Happy Birthday To Me

I can't resist this,especially since I came across it on my birthday. It's the table of contents for an anthology called "the Mammoth Book Of Ghost Stories", edited by Otto Penzler, and if you look real carefully you'll find I'm in sandwiched in between people who really know what they're doing,like Saki and H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James and ... annd ... It's like the saying goes ... I'm the only person in it I don't recognize.  

CONQUEST OF SPACE

THE CONQUEST OF SPACE, a 1950s Disney(!) film, is a truly amazing movie. You can find it on You-tube (of course). It bears watching by anyone who's an atheist. Why? How? (SPOILERS ...) Certainly not for things like story; pedestrian at best (outside of ... well, you'll see), or acting; Ross Martin is the only non-cringeworthy thesp in the lot, and he doesn't last long. The rest are terrible, although they don't have much to work with -- they're all cultural stereotypes. (One gets the feeling that if a black crew member had been included, he'd be asking for watermelon-flavored food pills.) The vision of the future is the usual 1950's society with a couple of decades tacked on. Nevertheless, it is truly amazing for one character's through-line only: the expedition's leader, a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist who comes to the conclusion during the voyage that leaving Earth without the permission of the Almighty is an offense unto Him, and who eventually sabotages the expedition before being killed by his own son. Heavy stuff, for an obviously teen (at most) oriented family film. But what really had my jaw hanging was that there was no effort at all made at the end to absolve either the Captain (other than the fairly obvious conclusion that he was batshit crazy), or God. Nothing is said to the effect that it's cool with God for us to leave the cradle, nor is any attempt made to justify the Captain's actions (not among the crew, at least, although there is consensus that he'll be presented to the public as a martyr). But we get the strong sense that his faith had nothing to do with his sacrifice, or so they'll spin it. Again, hard as it is to believe, the film takes a very clear stand for atheism (or at least against organized religion), with no mealy-mouthed apologies. Truly amazing ...

Spaceman Jones' Locker

The last post has kept me thinking about how different the solar system is from what we thought it was, even just fifty years ago. Was a time when Venus and Mars were the odds-on favorite for life.

And now?

My personal odds-on favorites for places most likely to support life in the solar system? Not what you'd think. First off, I wouldn't bother looking in the inner system. Mercury is blasted by a sun so close its apparent disc fills half the sky; even extremophiles would have to wear sunglasses. Venus? Oy. It's hell, pure and simple: victim of millions of years of rampant greenhouse effects that have turned the surface into seething lava beds and the atmosphere into a dense and boiling ocean of sulphuric acid. Mars? The best chance of all the inner worlds, but still not the way to bet. If only it were as big as Earth; but, as they said on Firefly, "if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak." Mars was simply too far from the sun, and too small to hang onto its core warmth, and thus its magnetosphere dissipated. With no magnetosphere to protect the planet (think of the magnetosphere as a planetary-sized deflector shield) from the sterilizing UV rays, there wasn't much chance for life to develop.

So we have to look further out. A lot further.

The two biggest planets in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. Together, they have over a hundred moons (hell, they probably have thousands if we count rocks from the size of baseballs on up. If you count all the rock and ice fragments making up the rings, we're into millions. This way lies madness. We're only interested in two: Europa and Enceladus.

They're very similar (despite Europa belonging to Jupiter and Enceladus to Saturn); So similar that we can generalize both of them into one. The major difference is size; Europa's about twice the size of Enceladus. Other than that you can barely tell 'em apart. They're both huge balls of ice; snowball moons. Utterly inhospitable on their surfaces, they nevertheless represent the best chances for extra-terrestrial life.

How? they're both covered with ice. Ice several miles deep, in fact.

Ah, but UNDER the ice ...

... is water. WARM water.

Wait, what? How is this possible? We're not talking colder than your Frigidiare cold, or even Antarctic cold; we're talking minus 300 odd degrees below zero cold. that's not just cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, that's cold enough to shatter it into powder with one blow of a ball peen hammer.

