Michael Marshall

I helped edit a report on using AI to help tackle antimicrobial resistance

16/1/2025

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of those nasty looming threats on the horizon that it's difficult to even think about, especially given how many other problems we have as a species. In the most extreme scenarios, we end up back where we were in the 1800s, where a simple bacterial infection could kill you.

Over the last few weeks, I've been helping to edit a report that looks at how we could use artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle AMR. The report is a joint effort by Google DeepMind and the Fleming Initiative and is out today. It's free to read:

Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance

There's also a press release on the Fleming Initiative website, which summarises the key points.

The report starts with the need to figure out which aspects of AMR are most "learnable" by AIs. From there, it proceeds through the need for much more data and for that data to be widely shared. I also want to highlight the importance of equity: the AIs need to be accessible to low- and middle-income countries, as they're the ones at most risk from AMR.

I don't know how much of this will come to pass, but I hope it does: it's in problems like AMR, where there's a huge amount of complex data to sift through, that AI can be genuinely useful.

Belatedly, my favourite stories of 2024

4/1/2025

So 2024 is over and wasn't it... er... 366 days of stuff happening.

As is tradition, here are my 12 favourite stories I've written over the year. These are the ones I'm most proud of, for whatever reason. Happy reading!

Game-changing archaeology from the past 5 years - and what's to come
Leading archaeologists share the biggest recent advances in our understanding of human evolution, and their hopes for the exciting finds the next five years may have in store

Readers deserve better from popular science books
There is a dirty secret in publishing: most popular science books aren't fact-checked. This needs to change

Iceberg A-68: The story of how a mega-berg transformed the ocean
The world's largest icebergs – which can be larger than entire countries in some cases – break off the Antarctic ice sheet. As they drift and melt in the Southern Ocean, they create a unique environment around them.

Geology's biggest mystery: When did plate tectonics start to reshape Earth?
Researchers have spent decades hunting for clues about the origins of the process that moves the continents around. Its deep history is finally starting to come into focus.

Why fantasy has often handled environmentalism better than science fiction
Science fiction struggles to portray environmental concerns; fantasy brings them to life (originally published in Arc 10 years ago, republished on my blog in 2024 so it counts)

The truth about social media and screen time's impact on young peopleThere are many scary claims about excess time on digital devices for children and teenagers. Here’s a guide to the real risks - and what to do about them

The UK coal-fired power station that became a giant battery
The closure of the last coal-fired power station in the UK raises questions about how old fossil fuel infrastructure can be repurposed. One option is to use them to store energy from renewables.

The unexpected reasons why human childhood is extraordinarily long
Why childhood is so protracted has long been mysterious, now a spate of archaeological discoveries suggest an intriguing explanation

The Earth's deepest living organisms may hold clues to alien life on Mars
To understand the life that might survive deep below Mars' surface, we can look to some of the deepest, and oldest, forms of living organism on our own planet.

First Nations astronomers predicted eclipses without using writing
The oldest written records of eclipses are in cuneiform texts from around 2000 BC, but examination of oral traditions reveal First Nations astronomers were predicting eclipses by word of mouth

How CRISPR could yield the next blockbuster crop
Scientists are attempting to rapidly domesticate wild plant species by editing specific genes, but they face major technical challenges — and concerns about exploitation of Indigenous knowledge.

And last but most definitely not least:

Our human ancestors often ate each other, and for surprising reasons
Fossil evidence shows that humans have been practising cannibalism for a million years. Now, archaeologists are discovering that some of the time they did it to honour their dead

My favourite books of 2024

3/1/2025

I read 30 books in 2024 - a bit shy of my target of 35, but I don't take those targets seriously so who cares.

You can see an overview of my year in books on GoodReads and on StoryGraph (login required).

Here are my five favourites and why:

Saga, Compendium One
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
I realise I'm late to this party but Saga is astonishing: a gripping, funny and touching multi-stranded epic about space travel, oppression, sex, robots and parenting. All human life is here, and quite a lot of non-human life as well.

The Republic of Thieves
Scott Lynch
The third and so far latest in the Gentlemen Bastard series - think Ocean's Eleven in a fantasy world inspired by Renaissance Venice - this was packed with cunning plot twists while also telling a compelling love story.

The BBC: A century on air
David Hendy
A rich, informative, funny and surprising history of the BBC - which doubles as an argument for why we in the UK need to take care of the BBC in the face of endless right-wing attempts to destroy it.

The Girl in the Road
Monica Byrne
Back in 2021 I gave a rave review to Monica Byrne's second novel The Actual Star: the word "masterpiece" was used and I don't say that lightly. In 2024 I finally read her debut, about a young woman fleeing across a narrow artificial trail that spans the Indian Ocean. It's hallucinatory, immersive, deeply unsettling and wildly imaginative. It won't be for everyone - but it's a hell of a ride.

Fool's Errand
Robin Hobb
<sobs uncontrollably> Another piece of work that I'm late to, this first volume of The Tawny Man trilogy starts with 100 pages of gentle character work before building to a nail-biter of a climax. I can't discuss the reason for the sobbing without spoilers, but everyone who has read the book knows exactly which episode wrecked me.

A correction to a story, and some thoughts on corrections

14/10/2024

One of the worst experiences in any halfway-conscientious journalist's life is when someone tells you you've made a mistake. This just happened to me, so I thought I'd describe what happened and what my editors and I did about it. This also seems a good place to spell out something about corrections: it's not a novel insight by any means, but I think it's a useful one.

In September I wrote a feature for BBC Future about an emerging trend of old fossil fuel power plants being turned into battery storage sites. Here it is (no paywall):

The UK coal-fired power station that became a giant battery

The story is built around a case study of a site in Ferrybridge, UK. It also highlights some other examples from around the world, and digs into some numbers to estimate how much more battery storage the UK will need if it's to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 while ensuring a reliable supply of electricity.

After the story was published, two readers flagged an apparent mistake on social media. On Threads, @sambeaujones posted:

"Dear BBC (and Michael Marshall @michaelmarshall6504), GW is not a measurement of battery storage capacity - GWh is. GW is a measurement of generation capacity. Yours, Grumpy."

And on Twitter/X, @CHPopp wrote:

"Great News from UK. BESS [battery energy storage systems] will become an important feature for renewable energy. One question: why is capacity denominated in GW and not in GWh?"

Oh no, I thought. While I've been writing about environmental and sustainability issues for years, my background is in biology and very much not in electrical engineering. I know that the units and terminology around electricity are quite specific and can be confusing. Had I mangled things? The two readers were making different points, but both revolved around the use of GW (gigawatts) as a unit of electrical capacity.

First, a basic point about these abbreviations. W is short for "watts" and Wh is short for "watthours". The G in front is for "giga", which means we are talking 10 to the power of 9, or a billion. So a gigawatt is a billion watts. Elsewhere in the story I talked about MW, megawatts, which means 10 to the power of 6, or a million watts. The thing that was at issue was the W bit.

The figures that were being questioned came straight from primary sources. SSE, the company building the Ferrybridge battery site, talks about capacity in MW: see for yourself. The National Grid report I had cited for projections of future BESS needs also talked about capacity in GW: again, scroll to page 119 and see for yourself. The numbers were correct. Maybe I was using these units wrong in some way, but if I was, it seemed, so were an energy company and the National Grid.

Still, I consulted the editors at BBC Future, and emailed Grazia Todeschini; an electrical engineer at King's College London whom I had interviewed for the story. She told me that, to properly describe a battery, you need two numbers: one expressed in W and one in Wh. Strictly, the W is "power" and the Wh is "capacity".

In other words, the numbers I had used were all correct, but I had used the wrong word to describe them. While the figure in W is indeed a description of "how much electricity this thing can store", it isn't technically the "capacity".

The thing is, the word "capacity" is often used loosely. The National Grid report I had relied on did so, as did many energy company websites. In fact, while this was going on, the International Energy Agency released a big report called Renewables 2024. In the executive summary, the very first graph shows growth in "renewable capacity", measured in GW. The IEA is about as authoritative as it gets on energy supply.

Armed with new knowledge, I went back to the editors, and in the spirit of dotting Is and crossing Ts they decided to remove some of the uses of the word "capacity". For various reasons they couldn't remove them all: for instance, some are in direct quotes from interviewees, which can't be edited.

This is what a fact-checking process looks like. I went back to my documentary sources, and explicitly asked an expert in the field if I had done anything wrong. And then the editors tweaked the article accordingly.

I want to end by saying something about the importance of corrections. Mistakes are inevitable in any body of work, so despite my instinctual panic there's no shame in it. The important thing is to be open-minded when someone calls you out for a slip, to tell the editors immediately, to investigate, and ultimately to be willing to make a change.

I'm also a believer in openness. Apart from ensuring accuracy, I think it builds trust. A lot of ink has been spilled, rightly, about newspapers burying corrections deep in the inside pages, where hardly anyone will see them. It seems to me this is fine if it was something minor, like a spelling mistake or a slightly wrong date for a historical event. However, it becomes wildly problematic if the correction is an admission that an entire story was nonsense, especially if the story in question was promoted on the front page or otherwise a big deal. If your publication made a dramatic claim, and it was wrong, you need to correct it prominently. There is a sliding scale of mistakes, ranging from missing a full stop at the end of a paragraph (annoying but ultimately harmless) to falsely accusing someone of murder (very harmful). To my mind, the prominence of corrections needs to reflect the severity of the mistake.

Where does my "capacity" mistake fall on this spectrum? I think it isn't a big deal, for two reasons.

First, if the way I used "capacity" is a mistake, then a lot of people in the energy industry are making the same mistake. As I've documented, pretty much every source I looked at used "capacity" in the same way as me. I think it was pretty reasonable for me, as a journalist, to copy the National Grid's word choices.

Second, nobody reading the story would come away with the wrong impression. Again: all the figures are correct, as is the picture they paint of what the energy system looks like now and how it needs to change to achieve net-zero. And far from my word choice misleading readers, the lay understanding of "capacity" is "how much can this thing store", which is the right idea.

In short, this is the sort of correction that publications should absolutely make, and BBC Future did. But it's a minor one.

My contributions to the 2024 GESDA Breakthrough Radar

10/10/2024

I helped to write the 2024 GESDA Breakthrough Radar. What is the GESDA Breakthrough Radar, I hear you ask? It's a roundup of the most exciting scientific and technological fields, from artificial intelligence to synthetic biology. Crucially, it offers predictions for what these fields will throw up in the next 5, 10 and 25 years, based on workshops with leading researchers.

The Radar is produced by the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), a think tank affiliated with the Swiss government. The idea is to provide policymakers and diplomats with a rough roadmap of coming scientific discoveries, so they can make policy to handle them. That means anything from how to regulate synthetic biology to how to drive decarbonisation.

I want to emphasise that I am one of many writers and editors who contributed to the report. This was very much a team effort.

With that in mind, here, in alphabetical order, are the topics that I covered. Some of these were written in previous years and lightly updated for 2024. Others are entirely new. All of this is completely free to read, and it's designed to be very accessible (policymakers and diplomats not necessarily having much background in science). So if you're interested in what the next 25 years might look like, do have a read.

Archaeology
Decarbonisation
Earth systems modelling
Future food systems
Infectious diseases
Ocean science
Science of the origins of life (I mean, I did previously write a book on this...)
Shaping ecosystems: Anticipating an age of eco-augmentation (this one was particularly good fun because I went to a three-day conference about it in the Swiss Alps, which is a very nice way to spend three days and I recommend it very much)
Solar radiation modification
Synthetic biology

Why fantasy has often handled environmentalism better than science fiction

12/9/2024

This essay was published in Arc, a sadly short-lived spin-off from New Scientist, in 2014. Arc was a wild blend of short stories, essays, criticism and general interestingness, created and edited by Simon Ings. You can buy back issues on Zinio, if you want to see it in its full glory.

In this essay, I tried to articulate why it is that so many of my deeper feelings about nature and the environment are rooted in fantasy literature, not in science fiction - even though you might think SF was the genre more suited to dealing with such "realistic" topics.

There are bits of it I would write differently now, so in a few places I've inserted notes in square brackets. Also, things have changed in the last decade: subgenres like cli-fi and solarpunk were less prominent in 2014. So in some ways the argument might be out of date. But on the other hand, I was mostly writing about the prominent "entry texts" in the genres, as those are both the most widely known and responsible for setting the tone. You can judge for yourself whether there's still anything worthwhile here, 10 years on.

