by

Scale

scale“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke.

Scale and scope.

When did the scale and scope of speculative fiction become so obsessed with the unimaginable?  This question came to mind the other night when I was watching Star Trek Into Darkness, after having just seen a re-run of Doctor Who‘s “The Eleventh Hour” (s05e01) the day before.  Both shows, so completely different in theme, character, and setting, do have something in common: The stakes are so high that the action — both physical and dramatic — has to be quasi-supernatural in order to … in order to … in order to what?

Keep our attention?

  • Is it really necessary to have a fist fight with a genetically engineered god on top of an air-car traveling at 100 miles per hour?
  • Is it really necessary to have Mr. Spock from two different universes?
  • Is it really necessary to climb through an unimaginably large warp core that’s eerily reminiscent of a famous British police box on the inside?

Speaking of which …

  • Is it really necessary to hack into a global video teleconference?
  • Is it really necessary to have an villain who can shape-shift (clothes, and dog collar, and all) into anything, anything at all?
  • Is it really necessary to program a planet-wide computer virus?

Maybe it is.  I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, because both of these shows charge me with that sense of wonder that’s enchanted me since I was old enough to know what genre is.

Vast scales and scopes are nothing new to the mythos of speculative fiction; not when you had shows like The Twilight Zone telling you that there was a fifth dimension “as vast as space and as timeless as infinity” right there in the corner of your eye; not when you had The Outer Limits telling you that “we will control all you see and hear”; not when you had spaceships traveling to Jupiter so humanity could become star children.  And all of that was a generation ago.

But if we take away today’s themes of the universe-is-going-to-implode-and-all-of-spacetime-is-going-to-get-flushed-down-a-Planck-scale-toilet, then what are we really left with?  We’re left with questions.  And those are the hardest things of all.  Do we seek justice, or do we demand revenge when we see crimes of utter devastation?  Do we trust the man in the bow-tie when he was really only figment of our childhood?   Do we believe there is absolute good and absolute evil?  Or do we believe there’s a spectrum in between?

The struggle to save humanity — the galaxy, the universe, the mutli-verse itself — really pales when compared to the questions that these shows ask.  The visual candy is there — oh, yes — and I will gladly pay the price of admission time and time again to consume it.  But I want to ask these questions.  I want us all to ask questions.  In my opinion, that’s the only way we can grow.  I want to know if there’s moral absolutism or moral relativism … or both.  I want to know what we do when morality changes, if indeed it can.  I want to know how to ask these questions.  I don’t look for answers much anymore, but I don’t think that’s the point anyway.  I think we, as humans, have to ask them.

By the way, a Star Trek fan gave me two hand-made Tribbles.  They’re sitting on the mantle next to a Waterford crystal wine decanter, in stark contrast to one another: The sublime and the ridiculous.  The trouble is, I don’t know which is sublime and which is ridiculous.  That’s another question I’ll have to ask.

Until next time, years truly,

Keith

Copyright © 2013, Keith Parker, except as noted below:

Doctor Who is copyright © 2013 by the BBC. No infringement upon the rights of the BBC is intended.

by

Relative

ClaraThis week on Fish and TARDIS Sauce The PITTS* examines the frontiers of the good Doctor’s name, and waxes sophomoric about variants that have given us even richer viewing experiences over the years.  Since there’s widespread speculation that the name itself might be an impediment to new viewers, we’re going to explore other shows of its era that are similarly titled, and see how they did.

Now, when I say widespread speculation please understand that this means it’s really just a large school of thought.  Okay, not large, by normal standards, but certainly a school.  And take school with a grain of salt, too, since I’m painting things with a broad brush.   In fact, let’s just call it a vocal minority.   Eh, well, since that might imply a crowd, we’ll be a little more precise and say that this idea stemmed from a few folks who were standing around shooting the shit.  And when I say “few” I really mean one guy who posted it before going to the kitchen to make himself a ham-and-swiss on wheat … with mayo.

And that brings us full circle.  What exactly is the name “Doctor Who,” and have there been others like it?   In grammatical terms, it’s simply a combination of an honorific and a relative pronoun.

