s world who want to capture the essence of gay culture. I mean, the pecs of a man’s chest is a little more chiseled. It’s a little bigger or . . . so there’s this gratification when it comes to sex I feel like in gay pop culture and arts. What are your thoughts about that?

CRUSE: Well, I have done a certain amount of illustration, specifically for gay porn magazines, in which obviously I’m trying to idealize the bodies that people will feel are really attractive.

MEOW: Yummy.

CRUSE: However, my real mission, particularly with my comic strip, Wendell, which was drawn for The Advocate for a number of years and read mainly by gay people at the time, the important thing was for them to feel that their lives were being reflected in the comic strip, including the fact that they were not all perfect

bodies. They were just everyday people who had everyday concerns.

Gayness was part of their life, but so were other things: parenting, friends, difficult relationships, jobs. That’s the way life was for people I knew, and of course mixed into that was political activism. I very specifically did not idealize the characters in terms of their bodies.

MEOW: That’s wonderful.

CRUSE: I wanted them to be sexual. I mean, they were sexual, but the way I was and the way my friends were, without some kind of big studs. I think this is something that was really needed at the time.

ZIPPERER: Okay, Howard, give a shout out to some of the other LGBTQ artists you see today that you like. If people are not familiar with some of these folks, who would you recommend? Besides of course checking out howardcruse.com.

CRUSE: There are far too many for me to pick out some, but I would encourage people—there are some excellent anthologies.

There’s one called Qu33r, where the two E’s are threes, or sort of backwards E’s. It’s called Qu33r, and it’s a lot of the current crop where cartoonists are doing interesting [work]. And there was an anthology called No Straight Lines, which was an anthology consisting of a lot of the earlier generation of gays and lesbians and transgender and whatever, cartoonists. If you chase down Robert Kirby and Justin Hall, each of them have been editors of anthologies.

Galaxis

Game Set Take your brain cells for a ride

Word Hunt Flash Gordon edition: Find the words that match the clues below. Words may be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and even backward.

Creator Al Arborian royalty Adult parody first name Killer planet Flash Gordon Conquers this Ming lacks this Sci-Fi’s Ming controls this Playgirl centerfold Flash Vultan can’t believe Gordon is ____ Foul-mouthed bear was Flash fan Sam Jones in 2007 TV series He was Flash and Buck

Quiz How good is your SFIQ—science fiction intelligence quotient?

Take our quiz, which ranges from easy to expert questions.

Answers are at the end of the quiz.

3

1] Before he became a television writer and producer, what job did Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry have? a. Career naval captain b. Police officer c. Carpenter d. Empath 2] What is the name of the famous workshop for science fiction writers? a. Fantasy Forum b. The Devil’s Workshop c. Clarion Workshop d. Mode Training 3] In what year did The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction debut? a. 1936

After failing to get Flash, Lucas made this Produced 1980 film (first name) Dale Flying warriors The Lion prince Cold queen _____ Zarkov 1950s series filmed in this European city Studio behind 1982 Flash cartoon Flash Gordon’s Trip to _____

B N O N K Y A L P O N I D R

O R U R B E R L I N I R A B

T H E N V E D C L A I Y T E

T B T U I M E K R S M E W V

B T E S B X N I A O E M O I

T O M A B T I E N U R I O L

E G I A A E B D A R C F D A

D U T S R G A F I C Y I U S

H S H I I S N L A E T L N T

A E A N N E D E O W U M I A

N L W A Y B F S R A R A V R

S G K I T B N H M T I T E W

R I M R E A E N E E I I R A

R E E F L R T I O R P O S R

M O N G O C S A M J O N E S

b. 1949 c. 1964 d. 1979

b. Godzilla vs. Queen Screech c. Godzilla’s Evil Spawn d. Godzilla vs. Stomp III

c. Ordinary Magic d. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle

4] Natalie Portman stars in the 2018 adaptation of what science fiction horror novel by Jeff VanderMeer? a. Annihilation b. Arcade Winderome c. Shriek: An Afterword d. A Dark Place in Space

8] M. Night Shyamalan’s 2019 film is named after whom? a. River Song b. Gort c. Mr. Glass d. Octavian

12] What leading SF author adapted the classic Star Trek television episodes as short story collections? a. David Gerrold b. Alan Dean Foster c. James Blish d. Leigh Brackett

5] What was Avatar director James Cameron’s debut movie as director? a. Rambo: First Blood Part II b. Battle Beyond the Stars c. The Terminator d. Piranha II: The Spawning 6] Besides Babylon 5, what TV series did J. Michael Straczynbski create? a. Space: Above and Beyond b. Sliders c. Roswell d. Sense8 7] What is the full name of the 2019 Godzilla movie? a. Godzilla: King of the Monsters

9] What is the name of the next Wonder Woman movie? a. Wonder Woman 1984 b. It’s a Wonder Woman Life c. Wonder Woman in the Mortal Clash d. Wonder Woman Is Now Unleashed 10] Which one of the following is not a Doctor Who spinoff? a. Torchwood b. K-9 and Company c. The Sarah Jane Adventures d. Dalek Cookoff 11] What was Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds’ first motion picture? a. Flesh Gordon b. Big

13] Surrealist artist and Alien designer H.R. Giger did not work on which one of the following films? a. Poltergeist II: The Other Side b. Species c. Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis d. Planet Terror 14] Actor Brad Pitt is starring in what 2019 science fiction film? a. Ad Astra b. Artemis Eternal c. Sigmund Jähn d. Iron Sky: The Coming Race ANSWERS: 1) b. 2) c. 3) b. 4) a.

5) d. 6) d. 7) a. 8) c. 9) a. 10) d.

11) c. 12) c. 13) d. 14) a. weimar.ws Galaxis

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it’s in th Forty years ago, science fiction movies and TV took over the world of trading cards. | BY JOHN

E

ZIPPERER

arning a living from cards isn’t as easy as those people on television make it look as they play in fancy highstakes celebrity poker matches. For them, the rules of the game are set in concrete, ages old, and everyone at the table knows what they’re doing. They know how much money they can make, and they know how they’re going to try to make it. No, if you’re trying to run a business that sells trading cards, the rules are always changing on you. How you distribute the cards, what topics will interest buyers, how long popular series will remain popular—it takes a brave entrepreneur to get into this business.

As in many things, we can thank Star Wars for fueling a long-lasting connection between science fiction and trading cards that largely began in the mid-1970s. “[George] Lucas’ brainchild had revolutionized the licensing market while simultaneously whetting kids’ appetites for fanciful action-adventure characters, weapons, and vehicles,” Gary Gerani writes in his introduction to Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, Volume One. Gerani worked at Topps when it brought out its first line of Star Wars cards. “This particular combination of movie and kid merchandising was a match made in licensing heaven, and Topps,

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he CARDS

Facing page: Though the main action was on the colorful fronts of SF trading cards, the backs of the cards were used for character information, episode synopses, puzzles, and more. This page, clockwise from top left: Heavy Metal was just one magazine to come out with its own trading cards; Indiana Jones card package; and Wilma Deering from the 1979 movie and TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. weimar.ws Galaxis

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along with a savvy Marvel Comics, was one of the first companies to greatly benefit from it.”

Star Wars had indeed taken Marvel by surprise (and, according to Sean How’s bestselling 2013 book, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the comic book licensed from the film arguably saved Marvel’s business); the company almost didn’t license the film. But of course Marvel did come out with a Star Wars comic book, and Topps did come out with a line of Star Wars trading cards. In both cases, the companies had runaway hits on their hands.

Star Wars set off the avalanche of science fiction movie and TV trading cards that followed. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Star Trek movies. Battlestar Galactica. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Alien. Indiana Jones. Dune. The Black Hole. V. Tron. Moonraker. And on and on.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of trading cards. They are inexpensive; they are sold with packages of bread or slices of hard chewing gum, or given away as promotional items at restaurants or with magazines. On the backs of the cards was trivia or a description of the photo or fan club information; sometimes it was a piece of a larger puzzle that would make a larger photo when combined with the backs of other cards containing the complementary pieces; sometimes it was a checklist of all of the cards 28

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Previous page: Burger King released cards featuring Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, the better to remind you to fuel up with a Whopper before fighting the Empire. This page, clockwise from top left: Yoda from the Burger King set; new Galactica card; old Galactica card; and packages from The Black Hole and Dune. weimar.ws Galaxis

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in the set.

And in those days decades past when it was hard to track down photos of your favorite movie or TV stars and film scenes, trading cards allowed you to gather a collection of rare pictures. You were no longer at the mercy of the editors of Famous Monsters, Starlog, or Fantastic Films to publish a photo of a Cylon baseship or of Luke Skywalker looking pensively into the distance or Buck Rogers standing next to his ship. Best of all, the trading cards were in color—a rare delight in that time when even film magazines were mostly black-and-white.

Later Years Even after the internet came along (eventually sweeping most American SF magazines into the dustbin of history) and made it simpler to find a desired film photo than it is to find your shoes in the morning, trading cards have continued. Sliders.

Babylon 5. The X-Files. Lexx. Stargate. Farscape. And—once again—on and on. Even magazines such as Heavy Metal and Starlog got into the act, issuing sets of cards featuring cover images and art from the magazines.

The main trading card companies have been experimenting with digital products, but it will be a challenge to adapt such a hard-copy industry to the virtual world. In the meantime, Topps is staying current by going back to the past—in December 2018, it began small weekly releases of classic Star Wars: A New Hope cards, just a few each week and available only from Topps. At the end of each week, those cards are replaced by the next batch.

But people searching for pristine, graded trading cards can find them at any number of collectibles retailers. Or you can go to eBay and other online marketplaces and find it pretty easy to buy a batch of cards from your favorite TV show or movie, sometimes at prices as low as a few dollars.

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Previous page, clockwise from bottom: Packages of cards featuring Alien, Moonraker, Tron, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This page, clockwise from top left: Cards for Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The X-Files, and from two different sets of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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HIM & HER & HIM & HIM & HER & HER & THEM & IT Exploring sex and gender roles in the genre that was supposed to solve it all. | BY JOHN ZIPPERER 32

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IMAGE: NOUPLOAD; MY CLONE SLEEPS ALONE LYRICS: PAT BENATAR / ROGER CAPPS MY CLONE SLEEPS ALONE LYRICS © BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC

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You know and I know my clone sleeps alone She’s out on her own, forever She’s programmed to work hard, she’s never profane She won’t go insane, not ever No V.D., no cancer, on TV’s the answer No father, no mother, she’s just like the others And you know and I know, my clone sleeps alone. . . .

Before we existed the cloning began The cloning of man and woman When we’re gone they’ll live on, cloned endlessly It’s mandatory in heaven But they won’t remember or ever be tender . . .

—“My Clone Sleeps Alone,” Pat Benatar

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lmost halfway through the 2012 science fiction movie Paradox Alice, the crew of a spaceship is whittled down to just three people—all men. The human race has been otherwise wiped out, so they’re not only the last remaining members of the crew; they’re all that’s left of the species. Suddenly one of them, Alex, is physically transformed into a woman. Is it a matter of salvation of the species, allowing them to breed and restart humanity, or is it something else? While all three of them try to figure out what has happened, the two remaining men find themselves to be serious rivals to mate with Alex and sire the next generation of humans.

Alex (now Alice) slowly adapts to her new female body, and she becomes emotionally somewhat stereotypically female. She also finds herself victimized by the violent affections of one of her crewmates. In this tale, even in outer space in the future, old-fashioned sexual violence and gender roles continue. “I have to take on my new role, or he’ll kill us both,” she laments.

Paradox Alice is just one of a countless number of SF stories to play around with gender and sexuality. Science fiction is a never-ending rollercoaster ride: Pushing the boundaries of understanding about gender, either in an attempt to get people to rethink how they’re living today or to understand what humans might evolve into. Or just to have fun. Sexuality and gender make up just one area of interest for speculative fiction, but it is one that is intensely personal for people and broadly political for many.

Now that the real world seems to be living out some of the science fictional possibilities explored on page or on the screen, the genre might not be able to handle the interest from friends and fans and foes alike. In the real world (and in the more realistic SF novels), big changes that leave some people confused or threatened almost always result in political controversy and backlash, if not outright violence.

In Iain M. Bank’s 1996 science fiction novel Excession, part of his superior Culture series, people change gender whenever they want. This includes the hero weimar.ws Galaxis

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of the book, Genar-Hofoen, who is being forced by a sentient spaceship to have a reconciliation of sorts with his former lover.

The two of them had changed genders now and then, with one of them becoming pregnant with a baby that was eventually killed by the other one in a jealous fit.

Excession isn’t the only story to play with the idea that people can change genders willy nilly. But in the real world today, people do change genders. Ultra-conservative Iran is one of the leaders in gender reassignment surgeries, though it is more out of a misguided interpretation of homosexuality than from an understanding of gender dysphoria or even anything categorized in the West as gender non-conforming. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, homosexuality can carry a death sentence, and homosexuals are pressured into having sex-change operations on the assumption that their sexual orientation is the result of wishing to be a different gender.

That’s nonsense, of course; homosexuality is nothing more than an attraction to people of the same gender. Few homosexuals want to become anything other than what they are. But people who have never experienced what it is like to be different often have difficulty understanding those who are different. A diet of science fiction can help cure that deficiency, because it can allow them to explore other possibilities—some possible, some fanciful—completely in their mind, where they can play with it at leisure.

There have always been people who want to punish, imprison, or even kill people who challenge gender norms. (Sometimes the challenge is no more radical than insisting that women can vote.) If you were assembling a package of science fiction to give to such persecutors, include a copy of Excession. But what else would you include?

as being a sexist tale, showing that women can’t handle a “man’s job.”

A different way of handling the matter was in The Orville’s third episode, “About a Girl.” A couple from an all-male species has a child—a rare female. They and their friends on the ship then wrestle with whether or not to “correct” the child by making her male.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was a bit more outfront than its predecessor series in exploring gender issues. In its fifth-season episode “The Outcast,” Commander William Riker falls in love with Soren, a member of the J’naii species, which does not recognize male or female genders and considers gender-based activity—including sex—to be perverse. Soren also faces intervention from J’naii society to make sure genderless norms are adhered to.

In Anne Leckie’s Hugo-winning novel Ancillary Justice, there’s arguably not a lot of differentiation in gender roles (yes, it has strong women, but England’s Queen Elizabeth I and Russia’s Catherine the Great didn’t make those countries gender-neutral) but there is only one pronoun—the female one—used to describe people regardless of their physical gender. That might remind some people of Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1968 Left Hand of Darkness, in which all characters are called “he” and they only take on a specific gender to reproduce.

And in Samuel Delany’s Nebula-winning short story “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking (and “controversial” would be the mildest of descriptions) anthology Dangerous Visions, astronauts are neutered before they reach puberty. Delany explores how the status of these “Spacers” leads to people treating them and how they come to view others.

Him and Him Consider gifting them some DVDs or streaming videos.

The original Star Trek and its Next Generation spinoff explored gender. On June 3, 1969 , the original Trek ended its three-year run on NBC with “Turnabout Intruder,” in which Captain James Kirk switches bodies with a woman. Now inhabiting Kirk’s body, Dr. Janice Lester finally finds herself with the command she wanted, but she is unable to handle it. In the time that it takes Kirk’s colleagues to realize what has happened, William Shatner is able to ham it up by playing the Lester-Kirk as an overly emotional character who drives her/his shipmates to the edge of mutiny. This episode is proof that exploring sexuality in SF doesn’t necessarily mean pushing a progressive agenda; “Turnabout Intruder” has been criticized

Him and Him and Her and Her Homosexual and bisexual characters crop up in many books by the late grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke. Walter Curnow and Maxim Brajlovsky in 2010: Odyssey Two; George and Jerry in 2061: Odyssey Three; Duncan Makenzie in Imperial Earth; Karl Mercer and Joe Calvert in Rendezvous With Rama; and others. The frequency of the occurrences in his books led some to question whether he himself was gay. Though largely unknown during his lifetime, after his death Starlog cofounder Kerry O’Quinn confirmed on his website, writing “Yes, Arthur was gay—although in his era that wasn’t the term. As Isaac Asimov once told me, ‘I think he simply found he preferred men.’ Arthur didn’t publicize his sexuality—that wasn’t the focus of his life—but if asked, he was open and honest.”

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Sometimes the homosexuality of a character is front-and-center, as with Maureen F. McHugh’s 1992 novel China Mountain Zhang. Set against the backdrop of a United States dominated by China, the book (made up of several long short stories) features a young gay man of Chinese and Puerto Rican background as he navigates the social and economic situation. This beautifully written book doesn’t make its protagonist conflicted or hidden about his sexuality; it simply is who and what he is.

McHugh’s third novel, Mission Child, focuses on Janna, who is trying to find her way in the world. Janna also plays with gender a bit, at first in disguise as a boy (in an act of survival) and later choosing not to choose a gender, what some might today call gender

IMAGE: COMFREAK

Most people do not want to have their assumptions questioned, especially about something as deeply personal as sexuality and gender, love and sex, identity and physicality and mentality.

nonconforming. In her book Nekroplis, a part-human, part synthetic character is considered neither male nor female, leaving the android to navigate between the two.

Long before the reading public knew David Gerrold is gay they read about the homoerotic experiences of the protagonist of The Man Who Folded Himself, in which a man replicates himself by using a time machine; he couples with some of the male copies of himself. Contrast that to a trilogy of juvenile SF books he wrote a couple decades later (Jumping off the Planet, Bouncing off the Moon, and Leaping to the Stars), in which one of the main characters has a matter-offact same-sex relationship that is treated as no big deal—by his fictional family and by the readers.

The Man Who Folded Himself is something of a classic of the genre. Its appearance underscored that Gerrold—already establishing a reputation as a talented and brash newcomer to the SF field—was Someone to Watch. It arrived almost a decade after Frank Herbert’s groundbreaking Dune, a novel that had very little sexuality, but what sexuality it had wasn’t likely to warm the hearts of its gay readers. That the beastly villain Baron Harkonnen is gay would raise a few eyebrows in itself, but what really made some people wonder about Herbert’s views of homosexuality was the presentation of Harkonnen as not only gay but as murderously and pervertedly so. His preferred method of sex is with a young partner (“victim” would not be an inappropriate description) whom

he then kills after the act.

The evil Baron is a well-known character.

But what is not as well-known is that Herbert’s son, Bruce Calvin Herbert, was a gay activist, and there are reports that he never got along with his father, at least in part because of his sexuality. Just because something is part of the science fiction genre does not mean that it necessarily conforms to an anything-goes interpretation of gender.

One of the most obvious examples of nonconformism is Hugo- and Nebula-winning author Orson Scott Card. His Ender’s Game and the ensuing sequels earned him many fans and fame, in justifiable appreciation of his writing skills. But his very vocal opposition to homosexuality and public activism against same-sex marriage earned him the weimar.ws Galaxis

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enmity of many, leading to boycotts of his Ender’s Game film and the end of his opportunity to script a DC comic (for details, see “The Orson Boycott, Galaxis #4).

In 1990, Card wrote about a gay character in his story Songmaster, Josef, who has a relationship with another character: Given my personal feelings about the individual homosexuals I have known and, in some cases, have regarded and still regard as dear friends, and my religious beliefs about what God requires of those of us who take upon ourselves the commitment to be members of the Mormon Church, it is hardly likely that Songmaster would be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ homosexuals. What the novel offers is a treatment of characters who share, between them, a forbidden act that took place because of hunger on one side, compassion on the other, and genuine love and friendship on both parts. I was not trying to show that homosexuality was “beautiful” or “natural”—in fact, sex of any kind is likely to be “beautiful” only to the participants, and it is hard to make a case for the naturalness of such an obviously counter-evolutionary trend as samesex mating. Those issues were irrelevant. The friendship between Ansset and Josef was the beautiful and natural thing, even if it eventually led them on a mutually self-destructive path.

