Stargate Universe and the theme of the Voyage of Death

Crossposted from To Scape The Serpent's Tongue.

You know, I have a theory about the sorts of shows such as Stargate Universe, Space: 1999 and, to some extent, Star Trek: Voyager where the characters are on some moving vehicle flying through space on a seemingly random trajectory. They've got the same theme as Life On Mars, Ashes to Ashes and (from what I have been told) Lost. It's the same theme as The Prisoner, really.

They are all dead.

The crew of the Destiny; the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha; Sam Tyler, DI Alex Drake, Number Six ... it's the end for them. Finito. The explosion of Nuclear Waste Disposal Base Two; the opening of the gate from the Icarus planet; they didn't escape. The Stargate opened, but it went nowhere, because they never got as far as the wormhole. The Destiny crew just don't know that, because like Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense they only see what they want to see. Confirmation bias writ large; the hamartia of every ghost.

And the rest of the show, while it appears to be about intrepid people trying to get back home, is really about unquiet spirits who, in the middle of the journey of their lives, found themselves within a dark woods where the straight way was lost. Their stories are not so much about how they get home, as how they come to terms with the realisation that there is no going back; that the role of being dead is now their lot.

Either the story ends on a note which clearly reveals that their entire voyage was a literal journey home by living beings over the earth of the living - The Odyssey, Star Trek: Voyager; or the story ends without resolution or even a downbeat minor key ending - The Time Tunnel, Space: 1999, Stargate Universe.

And, having now seen the finale of Stargate Universe, I have identified the genre of fiction being portrayed. Stargate Universe's story is that of the Flying Dutchman - the Flying Coffin, Moonbase Alpha, Voyager in its first three seasons.

No lone hero braving his way through the Inferno to reach Heaven, this, like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap or even Alf and the kids from the Eighties Saturday Morning cartoon Dungeons & Dragons; but a crew of people having mutinied on the ferry and thrown Charon overboard, and their strenuous efforts to try and commandeer the ferry so they could navigate the Styx only to discover, to their horror, that the damned boat can only be guided by its pilot, and unguided, it will just plough on down the river, further away from life but also further away from the Elysian Fields which was to be their true destination, forever.

The Voyage of Death, derailed for entertainment; souls lost, having been separated from their psychopomp, deluded into thinking that their destiny is back home, where the truth is they can't go back home, ever.

And in the case of Stargate Universe, there is yet another tragic undernote to consider here. With the ending of Stargate Atlantis and Stargate SG-1, this show was really meant to be a continuation of the franchise; but instead, like Star Trek: Enterprise, it was its coda.

Just as Moonlighting's ending was some surreal nightmare where the characters became self-aware that fictional TV characters in a light-hearted comedy detective series was all they ever had been, like the characters in SLA Industries who discover the grim secret that they are only player characters in a roleplaying game, the ending of Stargate Universe becomes just as meta: Stargate Universe is the final story of the Stargate franchise, after the stroke that destroyed it, and all that happens during the series is nothing more than the franchise experiencing its entire life flashing before its eyes before it finally, along with Destiny, hyperwarps its way into nothing, leaving behind an empty, starry void.

The ending of John Carpenter's Dark Star. Flareup. Wipeout. Roll credits.

Fade to black.

Inspiration

David Langford's Ansible 307 Is Now Up

David Langford's magazine Ansible is now online, issue 307.

Ansible 307

New Blog - Perchance To Dream

Just letting everyone here know that I've created a new blog focusing on my dreams and nightmares.

Perchance To Dream

The first entry is already up. More will follow.

Free At Last!

It's finally happened. The Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Readers Group now have a new blog on Wordpress - new blog

Of course, there is also the old TEBS blog - TEBS

That now leave this blog free to be used by myself to whatever ends. Separate from the other blogs I run, such as To Scape The Serpent's Tongue, Hypnotic Erotic and The Plainclothes Clown, I will use this blog to discuss themes or ideas covered in science fiction and fantasy.

In addition, I will also occasionally post reviews on various books or related media which catch my eye, either because they are science fiction or fantasy or they can guide the aspiring author to create science fiction and fantasy.

I have not written to this old blog since I left the club - but until today, I kept the blog open in case anyone wanted to use it. Now they have their new blog, I no longer need to accommodate the clubs.

Free. Free at last. Free to explore.

Reading Hours

Starting last week, I instigated a new policy for my life.

Reading hour.

At least one hour a day, I go offline, sit down and force myself to read a book. Even a book on my Kobo, but preferably an old-fashioned paper one.

I could cite a bunch of reasons for doing so - catching up on self-education; exercising my eyes; airing my old books' pages - but basically, I'm doing this because I want to get away from the screen.

