HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL IN THE GAINESSCIFI BLOG FAMILY

      

Hello to Ireland and the Netherlands

It's particularly wonderful to welcome visitors from two delightful countries that I have had the good fortune to visit in person.   Of course, both the Irish and the Dutch speak English at least as well as many of my local neighbors, so you can enjoy our novels Life Sentence and Spy Station, as well as my collection Beyond the Covenant and Other Stories.  We hope you will give them a try if you enjoy exciting sci fi that is rich in alien action.  And if you do, please don't forget to give us a rating in Kindle, Amazon, or Goodreads.

 It's frightening, it's puzzling, and it's YOURS FOR FREE on Kindle this weekend. Spy Station is 4 star + rated interplanetary espionnage, so try it now by clicking ...

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Mars: the Total Recall Settlement Option

Some sci fi fans may not be aware that Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" provides only a fraction of the plot for the film version Total Recall.  In fact, Dick's story never gets to Mars, except indirectly in memories that may be illusions.  The entire portrayal of life on Mars was added somewhere in the middle of a writing process that involved some forty drafts, with numerous inputs and cancellations from successive directors and producers, and eventually Arnold Schwartzenegger himself, who was the last of many actors envisioned for the lead over sixteen years of production.

  
Even the various features of the Mars segments went through a complicated evolution.  Neither the memorable Venusville scenes, nor the scenes in the reactor, nor the nature of the turbidium mountain itself were part of the original plans.  As has happened with other great films such as Casablanca, we can only thank our lucky stars that a masterpiece emerged from a byzantine and often off-the-cuff creative history.

Nevertheless, the portrayal of the Martian colony contains a great deal that may apply to an eventual effort to settle the Red Planet.  First of all, we should mention the crucial importance of a reliable oxygen supply to the success of the endeavor, as well as the assumption that such a supply will not come easily through some magic wand of terraforming based on human technology.  In Total Recall the first groups of settlers are poisoned by the lack of clean air, which produces the generations of mutants that populate Venusville.   It is only through the deus ex machina of highly superior alien tech that Mars is terraformed at the conclusion of the movie, a virtually last-minute addition that caused much controversy among the filmmakers.  While the dangers of toxicity on Mars have ony recently begun to receive much attention, the oxygen quandary has been known for well over a century now and efforts to solve it seem still as quixotic as the plan in Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon bring trees in a space vehicle to plant on the lunar surface.

Another item considered in Total Recall (and noticeably absent in The Martian) is the possibility of living inside the planet instead of on the surface.  This clever alternative might even be accomplished robotically, sparing future Mars-farers many of the travails posed by erecting domes or dodging dust-storms.  Robotic construction missions might, of course, involve much time and expense -- but less than trying to provision a colonial garrison.  This is especially true if the robotic crews had access to an adequate atomic reactor to produce electricity without the need for much water or any combustion.  

Unfortunately, Total Recall does not address the issue of feeding a Martian colony, other than that the inhabitants of Venusville seem to somehow have access to huge supplies of alcohol.  We now know that it could not come from The Martian's little garden of potatoes, since the soil fortuitously used in the latter film now appears to be highly toxic to most of Earth's flora.  Here, we may find a solution in another sci fi classic, Outland.  The mining settlement in that film featured a very extensive vertical greenhouse that plays a major part in the violent finale.  It is conceivable that such a facility could be constructed in the shelter of a sunlit Martian canyon wall that would avoid some of the abrasive dangers of dust storms.  Perhaps another contribution could be supplied by Einstein's favorite vegetable, mushrooms.  It is only with tongue in cheek that we can mention the name of The Mole People, where a subterranean remnant of Sumerians is kept alive largely by edible fungi.  Such underground farms could, though, certainly make a contribution to the diet of humans on Mars, should a cavern system be excavated beforehand.  

At least one other problem must be overcome in order to achieve a community based on human Martian troglodytes: marsquakes.  Recent research shows that they are much more frequent than previously believed.  There is clearly more we need to know about the deeper nature of the Martian core and its movements before we can invest in the type of venture suggested by Total Recall.  Geological stability, at least within manageable parameters, is a must to support a sub-Mars colony.  Just comparing Mars settlement to that of the New World in the Age of Discovery, we should realize right now that we face definite limitations to the number of failed missions we as a planet can support.  The disappearances of the viking communities in Greenland and Newfoundland, the Portuguese colony on Cape Breton Island, Gosnold's post in Cuttyhunk, the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, or the French port in what is now South Carolina offer ample evidence that even less hostile environments than Mars can gobble up groups of humans who face difficulties in contact and resupply.  

