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I attended a special preview screening of the new science fiction film Sunshine on the 20th Century Fox lot in West Los Angeles last week, at an invitation to me as an editor of a science fiction website. Despite my location in Los Angeles, I get these sort of invitations only very rarely. I forwarded this one to Gary Westfahl, who’d earlier expressed interest in reviewing the film, but he lives 50 miles east in Claremont, and wasn’t enthused about driving into LA on a weeknight; he passed. (He’ll review the film after it opens officially in the US on July 20th, and opens in a theater nearer to his home.) So I went myself.

The film opened earlier in the UK, and I’d gleaned some positive reviews in the British press. Briefly, it’s about an expedition to reignite a dying sun. The cinematic interest is that it’s directed by Danny Boyle, best-known as director of Trainspotting (1996), as well as The Beach, 28 Days Later, and Millions — in short, not a director you’d expect to oversee a high-tech SF drama. And it’s written by Alex Garland, writer of some of those films, as well as novel The Tesseract, from his original idea.

What did I think? I’m afraid my brow was skeptically furrowed throughout most of the film. It’s very pretty — the visual effects are spectacular and mostly quite plausible. The universe of Sunshine is a 50-years hence NASA-style mission, not the space opera of Star Wars or even Star Trek. The crew of eight, a mixed white/asian crew (on the grounds that China and the US will be the two powers most likely to be able to afford such a mission, in 50 years), is dramatically portrayed as they deal with disagreements and problems and mounting dangers. The film has the pace of a thriller, suspense building as characters begin dying and the mission’s success is increasingly in jeopardy. (Despite which…) The audience applauded at the end.

Sunshine aspires to be a sort of contemporary version of 2001, portraying a technically rigorous space mission while addressing larger questions about mankind’s destiny, and it is rich with nods to that film (a scene in which astronauts go EVA to replace parts, another involving leaping into an airlock sans spacesuit, later a computer voice that deepens as its plugs are pulled, etc.) as well as to Alien and Solaris. After the screening, directory Danny Boyle got on stage, along with castmember Chris Evans and a Fox host, for Q&A; he commented specifically about doing a space movie in the shadow of those masterworks, how difficult it was to avoid solving certain problems in the story or film production in ways different from their solutions…

The film’s ambition isn’t fulfilled, alas; the conceptual premise is undermined by lapses in logic and scientific plausibility, and the thematic issues are lost in a formulaic suspense finale that trades the question of man’s destiny for a hideously scarred bogeyman.

The plausibility issue isn’t the idea of saving the sun by dropping a bomb into it. The press release actually brags about the film’s scientific credentials, on the basis of the producers having worked with British physicist Brian Cox to justify the idea of what might cause the sun to start to fade out. (The producers also consulted NASA advisors about the design of the ships.) The astrophysical thesis developed by Cox is that a theoretical supersymmetric particle called a Q-ball has fallen into the sun, somehow compromising its health, and the bomb being delivered by the ship Icarus is to destroy that, thus removing an infecting agent and restoring the sun to full brightness. OK, I don’t dispute such speculation — but it’s entirely academic. It’s buried in the press release and is nowhere in the film, which begins with a brief voice-over matter-of-factly establishing the sun’s weak state, the current mission to save it, and the first mission’s mysterious disappearance.

Still, I’ll accept the film’s implicit rules that the sick-sun premise is a given, just as I’ll accept the film’s aesthetic decisions to depict exterior shots of the spaceships and the sun with a great deal of ambient noise — not just the rumble of the ships moving past, but the sound of the sun itself — and to film almost all interior scenes (except those in airlocks!) as if the spaceships have artificial gravity. These choices compromise the intellectual rigor of the film, but can be accepted as conventions of screen story-telling (even though the latter is perilously close to the aliens who speak English crutch of media sci fi.)

It’s harder to forgive the lapses of logic and plausibility that I imagine arise from the filmmakers’ unfamiliarity with basic astronomy and physics and astronautics — what I suspect most SF readers would know, even without Brian Cox. Here’s a list:

• To begin at the very beginning, why is it necessary to send a manned expedition to drop a bomb into the sun, even at a very precise location on its surface? NASA (and other agencies) have long histories of launching objects on years-long trajectories that accurately reach their targets. (Well, if there wasn’t a manned mission, there’d be no movie. But they could have invented some reason — maybe the Q-ball is moving unpredictably, or something.)