A few common honorifics include …

  • Mister
  • Dowager
  • Miss

… while some of the relative pronouns in English are:

  • Who
  • Whom
  • Whose

Now, let’s take a look at some of the other shows that’ve cropped up over the years and see how they did:

Mister Who — In this American alternative to the BBC’s offering, the protagonist was not so much a “Time Lord” as a “Working Man Whose Time Is Valuable.”  Mister Who followed the adventures of an angst-ridden, angry electrical engineer who lived in a three-bedroom rancher, mowed his lawn with alarming regularity, and boasted uncanny foreknowledge of each Sunday’s NFL games.  In fact, most of his time-traveling involved jumping back and forth between his Saturday morning chores and Sunday afternoon’s organization of his toolshop, where everything was arranged alphabetically in his one-car garage.  The garage was also the location of his time machine, a UNIVAC I that he bought from a surplus equipment sale at a local air base (along with a gun-metal-gray desk and chair).  The real drama of the show surfaced when the boys “down at the shop” realized that Mister Who had been secretly voting for Democrats while telling them he was a Republican.  The show was cancelled after funding was pulled by its sponsor, a security firm known as The Plumbers.

Dowager Whom — In a tradition that only science fiction seems to maintain (see: Trek, Star) – Dowager Whom had more than one pilot episode, pitting the widowed detective against an array of stodgy Scotland Yard policemen who do not realize that by channeling her late husband, the Dowager could conveniently see into the future and find out “whodunit.”  While the network was impressed with the originality of the plot, they felt that “woods were full of shows like this” and opted for something more unique: A continuing daily serial copiously sponsored by makers of cigarettes and soap products.  It should be noted that Dowager Whom is known as DW to its legions of fans, who are increasingly annoyed that the initials DW have come to refer to a different show altogether.

Miss Whose — This delightful fantasy only aired two episodes before being turned into an ongoing series of Canadian pantyhose commercials.

And that, friends and neighbors, is just one small sample.  If you skim the pages of old issues of TV Guide, or simply have an overactive imagination, you’ll see dozens of other programs employing similar grammatical techniques, like the ill-fated Brother That, and the semi-lurid Master Which.

You’ll also note that I’ve posted a photo of Doctor Who‘s latest companion, the fictional but beautiful Clara Oswald.  That is all.

Years truly,

Keith

* PITTS — The Parker Institute of Time Travel Studies

Copyright 2013 Keith Parker

by

Primer

DW BakerI’ve discovered a small but growing number of readers really enjoy my blog but have never seen a single episode of Doctor Who.  I became aware of this after receiving a series of comments, emails, Facebook posts, and late-night phone calls that started dropping subtle hints.  Here’s but one example:

  • “I never really gave a tinker’s dam about your blog in the first place, and that goes doubly-so now that you’re writing about Doctor Who, whoever the hell that is.  We’re done!”

After reading between the lines and teasing out the undertones I decided I might need to address this problem.  I’ve never written a primer before, so brace yourself … this might get rough.

A list of characters you’ll see in the show (I’ll tackle Dramatis Personae in a later post):

  • The Doctor — A wise-cracking British time-traveller who regenerates into a new actor every few years.
  • The Companion — A woman (usually) who smacks the bejesus out of The Doctor whenever he needs it.

Where the characters might be in any given episode (not to be confused with setting):

  • Anywhere in time and space, except possibly Kansas.
  • The TARDIS — This is The Doctor’s time machine.  It looks like a blue phone booth.  That’s because it is.

Things that might happen during any given episode (I’ve never been any good at plot):

  1. Tentacled aliens bullied by their society’s rigid caste system time-travel to Elizabethan England where they take over the bodies of British Royalty in order to learn how to behave in polite company.
  2. The Doctor and (more likely) his Companion stop them.
  3. The Doctor, proud of himself, slips and falls, and winds up hanging from a cliff as the episode’s cliff-hanger.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this romp.  And please note any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is truly unfathomable since this isn’t a work of fiction and was never intended to be.

Years truly,

Keith

Copyright © 2013 Keith Parker

by

Lost

clara“I know what I said.  I was the one who said it.” ~ Clara Oswald, Companion of the 11th Doctor

This week on Fish and TARDIS Sauce The Parker Institute of Time Travel Studies (The PITTS) brings you yet another blog post peppered with slightly (read: highly) unorthodox quotes from another brilliant episode of Doctor Who.