The Hobbiton set in New Zealand (Credit: Joe Ross, CC-by-SA-2.0)

The nature of the catastrophe

Science fiction struggles to portray environmental concerns; fantasy brings them to life. Michael Marshall wonders why talking trees speak more eloquently than hard facts

Everyone knows the environment is in trouble. The climate is changing, species are going extinct, and vulnerable people are paying the price. It’s part of our narrative as a society: we are screwing up the planet, and we need to stop before we screw ourselves.

You wouldn’t know any of this from science fiction. SF has, with a few exceptions, ignored climate change and the ways in which a rich biosphere helps to sustain our society. The exceptions (we’ll get to them) do portray environmentalism extremely well, but they are not entry texts: new readers must work their way through the genre before they reach them.

Environmentalism and science fiction both have their roots in the nineteenth century [Dear Past Mike, this sentence needs a qualifier. People have been worrying about the environment for millennia, and the roots of SF run extremely deep.]. The period that saw the publication of science fiction’s formative texts, Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds, also saw William Blake coin the phrase “dark Satanic mills” in reference to the hideous pollution created by the Industrial Revolution. Later, the British physicist John Tyndall produced the first real evidence of the greenhouse effect, demonstrating via ingenious experiments that gases like water vapour and carbon dioxide trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. [<cough> Eunice Foote </cough>]

Science fiction exploded onto the popular consciousness in the middle of the twentieth century, driven first by pulp magazines and later by B-movies. By then some scientists were already concerned about climate change, warning that if humanity kept emitting carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels, Earth might become dangerously hot. Concerns loomed large about the destruction of wilderness, the extinction of species and pollution. The milestone came in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a grim but lyrical warning about the reckless use of pesticides on farms.

These were some of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Science fiction ignored them. The great early authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were largely concerned with space travel, artificial intelligence and other forms of computer technology, and with what a future society might look like. Asimov’s Foundation series, published in the 1950s, is a long disquisition on how to run a society so that it survives in the long term, but environmental degradation, one of the principal threats that can collapse a society, doesn’t feature.

[If I were to write this now, I would tweak that last sentence to make clear that climate change can act as a stressor on societies, but how that society (especially its elite) chooses to respond is a huge factor in whether or not a collapse (whatever that means) happens.]

In the decade after Silent Spring, Clarke produced two important works - 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama – and Heinlein published The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. All are classics, asking huge questions about our place in the universe and how a space-based society might work; but it’s fair to say that Silent Spring might as well not have been written. In fact Heinlein’s book expressed a libertarian philosophy, preaching extreme individual freedom and an extremely reduced state. Many other technofuturist authors pushed similar philosophies, until the courageous individual struggling against the cruel, repressive state became a recurring theme in the genre. In fiction, as in the real world, libertarianism tends to ignore environmental concerns – or denies their validity – because they pose an insoluble problem for anyone trying to design a libertarian utopia. It’s hard to imagine how to halt society’s emissions of greenhouse gases if you don’t even admit the existence of society.

One exceptional science fiction author did tackle the environment. The result, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is (for my money) the best science fiction novel ever written. It contains plentiful genre tropes, from faster-than-light travel to advanced weapons technology. But its breakthrough was to create an entire planetary ecology and then show how people lived within it.

The desert world of Arrakis has almost no water, so the native Fremen have been forced to adopt extreme methods of water conservation. They wear “stillsuits” that prevent them losing moisture to the air and even have a taboo against crying. In later novels, the Fremen gather enough water to change the planet’s climate, and Arrakis experiences rain for the first time. But this comes at a high price: the rain is lethal to the giant sandworms, which produce the lucrative spice that underpins the economy. So, in a bid to improve their environment, the people of Arrakis damage it and threaten their own livelihoods.

In the wake of Dune, science fiction had a decade of strong interest in the environment. In 1966, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! delivered a stern warning of the dangers of overpopulation, portraying a nightmarish future New York City that is overcrowded and chronically short of food. [Your regularly scheduled note that fears about overpopulation are at best wildly overblown and often extremely misguided.] Its film adaptation Soylent Green, together with Silent Running, in which a botanist fights to preserve some of the last living plants in an artificial orbiting habitat, contributed to a short wave of environmentalist-themed SF at the movies. But this burst of interest wouldn’t last.

Instead the 1980s saw the rise of cyberpunk and a revival of space opera. Cyberpunk often took environmental destruction as read and made it part of the background: the future world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer has clearly taken a beating. It’s equally obvious that this wasn’t a book about the environment.

Iain Banks exploded onto the SF stage in the 1980s with his Culture novels. Set in an ultra-technological communist utopia, the books were unusually thoughtful space operas that asked tough moral questions, often about whether advanced societies have the right to interfere with the more primitive. The series helped establish a template for many later authors like Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross. Strangely, though, for a writer so vocally “green” in interviews and in his personal life, Banks rarely worked environmental questions into his fiction.

The one genre that has really aced environmentalism is the one that has, on the face of it, the least to do with harsh reality. From The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones, fantasy has conveyed the threat of environmental destruction in a way SF never has.

Tolkien himself denied that his tale of hobbits and their quest to destroy the One Ring was about anything in particular. In his foreword to the book he said that, while it was enriched by his experiences and ideas, he didn’t like to write allegories, and preferred “history, true or feigned”. So one shouldn’t take The Lord of the Rings as an environmentalist tract, any more than it is an allegory for the second world war. But it does contain a wealth of key environmentalist ideas, and even foreshadows some modern debates.

Most obviously, the book portrays a clash between heavy industry and the desire to preserve nature. Sauron’s forces pollute their home, leaving it a barren wasteland. One character states that Sauron “can torture and destroy the very hills”, and the Dark Lord’s stronghold of Mordor is a vivid portrayal of a collapsed, polluted ecosystem. The subplot about the wizard Saruman, who cuts down a forest to build facilities for his army, and his defeat by the talking trees known as Ents, develops this theme. The Ents’ final decision, to recolonise the area razed by Saruman, is a textbook example of rewilding, in which a landscape altered by humans is restored to a wild state by reintroducing long-lost plants and animals. We can be confident Tolkien intended this fanciful-sounding interpretation: in his foreword he complains, “The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten”.

But there is more: the people of Middle Earth have to find ways to coexist with nature, just as we do. Today, most countries measure their success in terms of Gross Domestic Product: how much money they have made. But there is a growing push towards new measures that focus on the wellbeing of people and the environment. There is no point having lots of money if everyone is miserable and hungry. Tolkien understood this: in the book’s penultimate chapter, Saruman takes over the hobbits’ homeland, the Shire, and converts it from a bucolic paradise to a ravaged industrial backlot. He does this largely out of spite, and indeed there’s no benefit to anyone: as one hobbit notes, the villains install a new mechanised mill to increase efficiency, but there is no point as the old mill was quite fast enough to grind enough corn for everyone. The Shire has made technological and economic progress, but all this does is foul the environment, and make its inhabitants less happy.

With all these proto-environmentalist themes in The Lord of the Rings, it’s no wonder it was taken up by the burgeoning hippy movement in the 1960s – to Tolkien’s acute embarrassment. (The San Francisco free-love scene was hardly his intended audience.) But it’s striking, the extent to which these themes recur in other fantasy classics of the twentieth century.

Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy was published in the late 60s and early 70s. Written for older children, it follows a wizard named Ged from his initial training to his time as chief wizard, when he must defend the Earthsea archipelago from a seemingly world-ending evil.

As in many of her books, Le Guin uses Taoist ideas about how to live one’s life, with a strong focus on letting things be and refraining from action unless it is absolutely necessary. This is spelled out early in the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, when Ged is apprenticed to a wizard named Ogion and finds that his tutor hardly ever does magic. This frustrates Ged, “for when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside.” Clouds are comically shoved from side to side by neighbouring wizards, none of whom want to get wet. “But Ogion let the rain fall where it would,” and simply takes shelter, reluctant to change the path of the storm in case he inadvertently causes something far more serious. Nowadays we know that human interference in the climate can create more extreme storms, yet we keep pressing planet Earth’s buttons willy-nilly. Ogion seems wiser than ever.

Restoring the balance of nature is something the genre returns to just as often as it returns to magic swords and dragons. Fantasy authors obsess over the notion of evil as a pollutant. Hating everything that is beautiful, the villainous Lord Foul of Stephen Donaldson’s ten-book Thomas Covenant series, begun in the late 1970s, creates monsters and spews toxins into The Land. [Yes, I know these books are hugely problematic for (among other things) their portrayal of rape, not to mention Donaldson's, er, overcooked prose style.]

In the second Covenant trilogy, Lord Foul deploys a piece of black magic known as the Sunbane, a malevolent aura that surrounds the Sun and causes paroxysmic environmental changes. In rapid succession, The Land suffers drought, fertility, pestilence and rain, the changes coming too swiftly and violently for many of its inhabitants to adapt. Anyone wanting to get a sense of what it would be like to live in a world suffering rapid climate change should go read The Wounded Land. It is far from literally correct, but it is incomparably vivid.

Today’s most successful fantasy series is George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted for television as Game of Thrones. [Obviously, I wrote this before season eight came out] The series is known for its rich political intrigue and “realistic” approach to its pseudo-medieval setting. But it’s telling that even in this tale of warring kings, the biggest threat is environmental. In the world of Westeros, seasons last for years, and the story plays out in the run-up to a brutal winter in which the snows are expected to fall hundreds of feet thick, causing everyone to freeze to death. That’s if the ice zombies that only come out in winter don’t get them first (and of course assuming that Martin ever gets around to finishing the thing). In Martin’s world, political leaders squabble endlessly over power and money while in the background a changing climate threatens to kill everyone. Sound familiar?

There are other elements in fantasy that are innately environmentalist. The use of anthropomorphic nature is one: Tolkien’s personified trees, with their comical slow speech, no doubt help many young readers to love woodland. They certainly had that effect on me. The use of talking animals, whether it’s Le Guin’s aloof dragons or the talking rabbits in Watership Down, also ensures that the reader starts to care about nature, almost without realising it. This is most effective when the anthropomorphised organisms are still recognisably themselves: Tolkien’s Ents are extremely tree-ish in their behaviour and manner, for all that they can talk and walk; it’s an easy leap from liking Ents to liking real trees.

Many fantasies hark back to a distant past when their world was dominated by other creatures, before the advent of humans. Many of the trees in A Song of Ice and Fire’s Westeros are carved with faces, which relate in some nebulous way to old gods that have long since disappeared with the rise of human society. Humans in fantasy are often interlopers in a wondrous landscape, who don’t know what they’re doing and may unwittingly harm their world. Concepts like stewardship, and responsibility for nature, emerge naturally from this.

Fantasy succeeds by expressing these elemental truths about humanity’s relationship with nature, rather than through realistic depictions of genuine environmental problems. After all, metaphor is often more vivid than straight exposition, however beautifully delivered. That’s why the Ents’ assault on Isengard can still move me to joyful tears, over two decades after I first read it. I know that trees can’t literally do that, but it’s an exaggerated version of something I would dearly like to see happen: for Earth’s wild areas to retake some of the land that humanity has sprawled onto and despoiled.

Can science fiction offer any competition to these vivid images? James Cameron’s Avatar – at time of writing still the most financially successful film in history – did try. Avatar is a straightforward environmentalist parable, in which human miners dig for a rare mineral in the pristine forest of an alien world, while eco-conscious natives fight back. [Hmm, not sure about "natives": it has a colonialist ring. "Indigenous peoples" would be better]

The film certainly took environmentalism to a mass audience, and the astoundingly detailed ecosystem of Pandora makes for a vivid experience. The trouble is, the film articulates an out-of-date “hair-shirt” version of environmentalism. The only way to live in harmony with the Pandoran ecosystem, it seems, is to abandon advanced technology and return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Really? It wasn’t possible to mine for the mineral in a slightly more sensitive way, without blowing up the natives’ home tree? Avatar suggests that any damage to the ecosystem, even the smallest interference, is a bad thing, and that modern technology and the environment cannot coexist. If Cameron really believes that, he should refrain from making big-budget movies. At any rate, much of the environmentalist movement has moved on from this sort of thinking. You can now find greens like Mark Lynas arguing furiously in favour of nuclear power, because it produces lots of energy without releasing greenhouse gases. Avatar, for all its visual brilliance, was obsolete even when it came out.

