The Kong File: The one that was the first sequel

 

 

Title: Son of Kong

What Year?: 1933

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’m looking at things to clear out my backlog, and that brought me to an idea I’ve had on hold for quite a while. It’s nothing less than a survey of the oldest, most influential and most eclectic science fiction franchise of all time, which has already figured frequently on this blog and my fiction and non-fiction as a whole. Needless to say, I will be looking at the obscure and very odd outliers of a wild and woolly franchise whose management has been uneven to put it mildly. There was no better place to start than ground zero. I present Son Of Kong, the very first sequel to the original monster movie blockbuster.

Out story begins with Carl Denham, the adventurer and showman who brought King Kong to New York, now at the center of a very realistic wave of litigation. To stay out of court and perhaps improve his finances, Denham sets out on another expedition to Skull Island, following an obviously unreliable rumor of treasure. Everyone’s back except Anne and Jack, including the minority comic relief cook. Along the way, they pick up a new romantic interest, a clearly untrustworthy sailor who might know about the island, and finally a smaller and more friendly Kong. There’s wacky hijinks, strange creatures, and old fashioned heroics ahead as the expedition explores the island. But when the island is destroyed by a volcanic eruption, it will take all their daring do to get out alive!

Son of Kong was a 1933 science fantasy film by RKO, created as a sequel to King Kong released the same year. The film was the only direct sequel to Kong made by RKO and the cast and crew of the original film. A script was created by Ruth Rose, credited as co-writer on the original film; Rose stated that the script was written to replace all dramatic elements with comedy. The film starred Robert Armstrong returning as Carl Denham and Helen Mack as his romantic interest, identified as Hilda but not named in the film. Other returning cast included Frank Reicher as Captain Engelhorn, Victor Wong as Charlie and Noble Johnson as the islanders’ chief. Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot did not participate, nor was there any evidence that they were offered the opportunity to do so. Willis O’Brien again created special effects for the film, which were limited by RKO’s decision to complete and release the film by the end of 1933. Armstrong reportedly favored the sequel for the expanded role of his character. It was not otherwise well-regarded by critics or fans, and became largely obscure. In 2005, the film was released as a set with the original film and Mighty Joe Young. It is currently available on digital platforms including free streaming from Tubi.

For my experiences, the real background here is the misadventures I went through to get the original King Kong in the 1990s-early 2000s, which I covered when I reviewed the 1976 De Laurentiis remake (see also Mighty Peking Man). After the difficulties I went through for that, I was neither optimistic about nor particularly interested in finding the present film, which I definitely knew about. I finally watched when I got the “franchise” box set as a gift, around the time the 2005 remake came out. Once I did see it, I immediately found my opinions mixed. On one hand, it was obviously far inferior to the original, as well as clearly further weighed down by the rushed production. On the other hand, it is far better than one might gather from casual accounts, and in certain lights better than it had any right to be.

Moving forward, the obvious strengths of the movie lie in the cast, which is mostly a case of leaving well enough alone. Armstrong as Denham is as good as before if not better, in situations that genuinely develop his character. The inherited supporting cast prove that they were always part of the successful equation, especially Johnson (see my rants under Gone With The Wind and Ingagi), with Wong coming up from behind as underrated. Most impressively, Mack is in many ways an improvement on Wray. By my assessment, she gives her character a more mature and melancholy quality than Ann Darrow, which is all the more striking since she was actually significantly younger. That coupled with Armstrong’s more subdued character gives a chemistry far more interesting than that of `the original leading pair. (On the other hand, the real-life age difference gives a solid cringe.) Beyond these obvious points, the story truly builds on the original with some surprisingly realistic consequences. There are even moments where the effects and camerawork improve rather embarrassingly on the previous film, particularly a trip through a half-submerged cave and a dynamic head-on shot of a charging cave bear.

That leaves the stop-motion, which is normally where I would be holding myself back. The unfortunate reality is, it’s not hard to envision the film done just as well entirely without them. The little Kong is a fine creation that takes the art and technology in new directions (compare especially with the prince in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger). In far too many ways, however, it’s a case of too much and not enough. The animation isn’t nearly up to the standards of other O’Brien films. (And if you don’t want to be horrified and depressed, do not look up his biography for this time period…) At the same time, the “cute” moments tend to be predictable at best and overdone at worst, with only a mishap with a gun really building on the character. The problems are magnified with the other creatures. The best of the lot is a ceratopsian, originally in the “spider pit” scene of the original, while the bear and a briefly seen plesiosaur both pass. Things get far more difficult with the dragon-like creature of the intended climactic battle, which is the best explanation I can think of for certain talk of a spinosaur somewhere in the franchise. It should have been among O’Brien’s work, and it is by all means very good, yet there are too many corners cut in both the model and the animation, egregiously the uncanny eyes. The common denominator is that only the laziest, greediest suits could have thought that an early release date was a fair trade for the money and time that could have been put into improving the effects. It gets that much harder to take little Kong’s repeatedly extended digit as anything but an expression of Obie’s feelings on the studio system.

Now for the “one scene”, I was honestly debating between a few choices. I finally skipped ahead in the review just to take a look at one of them. At only the 13-minute mark, the leading lady is introduced as Helen, the star attraction of a late-colonial backwater theater. As she takes the stage, Charlie loudly claps, conspicuously alone. She then goes into her predictably underwhelming act, while the camera mercilessly shows the silent stares of the audience. In the middle, we cut to Denham and the captain as they comment at her expense. Denham says in her defense, “She’s got personality… if someone would show her what to do with it.” It’s an effective introduction to a character. The truly funny part for the seasoned bad-movie veteran is that as not-great as it is, the “joke” act is still vastly better than plenty of completely “straight” musical numbers. And that reminds me, I have to do something with Wild World Of Batwoman…

In conclusion, what I come back to is what I am always saying about sequels (see Ghostbusters 2). Sequels are always going to be stuck between studio management, fans and general audiences who have consistently failed to comprehend the things that make an actually good one. The present film is at face value depressing proof that things were no different in the days when sound film was a new and nearly unknown medium. The brighter side is that it proves that even maximum interference and stupidity are not quite enough to keep genuine merit from shining through. The final proof is that I can absolutely say that this film is nowhere near the worst one I have considered for this lineup. And with that, I’m going to go lie down for a while.

Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 11!

 It's my last day for a weekend post, and once again all I have is another Space Guys post, this time pretty much odds and ends. And yes, spoiler, I'm recycling the Space Nazis scenario from my Exotroopers (anti) series. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.

As the Janus left the asteroid belt behind, Jason finally proposed to Alek. The crew was gathered in the captain’s cabin in hopes of a glimpse of Jupiter. To that end, Donald set up a telescope in line with the porthole beyond the captain’s cabin. It was not a stable view, thanks to the rotation of the ring, but they could see the giant planet when the wing-like extensions of the Mission Fuselage were not in the way. The captain took the first look through the telescope, as the ring reached the bottom of its rotation, and gave his rumbling laugh of approval. As the others gathered to look through the telescope, Jason knelt and fumbled through his overprepared speech. Alek let him get halfway through before she cut in. “You want to marry me, no?” she said.

“Of course,” Jason answered.

“Why?” she said.

“Be… because I love you,” he said. “I… I want to make you happy.”

“Yes,” she said, shifting to her flat lecture voice. “But why do you want to marry me? What is in it for you?”

“Well, you… you make me happy.”

She made a point of pondering. “Good enough,” she said. “I accept.”

“Speaking of,” Donald chimed in. He abruptly kissed Anastasia. “The captain married us last night!” Alek looked incredulously at Anastasia. She blushed but held her head up, ignoring critical stares from Vasily and Jackie and a bemused gaze from Moxon.

 

In the company of their friends, Jason had learned that his best defense was to show that he was far from uneducated, joining in discussions of everything from astronomy to engineering to languages. Moxon in particular regularly quizzed him on geography, and rarely caught him in an error. Jason, for his part, was most interested in a subject called mathematical linguistics, apparently developed by Tanya and Mehmet, who could be found together often enough that there was speculation if they were involved. For their part, the odd pair listened respectfully when he told them one of the “story” problems from his education, this one set in the lands of Arabia, called the Scroll of Solomon.

“So, there was a Sultan called Saladin,” Jason said by way of introduction. “He was a powerful king and a great warrior, but what he valued most was wisdom. So he collected books from every land and in every language, and he paid hundreds of scribes to translate them in his own tongue. Then one day, someone brought him a scroll that wasn’t like any other. It was very, very old, with words written in gold and beautiful pictures. The scholar who brought it said that it had belonged to King Solomon, and he got it from a holy man who said that it was a gift from an angel. The problem was, nobody could read the letters, or find any script like them. So Saladin had his scribes give every letter a number, based on how often they found it in the scroll. Then they rewrote it as numbers, and what they found was one long, beautiful equation.”

Mehmet had considered for a few moments. “Interesting,” he said. “I’m sure it is based on a real text. A smuggler brought it out of Italy, as I recall, only about a hundred years ago. At any rate, the story was clearly created by someone who understood the basic principles of statistical linguistics. It would not work, of course, but for an illustration, it is sound.”

“So how does it work?” Jason asked. “Do you just treat languages like a code to crack?”

“No,” Mehmet continued smoothly. “Cryptography is about communication with a function that would be obvious if it were unencrypted. What we learn from it is that language and mathematics are not fundamentally different. All information has a mathematical component. By extension, no language can be so different from any other that certain things cannot be learned by statistical analyses. If an archeologist 6,000 years from now had no knowledge of English, they could still figure out that `e’ and `a’ were the most common letters and `an’ and `the’ were among the most common words.”

“What if someone tried to fool you?” Jason continued. “Suppose they just made up a bunch of symbols and chose which one to put together with a spinning wheel. From there, they could put together words and put them on the same wheel, only a few words could be repeated. How would you know there wasn’t something there?”

“It has been tried,” Mehmet said. “In the occult fields, it is fairly common. What we have learned is that the human mind is not equipped to understand randomness. We can look at momentary patterns of water vapor or the positions of stars thousands of kilometers away, and think we see shapes and order. But thousands of us could walk past a series of pits in the rock for decades before one figured out that they once held the support beams of a temple. In practice, we are even worse at producing the random than we are at recognizing it. Without a fully automated system, our conscious and unconscious minds will always contaminate the results?”

Jason glanced in Jax’s direction. “Suppose we found something out there?” he said. “Something that wasn’t built by any human?”

For just a moment, Mehmet and Tanya gave each other a glance that made him wonder if they knew something he didn’t. But the former merely shrugged. “We will only know if and when we see it,” he said. “Even so, I would wager that we could figure out their math.”

 

Jason also spent time learning about their destination. Almost all of it came from a single image, taken from a distance of over 4 billion kilometers. The established authority was Professor Futura. When he first presented the image, Jason immediately pointed to a bright white spot on the blue-gray orb. “What’s that?” he said.

Futura had smiled. “That is the main reason we are out here,” he said. “It has been called simply the Anomaly, which is really a routine practice. What we know is that it originated as a meteor impact crater. In those terms, it is large but not exceptional, perhaps half the size of Hellas Basin, though much larger in proportion to the planetary body. What is unusual is that the interior is a completely different climate system from the paramoon as a whole. It is much warmer, enough that the initial survey classified it as volcanic in origin. It also has a greatly different atmosphere. Spectroscopic data show gaseous nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, in quantities comparable to Gaian atmosphere. Most remarkably, there is a high volume of water, the source of the cloud layer. The data was inconclusive whether this is actual water vapor or suspended ice crystals, but either implies an Earth-like precipitation cycle. Unfortunately, the same cloud layer prevented direct observation of the crater interior. Our main objective is to survey the anomaly.”

“What about the paramoon?” Alek said. “The reports say it has nearly the same gravity as Gaia. How is that possible? How do you really know?”