• You realize gradually that the producers (or perhaps the screenwriter in particular, but given the collaborative nature of film work, I’ll generalize) don’t appreciate the dynamic nature of how spaceships and astronomical bodies necessarily move with respect to each other. (The word ‘orbit’ is mentioned with alarm at one point; I don’t recall hearing the word ‘trajectory’ at all.) Early on in the film, the Icarus II spots the earlier ship, the first Icarus, at a location just a few degrees from the current mission’s target… as if the ship is just sitting there in space, suspended over a spot above the sun’s surface. (How?) Later, we come to understand that the current mission will have the Icarus II pull up at its target spot, release its payload, and then just sorta move back out of range before the payload explodes… as if it’s not deep deep in an enormous gravity well.
• One of the crew becomes distraught after he alters the ship’s course to intersect with Icarus I and forgets to adjust the shield angle, thus damaging it. He checked the figures three times! But not, apparently, with another crew member, or with the computer, which you might think would override, as it does in a similar situation later in the film.
• There’s a geometrical problem with the scene in which the ship turns its gold-plated shield partly away from the sun so that two astronauts can go EVA to replace parts without being fried. We are told, and shown, that direct exposure to the sun at this close range instantly vaporizes anything; that the shield is umbrella-shaped; and that the crew-occupied ship, which extends behind the shield like the umbrella’s handle, must remain protected by the shadow. So how can the astronauts on an outside edge of the shield be protected without the shield turning away from the sun by nearly a full 90 degrees (which would expose the crew quarters)? The shield appears to turn only about 30 degrees, and somehow the astronauts change out parts in full shadow.
• When astronauts need to travel from Icarus II over to the derelict Icarus I, the entire crew compartment (the umbrella handle) from Icarus II detaches from its shield (!), pivots around (!), then hard-docks itself to Icarus I. Yikes. As if two ocean liners needed to bolt themselves together amidships to exchange passengers.
• Much is made near the end of the limited air supply aboard Icarus II, which might be enough for four astronauts, but not 8 or 7 or 6 or 5… (They used up air during their detour to check out the first Icarus, and they used up some oxygen to, counter-intuitively, put out a fire.) Yet, the interior of the ship is enormous — especially the payload bay, which contains a cubic block of fissionable material that looks to be something like an acre on a side, and is like the crew quarters completely pressurized. If they’re short of air, why not just evacuate non-critical areas (they’re only 12 hours or so from the end of the mission by this point) and save that air for where it’s needed…?
• Oh, but the payload bay has to be pressured so that the one crewman (why only one?) who knows the code (why is there a code?) can activate the bomb mechanism (why isn’t it automatic?) inside the payload bay (why there?) just before it shoots down into the sun.

The director does a good job with the characters — such a good job of staging rivalry and disagreements and horseplay in fact that it’s hard to believe these folks are trained, disciplined astronauts. Much the same could be said about the rogue commander of the first Icarus, who’s undergone a bizarre conversion (I won’t spoil it by saying exactly what kind, or kinds) that prolongs the conflict at the end for another scene or two. It is that conversion and conflict, in fact, that allows the producers to aspire to 2001-hood, by alluding to some larger issue beyond the simple rescue mission — that of man’s destiny and God’s will. It doesn’t work; the commander becomes merely a bogeyman to extend the suspense, Alien-like, of the final scenes, the issues he represents trivialized by his obvious insanity.

Like many a big-budget SF film before it, Sunshine is cinematically impressive but conceptually hollow. It’s an SF film made by filmmakers who know SF only from other SF films.

Is it worth seeing? Sure. It has its good points. I just wish the filmmakers, instead of hiring a name Physicist to provide an abstruse theory that’s nowhere visible in the film, had hired a physics grad student to shore up the basic plausibility of how such a mission might actually work.