In the book world, there is a movement (or at least, a number of authors who critics have lumped together and called a movement) called biopunk, with a strong environmental emphasis. The most successful example is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, set in a Bangkok where sea levels have risen and genetically-modified organisms run wild. Bacigalupi shows how environmental change has affected society – but it’s a grim book, and long, not for science-fiction newbies.

SF’s environmentalist figurehead is Kim Stanley Robinson. His Mars trilogy is one of the pinnacles of modern science fiction, and its story of ecologists terraforming Mars should be read by everyone with an interest in the environment (which is to say, everyone). Robinson tackles everything from man’s relationship with nature to environmental economics, and does it all with élan. ["man's relationship", ugh] More recently, his less-successful Science in the Capital series is about US government scientists trying to stop climate change. [Robinson has since published Aurora and The Ministry for the Future, both of which tackle environmental issues.]

Robinson is going to go down as one of science fiction’s greats, but he is not a gateway author. Only a fraction of fans will get past the allure of full-on space opera and find their way to someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. By contrast, most people’s introduction to adult fantasy is likely to be either The Lord of the Rings or – nowadays – A Song of Ice and Fire, and the environmentalist themes are in place from the start. The beginner texts may not receive the same critical attention as more sophisticated works, but they are more influential; these are the stories people read while they’re young.

Does SF have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to portraying environmentalism? Maybe, but there are a few things its practitioners might bear in mind. First, any novel that’s set anything more than a few decades into the future has to include the effects of climate change. It’s ridiculous not to. You can make all the cute predictions about artificial intelligence you like: if you set your story in 2100 and don’t at least give lip-service to extreme weather and an ice-free Arctic, your imagined future will be irrelevant. It would be like a science fiction writer of the early twentieth century deciding, without explanation, to imagine a futuristic society without computers or space travel.

Some of the techniques of fantasy aren’t really available to science fiction authors. It’s hard within science fiction to personify nature (although Avatar did give it a shot). SF authors, being oh-so-rational, wouldn’t dream of anthropomorphising a tree – and then they have the devil’s own job making the trees matter. Shorn of the ability to walk and talk, greenery’s a poor protagonist. [I didn't anticipate Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, which among other things personifies slime moulds.]

But perhaps SF authors could trust the real science a bit more. Most ecologists, for instance, don’t talk much about the beauty of wilderness, but about “ecosystem services”: the things that ecosystems like forests do for us that we don’t appreciate until they’re gone. For instance, forests clean dirt out of the rivers that flow through them, ensuring that people living downstream have access to clean water. When you take that into account, preserving the forest stops being about having a nice place to go for a walk, and becomes a health issue. Frank Herbert used this idea in Dune half a century ago, but it hasn’t had much play since.

One big thing science fiction could do is ditch the libertarian fringe. SF has done so little on the environment because the genre can’t bear to let go of its libertarian ideals. It’s easier to transfer those ideals into outer space (where resources seem effectively limitless) than face up to the realities of life on the ground. From Heinlein on, the genre has pushed an extreme freedom ethic that rejects any notion that society has the right to curtail an individual’s actions, particularly if those actions are part of a free market.

This is an easy place to write from, but it’s a calamitous philosophy to live by. We often hear complaints that SF has lost its can-do optimism. Well, is it any wonder? In the hard, chromed, rugged, affectless shambles SF has made of the world, the introduction of some shamanic wonder - or failing that, a little love of place and people - would go a very long way.

How I came to write a feature in Nature about the origins of plate tectonics

9/9/2024

Recently I a feature out in Nature, about how plate tectonics got started on Earth. It's free to read:

Geology's biggest mystery: When did plate tectonics start to reshape Earth?

I want to say a little about how this story originated, for two reasons. First, I thought it might be useful to any aspiring or junior journalists to get a sense of how someone like me (who has been around the block a few times) comes up with ideas. This is one case where it was solely my idea and I can tell you exactly what happened. And second, I can give a little bit of personal context that wasn't appropriate for a reported story.

What happened was this. I have a longstanding interest in palaeontology and the history of the Earth, which of course relates to my fascination with the origin of life - about which I wrote a book called The Genesis Quest that you should all go and read. This includes an interest in what the planet was like when it was young, e.g. when did the crust solidify, when did oceans form. The onset of plate tectonics is a big part of that story.

For years I've seen (and written!) stories that try to pin down when plate tectonics got started. Depending on the type of data they were collecting and the processes they were trying to study, people came up with wildly differing timings - sometimes billions of years apart. So the debate became a matter of "my data's better than your data", or perhaps "my data's more relevant than your data".

In 2022, I wrote a feature for New Scientist about the early geological history of the Earth. This was mostly focused on the early oceans, in particular on the vexed question of when the first exposed land emerged, and what that meant for the origin of life. Here it is (paywalled):

What Earth's mysterious infancy tells us about the origins of life

The story included a short box about the origins of plate tectonics, based largely on a conversation with geologist Nadja Drabon. Her evidence pointed to a multi-part story, in which there were early episodes of subduction that were localised and short-lived, and which gradually built into global plate tectonics. In other words, there was no single switch-on date: it was a process. I wrote this up in about 200 words, and spent most of my time on the oceans question.

Once that feature was done, the idea of a multi-stage onset of plate tectonics lodged itself in my head and wouldn't leave. If this was correct, then all those stories I had read (and written!) pinpointing the origin of plate tectonics were in some crucial sense wrong. Not that the data was wrong, or that the dates identified weren't significant. But the stories were conceptually wrong because they were chasing a single onset date, when that just wasn't what happened.

Naturally, actual geologists were way ahead of me. When I started looking, I found reviews making exactly this kind of argument. It seemed to me that there was a quiet paradigm shift happening in geology: the idea of a single onset of plate tectonics had proved unworkable, so everyone was instead devising multi-step scenarios. And that's the story I pitched to Rich Monastersky at Nature, and which is now published.

It was a challenging story to report, because two contradictory things happened. Some of the geologists I spoke to were, I think, slightly baffled that I was doing it, because what I was saying seemed obvious to them. Meanwhile, the editors at Nature (rightly!) took a certain amount of convincing, because this shift in consensus had happened gradually and there wasn't a clear peg: no single dramatic study that had overturned the previous paradigm. It had crept up on everyone, including me.

I don't know how much cut-through the story will have, but here's the dream. You should never again see a story that is framed around "we found the date when plate tectonics started". The geological community is forming a consensus that there is no such single date. It was a multi-step process. Put another way, the point of the story isn't to say "this is exactly how it happened", but rather "this is the kind of story we need to be telling".

This is, of course, also implicitly about churnalism. If you're a journalist who is constantly writing rapid-turnaround stories with little or no time for reflection or deep reading, you won't be able to grasp slow but crucial trends like this. I'm privileged to be able to do this sort of thing, because the outlets I write for are willing to give me the time and money it takes. Many other journalists aren't so lucky.

That time my wife and I watched literally all the Star Trek films

8/9/2024

During the covid-19 pandemic, beginning August 2020, my wife Sarah and I amused ourselves (if that's the term) in an eccentric way. We watched all the Star Trek films and I tweeted her reactions.

The premise for this was that I had seen all of them, but Sarah, being (as I put it) less warped, had only seen a handful. And some of her responses were, um, strong.

Since Twitter is now X and also awful, I thought I'd recover the ensuing mega-thread and re-publish it on my own site.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

I worried about this one. Sarah has loved several slow-paced sci-fi films, notably Moon and Arrival, but she hated 2001 (“two hours of my life I’m never getting back”) and was variously bored and amused by Alien. I was right to worry.

She does like the overture music. Then she is startled to learn that the theme music for The Next Generation is actually the credits music from this film, repurposed. And then there are Klingons. She blames me for the fact she recognises the ships instantly.

“Great CG,” she says sarcastically, of the Great Big Wibbly Wobbly Swirly Thing in Space. I point out that the film is pre-CG and is all practical effects, and she shifts to grudging respect. This will not last.

We re-meet all the characters as they assemble, and Kirk spends a good few minutes eye-fucking the revamped Enterprise. Eye-fucking, we eventually decided, is a key element in this film.

Plus there are new characters! First: Decker, who was supposed to be the Enterprise captain until Kirk had him subbed out, creating Manly Conflict. Sarah says Decker looked like a Ken doll. Afterwards I found the actor’s career ended *horribly*.

And then there is Ilia, the navigator and Decker’s ex. Ilia is also Deltan, a new species for Star Trek, with a notable feature the film entirely fails to explain. Fortunately I have read the novelisation...

<insert gif of Homer Simpson screaming "NEEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDDDDDD!">

Deltans have super-intense pheromones, so humans who have sex with them basically become addicted. Sarah says she can relate. This is why Ilia says she has taken an “oath of celibacy”: she’s not allowed to shag anyone in case they lose it. Sarah is bemused.

So I go a bit further and explain that this was the sort of vaguely sex-positive, but also rather male-gaze-y, stuff that Gene Roddenberry was coming up with at the time. He also wanted Troi in TNG to have three breasts. Sarah’s face is quite expressive now.

Ilia, by the way, was played by an Indian actress called Persis Khambatta, in what was meant to be her Hollywood breakthrough. It seems it didn’t pan out, as within a decade she was starring in She-Wolves of the Wasteland.

Anyway the Enterprise finally sets off, but when they try to go to warp it doesn’t work and they go into a wormhole, which distorts time and causes everything to become reeeeaaaalllyyyyyyyyyyy slooooooooooowwww. Sarah will later say this encapsulates the whole film.

To escape they have to fire a photon torpedo, and the slow-motion is now so extreme that Chekov says: “Phooooooootoooooooon toooooooorpeeeeeeeeeedoooooooooo.” Sarah laughs really, really hard. I sense the film is losing her. I am not wrong.

Spock arrives, and they finally get to the Wibbly Wibbly Swirly Thing, and after some mild kerfuffle fly inside. A lot of 2001-style special effects ensue. At this point we pause the film to get drinks etc...

When we get back Sarah asks if this is the finale. I check the DVD player and we’re at 1:06 of a 2-hour film. Sarah: “Are you shitting me?!” The film is paused on a shot of Nichelle Nichols looking fed up, which Sarah says expresses her feelings precisely.

It emerges that Sarah thinks the film is a single episode’s worth of plot stretched out to feature length. I explain this is literally the case (it was supposed to be the pilot for an aborted Star Trek Phase II TV series). “Uh-huh.”

More special effects and model work, and then a glowing beam of light trundles around the bridge and disappears Ilia. Then the Enterprise gets sucked into a Giant Metal Orifice, and a robot version of Ilia comes onboard to study the crew.

This is where the film briefly threatens to be interesting: the alien is a single huge machine, and doesn’t believe the humans are true life forms. This is a neat-ish twist on carbon chauvinism and prefigures films like Blade Runner.

But Sarah will have none of it. If the AI is advanced enough to have crossed the galaxy and made this whizzy machine, it should know biology and/or be able to imagine forms of life different to itself. We eventually agree that the alien robot is “basically racist”.

When we learn that the alien is called V’ger and that it’s transmitting a message in basic radio, Sarah quickly figures out that it’s an old NASA probe, one of the Voyagers, that’s been hugely upgraded by alien robots. The film reveals this 10-15 minutes later.

V’ger has unfulfilled needs and wants to meet its creator, to touch its creator. Sarah says this doesn’t make sense so I say it’s like Michelangelo’s painting of touching God’s finger. “I always think of it as Michelangelo’s pull my finger.” I become briefly hysterical.

Sarah realises that Decker could be the one to join with V’ger. “Oh is he about to become Captain Expendable?” Decker and Robot Ilia continue eye-fucking. “How much more eye-fucking are those two going to do?!”

Spielbergian special effects mark Decker’s fusion with both V’ger and Robot Ilia. There is a final eruption of 2001-style light show and V’ger et al are gone. Sarah: “They’ve spluffed their way into hyperspace.”