But nevertheless, if you could somehow drill down through several miles of rock hard ice, you would find water. Water warm enough, and filled with enough amino acids that, given a few billion years of sloshing around, the chances of life -- complex life -- developing are almost inevitable. How do we get warm liquid water in such an inhospitable place?

One word: torsion.

Europa and Enceladus have one other thing in common: they're the inmost orbiting moons of both their primaries. their orbits are close enough for Jupiter's and Saturn's gravitational pull, working against the gravity of the other moons, to cause massive tidal forces. And what does that mean?

It means the same thing that happens to any closed volatile system when outside energy is introduced:  it produces heat. A lot of heat. Enough, over the eons, to keep an entire ocean liquified.

So, with kinetic heat generated by the gravitational equivalent of a huge taffy-pull and a nice insulating cap of ice sitting on top of them, the oceans of Europa and Enceladus could be sitting there, nice and cozy, for millions of years. More than enough time for complex life to develop.

Of course, "complex" is a -- well, complex concept. It could define anything from simple multi-cellular lifeforms you need a microscope and a powerful lot of squinting to see, all the way up to critters that (given the high salinity of the water plus the lesser gravity), could make a blue whale look like a rainbow trout. Hell, why not? As Sagan was known for saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." True enough, but if I might humbly propose a codicil: "Extraordinary evidence demands extraordinary imagination to be recognized." Most planetary geologists, exobiologists and the like will pee up one leg and down the other if they find so much as an ice moon's equivalent of a paramecium Out There. Me, I'm voting for the marine equivalent of Argentinosaurus. Something that can pick its teeth with Nessie.

If you're going to dream, why not dream big? We used to think that the clouds of Venus hid a steaming swampy world that teemed with exoraptors. We got rogered real good on that one. But maybe, even though the inner worlds weren't exactly the stuff of which dreams -- or at least masthead novelettes for a nice, shiny nickel a word -- are made, perhaps, in the black depths of those exolunar oceans, a second chance worthy of the name Leviathan may yet lurk.

Moon Man

Some years back, a friend of mine (I don't recall, which one, sorry) said that, as far as he was concerned, the best part about the first moon landing were the names of the first two men to step off the Lander.

I'm happy to say that, though I didn't get it at first, it didn't take me long because I had the proper cultural references. Think about it. The first two men who actually set foot on the moon ...? Maybe it'll help to imagine a multi-tentacular monster lurking behind the nearest rock. No? How about if they both have rayguns? Work with me!

All right, stop sulking. But you're gonna do a facepalm when I tell you --

The first man on the moon was named Neil Armstrong. Maybe you can come up with a name that sounds more quintessentially two-fisted and All American than that, but if you can my fedora's off to you, pal. Neil Armstrong isn't the name of an "astronaut" -- it's the name of a spaceman. A lean, muscular rocket jockey who knows the business end of a laser pistol, who's bronzed by alien suns, and who's on a first-name basis with the Queen of Outer Space. I mean, could it get any better?

Well, hard as it is to believe, yes it could. Because not only did the Commander (he had to have been a commander; there are some things that are just non-negotiable) have a name to strike fear into the cold, flinty hearts of space pirates everywhere, but his second in command was a feisty fella nicknamed -- wait for it -- "Buzz"! Okay, granted his last name wasn't "Lightyear", but that would've been too good. As it is, the dialogue practically writes itself:

"Smokin' rockets, Commander! Is that a Tenta-Man lurking behind that rock over there?"

"Yes it is, Cadet. Now remember what you learned back at Space Academy, Buzz; drill him right between the first pair of eyestalks ..."

"I'll try, but the real thing is sure different from the holos ...!"

They didn't get much else right, sad to say; instead of a sleek and silver rocket out of a Bonestell painting, the Lunar Landing Module looked more like a wadded-up piece of tinfoil. And even worse than that, there was no girl! This was really unbelievable. You need a girl to (a) faint and (b) be carried off to service the improbable lusts of the Tenta-Men.  Otherwise how are you gonna reach that 5,000 word limit?

