Like Tears in the Rain

Over the Christmas holidays, I rented Blade Runner (Director's Cut) on Blu-Ray and was pleasantly surprised at how convincing the screenplay, the acting and the special effects were after almost thirty years.


Apparently, there are fifteen odd mistakes in the film, not counting problems with translations and subtitles, but the suspension of belief and the character immersion is such that, even knowing a couple of them didn't spoil the film.


Science fiction is unique as a genre in that it puts science, whether it is speculative, imaginary or real, in the spotlight, but the truly great science fiction stories expose how much more there is to learn about ourselves.

The dramatic conclusion of Blade Runner, with the dying replicant saving the life of Deckard, his mortal adversary, is, perhaps, the greatest scene in science fiction history, as an android comes to understand the true value of life while mankind continues to treat life with disdain. I still remember the first time I heard that speech and the delivery of Roy's final line, "Time to die," with its ambiguity about who would die. Roy had Deckard dead to rights, but Roy saves him from falling and allows him to live on, choosing not to waste yet another life. Roy talks of the impending waste, that with his last breath, his memories will be lost like tears in the rain, and we all realise our memories too will one day be washed away. It is the quintessential human realisation.

In the same manner, my latest short story, Serengeti, explores human emotions and the meaning of our all too brief lives through the eyes of two clones searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life. This is something I think science fiction does better than any other genre. It detaches and divorces us from reality, immersing us in an artificial world, but ultimately drives home real world truths that help us to better understand ourselves.


If you haven't seen the sketchbook for the set design of Blade Runner, it's worth flipping through. There's some great sketches, including at least one that didn't make it into the movie.

I have mixed feelings about a reboot. I just can't see how Blade Runner could be improved. The script writers have their work cut out for them.

Apollo 18

Apollo 18 is a mockumentary using the kind of fake-realism made famous by The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, but without the absurd camera shaking that made so many people nauseous, and provided a new use for all those empty popcorn boxes. There's a bit of handy-cam syndrome, but only enough to add a sense of authenticity. There's not enough to distract from the movie itself.

The user ratings on IMDb give Apollo 18 a five out of ten, while Rotten Tomatoes, another user-driven rating system, has the movie at two out of ten. Ouch! But, don't be put off, it's not as bad as all that. 

As an author that has been criticised for weak characterisation, I think that's part of the problem with Apollo 18 as well. We, the audience, never really got to identify with the astronauts before they were thrown into the fray. Although the sense of being part of a lunar expedition is carried off very well. 

Warning! Spoilers!

On a technical level, the movie has been criticised for the footprints being too close together, too evenly distributed. With the exception of the actual Moon footage spliced in at the start of the movie, the motion of the astronauts is too much like a shuffle and lacks the free, flowing, bouncing motion of an actual moonwalk. Clearly, faking a moon landing in the 21st Century, with a multimillion dollar budget, is not easy. It makes you wonder how they faked four moon landings in the 60s, or, perhaps they didn't, perhaps Armstrong and Aldrin actually walked on the Moon. (sometimes, the simplest explanations are the best)

The use of sound within sections of Apollo 18 was misleading, with the astronauts hearing the alien creatures while on an EVA, something that's impossible in a vacuum.

Also, the alien/rock creatures have absurdly fast motion/metabolism for something living in the coldest place on the moon, a crater that never sees sunlight. And one wonders what these critters feed on when there's not an astronaut to munch on.

Having said all that, however, I think Apollo 18 deserves far more than a two or a five out of ten. I'd rate it as seven out of ten stars. It is an ambitious movie, carried out with an admirable level of detail, particularly within the LEM. The slowly building crescendo of suspense worked well for me. Alien life on the Moon was always going to be a tough sell, but I think they succeeded far more than Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which, ironically, rated slightly better on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

I found the discovery of a cracked Soviet cosmonaut helmet particularly poignant and moving, given the string of disasters that befell their space program. It was a stunning, vivid reveal within the storyline. And, as for the original poster, with the three-toed wolf-life footprint, I was hanging out for the point we'd see what made those tracks, but it never came. Perhaps it was a case of the marketing department outpacing the writers. 