The film ends with a title card: “The human adventure is just beginning”. Sarah: “It’s only just beginning?! Fuck off!” She notices Isaac Asimov’s name in the credits and is impressed, then wonders aloud why the film was nevertheless so shit.

Final rating: one-half impulse power I assure her that the next few are better. She glares at me suspiciously. “It was a nice marriage while it lasted.” So this is going well.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

I wasn’t worried about showing Sarah this film. I was right not to worry. She liked it. Our marriage is back on.

Sarah raises two key problems with WoK. The first is she knows Spock isn’t permanently dead, so his death didn’t really hit home - but she is notably silent and non-sarcastic for the actual scene, and says she can imagine how audiences must have reacted originally.

The second is a plot point. She thinks Khan and his crew shouldn’t have been able to take over a Federation starship, as they’re from the 1990s and wouldn’t even know how to unlock an iPhone. I disagree...

I point out they’re genetically engineered to be hyper-intelligent, plus they have the ship’s captain and first officer mind-controlled to help them. She counters that the previous film showed Kirk, “who’s a fucking admiral”, struggling with the new Enterprise. I give in.

Beyond that, she simply had a lot less to complain about and spent most of the film quite happily engrossed. She does say that Ricardo Montalban clearly went to the William Shatner School of Acting. He is monologuing at the time so I am unable to argue.

But interestingly she has nothing to say against the main crew’s performances, and one of Kirk’s jokes gets a genuine laugh (“Then this’ll be your big chance to get away from it all”). She doesn’t even find “KHAN!!” too silly. It’s very memed but makes sense in context.

She does think Khan’s crew look pretty stupid. In fact, with their ripped clothes and bouffant hair, she thinks they look like a 1980s hair metal band. This is annoyingly accurate. I can’t decide if Poison or The Scorpions are the best match.

Beyond that, Sarah only wishes to add one thing. “Are they fighting back? Does that mean they’re going to fire the phoooooootoooooon toooooorpeeeeeeeeedooooooo?” That one is apparently never getting old.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

It was all going so well. This film started quite promisingly and there was a good 20 minutes where Sarah was broadly happy, but then it went slowly and gradually off the rails before exploding in a fiery mess.

Sarah was pleased that the Enterprise was still visibly wrecked, inside and out, from the battles in the last film. The scars of Star Trek: Voyager run deep. She was less thrilled by Christopher Lloyd as the main Klingon: “I keep expecting him to yell ‘Great Scott’.”

I was expecting her to cry foul at the reveal that Vulcans have eternal souls, which is a godawful cheat, but she lets it slide. At that point she’s more pissed off that Kirstie Alley has been replaced as Saavik: it’s hardly a Terrence Howard / Don Cheadle trade-up.

There is also a phase where she becomes convinced the film is ripping off Star Wars. In fairness, there is in short order: a cantina, complete with backwards-talking alien; a Hoth-like snow environment; and a prison guard in a vaguely Imperial uniform.

But then Kirk et al “go rogue”, break McCoy out of prison and steal the Enterprise. The film has been building to this for a solid half-hour, and it evidently plays well because no complaints are aired.

And then we get “Mr Adventure”. As this junior officer patronises Uhura, telling her that her “career is winding down”, Sarah first demands Uhura punch him, dubs him “Chad”, and tells him to “fuck off”. Then Uhura pulls a phaser on him and locks him in a cupboard. “Love her. *Love* her.”

Sadly this will be the last unmitigated good bit. We find out that Genesis doesn’t really work. I have long hated this reveal because - like so much of this film - it walks back the interesting stuff from the last one. I air this, and Sarah agrees.

Then the reborn Spock goes into pon farr, aka Vulcan extreme horniness. At first Sarah says he could just take care of himself. I explain that it doesn’t work like that, and that he has to shag someone or he’ll die. She says this is more proof Gene Roddenberry was a perv.

Then she realises that Saavik is going to have to deal with this, and that her solution is going to involve “finger wanking”. Sarah, who is a teacher and has strong views about adult-teenage sexual consent, hits the roof. We pause the film to hash this out.

I argue Saavik is saving Spock’s life and doesn’t have any other options. Sarah argues that the sequence is simply unnecessary. The laws of biology are already upended in this situation, so Spock could just skip pon farr and only ardent Trekkies would know.

Our main takeaway is that all major 80s film franchises had questionable sexual content that fucked our generation up for life: Star Wars has Luke and Leia, Back to the Future has mother-son incest, Raiders of the Lost Ark implies Marion was underage, and then there’s this.

Now things spiral. After a rather short battle - very few phooooooootooooooon toooooooorpeeeeeeeeedoooooooooeeeeeees - the Klingons kill David. Sarah shrugs. He and Kirk had no screen time in this film, and not much last time, so who cares? Again, walking things back.

And then Kirk takes out most of the Klingons by blowing up the Enterprise. Sarah complains that the self-destruct codes are so easily cracked, “it’s like having your password be 1234”. I can only mumble that it was the 80s.

The film culminates with Kirk and Kruge having a fist fight as the planet erupts around them. The fight is so badly staged that Sarah is giggling hysterically throughout. I compare it to the fight with the Gorn in the TV series. She says it’s worse: it’s like 1960s Batman.

There is a lengthy epilogue on Vulcan where Spock gets his soul/memories back. Sarah thinks he must be very confused by how different Saavik looks. It’s telling that the film has lost her so much that McCoy’s “Helluva time to ask” doesn’t raise a smile.

Sarah’s takeaway is that the film should not exist. If they really wanted Spock to not die in ST2, they should have had him not die - not do it anyway then spend a film retconning the death, and deleting everything that film did to the status quo. Also, “finger wanking”.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

This will be uncharacteristically short, because Sarah really likes this film and had almost no major complaints or snark outbreaks. She says it’s the Fast Five of the franchise: it knows it’s a bit silly, and it *commits*.

Sarah does ask how it is that the probe is wrecking Earth. I say it’s because the signal is sending out is so powerful, that it’s effectively shouting. She nods but is then disappointed when Uhura, language genius, “caaan’t speeeeeaaaaak whaaaaaaaaale”.

She also wishes to know precisely why flying very fast around the Sun should lead to time travel. I don’t have a good answer for this, because there isn’t one, but I point out it’s what they did in “Tomorrow is Yesterday”. Apparently this is not a satisfactory response.

However the culture shock humour appeals to her. She particularly enjoys Chekov, in his thick Russian accent, politely and repeatedly asking a 1980s American policeman where he can find the “nuclear wessels”.

Later in the film she is delighted when McCoy bluffs his way into an operating room, past two guards, by claiming to have a patient with “severe post-prandial upper abdominal stitching”. (That’s cramps to you and me)

There is even a slapstick chase down a hospital corridor. I say this was probably a dry run for Three Men and a Baby and she is surprised to realise that Leonard Nimoy directed that. She has happy memories of that film - I worry it might be best left to nostalgia.

She does have concerns about the ending. First, she says it’s a problem that there are only two humpback whales in the world; they’ll get inbred. I say futuristic genetic engineering could probably handle it (given we’re already toying with this for northern white rhinos).

Then she objects that they couldn’t possibly have built a whole new Enterprise so quickly. I suggest their first sight of it might just be the superstructure, with the actual launch months later, but she’s having none of it. I feel I need to retreat.

Nitpicking aside, though, this film was a resounding success. “You won’t have a very long thread,” Sarah says. It’s fine, I say to myself. Star Trek V is coming up like a no-deal Brexit. The problem is going to be remembering everything she says.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Well that was an absolute, total, unmitigated, comprehensive clusterfuck of a disaster. “It was awful,” says Sarah at the end. She is actually lost for words.

I prompt her to consider whether it’s worse than the first one. “Ooh that’s tough,” she says thoughtfully. “They’re about level.” I suggest that they’re shit in different ways. The first one is slow and boring. STV isn’t that - “No, it’s just bollocks.”

The film opens atmospherically on a desert landscape where a wretched man digging holes is surprised by a horseman arriving through the swirling dust. Sarah thinks it looks like the Nazgul are guest-starring in Mad Max. That’s a better idea than this film.

We meet Kirk, Spock and McCoy on holiday. Kirk is climbing El Capitan in Yosemite. Sarah complains that he isn’t using any futuristic climbing equipment. I say he’s doing it old-school for kicks. She accepts this. It’s the last successful justification I will offer.

Then Kirk falls off, forcing Spock (who is handily wearing rocket boots) to save him. The special effects are not great (this will be a recurring problem) and Sarah giggles throughout. The subsequent campfire bickering does get a laugh though.

We learn that the new Enterprise was built too fast and consequently nothing works. There is suddenly an attempt at sexual chemistry between Scotty and Uhura, which Sarah roundly ignores. She complains of excessive exposition.

All the shots of shuttles in flight raise snorts of laughter, and the Enterprise in front of the Moon actually elicits a groan. “It’s like they’ve taken a step back.” I had thought ILM were on strike and couldn’t do the film, but I was mistaken: they were just too busy.

David Warner is in the film. “He’s bad,” says Sarah instantly , reasoning that the character both has greasy hair and is played by David Warner, two infallible indicators of villainy. I stun her rigid by telling her that Warner’s character isn’t bad at all.

The main villain is a Vulcan cult leader called Sybok, who wants everyone to join his quest. “Is it for the Holy Grail? Only this time they’ve got the budget for horses.” A starship is required. “Yeah because Nimbus III swallows are non-migratory.”

Kirk and co have to rescue Sybok’s hostages. To do this they need to steal some horses, which means distracting the horses’ owners, so Uhura does a burlesque fan dance on top of a sand dune. “You’re not dreaming this,” I say...

Sarah is apoplectic. She has so many issues with this scene that we have to pause the film for her to articulate them all. But in brief, it’s both plainly misogynistic and a sad comedown for a character who’s been badass in the last few films. “Uhura needs to ring HR.”

Sybok turns the tables despite Kirk’s tactical genius and soon takes over the Enterprise. He is Spock’s secret half-brother. This reveal gets no reaction whatsoever. (It occurs to me that Sybok is absent from the flashback scenes in Discovery - probably on purpose.)

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are locked in the brig, but Scotty blows a hole in the wall after using Morse code to say “stand back”, leading to a “stand back?!” moment that causes Sarah to groan that the film is lapsing into self-parody.

Shortly afterwards Scotty says “I know this ship like the back of my hand” and immediately knocks himself out on a low ceiling strut. Sarah is viciously silent. Then Kirk et al use the rocket boots to hurtle up an elevator shaft while yelling. “For god’s sake...”

It’s revealed that Sybok is actually on a quest to meet god, at the centre of the galaxy, so Sarah’s Holy Grail guess was pretty close. The reveal is met with more stony silence. There is an actually OK flashback scene about McCoy’s dad.

Then it’s off to the galactic centre, which is a wibbly-wobbly swirly thing (and not a supermassive black hole). The Enterprise gets through unscathed because of faith, or something, and finds a planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Sybok go down in a shuttle.

I forgot to mention the Klingons! They’ve been stalking the Enterprise but honestly who gives a shit. These Klingons are even less developed than the last lot, except for the dazzling twist that the first officer is a woman. Chekov will later praise her muscles.

The god planet looks remarkably like the Mojave Desert. Some stone pillars shoot out of the ground and then there’s a pillar of blue light with a bearded man in it. “For fuck’s sake.” Of course this isn’t the real god, because he needs the Enterprise to escape.

Realising that he’s fucked up massively, Sybok starts wrestling the god being, and Kirk has the Enterprise fire a photon torpedo, which temporarily incapacitates it. Sarah basically has her head in her hands. There is then a chase, except with minimal special effects.

The crisis is resolved when the Klingon ship arrives, Spock manages to take it over, and uses it to blast the god being. Kirk thought he was going to die, but Spock says that’s impossible because he wasn’t alone, thus paying off a stupid line of dialogue from earlier.

It turns out that god isn’t out there in space, and isn’t even the friends we made along the way, but is “in the human heart”. Sarah demands reassurance that things are going to get better. I promise that ST6 is good.

Her favourite bit of the film is the detail that the gritty little desert town is ironically called Paradise City, thus giving her an excuse to sing Guns n’ Roses throughout an early scene. No other redeeming features present themselves.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

We were going to watch the new Emma. with Anya Taylor-Joy, but our stupid Sky box was taking forever to download it, so Sarah said “fuck it let’s do the next Star Trek”. She broadly approved of it, but with reservations.