Not an explanation designed to end controversy over his beliefs (or his leadership role in a vehemently anti-same-sex marriage organization), but at least Card doesn’t shy away from dealing with the controversy.

The strength of SF is not that it forces writers and fans and works of art (or just works of commerce) to conform. It is one of the last genres that should be all the same.

But its strength will be sapped if it doesn’t at least question things, explore them, debate them (civilly), have fun with them, and think about them.

Changing Perspectives What’s innate and immutable? What can be changed? What should be changed? This can confuse even people who are otherwise on the same page when it comes to sexual freedom and self-expression. For many people, the lesson learned from long millennia of sexual repression and violence and discrimination is that one’s gender should not matter legally, economically, professionally, or morally. You should expect the same level of professional quality and moral probity of anyone. Gender differences, if pertinent at all, are not terribly important. A good man would be a good woman and vice versa.

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But transgender people have a different message. They’re not in favor of discrimination; but they are saying that gender matters deeply, intrinsically to who they are.

Someone who feels that they were born into a body with the wrong gender can feel utterly miserable for years until and if they are able to begin to live as the gender they feel is their natural gender.

On a celebrity level, Olympic champion Bruce Jenner educated a lot of people about transgender issues when he became Caitlyn Jenner. This was not science fiction; this was just a man who has been in the public eye as an athlete, a celebrity, a reality TV star, and finally as a transgender person, and his— now her—celebrity served to make it seem normal to many people. The fact that she is a Republican just makes it all the more interesting. And normal.

Critics of Jenner have rightly pointed out that her experience is not like that of most transgender people. Jenner is rich and famous. Being a transgender person today is nothing like the oh-it-doesn’t-matter crowd in Excession. It often brings public condemnation—sometimes from the very White House itself, not to mention family members and religious leaders. And it brings discrimination in professional settings and health care. For today’s transgender people, tomorrow can’t come fast enough.

Backlash There is a worldwide phenomenon of a resurgence of nativist and majoritarian governments. As the name suggests, majoritarian governments and movements rule on the basis of and in the name of the majority of the people, usually a religious or racial grouping. Such governments are also usually authoritarian (or “authoritariancurious”), such as the current governments of India (ruling in the name of Hindus and often explicitly discriminating against Muslims), Russia (white, Orthodox Christians), Myanmar (Buddhists), Hungary (ethnic Magyars), Turkey (Muslims), and on and on, including the Trump administration in the United States, which sees itself as the voice of white Christians.

That might sound like simple democracy to people, but the flip side of majoritarianism is that anyone who is not part of that majority group is either sent packing or is allowed to stay only at the sufferance of the majority. The Jim Crow South was an example of this; sure, African-Americans were allowed to live there, but they had to show deference to whites and accept second-class status in all things.

That dynamic is also present in the vicious online attacks that are being directed against women in science fiction. The fe-

male stars of the Ghostbusters remake were relentlessly trolled by “fans” (what’s in a word?) who attacked their looks, made crude and insulting comments about them, spread scandalous lies about them, and more, all in the interest of humiliating them—trying to put them back in their place.

The same thing happened to Kelly Marie Tran, who portrayed Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. She is the first Asian-American to land a major role in the Wars films. For that achievement, she was subjected to such a barrage of online insults—some racist, some insulting her appearance—that she took herself off of Instagram. And as we reported a few issues ago, original trilogy star Carrie Fisher was targeted by these trolls after the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

For decades from the inception of science fiction fandom early in the 20th century, the genre was largely known as the realm of males. The parody of the SF fan, much like the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, was of a socially awkward young male with little or no understanding or experience with the other sex.

The main thing for the genre is that these topics are explored, fearlessly and with an approach of intellectual curiosity. If not in this genre, then where? some good ol’-fashioned testosterone-fueled military SF took home some awards instead of novels by women and others that explored alternative gender roles and social arrangements.

Aja Romano explained on Vox.com: The disruptive fans “typically present a familiar cadre of objections. They feel threatened and newly underrepresented by the sudden emphasis on being more inclusive; long used to the status quo where heroes are white and male, they don’t see the need for universal representation now, and the sudden recent emphasis feels superimposed and tokenized.”

There had of course been female science fiction fans and writers from the beginning, but their numbers and visibility began to increase as SF moved out of the pulps and into the mainstream in the 1970s.

So the problem with the genre was once the need to overcome its reputation as a juvenile boys’

club. Today, there is another gender problem with science fiction fandom, but it has to do with a subset of its male fans who seem dedicated to making the worst accusations against fandom come true.

Most people first got wind of it during the Hugo Awards war a few years ago, when even mainstream media began reporting on the attempt by some “alt-Right” activists— the so-called “Sad Puppies” and the even more extreme “Rabid Puppies”—to ensure IMAGE: NOUPLOAD

The Poison and the Antidote For much of the mid-20th century, William F. Buckley shaped and defined the modern conservative movement. One of his most important moves came early on when he read the riot act to the anti-Semites and other extremists, declaring them to be outside of the conservative mainstream.

Though they never went away, they were not treated as being suitable for public appearance (until recently, alas).

Whether the science fiction community—the professionals and the fans and the casual customers—throws the extremists out or it learns to live with them, they nonetheless cannot let them take over. For if they do, the genre’s greatest gifts and tools will be lost or dulled.

We also should not let the extremists ruin the party. There is too much fun and wonder to be had within the sprawling science fiction genre to let it be stifled by their machinations. That requires supporting and making use of the genre’s unique ability to explore ideas. Just because one explores homosexual topics doesn’t mean one is necessarily adopting a gay-friendly stance. (Some of Robert Heinlein’s later novels had characters who dabbled with a gay liaison but rejected it as being not for them; and of course Orson Scott Card has put his conservative take on homosexuality in some of his writing.) One can explore women’s and men’s roles, gender, orientation, power, and more and still come to one’s own conclusions even within a genre that is generally open-minded and adventurous.

Though many of the writers might well be inclined toward an accepting and positive

attitude toward non-traditional views on these subjects, the main thing for the genre is that they are explored, fearlessly and with an approach of intellectual curiosity. If not in this genre, then where?

One thing writers of a liberal bent could do better when writing about gender and other politically charged topics is to understand and represent the opposition better.

Putting up a straw man—a simplistic repressive religious order that wants to keep women in their place, or leaders who use traditional ways to enforce their power— might ring true to the casual reader, but it doesn’t actually advance the arguments the writer is trying to make, because people and society and organizations are much more complex than that.

The best way to sideline the extremists is to treat the non-extremists who disagree with you as intelligent people who happen to disagree with you.

Through conversation and interaction, you might or might not convince them of your way of thinking—and, to be honest, they might or might not convince you of their way of thinking, because for the conversation to be honest and real, you have to be open to really hearing what they are saying—but it will make your conversation or your book or movie more realistic and less juvenile wish-fulfillment.

Dangerous Visionaries If the genre is to continue to push the boundaries of thinking and consider the unconsidered, it also will need to avoid a trap that is almost as bad as the alt-Right backlash: the left-wing fans who want to restrict the explorations to only what supports their own views. As Dangerous Visions and countless other SF works proved, offending people is unavoidable and sometimes necessary.

Intellectual exploration—that’s a strength of the genre; it is, we believe, a mission of the genre—requires asking questions, exploring possibilities, questioning assumptions.

Sometimes it is a dangerous thing to do. But done right and done bravely, it can provide a place where people can explore an infinite number of possibilities and help them become people who are better able to make decisions regarding these matters in the real world.

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The X-Files:

Something wicked this way comes The first season of the paranormal-science fiction series on the Fox network arrived like a bolt of lightning. | BY JOHN ZIPPERER

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episode guide

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IMAGE: TOMBUD

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marks the spot—where science and science fiction intersect with anti-science paranoia and real-life politics. The X-Files marks the spot where entertainment met real psychic agony, and the result was one of the most unexpected smash hits of all time on the small screen. This is the story of dark television magic.

The television series The X-Files premiered in the early 1990s, when a certain wing of the American public was both losing trust in the governing class and was worried about its own falling economic future. Make no mistake; militias and cult crazes were intimately connected to the idea of government conspiracies and alien invasions and, in general, outsider control of our lives.

September 10, 1993, was the day that the first episode of The X-Files premiered. Millions of viewers were confronted with something they’d never seen before: A program about government conspiracy featuring two attractive, quirky, likable characters who might or might not have the abilities to solve the mysteries.

For me, my revelation had come months earlier. A friend of mine worked at a major Chicago-based advertising agency. She invited me to her apartment one evening to view a new TV program that was expected to be a big hit—not, it wasn’t The X-Files; it was some other program that I have long since forgotten. The X-Files was the backup, another cassette, the secondary show we’d watch after the main event. We watched the first show— whatever it was—and then put in the cassette for the next program, and for the next hour we were mesmerized. When The X-Files’ pilot episode was over, we looked at each other and said “That was pretty cool.”

And it was.

We became two of the earliest fans of the new program, probably along with other advertising professionals around the country who had been sent review copies to aid them in their plans for purchasing ad time on television. Our attraction was not unwarranted; The X-Files went on to a strong first season that set the tone that defined the series for a total of 12 seasons (counting the new limited series) and two motion pictures.

Let’s look at that freshman season.

A note of caution: This episode guide as-

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sumes that you have already seen these episodes, so they contain plenty of spoilers. If you have not seen a particular episode, we recommend viewing the program first, then reading this guide. You have been warned.

Production

Studio: 20th Century Fox Network: Fox Creator and Executive Producer: Chris Carter Producers (various titles and time frames): R.W. Goodwin, Howard Gordon, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, Kim Manners, Glen Morgan, James Wong, Michelle MacLaren, Michael W. Watkins, David Greenwalt Theme Music by: Mark Snow

Cast

David Duchovny: Fox Mulder Gillian Anderson: Dana Scully Mitch Pileggi: Walter Skinner William B. Davis: Cigarette Smoking Man SEASON ONE Pilot Writer: Chris Carter Director: Robert Mandel Airdate: September 10, 1993 Dana Scully is instructed by the FBI to team up with a troublesome agent named Fox Mulder, who pursues cases involving claims of the paranormal. Mulder, a believer in the paranormal, later informs Scully that his sister was abducted by aliens when she was 12.

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For their first case together, Scully and Mulder head to Oregon, where high school students are disappearing and turning up dead. Exhuming the most recent victim, Scully discovers that the body in the coffin isn’t the teenage girl’s but is instead that of an orangutan. Are the kids being abducted? And why does Mulder’s car keep experiencing problems at one spot on the road?

aircraft over the base before they are driven away by a black helicopter. Later Mulder returns and is captured, his memory wiped of what he has seen. Scully rescues him by swapping him for an undercover security person. Later, Mulder once again meets Deep Throat back in Washington, and the informant lets him know that “they”— presumably aliens—are not recent arrivals.

Scully: Time can’t just disappear; it’s a universal invariant.

Mulder: Not in this ZIP code.

Deep Throat: Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a long, long time.

Notes: This show sets up the series pretty well, and it is surprising how faithfully this long-lived show follows the path laid out here. Not only do we have a mythology set up in which there are small capsules implanted in human abductees, but we meet the characters Mulder, Scully, Cigarette Smoking Man, and others. And the mood—the quiet, mysterious, ominous feeling that is established here and never leaves. This is the episode that made many viewers fall in love with the show, yours truly included.

Deep Throat Writer: Chris Carter Director: Daniel Sackheim Airdate: September 17, 1993 Deceit within a coverup within misdirection.

Scully and Mulder investigate rumors of experimental aircraft and abused test pilots at an Air Force base in Idaho. While using a restroom, Mulder is contacted by Deep Throat, who warns him that he is being watched.

Mulder and Scully watch strange maneuvers of

Notes: Yes, Deep Throat the character was named after Deep Throat the famous government source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate coverage, and that source had been named for the adult movie Deep Throat, which was named for . . . well, look, the point is this new character served to explain the mythology backstory and give clues—sometimes vague—to Scully and Mulder.

Deep Throat was portrayed by Jerry Hardin.

Veteran actor Hardin also appeared in such genre series as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Sliders, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Voyager.

Squeeze Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong Director: Harry Longstreet Airdate: September 24, 1993 Mulder and Scully are brought in to investigate a case in which a man was killed and his liver taken, but where no obvious point of entry into his building presented itself. Mulder concludes that the murder is similar to killings in 1933 and

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Deep Throat served to explain the mythology backstory and give clues—sometimes vague—to Scully and Mulder.

Left: Series stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny.

1963, and each of those previous times there were three murders apiece.

They catch Eugene Victor Tooms and give him a lie detector test. He fails the questions Mulder used to tie him to the previous murders, but another FBI agent releases Tooms. Exploring Tooms’ home, they discover he created a “nest” out of newspaper clippings and kept mementos of his victims. When Mulder discovers Tooms has taken Scully’s necklace, he has to track him down before she becomes his latest victim.

der. They think they may have been eaten off by a human.

Mulder: Where in New Jersey?

Scully: Just outside Atlantic City.

Mulder: Not an uncommon place to lose a body part.

Scully: Oh my God, Mulder! It smells like—I think it’s bile!

Mulder: Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly, without betraying my cool exterior?

Shadows Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong Director: Michael Lange Airdate: October 22, 1993 Fans of electrical-based fiction will get a real charge out of this one: After attempting to rob a woman at an ATM, the dead bodies of two muggers in Philadelphia are found to have an electrical charge. While tracking down the woman who was unsuccessfully mugged, Scully and Mulder witness their car moving on its own—and a later check-up shows that the car, yep, has an electrical charge.

Tied up in all of this is a possible connection to a Middle Eastern terrorist group, and a technology deal gone wrong. And, because this is The X-Files, a ghost.

Notes: This is the first script from writing pair Glen Morgan and James Wong. The two would also go on to create the short-lived SF series Space: Above and Beyond.

Conduit Writers: Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon Director: Daniel Sackheim Airdate: October 1, 1993 Our heroes travel to Iowa to follow up on a tabloid report about the disappearance of a teenage girl. They find her brother writing down code that he says comes from the TV, and the code later turns out to be from the U.S. military. The kids’ home is raided by the NSA and the family taken into custody.

While they work out the mystery of the missing teen and a related murder, Mulder finds himself thinking back to the abduction of his own sister years earlier.

Mulder: I want to believe.

Notes: This episode ends with a dawning realization by Scully that Mulder just might be on to something real after all and isn’t just a believer in conspiracy theories.

The Jersey Devil Writer: Chris Carter Director: Joe Napolitano Airdate: October 8, 1993 Something humanoid killed a man and ate part of his body. Mulder and Scully think the killing is the doing of a female humanoid creature whose mate was killed. They track down and find the creature, who is killed by a SWAT team. Her child, however, is still alive, and is keeping watch on some new prey.

Scully: They found a body in the New Jersey woods yesterday missing its right arm and shoul-

Notes: As a monster-of-the week episode, “The Jersey Devil” acquits itself just fine. But we do get some neat early insight into Scully’s life (she has one besides her work with Mulder).

Mulder: Do you know how difficult it is to fake your own death? Only one man has pulled it off: Elvis.

Notes: Sometimes the scariest setups aren’t supposed to deliver the scares. There’s a nice twist here about a haunting that turns out to be protective.

Ghost in the Machine Writers: Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon Director: Jerrold Freedman Airdate: October 29, 1993 Facing shutdown over budget cuts, the central operating system (COS) of the Eurisko company begins to fight back, killing one of the company’s leaders and waging battles against law enforcement sent its way.

Mulder learns from Deep Throat that COS is an artificial intelligence that the U.S. Department of Defense wants to get its hands on, but Mulder wants to destroy it. He tries to upload a virus into the system to take it out a la various attempts against the Borg, but the Defense Department tries to stop him.

Mulder: He ran into a little bad luck in Atlanta, working hate crimes.

Scully: What kind of bad luck?

Mulder: He misplaced a piece of evidence— bagged and everything. Sent it to the cleaners. By the time he got it back, a federal judge had lost both his hands and his right eye.

Notes: We’ll agree with others who have made the obvious 2001/HAL 9000 references. Most computers-run-amok stories fail (with the exception of Terminator 2), and this episode won’t break that pattern.

Ice Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong Director: David Nutter Airdate: November 5, 1993 Mulder and Scully head up to Alaska, where a number of scientists have killed themselves at a research station. A dog, found with the dead bodies of the scientists, is discovered to have black spots on its skin, as well as something that appears to be moving beneath its skin.

When the pilot who flew them there dies during an escape attempt, they are stuck there, and Muller, Scully, and the remaining scientists need to find out what is infecting people and how to stop it. Scully eventually realizes that there are worms inside the bodies, and that the worms will kill each other if put together in the same organism. If only they could trust each other that they weren’t infected.

Mulder: Before anyone passes judgment, may I remind you—we are in the Arctic.

Notes: Even though this episode was heavily influenced by The Thing (and its literary antecedents), “Ice” is just a delight from start to finish.

From the tension of having everyone mistrusting everyone else, to a threat that is unknown but virulent, to actors and direction that plays it all perfectly (even adding humor to the famous strip-search scene), this is one of the series’ best episodes.

Space Writer: Chris Carter Director: William Graham Airdate: November 12, 1993 Scully and Mulder sure do get around. One week they’re in the wilds of Alaska, and the next they’re at NASA. Mulder gets to meet a childhood hero of his, an astronaut with the improbable name of Lt. Col. Marcus Aurelius Belt, who runs the space shuttle program. Unfortunately for the heroworship time, he pours cold water on the stories they’ve heard about sabotage of launches. Reports of a ghost outside the space shuttle don’t help. And it might be a ghost that Belt picked up weimar.ws Galaxis

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on his own trip to space years ago.

PHOTO: GAGE SKIDMORE

Mulder: The failure of the Hubble Telescope and the Mars Observer are directly connected to a conspiracy to deny us evidence.

Scully: Evidence of what?

Mulder: Alien civilization.

Scully: Oh. Of course.

Notes: Actor Ed Lauter, who portrayed astronaut Belt, had also appeared in the 1976 King Kong remake, the 1978 horror film Magic, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Charmed, The Rocketeer, and, because life is weird, The Waltons.

Fallen Angel Writers: Howard Gordon, Alex Gansa Director: Larry Shaw Airdate: November 19, 1993 A UFO crashes near a small town in upper Wisconsin, and its invisible pilot is on the loose.

Mulder is nudged by Deep Throat to go investigate, but when he shows up to take photographs of the crash site, he is arrested and interrogated

by Col. Calvin Henderson. Scully goes to get him out, and lets him know that the FBI wants to shut down the X-Files project and that the crashed ship is said to be a crashed Libyan fighter plane— because so many Libyan warplanes regularly cruise over rural Wisconsin, apparently.

Max Fenig, a UFO researcher and fan of Mulder, shares some of his evidence from the UFO crash site, and Mulder and Scully learn that locals have been threatened by the government to stay silent about what happened.

All the while, the invisible alien is running around and finally kidnaps Max, and Henderson’s forces arrest Mulder once again.

Back in Washington, Mulder gets a cold shoulder from his boss, but the X-Files won’t be shut down—thanks to intervention by Deep Throat.

Deep Throat: Quick response—I’d say you have 24 hours before the entire area is sanitized. After that, it will be like nothing has happened.

