Mayhem Parody Commercials

Here are the Mayhem Parody commercials I acted in. These videos were shown during services at 422CHURCH.com on big video screens before the pastor's sermon.

I'm not the guy talking, I'm the guy getting himself into trouble.

World's Greatest Valentine's Day Card...

Just wanted to share the great Valentine's Day card my wife gave me. Thanks Babe, you're the greatest!

How many Hugo Nominees and Winners can you get for free?...

To me, the Hugo Awards are THE award for science fiction. Tastes may vary I know, but I like to use them as a guide to the genre. So as far as I'm concerned, if you can get a lot of Hugo nominees and winners online for free then you can get a lot of science fiction online for free.

I took this to the extreme and did all the math. I got all of the Hugo Award information from Wikipedia's Hugo Awards entries. And I cross-checked that against which stories were available at Free Speculative Fiction Online, which I've found to be pretty thorough. Basically if you find a science fiction story somewhere else online, but the Speculative site doesn't offer it, I'd definitely question the other site's legality and/or legitimacy.

For the purpose of this chart I lumped the Retro Hugos in with the normal Hugos

So that is 180 science fiction stories I can put on my Nook for free. And these are all stories that are considered the best of the best in science fiction.

Now most of these stories are available to view online without download options, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, if you can find the text online, you can also convert it to a format an e-reader can use. Here is a site that offers free online conversion of files. I tested PDF to Epub format and it translated pretty well. Meanwhile, doc format to Epub was perfect. So assuming you have the text of the story on a website, all you have to do is copy the text and paste it into a blank Word document file and you are ready to go! (Thanks to Michael at the Classic Science Fiction Board for suggesting this site)

To me, I think it proves that everyone should get an e-reader of some kind. Otherwise your options are to read off the computer screen which strains most people's eyes, or print the stories out which can get pricey with the cost of ink. It just seems like e-readers pay for themselves because you can download so many stories for free.

Thoughts on "Midnight at the Well of Souls"

What Makes us Human?

“Midnight at the Well of Souls,” by Jack Chalker is a novel that explores the idea of what it means to be human. Is humanity in this shell we call a body, is it found only in our intellect, or is it a synthesis of the two?

The protagonist of the story is Nathan Brazil, a freighter captain who may have lived too long. When he was younger, humanity was made up of individuals, but most of humanity are now members of a Confederacy. These humans are bred in laboratories and are hermaphroditic or neutered. Most of these humans are cloned from the same couple of original models and all of them are “raised by the state to think as identically as they looked” (p. 6 in my paperback edition).

In my mind, that essential spark or drive that makes us humans has been bred out of these creatures. They are organic robots instead of free-thinking people with wants and desires. In an attempt to “improve” humanity, by covering-up the blemishes of rebellion and vanquishing the dreaded pox of evil, this society has thrown the baby out with the bathwater and leached away everything that made us human in their attempts at creating perfection.

The whole concept reminded me of the asexual clone-based-telepaths humanity has become at the end of Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War.” Haldeman’s novel was clearly a reaction to the changes in American society regarding sexual norms that took place while he was a soldier in Vietnam. When he left it was Donna Reed and when he returned it was free love.

However, I don’t believe that Chalker’s point was as political or topical in nature. I think his goal was to look at these themes in a broad sense; to compare individualism or existentialism to being a part of a larger whole or a part of something greater than yourself. Nathan is surely the hero of the novel and he embodies a rugged individuality and yet his philosophy has not found him happiness, instead he thinks to himself over and over again that he is “alone and will always be alone.” It is only while he is a part of a grand adventure in the Well World where he has to work with and depend on others that he is able to truly be happy.

Well World

The Well World is a magical sort of world. It is broken up into 1560 hexagons. Each hexagon is 355 km tall and 615 km wide. Each of these hexes is a controlled environment with it’s own planets and animals and unique temperature and atmosphere norms. However, the borders are open, you can step from one hex into another and not notice, just make sure you’re able to breathe the air in the new hex. Oceans, mountains, deserts, and/or forests may stretch across multiple hexes or only one. But most importantly each hex houses a form of intelligent life. One hex holds beings called Dillians that resemble our mythical Centaurs, one holds plant/animal hybrids called Czillians, and another houses man-sized bat like humanoids called Creits.