The opening special effects bonanza evidently hasn’t aged well; Sarah notes my input that the film invented the “Praxis wave” effect, but says later versions were better. Then she mocks the scenes of the Excelsior bridge wobbling.

When Kirk et al show up, she is immediately annoyed by expository dialogue. The “let them die” exchange does seem to land though. Then Kim Cattrall shows up as new helmsman Valeris. “I keep expecting her to say something smutty.” I explain that this will not happen.

She is getting a bit restive, but then the Klingons arrive and she immediately begins second-guessing who’s going to be bad. She isn’t sure about their leader, Gorkon: he’s played by David Warner, which (again) implies baddy, but they have fooled us with that before...

However she’s very sure about Christopher Plummer’s General Chang, who she thinks looks like Ming the Merciless and is plainly a wrong ‘un. There is then a little scene with Valeris and two random crew who are racist against Klingons. Sarah feels there is something off.

Kirk’s “we must do this again sometime” gets a proper laugh and things seem to be on an upswing. She is properly intrigued when the Enterprise seemingly fires on the Klingon ship. Unfortunately the “bad” zero-gravity effects and CGI blood ruin the assassination scene.

Sarah ridicules McCoy’s attempt to save Gorkon (“You just said you don’t know his anatomy, why are you hitting him where you’re guessing his heart is?!”). But she is otherwise fairly absorbed - there’s a mystery and she likes those, and Kirk and McCoy are suitably fucked.

The Klingon court prompts a comparison with the Senate in the Star Wars prequels, and an accusation of plagiarism. I have to point out that those films were made several years later, so can’t have been the inspiration. “OK in that case Star Wars copied this.”

She is quite impressed when Kirk and McCoy are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives mining an asteroid. “That doesn’t sound nice.” The film then settles into Spock et al mystery-solving while Kirk and McCoy struggle to survive in prison, and this all seems fine.

Sarah does roll her eyes, hard, when William Shatner snogs Iman. I suggest it’s self-parody. She’s having none of that. Then Iman shapeshifts into a teenage girl (to get out of an ankle shackle), which prompts an “ew”.

The Enterprise comes to rescue them, which necessitates Uhura talking them past a border patrol by speaking Klingon very badly. Sarah is again enraged. “What happened to her speaking all the languages?!” I say that idea only came in with the reboot films and that OG Uhura was presented more as an expert in communications technology. But I nevertheless agree this scene is stupid. She can’t speak *any* Klingon? Allied soldiers in WWII often spoke a bit of German in case they needed it. You learn these things!

Apart from that, we largely roll along quite happily from here on. Sarah approves of the Valeris reveal, as she had been getting suspicious, and she’s delighted to have twigged that the Romulan ambassador would be in on the plan.

The effects in the final battle don’t prompt any laughs, which is a first. She does roar at Kirk’s over-dramatic “Fire!” though. And she is amused that “they basically MacGyvered a phoooootooooon toooorpeeeeeeeeedooooooo to be heat-seeking”. But overall it ends well.

Sarah concludes that it was one of the better ones: “a bit predictable”, as she figured out a lot of the conspirators and their purpose early on, but lots of fun.

I ask if she’d like to attempt a ranking of the first six films, and she obliges:

4
2
6 (close to 2)
3 (significantly further down)
1/5 (way down, and she still can’t decide which is worse)

She does have a caveat though, which is that she saw 2 knowing Spock would return, which robbed the ending of its impact. But she says 2 is clearly a really solid piece of drama, so if she’d gone in blind it might have had more weight, prompting her to put it above 4.

Star Trek: Generations

As the credits roll on this film, the cat does a large and stinky shit in her litter tray that I have to go and clean up. That about sums it up for Sarah. It makes her so irate she makes a mistake in her knitting and has to unravel.

The opening shots of the champagne bottle drifting through space and then smashing on the hull of the Enterprise-B prompt immediate complaints. Sarah points out that the bottle would have to be huge to be visible, and that it’s very Eurocentric for 300 years in the future.

The Enterprise-B bridge crew is a cast of ringers. It’s the mum from Titanic who reads to her kids about Tír na nÓg! It’s Tuvok! It’s that guy from 24! And it’s Alan Ruck as the Captain. “Is he going to take the day off and piss off with his mate?”

The helmswoman is Sulu’s daughter. Sarah calls bullshit on this as we have never seen any indication of Sulu having any kind of family life. Then she wonders if this is going to be another David situation and she’s going to be killed off for effect.

There is a distress call, and it rapidly transpires that the Enterprise-B is on its maiden voyage without a tractor beam, medical staff or phooootoooooon toooorpeeeedooooooeeeeees. This absolutely infuriates Sarah, who has relatives in the navy and related fields...

“You don’t do that! You float it when it’s just the hull, sure, but then you actually build the damn thing and do sea trials before you do a proper maiden voyage! This is so stupid!”

Then she sees an alarming parallel with current events. “Oh my God, is Starfleet run by BoJo and Matt fucking Hancock and Gavin What’s-his-tits? And they’re applying their pandemic response approach to starship construction? No wonder it’s an omnishambles. Jesus Christ.”

<at this point I retweeted Boris Johnson's tweet from 2 January 2020 that "This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.">

This is all prompted by a Wibbly-Wobbly Swirly Thing, which destroys two ships - although Scotty manages to beam some of the crew aboard. These include Malcolm McDowell, who Sarah immediately IDs as the villain because, well, obviously. And Guinan, which prompts a cheer.

The Enterprise gets sucked in too, but they escape after Kirk jury-rigs a blue ray of light, and then part of the ship gets ripped open and Kirk is apparently killed. Sarah is nonplussed and concludes that there’s going to be “timey-wimey”.

We cut to the Next Generation crew, who are on the holodeck pretending to be 19th-century (??) sailors. There is a lot of alleged humour. “This is really silly.” Thankfully a distress call intervenes and the plot restarts.

On a trashed space station we’re reintroduced to Malcolm McDowell’s Dr Soran. It seems the Romulans attacked it for reasons unknown.

Meanwhile the crew are dealing with some personal issues in a frankly self-involved way. Picard is sad and withdrawn. And Data, having failed to perform a practical joke, decides that *now*, the aftermath of a Romulan attack, is the right time to have Geordi perform brain surgery on him to implant an emotion chip. (We are also meant to remember from the TV series that the chip exists.)

For about a minute, Data-with-emotions amuses Sarah. The “I hate this” bit gets a proper laugh. But then it rapidly becomes grating. “Is Data going to be a dick all the way through?” I have to confirm that yes he is.

There is a moving scene where Picard explains to Troi that his brother and nephew have died in a house fire, breaks down in tears, and reflects that his long family line is now possibly at an end. Patrick Stewart sells the hell out of it...

Sarah complains afterwards, though, that the scene is *relying* on PS. We don’t know the deceased relatives, unless we remember the one episode they were in, and we don’t see their deaths, so it’s a little forced.

Then the star explodes, and a Klingon Bird of Prey decloaks off the starboard bow. ”Theeeeeere’s Klingons off the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow... Sorry.” Soran captures Geordi and they’re beamed aboard the Klingon ship, which escapes.

We now get another decent scene, when Picard talks to Guinan about her old pal Soran and she explains that the Wibbly-Wobbly Swirly Thing is a doorway to the Nexus, wherein you feel perfect and eternal joy. Soran is obsessed with going back there.

Picard and Data figure out that Soran is destroying stars to change the course of the Nexus Ribbon. This annoys me, because the mass of the star would still be there so the gravitational fields wouldn’t be changed...

Soran wants the Ribbon to fly through a planet so he can be safely taken inside, because flying a ship into it would be too dangerous (even though it worked before and he wouldn’t care about the ship being destroyed). Argh this is contrived.

His aim is to blow up the Veridian star, pushing the Ribbon through the third planet - where Soran will be standing. The Enterprise heads off to stop him. They get into a standoff with the Klingons, who are headed by Lursa and B’Etor. Who?

Yes the film is dragging in two villains from the TV series and entirely under-using them. Sarah complains that their outfits show a ridiculous amount of boob, like so many films with women in armour, and I have no counter-argument because she’s right.

The Klingons bug Geordi’s VISOR so they can see how the Enterprise’s shields work, and proceed to start blasting the hell out of it. Sarah laughs hysterically at the extras flinging themselves around the bridge, especially the slow-motion bit.

The Enterprise pwns the Klingon ship, but the damage is done. The engines are going to explode so they have to separate the saucer section. “Ooh they don’t often do that. Exciting!” In the evacuation a child movingly drops a teddy bear. Sarah is disdainful.

The engine explosion is so big it sends the saucer plummeting towards the planet. Data says “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh shit”. This is the first thing he’s done that she’s liked in about an hour.

The ship crashes. Sarah decides that nobody in their right mind would accept a posting on a starship called Enterprise because they all get blown up or crashed. “Like, nobody ever called another boat ‘Titanic’.”

Meanwhile Picard is confronting Soran at his missile launch site in the Californian desert. We get a little speech from Soran about how the Borg killed his family, then he destroys the star and he and Picard are sucked into the Nexus just as the planet is torn apart.

Sarah is restive. She complains that Soran is under-developed and says we needed to see his family die to properly get him. She also thinks Picard isn’t in the film enough, and she wants to know if the Data/emotions thread is going to pay off. I say it won’t. She growls.

In the Nexus Picard is married with kids and it’s Christmas. The chintz level is off the charts. Sarah objects to the wife being a random when it so plainly ought to be Dr Crusher. There’s no arguing with that. Mind you the film forgot to remind us that Picard loves Crusher.

Guinan is also in the Nexus from before, because time has no meaning there (a concept we’re starting to appreciate). She sends Picard to go recruit Kirk to help him, and *finally* the two captains meet. We both agree the scene is bullshit...

Kirk is reliving an episode from 9 years earlier (in his timeline), when he dumped his girlfriend Antonia and went back to Starfleet. “Who the hell is Antonia?” I reassure Sarah that she’s not confused and Antonia has never been mentioned before. “Just... what?”

I suggest that this really ought to be Carol Marcus, because if the Nexus gives you the path not taken, then for Kirk that is marrying Carol. “YES. Why didn’t they do that?” I have no answer. This scene has annoyed me for over 20 years, and now it annoys Sarah too.

Picard talks Kirk into leaving his ersatz lovenest and they go back to the California desert to fight Soran. Fisticuffs and stunt work ensue, and Sarah is underwhelmed. “I thought it’d be awesome having Kirk and Picard together. It’s not.”

Soran gets blown up and the day is saved, but a metal bridge falls on Kirk and after a brief bit of acting he dies. Sarah is again underwhelmed. I suggest the sailing-off-into-the sunset bit from Star Trek VI is a better ending for him and she agrees immediately.

Data recovers his cat and cries with happiness. Sarah is now so fed up that even this does nothing for her, and when Troi says “another family reunited” she harrumphs. Picard and Riker have a talk about mortality and then the film ends. “Well that was definitely a film.”

I suggest to Sarah that this film is bad in a new way, because while previous stinkers like 5 had fundamentally bad core ideas, this actually has quite a good one - but the execution is awful. Specifically, I think the Nexus is quite a good concept. It forces Picard to really face mortality by tempting him with a kind of heaven, just when he’s most vulnerable - and it highlights how Picard and Kirk are both rather lonely because they’re so career-focused. This is good stuff!

But then that death-anxiety theme gets lost in a hopelessly complicated plot, the villain is underwritten so we don’t feel the weight of his grief and longing, and the Data stuff is just shoehorned. I wonder if Sarah will think this is special pleading, but she agrees.

She is staggered that it was co-written by Ronald D. Moore. “What, Battlestar Galactica?!” I say even he’s written the odd stinker. “Like what?” “Outlander.” “What’s he got to do with Shitlander?” “He’s showrunner.” “Jesus Christ. Mind you, the source material’s crap...”

In conclusion, Star Trek: Generations shows us what it would have been like if, after all the buildup, The Avengers had been a bit crap.

Star Trek: First Contact

This is by some distance the best-reviewed of the Next Generation films, so it doesn’t bode well that Sarah isn’t terribly impressed by it and has an extensive list of complaints. She doesn’t hate it, but she’s underwhelmed.