But the worst part of all was the ending. I will give the American public this: it took every writer, editor and critic completely by surprise. Even the really gonzo ones, like Phil Farmer and Roger Zelazny, didn't see it coming. And yet, in retrospect it worked perfectly within the confines of its reality. Which, unfortunately, was also our reality.

I never got a chance to meet Neil Armstrong, but remind me to tell you about the time Buzz Aldrin came to our house. It was a hot, still, August day, and yet somehow, I swear to God, he'd arranged for a breeze to be blowing on him, enough to rustle his hair slightly as he stood on the front porch, arms akimbo, and said, "Hi, I'm Buzz Aldrin."

I still don't know.

This was in 1984, and by this time we'd all of us, astronauts and authors alike, accepted  the bitter truth; that we weren't going back to the moon anytime soon. In a way, it was almost better, because the reality of the mission was so much less. Instead of the ship from DESTINATION MOON, we had this bizarre little thing that would have looked complete only with a NIXON/FORD bumpersticker. We built a space station, which resembled the austere magnificent double wheel of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in much the same way that a Big Daddy Roth creation resembled a Porsche 911. And it smelled like old socks. If there's one thing we can take away from all this, it's that style means nothing in space.

I don't know ... maybe if we'd paid a little less attention to getting there without any style at all, and tried getting at least one decent coffee table book out of the whole damn thing, people might have not had the one reaction to the space program that no one expected:

 Maybe they wouldn't have gotten bored.

But Armstrong did his part. And, while doing it, achieved true unique-ness: now and forever the first Man On the Moon.

RIP.

Rant

Every woo-woo snake charmer with two chakras to rub together has greeted the development of quantum mechanics with the same naked greed as that of a couple of starved Siberian tigers greeting the unexpected arrival, out on the frozen tundra, of a Craft Services truck. They all latch onto the same thing: quantum entanglement and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The concept that subatomic particles are, among other things, "connected" through higher dimensions, so that one electron instantly "knows" what's been done to its twin, even though they're billions of lightyears apart, causes them unbridled ecstasy. "Consciousness is the key!" they bray. "The universe is me and I am it!"

These are the same people who believe that unicorns fart rainbows and that nice friendly spacemen dressed in the worst styles of the 70's would happily give us cosmic secrets if the nasty ol' government would just stop getting in their way. They believe that the universe is a happy, shiny and loving place that cares about us and tucks us in at night. They believe this with exactly the same fervor and intensity that led them to clap their hands as hard as they could when they were children to bring Tinkerbelle back to life, and with exactly the same dewy-eyed confidence that tells them that God answers prayers and that Jesus is real because he reincarnates periodically in a bit of cheese toast.

Well, good luck with that worldview. No doubt the dinosaurs that were swept up in the ejecta hurled skyward by the asteroid that nearly punched a hole through the world thought it was really cool to be the first sauroid saints lifted up to Heaven -- except  that they probably had a hard time thinking anything at all, considering how thoroughly and completely dead they were.

My belief is that the only brittle, hard-nosed realists in all this are most likely the con artists like Chopra, who know the real score and are going Ommmm ... all the way to the bank.

Having trouble following my logic? Then riddle me this:  Approximately 30 billion people have lived on this planet, and (presumably) died on it. Most of them inconsequential, to be sure, but some of them were bona fide geniuses. Think about that. Archimedes, Paracelsus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein --the one thing they have in common is death -- and, if the legends are true, revival on the other side.

So do you really believe that, with such an unbelievable brain trust working on the  biggest question that has bedeviled humanity since Homo ergaster was a pup, the best communications device they've been able to put together so far is the Ouija Board?

Ray

A bit after the fact, I know, but better late than never ....

Never bury your lead, they say, so -- Ray Bradbury's dead.

I never knew him that well; others, like Marc Zicree, knew him much better than I. I started losing my voice about the same time Marc was getting to know him, and I made no effort to ride on his coattails, because I couldn't see the point. Ray wasn't the sort of guy with whom one could spend long companionable silences with. Like Sidney Greenstreet in THE MALTESE FALCON, he liked talking to a man who liked to talk.

