Jan 142024
 

About 20 years ago I got it into my head to write a screenplay: an update of “When Worlds Collide,” based on the book from the 1930’s not the movie from 1951. When originally written, the question was “can we build a rocketship to fly to another planet?” My rewrite would set it a century later (mid/late 2030’s), when the question would be “how many rocketships can we build?” The arks would go not just to Bronson Beta but also to Mars, the Moon and asteroids, all of which would have already been visited by that point anyway. Nations, billionaires, corporations, organizations all slapping together ships of all sizes, to launch as many people, plants and critters as possible. The story would be otherwise much the same as the book.

The sequel, “After Worlds Collide” would remain possible. In the original, the Nazis and the Commies join forces to build their own ark and continue to be dicks on the new world. In my update, their place would be taken by, say, the ChiComs and the Jihadis… but again the story would be similar. One American ark lands on the new world, which they find to have once been populated, the original inhabitants having left a number of domed cities behind. The new world ends up in solar orbit, but an elliptical one… as far out as Mars, not quite as close in as Venus. So those domes cities will come in *damned* handy. But there are arks all over the place, with some working together, others working to take over.

Sadly, I never got around to writing the screenplay. News broke that Spielberg wanted to do a remake of his own and the idea of me writing a competing screenplay became monumentally stupid. Still, I’ve never forgotten the idea and I still think it has merit.

 Posted by at 9:07 pm
Aug 242023
 

So, there’s this movie coming:

It looks like your bog-standard Supernatural Entity Scary Horror Movie, with the twist being that the main characters are Indian immigrant and the Entity is something out of Indian folklore. OK, sure. We’ve all seen this before, with folk monsters from various ethnicities/nationalities/whatever pestering the appropriate people.

Here’s my idea, though.

Main characters are Popular Ethnic Minority Types… Indians, Japanese, Native Americans, Nigerians, whatever. They end up plagued by some magical critter from their homelands folklore. 80 to 90% of the movie is them on the run from Scary Monster, occasionally bumping into Clueless Standard White Americans. You know, the people who in these stories can be relied upon to be of no help whatsoever, because they have no knowledge of Diverse Supernatural Entity. But one member of the Doomed Ethnic Cast – let’s say a small-ish child, willing to talk to outsiders – explains the problem to Clueless White Guy. The Ethic Cast then runs off, leaving Clueless White Guy to look after them with a look of confusion. But then at the end of the movie, when Scary Monster looks about ready to pounce and kill everybody or send them all to Hell, or whatever it does, Clueless White Guy shows up.

I see two possibilities that I’d like:

1) Clueless White Guy shows up and sees Scary Ethnic Monster about ready to pounce. “Huh,” he says. Then he looks to the empty space to his right and says, “Hey, can you help out here?” Then there’s a rumbling sound that transitions to deep laughter. Scary Ethnic Monster Turns to look at Clueless White Guy, turns to eat *him,* but then stops. Because something from Clueless White Guys ethnic folklore, in this case Thor, manifests, whips out Mjolnir, and proceeds to beat Scary Ethnic Monster into a mess of ectoplasm. When Scary Ethnic Monster is finally destroyed, Thor hefts Mjolnir, leans, back, laughs some more. Winks at Little Kid, turns, pats Clueless White Guy on the shoulder (who hands him a bottle of beer), says, “I haven’t had that much fun in ages,” then walks off/fades away.

Or…

2) Clueless White Guy shows up and sees Scary Ethnic Monster about ready to pounce. “Huh,” he says. “You know what my cultural heritage is?” he asks the monster as it begins to pay attention to him. “Science, bitch!” Whereupon he whips out something akin to a proton pack and converts said monster into nonexistence. I would also accept “Doing some basic research,” whereupon he hits the monster with holy water, garlic, salt, holy books, silver, electricity, UV, ashes, tax forms, white oak, a handful of gerbils, a pissed-off housecat… whatever it is that is appropriate for the particular threat in question.

 

 

 Posted by at 1:02 pm
Jul 222023
 

As a followup to THIS POST, I had a half-formed idea that I posted in comments OVER HERE. I’ve decided to expand upon my idea a bit.