It’s better than Generations, she concedes, and there are some effective sequences as the Borg gradually take over the Enterprise. But the planet-side B-plot leaves her cold. Worse, she thinks the entire time-travel premise is fundamentally broken and stupid.

It opens well enough. The dream where the Borg tech springs out of Picard’s cheek makes her jump, and she quite likes the new Enterprise. But she objects vociferously to Crusher going blonde (or “Black Widow” as she calls it). Geordi’s artificial eyes are also not a hit.

There is a full-tilt space battle against a Borg ship, which ends disconcertingly fast when Picard suddenly knows how to blow it up. But a smaller ship escapes and time-travels into the past, with the Enterprise in tow. This all seems OK?

We’re now in the 21st century, not long “after the Third World War”. Sarah enquires if that means 2021. I wince. Now things get complicated. The Borg are here to stop a man called Zefram Cochrane from launching the first faster-than-light spaceship, because when he does so he’ll draw the attention of aliens (actually the Vulcans but nobody says that), who will make first contact with Earth. This is a pivotal moment in human history, and in the history of the galaxy.

Sarah accepts this in grudging silence. Later she will flay the whole concept. We’ll get to that. Anyway some of the crew are on the surface helping Cochrane fix his ship, which the Borg have damaged. But things are not well on the Enterprise.

Geordi mentions that “it’s getting a little warm”, which Sarah identifies as the least subtle bit of foreshadowing ever. In short order we learn that the Borg are aboard. Now we have two plots: Picard, Data, Worf and Crusher on the ship - Riker, Geordi and Troi on Earth.

Troi has found Cochrane but this has necessitated getting drunk with him. Marina Sirtis has a lot of fun as Drunk Troi and Sarah chuckles. But then she says it’s jarring. The Borg plot is meant to be creepy and intense, and this goofiness doesn’t fit.

The film keeps weakening the tension by cutting to “comedy” scenes in the planet. This is doubly annoying because there’s plenty of story-appropriate humour, like the bit where Data starts experiencing anxiety as he walks into the Borg nest.

Sarah is quite impressed with the Borg stuff. There’s a moment where Data snaps a drone’s neck that elicits a “Data’s a badass”, and a scene where half a dozen drones emerge from a dark room so at first you only see their red eye beams is “properly creepy”.

But the tension never properly builds. A sequence where Picard lures some Borg onto the holodeck elicits major grumbles. Sarah also finds Alfre Woodard’s Lily quite annoying at this point, as she’s doing a lot of shrieking and shouting (this at least will improve).

And then there’s the Borg Queen. I’ve always hated the whole idea because it gives the Borg a personality, when the thing that’s scary about the Borg is they’re utterly dehumanised.

Sarah is mostly just taken aback by the sexual undertones: The Queen has human skin grafted onto Data’s arm, then blows on it to give him goosebumps and asks if that was good for him. “Well this is 18-rated!” Then she seduces him. When Data says he hasn’t shagged for 8 years Sarah wants to know who. “Tasha,” I say. “Oh yeah!”

Sarah says she can see the appeal. Given how much sex toys have improved just in the last few decades, it seems likely that Data would have all the mod cons, as it were, and would “know all the tricks”. She decides he will now be known as “Data Unstoppable Sex Machine”.

We get another action sequence in which Picard, Worf and a redshirt have to walk in spacesuits over the ship’s outer hull. This is pretty suspenseful and holds Sarah’s attention, and Worf’s weary “What are you suggesting” gets a proper laugh.

Now the film gets properly good. The Borg take over almost all the ship, and a row breaks out when Worf proposes using the self-destruct while Picard wants to stay and fight. We see that Picard isn’t thinking straight because he’s traumatised by his experience with them.

This leads to the film’s best scene, where Lily chews Picard out for his obsession and compares him to Captain Ahab, so he loses his shit... and realises she’s right. It’s terrific, and Sarah announces that she now likes Lily.

We then pause the film to discuss the excessive referencing of classic literature in Star Trek. Sarah says the Moby Dick use here “absolutely works”, but it’s a crutch the films lean on to seem sophisticated, and the choices are often blandly Eurocentric.

Sarah enjoys the action finale in the simplest way possible: Patrick Stewart is stripped to his vest, becoming “the thinking woman’s John McClane”. Data’s altered face reminds her of Buffalo Bill. And the shots of the Borg Queen’s flesh liquefying get an “urgh”.

But as the film ends she says the story is bad. You get the goofy Cochrane stuff alongside the hard-as-nails Borg plot and they undermine each other. The Borg are the wrong baddies for this story, I suggest; it needs someone anti-progress. Belligerent Klingons?

Sarah also thinks interfering with history isn’t a Borg thing to do: it’s too creative and they’re supposed to be zombie-like. And if they can time-travel, why not just go back and assimilate Earth in 1472 or something? “It’s all very contrived.”

Sarah’s final critique is that the film underuses its cast - especially Troi and Crusher. “Troi basically gets pissed and that’s it,” she says, and neither of us can think of anything Crusher does. Sarah says this is a fail, and I can’t disagree. TL:DR; this went poorly.

<posted 9 September 2020>

Sarah decided that since today is #StarTrekDay we should crack on with the rewatch, and unfortunately that means:

Star Trek: Insurrection

I thought Sarah might take against this film, and I was right. Elements of it impressed her, but for the most part it collapsed in a heap. There will be ranting.

We open in media res with a bucolic village, which Sarah immediately identifies as about to have some shit go down. Data is there and he goes rogue, exposing a hidden Starfleet base.

Alongside the Starfleet officers there are some new aliens with stretchy, peeling skin. They are called the Son’a, but Sarah diligently refuses to learn that and instead calls them the Bollock People throughout.

The Enterprise arrives to try and capture Data and find out why he’s gone rogue. This involves entering a dodgy region of space with lots of weird gas clouds and stuff. Sarah says the CGI is terrible, which will become a standing complaint throughout.

Picard and Worf chase Data in a shuttle, and try to distract him with a rousing chorus of “A British Tar” from HMS Pinafore, which he was rehearsing before he left. Sarah says this is “ridiculous” and I cannot disagree. I hate this stupid goofy sequence.

However this does get a big laugh: “Mr Worf, do you know Gilbert and Sullivan?” “No sir, I have not had the chance to meet all the new crew members since I have been back.”

The film then goes into mystery-solving mode, as Picard etc try to figure out what happened to Data, while at the same time weird things start happening like Geordi’s eyes growing back (a development that elicits a yawn from Sarah).

However we interrupt this for the Riker-Troi Reconsummation Event. This has the disastrous consequence of Troi shaving off Riker’s beard, which Sarah says makes him look like a 1960s Republican politician called Chad, with a put-upon wife possibly called Betty.

Picard is also getting his motor running: with Anij, who lives in the village. Sarah says she can well understand why Anij would be having “fanny flutters” at the sight of Patrick Stewart, but is annoyed that Crusher-Picard is off the table.

Anyway the crew discovers a cloaked ship with a holodeck of the village inside, and Picard twigs that the planet is a fountain of youth. Anij and the others are centuries old. This is why Geordi’s eyes grew back, and it’s why Picard is dancing the mambo.

It seems the Bollock People are working with Starfleet to move Anij’s people off the fountain-of-youth planet so they can take it for themselves.

Picard has a stand-up row with the local admiral, Dougherty, about this. This is the best scene of the film and holds Sarah’s attention easily. Properly harnessing the planet’s life-giving effects means harvesting special radiation from its rings, but this means setting off a reaction that will leave the planet uninhabitable. So for millions of people to benefit, Anij’s people must be removed from their home. Picard will have none of this. It’s “forced relocation”, he says, and it destroys cultures.

Dougherty offers increasingly weaselly defences. Sarah says he reminds her of a lot of politicians, who say that it’s necessary to break some rules for the greater good and we should trust them. After all, they’re only breaking the Prime Directive in a specific and limited way. #SpecificAndLimited

Sarah also draws parallels with Israel-Palestine, and with Europe’s carving up of Africa. All in all she is fascinated and engaged with the politics and ethics of the scenario, and I begin to hope that despite its goofy bits this film might be a highlight. This won’t last.

For starters Sarah points out a huge plot hole. Why not just harvest the material from the rings (maybe with the ramscoop that we’ll later see the Enterprise use) and do the dangerous reaction somewhere else, so the planet won’t get wrecked?

This has never occurred to me, and it evidently didn’t occur to anyone in-universe either. Sarah says this is because the people in charge are all men. She also suspects the Bollock People of having personal reasons to kill Anij’s people, as their plan is so OTT.

The second half of the film is mostly a series of running battles, as the Bollock People try to beam everyone off the planet while Picard et al try to stop them, and the Enterprise tries to get far enough out to send a message but is pursued by Bollock People ships.

This is interspersed with “humorous” bits as the planet keeps having its effects. Worf is experiencing Klingon puberty, so he has spots and “aggressive tendencies”. Sarah questions the logic of this (“puberty isn’t regrowing anything!”) and also gets impatient with it all.

Then Troi says to Crusher “And have you noticed how your boobs have started to firm up?”

Some brief excerpts from the ensuing rant: “This was written by a fucking man, wasn’t it?” “... sexist, misogynist, patriarchal, body-shaming BULLSHIT...” “You know what they might really want, given their age? Not to be fucking peri-menopausal. Or maybe Crusher might like her pre-baby brain back. Perkier boobs is just something some sexist male writer imagined they’d want because that’s what he fancied.”

This one stupid conversation kills off whatever appeal the film had left. There is some cheesy crap with Picard and Anij, a mildly clever trick involving the holoship, and then a very underwhelming action climax. But basically the film lost Sarah at “boobs”.

In summary Sarah says there’s some good political allegory stuff in Insurrection, but the endless goofy humour is awful. She also says the stunt work is particularly bad in this film, and I can confirm that once you notice it you can’t unsee it.

It was inevitable. We all knew it was coming. Sooner or later, I was going to have to show Sarah:

Star Trek: Nemesis

She hates it, obviously. But precisely *why* does she hate it?

The opening scene, wherein the Romulan Senate is assassinated en masse by means of a cloud of green glowing dust, has no especial merit other than that one of the Senators is played by “Alan from Neighbours”. Then we cut to Riker and Troi’s wedding. “Finally!”

Sarah laughs delightedly at Guinan’s reason for not remarrying (“23 was my limit”). Then a hungover Worf says Romulan ale should be illegal, Sarah pipes up “it is” before Geordi does. Next she swears at me for the fact she knows that. “What have you done?!”

Data’s performance of “Blue Skies” elicits only a weary “why?” And, when Worf groans, a sympathetic “I feel you, Worf”. Soon some plot happens and they divert to a desert planet to drive around in a dune buggy and pick up an android who looks *just like* Data.

There is a wholly gratuitous car chase in which the Prime Directive is comprehensively violated by firing phasers at a primitive society then flying off into space right in front of them. Sarah sits in stony silence.

The android is called B-4, which elicits another groan, and he’s a prototype of Data. He’s simple-minded (“Why do you have a shiny head?”) and Sarah says he’s sweet. She semi-randomly wonders how Data’s genitals work and if they’re attachments like Kryten in Red Dwarf.

Now the plot starts in earnest, as the Enterprise is sent to Romulus to meet the new leader, Shinzon. He’s from Remus, a twin planet never before mentioned, which is home to an enslaved species. Shinzon has a massive ship with shedloads of weapons and a cloaking device.

<In fact the original series episode "Balance of Terror" briefly mentions Remus, but I'd forgotten that>

Shinzon is a clone of Picard. He is played by a young Tom Hardy, whose performance is... unique. Sarah says the voice he’s doing combines Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Dr Evil and Eddie Izzard. She is also reminded of Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending - a nuclear insult.

Shinzon is accompanied by a bunch of Remans, who are meant to be creepy, but Sarah can’t take them seriously because they look so much like Nosferatu, and this reminds her irresistibly of the “monster monster monster” sketches from The Fast Show.

Shinzon is supposedly trying to liberate the Remans from slavery, but his ship has a special weapon that can shoot the green dust from the opening. It could wipe out all life on a planet. Sarah treats this threat with precisely no gravity.

We now get a bit where Riker and Troi are having sex. Sarah is just querying why this needs to exist when the scene turns very nasty indeed, as Shinzon uses his Reman friend’s telepathic abilities to attempt to telepathically rape Troi. Sarah is decidedly taken aback.

But her reaction turns to fury when Troi asks to be relieved of duty and Picard says no, and says that if she “can tolerate more of these assaults” he needs her help. “What?!” Later she will argue that this bit is gratuitous anyway: we know Shinzon is bad at this point!

Picard gets zapped away to Shinzon’s ship, but Data gets aboard and rescues him. There is a ray gun fight that Sarah says could come straight out of Star Wars, and then a flying vehicle bit that is frankly Fast and Furious.

The Enterprise now legs it. They deduce that Shinzon is going to destroy Earth, which makes little sense as his grudge really ought to be against the Romulans, but I guess we need Stakes. He catches up with them near a green space cloud, and battle is joined.

Sarah announces at this point that Nemesis feels like a parody of a Star Trek film, not the real thing. The comedy aliens are a factor, as is the way Shinzon has been written as basically a Bond villain rather than given the nuance a character like this really needs.

The battle is unusually brutal, culminating with the Enterprise ramming Shinzon’s ship. I remember finding this fairly effective when I saw it in a cinema in 2002, but since then we’ve had Battlestar Galactica, and Sarah says that in comparison this is still lame.

Shinzon decides to use his green dust weapon to kill everyone on the Enterprise. Sarah is trying to work out why she’s bored. I suggest that it’s unoriginal, as it’s ripping off ST2 and ST6, except the weapon isn’t interesting like in 2. She agrees with that...

She also thinks the film really isn’t Star Trek. It’s far too dark and nasty, like Battlestar. “Star Trek’s like a nice comfy pair of slippers,” she says. Even DS9, the darkest of Treks, has a broadly happy ending (unless you’re Cardassian...). And there’s no humour.

Picard beans aboard Shinzon’s ship to stop the weapon. Then the transporters fail, so Data jumps across the gap between the ships. Sarah thinks this is stupid in a Fast and Furious 8 way. I actually disagree - although it’d surely be easier with a fire extinguisher.

Picard and Shinzon fight, and Shinzon impales himself on a spike like Ming the Merciless. Then Data beams Picard back using a gizmo we saw earlier, and blows up Shinzon’s ship. “Wait is Data dead? I unlike this!” I remind her he was dead in Star Trek: Picard. “Oh yeah...”

Sarah’s final view is that Nemesis isn’t a proper Star Trek film. “It could be any outer space film,” she says. Once again the ensemble cast is neglected, and dumb 90s-style action is prioritised over the thoughtfulness and character work of the TV show. “It was awful.”

I ask for her ranking of the Next Generation films, and she obliges:

First Contact
Insurrection (considerably worse)
Generations/Nemesis (abyssal - she can’t decide which she likes less)

We agree that Insurrection is frustrating because there’s the germ of an idea there.

She attempts an overall ranking:

4
2/6/First Contact
3/Insurrection
1/5/Generations/Nemesis

Sarah says she preferred the original series films, “which I never thought I’d say, because I love Next Generation and Patrick Stewart”.

I suggest that the TNG films were hamstrung by the demands of 90s blockbusters, and lost the show’s thoughtfulness. A *real* TNG movie would play more like Arrival. Sarah agrees. Sadly, she says, Nemesis merely shows us what will happen if Fast 9 really does go to space.

<The following year, Fast 9 went to space and it was terrible>

It’s been a while since Sarah and I watched a Star Trek film: the experience of Nemesis will do that But time heals all wounds (unless they’re infected or you have haemophilia) So we have now rewatched:

Star Trek (2009)

This was the first ST film we saw together at a cinema. At the time Sarah loved it. She has revised that opinion. She still enjoyed it a fair bit, but says it doesn’t make sense, and is disappointingly non-progressive. “Also I now know there are better Star Trek films.”

It starts with Sarah mostly just recognising actors: the baddy from Iron Man, Thor from Thor, and Emma Swann from Once Upon a Time. She complains that Kirk’s dad being killed is “a bit of a trope”. And then we cut to Iowa and oh boy.

The phone call from Kirk’s stepdad prompts Sarah to complain that “they still have toxic masculinity in the 23rd century”. We then pause the film to have a mutual rant about this film’s failure as a piece of sociological imagination. Its attitudes look regressive *now*.

The bar scene makes it worse, with Starfleet cadets acting like football hooligans. “I see society hasn’t moved forward in 300 years.” Sarah says modern British society would be unrecognisable even to Victorians so 23rd-century society will be even more different, so why does this film imagine attitudes being fossilised in this way? I point out that the original show was daring just by having a black woman in a professional role at all. These films do nothing so forward-thinking. Why are there no trans or disabled characters?

Anyway, we cut to Vulcan and Sarah says she rather likes “baby Spock” because the bully he beat up had it coming. She also appreciates that Vulcan children bully in such a restrained, logical way.

Spock’s dad Sarek does some parenting and Sarah explodes in rage. Why is Sarek insisting that Spock choose between being Vulcan and human, she wants to know. He’s both! He needs to embrace his full identity, or he’ll need years of therapy.

I say it’s long-established that Sarek is a shit dad, but Sarah points out we’re 300 years in the future, in a culture that’s keen on logic and evidence. Sarek should know basic parenting skills (and anyway his original disagreement with Spock was about Starfleet).

McCoy turns up and Sarah says Karl Urban is perfectly cast. I agree - the casting throughout is great. Rachel Nichols pops up for a scene so as an aside: she was the star of Continuum, an under-rated show that did wild interweaving time travel plots long before Dark did.

Sarah has thoughts about Nero and his gang of Romulan baddies. First, like Shinzon in the last film, their motivations are nonsense. Why does blowing up Vulcan protect Romulus from a supernova 150 years in the future? Anything could happen!

Sarah also wonders why all baddy ships have such poor lighting, and so many cables and tubes dangling everywhere. “Do they not have cable tidies?” I suggest that refusal to use cable tidies is the first step on the slippery slope to genocidal megalomania. “Bastards.”

Nero’s plan is to destroy Vulcan by using red matter, which is evidently super-unstable and will collapse into a black hole as soon as it’s out of its protective container.

For some reason this necessitates drilling to the planet’s core with a weaponised space elevator. I wonder why they can’t just drop the red matter on the surface. Sarah says it’s because the Romulans are all men and must flaunt their virility with their huge phallic drill. I suggest instead the screenwriters failed to think their plot device through. “That too.”

Spock loses his shit with Kirk and maroons him on a random planet called Delta Vega. I object to this because Delta Vega is in the pilot of the original series (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”) and it’s established as being on the edge of the galaxy, so it shouldn’t be anywhere near Vulcan. Sarah says only hard-core Trekkies would know that, which I concede, but I point out that there is a wiki of Star Trek facts called Memory Alpha that the writers could have consulted. “It worries me that you know that.”

Sarah asserts that there are multiple Acacia Avenues in London, differentiated by postcodes, and it could be the same for planets. “Maybe this is Delta Vega NW1.” I grumble that in any case Delta Vega is a star name, not a planet name, and am told to shut up.

A huge red monster chases Kirk. “What is it with JJ Abrams and the colour red?!” The thing crashes down a steep slope, which given its bulk ought to have shattered its bones, but no - it takes Old Spock with a flaming torch to make it leave.

Obviously Leonard Nimoy is a joy here, his gentle yet gravelly tones giving the film a gravity it has so far largely failed to earn. Some more stuff happens, Kirk gets back to the Enterprise and takes command, and we’re off to the action-packed finale.

After some sustained weapons fire, the red matter gets set off and suddenly Nero’s ship is being torn apart by a new black hole. Kirk chooses this moment to take the Enterprise close to it and open fire. “Why?!” I yell.

Kirk becomes captain and all’s well, apart from Vulcans now being, as Spock says, “an endangered species”. The later films will ignore this because of course they do. Sarah says this is hardly the worst Trek film, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny the way, say, 2 does.

What gets us most is the failure to imagine a better future society. All the parents (except Amanda) are awful or absent - in contrast to TNG or DS9 where great parenting is constantly showcased. And instead of a society without money, we get a Nokia ringtone.

It’s been a busy few weeks but this evening Sarah decided she was game for another Star Trek, so it’s time for:

Star Trek Into Darkness

This is going to be interesting. When this film came out I was one of the many who took against it. Whereas Sarah thought it was fine, albeit not up to the previous one. Will she come round to my way of thinking?

We open on a planet of Stone Age-y people. It seems a volcano is about to erupt and this will somehow kill everyone on the planet. So Kirk and McCoy are luring the people away while Spock is lowered into the volcano with a device that will stop it going off.

Not sure why they did the luring if Spock could stop the eruption, and if his failure would doom the planet anyhow.

+ the Enterprise is underwater. Sarah asks why. I suggest it might be because someone said it’d look cool when it came out of the water. “Sounds right”

Sarah demands to know how this all fits with the Prime Directive, a rule she is fairly firmly behind. I say they make exceptions if the alternative is a planetwide extinction event - although even then they’re supposed to be subtle about it. The issue is that a volcano just isn’t going to be cataclysmic enough to count - except the script says it is. “Is it me,” says Sarah, “or is this all a bit contrived?” “It’s bollocks,” I say. “Just so we’re clear.”

They go back to Earth and Kirk is stripped of command for about five minutes. Then Mickey from Doctor Who is sad that his daughter is ill, until Benedict Cumberbatch shows up and says he can cure her - for a price. Sarah adores BC, who resembles “a sexy otter”.

BC's price is blowing up a Starfleet building. Then when a bunch of admirals gather to plan the response in an exposed room in a skyscraper (and not in a bunker, or heavily armoured starship), BC flies a ship at them and shoots the room up, killing Pike.

BC is “John Harrison”, a rogue Starfleet officer - except he’s not, he’s Khan, but we won’t learn that until halfway through the film, thus eliminating any possibility of doing anything meaningful with the character. Instead BC just enunciates a lot.

The Enterprise heads off to catch Khan, armed with 72 special phoooooootoooooooon toooooorpeeeeeeedooooooooooes.

Also on board: Alice Eve’s Carol Marcus. Under-developed would be putting it kindly. I object to Carol suddenly being a “weapons specialist”, but I object more, and Sarah agrees, to her relationship with Kirk being reduced to him ogling her tits. This is the love of Kirk’s life and the mother of his child. I’m sure he *does* like her breasts but there’s no sense of them bonding as people.

So it turns out that Carol’s dad, Admiral Marcus, is the real villain. He wants to start a war with the Klingons, on the grounds that war is inevitable anyway so they might as well take the initiative. Sarah thinks that’s pretty stupid.

But also, his strategy is to have Khan bomb a building in London, then flee to the Klingon homeworld, so that the Enterprise can go after him and either shoot at the Klingon planet, or be sabotaged in Klingon space (who by??), and thus provoke a war. Sarah complains that this doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Also, Marcus has a gigantic warship that he’s secretly built near Jupiter. “Right, no,” says Sarah. She has family involved with the armed forces and knows a little about defence procurement, and you can’t secretly build a warship. There’s bureaucracy and people have to sign off, precisely to stop this sort of shit.

“Unless Marcus is like Dominic Cummings and does what he wants, at least until he disses the President’s girlfriend?” Sarah suggests, before enquiring whether Marcus drove his warship to Jupiter to test his eyesight.

Sarah also compares his plan to faking the Moon landings: too many people would have to be in on it. This film, she concludes, is stupid.

A lot more plot ensues, Khan kills Marcus, and the Enterprise is crippled and is free falling towards Earth. This is never explained: they were off by the Moon in the previous scene so I’m unclear how they got so close to Earth. But we’re beyond caring now.

Kirk saves the ship by going into the warp core and fixing it, but gets a lethal dose of radiation and dies. Enraged, Spock yells “KHAAAAAAAAAAN!” I’m unclear why, as this is all Marcus’s doing and Khan was just a pawn.

We pause the film to discuss the way this bit mirrors the end of Wrath of Khan. “It’s sort of clever,” says Sarah unenthusiastically. I ask if it has any emotional impact. “Oh God no. None at all. Star Trek II packs a wallop, remember we had to pause the film?”

I suggest they’ve done this story too early so the Kirk-Spock relationship hasn’t acquired its full weight - they’ve only known each other about six months at this point. Sarah agrees but she says there’s a deeper problem, which is that the relationship isn’t subtle enough. This Kirk is a jock, and this Spock veers between ice-cold and rage-beast - whereas OG Kirk is thoughtful, and OG Spock lets you see all the emotions under the surface with tiny facial gestures, without losing control.

“It makes you appreciate,” says Sarah, “just how good an actor Leonard Nimoy was.” There’s a depth to his Spock, and thus the Kirk-Spock dynamic, that means the end of ST2 is a gut-punch. This is just a half-witted imitation.

Anyway then McCoy saves Kirk by injecting him with Khan’s blood, which never worked that way before but what the hell. Sarah suggests he got the covid and it gave him superpowers, and sure, fuck it, let’s go with that. Sarah has come round to my thinking on this film.

Star Trek Beyond

We’re finally here: the capstone of the series, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the franchise (not that you’d have known that from the marketing) It’s all right, we guess, but we can’t muster much enthusiasm.

There are definite pluses here Sarah likes that Kirk is more mature this time, and Spock “has slightly less of a stick up his bum”. But she has decided that Zoe Saldana’s Uhura is subjected to too much regressive behaviour by the men in her life.

She is surprised that this film isn’t particularly funny, given it was co-written by Simon Pegg. Although she does appreciate that the opening scene rips Kirk’s shirt off, and we then get a carefully-framed topless shot showing his nipples. “Someone put thought into that.”

The plot starts when the Enterprise visits Yorktown, a ginormous space station that McCoy says looks like a snowglobe. Sarah feels the whole thing is an excuse to show off CGI, which, it is, but I suggest that it’s more imaginative than anything in the last two films.

Anyway they have to go through this “nebula” that is actually a dense asteroid field (unless it’s meant to be a solar nebula, but then why is there a mature planet in it?) to rescue a supposedly stranded ship. Except surprise it’s a trap.

This swarm of tiny spaceships totally kicks the Enterprise’s arse: cutting off the nacelles, then cutting the central spine, leading the saucer to crash on the planet. Sarah says Reboot Kirk has fucked the ship in three films out of three and ought to get fired.

Everyone is stranded on the planet. Kirk and Chekov go to the saucer to scan for everyone but there’s baddies and a fight ensues. Sarah complains the action is incomprehensible: the camera’s so mobile and the spatial relationships unclear. It’s not Justin Lin’s finest hour.

<Insert gif of the car chase with the safe from Fast Five>

Scotty meets Jaylah, who has been stranded there for years and combines violence with fractured English. Sarah says she reminds her of Neytiri in Avatar. I can see that, but the Jaylah’s tangled syntax reminds me more of the Starfire. She’s good fun anyway.

So, the baddies. Their leader is called Krall, and Sarah cannot take him seriously because he reminds her of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where Matthew McConaughey demands that Kate Hudson call his penis Krall the Warrior, so she gets a chihuahua and calls it Krall.

Krall is after an ancient weapon from the planet that had ended up on the Enterprise, and it’s mighty convenient that was the case because otherwise the plot couldn’t happen. This is the first of two gaping holes in this film’s logic.

The other concerns Jaylah’s “house”, which is an old crashed Starfleet ship. She has hidden it using a holographic field thing. Except we learn later that Krall is ex-Starfleet and it’s his ship, so how the hell does he not know where it is? “You’d remember, right?” Sarah says. “It’s not like you’re in a car park trying to remember which Corsa’s yours. Wouldn’t he just go beep-beep with his keys?” I agree and say my phone has Find My iPhone. “Right? His communicator would have Find My Starship.”

Anyway Jaylah helps Kirk and the other main characters rescue the crew, partly because she has a random motorbike that Kirk drives around Krall’s base causing havoc. But Krall has the weapon and is off to trash Yorktown, so they have to make the old ship fly and chase him.

This leads to the best bit of the film, where they decide to bring down Krall’s swarm of little ships by disrupting the signals controlling them - so they blast the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” at full volume on the relevant frequency. They beat the arseholes with *art*!

<I'm pretty sure Charlie Jane Anders first made this point but I can't find the piece>

Sarah concurs but questions whether the Beastie Boys will still be listened to in 300 years. “Like, are they Beethoven? Really?” I suggest they were influential in their use of sampling and fusion of genres, so maybe. It’s more plausible than anyone remembering Oasis.

Anyway there’s some more action and Krall dies, and the film ends with a new Enterprise. “I feel like I’ve seen it before,” Sarah says. She argues this has the same premise as Into Darkness: old Earth person gets enhanced abilities and has a grudge against the Federation

I ask for her ranking of the reboot films:

Star Trek
Into Darkness/Beyond

She can’t choose which is worse. I suggest Beyond makes a bit more sense (“marginally”) and has a better handle on Kirk and Spock, but she’s unconvinced.

Overall the reboots sit in the middle of her rankings: well below 4 and 2, but not in the abyssal reaches of 1, 5, Generations or Nemesis. Sarah finds them oddly regressive and angry films, and rather unimaginative (apart from visually).

Sarah had assumed there wasn’t now going to be a fourth reboot film, especially after Anton Yelchin died, and I say that seems likely. We both feel it’d be better to just move on and do new things rather than reboot again.

Anyway that’s the last of the mainline Star Trek films, so I guess that ought to be the end of this mega-thread right?

Come on, we couldn’t do a rewatch of all the Star Trek films without tackling arguably the best of them all:

Galaxy Quest

I honestly find myself at a bit of a loss for what to say about this, because it’s Just. So. Perfect. So much of it is in the little details: the quick reference to “Klaatu” in an early scene, the ludicrousness of having a child piloting the spaceship...

Maybe some Sarah reactions?

“Christ, he’s more Shatner than Shatner.” (This is repeated several times)

“Oh my God it’s Veronica Mars’s dad!” (He’s the leader of the aliens - incidentally also the crime boss in Person of Interest - the guy has Range)

Sarah falls about when the “crew” gets their first look at their real ship: “oh god it’s just like in every Star Trek film where they stare at the ship!” She also cheers when we first see the baddies’ ship, and it’s both green and has poor interior lighting.

Probably the film’s biggest laugh comes when they have to pilot the ship out of space dock, steer too far left, and slowly, agonisingly, scrape their way along the left wall for the longest possible time, every squeal of wounded metal somehow more cringey than the last.

But Sarah is also particularly amused by the main characters’ escalating states of undress as the film goes on, with Tim Allen frequently shirtless or at least in a ripped top, and Sigourney Weaver’s top also artfully damaged to show maximum cleavage.

There’s not a weak link in the cast, but come on: Alan Rickman steals this film. It’s just line after reaction shot after reaction shot after line after line after line after line.

Sarah and I wind up having a brief debate over whether this is in fact Rickman’s greatest performance. She thinks it might be, with Snape as a close contender - I have a sneaking admiration for his Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. The man was a god.

It’s particularly the bit where he tries to guide Tim Allen through his fight with the rock monster and goes full actor: “You’re just going to have to figure out what it wants. What is its motivation?” “You were never serious about the craft!”

Sarah notes only one implausibility: the fact the spaceship lands on Earth at the end, in a city: “You can tell this was pre-9/11, these days it’d be shot down.” She also notes the late 90s CGI - which I think kind of adds to the parodic effect by looking vaguely shit.

Anyway this film is glorious and we have no regrets whatsoever about dedicating our evening to it. Sarah says it’s the best Trek film, or rather (on close questioning) that it’s on a par with 4: she can’t choose between them.

Galaxy Quest reminds me of the importance of notionally silly pop culture like Star Trek. Yes, of course you shouldn’t take it too seriously, but there’s life lessons and wisdom to be taken from these things, despite their silliness.

Looking back, I think that a huge chunk of my outlook on life and even my political stances are basically shaped by the pop culture I devoured as a kid - which includes a lot of Star Trek and (much later) the Culture novels.

This is why it rings so true in the final act of Galaxy Quest when Dane again says his hated catchphrase, only this time he finds he really, really means it. It’s acquired deep significance despite its superficial stupidity.

What I got out of Trek was a deep-seated belief that people are people the world over, and that despite all our differences and cultural peculiarities, communication and cooperation are (almost) always possible.

This of course is why so many of the *films* are disappointing: they degenerate into bog-standard shoot-em-ups. And it’s why films like 4 - an adventure to save the world in which not a single weapon is fired - stand up despite their quirks.

I’m not sure Sarah agrees that all this Star Trek was a good use of 28 hours of our lives, but I did enjoy seeing it through her (mildly jaundiced) eyes.

Where to find me on social media

7/8/2023

What with all the brouhaha around X (formerly Twitter) and the launch of competing sites like Mastodon and Threads, I thought it might be useful to quickly spell out where you can find me on social media and what I'm doing there.

For now at least, I'm keeping my profile on Twitter. I'm less active and chatty on there than I used to be, but I'm present. I've thought about deleting my account, but for now I'm keeping it, for two reasons. One, I have a lot of followers there (and the number has held up despite Elon Musk's activities). And second, if I delete my account it just opens up the space for potential impersonators. But if you've left, that's fine: I'm on plenty of other sites.

For a full listing of where to find me, have a look on the About page. If you scroll down a bit, you'll see a grid of logos: these are all the websites where I have a public profile.

With a few exceptions, I post the same things to every social media site I'm on. If you follow me on Instagram, you're pretty much getting the same stuff you'd get on Facebook or LinkedIn. I'm on these sites to raise my own profile and to draw people's attention to my work, so my aim is for them to be pretty consistent in the messages they present. Or to put it another way, I want to meet and engage with readers wherever you are. If you prefer Threads to Mastodon, that's fine: I'm on both. I tweak the posts according to the rules and conventions of each site, but fundamentally I'm posting because I want you to read a story I've written about a gigantic extinct shark, or I really liked a book and want to tell the world about it, or whatever.

Because I have so many accounts, I use a piece of software to manage them. It's called Loomly and it allows me to quickly post the same (or basically the same) thing to multiple sites. It's great, I love it.

The problem I currently have is that Loomly doesn't connect to the newer social media platforms. Mastodon, Threads and Newsmast are not supported, and if I were on BlueSky or Post they wouldn't be either. This means the time I saved by adopting Loomly is now being sucked up by copying posts to these other sites.

All of which is another way of saying: I really want Loomly to roll out integration for these newer sites ASAP. Otherwise I'll either need to find a different social media manager, or ditch some of the accounts.

I don't want to do either of those things. In particular I don't want to abandon my accounts on nascent networks like Mastodon, because the audiences on these sites may well grow. In an ideal world I'd also make some short videos for TikTok and YouTube. But right now managing my existing social media is a time-consuming slog.

And yes I do blame Elon Musk for this.

I wrote a special issue called "The Civilisation Myth" for New Scientist

30/6/2023

After over 15 years as a journalist, I still get a thrill whenever one of my stories is the cover feature. This one for New Scientist is particularly special because it's a special issue: one big main feature and two shorter tie-ins, plus an editorial.

The main feature is called "The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history". It's about the great transformation that began around 10,000 years ago, when societies that were based around hunting and gathering instead took up farming, city living, writing and the other accoutrements of modern life. In particular, it's about why our ancestors did this - and whether the reasons were the same for every society.

The first tie-in story is called "The societies proving that inequality and patriarchy aren't inevitable". It explores the enormous diversity of past societies, many of which can't be neatly fitted into simple categories like "monarchy" or "authoritarian". For example, the degree to which men have dominated society varies considerably.

That leads into the other tie-in story: "Utopia: The ancient discoveries that point to the ideal human society". For this, I asked the anthropologists what they would change about our society. They had quite a lot to say about this, ranging from ending systemic racism to reducing wealth inequality in order to reduce the risk of violent unrest.

Finally, I wrote an editorial called "History reveals vital new lessons in how to make our societies better". Whereas the main features are focused on synthesising what the various experts say, this is more my interpretation. My main argument is that we all have a lot more power to influence the course of history than we think.

The stories are all in issue 3445 of New Scientist, which is in shops now.

Even after all that, I still had some material left over. In the interests of sustainability and reducing waste, I'm going to use it for this month's Our Human Story email newsletter for New Scientist.

<<Previous