inconsequence

Yup I guess that was a shark in the rear view mirror.

It was clear from the start that the story could not stretch beyond a season or two without being resolved or completely rethought. Admitting that, and pitching the show as a limited series or mini-series, would have meant going to cable or working with much smaller resources, and you can’t blame the show’s creators for not wanting that. But it always made their protestations about how the show threatened to get away from them ring a little hollow.

From No Longer ‘Lost’, but Still Searching (NYTimes) — a much more sympathetic view of the conclusion to Lost than my own, which nevertheless reaches similar conclusions.

I lost patience with Lost during the horrible mess that was season three. It seemed clear at the time that the writing team suffered a creative crisis as a result of suddenly finding themselves converting a three year arc into a five-plus year arc. The resulting lost ratings then forced them to accelerate the arc, which in turn restored ratings and led the arc to get re-extended. In a sense, you can’t really blame the writers for the result, although it seems to me that they still could have done much better.

You can’t really blame the actors, either. The acting is pretty much excellent (up until the last episode, where the actors are suddenly forced to play their characters very differently in the alternate universe). Indeed, the final episode put enormous strains on almost everyone, not least among them the composer who seemed, having done nothing but “scary stuff coming” and “omg WTF?!” music for six years, to be utterly incapable of handling schmaltz. Is there a good way to score the kind of sentimental dreck that padded out the finale? Faux Jaws or Terminator riffs accompanying kiss kiss flashbacks might actually have made them less annoying. We may never know — you can’t reset your brain and watch this crap again for the first time.

I wanted to like the finale. My bar was pretty low. Remember when the creators claimed that there was a non-magical explanation for everything? I’d put that down to Fargo-esque (“based on a true story”) chutzpah… It will work better if you refuse to assume a magical explanation for as long as possible.

I would have settled for some kind of indication that the creators had a vaguely coherent idea of what was going on, versus simply slathering on incomprehensible crap over each new glaring hole. (I would describe Lost to friends as an onion where you start halfway in, and when you think they’re about to peel a layer you discover they’ve actually pulled out and are showing you a new outer layer. The simple version from a friend is “it’s a show that asks more questions than it answers”.)

There’s nothing wrong with asking questions and not answering them, or even answering them with more questions — if the questions are interesting of themselves. But Lost‘s questions aren’t deep and meaningful, they’re more along the lines of “Bear? Where the fuck did a bear come from?” Replace the world “bear” with any noun-phrase representing anything found in the show and that’s the kind of question Lost asked and never answered. Dharma Initiative. Bomb shelter. Underwater base. Submarine. Smoke monster. Glowing cave. Giant statue. Temple. Heavily armed group of people living in the woods. Village.

The one great thing about Lost, and this is no small thing, is that it added to mainstream TV a new vocabulary of acceptable narrative devices. But before Lost had completed its shark-jump, other TV shows had picked up its tools and made better (more disciplined) use of them. I’m thinking in particular of the show Damages, but you also see similar narrative games in Dexter and True Blood. Indeed, I’m sure that there are plenty of examples of, for example, multilayered flashbacks being used to build out plot and narrative that predate Lost, but Lost used it almost exclusively, and for a while it worked. Damages did the same thing, and did it better. It also layered its arcs so that it would have been perfectly satisfying as a single season show, and yet it is still surprising us with links to the first episode in season three.

It’s not like the writers of Lost ever wrote themselves into a corner from which there was no obvious way out. Lost was always pregnant with possibilities that were never narrowed down. So Lost‘s failure to make, at least, a little bit of sense is very disappointing. One thing that occurs to me, and I think many others, is that the big reveal was going to be “they’re in purgatory” (which seems really dumb and yet would be a better arc than what we got) but that so many fans guessed this they tried to make it something else, and failed.

It was purgatory after all. But for the viewers.

In the British paperback market, having a gigantic spaceship on the cover of a book used to mean "it's science fiction" regardless of the substance of the story. Suffice it to say that there are no gigantic spacecraft in "The Face" and no indication anywhere in this picture that the artist read the book or had it in mind when he created the picture.

One of my ambitions is to write a science fiction novel. Or two. I have some fairly elaborate ideas sketched out, but I’m a little short of spare time right now. I also don’t think that creative endeavors such as writing are a “zero sum game”. Science fiction is in a pretty dreadful state right now, and it’s no use to me if it withers and dies before I get around to making my contribution to the genre.

Here's the latest printing of the same series (this is volume 1, the second volume is very similar). Note what looks like some kind of space carrier on the cover. Aha, it must be "science fiction". (You can guess how many "space carriers" figure in the series.)

