As with most TV shows, they drive through the setup so hard and fast you don’t have time to care much about anything. The 22nd century is Blade Runner Time, loving cop fathers one too many kids, gets tossed in the slammer. Loving wife is doctor, skill wanted desperately at Terra Nova (more later) so is recruited, but can only take two kids, and must leave husband in jail. Do I really need to explain what happens next?

Let’s jump past the completely unbelievable escape sequence and get to Terra Nova, shall we? Someone discovered a fracture in time and space. They didn’t know where and when it led to so they sent a probe through, and then looked for its signal. With an arrogance only a TV “scientist” could muster, they concluded that since the probe signal didn’t turn up anywhere it must represent an alternate time stream (the alternate time stream thingummy is required to get around the Butterfly Effect, and if you don’t know what that is, you need to find a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Sound Of Thunder and read it, like now).

So the where of Terra Nova is an alternate timeline of Earth, roughly 85 million years ago (no explanation of how they determined that, as well; after all, an alternate timeline means there may be no end to divergences from anything we know about our past). The who is the standard family set of loving parents, rebellious but sensitive teenage boy, awkward nerdy teenage girl, fearless five year old innocent girl. Boy leaves love of his life behind (of course) and finds a new love interest (of course). Encouraged by New Crowd, boy breaks rules.

Which sets up the family tension, because, you see, father, being an ex-cop does what every ex-cop would do, leaves his agricultural duties behind to follow Man With A Gun, and long story short (too late) gets hired on as Security.

What we’re looking at here is Jurassic Park (hi there, Mr. Spielberg, executive producer) meets Lost. Oh, and we can’t go away without a mention of the Bad Guys. They’re called “sixers,” not because they played basketball in Philadelphia, but because they came in as part of the Sixth Migration, and seem intent on taking over Terra Nova.

If I’ve seemed snarky it’s because this is so standard, so trite, that it begs for it. But then, that’s so for a lot of television shows at the beginning; television, it seems, always selects its starting characters “off the rack.” What counts is where they go from here.

The object of a pilot is to set up the board for the rest of the season; to show the players and get them in place, and provide enough to hook you into coming back next week so we can see what they will do, now they are in position.

What will keep me coming back is how unpredictable they are, or (failing that) how much they make me enjoy a ride in familiar territory. Spielberg, at least, is a master of that. The credits for the rest of the executive producer lot (Castle, The 4400, 24) is spotty. Castle is saved by Nathan Fillion’s grown-up little boy (I’d call it an act, but I know better), the 4400 had a good season or two, then ran out of steam, and 24 wasn’t tolerable after the middle of the second season.

My expectations (after seeing the first hour of the two-hour pilot) are that the Commander has a spy among the sixers, the sixers are attempting to get rid of the dictatorial, even tyrannical, government of Terra Nova and set up something blissfully democratic. Good Cop Dad will find some disturbing things, probably someone playing games with the food supply, that will make him start to question. The boy will hate his father until near the middle of the season (for daring to let himself be put in prison for trying to protect his illegally large family) but honestly, the longer they let that go on, the less likely I’m going to stay around. Maybe it’s my age, but overblown teenage angst makes me more and more twitchy.

So yes, I mean to imply I’ll be watching, at least the early part of the season. I want to see real people grow out of these cardboard cutouts they’ve been parading around in front of me. I want to see the older girl’s knowledge get used for something besides making herself blush. (Honestly, I’m sooo tired of the sexist tripe that makes her embarrassed by how smart she is, I almost hit the back button on the browser. Cut it out, you cretinous writers!) But I’d better see signs of life soon.

It’s fashionable to rate things like this with numbers, so I’m not going to. Instead I’m simply going to say that Terra Nova is starting out in a hole, burdened with ideas and characters that haven’t been new for a half-century or more, but it has enough potential that I’m willing to invest a few more hours in it waiting to see something of that potential realized. I’ll give it chance to either surprise me or make me care (I almost care about dad and older girl right now; doctor mom lost me when she just pulled a leech-like thing another doctor had placed on a man off his back without knowing anything about it, including what it was, let alone the proper way of removing it).

But seriously, television, science fiction is the literature of ideas. It’d help to have a few before you try this again, OK?

Still, I’m fairly nervous about it, and the why of that didn’t become clear until the train ride home from Reno, when I had time to think.

After Raleigh (last year’s NASFic) I’m convinced that I can handle most anything a convention can throw at me. But the unsettling question is will I?

That’s what it all comes down to, each and every day, for all of us. We most definitely can, if we have the will. I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Vince Lombardi (while there is no proof he said precisely this, it’s close enough to his thought that I’m sure he won’t mind being associated with it):

The difference between the successful man and the rest is not a matter of luck, or intelligence, or even talent; it is a matter of will.

