TV

The Origins of Original Sin

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’m now caught up on Horizon again. Yesterday’s episode was titled “Are You Good or Evil?” and looked at the psychology, neurology and genetics of evil. Here are a few highlights.

Contrary to what Christianity teaches, it seems that most children are born with an innate sense of empathy and morality. (I’m a bit dubious about this one, for the same reasons I’m dubious about psychological tests of gendered behaviour.)

There are clear diagnostic brain patterns that are indicative of psychopathic behaviour. Put someone under an MRI scanner and you can tell if they are a potential psychopath.

Psychopathic behaviour is also linked to a particular gene. Having the diagnostic brain pattern and the “warrior gene” is very bad news.

Even so, a happy childhood and moral upbringing can make a decent human out of someone with all of these diagnostic indicators. An abusive childhood coupled with the diagnostic indicators is likely to create a very dangerous individual. (Radical feminists please note: we have both nature and nurture at work here.)

Well adjusted psychopaths can find other outlets for their antisocial tendencies. The proportion of people with the diagnostic indicators is four times higher in the senior management of big corporations than it is in the general population as a whole.

It’s a shame that the programme couldn’t find anyone who had tested politicians. Psychopaths are characterized by a great deal of charisma and lack of moral compass, which sounds to me like an ideal combination for politics.

If you write horror fiction, I think you’ll get a lot of food for thought from this programme.

Getting Ready to Flip?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’m a bit behind with Horizon as there’s a new episode showing right now, but today I got to watch the previous one, “The Core”. Once again I’m impressed.

The programme is all about the innards of the planet we call home. The center of the Earth is a lump of nickel-iron alloy almost as big as the Moon. But it is not a spherical lump of rock. Experiments putting the material under high temperature and pressure in a laboratory show that under those conditions it forms rod-like crystals. The Earth’s inner core, therefore, is a giant cluster of linear crystals. Some of the properties of the core are defined by its structure including, of course, its magnetic field. The north-south alignment follows the alignment of the crystals.

But things are not that simple. Surrounding the inner core is a sea of molten metal about the same diameter as Mars. Like all fluids, it is dynamic, and can be turbulent. The “weather” in this outer core affects how the magnetic field behaves.

We have known for a long time that the Earth’s magnetic field sometimes flips. What is now the north pole has spent time as magnetic south, and vice versa. These changes have happened as often as five times in a million years, but there hasn’t been one for almost 800,000 years. It looks like we may be due.

What geologists have discovered, however, is that the flip is not a sudden event. Indeed, there are parts of the outer core where the field is already reversed. One of the most notable is an area currently centered under Uruguay which causes the South Atlantic Anomaly. We don’t notice this much of the time because the magnetic field that we experience is the sum of the fields generated by all parts of the core. If you were to stand in Montevideo with a compass it would not point south. However, if you measured the strength of the field it would be a lot less than you would find at other points on the globe.

Where this can matter is out in space. The Earth’s magnetic field protects us from all of the charged particles thrown out by the sun. Where the field is weaker, the Van Allen Belts, where those particles are confined, are closer to the surface. That’s still a long way up, but the Hubble telescope has to switch off its instruments when it passes over the Anomaly because of the interference. Astronauts have been affected as well, though as yet none of them have become superheroes.

So, are we due for a flip? If so, how soon, and what will the effects be?

Of course we don’t know. This will be the first time that human civilization has experienced a flip. We do know, however, that the South Atlantic Anomaly has been getting more pronounced of late. We know that the overall strength of the magnetic field has been falling constantly since regular measurements began in the 19th Century. And archaeological evidence suggests that the field was twice as strong in Roman times as it is now.

The good news is that no major extinction events have been correlated with past flips. There may be particular problems for species that depend on the magnetic field for things such as navigation on migrations, but it seems like the field still protects us from most of what the sun throws at us, and life will continue to be possible during a flip.

What a flip will do to our increasingly electronics-based technology is another matter.

Those of you outside the UK who are blocked from using the iPlayer might like to investigate TunnelBear. I have not used it, but Neil Gaiman has been tweeting happily about it while he has been in the UK so it may work the other way around too.

