I read this post over at SF Signal today and it really piqued my interest. Aside from all the potential time paradoxes that inevitably crop up as soon as we think about time travel, it’s a fascinating concept. And of course, only going forward in time doesn’t trigger anything like the potential paradoxes of going backwards or back and forth in time. And these scientists seem to think that the ability to go forward in time is inevitable and dependent only on us managing to control sufficient energy.

In the SF Signal article Scott says:

…I recently saw an episode of National Geographic Channel’s Naked Science where they discuss with leading scientists the fact that most of them feel time travel is not only possible, but inevitable.

Scott also poses the question if/when it is possible to travel forward in time, would you do it? Follow the link above to read the article.

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I know I was pretty slack about this last time. Harper Collins, way back in the mists of earlier this year (or was it last year? I can’t be bothered to check) released Gaiman’s novel American Gods for free online for a limited time. I happened to mention it here when it had about a week to go. Better than nothing, but no help to the slow readers among you.

Well, this time I’m on the case like a rash on a mangy dog. Gaiman has just announced on his Live Journal that his novel Neverwhere is now available to read for free. This time you can read it online like before or download it. It’s a time bomb download and will only last thirty days before it self-destructs, but, as Gaiman says, free is free. In fact, what he said was:

For those people who grumbled about reading American Gods online, here’s Neverwhere. You can read it online, and it’s also downloadable. That’s the good news.

The bad news is you don’t get to keep it forever. It’s yours for thirty days from download, and then the pdf file returns to its electrons. But if you’ve ever wondered about Neverwhere or wanted to read it for free, now is your chance. And free is free…

You can get the free book here. Bear in mind that when I tried it, the Read Online link worked, but the Download link needs fixing. Apparently they’re on the case. According to Gaiman’s people:

If, when you try to download it, it gives you an “ebx.edt” file then you may either (A) save the file as “neverwear.txt”, open it, find the “bookfileurl” line, paste that URL into your browser, and save that file as “Neverwear.pdf” OR (B) wait for HarperCollins to fix the problem.

I must say, I found the typo in that above quote quite amusing. Gaiman, not happy with being the most popular author on the planet, has started his own clothing line, perhaps? Enjoy.

EDIT - Check the comments for a very kind correction from Mr Gaiman’s Web Goblin (and also to see that I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am.) I’ve corrected the link above too, so that should work for everyone now.

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There are spoilers later in this post but I’ll warn you before they appear, so read on in safety for now.

I actually went to see this movie on Sunday. Today I went to see it again. It’s not often that I’ll do that. In fact, this is the first time in years that I’ve done it, so I guess that’s some indication of how good this film is.

I should qualify this from the outset with the fact, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, that I’m an absolute fan of Batman. I’ve been reading the comics since I was a kid and I still read them. I have a little Batman statue at home. Yes, I’m that much of a fan (read: geek.) So, by that standard, I’m very hard to please when it comes to Batman movies. Frankly, I hate them. Burton’s original Batman films looked good but the stories were awful, Keaton is not a good Batman by any stretch of the imagination and they killed the Joker. Awful. And the movies just got worse after that.

So when Nolan cast Christian Bale in Batman Begins I was intrigued. Reservedly I went along and I was thoroughly impressed. I had (and still have) a bit of an issue about how he made Henri Ducard and Ra’s Al Ghul the same person, but I can live with that. Otherwise it was an excellent film.

The Dark Knight is better. When it was obvious at the end of Batman Begins that Nolan was taking on the greatest Batman villain ever, in fact, the greatest villain ever, I was excited and concerned. The Joker is my second favourite fictional character, after Batman himself. The two are opposite sides of a coin, but more on that later.

I was also concerned when I first heard that Heath Ledger had been cast in the role. But I had very high hopes for the film and Heath was getting some extremely high praise early on. Believe me, he deserved it. Bale is excellent as Batman, even if he still can’t quite get The Voice. Aaron Eckhardt plays a great Harvey Dent, Gary Oldman is always outstanding and is once again with Jim Gordon in this film. But Heath Ledger steals the show. His performance is flawless. Let’s take a look at why.

This film deals with three primary issues, rather than the usual two issues of good and bad. Each is personified by the three leads. There’s good, moral righteousness, played by Batman, with his hard and fast rule of ‘no killing’. He’s not shining white good, he has to let crime happen to get to the roots of it, but that makes him a realistic good and shows the strength all good people strive for. Then, in place of bad, there’s chance and chaos. This is so much more realistic than a simple morality tale. Bad is easy. Bad is selfish people helping themselves and hurting other people along the way. They’re easily dealt with too. You just trap them with their own vice, be it money, power, whatever. But there are far scarier things in the world than bad people.

There’s chance, which we can do nothing about. In this case that chance is personified by Two Face, making life and death decisions with the flip of a coin. And there’s chaos, again beyond our control, which is where The Joker comes in. He’s not after money or power or anything else. As Alfred puts it during the film, “There are some people that just want to watch the world burn.”

This is why The Joker is such a great villain. This is why he’s so scary. This is also what every portrayal of The Joker before this one has missed. Nolan got it, directing the film. Christopher and Jonathan Nolan and David S Goyer got it with the script and story. And Heath Ledger got it. The Joker even makes a point of telling Harvey Dent during the film, “I’m an agent of chaos.” He really is.

There are going to be SPOILERS now, so stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie. Go and watch it and then come back.

The Dark Knight deals with two primary stories. One is a great crime caper. It’s as good a crime movie as Heat. Sure, it’s Heat on acid, set in a nightmare, but the comparison is still valid. There’s the police versus the Mob and the bigger than life characters that are the primary drivers of that situation. It deals with corruption, trust, heroism, sacrifice. All the good stuff you expect from a crime thriller. And it does a really good job of it.

But it’s also a Batman movie. Nolan has been quite open about the fact that he took a lot of inspiration for the film from an Alan Moore graphic novel called The Killing Joke. And so he should. No Joker story would be right without that book as its inspiration. It’s the best Batman story ever written, in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the best stories ever written. You really should read it if you haven’t already. If you have, read it again. It’s about the fact that Batman and The Joker need each other. It’s about how one created the other and sustains the other. It’s about how The Joker is trying to prove that Batman is really not so different from The Joker himself. In a line from the book The Joker, talking to Batman, says, “When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot. I admit it. Why can’t you?”

In the movie, The Joker says, “You complete me!” and “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.” The Joker and Batman are a duality, with Batman representing good and The Joker, rather than representing bad, represents something that scares us even more. Chaos. The unpredictable. The car that jumps the lights as you cross, the shadow on the MRI scan, the fish bone turning sideways in your throat. There’s nothing you can do about it, no way to plan, no way to predict it and catch it out. And with a hero and defender as powerful as Batman, it takes a force of chaos as powerful as The Joker to really make him viable.

In the movie, Harvey Dent is close to becoming the open, maskless force of good that the city needs. But The Joker sees in the Batman a reflection of himself and can’t let Dent take the mantle of the bat. He tears Harvey Dent down, murders his love and disfigures him. As The Joker says to Batman, “I tore him down to our level.” By doing that he ensures that Batman will have to stay. Batman staying means The Joker always has a purpose, a justification. He knows the Batman will never kill him, because the Batman believes in his own code, his rules. The Joker will never kill the Batman because he’s “just too much fun.” Should the Batman ever crack and kill The Joker, which is the only way to really stop him, then The Joker wins anyway, as Batman has forsaken his rule and descended to the bottom.

These are all themes that the movie deals with excellently, while providing an incredible visual feast (with real explosions and the flipping of eighteen wheelers, no less), and it wraps it up in a great crime caper.

So, is it the perfect film? No, not quite. The primary problem is that it’s a bit too long. The first time I saw it I thought it was much too long. The second time I didn’t mind so much. It’s really refreshing that a Hollywood movie attempted, and largely pulled off, a complex, intellectual story. It doesn’t insult your intelligence, at least not until the last twenty minutes or so.

The other problem, and it’s tied into the first, is the killing off of Harvey Two-Face at the end. It takes something away from The Joker’s finale and it forces the writers to hammer home their points too much. After all the complexity, they club you with their point at the end to make sure you got it and that’s a shame. They needed Batman to become the vigilante again. They needed him to be the hero that Gotham needs, dark and frightening, and take the rap for all the shit going down. They did that by letting Batman take the heat for all the things that Two-Face did after The Joker cracked Harvey Dent. They should have let it go at that.

We didn’t need to have Two-Face’s story wrapped up at the end. They should have let him go on and Batman could still have taken the rap for the things he did. They didn’t need that scene at the end with Two-Face threatening Gordon’s family. They really didn’t need Gordon spelling it all out for us again. It would have been more intense to have left it with Two-Face being out there somewhere and Batman, a vigilante again, trying to find him and bring him in before he ruins Harvey Dent’s reputation. It would also have made a nice thread to pick up in the next movie if they make one.

However, aside from that rather small quibble in the grand scheme of things, this really is a great movie. Definitely the film of the year so far and Heath Ledger’s Joker should be a benchmark for all future villains to try to live up to. And they should never be ashamed if they can’t.

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I know, it sounds truly ridiculous. And it is. But in a good way.

I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon. Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel were top-notch television and Firefly was a notch above them, and a series that should never have been cancelled. It got us Serenity, but that’s not enough. Anyway, suffice to say that Whedon is something of a genius when it comes to writing sci-fi and fantasy based scripts. He always has this comedic edge to his writing, yet manages to deliver horror and shock along the way.

During the writer’s strike in the US last year he decided to use his time to engage in a purely personal project and put together a short film using actors he had worked with before and even getting his brothers in on the crew. The film he made is Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

For a few short hours the film was streamed for free from the website in three fifteen minute acts. It’s now available to download from iTunes for the very modest price of US$4. There is also going to be a DVD released, which will supposedly contain all kinds of delicious extras.

The story is about Dr Horrible, played by “Doogie Houser” Neil Patrick Harris (will he ever get past that casting?), and his efforts to take over the world and win the heart of Penny, played by Felicia Day. He is, however, rather too embarrassed to talk to Penny and is also concentrating on getting into the Evil League of Evil, headed by the bad horse, Bad Horse. So along comes Captain Hammer, Nathan Fillion, to save the day and steal the girl. Oh yeah, they totally did it.

It’s a truly bizarre short film, not least because it’s a musical. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will recall the episode from Season 6 called Once More, With Feeling, where a mysterious force made all the characters sing their dialogue. There is spoken dialogue as well as songs in Dr Horrible, but the Buffy episode was never far from my mind. Whedon is so good at putting together songs that are lyrically brilliant and utterly stupid at the same time. As I said before, he’s a genius.

Anyway, click on the banner above to have a look. You’ve missed the free stream now, but it’s certainly worth US$4 of your hard-earned to see this thing. And it’s a great experiment by Whedon and friends to use the power of the internet to pay his crew and have a successful film without producers and big company involvement. As an independent publisher I can certainly get with that program. There’s also a comic book of Captain Hammer that you can check out, written by Zack Whedon.

Hat-tip to Michael for putting me on to this.

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This isn’t really something that fits in with the general theme of my blog here, except for an extremely tenuous link between me as a science fiction and fantasy writer and the current exploration of space. So what the hell? That’s good enough for me.

This is by far the coolest picture I’ve seen in a long time:

For a bigger version, check out the NASA site here.

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This is a bit of a stretch for inclusion here at The Word but I can’t help it. It’s a clever use of words, so I’m calling it valid. If anyone knows where this originated, please let me know - I got it in an email from a friend and it really made me laugh. It’s one of those nerdy, clever things that’s surprisingly entertaining.

Graphical Representations of Popular Songs

To be fair, not all of these songs are that popular. They just lend themselves well to the concept. Like this one for example:

Whatever happened to Right Said Fred anyway?

I don’t really care where Rick Astley went. I’m just glad he’s gone.

Love is a feature of the large majority of songs, naturally. Here are two very important concepts:

And talking of love, here’s something a little more controversial:

I can’t explain why exactly, but for some reason these last two are by far my favourites:

So there you go. Sorry about that, I just felt the need to share.

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A couple of items have surfaced recently that make for interesting reading. Firstly, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have announced the Nebula Award winners for 2007.

The winners are a diverse bunch.

Winning novel is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

I read this book on holiday last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s not often that something totally different comes along but this book was unlike anything I’d read before. A surprise winner for me, but utterly deserving. The other nominees in the category were:

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt
The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell

Other Nebula winners for 2007 were:

NOVELLA: “Fountain of Age” by Nancy Kress
NOVELETTE: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang
SHORT STORY: “Always” by Karen Joy Fowler
SCRIPT: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth was one of my favourite films of 2007 and I’m really glad to see it score a Nebula.

The Andre Norton Award (for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy) went to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

One of my all time favourite authors, Michael Moorcock, was named recipient of The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. Read the full article about that award here.

On the subject of great books (excuse the tenuous segue), Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper has released a list of the fifty best cult books of all time. Interestingly, they can’t even define what a cult book is, and freely admit as much, but simply claim that “you know [one] when you see one”.

See just how cultish your reading habits are by checking out their list. It is a pretty interesting collection. See the online article here.

And finally for now, firstshowing.net have revealed a poster for the new Batman movie that was released as part of the viral marketing campaign. Seriously, how awesome is this:

Now I’ll readily admit to being a completely hopeless Batman tragic - he’s my favourite hero in any form of fiction. Harder than Riddick, cooler than Han Solo, more tortured than Rick Deckard, darker than Lobo. You have to put the hours in to truly understand the Dark Knight. For this reason, I have been appalled year after year by the utter tripe that gets vomited out purporting to be a Batman movie. Even Tim Burton, master of the dark and macabre, cast Michael Keaton as the Bat and killed the Joker on his first outing. What should have been cinemas highest moment was a steaming turd of epic proportions. Then along came Chris Nolan with Batman Begins. It had some flaws and took some liberties with the story, but was, on the whole, awesome. Now he’s made another one and by the look of this poster, he’s going to pull out a masterpiece again. Here’s hoping.

I’ll stop gushing now.

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I’ve had another short story accepted for publication. It’s not a paying market this time, but a new journal showcasing emerging Australian writers called Harbinger Journal. They produce a print ready pdf download of each issue and are trying to develop their profile high enough to produce a hard copy anthology each year of the best from each issue.

There is a theme set for each issue and my story, Runaway, will appear in Issue 03, for which the theme was Secrecy. Runaway is a contemporary non-genre piece, which is a bit beyond my normal hunting ground, but it’s always good to exercise those creative muscles. I’m most at home writing Speculative Fiction, so writing something non-genre was an interesting challenge for me. I actually wrote this story some time ago and didn’t really consider getting it published. Then I stumbled across Harbinger Journal with their Secrecy theme and this particular story fits perfectly. So there you go, another publication to add to my CV. Which I will get around to writing up and posting here on my website sometime soon, I promise.

You can learn a bit more about the Harbinger Journal project by clicking here. If you’re a writer, have a go at submitting something and see how you go. Non-paying or paying markets, anywhere that accepts your work through an independent editing process is a publishing credit. If you enjoy quality short fiction, keep an eye on the site and buy a download when it’s produced. I’ll drop another note here to let you all know when the issue is released.

A lot of people consider it simple vandalism, but, as far as I’m concerned, there’s definitely a place for quality graffiti. And such a thing does exist. Dickheads that go around with a big texta or spray can and just tag anything in sight are vandals; I don’t think anyone would argue with that. But if you’re a good artist and you can take the time to share a good image, then more power to you.

Things like this make the world a better place, for example.

Graffiti is also the domain of insightful social commentary. Where would we be today without some of the toilet wall wisdom that has been passed down through the generations? I’m sure everyone has learned something from a toilet wall during their lifetime, even if it’s only that Megan likes it rough or that Harry is a homo. Not everything is intellectually stimulating, obviously, but you put up with all the dross in order to find the quality. You have to dig through a lot of earth and rock to find a diamond, but no one would consider giving up diamonds altogether, to dangerously overstretch a metaphor.

So, here on The Word, where all things word related fascinate us to an unhealthy degree, graffiti is our free to air drug. I recently came across a few diamonds in the field. From the bizarre:

to the very honest:

From the truly surreal, yet strangely accurate:

to the surreal and droll:

Then there’s the homage to things that really should die, but simply refuse to go away:

And finally, the simple and eternal. My personal favourite thus far:

You can’t touch this.

As if we needed any further proof that Douglas Adams was a bloody genius. If you haven’t read his fantastic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, turn off your computer this instant, get down the bookshop and start reading. For the humans among you, you’ll remember that the mighty supercomputer Deep Thought pondered for 7.5 million years to come up with the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. His answer was 42. This prompted Arthur Dent and friends to go off in search of the real question to which this was the answer, as that was rather beyond Deep Thought at the time.

Douglas Adams - bloody genius

Well, in one of those truth is far stranger than fiction moments, the universe is providing the question for us after all. For some time now scientists have been trying to estimate the weight of the universe. It seems like one of those cunning ploys to get indefinite funding from some mug, but there’s actually good reason for the research. Knowing the weight of the galaxy, the amount of matter it contains, is key to solving important astronomical problems.

Astrophysicist Ken Freeman is particularly interested in the nature of so-called dark matter. Unlike the “ordinary matter” of stars and planets, scientists don’t really know anything about the nature of the invisible material that, along with “dark energy”, they estimate makes up 96 per cent of the universe.

Serious questions abound with regard to dark matter. What is it? How is it distributed across the universe? Does it really even exist? That last question is particularly relevant.

“That’s worth knowing,” said Professor Freeman, an astrophysicist with Mt Stromlo Observatory and the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Canberra. Let’s give Prof Freeman this week’s Understatement of the Week trophy.

Along with colleagues in Australia, Europe, the US and Britain, Freeman decided to “weigh” a galaxy. How’s that for a lofty goal? This is the description as reported in the The Daily Telegraph:

While it’s possible to estimate the mass of the entire universe, accurately measuring galaxies, particularly distant ones, is another matter.

The problem is there’s no good way to quantify all the dark matter in such galaxies, thus making it difficult to total all the matter, dark and ordinary.

So Professor Freeman and his colleagues chose the Milky Way.

“Because we’re inside our galaxy, we can get a more reliable measure of the dark matter content than we can for galaxies outside,” he said.

To do so, the group first estimated the “escape velocity” of the galaxy - the speed stars passing near the sun needed to attain in order to escape its gravitational pull.

It did so using the line-of-sight, or radial, velocity of stars crossing the central rotating disc of the galaxy.

The data was collected by the 1.2m Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Siding Spring, NSW.

The escape velocity, calculated at between 544km/sec and 608km/sec, allowed the team to calculate the Milky Way’s mass and weight, as well as the amount of dark matter: 94 per cent.

And the net result of all this? Where’s the connection to Adams’s magical number of 42? Well, it’s slightly tenuous actually, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story. It turns out that our galaxy weighs three times 10 to the power of 42kg. Or a number written as 3 followed by 42 zeroes. Ooh, spooky!

Whatever, Douglas Adams was still a genius. Vale, Douglas.