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Sorry for the long break — long story that I don’t need to go into here. But I’m back now and hope to post much more regularly!

This Christmas I asked for and received the Starman DVD set. For those of you who do not know of which I speak, Starman was a Japanese superhero created in the late 1950s and based on Superman. In Japan, he was known as Supergiant and was the star of several 50-minute serials. In the early 1960s, Walter Manly Enterprises acquired the U.S. right and cut them together into six 75-minute films, dubbed in English for American television consumption.

These were the films I grew up on. I loved Starman — I think I had a pre-teen crush on him. I used to play Starman at recess and pretend that I was a part of the films I watched on the weekend.
Read more »

Each Fall I eagerly await the new slate of TV shows. Which ones will I enjoy and keep up with? Which ones will I enjoy and they’ll get cut anyway? Which ones will I pass on in disgust, only to discover they are a big hit?

With each passing year, I’ve noticed an increasing number of science fiction and other genre-themed TV shows. But I’ve also noticed another trend — the “mundaning” of science fiction. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Lost and Heros, but I also noticed that they are fairly stripped of their SF trimmings. They are science fiction for the mundane.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t rightly know. To some degree it is a good thing, because it introduces SF to a wider audience, some of whom may then go on to explore the real thing.

But then the really good quality SFTV is getting to fewer and farther between. For example, I am a big fan of Babylon 5, and in my opinion it is one of the best SF TV shows ever. It made #5 in Boston.com’s Top 50 Science Fiction TV Shows of All Time. But that show had a struggle because it wasn’t as accessible to the average Joe as a show such as Journey Man has.

Now that I’ve written this all down, I’m not really sure where I’m going with it. But I have this feeling in my gut that as reality catches up to SF, SF needs to keep pushing forward to maintain its edge — the edge that made me fall in love with it when I was 5 years old and has held me for the decades since.

Do any of you have those feelings? I know some people share my angst, for articles such as Mike Treder’s article, “Post-Millennial Malaise in SF?“, are still being written.

Guest Writer: Groshan Fabiola

In 1977, Star Wars reintroduced the world to the serialized space opera with groundbreaking results both creatively and financially. In the wake of this paradigm shift came a gaggle of embarrassing me-too projects both for film and television. Then there was Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica was the brain-child of producer/writer/director Glen Larson. It was both a pastiche of the Star Wars formula, and a bizarre melding of wagon train and Egyptian mythology. The series chronicled the adventures of a “Rag Tag Fleet” running from the Cylons, a mechanized horde of robots lead by a human traitor; their destination is a mythical world called “Earth”. Battlestar Galactica was a success both theatrically and on the television. Despite it’s campy acting and plot lines there was an endearing element in the quest of these characters. Battlestar Galactica never made any apologies for borrowing the character archetypes made so popular in Star Wars. Apollo is a dark haired Luke Skywalker, Sheba the strong female cut from the Princess Leia strand, and Starbuck as the charismatic scoundrel that Han Solo would surely approve of. Despite these obvious pastiches, Battlestar Galactica got away with it. Read more »

The following essay was a paper I wrote for a class I took called “Science Fiction and American Culture.” It discusses issues brought up in Isaac Asimov’s novella Bicentennial Man, which can be found in Robot Visions. You should be able to find a copy of it at your local library, or you can purchase one from Amazon.com.

This essay was written several years before the movie version starring Robin Williams produced.

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sentience n.	1. The quality or condition of being sentient: CONSCIOUSNESS. 2. Emotion as opposed to perception or thought.
consciousness n.	1. The state of being conscious. 2. The totality of attitudes, opinions, and sensitivities held or thought to be held by an individual or group…. 4. a. A critical awareness of one’s own situation and identity. b. Awareness: concern.
Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary

Can humankind create life? Can we, through our technology, our intelligence, and the raw materials we have available create an artificial life that is capable of thinking, coping with its environment and feeling? This has been an underlying theme in many works of science fiction. It is the underlying question in most of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories and continues to be asked to today in stories and television.

“The Bicentennial Man” by Asimov reminded me quite a bit of several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation ( STTNG). Data, the android, can be thought of as an extension of the ideas Asimov worked with in his stories and novels of robots. His uniqueness sets him apart, but at the same time he can be remarkably “human.”

The arguments that say a machine — a computer — no matter how complex can never be considered alive (that I’ve noticed) are:

1. A machine cannot think, it can only simulate thought.
2. Humans can experience emotions, machines cannot.
3. If the Three Laws of Robotics are taken into consideration, then a robot can never have free will. A human can.

Using examples from the readings for this week, from episodes of STTNG, and bits and pieces of an argument I have been developing for years, I plan to show that a robot can be capable of sentience — in all its meanings. Since there are no robots of this caliber in existence yet, I will not be able to prove my point, but I hope to at least cast doubt on the idea that it is an impossibility.

Argument 1. A machine cannot think, it can only simulate thought.

What is thought anyway? Is it a function of the brain or the mind? Is there a difference?

Some scientists believe that the sum of the brain cells in your head equals the sum of your mind, that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. To them, everything you feel, everything you think, everything you remember can be explained by the electrical impulses and chemical markers of your brain. They believe that, in theory, it is possible to extract everything that you experience as your mind from the gray matter in your head.

Other scientists do not believe this. They believe that when your brain cells work together they create something that is bigger than the sum each cell added together. They believe that it is impossible to extract from the physical stuff in your brain everything that you experience as your mind. If you separate the brain cells, you loose the ability to understand the mind.

Because these debates still goes on today, with evidence accumulating on both sides, how can we say what thought is? If we can’t understand our own thought, how can we say that a machine is not thinking? If the first group of scientists are correct, then we are nothing more than carbon based computers. The only difference between us and a thinking machine is the materials we use to create the thoughts. Both a computer brain and a human brain use electricity.

Until we fully understand the basis of human thought, argument one is moot. It raises a philosophical discussion that can only be backed by faith, belief and opinion. It cannot, at the present time be used as an argument against artificial intelligence.

Argument 2. Humans can experience emotions, machines cannot.

The key idea, which runs through most episodes of STTNG that concern Data, which is thought to set him apart from humanity is his lack of emotions. I disagree. I am absolutely convinced that he has emotions. They may not be passionate emotions that clog his thinking or cause him to behave irrationally, but they are there.

In “The Bicentennial Man,” Andrew describes how he experiences something akin to emotion. “Andrew was fond of them…. At least, the effect they had upon his actions were those which in a human being would have been called the result of fondness, for he did not any other word for it.”

A little later he goes on:

“I enjoy doing them, Sir.”

“Enjoy?”

“It makes the circuits of my brain somehow flow more easily. I have heard you use the word ‘enjoy’ and the way you use it fits the way I feel. I enjoy doing them, sir.”

Data says the same thing in the episode where the Enterprise visits Tasha Yar’s home planet and meets her sister Ishara. Data says that he has a memory loop, that he keeps thinking about Ishara and misses her.

What are these experiences if they are not emotions? When we are enjoying something, can we not say that what we are experiencing is an easier flow of our thoughts? When we miss someone, do we not experience a memory loop? Is there really that much difference between a “simulated thought” and a real one?

When an actor acts are they experiencing a “simulated emotion”? If so what makes it simulated? I would say it is simulated because the actor knows that it is not his emotion but that ofthe character he is portraying. So I ask this. If a robot experiences a “simulated emotion,” why is it simulated and not real? The emotion is its. It is not pretending to be someone else. Is it only simulated because someone programmed the possibility of its existence into the computer? Then I ask, how do we know that we are not “programmed” in some way — by our genetics, evolution or God?

Argument 3. If the Three Laws of Robotics are taken into consideration, then a robot can never have free will. A human can.

This argument, in effect says that because Asimov’s robots are programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics, they have no free will. This implies that humans do. But do they?

Psychology often uses the premise that adult behaviorcan be explained by — and is often dictated by — events that happen in childhood. In other words, if X happens when someone is 3 years old, then Y is mostly to be manifested in adulthood. The person in question does not even need to consciously remember X in order for Y to happen. And even when the person is aware of the root of their behavior, it does not mean that they are able to change it easily. Is this not like a program? Does this not limit a person’s free will?

Then there are rules imposed by society. Some are never even explicitly stated. People just “know” that Z is wrong — they don’t know why necessarily. Is this not like a robot “knowing” not to harm a human and to follow a human’s orders?

What is the difference? A human programs a robot and humans weren’t programmed? How do we know this? We have no proof that we are not programmed. For all we know, genetics and evolution have programmed each an every one of us quite precisely — just as precisely as the roboticists programmed Andrew.

George argues with his father “When you talk to him [Andrew] you’ll find he reacts to the various abstractions as you and I do, and what else counts? If someone else’s reactions are like your own, what more can you ask for?” What, indeed. Artificial Intelligence researchers ask this same question of their critics. I ask this same question. If a computer or a robot can show me that it is self aware, then I’m willing to accept it as “alive.”

This essay was written in response to a reading assignment for my “Science Fiction and American Culture” class. We read Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith.

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For those of you who think a writer is someone who gets his name on books, let me assure you that is an “author.” A “writer” is a hapless devil who cannot keep himself from putting every vagrant thought he has ever had down on paper. I am a writer. I write. That’s what I do. I do a lot of it.

– Harlan Elison,
Afterward for “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”,
Dangerous Visions

In the book Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon-Smith looks at, describes and tries to explain a segment of Star Trek fans. This segment is predominately female and writes about the characters from the series in ways that some think are not “in character” for those characters.

Writing (and creating in general) is the focal point of the community. Through writing about Star Trek, its characters, and its “universe,” members of the community can share a common base of knowledge, share their feelings about life and discover who they are. This is what I found most interesting about Bacon-Smith’s book — the way that writing served as a tool for self-discovery.

In the spirit of FIAWOL — fandom is a way of life — one can say that writing is also a way of life. Journal writing has often been recommended as a way of helping people sort through difficult times, understand their dreams, and, for writers, a way to practice and to develop ideas. I get the impression that fan fiction is something like an elaborate form of public journal writing.

In the quote that opened this reaction paper, Harlan Elison makes the distinction between an author and a writer. The fans discussed in Enterprising Women are writers, some may go on to be authors as well, but they are writers. In a way, I speak from experience.

I am a writer. I have been writing since I learned how — and I’ve kept at least 95% of all that I’ve written. Writing is such an integral part of my life, that I’ve compartmentalized my journal. I have my daily journal, my writer’s journal and on occasion I have my dream journal. I not only collect everything I’ve written, but all the in between drafts so that I can go back and look at the development of the stories I’ve written.

At the beginning of the semester, I referred to myself as a “closet Trekkie.” Reading Enterprising Women, and the essays by Constance Penley and Henry Jenkins III, helped me discover what I really meant by that.

Jenkins, in his essay “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten,” says “one becomes a ‘fan’ not by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a ‘community’ of other fans who share common interests.”

After reading Enterprising Women, I figured that I wasn’t a fan — which made me feel good. I’m very uncomfortable with the term fan being applied to me.¹ I’m not fanatical. I have a life beyond any one of my many interests and hobbies. How could I be a fan? No, not me.

But I fit Jenkins definition. Up until 1990, my fan activities were limited to watching Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation ( TNG) on TV, and discussing the episodes with the random friend I could wheedle into the conversation or my mother. But in 1990, things changed. Through the belly dance community I had become a part of I met fellow Trekkies², and we decided to go to our first convention.

My first convention (held in San Jose, CA) was not what Bacon-Smith, Penley and Jenkins said other fans thought it was. I thought it was weird. I didn’t feel like I fit in — not really — and I decided never to go to one again. But a year later, I did. Gates McFadden, who plays my favorite female character on TNG, Dr. Crusher, was coming to my hometown. This experience was much better, and with each convention I go to they continue to be more fun (I’ve gone to two more since then).

But that isn’t what makes me a fan. Much to my chagrin, my friends (from the first convention) and I attempted to write about Star Trek. We came home from the convention and decided to write our own episodes and share them the next week. What’s worse is that they were to be ” Star Trek Erotica.” I never finished mine — I wrote a dozen pages and never even got to the erotica part. I guess, within the larger community, our work would have been considered lay-Data, lay-Worf and lay-Riker stories.

It was weird reading Enterprising Women, knowing in my mind that these people were separate and different from me, only to discover that they were, in many ways, just like me.

What I also found interesting was that all three of the authors we read for this week started out as a fan before becoming the ethnographer. I think it especially showed in Bacon-Smith’s work. She we would often neglect to define terms (often the more obscure), but then she’d go into great detail about others (often the more well-known).

I also am quite curious what Starsky and Hutch has to do with Star Trek. I can understand Blake’s 7 and even, with a small stretch of the imagination, Beauty and the Beast, but Starsky and Hutch? Where did that come from? Bacon Smith mentions the fiction coming from this fandom, but never explains why she’s talking about it. I think she might have gotten too close to the community to be able to come all the way back out and see it objectively. But this is another discussion, so I’ll leave it to my book critique.

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1. This may, in part, be due to the press that “Trekkies” get, as mentioned in Jenkins’ essay. (Back to essay)
2. Unlike those referred to in the literature, I prefer “Trekkie” over “Trekker.” “Trekker” makes me think of big, ugly, uncouth truck-drivers. “Trekkie,” for me, brings up the image of fantasy, of being in your head, not in your body, and that’s the kind of fan I am. In fact, I often refer to myself as a “Trekite” — a “Trekkie” who is not like the others, a bit of a loner. (Back to essay)

This essay was written in response to a reading assignment for my “Science Fiction and American Culture” class. We read Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith. It also makes reference to Brian Stableford’s book, The Sociology of Science Fiction.

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In the book Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon-Smith looks at, describes and tries to explain a segment of Star Trek fans. This segment is predominantly female and writes about characters from the series in ways that some think are not “in character” for those characters.Writing (and creating in general) is focal point of the community. Through writing about Star Trek, its characters, and its “universe,” members of the community can share a common base of knowledge, share their feelings about life and discover who they are. This is what I found most interesting in Bacon-Smith’s book — the way that writing served as a tool for self-discovery.Unlike Stableford, who did his research by reading the fiction and the letters that the readers wrote (and were published), Bacon-Smith “infiltrated” the community. She became an active member of the community she was studying.Interestingly, she was a fan of Star Trek before becoming an ethnographer of its fandom. I think this is especially showed in some areas of the book. She would often neglect to define terms (often the more obscure), but then she’d go into great detail about others (often the more well-known or obvious).I also am quite curious what Starsky and Hutch has to do with Star Trek. I can understand Blake’s 7 and even, with a small stretch of the imagination, Beauty and the Beast, but Starsky and Hutch? Where did that come from? Bacon-Smith mentions the fiction coming from this fandom, but never explains why she’s talking about it. I think she might have gotten too close to the community to be able to come all the way back out and see it objectively.

This method of ethnography — becoming a part of the community that you are studying — has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include a deeper understanding or at least exposure to, the culture you are studying. Stableford wasn’t able to acquire information that was not written down and published. There are many things that people will not write down and definitely not publish. Through becoming a part of the community and by extensive interviews with members, Bacon-Smith was able to get the kind of information that Stableford lacked.

However, there is also the danger that when you are inside the forest all you can see are the trees and not the whole forest. Bacon-Smith may have gotten lost in the particulars. Most Enterprising Women was spent analyzing the literature that these fans wrote rather than commenting on their culture.

Also, because she got so close, the ethnography almost became an autobiography. The problem with autobiographies is that they can never be considered objective. Bacon-Smith’s work is a subjective account of what she experienced. This does not reduce the value of the work, however. As with all studies of human behavior, one needs to look at the situation from many different viewpoints. Bacon-Smith’s study, in conjunction with a study conducted from a different vantage point, would be very useful in understanding this community.

I have some problems with her generalizing about the psychology of women. How do we know that women act this way because it is in their nature or just because that is how they were raised? We don’t. The debate over nature versus nurture still rages today.

Bacon-Smith states that

fanwriters, like soap opera fans, want to see characters change and evolve, have families, and rise to the challenge of internal and external crises in a nonlinear, dense tapestry of experience. Whether because of innate qualities or socialization, women perceive their lives in this way, and they like to see that structure reproduced in their literature.

(italics added, p. 64).

My immediate reaction was, “And men don’t?” Maybe because I’m female as well, I find it hard to believe that men don’t perceive their lives in a nonlinear way, that men don’t perceive that events are going on in other people’s lives at the same time that other events are going on in their own.

In Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self, Turkle writes about how computers, “long a symbol of depersonalization, … long a symbol of the power of the ‘big’ — big corporations, big institutions, big money — began to acquire an image as instruments for decentralization, community, and personal autonomy.” The community Turkle is discussing is predominantly male, however they are behaving in what I gather, from reading Enterprising Women, is a distinctly feminine manner.

I don’t think that the women Bacon-Smith was studying were behaving the way they were because they were women. I think they were behaving that way because of the circumstances that made up their lives. Albeit, most of these circumstances were created by a masculine culture dictating feminine behavior, but I don’t think she can generalize to the extent that she did. I think there are plenty of men out there behaving in similar ways, but with a different genre.

At some point in the book, Bacon-Smith mentions what these women have in common. They are all women, they were loners, perhaps women with what has been considered masculine drives in their youth. They were independent and different. They didn’t fit in. First, I think this is common to science fiction fans in general — male or female. Second, I think that the particular cases she mentions does adequately explain why these women may behaving the way they are. However, she doesn’t go much into it. She leaves much of her explanation of why these women are manifesting their particular behaviors to the reader’s intuition. Too much of the book is spent in literary review and critique. The book seemed more like a work of literary criticism than a work of ethnography.

Within that criticism, I noticed favoritism in the four genres she and critiqued: Mary-Sue stories, Relationship and Lay (whomever) stories, Homoerotic or Slash stories and Hurt/Comfort stories. She spent approximately nine pages dealing with the Mary-Sue genre, 12 dealing with Relationship and Lay (whomever) stories, 22 on Hurt/Comfort and 26 on homoerotic fiction. Interestingly enough, after reading the book, I would have put this in a different order. Although she spent 22 pages discussing Hurt/Comfort, she didn’t have much to say about it. But, even though she spent nine pages discussing Mary-Sue stories, she had a lot to say about them.

I got the impression that she liked Mary-Sue stories and was intrigued by the homoerotic fiction. She professed to finding Hurt/Comfort stories “difficult” to deal with because of her “strong aversion to violence.” But then she spends 22 pages discussing this genre and admits to reading one of the stories several times. First of all, if it was that bad maybe she shouldn’t have read it, at least not several times. And secondly, I’m sure that not all Hurt/Comfort stories are all that violent or difficult to read.

For instance, in the movie The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker has hand chopped off and is comforted by his friends Han Solo and Princess Leah. This was a minor part of the film, but it is a Hurt/Comfort story. Given the descriptions that Bacon-Smith gives of the majority of the Hurt/Comfort stories, I just didn’t understand her aversion.

Many researchers (as discussed by Bacon-Smith, Jenkins and Penley) find this particular community of Star Trek fans radical or deviant. I don’t think this is the case. From reading Enterprising Women, I get the impression that this is just a group of women who get together and help each other survive life in today’s society in a way that they find mutually fulfilling. I think this particular version of Star Trek fandom is just one example of a multitude of ways of dealing with our so our society. There are certainly a lot of other choices to pick from if one wanted to study deviant behavior. I think these women are basically harmless. Let them have their fun. They’re really not hurting anyone — at least not now anyway.