Notes: My favorite bit of trivia for this story is that Brent Stait, who portrays Corporal Taylor in “Fallen Angel,” is a teacher at the William Davis Centre for Actors Study; William Davis is, of course, the man who plays the Cigarette Smoking Man. Eve Writers: Kenneth Biller, Chris Brancato Director: Fred Gerber Airdate: December 10, 1993 Mulder and Scully look into two killings that occurred simultaneously on opposite ends of the country. Identical girls were present, appar42

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The X-filer-in-chief, Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, Millennium, The Lone Gunmen, and Harsh Realm. ently the result of some test-tube babying at a San Francisco clinic. Deep Throat tells Mulder about a military effort to genetically modify super soldiers, and they meet a woman who is part of the project who says the clones had great powers and, alas, killer attitudes. The X-Files agents find a couple of the clones who, after trying to kill them, are put into a mental hospital.

Scully: Mulder, why would alien beings travel light years through space in order to play doctor on cattle?

Mulder: For the same reason we cut up frogs and monkeys. Besides, they seem to have stepped up their interest.

Notes: The history of the U.S. military trying to develop special powers for soldiers is humorous at best (see the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats), but it’s worth noting that part of what made the Nazi defeat of France and its small northern neighbors so easy at the beginning of World War II was that the German forces were drugged with various pills to keep them functioning for days. A 2016 History Channel article noted: “A so-called ‘stimulant decree’ issued in April 1940 sent more than 35 million tablets of Pervitin and Isophan (a slightly modified version produced by the Knoll pharmaceutical company) of the pills to the front lines, where they fueled the Nazis’ ‘Blitzkrieg’ invasion of France through the Ardennes mountains. It should be noted that Germans were not alone in their use of performance-enhancing drugs during World War II. Allied soldiers were known to use amphetamines (speed) in the form of Benzedrine in order to battle combat fatigue.”

Fire Writer: Chris Carter Director: Larry Shaw Airdate: December 17, 1993

Members of the British aristocracy are being killed—by bursting into flame. When one aristo comes to Massachusetts to seek safety, also making the trip across the pond is a former, er, flame of Fox Mulder’s, Met investigator Phoebe Green.

Scully thinks Green is just playing up the stories of the fires because of Mulder’s fear of fires, but the fire-starting killer has followed the British aristocrat to Massachusetts and the fires start again. When Mulder freezes up, unable to save some children from a burning room, the killer— Cecil L’Ively, working undercover as a caretaker at the Massachusetts residence—steps in and saves them.

Scully starts to put together the evidence pointing to L’Ively as the killer, who gives himself away when confronted by Scully and Green.

Cecil L’Ively: I’m just dying for a cigarette.

Notes: Boys From Brazil, Firestarter, The Thing— there’s been a bit of a trend this first season of episodes echoing (or homaging the heck out of) famous horror films.

Beyond the Sea Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong Director: David Nutter Airdate: January 7, 1994 After her father dies, Scully has visions of him talking and singing to her. Meanwhile, Mulder says that a serial killer he had helped arrest, Luther Lee Boggs, says he has psychic insight into the kidnapping of a young couple—and he’ll share it if his death sentence is commuted.

Though Mulder is skeptical that Boggs has any real psychic value, Scully follows one of the serial killer’s suggestions and finds the couple. The girl is rescued, but the kidnapper escapes with the male. Scully gets more info from Boggs, including a warning about “the blue devil”—which turns out to be painted on the backdrop behind a

There’s been a trend this first season of episodes echoing (or homaging the heck out of) famous horror films. walkway, on which the kidnapper is killed.

Boggs then tells Scully that he can relay a message to her father, but she says no. After all, she tells Mulder, she already knows what her father would say.

Scully, interrupting Mulder reading a file: Last time you were that engrossed, it turned out you were reading the Adult Video News.

Notes: Award-winning actor Brad Dourif portrayed the creepy serial killer. Dourif ’s many acting credits include David Lynch’s Dune, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Alien Resurrection, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mississippi Burning, Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween II, to name just a few.

Gender Bender Writers: Larry Barber, Paul Barber Director: Rob Bowman Airdate: January 21, 1994 Mulder and Scully investigate the death of a man following a one-night stand with a woman he met at a club. They follow clues to the Kindred, a religious commune in Massachusetts, where Scully finds herself unable to put up resistance to one of the members.

Later, Mulder goes back to the commune and witnesses strange religious activity that includes an apparent gender-switch of a sick man. Mulder saves Scully from her would-be Kindred seducer.

Later, a man named Michel is engaging in sex with a woman who is really one of the male Kindred in female form. When a police officer stops them, the female attacks the officer, turns into a man, and runs away.

When we next see the Kindred commune, it is abandoned.

Scully: Take me back to the 20th century.

Notes: The character of Michel is played by Nicholas Lea, who would return to the series in the role of the incredibly untrustworthy and incredibly sexy Alex Krycek.

Lazarus Writers: Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon Director: David Nutter Airdate: February 4, 1994 Scully teams up with FBI agent Jack Willis, a former teacher and love interest of hers, to capture or kill bank robbers Warren Dupre and Lula Phillips. But when they catch Dupre, both Willis and Dupre are shot—Dupre is killed, but Willis’ body is inhabited by Dupre.

The now-possessed Dupre finds his former Willis body at the hospital and cuts fingers off the corpse so he can retrieve a wedding ring,

which is not standard FBI procedure. Mulder realizes that Willis is now actually Dupre, because Dupre/Willis used a pair of left-handed cutting shears despite the fact that Willis is right-handed.

Willis tracks down Phillips and takes Scully hostage. While Mulder finds Scully’s location through analysis of a ransom phone call, there’s treachery in the Dupre-Phillips relationship, and they manage to do each other in.

Mulder: How well do you know him?

Scully: We dated for almost a year. He was my instructor at the academy.

Mulder: The plot thickens.

Notes: Like most actors, Alexander Allport Jr., who portrayed FBI agent Jack Willis, had many roles and probably went out for many more that he didn’t get. But in the mid-1970s, he and Amy Irving did a screen test for a little movie called Star Wars—had they been successful, they would have been Han Solo and Princess Leia.

Young at Heart Writers: Chris Carter, Scott Kaufer Director: Michael Lange Airdate: February 11, 1994 Killers who are unkillable or nearly unkillable once again are featured in The X-Files. John Barnett is a killer who Mulder helped arrest in his first FBI case, but now Barnett is leaving messages even though he is said to have died in prison.

Barnett is benefiting from some top-secret research that has him aging in reverse—apparently in reverse from the very end of his life when he supposedly died.

Barnett keeps taunting Mulder, and the FBI agent finally manages to get to him at a concert hall where the killer is pretending to be the piano player. Barnett shoots Scully—don’t worry, bullet-proof vest—and is in turn shot and killed by Mulder.

Mulder: Reggie! Reggie!

Reggie: Mulder—God, I hate it when you do that.

Notes: Trivia mavens on the X-Files wikia page note that this is the first episode of the series for which Fox Mulder is directly responsible for someone’s death.

E.B.E Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong Director: William Graham Airdate: February 18, 1994 What ties together an Iraqi fighter jet, an American truck driver, and shooting at a UFO in Tennessee? Deep Throat, apparently.

Agents Scully and Mulder investigate a UFO

sighting in Tennessee, where a truck driver by the name of Ranheim had shot at the flying object.

While they’re there, someone briefly borrows Scully’s pen, and when she gets back to Washington, D.C., Scully finds that there is some sort of surveillance technology now in the pen.

Mulder shows her his friends known as The Lone Gunmen, three conspiracy theorists who help him out from time to time. Deep Throat gives Mulder “proof ” about the Iraqi UFO sighting, but Mulder thinks it’s fake, a distraction to get him off the trail of the Ranheim case. Deep Throat tells him Ranheim’s truck is carrying an E.B.E., or extraterrestrial biological entity, that had been found at the site where the Iraqi UFO crashed.

Mulder and Scully track down the truck, only to find it’s empty and a likely distraction from the real location of the E.B.E. They track Ranheim— not his real name—to a power plant, but they can’t get to the E.B.E. held there and are taken by the plant’s guards. Deep Throat shows up, freeing them from their guards but telling them about an international agreement to kill any alien biological being; he himself is one of only three people to have killed an E.B.E. Probably has it on his Facebook profile.

Mulder: Have you heard of any classified planes being flown during the Persian Gulf War? Byers: Why would you need to expose a secret plane to an air force that runs to Iran whenever you take to the air?

Mulder: What about UFO activity during that period?

Langly [laughs]: Yeah, UFOs caused the Gulf War Syndrome, that’s a good one.

Byers: That’s why we like you, Mulder—your ideas are weirder than ours.

Notes: As much as The X-Files became a ratings, critical, and cultural juggernaut, it has a terrible record of spinning off successful new shows. The Lone Gunmen in this episode appear again later in the series and eventually are given their own television program.

The Lone Gunmen premiered in March 2001 on Fox, but it only lasted 13 episodes. Starring Bruce Harwood (as John Fitzgerald Byers), Tom Braidwood (Melvin Frohike), and Dean Haglund (Richard Langly), the quirky show was lighter in mood than the dark X-Files, but as much as the Lone Gunmen were a great side story in The X-Files, The Long Gunmen just didn’t work as a standalone show. It’s not that there wasn’t initial enthusiasm; the premiere episode attracted 13.2 million viewers, but its final episode could only muster 3.6 million.

For the record, the other X-spinoff was Millennium, which, though short-lived at just three weimar.ws Galaxis

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ox said no. That’s Fox television, not Fox Mulder. And what the young television network was rejecting was what would one day become a cash cow for them: an initial treatment for The X-Files, presented by television writer Chris Carter.

Luckily, with the help of a producer friend, Carter got another chance to pitch his series to Fox, and this time—reportedly reluctantly—the network gave him the go-ahead for a pilot.

And the rest, as they say, was historic amounts of success.

The show appeared at a time when science fiction was gaining a foothold on television thanks to syndicated stars (such as the Star Trek spinoffs). But X-Files was both new and old: new, in that it wasn’t like anything else on TV at that time; old, in that it had its roots in classic series of horror and science fiction. It grew those roots into something that was better and edgier than any of its antecedents.

Carter cites as his inspirations shows that he watched as a child,

such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Night Gallery, and Outer Limits. The film The Silence of the Lambs played a unique role in shaping The XFiles. “Silence of the Lambs was an inspiration.

It’s not a mistake that Dana Scully has red hair like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs,” Carter told Smithsonian magazine in 2008. He said there were a number of sources that helped him, “but the idea itself came out of my religious background and my interest in science. My brother is a scientist. He’s a professor at MIT. He brought science fiction into my world. But I am a person of faith, and so it’s the combination of those two things.”

Carter, who was born in 1956, was a teenager during the political

seasons and 67 episodes, still had a much longer life than the entertaining Gunmen.

Miracle Man Writers: Chris Carter, Howard Gordon Director: Michael Lange Airdate: March 18, 1994 As a child, Samuel brings a badly burned dead man, Leonard Vance, back to life. As an adult, Samuel is a faith healer, but something is going wrong. The people he is trying to heal are instead dying, and Samuel is arrested.

The person behind the mysterious antihealing deaths turns out to be Vance, who was brought back to life, yes, but horribly disfigured from the burning. While in prison, Samuel is killed by people working for the local sheriff, but he comes back to haunt Vance, who fesses up to his misdeeds and takes his own life.

Scully: Maybe we should head backstage and see what the reverend has to say.

Mulder: No, wait, wait—this is the part where they bring out Elvis.

Notes: Despite a month between the airing of “E.B.E.” and “Miracle Man,” the show picks up again without missing a beat.

Samuel is portrayed by actor Scott Bairstow, whose genre credits include The Postman, The 44

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ILLUSTRATION: ANDRÉS NIETO PORRAS

THE ORIGIN STORY

and social ferment and turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “I always liken myself to a child of Watergate, and that’s where I developed my kind of distrust of the government,” he told Mental Floss in 2014. “It was 1974 when Nixon resigned, but I still think there was a residual distrust of authority, and The X-Files capitalized on that.”

He said the program’s writers “were mining genres that had already proven in my childhood to be popular, which were hor-

Twilight Zone, Android Apocalypse, and Harsh Realm (another series created by Chris Carter, but it lasted only nine episodes, making The Lone Gunmen look like Gunsmoke).

Shapes Writer: Marilyn Osborn Director: David Nutter Airdate: April 1, 1994 Is it man or beast that killed a Native American man? Mulder and Scully go to Montana to find out the truth behind the death of Joseph Goodensnake. Mulder traces the strange killing to the very first X-file case four decades earlier, in which none other than J. Edgar Hoover investigated a similar happening.

The agents find evidence of animal features on Goodensnake’s body, as well as footprints that really should be called pawprints, at least after a point.

Though the FBI agents have trouble getting information out of the local Native Americans, due to the troubled history between the two groups, Mulder learns about the belief in the manitou, a shape-shifter that can also transfer to a new host.

And it’s on an eight-year cycle. It just happens to be eight years since the last sighting.

Scully: Mulder, what this folder describes is called lycanthropy. It’s a type of insanity in which

ror and science fiction. We were capitalizing on it in a new way and in a new era, and I think that if I can take any credit for anything, it’s that we were, I think, effective storytellers that had a relentless pursuit of excellence. . . .

“I always said that the show ultimately was a search for God, but that could be said about any show, in a way,” he told Mental Floss. “It was about faith, and just the different aspects of faith, so I think those characters would be true to themselves.”

an individual believes that he can turn into a wolf. I mean, no one can physically change into an animal.

Mulder: How can you just dismiss the evidence: the tracks in the mud, the shredded skin, a man with the teeth of an animal?

Scully: Mulder, even if you’re right and Joe Goodensnake did somehow have the ability to transform physically into an animal, he’s dead.

Jim Parker shot him and in a couple of moments, his body will be burned. End of mystery.

Mulder: Let’s hope so.

Notes: Though maybe not a stellar episode, “Shapes” is an attempt to expand the horror folklore that the show’s writers draw upon for their monsters, and they deserve credit to at least paying attention to the Wounded Knee aftermath Darkness Falls Writer: Chris Carter Director: Joe Napolitano Airdate: April 15, 1994 Mulder and Scully head to the forests of Washington state, where some loggers have gone missing. They find a recently cut tree with an odd green ring in it. Doug Spinney, an eco-activist who, with his pals, has been setting potentially deadly traps in the forest to stop logging, thinks the ring is left from some organism that was re-

The X-Files ends its first season on a high—the highest-rated episode, as well as a complex story that brings together the mythology with a cliffhanger. leased when the tree was cut—in the form of a swarm of green insects, such as the swarm that got those missing loggers.

People are safe from the swarm during the day or when there’s light. But when Mulder lets Spinney borrow gas needed to run a generator in their cabin, things get tense. They eventually make it to a car, but the insets enter the Jeep through air vents. Revived at a scientific facility, they learn that the government is using fire and pesticides to try to kill the insects.

Mulder: What happened to your friends?

Spinney: They didn’t make it. We’re not going to make it either—unless we haul ass.

Notes: Actor Jason Beghe, who played the role of Larry Moore in this episode, reportedly was a childhood friend of David Duchovny.

Tooms Writers: Glen Morgan, James Wong Director: David Nutter Airdate: April 22, 1994 Remember serial killer Eugene Victor Tooms from “Squeeze”? Well, he’s out of jail, thanks to his jailors buying his doctor’s claim that he only attacked Scully because he had been accused of murder. Mulder and Scully keep a close eye on Tooms as he now goes about his life, breaking up his attempts to prey on people and surveilling his apartment. Tooms then breaks into Mulder’s home and frames Mulder for attacking him.

FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, who has told Mulder and Scully they have to stick to the rules more closely, tells Mulder to stay away from Tooms.

Tooms needs just one more liver to eat so he can hibernate for another three decades, and he finally gets it by killing his doctor. But his former home, where he had his hibernation nest, has been destroyed and replaced with a shopping mall. He builds his nest under an escalator, and Mulder finds him there and kills Tooms by turning on the escalator.

Judge: Agent Mulder—look at his fingers. Look at him—100 years old?

Mulder: I contend that, perhaps through genetic mutation, Eugene Tooms is capable of contorting and elongating his body in order to gain access to victims so that he may extract the livers which provide him with sustenance for the hibernation period of 30 years. He needs one more liver to complete this cycle.

Defense lawyer: Your honor— Notes: We see Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) for the first time. Though he only appears this one time in this season, he would of course go on to be a major continuing (and popular) character in subsequent seasons and the films.

Pileggi pulled off an impressive accomplish-

ment over the years with Skinner. More than just a boss cracking down on his feral agents, his Skinner had to be the heavy, as well as be the protector, and eventually co-conspirator, yet still make it believable that the FBI would keep him in that role.

Pileggi’s other genre credits include Shocker, Knight Rider 2000, Transformers: The Last Knight, Alien Nation, The Batman, Stargate Atlantis, and hosting eight episodes of In Search Of . . . .

Born Again Writers: Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon Director: Jerrold Freedman Airdate: April 29, 1994 A lost little girl, Michelle, has an unexplained connection to the death of a police detective who was interviewing her. Another officer dies while she is watching, as his scarf gets caught in a bus door. Scully and Mulder investigate the ties between the two dead men, as well as another death of a former coworker of theirs.

Michelle turns out to have been conceived at the same time of that former coworker’s death, and Michelle targets his other former colleagues who had killed him when he tried to report their theft of some serious cash. Mulder and Scully manage to stop her from killing another officer, who had married the widow of the man who tried to report them. He is saved from being killed, but he pleads guilty to grand larceny and murder.

Detective: Excuse me, could I talk to you for a second?

Scully: I just started the autopsy.

Detective: Yeah, um—I don’t think he’s going anywhere.

Notes: Andrea Libman is the young actress who played little Michelle in this episode. Libman would go on to have a thriving career as a voice actor, working on dozens of animated projects.

Roland Writer: Chris Ruppenthal Director: David Nutter Airdate: May 6, 1994 Deaths at a high-tech research facility in Washington state seem to center on a mentally disabled janitor named Roland Ruller. Scully and Mulder interview Roland, who turns out to be something of a math whiz, but they can’t directly connect him to the violent goings-on at the center until they tie him to a computer file of a dead scientist; the file has been worked on regularly after his death, and the password is the same one Roland uses on a piece of art.

When another scientist tries to kill Roland, Roland manages to fight back and nearly kills his attempted killer. Mulder and Scully stop him from doing so, but they might not have stopped

his dead brother from controlling his body.

Mulder: Now you see the way you work that toy is like what’s happening to you. You’re the spaceship, Roland, and your dreams are the controls.

Roland: But who—who runs the controls?

Notes: Writer Chris Ruppenthal only wrote this and one other X-Files episode, but he has had a long career in television as a writer and producer.

He was producer (supervising, co-, or executive producer, variously) on The Outer Limits revival at the end of the 1990s, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Touched by an Angel, and Quantum Leap.

The Erlenmeyer Flask Writer: Chris Carter Director: R. W. Goodwin Airdate: May 13, 1994 Dr. William Secare is being chased by police, but when they get close to him, he’s easily able to repel them. He’s shot and jumps into the water, disappearing, but not before his pursuers notice that his blood is green.

Deep Throat tells Mulder that Secare is very important. Mulder and Scully look into it, as Deep Throat continues to egg them on. At the scene of a related death, Mulder discovers an Erlenmeyer flask with a label reading “Purity Control.” A scientist tells him the flask contains some very unnatural bacteria that could be extraterrestrial.

Once again Deep Throat shows up to shed some light on human experimentation that showed signs of saving terminally ill people with the alien bacteria. A killer (aka “The Crew Cut Man”) is going around killing people involved in the caper, and when Deep Throat gives the Crew Cut Man an alien fetus, Deep Throat is shot by the killer. Deep Throat’s last words to Scully are “Trust no one.” Soon, Mulder tells Scully that the X-Files has been closed down.

Mulder: They’re shutting us down, Scully. . . .

