As I mentioned in my post on John Scalzi's The Human Division, upon finding out the book ended on a semi-cliffhanger, with several narrative threads left unresolved, my mind jumped immediately to Stargate: Universe due to Scalzi's association with that show, and because it, too, ended with a goodly number of loose ends.
Happily, there will be a next season for THD. As for SG:U, even if the writers and producers had wrapped everything up at the end, I still would have been miffed just because it was ending. Although I did not like the second season as much as the first, it was still pretty good. And I really, really liked the first season, especially the early episodes.
The third part of the series premiere hit so many of the right hard-SF notes for me, in fact, that I think that the goodwill from that one episode helped keep me watching until the end, even if later episodes were not quite as strong.
What made it so much better than most television SF? Here's a comparison:
Typical SF TV problem: The ship, which looks inside and out like a luxury car just off the showroom floor, crewed with happy, competent, highly-trained people, is being attacked by a mysterious energy being from the depths of space!
SG:U problem: The ship is thousands of years old and is falling apart. The "crew" is a band of soldiers and civilians who got dumped on board by unexpected events. Oh, and the technology is alien, so almost nobody aboard knows (or can figure out) how it works. They are able to figure out one thing: the CO2 scrubbers are failing, and once the scrubbers fail, these folks are all going to die, slowly.
Typical SF TV fix: We can reverse the polarity of the bogonic field to create a beam of quuxons that will drive the creature away!
SG:U fix: We need lime. Not limes, lime. Calcium oxide. There's a possible source nearby. It's a desert planet that makes Tatooine look like a Sandals resort. Since we don't have any vehicles, hopefully there's some within walking distance. Otherwise, we're back to the "everybody dies" part.
Typical SF TV resolution: At a shouted command from the charismatic commanding officer, a crew member taps meaningfully on a touchscreen to implement the critical polarity reversal, just in time!
SG:U resolution: Crew members trudge through the hot sand with chemistry kits, stopping to periodically perform titration experiments to find the right kind of lime. They go past the deadline, and only make it back because one of them, a civilian, risks losing a limb or even dying in order to delay a countdown.
Seriously, I almost cried when I saw the actors swirling sand around in a freaking Erlenmeyer flask in order to save the day. Here it was, late 2009, and somebody had finally made an sf TV show that felt like the stuff from the 50's that I had read as a kid. Plus, it made all those times I had watched stuff drip out of a pipette in high school and college seem so much more meaningful.
There was something of a downhill slide after that (The communication stones. Dear Lord, the communication stones.) It wasn't as much of a space opera as other SF shows, but it got to be a lot more of a soap opera than those shows, which is just as bad. I still miss that show, though. It definitely ended too soon.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Thoughts on The Human Division
Note: I originally wrote this post April 10, right after episode 13 came out, but once I published it, I realized I had not expressed my thoughts very clearly. I meant to revise it and re-post it that week, but something came up, and then something else, and so on. So, not as timely as I had originally intended, but here it is.
I had planned to write something about John Scalzi's The Human Division as I was reading it, but I never got around to it when the first few episodes were released. Since then, my thoughts about it have gone through several changes, so a few weeks back I decided to wait until it was finished to actually put my thoughts down.
The short version is that I enjoyed the book just as much as the other recent Old Man's War books (the original book and The Ghost Brigades are still my favorites, though.) I definitely enjoyed the main story line (especially the final episode), but also thought most of the other stories were good, too. Some of them, though, didn't really make sense to me, either as "episodes," or as short stories, or as either one. I was a bit nervous about the major plot threads left dangling at the end of the final episode, since I couldn't help but think of what happened to SG:U, but as it turns out there will be a second season, so hopefully some of those will get tied up. I appreciated the serialized format; it was fun to get a new episode every week, just like a TV show.
The longer version:
I really liked the short story "After the Coup" that Scalzi had published online, so I was looking forward to a whole set of stories featuring Hart Schmidt and Harry Wilson. At the time I read "Coup", I vaguely remembered Wilson from Old Man's War, but he as a minor character. The best part about THD, for me, was getting to know Wilson better and seeing him act like a classic sci-fi character, equally at home in a lab or a bar fight.
I also liked episode 8, "The Sound of Rebellion." It was a "side" story apart from the main Wilson/Schmidt/Abumwe story line. This story reminded me of something that I often forget when reading stories about CDF soldiers: inside, they're old, with an entire 75-year life behind them when they join up. Seeing Lt. Lee use aspects of her past life as a musician (and what an interesting contrast that is to her current life as a soldier!) to get out of the predicament in which she finds herself made for a great story.