Vancouver wasn’t quite what I expected, but was impressive nonetheless. Perhaps from reading too many William Gibson novels, I expected more of a high-tech city full of gleaming office towers backdropped by the green mountains you always see in shots of the city (link is an example I found in Google images). In fact, most of the towers are residential, dozens or hundreds of 15 and 20 story buildings that look built in the ’70s, with balconies for every unit and windows in hotels that actually open (we were on the 18th floor of the Pacific Palisades Hotel, looking southwest). I read somewhere that the downtown area of Vancouver has one of the highest residential population densities in the world…

Nevertheless, it is a picturesque city; standing on the pier by the convention center (which is undergoing a huge expansion in preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics), looking out on the bay as the seaplanes take off and land, with green island of Stanley Park to the left and an enormous cruise ship lumbering its departure ahead and North Vancouver beyond and the green mountains embracing it all, the view is surely the most beautiful I’ve ever seen from any city’s downtown.

We drove the rental car to Horseshoe Bay, where ferries leave for spots on Vancouver Island, and had lunch, with the biggest juiciest Fanny Bay oysters I’ve ever seen, as the clouds hung low over the steep hillsides.

Icon alert: the symbol of the 2010 Winter Olympics is a humanesque figure that looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and a Pacific Northwest totem pole. It’s in the upper left corner of the linked page. It’s everywhere in the souvenir shops: jade statues, wooden frig magnets, letter opener handles.

I can confirm Vancouver’s status as a site for frequent film and TV shooting; we saw location film crews twice, once in Stanley Park near the totem poles, another in Capilano River Regional Park (after we’d passed on the C$35 admission to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, a tourist attraction that from what we could tell had no purpose other than being a tourist attraction).

Not much new to say about Seattle — I’ve been there three or four times previously — except that driving south into downtown during rush hour was just as bad as I would have thought driving out of downtown would have been. The Marriott Courtyard at Lake Union (which isn’t precisely a lake, but an inlet of the bay, in turn a corner of Puget Sound, in turn a pocket of the Pacific Ocean) is a pleasant enough hotel, close to the SF Museum, with a nice McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant a short walk away. (I ordered Fanny Bay oysters again, and they were good, but not nearly as large.)

I described the Hall of Fame ceremony in a previous post. After the Hall of Fame event the SF Museum itself was open to attendees, and while the main museum exhibits seemed identical to those on display last year (the stack of Neal Stephenson hand-written manuscripts; the Lost in Space Jupiter 2 diorama; the original Star Trek set model), there was this year a special costume exhibit upstairs on the third level. It featured a scattering of costumes from various genre films that was at least half filled with costumes from various Star Trek movies and TV series episodes. (Amanda’s dress from “Journey to Babel”! and so on.) (There was also a Blade Runner spinner suspended overhead.) What struck me about the costumes — as with the props from Star Trek and other productions — was how crude they appear in close-up. They are not finely tailored; the tricorder looks like a high school mockup. The point is that film productions imply as much as they show; it’s so much bigger on the big screen than in reality. The magic of cinema.

… After the weekend I flew to Tampa for a work-related conference, this year’s Systems & Software Technology Conference, which prior to this year had been held for two decades in Salt Lake City, but which for 2007 had moved to Tampa, Florida. I had never been to Tampa, or anywhere on Florida’s Gulf coast. The Tampa Convention Center, where the conference was held, was impressive, vast enough to host two other events besides ours. But Tampa, embedded deep in Tampa Bay, struck me as rather dull, an older city gussied up with a few glassy high-rises downtown. One afternoon when there was nothing pertinent for me to attend at the conference I took my rental car for a tour of the area, driving across the bay to St. Petersburg (whose downtown seems much more charming than Tampa’s) and across the spectacular Sunshine Skyway Bridge before looping back northward to Tampa. I’ve heard there are amazing beaches along the coast south of the bay, but I didn’t have time to check them out.

And I’ll spare you the all-too-typical agonies of my delayed and rerouted plane flights.

More soon: I just saw a preview showing of SF film Sunshine last night, and will write up my reactions to the film, and the experience of visiting the Fox lot, soon.

Again this year the presentation of the Locus Awards — the winners of the annual Locus Poll — was held in Seattle in conjunction with the Science Fiction Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Again this year the Locus Awards presentation took place at the official event hotel, the Courtyard Marriott on Lake Union (which isn’t really a lake), about a mile from the SF Museum, and this year it was preceded by two panel discussions with various attending SF luminaries.

