In this second catch-up episode, I talk about the most recent monster movies (and one novel) to come out and their place in science fiction as a whole.
Movie recommendation: Love and Monsters
My YouTube video on the physics of giant monsters.
Other works discussed:
The Color out of Space (2019)
Underwater (2020)
Godzilla vs. Kong
Jurassic World Dominion
Monster Hunter (2020)
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
In this week’s episode of A Reader’s History of Science Fiction, I talked about constructed languages, or conlangs. I listed the major ones I discussed in the description, but there were many more that I mentioned in passing, which I didn’t have space to list. So, as I’ve done a couple times before, I’m following up here with a complete list.
Lingua Ignota (St. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century)
Dovahzul (Adam Adamowicz, Skyrim)
Lojban (The Logical Language Group, 1987)
Esperanto (L. L. Zamenhof, 1887)
Barsoomian (Edgar Rice Burroughs / Paul Frommer, John Carter of Mars)
Quenya (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)
Sindarin (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)
Old Solar (C. S. Lewis, The Space Trilogy)
Newspeak (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four) Previously recommended.
Nadsat (Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange)
Martian (Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land)
Heptapod (Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life”)
Babel-17 (Samuel R. Delaney, Babel-17)
Pravic (Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed) Previously recommended.
Ascian (Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun)
Tamarian (Joe Menosky, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok”)
Speedtalk (Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf)
Tnuctipun (Larry Niven, World of Ptaavs)
Trinary (David Brin, Startide Rising)
Ruanja (Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow)
Láadan (Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue)
Klingon (Marc Okrand, Star Trek)
Atlanean (Marc Okrand, Atlantis: The Lost Empire)
Na’vi (Paul Frommer, Avatar)
Beama (Christine Schreyer, Alpha)
Dothraki (David J. Peterson, Game of Thrones)
Kastithanu, L’Irathi, Indojisnen, and Kinuk’aaz (David J. Peterson, Defiance) Recommended.
Science fiction frequently plays with language in different ways to explore the concepts of philosophy, culture, and cognition; and constructed languages (or conlangs) are a big part of that. In this episode, I highlight how conlangs have contributed to the genre over its history.
TV recommendation: Defiance (Kastithanu, L’Irathi, Indojisnen, and Kinuk’aaz, by David J. Peterson)
My blog posts about language in Creationism.
jan Misali’s Conlang Critic playlist.
Other languages discussed:
Newspeak (Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell)
Láadan (Native Tongue, by Suzette Elgin)
Klingon (Star Trek, by Marc Okrand)
Na’vi (Avatar, by Paul Frommer)
Thor: Love and Thunder is Disney’s latest addition to the MCU and the fourth Thor movie. This is actually a pretty big deal. Thor is the first MCU hero to get a fourth movie outside of the ensemble Avengers films. And Thor as a series had not one, but two lackluster offerings at the outset, only hitting its stride with Ragnarok.
Obviously, trilogies are something of a tradition in film, and with Iron Man dead and the original Captain America retired if not dead by now, there aren’t that many opportunities for a hero to rack up four movies, but Thor has done it and still gotten a “Thor will return” tag after the credits.
But the most important question is, how was the movie? And I’d say it was pretty good. It’s not stellar. It didn’t live up to Ragnarok, but it’s still a pretty solid movie and up to Marvel’s standards.
My rating: 4 out of 5.
Spoilers below.
Continue reading
My first episode catching up both on classic works of sci-fi that I passed over before, and new works from the past 2 years. These are “short” episodes that will continue intermittently with longer ones.
Book recommendation: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
Other book discussed: Cities in Flight by James Blish
The new Jurassic Park trilogy made big waves when it debuted in 2015. Now, that trilogy has concluded with Jurassic World: Dominion, and things are crazier than ever.
This movie has not been loved by the critics, scoring the worst of the entire series with them on Rotten Tomatoes. However, I quite liked it. In fact, I daresay Jurassic World: Dominion may be the best Jurassic Park movie since the original. (And the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes supports that.) It’s not perfect, but it did a really good job of cleaning up the narrative mess the last movie got itself into.
My rating: 4 out of 5.
Spoilers below.
Continue readingI interview Farah Mendlesohn, a scholar of children’s sci-fi and fantasy literature and author of The Intergalactic Playground.
Farah’s book recommendations:
The Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (free online)
A Reader’s History of Science Fiction will return next Monday with my interview with Farah Mendlesohn, author of The Intergalactic Playground. Be sure to check it out.
This past week, Apple TV premiered its new dinosaur documentary, Prehistoric Planet. This is a bigger deal than it may sound.
Okay, so, for a long time, the gold standard for dinosaur documentaries was Walking with Dinosaurs, which premiered on BBC One all the way back in 1999. It was an epic piece of work, using CGI on a level that had never been seen before, and kicking off a slew of sequels, plus plenty of similar shows on the Discovery Channel and the like.
