Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  Well, for starters, we get a future less than half a century from now in which the Supreme Court has no objection to throwing people in jail for planning crimes.

  We get a scene where Tom Cruise escapes from the authorities by climbing into a car that's coming off an assembly line and driving away in it. That one really got me muttering at a hundred-decibel level. Has anyone ever seen a car come off an assembly line with a full tank of gas?

  We are told that the three seers/mutants/whatever-they-are can only foresee capital crimes. Even bank robberies slip beneath their psychic radar. But in a crucial scene, one of them predicts or foresees a necessary rainstorm. (I hit 120 decibels on that one.)

  It's also explained that their powers have physical limits. If they're in Washington, D.C., they can't foresee a crime in, say, Wilmington, Delaware. But the villain of the piece, who knows their abilities and limitations better than anyone, plans to use them to control the entire nation, which the last time I looked at a map extends even beyond Delaware. (140 decibels that time.)

  Okay, I'm too serious. These are just entertainments. I should go see one made from a comic book—Hollywood's Intellectual Source Material Of Choice these days—and just sit back and enjoy it.

  Good advice. So we went to see Hulk. You all know the story; it's swiped from enough science fictional sources. I didn't mind the poor animation. I didn't mind the idiot plot that had Bruce Banner's father responsible for his affliction. I didn't mind this; I didn't mind that. Then we came to Thunderbolt Ross, the 5-star general—and suddenly I was muttering again.

  I was willing suspend my disbelief for this idiocy, but alas, I couldn't suspend my common sense. Here's this top military commander, the film's equivalent of Douglas MacArthur or Tommy Franks. And here's the Hulk, who makes Superman look like a wimp. Now, you have to figure that even a moderately bright 6-year-old ought to be able to conclude that if attacking the Hulk and shooting him doesn't hurt him, but just makes him bigger and stronger and angrier and more destructive, the very last thing you want to do when he's busy being the Hulk rather than Bruce Banner is shoot or otherwise annoy him, rather than simply wait for him to change back into his relatively helpless human form. That, however, seems to be beyond both our general and our screenwriters.

  Even the good science fiction movies assume that their audiences are so dumb that logic means nothing to them, as long as you dazzle them with action and zap guns and aliens and the like.

  Take The Road Warrior (a/k/a Mad Max 2), which is truly a fine movie: well-acted, well-conceived, well-directed. And yet . . .

  In The Road Warrior's post-nuclear-war future, the rarest and most valuable commodity in the world is refined oil (i.e., gasoline), because the distances in Australia, where it takes place, are immense, and you can't get around without a car or a motorcycle. The conflict takes place between the Good Guys, who have built a primitive fortress around a refining plant, and the Bad Guys, a bunch of futuristic bikers, who want to get their hands on that gasoline, which is so rare that it's probably worth more per drop than water in the desert.

  So what do the bad guys who desperately need this petrol do? They power up their cars and bikes and race around the refinery for hours on end, day in and day out. If they had the brains to conserve a little of that wasted energy, they wouldn't have to risk their lives trying to replace it. (And, while I'm thinking of it, where do they get the fuel to power their dozens of constantly-running vehicles?)

  Then there were Spielberg's mega-grossing dinosaur movies, Jurassic Park and The Lost World. The former hypothesizes that if you stand perfectly still six inches from a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex he won't be able to tell you're there. I would like to see the screenwriter try that stunt with any hungry carnivore—mammal, reptile, or dinosaur—that has ever lived on this planet. The latter film shows you in graphic detail (and with questionable intelligence) that a T. Rex can outrun an elevated train, but cannot catch a bunch of panicky Japanese tourists who are running away, on foot, in a straight line.

  Although these two films are the prime offenders, simply because Spielberg has the resources to know better, I am deathly tired of the superhuman (uh . . . make that supercarnosaur) feats with which Hollywood endows T. Rex, who seems to be the only terrifying dinosaur of which it was aware until someone told Spielberg about velociraptors. (Give them another decade or two and they might actually discover allosaurs and Utahraptors.)

  T. Rex weighed about seven tons. By comparison, a large African bull elephant weighs about six and a half tons, and could probably give old T. Rex one hell of a battle. But no one suggests that an elephant can throw trucks and trains around, break down concrete walls, or do any of the other patently ridiculous things T. Rex can do on screen.

  And the list goes on and on. In Alien they all go off by themselves to search for the creature; haven't they learned anything from five centuries of dumb horror movies? At the end of Total Recall, Governor Schwarzenegger is outside for maybe six minutes while Mars is being miraculously terraformed. Just how long do you think you could survive on the surface of Mars in 100-below-zero weather with absolutely no oxygen to breathe?

  Some "major" films are simply beneath contempt. I persist in thinking that Starship Troopers was misnamed; it should have been Ken and Barbie Go To War. And if that wasn't a bad enough trick to pull on Robert A. Heinlein after he was dead, they also made The Puppet Masters, which was handled exactly like a 4th remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  Then there's Armageddon, which tries to make the case that it's easier to teach hard-drinking functionally illiterate wildcatters how to be astronauts in a constricted time period than to teach highly intelligent physically fit astronauts how to drill for oil. And Ghod help us, it was Disney's highest-grossing live action film until Pirates of the Caribbean came along.

