OH, CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN!

We all know that Captain James T. Kirk died (rather ignominiously, IMHO, but that’s another post) in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS, the seventh in the original film series of the TREK franchise. But William Shatner, the actor who played him in The Original Series and most of those films, just turned 90 years old this week (on March 22). That’s right, count the years, 90.

Even he can’t quite believe it. “It’s a bit embarrassing,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “Who wants to be 90? I don’t want to be 90, but I’m 90!”

Not that his age has slowed him down any. He has a new movie out, SENIOR MOMENT, about a former NASA test pilot who loses his driver’s license after drag racing around town, and, forced onto public transportation, meets a new love. The film is packed with star power—Christopher Lloyd, Jean Smart, Esai Morales—and a certain kind of corny charm, judging by the trailer. It debuts today both in theaters and on demand.

You have to admire a guy who just won’t give up what he loves no matter what the calendar says. Now that James Brown has passed on, Shatner is surely the hardest working man in show business. Or at least the most visible one.

I’ve been a fan of the actor since before I even knew who Shatner was. He attracted my attention when I was a mere youngster (and had the bejeesus scared out of me) in that famous episode of The Twilight Zone in which he battles the gremlin on the plane’s wing that only he can see, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” He was in an earlier Zone episode, “Nick of Time,” about a fortune-telling bobblehead in a small-town diner that almost traps a newlywed couple in a web of fear. When I look back at the most memorable episodes of one of my favorite series, that one stands out, too.

But then Shatner donned the uniform of Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and I was hooked. There are times when the casting of actor with character just matches perfectly, and this was so clearly one of those times. We know it, because the first pilot of Star Trek, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Jim Kirk, demonstrates just how badly the character could have been portrayed—as a wooden, by-the-book flyboy straight out of the Hollywood mold.

But Kirk as Shatner plays him is smart, quick-thinking, intuitive, action-oriented but not impulsive. He is compassionate to those in need and loyal to his friends and crew. He seeks the opinions of his senior officers, but makes his own decisions, often synthesizing the disparate notions of the logical Spock and the emotional McCoy into a reasonable solution to the problem at hand.

William Shatner as James T. Kirk: in command.

And Kirk is human. So human. Passionate. Full of doubt. Willing to take risks and break rules. Sometimes wrong. And given the chance to attain a Paradise of peace and serenity without challenges, he passes, every time. As he tells the renegade Vulcan Sybok in STAR TREK V: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, “I need my pain!”

Kirk is a complex character that draws on deep reserves of light and dark within himself to command his ship. The classic episode “The Enemy Within,” in which a transporter malfunction splits him into his “dominating” half and his “compassionate” half provides the perfect example. Neither half can command without the other. “Meek” Kirk hates his darker self but must embrace him to become fully integrated again and save the ship.

In fact, I believe the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation needed three characters to replace Kirk—the cerebral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart); his action-oriented Number One, Cmdr. William Riker (Jonathan Frakes); and the intuitive Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis). I recently watched the first season of Picard, the Paramount+ series about that captain’s post-Enterprise adventures and found it only mildly entertaining. I love Patrick Stewart as a person and an actor, but Picard just doesn’t do it for me as a captain. He thinks too much.

A few posts back, my fellow blogger K.M. Fawcett challenged us to name our favorite starship captains. As for other Starfleet captains, I enjoyed watching Voyager’s Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), but had no particular emotional attachment to her or her crew. I couldn’t get into other older iterations of TREK, for various reasons, so their captains are lost to history. Now, Christopher Pike (as played by Anson Mount in Star Trek: Discovery) has some real potential. He has the presence (and the looks—wowza!), and the powers-that-be have hinted that a series may be in store for him and Ethan Peck as Spock in a prequel to the five-year mission of Kirk’s Enterprise. I’d definitely watch that!

I love Mal Reynolds of the Serenity and James Holden of the Rocinante, but their ships and crews are small and independent. You can’t really compare them to Kirk, who acts on behalf of the Federation and whose actions have galactic scope. (Well, Holden’s affect the solar system, but, too often in the wrong direction because the boy doesn’t think!)

Han Solo, too, is an indie operator. He doesn’t command a crew. (Chewie is a partner.) I doubt that anyone would ever follow him, even if he deigned to lead them.

No, Kirk is my captain. He has always been my captain—my first hero in the TREK fanzines I wrote and the model (at least a little) for Sam Murphy, the space pirate captain of the Shadowhawk, hero of Fools Rush In, Interstellar Rescue Series Book 3.

So, happy birthday, Bill, and thanks for giving us this character for the ages.

Cheers, Donna

 

THE VAST OF NIGHT: ALIENS IN A SMALL TOWN

With theaters closed due to the coronavirus, it hasn’t been easy to keep up with my film reviews here on Spacefreighters Lounge. I do the best I can over on my podcast website, My Moviehouse My Rules, with reviews of television shows, streaming movies and such, but new films are not that easy to come by.