Futura smiled again, more subtly. “We were able to infer certain things either from the paramoon or from its evident effects on the orbits of other moons,” he said. “Its gravity implies that it contains a core of very dense material. It is believed that it was captured by the gaseous planet in the relatively recent past. The real question has been how recent. Many moons and planetoids have been discovered within the Atomic Era, but every paramoon of comparable size was discovered before the Great Wars. Some have gone so far as to speculate that its capture only happened since space exploration began.”

“Then can it really be colonized?” Jason said.

“We don’t know,” Futura said. For a moment, Jason wondered if he knew something he would not tell. He did not notice that Alek had met the professor’s gaze and shaken her head.

 

Regular communications continued to and from Gaia and Mars. Every week, each crew member was allowed to record and receive at least one personal communication, and given the choice whether to listen in private. Jason and Alek were with Jax when he played a message from his wife. The morena kept a level tone and a calm expression as she explained that she was expecting their first child, and that it would be a son. Jason turned to his friend sternly as the message ended. “We knew,” Jax said. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You know how it is. Most of the time, that doesn’t work out anyway. This was once in a lifetime.”

Alek true closer, looking very sad. “I have seen figures,” she said. “The miscarriage rate is very high. Do you think… he will make it?”

Jason shrugged. “Usually, if something goes wrong, it would have by now,” he said. “It’s the same on the Motherworld, really.”

“What about Dr. Cahill?” Jason said with a scowl.

“She knows,” Jax said. “It’s not like that, anyway. We talk, we take care of each other. Jill knew it might happen. I told her she could do whatever she has to.”

“Then what does Dr. Cahill say?” Alek said.

“She says she’s glad I have someone back home,” Jax said. “She’s told me about her husband, and her son. I know all about that. They had problems before she came out here, not the way people think. It doesn’t matter.” The conversation trailed off then. But the next time Dr. Cahill came to the cabin, she left quickly, with tears in her eyes.

 

Then a time came when Jason lay with Alek, her face-down beneath him, half-listening to a documentary. “For seven years, the War had raged in the lands between the great oceans,” a narrator intoned. “But the final battle would come more than a year after its end, in the one place the War had never touched. It is the shores of Pantagonia, and young Professor Futura is leading the charge against the last stronghold of the leader of the Final Reich, Heinz Himmelman.”

Jason looked up in interest. Of course, he had seen the footage before: The desolate cliffs; the scrambling commandos; the lumbering Landkreuzer; the mass of rockets and fuel tanks it supported; and atop it all, a spade-shaped craft not unlike the Pegasus payloader. The narrator explained how Heinz Himmelmann had recruited or captured the greatest minds of the world for his special projects, starting with an electronic brain that proved that the Reich could not win the war. How he had diverted thousands of prisoners and laborers, billions of marks and countless tons of material for the greatest project of all. “His workers labored night and day, some in fear, some in devotion, some in the hope of some greater good,” the narrator continued. Jason felt Alek stir beneath him. “The sum of their efforts was the Tottenkarte, the first spacecraft capable of reaching into interplanetary space.”

The screen showed the craft rising into the sky. “It launched into the heavens, carrying Himmelmann and the greatest minds of the Reich. No other craft could pursue it, nor rise high enough to intercept it. The armies of the world could only watch as it rose to the edge of space… and vanished.”

“My grandfather worked on that ship,” Alek said. “Great grandfather, actually. We all just call him Grandfather. A lot of people think he was on it. But probably no. They only ever said that because nobody never found him. I spent a long time trying to find out what I could. I talked to people who would not have talked if they knew. They all said they did not know. I could tell it was true.”

“What do you think happened?” Jason asked.

Alek shook her head at that. “It is not like people think,” she said. “They never really had a chance. There was too much they did not know, too much they could not do. The only question should have been where they came down. But they never did. We should have seen it, we would have. People were watching, everywhere. Nobody saw nothing, never.”

She settled on her back, staring upward. “I feel like I know him, better than my own mother and father,” she said. “I understand him. I understand what it was like to be him. I am the only one left like him. You know, with the supergenius. There were a few others in our family who had it. But it skips around, like red hair. An uncle here, a cousin there, maybe one of my aunts. My mother and her father, not even a little. That is why I am here at all. The rest… all gone.”

She turned her head to meet Jason’s gaze. “I might be the last one, even if we have children,” she said. “I can’t, you know, until we get back. To come at all, I had to let a doctor do something, something only another doctor could undo. We all did. If we get back, you will still be a farmboy. I know, you are very smart; you will still never be like me. But it is okay. I like you the way you are. If it has to be a farmboy’s son with you or a girl like me with someone else, I would call it a fair trade.”

 

She put her arms around him. “There are things you do not know,” she said. “Do not worry, you will. Some, you may not like. I still like you.” She rolled down a partition. “Now show me again, what it is the farm girls do…”

Table of Contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!

No Good Very Bad Movies Special: The one with Slinky killbots

 

 

Title: The Super Inframan

What Year?: 1975

Classification: Prototype/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

As I write this, I’m approaching 2 and a half years of writing this blog, and reflecting depressingly on just how far my view counts have gone down. So, of course, I have planned out one last ride to clear out my backlog. For this feature in particular, I had one more thing that wasn’t fitting in anywhere else, a movie so legendarily weird that I hadn’t gotten around to watching it. I took a look, and I knew it always belonged here. I also knew that it was something that I needed to wait to watch until I was ready to review, because this is the kind of movie where the first impression is what matters. I present Super Inframan, a movie possibly as weird as House.

Our story begins with a bus load of kids apparently on their way to defeat the Red Army with sonic warfare when they are attacked by a mysterious pterodactyl creature. In the aftermath, we learn that it’s the work of a mysterious ancient queen named Dragon Mom who has only just made herself known to the modern world. The actual military with guns, tanks and attack aircraft are helpless against her hazy combination of magic and super-science, but a scientist who for once has the full backing of the government believes he can turn the tide by transforming a heroic volunteer into Inframan, a cyborg with whatever powers will barely defeat the latest wave of Dragon Mom’s biomechanoid goons. Meanwhile, the monarch has sent an infiltrator to destroy the mentor’s headquarters while her forces close in. Inframan keeps her at bay, but when the scientist and his daughter are kidnapped, it’s up to the superhero to take the fight to them. There’s no doubt of the outcome, but you will still have no idea what’s going on!