They called me in tonight and they said they’re going to reassign us to other sections.

Scully: Who said that?

Mulder: Skinner; he said word came down from the top of the executive branch.

Scully: Mulder— Mulder: It’s over, Scully.

Scully: Well, you have to lodge a protest. They can’t— Mulder: Yes, they can.

Notes: And so The X-Files ends its first season on a high—this episode being the highest-rated of the season, as well as being a complex and taut story that brings together the mythology theme with a cliffhanger and some true alien weirdness.

The appetites were definitely whetted for season two.

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Worldly Things

What’s new from the tech and toy worlds

PHOTO: JOHN ZIPPERER

Techno Smarts and Smart Tech

The new Pixel Slate from Google makes a smart addition to your desk—but it also works well as a handheld tablet.

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hey stand about five inches high, are round on all sides, and have a screen at the top that you touch to change intensity or color of light. They’re hybrid lights and Bluetooth speakers, and they are sold under a number of different names on Amazon and other retailers (ranging from $19.99 to $35).

The version that was gifted to us was by Elecstars. We don’t use it for a speaker— we’ve already got Bluetooth-enabled and internet-connected speakers in our bedroom and office, but we like the touch-sensitive light device quite a lot. It’s not enough to read by, but it makes a nice night light or mood light for your room. volkswagen recently announced the end of its famed line of Beetles. This July, the last of the current model of Beetles will roll off the assembly lines, ending six decades of production. More than 21 million Beetles had been sold. Contrast that with 46

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modern tech companies, some of which have a penchant for ditching entire product lines and replacing them with a next-generation product under a new name.

Worldly Things readers know of our appreciation of Google. They have been at the forefront of technology (search, advertising, self-driving vehicles, mapping and navigation, etc.), and they have brought to the masses previously elite technologies (virtual reality, etc.). So if you have a golden name like Google and you come out with a phone, what do you call it? You don’t call it a Google phone, you call it a Nexus phone.

Okay, fine, but then a few years later, you replace the Nexus phone with the Pixel phone. Why? The new name is no better or worse than the one it replaced. It’s just . . . a new name.

Whatever. The Nexus-to-Pixel switcheroo was also carried out on the company’s tablet computers, as the Nexus 9 has been replaced with the new Pixel Slate. Why not

call it the Nexus Slate? God only knows.

Nonetheless, we have a Pixel Slate, and it is a wonderful machine after all.

The 12.3-inch tablet with what Google calls its “molecular screen” is indeed crystal-clear. The model we purchased has 128 GB storage, 8 GB RAM, and Intel Core i5 processor (total price about $1,080). We also added the Pixel Slate Keyboard, which has unique round keys that are backlit, a magnetic connector for snapping it to the Slate, and an adjustable backing that can fold to support the screen ($199).

In our use of the new tablet, we have no complaint and much admiration. Pages load quickly, video plays smoothly, colors are bright and clear, the keyboard a helpful alternative to typing on the screen. In short, it’s wonderful.

With the Slate, Google has melded the tablet with the laptop. (Microsoft had already done this successfully with its Surface line of computers, and we have colleagues who have replaced their laptops with the portable Surface.) The handheld tablet— keyboardless, touchscreen, light—and the laptop—keyboard connected to the screen, larger form factor, larger native set of apps.

Slate can be a laptop, with superior performance than Google’s line of mostly cheap Chromebooks, and it can be separated from the keyboard and used as a tablet. It’s slightly unwieldy as a tablet because of its size, but that’s the only complaint we have.

Oh, and we still don’t understand why it’s not a Nexus Slate. if you want to add spice to your meals without being lured over to the dark side, then you might want to arm yourself with Pangea Brands’ Star Wars Lightsaber Salt & Pepper Mill. It’s a pair of salt and pepper mills shaped like the hilt of a light saber ($24.99). They won’t make your food taste any better or worse, but they’re more fun than your old salt and pepper shakers shaped like pigs. and, finally, the Fitbit Blaze watch is a lightweight digital watch that can help you track your exercise, alert you about new emails and texts, and can even tell you the time ($174 to $199.95).

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Screenings What’s on, what’s next? The latest on major SF and science TV and motion picture action. All TV airtimes are Eastern; airtimes and movie release dates subject to change.

Television Black Lighting (Tuesdays, CW): Second season began airing in October.

Colony (Thursdays, USA Network): Canceled after only three seasons.

Doctor Who (BBC America): Nearly 900 episodes strong, this venerable SF series continues under the current doctor, Jodie Whittaker.

The Expanse (Amazon Prime): Amazon picked up the series for a fourth season after Syfy dropped it.

The Flash (Tuesday, 8 p.m., CW): Fifth season now airing.

The Gifted (Monday, 9 p.m., Fox): Second season of this XMen-related series aired in fall 2018.

The Gifted (Sunday, 10 p.m., One31): There’s a second series called The Gifted, and it’s a Thai science fiction fantasy about a high school for very gifted students. Non-Thai viewers can watch the series on producer GMMTV’s YouTube channel with English subtitles.

Gotham (Thursday, 8 p.m., Fox): Now airing season five.

Killjoys (Syfy): Space bounty hunter series set to conclude with its final season airing this year.

Legends of Tomorrow (Tuesday, 9 p.m., CW): Fourth season debuted in October 2018. Ratings have declined with each season.

The Mandalorian (Disney+): This live-action Star Wars series will help anchor Disney’s new subscription streaming service.

See Launch Tube for more Star Wars TV series.

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC): Already renewed for a seventh season, its sixth season will air starting in July 2019. The stars can

make down payments on new homes.

Marvel’s Daredevil (Netflix): Canceled after three seasons.

Marvel’s The Punisher (Netflix): SecAsher Angel is Billy Batson in Shazam. ond season released in January 2019.

Focus Features): Collaborators vs.

The Magicians (Wednesday, 9 resisters in an Earth occupied by p.m., Syfy): The fourth season of alien overlords.

13 episodes of this fantasy series Chaos Walking (March 1, 2019, slated to premiere earlier this year.

Lionsgate): Todd (played by Tom Nova (Wednesday, 9 p.m., PBS): Noah’s Ark! Easter Island! The Em- Holland) lives on a far away planet peror’s ghost army! Four and a half where there are no women and evdecades after it debuted, this sci- eryone can read each other’s—and animals’—minds. ence show remains strong.

Gemini Man (October 4, 2019, The 100 (CW): This post-apocaParamount Pictures): Aging assaslyptic series, based on a 2013 book

by Kass Morgan, has been renewed sin vs. youthful clone of himself.

Godzilla vs. Kong (May 22, for a fifth season.

The Orville (Thursday, 9 p.m., 2020, Warner Bros. Pictures): The Fox): Second season launched in title pretty much says it all, right?

Ol’ Scaley vs. Ol’ Furry. Will be reJanuary. leased in 2D and 3D versions.

High Life (September 9, 2018,

Films

Artemis (release date unknown, 20th Century Fox): Geneva Robertson-Dworet reportedly writing screenplay to this adaptation of Andy Weir’s second novel.

Avatar 2 (December 18, 2020, Walt Disney Studios): Most of the original stars return for this sequel, including Sigourney Weaver in a different role.

Ad Astra (May 24, 2019, 20th Century Fox): Brad Pitt stars as Roy McBride, an engineer searching for his father somewhere in the solar system.

Alita: Battle Angel (February 14, 2019, 20th Century Fox): Budgeted at up to $200 million, this is director Robert Rodriguez’s take on the Japanese manga. James Cameron co-wrote and produced.

Captive State (March 29, 2019,

A24): Criminal father, unplanned child in space.

Men in Black: International (June 14, 2019, Sony): MIB returns with new stars (Chris Hemsworth, Emma Tompson, Liam Neeson, and more) trying to solve a global murder mystery.

Replicas (January 11, 2019, Entertainment Studios): Keanu Reeves stars in this story of life after death.

Star Blazers (release date unknown): It’s difficult to find recent updates on this project, but if produced, it would be an English-language live-action version of the classic Japanese anime/ mange/live-action-film franchise.

Star Wars: Episode IX: (December 20, 2019, 20th Century Fox): The finale of the J.J. Abrams-led trilogy will also end the Skywalker storyline. A new trilogy is already in the works.

Terminator (November 1, 2019, Paramount Pictures): Sequel brings back Schwarzenegger and Hamilton in a follow-up to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, ignoring the films in between.

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King Kong could be returning to the big screen to take on that giant lizard foe, Godzilla, in 2020. weimar.ws Galaxis

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KONG PHOTO: SKEEZE; ANGEL PHOTO: GAGE SKIDMORE

Tracking genre TV & film projects

space artist

the color of art

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omeone going by the name of DasWortgewand posts a great space art image to the online image site Pixabay. “Das Wortgewand” literally translates from the German as “the word garb.” That’s an awkward translation, but it’s humorous because his amazing digital work isn’t about the word—it’s about the impact of the visual image.

The age of digital image creation and dissemination has resulted in the discovery of many creative geniuses around the world. But most of those creators work within a fairly uniform

A German artist going by the name DasWortgewand presents a stunning collection of SF art. | BY JOHN ZIPPERER 48

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ALL ART: DASWORTGEWAND

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His artwork ranges from the whimsical to the deep-space to the experimental. set of ideas and subjects. Not for DasWortgewand—as you can see from these images, they range from the whimsical to the deep-space to the experimental.

He even gets into bright color images of a famous space freighter from the Star Wars universe, which illustrates our review of Solo: A Star Wars Story (see page 60).

Giant faces in space made up of—what? orange barrels? filled with what? water? sand? cat litter? A stormy scene of a Soviet machine on a (presumably alien) planet. An airship soaring through a cityscape with a giant mushroom nearby. An astronaut floating in deep space. Another suited explorer staring at a ringed planet above an icy landscape. Or a bunch of arms sticking out of a landscape.

Why? Who knows? But that’s the fun of it.

Everyone who looks at these colorful images will see something different that

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chimes with their souls. Some of us want to wander that snowy mountain range.

Others want to know how that astronaut ended up floating in space. Is that CCCP machine a planetary lander or an installation? And it’s really hard not to see that orange space head as some sort of godlike figure—is it making commands or solving a problem of lessers? And that mushroom—God, you’re on your own on that.

That’s the magical impact of the art of space and the fantastic. It makes you think and dream and consider possibilities for the first time. Dream and consider.

You can view and download and use the latest great images from DasWortgewand from Pixabay at pixabay.com/en/users/daswortgewand-8385.

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That’s the magical impact of art of space and the fantastic.

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IMAGE: TOMBUD

SCIENCE FICTION

JOHN ZIPPERER

The Dragon is drawn deeper into a conspiracy against the Union. But who is behind the conspiracy? | BY

the plan

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G

re-ordan cupped his hands around a warm cup of tea I had just poured for him. He sat across the table in our little galley, sipping the tea while Jae and I watched him intently.

The robots were manning the cockpit—roboting the cockpit?—and Dragon would alert us if anything came our way. So at the moment we had no distractions from our recently acquired guest and his tale of secrets about the Union.

But first we had had to sit through him wolfing down his first meal in 36 hours. He ate two entire prepared dinners before he slowed down, and he’d barely said a word.

Now, the plates cleared away and the teacup in his hands, the time had come for some explanation.

A plan to defeat the Union, he had promised. “How can you defeat the Union?” I asked. “It’s been in control for nearly a century, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any weaker.”

Gre-ordan nodded. “The Union party has controlled the military and administrative branches for about 100 years, that’s true,” he said. “And they have co-opted most but not all of the judges. They achieved all that by destroying the competing parties. Small groups of opposition were no threat to them, so they could let them slink around. But there no longer exists any large-scale party or grouping that could challenge Union control.”

“There’s Pantheon,” said Jae. “They’re huge and powerful.”

Gre-ordan’s eyes widened. “Ye-e-e-s-s, they are. But Pantheon is primarily a religious organization. They want to be left alone to pursue their faith as they see fit, so they’re powerful enough to keep the Union out of its interests, and they’re uninterested enough in governing to not constitute a threat to the Union.”

“Then who or what can take on the Union?” I said. “I thought the Pantheon was the only group with enough power to do anything about it—”

“Yes, they could, but the Union hasn’t given them any reason to do so—at least not yet, outside of the occasional skirmish.”

I repeated myself. “Then who or what can take on the Union?”

“A new player,” Gre-ordan said, smiling.

I wasn’t sure I was going to like who this new player was. Some new conglomeration of dissident planets and trading groups?

Some delusional military commander who wanted to set up an empire? Perhaps it was Gre-ordan himself. God, I hoped not. He still struck me as nothing more interesting than an unusually peppy accountant. If there was a new alien race on the fringes of Union space, I sure as hell wasn’t going to help some other tyrant take over.

Interstellar war was not pretty; that’s part of the reason the Union had been able to establish something of a pax-unionica. The distances required for travel and the ease of slipping through blockades made such a war mostly a

game of waiting and waiting until finally there was unimaginable destruction. When someone struck an enemy after traveling many lights years to get there, they did so with high lethality.

So no, I didn’t want to overthrow our government in a civil war or a non-civil war; I just wanted to change the party that was in control of it.

And, again, I hoped this didn’t mean Greordan was the answer. I hoped he had the answer.

Our guest downed the rest of his tea and placed the cup on the narrow counter behind him. Then he turned back to face us. “A new player, one with technologies we don’t yet have. One with an interest in helping us replace Union.”

“If you’re working with some alien government, you can get the hell off my ship now,” I said.

“Our ship,” said Jae. “Our ship,” I said, not making eye contact with Jae. “We’ll put you back in the pod and send you to some planet here in the Na’ha system, and that’ll be that.”

Gre-ordan sighed. “Paulik, where are we now.”

“Ship’s galley,” I said sharply.

He closed his eyes and spoke clearly, as if talking to an imbecile. “I mean, in space.”

I paused before answering. “Currently in the Na’ha system. But we’re heading out of it at a pretty good clip. So if you’re going to get off the ship, you should probably make one last bathroom break and head back to your capsule. We’ll give you some cookies for the ride.”

“We’re in the Na’ha system,” he said. “And we’re near the what system?”

“The alleged Sevents home,” said Jae. I remembered what Kriz said about this not being a coincidence that we were called for a job so near the system I suspected to be the Sevents system, home of—a lost civilization? Could they still be around, ready to reemerge and topple the Union from its preeminence?

“Gre-ordan, you’re not telling us this new player is the Sevents?” I asked.

He shook his head quickly. “No, of course not. I already told you only an idiot would think Sevents was located out here.”

“Yeah, you said that,” I said. “Offense taken.”

He waved off my insulted feelings. “If the floating cities of Sevents exist—presumably held up by the rose-scented breaths of flying unicorns—it is on the other side of the galaxy. Even with hyperspace it would take you too long to get there.”

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“Unicorns can’t fly,” I said.

His expression didn’t change.

“My research showed—” “Your research led you to me,” Gre-ordan said.

“Uh, what?”

“Who do you think was communicating with you on the network? Who left you clues to find Sevents out here? Who just happened to have new files to send you when you needed them, with critical info in them?”

“Y-you?” I stammered. “But I communicated with a whole range of people. Other amateurs, academics, journalists.”

“And I’m sure some of those people were genuine. Mostly, I think, you were communicating with me, under various pseudonyms, of course. I detected early on what you were doing, figured out who you were, and found a way to get you to come here.”

“To Na’ha?”

“Well, at the moment,” Gre-ordan said.

“But I suggest we turn around; you have us on a course out of Na’ha but in the wrong direction. Head back to the Quê Huong system—the system where you thought you’d find Sevents. It’s had many names over the

ordan was now telling the truth.

During our time in hyperspace, Jae and I discussed our situation. Neither of us was convinced Gre-ordan wasn’t taking us on a circus ride. I no longer believed he was some sort of accountant; I had no idea what he was. An ambassador? Spy? Crazy person?

Jae was all for going along with it at least until we could tell what the real story was.

At that point, we could decide whether to continue on with Gre-ordan or leave him behind and get back to our normal business, hook back up with the Typhoon, and try to digitally cover our tracks in case Gre-ordan turned out to be politically radioactive. I set Dragon to the task of calculating and arranging ways to cover up our footprints on this weird journey.

In the cockpit, Jae and I watched the longrange scanning data slide across the screens.

Just like on our first flyby, we were detecting structures on the ground, and now that we knew where to look we were able to focus

Whatever was about to happen—good or terrible—Gre-ordan was clearly pleased with himself. eons. You’ll find another civilization, just not the one you thought.”

“You could have said that before you started eating two and a half meals.”

Approaching Quê Huong It was nearly a day later. We had turned around the Dragon, entered hyperspace, and exited in the Quê Huong system. This time as we approached the tenth planet, I felt more apprehension. On our previous visit, I thought I was going to find some fantastic floating cities and prove they weren’t myth. But I was a fool, and at least this time I would be a cautious fool, since we were approaching a planet that might have a still-extant society, and one that might be powerful enough to destroy the Union, at least if Gre-

the extenders and get more details on the structures—apparently massive buildings.

Gre-ordan entered the cockpit, a half-full wine glass in his hand. He took a sip and sat at the back of the cockpit. As he opened his mouth to speak, Kriz ducked into the cockpit, took the glass out of his hand, and disappeared down the corridor. Unfazed, Greordan interrupted our work.

“So have you found it yet?”

“No,” Jae said, waving a hand at the screens in front of us. “Lots of buildings on the ground, but no active signs of life. No chatter, no movement, no anything.”

“I told you, it’s not going to be just there waiting for you. It—they—will find you.”

He was irritating. “Maybe you could signal your alien pals so they can come out and

meet us and stop wasting our time.”

“Thought you’d never ask,” he said, adjusting his watch. Then he looked back up. “There.”

“You did it?”

“Yes.” “Gre, what should we expect?”

“Something big,” Gre-ordan said.

Nice. Whatever was about to happen— good or terrible—Gre-ordan was clearly pleased with himself. I looked at the Dragon schematic on the cockpit’s roof, and I could tell our ship computer had primed the engines and nav machine to make an emergency breakaway in case we needed to get away from the terrible. Good going, Dragon.

Despite whatever Gre-ordan had done with his watch, nothing happened. We were still about 350,000 kilometers away and moving fairly slowly. Jae and I continued reading the scanning data, Gre-ordan got bored and left the cockpit, returning half an hour later with a glass of something else, left again after another half hour. I was getting ready to call in Kriz or Sicma to take over our stations when Dragon’s warning lights and alarm went off.

“Unidentified spaceship now appearing above Quê Huong,”Dragon’s voice advised us.

The ship was right, something large had just appeared above the planet. And it had just appeared—no hyperspace exit disturbance, no engine release; one moment it wasn’t there, and then it suddenly was.

“Dragon, intercom,” I said. “Gre-ordan to the cockpit. Your . . . friends are here.”

He mustn’t have been too far away, because within seconds he was climbing into a chair behind Jae and me. “Okay, Gre-ordan, what do you suggest we do? Say hello?”

The newly appeared ship was massive; scans said it was three miles long and half that wide. If it was made by any government that I

knew of, it would certainly be a battleship, and one of the most dangerous in known space. I hoped these aliens had a completely different ascetic sense and this was really just how they designed an archaeology ship or a florist delivery service.

“I’ve already signaled to them who we are,” Gre-ordan said. “ “Please don’t send any signals off this ship in the future without my say-so,” I said. “You never know what you might be giving away.”

Gre-ordan laughed. “It’s kind of late for that; we’re already committed to meeting these guys. That’s the whole reason we’re out here.”

“Yeah, well, shipboard radio silence is the only thing I seem to have any control over,” I said. “Everything else seems to do whatever it wants.”