The catch is that if you stumble into the Well World (there are various planets and points in space where this might happen) you will be forced to become one of these species at random. You will still have your human intellect and your memories, but you will be a beaver (Ambrezans), or a giant flower (Slelcronian), or maybe a sort of elephant with two trunks that walks on its hind legs (Slongorian). “Midnight” seems to suggest that you would still be the same person, but you would also be driven by the needs/desires of the body you ended up in. For example, does the body produce a desire to procreate every day, every month, or only a few times a year or does it reproduce asexually? Does the new body hibernate in the winter? Do you have a sudden urge to fly south during the winter, or swim upstream in order to hatch your eggs in fresh water?

I loved the world of this story and how we only get to see a fraction of the hexes and different races and cultures that inhabit them. My imagination ran wild thinking about what might live in these unseen hexes. Also I liked how no species was truly evil just for the sake of it, they just seemed to be evil due to their nature. For instance, the “savage” Murnies who seemed like senseless monsters the way they would rip a deer apart and eat it raw, but it turned out that they were rational beings with their own sense of honor and right and wrong. It was just not the same values we uphold.

Maps and Mathematics

I did a lot of mathematical calculations regarding the Well World itself. I previously did some calculations of Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” and was fascinated that I was much better able to visualize and understand the distances involved in that story after taking a closer look at it.

780 Southern Hexagons
780 Northern Hexagons
1560 Total Hexagons (p 62)

614.86 km is the length across of each hexagon (p 88)
355 km is the length of a side of each hexagon (p 62)

Area of a Hexagon
½ x (6s) x h
½ x (6(355) x 307) note: h is the radius so it is half of 615
3,269,552^2 Area of a Hex. (This is roughly the size of India)

3,269,552^2 x 1560 (number of Hexes)
510,049,800^2 (projected area of Well World)

Area of Well World is 5.1 x 10^8 km^2 (p 55)
5.1 x 1,000,000,000
or 510,000,000^2
This is remarkable close to the area of the Earth which is 510,072,000^2

Later in the book we are told that the hexes that border the wall that separate the Northern from the Southern Hexes are “two hexes wide and half a hex tall” (p 287). Which may explain why my projected area doesn’t match with what we are told the area of the Well World is.

My edition of “Midnight” didn’t include a map but Ben from the Classic Science Fiction Message Board provided me with a copy. However, if his map is to scale the border hexes look like they are the same size as the other hexes just cut differently. I can extrapolate from that map, assuming the rest of Well World follows the same pattern as the pictured area, that there are 128 of these border Hexes, but I still can’t be sure of their shape because the map and the text in the novel contradict each other.

Thoughts on "Fahrenheit 451"

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953) is considered a classic science fiction novel. It’s the story of a mixed up world where a fireman is someone who burns books and the houses where they are hidden, because books are evil.

Fahrenheit is usually considered to be a novel about censorship gone wild and that certainly is a part of it, but it is also clearly about the pitfalls of increasing government control as well as a very dark prediction about the future of television.

In fact, it was eerie to me how accurately Bradbury predicted the rise of reality television. Bradbury describes a population that is addicted to watching “the Family,” it’s a kind of a 3-D soap opera. We don’t have “the Family,” but we do have a population that seems to hunger for Reality TV. Especially creepy was the scene where Guy Montag is running from the hound and every house he passes he sees in the window that the people are watching the chase on TV. Then he hears an announcer tell everyone to look out their front door and Montag imagines millions of people all opening their front doors.

Many of the characters in the novel are memorable. Montag’s wife, Mildred is such an instantly unlikable character, there is just nothing ever redeeming about her. Captain Beatty, who always sounds so well read. You can’t help but imagine that he must have a secret stash of books himself somewhere. And Clarisse, the girl that Montag befriends at the beginning of the novel. She shows so much intelligence and free-thinking, her household was clearly one in which they read in secret. I kept thinking the novel would reintroduce her and/or her family.

Bradbury just doesn’t write like a typical science fiction authors. Typical science fiction is event and idea driven, while Bradbury writes in a style that is a bit more poetic and descriptive.

In general, I liked Bradury’s writing, but at times, in the novel, the prose would get so descriptive that I’d lose track of what was actually happening. However, in other parts of the novel the increasing description was masterfully handled, such as when Montag is being chased by the hound, the text begins to blur and confuse until we aren’t quite sure what’s actually happening vs. what Montag is imagining.

I read the 50th Anniversary edition which has an Afterword (1982) and Coda (1979) (both by Bradbury). It wasn't until I read these that I realized that Fahrenheit was Bradbury’s first novel. These two short pieces made me wish that Fahrenheit had been written later in Bardbury’s career, the Coda especially is by an author at the height of his confidence and creativity. Here is a large sample, Bradbury was talking about how people send him letters and ask him to make rewrites to his novels and update them and then he mentioned how a school reader anthology tried to edit one of his short stories:

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito-out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch-gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer-lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like-in the finale- Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention-shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Reading these two add-ons made me very interested to read the stage play adaptation of “Fahrenheit” that Bradbury wrote, if it’s as good as this Coda…then it would be well worth reading. And apparently a lot of things in the novel are expanded upon, especially Captain Beatty’s part.