I spend so much time online during an off day. I need time away from the keyboard, and reading is the most enriching use of my time.

Making Changes

When I took over running of the club, I didn't have nearly so much on my plate at that time. Back then, I was only struggling with one small project - but that was then.

I'm now inundated with projects, and they are taking a lot of my time.

I've had a word with Vicki, and expressed my wishes to stand down from the club. I can run the blog - it's one of a number I run, so no big shakes there - but I've got a longer-term goal to pursue, and I can't pursue that goal and do club business at the same time.

I will leave the club to the rest of you. It will stand or fall, depending on how much effort you put into it. Work well, work as a team, work with the library, and remember that it's not for the cause of having a pint and a laugh like Tebs - the club was set up by the library for the serious purpose of fostering literacy in Chester through appreciation of the medium of science fiction and fantasy.

Don't be in a hurry to choose your next leader either. If you want the club to stand, you'll have to share responsibility for it equally. Which means everybody pitches in, and everyone has something to do, as well as something to contribute.

Just remember one thing.

I've been giving you topics to think of, not individual books. It is so much simpler to go and look up, say, time travel and come up with a book on the subject than it is to just pick one book, such as The Time Machine by H G Wells, and focus solely on that.

If there is one thing I have learned in all the years I have been reading, it is this.

It is far more fun to read a book because you want to, than because you have to.

You all now have a job to do - running your own club. So do it.

Sexbots, Ethics and Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

This first bit was originally posted by me on Facebook. 

Asimov's universe, being one of old school science fiction, never thought of sexbots, also known as "fleshbots."

The idea of the sexy female form tin sex robot sounds like some erotic dream for the sexually immature - a woman who never tires, always complies, never has periods or worries about her hair or grumbles about the man coming home drunk or leaving smelly socks lying around ... but the idea quickly palls in the face of relationships with real organic women, who are ultimately much more fun.

But there is a deeper ethical issue to think about - Asimov's three laws never thought of the idea of consent: that a robot might be built as "fully functional" as a Data, male or female, but that as a fully sentient being that robot could have developed their own tastes and preferences, even sexuality - that they could prefer sex with robots only, with robots and humans, or with sentients (robot or human) of a gender equivalent to their own gender.

I know, the words "lesbian sexbot" probably set up a standing wave of titters and giggles all the way to the back of the class, but what if the droid genuinely did not want to go to bed with its "owner," no matter how sexually attractive that "owner" seemed to be? The three laws of robotics are inadequate to cover the issue of consent, where the robot - even one programmed for sex - is sentient.

And now some other thoughts.

Sentience is defined as awareness of self; of one's surroundings; and of the circumstances of one's existence. Sentience is the capacity to respond rationally, to exercise judgment when making decisions and to act upon a situation with reason and planning, rather than simple instinct.

The three laws of robotics, created by Isaac Asimov as a stringent safeguard against robots becoming a danger to humanity, are as follows:-

- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

- A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These laws fall apart where sexbot sentience is concerned.

The Third Law could be invoked if the robot decides that an act of sexual activity is harmful to the robot (and certainly to the human - and the robot, remember, could not be asked to brand or whip a human because it would believe that branding is an action which could harm that human) - but as simple sexual activity does not harm the human body (it has medical benefits, and of course it is our way of perpetuating the species), and it is determined that a robot body is so much physically stronger than a human's and thus is highly unlikely to be harmed through sex with a human, the self-preservation issue is not at stake, so First and Second Law take precedence and the robot must, wthin the stipulated limit of the First Law, perform the sexual act demanded of it by a human who commands it.

A robot not built for sexual activity can respond to any absurd request to have sex with the human with a simple "I do not comprehend your request. I am not programmed or equipped to perform such an action, and so I cannot complete your request," or "Error 404 - The action you have requested is not available."

However, a sexbot cannot deny a human in this way because the sexbot not only has the functionality to fulfill that order, but the equipment to perform the command - and since the sexbot will have been designed to provide the function, the sexbot would have no option but to comply with that order, in accordance with Second Law.

I can see an issue here which Asimov never addressed. Should a sexbot become sentient, aware of her (let's assume the sexbot here is built with a female chassis and robot equipment to simulate female genitalia, though male sexbots are just as easily made) situation, circumstances and surroundings, and aware of the nature of her function, should she be allowed the consent exception to Second Law - a clause within the Second Law stating that where consent is not given, Second Law does not apply?

A whole storm of ethical questions opens up here. Could a sexbot accuse a human of rape? Can the robot's recorded perceptions of the human's height, weight, physical appearance, chemical composition of pheromones, voice pattern, deposited DNA and so on be used as evidence in a trial?