Surely, some of these issues will also present themselves in the nearer future as we attempt to develop ressources on the Moon.  A viable colony there is, after all, a likely necessity before we can move large masses of people and material to Mars.  Perhaps there we can begin to work on solutions to the bigger problem.  As we do so, it may be advisable to avoid some of the mistakes made in the New World experience, where humans fighting amongst each other forced many efforts to collapse.  It may take the unity of all Earthlings to undertake the colossal challenges of interplanetary living.

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Batman Could Only Have Developed in America

      Not many characters from speculative fiction are uniquely associated with the United States.  Superman, despite "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," is from a distant planet.  Monsters are almost always foreigners: the Mummy from Egypt, Wolfman from the Celtic Lands, Frankenstein from Germany and Switzerland, Dracula from Transylvania, the Gillman from the Amazon Basin, Godzilla from Japan, Mothra from the South Pacific, etc., etc.  Wonder Woman hails from Atlantis and Green Lantern got his powers from somewhere out in the universe.  Silver Surfer caught a space wave from out beyond, as well.  

     But Batman is firmly rooted in the good old US of A more than any other, because his very name would not make sense elsewhere on Earth.  Consider that in Berlin he would translate as Flying Mouse Man, in Paris as Bald Mouse Man, and in Naples as Peep-Peep Star Man.  Further back, in the ancient Roman Empire, he would have been Little Evening Thing Man.  Even among the Brits, with whom we occasionally share a common language, his name could not have caught on, for it would suggest a flunkie serving a military officer.  And so it goes.  Not nametags that exactly would make a criminal tremble.  

     So we must be grateful for our homegrown hero, even if he dresses less patriotically than Captain America.  He is so much one of us, both in his strengths and his weaknesses.  Empowered with his belt full of technological wonders and beset with periods of emotional anxieties, Batman looms over Gotham like the ghost of our national imagination.  Whether the rest of the world will ever truly understand him, we know not.  Yet our own visceral bonds to him will never fail.  Hail to this Dark Knight in a land that dubs no knights of its own.  May he always lurk in the alleys where our fears wait to assail us, offering the salvation he could never give his own privileged family.  Batman is America.

Will Old Malls Become New Mini-cities?

     Here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, archaeologists of the future may one day uncover a variety of urban footprints to rival the multiple levels of the ancient city of Troy.  There is an Old Town that is mainly mid-20th century, but with some buildings sprinkled in that date from the American Revolution and the Civil War.  Outside that time capsule, the later 20th century produced layers of subsequent urban models, including both an enclosed mall and a couple of immense big box commercial areas.  Both the mall and the big boxes are no longer what they were originally planned to be.  If the 80s-era boxes are beginning to show vacancy gaps, the mall is barely recognizable.  Its on-site duplex cinema is barely a memory, its anchor department stores have fallen away, and generation after generation of retail shops replaced each other to reflect lower and lower buying power.  Its main commercial hopes for the future are largely pinned to an immense Costco planted in one unused corner of its colossal parking periphery.  

     These developments appear to reflect a widespread tendency across the USA, if I am to believe some recent Facebook posts that confirmed my own more limited observations.  One in particular grabbed my attention, as it spoke of a more recent movement to build residential apartments directly into the physical body of malls in order to create an in-house clientele made up largely of millenials and post-millenials who might eschew the car culture and patronize walkable businesses adjacent to their abodes without braving the vicissitudes of traffic, road rage, and higher gas prices.  Indeed, our local mall is doing exactly this, as blocks of apartments rise from the ruins of a moribund Sears store.  Some see this new type of insularity as offering a type of freedom to the hipster generations.  But will "freedom" come only at the price of the access to movement?