Here’s the basic problem: for a hundred years or so science fiction writers have been pretending that “the future” will involve interstellar travel by faster-than-light travel. Sure, there are notable exceptions who write stories set in near-future dystopias (e.g. much of Philip K. Dick’s work, all of William Gibson’s or Neal Stephenson’s work, or David Brin’s Earth and The Postman), but in large part we haven’t advanced beyond E. E. Doc Smith’s “60 parsecs/hour” via “inertialess drive”. Certainly SF in popular culture, which means TV and movies, is essentially a species of fantasy with spaceships and energy bolts instead of dragons and wizards. (Not that this kind of fantasy can’t be fun!) The flipside of the problem is that most science fiction ignores or negates the advances in technology in fields other than warp engineering. Star Trek features fabulous spaceships but no voicemail.

I’ve complained elsewhere that SF does a lousy job of envisioning a future that grapples with today’s problems. Where is a science fiction setting which addresses energy conservation the way the original Star Trek addressed racism? At least BSG had something to say about the War on Terror, but as a piece of speculative SF it was simply dreadful; we can’t make anything remotely resembling the Galactica, but we have firearms way beyond the crap they were using.

It doesn’t help that the few writers who have taken a stab in this direction, e.g. Pamela Sargent’s Venus series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s horribly overrated Mars trilogy, have written ridiculously overlong and generally dull doorstops.

I’d like to see a speculative science fiction setting (on network TV or in a decent series of novels, say) that is not near-future (e.g. Star Trek timeframe or beyond) and does not go beyond our Solar system. Ideally, it wouldn’t make stupid assumptions about, say, the rate at which we can realistically terraform other planets, but let’s not expect miracles. I’d also like to see a speculative science fiction setting that involves interstellar travel using some kind of plausible technology and deals with the implications rather than wishing them away.

I have two fairly solid ideas for settings that satisfy these constraints (I think I have an actually brilliant idea for the second); what I don’t have is a good idea for a plot. Maybe I’ll just steal something from Shakespeare.

So for some reason John Gruber has been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole Gizmodo-buying-a-probably-stolen-prototype-iPhone thing. While I agree with pretty much everything he’s said (or think I do, given I haven’t been interested enough to read any of his longer posts or numerous linked articles), the basic question remains: who the frack cares?

First of all, Gizmodo’s cell phone was remote bricked — so they can’t tell us anything about its most interesting features beyond stuff Gruber had already leaked: it has a ridiculously sharp screen. Thanks.

Second, Gizmodo is kind of a dumb website. I cite as evidence the amount of excitement over Windows Phone 7 Series. The first words in this “article” are:

I’m sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.

Gizmodo is worse than a fanboy site, it’s a site run by people who aspire to be fanboys. To the extent that I am an Apple “fanboy” I both cringe at the label and try to second-guess myself. Gizmodo is a website for people with no life, no sense of priorities, and no ability to think beyond, “ooooh, shiny”. The thinking person’s ten second reaction to Windows Phone 7 is “wow, cool”. But after thirty seconds it becomes “how the frack is it supposed to work?” As Edward Tufte puts it:

The WP7S screens look as if they were designed for a slide presentation or for a video demo (to be read from a distance) and not for a handheld interface (read from 20 inches). …

… The titling typography does not serve user needs or activities. Instead it is about its designer self, and looks like signage on the walls of a fashionable building. Good screen design for information/communication devices is all about the user and should be endlessly self-effacing.

Indeed, he speculates that the design was optimized to look good in internal PowerPoint presentations rather than based on actual use of a life-sized device. Ouch.

I won’t dwell on this, the Gizmodo article is almost pathetically adoring of the Windows Phone 7 interface. My favorite bit is how rather than merely being user-centric, the interface is data-centric. As if this is a Good Thing. The Thing beyond user-centric, I guess. But how can it be? If the user needs data-centredness, then being data-centric is being user-centric. If not, not.

Argh, the whole damn website is so stupid it’s not worth criticizing. And that’s my point. But hey, they may be idiots, but at least they have some ethics… Oh, wait.

Since this is my day to post X vs. Y entries, Twitter has hit 50M tweets per day. According to About.com as of 2008 there were 183 billion email messages being sent each day by 1.3 billion people of which around 70% is spam or viruses (which I found surprisingly low; but then I suspect Twitter’s signal/noise ratio is even worse and there are no good filters). Twitter has been growing at a rate of 400% every six months, so at its current rate of expansion it should hit 183 billion tweets in three years, give or take. (Email growth is considerably slower—it averaged 14.6% from 2001 to 2007.)

Of course, in three years we’ll all be using Google Wave on our Windows Tablet 7 Series Tablets.

…is harder than we think it is.

Incidentally, I first heard of Po Bronson when he was interviewed on Australian radio about his first novel, Bombardiers. (It’s essentially Catch-22, but the “bombardiers” are Wall Street Junk Bond salesmen, and the Junk Bonds are the bombs. It’s very funny, and—given it was published in the 90s—pretty topical. Unsurprisingly, Bronson did actually work as a bond salesman.)

Maybe the solution is to tax racism.