Keep in mind that in order to watch this show — or read my blog — you don’t have to know jack-shit about either one.  You don’t even have to know — like I didn’t — that the plural of deus ex machina is dei ex machina or that — like Bug Bunny knows — Carson City is the capital of Nevada.  None of that is a required reading.  But Doctor Who should be required viewing.  And the episode in question, “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS” (s07e10), gives us enough one-liners, head-scratchers, and zingers to make us hungry for more.

  • Clara: “It’s an appliance.  It does a job.”
  • The Doctor: “It’s a pretty cool appliance.  We’re not talking cheese grater here.”
  • Clara: “You’re not getting me to talk to your ship.  That’s properly bonkers.”

When Clara gets lost inside the TARDIS following an accident, she quickly discovers one of the best story lines in all of science fiction: Finding your way out of one big-ass maze that has decided that it (the intelligent big-ass maze) isn’t terribly fond of you.

  • The Doctor: “Ever see a ship get ugly?”

So, like the sprawling metropolis of London or the freeway system of Atlanta at rush hour, Clara finds herself in the seemingly impossible situation of getting out of a seemingly endless situation inside a seemingly endless setting, all within the span of one hour of telly (seemingly to include commercials).

  • Note to aspiring writers: Don’t use adverbs too much.
  • Or, as The Doctor put it: “Don’t get into a ship with a madman.  Didn’t anyone teach you that?”

The episode drips with teases, like Clara looking in the OED-sized History of the Time War, flipping to a random  page, and murmuring, “So that’s who,” when she learns The Doctor’s real name.  Or the tease about the relationship (past, present, and future) between The Doctor and Clara, and why she is who she is.

“It’s spinning a labyrinth?” the Doctor says to the under-developed junk-dealing characters.  That’s what this episode does.  It spins a labyrinth, and dares us to follow the string back out again, especially given the creepy, distorted hallways and ghoul-like monstrosities wandering the “lower decks” of our favorite time machine.

  • Clara: “Why have you got zombie-creatures?  Good guys do not have zombie-creatures.  Rule one, basic storytelling!”
  • The Doctor: “Not in front of the guests.”

And yet, the Doctor knows he has to keep secrets.  Without secrets, he can’t keep his loved-ones safe.

  • Clara: “What aren’t you telling me?”
  • The Doctor: “Trust me.  There are some things you don’t want to know.”

The TARDIS can be both magnificent and malevolent, sublime and ridiculous, jovial and jealous.  With its Star Trek-like corridors and horror movie memes and under-developed side story, there’s plenty of room to criticize the episode, but a couple of lines of dialog really make us sit up and think about why we’re watching and why the BBC is writing and producing this masterpiece.

  • The Doctor to Tricky, the man who was tricked into believing he was artificial: “They changed your identify to provide some inflight entertainment.”

The essence of this episode, the essence of Doctor Who – and if you’ll forgive the conceit — the essence of all speculative fiction is summed up in The Doctor’s fierce reprimand of the brother who tricked Tricky, as it were:

  • Doctor [to Tricky]: “Listen to me.  Ask yourself why he couldn’t cut you up.  He had just one tiny scrap of decency left in him, and you helped him find that.”
  • Doctor to Gregor: “Now, you.  Don’t ever forget this.”

Yep.  For me, that is why we have genre; it reminds us that we have tiny bits of decency within us.  That’s why we have science fiction, fantasy, humor, horror, romance, mystery, and their red-headed stepchild known as time travel.  Or maybe I’m just full of it.  Could be.  Like Clara said when looking at the vast cathedral the TARDIS whipped up out of midair: “Now that’s just showing off.”

Maybe I’m showing off.  Or maybe I’m just lost in a maze, too.  In a way I hope that’s true.

Years truly,

Keith

P.S. To all my new blog followers, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to read and comment.  I hope you’re enjoying this little sliver of cyberspace as much as I’m enjoying weaving it.  Your support is appreciated more than you know!