“They’ve returned my signal. We can approach.” Gre-ordan was looking at his watch. “Head toward that mound on the top of the ship—toward the back of that mound you’ll see a docking bay.”

Jae instructed the Dragon where to go, then asked, “Are they okay with us scanning them? And I’ve got weapons on stand-by.”

Gre-ordan laughed. “Even if the Dragon had weapons five times more deadly than what I suspect you have, you couldn’t hurt the Vapor. That’s the name of that ship, and it has weapons that could turn Dragon into vapor.” Not florists, then.

Florist Contact Though we were already cutting our speed considerably as we neared Vapor, as soon as we were 10 kilometers away, it was as if we had flown into a strong headwind, the ship

slowing despite our unchanged engine settings.

“Dragon,” Jae said. “What’s going on?”

“Apparent shield around alien ship is reducing our speed,” the ship responded. “I am reducing engine output to prevent burnout.”

“Good idea,” I said, impressed by the alien ship. That’s the first bit of new technology we’re witnessing, I thought. I wonder what else we’ll see?

We could tell the ship was keeping very careful watch over our route to the docking bay; we were being constantly bathed in scans. Just to see how this worked, I dropped our speed even below what was forced on us by the Vapor; they seemed to have no problem with that, and now that we were flying just 500 meters over the ship, I had Dragon record as much data on the appearance, construction, and anything else it could observe of the great vessel.

Eventually we neared that “mound,” which looked to be—if the alien crew was anything like humans—as tall as a medium-sized skyscraper back home, though wider and tapered at the sides. Lights escaped through occasional windows, though we were still moving too fast to see anything inside; I hoped the recordings Dragon was making would provide some insight. But we would be inside soon enough. Dragon rounded the rear of the mound, and a docking station— or what looked like a nest of docking bays— was clearly visible. Our speed cut to a near weimar.ws Galaxis

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from the Dragon’s artificial gravity—we floated the five feet of the enclosed docking bridge to the Vapor’s door.

There was no porthole on their door; f rom

crawl, and I lined up our docking portal with what looked like the same on the Vapor’s side. Our adaptive bridge would have no trouble making a tight seal with their side.

Once docked and confirmation from Dragon of a bridge seal, Jae and I unbuckled and turned around to look at Gre-ordan, who seemed to have finally realized this was time to be more forthcoming.

He directed us to wear some lightweight breathing masks; suits were not needed, but the air on the Vapor was different enough to ours that we’d need the masks to prevent asphyxiation. As we headed toward the portal, masks on, he told us Vapor’s crew was not going to hurt us and that we should not be taken aback by their appearance. They were, he said, descended from some reptilian species on the planet Quê Huong; more or less humanoid, their smooth, hairless skin was covered in a thick hide not unlike a salamander’s. He showed us a picture on his watch, and they didn’t look any more disturbing than any other alien species we knew of, and probably less disturbing than we looked to them.

Then Gre-ordan put his hand on my arm and said, with great seriousness, “Paulik, leave your weapons on the Dragon. They won’t do you any good, and if they wanted you dead, they wouldn’t be stopped by your little peashooter of a gun.”

I looked at Jae; he shrugged, so we both took off the weapons we’d had clipped to our pants and left them on a shelf on the Dragon’s side of the docking bridge.

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our side, the dark blue door looked like it was made not of metal but of some sort of stone. Dragon confirmed that it was indeed an artificial rock, apparently a cladding over a metal interior. I expected the door to open upon our approach, but as we glided up to it, nothing happened. I looked at Gre-ordan, but he no longer seemed to be the oracle of all things Vapor. He shrugged.

Fine, I’ll knock, I thought. I reached out to pound on the door with the flat of my hand, but just before I struck the door it disappeared. Just like the Vapor had appeared from nothing, the door disappeared. And we were staring at a dozen or more of the salamanders—er, Vapor crew—staring back at us.

They were indeed about our height, maybe on average a foot or so taller. Bipeds, arms half again as long as mine, their shiny faces dominated by two large black eyes several inches wide—and a mouth that stretched from one side of their head to the other. They too were not wearing spacesuits, but instead over their mostly black skin they wore some sort of cloth that looked like a thin and flowing metal mesh. Frankly, I liked it; if this entire deal went south and we barely escaped with our lives, I’d still be happy if I could get enough of that cloth to make a sport coat.

Jae raised his hand in a weak wave. “Hello?” he said. The aliens’ expressions indicated surprise, their eyelids completely opening.

But they didn’t seem to tense up, so I don’t think they were alarmed, just surprised that one of the humans spoke. Gre-ordan then moved ahead of us, pulling himself enough into the Vapor to let his feet sink to the floor from its artificial gravity. When he spoke, it was certainly no language I knew of; I did know that Dragon would be monitoring our comm badges and would be tr ying

t o translate it.

But I made a mental note that whatever he was saying wasn’t Vietnamese. Quê Huong was derived from a Vietnamese term, Dragon had told us, but that apparently had no relation to whatever it was Gre-ordan was speaking to them. And it might have no relation of any import anyway; the planet might have been discovered, named, and then forgotten by a Vietnamese explorer 500 years ago, for all I knew.

The alien at the front of the group answered Gre-ordan, slowly at first, but its speaking picking up speed as it went on. It spoke for a couple minutes uninterrupted, and when it finished, Gre-ordan uttered something unintelligible, seemed to nod, and then turned back to us.

“They want you to meet their ghreash— that’s something like an ambassador, something like a religious leader,” he said. “That’s what we were hoping for, so this is good.

Let’s go.”

Figuring if nothing else this put me one step closer to the secrets of their clothing, I nudged Jae and we entered the ship, too, our feet gratefully meeting the floor as the gravity took effect. The lead alien—Gre-ordan said its name was Noon—said something to me and then turned around and began

walking away. We followed, along with the other aliens, as Noon led us through long corridors. The walls inside were also stonelike, though here and there were metal posts and other indications of a metallic superstructure. The corridor was a flat-floored tube, and occasionally as we walked small shoebox-sized robots would go zooming past us one way or the other along the outermost curved reaches of the walls.

After about ten minutes of walking down similar corridors and only occasionally passing other aliens, we came to a large opening in the corridor wall. There was a glass door that slid open and we entered a large round room with a

dark f l o o r, w h i t e walls, and the only light provided by the wall farthest away from us. Directly in front of the curving lighted wall was a dais, behind which stood a sole salamander alien. The ghreash, I assumed, and as soon as Gre-ordan interpreted the words the alien spoke, my assumption was confirmed.

“He says he welcomes you to the Vapor and hopes we will all become friends and comrades,” said Gre-ordan. The ghreash continued talking for what seemed like five minutes uninterrupted, and when he stopped, Gre-ordan simply said, “He hopes your flight was uneventful.”

“Gre, can he tell us what this is all about, this overthrowing the Union stuff,” I said.

Gre-ordan looked annoyed. “I know what it is all about.” I thought he might not get us any more information, but he said something then to the ghreash and reported back the response. The ambassador invited us to witness the tool they would use to get rid of

the Union. My stomach tightened as I again began to fear I was falling into some sort of interstellar treachery. I wanted a change of party, not a change of government.

But we were in their ship and along for the ride. So after a few more uninterpreted comments between the ghreash and Greordan, the ambassador indicated we should follow him out of the room. He led us to another room, much like the last one, but this time with a large raised platform in the middle, and a couple dozen more of the aliens standing around the table, talking.

As we entered, they parted enough to let the ghreash approach the table, with us close behind. Up close, the top of the table looked like a shimmering large computer terminal.

As I looked more closely, I saw that it wasn’t shimmering; it was covered in water or some other liquid, like an inch or so over an underlit display

showing a closeup view of the planet before us. I could finally see the large structures our scanners had told us were there.

They were amazing; I couldn’t wait to get down there and explore them. They looked like ancient temples, but miles long, with trees and other vegetation growing along their ridges. So no sign of sentient life, but clearly some life on this planet, and it looked ancient. How ancient, I couldn’t know, but if it was several thousand years old, I wouldn’t be surprised. And it must have been a very advanced civilization; the display was crisp enough that I could estimate that some of these buildings were a half-kilometer high.

The ghreash turned to us, looked me right in the eye, spoke something that sounded a bit sad, then turned back to the table. Gre

looked at Jae and me and said, “The ghreash says his people have been waiting a long time to accomplish this, and they dedicate this presentation to your honor.”

I smiled at the ghreash and nodded, feeling like an idiot with nothing significant to say. “Um, tell him thanks.”

Gre-ordan spoke a bit more, the ghreash listened, then turned back to the table. The lighted walls in the room went out, and the only light in the room came from the display. Everyone was silent, and it was almost spiritual, the only sound a gentle thrumming of the ship’s engines. I looked past Gre’s shoulder at the table, and I hoped I would see the secret of those beautiful alien structures below us.

I thought I was somehow tuned into the mood of the aliens as I watched the table. I didn’t know what they were about to show me, but it had to be something incredible.

They clearly had technological abilities beyond anything the Union had. But suddenly they moved to shield their eyes, and a second later, the structures on the display

exploded. I saw smoke and rubble and melting stone. The aliens moved back from the table, chattering now loudly and seeming to relax.

The ghreash spoke at length, his hands clasping together in front of his chest, and Gre translated. “On to Earth.”

No—no no no no, this is not what I signed up for, I thought desperately. I felt Jae move toward me and put his hand on my lower back to pull me a bit closer. He leaned toward me and said softly, “Not even the Typhoon’s crew can save us now.”

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SPECIAL FEATURE

SOLO GOES SOLO The box office failure of Ron Howard’s Solo film has caused some people to suggest the Star Wars revival is dead. Don’t believe it. | BY JOHN ZIPPERER

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tar Wars creator George Lucas is known for having been inspired by the movie serials of the 1930s when he created Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The serials were often science fiction or actionadventure, with enough action and a cliffhanger ending to ensure the audience came back to the theater the following week for the next installment.

Star Wars and Raiders both emulated that thrill-aminute pace.

In 1977’s Star Wars (later redubbed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), the cliche comes true: There’s never a dull moment. Luke, Han, and Chewie fight their way into the prison block, rescue Leia, end up in a trash compactor, which duly compacts, are saved from the compactor only to fight their way off the ship and have Obi Wan Kenobi sacrifice himself in a duel with the dark lord of the Sith; once off the planet, it’s time to attack the Death Star.

A few years later in Raiders, Indiana Jones goes from escaping a giant rolling rock to fleeing poison-shooting locals to finding a hated snake in his plane seat. And then things really pick up, with fights under an airplane’s whirling blades, being dragged behind a Nazi truck, fights on the truck, escape on a boat, which is stopped by a Nazi submarine, and on and on.

Both of those movies are fast-paced and actionpacked. Yet they also managed to deliver lots of good character moments. Indy and Marion’s reunion in Belloq’s tent, their interlude on the escaping freighter, Indy talking archaeology with Marcus Brody. Luke Skywalker gets to brood on Tatooine, argue with his uncle, go droid shopping, learn about his father and the Clone Wars, get some training in how to use the Force. In both of those movies, the slam-bang “non-stop” action actually did stop long enough to give the movie more than just a roller coaster adventure. The action sequences were exciting because they punctuated the non-action sequences.

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The most recent Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, turned that on its head. What little exposition or character moments there are in the film feel like they’re surprise guests dropped in the middle of an out-of-control roller coaster ride.

First let’s pause for an important announcement. Please note: This article includes spoilers. So read on if you have seen the film or haven’t seen it and are a masochist, or avoid this article until you’ve watched Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Now back to the action.

Backstory Movies like Solo were announced as welcome vehicles for exploring the backgrounds of some of our beloved characters from the Star Wars universe.

Writers of Star Wars comics and novels

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IMAGE: DASWORTGEWAND

The Solo Story The man who would become the rogue with a heart of gold began life as something of an indentured servant, an orphan working for a giant snakelike creature on the planet Corellia. The creature’s collected orphans steal to survive, so it’s no surprise then that the overlord is eventually felled by thieving orphans. Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) attempt to escape the planet, but only Han succeeds.

He joins the Imperial Flight Academy, but after being expelled, he serves in the Impe62

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rial infantry. During an attack on the planet Mimban, Han joins forces with a group of criminals led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), but not before Beckett tries to kill him by having him put into an underground cell with the “beast”­—which turns out to be a certain Wookiee called Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo). Obviously, Chewie doesn’t kill Han, or this would be a very short film. The two of them join Beckett’s band on an unsuccessful attempt to steal some fuel, coaxium.

Beckett’s boss, Dryden Vos, is a Crimson Dawn criminal leader, and he’s not happy about the failed fuel heist. Beckett, Han, and Chewie set out to steal some unrefined coaxium, and Vos sends his top aide, Han’s former girlfriend Qi’ra.

First, they team up with the smuggler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), so they can use his beautiful ship the Millennium Falcon. Lando’s droid, L3-37, is an outspoken ’bot that convinces the other droids at the coaxium mine to revolt, allowing Beckett’s team to make off with the unrefined coaxium. They then rush to the planet Savareen to get the fuel refined before it starts exploding, but there things pretty much all go south. A group of pirates who turn out not to be pirates complicates the exchange of coaxium, and there’s a lot of last-minute double crossing and double double crossing that leaves a number of people dead.

In the final minutes of the film, Han wins the Falcon after a rematch at a game of sabacc with Lando (who cheated the first time they played for the ship), and Han and Chewie set off for Tatooine to find some smuggling work.

End credits. End movie series?

The Mystery Why did Solo fail with audiences?

In September 2018, in the wake of the box office failure of Solo (it took in about $400 million worldwide on a budget of $275 million, when an estimated $500 million was needed to break even), Disney CEO Bob Iger told The Hollywood Reporter that the company would “slow down” the rollout of more Star Wars films. They would still come—including the December 2019 release of the ninth film in the new trilogy, the launch of a new trilogy under Rian Johnson, and a series of films from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. “You can expect some slowdown,” said Iger, “but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to make films.”

So there will be more Wars. But if the studio is blaming the failure of Solo—a highly anticipated movie—on Star Wars fatigue alone, it is burying its head in the sand. I enjoyed Solo, but it was not without problems

CHEWBACCA PHOTO: QUARAX; CANNES PHOTO: GEORGES BIARD

have given hints of the characters’ pre-New Hope lives and experiences and influences.

But to be able to delve into that history in a big-budget movie sounded like it would be a certain success.

And it still might. As of this writing, Solo was a financial failure, earning more than its listed production costs but not earning enough to break even when you add in marketing and distribution costs. The film might still get into the black over time, as on-demand and DVD sales and rentals are thrown in, not to mention when the merchandising residuals are toted up. But Disney had gotten used to billion-dollar performances of its Star Wars films in initial release, so this film’s inability to deliver at that level could cause considerable secondguessing of future stand-alone Wars films.

That would be a pity. Again, the concept of fleshing out the background is fine, and we’d happily learn more about young Leia or young Obi Wan. I’m not sure Luke’s life before the events of A New Hope are worth chronicling on the big screen (after all, the whole point of his dissatisfaction at the beginning of the movie was that he was bored, bored, bored on this dead-end planet), but then again, stand-alone films don’t have to just show backstory; they could show us what Luke did between the original trilogy, or adventures he had afterward.

Different fans of the movies will have different ideas about what Han’s background should be. Some of them will complain that the backstory of Han in Solo doesn’t match what they read in such-and-such graphic novel or prose story. Others will have made up their own backstory for Han that satisfies them more than what screenwriters Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan and director Ron Howard presented in this movie.

Still others will be pleased with Solo’s Solo.

There’s no way to satisfy anyone, so the fact that it leaves some people unsatisfied is not a verdict on the film as a whole.

And that includes my opinions. I had no preconceived idea of what Han Solo’s background should be, so I let the filmmakers tell me their version.

Above: Solo: A Star Wars Story is presented at the Cannes festival, with stormtroopers protecting producer Simon Emanuel, a performer as Chewbacca next to Chewie-actor Joonas Suotamo, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, director Ron Howard, and Emilia Clarke.

Previous page: Fan photo of Chewie. that I believe quickly dampened fans’ enthusiasm once they sat in the theaters.

As mentioned at the top of this article, the flaw that runs through the entire movie is that it never lets up on the action. That would not be much of a problem if the story and the characters were pretty simple. Remember that the original trilogy’s characters were initially quite stark representations of good and evil, innocent and wise or bad and devious. Throwing them into lots of action therefore gave them opportunities to flesh out their characters and their interactions. The fun of our heroes escaping from the garbage compactor wasn’t so much in worrying that they would be crushed to death if they didn’t get out; it was enjoying the developing relationship between Luke and Han and Leia and Chewie. That scene showed us Han’s reckless impetuousness and Leia’s fearless take-charge attitude.

One could quibble, but I’m not sure we get that effect in Solo, where the nonstop

action seems even more nonstoppy than in previous Star Wars films.

This is also a darker film than the original trilogy. Darker in tone and darker in terms of actual lighting. The former might be warranted, though some might second-guess the filmmakers’ decision to make it thus— Han Solo was the fun, mocking hero, not Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight. As for the latter, it is the continuation of a years-long trend that we hope changes direction before we’re left paying to see films of completely black screens for two hours.

The actors do a good job bringing their characters to life. Ehrenreich’s Solo is believable as the young man who would grow up to be Harrison Ford’s Solo. He’s a mixture of youthful idealism and ready cynicism bred by his experience as a thieving orphan. Clarke’s Qi’ra walks a character tightrope between sympathetic and dangerous—is her loyalty more to Solo or Vos or . . . someone else? Clarke pulls it off, giving maximum impact to her actions following the fight in Vos’ office. Harrelson is good at playing an untrustworthy Beckett, dangerous and at times sympathetic, and his final actions in the movie fit in with the criminal life he’s led. Glover is good as the ambiguous smuggler Calrissian, and Joonas Suotamo successfully reprises his Chewbacca from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

Sometimes a film’s flaws become more

apparent or diminish in importance upon multiple viewings. Not so with Solo. Soon after Solo was released on May 25, 2018, I watched the film at the cinema. I enjoyed it, even with the above caveats. In midSeptember when the film debuted in digital distribution, I bought it and watched it on my tablet computer. Again, I enjoyed it, but the weaknesses that had tempered my pleasure the first time out remained. Director Ron Howard did a fine job with the film; the moments where the characters are allowed to do more than run jump and react to explosions are well-handled. But ultimately he had a story that tried to jam too much information into its 135-minute running time while also being stuffed with three James Bond films-worth of action.

Solo doesn’t deserve the harsh criticism and blame (for its impact on the franchise) that it’s getting from some quarters. It also didn’t deserve to flop at the box office. But if future Wars writers and directors respond with more confidence in the ability of their characters and actors to retain our interest and not rely on too much action set pieces, Solo will have served as a worthy lesson for Disney’s Star Wars filmmakers.

Solo ends with an obvious setup for a sequel. We’ll pass on that for now, but we’re open to other standalone Star Wars stories that will continue to flesh out the universe created by George Lucas.

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BEAUTIFUL ORIGINS The space operas The Empire Strikes Back and Battlestar Galactica both had very different origins from what showed up on the screen. | BY

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hewbacca didn’t like all of the kissy-face. It annoyed him that when he was trying to solve problems on the Millennium Falcon with Imperial ships breathing down his neck, Han Solo and Leia Organa were nearby smooching and not paying attention. It’s every Wookiee’s pet peeve.

It’s also a Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back that you never saw. Found in the pages of screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s script, this insight into Chewie’s irritation at his friend’s extracurricular activity is just one of the many morsels of tasty what-mighthave-beens in the screenplay that was eventually rewritten and rewritten to produce the much-celebrated Empire film that is a Galaxis favorite.

