Sci Fi Weekly Gallery Image 8 October 2007

Since I'm getting international acclaim for these snippets, time to get back in the saddle, though I confess I was difficult to inspire with this one. Nothing against Christoph Gerber's "Space Tour," #546 on this page, but views of ringed gas giants from one of their moons have been pretty common lately.

Tof pressed his nose against the ship's window. Outside lay a rock-strewn desert out of ancient Arizona or Alpha Centauri IV. "Isn't it neat?"

Gerber banked the shuttle. They flew low, below the tops of the natural spires of khaki basalt rising above the plain a few hundred meters apart. Flying between them left his augmented reflexes unchallenged. "It's a marginally habitable moon."

"But Grand-Orb is so close! You can see its clouds and count its rings!"

Gerber sighed. "It's a ringed gas giant. The galaxy is full of them. This trip is just a milk run. It's the antisense of wonder."

Movie reviews: Barbarella and 300

The last couple of months have been busy with work and play. Here are a pair of movie reviews for you:

It came as a fitting surprise, the kind that resolves a question you weren't consciously aware your subconscious had asked, to find after seeing the movie that Barbarella was based on a French comic book. At times, one can sense the title character reflects the beautiful-naif archetype of Gaullist-era pop culture I first encountered in the Clementine books my father had stashed away in a bottom shelf of the bookcase. Sadly, the film suffers from Roger Vadim's ham-handed direction. Few things are as tedious as the adolescent taboo-nudging of a previous generation, which was especially regrettable given the truly interesting potential of the conflict between the sexually-innocent Barbarella and the mad scientist Durand Durand. Alas, Vadim gives us his then-wife Jane Fonda's nude silhouette and some ludicrous dialogue (e.g., Barbarella tells the blind angel to "look out!"). The film had a few good moments, such as Barbarella shorting out the Orgasmotron, and Barbarella and Dildano using the intimacy pill to make love a la Terre, plus I could see themes, blurry through Zeitgeist transmission, from the atrocity exhibition that was '60s New Wave British sf, but those moments were few and far between.

300 is of course the highly-fictionalized epic story of a group of white men with ripped abs slaughtering thousands of veiled Asiatics and servile Negroes in the name of truth, justice, and the Spartan way. To be fair, effeminate Xerxes with his overdubbed breathy-bass voice has some Caucasians in his employ, but they are twisted and monstrous (and they aren't spearcarriers, either). Think of it as a sword-and-sandal version of The Iron Dream; it is the best piece of gay fascist post-September 11 propaganda I have yet seen. To be fair, the earliest fight scenes were well-done, before the viewer was numbed with their repetitiveness, and the symbolism of Ephialtes--whom Leonidas wants to stand and Xerxes wants to kneel--was more evocative than I expected.