Super Inframan was a 1975 science fantasy film by the Shaw Brothers (see Mighty Peking Man, Meteor). The film was regarded as a knockoff of the Ultraman and Kamen Rider tokusatsu TV series. It has also been described as the first Chinese superhero film. Danny Lee was cast as the titular hero, with Terry Liu as Dragon Mom and Dana Shum as the minion She Demon. The film’s profile was improved by a favorable review from Roger Ebert, who stated, “When they stop making movies like Infra-Man, a little light will go out of the world.” The movie has remained popular as a cult film, receiving favorable reviews from James Rolfe and Brandon Tenold. It is currently available for digital rental and purchase from Google/ Youtube, but not on the Amazon US platform.

For my experiences, I heard of this one from Brandon’s Cult Movies, and was immediately interested. What has fascinated me is the multiple directions of evident influence. On one hand, it’s quite obvious that the Hong Kong auteurs were ripping off Japan. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that Japan more than repaid the debt, egregiously through the Super Sentai/ Power Rangers franchise. I have continued to wonder about its influence on movies I had reviewed: The Transformers animated movie; House, which I really did not like; and Everything Everywhere All At Once. I finally bought and watched the present a few days before this review, which I started and then stopped before coming back as I approached my usual 3-day limit. That was about the time I needed to digest this properly. What I find is that I still cannot quite make up my mind, and what truly vexes me is whether this was meant to be funny.

Moving forward, the counterintuitive thing about this film is that it is not actually random in the way that House and Everything Everywhere All At Once are. Sure, the visuals, the effects and the powers of the hero and villains look like they could have been conceived by placing nouns on a dart board. At its narrative core, however, this is deceptively linear. The story and stakes are clearly defined. The villains and other entities are introduced early. The authority figures are competent enough to help, and draw an equally measured effort by the villainess to remove them before they get further. The characters are genuinely developed into generally interesting ways. As a corollary, the film plays its influences and premises on something resembling a “straight” basis, which is even stranger to say considering the villainess and her utterly demented goons. The mutants and biomechanoids may be surreal apparitions brought to life with indifferent production values, yet they are quite consistently portrayed as legitimate threats to the hero and the world, with genuine personalities to boot. This shows especially in the finale fight with the queen and the slinky goons, who thoroughly pummel the hero.

If there’s a con, it’s a shared feature of very weird Asian cinema: This rides a razor edge between inspired and simply exhausting. This is where the seeming seriousness of the material comes closest to being a defect. There are moments where the somber tone is welcome, especially in light of the kiddie fare that the tokusatsu/ kaiju genres were already devolving into. There are others where having a good laugh is your only shot at getting through this damn thing in good spirits and with some vestige of your sanity. Again, this is especially evident with the villains, particularly Dragon Mom herself, whose bizarre regenerative powers have regularly been discounted as comical. The highest toll, however, is for the good guys. This is set up as a superhero plot with real stakes and genuine weight, and it holds up for a while. By the professor’s solemn warnings, Inframan himself can only gain his powers at the price of terrible pain and an uncertain future, a problem we can easily believe after seeing the transformation. After a while, however, it becomes clear that the toll is never going to come, at least in any way that figures in the story. Thus, the most compelling element of the story becomes a bait and switch.

That brings me to the “one scene”, and I went through a new viewing to get back to it. Around the 40-minute mark, Inframan and a squad of enthusiastic agents chase after a double agent sent by Dragon Mom. A fight between the good guys and minions is in full swing when a newcomer appears. We get our first look in a distance shot of a desolate quarry. The figure stands at the top of the rock face, its face hidden by some kind of mane, and announces itself with a truly unnerving laugh before literally leaping into action. It quickly proves to be one of the most formidable antagonists out of the entire rogues’ gallery, trading blows and laser beams with Inframan until the hero finally dives into the water of the dodgy mill pond. The creature continues to fire away, drawing a blast like a depth charge with each shot, of course laughing all the while. What stood out on second viewing is that it finally stops and looks for any sign of the hero, dead or alive. As it peers into the water, it makes a sound quite different from the laugh or whatever it is, almost like a cat’s meowing. Naturally, that’s when Inframan counterattacks. It’s a well-choreographed scene that works far better than it should, in no small part because the film actually conveys a real sense of danger.

In closing, I come to the rating. What I suppose might seem odd is that I didn’t simply give this one the Unrated ranking, as I did Everything Everywhere All At Once and House before it. I certainly considered that very strongly, before and after actually watching it. I suppose the difference is that the other films were very much exceptions to my usual rules. By comparison, this one is exactly the kind of movie I would normally view and review. Within my admittedly skewed framework, I can understand what they were trying to do. In those terms, it’s not great, and was presumably never intended to be. It is good, hallucinogenically weird fun, and its light truly deserves to burn for a long time. With that, I can once again call it a day.

Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 10!

 

Because I run on obsessive compulsive behavior, I decided to try to fill out a full month of blogging to end the year, so naturally, I'm starting with some Space Guys filler. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.

 

The voyage went on. Morale greatly improved as soon as the life support ring reopened, allowing the crew to return to their normal quarters and stored possessions. At six weeks, the Janus reached the first visible benchmark outside the orbit of Mars, the asteroid belt. It took another month to cross it. In that time, they sighted at least a dozen asteroids and two mining ships. There was a running correspondence between Yuri and the crew of a survey craft called Platinum Star. They had a single mishap when a tiny particle hit the windshield of the Pegasus. He went into the depressurized cabin and returned carrying a spiderwebbed pane. He found Moxon loitering in the main corridor. “Let me see that,” he said. Jason held out the pane. “It’s strong, isn’t it?”

“It’s rated to stop a 2 cm cannon shell,” Jason said. “It probably would have.”

“We’ll see,” Moxon said. He took the pane and set it upright. Then he drew his trench knife. With a single, sudden thrust, he drove the narrow blade straight through the pane. He twisted the knife back and forth.

