Return to Babylon 5

After reading Downbelow Station, I just had to re-watch Babylon 5 (for the umpteenth time... I've lost count, but I'm probably well into double digits by now). It's hard to believe the show is over twenty years old; it still works so well, and even the special effects have held up nicely. (The Shadow ships still give me goosebumps.) If you haven't seen Babylon 5, you need to. It's amazing, and a great lesson in constructing plot and character arcs, if you're a writerly type like me. The show also does foreshadowing remarkably well. That's part of why it's so much fun to re-watch: the second time around you get all the cryptic remarks and glimpses of hidden things.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes from the show's first season:

Kosh: Understanding is a three-edged sword.
--  "Deathwalker"

Ivanova: Commander, we don't have a lot of time. We're cut off from the way we came in, we don't know if we can find another way back to the ship before we run out of air. . .

Sinclair: We can't leave him like this!

Ivanova: I know, I know. It's a Russian thing. When we're about to do something stupid, we like to catalog the full extent of our stupidity for future reference.

--"A Voice in the Wilderness" part 1

Delenn: I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light.

-- "Babylon squared"

Londo: There comes a time when you look into the mirror, and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it, or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors.

-- "Chrysalis"

Kosh: And so it begins.

-- "Chrysalis"

Go on, go watch it. I know you want to.

Etymology Expeditions: Words from the Future

Science fiction has brought us a number of new words. Let's check out a few, shall we?

The word robot is actually a translation from a 1920s play "Rossum's Universal Robots" by Karel Kapek. It comes from the Czech robotnik, "slave." The noun robotics is attributed to Asimov (you know, as in the three laws of robotics). Android, from Latin androides, from Greek andro- "male" + eides "shaped," is older, from 1837, it meant an automaton resembling a human being, originally referring to automated chess players. It was popularised by science fiction writers in the 1950s.

We can't forget the ansible, which Ursula Le Guin coined from "answerable" for her book's interstellar communication needs.

Cyberspace is a fairly new word, invented by William Gibson of Neuromancer fame for a short story in 1982. The prefix cyber was borrowed from cybernetics, which comes from Greek kybernetes "steersman, guide."

Spaceship is from 1894, from John Jacob Astor's "A Journey in Other Worlds." Space, as an astronomical term, has been used as early as the 1600s, perhaps from Paradise Lost, but many compound were invented by science fiction authors, like spacecraft (1928 Popular Science), space station (1936 "Rockets Through Space"), and spaceman (1942, Thrilling Wonder Stories). The word astronaut is of French descent,  coined from aéronautique by Belgian-born science fiction writer Boex.

Telepathy, from Greek tele+pathy "feeling from afar" is an exception. This term was invented by psychologist Frederick Myers in1882.

So that's it for this week. Interesting stuff. Language is always shifting and changing. Apparently there's a new word created every 98 minutes. Got a good one in mind? Post it in the comments.

Sources:

http://www.etymonline.com/

Happy Leap Day!

February 29th only comes round every four years, so go do something fun and memorable!

Have cupcakes for breakfast or ice-cream for dinner.

Visit a museum or art gallery even though it's a workday.

Read a book from a genre you normally wouldn't touch, or an indie comic, or some Victorian poetry.

Call an old friend out of the blue.

Try a new sport, or an old one. (I'm thinking medieval sword fighting.)

Write a drabble,

do a cartwheel,

sing karaoke like nobody's listening.

Take a leap!

Release the Kraken!

                         

Meet the steampunkiest rum out there: The Kraken. It's sweet, spicy, thick, and black. I mixed it with diet coke this time, and because I'm slightly insane delightfully quirky, I carved a kraken out of lime peel for my glass.

                              

                                                    Here's a close-up of the label.
                                                                Cheers, matey!

Science Fiction Classics: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh

Image from www.amazon.com   

Downbelow Station is a complicated novel. From the prologue we learn that long ago the Earth Company funded space exploration and built a number of space stations as stepping-stones to the stars. Everything went well for a while, and the company prospered and built more and more bases so humans could travel to distant worlds. They collected taxes etc. to pay for this. At some point the farthest stations began to rebel, and the company built a fleet to reinforce its orders. The far-away stations formed a break-away element, the Union, and war broke out between the Company and Union fleets, with the stationers and merchants caught in the middle.

