Get a pen or pencil and some paper and write down the titles of all the Star Trek films, in order, from memory.
(You have to use a primitive mechanical inscription device because otherwise you might look them up on your primitive semiconductor-based computer terminal.)
Once you’ve done that, you can see how I did.
The new Star Trek film is great fun, and full of subtle references for long-time fans. How many of these did you spot?
Nero’s face tattoos actually a highly stylised alien script spelling “KISS ME, I’M ROMULAN”
The new film’s title, Star Trek, is exactly the same as the title of the original series
Uhura shown wearing strange “feminine under clothes” long hypothesised by male Trek fans
Time travel plot device used in full accordance with Starfleet Regulations 109.223(xii-lxiv) governing the permissible use of continuity engineering
Spock and Kirk are, like, totally hot for each other
Nero’s ship’s interior decorated in traditional Musty Dank Lair style
Older viewers will notice “time dilation” effect in which mid-20th century franchises live on for so long that it seems as if pop culture itself were slowing down
Sound of shuttle engines is a digitally processed version of Harlan Ellison screaming
Remember that we are only the second expedition ever to set foot on X’s World…
Good: Vandersteen, Adamson, Ling, McCallum
Bad: Franck, Corman, Jeffries, Brown, Springsteen
Gentlemen! Behold! I give you: the YOUR-NAME-HERE Drive!
Good: Voigt-Kampf, Alcubierre, Jones, Clarke, Schwarzchild
Bad: O’Reilly, Johnson, Smith, Wu, Neidermeyer
If word of this ever reaches the ears of Supreme Leader ______, we are as good as dead.
Good: Jones, Smith, Deckard, Gonzalez, Bergson
Bad: Johns, Peterson, Ricardo, Bergmann, Beerbohm
Categories: sf
I’m glad I didn’t see this 2004 ultra-low-budget science fiction film till just now, because it works so well as a parable about Wall St and quants.
Two engineers accidentally build a time machine in a garage, and what’s the first thing they do with it? Day trading. Very soon afterwards (well, technically, even sooner than that) things start to not make much sense at all. Even if you watch the film again the next day like I did.
0 .0 mya – virtual particle haze, icing sugar
1.0 mya – high porosity rubble
1.5 mya – tholines, tar, nicotine, fibres
2.0 mya – low porosity rubble, buttons, loose change
3.6 mya – ices (astronomical)
3.9 mya – documentation
5.2 mya – sediment
5.4 mya – unknown, possibly jam
5.5 mya – ices (gastronomical)
5.6 mya – mud
8.6 mya – mud generators (all that is known about the civilisation who built these is they had a highly advanced femtoscale technology and that they really liked mud)
9.2 mya – carpet tiles, dust bunnies
9.3 mya – strange matter / gluon amalgam
9.5 mya – outer core of tightly wound rubber bands
10.1 mya – inner core of synthetic cork
18 January, 1977
The sky above the swimming centre was alive with sounds he had previously heard only on television: sirens in chorus and the thumping flutter of helicopter blades. The swimming lessons were cancelled and they were sent home with their parents. According to the announcements, the bridge had fallen down. He thought, “What bridge?”
The seabirds
Years later, he would visit the Granville branch of the council library on his way home from school, a short walk from the rebuilt Bold Street bridge. He borrowed copies of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition and read them while he waited for the bus home. The concrete paving of the bus terminal was dazzlingly white in the sun, making him dizzy when he looked up from the pages of the book. Seagulls perched on the halogen streetlamps, drawn this far from the coast by the Parramatta River to the scavening grounds of suburban rubbish dumps.
Dead white males
“Since the death of Einstein in 1955, there hasn’t been a single living genius. From Michelangelo, through to Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Darwin, Freud and Einstein, there’s always been a living genius. Now, for the first time in 500 years, we are on our own.”
Categories: literature · sf
We got sick of eating fruit.
The Utopia in the next valley declared war on our Utopia.
The heroes came and explained to us that our Utopia was an illusion and that our freedoms were based on lies. Then they had a big argument with the Grand Wazoo and the volcano erupted.
Runaway hyperinflation.
Giant ants.
We abandoned our Brutalist buildings because they had mildew problems and always flooded after it rained.
After three weeks the Utopia was forced to became a bloody and repressive dictatorship.
An outbreak of an unmentionable disease.
The Utopia was preyed upon by a race of hideous nocturnal creatures who kidnapped and devoured those of us who strayed too far from the walls after dark. Once we realised this and stayed in at night, depriving them of their chief source of protein, the machines gradually stopped working.
An argument in a communal kitchen over the question of whether Utopia, being the perfect state of human society, thereby implies non-Utopia (or even Dystopia) led to a long-standing feud which in turn escalated into civil war.
The Stagnationists lost an election.
It was discovered that we all carry an image of Utopia within our hearts and so we dispersed.
Categories: sf
Singularity (n.) hypothetical future scenario in which science fiction writers and fans get so into computers that they can’t imagine any hypothetical future scenarios other than “runaway hyperintelligent AIs turn the whole Solar System into a vast computer”
Swingularity Unexpected fad for a cappella jazz sweeps the world, resulting in a billions-strong toe-tappin’ close-harmony groupmind.
Engularity In the wake of Great Depression 2.0, the only remaining economic activity on Earth is teaching English as a second language to business students.
Wingularity We bioengineer ourselves to be flight-capable, but it’s so much fun and so energy-consuming that all we do in our spare time is hunt for grubs.
The pamphlet says that “our mediation service is the most highly sought-after in the Galaxy because Hyperion’s unique quantum-physical status reduces travel costs and waiting lists. Our friendly staff are uniquely equipped by their own multivalent nature to the onerous task of finding a common ground between the most disparate points of view.”
How it all works is that we set the pleroma to pick up the various representatives and wait until it collapses into a state where they’re not actually maiming one another. Then we get them to try and talk it over. Technically, what this involves is perturbing each current active self-state so that it will either find a pathway to some kind of stable ensemble-attractor, or, alternatively, react by fleeing the pleroma altogether, to be replaced by another, and hopefully more relaxed, instance of itself.
My favourite way of doing it is to throw rocks at them.
This morning I’ve got a representative of a space-going species who operate entirely on reason and logic, and an ambassador from a neighbouring system whose culture operates entirely on reason and logic as well. These two have been at war for something like three thousand years: I think it all started as a dispute over either comet mining rights or the timing of certain seasonal festivals, or whether comets could be mined at certain seasonal festivals or something like that. You’d be surprised at how many civilisations claim to be operating entirely on reason and logic. They’re always very proud of it.
The second one just pulled something out of her mantle that looks like a field mortar. Sorry, I’m going to have to go and get a bigger rock.