     This set me to thinking of a favorite novel, Jose Saramago's The Cave.  Portugal's Nobel-Prize winning master of prose is not always considered as a writer of speculative fiction, but that is perhaps an oversight.  After all, one of his first best sellers, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, already revolved around a ghost (no less than that of its great modernist poet Fernando Pessoa).  Others concern events in Lisbon's gargantuan graveyard (All the Names), a mysterious malady that causes his countrymen simultaneously to lose their eyesight (Blindness), or a geological oddity that snaps all of the Iberian Peninsula off from Europe and sets it floating across the Atlantic toward the New World (The Stone Raft), to name but a few.

       The beginning of The Cave gives no hint of such speculation, or even of much magical realism, as it traces the banal life of a humble ceramist whose livelihood is threatened by the onset of capitalistic globalism.  He is later drawn into events on a different scale as family members are invited to move from their traditional village to a giant complex called The Center.  This place combines vast housing facilities with mass commercial interests that the potter had formerly dealt with.  It is a softer and quintessentially Portuguese version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  Old Cipriano's unemployed rambles (he is now supported by his son-in-law Marcal, who works as a security guard) bring him finally to discover a darker side of reality, and his own destiny, concealed deep beneath The Center.

       Will tomorrow's hipster mall-dwellers collide with sinister consequences of a new urbanism as Cipriano does?  If so, will they follow him and his little family towards a new (or perhaps old) frontier experience?  Given that today's apartment complexes are hastily-constructed, minimally committed types of architecture, I have my doubts if they will be able to found a durable model for new urbanism, or even to adapt to the high-frequency technological and social changes that are under way.  Saramago seems an unlikely type for a prophet, particularly since he was remarkably heterodox in his spiritual ideas and actively opposed by at least one Pope.  Yet, we may do well to lend some thought to his works as late stage capitalism offers us a new spectacle (in the sense of the late Situationist Internationale) of mall settlements sprouting mushroom-like across the landscape.  It will be well worth watching.

Planetary Polarity is Getting More Complicated

     Some recent research on exoplanet TRAPPIST 1-c aided by the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that this rocky, Venus-sized world orbiting a red dwarf star may have little or no atmosphere, dampening hopes that it might host some form of advanced life.  Prevailing sci-fi thinking might react to this situation by simply saying, "Let's terraform it and give it an atmosphere so we can settle there."  An example of this kind of thinking can be found in the Alien universe, where the moon LV-426 is subject to a terraforming project by the interplanetary Weyland-Yutani Corporation.  Of course, we all know how well that plan worked out once the colonists made contact with the vicious aliens.  Instead of becoming a new Earth, LV 426 wound up being nuked from orbit.  

     This brings us to the Earth's closest terraforming candidate, our solar system neighbor Mars.  One still hears occasional mentions of the idea that we might use machinery to generate an atmosphere permitting human colonization of the Red Planet.  Taken on a simple level, the project may seem to have merit, assuming we could economically transport enough machinery to its surface (via the Moon, most likely) to begin the long, slow process of turning Martian materials into nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen sufficient to support organic life that, in turn, could support a colony.  This scenario apparently could lend credence the recent hit, The Martian, were it not that another wrench has already been thrown into that scheme.  Based on Andy Weir's novel, Ridley Scott introduces us to the plucky astronaut Mark Watney, who manages to survive after being abandoned by growing potatoes in protected bits of local soil.  The problem is that subsequent research has discovered that Martial soil is probably far too toxic to permit this kind of solution.  If the nearest fertile soil has to be brought by rocket all the way from Earth, that poses a major problem.

     Furthermore, another area of research may have uncovered an even more daunting obstacle.  Japanese researchers using the latest data from probes have formulate a theory about how and why Mars lost its ancient, moisture-rich atmosphere.  It has long been thought that the air was stripped away by radiation streaming from our own sun, a fate that would await our own world under various circumstances, such as the loss of our ozone belt.  But the Martian catastrophe probably came about because of a different root cause: the weakening of Mars's magnetic shield.  The Japanese researchers have determined that evidence relating to the Martian molten core beneath the planet, which generated an early magnetic shield, shows differences from Earth's core chemically.  This difference could have caused the Martian core to homogenize and "clot," weakening the field to the point that the Solar Wind would erode the atmosphere.  

