Book Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

My goodness...

I have yet to consume any Ayn Rand but I would imagine that Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has got to go up there with Rand in terms of solid Libertarian manifestos.

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

and

"I beg of you — do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

These are just two of the numerous quotes from the novel that truly resonate with me and I would think with many of the libertarians and Silicon Valley inhabitants among us.

The novel itself is, in theory, science fiction, as it takes place primarily on the Moon and in the future (such as it was imagined when Heinlein wrote the work in the mid '60s).  Heinlein, like a proper great sci-fi author has a wonderfully imagined world of a penal colony on the Moon where the Earth sends many of its undesirables (not just pure criminals) to work as a compulsory labor force producing food for the starving masses back on the homeworld.  You have underground "warrens" where people live, a shortage of women driving all sorts of varied family structures, a mish mash of racial and religious backgrounds, a "self aware" computer, rock throwing rail guns, a global Lunar Authority, etc.  The novel is a futurist's thesis writ large.

Which isn't to say that this world is perfect--the participants are still tied to physical lines of communication--land lines for goodness sake!  But Heinlein can be forgiven for smaller items like this.  His overall call to arms for a rational anarchist revolution is an idea that grows with value each day.  A society with no laws or rules besides ones own morals may be a libertarian fantasy but that's not to say its not something to strive for.

While the main character of the novel is Manuel Garcia O'Kelly-Davis who speaks to the reader in a Russian like patois it is Professor Bernardo de la Paz who gives the novel its motion and inspiration.  la Paz is the theoretician and rational anarchist behind the Moon's revolution against Earth and it is he who drives the ideas Heinlein is directing to the reader. While I'm certainly not one to subscribe to all the ideas herein (and as this is a novel made to both entertain and to challenge it is NOT a political diatribe) the book does present a persuasive argument for revolution against authoritarian regimes as well as the subversive methods by which one might begin such an enterprise.  As with the best sci-fi novels, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is both an excellent critique of our modern world and an entertaining supposition on where we might be heading.  Well worth the read, it should really get your hamster spinning.

TV Show Review: Helix

I wanted to like this show...I REALLY did.  I gave it three episodes but now I have to let it go.

The premise is right up my alley.  A kind of sci-fi show revolving around a secret biological facility in Greenland that has been working on various scary viruses and one gets "loose" within the facility's population, drawing in a team from the CDC to look into the matter.

You have the clean background of the arctic vs. the black goop that the virus turns the infected body into.  You have the mysterious corporation that is trying to control the virus for its own purposes. And you have all of this on the SyFy channel where you hope the program can be a bit edgy, dark and odd...

Unfortunately I should have known better from the network that has made its bones recently off of broadcasting WWE wrestling and movies like Sharknado.

Sure, there are a few qualities about the show I like-- Hiroyuki Sanada as Dr. Hiroshi Hatake is quite good as the lead corporate scientist in charge of the facility.  I first saw him in Danny Boyle's Sunshine and he is quite good in his role.  And there are some of the special effects--particularly the body ones where human bodies have been liquified or an infected individual spreads the virus to another by disgorging the black goop in mouth to mouth contact with its target.

Unfortunately SyFy meager budget, poor casting and weak directing kills the show for me.  Some of the props (Hello high school science lab face shields??  What are you doing here??) and special effects are EXTREMELY cheap, giving the show a decidedly D-movie feel to it at times.

The casting is also extremely weak...likely driven out of budgetary reasons.  Billy Campbell is barely acceptable as the head CDC scientist and primary character in the show but the supporting cast (outside of Sanada) is BRUTAL.  Beyond bad.  Like so bad I want to turn my eyes from the screen bad.  There is nothing believable or remotely realistic about the acting by most of the cast--made all the worse by terrible wardrobe choices as well.  The head of security for the base is a chubby male in his late twenties who looks about as ready to secure a facility as I do to join the Navy Seals.  And this is just one of the numerous poor casting and wardrobe choices for the characters.  The choices seem almost childlike in their stupidity--like someone was making a joke of a scifi program--virtually every single one is a disaster of one proportion or another.

Lastly the directing--its like someone threw a catalog of good scifi movies at the directors and said--here!  Make a TV show like this!  In the first three episodes we have direct ripoffs of the scene from Alien where Tom Skeritt searches for the titular monster through the metal airshafts as well as a scene from The Thing where Wilfred Brimley wields an ax against his comrades.  Each scene is so blatantly ripped off its like you are watching a Simpsons parody of the real thing.

This is all truly a shame as SyFy but a lot of marketing and focus on this series as a seeming attempt to get back to real programming.  It unfortunately fails on far too many levels for me to spend any more time with it.