Many film and TV properties undergo dramatic changes from their early conceptions to their final presentations. Another fan favorite of the same era was TV’s Battlestar Galactica, a show that was significantly different from what was originally envisioned by creator Glen Larson. Things change as producers navigate restrictions of budgets, studios, networks, lawyers, and plain ol’ creative evolution. Galactica underwent significant changes over the years before it came to the small screen. Some changes were improvements, some were lamentable.

In Empire’s case, the final film was arguably better than what was originally scripted by Brackett, but it shows what freedom the writer had to tell the story her way.

Imperial Freedom The studios behind Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica—20th Century Fox and Universal, respectively—fought fierce multi-year 64

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JOHN ZIPPERER legal battles trying to punish each other for various violations. Fox went after Universal for what it saw as unfair competition from the latter company’s Galactica series; one of the concessions Larson made was that the laser pistols used in his series wouldn’t shoot out bolts of light-colored energy but would instead make a noise and viewers would see the explosion take place wherever the gun was pointed.

If that seems like a silly thing for Fox to insist on, it at least demonstrates the ridiculous tit-for-tat that the legal battle became. Universal counter-sued, claiming that Fox had stolen from its early 1970s SF film Silent Running—and on and on. Each side won a victory here or there, but it was basically an exercise in lawyerly income-generation. It didn’t affect the fans, except for those of us who liked seeing laser beams.

Fan anticipation of the Star Wars followup was sky-high. No one knew what to expect—and, according to the official Star Wars magazine, even creator George Lucas wasn’t sure, at one point planning on a budget sequel that would have had all of the Above: Author Leigh Brackett. Right: Cover magic of a spiffed-up Star Wars Holi- page of Brackett’s screenplay for “STAR WARS day Special. Lucas didn’t know the sequel,” which would evolve into the nowfirst movie would be the monster hit classic The Empire Strikes Back. it was, but when Star Wars: A New Hope became the biggest hit ever up to that time, it gave Lucas the clout to make storyline outlined didn’t mean that Lucas a quality sequel that is often held up as an had all of the sequel’s details worked out. example of a sequel as good as or better For that, he looked for his screenwriter’s than the original. magic, and he chose celebrated science ficBut just because he had more money, tion writer and screenwriter Leigh Brackmore freedom, and a rumored nine-picture ett. One of the groundbreaking SF authors

(not to mention a female SF writer at a time when you could count female SF writers on one hand and still hold a cup), Brackett’s screen credits included such classics as The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and Rio Lobo. Lucas didn’t settle for a hack; he got one of the best. She handed in her first and only version of the script shortly before her death from cancer in March 1978. Though she worked from an outline by Lucas, many sources have indicated that he was unsatisfied with what she had written. He did his own rewrites before turning it over to Lawrence Kasdan for the final script.

But that doesn’t mean Brackett’s work didn’t make it to the screen. Unlike Splinter

of the Mind’s Eye—Alan Dean Foster’s novel that was at one time expected to be the Star Wars followup but is nothing like what eventually appeared—Brackett’s script includes many things that were in the final story.

Charlie Jane Anders wrote on io9.com that it is “fashionable to disparage Brackett’s contributions to Empire—Lucas himself says that her script wasn’t what he wanted at all, and she died of cancer before she could do any rewrites. Lucas is quoted in The Annotated Screenplays as saying, ‘During the story conferences I had with Leigh, my thoughts weren’t fully formed

and I felt that her script went in a completely different direction.’ But it’s not true that none of Brackett’s storyline winds up in the final movie — the basic story beats are the same.”

Leigh’s Leia (and Friends) Perhaps one day Disney will publish Brackett’s screenplay, but for now, it has been unreleased, just like almost every other early draft of a movie script. But we found an online script that purports to be Brackett’s original, and it matches up with other sources of information about what was in that script. Many things were different from the filmed script, and therein lies the fun of seeing what she wrote.

The ice planet is more troublesome in Brackett’s script than in the final movie. For one thing, Bespin isn’t the name of the cloud city; the cloud city is named Hoth; Bespin (spelled Besspin) is the name of the final planet our heroes arrive at after fleeing the cloud city.

Fans who have read more background on the story and who have heard the National Public Radio production of Empire know that earlier versions included an infestation of the rebel base by snow creatures and that there was even danger of the base melting. But in Brackett’s script, the rebels actually decide on their own that they need to abandon the base because it is under attack by nearly invisible snow creatures; like the Wampas in the film, one of them attacks Luke while he is out on patrol; but more of them start killing rebels in the base, and the rebels realize they have no defense against them anywhere in their “ice castle” base.

Yes, they are driven away by snow creatures; there is no dramatic ATAT battle. However, Luke still has his vision that includes Ben Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, his father.

Another dramatic moment of the final film was in Brackett’s script. Our heroes take a dangerous flight into an asteroid field, and the Millennium Falcon lands on one of the asteroids before it is finally forced to take off again. In this version, the ship’s hyperdrive works.

Han Solo and Leia Organa fall in love, but absent is the 1930s-style tough banter and arguing between the two that provided so many of the great lines of the final film (Han: “No time to discuss this as a committee.” Leia: “I am not a committee!”). Instead, they fall for each other much more quickly than in Kasdan’s script, making

Chewie jealous by their closeness.

Luke goes off to train with Yoda, but the Jedi leader is not called Yoda; his name is Minch. There, Luke learns about how tempting the dark side of the Force can be, and he leaves Minch’s planet to go confront Vader, but it isn’t against Minch’s wishes; in fact, Minch tells him he has to go confront Darth Vader.

At the cloud city—remember, called Hoth—there are a lot of differences. Lando Calrissian is called Lando Kadar, and on the planet below the cloud city are the ruins of the first city run by Lando Kadar. The planet also has members of an indigenous intelligent species who later help Luke get into the cloud city.

Largely unchanged is the scene on the cloud city in which our trusty droid C3PO wanders into a room where he is not supposed to be and is taken apart by imperials—as in the film; he is reassembled by Chewbacca.

Han is not put into carbonite; instead, he escapes along with the others. And his relationship with Lando seems more fathersonnish—but don’t think Lando is his father. At the end of the script, Han is tasked

by Leia to go find his adoptive father, who is an arms dealer working with the empire; Han is supposed to convince him to switch sides and support the rebels.

In the end, we’ll never know what Brackett would have produced had she lived to do rewrites of her own script. But the version we’ve seen demonstrates her acknowledged expertise of the space opera genre.

Still, we’ll take the final filmed version, with its dramatic AT-AT attack on Hoth, the added tension created by that damned malfunctioning hyperdrive, and the bickering turning to final acknowledgement of love at a moment of tragedy between Han and Leia. Throughout the movie, the dialogue is much punchier and memorable in the Kasdan script, and the final experience is a more romantic space opera adventure.

Adam’s Ark and Earth Star Battlestar Galactica existed long before it existed—and it could have gone any number of ways in its final form. Time, lawyers, network interference, and editorial decisions resulted in the series that premiered on ABC TV on September 17, 1978.

Glen A. Larson told interviewers that he had come up with the original idea for what would eventually become Battlestar Galactica back in 1968, when he put together what he called Adam’s Ark. A member of the Mormon faith, Larson wanted to tell biblical stories but to place them in space, on other planets. So in Adam’s Ark, the humans are fleeing the destruction of weimar.ws Galaxis

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PHOTO: JOHN SEB BARBER

Glen Larson’s early version of Battlestar Galactica was known as Adam’s Ark, and it was a reverse version of Galactica; instead of looking for Earth, humans were fleeing the destruction of Earth.

Earth and are looking for humans elsewhere in the universe. “It was kind of the reverse of Galactica,” Larson told Starlog in 1980. “All the great people from this planet were leaving Earth and going someplace else because of an imminent prediction of disaster. They were tricked into going in this particular thing.”

A decade later, when Galactica would finally materialize, that storyline would be reversed. Humans were fleeing the destruction of the Twelve Colonies and were instead searching for Earth. But the religious themes were still there. In the series that hit small screens in 1978, human ancestors had lived on the planet Kobol, from which they emigrated to colonize 13 planets. The religious factors come to the forefront when the Galactica encounters the Lightship in “War of the Gods.”

In his informative 2012 essay “Earth Star: A Monograph on the 1977 Vision of Battlestar Galactica,” Steven O’Donoghue describes the Galactica that could have been, before it was heavily refined to become the series we know. (O’Donoghue’s monograph is available for $2.99 as an Amazon Kindle book and as a Barnes & Noble Nook book.)

O’Donoghue includes a synopsis of a November 1977 script for the pilot movie, “Saga of a Star World”: In the Seventh Millennium of time, the Twelve Colonies of Man hope to end a protacted war with a race of reptilian cyborgs. But the Cylons ambush the humans and destroy their civilisation. A single battlestar, the Galacti66

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ca, escapes with a fleet of ships. They travel to the planet Carillon, where the insectoid Ovions lull them into a false sense of security with offers of food and fuel. With Commander Adama captured by the traitor Baltar, the Cylons launch an all-out attack in an attempt to wipe out the last vestiges of humanity. The Colonials escape the trap and flee into deep space.

That description sounds very much like the three-hour movie aired on ABC, with some obvious caveats: the Cylons became full automatons instead of reptile cyborgs (thereby somehow making it less violent or scary when the Cylons were destroyed on a show that would end up airing fairly early in the evening), and Adama was not captured by Baltar. Of course, the reptilian Cylons were also present in the Galactica novelization released by Berkley Books; those books also mentioned an early idea of Larson’s: the rag-tag fugitive fleet of humans was made up of a couple hundred thousand ships, not the 220 they were whittled down to because the filmmakers didn’t think they could show that many ships on screen. (That was a silly concession to make; they never showed 220 ships, either, it was always just a small shot of a portion of the fleet, so they could have said there were 220,000 ships if they wanted.)

The success of Star Wars and the legal battle between the two studios played a role in some other changes, such as the aforementioned laser guns or the inclusion of the word “star” somewhere in the title (hence Battlestar Galactica, though the

August 1978 issue of Starlog notes that the series had been announced under many names, including Earth Star, Star Worlds, and Battle Star Galactica) or the changing of some names from things too reminiscent of Star Wars character names to Egyptian and Greek names such as “Apollo.”

The End Product As with The Empire Strikes Back, most of the changes made in its setting, storyline, and characters resulted in a better, more dramatic Battlestar Galactica series. We’d have preferred the laser beams (darn lawyers!) and 220,000-ship fleet (darn producers) and less kiddie-friendly elements (darn network), but in general making the series about humans looking for Earth rather than fleeing from it gave the series an added layer of (rather literally) otherworldliness. (Coincidentally, that was the same thing added when George Lucas located his adventures “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”)

Then again, the end is no longer always the end. George Lucas revisited his original trilogy in the late 1990s to make changes he said he always wanted to do in the first place but lacked the time or money. Though not major changes, they made the movies more like he envisioned. And when Battlestar Galactica was revived as a new Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy) series, they picked and chose from the original series’ elements and came up with a celebrated version that was as much unlike yet like Glen Larson’s Galactica as Larson’s Galactica was unlike yet like Adam’s Ark. Galaxis

PHOTO: U.S. ENERGY DEPARTMENT

did science save the day?

the uncertainty of heisenberg I

f you could reach the loftiest heights of your profession—mastering the most powerful forces known to mankind—would you do it? What would you be willing to do to accomplish it? It would bring you glory, certainly; money, almost certainly; a Nobel prize, perhaps. What if it also brought you international moral damnation?

Most people will never have to face anything that dramatic, but people who have lived in totalitarian societies have faced the questions of whether to help the system in a range of ways. Do you defy Chairman Mao and let a poetry professor escape a possibly lethal beating during the Cultural Revolution? Do you defy der Führer and all of your military superiors and refuse to work in a Nazi death camp? Do you risk your own life by refusing to carry out your KGB orders and round up innocent men and women who are destined to torture and death in Soviet gulags? No glory, money, or Nobel prizes will come to you for any decision you make in those cases, but they are fundamental and moral decisions nonetheless.

For decades after World War II, a mystery perplexed scientists, historians, and military analysts alike. Did a leading German physicist conspire to prevent Hitler’s Nazi government from developing a nuclear weapon? For top German scientist Werner Heisenberg, who worked on the German effort, the questions of what he did, who he tried to help or hurt, and whether he should go down in history as hero or villain have dogged him for so long that at the turn of the new century, a

Why Copenhagen is a great science-based play. | BY JOHN ZIPPERER

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BOHR/HEISENBERG/PAULI PHOTO: AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS, EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES; NIELS AND MARGRETHE PHOTO: NIELS BOHR INSTITUTE

This page, top: Niels Bohr and Margrethe Nørlund on their engagement in 1910. Bottom: Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli talking in the Niels Bohr Institute lunchroom in the mid-1930s.

Broadway play was successfully produced that explored the central mystery in his professional life.

One Bomb to Rule Them All My favorite stage play isn’t one that most people know about.

In the early 1970s, my parents helped create a community theatre company in southcentral Wisconsin, and for decades it has presented classic plays — mostly musicals, — known to just about everyone: Annie Get Your Gun, Music Man, Annie, Fiddler 68

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on the Roof, and so on. I saw quite a few of the plays when my father had a role in them; his favorite was playing his hero, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1984 production of Annie. As a result of this exposure, I know the lyrics to quite a few well-known Broadway tunes.

And yet, I don’t really care for Broadway musicals. Plays are just not in my blood they were in my late father’s. Still, I’ve watched and enjoyed many plays, and only endured a few.

One play I saw on Broadway was as far

from a toe-tapping musical as you can get, yet it was mesmerizing. I saw Copenhagen a couple years after its 1998 premiere, and the play had a lively existence off the stage, as well, as The New York Review of Books and other media outlets debated the issues raised in the story.

Written by playwright Michael Frayn, the play’s structure is simple. It involves only three characters: German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s onetime colleague; and Margrethe Bohr, Neils’ wife. Set after the deaths of all of the characters, the play concerns a conversation they have in which they rehash a key meeting during World War II in which Heisenberg visited Bohr in the Danish capital of Copenhagen.

What did the two physicists discuss during this visit? Well, that’s the point. They disagree over their interpretations of what was said, what wasn’t said, and what it all means.

At its core, the question was whether or not Heisenberg was trying to undermine the Nazi effort to develop a nuclear weapon.

Their meeting was reportedly brought to a premature end, and the controversy would continue throughout the 1950s, only to be reignited in the new century following the play’s success. Was Heisenberg trying to sabotage the Nazi nuclear program? Or was he seeking Bohr’s help with a particularly vexing physics problem? Or was he trying to get Bohr to somehow help bring an end to the war?

Alternative histories are all the rage these days, with books, movies, and television series based on “what if ”s such as “What if the Nazis won the second world war?” Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle posits a world in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won the war, resulting in a United States divided between Nazi-controlled and Japanese-controlled regions. The novel was translated into a successful television series in 2015, executive produced by Ridley Scott.

Robert Harris (Fatherland), Len Deighton (SS-GB), Christopher Priest (The Separation), and others have mined the same vein.

Fictional ponderings aside, consider what might have happened if Nazi Germany had developed a bomb. For a government that had no compunction about

bombing civilians, torturing and killing its own citizens, and committing genocide, the dropping of a nuclear weapon on London or Moscow or Paris would not have been out of the question. If the United States was willing to drop two nuclear bombs on Japan even though it was winning the war, can anyone doubt that Hitler would have used nukes to prevent himself from losing the war?

Some people might wonder what it matters to debate such questions more than a half century after they took place. The mystery of the Bohr-Heisenberg discussion gets right to the heart of how science and scientists played a pivotal role in one of the most critical junctures of human history.

Nazi Germany had demonstrated its ruthless willingness to use the latest weapons on its enemies, military and civilian. With a nuclear bomb in the hands of the Luftwaffe, what could have saved London or Moscow or even Washington?

One of the central issues from the play and the mystery it tackled involves what could happen if the Nazis successfully developed nuclear weapons. For decades after the war, scientists and historians had debated (rather heatedly, at times) whether the German scientists were unable to develop a nuclear bomb or if they intentionally slow-walked development to avoid handing Adolf Hitler the ultimate weapon. In 1939, German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered

nuclear fission, but despite the Germans having a head start in the nuclear race and an advantage in its many highly trained physicists, it never got close to developing nuclear power or nuclear weapons.

According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the U.S. government was concerned about the German nuclear effort: “There was even consideration of kidnapping Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland in 1942, although this plan never came to fruition.

In 1943, the United States launched the Alsos Mission, a foreign intelligence project focused on learning the extent of Germany’s nuclear program. By 1944, however, the evidence was clear: the Germans had not come close to developing a bomb and had only advanced to preliminary research.

Following the German defeat, the Allies detained 10 German scientists, at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester, England, from July 3, 1945 to January 3, 1946. Some of them, such as Heisenberg, Kurt Diebner, and Carl von Weiszacker were directly involved in the project, while others, such as Otto Hahn and Max von Laue, were only suspected and later proven to have not been involved. Heisenberg’s disbelief after hearing that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima confirmed in the minds of the Allies that the German effort was never close. As one German scientist exclaimed, it must have taken ‘factories large as the United States to make that much uranium-235!’”

Staged History Taking the role of Niels Bohr was Tony and Daytime Emmy awards winner Philip Bosco. Stage veteran Michael Cumpsty played Werner Heisenberg. Performing the role of Margrethe was Blair Brown, who had played the spouse of another scientist in 1980’s Altered States and starred in the TV series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.

Brown won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance as Margrethe.

Copenhagen picked up a number of awards, including a Tony, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and the London Evening Standard Award.

That is a lot of attention for a play dealing with a little walk in the Danish woods in 1941. Had history gone differently and the Nazis had gotten their nuclear bomb, it is unlikely Frayn would have been allowed to stage a play concerning such a controversial topic.

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Special publication: If you’re anything like us, you love magazines—the good, the bad, and the downright outrageous. So read Magma, the “magazine industry review,” and learn about the inner workings of Condé Nast, what Bob Guccione left behind, an interview with Carr D’Angelo, a post-mortem on Starlog, plus opinionated reviews, complaints, and ideas.

MAGMA Get free digital edition or purchase print edition at weimar.ws weimar.ws Galaxis

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BUNKY PART TWO The ne’er-do-well Osgood Mulch finds his adventures turning even scarier. | BY LYLE LAHEY

L

ast issue, we met farmboy Bunky and his troublesome neighbor Osgood Mulch in the bucolic farmland of Wisconsin. Mr. Mulch managed to get himself transported around the world on a rocket, and he was discovered by members of a friendly if surprised tribe.

This month, Mulch dodges bigamy only to find himself strapped to another rocket. Some people just can’t win.

The comic strips in this installment originally ran from August 14, 1975 through September 18, 1975 in newspapers in northeastern Wisconsin.

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BUNKY

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Bunky continued next issue ... weimar.ws Galaxis

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POLITICAL

ANIMAL

?

THEN FEAST ON LYLE LAHEY’S AWARD-WINNING POLITICAL CARTOONS For four decades, Wisconsin original Lyle Lahey commented on issues of the day in his own creative way.

Now you can read a treasure trove of the late political artist’s work—meet the odd people who make the news.

They’re free!

Classic Lahey cartoons:

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Compendium is our catalog of things to do, see, and hear related to the worlds of science and science fiction. Please note: Events can change dates, times, prices, and locations. Therefore, we strongly recommend you contact each organization directly before making plans to participate in any activity listed here.

If you would like your event to be considered for inclusion in these listings, send information— including contact information—to jzipperer@ gmail.com. There is no cost to be listed in Compendium. Events are listed solely at the discretion of Galaxis.

