Don't send a robot to do a man's job

I'm not one to romanticize nature, but I entertain an unconfirmed theory that man was better when he was at odds with nature. When man conquered nature and was set up in worldly comfort, he turned his efforts to conquering God and removing His claim to His children. As is often the case with patricide, the murderer, having to live with his murder, suffers more than the victim.

One theater where man's ennobling battle against nature continues is space. Since we're still over 3 years (!!!) from putting a man on the Moon again, currently all eyes are on Mars. The hopes for the Perseverance rover are high, as the United States's last three Mars rovers have logged 30 years of service, and Curiosity is still going.

Next week the Ingenuity drone helicopter will take flight on the Martian surface. It's scheduled to make five flights, but it's the first one that really matters. The atmosphere is 1% as dense as Earth's, which is offset by a factor of three by Mars's weak gravity.

If Ingenuity can stay in the air using a pre-programmed flight plan, it opens the door for future missions to expand their range of operations. One thing Mars rovers are not is fast. It will take Perseverance years to simply go to where it needs to complete its mission. A helicopter with an instrument package and greater wingspan would be the logical next step in unmanned Martian exploration.

If Ingenuity fails—if it can't take off or it crashes—it'll confirm what skeptics like me have been saying for years. We need to put a man on Mars. I cheer Perseverance on, but it's doing a man's job at one one-thousandth the pace. Some say we're going to the Moon as a dress rehearsal for Mars, even though the Moon and Mars are nothing alike. The only way you can maintain that narrative is to make a future manned Mars mission dependent on the success of your manned Moon mission.

The more we learn about space, the greater the gulf in those missions grows. We now know extended periods of time spent in zero gee causes the heart to atrophy. Moon missions last a few weeks at most and don't need to worry about bringing along exercise equipment. Mars missions will. At least one of the astronauts who goes to Mars will spend closer to 2 years in zero gee. There's a good chance he will need extended rehab upon his return to Earth, no matter how fit he is when he leaves.

Our continued reliance on rovers betrays an aversion to risk that is an order of magnitude greater than the Apollo days. No doubt there are men chomping at the bit to be the first to visit another planet. But ours is not an explorer society. We're an insurance adjuster society.

Nevertheless, the spirit of Manifest Destiny is being revived by the kinds of eccentric personalities that used to populate the halls of NASA before it became yet another alphabet bureaucracy. I'm looking at you, Elon. Thanks to people like him I'll see men piloting helicopters on Mars in my lifetime.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Brevity is the soul of wit

For me, watching creatives achieve storytelling heights with limited resources is a neverending marvel. By limited resources, I don't mean just money; although, that is a glaring factor in movie, TV, and game productions. The writer, on the other hand, is bound only by his imagination and the limits of the medium. The only real costs are ink and paper, which the industry has simplified to a calculation based on wordcount.

How long should a story be? However long it needs to be, is the best answer. (Or, if you're Zack Snyder, twice as long it needs to be.) From a story-telling perspective, the quotas tradpub puts on words is completely arbitrary. Which is why, despite my misgivings about the digitization of entertainment, I still celebrate the ebook revolution. There is no set length for ebooks, so the writer can tell the story in as few or as many words as necessary.

In the last couple of years, David V Stewart has done well self-publishing short-form books. His Eyes in the Walls was one of the best stories I read last year. I can't recommend it enough! But rarely does tradpub take a chance on a standalone novella of 120 pages.

Movies are undergoing their own change. It used to be movies respected a hard upper limit of 3 hours. Then the coronavirus killed theaters and pushed Hollywood onto the small screen. Now movies are no longer constrained by how long you can sit in a dark theater with a belly full of popcorn and carbonated soda. Realizing this, Warner Bros. released a gratuitous 4-hour cut of Justice League to sell HBO Max subscriptions to DC Comics cultists.

Is it worth it? I could give many reasons why not, but the one I'll focus on here is time. The older I get, the more I value my time. Nothing upsets me like wasting my time. If you want to sell me a 4-hour movie, it had better be on par with Ron Maxwell's Gettysburg or the The Return of the King extended edition. By all accounts Justice League was a mediocre 2-hour movie. Four hours to tell basically the same story is the definition of self-indulgence. It verges on disrespect for the audience.

Then again, I'm not their audience. This guy, whom the well-worn aphorism "quality over quantity" was meant for, is.