“There’s today’s science lesson,” Moxon said. “Bullets are blunt. So are meteors. But a knife delivers power straight to a point.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Nice trick.”

The trooper smiled. “I’m sorry we haven’t gotten along better,” he said. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. But there’s still 18 months ahead. Who knows?” Jason was already withdrawing.

 

Jason watched Alek radiate as soon as she reunited with her robots. She happily introduced him to her workhorse machines, a silver machine she called Scarecrow and a gold one dubbed Patchwork Girl, or Crow and Patch for short. She insisted that they had discrete personalities, for reasons that remained elusive to him. He came closest to believing when he walked in on the pair alone.

The two robots were in the middle of the floor, on top of the hatch for an airlock. They grasped each other with pincers on the end of accordion-like arms as they did a kind of shuffle. What held his gaze was that they moved in a circle unsuited to their gait. He frowned, not at the behavior but a vague sense of order behind it. He narrowly stopped his jaw from dropping as he realized that they were going slowly and clumsily through the steps of a waltz.

“I taught them that a while ago,” Alek said in her plain lecture voice. He no longer started at finding her already at his side. She gestured with her mechanical pencil. “It was a test of their gyrostabilizers, originally. Now they do it when they are online without a task. It happens sometimes, when I give them an exercise without resetting their memory. I am still not sure which one started it. I believe Patch initiates more often than not.”

“Why haven’t you reset?” Jason said, not really questioning. “The manual says to do it every month on the outside.

“It is the only way to test the emergent properties of their AI,” Alek said. “They do improve at their tasks when I let them remember. Besides, would you do it?” Jason looked at the robots again, and shook his head.

 

With the privacy of the lab, Alek began to show new sides of herself, sometimes endearing, sometimes puzzling and occasionally alarming. She did many things to please him, or with the expectation that he would be pleased. Then there were times when he found her weeping in anger or jealousy. In those times, she would play the target shooting game, whooping, screeching or hissing depending on her fortunes. But that could get her wound up over her chief grievance, that she was not an officer. Then, as often as not, she would take control of a robotic arm in her lab that genuinely terrified Jason. “I should have been one of the 12,” she had said on one occasion. “They call me `special technician’ so they do not no have to give me a weapon.”  She proceeded to crush 3 empty rations containers and a damaged fuel pod. Jason had finally called out to Nick Chopper to restrain her. As the robot emerged and turned toward her, Alek looked ready to attack her own machine with the arm. The moment passed, and she powered down the arm. Then she wrapped herself around Jason.

Outside the privacy of the lab, Alek showed Jason the ship and introduced him to the rest of the crew. They spent much of their time in the science module, an ovoid shell 30 meters wide and 40 long that connected the life support ring with the Mission Fuselage. Its official purpose was to observe zero-gravity phenomena and test equipment. In practice, the off-duty crew frolicked back and forth across the enclosed expanse, whether leaping, propelling themselves with fire extinguishers and other improvised propulsion, or simply sliding along the flexible fabric of the inner shell. Alek’s favorite pastime was to give a yodeling call that would echo across the shell, making ripples in the supposedly sound-dampening lining.

He also spent a shift with Alek and old Yuri, long a presence more than a person, in the communications center beneath the ship’s directional communications dish. It proved to be a cabin the size of a storage shed lined with tiny monitors, which Yuri explained was a fraction of what they could receive. “This is the real center of the ship,” he said in his richly timbered voice. “If it went down, we would have no telemetry, no orders, and no movies except what we have on data discs or your record collection. Command on Gaia wouldn’t even know if we were dead or alive. That is why at least one officer is on duty at all times.” He patted the sidearm at his hip.

He pointed to a cartoon Major Maxon trading stylized blows with the monocled villain Heinz Himmelmann and his alien bodyguards. “That is from Houston,” he said. “The spaceport sends out the local station, sometime. The show, I have watched with my grandsons. They say it is a commercial for silly toys. They are not wrong. I like it. It is idealistic.”

“What about the solar interference?” Jason asked. “We can never get a signal off on Mars…”

Alek shook her head at that. “That is not solar,” she said. “Not all of it. It is the high beams from Mons, Port Eris, Columba. They broadcast to Earth, Jupiter too. Nothing you have is powerful enough to get over them. They would not let you have anything that could.” Jason had only nodded. Yuri looked at him thoughtfully.

“You know,” the elder spacer said, “when the Federation and the Union proposed a joint space program, a lot of people said it was the best way to ensure the survival of the human race, in case something went wrong on Gaia. They never quite said what. What do you think? Why would you say you’re out here?”

Jason shook his head. “I don’t know what happened back then,” he said. “But we aren’t anyone’s backup plan. We’re here to find out what’s out here.” That had gotten a smile from Yuri

 

They also paid regular visits to engineering, which to Jason’s discomfort was in the axis of the life support ring. He pointedly did not comment when Anastasia proved to be an equally frequent visitor. The outer chamber was a three-way intersection that was disorienting even for the Martians, where one of the engineers was invariably ensconced either reading or watching the single television screen. Anastasia had been on hand when Jason tried to argue over the safety of a reactor in the middle of the crew’s quarters.

“So, people get the idea that nuclear reactors can turn into an atomic bomb,” Donald said. “That’s like worrying that the engine on your petrol car will burn like a Molotov cocktail. If you want a nuclear explosion, you make a nuclear weapon. If you want nuclear power, you build something not to blow up. It’s really virtually impossible for a reactor to explode.”

“Almost,” David said from the other side of the radiation barrier. “And comparatively speaking, really.”

“Sure,” Donald said. “There’s lots of things in a reactor that can brew up if someone does something stupid. Things like that can all be contained, if you designed it right. If things go as they should, they implode, not explode.” He chuckled. “When I was Dr. Czernabeg’s student, I advised the Sheng on their first fusion reactor. Six weeks in, we got a call from one of their senior officials. It turned out that an electrical fire had burned out the control system. They flew me in to inspect the facility. By then, you could see the smoke from Shanghai. The military had set up a perimeter, but they wouldn’t go anywhere near the building. They honestly thought the fusion reactor could blow up the whole country or even the world, like a star going nova. I told them to give me a suit and a helicopter to drop me in the middle. They did it, because they thought it wouldn’t matter. As soon as I got inside, I saw exactly what I knew had happened: The reactor had melted down, right enough, but it had melted down through the floor. Then the rest of the plant had caved in on top of it. The fire was from their instruments burning.”