 

In short, people have recognized that in Star Trek, the federation – and in particular the Humans – are essentially mad scientists. Everybody else out there got from early industrialization to spaceflight over a span of millenia, carefully and painstakingly working their way up one reasonable rational step at a time. Humans, on the other hand, said “hold my beer” and charged from “I wonder if I can use steam to do work” to “maybe if I invent a faster than light drive I’ll get to bang a lot of hot chicks” in record time. This feature of humanity has been repeatedly shown in Trek, but I don’t believe it has been really called out as such, except for the occasional throwaway line. Well… what if, instead, a series leaned into the idea? A combination not just of Star Trek, but “Eureka” and “Warehouse 13” with a huge helping of “Stargate: SG1.”

 

“Star Trek: Bonkers” features Captain Liam Shaw, the best new character in Trek since The Doctor and Seven of Nine, unwisely killed off (apparently) in season three of “Picard.” Here, he has been resurrected by Federation mad science, put in command of the USS Rotwang (an Emmett Brown-class “science” vessel) tasked with researching rumors of super-science and advanced weapons that can be used to defend against existential god-level threats such as V-Ger, Organians, Q-Continuum. Episodes include:
* The one where the crew capture a rogue Q and break his mind by exposing him to the most diabolical psychological weapon yet devised: “Star Trek: Discovery.”
* The one where they accidentally shut down all fusion reactions in the Large Magellanic Cloud. That means stars, too. Whoopsie.
* The one where Emperor Kahless attempts to capture the vessel for the greater glory of the Klingon Empire. Captain Shaw zaps him with the new Trans Ray; whereupon the other Klingons tear Kahless into bits and back off from Shaw and the Rotwang, not willing to risk getting struck themselves. There are, after all, fates worse than the dishonor of retreat.
* The one where an invasion fleet of Kelvans from the Andromeda galaxy is intercepted while still 100,000 light years from Federation space… and the cubic lightyear of volume enclosing the fleet is converted from a 3-dimensional space to a natural log of 9-dimensional space.

* Based upon fragmentary documentation that survived without adequate historical context from before the Third World War, the engineers on board the Rotwang create a device that rips a hole in space which leads to a warped realm of chaos and demonic entities. A few probes are sent in, they realize the place really kinda sucks, and they close it up again. “Nope,” says the lead engineer on the project, Engineering Commodore Montgomery Scott.

*Following those events, Scotty goes on a bender. While blind drunk he creates four dimensional whisky. His first thought is “It’s green,” but in actual fact it’s an indescribable color that Man has never before encountered. As an experiment, the Rotwang taunts the Q loudly over subspace radio; one shows up and threatens to snap them out of existence. they offer him a drink first… and get him blind, stinking drunk. Then they interview him, receiving billions of teraquads of new information about reality-bending, and leave him passed out at the side of a nearby neutron star. When he wakes up he doesn’t remember what happened.

* Another Planet Killer/Doomsday Machine is discovered. It’s asleep, but seems to be waking up… and unlike the one Kirk encountered, this one is virtually pristine. There’ll be no stopping it. And since it’s neutronium, there’s no landing on it or beaming into it. So what to do? The recorded memory/personality engrams of Admiral Archers pet beagle are downloaded into it. It now wants to follow the Rotwang around like a happy puppy. This is of course a problem. Until a warp drive and massive impulse engine are bolted to a sizable moon; the warp drive knocks the effective mass of the moon down almost to zilch, which the impulse engine accelerates it at tens of G’s. Enough fuel on board to last for centuries. The Planet Killer Puppy is then told “fetch!” Asteroids control systems keep track of the PKP and maintain a constant distance, and lead the PKP on a path slowly out of the galaxy. PROBLEM SOLVED FOREVER.