But I'll let others speak about that. I'll keep this memoir to what I knew about him.

What I remember most about Ray was his joy.

How exuberant, ebullient, and just plain gosh-wow over things he was. Not just things having to do with writing, but just about every damn thing in the world. Ray could rhapsodize over milk. He could get teary-eyed, not just over sunsets and kittens, but such admittedly unlikely things as the flensing of a whale. (He once wrote a poem about Ahab and Moby Dick, in which he took the relationship to ... unprecedented territories, and at one point got positively misty-eyed over, uh, a scene it's probably safe to assume Melville never envisioned. Of course, a lot of his audience was having the same reaction, though not, I think it's safe to say, for the same emotions. I've heard Ray referred to as the Proust of science fiction prose, and I can certainly see that. But if one were to call him the Wordsworth of sci-fi poetry, I don't think the comparison's completely invalid either).Nevertheless, I credit Ray with inspiring me to be a writer. He spoke at my high school once, and he so obviously loved what he did that I, who'd been waffling uneasily between being an FBI agent and a commercial jet pilot (or  something equally absurd), left the assembly thoroughly and utterly convinced to do neither. I would cast my lot instead with the muse, and fuck her brains out. (Hey, don't blame me; it was Ray's line. He caught some hearty staff disapproval for it too, this being 1968, as well as a huge laugh and spontaneous applause.)

About 30 years later, when his HALLOWEEN TREE beat me out for a second Emmy, I wrote him a note to congratulate him, and also mentioned that bright storybook spring day when he had helped fix my course and steady my hand on the helm. I wish I could bring this thing to a proper conclusion by telling you about the nice reply I got. But I never heard back. Which is okay; it wasn't a callback for him. It was for me.

Adios, Ray... and thanks again.  
Nevertheless, I credit Ray with inspiring me to be a writer. He spoke at my high school once, and he so obviously loved what he did that I, who'd been waffling uneasily between being an FBI agent and a commercial jet pilot (or  something equally absurd), left the assembly thoroughly and utterly convinced to do neither. I would cast my lot instead with the muse, and fuck her brains out. (Hey, don't blame me; it was Ray's line. He caught some hearty staff disapproval for it too, this being 1968, as well as a huge laugh and spontaneous applause.)

About 30 years later, when his HALLOWEEN TREE beat me out for a second Emmy, I wrote him a note to congratulate him, and also mentioned that bright storybook spring day when he had helped fix my course and steady my hand on the helm. I wish I could bring this thing to a proper conclusion by telling you about the nice reply I got. But I never heard back. Which is okay; it wasn't a callback for him. It was for me.

Adios, Ray... and thanks again.


Nevertheless, I credit Ray with inspiring me to be a writer. He spoke at my high school once, and he so obviously loved what he did that I, who'd been waffling uneasily between being an FBI agent and a commercial jet pilot (or  something equally absurd), left the assembly thoroughly and utterly convinced to do neither. I would cast my lot instead with the muse, and fuck her brains out. (Hey, don't blame me; it was Ray's line. He caught some hearty staff disapproval for it too, this being 1968, as well as a huge laugh and spontaneous applause.)

About 30 years later, when his HALLOWEEN TREE beat me out for a second Emmy, I wrote him a note to congratulate him, and also mentioned that bright storybook spring day when he had helped fix my course and steady my hand on the helm. I wish I could bring this thing to a proper conclusion by telling you about the nice reply I got. But I never heard back. Which is okay; it wasn't a callback for him. It was for me.

Adios, Ray... and thanks again.

Cannibalistic Humanoid Under-appreciated Ducks

Did you ever wonder why Pluto is Mickey's dog, but Goofy, who's also a dog, is on a more or less equal footing? (This what you get when I wake up with insomnia.) When I was a kid, this used to bug the hell out of me. I count it as one of the triumphs of my life that I was eventually able to learn the answer straight from the mouse's mouth, as it were. Once I was working for Disney animation I had to climb a surprisingly long way up the chain of command to find out; eventually Jeffrey Katzenberg himself told me. And, as is the case with most things Disney, there's a certain twisted logic to it.