     If this hypothesis is correct, the loss of the Martian magnetic field would be all but irreversible.  Any attempts to rebuild a new atmosphere would be doomed because any new gasses would continue to be stripped away as fast as they were generated by machinery.  So how could humans "jump-start" the core of Mars to protect such new gasses?  The scope of the challenge is staggering, beginning with the absence of a plan to get such a process started.  Consequently, terraforming a distant planet like Trappist-1c seems even more remote if we cannot envisage doing something similar with a relatively near neighbor.

     "Impossible" is a very weighty word to apply even to the most unlikely of prospects.  The more we learn about the cosmos, the more we realize how little we actually know and how much more knowledge is still out there.  Skepticism is central to the scientific method, but we must not allow caution itself to immobilize our imagination or our ingenuity.  As we watch the skies, we have to be just as wary to spot new opportunities as to appreciate difficulties that arise to block our aspirations.   

 

Hello, Singapore!

Greetings to our new visitors from the other side of the Earth.  it is always a pleasure to welcome new adepts of science and fiction, especially those who take the trouble to tune in from far away.  We know Singapore is one of the modest modern and vibrant places on the planet and one that is not afraid to experiment with new things, be it in architecture, business, or all other fields of human endeavor.  Hope you will stayed tuned to new posts and share some of your own observations.

 

Will We Learn to Listen Before We Speak? 

     It's exciting news that there are now plans to expand the Very Large Array in New Mexico to almost four times the present number of antennas.  This will make one of our most important receiving stations for various forms of electromagnetic diffusion in the universe far more sensitive and extend our understanding of new cosmic phenomena being discovered by our space-based units like the James Webb Telescope.  It will supplement existing Earth-based facilities such as the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia and hopefully make up for the abandonment of the giant Arecibo structure in Puerto Rico, which has been allowed to fall into irreversible disrepair.  

     This step forward brings us back to the question of whether, as a researching planet, we should rely a bit more on "passive" research before broadcasting our presence to the universe with increased radio signals sent into space.  After all, some of our earliest televised emissions were of Hitler's speeches, filled with genocidal hatred and conquest!  More recently, the late Stephen Hawking, arguably the Einstein of our age, warned that we might not want to attract the attention of space-faring intelligence, especially if its intelligence was artificial rather than organic.  Perhaps we should take a hint from Native American culture, which stressed the great importance of observation as a prelude to any kind of confrontation.  Or even from the old carpenter's adage: "measure twice, cut once."  Work with vast amounts of data involving the search for Earth-like exoplanets suggests that a good deal of time and effort on the analytical front is necessary before we can properly digest the importance of the amount of observation we are already receiving.  Let's hope that the new Very Large Array will aid us in better understanding what we see and hear as we "Keep watching the skies." 

 A Great Break at the Beach

There's nothing like a few days at the beach to refresh the mind and body.  Kids playing in the sand, wind surfers, kite fliers, parasails, dolphin searchers, beachcombers, ospreys diving into the surf, everything is full of fun and relaxation.  And of course, there's great seafood to be enjoyed.  

CRRLCon Was Fun!

It was great to meet new fans and readers at the CRRLCon this Saturday, May 20th, at the Howell Branch Library in Stafford County.  Especially important were all the young new readers getting familiar with all the great experiences that await them in the library system.  They sure did clean out my candy dish a couple of times!  I promise to stock up with different flavors before the next event. Many people grabbed up our brochures and cards, and of course the sales topped off the whole day for us.  Kudos to Central Rappahannock Regional Library for organizing such a great series of activities to keep all the visitors smiling. 

We're Heading for CRRLCon!

     On Saturday May 20th, we'll be at the annual CRRLCon held at Howell Branch Library in Stafford County, VA from 10 AM to 4PM making Life Sentence and Spy Station available to SciFi and Comic fans and talking about our work in progress.  Drop by to say hello and get your signed copies at a special promotional price.  We look forward to seeing you. 

HAIL TO RAVENCON! 