* The Captain holds a contest to design, build and fly a one-man craft. It’s a race: not just to build it within a short time, but to fly ten light years out and back again. Teams from as few as three to as many as a dozen work feverishly for two weeks on their craft. But the night before the scheduled launch of the five craft that are finished, Ensign Skippy, who has not been involved, sneaks a drink of Scotty’s 4D whisky. He staggers down to the torpedo bunker and modifies a Class 8 probe and, five minutes before the race time, enters it. Everyone chuckles as he drunkenly gets in and is launched… and then promptly vanishes. The other craft go out and come back in various impressively short times, but Ensign Skippy does not return. Until he shows up for duty the next day with a pounding hangover and no recollection of the day before. A search shows that the probe is back in the torpedo magazine, the modifications burned out; sensor records show that it quietly reappeared in its rack, followed by Ensign Skippy staggering away from it and back to his quarters, two minutes before it launched.

* A new threat emerges in the Gamma Quadrant. A previously unexplored dust cloud turns out to have a single star and Earth-like planet within; the culture that evolved there has never seen another star, so they were unaware of the outside universe. Upon accidental first contact with the Rotwang due to a navigational error, the locals realize that they aren’t alone and decide that all life in the universe would have to go. Their technology, based on white servant-robots, is not particularly advanced; but evidence shows that they will very quickly become a galaxy-wide threat exceeding that of the Borg. So Captain Shaw has Scotty re-open the warp gate on the planet, spilling hellish chaos onto the place. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Shaw says to the senior staff as they watch from a safe distance as the entire nebula folds in upon itself, sucked into an another dimension. No report is made to Starfleet.

* Years earlier, a miniature “proto-universe” was discovered at Deep Space Nine after a ship passed through the wormhole. Given that the expansion of that universe would destroy *this* universe, such things are obviously to be avoided. So the Rotwang crew decide to see what it would take to *create* a proto-universe. Purely hypothetically. Simulated only. Not at all real. Nope. Until… “Hey, hold my beer.”

 

Any other ideas?

 

 Posted by at 10:22 am
Sep 212022
 

… this one was kinda weird.

Anyway, today I took a nap which ended with an attempted nightmare. I say “attempted” because it had the trappings of a nightmare, but I kinda watched it happen second-hand. I’m not one for true lucid dreaming, but I often have dreams where I’m more observer than main character. I don’t seem to be able to control the dream as those who lucid dream can, but I can hit the “eject” button from time to time. This makes a lot of what should be “nightmares” into “horror movies.”

As the dream began, I understood the world I was in. A “zombie apocalypse” had occurred, but was apparently largely over. Things were trashed, but it wasn’t The End for mankind, though apparently there were a lot less of us. I – or at least the main character of the dream – was alone in something like a old folks home, retirement center, combo apartments/hospital, something like that. It was long abandoned, power off, but the hallway was fairly well lit via sunlight coming in the windows of the rooms off the hallway. The place was filled with cats… normal, non-zombie felines who didn’t seem to pay me much mind one way or the other. I had a sawed-off shotgun and a flashlight and was going room to room looking for something (don’t know what, though I seemed determined to find it). The place was dank, a bit damaged, but silent except for some muted meowing from the cats.

One door was closed. As I went to it, the cats began to gather around, silently. They didn’t hiss or growl, but they had that determined look that cats get when they are twitchy. The door opened without protest; the room beyond was near pitch black. Went inside, shotgun in right hand, flashlight in left, and began to sweep the room. The cats gathered out in the hall and watched me but did nothing else. Standard depressing nursing home room… bed, dressers, knick-knacks. Seemed empty… until someone started speaking from a dark corner. Quickly turned to find an old lady sitting in a chair in a pitch black corner, calmly talking to me. Difficulty: she was a zombie, and in a pretty bad way. I understood that in this world, zombies don’t think, much less talk. But this one was calmly chatting away. I don’t remember a single word she said, but what stuck with me was that she Knew Things. She knew who I was, though the old lady was nobody I’d ever met. And she knew things about the world. Why things had happened, and what the future held, and what the larger motives were. She didn’t move, didn’t threaten, but she was malevolent. And the mind chatting away was not the old ladies, but something else. Something I recognized to be vast.

It was at that point that “movie goer me” decided to hit the “eject” button. I recall that as I woke up I actually said “haha, no.”

I suspect a good author could make something of this story. I’d like to figure out how to incorporate it into “War With The Deep Ones,” though there are no zombies in that. The obvious approach would be to have a Deep One get caught and say such things, but that would lose much of the impact: a monster telling you horrible things might be bad, but a little old *dead* lady telling you the same things is a door straight to “nope.”