In an era of virtually limitless data, creatives are tempted to push the upper limits of length in their stories. They do so at risk of alienating their audience, who are still limited in the amount of what they consume by time. Style differences aside, storytelling done right is tight, efficient, and economical. It should linger to drive home significant points, and it should describe to excess when the reader's imagination fails.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Your hill to defend

After I went running last night, you know what I did while waiting for my pulse to come down and the sweat on my forehead to dry? I sat in my office chair and watched an hour of Looney Tunes' Pepe le Pew. Next week I'll get around to watching Gone with the Wind. The only reason I borrowed these DVDs from the library is I expect I won't be able to watch them in the future. Our commissars drove the amorous French skunk who made children laugh from polite society last month for violating their current year sensibilities. HBO Max—"the world's worst streaming service" according to Christopher Nolan—temporarily removed Gone with the Wind before restoring it with humiliating commentary videos to put the movie "in context." If Gone with the Wind is indeed guilty of what it stands accused of, there's only one acceptable outcome to the commissars: digital death.

I don't want to get into why I despise the cleansing of legacy IPs from cultural memory, or the many ways it exemplifies a decadent society. The point is our house is on fire, and there's a limited amount of time to save our things before it collapses. Pepe le Pew went from the subject of a throwaway line in a C-list New York Times column to cut from the Space Jam sequel in 5 days. While many of us were hearing about the latest outrage and having a good laugh, corporate board members at Warner Bros. were holding crisis meetings. As usual, they listened to the loudest voices and those most privileged by supposed grievances. At least in Nineteen Eighty-Four Two Minutes Hate ended after 2 minutes. Now the object of cathartic scorn disappears forever, or else limps along on used DVDs that you can't resell on eBay without being added to the no-fly list.

So, 5 days is the new benchmark for a legacy IP to be revived from relative obscurity only to be figuratively burned at the stake. Away from the culture war front, the conflagration is slower moving. Sony's online Playstation 3 and PSP stores are going away this summer, which means a lot of people are going to be buying external hard drives to keep their games.

The situation reminds me of early electric cars being designed to tap backup gas tanks in case the engine battery ran out of juice. If gas is a more reliable backup, why bother with an electric battery in the first place? The same could be said of Cloud storage versus owning physical media. Why bother with the Cloud when you can upload a game from a CD-ROM onto your computer plus any computer you own in the future?

The answer is convenience, but not on the customer's part. I'm a supply-sider, which means I believe the market is pushed not by what people want, but by what producers offer consumers. It's more convenient for producers to maintain a direct pipeline into your home, to feed you games, music, TV, and movies on-demand. That pipeline is a single point of failure. In the back of our minds we may have understood the inherent flaw of the system, but only recently have we come to grips with what it really means: the erasure of cultural memory.

JD Cowan, take it away:

As download speeds got faster and hard drives got bigger, so did the possibilities grow. Physical sales of media dropped year after year, eventually ending up with music more or less stranded on digital download services with no other option for purchase. Unless you were quirky enough to get a vinyl release, finding CDs had gone out of style with the death of rock music. And this is before getting to the downgrade that is streaming.

Everything changed in a small handful of years, but nobody realized how much it had until much later. Some of us still don't see it, and won't until they wake up without access to a digital library that had been turned off by the license holder. We've walked into a situation that many think is a dream but is actually a nightmare scenario.

You don't actually own anything anymore. Most won't even notice or care until they get their rude awakening. We will keep paying corporations to make things more convenient, and yet far inferior, to what came before.

They can't take from you what you physically own. It's convenient to retcon the digital space; it's harder to burn books for real.

Maintain a personal library. Include things you enjoy as well as timeless classics. Make a habit of raiding yard sales and resale shops. (Amazon is part of the problem, but it's also part of the solution. I get a lot of physical media there that I can't find locally.) Be discerning, lest you fill your garage to the ceiling with stuff you'll never look at. Don't forget to save something for your kids. This is your hill to defend.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Deceptive philosophy

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. (Colossians 2:8)

Always remember that the easiest lies to swallow are 90% true, and tend to sync with basic human nature. The 10% lie against orthodoxy produces not a difference in degree of faith, but a difference in kind.

If God asks for an orange, a small round fruit, and you bring an apple, also a small round fruit, you have failed. An apple is not an orange. (Hat tip David V Stewart for the metaphor.)

Test what you hear against the teaching of the Bible and God's will that is made known to us. God is a specific person, and heretical teaching will try to change His identity. Discern truth from falsehood, and pray to God to give you insight.

Check this out:

This teaching, which identifies Jesus as a political revolutionary, substitutes a non-limiting principle (overthrow oppressors) for a limiting one (subject yourself to God). The liberation convert may deduce, rightly, that it's your "Christian" duty to upend all of creation if it oppresses your political will. This invariably includes timeless Biblical proscriptions against immoral acts, which all people made of flesh and bone chafe against.

Kendi's "savior theology" is simply a rewording of the Great Commission with negative racial connotations. This is clarifying. Jesus' last command, to spread the truth of the Gospel, stands in contrast to Kendi's liberation theology. On this alone, you can reject Kendi's deception.