It seems that, among the various sentient beings of the Disneyverse, (by which I mean those created by the studio, not purchased as outside properties such as Baloo the Bear or Winnie-the-Pooh -- who's also a bear, come to think [I prefer to read into this merely the fact that I'm typing this at 6 AM]), anyway, among the inhabitants of Duckburg (and before you ask, I have no fucking idea if Mickey lives in Duckburg or the neighboring hamlet of Mouseville [which I believe I just made up]. For all I know, he lives in Secaucus), so anyway, the way it works is simply thus:

It doesn't matter what kind of animal you are in a Disney cartoon; if you are bipedal, can talk and wear clothes, then PETA be damned; you can own "lower" animals and do with them as you will.

This answers a lot of questions. Goofy, for instance, is nominally a dog. But he's bipedal (albeit with horrendous posture), wears clothes (sort of; interestingly, he's one of the few inhabitants whose ensemble includes pants), and speaks a colorful patois of English. All of which evidence his canine antecedents while simultaneously showcasing his cultural and evolutionary superiority over Pluto, who's also a dog, but who goes on all fours and wears naught but a dog collar (and to all those with fingers poised gleefully over their keyboards who live in West Hollywood, the Castro District, or other places like them -- you're only muddying the waters; shut up).

As I said, this clears up a lot of questions. But it also opened -- for me, anyway -- a veritable Matryoshka of Pandora's boxes. None of which I intend to go into now, save to note that I'm still not at peace -- and most likely never will be -- with the horror I felt as a seven-year old when I opened an Uncle Scrooge comic and witnessed the entire McDuck clan -- Scrooge, Donald, Daisy, and the trifecta of nephews -- sitting down with drooling beaks, utensils firmly gripped in feathered fists, and napkins knotted around wattled necks, to a turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

Universal Thoughts

It has always amazed me that, considering what pale, insubstantial wraiths we are, we can still feel as intensely as we do. We are all of us, less than the faintest wisps of ephemerality; 99.99999999% of our bodies are, quite literally nothing -- nothing at all, not even air. consider the simplest of all atoms: hydrogen. the nucleus is a lone proton, orbited by a solitary electron. If that nucleus were the size of your thumbnail, the electron would orbit it a quarter mile away, making that single hydrogen atom roughly the size of a baseball stadium, and the vast majority of it -- nothing.

And yet, we feel.

We are revenants, but at least we occupy a world of comforting solidity, right? Wrong. When the Big Bang blew, it created matter and antimatter in very close to equal amounts, and thus both atoms and anti-atoms immediately and enthusiastically launched into wholesale mutual slaughter. When the dust settled, one atom out of every two billion was left whole. In other words, for every billion atoms of antimatter, the primordial explosion had created a billion and one atoms of matter. So right from the start all the cosmic matter was dramatically thinned. Now, nearly fifteen billion years later, the universe is still an anemic shadow of a far more robust initial state. Furthermore, even those pale scraps of plasma and interstellar gas make up only a tiny part of the "real" universe.

And yet, we care.

Ghosts we indeed are, living in a universe just as ghostly, a world that makes the pink, fluffy clouds of Heaven itself look like a WWII concrete pillbox. The matter we interact with (baryonic matter, it's called), comprises less than 5% of reality. The overwhelming majority consists of two other matter/energy states, called, with stunning originality, dark matter and dark energy. We can't touch, see, hear or smell the reality of the material universe, because the stuff doesn't interact with electromagnetism. it only shows up indirectly, through gravitational waves.

And yet, we love.

On top of all this, we are truly creatures of a day; our time spent in this world is no longer than a breath, a blink, a barely noticeable instant when held against the turnings of the cosmos. It seems impossible to have and hold anything, so quickly do we go from wombs of flesh to wombs of dust.

