"One small step ..."

Pondering Apollo 11, 40 years later

Magicians and astronauts

Some time in 1969 or 1970 — I was about five years old — my maternal grandparents paid a visit to our small 2-floor apartment, where we lived above my aunt and uncle and three cousins.

Naturally (I was only five after all!), I don't remember a great deal about that visit — in truth, since Grandpa Hart died in 1975, I don't remember all that much about him at all, at least not memories uncontaminated by the memories and stories of others.

Some informal remarks towards a calculus of modular culture or,

Torchwood: Children of Earth considered as a helix of semi-precious shows

God said to Abraham kill me a son
Abe said man, you must be putting me on
God said no — Abe said what?
God said you can do what you want Abe, but,
Next time you see me coming you better run.
Abe said where'd you want this killing done?
God said out on highway 61

— Bob Dylan

It was probably the simply embarassing post-script to the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, that first really taught me there is usually an inverse relationship between hype and reality. (And of course, this year's utter travesty of an end to the sometimes brilliant Battlestar Galactica was a superb reminder.)

While most of North America's children and geeks are making hits out of Star Trek or (god help us) of Transformers: Something-or-other, Great Britain's BBC has provided us with something a little different. A five-hour "special event", a mini-series broadcast (in the UK) on Monday through Friday of the week of the 6th called Torchwood: Children of Earth (it's airing starting tomorrow on BBC America in the States, but I haven't been able to pin down when it will show up in Canada).

And for a change, the work pretty much lives up to the hype.

Truth to tell, until now Torchwood has been mostly a guilty pleasure for me. A Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood was and was meant to be a grittier, more "adult" version of the long-running children's show. The violence was more graphic, there was sex (male/female, female/female and male/male as well as "miscellaneous" — these people dealt with aliens, after all) along with near-nudity and swearing, including the F-word, at least during the first season.

By the end of the second, four of the seven original members of the "team" had died violent deaths, leaving fans to wonder whether this year's edition would introduce new characters. As it turns out, long-time fans will have more grieving to do — but I'll say no more along those lines.

For more, along with some (though — I hope — not too many) spoilers, please click the "read more" link below. Otherwise, book-mark and return once you've watched it — and then we can argue!

Roads not travelled

Samuel R. Delany's Dark Reflections:
A marriage of SF and the mundane

With thousands of books published in the English language every year, to name any particular book or particular writer as "the best" of any particular category is to be either simply foolish or foolishly hubristic.

But still ... Samuel R. Delany is still the best writer working in the English language today. His recent novel, Dark Reflections, is a quiet, almost elegiac proof, not only of Delany's mastery of his craft but, perhaps more interestingly, that while you might take the science fiction out of the story, you can't take the science fiction out of the writer — at least, not this writer. And further, that "science fiction" may be less a matter of technology and time-lines than it is one of attitude and tone.

Dark Reflections is unquestionably a "literary" novel and yet, in its uncompromising story of one man's (unique — and yet, somehow universal) life, it nevertheless feels like science fiction in that it offers the reader the chance to explore the aline — that is, to get to know another being. If not "the universe in a grain of a sand", then the universe in the life of a man.