 

Anyway, enough about babbling zombies. Back to Joe Biden and Vlad Putin.

 Posted by at 11:53 pm
Sep 072022
 

Reminds me somewhat of DC’s recently finished-but-canceled “Batgirl” movie:

World’s biggest cruise ship is set to be sold for scrap before first voyage as owners go bankrupt: $1.6BILLION vessel was built with 20-decks and a WATER PARK

The “Global Dream II” cost more than *billion* dollars and is structurally complete but currently lacking in finishing touches (reportedly $200 million dollars to go). It’s 1,122 feet long and design to carry nine THOUSAND passengers. What astonished me the most, apart for the utter failure that this represents, is that it was apparently built indoors. The cruise line that paid for it went bankrupt and apparently could not find a buyer for the ship, so it’s to be broken up for scrap. The waste involved here is breathtaking. Think of all that could be done with a vessel like that. Granted, it’s a civilian cruise liner, and that comes with certain definite limitations; any idea of turning it into a combat vessel (it’s certainly big enough to be a creditable aircraft carrier) kinda go right out the window. But perhaps it could have made a dandy hospital ship. Or a floating apartment block.

 

It reminds me, because of course it does, of my “War With the Deep Ones” story “Champion of the Seas,” which you can get here:

War With The Deep Ones: Champion Of the Seas

 Posted by at 11:46 am
Sep 022022
 

I haven’t completed a WWTDO story since 2018, but a few days ago I completed an all-new one: “The Camp Commanders Conundrum.” This followed after cracking open my WWTDO folder and taking a look at a number of incomplete stories last saved four years ago… a few of them carried out to some length… and I can’t for the life of me remember where I was going with them. D’oh. Hopefully as the Wu Flu cognitive effects fade away and my noggin returns to normal some memories will reemerge.

The first books worth of stories was completed in about a month four or more years ago; I then started work on two different books. The first book was a collection of separate stories from the first few days of the war; the second book would have covered a span of some months. The other book I started was something of a prequel. A third book, with nothing yet written, would cover a span of a few years, up to the end of the war (no spoilers on how it ends, but it’s in the Lovecraft mold, so go ahead and guess). I’ve another Book 2 yarn in mind that I might scribble down soonish, as well as returning to the incomplete ones. I think that when I’ve got the third book finished I might take a stab at finding a publisher. Shrug.

 

 Posted by at 1:24 am
Jun 252022
 

Part of the back story to my Zaneverse stories set 500 years in the future is that the 21st century turned out to be the most nightmarish century in human history. The Pan Asian Wars wipe out about half the planetary population and trash the rest of the worlds biosphere via pollution and radiation and plagues. Subsequent to that is the European Diaspora as tens of millions of indigenous Europeans flee the continent as it transforms into a third world hellhole, dominated by the Caliphate, feeding into the resurgence of Iceland and the rise of the Texas Semi Autonomous Region. All this is far in the past of the main characters, but it helped establish the world they live in just as the colonization of the New World starting five hundred years ago established *our* world.

This was all supposed to be *decades* in the future, time enough for civilized society to get set up on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, habitats, leading to *some* portion of humanity surviving The Fall at the end of the world at the beginning of the 22nd century. I fear I was too optimistic.

 

 Posted by at 1:32 am
Jun 092022
 

For the past year or whatever I’ve had better things to write, but something I’ve *wanted* to write is a way to canonize “Star Trek: Discovery,” to fit it in with actual Star Trek. As is abundantly obvious, STD simply doesn’t fit in the canonical Star Trek universe. There are too many differences, from the designs of ships, to the design of species, to the history and lore, to technologies that simply don’t fit and wouldn’t exist. Without handwaving away such things as the Klingorks or the mushroom drive, how can you possibly conclude that STD is in any way canonical? I’ve got it worked out, but I don’t currently have a good way to turn it into a standard narrative story. One of my interests here – because of course it is – is to produce ship designs that actually fit into the TOS design ethic.