Gaiman v Mullan – Smackdown?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

As many of you will know, Neil Gaiman has been attending the Edinburgh Book Festival. As part of the entertainment he was interviewed on stage by the critic, John Mullan, who has something of a track record of looking down his nose at SF&F. The event was podcast by The Guardian. How did it go?

I was amused at the beginning to hear Claire Armistead introduce Neil as someone who had become very popular in the USA, as if it was necessary to excuse featuring a writer who was unknown here in the UK. However, Mullan very wisely stuck to letting Neil talk, which is something Neil does very well. There is one section in the middle where Neil talks about the relationship between fantasy and reality, but unless the podcast has been cleverly edited it doesn’t appear to have been in response to an attack from Mullan.

If you listen to the podcast you can hear Neil talk about the origins of American Gods, and about his hopes for the planned TV series. He does not mention that the book won a Hugo, or how he reacted at the time, which is probably just as well. In addition he talks about which writer he thinks wrote rather too much, and which one he wishes would write more. Enjoy.

Building Better Babies

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

The new season of Horizon continues to provide lots of food for thought. This week’s episode, “The Nine Months That Made You”, looks at how the environment in the womb may affect the future lives of babies.

If you think about it, it is fairly obvious. We undergo far more “development” before we are born than afterwards. If we, as children and adults, are sensitive to diet and chemicals in the environment, how much more sensitive must we be as foetuses? It is certainly worth investigating.

The bulk of the program revolved around the idea that our susceptibility to things like heart disease and diabetes is a function of the quality of nutrition we get in the womb, as well as of diet and lifestyle after we are born. The statistical evidence presented seemed fairly convincing, and the doctors in India who worked on the project were convinced enough to launch a large-scale and long-term experiment in Mumbai to try to improve the health of the poor by improving the diet of young women.

This isn’t a simple process. It is not just a question of making sure that pregnant mothers get enough to eat. The levels of micro-nutrients such as vitamins are apparently crucial. Also it is a multi-generational project. Some of the factors involved may depend on whether certain genes are switched on in the mother’s eggs and, as women are born with a fully stocked ovaries, your ability to bear a healthy child may be in part dependent on the quality of diet your mother had when she was bearing you.

What interested me most, however, was when they went beyond health issues and started to look at personality. There was a nice experiment in which they showed that foetuses have clear personalities (something that most mothers know, but doctors need to prove), so the sort of person we become is not entirely down to our environment and upbringing.

Another experiment related the level of testosterone in the womb to the type of gendered behaviour shown by the resulting children. Girls exposed to higher levels of testosterone are apparently more likely to exhibit gendered behaviour that is generally associated with boys. I’m pretty sceptical of such experiments because they are often carried out by people with a poor understanding of gender, and with lots of cultural bias, but it does hold out the possibility of starting to understand the origins of transsexuality.

Talking of gender differences, I saw a report yesterday that purported to explain why women are much less fond of horror movies than men. Apparently women get much more stressed by the clues that something bad is about to happen. Again I am sceptical of such things. There may be a lot of cultural training and expectation involved here. All I can say is that I’m very female-typical here and always have been. My mum had to take me out of The Wizard of Oz when I first saw it because I found it too scary.

Of course I also view such things as a science fiction reader. If we can build better babies, how far will people take this? How much human variation do we want to “cure”? Whereas the treatments being given to poor women in Mumbai are cheap and simple, what procedures will be developed that only the rich can afford? Science, as always, is a double-edged sword.

Optical Illusions

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Judging from Twitter, most of my UK-based friends spent all of last night glued to the television news. Except, of course, for the idiots like me who spent it working. But today I caught up with some other TV, because there is a new series of the BBC’s science program, Horizon, just started, and the opening episode is well worth a dive into the iPlayer archives.

The program looks at the idea of color, how we perceive it, and what effect it has on us. Many of the findings may surprise you. For example, color influences not just our emotions, but also how awake we feel, and even our sense of the passage of time. Color perception is different for different people as well. For example, your ability to tell the difference between two colors depends heavily on how the language you speak divides up the spectrum into categories. That’s because as a child you learn to distinguish colors on the basis of the words you learn to describe them. And that’s fascinating because it means that our experience of art can be subjective on a very basic level.