I would have liked to have seen a different ending. The conclusion seemed rushed and was a bit of a let down. But, hey, I've been criticised for both of those points as well with Anomaly, so there's some learning here for all. A slightly different ending and Apollo 18 could have escaped the horror genre, which really doesn't suit the movie at all.

If you have low expectations, you'll be very pleasantly surprised by this movie. It's not Apollo 13, but it's nice to see someone going back to the Moon :)

Conversations with an Alien Hunter

OK, strictly speaking, this is not a science fiction book, but it contains concepts that are the basis for science fiction encounters with aliens, debunks myths and tells you who gets it right and who gets it wrong.

The book is called Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI institute, but it could have equally been called Conversations with an Alien Hunter...  because of its relaxed, informative, conversational style.

And this raises an interesting point about the 21st Century. Never before have so many had such direct access to the relatively few pioneering minds of our time. Today, you can follow scientists like Seth on Twitter or like them on Facebook.

Seth is one of the brave few that still has his direct contact details on the Internet and gets flooded with emails and phone calls. With hundreds of new emails every day, he's gone from senior astronomer to chief correspondent as he juggles public demand against his professional inquiry in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I'm sure there are some days where he'd be glad to find terrestrial intelligence, while anything beyond that would be a bonus. And this brings us back to Confessions, as it is, in a nutshell, the opportunity to sit one-on-one with Seth and listen to what he has to say on the subject of intelligent alien life. Its soft, easy-going, conversational style makes it enjoyable to read.

In an age where communication moves at close to the speed of light, zipping around the planet through copper wires and fibre optics, bouncing of tin cans in the sky and through cables running along the sea floor there's rarely the chance to have a sustained, in-depth conversation any more, but, ironically, books are filling that niche. Rather than superseding and replacing the written word, the advent of the Internet has ensured books have a place of even greater prominence in that they are the sole repositories of comprehensive knowledge. Catch something interesting in a tweet? Read some titbit in a news article and want to know more? Head for the books.

And Confessions delivers in style. It's everything you wanted to ask after seeing the movie Contact, but didn't know who to approach.

It is fascinating to have the search for extraterrestrial intelligence put in context. Yes, it's been going for decades and they haven't found anything, but do you realise how big space is? I mean, we all know space is big. But do you know how big it really is when you start searching for ET? Seth points out that if you were sitting in orbit around Alpha Centauri, the closest of over two hundred billion stars to our sun, looking for mankind, then spotting the Earth would be like noticing a mosquito circling a light-bulb from 10,000 miles away. The clincher, though, is the mosquito circles some 25 feet away from the light-bulb and never gets any closer. And that's the view from our closest neighbour!

Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is, then, perhaps the most adventurous undertaking in the history of science.

The Arecibo telescope, made famous by the movie Contact, is located in Puerto Rico with a dish measuring 1,000 feet across. It's capable of holding 373 tennis courts and is so sensitive that the dish can detect signals one-trillionth the energy of an ant taking a single step. These guys may not have found ET yet, but it's not for lack of trying. The reality is, our galaxy is astonishingly big. Shostak points out that if the largest, most comprehensive SETI search to date had been conducted on a haystack, we would have made a particularly thorough search through roughly a tablespoon's worth of hay and determined there were no needles...yet...

So patience is the order of the day, but, as Shostak points out, Moore's Law not only ensures ever faster computers for our home office/study, it means our ability to trawl through millions of frequencies is growing exponentially. Within the next couple of decades we'll have gone through a sizeable portion of our haystack and, as we suspect there are thousands of needles buried within it, we should end up pricking our finger.

SETI's research is becoming the basis for better, more accurate science fiction stories. Recent releases, like Anomaly, have shot up the charts as hard science fiction novels because they steer away from the Hollywood caricatures and provide a more intelligent view of how an alien is likely to interact with us, what they would look like, how they would react to human idiosyncrasies, etc. And, no, they're not going to look anything like Dr. Spork or Worf.

There's a whole bunch of extraordinary insights throughout Confessions, but I won't spoil it for you, suffice to say, Hollywood gets it all spectacularly wrong. If you enjoyed Contact, you'll love Confessions.