Scificionado

The first episode in a new web series called Star Trek: Reunion has been released. It episode is 25 minutes long, and is the first of a series created by Oliver Smith of Cerberus Films. What makes this interesting is that the scenes and actors exist within the massively multiplayer online game, Star Trek: Online.

Budding film makers have been using games to make their movies for a while now, in a format called Machinama. You can find plenty of examples on YouTube of mini-movies and music videos created using World of Warcraft. And of course, there is the famous Red vs Blue, created entirely on Halo.

One of the predominant plot lines in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the Dominion War. Star Trek: Reunion takes place many years after the end of the Dominion War and starts with several Starfleet officers at a reunion, talking about the events of the war. These stories are told as flashbacks.

So settle back, grab some popcorn, and enjoy.

This last Christmas, my friends and I all seemed to get the same idea, and a number of the gifts that were given — a big percentage anyway — were of the board game type. It was one of those moments of synchronicity because none of us discussed or mentioned the idea, and it wasn’t until the last minute that I came up with the idea of giving some of these games myself.

I had mentioned a few months before Christmas of my fondness for Zombie movies and a passing comment became a gift of the Zombies!!! board game.

Zombies!!! has a fairly simple set of rules which makes it really easy to get into and to get started, but the game itself can take two to three hours.

The premise is pretty simple. You and your friends start off in the town square. At the start of each players turn, they draw a town tile and place it next to an existing tile. This tile might have a number of zombies on it, and/or some health and ammo. The player then rolls for movement and if a zombie is encountered, there’s a combat roll. At the end of his turn the player rolls for the number of zombies to move a single space. The first player to kill 25 zombies, or reach the helipad tile, wins.

What’s fun is the the cards you can draw and the backstabbing you can do. It’s always a joy to double the number of zombies in a room that your friend is in.

We played another board game today. It’s called Twilight Imperium and is a far more involved game than Zombies!!! It’s basically a space conquest game on a board made up of hexes with different planets and the like. The goal is simple — the only part that is — just get 10 victory points to win. How you get those victory points is harder to work out.

I said it was complex, well it took my friend around six hours to remove all the different tokens, cards, and other pieces from the frames holding them together. And it took over an hour for five players to complete the first turn. After constantly checking the rules, and about six full hours of play, I figure it’s going to take us a few sessions to get Twilight Imperium down pat.

And that’s just two of the games that were given at Chrissie. There’s  Starcraft: The Board Game (See all Strategy Games) board game, as well as another called Starfarers of Catan. It looks like there will be quite a few Saturday nights rolling the dice over the next 11 months. And of course the common refrain, “Stupid game!”

Crossposted from Stropp’s World.

What would happen if humanity discovered a new habitable world, and the three major world powers each decided to establish bases on this world?

What if this new world was already inhabited by not just one, but three sapient species who live in relative harmony with the world?

Throw in a precarious political situation where each power is capable of wiping the other two out in a nuclear war, and is only restrained from doing so by the prospect of mutually assured destruction, and you have Jem, a novel by Frederick Pohl.

Jem was published in 1979, and thus could probably be considered as classic science fiction. The era certainly shows through. This was right smack dab in the middle of the cold war. We had movies like The Day After (1983), and the British TV series Threads (1984) all depicting the aftermath of nuclear war. Nuclear Fear was cited as one of the causes of youth depression.

This sense of human folly comes through strongly in Jem, and there is a distinct feel of dark humour in the book. However, Jem is somewhat divided in this regard. The elements that should be ironic, often come through as tragic, and I’m not sure that the humour works in this story.

For the most part Jem comes across as a believable world and the three species are nicely defined, and fit well into the evolutionary niches in which they live.

The problem of Jem is in the habit of humans to take their problems with them. At first glance Jem appears to be the perfect situation for the inhabitants of a world at conflict to escape at least some of that. Unfortunately for both the human settlers and the native inhabitants of Jem, the bigger problems of Earth find their way to the new world.

There are a few concepts in the book that didn’t really gel with me.

Jem isn’t entirely hospitable to humans. We can’t eat the local produce or drink the water without experience toxic allergic and sometime fatal reactions. Despite this the settlers live in tents and come into physical contact with the local environment. That seemed very risky behaviour. I would have expected some form of quarantine from the environment.

Some of the humans didn’t behave at all rationally. Not that people do, but there were cases of one team member attempting to make contact with one of the sapient species, while another member of the same team was bent on taking specimens any way he could, including shooting, gassing, or blowing them up. This made some of the characters feel quite flat, and consequently I found that I could care less about many of the characters.

On the other hand, the behaviour of the human settlers in killing the local intelligences for research while at the same time using them to spy on and attack their human neighbours, or the wholesale slaughter of neighboring villages to remove any threat, was quite believable given the unfortunate history of humanity in how it treats the natives of the lands of colonisation.

In some ways Jem mirrors the story of the Garden of Eden, with mankind playing the part of the snake.

Where Jem really shines is in the way Pohl represents the way the human world works, especially in the arenas of politics and bureaucracy and our tendency to exploit anything and anyone to get our way, no matter the consequences.

Rating

a·fi·ci·o·na·do/əˌfiSH(ē)əˈnädō/

Noun: A person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about an activity, subject, or pastime.

sci·fi·ci·o·na·do/syˌfiSH(ē)əˈnädō/

Noun: A person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about science fiction, fantasy, horror and speculative fiction in general.

I received my first science fiction book when I was eight years old.

My grandmother took me into a bookstore in the Rundle Mall in Adelaide and let me have a look for one book. I spent a fair bit of time looking through the science fiction shelves and finally selected 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m not sure why I selected that particular book, it was probably because of the space station picture on the cover and an eight year olds fascination with space.

2001 was my first experience with science fiction literature. I had seen some scifi television previously. I was four when shows like Lost in Space, and the Saturday matinee Japanese giant robot movies appeared on the family black and white TV, with the occassional 1950′s classic like Forbidden Planet. But that book stimulated my imagination more than any TV show or movie had done before. That sealed my love affair with science fiction, writing the genre indelibly into my soul.

I’m 46 now, and I still have that book even though it is quite dilapidated. The cover is terribly worn and loose, and the pages are coming out of the binding. Probably as a result of being read so much at the time. It’s a cliche but it appears that I literally read the covers off. 2001 has been joined by hundreds of other titles, more than I can fit into my bookshelves.

I have started Scificionado as a place to write my thoughts about all things SciFi. I’m coming to this blog from my previous blog, Stropp’s World which is about MMO gaming. I started Stropp’s World nearly five years ago as an experimental entry into blogging. At the time I gave it 90 days to see if it was something I could stick with. I guess five years answers that question.

Scificionado, however, has a bigger mandate than Stropp’s World. While there is a lot to talk about in the MMORPG genre, there are several orders of magnitude more to discuss in Science Fiction. Aside from Literature, Television, Movies, Comics, and Collectibles there are all the real world discoveries that were predicted by, or influence the direction of SciFi. And if all that weren’t enough, there is the philosophies expressed by the stories that are being told.

Because after everything else is said and done. Science Fiction isn’t about science. It’s about people, the human condition. SciFi is a form of literature that allows stories to be told that couldn’t be told in any other genre.

I’ll leave this post with the following quote by Isaac Asimov.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
Isaac Asimov