This year's convention at the Hilton Virginia Crossings Hotel in Glen Allen, Virginia was really a gas!  What an assembly of fine writers, publishers, cosplayers, artists, and all concerned.  John and I felt that all of our panels went extremely well, whether we participated as moderators or as panelists.  We did not have a single unsuitable room (from the aspect of sound, size, or comfort) and some, like the Fairfax Library, were especially neat.  The food that we had at the con hotel itself was above usual quality and the area had plenty of nearby restaurants, as well.  Parking was MUCH better than at other venues we are familiar with.  The GOHs were far more involved and accessible than at many cons and we have to single out DC's veteran monster host, Count Gore de Vol, as particularly wonderful.  While we didn't have little ones in tow, we head that the schedule was above the usual quality in having activities for the mini-fans.  Kudos to ALL the Ravencon crew for a superlative event and a most rewarding experience.

Update for Ravencon

Here are the panels we'll be joining:

Jim: Friday 4/21

6 pm (Panel)  What to Leave Out / King William

5 pm - 7 pm (Private, Optional) Meet and Greet for Guests / Outdoor Terrace, Glen Restaurant
7 pm (Opening Ceremony) King George
Saturday
11 am (Panel) Creating Fictional but Meaningful Religions / Brunswick
Noon (Panel) Says Who?? Writing Memorable Dialogue / Brunswick
3 pm (Panel) What It Takes to Co-Author Successfully / Henry
4 pm (Panel) Questions to ask when Creating a Fictional Culture / Brunswick

John Friday

5 pm - 7 pm (Private, Optional) Meet and Greet for Guests / Outdoor Terrace, Glen Restaurant

7 pm (Opening Ceremony) King George

9 pm (Panel) Getting New People into SFF / Dinwiddie

10 pm (Panel) Dragons as Pets / Brunswick

Saturday

3 pm (Panel) What It Takes to Co-Author Successfully / Henry

4 pm (Panel) When is Evil Irredeemable / King William

Sunday 4/23

We're Going to Ravencon 16!

Jim and John are invited guests at this year's Ravencon, to be held in Glen Allen, Virginia on April 21-23.  We will be involved in various panels and activities and will keep you updated as the Con approaches.  We hope to see our fans and to talk about our latest publications and plans.  Here's the con link.  More to come... 

GLITCHES

     Sometimes exploring means one step forward and two steps back.  It happened during the Age of Discovery time and again.  Look at North America.  The DeSoto, Nervaez, and Ponce de Leon missions all failed and included incredible disasters, such as the extermination of the important Mobilien and Biloxi peoples in the Southeast.  On the Atlantic Coast, the settlements at Roanoke Island, Parris Island, and Cuttyhunk all disappeared in less than two years before Jamestown, with great difficulty, held on.

     In recent weeks, the second stages of rockets launched from the European Space Agency at Kourou, Guyane, and from the Japan Space Agency at Tanegashima in the Kagoshima Prefecture both failed to function properly.  Add to that the failure of the first 3-D printed rocket made by Relativity Space  scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral.  Perhaps we were a bit spoiled by an incredible run of space successes by many countries in the preceding years.  Nevertheless, the journey will go on.  

     Sci fi has already been sensitive to the double nature of space exploration.  In The Other World by Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, the explorer's earliest efforts only got him as far as Quebec before a serendipitous accident propelled him to the Moon.   Jules Verne, two centuries later, also showed in From  the Earth to the Moon and its sequel that things didn't work out exactly as planned or his Franco-American crew.  During the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Heinlein in his The Green Hills of Earth and Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles each sketched intimate portraits of space exploration that were filled with unexpected hardships and tragedies.  On the big and small screens, Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space confronted voyagers with failures that could have vast planetary consequences.  

     So we have to brush aside the carefree vistas of Tomorrowland that prevailed for a while and accept the reality of a prolonged period that will not always offer success.  With curiosity and a bit of trepidation, we will see what the future has to offer.

 glitches 2 second stages japan, kourou

  3 dprinted rocket fails

 Thanks Forlani Fans!

You've helped launch Life Sentence into the Amazon Top 100 in three categories already.  There's still time to take advantage of this weekend's FREE promotion by going to  https://www.amazon.com/Life-Sentence-Forlani-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B01MCUIHXY   and nabbing your Kindle copy before the close of the promotion Monday.  Don't wait, but do remember to give us an Amazon review, even if it's just a few words or some (hopefully five!) stars.  

