Science Fiction on Television

I admit to being a fan of science fiction both in written form and in filmed narrative--since childhood. Today I just want to talk about science fiction series on television. The original Star Trek was the first one I really enjoyed and I still do today, though it is no longer my favorite. It has been the genre model for many successors such as Voyager, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation and a host of recent ones like Discovery and Picard that I have hardly bothered to watch. Of this whole group the best are likely the original show, The Next Generation and Voyager though Enterprise and Deep Space Nine certainly had their moments. Culturally and sociologically they share a set of common values that seem to assume that all future economies will be socialist (except the Ferengi), that fashions will be weird versions of the 60s and that future crews will be exclusively American and alien.

Then there are a whole bunch of individual series with their own virtues and faults. Among these are Battlestar Galactica, the revival. I never saw the original because I was in Spain studying guitar. The new version which came out in 2003 was a breath of fresh air. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack it featured a suit of military virtues and a battle for survival. The first few seasons were very enjoyable but to my mind it descended into incoherence towards the end which I never bothered to watch. This seems a chronic failing of many shows who tend to "jump the shark" as creativity fades. Game of Thrones is a classic example.

One rather eccentric series is Farscape, an Australian-American co-production which ran from 1999 to 2003. The brilliant innovation here was replacing Star Trek-style facial prosthetics with Jim Henson puppets to create plausible aliens. It often worked quite well. The tradition of featuring alluring female aliens was also an element.

A slightly older and much loved series was Babylon 5 which premiered in 1994 and ran for five seasons. Entirely the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski who wrote and directed every episode, it was a rather different take on the future, much more politically aware and featuring a lot of power politics and some really evil aliens.

The most abbreviated series of all was Firefly, the creation of Joss Whedon, also known for Buffy and Angel. The sad irony here is that of all the show runners in this genre, he is the one most capable of coming up with excellent series finales as witnessed by both Buffy and Angel. The irony is that Firefly was cancelled halfway through season one though that was followed by an excellent movie that did allow some development. But we are all robbed of what would likely have been some remarkable character developments.

In contrast to Firefly, Stargate SG-1 had a huge run: ten seasons of the original series which was a development of the original film which came out in 1994. This was a brilliantly original concept which blended aesthetic motifs from ancient Egypt with science fiction futurity and primitive cultures to yield a rich visual texture. Then there was the Atlantis spinoff which ran for five seasons and the Stargate: Universe series which ran for two, plus two movies.

After Firefly, which is likely the finest science fiction to be filmed, I would rank Stargate SG-1 and spinoffs as my favorite. Its rich visual texture is an improvement over the stark, sterile sets of most tv science fiction. Mind you, the fact that they were all shot in Vancouver leads to a certain sameness of alien planets which all look like the heavily-treed landscape of coastal British Columbia, a fact often commented on by the characters. Incidentally, Battlestar Galactica and Andromeda were also shot in Vancouver as well as The X Files.

Stargate SG-1 is classic hard science fiction with no mystical elements and a fairly conservative set of values. Oddly, the pilot featured some full-frontal nudity that was never repeated. The series feature strong male and female characters with, apart from the pilot, a minimum of alluring aliens. The frequent comedy is well handled and a major element.

That's about as far as my critical skills will take me so I look forward to your disparaging comments!

A Few Good Men

After living in Mexico for twenty-seven years, sometimes the thought runs through my mind that Canada has little history and even less culture. But despite that, with the perspective of time and distance a few individuals stand out as being strong contributors to culture. In music there are four: jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, composer Claude Vivier, poet and song-writer Leonard Cohen, and pianist Glenn Gould. Interesting that three of the four are from Montreal. Outside of music my knowledge is limited, but we could certainly add to the list writer Mordecai Richler, literary critic Northrop Frye and possibly Jordan Peterson, but we have to see how he wears over time. Richler is another Montrealer and Frye was also born in Quebec, but not in Montreal. Peterson was born in Alberta but attended McGill University in Montreal.

Yes, of course there are many others, but less-known to me. There are quite a few artists that I only have a vague knowledge of, Jack Shadbolt for one, born in England but lived in Vancouver, the Group of Seven and likely others, but I don't have the experience to name names.

I'm spurred to write this because I am re-reading, as I said the other day, a marvelous work of literary criticism by Northrop Frye. As Oscar Peterson is one of the best jazz pianists ever, so we should count Frye as one of the best literary critics ever, certainly that I have ever read and my reading in this area runs from Aristotle through Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Bakhtin and Harold Bloom. If it were not for Northrop Frye, few of us would know what Menippean satire was!

For an envoi there is likely nothing better than a little Oscar Peterson:

Now what I am reading

There was enough interest in my last "what I'm reading" post to encourage me to offer another. First, a set of books I am re-reading that I first read over fifty years ago:

This nine-volume history of philosophy, in my opinion the clearest, fairest and most balanced, was written in the 1950s and reprinted ever since. I started reading it as an undergraduate after taking my first philosophy course, but only got as far as the volume on Kant. I just hit a wall! Now I am re-reading this volume with the British empiricists because I am rethinking the problems of the relationship between consciousness and the material world.

I just read John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I enjoyed the Inferno, but the Purgatorio less and less and stopped before the Paradiso. I am following it with possibly the most striking and unique book of poetry I have ever encountered:

Knit Ink contains two books of poetry, Slate Petals and Stray Arts and two shorter "chapbook epilogues." The first thing to note about those odd titles is that they are all palindromes! We know of palindromes from phrases like "Able was I ere I saw Elba" something Napoleon never said. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Bach did some in music. I even did a song as a palindrome. But palindromes in literature are much harder than in music where the cancrizans or "crab" canons are quite common. Anthony Etherin in this compendium takes the palindrome to heights never before seen. The very simplest example is a haiku in palindrome form. I have been trying for days to write one, but, good lord, it is nearly impossible. Here is an example from the book:

Slam ice, dynamic.

A bad loch: Cold abaci.

Many decimals....

Try it! I first read a few of the opening poems and failed to notice any of these structural constraints. Then I discovered that after each book the author explains how each poem is structured. But he does more than just construct nearly impossible palindromes. Here is the description of the poem Colourscape:

An ottava rima (ABABABCC) in iambic pentameter, intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer--such that the third metrical foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet. It is preceded by an anagram-poem.

AGH! Since I suspect you don't believe this was possible, here it is:

There are a hundred other structural innovations including experiments with triolets, ottava rima, villanelles and a host of things there are no names for. This is poetry as pure structure and the miracle is that they are also aesthetically fascinating even though meaning is sacrificed.

And I just started this book today, though I first read it thirty-some years ago:

Certainly the best work of literary criticism I know of though disperaged by current English departments.