The first panel, “Thinking about Humanity”, with Connie Willis, Gardner Dozois, and Nancy Kress, moderated by Eileen Gunn, addressed the question of what humanity might look like after the “singularity” — or to what extent that question even made sense. Would post-singularity people even be recognizably ‘human’? Dozois made the point that even if some people ‘transcended’, many others wouldn’t; society would always be a stratified parfait, with homeless men lying in the streets somewhere. Willis had her doubts about the putative transformation of human nature, discussing social vs permanent components — the way teenaged girls are judgmental these days not about sex lives, but about food — they’re always judgmental about something. Kress didn’t think there would be any fundamental change, at least not for millions of years, and even if there was, it wouldn’t be much use to writers, who have the problem of writing characters their readers can comprehend (if not always sympathize with). The discussion wandered slightly, to the way contemporary SF can be impenetrable to newcomers, constantly raising the bar, and what works better for young readers vs older readers. From the audience Greg Bear cited Apocalypto as the best presentation of a truly alien society to a general audience that he’d ever seen.

The second panel was the flipside of the first — “Thinking About the World”, with ubergeeks and singularity thinkers Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, and Neal Stephenson, moderated by Charles N. Brown. Vinge recounted his cautious definition of ‘singularity’, and what he suspects to be a common belief among SF readers that in some sense people in the future will be better — that maybe the future won’t necessarily always entail Chinese farmers planting rice in muddy fields. Bear described how the theme wasn’t new; Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s singularity, broken off at the point where the author could say no more about the transformation of humanity. Stephenson spoke of reading German philosopher Edmund Husserl (if I heard him correctly) about the problems of consciousness; computers aren’t the answer, Stephenson opined; they’re merely faster. The discussion veered into the virtual realm; Brown noted how much people want to be watched these days, in an inversion to 1984; Vinge sensed a sea change about what young people are willing to give away; and Stephenson cited the guy on a government watch-list who’s put his entire life on the web, as a defense. Most people don’t have anything to lose, he said; for most, it’s a net gain to put their personal stories out there for everyone to see.

Then came the Locus Awards banquet — luncheon buffet, actually — on Saturday at 1p.m. Again Connie Willis was Master of Ceremonies, providing a history of the Locus Awards, with props held up by assistant Amelia Beamer, with a long explanation of why the awards have become associated with Hawaiian shirts, followed by the traditional Hawaiian shirt contest, including the ritual humiliation of those in the audience who, despite instructions, neglected to wear proper garb. That portion included a pop quiz on current events, where the plainly clad attendees could redeem themselves by answering questions about Paris Hilton and movies and TV shows featuring Hawaiian shirts, for the chance to choose from a selection of Hawaiian consolation prize shirts from Denver-area Salvation Army shops and the like.

Then came the Hawaiian shirt contest itself, metered by audience applause through several elimination rounds. For this I was abruptly recruited for photography duty, and was too busy lining up shots to pay much attention to who actually won. But a good time was had by all.

Then came the Locus Awards themselves, a bit anticlimactic after all that, especially since — a perpetual problem — not very many of the actual winners were in attendance. Results are posted here. Of the fifteen categories, only three were accepted by their winners — John Picacio (artist), Gardner Dozois (for anthology), and Vernor Vinge (for SF novel). Not that there weren’t other luminaries in the audience, most notably Gene Wolfe, a Hall of Fame inductee later that day, who stood up to accept Neil Gaiman’s two awards, for short story and collection. David G. Hartwell, Jim Frenkel, Eileen Gunn, L. Timmel Duchamp, Charles N. Brown, Amelia Beamer, and Carol Stevermer got up to read acceptance speeches from the other winners. An emergent theme of the awards was the idea of accepting via an ‘interpretive dance’, suggested by one or two of the (non-present) winners. Jim Frenkel made a valiant gesture in that direction, but it was Amelia Beamer who showed more enthusiasm for the idea, not just once but two or three times. Surely such dances, along with Hawaiian shirts, will become a Locus Awards tradition.

Among acceptors of publisher’s scrolls — the Locus Awards are unique in explicitly honoring publishers of winning works — was Rome Quezada, newly appointed editor of the Science Fiction Book Club, making his first appearance at an SF event, assuring the audience that original titles, like Dozois’ One Million A.D., which published Charles Stross’ winning novella, would continue.