Here’s my basic outline of how STD fits into the TOS universe:

Michael Burnham is a crewman on the USS Shenzhou, under Captain Georgiou, about a decade before the adventures of the USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk. But here she’s an Ensign, and the ship is “canon design.” It would have the same basic layout as shown on STD, including the underside-bridge, but the components would fit in with the TOS era. It would look like something that Franz Joseph or FASA would have come up with.

She goes down to the desert planet that STD started on. As on the show, she fires a phaser blast down a dry well in order to crack the well open and allow the locals to access the water. Here’s where things start to diverge. The bottom of the well is damp and musty; when the phaser strikes and break through into the high pressure water below, a blast of damp air is shot up the well. Burnham takes the blast of wet air to the face. Nothing major, just enough to knock her over. But in that cloud of damp air are the spores of a local cave-fungus. She breathes in a snortful of them, and they promptly begin to do their thing. They invade her system, but are un-noticed during transport back to the ship.

Soon, the fungal spores invade her brain and she falls into a coma-like stupor, but her brain goes into overdrive and she begins to fantasize in a Walter Mitty like fashion. Her boring life gets transformed into one where her parents were Special Science Types until they were killed by Klingons; instead of having an undistinguished adolescence, she was raised on Vulcan by the ambassador, who in reality she once saw at the Academy and was impressed by (but who never noticed her). Instead of just squeaking by on the entrance exams, she was a Very Special Candidate for Starfleet, and instead of barely being noticed by her Captain, she was beloved… not just by the Captain, but everyone.

The ships doctors try to cure her of the mushroom infection, but only manage to suppress them and bring her around. She has suffered brain damage; the spores have bonded to the neurons in her brain and are slowly beginning to supplant them, forming their own network of mycelial synapses. She goes bugnuts and under the LSD-like influence of the shrooms, steals a shuttle and causes an incident with a nearby Klingon garbage scow. It’s a minor incident, easily and quickly patched over, but she thinks she’s started a war with the Klingons. The crew of the Shenzhou realize that she’s beyond their aid, so they contact the nearby science vessel USS Discovery to come and pick her up. On the way to drop her off at the Tantalus V mental institute, she slips further into delusion, taking in the scraps of information she has picked up about the USS Discovery and its crew and fully filling in back stories that make no sense. Thus all the constant talk she hears about “she’s being driven by spores” and “a mycelial network,” words she hears only partially and in passing while fading in and out of consciousness, are applied not to herself but the ship. By the time she is dropped off at Tantalus V, her brain has been fully dominated by the fungal network; she’s dreamed *years* of fantasies in the weeks the Discovery takes to transport her.

Something-something handwave something about Dr. Simon van Gelder at the Tantalus V facility using an early version of the neural neutralizer (“Dagger of the Mind”) to stabilize her now quite corrupted brain; psycho-tricorders (only mentioned once, I believe, in “Wolf in the Fold”) are used to read her mind and get her story from her. Her long, rambling fantasies where she is time and again the most important person in the universe and everyone loves her are recorded for academic purposes; decades later a Ferengi named Quark acquires the complete set of archival recordings and translates them into a series of holodeck programs. They become rampagingly popular across the Federation; the stories of increasingly bizarre aliens and technologies and histories begin the new fictional “sporepunk” genre, alternate histories of Federation worlds or historical characters that go basically off the rails due to the introduction of spore-based technologies. Klingons file official protests – and unofficial threats – over the slanderous way they are presented, but it’s far too late to complain to Burnham, who died long ago, one of the few sad crazy people who could not be helped by modern medical technology. The stories are of some concern to certain quiet departments of Starfleet and the Federation… how could she know about the Terran Empire? She dreamed up the holodeck and atmosphere-holding force fields decades before they were installed in Starfleet vessels. Section 31 is, perhaps oddly, *not* concerned about what she dreamed up about them. They conclude that she must have heard some rumor about them, as doubtless many Starfleet officers have, but by imagining them being a vast, well-known and fully out in the open organization, this actually gives the real Section 31 cover. After the “sporepunk holodramas” go public, any future mention or rumor of Section 31 can now be safely laughed off as having been inspired by those silly stories.

So the ships of STD exist, the configurations are there, but everything is crazy big, everything is too sharp and edgy and shiny with lens flares in an abundance explainable only by way of an optical cortex being attacked and sparking.