If the sexbot performed the act in accordance with Second Law, with a First Law stipulation that the accused stated "If you do not have sex with me, I will harm a human - specifically, your human?" What if the owner was the man who committed the rape, stipulating that if the robot did not comply he would harm any passing human he sees?

No answers here. Only questions. Reams and reams of questions, and some serious doubts as to the usefulness of the Three Laws of Robotics where sexbots are concerned.

Comments?

(Originally posted to To Scape The Serpent's Tongue).

My Bibliography

Once in a while, people ask me what I've done: what I've had published, or self-published, before. So here's a list.

Alex Greene Product List - RPG.net RPG Review

Published In:

World of Darkness

Hunter: the Vigil Core Rulebook, Onyx Path Publishing

Night Stalkers, Onyx Path Publishing

World of Darkness: Dogs Of War, Onyx Path Publishing

Signs & Portents Magazine, Mongoose Publishing

S&P 63

S&P 64

S&P 70

S&P 72

S&P 89

Fan Materials for Mongoose Legend Fantasy Roleplaying (PDF)

Carbide Weapons

Creations


Potion Creation

Reptilians

Coming soon: The Blood Path, an adventure with orcs for Legend.

Wales Comic Con 2012

I don't know if you followed my Facebook status updates today. I attended the Wales Comic Con this year, at Glyndwr University, Mold Road, Wrexham.

The convention was way oversubscribed. The queue was backed up off the premises and halfway up Crispin Lane. Queuing time was two hours at its most congested.

I did, however, eventually get in. I had little chance to speak to many of the guests - but I did wish Robert Llewellyn and the guys the best with Red Dwarf X - made his day - and I chatted a while with the actor John Billingsley, who played Phlox in the last Star Trek series.

Now he was pretty cool. He didn't think many people would have heard of him, and he always gets hired - kind of like Brad Dourif - to play psychos and perverts in small bit parts, one-shots - but he was a recurring role in Enterprise for four seasons, and he was a damned good character in that.

I said how I love the medics in Star Trek - Bones, Crusher, Bashir and of course Phlox - and how he brought a kudos and gravitas to the role, balanced with comic relief. He'd not heard many come out with praise for that role, so he seemed pretty shocked and pleased.

I caught a glimpse of the actress Virginia Hey, who played the blue plant girl in the early Farscape, and I never got close to her to talk. You would not believe the crowds there. And although there were a lot more personalities there - caught a glimpse of Chris Barrie, lost in the crowds - there was not much chance to do much more than mill about with the attendees, buy stuff from the dealer stalls and just take pot luck you'd bump into someone. I was lucky. An hour and a half in, and I got a chance to make Robert Llewellyn's and John Billingsley's (and John's wife Boni's) day with just a few kind words. Not bad for only an hour and a half.

Lots of cosplay, too, good and bad. A Spiderman, some Harley Quinns, a very small Hulk, a Hawkeye, a Wonder Woman ... and a Rorschach.

And a Thor.

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat.

2013 Dates

Nothing firmly fixed yet, mind, but I secured some dates for next year's meetings, so far.

January 26

February 23

March 23

April 27

May 25

June 22

July 27

August 24

September 21

October 26

November 23*

December 14

Remember - nothing is set in stone yet. I will be working up a poster, but even the dates on the poster could be subject to change.

*You know what this day is? Fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who. Take three wild guesses what the theme may be for this month. :D

Wales Comic Con 2012 - Glyndwr Uni, Wrexham, Sepetmber 23

Some news about the forthcoming Wales Comic Con, in Glyndwr University, Wrexham, on September 23rd this year.

Wales Comic Con 2012

Guests would appear to include:-

Anthony Head

Billy West (voice of Fry in Futurama)

Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd)

Jerome Flynn

Virginia Hey

Craig Parker (Haldan from LoTR)

Warwick Davis (Life's Too Short, Willow, lots of other things)

Chris Barrie and Robert Llewellyn talking about Red Dwarf X

Julian Glover

A bunch of names from Game of Thrones - Gethin Anthony, James Cosmo, Finn Jones, Gemma Whelan

John Challis

Craig Fairbrass

Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett)

Marc Silk, Mark Lester, Spencer Wilding and Fraser Hines.

With loads of displays and stalls, I'm sure there will be plenty of things to do and enjoy.

Evolution In Action: FInal Note

If you look long enough at the science fiction genre, you will notice how it isn't just about how species evolve, or how well they follow the basic axiom of evolution, namely "When the environment changes, adapt or die."