February 28, 2019 Financing the Future of Water Speech. For most Americans, water will be the primary delivery system through which they personally experience the effects of climate changes: drought, floods, storm water, and wastewater discharges. Horror stories abound about the massive infrastructure costs needed to address these issues, but we have solutions that are both environmentally sustainable and affordable. Cynthia Koehler, executive director of WaterNow Alliance, will present new options to finance systems that ensure a resilient future for water flow.

Location: The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, California, United States. Cost: $8–20. Contact: 415-597-6700, commonwealthclub.org April 18–21, 2019 March 12–13, 2019 Internet World Expo Conference/expo. Europe’s leading e-commerce trade fair presents the latest trends and technologies as well as renowned experts and numerous highlights. Notable exhibitors present their products and services; main issues of

Norwescon 42: Don’t Forget Your Towel!

Convention. This literary-focused con is a major regional SF/fantasy convention. Confirmed guests of honor include writer Mary Robinette Kowal, artist Tran Nguyen, Dan Koboldt (for science), Nancy Pearl (special GoH), Neil Clarke (as an honored professional) and publisher Subterranean Press.

Location: DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, 18740 International Blvd., SeaTac, Washington, United States. Cost: $70 four-day membership. Contact: info@norwescon.org May 24–27, 2019 WisCon 43 Convention. This feminist science fiction and fantasy convention features academic tracks, gaming, programming for children and teens, panel discussions, parties, readings, workshops and more.

Location: Madison, Wisconsin, United States.

Cost: $20–55. Contact: wiscon.net May 24–2630, 2019 AniMinneapolis Convention. As you could guess from the name, this anime-focused con takes place in Minneapolis. What the name doesn’t tell you is that it includes hundreds of events—cosplay, concerts, dances, contests, video games, autograph sessions, panel discussions, and shopping. Guests include Tia Ballard, Marissa Lenti, Chuck Huber, Mega Ran, Greg Ayres, D.C. Douglas, John Stocker, YTCracker, and the trade fair will be e-commerce, multichannel, online marketing, logistics, software, epayment, usability and social media..

Location: Messe München, Paul-HenriSpaak-Str. / Gate 16, 81829 München, Halls C5 and C6, Munich, Germany. Cost: €0– 213.01. Contact: internetworld-expo.de/en/

PHOTO BY AND COPYRIGHT: INTERNET WORLD

ARE YOU A

Compendium

PHOTO: FRED ARMITAGE

Location: Marriott Warner Center, May 16–19, 2019 Woodland Hills, California, United States.

54nd Annual Nebula Conference Conference. The genre’s top writing talent Cost: $295 plus $15.95 fee for full confergathers in the Woodland Hills section of Los ence and banquet; $210 plus $11.65 fee for Angeles, as the Science Fiction and Fantasy conference only. Contact: nebulas.sfwa.org/ Writers of America presents its annual con- nebula-conference ference for authors, editors, agents, publishers, and other professionals; others may attend if they buy an attending membership.

The weekend will feature three tracks of panel discussions and workshops of interest to professionals: career management, professional development, and expert knowledge panels and workshops. Of course the festivities also include the prestigious Nebula Awards and banquet, along with the celebration of the newest SFWA Grand Master, cyberpunk William Gibson will be honored as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s newest Grant Master. pioneer William Gibson.

Zack Storch.

Location: Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, 1300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Cost: $40–110 ticket packages. Contact: animinneapolis.com June 1–3, 2019 ICRAS 2019: International Conference on Robotics and Automation Sciences Scientific conference. A thigh-level scientific conference will feature papers and presentations on machine learning, autonomous agents, humanoid robots, human-robot interfaces, robot design, intelligent design and manufacturing, and more.

Location: China University of Geosciences, Room 301, 2nd Floor, No. 2 Teaching Building, No. 388 Lumo Road, Wuhan, China. Cost: $250–480. Contact: icras.org July 2, 2019 Solar Eclipse Astronomy. A total solar eclipse will occur.

Location: Visible in the southern Pacific Ocean to parts of Chile and Argentina. Cost: Free. Contact: Keep watching the skies July 12–14, 2019 Ad Astra 2019 Convention. The weekend includes discussion panels and presentations on a variety of topics, including writing, publishing, TV and movies, science and costuming, as well as events such as book signings, a meet-and-greet with special guests, writing workshops, the masquerade costume competition, book launches, a Saturday night dance, live music, and The Tesla Tea Service, a charity event hosted by the Toronto Steampunk Society, and more.

Location: The Sheraton Parkway North, 600 HWY-7 E, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada.

Cost: $15–65 weekend ticket. Contact: ad-astra. org

Webbed Special Science Edition If you would like your website to be considered for inclusion in upcoming Webbed listings, send information—including URL—to jzipperer@gmail.com.

There is no cost to be listed in Webbed. Websites are listed solely at the discretion of Galaxis.

Citizen Science Alliance citizensciencealliance.org Be part of the movement of “civilians” contributing to actual science Comics and Science americanscientist.org/ article/science-comics-super-powers An article from American Scientist about using comics to tell tales of science Cosmos & Culture npr.org/sections/13.7 National Public Radio’s collection of science bloggers

July 16–17, 2019 Lunar Eclipse Astronomy. A partial lunar eclipse will take place, with the Earth’s shadow covering roughly half of the moon.

Location: Visible in most of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and South America. Cost: Free.

Contact: Keep watching the skies

Discover discovermagazine.com In 1980, Discover magazine was one of a wave of new science magazines revolutionizing the way science was communicated; still going strong and worth the look

August 2–4, 2019 Anime-zing!

Convention. Anime con celebrating anime with cosplay, gaming, and Asian pop culture. Guests include Danielle McRae, Brittany Lauda, Matt Shipman, R. Bruce Elliott, and John Swasey.

Location: RiverCenter (136 East Third Street) and Radisson Quad City Plaza, 111 E. 2nd Street, Davenport, Iowa, United States. Cost: $10. Contact: qcanimezing.com

Katharine Hayhoe katharinehayhoe.com An award-winning atmospheric scientist who bridges the worlds of science and her Christian faith

August 15–19, 2019 Dublin 2019: An Irish WorldCon Convention. The one con to rule them all comes to Ireland for the first time in its 77-year history.

Vote for the Hugos, and meet guests of honor Bill and Mary Burns, Diane Duane, Ginjer Buchanan, Ian McDonald, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Steve Jackson.

Location: Convention Centre Dublin and the Point Square, Dublin, Ireland. Cost: €40–210.

Contact: dublin2019.com Undated October or November 2019 CHEOPS Launch Space science. The European space telescope called CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite, kind of a stretch just to get that acronym, but it’s for a good cause) is expected to be launched sometime in October or November.

The solar-powered space telescope’s mission is planned for three and a half years.

Location: Guiana Space Centre, French Guiana.

Cost: €50 million. Contact: not applicable

Famous Scientists famousscientists.org Treasure-trove of news and biographies of scientists throughout the ages

Max-Planck Gesellschaft mpg.de/en Englishlanguage site for the massive collection of German scientific research institutes New Scientist newscientist.com This longrunning weekly leading science magazine’s site features lots of features and breaking news (albeit much of it behind a paywall) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal smbccomics.com Science commentary in comics form Science sciencemag.org/news C’mon—it’s science news from a magazine literally called Science Science and Medicine npr.org/podcasts/2047/ science-medicine NPR’s collection of sciencerelated podcasts Space.com space.com Breaking news about astronomical and cosmological happenings Timeline of Scientific Discoveries en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_ discoveries Wikipedia page listing scientific news going back to the 4th century BC Wired Science wired.com/category/science Science from the soul magazine of techland XKCD xkcd.com A web comic that tackles scientific concepts and arguments weimar.ws Galaxis

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Reviewscreen the new • the classic • and some fantastic finds

Slash not Burned

Slash, directed by Clay Liford Gravitas Ventures • 100 minutes • 2016

I

s Slash sweet or bittersweet?

In Slash, teenager Neil (Michael Johnston) is somewhat of a loner, withdrawn into his own world of science fiction. Not content to just watch his favorite science fiction tales of galactic hero Vanguard (Tishuan Scott), he writes erotic fan fiction—slash fiction—which he keeps to himself, until people at his school find out and he’s left feeling even more isolated than he was before.

But one fellow student stands up for him.

Julia (Hannah Marks) is an outsider of a different type; her relationships are wilder than Neil’s world and her friends rougher and edgier. But different though they are, they begin to develop a friendship based on their mutual interest in slash.

Slash fiction is fan-written fiction that features characters from science fiction and fantasy films, books, and television engaged in same-sex relationships, often of an explicit, X-rated nature. (When we looked up “slash fiction” on Wikipedia, it noted “These fan written stories are not canon.” Well, no kidding.) Lest you think it is a gay phenomenon, the writers and consumers of these stories are

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often straight women writing about two men in love and/or having sex.

Its origins lie in fiction written by female fans of the original Star Trek series, featuring stories of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock engaging in activities that, let’s just say the Catholic Church would have frowned upon.

One explanation for why the straight women were writing gay male fiction was that they were taking the real object of their affection, stoic Mr. Spock, and making him warm and emotional and sensual. (A similar argument has been made for the prevalence of gay male manga, most of which is purchased by straight girls and men. Usually no more than PG-13 or R-rated in content, the stories feature male characters showing emotion and tenderness in a society that is famous for its reserve.)

With Julia’s encouragement, Neil goes “public” with his writing, submitting it to online adult fan fiction forums, where they develop a following. One of his online fans, a gay man named Denis (Michael Ian Black), takes an interest in Neil, whom he believes to be at least 18 years old.

Things start to get dicey when Neil and Julia go to a Comic-Con-like science fiction convention where they have a chance to impress some important people in the slash fiction genre. Denis will be there, hoping to meet his new discovery. Once at the con, there is some competition between the two friends about who will be recognized as a budding slash star, but another veteran slash writer is convinced—correctly, as we already know—that Neil isn’t old enough to be in the competition.

Denis doesn’t realize this until he talks to Neil, and his hopes are dashed.

One of the problems about movies focusing on teenagers is that, well, teenagers are less likely to be accomplished in the craft of acting. That’s a nice way of saying that they usually aren’t very good, so older actors are hired to play younger characters, often resulting in high schools that look like they’re populated by college grad students. So star Michael Johnston, who is also known for his portrayal of Corey Bryant in 25 episodes of the Teen Wolf TV series, does a good job playing a 15-year-

old, despite being about 5 years older. Hannah Marks—a veteran of the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency series—as Julia fares less well in the age-shifting realm; though in real life she is only a couple years older than Johnston, in the film she appears to be a great deal older

Previous page, bottom left: Director Clay Liford. Center photos, top to bottom: Neil’s fan fiction is mocked by someone he admired; Neil and Julia attend a science fiction convention; and an imagined scene from one of Neil’s stories.

PHOTOS: GRAVITAS VENTURES

than he is; but she makes up for that in acting chops, turning in a great performance as a character who is edgy and sympathetic. It is her character, Julia, who effectively leads Neil through whatever degree of sexual development he undergoes in the storyline.

Let’s face it: This could easily have been a tawdry or just bad-taste film; there are so many sexual land mines here. Teenagers writing explicit gay stories? An older man attracted to a younger man? Julia announcing that she—like all women, in her view—is bisexual? Neil working through sexual confusion and attraction? A gathering of adults who write pornographic fan fiction?

But this is not a sexual film. It’s a sweet coming-of-age story featuring a character who is learning about himself, about his peers, about adults, while navigating a sexual environment that he barely grasps. Writer and director Clay Liford’s success with this story is taking what could have been a tasteless teen sex comedy and turning it into a touching story of two friends who each make the other a bit better and a bit better able to deal with the world. When Neil talks with Denis and learns the mundane job the man does for a living, it spurs him to wonder if Denis is himself in 30 years.

One of the best things about Slash is that it doesn’t resolve everything. Neil might or might not be gay. He frankly might or might not have a future in writing of any sort. Denis might or might not be a pervert, though we are left with the indication that he avoids underage partners.

That makes Slash a slice of life and not a neatly wrapped-up package that leaves you thinking everyone’s all right at the end. You are left with a good feeling for the two leads, and you can be hopeful about how their lives will develop, but you are mostly left with the understanding of the bittersweet ambiguity of life at that stage of a teenager’s life. No one knows where the two lead characters will end up, but you do think they seem a bit more emotionally equipped to deal with each other and themselves.

The film, lensed in Austin, Texas, does at times show the seams of its low-budget and indie self. But be thankful for that. If a major studio had tried to make Slash, it’s very unlikely it would have the heart and realism that it has.

What made us love Slash so much? The movie does provide a bittersweet look at fandom and fannish love, not to mention coming of age. But it doesn’t wrap up all of the loose ends with unlikely neatness. It’s somewhat awkward, disturbing, hopeful, and undefined.

Like real life.

Hear science.

Talk science.

Think science.

In the Bay Area or anywhere else, The Commonwealth Club of California presents the best minds of science.

Attend live events with leading scientists and thinkers on timely discoveries, controversies, and mysteries in the world of science. Or catch them on podcast, radio, or video.

On our website, click on “Watch and Listen” to find thousands of free podcasts and videos. commonwealthclub.org weimar.ws Galaxis

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Reviewscreen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, directed

by J.A. Bayona Universal Pictures • June 22, 2018 • 128 minutes

T

he fifth film in the series started by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was filmed, released, earned its billion dollars, and become part of our film environment.

Considering the proliferation of Jurassic-X films—Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and the forthcoming Jurassic World 3 (2021)—it could be confusing to keep track of what’s happening. But luckily for the viewer, it’s easy to get caught up on the latest developments even if you haven’t seen all of the film’s predecessors, and none of that matters anyway, because the entire point of these films is to have scenes of people being hunted by dinosaurs. They either escape or they are eaten as they rush desperately for the airplane or ship docked at the beach. Roll credits.

It would seem to be a rather thin basis for a blockbuster film series. Even the splatter films of the early 1980s ran out of steam; there are only so many ways you can slaughter teenagers. And five Jurassic films have amptly demonstrated that there are only so many ways for a dinosaur to kill people. Step on them, slash

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them to shreds, or bite them and rip them apart. Somehow, it is still compelling enough to get us into the cinema seats.

This time, the story unfolds as a longdormant volcano on Isla Nublar becomes un-dormant and begins erupting, promising death and death and more death for the dinosaurs located there. The U.S. Senate considers whether the dinosaurs should be rescued or left to die, finally deciding on the latter and rejecting the use of public funds to rescue what is a private enterprise. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), an activist dedicated to saving the dinosaurs, is employed by Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), the former business partner of Jurassic Park founder John Hammond, to save the animals by relocating them to another island.

Claire, eschewing anything so complicated as Googling the new island to see if it exists or if anyone owns or is developing it, joins the effort and lures another former Jurassic World employee, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), to come along. They head off to Isla Nublar, accompanied by dinosaur veterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and IT techie Franklin Webb (Justice Smith). There they are met by Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine), a mercenary in the employ of Eli Mills (Rafe Spall),

Lockwood’s right-hand-man who’s secretly not relocating the animals to a safe island but is instead bringing them to Lockwood’s California estate, where they are being auctioned off to various sundry arms dealers and military thugs.

The action (and human-stomping) begins on Isla Nublar, but it resumes and concludes on Lockwood’s estate.

Pratt and Howard carry most of the weight of the movie, acting-wise. Cromwell is always a welcome addition in a movie, though playing a dying old man somewhat limits his acting range. The bad guys are as cartoonish as you would expect; though some attempt is made to spread the moral blame for the dinos’ plight to our heroes, it doesn’t really stick.

Does anyone who goes to see a Jurassic movie not want to see dinosaurs come back to life?

Dino vet Rodriguez is initially one of the more unlikable characters in the film, needlessly insulting people, including computer wiz Webb. Her early behavior is particularly distasteful, because it was directed at the innocent as well as the guilty. She was a prime competitor in the “I hope she gets eaten soon” competition. One report says there was a scene in which Zia was revealed to be a lesbian, but the scene did not make the final cut.

If true, the filmmakers were wise to exclude it, or they would have risked perpetuating the myth of the “mean lesbian.” Instead, Rodriguez ends up helping to save the day.

In the end, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom delivered what it promised: dinos chomping and stomping on humans. Everyone who watched this movie knew what to expect. This is not like sitting down to watch an episode of PBS NewsHour and instead getting Real Housewives of Isla Nublar.

This movie is exactly what it promised to be; it is exactly what its viewers expected it to be; and it acquits itself of those expectations very well.

It’s an enjoyable romp.

Romp. Stomp. Chomp.

PHOTO: CAPRI23AUTO

Once More Unto the Beach, Dear Friends

S:7.375�

IWitnessBullying.org weimar.ws Galaxis

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Reviewscreen His Dark Fantasies His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman Everyman’s Library • 2011 • 1,144 pages

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yra Belacqua has a problem. Actually, it seems at times like she has all of the problems. Because she has discovered the secret of the Dust, and it is the key to, well, everything that is happening around her and everything that is happening in the worlds connected to hers.

How to describe this story in brief? There’s this mysterious matter called Dust that is somehow crucial to people’s consciousness (or souls?).

People have daemons—animal-shaped spirits that accompany them and are critical to their well-being. But if those daemons are stripped away from a child, it can render him or her as a zombie. So Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are each trying to discover the truth about Dust, and each of them is doing so differently—but both are doing so ruthlessly. Lyra comes into contact with each of them, and at each stage of her journey

Who convinced Americans that politics is all about shouting & polarization?

Meet the antidote: Week to Week, the political roundtable program from The Commonwealth Club of California hosted by Galaxis and Zippererstrasse editor/ publisher John Zipperer, where we feature journalists and academics with differing views discussing the political issues of the day with intelligence, humor, and civility.

Come to our roundtables (complete with a social hour) in San Francisco, download the podcasts, or watch us on the California Channel.

For event dates & media links:

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finds the situation getting grimmer and more dangerous. Who are the good guys?

Well, in short, the giant armored bear is better than the lord and the ma’am who are seeking the Dust secrets.

This 2011 hardcover collection brings together in one volume The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Though

the temptation might be strong to continue reading all three novels uninterrupted—Pullman is a damn good writer—one should read each one as if they were separate books, otherwise by the third book in this volume one begins to get a bit impatient to have everything solved.

The story moves between alternate universes and (presumably) our own universe in an incredibly imaginative adventure that, though aimed at younger readers, can entertain older ones, too.

The 2007 film of The Golden Compass (starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott, Ian McKellen, and Dakota Blue Richards) was a pretty good big-screen adaptation of the first book. That movie’s tepid success at the box office meant that sequels never appeared, so the only way you can find out what happens is to go back to the books, and this omnibus volume is a good way to do so.

A side note: Pullman attracts (and occasionally feeds) controversy from conservative religious forces. You can ignore all of that in these books.

Yes, there are bad religious figures and organizations in these stories. But no one is going to lose their faith because the Magisterium is a bad actor in these books. Move on to real controversies.

IMAGE: RED ROCK ENTERTAINMENT

The Last Scout Is a Deathtrap The Last Scout, directed by Simon Phillips Epic Pictures • March 7, 2017 • 107 minutes

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nuclear war between China and the United States has made life on Earth impossible; survivors get off the planet using whatever ships are available, but the rivalry continues as China and the United States each sets out to find a new home. There is no coming together of the two sides, even after they mutually destroy humanity’s cradle.

They send out a small fleet of ships to seek out a planet suitable to be their new home. One of these ships, the Pegasus, has gone so far after seven years that it is out of communications

range as it nears its destination. What should be a cause for celebration instead becomes one of intrigue and death; the discovery of a Chinese spaceship stirs up tensions among the crew, already tired of dealing with space travel and running low on supplies. Did the Chinese beat them to their new home world? Will the Pegasus crew ever get off the ship?

