The Ark 1.8: "Follow Your Future Selves"

Checking in with a review of The Ark 1.8.  If it seems that I'm posting this review a little later than usual, you may be right.   On the other hand, that may just be your perception.  Maybe, in reality -- whatever exactly that may be -- I actually posted this review a day or two ago.  It only seems to you that I'm posting this now, because we're traveling faster than than light, so what happened yesterday or the day before yesterday seems like it's happening now.

That makes sense, right?  Don't ask me, because if I'm traveling faster than light I probably wouldn't know.  Now, last time I checked, we here on Planet Earth are not traveling faster than light.  We're traveling at whatever speed it takes for our planet to circle around the sun, in what we call a year.

Is that clear now?  Of course not.  But I've got to give The Ark credit for presenting this enigma on the screen in a way that almost does make sense.  Alicia, genius that she is, has figured out how to retrofit Ark 1 with the faster-than-light drive that powered Ark 3.  This was developed in principle by Trust but actually put in motion by Trust's successor.   So Trust understands it, or least how to make sense of being on a ship that's moving faster than light, and he helps guide his wife and Alicia to get to a place on Ark 1 where the three catch up to their future selves, i.e., things seem normal on Ark 1, though the ship is apparently not closer to Proxima B.

His wife, by the way, is the jealous type.  Sooner or later she'll walk in on Trust when he's pursuing his proclivities, and who knows what might happen then.  With any luck, someone on the ship will increase its speed even faster -- analogous to exceeding Mach 10 like we saw in Top Gun: Maverick -- and that could shake the wife's confidence in what she thinks she's seeing.

Star Trek has portrayed faster-than-light travel ever since 1960s.  Creds to The Ark for portraying it in a way I haven't seen before.  About the closest might be John Stith's murder mystery on a ship traveling FTL in Redshift Rendezvous -- but, hey, that hasn't been as yet made into a movie or TV series as yet.  So to see it on a screen -- assuming you haven't seen this yet -- follow your future self and watch this episode of The Ark.

See also The Ark 1.1: Worth Watching ... 1.2: Why I'M Enjoying It ... 1.3: Asteroid and Comet ... 1.4: Hallucinations ... 1.5-1.6: More than One ... 1.7: "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)"

a second ship around Proxima Centauri B, too ...

The Ark 1.7: "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)"

The Ark 1.7 offered a dazzling array of concepts and developments, and was the best episode so far in this new series.  If I've said this before, that's an indication of how good The Ark has become.  Even if I hadn't said that, The Ark has moved into some fine science fictional territory.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

So, I said in my review last week that I thought that other Ark floating motionless out there in space was Ark 5, carrying William Trust, the creator of the Ark project, who had planned on going out to Proxima B in Ark 5.  And, though Trust plays a big role in episode 1.7 (see below), turns out that the motionless Ark is not 5 but 3.  I got the name but not the number right.  Reminds me of that Beatles song, "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)".

But how did that later Ark get to this place before Ark 1?  Here the series pulls out an old but still surprising science fiction chestnut:  Ark 5 had faster than light travel, developed by Trust's successor.  It, too, was disabled, most of its crew destroyed, by some kind of powerful, unexpected force.  Which turns out to be ... Ark 15.  Hey, once you can travel faster than light, you can travel faster and faster, right? That's logical, as Spock might say.

And as icing on the cake of this fine episode, here's the big role that William Trust plays: at the end of the episode, two of our favorite characters, thinking they have only seconds left to live, are about to kiss ... when a code that only William Trust could know is delivered just in time to save them.  Thanks Lane for bringing Trust out of suspended animation just in time.  You can always trust Dean Devlin to deliver an excellent episode.

See you back here next week with my review of what I hope is the season one (not series) finale.

See also The Ark 1.1: Worth Watching ... 1.2: Why I'M Enjoying It ... 1.3: Asteroid and Comet ... 1.4: Hallucinations ... 1.5-1.6: More than One

a second ship around Proxima Centauri B, too ...

Book Review: Redshift Rendezvous by John Stith is Perfect Science Fiction Mystery Hybrid

I've published dozens of reviews of science fiction novels by well-known and little-known authors in the past few decades, in the New York Review of Science Fiction, Tangent, the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, and other places.  I thought it was time to begin putting these reviews up on this blog, one or two a month, right alongside the more numerous reviews of television series.

To start, here's my 1992 review, published in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, of John Stith's  Redshift Rendezvous (Ace, 1990, 256 pp.), now available on Kindle.   People often ask me to name a science fiction/ mystery hybrid that really works.  Isaac Asimov's robot stories (in contrast to his faster-than-light ships in space) are a good example.   And then there's Redshift Rendezvous, in some ways even truer to the hybrid ideal ...