Streaming services have been a source of some excellent new films recently, though, that should be of interest to science fiction fans. This week I want to review one that’s right up my alley, THE VAST OF NIGHT, featuring weird lights and noises in the night, leading to mysterious disappearances from a small town. Next week, Charlize Theron heads up a supernatural action thriller helmed by Black director Gina Prince-Blythewood, THE OLD GUARD.

My love of science fiction started with Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, a show I had to watch at first through my fingers because it scared six-year-old me to death. By now though, I’ve seen all 156 episodes multiple times. That likely explains why I loved the indie science fiction film THE VAST OF NIGHT now showing on Amazon Prime. 

Newbie filmmaker Andrew Patterson obviously meant his debut film as an homage to Serling’s seminal work. At the beginning of Anderson’s film, we see the show’s intro on an old TV screen in a 50s living room in black and white, then zoom in and become part of the action in color as we meet the protagonists: 16-year-old part-time switchboard operator Fay and fast-talking local radio DJ Everett. 

The pair meet up at the Cayuga, New Mexico high school gym, where the big basketball game is about to start. It’s a small town, so they know each other, but it they also have things in common: a far-ranging curiosity, a nerdy interest in science and the developing technology of radio and sound recording, and, not surprisingly given the tiny town they live in, a desire to escape to the wider world. 

While the rest of the town is stuffed into the gym for the game, the two of them head off to work, he at the radio station, she at the town’s switchboard. (Yeah, you remember, those things that used to manually connect phone calls.)

Soon enough, a mysterious humming sound is heard through the wires. Then calls start coming in reporting not only the weird sound, but high, possibly tornado-like winds, sightings of “things in the sky,” and so on. Fay tries without success to get the sheriff on the line. She calls other friends and family only to get cut off. Finally, she calls the only other person who might help: Everett. He agrees the sound is weird, records it, and sends it out over the airwaves, asking his listeners to call in if they have any idea what it might be.

Up to this point the film has been pleasant, but a little slow. But when a guy named Billy calls in to the radio station to tell his story, the movie gets riveting. In some ways, what happens in this part of the film works despite all the rules of modern filmmaking, because it relies not on the image we see on the screen, but purely on the voice we hear through the telephone line: Billy’s voice telling Everett, Fay and Everett’s presumed radio listeners about secret work details to cover up evidence of UFOs during his military service. Details that occurred not far from their New Mexico town, work that made him fatally ill and involved only black and Hispanic soldiers because no one would believe them if they eventually told their stories.

 We never see Billy as he’s talking; we only see Everett’s reaction in the dim radio studio, Fay’s reaction at her switchboard. But as I watched, I found myself hanging on every word, as if I were listening to the broadcast late at night on a transistor radio under my pillow, chills running down my back. The effect was remarkable, and I was in a well-lit living room. I can’t imagine what it would have been like seated in a dark theater, or in a drive-in, which is how this film is being distributed widely during the pandemic.

Billy’s call leads Fay and Everett to further hard evidence of the mysterious sound, which he insists is made by something communicating back and forth, sometimes “at Sputnik level,” sometimes close to ground level. This “something” doesn’t belong to any military on Earth, of course, so that only leaves one conclusion, though it’s interesting the terms “UFO” or “alien” are never mentioned in the film. 

Anyway, the middle of the film involves much running around, which seems a little overdone. Things improve when Fay and Everett get another phone call from a woman named Mabel, who claims to know what the mystery sound is. They rush to her house and arrive to hear the elderly Mabel reciting words in an unknown foreign tongue. She claims they’re an alien language, words that her infant son began spouting before he could even speak recognizably in English. 

The boy was apparently a target of the aliens, going into a nonresponsive trance when the wind picked up and the mysterious sound could be heard, until she recited the alien words and he would snap out of it. Then one night the wind picked up, the sound came, and the boy, then nine years old, walked out the front door and disappeared. Mabel found his footprints in the yard—they went so far, then ended, as if he’d been plucked off the ground from the air. “They took him,” she says. 

Now, it would have served Fay and Everett well to listen to Mabel, since her experience is not only relevant, but acts as a nice bit of foreshadowing here. Alas, they think she’s been driven crazy with grief. And, to be fair, filmmaker Anderson sets up the scene so his audience, too, dismisses the old woman’s testimony. At the risk of giving him too much credit, he may be making a point about how society discounts the living witness of its women and its elderly. At any rate, the last third of the film is no surprise if you’ve been paying attention to the first two-thirds. I won’t go into the details out of respect for those who hate spoilers. Let’s just say it’s a satisfying, if predictable, ending from that point of view, though it provides few explanations for what happens. 