Jason frowned. “Didn’t the Federation have a reactor meltdown?”

“That was something different,” Anastasia said. “There was a factory that was making material for nuclear bombs, way too close to a big city. There was an explosion that blew open the containment and released the radioactive material into the atmosphere. There would have been less damage if a nuclear bomb had gone off. That was the real reason we made peace; that, and figuring out just how powerful the Alliance had become.”

That same night, Jason lay with Alek in his bunk, intermittently watching Sparky the squirrel. The adventure showed Sparky, Spunky and Tweel the Martian on Venus. They conveniently wore armored suits to protect them from the heat and pressure, at the cost of correspondingly limited movement. Sparky was currently struggling to pick up a wrench dropped while repairing their spaceship. At first, he simply could not get hold of it with the clumsy gauntlets of the suit. When he did manage to grip it, however, he found that the pressure made it impossible to pick it up. Spunky and Tweel tried to pry it off the ground, but only bent the tool. At first, he didn’t notice the raised voices, from the direction of the cabins across the main corridor where Jackie and Vasily slept, until he recognized Anastasia. He still might have done nothing, if Alek had not stirred. He patted her hand and climbed down, past Jax and Sarip. He had just passed the half-open privacy partition when Jackie crashed through the partition of Vasily’s cabin, kitty corner to theirs.

Jackie might have gone right into his own facing cabin, if he had not hit the frame of its partition. The partition he had just gone through clattered to the floor, derailed and deformed but not penetrated, as Vasily pushed his own way through. The moreno gave no more than a grunt as he assumed a defensive posture, easily drowned out by Anastasia’s shriek. The Federation pilot struck twice with his fists and once with a high kick before Jackie struck a single blow of his own, staggering his foe with a jab to the abdomen. Jason called out a half-articulate warning, before he found himself pushed aside. He glared in anger as Moxon strode past, brandishing his sheathed trench knife as a knuckleduster.

Anastasia came into view, clad in the bottom half of her fatigues and a half-fastened undergarment. When she grabbed for Vasily, he pushed her back and wheeled to face the interloper. Jason felt an irrational satisfaction as Moxon advanced. Let the man of Gaia try to separate two Martians unaided if he chose; let him try to part a lion’s jaws with one hand. Yet, he already had a foreboding sense that Moxon knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, Moxon moved faster than Jason could follow. One moment, Vasily was drawing back  his fist. The next, he was crashing down on top of the broken partition, leaving behind a suspended spray of blood that ended at Moxon’s still-raised fist.

That was when old Yuri emerged from his cabin in the cross corridor. He raised a hand to Vasily, who protested but was not bold enough to raise a fist. The elder pilot gave another warning, then planted a foot on Vasily’s chest. The younger pilot’s face flushed in rage, but he was already put in his place. That was when Anastasia emerged, dressed only in the bottom of her fatigues and her half-fastened upper undergarment. She lashed out with an open hand. Moxon might have blocked the blow, but he might not have bothered. What was clear was that he caught Ana in the breastbone, slamming her up without effort against the corner bulkhead.

Yuri turned his stern gaze to Moxon, then to Anastasia. Moxon, in turn, looked to Vasily. He rose to his feet, lifting the partition. “Go to Dr. Cahill to have your injuries examined,” Moxon said. “Say nothing of what happened. Remain there for the remainder of the cycle.” Vasily ran away with a clatter down the corridor of the ring. The trooper looked to Jackie next. “Mr. Henderson, do you wish to file a charge with the captain?” The moreno returned his stare for a moment, then withdrew to his own bed.

The trooper released Ana. She retreated behind Yuri. “We gave you quarters with the officers and the married crew,” Moxon finished. “Return there; you are confined until I decide if other arrangements are needed.” Yuri silently lifted the fallen partition and shoved it back onto its track. Then he escorted Ana away, one arm around her.

It seemed to Jason that he realized only then that he was poised to lunge. “He’s got no right,” he said. “They aren’t on our side, but they’re ours. We take care of our own, one way or the other.”

Alek took hold of his arm. “Don’t,” she said.

Jax came up more cautiously at his right. “Don’t do it, man,” he said. “You know what they did to us. We don’t know what they did to him…” That was what made him untense and step back. At that very instant, Moxon turned his head just enough to show him a half-smile before he strode away.

Table of Contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Arcade prize dinos!

 

As I write this, I'm 2 days past the deadline for my weekend post, and I still don't have a dino blog for this month. To get in one more thing, I literally dug through storage for something I could use, which brought me to a trio of dinos I had considered on and off for a while. Behold the glory of the megalosaur when I got it, ca 2017!

Now, as always, there's backstory, in this case involving some people I've been out of touch with. The upshot is that for a while, I was going to an old-fashioned-ish arcade/ restaurant/ general purpose rec center on the far end of the metro area where I live. Of course, they had impressive collection of junk prizes, of which these were in fact the most conceivably valuable. So, of course, I collected quite a lot of other stuff before I gave a thought to saving up points for these. Here's the pair of dinos I got on The Couch Mark 2.

"Grr. Raarr... Come on, this only works if you get into it."

As it happens, in years since, I've seen the predator of this pair listed as the "worst" dino, presumably by people who have had the good fortune never to encounter the Hideous Abomination in the wild. I have to say I like it. Obviously, it's bad, but it has a charming kind of obsolescence. In many ways, it feels like something out of the Crystal Palace, if anything a little more accurate than many of that time. It falls into the description of a megalosaur, especially for the time frame when that was a semi-generic designation for a therepod. The prey is harder to classify. It also would look at home in the Victorian era, even somewhat forward-thinking for the time. It isn't an iguanodon or a hadrosaur. In most respects, it looks like a hypsylophodont, which was presumably what the crew was going for whether they knew it or not. What's startling is how meek and seemingly terrified it is in both form and posture. It's the perfect prey. But then there was something else in the bin that took a little more digging to find for this post. Here's a pic.

