Matt’s Blog

I’m as big a fan of Douglas Adams as the next guy (count the words in this post if you want to find out how big) but in this case I’m referring to the annual science fiction symposium held annually at BYU.  It’s coming up next weekend.  Check out ltue.org for more information.  Sadly the website this year says no costumes or weapons, which is generally the best part, hopefully everyone quietly ignores that (not that I condone such behaviour, especially on BYU campus).

Finally I got my hands on season 9, though two weeks late unfortunately. I guess I’ve been a little more obsessed with bowling than I though I was. So far I’ve just watched the first three part episode, and I like it more than I thought I would. Col. Mitchell’s dialog is a little too reminiscent of Jack, and though I can see the motivation for it, I think it might get a little annoying. And the interaction between Vala and Daniel is not exactly what I was hoping for, so far anyway. We’ll see where that goes, hopefully nowhere, though she does make for excellent eye candy. Forget the faults though, it’s Stargate, the best hope for a replacement for Star Trek.

I always wanted to read Ringworld by Larry Niven.  I finally did it the other day.  My only dissapointment is that I came to learn of it only through the video game which was partially inspired by it, Halo.  I say that because I don’t generally play video games, and so I came to know of the book by somewhat random chance.

It’s quite an amazing idea really, to build a Ringworld around a sun.  Though I think the mass requirements are a little prohibitive.  But the book is full of traditional Star Trek style space adventures.  Weird looking aliens, tech talk and ideas of massive proportion.  Since what is space besides potential for objects of mind blowing size.  All the recent sci fi productions, be they books or movies, have been leaning more toward the human component of futuristic fiction, which I praise and have even blogged about recently.  Ringworld is just a reminder of a simpler time, and since it’s even better since it’s a whole series.

The last half of season two just came out a few days ago and I’ve been catching some episodes.  Unfortunately, I’ve been quite dissapointed.  While there are some pretty exciting things going on, it’s all related to the humans.  They’re practically falling into civil war, it’s so dramatic.  Though I guess it is highy plot related, with all the humans are imperfect, blah blah, do we deserve to survive, yada yada yada rhetoric.  Maybe I’ll like it better the second time around, or maybe the third.

I was certainly sad to see xxxxxx die, and not even by a Cylon.  I always wonder about deaths in tv series, whether they’re motivated by the actor/actress quitting the show or not.  Maybe xxxxxx will come back as a ghost or, even better, as a cylon.

I just watched an old sci fi movie with Gary Sinise. It’s about a futuristic war between humans and centauri in which the enemy sends replicants to infiltrate Earth. These replicants are made indistinguishable from humans using advanced nano-technology. It’s a theme repeated in the new Battlestar Galactica, and one that I find very interesting. In the movie, (spoiler coming up, highlight to read) the replicants don’t succeed completely in their mission, but one of them does manage to detonate the bomb each one carries inside the rib cage.

I find it an interesting idea because it truly is the one tactic I don’t believe we’d be capable of combating. Humans are too dependent on one another, our relationships with each other are too important to allow us an unbiased decision were such an attack possible. I think even if we had the ability to screen replicants from genuine humans, we would probably still lose because of our emotions. It will be interesting to see how Battlestar Galactica plays it out.

The Sci-Fi channel announced it wouldn’t be picking up SG1 for another season. While I am sad about that, I realize that it’s inevitable. I only hope that there are many more stories to come from the universe, and there is still Atlantis, which I think is shaping up to be just as good as SG1 was, not to mention the fact that it offers a great chance for appearances from SG1 characters

Stargate SG-1 is an incredible series. Honestly, I’m a die hard Star Trek fan, and I never thought there would be anything to compare to it, but Stargate does. It’s a different kind of science fiction, because it’s happening in the present day. Star Trek can be so distanced, because it’s placed so far in the future, the people seem so different from us. But Stargate is in the present day. It’s a reflection on how we would react to finding out that the universe is not devoid of life as we think of it now. It looks at human values, and tries to determine what kind of decisions those values would help us make with a bigger picture in mind. That might seem extremely nerdy, but it’s really more than that. It’s an exploration of human nature, and that’s the most intriguing thing a human can do, the way we gain the most knowledge, is by exploring ourselves. Stargate does that in a way which no other series I know of does, and it does it in present day terms. And that’s why I hope to see it continue, even though some feel, and justifiably so, that the series should conclude.

A few months ago I started writing a Firefly story.  Firefly is a cult hit television series which many fans appropriately referred to as a space western.  It was cancelled after one season, a fact which I still lament, and promptly (by promptly I mean as prompted by the fans) made into a hit (as far as I’m concerned) movie.

Unfortunately, I never finished it, so if you hate unfinished stories, read no further. It’s called Horizone, which I ended up with after trying to spell horizon, and kept because I kind of liked.
Horizone