Later that day was the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at the SF Museum, staged very similarly to last year’s event, with a dessert buffet (albeit a smaller one than last year), and a program that included guest star presenters of each award together with film collage tributes to each inductee’s lifework. Neal Stephenson was the droll Master of Ceremonies, noting the absence of Museum curator Therese Littleton due to illness. John Picacio expertly introduced the film tribute to artist inductee Ed Emshwiller, with Eileen Gunn accepting on the family’s behalf. Next Generation actor Will Wheaton (see footnote*) introduced inductee Gene Roddenberry, presenting the ensign bars Roddenberry had given him on the set many years before to acceptor Eugene Roddenberry, Jr., on stage. Warren Etheredge introduced inductee Ridley Scott — who, though still alive, was unable to attend — noting the feat of achieving Hall of Fame status on the basis of just two films. And David G. Hartwell introduced Gene Wolfe — inadvertantly repeating some the remarks captured by the film intro, a distillation of two hours’ filming. Wolfe, the one inductee in attendance, exclaimed how so many other people seemed to know this Gene Wolfe better than he himself did, he had little to say, other than he was shaken to the core.

And the ceremony was finished early!

I’ll have more later about other events of the weekend and my own recent travels.

*Footnote: Taking a shuttle van from the hotel to the SF Museum for the ceremonies that evening, my partner and I were joined by a polite 30ish young man who apologized when one of us moved to the rear, third seat so he could climb in after us into the second row. As we alighted at the museum, I noticed a couple of fans stopping him to ask for autographs–but it still didn’t register. It wasn’t until we were settling at our tables before the ceremony, and someone said there’s Will Wheaton, whom until then I hadn’t even realized was on the program, and my partner said that’s him, him in the van, that I realized — oh, why so it is. I hadn’t recognized him. It’s been 12 years since I last saw him, on TV, and we’re both that much older…

I’ve been on the road — or I suppose the phrase should be in the air, these days — since Wednesday, which I reveal to explain the relative lack of new posts on the Locus Online website since then. The central event of my recent schedule was the Locus Awards and SF Hall of Fame induction this weekend in Seattle. Before that, my partner and I flew up to Vancouver for a couple days, and following that, I’ve flown to Tampa for a work-related conference, where I’ve just arrived after a typically nightmarish long day of cancelled flights and re-routed itineraries.

I’ll post more about Vancouver and the Locus Awards and Hall of Fame in the next day or two.

My latest bit to be environmentally conscious is to take a cloth tote-bag to the grocery store with me, so that I don’t need to choose either paper or plastic. I’ve been using my 2003 World Fantasy Con tote bag, with the orange straps. My local Ralphs supermarket gives me a whole $.05 credit on my bill for not using their paper or plastic bags. If I shop twice a week, and remember to take my tote bag each time, I’ll save in a year’s time a whole… five dollars.

Weirdly, my local Ralphs has recently remodeled, closing for 10 days last month to do so, upgrading to look more like a Whole Foods Market, or a Gelson’s, with more prepared food counters and high-end liquor shelves at the front, while actually reducing the shelf space for ordinary canned and bagged goods now at the back. It’s weird because I realized after 2 or 3 visits to the reopened store that the entire staff has changed. None of the old checkers or bag boys are there. I’m afraid to ask. It’s as if Stepford clerks, or aliens, have moved in and taken over.

I’d say the finalists for this year’s Quill Awards — by McDonald, Marusek, Walton, MacLeod, and Rothfuss — are better representative of the field than the bestseller-oriented selections in the previous two years… and would attribute this to the removal of open voting to the public to determine the nominees. On the other hand, the current procedure amounts to the award being a function of Publishers Weekly magazine, whose editors and reviewers determine the finalists.

But what struck me about the list is the selection of categories. There is, most glaringly, no science category…. Apparently, the awards intention to “honor the most entertaining and enlightening titles” includes religion/spirituality, and cooking, and health/self-improvement, and sports, and even poetry (!), but not books about science or technology…

Gary Westfahl’s essay is up, several days ago now, having generated since then no response other than the predictable negative response from a certain reliable hate-mail respondent, as if he (she?) doesn’t have anything better to do. I shouldn’t even mention it, I know.