Anderson did well with his first film effort, taking honors at the Slamdance Festival (the indie film sister to the Sundance Film Festival); the Toronto International Film Festival, the Overlook Film Festival and several others. And critics have loved it, giving the film an overall 85 percent Metacritic score and a 92 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. Though some of the film shows Anderson’s inexperience, a few scenes show genuine brilliance, including one nine-minute single-camera tracking shot that would do 1917’s Sam Mendes proud. You can catch THE VAST OF NIGHT on Prime Video for free if you have that streaming service—or maybe at your local drive-in if you get really lucky. And you can hear my expanded review of the movie on my podcast at My Moviehouse My Rules anytime.
 

Cheers, Donna

WEIRD IN THE HERE AND NOW: CONTEMPORARY SFR

Always something strange in this THIS neighborhood.

Think for a moment of your definition of science fiction. I’ll bet you a Romulan ale 

the first thing that comes to mind is space, 

a starship, and an adventure set in the 

future. That adventure might be dark (dystopia) or hopeful (STAR TREK or 

STAR WARS), but the world you envision

is far, far away from the here and now.

But, of course, there is nothing in the actual definition of science fiction that requires a setting in the future or, for that matter, in space. Although my Oxford American dictionary does say SF is set “typically in the future” (my emphasis), it also says SF “deals with imagined scientific, technological or social developments.” Those could happen any time or place, it seems to me. The whole Steampunk subgenre imagines they happened in an alternate Victorian era, here on Earth. Alternate histories by authors like Phillip K. Dick and Harry Turtledove imagine those events happened in a completely different America and still fit the SF bill.

Mad scientists like the Dr. Frankenstein of the very first science fiction novel; Godzilla and his ilk arising from the nuclear testing wastelands of the postwar Fifties; Batman and Spiderman and Ironman—all qualify as science fiction without a space ship in sight. And, in fact, much of SF in the Fifties and Sixties dealt with the effects of science on the humans of Earth, as our technology outran our good sense in the headlines every day. Stories by authors Zenna Henderson and Theodore Sturgeon, television shows like THE TWILIGHT ZONE and THE OUTER LIMITS (and later, THE X-FILES and FRINGE) reflected this Earth-bound kind of SF. A lot of weird stuff can happen right in our own neighborhoods, as any fan of Rod Serling can tell you.

And in this one! Still no space ships unless you count UFOs.

As most of you know, I write this kind of “grounded” science fiction romance. In my Interstellar Rescue universe, the alien bad guys and others out there have the tech to get around in space, though this backwater called Earth does not. That makes us Earthers vulnerable and Earth the nexus of a lot of juicy conflict.

The problem comes when I try to describe the kind of SFR I write to a world that deals in “tags” and marketing concepts and simple one-line pitches. I don’t write “futuristic novels;” I don’t write “time travel;” I don’t write “dystopia” or “space adventure” (except for Book Three in my series, which might qualify for that particular tag). I’ve been calling my work “SF suspense romance,” but that’s a mouthful, and people look at me blankly when I say it. I tried borrowing Heather Massey’s descriptive “hearth and home” term, but that didn’t seem to fit, either.

So, as with Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is always the best. I’m thinking I should just call it what it is: Contemporary SFR, meaning science fiction romance set in the here and now.

Gah! you say! Doesn’t that lump me in with small towns and coming-back-home stories? Or maybe big cities and millionaire mystery baby daddy drama? Or, to bring things completely up-to-date, barely legal kinky sex?

Well, whoa there, space rangers. First of all, if the term did link me with the contemporary romance crowd, I wouldn’t complain,’cuz, you know, those readers read A LOT of books. And straight, laser-shootin’ SFR hasn’t brought in nearly those kinds of numbers yet.

But there’s a reason contemporary romance has so many faithful fans: the stories play to themes of community and family and loyalty to core ideals. They may be fantasies, as all romances are, but they speak to familiar, and very human, qualities.

Paranormal romance has played off these key concepts quite well to attract the same kind of romance readers. Take J.R. Ward’s wildly successful Black Dagger Brotherhood series, for example. Over and over the books return to tropes of “fated lovers”, a good woman taming an alpha male, loyalty to the “family” of the Brotherhood, the small town of Caldwell NY and a central cast of characters that become known to readers of the series. None of this is new to contemporary readers. The only thing different is that these guys aren’t ranchers or small town bad boys. They’re kickass vampires.

I’m trying to take similar concepts of community, loyalty and core characters and give them an SFR twist in my Interstellar Rescue series. The bad guys (and some of the good guys) just happen to be aliens. And though my heroes and heroines may wander to an alien planet or onto a starship on occasion, it’s Rescue’s mission to protect Earth. The central focus of the series always returns home to this planet, in the here and now, where a close group fights together against a common enemy.

So now I can say that what I write is contemporary SFR, both in time and place, but also at heart. It’s short and to the point. Maybe it’ll catch on.

Cheers, Donna