Faster than light travel has been one of the most intriguing and frustrating challenges of science fiction, which generally distinguishes itself from fantasy by writing about technologies and events that are at least scientifically plausible. But according to Einstein's theory of special relativity, movement at faster than light speeds is flatly impossible, and the slightly more lenient theory of general relativity insists that objects attain infinite mass at light speeds. So how, then, is science fiction to write about human relations across star systems and galaxies in human time frames?

One approach might be to contest Einstein's proscriptions on super-luminary travel on scientific or philosophic of science terms. If we agree with the philosopher Karl Popper that even the best corroborated scientific theories are nonetheless highly fallible and destined for falsification -- as Einstein himself did -- then fiction writers should have little trouble amending Einstein much the same as Einstein amended Newton. But not many science fiction writers seem aware of Popper, or indeed sophisticated discussions of philosophy of science, at least insofar as these might pertain to speed of light.

The result has been a science fiction that by and large has repealed Einstein without much of a hearing. Whether the hyperspace drive of Asimov in the 40s or the warp drive of Star Trek and most else in between, travel at faster than light speeds has been more of an assumption than a challenge in a genre which is supposed to engage rather than subsume technological puzzles. (Cryogenic solutions that posit transport of frozen humans to be wakened upon reaching their destination at least have the merit of not ignoring Einstein. Frank Herbert's approach of beings "folding" space in the Dune series has an Einsteinian plausibility, but relies a bit too much on the quantum mechanical idea of mind pushing matter to be satisfyingly scientific.)

Even more disappointing than the repeal by fiat of Einstein has been science fiction's treatment of human relations in the faster than light environments. That treatment has usually been a simple transplantation of human dynamics from Earth to far vaster realms, with the assumption that travel from here to Tau Ceti and beyond should in principle be no different in terms of human effects than our capacity to easily travel now from New York to Los Angeles. But history and philosophy of technology have shown over and over again that new modes of transportation profoundly transform their passengers -- the medium is the message, as McLuhan pointed out, whether communication or transportation -- and science fiction that treats a trip across the galaxy as no different in human principle than a trip across the country thus shortchanges its readers.

Which is why John Stith's Redshift Rendezvous is so refreshing. The book is in many respects a standard adventure of murder and hijacking in space. But in one crucial regard this book is extraordinary in science fiction: it deals with the human detail of faster than light travel. Indeed, speed of light and its consequences is the real hero of this book.

The "Redshift" is a ship that travels faster than light, and Stith posits that speed of light inside the ship is therefore reduced to some ten meters per second, or 30 million times slower than its usual speed. This is far from always pleasant, and passengers are advised to keep their lifebelts on at all times (in order for their neural chemistry to operate at normal speeds), and trust their kinesthetic rather than optical perceptions.

Simple dining can be very interesting in this environment -- a morsel of fish turns indigo as it enters its eater's mouth and life field -- but committing and solving murders are even more so (the latter can be done by removing the victim's lifebelt). The chief security officer single-handedly manages to nearly disable an entire terrorist crew by virtue of his superior understanding of human movement and vision aboard his ship, and in the end he calls upon the physics of the ship's corridors to quite literally hoist the villain on her own petard.

If you like your science fiction to treat faster than light travel with a bit more respect than Dorothy clicking her heels together three times to go from Oz to Kansas, you'll enjoy this book. I look forward to return voyages on the Redshift and other Stith vessels that speculate on the stretching of natural laws and its effect on humans.


"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction,
The Silk Code delivers on its promises." - The New York Times Book Review

#SFWApro

Heroes 3: Augmented

Being a meta-person myself, I've always thought the most interesting powers on Heroes were those which in some unusual way played off the other powers - causing them to vanish like a super-temporary-eraser (the Haitian), absorbing the powers of others like a super sponge (Arthur and, in a different, deadly way, Sylar), and now...

In the final episode of volume 3 - 3.13 to be exact - Ando gets a great power of augmentation, or intensifying the powers of those heroes around him.

This causes Matt to read the minds of everyone in the city at once - not very useful - but Daphne to travel super super fast, faster than the speed of light, in fact, which, if some quantum mechanical theories and applications of Einstein's are right, can allow the superfast traveler to travel through time. Works for me. And for the series.

Meanwhile, it's makeup, breakup, everything is shakeup, to quote the Mamas & the Papas in "Creeque Alley", as I've done before, in at least one review, of Heroes. A few villains are gone, at least one hero, and, as for everyone else...

Heroes will back the Monday after the Superbowl, and I'll be watching.

See also Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox ... Sylar's Redemption and other Heroes and Villains Mergers ... Costa Nuclear ... Hearts of Gold and the Debased ... Seeing the Future Trumps Time Travel ... Superpowered Chess with Shifting Pieces ... Villains and Backstories ... The Redemption of Sylar ... Thoughts on the Eclipse, Part I ... The Lore of the Comic Book Store ... Hiro's Time Traveling Closure

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