Afterthoughts
Bradbury thought 451 degrees Fahrenheit was the temperature at which paper combusts. It is actually 842° Fahrenheit or 450° Celsius. I bet Bradbury gets letters all the time that say he should rename the novel “Celsius 450” or “Fahrenheit 842.” How absurd can you get? By that logic it could also be called, “Kelvin 724.”

One of the reasons why Fahrenheit is so well know is that it has been on the book list of many American schools for decades. On the flip side, I’ve heard sometimes that Fahrenheit is banned by some American schools. This may be true, but only in isolated cases, according to the sources I found it is not one of the commonly banned classics.

Thoughts on "The Foresight War"

In this review of “The Foresight War” by Anthony Williams, I will refer to the author as Tony, because the two of us are both active members of the Classic Science Fiction Message Board. Where we discuss all kinds of things science fiction related.

The plot of the novel concerns two present day (2004) WWII historians traveling back to 1934. One historian is British (Don Erlang), and the other is German (Konrad Herrman). Each of the historians informs their respective governments as to what will happen during the war. Both countries use the knowledge from the historians to better prepare for the war so that weapons that in our history were available in the middle or end of the war are mass produced by the start of the war.

Time Travel

Erlang briefly talks about his mother and father being just children in the 1930, but he never goes and seeks them out. I would have found it irresistible, I mean, his parents might have just been children, but what about his grandparents? I’d love to meet my grandfather when he was in his prime; he died before I was born. He was a doctor and had a private practice in a suburban town for many years. If I’d gone back in time, I’d probably go see him as a patient. That kind of harmless encounter probably wouldn’t put the space-time continuum at risk.

Erlang speculates as to the nature of time travel. He cites a time paradox that is worth mentioning. Since he has altered the course of the war there is a chance that one of his parents might get killed by a bomb during the Blitz that in the normal course of things didn’t explode anywhere near them. If they died then Erlang would have never existed, therefore Erland couldn’t travel back in time and alter events therefore history would return to the way it was in the first place. Unless, as is speculated, Erlang’s time traveling created a parallel universe or dimension which is no longer looped to the previous future, but instead free to explore an entirely different future.

My theory is that the “Foresight” universe is tangent dimension created by an all-powerful being (the author) just to have a playground to test his what ifs. (The novel's Afterword pretty much proves my theory).

German Historian

Herrman, the German historian who is sent back through time, was written as less capable then Erlang. He just didn’t seem to be a historian on the same level as Erlang. I couldn’t help but wonder how much more prepared for the war Germany would have been if Herrman had truly been Erlang’s equal. Also, I never really understood why Herrman worked with Hitler and Himmler and the rest when he clearly found them repulsive. His motivation was to create a stronger Germany that wouldn’t end up controlled by Russia for decades. From the beginning, I would have looked for a ways to circumvent and destroy Hitler and the Nazi’s, not work with them.

Glossary

Especially helpful is the glossary in the back of the book that lists all the military terms used in the book and also explains all the equipment used in the book. So when I read about a Churchill tank, I could look it up in the glossary and learn it’s specifications as well as whether the Churchill in the “Foresight” universe was different from the historical Churchill tanks.

This means that the book is readable to a Joe Shmoo like me, who is not one of these dumb Americans you read about that doesn’t know who fought in WWII. But, I am also not an expert on the war. Heck, for most of the book I kept wondering when they were going to start building trenches.

Vignettes

The action of the war is played out in vignettes that run anywhere from one paragraph to a page and a half. Most times the vignettes are strung together so they tell the story of a battle or a certain campaign. You see the action from different perspectives such as, British planes, then German U-boat, then a British tank, etc. Sometimes it was difficult for me to figure out what I was reading about, and by the time I understood the perspective changed again.

The perspective also shifts back to Erlang or Hermann who are in respective command centers and are reacting to the events of the day like a sort of Greek Chorus evaluating the course of the war and providing exposition.

Sometimes the vignettes were emotionally powerful such as the story of the British plane that fires at a German bus. Shrapnel from the bus ends up downing the plane. The pilot bails out and hits the ground near the bus. It is then that he realizes that the bus he destroyed was full of children. A crowd of Germans grabs the pilot and lynches him. As they tie the rope around his neck he pleads, “I didn’t know it was children.” This level of pathos is impossible to sustain, especially with so many short pieces.

