So we’re watching Alien Planet<\/em>* on the Discovery Channel, and I’m asking myself: how do you take such an intrinsically interesting subject and make it boring?<\/p>\n Here are the problems, dramaturgically speaking:<\/p>\n 1. No protags. In Alien Planet<\/em>, what passes for protags are two robotic probes, ‘Ike’ Newton and ‘Leo’ (Galileo). They’re cute bots, but they’re not human. Not even close.<\/p>\n 2. No plot. Funny thing, a lot of SF novels suffer from that same problem: as if exploration alone were enough to drive the story forward. I had that problem with Ringworld<\/em>, for example.<\/p>\n 3. Few new ideas. Many of these critters look alike: roughly mammalian, with tiny heads (or no heads), and no discernible eyes. They have a few birds, too, but these look like flying versions of the mammalian critters.<\/p>\n Their heart is in the right place. They’re trying to teach terrestrial biology in a new and interesting way, and they’re also attempting to depict such an expedition in a scientifically reasonable manner. In the real world, you would<\/em> explore such worlds robotically; in the real world, you wouldn’t<\/em> have much more of a plot than ‘let’s go out there and see what we find.’ But that doesn’t necessarily make for good entertainment.<\/p>\n What’s your favorite first contact story? I’m not sure which one I would choose, but here’s an old, but not-half-bad list<\/a> I found on the web. Lots of novels I haven’t read here.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Jake’s Medford pediatrician called me late yesterday to give me the LP results: no meningitis. We’re back to square one, a presumptive diagnosis of ‘chronic tension-type headache’, with little left to do but try him out on Elavil and — get this — biofeedback.<\/p>\n Karen and Jake came back this afternoon. Jake has a sore throat, upset stomach, and headache, making me wonder whether he caught a virus at the hospital. I pushed the fluids and he rallied enough to eat some dinner.<\/p>\n The apple pie turned out okay. Store-bought puff pastry is about as good as it sounds (not). My bottom crust, a galette from Baking with Julia<\/em>, was far better than my puff pastry top crust. Live and learn. I may be a foodie, but I’m not nuts enough (yet) to make my own puff pastry.<\/p>\n D.<\/p>\n *If you missed this program, here’s the idea. A manned mission to an Earth-like planet, Darwin IV, encounters one new organism after another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So we’re watching Alien Planet* on the Discovery Channel, and I’m asking myself: how do you take such an intrinsically interesting subject and make it boring? Here are the problems, dramaturgically speaking: 1. No protags. In Alien Planet, what passes for protags are two robotic probes, ‘Ike’ Newton and ‘Leo’ (Galileo). They’re cute bots, but… Continue Reading What’s your<\/i> favorite first contact story?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mishpucha-mi-familia","category-writers-life","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}