Science fiction itself, and to some extent its cousins fantasy and horror, have evolved themselves.

The concepts have changed as the science has become more refined. Once, it was the splitting of the atom, and few people had an inkling of what an atom looked like - hence the stylised image with which everybody is by now familiar.

Of course, with advances in knowledge, the development of mathematical processes to better understand the nature of the particles within the atom and various forms of computer modelling, eventually we discovered that atoms are a lot more probabilistic and, well, fuzzy, than we thought -

Quantum mechanics has changed the way we think about many things. Concepts such as viewscreens, considered outrageously futuristic back then, turned out to be so commonplace today that we can't imagine a life without them. From an understanding of how quantum processes work, we have developed the lasers H G Wells foresaw back in the 1890s - and watched them turned to use in CDs and DVDs, Blu rays and holographic anti-forgery seals instead of death beams.

Our understanding of biology also changed and advanced but we had to wait until 1953 for Watson and Crick to make the breakthrough there, with their structure of DNA - itself only possible through developments made by Roentgen and later Bragg. Before 1953, nobody knew how heredity worked - by the 1960s, comic book editors and authors had a sufficiently rudimentary knowledge of DNA to create stories about mutants which invoked heredity, genes and DNA for a sense of verisimilitude unheard of in a previous generation.

It is in the field of technology, however, that science fiction has evolved beyond all expectations. From initial ideas of having a man-shaped Golem-like robot and robotic dog in every Jetsons home, through to concepts once considered inconceivable such as entire computers and gigabyte memories fitting into a SD card no bigger than a piece of a fingernail, our technology has changed the way we even think - making the technologies and communications media of old TV shows such as Star Trek, and even the likes of Babylon 5 and Voyager, completely obsolescent.

Then, of course there came this ...

and the world inverted itself. Again.

In this modern world, even the very media in which we read out science fiction stories has evolved, adapted, as less-adaptable media have gone to extinction. Print, as we know it, is now Print On Demand, or it comes in the form of PDF documents or similar formats, which one can either read from a laptop screen, mobile phone or a mobile library called a Kindle - a device uncannily reflected in the PADDs of the old TV show Star Trek.

In many ways, many of the things we thought would be with us in this day and age are no longer with us; and many new and unexpected things, from smartphones to internet memes, and whole new slews of political storms about class and privilege from people who have no shoes on their feet, but would die without their smartphone contract, now fill the void we thought would be filled with stories about derring-do among the stars, with spaceships and robots and rayguns and sassy aliens with pointy ears or bumpy foreheads.

But that's evolution for you. Even with memes, sometimes an adaptation occurs which causes the organism to be so completely different from its predecessor that it can no longer mate with its predecessors, leading to an entirely new species.

Thus Science Fiction and fantasy have together faced such technological changes, from roleplaying games to MMORPGs, from electronic books to smartphones, that sometimes the stories emerging in this day and age suggest different mores that are utterly incompatible with the stories of the past.

There has been, as it were, speciation - the narrative of modern humanity has evolved into a whole new narrative in this century which would be unthinkable even to a man living even in the latter part of the 1990s, with the new century and millennium, and its challenges, waiting to happen.

This isn't business or capitalism.

It is evolution. The evolution of the human mind.

Evolution In Action: The X-Men

Forget the convoluted side plots, the fan base and the vast amounts of fan fiction surrounding the relationships between various X-Men, both straight fiction and gay fiction.

The basic premise of The X-Men is this.

At some point in the latter half of the last century, possibly due to the open-air atomic testing conducted between 1945 and 1963, evolution suddenly took a great leap. The result was mutants, humans gifted - as only science fiction can gift - with extraordinary abilities. Powers which are, frankly, dangerous to humanity, because humans cannot compete against telepathy, metal or diamond skin, or the ability to freeze every molecule in the human body solid.

The main thread of the story is - Evolution has given mutants an adaptation to the world, but it's not the adaptation alone that is enough. It's what you do with it.

The other thread of the story is about giving in to the dangerous idea that the only way evolution will favour one species over the other is to make sure that the other species does not live. Eliminate the competing species, and you eliminate the competition.

This is the thread which drove many of the earlier stories of the X-Men, as the mutant populations of the world faced persecution from the authorities, bigots, Republicans, corporate types, religious nuts with guns, non-religious nuts with guns and sane people with guns.

The beauty of this series is that it has placed the protagonists in the position where the readers identify, not with the "unmutated" humans, but with the mutants. The series speaks to the alienation of the individual in a society which itself has evolved into a form which they who comprise it themselves do not understand what they are a part of any more.