Who's Coming to Commandeer a Boat in Portland, Maine With Me??

This is so William Gibson-esque its not even funny.

One of the world's largest, most technically proficient and futuristic corporations has a hand in mysterious floating barges popping up in harbors around the country.  On these barges are stacks of cargo containers holding who knows what.  Building and shepherding these barges around is by all accounts some small shell corporation with no history while the billionaire founder of said company drives his giant yacht up to said barges in order to do who knows what!!

Its like straight from a near-future sci-fi novel.  Maybe these are going to be Google Glass stores (but I don't think that's likely at all from the design and layout of these creations--too utilitarian at this point and besides...Google is already opening a retail store in NYC which fits in much better for the sale of hard goods than some floating apparatus.

There is little benefit for a very slow, moveable, retail store.  Why would you MOVE your store from NYC to say Baltimore anyway?  Wouldn't you be better off (from a sales perspective) having a stable location people know they can go to in order to buy your product?  No, a moveable data center removed from land and very possibly--the legal constraints surrounding being tied to a landmass (how about hosting a Bitcoin exchange or Pirate's Bay or Silk Road from an international waters, self sufficient, satellite linked datacenter?) makes a lot more sense.

Some one needs to get up to Portland and track the workers that are going to and coming from this ship and find out what is going on...now THAT would be some good journalism work!!  Much like finding out what was/is occurring at Groom Lake by tracking who was flying into and out of the satellite airport that catered to its workers, the same methods could be used here.  So who's up for renting a little motorboat for a few days in Portland and following around the comings and goings of these mysterious Google barges?!!?

Google Barges Popping Up Across Country....

Book Review: Leviathan Wakes

Written by the combination of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name of James S.S. Corey (why?), Leviathan Wakes is one of the first large form Sci-Fi books I've written in quite some time and one of the most entertaining I've ever read.

Make no mistake, this isn't "hard" sci-fi.  You won't be getting into multipage descriptions of the technological minutiae of a propulsion drive or the math required to calculate the force necessary to move a heavenly body out of its orbit.

What you do get is a fully formed and eminently believable "world" in which the story functions.  Extrapolating from today's space technology, political machinations and corporate expansion, Corey weaves an extremely detailed pathway for his characters to ride.

Corey also does a fantastic job of literally weaving the story together--taking two characters and alternating chapters between them until they come together later in the story and then towards the end returning to the alternating perspective as the characters again are separated.  The convention works well and lends itself well to holding the reader's attention.

The story itself involves the hunt for a missing woman and the eventual conspiracy that is uncovered as being responsible for her death (? here as I'm not sure she really "dies").  You have all the typical features of a great sci-fi story with space battles, weird creatures, items floating around, the danger of space's vacuum, etc.  In fact, much of the story carries familiar aspects that we've all encountered elsewhere--whether its in Alien, Blade Runner, 28 Days Later, Outbreak, etc.  Corey is not exactly breaking new ground in terms of storytelling but he has wrapped together a number of genres into a very entertaining package.

With Leviathan Wakes being the first novel in a trilogy, it does what it sets out to do--which is to get you looking for the next chance you get to buy the followup.

Film Review: Videodrome

Been a while that I've posted anything so we'll start with my most recent item.

Watched this one last night I as I had limited time from putting the kids to bed and was just running through what was available for free on demand.  At only 84 minutes and a cult classic, Videodrome fit the bill.

A classic David Cronenberg film mixing hallucinatory visuals with modern social critique, it could be remade for the Internet age and be just as applicable as it was in the early 80's.

James Woods stars as the leader of a small TV station in Toronto who is on the look out for new programming.  With the station's soft-core porn not garnering the ratings wanted, Woods' character comes across something pushing even his boundaries, snuff films he at first believes to be just well staged but in fact he comes to discover, horrifyingly real.  The more of these programs he views, the more disturbing and deep his hallucinations become.

In typical Cronenberg fashion this comes to include pulsating TV sets and cassettes, a new orifice in his gut which accepts VCR tapes, his gun, etc. and various TV based communication.  It is in this last part where the film takes a sci-fi/political bent.  The truth of the whole matter is that there is an underground group using the TV signal broadcasting the Videodrome programming to kill off those who are depraved enough to be watching such a show.  This would eliminate the "sick" and "undesirable" in America is the theory here.  Given that the company creating this solution is linked to NATO weapon production you can read some political critique here.

In the end the film suffers a bit from 80's cheesiness as do other period pieces of Cronenberg and Carpenter and other "cult" film makers in this range but it holds enough of its core value and Marshall McLuhan education to make it worth viewing--and not just for the fact that it features a topless Debby Harry!