Two thousand years ago the Jews of the Roman province of Judea desperately wanted a political messiah to lead them in a revolt against the Romans. Jesus, the final and fullest revelation of who God is, did not do this.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," Jesus said. Paul wrote to the Romans to submit to the governing authorities. He told slaves to be obedient to their masters.

As much as you may justifiably hate the Romans, hate the authorities, hate slavery, Jesus did not come to liberate you of the chains other people put on you. Jesus came to break the chains of sin, to break our ties to the devil. Through Him, who defeated death, we are one with our Creator. That is the unmovable essence of Christ.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

A sham of a farce

I find one of the hardest parts of writing is matching character and motive. The temptation is to jury-rig characters' motives to orchestrate a sequence of events I want. It's something Rian Johnson struggles with as well, as I've concluded after watching Knives Out.

• If you think you're going to die because your nurse accidentally injected a fatal amount of morphine in you, and you want to make sure she isn't prosecuted for murder after you die, what do you do? Do you tell everyone in the house what happened and bid your family a tearful farewell? Do you write a short letter explaining the honest mistake and sign it? Neither of those, actually. You slit your own throat to make it look like suicide, instruct the panic-stricken nurse to manufacture an iffy alibi, and hope the coroner doesn't notice the morphine in your system.


• If you're plan to frame your granddad's nurse for murdering your granddad goes awry when the police conclude it's a suicide, what do you do? Do you ask the police if your granddad was under the influence of mind-altering drugs, knowing the bloodwork will put suspicion on the nurse? No. You anonymously hire a private detective who may find anything under the Sun, which may or may not include the bloodwork. When your granddad's housekeeper tries to blackmail you, what do you do? Do you rough her up until she tells you everything she knows, then kill her? No. You leave her to die slowly so she can tell anyone who finds her that you're the killer.


• If you're a cop investigating a suspicious death of an old man with an inheritance his family stands to benefit from, what do you do? Do you look at the bloodwork to see if he was under the influence? Do you take the nurse's medical bag into evidence? Do you review all available security footage of the estate to rule out foul play? Do you examine the study where the supposed suicide took place for suspicious entry? Nope. You do none of those things.


• If you're a private detective who's brought in by an anonymous client to find something the cops haven't found surrounding a suspicious suicide, what do you do? Do you conduct an immediate review of the scene and of the chain of custody of the evidence? Do you question potential suspects when they conveniently turn up at other crime scenes and subsequently evade the police? No. According to Rian Johnson, you carelessly disregard chain of custody and let potential suspects run nondescript errands minutes after leading police on a chase while you wait in the car. Good job.


• Last, but least, if you're a housekeeper whose boss just killed himself, and you spot his grandson a week later rummaging through the nurse's medical bag in the study, what do you do? Do you ask him what he's doing? Do you tell the police and let them sort it out? Of course not! Here's what you do: You assume the grandson poisoned your boss and proceed to blackmail him; you ask your cousin who works for the coroner to give you access to your boss's bloodwork; you then mail a photocopy of only the header of the bloodwork to the grandson and demand a secret meeting; and at the meeting with the person you suspect of murder, you bring no friends and nothing to defend yourself with. Well played.

It's not that the characters are stupid. It's that their motives for acting make no sense. Because Rian Johnson needed the movie to happen, he jury-rigged the characters' motives.

Farce may be the most difficult type of movie to execute because it's wink-at-the-audience funny as well as internally consistent in the genre its poking fun at. Hot Fuzz, Team America: World Police, and Tropic Thunder are excellent farces. Knives Out is a bottom-tier farce because of its baffling plot problems. The actors elevate the poor writing to mere mediocrity. The profane treatment of family is not a point in its favor.

Due to the 2020 demise of tentpole movies, a sequel to Knives Out, which was produced for a mere $40 million, seems inevitable. Don't see it. Read a book instead. Like mine! If you like hard sci-fi, check out Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. I'll respond as soon as I can.

The best Christian movies

…are movies that aren't explicitly Christian. They're secular, but whether they know it or not they favorably convey Christian teaching. This may have been intentional with American movies of the past, but I think it's more accidental in American movies today and in movies from non-Christian countries. So let's dive in.

• The Big Country. Easterner James McKay, played by Gregory Peck, escorts his fiance west to her father's ranch. Referred to repeatedly and mockingly as "the dude," McKay refuses to defend himself against the slights and insults that are thrown his way by his father-in-law's ranch hands. Everyone reads his internal confidence and strength of character as weakness, including his fiance, but he doesn't care what they think. When challenged to a fight by Charlton Heston, he agrees, and they fight to a draw. "What did it prove?" he asks, gasping, afterwards. The look on Heston's face says it all. In my experience, there's no better cinematic example of turning the other cheek or being slow to anger than this movie.