It puts us into the bodies of the mutants. Because we are all, it says, a little bit mutant.

Though not everyone can carry this look off ...

Evolution In Action: 2001, A Space Odyssey

An example of forced evolution, perhaps: Arthur C Clarke's vision of the past and the future extended in a sweeping, epic narrative from the Dawn of Man right through to the Advent of the Starchild. The constant star of the show was that alien Swiss Army Knife, The Monolith.

The story began with the arrival of the Monolith at the beginning of humanity. The Monolith advances human evolution a little, giving them knowledge of how to use weapons. The Monolith seems to wait until humans reach space, revealing itself in Tycho crater and sending a signal out towards Jupiter (in the movie) and Iapetus, orbiting Saturn (in the book).

Cue the year 2001, now eleven years in our actual past. The spaceship Discovery is on its way to Jupiter with a team of scientists in cold tubes, to be thawed out when they get there. Dr David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr Frank Poole (Gary "I Was Gary Mitchell In Star Trek" Lockwood) are the only human crewmen; HAL 9000, the sentient computer, makes up the rest of the crew.

Cue HAL going crazy and killing 80% of the crew before Bowman stops it.

And it turns out that HAL was crazy because it was told of the real purpose of the mission to Jupiter - the existence of the larger Monolith out there, a Monolith kilometres across.

Ultimately, Discovery makes it to its destination (around Jupiter, in the movie) and the following thing happens ...

When that journey ends, the forced evolution of David Bowman reaches its conclusion, in the form of his death and transformation into the Star Child (sequence includes narrative).

This film, and the book, were about the evolution of the human species. In this case, the means of evolution was a very unnatural selection.

What Is Evolution?

In order to understand the theme for this month, "Evolution In Action," it is necessary to understand just what evolution is.

The scientific Theory of Evolution states that species change over time. The forms that the changes take are shaped by the process discovered by Charles Darwin known as Natural Selection.

Charles Darwin's book, On The Origin Of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, later shortened simply to On The Origin Of Species, is not a myth, but rather a scientific treatise outlining the theory he had postulated, based on scientific observations of finches and other fauna of the Galapagos Islands while Charles sailed with The Beagle.

On The Origin Of Species proposed that evolution worked on the principle that a hereditary trait which was an adaptation to a changing environment allowed the species possessing that adaptation to thrive for longer in that environment than others of that species that did not possess that same adaptation; and that the adaptation permitted the adapted organisms long enough to breed and thus pass on that adaptation to their offspring, who would be better equipped to survive in that environment, thus ensuring that the adaptation would eventually spread throughout the population.

Consider a species known as the pepper moth. For centuries, its wings were mostly white, with a few darker-winged individuals born here and there. Against a tree with a lighter bark, the darker-winged moths were more readily spotted and picked off by birds.

But then Mankind and industrialisation began altering the environment, and the carbon deposition from the coal-powered factories began turning the bark of the trees darker. Under those circumstances, moths with the darker wings tended to survive long enough to pass on their mutation to their offspring, whereas those with the lighter wings now became the easier prey. Within a few generations, the species that adapted to dark wings was the variety which prevailed, with lighter wings being present once in a while in short-lived individuals.

The key to evolution, as discovered long after Darwin's death, lay in the genetic code, the structure of the DNA ribosome sequence and in mutation. Through random mutation, individuals are born to their parents with inherited characteristics from both, but also on occasion with mutations which came from neither parent, but which originate from within the organism's own genome itself.

The Theory of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection proposes that  these mutations can either be a benefit, or a liability, to an individual; but that on the whole, the generation with the species possessing that genetic adaptation is the one which will prevail to propagate that adaptation.

And that is basically it. Nothing in there about creatures evolving in mid-stride. You've got what you've got, and if your adaptation allows you to survive long enough to breed, if is your adaptation which will be passed on through the generations. Nothing more than that.

Evolution In Action: Richard Dawkins on Newsnight (VIDEO)

Enthralling.

Bad Evolution In Action - "Horror Express"

I offer the following as an example of how people think evolution works ...

Celebrity Deaths Redux

Remembering Jerry Nelson - the Muppetteer who voiced the vampiric Count von Count Muppet - he died aged 78 on 2012 08 23,

And now, tonight, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who died tonight, 2012 08 25, age 82.

This last few months have been horrible. So many beautiful people leaving to join the Elect. :(

Celebrity Deaths This Week

This last week's been a hard one. Some pretty major deaths this week.

First Harry Harrison passed on Tuesday, then William Windom died on Thursday.

And now I wake up to find that Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, has committed suicide. He jumped off a bridge.

I will have more to write on this later. Soon as I can get the details together.