However, two of the episodes did not really work for me: "Walk the Plank" and "A Voice in the Wilderness." Each story in THD, as I understand it, was intended to be a stand-alone piece, like a weekly TV episode, in addition to carrying the overall story forward. Neither of these seemed quite right to me, either as short stories or TV-style episodes.
I can't see "A Voice in the Wilderness" fitting in as part of a THD TV series, although maybe as part of an anthology show like The Twilight Zone it could work. All the other stories just fit together better to my mind.
While I could see "Walk the Plank" being made as a cool found-footage-style episode that does fit in with the other ones story-wise, it's a little thin to stand on its own. I picture the characters in the TV version of "We Only Need the Heads" standing around the lab and listening to excerpts of it, to help them (and the audience) figure out what happened to the wildcat colony.
As prose, those two episodes have reversed positions; "Walk" works even less for me as a standalone story than as a TV episode. However, just as I could see "Voice" working as part of an anthology TV series, I can also envision it working as a separate OMW short story. It's more "Judge Sn Goes Golfing" than "After the Coup," but that's fine by me.
It's entirely possible, even probable, that I've missed the point in some way, or maybe several ways. I don't think it really matters, though. The quibbles I have with some of the choices Scalzi made are just that, minor little points. Overall, the experience was great. I'm really looking forward to the next season.
I had planned to write something about John Scalzi's The Human Division as I was reading it, but I never got around to it when the first few episodes were released. Since then, my thoughts about it have gone through several changes, so a few weeks back I decided to wait until it was finished to actually put my thoughts down.
The short version is that I enjoyed the book just as much as the other recent Old Man's War books (the original book and The Ghost Brigades are still my favorites, though.) I definitely enjoyed the main story line (especially the final episode), but also thought most of the other stories were good, too. Some of them, though, didn't really make sense to me, either as "episodes," or as short stories, or as either one. I was a bit nervous about the major plot threads left dangling at the end of the final episode, since I couldn't help but think of what happened to SG:U, but as it turns out there will be a second season, so hopefully some of those will get tied up. I appreciated the serialized format; it was fun to get a new episode every week, just like a TV show.
The longer version:
I really liked the short story "After the Coup" that Scalzi had published online, so I was looking forward to a whole set of stories featuring Hart Schmidt and Harry Wilson. At the time I read "Coup", I vaguely remembered Wilson from Old Man's War, but he as a minor character. The best part about THD, for me, was getting to know Wilson better and seeing him act like a classic sci-fi character, equally at home in a lab or a bar fight.
I also liked episode 8, "The Sound of Rebellion." It was a "side" story apart from the main Wilson/Schmidt/Abumwe story line. This story reminded me of something that I often forget when reading stories about CDF soldiers: inside, they're old, with an entire 75-year life behind them when they join up. Seeing Lt. Lee use aspects of her past life as a musician (and what an interesting contrast that is to her current life as a soldier!) to get out of the predicament in which she finds herself made for a great story.
However, two of the episodes did not really work for me: "Walk the Plank" and "A Voice in the Wilderness." Each story in THD, as I understand it, was intended to be a stand-alone piece, like a weekly TV episode, in addition to carrying the overall story forward. Neither of these seemed quite right to me, either as short stories or TV-style episodes.
I can't see "A Voice in the Wilderness" fitting in as part of a THD TV series, although maybe as part of an anthology show like The Twilight Zone it could work. All the other stories just fit together better to my mind.
While I could see "Walk the Plank" being made as a cool found-footage-style episode that does fit in with the other ones story-wise, it's a little thin to stand on its own. I picture the characters in the TV version of "We Only Need the Heads" standing around the lab and listening to excerpts of it, to help them (and the audience) figure out what happened to the wildcat colony.
As prose, those two episodes have reversed positions; "Walk" works even less for me as a standalone story than as a TV episode. However, just as I could see "Voice" working as part of an anthology TV series, I can also envision it working as a separate OMW short story. It's more "Judge Sn Goes Golfing" than "After the Coup," but that's fine by me.
It's entirely possible, even probable, that I've missed the point in some way, or maybe several ways. I don't think it really matters, though. The quibbles I have with some of the choices Scalzi made are just that, minor little points. Overall, the experience was great. I'm really looking forward to the next season.
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