It might look like a missing link between a pig and a walrus, but it took only a little inspection to be sure that this was indeed a dicynodont, one of the many creatures that is not only not a dinosaur but more closely related to us than the dinosaurs (see my zombie synapsid post, and for that matter the adventures of Chelsea the (bad) social worker). It's not great, but it's a rare enough thing to find a synapsid other than Dimetrodon in a prize bin, so I snapped it up. Here's a couple more pics.

So beautiful, and so hideous...

And that's just enough to fill out a dino blog for the month. What I like about doing this feature is that I always have flexibility whether to go long or short. While I'm at it, here's one more completely ridiculous thing I fished out... Yes, that is a friction toy.

Oh, and that would be a velociraptor skull in the background; that is quite good.

That's all for now, more to come!

Fiction: The Space Guys adventure, Part 9!

 I'm getting over a really bad cold/ flu, so my weekend posts will be going into next week. Of course, I happened to have another installment of the Space Guys and obsessive world-building. As usual, a table of contents is at the end.

 

The crew remained crammed into the Mission Fuselage for a week and a day. The quarters were too close for any secrets. Alek continued to share Jason’s bunk quite happily. They were not the only couple to do so, in or out of marriage. Anastasia kept company with both Jackie and Vasily, sometimes on the same night. Even so, Donald continued to press his own suit for her attention, without ever quite provoking her to drive him away. The greatest shock, however, came when Jason pushed back a partition and beheld Dr. Cahill bunked down with Jax. She had merely said, “Sorry, I was just leaving.”

Meanwhile, the crew were pushed to step up a regimen of exercise to counter the effects of low gravity. It required 90 minutes a day in a set of centrifuges that filled their own module. It took a heavy toll on all of them, yet the Martians proved better able to endure it. When Alek pressed him long enough, Jason offered a semblance of an explanation. “It’s like… being a whale that was living on land,” he said. “It’s hard getting in the water. But you finally know… what your tail is for.”

Alek had pondered only a moment. “That makes no sense at all,” she said in her uninflected voice. “I can tell, you are not even-“ He had kissed her then, and that quieted her for a while.

Where Jason thrived, Alek quickly wilted. At one point, he found her simply collapsed a few meters from the centrifuge. Jason had carried her to the adjoining infirmary. She had mumbled, “No, no… I want to go home…”

“I know,” Jason had said. “`There is no place like home.’ But we won’t be home for a while.”

That had brought her back to lucidity. “But my home is Dalmatia,” she said. “Yours is Mars. If we both go home, you will be gone.”

“I know,” Jason answered between kisses. “We can work that out later.”

 

Inevitably, there were long periods when even the Martians were completely exhausted. Then they would lounge about, reading, listening to music, or watching movies and videos. Jason quickly got through his own set, of which the Kong set became consensus favorites. They also watched the adventures of Sparky the Space Squirrel. He visited the planets and moons of the Solar system, narrated by an authoritative voice that explained the science. He was frequently accompanied by Spunky, a girl chipmunk who was hinted as a romantic interest, and Tweel, a Martian ostrich creature. Jason vaguely hoped would that playing the adventures keep Moxon at bay. To his discomfort, Moxon insisted that he loved the character. He would not only watch the cartoons but laugh, a braying sound Jason had never heard at any other time, quite unlike the sharp barks that came when he made his own jokes. Once, he insisted they watch a very early black-and-white cartoon that was the first to feature the character. It turned out that it was a training film for power plants, in which the squirrel was just Sparky. Invariably, he did whatever the viewer was told not to do, resulting in electric sparks between his long, tufted ears.  That got long and loud laughter from Moxon.

Another set that got approval were number of movies based on the Oz books in the ship’s library. They were on silvery discs that initially interested Jason more than the movies themselves. When he asked Alek about their circulation on Earth, she shrugged. “They never quite caught on,” she said. “Well, not yet. Mostly, they get used by businesses for data storage. For movies and music, people prefer microtapes. They do not scratch, plus you can play things you record yourself.”

The movies were mostly animated, many of them from the outlying satellites of the Federation. Jason shuddered at one that was made with stop-motion models, many clearly made from the fur and bones of real animals. The one he liked best was a retelling of the third book, prominently featuring Tik Tok and the evil Nome King. The film he knew best was different than the others. It was live-action, with bits of stop-motion. It was made as a musical, starring a blonde girl as Dorothy. She met the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the cowardly Lion. As per the story, they went on a quest to overthrow the Wicked Witch, who was guarded by the likes of giant bees, tiger-headed giants, and a flying ape. In their first viewing, Alek pressed against him as Dorothy told the Scarecrow, “No matter how dreary and plain it may be, there is no place like home.”

They also got a steady stream of broadcasts from Earth about the expedition, carefully cataloged by old Yuri. Seemingly every member of the expedition was being celebrated in some quarter of the Earth. The Martians were getting the highest proportion of coverage. It bemused Jason to see reporters from Earth venturing to the furthest reaches of the New Dakotas to interview his family and friends. He gave a meaningful glance at Jax when they saw an interview with his wife and Preacher Mosey. Jax glared back when another broadcast on Alek showed her in the lap of another man, who was interviewed as her fiancée. He shrugged and continued stroking Alek’s legs. “He never did this good as you,” she murmured to him.

Jason was more interested in the toy advertisements, which Yuri sometimes played back to back. Innumerable toys were based on the Janus and its crew. There were many representations of the ship itself, from crude, cheap playthings to realistic scale models. Then there were sets clearly modeled on toy soldiers, always groups of interchangeable space explorers with one or two women mixed in. He was most intrigued by the larger figures, evidently between 10 and 15 centimeters. Some were merely scaled-up toy soldiers, frozen in bold poses. Others were jointed toys referred to by the Earthside crew as kinetic toys. They could be moved in a range of poses, and their features tended to differentiate them. Some of them were soldiers in all but name, with out-of-scale versions of the plasma pistols that in reality were reserved for the 12 officers and the most senior members of the military contingent. Others appeared to be intended as dolls for girls, though rarely sold as such. These were sold along with stylized vehicles and sets representing ships, surface rovers and Martian-style living domes. On one of the few occasions Tanya wandered in, he heard her hiss, “Decadent exceptionalist kaka…”

At one point, Jason talked to Raeder about the toys. “A significant part of our funding is from product licensing,” he had said. “One of the conditions they all agreed to was that they would not use the names or likenesses of any of the crew.” Even as they spoke, an ad came on for a line called Major Maxon of the Strato Corps, centered on a character definitely resembling Moxon.

That got a shrug from Moxon. “It’s an old line,” he said. “The Corps looked into it. As far as we could figure, a copy writer talked to an old-timer in a bar in Jakarta. It wasn’t one of ours, but it might have been a local auxiliary. It didn’t matter.” Jason nodded, then scowled as another ad came on. It was for a doll named Alexis Astra, a beautiful young lady with outfits for a dozen different careers. She definitely resembled Alek, while her gentleman friend  was definitely not him, but could have been Jackie.

Then there was a stretch when Alek got to talking with Anastasia. That brought Anastasia to offer peace. “Look, we may be divided between the Union and Federation, but we have more in common with each other than anybody back on Earth,” she said. She had looked to Alek then. “You aren’t too bad. You’re crazy, but you’re friendly. And you aren’t nosey."

Jason looked between them. He ventured to ask, “What happened between you to, anyway?”

“We met at a conference once,” Alek said. No other comment was forthcoming from either of them.

“Well, if you’re friends now, what do you want to talk about?”

“Boys,” Anastasia said with a smile

“Boys,” Alek agreed.

“Then maybe I should go,” Jason said.

“You don’t have to,” Alek said. “So, what is really going on with Jackie and Vasily?”

Ana smiled at that. “Sometimes, I need different things,” she said. “I can’t always get it from one man. Vasily and I came up together, so I owe him for that. Jackie mostly just likes to talk.” She looked to Jason. “Frankly, he says it’s easier to talk to me than it is to talk to you or especially to Jax. He tells me stories from his parents, and stories from their grandparents… Damn, your people really treated his like kaka. But they aren’t all the same, either. Down in Hellas, you got the ones who wanted Mars to be a great experiment in reconciliation. His folks were the ones who just wanted a place to live by themselves.”

“What about Yuri?” Alek asked. Ana said nothing

“What about Donald?” Jason put in.

“Ai, bog,” Ana said. “What did he tell you?”

“Nothing, actually,” Jason put in. “Is there something to tell?”

“Never mind,” Ana said. “You know, I could give him a chance, but you’ve both seen what he’s like when he thinks you’re encouraging him. Anyway, what about you two? Are you getting married? Are you going to get married? What are you doing, anyway?”

“What, are you asking if she’s a virgin?” Jason said. The women looked at him, then each other, and promptly burst out laughing.

“We are taking our time,” Alek said. “I am an enlightened woman. He is an enlightened man. We do not need to rush.”

As they spoke, Moxon wandered in, as he often did. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “A few people said you three were together. I told them I’d check on you. I’ll clear out if it’s private.”

“Is not private,” Alek said. She held out one of the microprint sheets to Anastasia. “Can you read this?”

Ana made no move to take it. Instead, she looked at Jason. “You showed her your trick, didn’t you?”

“Only because Jax told her about it,” he said defensively.

“`Your trick’,” Alek repeated. “So can you all do it, or only him?”

By then, Moxon was sorting the disc boxes. Jason was past being surprised when he chimed in. “They can all do something,” he said.

“Yeah, we’ve got time to practice,” Jason said.

“What you show me is not practice,” Alek countered. “I looked into it. No human can read microprint without magnification. There is something more, so why don’t you not tell me?”

Moxon sat down then. “That’s the thing,” he said with his barking laugh. “Your Martian farm boy isn’t exactly human. None of them are. Are you?”

Jason met Alek’s gaze, very uncomfortably. “It’s not like that,” he said. “Humans just aren’t built for Mars. For all of us who were born there, it doesn’t just affect our bodies, it affects how we grow. We have to receive injections, hormones and things, starting before we’re even born. It mostly stimulates the growth of muscle tissue and bone calcium. You could call it enhancement. We’d be like superheroes out of the comic books if you put us in an Earth-like environment, assuming something else didn’t go wrong like it probably would. But with what Mars does to us, it really just evens things out. It’s like trying to fight a fire that’s burning your house down by building more house.”

“You too?” Alek looked to Anastasia.

The other woman met her gaze. “If anything, the Federation’s treatments are stronger,” she said. “He’s right about the rest. We call it the Tin Man problem, after Nick Chopper. It’s one of our only stories that’s not from the Greek myths."

“It is from a Greek story, the ship of Theseus,” Moxon said. “But it works.”

Alek looked at Anastasia. “Show me,” she said. She added boldly, “Hit me.”

Jason moved to intervene. Moxon just leaned forward. “You first,” Anastasia said. Alek swung with an open hand. She had barely raised her hand before the Martian caught her by the wrist. “It works on our reflexes, too,” Ana said. Then she countered with a back-handed blow that knocked Alek back in her seat. Jason rose to help her then, but Alek pushed him back. He held his ground, lifting her up.

“Now you know our secret,” Jason said. “Except… it’s not really a secret. We don’t talk about it, and the Administration makes sure it stays out of the press. But it’s all there if you know where to look. We all know you’re all about reading papers, no matter how far they are outside your specialties. So why would all this be a surprise to you?”

Alek relaxed. “I knew a little,” she said in her neutral tone. “It was back when we were just writing. Some of the stories were bad. I chose not to read anymore. I did not want to know no more, unless you told me.”

Jason untensed and drew her into an embrace. “There is one thing I do not understand,” she said. “Moxon could do the trick, too. So what happened to him?” They looked up. Moxon was gone.

Table of contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!