ISS Leads the Way

Kudos to all aboard and supporting the International Space Station for the mature and effective way they have dealt with the Soyuz leak and crew support.  No bickering or jingoistic BS to be seen.  Roscosmos sent up the replacement vehicle without a hitch and SpaceX got the new crew up there in flawless manner.  If only we could handle things on Earth in such a grown-up manner.  Keep on flying for all of us down here!

 What is the deal with dragons?

I've been enjoying the first half dozen episodes of the latest George R. R. Martin series, House of the Dragon, since John recommended watching it on HBO.  I have to preface these remarks by saying that I tried watching a couple of episodes of its predecessor/sequel Game of Thrones, but despite being impressed by some of the visual effects, the soap opera nature of its character presentation put me off.  So far, this has not happened with House of the Dragon, at least, not enough to make me hit the off button.  I can stretch my sense of verisimilitude enough to tolerate a certain number of anachronisms and anomalies that have turned up as I wait for resolution of some issues.  It is interesting for me to observe that the wide audience of this drama probably has little actual understanding of what life was like in the Dark or Middle Ages, even for the privileged noble classes.  However, this is perhaps not that surprising, since people in the Renaissance went to plays that presented Julius Caesar or Pericles prancing about in doublets and tights.  

I was struck by the role the dragons play in the pseudo-historical process.  They are the instruments of ultimate power, the weapons of mass destruction that enable clans to achieve hegemony in greater Westeros.  As such, they are rather like flying, squawking atom bombs.  Inferior races, like the Crabfeeder's Triarchy followers (Terrorists? Axis of Evil?) do not have access to dragons for unspecified reasons.  Consequently, they can only fight a sort of guerrilla war against the victorious "noble" houses.  Fortunately for the plot, they do not seem to be able to enrich uranium or import technology to give them an equivalent force de frappe, and so are doomed to eventual defeat and devastation.  The mass impalement of Triarchy forces after Daemon's victory over them is in large part a parallel of the public humiliation of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.  Visually, the Triarchy forces are even portrayed as "ragheads." Dragons in this universe present the contemporary equivalent of Shock and Awe, the power that makes the hegemons rule.

Does it follow that House of the Dragon is a mythogenic instrument of the New World Order?  If so, it is a subtle one in that it invests women with a tempting role in this clan/corporate universe.  The princesses and queens, especially through their quest for sexual and matriarchal assertion, certainly have skin in the game.  The same can be said for racial minorities, as the great houses seem to be equal opportunity power structures.  This may reflect the increasingly female and non-Caucasian face of the modern military forces, which are willing to incorporate diverse elements in order to fulfill their quotas, whether or not they actually reward these elements with the trappings of luxury and power.  For it does seem to me that in many ways House of the Dragon is a fantasy double for House of Cards (and perhaps Game of Thrones a clone of the Game of Global Domination in the Bond film Never Say Never Again).  Perhaps pseudo-Medieval fantasy functions as a kind of psycho-drama permitting public audiences to vicariously participate in a level of power play that is railed off from them in real life, that they sense must be happening somewhere, but can only viscerally access through a subscription spectacle.  

At any rate,  these ruminations are interesting enough to keep me tuning in for awhile, if for no other reason than to understand better how my fellow Earthlings may be "trained" or experimented upon in the still evolving New World Order.  

   

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SPACE 1999, MAYA THE METAMORPH
AND THE PROSPECT OF SHAPE-CHANGING 

Before there was Odo of Deep Space 9, the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series Space 1999 (1975-76) explored the increasingly important story element of shape-changing.  Strictly speaking, even this forward-looking multiform character was not the first of its kind.  For example the 1958  film, I Married a Monster From Outer Space had shown an alien, played by Tom Tryon, who was able to assume the physical shape of a human captive in order to infiltrate and subdue the population of Earth.  How the aliens achieve this is not explained and sometimes appears to be a sensory illusion rather than an organic transformation.  Before this movie, such disguises were only partial.  In John W. Campbell's 1938 short story "Who Goes There?" an otherworldly creature in Antarctica can take on the shape and behavior of victims that it assimilates, yet when the tale was filmed in 1951 as The Thing From Another World, Christian Nyby presented the invader was as a "hominid carrot" that had apparently evolved in an anthropomorphic direction but could not change form.  John Carpenter's 1982 refacciamento of the story returned to the original shape-changing concept and enhanced it by making the intruder at times morph into several life-forms at once.  Another early precedent (1956) can be found in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where interstellar spore creatures in their pod stage can mimic the form of nearby sleeping humans and simultaneously absorb their thoughts.  However, this replication, though organic, does not seem to involve an act of conscious will on the part of the "larval" pod. 