The “matter of will” is not the “I wish” type so many of us confuse with will. It’s the determination and mental discipline to do what it takes to achieve what we are willing. If my will falters, I cannot achieve, and that’s not a lack of ability, but a lack of will.

As so often with quotations from St Vincent of Lambeau, it applies to so much more than football. Success, no matter how we define it, is never free of cost. It has a price, rarely measured in mere money.

The only question that matters is: will I pay it?

Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.

Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.

That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.

I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.

I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room.

Well, that’s what happened here. No, it wasn’t the sneers he throws at religion; I’m getting used to that by now. That seems to be the current trend. When an author today wants to hang the “intelligent” label on one of the characters, the character disses religion. After all, it’s not possible to believe and be intelligent at the same time, is it?

But, as I said, that’s not why the book went airborne. The premise of the book involves the crossing over between parallel universes of a scientist. The twist is the scientist is a neanderthal, coming from a universe where the spark of consciousness lit up the minds of the neanders, not the cro-mags. He’s been learing english through conversation, aided by a computer, which beeps whenever it hears a word it cannot translate.

The situation is handled really well, until at one point the computer translates (into english) the exclamation “That’s so oxymoronic!” As if I’m supposed to believe that word has come up in conversation, when words like “endanger” haven’t. It blew the whole mood, destroyed the credibility of the process. After I picked up the book and read a few more paragraphs I realized that the reason for this was that the author needed to gather some momentum for the obligatory No Thinking Person Can Believe scene (since the author had been silent on religion up to this point, I confess I didn’t see it coming until it got here) and so had to suspend the limititations he’d imposed on his scientist to this point.

Still, the “first contact” scenes are handled well enough. The plot is too flimsy to carry the novel, but that’s more because the book isn’t plot-driven. Nor for that matter could you call it character-driven. It’s more driven by the examination of the concept of quantum states and many worlds, and by the chance to view of Neaderthal scociety.

If you’re looking for a strong plot, or compelling characters, pass this book by. If you enjoy travelogs to unfamiliar societies, however, you’ll enjoy this one a lot.

I never met him face to face, something I was hoping to rectify and now will never have the chance. Our opinions and beliefs diverged more than they converged, which you might think was a good reason not to meet. But if you do, then it’s clear you never knew rich.

You didn’t need to agree with him; in fact I often got the impression he preferred it if you didn’t. Not because he was scrappy old curmudgeon, lusting for the cut and thrust of a good fight (though if it happened, he was able to keep his end up nicely). But it seemed somehow, just by disagreeing with him, you uplifted him. The existence of contrary points of view was interesting in itself, and was a phenomenon to be respected and studied for what it was: confirmation of the diversity of the universe, and the strength that flows from it. There was something to be learned from every person he met.

Dr Gafia has now left the planet. And the planet is the bigger loser.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

We got the bid! Have patience. It’s a new site and we just got the bid for 2008, so there’s a lot of decisions that are just now being made. I’d tip you off to them here, but Robert Bloch promises me he’ll stop haunting me if I do, so you’ll just have to be patient. Just expect to come and have fun.

Wow. Me on a concom. Now that’s horror.

Starngely enough, I really like working conventions, and working with this group was a new experience, and a good one. Miriah and her support team from ISS worked heroically, and thanks largely to them I actually looked like I was capable of doing my job. Both Lea Farr and Charlie Harmon went far above the call of duty to make my time in the Program Ops office an enjoyable one, and the entire staff had enough enthusiasm for the job to make it an altogether fun experience.

One of the hazards of working Program Ops is you don’t get much feedback on what is going right with the convention, all you hear are complaints. And there are always complaints; you can’t please everyone. One example: We were told we should have cut the number of kaffeeklatsches in half, because holding two different ones in a 600 square foot area made it hard for the hearing impaired. Doing so would, of course, have disappointed some pros and their fans, who would not have had the chance to get together at all. So either way someone gets irritated with us. (Personally, I was on the side of the hearing impaired complainer until he as much as called me a liar to my face when I told him we were noting the complaint as something to be more heavily considered for the next con. Just a note for his future reference, if he’s reading this: It never helps your case if you go out of your way to insult the person you’re trying to convince to help you.)

The intent of the programing head was to provide as varied a program as he could, WorldCon-class programming in a space that was certainly not WorldCon class in size. A laudable goal, and one which was achieved, although achieving it made several panel audiences much smaller than they otherwise would have been, and made getting to some panels problematic.