Interestingly, our ability to perceive color is dependent on our expectations. So, for example, we will identify a banana as yellow under a range of different lighting conditions, but a patch of yellow paint has no such clues. That means that our brains are making up the color we see, based on their expectations of what we are looking at.

Color can also influence what we think we are seeing. In combat sports contestants are randomly allocated blue or red clothing. Experiments, including digitally altering the color of film, suggest that expert judges will tend to favor the contestant in red. Studies of sports at the Olympics suggest that in a close bout wearing red confers a significant advantage.

All of this is fascinating, but I can’t help but wonder if it is the tip of a very big iceberg. I have this sneaking suspicion that an awful lot of what we think that we see is influenced by our environment, and by our expectations of the things we are looking at.

For those of you who don’t have access to the iPlayer, there is an article about some of the issues raised during the program here.

TV Gets Interesting

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday the news broke that Playtone Productions, which is part-owned by Tom Hanks, will be producing a TV series based on Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-winning novel, American Gods. Forbidden Planet International has more details here.

Quite often us bookish types complain that we don’t want to see a whole novel squashed down into a 3-hour movie. In this case, however, we have a single novel being turned into six 10-12 episode seasons. Each episode is an hour, so we are talking 60+ hours of TV (though “hour” may mean 45 minutes when ad breaks are taken out). Compare that to A Song of Ice & Fire in which each book is only one season. Interesting. I see that Neil is on board as executive producer and writer, so maybe there will be additional material.

What I really want to see, however, is the Hugo logo in the credits.

Meanwhile Salman Rushdie has been talking to The Guardian about his plans for a science fiction TV series, which he is writing instead of a new novel. Part way through the interview Rushdie comes out with this:

“It’s not exactly sci-fi…”

Wait for it…

“…in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it”

Well played, Mr. Rushdie, well played.

A Waste of My Taxes

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Everyone knows that the UK’s Press Complaints Commission is a big joke, an operation run by the media with the express remit of whitewashing everything that the media does. When the BBC misbehaves, however, the government has to get involved, and complaints are apparently handled by Ofcom, the communications regulator. Are they any better? There are no prizes for guessing the answer.

My story begins several months back when a Thai airline decided to hire a few kathoey as stewardesses. Monica Roberts has a recent blog here with pictures of the successful applicants. In the wake of this a “comedian” on the BBC did a sketch purporting to show what would happen if that sort of thing happened in the UK. Christine Burns has more background here, but the basic details of the “joke” were that:

  • Trans women can, and indeed should, be laughed at;
  • Trans women are not just ugly, they are so repulsive that people seeing them are likely to vomit; and
  • Trans women are not women, they are heterosexual men who are liable to sexually assault women in public.

A more textbook case of a dehumanizing portrayal of a minority group would be hard to find. And yet Ofcom managed to find the whole thing entirely innocent, claiming that it was only making fun of budget airlines. It is a piece of whitewashing on a par with an inquiry finding that the prisoner died of natural causes, and the mass of boot-shaped bruises, broken ribs and cracked skull must have happened when he fell out of bed. They even had the cheek to say that the BBC “could have made is clearer that the characters were not intended to be based on transgender or transsexual people.” Exactly how would that be possible when the whole point of the sketch was to respond to the fact that trans people were being given jobs instead of, you know, beaten up or murdered or something?

Paris Lees has a great post on the human cost of trans people being treated with contempt in this way by people supposed to safeguard the public.

In regulatory economics we have a term for this sort of thing. It is “regulatory capture”, and it is what happens when a regulator becomes so caught up in the agenda of the industry that they effectively act as a lobbyist for the companies they are supposed to be guarding us against. Regulatory organizations that get into this sort of situation need to either have their senior management fired, or be disbanded. They are quite clearly a waste of public money, and as Mr. Cameron is so keen to make savings he might profitably take a good look at a few over-paid bureaucrats doubtless too fond of a good lunch with their media executive pals.

Of course that’s not going to happen, because the kow-towing to media executives doesn’t just stop with civil servants, does it?