Copyright © 2013 by Alan Keith Parker

Doctor Who and the quotes reproduced here are copyright © 2013 by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); no infringement upon their intellectual property is intended.

by

Soul

Doctor-Who-final

Okay, so I finally watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special from 2011 titled “The Doctor, Widow and the Wardrobe,” and reminded myself that I need to remind myself that I need to ask the question that famous SF author Connie Willis is constantly reminding herself to ask: “Do apes have souls?”

In this case, of course, the question would be better re-worded to ask whether trees have souls, and I’ll remind myself to do that at the end of this post.  But the sentiment is the same, isn’t it?

  • Reminder: Be sure to ask this question in multiple venues, including the office, church, and the next cocktail party I go to.
  • Reminder: Note the reactions.  The last time you did this people rolled their eyes and mumbled excuses to wander away.

But do they?  Do trees have souls?  Individually?  Collectively?  Are they … Borg?   Speaking of Borg, did you know that in one of the 1960s’ Doctor Who episodes the Daleks told The Doctor “resistance was useless”?  Coincidence?  Doubtful.  Germane to this blog?  Not in the least.

It’s a touching episode — “The Doctor, Widow, and the Wardrobe” — and even though I’m not a fan of C.S. Lewis, I found the homage delightful.  It’s certainly heart-warming, with a great time-travel paradox to wrap things up in a Christmastime bow.  Those always give me that “ooh ah” sense of wonder I love so much.

But I really did start waxing idiotic about the soul again.  It’s an ages-old question that won’t be solved here, but the question still lingers like the downed tree in the forest that nobody heard fall except Walt Whitman.

The answer is another question: Do we really know?  The atheist says he knows, and the theist says that he knows, while the Buddhist simply says to the hot dog vender: make me one with everything.

But if we have souls, then are our souls unique?  Or, are we part of a greater collective soul?  A collective consciousness, one German called it.  And is that the destiny of all living things?  Is that part of evolution?  Amy Pond is certainly part of evolution.  She’s pictured to the right, even though she — like The Borg — has nothing to do with this post.  Now that my obligatory lecherousness is out of the way, I can pose a few more questions, bullet-style:amy_pond

  • Ever wonder about entities that might become alive?
    • Like a virus, or the Internet.
  • Can there be a collective RNA?
  • Will a sentient Internet have a collective consciousness?
  • What if the plants and the trees and the birds and the bees are all part of our consciousness?
  • Whither the lions and tigers and bears?

And then, … and then, … and then you have to ask, does the universe itself have a consciousness?  Here are some more bullets for your consideration:

  • Is the universe alive?
  • Is the universe’s life force the same as what we call God?
  • Did Luke use The Force?
  • Why did my team just run 3 draw-plays in a row?
  • What about parallel universes?  Do they get souls, too?

It’s an interesting question isn’t it?  There are roughly 1082 particles in the universe.  What if they all compose a single mind?  Are they (it?) the source of morality, of genius … of art?  And what do we do about that one rebel (there’s always one) among us who asks, what about particle number 1082 + 1?

Is that lonely electron on its own?

One is, as the song says, the loneliest number.

That’s all for now.  Just some simple questions to ponder over a mug of beer (or six).  Oh, and remind me to talk about Doctor Who next time I post.  That really is what this blog is all about.  Well, that, and hot dogs.

Years truly,

Keith

Copyright © 2013

by

Clutter

Rose and Jack“All the world’s a stage” ~ As You Like It, Act II Scene VII, by William Shakespeare, used without his permission.

It’s been a stressful couple of months for a number of reasons (long hours, stomach flu, etc.), and during this time I’ve noticed that my mind keeps circling back to the famous Doctor Who story arc in “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances.”

  •   Are you my mummy?

As I daydream these two episodes get mingled with a conversation I had with a friend over the holidays.  It was one of those “tough love” kind of conversations (I was on the receiving end), which sought to knock some sense into me about the stresses in my life compared to those of others.  There is no doubt that my friend was right:  Others have it far, far worse than I.  We throw away enough food here in America to feed entire continents.  We have electricity, heat, air conditioning, and we even still have Twinkies.  And I am grateful.  I’m grateful to everyone, from farmers to HVAC mechanics, who help make us a first-world country.   So, no, I’m not living in desolation.  But even those who’re the same demographic as I am have their own burdens of stress, grief, disease, and turmoil on a daily basis.  Knowing this, however, does not comfort me.  Knowing that everyone else is going through hell just makes me wonder if I’m the victim of a gargantuan prank.  I’m not — I’m not that jaded – but it does make me wonder.