There were rough patches, some made worse by the cultural differences of the staff (we’d all worked different conventions, and so were used to doing things in different ways) but those got smoothed out by mid-con. At something over 1500 attendees, this was the smallest con I’d worked in over two decades, so the looseness of some of the operation scared me at first, as did the low number of volunteers. You need bodies and a more rigid system to run a large con, but smaller cons can spend more time in improv mode and still succeed. And smaller numbers of attendees means a smaller number of volunteers; there’s no valid reason to suggest the percentage of volunteers would go up as number of attendees goes down. But once I’d had time to think about it rationally, I understood and adjusted, just as other con staff began to understand me and adjust.

It was a fun time. If you were there, thanks for making it fun. If you weren’t. you missed out on something good.

Susanna Clarke’s first novel has a good sales run at the moment, and it’s up for Hugo. With some difficulty, I read it. Well, perhaps “read it” is too strong a term. At several points along the way, my eyes frankly glazed over, and I skipped pages. An actual page count of what I read vs what I skipped would reveal I probably read about 85% of it. And that was too much.

She seems to have a full-blown case of the disease that has been afflicting George RR Martin, JK Rowling, and many other writers today. I’m not sure what the exact cause of it is, but the result is The Big Book, the book that’s too long for the story it’s telling. I don’t know if they think readers want more pages to justify the higher price, or if the cutbacks in staff at the publishers are resulting in editors that are incapable doing their job because of time constraints, or what. But many books today are just too long.

This is an excellent case in point. This 782-page monstrosity shouldn’t have been over 500, and probably could have been less than that. The plot is rather good, as are the sub-plots, but they get so bogged down in detail that on more than one occasion I had to resist the urge to throw the book across the room. Come on, get to the point already!

The Big Book has always been with us, but not in such large numbers as today. Yes, Lord of the Rings was long. But, to tie the two together, JS&MN reads as if Tolkien had included all of the Silmarillion as footnotes in the Rings trilogy.

The basic idea here is that a mean-spirited magician (Henry Norrell) is wanting to be the only magician in England, when a young pup with some talent comes up; Norrell can’t resist keeping him around (you know the story, it’s as old as the hills) and Things Develop. Mix in the idea of a long-disappeared English King that his subjects expect to return and let simmer.

This is generally a good dish to preprare, but Clarke has decided it needs to be garnished with a dry-as-dust academic tone, including footnotes that go on for pages(!) and all sorts of irrelevancies that serve mainly just to brag about the back story she’s created for the book. Yes ma’am, it’s a well-crafted deep back story, and you’ve certainly done your homework. But every good fantasy tale has one of those, trotting it out and putting it on display is tacky at best, and boring at worst. In the case at hand, it oscillates between the two poles.

I can’t explain why the book has sold the copies it’s sold; I haven’t yet got around to the other Hugo nominees, but this makes me dread going through the rest of them. If the art of writing is knowing what to leave out, then this book is truly artless.

Maybe I’m just being silly, but I expect the book to tell me a story, and hopefully through the story’s development learn something more about myself or the people around me. This book has a good story buried in it, struggling to get out, but the excavation process is painful, and frankly, not worth the effort. I can only recommend this book for those who think doctoral dissertations make good reading.

This is just silly. I suspect, however, it just is keeping in step with the general erosion of our societal attitude toward truth and facts. “Science Fiction” used to mean “no supernatural effects need apply.” The premises of a science fiction story had to be either demonstrable as fact, or at least possible/probable given what we know.

We have relaxed our collective definition of truth. It used to mean, “that which we can prove.” It now appears to mean “that which we cannot disprove.” There is a large distance between those two points that we have leaped, without good reason. I hope someday we recover our senses, before it’s too late and we’re lost.

And I was. The premise is that the blessed Father Vidicon is walking down the throat of Hell (having, of course, passed successfully through the Hellmouth) and hears the pleas of those who are struggling against Murphy. A young man, Tony, a computer troubleshooter, stumbles across a message from the blessed father, and becomes pressed into service, falls in love, and tries to maintain a relationship with both a beautifule woman and the blessed father.

All the while Tony strives against a delightful bestiary representing the problems we all encounter, Father Vidicon continues his walk, struggling with the more powerful sendings.

Stasheff has put together an allegory for our time, sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress, albeit with both a technological and philosophical twist. While the former would, no doubt, delight Bunyan, the latter I’m equally sure, would not.

Definitely a Good Read, though perhaps we techno-dweebs are most likely to identify with Tony. There is a low probability of this becoming a series, which is a Good Thing (I’d call it impossible, but I know better; still I hope it doesn’t as the story is complete as it stands) because I think the tale would lose something were it to continue.