The United States and China were in a race to find humanity’s new home; if they’re not careful, they’ll ensure space is their final graveyard.

The Last Scout tells this grim tale set in the year 2065. The movie has a very slow beginning. One could argue that the beginning extends well into the middle and toward the end of the film. What might strike many viewers as

overly talky and boring, perhaps the reflection of a low budget. But we got two things out of it: first, it let the filmmakers establish each of the characters; second, it left us totally unprepared for the turn that the film takes when things do begin to shift quite significantly near the end.

The Last Scout was made with a budget of only $3.2 million; yes, that might show up in the form of exposition over action, but the special effects on this film are impressive. (A online crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter to raise $8,289 to finish some special effects work resulted in a paltry $138 in support. We take it they found some other way to pay the bill for the SFX artists.)

The filmmakers cite Prometheus, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica as inspirations for the look of the Pegasus. With such a low budget, the film does look quite good. I wish the lighting hadn’t been so dark—whether it was done to create the mood or to hide set problems, I’m not sure, but it makes it difficult to view.

The film stars Blaine Gray as Jon, the captain of the Pegasus; Simon Phillips as Pete; Rebecca Ferdinando as Hayley; Deji LaRay as Mike; Rita Ramnani as Jane, pilot of the Pegasus; Paul Thomas Arnold as Gerry; and Peter Woodward Edward.

There are only so many things you can do with a low budget and a group of people confined on a spaceship. Killing them off one by one is a popular past-time. But no one did it better than the big-budget Alien in 1979. So why bother with a smaller budget?

Well, I viewed this movie on Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime is a wonderful service; thogh the company touts its original productions, its huge catalog of movies in many genres is its main attraction to me. I like to watch movies that do things differently. Sometimes, they turn out to have been worth the time; other times, they are utter wastes of time; and still other times, they are a mixed bag. The Last Scout is a mixed bag, but one I’m happy to have picked.

Amazon Prime has a lot of clunkers in its catalog. In that, it is the new Sci Fi Channel, which was once infamous for airing seemingly any zero-budget sci-fi flick that would fill up its schedule between the prestige series and films it aired more sparingly. (And it would have learned its lesson if it hadn’t hit the jackpot with the Sharknado series.)

Watching a lot of low-budget independent films can either inure you to their badness or it could lure you into unconsciousness, if you made it a drinking game by imbibing every time a lame line was spoken. But The Last Scout doesn’t fit into that category. It isn’t The Empire Strikes Back and it isn’t Alien. But it is a worthy entry in the SF film community. weimar.ws Galaxis

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The Stronghold The Stronghold, directed by Yuriy Kovalyov UFD • October 12, 2017 • 151 minutes

I

f you are looking for something other than the films that are coming out of Hollywood, maybe look further east.

Way east—to Ukraine. Unless you are a foreign film aficionado, you probably have never seen a film from Ukraine; the closest you’re likely to have come is a Russian movie. Let The Stronghold be your first.

Starring Danylo Kamenskyi as Victor (or Vitko, depending on your translation), the story follows a Ukrainian teenager who is troubled by an accident that killed his father.

He is suddenly transported back 1,000 years and finds himself helping locals who are fighting fierce Cuman warriors. While trying to get back to his time, he brings some 21st-century ideas and technology to the defence of the villagers, who are living in the titular stronghold. The Cumans, however, have some supernatural help that gives them the aide of a giant golem rock monster, and the stronghold is in dire straits if something original can’t be done.

The natural scenery in the film is gorgeous. The Stronghold was reportedly filmed in the Carpathian mountains, an ecospace, and elsewhere. The film has charm and humor, and in the right portions. It is easy to see how teens and tweens can identify with the hero and his story, but this is a film for all ages. Don’t let the subtitles bother you; this is an eminently understandable and thoroughly enjoyable fantasy.

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ANT-MAN IMAGE: WILLIAM TUNG

Good Buzz for Ant-Man and Wasp Ant-Man and the Wasp, directed by Peyton Reed Marvel/Disney • July 6, 2018 • 118 minutes

O

ne of the quirkier comic book heroes to make a successful screen debut, Ant-Man surprised audiences and critics with its 2015 first feature (titled, simply, Ant-Man) by rejecting the increasingly dark and ominous tone of much of the Marvel films.

Instead, the movie was fun and funny—and successful, raking in about $520 million on a budget of between $130 and $170 million.

And so, a sequel, 2018’s And-Man and the Wasp. It turned its budget (somewhere in the realm of $160–195 million) into a $622 million box office, and it succeeded by replicating the first film’s mix of likability and humor.

Whereas the first film was the expected origin story (reluctant hero gets powers, learns to use them), the sequel plays with some of the situations set up in the first film but doesn’t lose the charm that made it so enjoyable.

Returning for the sophomore outing are the first film’s stars Paul Rudd (Scott Lang, aka And-Man), Evangeline Lilly (Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp), Michael Douglas (Hank Pym),

Michael Peña (Luis), and others, along with newcomers Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster, Pym’s former partner, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Pym’s wife Janet van Dyne, who has been lost in the quantum realm after a bit of runaway shrinkage that took place years before the first film’s events.

Ant-Man and the Wasp begins with Scott Lang chafing at the house arrest he is under, due to having violated the Sokovia Accords (which have been larded on the Marvel Cinematic Universe thanks to another film series).

He discovers that he is entangled on a quantum level with Janet van Dyne, so he teams up again with Pym and Hope to build a device that will allow them to drive a machine into the quantum world and retrieve Pym’s wife.

While this is happening, a woman who can slip in and out of phase steels the lab (um, yeah, steals the laboratory—shrunk it to carrying size, as one does), and Pym turns to his former partner Bill Foster. It turns out that Foster has been trying to fix the quantum phasing problems being experienced by Ava Starr—the “ghost” who stole the lab. But helping her might eliminate any hope of saving Janet van Dyne.

That’s the setup. It includes the requisite amount of action and fights and villains looking mean and good guys getting beaten or beating up bad guys. That’s all a given in any superhero movie. Though we find such punch-em-ups to be tiresome, there is apparently some chart on the walls next to the desks of the superhero writers that determines how much of the tiresome action to put in. Nonetheless, Ant-Man and the Wasp is as enjoyable to watch as the first film.

Much of that credit goes to the writers for putting great lines in the mouths of the characters (Rudd’s and Peña’s, in particular). But as much as just about every major character was fun to watch, the biggest hurrah must go to Paul Rudd for making his Scott Lang both likeable and believable—if “believable” even means anything in a story in which people and objects get rapidly shrunken and enlarged and the hero’s most important team members are ants.

And so, another sequel is reportedly in our futures. If the producers can resist the urge to make it overly complex and throw in too many villains and subplots (hello, Spider-Man 3), we will anticipate it with eager hearts. weimar.ws Galaxis

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Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve Warner Bros. • October 6, 2017 • 163 minutes aybe the best thing that can be said about this sequel to a classic is that it isn’t just a remake of the original. An added compliment might be that it is as enigmatic as the original.

This time out, Ryan Gosling (photo above left) portrays K, a blade runner who learns something that could result in a great deal of violence between replicants and humans. He eventually finds Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hiding out in Las Vegas. And much action and sad faces ensue.

Blade Runner 2049 is as ambitious and complex as its predecessor, and it is likely to take a few viewings to appreciate and understand it fully. It is a worthy followup to a classic. A mild success, like its predecessor, it might mean we never see a third outing. But at least these two have been quality attempts.

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Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics volumes 1 and 2, by Rich Handley, et. al.

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IDW Publishing • 2016 (Vol. 1), 2017 (Vol. 2) • 244 pages (Vol. 1), 240 pages (Vol. 2) Imagine instructing some talented writers and artists to tell stories about a big TV series, but don’t let them see the show first. They have to go from descriptions and a few photos. That’s essentially what happened in the late 1960s when Star Trek comics launched in the United Kingdom; instead of just reprinting American comics, these were brand-new, all-original stories and art, but the ships, rooms, and terminology are often also completely original, having little to do with the established Star Trek TV series then airing in the United States but not yet airing in the UK. The result is an at-times amusing collection of errors in otherwise quite entertaining stories, which ran in short 2–3 page bursts in weekly UK comic books. The stories occasionally suffer from a bit too much of residual British World War II “c’mon boys, let’s go get ‘im” fighting spirit, but they also have a refreshing inclusion of the Star Trek spirit, in which fighting is often avoided by clearing up a misunderstanding.

A problem for much of the first volume is that the art on the pages is run right across the gutter of the book, so it can be difficult to read some of the text that crosses the gutter, which happens often enough to be annoying. But if you make it past that you will discover some fresh classic Trek enjoyment.

Isle of Dogs, directed by Wes Anderson Fox Searchlight Pictures • March 23, 2018 • 101 minutes Atari Kobayashi, the nephew and ward of the mayor of Megasaki City, flies a little plane to Trash Island to find his dog Spots, who had been exiled there by his uncle.

Mayor Kenji Kobayashi banned all dogs from Megasaki City, because of a virus spread among the animals. But when a scientist comes up with a cure, he is killed, and Atari is aided by a band of young people who uncover the plot to rid the city of dogs forever.

Isle of Dogs is definitely a Wes Anderson movie. It is—thankfully—unconventional and is refreshing for it. It is also—annoyingly—sometimes odd for no other reason than to be odd. No

crime in that, and Isle of Dogs is a nice change from superhero overload at the box office.

Cargo, directed by Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter Atlantis Pictures • September 24, 2009 • 112 minutes Unlike a “normal” movie, a science fiction film is almost guaranteed to be costly due to the need to create spaceships, alien planets, or other special effects. So a nonstudio SF film—perhaps an independent film or a foreign one— traditionally showed its limited budget. That didn’t mean it was necessarily bad; it just meant that the effects were likely a bit dodgy and there were no big-name stars in the film. Technological advancement and smart movie making have shown us today that a film made thousands of miles away or by indie spirits can look as slick as a big-budget film. We welcome the change.

Five million Swiss francs is probably not a king’s ransom, but it paid for a pretty nifty film a decade ago with the deep-space epic Cargo (also known in some releases as Cargo Space Is Cold). This

IMAGE AT TOP OF PAGE: NASA/JPL-CALTECH; GOSLING PHOTO: GAGE SKIDMORE; ISLE OF DOGS PHOTO: PAUL HUDSON

Reviews in Brief

CARGO MOVIE POSTER: ATLANTIS PICTURES; THE BLACK HOLD IMAGE: DISNEY

German-language film from Switzerland, set about 250 years from now, tells the tale of the cargo ship Kassandra heading to space station 42. Dr. Laura Portmann (Anna Katharina Schwabroh) is on board, hoping to join her sister on the planet Rhea, but the flight becomes a bit of a nightmare when a couple crew members are killed and the survivors realize that something’s alive and dangerous in the huge cargo section of the ship.

Just when you think this is going to be another ten-little-Indians killathon (and after Alien, can anyone really do it justice?), Cargo deepens and its story broadens into a tale about virtual reality, official lies, and a planet that definitely is not ready for colonization. This is a well-done, mind-twisting SF triller.

The Black Hole, directed by Gary Nelson Disney • 1979 • 98 minutes e were prepared to hatewatch this 1979 movie, which we viewed via Amazon Prime Video. This would be our fourth or fifth viewing in the years since its release, and previous viewings had grated on us, especially the robotic character of Old

W

Bob, which dragged the film into Saturday morning kiddieland. But on this viewing, we were entertained, perhaps both as a result of low expectations and because we were able to appreciate what the film does offer, which is not insubstantial.

If you have not seen this film yet, here’s a brief synopsis. A small band of travelers aboard the USS Palomino in deep space comes across the USS Cygnus, a massive steampunk-designed exploration vessel that had been ordered back to Earth years before but had not returned. The old ship is parked near a black hole. They board the Cygnus, where they discover the ship’s commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, has gone quite mad and turned his crew into cyborg automatons. The Palomino-ans try to escape Reinhardt and his demonic robot helper Max, whose preferred method of killing is to stir people to death with his rotating handblades. You do not want to receive a massage from the big red killer robot. Meanwhile, the Cygnus heads closer to the black hole on Reinhardt’s mission to prove he has discovered a way to survive a trip through a black hole.

The Black Hole has absolutely wonderful visuals, a truly eerie sense—especially at the beginning—of the awesome vastness and dangers of space, and the aforementioned Cygnus design, which is utterly unrealistic yet never fails to communicate mystery, the past, and beauty.

Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh DAW Books • 1991, multiple reissues • 426 pages Subtitled “The Company Wars,” this 1981 Hugo Award-winning novel is stuffed full of—well, everything. It involves a two-way interstellar war that turns into a three-way (or is it a four-way?) interstellar conflict between the strongest party, the Union, and the former battle fleet of the nowdeparted Company. The two sides fight and then intrigue and then prepare to fight over the planet Pell, which harbors the first intelligent life humans have found in their steady spread out from Earth.

There is a space station orbiting around Pell, and when it becomes the bone of contention between the Union fleet and the former Company fleet (now called the

Maziani), it is up to the leading family of Pell Station and to one of the most ruthless of the Maziani captains to find a way out that doesn’t result in the destruction of Pell Station and of the gentle beings on Pell.

We had first read the related Merchanter’s Luck, which was actually published a year after this book, and that led us to this larger novel. Both are strongly recommended, though you might want to copy us and start with the simpler and shorter Merchanter’s Luck before taking on this dense book.

Both of them will either remind you of—or introduce you to—the incredible talents of C.J. Cherryh.

Starcrash, directed by Luigi Cozzi New World Pictures • March 9, 1979 • 94 minutes This Italian cash-in on the late1970s science fiction film boom is of interest to anyone seeking lots of scenes of space-bikini-clad women fighting robots, giants, and each other. Not camp, not good, but at least it has David Hasselhoff.

It’s what Battle Beyond the Stars wanted to be, if BBTS wasn’t trying to be good. weimar.ws Galaxis

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2001: A Space Odyssey, directed

by Stanley Kubrick MGM • April 3, 1968 • 142 minutes In the age when hundreds of television channels stream into our homes 24 hours a day, when online streaming services like Netflix, Google Play, and Amazon Prime offer countless new and old films for our viewing, it might be hard to understand the enjoyment of going to a theatre not to see a new release but to see a 50-yearold movie.

That’s what we did one recent weekend, with a holiday screening of Stanley Kubrick’s classic telling of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which was adapted from Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”). This is the third time we’ve viewed the movie, and we’re left with a few comments to share.

First, this is a masterful film.

Every scene, scripted line, prop, angle, sound effect was there intentionally and for effect. Second, there were several points in this film, such as when speakers in a conference room exchange places and we watch every second of them walking from the front of the room to the back of the room, when we’re left with the assumption that not a single frame of this film was left on the cutting

room floor. Oh, but if only they had been. And third, we still are left largely confused by large parts of the movie. Cerebrality is one thing; long scenes that only make sense if you’re on hallucinogenic that make you feel more profound than you are are another thing.

But even taking into consideration those comments, 2001 carries with it an automatic SEE THIS recommendation.

First Man, directed by Damien Chazelle Universal Pictures • October 12, 2018 • 138 minutes If The Right Stuff was considered to have too much chest-thumping hero-worship, First Man seems designed to present the early U.S. space heroes in a much more introspective, even depressing, light. In this well-acted, arguably too subtly-acted movie, we fol-

low Neil Armstrong (another fine performance by Ryan Gosling) from his early career and his early tragedy, when his two-year-old daughter dies from cancer, to his big triumph, when he becomes the first human to step foot on the moon. Throughout the movie, Armstrong is low-key, rarely cracks a joke or even a smile, and keeps having flashbacks to his lost daughter, which we are led to believe continued to create distance between him and his wife, two sons, and friends and colleagues.

Interesting, because after the moon landing, all three of the Apollo 11 astronauts looked pretty happy in real life when they were greeted by President Richard Nixon while they were still in the mobile quarantine unit (see image above).

Incredibles 2, directed by Brad

Bird Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Animation Studios • June 15, 2018 • 118 minutes And just a note about Incredibles 2: The film received mixed reviews but did super box office, so congratulations. We, however, did not see the film and we likely won’t. Around the time of its release, word got out that the movie included sequences using strobe lights. The general public might not know it, but it shouldn’t be any surprise to filmmakers that strobes are a problem to people with certain types of epilepsy; this isn’t the first film or stage production that has had to issue warnings. It just brings up the question of why they couldn’t have come up with another way to do the effect they used. The movie is reportedly quite enjoyable, but we wouldn’t know.

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ASTRONAUTS PHOTO: NASA; 2001 ROOM PHOTO: CHRISTOPHE FROM MONTREAL

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Next Galaxis

t’s time for Buck Rogers—many times of Buck Rogers, in fact. Join us for a look at the original texts, comics, serials, and later movie and television appearances of this seminal science fiction hero. The heroic, the dramatic, the camp. It’s all Buck.

We’ll remember the inimitable Stan Lee, and talk with horror with writer Sean Abley. We’ll profile some famous SF spaceships, present the second part of our X-Files episode guide, the continuing Dragonfire adventures, and more.

Plus: Reviews, science fiction art, more Bunky, independent SF movies, science news, and much more.

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LEE PHOTO: KYLE NISHIOKA FRO

I

Catch up on what you missed ND CO UE SE ISS

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special report: German science fiction then & now The WOrlds Of sCIeNCe & sCIeNCe fICTION

OCT. 2011 $9.95

farm Boy & his alien lUcian’s first sf short fiction spectacUlar satUrn event listinGs new perry rhodan

PlUs: OUr favOrITe ThINgs

Complete Episode Guide to the Modern SF Classic

B A T T L E S T A R

GALACTICA weimar.ws Galaxis 5

Issue #2 Episode guide to Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica! Classic

German SF; building a real starship; Perry Rhodan starts over; the controversy over spilling Prometheus’ secrets; the world’s first short SF story; a Saturn photo guide; reviews; & more!

Issue #3 The Star Wars wuxia connection!

Episode guide to original Galactica; author Charles Yu interview; Lev Grossman’s The Magicians;

search for Earth-like planets; photo visits to CERN & SpaceX; Google tech; trip to Mars; Galactica: Blood & Chrome; & more!

Issue #4 Special Trek focus!

An extended review of Star Trek into Darkness, plus episode guide to first season of ST:TNG; Europa Report; Artemis Eternal; El Cosmonauta; Orson Scott

Card boycott; space stamps; Indy Jones update; Ray Kurzweil speaks; Dragon Fire fiction; & more!

Issue #5 Special SF TV preview! New interview with David Gerrold; scientist Inge Lehmann; remembering Terry Pratchett and Leonard Nimoy; Mandelbrot art; Star Wars VII update; Hugo controversy; Frazetta lives; ST:TNG

Find them all at www.weimar.ws Get caught up on the best science & science fiction magazine!

episode guide seasons II & III; Dragon Fire part II; & more!

Issue #6 Trek turns 50! Space opera; The Expanse; SpaceX tours Mars; The Force Awakens; black hole science; astronaut’s view of Earth; David Bowie; & more!

Issue #7 Meeting aliens!

Next Generation episode guide finale;

2 Star Wars films reviewed; remembering Carrie Fisher; war in space; real hopes for exploring Mars; Blade Runner; & more!

Issue #8 Sex! Never-seen Galactica and Star Wars; space art; X-Files episode guide part I; Howard Cruse interview; SF trading cards; remembering Ellison; Copenhagen; & more!

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PHOTO: ESO/M. KORNMESSER

Issue #1 Premiere issue! Interviews with Michio Kaku, David Gerrold, Mary Doria Russell, Deepak Srivastava, Michael Medved; Mobile Suit Gundam; Lathe of Heaven on TV; space photos; Virgin Galactic; Star Wars in print; news & reviews.

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