The story takes place at Pell, on the station orbiting it (Upabove) and a base at planet surface (Downbelow).  Captain Signy Mallory of the company fleet dumps a holdfull of refugees onto Pell station, straining its resources to breaking-point. Angelo Konstantin, the Stationmaster, tries to cope. We follow him and his son Damon on the station and Emilio on-planet. Mallory also dumps prisoner of war Josh Talley on the station. He requests a mindwipe in return for his freedom. Then there’s John Lukas, Konstantin’s rival, working with union agent Jessad. We also have Mazian, leader of the company fleet, and his counterpart in the Union, Seb Azov. Confused yet? I know I was.

On-planet, we also have the indigenous hisa, fluffy big-eyed creatures who speak in broken English. They’re working for the humans, and some of them work on the station. They’re very loyal to the Konstantins.

The story follows Pell station, caught in the middle of the war, riots, and political machinations.

I chose to read Downbelow Station because it was on my list of science fiction classics, and the name reminded me of Babylon 5, one of my favorite TV-shows ever. Turns out that the novel was a major inspiration for B5’s creator J. M. Straczynski. The book also won the Hugo award in 1982. Should be good, right?

Not exactly. I really wanted to like this book, but I found it a tough read. From the beginning, I kept getting the characters mixed up. Mostly I had no idea who was on which side of the conflict or even who I was supposed to be rooting for. There were just too many characters with similar names, none of whom were that memorable. The only ones that stuck were Captain Mallory and Josh, the mind-wipe victim (and the hisa). Most of the time I had to read a few paragraphs/pages until I knew who I was reading about. The end result was that I didn’t care about the characters or what happened to them. Also their motivations were a bit fuzzy to me. Some major plot  twists and revelations just happened in passing, like they were no big deal, which messed with my caring about the characters.

The hisa also rubbed me the wrong way, but this is a matter of personal preference. They were just too cutesy (the way they said ‘love you’ constantly), and I found their speech patterns annoying. And the way the human characters treated them: naming them things like ‘satin’ and ‘bluetooth,’ like they were pets, and exploiting them as workers. Were they even getting paid? A bit too much of the noble-savage trope for my liking.

On the plus side, I did notice the similarities to Babylon 5, so it was interesting to see where the series' creator got his inspiration. The mind-wipe thing was interesting, and the base on Pell, the planet. I also thought the prologue about the Company and Union was intriguing.

A second read-through would probably help, but I didn’t like the characters enough to do that.

So, not a favorite. I wonder if I should try another book from Cherryh, just to give her a fair shot. Maybe something a bit more straight-forward and character-oriented? If anyone has a recommendation, comment away.  

Vader & the Kids

Are you familiar with Jeffrey Brown's hilarious cartoons of sith parenting? Here are a few of my favorites:

    

                    

                    

                                                Oh yeah, it's not just Luke. Here's the Leia one.

                      

                          

                   You can get the books here. Ooh, and there's a new one, Goodnight Darth Vader!

Etymology Expeditions: Classical Crime and Punishment

I thought we'd explore a few villains from classical mythology this week. You might argue that some of the greatest villains of Greek mythology are the gods, but I decided to explore the ones stuck in Tartarus for their crimes.

King Sisyphus got sent to Tartarus for being a poor host. No really, he killed his guests. He also seduced his niece and gossiped about Zeus' romantic affairs, so down he went. Being a clever sort, Sisyphus tricked Thanatos (death) and escaped, leaving Thanatos in chains. Without death, all sorts of wackiness ensued, but Sisyphus ended up back where he belonged in the end. He did trick Persephone into releasing him again, because his wife hadn't given him a proper burial. Hermes dragged him back, though. Then he had the gall to brag he was cleverer than Zeus. His punishment was to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, with the boulder always rolling away from him. The etymology of his name is unknown, though a replication of syphos "crafty" is one possibility.    

Another king, Tantalus, decided it would be fun to chop up his son and serve him to the gods. He also stole the ambrosia from them. Big mistake. He was condemned to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low-hanging branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches pulled away, and the water receded before he could drink. His name, literally "the bearer" or "the sufferer," comes from tal*talos, from PIE root *tele "to carry, support."

King Ixion got pissed at his father-in-law and pushed him onto a bed of burning coals, committing the first kin-related murder. Zeus pitied him and invited him up for a meal in Olympus. There the ungrateful wretch tried to seduce the goddess Hera, Zeus' wife. Ixion ended up strapped to a winged, flaming wheel that was always spinning. I couldn't find an etymology for this one.

The Titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men, and was punished by being chained to rock and having vultures peck on his liver for all eternity. His name means "forethought," from Greek pro "before"+ mathein "to learn."

Boy, the Greek gods sure knew how to hold a grudge!

Sources:
http://www.etymonline.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarus