The problem with all new Sci Fi shows is that the Sci Fi fan base has a very long memory and it’s all but impossible to come up with something completely new.  Alcatraz has the look and feel of Fringe, The X-Files, Prison Break, LOST, The Pretender, and just about every other Sci Fi show with something mysterious going on and random people wandering around trying to figure it all out.  There was even a strong feeling of The Matrix as the opening chase scene had our hero jumping between rooftops.  But that should be OK, we all like Fringe, et el, right?

House is a great show, but it has lost a lot of it’s appeal because we can all see the formula that the writers use.  We open with someone getting ill, House says they are boring, but then takes the case, he nearly kills them before each commercial break, and finally saves them with a sudden flash of intuition at the end.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And so it is with Alcatraz, the show’s formula is clearly on display in the first two episodes.  Bad guy shows up, kills people, good guys catch bad guy and put him in secret prison.   Of course, they may get away from the Murder of The Week formula as the show progresses, after all, they are going to be bringing back Guards at some point as well.

Alcatraz was a tad on the violent side, with lots of blood spatter and lots of random killings of strangers we had no real reason to care about.  We even get the feeling that our hero Doc Hurley is a little too soft for being upset at the sight of so much carnage, while our other heroes calmly wander among the blood soaked bodies.  Except for Jorge Garcia’s character, most of the people we meet are pretty cold blooded and often downright nasty.  Sam Neill is not a nice guy at all.

I’ll keep watching Alcatraz and hope that J.J. Abram actually has something to do with the show, other than letting it use the Bad Robot logo.

The story of a council block inhabited by an odd mixture of London poor, that happens to become the center of an alien invasion.    From the producers of Shane of The Dead, Attack The Block is a pretty straight forward take on a monster movie.

Unlike CGI fests such as Super 8 and Cloverfield, Attack The Block gives us a story on a human level-and leaves the over the top special effects in the box.

Our heroes don’t start off very heroic, they are busy mugging a woman when something falls from the sky and flattens a car.  They find an alien something inside.  The alien is small and appears to be nothing but an animal.  It attacks one of the street thugs and he decided to take it out.  It is only later, when a number of larger and meaner things fall from the sky that he realizes this might have been a bad idea.

The whole story takes place on a personal level.  We follow around a number of people as they fight for their lives while running from a lot of strange aliens with dayglo teeth and really black fur.  They don’t look at all like the first alien, but there is clearly some connection between them.  The authorities eventually show up, but they seem to have no knowledge of the alien invasion-they are still investigating the mugging from the opening scene.

Attack the Block is not a comedy and it’s not a parody, it’s just a good old fashioned sci fi movie.  There are a few funny bits and a few scary bits, and there’s a lot of action.

I liked the political aspects Attack The Block, mainly that Big Brother hates the poor and wants them dead.  At one point the main thug, a black teenager with dreams of being a drug dealer, says that the government sent the aliens to kills them, as they weren’t killing each other fast enough.  At another point he asks why someone is helping poor kids in Africa when there are plenty of poor kids in London that need help.  I’ve ask the same question myself.

I liked Attack The Block, but it very much a British film, and may not be to all Americans liking.

I have never been a huge fan of Harlan Ellison’s writing.  I can’t name even a single story of his that I can remember reading, though I must surely have stumbled across one or two over the years.  No, it’s more stories about Harlan Ellison than story by Harlan Ellison that spring to mind.

After seeing James Cameron’s Terminator, Harlan Ellison decided to sue because, well, it was a science fiction movie, and well, Harlan writes science fiction, so he should be credited for helping to create it.  At least, that’s the way I have always heard it. Much as A.E. Van Vogt sued the creators of Alien for stealing the idea that a spaceship might run into aliens at some point while it was in space.  I’m not sure why these two have not sued virtually everyone who has produced any sci fi in any form.

Another Harlan Ellison story has to do with Star Trek.  City on the Edge of Forever is one of the best episodes of Star Trek the Original Series.  But it was not filmed as Harlan Ellison wrote it.  This so pissed him off that he wrote an entire book about it and included the original script so that everyone could see how superior it is to the episode that every Trekkie dearly loves.  He reads a few lines from City on The Edge of Forever, doing a pretty good imitation of William Shatner’s famous pause acting.

Harlan Ellison is easy to understand, he just want things to be done his way-and he becomes outraged when they are not done his way.  This means that even though he likes working in the movies and TV, he has so many conditions in place that very few people are willing to work with him.  He dismisses this reality with a shrug.

Throughout Dreams with Sharp Teeth we are shown bits of tape featuring Harlan yelling at people. Mainly he yells at them for being so very stupid.  One of the great little bits in the film is when he talks about watching The Weakest Link.  The contestant was asked what famous star of Laurence of Arabia also wrote a very popular newspaper column about Bridge.  The Contestant answered Naomi Campbell instead of Omar Sharif.  Harlan was so flummoxed by this that he has turned into a running gag with his wife-the answer to virtually any question is now Naomi Campbell.

I grew up reading the last of the great Sci Fi writers, Issac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C Clark, among others.  Harlan Ellison was always the star of the Next Generation of great sci fi writers.  I remember that he was friends with Issac Asimov and that he wrote a very good script for Issac’s book I, Robot.  It was never filmed, of course, but it was about a million times better than that abomination starring Will Smith.

I have fallen by the wayside of current sci fi and have no idea who the big names of today are.  Like everyone else these days I tend to read more stories about werewolves and vampires than Martians and Ray-guns.

Harlan is an old school kind of writer-he expects to be paid for what he writes.  He doesn’t care about bloggers and he doesn’t like other writers who give away everything they do.  He illustrates this by telling the story of an interview he did about Babylon 5 and how Warner Brothers asked if they could use the interview on the DVD.  He said Sure, all you have to do is pay me.  They didn’t pay him.

And so on and so forth.  Dreams with Sharp Teeth is two hours of Harlan Ellison talking about all the things that bother him in general and the countless cases of personal grievances he has suffered in particular.  Sprinkled in are interviews from a couple of his friends and lots of old footage.  This is all great stuff.

Thanks to Agent139 for bringing it to my attention.

The first season of Torchwood had a high sexual content, as many British sci-fi shows do these days.  The second season they dropped it down a couple of notches.  The third season had little to no sex that I recall.  This latest Torchwood, from the BBC and Starz held the sex back until episode three of ten.  Must be in John Barrowman’s contract that we are all reminded that he is gay and that we have visual proof of the fact that he is gay.  Captain Jack Harkness is more pansexual-he makes a pass at Doctor Who and Rose Tyler when we first meet him.

Miracle Day is about more than the two surviving members of Torchwood, it is about the fundamental question of what to do with people who should be dead, but can no longer die.  A planet filled with immortals will soon run short on food, water, housing, and so on.  Nothing good comes from this miracle.

Bill Pullman, one of the main characters, plays a pedophile sentenced to be executed when the miracle occurred.   Bill looks pretty rough around the edges.  Of course, it has been almost 15 years since Independence Day.

Anyway.  He becomes an unlikely spokesperson for the one drug company who just happens to have a seemingly endless supply of pain killers on hand.  It’s all about the money.  Really?  Money?  Well, I’m sure it will all make more sense in time.  Maybe.

One of the running gags in the first couple of episodes has been the fact that Eve Myles’ Gwen Cooper is from Wales and does the usual bit of calling Chips Crisps and Cell phones Mobiles and so on and so forth.  Another bit is the idea of Wales being a separate country-one of the Americans says that Wales in basically London’s New Jersey.  It is kind of funny that Wales, Ireland, and Scotland all want to be thought of as counties-well, Texas and Hawaii were both countries once upon a time.

Torchwood Miracle Day is a fun show, but I’m not that big a fan of these season long story arcs.  I want Torchwood to be a one episode, one story kind of show.  But I guess those days are gone forever.

But rarely have I seen a mysterious something else quite as odd as the one used in Total Oblivion-More or Less.   The Earth finds itself over run by hordes of barbarian Scythians and people from something like the Roman Empire.  But the barbarians are not the worst of the new world’s problems-there is also a plague which turns people into paper once they are stung by a wasp.

Our hero on this journey through a world gone mad is a 16 year old girl and her fairly odd family.  We follow her as she goes down the Mississippi river and tries to adjust to the ever changing world, survive endless battles, and try to find out the truth about a rogue submarine.  The surface of the earth has changed, the stars in the sky have changed, Mars seems to be missing.

There is not much of a plot, it’s mostly a road trip with a few odd side trips along the way.  As with a lot of sci fi, there is never any explanation as to why or how the world has changed.

One of my minor gripes is a stylist one, Alan Deniro forgoes the common practice of using quotation marks, which is a bit annoying.  I like being able to tell when someone is talking and who is doing the talking.  There are still a lot of I saids and she saids and the like, but no quotation marks.  I’m not sure if he was trying to imply that quotation marks had also vanished from the world or that a 16 year old girl never learned to write very well.

There are a lot of shocking things going on in Total Oblivion, some of them fun, some of them pointless, and most of them kind of random.  It was a fun read, and did remind me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, which also featured a world filled weird unexplainable events.  I liked it and it is a great example of how the standard issue post apocalypse story can be tweaked into something new.

I first read The Man In The High Castle in about 1982 while I was working my way through of a number of the best SciFi books ever written.  I was heavily into Asimov, Heinlein, Lem, and a number of other great writers of science fiction who had found their way onto Best Sci Fi Lists of one kind or another.  Near the top of many of these lists was The Man In The High Castle.

An alternate history story in which the Allies loose World War II and the Japanese and Germans divvy up the world, with the small exception of a bit  ceded to the Italians for their role in conquering the earth.

The real star of the novel is the I Ching, which plays a large role in the lives of those persons who find themselves under Japanese control.  Anyone who wants a good life has done everything in their power to turn themselves into Japaneses clones, including using the I Ching at every decision point and following the formalized customs of the Japanese class system.

I went through a brief infatuation with the I Ching myself for a couple of years as a result of having read The Man In The High Castle.

On the other side of the world, The Nazis have perfected rocket travel to the Moon, Mars, and Venus-though they are still having problems with TV.  Seems they might have killed off a good deal of the people who had the skills and talents needed to do electronics work as we knew it in the early 1960s.  They did a really good job on population control, wiping everyone in Africa and killing everyone that didn’t meet their high ideals.  This brought the world population to around 2 billion-which was only about a billion or so less than it was in our own world in 1962.

Among the many story lines winding through The Man In The High Castle is the tale of a couple of American craftsmen who are skilled at making fake antiques.  They get tired of creating replicas and decide to create original artwork on their own.  In the process they make a new breed of American art which is infuse with Wu-that certain nothing that is highly valued by the Japanese.  A successful American merchant has the chance to become rich selling little plastic trinkets modeld on the artwork, but he decided that his pride in being an America outweights his natural greed.

There are small intrigues with Nazis and Imperial Japanese.  There are people who hope to make the world a better place, if only they can find the chance.  There is a little shift in reality at one point, where one of the Imperial Officers is transported to our world by some magic found in one of the little works of art the two craftsmen create.  All kinds of odd and wonderful things happen.

Mentioned in passing in all the little stories is a book written by the Man in The High Castle, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.  This is a book about another world, an alternate world in which the Axis Powers loose World War II and things are vastly different than they are in the world the people inhabiting the novel’s world understand.

The end of the book has one of our characters make her way to see The Man In The High Castle-who no longer lives in the High Castle, as he decided he didn’t like elevators.  They meet and talk about the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, then she leaves.

The book ends there, with a couple of interesting, but slightly anti-climaxic revelations about the nature of the I Ching and the nature of the Universe and what it means to be a character living in a work of fiction.  It seems a little cutesy now, but must have been a real attention grabber back in 1962 when it was written.

I like The Man in The High Castle well enough, but I think Do Andorids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick’s best novel length work.  All of his short stories are pretty amazing and well worth reading.

While at the Black Mailbox they see a car crash and they meet the grey alien Paul.  Now instead of a road picture, we have a road picture with an alien.  This is great stuff.  Seth Rogen, who was brilliant as B.O.B. in Monsters Vs Aliens, puts in a pretty good performance as the wisecracking little extraterrestrial.

Paul was not exactly a huge boxoffice hit.  It’s made about 15 million dollars and cost about 40 million.  Paul did hit number 1 at the UK box office and that helped it make 43 Million worldwide.  I guess there are still a lot of people in America that just don’t get British humor.  But I liked it.

The special effects were good enough, but I did find Paul’s gigantic eyes to be a bit annoying.  Most grey’s are depicted with solid black eyes like an insect, but Paul has eyes with irises and pupils and it’s just weird.  Paul smokes pot and does a lot of cursing.  One of the gags in the films is Paul convincing a fundamentalist Christian that Science is right and God is hooey and getting her to curse like a sailor and plan to do a lot of fornicating.  She was not really good at the whole cursing thing and she has to be taught, much like the Terminator in T2 how best to mix her profanities.

A part of the film that fell flat for me was the two half wit FBI agents who help to chase down Paul.  These two boobs are standard comic relief with no common sense or other purpose.  But it was still a bit shocking when they were are both violently killed.  I know Shaun of The Dead was filled with dead people and just about everyone in the film we cared about died, but that was a whole different feeling.  There was a sense of loss and tragedy about those deaths.  The two FBI agents were killed for no reason and one lame joke that was taken from Groundhog Day.

Paul was fun and silly and offensive and occasionally a bit shocking.  Needless to say it pales in comparison to Shaun of The Dead, but since that film has achieved cult classic status this is not surprising.  I think it had to do with the fact that there is so much sci fi out there to make fun of, but they had to really focus to make fun of one or two zombie movies.  Paul ended up trying to be Airplane, with a joke in every single line, and they fell flat of that goal.  In fact, it got to the point where I was listening to every line to try and figure out where it came from.  I’m sure the DVD will have a good list of all the source material.

One of The Wife’s complaints is a simple one-NBC Universal is run by idiots.  Or as my hero Rickey Gervais would say, NBC Universal is run by fucking idiots.  They have a new science fiction show, The Cape, on NBC and airing at the SAME TIME, they have a new speculative fiction show on Syfy, Being Human.  It’s bad enough that there are so few sci-fi shows worth watching anyway, it makes no sense to put OWNED BY THE COMPANY on at the SAME TIME!  Yeah, I know everyone has TiVo and the internet, but it is still a bit annoying.

Anyway.

Syfy’s Being Human has kept the spirit of the original while tweaking it just enough to give it an America feeling.  They changed a few of the names, but mostly kept the characters and the story intact.  As with any remake, it’s hard not to think of the original.  Of course, British Tv Shows only have about 12 episodes a season, so this Being Human should ver off into new territory if it is given a chance.  Curiously, Syfy is airing the BBC show Merlin without remaking.

Syfy’s Being Human looks good and I hope they can keep any new stories on the same high level as the orginal.

The only shows remaining are Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, and Eureka.  Tick tick tick That’s the sound of your life running out.

I never liked Caprica, it was too much a show about The Matrix and too little a show about Battlestar Gallactica.  But it was starting to get a little interesting, just when they axed it.

I didn’t like Stargate Universe either, for similar reasons.   The show had next to nothing in common with the long running SG-1 and the slightly more blood thirsty SG-Atlantis.  None of the characters were likable, and the whole idea of a million year old spaceship just seems a bit silly.  But again, it was starting to make a little more sense and I was coming to like one or two of the characters.

Word is that members of the cast found out about the cancellation of Stargate Universe on Twitter.  Nice.

Times are always hard for fans of Science Fiction on television.  These are shows that cost a lot of money to make, they have a lot of special effects and the good ones need real writers and not hacks who can bang out Lake Placid XXVI in their sleep.

Sadly Lake Placid 3 was one of the Syfy Network’s higher rated shows, along with the total nonsense of Destination Truth and Ghost Hunters.  So fans of Science Fiction have themselves to blame, we expect too much and bail on shows too quickly-only to fall in love with them once they are canceled.

I was more upset when Heroes was canceled, I really won’t miss SG-U that much.  But any Sci Fi is better than no Sci Fi.  I’ll even watch the horrid Sanctuary if it encourages the Syfy Channel to produce more science fiction and less ghost busters.

Back in the day, I collected a lot of rejection slips.  As always, those first few rejects were standard issue preprinted ones saying nice things like Not What We Are Looking For At This Time.  I soon moved up to Good Luck Placing This Elsewhere and finally hit the big time of rejects with hand written notes offering suggestions for improvements and telling me they were looking forward to my next story.

That, of course, is when I stopped writing and submitting short stories-or anything else.  It was that whole life got in the way kind of thing.  Or so I like to tell myself.  I really didn’t know that the handwritten notes were a good sign, to me they were just one more rejection.  I wrote a lot of stories back then, all sci-fi and horror.  Most of them were not too good, but one or two were solid bits of writing-that might have been published if I had just polished them a bit more.

So flash forward a couple of decades or so and here I am, flipping through the pages of Writer’s Market and once more having dreams of being published.  The good old days of making a living from writing short stories are pretty much gone, but it is still possible to make a bit of money.  Writing is a hard way to make a living, unless you happen to be one of those rare few with a Bestseller.  Or maybe a Screenwriter-even optioning a script and never having it made into a film can be a pretty good payday.

The listings are fun to read and the often very, very serious business of entertaining and informing people is just daunting as it ever was.  Just because I can bang out a few hundred words without breaking too much of a sweat doesn’t mean I can crank out publishable content that someone will want to buy.  I’d like to think that I can.

The Writer’s Market has thousands of listings for every kind of writing and it also has several articles in the front that tell you such things as how to format a manuscript and how to write a query letter that might actually get a positive response.  It tells you things like a screenplay sells for $50,000 to $100,000 and that book reviews pay $25 to $900.

Hmm, movie novelisation pays $3,000 to $15,000-how hard can that be?