  And when I was sure it couldn't get any worse, along came the stupidest big-budget film of all time—The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

  Consider:

  1. Alan Quartermain can hit a moving target at 900 yards in the year 1899 A.D. With a rifle of that era.

  2. Bruce Banner—excuse me: Dr. Jekyll—changes into the Hulk—oops: make that Mr. Hyde—and suddenly he's 15 feet tall and even his muscles have muscles. He's a bad guy—except when, at the end, the plot requires him to be a good guy and rescue all the other good guys at enormous personal cost, which he does for no rational reason that I could discern.

  3. Mina Harker is a vampire. She's Jonathan Harker's wife, and Jonathan, as you'll remember, is the guy who visits Dracula and sells him an English estate. (I always felt Dracula shouldn't have stopped terrifying hot-shot realtors with just one, but let it pass.) Well, Mina is a Good Guy, and certainly, given her physical features, a more Extraordinary Gentleman than any of the others. She can fly (Dracula couldn't), she can cross over water (movie vampires can't), and she can command a combat team (honest) of half a million bats. She also drinks blood, but only of Bad Guys.

  4. The Invisible Man joins the team. Well, no one reads H. G. Wells any more, so they announced that the original Invisible Man was dead and this cockney guy has replaced him. He spends most of his time being invisible in sub-zero weather, occasionally mentioning that it's chilly without his clothes on, but he never gets dressed, goes inside, or even puts on a pair of shoes.

  5. Dorian Gray. Well, he's got this picture, see? Oh, and he can't be harmed. Cut him, shoot him, and two seconds later he's whole, unharmed and unmarked. But if he should ever just see his picture, he turns immediately and gruesomely and eternally to dust. Funniest action scene in the picture is a fight to the death (honest!) between Dorian Gray, who literally cannot be harmed or killed, and Mina Harker, who is already dead.

  6. Captain Nemo is a bearded Indian who is a master of karate.

  7. The only Victorian figure missing is Sherlock Holmes, so of course the youngish villain turns out to be Moriarty (who Sherlock killed when he was an aging professor a few years before 1899.)


  8. And, oh yeah, there's an American secret agent named Tom Sawyer, who's about 22 years old—a really neat trick since anyone who's ever read Mark Twain knows that Tom was a teenager before the Civil War.

  I think it's nice that the screenwriter brought back all these Victorian and pre-Victorian characters. It would have been even nicer if he'd ever read a single book in which they appeared.

  How do they travel? In a half-mile-long 20-foot-wide version of the Nautilus. (And as this 2500-foot-long ship is going through the narrow canals of Venice, even Carol couldn't help wondering how it turned the corners.)

  There is a convertible car. (After all, this is 1899. They hadn't invented hardtops yet.) Alan Quartermain and two other Extraordinary Gentlemen have to drive down the broad paved boulevards (broad paved boulevards???) of Venice. There are 200 Bad Guys on the roofs on both sides of the street, all armed with automatic weapons. They fire 18,342 shots at the car—and miss. Alan Quartermain and his ancient rifle don't miss a target for the entire and seemingly endless duration of the film.

  What are the Extraordinary Gentlemen doing? They're stopping Moriarty from getting rich by selling weapons to rival European nations. And where is he getting these weapons? Easy. He has built a two-mile-square fortified brick city in the middle of an ice-covered Asian mountain range, and filled it with thousands of machines capable of creating really nasty weapons. I figure the cost of creating the city, shipping in the tons of iron he has to melt to make weapons, and building/importing the thousands of machines required to build the weapons, set him back about $17 trillion. But he's going to make $200 million or so selling weapons, so he's in profit. Isn't he???

  Every single aspect of the film is on this level. The real Nairobi consisted of two—count them: two—tin-roofed shacks in 1899, but in the movie it's a thriving city. And it's a city in clear sight of Kilimanjaro—which is passing strange, because every time I've been there it's a 2-hour drive just to see Kilimanjaro in the distance. Quartermain lives in a place which I suppose is meant to be the Norfolk Hotel, but looks exactly like an antebellum Southern mansion, complete with liveried black servants who speak better English than Sean Connery (who played Quartermain and will be a couple of lifetimes living it down).

  It's mentioned a few times that Alan Quartermain can't die, that a witch doctor has promised him eternal life. In the end he dies, and despite his having repeated this story about the witch doctor ad nauseum, the remaining Extraordinary Gentlefolk carry his body—unembalmed, I presume—all the way from the Asian mountains to East Africa and bury him there, place his rifle on the grave, and walk away. Then the witch doctor shows up, does a little buck-and-wing and a little scat-singing, and the rifle starts shaking as if something's trying to get out of the grave. End of film. My only thought was: "It's the writer, and they didn't bury the sonofabitch deep enough."

  Okay, I've really got to calm down. I'm starting to hyperventilate as I write this.

  (Pause. Take a deep breath. Relax.) I prefer science fiction to fantasy both as a writer and a reader. I prefer the art of the possible to the impossible, the story that obeys the rules of the universe (as we currently know them, anyway) to the story that purposely breaks them all.

