De Romanicorum Theoriarum

"On Speculative Fiction"—the Latin root of "speculative" actually means "to watch", with implications of "to spy on". "Speculators" were the Internal Affairs division of the Praetorian Guard.

Basically it's my "On Science Fiction" deal, but I might talk about fantasy too.

• If you read the essay by the Antichrist Ron D. Moore, called "Battlestar Galactica: Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera", you will quickly notice two things. Firstly, that his vision of "naturalistic" science fiction is actively opposed to the creation of joy in the audience. And second, that he attacks a strawman version of science fiction.
  
  Plainly, a few years of being criticized by dumb Trekkies who couldn't stand having DS9 turned into a show for grownups has broken his mind. And that, coupled with his obvious ignorance of science fiction other than Star Trek, led him to essentially identify any of the things that would make you want to set a show in space with a few of the unique excesses of the Star Trek franchise.
  
  Babylon 5 never pretended it wasn't science fiction, and it also never made any of Star Trek's mistakes. Neither did any Gundam show ever (G Gundam came close, though). Perhaps a novel idea: people who plainly have never even heard of any SF other than Star Trek shouldn't be involved in developing SF shows.
• Whedonites, guess what? You get to shut your noise-holes about Fox canceling Firefly, because they canceled Sarah Connor Chronicles—whose toilets Firefly isn't fit to tongue-wash—just as a favor to Whedon. And then you know what? He made a show with every single one of his stupid tics, and none of the funny dialogue we tolerate him for. And Fox lost money to keep it going longer than one season, just as a favor to you, you braindead monkeys!
  
  Someone needs to send a cyborg back in time to kill Whedon before he can sign that Dollhouse deal, so we can see more Sarah Connor.
• In my fantasy book, I'd replaced a lot of animals with their New World equivalents, e.g. jaguars instead of lions in the heraldry, but I was thinking I had to fudge, since I needed cavalry. I had hoped to rationalize it by the fact horses actually evolved over here before moving back into Central Asia over the land-bridge.
  
  But then I remembered: you can ride caribou. People apparently do it in Mongolia all the time. And also, if the caribou fulfilled the role in a society that the horse did here, you'd probably have bred different sizes of the things, and everything.
  
  I had considered making the people Asian-looking, but the flaw with that is, well, Asians have one eye color and two hair-colors. So I think they might have Asian features, but European coloring. Unfortunately it's really hard to describe that without being able to say "they looked Asian except for their coloring", so it might not actually make it into the text.
• My response to the book After the Siege, by Cory Doctorow, which essentially asserts moral equivalency between protecting intellectual property rights and bombing starving people, is that he's a racist. Obviously playing the race card is descending to his level (or would I have to ice-pick myself in the temples to do that?), but seriously, how do you think the Tlingit Indians, or any other Pacific Northwest potlatch cultures, feel about it?
  
  Also, fun fact: intellectual property may well predate tangible. Consider the number of societies throughout the world that, no matter what their material arrangements, made you join initiation societies before they'd teach you various skills or stories. Consider how pissed the Eleusinian Mysteries got at Plato, for incorporating their teachings into one of his dialogues. I guess it's nice to know that Doctorow considers the Australian aboriginal religion and Hopi kiva societies to be one step removed from Nazism.
• The name-dropping of actual brands, to lend verisimilitude, is called "K-Mart realism". I actually like to incorporate it into my SF, for instance using the ISO numbers for various things (Unicode, for instance, is called ISO 10646). I wondered about brand names, but I think I'm going ahead with 'em—while none of our corporations date back to the 1680s, a few do date to the early 18th century, and practically no business not requiring international trade was a corporation at that point.
  
  Remember how I said my Jeeps were Chrysler Vlakvarks? I also have a luxury car, known as the Tata Ocelotl. Most of the guns have names consisting of "BG", then an R or a P depending on if they're a rifle or a shotgun, followed by a year—roughly the naming system that gives us "AK-74". The BG stands, of course, for Běifang Gongyè. Somewhere I have a list of a bunch of other brands, too.
• I just realized I can sum up the anime Lost Universe in three words—"The Slayers: Andromeda."
  
  'S better 'n it sounds, though.
• I take back everything mean I ever said about the Chinese government. Why? They banned fictional depictions of time travel. Apparently they claim it treats history frivolously, though I question whether they don't actually mean "Marxism is a species of Hegelian historicism, therefore it dislikes the notion of being able to screw with the inevitable victory of the proletariat."
  
  But so what? I'm totally willing to overlook Tibet and the One Child Policy, due to their principled Anti-Time Travel stand.
  