The BBC Book Review Show

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

The BBC has a regular programme called The Review Show. Recently they have decided that once a month they will devote it entirely to books, and the first such episode was aired on Saturday. At the recommendation of Alex Preston I’ve just watched it on iPlayer, and it is well worth a look, especially as the main topic of the program is women’s literature.

The first segment was probably the least successful in that they were trying to have a serious discussion of the Orange Prize nominees in far too little time. On the other hand, whoever was in charge of the show managed to prevent Germaine Greer from saying anything about Annabel, and prevent John Mullan from saying anything about The Tiger’s Wife, and for such small mercies we should all be immensely grateful. The temptation to go for controversy must have been considerable, but the BBC resisted it.

Next up was an interview with Lionel Shriver who sounded very smart and had a very appropriate anecdote from Cannes. You are so right, Lionel dear, but at least you now have a McQueen dress, which is not to be sniffed at.

The bit of the show I liked best was the round table discussion between Fay Weldon, Joanne Harris, Lesley Pearse and Ruth Rendell on the subject of sexism in the publishing industry. Of course I liked it because they said exactly the same things that I (and many other people) have been saying for some time, but it is good to hear those things said on TV. When they came back to the studio, Denise Mina totally nailed the problem, and John Mullan tried to laugh the whole thing off on the grounds that the ladies were exaggerating everything. I guess it must have been their hormones…

Finally there was news of posthumous book releases from Beryl Bainbridge and Daphne Du Maurier. Bainbridge, I’m afraid, is not really my cup of tea, though I do now want to study her sentences. The Du Maurier, however, sounded fascinating. It is a collection of early short stories, five of which have only recently been discovered and are therefore new publications [Update: Sadly not – see Ellen Datlow’s comment below]. They are also horror. I hope that the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy juries have their eye on the ball here.

The title story of the collection, “The Doll”, tells the tale of a young man who discovers that the girl he loves keeps a life-size male doll as a companion. They read a short section out on the programme and another writer leapt immediately to mind. Here’s a bit I found on the Amazon web site:

I want to know if men realise when they are insane. Sometimes I think that my brain cannot hold together, it is filled with too much horror – too much despair …I cannot sleep, I cannot close my eyes without seeing his damned face. If only it had been a dream.

That’s right, it sounds very much like Lovecraft.

Thank You, @NeilHimself

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

Well, Neil Gaiman’s episode of Doctor Who appears to have gone down very well with the fan audience, doubtless to the extreme relief of all involved. Personally I didn’t doubt Neil’s knowledge of the series, or his ability to deliver a good story. He did, however, still manage to give me a very pleasant surprise. I missed it the first time through because we couldn’t hear the sound in the Ramada bar, and subtitles were not turned on until after the key lines had been delivered, but I watched it on iPlayer yesterday and was very happy.

Because the Doctor regenerates on a regular basis, female fans have long asked why he couldn’t regenerate as a woman. This has happened in fan fiction, and perhaps most famously in the 1999 Comic Relief spoof episode, “Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death”, which ended with the Doctor regenerating as Joanna Lumley.

However, in 2008 Russell (T.) Davies gave an interview in which he stated that a female Doctor would never happen because (eww!) that would make the Doctor a Tranny, and Trannies are much too yucky and pervy for a kids show.

Well, not in those exact words, of course, but that was the clear message. Significantly Davies noted that a female Doctor would require fathers to explain gender reassignment to their sons. Presumably the idea of a female Doctor becoming male would not worry him, because becoming male is something he thinks all women should aspire to.

Davies, however, is very much part of the 20th Century version of the gay establishment which regards transsexuals as people who are “really” gay but are so ashamed of their gayness that they alter their bodies to allow them to have sex with the people they fancy without seeming gay. The existence of transsexuals who identify as gay after transition, or of the various shades of genderqueer folk, is conveniently forgotten.

These days, thankfully, Doctor Who is open to a more flexible view of gender. The story of “The Doctor’s Wife” begins with our hero receiving a distress message from a fellow Time Lord known as Corsair. The Doctor makes it very clear that this person sometimes reincarnated as male, and sometimes as female. As this was said in an actual TV episode, it is now cannon.

Neil has many close friends who are trans people, several of whom he knows much better than he knows me, so I’m not trying to claim that he did this just for me. It is, however, something that he did not need to do, and must have done as a gift to his friends. For that I am profoundly grateful.