 Posted by at 2:27 pm
Apr 252022
 

 

I have hopes that at least some of these – Star Wars and Star Trek – can be returned from the dead. But to do so would require both a virtually complete change in “leadership” (i.e. those who are currently in charge of the IP’s) and an adequate passage of time. They should be left to sit quietly for a few years, in which time the hatred that recent misadventures have engendered in the fandom could cool off, and better ideas could be gathered.

I remain of the opinion that what the owners of Star Trek need to do are two main things:

1) Gather all the rights back into one place, allowing *real,* and not “25% different,” Star Trek to be made.

2) Create an anthology series. But *not* one helmed by a bunch of suits. Instead, open it to the fandom. Have anything from lone writers to whole amateur production teams (“Axanar,” “Continues,” etc) give them pitches. Those that seem pretty good get funded to make a small number of episodes… one to four, say. Something that could be a series. Then make a season with up to perhaps ten wildly different stories. One set on a ship at the same time as TOS, using actual TOS designs. One set in the movie era. A Klingon or Vulcan-specific yarn. A post-Voyager show. What-the-frell-ever. If, out of those ten shows, one is a smash hit? It gets turned into a full series. If three or four of the stories are wildly popular? Then great, now you can have four series that are popular right out of the gate.

Sure, there are counter-arguments. One big one is that ten wildly different stories would require ten wildly different sets of costumes and props and actors and starship bridge sets. Granted. But: do them sequentially and repurpose as much as possible. Do as much as you reasonably can with virtual sets. Don’t go nuts with the budget; let it be known right up front that the budget for these sort of things is limited. The fandom will accept that, and perhaps embrace it: I will die on the hill that TOS 1701 is the best starship design to date, and that both DS9 and Enterprise showed that the old-school bridge – which can be rented in New York State, IIRC – still looks awesome. You don’t need STD-level production standards for these little mini-shows. Because what you’re selling isn’t the effects; nobody complains that STD or STP have crappy effects and production standards – you’re selling the concept, the characters, the plots. If just one of these lower-budget short subjects knocks the viewers socks off with characters on par with Kirk and Spock and McCoy, *then* you can lavish an effects budget on it reasonably secure in the knowledge that things should go well.

Hell, I even wrote a short story a year or so ago set on a Klingon tugboat. Is it good? Dunno. Probably not. But if those in charge of Star trek seemed like they actually cared about Star Trek again… hell yeah I’d turn it in. There’s even my odd little “Artifact L-374-Alpha” thing from… holy crap, exactly one year ago today. Weird. OK… Anyway, that would likely make a poor basis for an ongoing series, but a season-long miniseries? Maybe.

Is such a thing likely? Sadly, no. So we’ll have to live with murdered franchises for a while, being dangled before us on strings like marionette zombies.

 Posted by at 7:58 pm
Dec 262021
 

A video of a guy messing about with a demo version of a “virtual Titanic” that let’s you wander around something like a quarter of the ship (the rest of the vessel coming later). Seems like a *spectacular* way to blow a bunch of hours.

 

This project dates back to at least 2016 (I posted a link to a YouTube video of theirs showing a real-time sinking of the ship back in early 2016, a lot of the website doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2017). The demo is downloadable here:

Titanic Honor and Glory

Those of you old enough to remember when James Cameron’s “Titanic” was released in 1997 (yeesh, nearly a quarter century ago) will doubtless recall how a good fraction of the public went bonkers, to the point that at least two efforts were made to produce a “Titanic II” ship designed to replicate the look and opulence of the original… but with a better hull and more lifeboats. Sadly these didn’t come to pass, but I’m pretty sure that if someone were to build a faithful replica of the Titanic, even as a land-locked hotel, people would line up around the block. Shoot, people throw money at Disney for their half-assed “Star Cruiser” Star Wars knockoff, so a Titanic “experience?” A license to print money.

As an aside, a story idea: turns out that the iceberg impact did not produce enough damage to sink the vessel. What caused it to sink was the sudden increase in weight on the ship as tens of thousands of time travellers arrived to witness the sinking.

 Posted by at 11:46 pm