  Okay not really, but still, man, I totally agree with them, banning that garbage. As long as Bill & Ted and Back to the Future get grandfathered in, I think we should get that made the UN's first actually binding resolution. A UN Peacekeeper shoving an M16 in their stupid faces might force people who write scifi TV shows to actually come up with stories that aren't an insult to the intelligence.
• Terra Nova is dumb (speaking of intellect-affronting time-travel stories), but passably entertaining. It has the dude who played Quaritch in Avatar, as one of the protagonists, and the people making it actually grasp that, when you live in a lone outpost that's under attack by dinosaurs and anarchists, you're either under martial law, or you're under six feet of dirt. Also they realize that mandatory limits on number of children are totalitarianism (though the unauthorized kid still got born, which—as anyone who knows China will tell you—basically doesn't happen).
  
  It is, however, pretty stupid. Leaving to one side that it's impossible for mankind to have polluted the planet that much by 2149, you wouldn't be any better off in the Cretaceous. In the Mesozoic, remember, the planet had half as much oxygen—that's the reason birds' lungs are so much more efficient than ours, and also why mammals were restricted to small sizes until the Cretaceous extinction event. Also, dinosaurs, like elephants, may be huge and terrifying, but guns still kill them pretty efficiently. They're not monsters, and it's long past time writers stopped treating them like they were. Freaking graboids from Tremors get treated more realistically.
  
  But on the other hand, Libertarians and liberals both hate the show, for acknowledging that sometimes you have to do without certain "civil rights"—which are actually the privileges of a citizen living in a peaceful community. For that alone, I think I can overlook the time travel.
• Apparently a lot of people didn't turn on Battlestar Galactica until they realized—as I saw coming a mile off—that it was going to end with a hackneyed "Adam and Eve" plot. And it seems the one thing many of them objected to about the series in general, was all the "religious" stuff.
  
  It's funny to me, because I actually like well-handled religious stuff in science fiction—maybe it's just the novelty that appeals to me (because SF writers, by and large, understand religion even less well than they understand human sexuality, and read some later Heinlein if you wanna see how little they understand that). The fact they actually can hack it is a big selling-point of many of the better done SF anime, like Gurren Lagann (which is chock-full of religious ideas, pace John "Took a Miracle to Know There's a God" Wright's assumption that religion=Christianity).
  
  But that, I think, is the problem with the religious stuff in BSG. Japanese works can cope with religious elements because everyone in Japan is the same religion—Confucian ancestor worship + Shinto purity code + Buddhist soteriology. BSG, on the other hand, pretends that it comes from a pluralistic society, despite America being just as religiously uniform as Japan (roughly 3% of both countries isn't, at least culturally, of their majority religion, and Americans are much more devout). So BSG poodles around between the Cylons' monotheism and the colonials' retarded version of polytheism, trying to pretend that both are true, because Hollywood is too chicken-shit to come down on one side or the other. Or neither—"they're both wrong" could've been handled satisfactorily, even to religious believers, if the writers had just had the guts to say so.
• In the "purgery" file, I think, go the people who say, and I quote, "Firefly is totally original". Uh, the US and China as the only superpowers, again, goes back at least to Heinlein; swearing in the other superpower's language is just a knockoff of Nadsat (all those weird words are actually Russian (e.g. "horrorshow"=khorosho), mangled significantly less than Firefly's actors mangled Mandarin).
  
  As for the plot and setting: the Earth being uninhabitable a ridiculously short amount of time from when the story was written is, again, at least as old as Heinlein. Only it was, just barely, tenable, when the reason was "nuclear war"; environmental crises, to the extent they aren't simply hoaxes to justify totalitarianism, take a lot longer. Contemptibly quick terraforming is pretty much as old as sending probes to Venus (not that we thought we could terraform Venus, just that that got people thinking about the Greenhouse Effect and the idea of artificially inducing climatic changes for human benefit).
  
  And the Alliance and its shenanigans are, of course, the standard boilerplate post-Watchmen comic book plot, or the tinfoil-hat conspiracy-mongering that also brought us the X-Files. So they go back at least to the Kennedy assassination (which, fun fact, was by the enemy in the Cold War—Oswald was a Communist).
• And finally, God forgive me, a word in defense of Avatar. A bunch of people on this screenwriting forum thread, about how Cameron is a hack (which he is), were saying the mecha in Avatar are ripped off from the one in the Matrix.
  
  Only, it was pretty obvious to me that the mecha in the Matrix are ripped off from the one in Aliens. So, no. He's not ripping off a ripoff of himself, guys.
  
  Everything else they said stands, though—not least because mecha should have armored cockpits. And hey, pro tip, armor 'em in red and they go three times faster.