It was also very much flawed. Walking with Dinosaurs didn’t showcase the latest science, but instead bowed to the popular conception of what dinosaurs were like (at that time probably driven by the original Jurassic Park more than anything else). Notably, we already knew in 1999 that dinosaurs had feathers, but Walking didn’t use them. (And honestly, for shows that did like Dinosaur Planet, they looked pretty dumb—more like fuzzy chicks than dangerous predators.)
The other thing is that there has been a pretty serious drought in dinosaur documentaries in recent years. I first noticed…probably 4 or 5 years ago that while there had been a lot of them in the 2000s, there were very few after 2011. We hadn’t gotten the opportunity to see the feathered dinosaurs properly updated. And what documentaries there were frequently weren’t up to the same quality of Walking with Dinosaurs. Most of them were shorter, and most of them broke the immersion by cutting away from the dinosaurs for interviews with scientists and video of modern day fossil hunts.
So when I saw the trailer for Prehistoric Planet, I was very excited. Here was the first major dinosaur documentary since (as far as I could tell) 2015, one on the same scale as Walking with Dinosaurs. It looked to be going all-in on the immersion (which later proved right); it had David Attenborough narrating (who turned down Walking With Dinosaurs because he thought it was too speculative at the time), Hans Zimmer on the music, and to cap it all off, feathered dinosaurs that actually look good.
So, yes, this was a big deal. And I have to agree it lived up to expectations. My rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Continue reading
So, a few years ago, I wrote a series of posts on this blog called “What If? Rejects.” (You can read that series from the beginning starting here.) This series was based on the book What If? by Randall Munroe, better known for the webcomic XKCD.
What If? was billed as “Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions,” a series that Randall started on his website, in which he solicited silly questions from readers like, “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?” And then, he would analyze the answers to these questions scientifically.
However, in What If?, Randall also listed a number of “weird (and worrying) questions” that he didn’t answer, but just included for laughs.
Well, I decided to answer them. Few of them really couldn’t be answered, at least if we’re willing to venture a bit further into the realm of science fiction, so I decided I’d go for it. There were 27 questions in total, and I was able to give what I considered to be decent answers to all but two of them.
So you can imagine that when Randall announced he was publishing What If? 2 this September, I was very excited. The book itself is sure to be a lot of fun to start with, just like the first one. But I really hope Randall includes some rejected questions in the book again, because if he does…I’m on it.
I was encouraged in this hope when, a couple weeks ago, Randall published a comic listing categories of questions that he refused to answer in the second book, with examples. He’s not answering them for a reason, but I’m not quite as selective as Randall. (It’s not my book, after all.) So, as a warm-up for What If? 2, let’s try to answer the questions he listed above, lightning round-style:
People Cheating on Homework
Q. What if I made a pendulum by hanging a rock on a 2.75 meter string? What would its period be in seconds? (Show your work.)
A. Since your homework was probably due a long time ago, I have no qualms about answering this, although I’m not going to bother deriving the entire formula here. By a lucky coincidence, the semi-period of a pendulum on Earth is very close to the square root of its length in meters, within 1%, so the period of this pendulum is 2*sqrt(2.75) = 3.32 seconds.
Medical Advice
Q. What if you got a scratch and the next day your hand looked like this [Attachment]? Should you see a doctor or what?
A. Since I don’t have the picture, I can’t assess it directly, but if you have to ask, the answer is probably yes. (Disclaimer: I am not an MD.)
Personal
Q. Why don’t the squirrels in my yard like me?
A. Um…Are they American red squirrels? Because that kind are territorial. If they’re gray squirrels or Eurasian red squirrels (and you haven’t been throwing things at them or something), then you may need to talk to a sciurologist.
Spam
Q. Do you want to meet lonely singles in your area tonight.
A. As fun as that sounds, I must decline, as I did not just get on the internet yesterday.
Phishing
Q. Have you recently been the victim of phishing? To check, log in to your account by clicking here.
A. Uh…no and no.
Requests for Help with a Crime
Q. Using modern science, what would be the fastest way to get through this bank vault door? [Blueprints.]
A. Well, the fastest way is probably a shaped explosive charge, but that’s probably not going to help you with that apparent crime because it cannot guarantee the safety of the contents of the vault.
Unanswerable
Q. Why am I me and not someone else?
A. …How do you know you’re not?
Vague
Q. What is going to happen? (Be specific.)
A. Given the open-ended question, about the only answer I could give would be to list specific things that are near-100% certain to happen in the future…
♫♪ The sun will come out…tomorrow… ♫♪
Vague and Ominous
Q. Will I have to start worrying about spiders after Tuesday?
A. Unless you’re traveling on Tuesday to a part of the world that has many spiders, it is very unlikely that you will have to worry about them more than usual.
?????
Q. Hi, we’re lonely singles in your area, and we’re wondering what would happen if we shot a nuclear bomb into a volcano! Click here to log in and tell us.
A. Questioner is probably a bot. Also, I already answered this one.
Science Meets Fiction 