To return to Space 1999, the character of Maya, played by Catherine Schell, represents for perhaps the first time in visual media a true, fully conscious shape shifter, independent of the need for illusion or a specific host to aid the transformation.  Moreover, the writers of Space 1999 insist on providing a back story for this process, since Maya was conceived as a new central character for the second season of the series and appears in almost all 26 episodes. When she appears for the first time in "Metamorph" (Schell had previously had a role in a Season One episode, but not as Maya), she is identified as the daughter of Mentor, a rogue member of the Psychon race.  Unlike her treacherous father, who seeks to lobotomize and enslave the Moon colonists, Maya befriends them and eventually turns away from Mentor (Brian Blessed) to join the wandering Earthlings.  In the course of "Metamorph", she transforms into a lion, dove-like bird, a fierce dog, a gorilla, and (unwillingly) into a weird and powerful hominid. Other animals whose form she assumes in later episodes include a caterpillar, a kestrel, a monkey and a ferret.  These transformations present a bit of a plot hole, since it is not explained how she would know what any of the Earth species look like, unless one assumes that Planet Psychon had exactly the same evolutionary track as Earth.  A deeper plot hole results when she manages to transform her inanimate clothing and other objects, along with her own body.  

It is further revealed in later episodes that Maya's transformations operate due to "molecular transformation," a deliberate process requiring special adaptability and training from a master.  This explanation, which seems plausible enough at first glance, nevertheless presents some problems.  Why break down matter all the way to molecules, when a convincing organic recreation could involve changes strictly on the level of cytology?  A physical copy woes not necessitate reorganization below the level of cells, perhaps even in non-carbon-based life forms.  This is the approach we take in the shape changers in our Forlani Saga universe.  Our characters Kelso and Horse, assume shape changing missions in the service of their masters, the Blynthians.  These adventures, rather like those in the original Mission Impossible television series, involve interventions among other cultures and planetary environments in order to deter activities that are harmful to the interests of the inscrutable Blynthians and the sector they seek to protect and manage.  Kelso and Horse require plans and models of their target identities, as well as time to adapt their own cellular makeup and sometimes implants or other physical adjustments, not unlike the wigs or false noses employed by Jim Phelps and his crew of television spies.  Some of their roles demand behavior that they would naturally find inappropriate or even disgusting, which causes the finicky Kelso a great deal more irritation than his more patient sidekick Horse.  But they are professional shape changers, well rewarded by their bosses for their efforts.  In this sense, we feel that they are descendants more of Philip Marlowe or Archie Goodwin than Maya or even Odo.  Still, we owe a tip of the hat to Maya as a precursor to our own experiments with shape changers.

LOTS OF FUN AT MARSCON 2023

Jim and John had a blast at this year's Marscon, held in Virginia Beach, Jan. 13-15 at Holiday Inn, Va. Beach/Norfolk, a new venue that the con staff adapted to with enthusiasm.  Altogether we served on nine panels.  Jim chaired "Researching for Your Story," "Creating Alternate World Histories," "Piecing Together a History of Witches and Warlocks," "World Building: Overview," "Swearing in Sci Fi" and "I Got a Great Idea for a Book."  John showcased his librarian background in "Banned Books? Seriously?" He also enjoyed "OH NO! Writer's Block" and "Using Social Media Effectively to Market Yourself and Your Book."  As usual, the outstanding Cosplay competition filled the conference with fantastic costumes and John has posted some great photos of Krampus and several of the other winners on our Facebook page JMR Gaines.  Booksellers, jewelers, craftspeople, weapons makers, visual artists and others crowded the vendors area and adjacent passageways. The Amazing Teapot Racers were back for their humorous hijinks.  Some wild music echoed down the halls, including inexplicably at one point a rendition of all verses of the Hymn to the Soviet Union.  I almost felt an urge to hammer on something at a tractor factory.  We were overwhelmed by the energy and togetherness of the event and can't wait to go back.