Which brings us back to

  •     Are you my mummy?

this two-part Doctor Who episode.  It’s a compelling, kitchen-sink mix of science fiction, history, humor, and horror.  We get to see a new character: The swashbuckling and handsome Jack Harkness.  We get to see Rose out of character: Freewheeling and whimsical in a delightful way that brings balance to the plot.  And we get to hear The Doctor’s name again: Not his real one, of course, but the time-worn (as it were) John Smith pseudonym once again.  And the story, like life, is a mountainous journey, with high peaks and shadowed valleys meant to

  • Are you my mmmmmmm-ummmmmmy?

scare the bejesus out of us.  But my goal is not to rehash the plot.  My goal is to say that the episode is CLUTTER!  In a good way :)

Like our lives, it is overwhelming – a city being bombed to rubble, a nano-virus on the loose, paranoia of not becoming “like them.”  Steven Moffat and his crew at the BBC took this confusion and turned it into a classic piece of entertainment.  For those of us who’ve never fought in a war or been helpless victims as bombs erupted in the sky we cannot possibly imagine the

  • Are you my mummy?

terrors of battle.  From the explosions that will blow your eardrums out, to the sights of rubble and carnage and blood, to the smells of death — the latter being the one thing that TV will never, I hope, provide us — the episode imagines destruction on a planetary scale and fright on a human scale.   But it’s all fiction.  It’s all smoke and mirrors.  It’s … all … a … play.  So, yes, for most people understanding that you’re not alone in your struggle helps to deal with an unpredictable world.   But that doesn’t help me.  What does help is story-telling, in all its forms.  Those media (books, film, TV) provide a sanctuary for my personal stress.   And they allow me to take a step back and project my life onto a stage, while I take my seat in the audience.  It helps me to know that Shakespeare was right: The world really is a stage.  It keeps me from going crazier’n a shithouse rat.  And that’s the “therapy” I need.  I don’t need tough love.  I need fantasy.

And you know what else helps, friends and neighbors?  Sneaking up on people and whispering, “Are you my mummy?” in a creepy British accent.

Years truly,

Keith

Copyright © 2013

by

Bad Does Not Spoil The Good

scotch“The way I see it, life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.” ~ Doctor Who

As an unapologetic, unsuccessful fiction writer I’m proud to say that I often rub shoulders with the people who rub shoulders with the people who rub shoulders with the writers who write in the tradition of  Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce.  Down through the years I’ve been drawn to the hauntingly compelling fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson, Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King.  So when my family sat down to watch the award-winning episode “The Doctor’s Wife” — and the opening credits popped up on our barn-size television set — I yelled out like the damn food I am: “Neil Gaiman!  Neil Gaiman!  It was written by Neil Gaiman!”

My wife and kids stared at me like I was speaking Serbo-Croatian.

But then I remembered the good Doctor’s quote, that bad things don’t spoil the good.  So instead of simply leaving it at that, and enjoying a stunning piece of drama — wherein Doctor Who melds science fiction, fantasy and horror with the aplomb of a good bartender mixing a mojito – I paused TiVo to explain that Neil is one of the über-talented writers who’ve inherited the mantle of Lovecraft and Poe, who’ve become the newest generation of fantasists.  And their blank stares reminded me of Christmas dinner twenty-years-ago, when a friend of the family asked what kind of fiction I wrote.  When I allowed that I was a fantasy writer, he said he loved — just loved – a book with good, steamy sex.  So do I, for what it’s worth, but that’s not the point.

When I say fantasy, I don’t mean Fifty Shades of Gray or late-night Cinemax.  I’m not a prude; it’s just not my genre.  In fact, I am not even referring to The Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones.  Again, not my thing.  You see, my foot is firmly planted in that land of shadow and substance, of things and ideas, and so when people ask what I write, I simply smile and say that I write Twilight Zone stories.  At which point some teen or tween will say, “Ooh, I just love Stephenie Meyers.”

And that’s when I go to the bar and order another scotch.

Years truly,

Keith

Copyright © 2013