Update: Various Doctor Who experts, including Paul Cornell and Graham Sleight, have tweeted to inform me that Steven Moffat wrote a regeneration scene in which The Doctor wonders whether he will comeback as a woman next time. It apparently occurs at the end of “The End of Time” and is repeated at the start of “The Eleventh Hour”. Thanks are therefore also due to Mr. Moffat, though to some extent he simply establishes the possibility of a female Doctor, whereas Neil makes it clear that Corsair is exuberantly genderqueer.

I am leaving the typo in place as it has caused so much amusement. Genre cannon! BOOM!!!

Bureaucrats are Never Wrong

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

One of the first things I did when I moved into The Cottage was buy a TV License. I did, after all, want to be able to watch the rather nice TV that I have here legally. I signed up to pay by direct debit so that I could never forget to pay.

Last month, because I have been here a year (doesn’t time fly!), a new license arrived. All well and good, I thought. But when I got back from Eastercon I found a letter asking me to buy a license. I checked my paperwork and it says my license is valid until March 2012. I went online and checked the official TV License website. It too says I am good until March 2012. So I ignored the letter.

Today I got another letter telling me that I could be fined £1,000 for watching TV without a license and that an Inspector would be calling. I’m going to have to ignore that too.

Why, you ask? Why don’t I just phone them up, or email them, or even write a letter? Because you can’t. The TV Licensing authority is so convinced that it can never make a mistake that it provides no means of challenging these letters. There’s the website, where you can check that you have a license. It says that I do. There’s a phone number, but there are no humans on the other end of it. All that the programmed scripts allow you to do is check if you have a license, and buy one if you don’t. I checked. I have a license.

However, some computer system at the TV License HQ is convinced that I don’t have a license, and the only thing I can do is wait for the Inspector to call and show him the license I have. I have this awful feeling that the Inspector will say that it is more than his job’s worth to go against what the computer records say, and that he’ll have to impound my TV and initiate a prosecution.

I shall talk to the letting agents. Possibly they have access that I don’t.

A Blast from the Past

~ Cheryl

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bryan Talbot has sent me details of an old (1981) Granada TV programme featuring him and Bob Shaw. It is part of a culture series called Celebration and includes an interview with Shaw and a production of one of his short stories, for which Bryan provides some illustrations. Bryan looks very young, Bob looks splendidly alive, and the cars look amazingly antiquated. Some things, however, don’t change. Bob can be heard complaining that science fiction gets no respect, and whenever something written as SF is good people say it is “not science fiction”.

The programme also reminded me of something else. Part of the interview with Bob has him seated at a desk, and on that desk is a familiar rocket-shaped object. It is one of these, which Bob won at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton. There has been much muttering of late about professional writers such as John Scalzi and Fred Pohl winning the Best Fan Writer Hugo. Well Bob won it twice, in 1979 and 1980. He also won the FAAn Award for Fan Writer in 1977 and 1979. And all of this was after his novel, Orbitsville, won the 1976 British Science Fiction Association Award.

Something else that doesn’t change is that TV commercials can be really awful. The show has them at the beginning and end, for which I apologize profusely.

Due to YouTube restrictions the show is split in two parts, which I’m embedding here. The part of the time traveler is played by Jenny Eclair who is apparently famous these days for being in TV programmes that I don’t watch.

More Car Ads

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Kevin tells me that Å koda don’t sell cars in the USA. That means that you folks will be missing out on some seriously cool ads. Four years ago Å koda produced a wonderful ad for their Fabia model in which they made a car entirely out of cake, jelly and the like. The background music was Julie Andrews singing “Favorite Things” (I think the Sound of Music soundtrack version). It is officially available on YouTube but not embeddable, so you will need to click here to see it.

Now Å koda has a new, sportier version of the Fabia available. And there is a new ad to go with it. Here’s what Å koda has to say:

…deep inside of the Å koda factory another incredible process has been taking place. Unbeknownst to the bakers, in an experimental wing where they fear to tread, an expert team of engineers and geniuses have been creating a new Fabia hot-hatch. And you certainly wouldn’t say it was lovely.