Last weekend I finished my first reviews for Locus Magazine in nearly five years, a 3600 word piece covering two best-of-the-year fantasy anthologies, those edited by Rich Horton and by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer. (Cover images at right.) There are so many best-of-year anthologies this year that Locus gave some relief to Gary K. Wolfe, who usually covers them all in two installments, by farming two of the books out to me. I confess I don’t keep up with the short fiction in magazines and anthologies anywhere nearly as well as I did when I was writing a monthly review column for Locus Magazine, but the shift in perspective, from reading everything in those venues to at best reading a couple best-of-year anthologies and the nominees for the Hugo and Nebulas each year, is instructive; I’ve thought about an entire essay along these lines, about how the expectations within a particular context (from slush-pile reader at one extreme, to skeptical reader of selected ‘bests’ at the other) affects one’s reaction to any particular work of fiction…

Anyway, the reviews I wrote should appear in the July issue of Locus Magazine.

Still pending: comments from the polls.

I finished checking and updating e-zine and magazine links on the Links Portal page over the weekend (Friday night actually, sitting at home…), using news/fiction/reviews subdivisions instead of the left-margin letter tags… the new arrangement is probably more useful. I hope.

Upcoming on the site: I have a Gary Westfahl essay that has been patiently waiting the contingencies of Locus samples and current news events and responses to be posted. And a huge batch of comments from voters in the Locus Poll and Survey, comments both in general and to the special online-only query about attracted young readers to serious SF. Those items should be up within the next week or two.

Meanwhile, I’m reading PDF advance copies of two best-of-year anthologies that I will be writing reviews of to the published in Locus Magazine — my first reviews there in five years or so. More on this soon.

As I was compiling my admittedly self-indulgent 10-year history of Locus Online a week or so ago, I noticed in particular how busy the letter pages of the site were back in the late ’90s, and how infrequent they’ve become the past few years. It takes something as provocative as Marleen Barr’s letter about Virginia Tech to incite barely a half-dozen responses — mostly confirming the rule of thumb that, whatever the issue, those who respond are generally those expressing the most negative reactions; the vast majority who approve, or don’t care one way or the other, aren’t those who bother to write.

As for why there are fewer letters in recent years — I can only imagine it is because there are so many more outlets for opinions on the web now than 8 or 10 years ago — message boards, blogs… and our own features format of recent months, powered by Blogger, that lets reader submit comments without sending e-mails.

I’ve been checking and re-arranging links on the Links Portal page in recent days. I’ve already re-sorted the blog listings by last name (rather than first), and I’m part way through checking all the e-zine and magazine links. I’ve decided to sort those listings by type within each group — news, fiction, reviews — doing away with the N/F/R tags in front of each entry. Most sites are one or another, and where sites are prominent in multiple types, they can be listed under each. Hope to have the updated list posted by this weekend. There’s also a major update to the authors’ links page underway, combining those with the interview index, major awards index entries, and major reviews index entries. I may need a Venn diagram to keep track of the overlaps. Or combine absolutely everything into a single links list…

We waited a few days for any paper mail stragglers, though they are increasingly few — only about 50 this year — then last night and tonight I finished editing write-in votes, ran final tallies, compiled the survey results, and turned them in to the home office. All done! There were slightly over 1000 valid ballots* this year, up from 962 last year, though I’m not sure if it’s an all-time record. Over 300 came in the final week, boosted by plugs from various websites and blogs. As usual, I ran incremental tallies as ballots came in over the past 10 weeks since the poll went online, and as usual, the majority of categories exhibited clear leaders early on. It’s nice to attract as many ballots as we can, but statistically, it doesn’t take 1000 ballots to determine a winner in most cases. (I’ve probably mentioned this before.) That said, there were two categories this year with fairly close results. You won’t know which until the poll results, with statistics, are published in the magazine, in… July? August?

A selection of comments from the ballots will be posted online in the near future. This year there were both general comments, and responses to a bonus online question about attracting younger reader to serious SF.

*We realize that many multiple submissions are probably the result of email or webform glitches, but there’s no excuse for submitting a ballot without a name, or voting for the same item more than once in the same category. We say this every year…