• Nausciaä of the Valley of the Wind. One of my personal favorites! A young princess, the de facto leader of a meek yet thriving valley, must meet two threats to her people: neighboring kingdoms fighting over a powerful weapon, and a toxic jungle encroaching on the kingdom's border. Nausicaä advocates peace and detente with the jungle, but her message loses traction as the neighboring kingdoms wrangle for control of the means to annihilate the jungle and each other. The ohmu, the sentries of the jungle, can withstand any weapon man can wield, and threaten to overrun the valley. On the brink of disaster, the princess makes a final overture of peace to the ohmu, showing that love, not hate, is truly man's most powerful weapon. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)


• Flight. This comes with a caveat, as there's rampant drug abuse, profanity, and explicit sexual content throughout the movie. For that reason, I don't recommend it to Christians who are already familiar with Christian doctrine on sin. However, to secular people, this is a sneaky sermon in a movie. The narrative thread of the movie is Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington, seeking exoneration from wrongdoing in his heroic crash-landing of a doomed commercial jet. (He was drunk while piloting the plane.) As an NTSB hearing looms, his freedom is at risk unless he can pass himself off as someone he is not (that is, sober and in control of his life). He tragically fails. Something becomes apparent in the movie's final scenes: Freedom from sin in many ways is more liberating than license to do whatever you want.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Did Han shoot first?

In the 1990s, during the runup to the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas released the special editions of the Star Wars original trilogy. Since then, multiple versions of the OT special editions, as well as prequels, have received DVD/Blu-Ray releases—but not the OT theatrical cuts. In 2012, Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, which decanonized the Expanded Universe and called on Chuck Wendig to write three books to bridge the OT and sequel trilogy. They also scrapped Lucas's notes and script treatments for the ST. For 8 years Kathleen Kennedy has run Lucasfilm and Star Wars, some say (myself included) into the ground.

More people have seen Blade Runner than read Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In the book Deckard takes a Voight-Kampff test and passes; therefore, he's not a replicant. The movie's original cut is ambiguous at best, but Ridley Scott's director's cut hints strongly that Deckard is a replicant. Scott has come out and said that's the case, no two ways about it. But Blade Runner 2049, produced by Scott, omits this certainty and embraces ambiguity.

JK Rowling's writing style matured along with her core audience through the late 90s and 2000s. Book and movie ticket sales lifted her from poverty to the most read author in the world. Since the 7-book Harry Potter series concluded, she's maintained Dumbledore is gay, something that's yet to be shown in any of the actual books and movies.

The Wachowski Brothers became the Wachowski Sisters years after the Matrix trilogy came out. Lana Wachowski (formerly Larry) now claims the movies are a trans allegory, not a reimagined allegory of the cave like we all thought at the time. You may assume the trans allegory will be the operating ethos of the upcoming fourth movie. It's unclear how breaking free from machine-induced mind control aligns with using medical technology to posit the will over reality, but what do I know?

I claim ignorance about all things Trek, but more TV and movie content has been produced after Gene Roddenberry's death than before. There's been an alternate timeline with two different Spocks, and a weird IP split that I still don't understand.

The problems with most of these franchises revolves around the legitimacy of canon. What is it, and who defines it?

Is it defined by quality, continuity, consistency, or all three? Is it defined by the IP owner? In Star Wars's case, that would be Disney, who say that Anakin Skywalker didn't kill Emperor Palpatine, and that Luke Skywalker abandoned his friends in their time of need. Or is it defined by the IP creator? Again, in Star Wars's case, that would be George Lucas, who said in 1977 Han shot Greedo first but who maintains for the last 23 years that he hasn't. Is he allowed to change what happened decades after we experienced the story a hundred times over in our imaginations?

"To me, [the original movie] doesn't really exist anymore. ... I'm sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be." -George Lucas

For fans, these discussions are not superfluous. Movies and books are content, and what do fans fall in love with but the content? Retcon the content, and you test the fans' suspension of disbelief. It's not all that different from a Christian losing his faith after marrying another Christian. At the very least, it strains the marriage.

I'm not really involved in fandom. I never was. Star Wars mattered the most to me, but now I refuse to care. Nevertheless, Lucas, Rowling, and the Wachowskis have forced me to take the position that even the creators of these IPs can't be trusted to define canon. Creators aren't static, and the successful ones are frequently vain. They change their minds. Are fans supposed to change as well?

For me, canon is the art's content in its original form. Han shot first, Deckard isn't a replicant, and Dumbledore isn't gay. (As someone who saw the director's cut of Blade Runner first, the second statement of these three has been the hardest to accept.) Fans who contend otherwise must reckon with how the creators told their stories the first time. Were they wrong? Even taking into account the compromises inherent in the creative process, I'm not prepared to say they were.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like hard sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.