And yet we feel.
And yet we care.
And yet we love.

East Meets West

Here's the thing:  I have Parkinson's Disease.

Had it for about 20 years. I've been able to slow its progress considerably by a combination of medicine and electrodes placed deep in my sub-thalamus. But I'm running out of options that western medicine can provide, and so I'm considering alternatives.

I've read numerous articles on the therapeutic effects of Tai Chi, Qi Gong and the like. Although I'm a writer of fantastic fiction (used to be mostly TV; now it's mostly movies and books), I'm a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, pragmatist and atheist. These might seem contradictory positions, but they're really not. (Think of it as cognitive dissidence.) I make a decent living writing about little green men, vampires, ghosts, etc. But it's all make believe. I don't believe any of it. I'm just grateful for whatever genetic quirk gave me the ability to make up stories and get paid to do it.

But the wonderful thing about science is that, unlike dogmatism, it thrives on being proven wrong. We learn from doing, screwing up, doing a face-palm and trying again -- until we get it right. I have no vested interest in believing in God, but on the other hand, I have nothing against being proven wrong. If Jesus Christ staged his big comeback tonight, I'd probably think -- well, probably at first I'd think he was, as John Lennon said, someone dressed up like Jesus, but after he'd, say, produced a few thousand loaves and fishes out of a bag of Long John Silver's, I might be inclined to admit that he was working some decent mojo. And if he finished up the evening's entertainment by lobbing a few lightning bolts up the collective asses of Messrs Romney, Gingrich and Santorum, I might have to admit that I may have misjudged Son'o'God. 

I'm not planning on losing any sanity points over it, however. In terms of cosmic horror Jesus can't hold a votive candle to Cthulhu, and in terms of sheer cosmic silliness it's hard to imagine any religion that rises in risability higher than Scientology, though evangelical Christianity comes about as close as any belief can. Where else but in churches deep within the Mason-Dixon singularity can one find nominal adults willing to fight for their belief that The Flintstones is a documentary?

So, as I've said, I intend to give the East a shot. There's a Tai Chi class within five minutes of my place (of course there is; this is California.) I'll let you know how it all works out. 

#1 In A Very Occasional Series: "How To Tell If You're Really A Writer"

One huge and undeniable difference between men and women can be summed up in a single word: shopping. With only rare exceptions (which sometimes, but not always, are linked to sexual preference), women love to shop, and men hate it. Give a woman a credit card with an asymptotic limit and parachute her onto Rodeo Drive, and you might as well have dynamited the Pearly Gates for her. On the other hand, point out to a man that the seat of his jeans has been worn to gossamer transparency, or that his T-shirt has so many rips and holes in it that one can barely make out the IMPEACH NIXON slogan it sports, and insist that he come along for at least an attempt at building a new wardrobe, and chances are that he'll cling to every doorjamb and article of furniture within reach with the howling desperation of a Warner Bros. cartoon cat about to be thrown from his place on the warm hearth out into the unforgiving night.

Myself, I belong to the latter tribe. I have at least one sweater that I bought in Wales over 30 years ago that's still intermittently wearable, and two pairs of Levi's 501s with 32" waists that still fit -- as long as I don't breathe. The Southern California climate is such that I can get by with shorts and a T-shirt, and I'm perfectly happy to do so, as long as I can avoid any stores that contain primarily cotton and denim. This anathema extends to just about any product -- with the notable exception of CDs, DVDs, and other media, which I usually buy online. In short, I hate shopping for just about anything.

With one notable exception -- and that leads us back to the slugline to this piece.

Put me in Staples, Office Depot, or just about any stationery store or anyplace where they sell writing or office supplies, and I immediately become a ten-year old in a candy store. I've been known to actually drool in such places (although that's probably the Parkinson's). I've literally had palpitations standing in the various aisles. It's not a pretty sight.

But it seems to me a fairly good indication that, at least as far as physical accoutrements are concerned, I love the trappings of a writer. I even love actually venturing physically from my lair and going to such stores.

And, best of all, it's all deductible.