  And yet . . . and yet, for some reason that eludes me, Hollywood, which seems unable to make a good science fiction movie to save its soul (always assuming it has one, an assumption based on absolutely no empirical evidence), has made a number of wonderful fantasy movies that are not intellectually offensive and do not cheat on their internal logic: Field of Dreams, Harvey, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Portrait of Jennie, Something Wicked This Way Comes, even The Wizard of Oz and the Harry Potter films (well, the first one, anyway).

  No, this is not blanket praise for all fantasy films. As I was walking out of The Two Towers I complained to Carol that I'd just wasted three hours watching what amounted to spring training for the real war in the next film. And about three hours into The Return of the King, as I was watching the 20th or 25th generic battle between faceless armies that I didn't care about, I had this almost-unbearable urge to find an usher and say, "Let my people go!"

  But for the most part, I find that fantasy movies don't raise my bile the way science fiction movies do. How can big-budget science fiction films be so ambitious and so dumb at the same time, so filled with errors that no editor I've ever encountered (and that's a lot of editors, including some incredibly lax ones) would let me get away with?

  Uh . . . Carol just stopped by. She said she heard me muttering and cursing and wondered what the problem was. I invited her to read a bit of this article over my shoulder.

  *Sigh* Now she says she won't sit in the same room with me when I'm writing about science fiction movies.

  * * *

  Why Do So Many People Resist the Idea of Global Warming?

  Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

  I think I have the answer.

  During the last two years, I've interviewed many people from many walks of life for my show The Future And You. In these interviews global warming is a topic that pops up frequently. Roughly half of my guests have a strong opinion about it, either agreeing that its existence is a forgone conclusion or disagreeing with its existence on the grounds that it is a fad, or hype or even an outright hoax.

  Many of those who accept the theory of global warming tell me that those who refuse to accept it are self-serving business people who care more about their personal wealth than about the future of our earth.

  While this is a claim I've heard from many mouths, some of them quite learned, my perception is that it says more about the biases of the claimants than about the resisters, since most of the people who resist the idea of global warming are not rich. Instead of having businesses, they have jobs just like everyone else.

  When pointing this out to believers the most popular response I get is: "Well, then the rich business people must have them all fooled." Which again says more about the perceptions of the claimants than about the resisters, since what they are trying to say without voicing it openly is that most people are sufficiently ignorant that they will believe anything they are told as long as they are told it by rich business people.

  Granted, I like to think I'm pretty darned smart, but I absolutely refuse to believe that everyone else is stupid. Not because I find such an elitist argument to be unpalatable—I've been forced by solid evidence to swallow uglier and more painful concepts than that—it's that I don't think it's accurate.

  But if universal gullibility is not the source of the resistance, what is? Clearly the resistance is real; and for it to be so powerful and so pervasive it must come from something important.

  In order to discover its source, I have examined my own resistance to the idea of global warming. A resistance so rigid it took fourteen months to reverse; a process which was completed only this year and never would have happened at all had I not interviewed many people from many walks of life for my show. As much as I hate climbing aboard other people's bandwagons, I am now a convert. I think I dislike being in this camp even more than I dislike my newfound awareness that global warming is real. However, as I mentioned, this gives me a unique opportunity for self-analysis.

  Through careful examination, I feel I have located the primary source of my resistance. If I am correct, most of my resistance I acquired over a period of decades from experiences unrelated to global warming.

  In the course of my half century on this planet, I have seen many ideas grow so popular with the general public that they dominated the popular media. Most of these ideas had no basis in science, and some contradicted scientific principals with joyous abandon. This however had no effect in slowing their popularity. If anything, being contrary to science seemed to work in their favor.

  The popularity of each of these ideas grew not because they were accurate or contained any particular merit, but because they were so easily used as a vehicle to satisfy three of the most basic, and therefore most powerf
ul, human desires: (1) money, (2) fame and (3) acceptance.

  How were they used for this?

  (1) Money. An incalculable amount of wealth was amassed by thousands who wrote books, articles, gave speeches and lectures, and taught classes about the idea.

  (2) Fame. It was easy to get on TV if one claimed the idea was true.

  (3) Acceptance. Believing was required in order to be part of the "in" crowd.

  Some of the easiest and most obvious examples of such ideas can be plucked from the smorgasbord of paranormal beliefs of the last few decades—and a bountiful harvest it is: ESP, biorhythms, pyramid power, ancient astronauts, crop circles, healing crystals, the Bermuda Triangle, UFO's, astrology and every possible incarnation (or reincarnation, if you prefer) of spiritualism.

  Describing these examples in detail is, of course, unnecessary. If you've been aware of the world long enough to see them you know precisely what I'm talking about, and if you haven't, no amount of explanation will be sufficient to clue you in as to the peculiarities of the feedback loop we call the modern media.

  My own response to seeing the rise and sometimes fall of these examples was not unique. Many who have watched these ideas come and go have noticed the similarities of how they rose through the media to become overwhelmingly popular. And having noticed these similarities have become skeptical of new ideas which follow the same path of exponential growth.