Welcome to the meanest car production process known to man.

Oh yes. Here it is.

Anyone know who did the cover version of the song? I’m sure I have heard it before, but my Google-fu is failing me.

Update: Messed up links fixed. Sorry, hadn’t spotted the weird stuff YouTube was doing with the URLs.

Briefly from Dublin

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Hello world. I am in Dublin for Octocon. I’ve been offline for a day or so due to lack of Internet access. I’m staying at a friend’s apartment rather than in the con hotel. However, I am now at the con, and the hotel wifi is working OK in the lobby. People are in the bar, and I plan to go and join them soon.

The place I am staying is very nice, sandwiched between a lovely park and the Royal Dublin Showgrounds. Leinster, and indeed Ireland, have played at the RDS, though with Croke Park now opened up as a rugby venue and the renovations as Lansdowne Road finished I don’t suppose they will do so much in future. In any case, BOD and the boys are playing Saracens at Wembley tomorrow so I won’t have any distractions from the convention.

The first people I saw on arriving at the con hotel were George & Parris. As George noted, the last time I saw them was on the other side of the world and we were both waving around large, chrome-plated phallic symbols. We seem to keep running into each other. George has been checking in on the progress of the Song of Ice & Fire TV series filming, which is being done in Belfast. I’ll have more information on that later in the weekend (and hopefully an interview with George for Salon Futura).

I don’t actually know a lot about the TV series right now. As I confessed to Parris, I had a quick look at the casting, saw that Sean Bean was involved, and stopped paying attention as I knew all I needed to know. I gather I’m not alone in this, though Parris tells me that the young actors cast as the Stark kids and Jon Snow are all unbearably cute and liable to set young hearts a-flutter across the world.

I was able to test this theory. Joining us for lunch were George’s German agent and publisher, Venor, and his two twenty-something daughters. Who did the young ladies want to see? Sean Bean, of course. I rest my case. But I’m sure Parris will be proved right in the long run.

Newman At The Beeb

~ Cheryl

Non-UK friends sometimes ask me what Kim Newman is up to these days. He hasn’t had a new novel out in some time, and they miss him. Well the good news is that there is a new Diogenes Club collection due out from MonkeyBrain next month. That should make you all very happy. But mainly what he gets up to these days is being a TV personality. To prove the point, here he is on a recent appearance on BBC1’s flagship early evening magazine program, The One Show.

Linkage, Etc.

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Herewith, a bunch of things that I have been meaning to post about.

– If you are in the UK, and have the bandwidth, please download Paul Cornell’s Pulse from the BBC iPlayer. The BBC will be counting downloads when deciding whether to commission a series.

– If I’d been more alert yesterday I would have posted about this and got there before The Guardian, but I’m glad they picked up the story. A woman in New York is suing Citibank because, she alleges, they fired her for being too attractive. Apparently her male colleagues were unable to concentrate on their work with her around. For the benefit of those straight male and lesbian readers who would like to check out Ms. Debrahlee Lorenzana’s alleged hotness, here’s The Village Voice with some photos.

– Subterranean is offering a free story, “Elegy for a Young Elk”, by Hannu Rajaniemi. (Yes, he’s one of my Finnish friends. He’s also very good. Just ask Charlie Stross.)

– The New Yorker has published a list of 20 hot new writers under the age of 40. It includes Karen Russell, who featured prominently in the article I bought for last month’s Clarkesworld. Some of the other writers listed have written weird stuff as well. Two of them have been in Best American Fantasy. Of course this didn’t stop people around the blogosphere complaining that the list didn’t include any SF&F writers. Matt Cheney is suitably scathing.

– Meanwhile in The Guardian top Spanish writer, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, has been picking his favorite Gothic novels. The man has excellent taste. Now I’m annoyed with myself for missing his appearance on Sky’s The Book Show.

– Talking of The Book Show, also at Hay this week there was discussion amongst historians about the propriety of fictionalizing historical characters. The Guardian summarizes. I mention this for the benefit for Guy Gavriel Kay, who trots out this argument regularly when asked why he writes fantasy rather than (presumably more acceptable) historical novels.

