1,000

...or, Wednesday's Post, postponed.

First, congratulations to True Grit, Inception and Toy Story 3 for earning a boatload of Academy Award nominations yesterday. Of course, I reviewed True Grit here and had a thing or two to say about Inception here. I like it when the movies I've seen are the ones recognized by the people in the industry as being exceptional, and while I'd have to think pretty hard about it to be sure...I was going to say that was 100% of the films I saw this year, but after thinking about it, those are only half the films I saw this year. I did see at least three others. (Despicable Me, Megamind and Tangled, if you are keeping score. The Junior Reader [age, 4] picks most of our films.)

Second, I read something very, very interesting yesterday over at one of my favorite websites, io9.com. While I've mostly focused on books, I read just about anything made out of letters forming words that barely qualify as English.

Case in point.

Anyway the aforementioned website has been going nuts on Battlestar Galactica this week, the groundbreaking tv drama that aired on Sci Fi Channel from 2003 to 2010. On Tuesday, they posted the series bible for BSG. It was a really neat read, and anyone who is interested in how tv is produced, and especially anyone who liked Galactica should give it a read. (Anyone who hasn't seen the whole show beginning to end probably shouldn't read it, IMHO. Too Spoilery.)

I'm not going to go into anything spoilerific here, either, but let's just say that when you read a couple of the character sketches, it's a little disappointing where their character arcs ultimately led.

It is a complete rebuke of everything wrong with Science Fiction on tv in 2003, namely the Star Trek legacy shows. (The original still kicks @$$ when you look at it in the context of its time.)

The bible is good stuff in its entirety, though. Give it a read.

Finally, today The Rochester Reader is likely to surpass just (9:28 am CST) surpassed 1,000 visitors since I started it in November. Thanks for stopping by. I mean it. (Especially the 14 hits I received from Belize this week. Seriously.) It is humbling to think that that many people have ended up here, much less that anyone would enjoy themselves enough to come back!

Thank you! See you next time.

Now go read something today already!

rr

UBIK and Inception

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
If you don't want the book UBIK or the movie Inception spoiled, please stop reading now.
But feel free to bookmark this page and read it later!


When I first read Philip K. Dick's UBIK, I thought, "someone should really make a movie out of this." When I saw Inception for the first time last week, I thought, "wow. Somebody did." That somebody being Christopher Nolan.

In the interest of full disclosure, the two are not the same. There are similar themes, though, and some really neat instances of congruent storytelling.

First up is worldbuilding. Both stories take place in realities very similar to our own. (My favorite kind of science fiction; not the sci fi of laser blasters and warp drive, but the kind of sci fi that takes place 20 minutes into the future.) People still go to work. Corporations still make billion-dollar deals. People fall in love. And they die. But both stories have one or two technologies which are no where near their infancies in the universe in which we actually live.

In UBIK, corporations employ people with special abilities: telepaths, precogs, people who have telekinetic powers. And when a person dies, if they have the money, they can have their body frozen in a special kind of mausoleum where they enjoy a "second life." They can still be communicated with, as long as the tissues of the brain remain somewhat intact. The cold helps preserve it longer.

In Inception, it is possible to access the dreams of another. This is done in the name of big business and usually done in order to steal ideas. Sometimes, though, it is necessary to implant an idea. There are rules, of course. Time and space take on different qualities. It is possible to dream within a dream. If you are hurt, you feel it. If you die within a dream, you wake up.

While these aspects of these stories may at first seem similar, the fundamental story behind each is not: UBIK is largely the story of a man, Genn Runciter, who is trying to figure out what the hell went wrong on his last corporate mission. A bomb goes off. Then some of his colleagues mysteriously die off, aging rapidly as if they had drank from the False Grail. His boss' likeness starts showing up on coinage. It is my favorite kind of story: the ontological mystery.

Inception is a story that is part caper, part tragedy; but I dare to say it is, in the end, the simpler story archetype of the two: the story of a man, Dominick Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), trying to overcome his own inner demons. Both stories play with one of my favorite themes: "what is real, and how do we know it is real?"

Both stories also had the one quality I love and hate about unique fiction: I love it so much, I can't wait for it to be over, even though I know when it is over, I'll be sad about it because I know I'll never be able to read it again for the first time.

The end of both stories is very satisfyingly left ambiguous, and I won't spoil that for you here. The bottom line, though, is that if you liked Inception, you will probably like UBIK. If you liked UBIK, you will probably like Inception. And if you don't like sci fi in general, thanks for reading this far. You are probably lost.

A Quote from UBIK: "It was a tranquil sight, these faithfuls, coming as they did so regularly to pay homage. They brought messages, news of what took place in the outside world; they cheered the gloomy half-lifers in these intervals of cerebral activity. And they paid Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. It was a profitable business, operating a moratorium."

A Quote from Inception: "Well dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."