One part of the book that worked really well was the part that dealt with Pearl Harbor. Morgan, an RAF (Royal Air Force) officer, is one of the few that know about future events. He is given the horrible task of going to Pearl Harbor to minimized US loses without telling them there is going to be an attack ahead of time. This piece wasn’t really longer then some of the other perspectives, but it meant more to me because I’d gotten to know Morgan throughout the novel.
That would have been my preference to follow certain soldiers’ perspectives for longer periods. I know the whole point of the book was to explore questions like how this British tank would have faired against that German tank, but without having the humanity of a soldier you get to know and care about, it just may as well be robot tanks fighting other robot tanks.

The Holocaust

I felt like it was weird that the Holocaust was only mentioned once or twice by Erlang and nothing about it was ever seen first hand. However, I realize concentrating on this horrible genocide wouldn’t have added anything to the focus of the novel, which was exploring how the “Foresight” universe differed from our own.

The Ending
(Warning major Spoilers)

The end of the book reminded me of two recent movies, both of which came out after this book. Is Hollywood stealing ideas from you Tony?

The movie “Valkyrie”(2008) is all about the ill-fated German resistance movement. Operation Valkyrie is not mentioned by name in “Foresight,” but it is pretty clear that after Herrman blew up all of the Nazi leaders, the resistance used the Reserve Army to seize and remove the Nazi Party under the false pretense that the SS had attempted a coup d'état.

The second movie that came to mind was “Inglourious Basterds” (2009). At the end of the movie several plots to assassinate Hitler and the other leaders of the Nazi Party collide with explosive results. The traitorous SS Colonel Hans Landa describes the film premiere in Paris that is being attended by Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels and other prominent part members as having “all the rotten eggs in one basket.”

I think the book ended in the right spot, at the end of the German/British conflict, because that’s what the book was generally about. However, I did have a lot of questions about what may have happened next:

-Did the increased Japanese navel losses at the beginning of the war cause the use of atomic weapons to be unnecessary?
-Was the United Nations created?
-Was the State of Israel declared?
-When did Britain “get the Bomb”?
-Did Russia emerge from the war a super power?
-What happened to Mussolini?

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I also reviewed Tony’s second novel “Scales.” here. I gave it an A+. It is a great read and it’s available for free here.

Some Details in "Back to the Future"...

Everyone has been celebrating the 25th anniversary since the debut of the movie "Back to the Future" and I'm no different. After all, I love the movie and watched it many times when I was a kid.

I watched it again a couple of nights ago and paid attention to some of the details in the film. You know, stuff I missed the first hundred times I watched it.

The first detail is the comic book the kid shows his dad in 1955, that proves that the DeLorean is a space ship and Marty in the radiation suit is an alien. "Shoot it, shoot it, it's already taken human form." I figured maybe it was a real comic, but it's just a creation. It really does capture the feel of the EC comics of the 50's doesn't it?






The next thing I wondered about was the movies that are featured on the marquee at the movie theater in 1955. The first one is "The Cattle Queen of Montana" starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Regan which was obviously picked just because Regan was in it. "Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's Vice-President? Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady! And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury."

The movie on the marquee on the night Marty goes back to the future is "The Atomic Kid," a 1954 movie starring Mikey Ronney. The theatrical poster has the tagline "It's a laugh explosion" and a woman telling Mikey to "control your neutrons." That sounds kind of like a lost Doc line.





The next details are in the scene where Marty uses George's love of science fiction to convince him to ask Lorraine out. "I am Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan." George had fallen asleep while reading the fall 1954 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine, this time the robot kind of like Marty in the radiation suit. The difference this time is that it's actually a real magazine!

However, the music Marty tortures his dad with may or may not be real. As the tape Marty puts in says it is definitely Eddie Van Halen on the tape, but I'm not sure whether the clips are from. Some websites say "Eruption"others "Donut City" from the movie "The Wild Life" which stars none other then the original Marty, Eric Stoltz and Lea Thompson. Still other websites claim that the music is just some original riffs Eddie played just for the movie as a favor to record producer Quincy Jones. Since the last claim was said to be from the commentary track with Bob Gale and Neil Canton it just might be the true one.



Finally, when Marty goes back to 1985 and it turns out his whole family is happier and more successful because George learned to stand up for himself when he decked Biff. George gets a copy of his book in the mail.

The joke being that it looks like a retelling of how Darth Vader told him he had to date Lorraine.

But the book is proof that, "if you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything."