Star Wars (minimal spoilers)

So we saw Episode 9 last night. As always, the special effects are great. The characters of episodes 7-9 are more engaging and interesting than those of episodes 1-3. But NOTHING MAKES SENSE.

It has bothered me for a long time that single-seat fighter ships, both good-guy and bad-guy, are apparently capable of interstellar travel. In fact, in Episode 4 there was a line about "short-range tie fighters" that couldn't operate far from the support of a larger ship. And yet in Episode 9 you see a bunch of tie fighters follow the Millennium Falcon through a series of lightspeed jumps to several different planets. (Why all of these seemingly-random lightspeed jumps, with all the vacant space in the universe, happen to put the Falcon within a hundred yards of a planet's surface, surrounded by tall obstacles to dodge, is of course not explained.) And as far back as Episode 5, Luke flew an X-wing from planet to planet, with no suggestion that the planets in question were in the same star system. Rey does that again in Episode 9. So let's just swallow this: not only is there a lightspeed drive enabling interstellar travel, but it's cheap enough to include in an expendable single-seat ship (we certainly see enough of them get blown up!) whose primary goal is tactical combat. Which makes you wonder about the point of all those larger ships, but anyway....

In Episode 8, a fleet of rebel ships is outnumbered and outgunned by a fleet of Empire ships at fairly close range (say, millions of miles tops), and the good guys have a matter of hours to depolarize the framistans on the Empire ships so the rebel fleet can escape. So several of the main characters decide to go find and recruit the framistan expert on a planet in a different star system, making their way through the seedy underbelly and the glitzy gambling resorts of that planet -- all of which should take at least hours if not days by itself, not counting any time it takes to get to that planet. If it's that quick and easy to go to a different star system, why not just move the fleet? The same thing happens in Episode 9: with hours to go before the bad-guy fleet mobilizes to destroy a gazillion planets, the good guys visit a colorful folk festival on another planet in another star system, make friends with the natives, and leave the festival (pursued by storm troopers, of course) to find a wrecked space ship that might contain a clue telling them how to get to the planet (in yet another star system) where the bad-guy fleet is. A clue, BTW, that Luke had spent years looking for, and they're hoping to find and use it in hours. Then they need help from a particular expert in the seedy underbelly of a particular city on yet another planet in yet another star system, so of course they go there and do that, still within those few hours.

Then there's the light-saber duel on the platform in the middle of a raging ocean (you've seen it in the trailers, even if you haven't seen the movie). WHY are they having this fight, other than because it looks cool? What is either of them hoping to achieve by "winning" the fight (which determines what "winning" means)?

For the final multi-ship battle, one ship has been sent off to "the Core worlds" to beg for reinforcements from the dispirited but secretly rebellious people of those worlds. I imagine the response taking days or weeks to develop the political will, and days or weeks more to mobilize the forces; here it all happens within an hour or so. And when the motley reinforcements arrive, from dozens of worlds (reminiscent, as shalmestere points out, of the rescue scene at the end of "Pirate Radio"), they all arrive at once, in formation, despite having no apparent command structure.

In short, an awful lot of things seem to happen for no reason except that they look really cool on screen. And I think with a little more creativity, they could have made equally-cool-looking things happen AND MAKE SENSE.

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch....

Happy birthday, Isaac!

As the OED points out, today is Isaac Asimov's 100th birthday.

Isaac Asimov was a formative influence on me. He was a decent science fiction writer (with occasional flashes of brilliance -- The Gods Themselves springs to mind), a good mystery writer, and an AWESOME non-fiction writer. For umpty-ump years he had a monthly column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which he could discuss pretty much whatever topic he wished, and he used that freedom to the fullest, covering topics from biochemistry (his Ph.D. subject) to astrophysics to geography to etymology to history to myth to... pretty much anything. Periodically these columns were collected and published in book form, and throughout my pre-teen and teenage years a good fraction of my bookshelf was these books of collected free-form articles, which I read and re-read voraciously. Another good chunk of my leisure reading was his book-length non-fiction, e.g. The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire.

And of course, he was mind-bogglingly prolific. It took me several years to write a textbook; he wrote at least two books each year from 1950 to 1993, and frequently half a dozen or more in a year, a mix of textbooks, popular non-fiction, and fiction.

Back to the science fiction, for which he's probably best known. He was never a master of character or dialogue, which was fine with me because I wasn't either; his science fiction was, in the classic John Campbell mold, "here's a cool scientific idea; how would people react to it and use it?" The aforementioned The Gods Themselves, the Foundation trilogy (and prequels and sequels), The End of Eternity, the short story "Nightfall", and no doubt dozens more that I'm not thinking of right now, are all splendid examples of this.

Anyway, thank you, Isaac.