– My congratulations to everyone at SpaceX for the successful launch of Falcon 9.

– And finally, an amateur astronomer in Australia has shot film of a bright flash on Jupiter. The prevailing theory is that the planet was struck by a large meteor, and the flash was the result of it burning up in Jupiter’s atmosphere. However, we remember how dismissive Ogilvy the astronomer was when he first saw those flashes on the surface of Mars. Who knows what might be coming.

Feeling the Pulse

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

As you may have noticed, I’m not a big fan of TV drama. I tend to have serious suspension of disbelief problems, and find much TV unwatchable. If I want melodrama I can always take a leaf out of Chris Gracia’s book and watch Mexican wrestling. However, Paul Cornell kindly asked if I would take a look at the pilot for his new medical horror series, Pulse, and I was delighted to do so. Paul is, after all, a good friend, both to me personally and to fandom in general. I’m pleased to be able to report that it is rather good.

The story is set in a teaching hospital called St. Timothy’s in which something mysterious is going on behind the scenes. Our heroine, Hannah Carter (Claire Foy) is a trainee doctor whose mother used to be a consultant at the hospital. Sadly mother died recently, but she seems determined to watch over Hannah’s career anyway. Understandably, Hannah is a little unnerved by this. There is other odd stuff going on too, but Hannah appears to be the only member of staff not determined to say nothing in case making a fuss damages her career.

I’m not a great expert on horror films, but it made me jump on several occasions, and watching people getting cut open, albeit in an operating theatre, is guaranteed gruesome. Paul even manages to drop in a particularly vicious “killing” (and no, I’m not going to tell you what those scare quotes are about). I don’t think many people will be disappointed with the ick factor.

The acting seems pretty good too. Claire Foy in particular seems to be someone to watch. She’s also playing Adora Belle Dearheart in Sky’s forthcoming adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, and later this year she makes her big screen debut in Season Of The Witch alongside Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman.

Yesterday Paul blogged the news that the pilot episode will screen on BBC3 at 9pm on Thursday, June 3rd. It is fairly obvious from the pilot that Pulse has been planned as a series with a story arc. But, because of the way the BBC works these days, that series won’t get made unless the pilot gets a good reaction. So Paul needs good audience figures. Please do tune in, even if you do so from behind the sofa.

Neil on CBS

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Those of you who, like me, did not get to see Neil Gaiman’s appearance on CBS Sunday Morning can view that segment online here. They ended up not talking about the Hugos at all, but there are a number of scenes from Worldcon in Montreal. Mostly, of course, they went for people in weird costumes, but there are a few familiar faces. My friend Anne KG Murphy is briefly visible in the background busily keeping Neil’s life smooth and organized.

Eno Speaks

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

I’ve finally got around to watching the Arena special on Brian Eno (thank you, iPlayer). If I were asked to play the dinner party game, Eno would definitely be on my guest list. He’s great at off-the-wall ideas that are very thought-provoking. Here’s something he said during the program.

Asked what artists could do to help change/save the world, Eno replied: “Artists celebrate and draw attention to philosophical ideas.”

Obviously this isn’t true of all artists (though some may claim that it is true of everyone who deserves the title of “artist”). However, next time someone asks me why I read science fiction…

A Gaiman Scoop

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

I have just done a post for the SFX Awards over on SFAW. What I didn’t put in there was the other snippet of news that Dave & Barry of Geek Syndicate tweeted during the ceremony. According to them, Neil Gaiman has written an episode of Doctor Who, which will air in 14 months time. Neil came on Twitter shortly afterwards and said that he had given the SFX guys “a scoop”, which I think we can take as a confirmation. You may squee now.

As Others See Us

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Joe Gordon at Forbidden Planet gets email from the BBC:

Does your avatar do more exercise than you? Are you happier running round World Of War craft than pounding the treadmill at the gym?

If you love playing high-octane games or reading sci-fi and action based comics from the comfort of your sofa, but are turned off at the thought of real exercise, we want to hear from you…

BBC Three is looking for 18-26 year olds who are proud of their lifestyle and leisure choices, to take part in a new series.

Gee, can you say “stereotype”?

15 minutes of fame being what it is, I am sure that they will find someone who fits the bill.