Mission of Gravity

I've recently slowed down my reading and writing, and it's making me a little cranky. I have no one but myself to blame, though. On the one hand, I was able to participate in beta testing for Star Trek Online, and now I am playing it. I'm really enjoying it, though it has the issues of a new game; it's obvious that the creators of the game are huge fans of the Star Trek mythology. And so it is taking some of the time I would normally spend on reading and writing.

But I also decided, for reasons that I cannot clearly recall at the moment, to read this well-received novel from 1954. I have owned it forever, but I have no recollection of actually finishing it until now. It has a reputation, both for being hard science and being really good, which throws a shadow across any reading or critical thought about it. To be blunt, reading this novel was a chore for me—although short, it took forever for me in good part because it was not very engaging. With a book I enjoy, I can find time to read, but with Mission of Gravity, my reading was confined to bedtime, when I wasn't too tired to give it some time.

How could this be? The premise of the story is very promising—on a planet where men cannot reasonably expect to live, due to horrifically cold temperature, an unsuitable atmosphere, and gravity that begins with three times Earth-normal and runs to 700 times what we experience, men have to enlist the aid of the natives to find a scientific probe. Between an exotic planet—the construction of which author Hal Clement details in an included article—and the potential of a first contact story, it would appear that all the ingredients are present for a fine story. But, when it comes to executing the details, a lot of things get in the way.

For instance, Mission of Gravity is celebrated for its world-building, as it rightfully should. The associated article, "Whirligig World," details the thought processes and calculations that went into the creation of the planet named Mesklin. And those same processes led to the creation of the dominant race that we see there. But the reader isn't given any of this information in the course of the actual story. We are only by implication told that the gravity on this planet is variable and that it spins so rapidly that days are only minutes long. The native Mesklinites already know this and so do not discuss it amongst themselves, and the humans that they interact with also never discuss it since it is a given for their presence in orbit around the planet anyway. And so the reader can only pick it up in dribs and drabs and never without explicit description of what's going on. All we can really figure out, without advanced degrees or the accompanying article, is that the planet is really weird.

And yet that weirdness is belied by the failure of the second component, the first contact story. The action of the story takes place well after first contact has been made between the Mesklinites, in the person of Barlennan, and the humans. In fact, when the story begins, Barlennan thinks of his human liaison, Charles Lackland, as a friend, and they communicate pretty easily in English. So the reader can perhaps expect that part of the storytelling will involve the growing understanding and inevitable communication problems between two peoples as they travel together, but Clement has set up the novel such that the humans can't travel with the Mesklinites and so are only witnesses via radio and television as they travel across the planet. In fact, the humans are very limited in the story, sometimes used for comic relief as they try to understand the things they see or wink knowingly to the audience as the Mesklinites try to figure out science that is obviously beyond them.

Even more odd is that the novel ends up being a story of Barlennan and his crewmates travelling across their own world in a sort of planetary romance that reminds me a great deal of Burroughs's Venus stories, but with the native seeing new regions of his own world and comparing them to the life he already knows instead of the sense of wonder an alien would feel. Barlennan does face danger but it comes in the form of cultures that are different than his, not from exotic and alien life. As a result, the story is told from Barlennan's point of view, further associating the he and his race with the species. A more gifted author could have used this as an opportunity to explore the mind of an alien but, distressingly, Barlennan may as well be human for all the differences in how he thinks and perceives his world. One difference between the species that Clement does play on is the Mesklinites' embedded acrophobia; it feels logical that if you lived on a planet that had a gravity 700 times what we experience here, you would have a fear of climbing more than a couple of inches above ground. But even though Clement keeps returning to this, Barlennan overcomes his acrophobia within the first few pages of the book and then, by the end of it, completely masters it such that he is willing to consider what the author has told us repeatedly is unthinkable.

The book ends up being charming, but not very compelling; the trappings of a hard science adventure but the inner workings of a travelogue with very little depth. It may be that, for 1954, this was ground-breaking stuff and thus seminal to the history of speculative fiction, but it has not aged well at all. There are far better alien encounter stories available now, and while there are probably no planets quite as exotic as Mesklin, less exotic locales have been explored and written about in far more interesting books. Even the twist Clement tries to give the relationship between human and Mesklinite at the end of his story has been foreshadowed in the most heavy-handed fashion, such that it really doesn't surprise so much as meet the standards the book has set for itself. As a result, given that I had other shinier things clamoring for my attention, I found reading Mission of Gravity somewhat tedious. And without context (and I haven't found any on the internet yet; I may have to resort to a real book), I am at a loss as to what the clamor is about.

The End of Dollhouse

Last week marked the last episode of a TV show that attempted to bring some high speculative fiction ideas to television with mixed success. Joss Whedon had created Dollhouse to explore the ideas of identity in a world where it's becoming less and less clear what an individual can do to effect change. Coupling this exploration with musings, both delicate and heavy-handed, on ethics and morality made Dollhouse a potential blockbuster, not just for speculative fiction but for television in general. Unfortunately, the show was pretty much doomed from the start, given that its parent network, Fox, apparently wasn't interested in high concepts so much as the appearance of thoughtfulness as a shiny veneer over action sequences and skimpy clothing.

One of the highlights of the San Diego Comic-Con for me was seeing the "lost" episode of Dollhouse, "Epitaph I," which can only be seen by people who buy or rent the DVD collection. I've written about that episode before (about halfway through http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/10/dollhouse.html), and the series ended with "Epitaph II, which as its name implies, is pretty much a direct sequel to the earlier episode. I'm afraid that a large number of viewers of this last episode might have been initially lost by an opening that had no ties to anything they had seen before.

The highlight of the episode, like the first one, was Fran Kranz as Topher, showing depths of acting the show had rarely given him the opportunity to display. Unfortunately, it felt like the rest of the regular cast members were sleep-walking through their roles, even Eliza Dushku, who can chew scenery with some of the best. This was not the result, however, of the actors themselves; I fear the writing of this last episode was the real disappointment, as the show turned to cliché as it came to an end.

I've written many times (and said more often) that endings are the hardest thing to write. Whedon was in a tough situation as he put together the script for "Epitaph II," compounding the normal difficulties of ending well. On the one hand, he didn't actually know if this was to be the final episode of Dollhouse, though he certainly had a feeling that it might be. And so while he attempted to tie things up, he had to be careful not to tie them so tightly that a sudden reversal of fortune and renewal of the show would be impossible because he had, say, blown up the planet. He also had to build off an episode that the majority of his audience had not seen, an episode that was by far the most powerful of the two-season run. The cumulative effect was that he had to live up to what he had done so well before while appeasing the majority of his audience.

The result was not very satisfying at all. After a tremendous build-up describing the potential of the terrifically horrible Dollhouse technology, the last episode made inferences that weren't easy to follow, at least by this viewer. It also radically shook up perhaps the most powerful relationship in the series, that between Sierra (Dichen Lachmann) and Victor (Enver Gjokaj), with a conflict that felt forced and was never adequately explained. The episode also attempted to resolve in one episode the crisis it had built up over two full seasons, such that there should have been deus ex machine warnings scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Fortunately, the episode did not go so far as a true deus ex machina, but the resolution was hurried, even forced so that it stretched believability to its limit.

Similarly, part of the strength of the show had been all the relationships, which due to the nature of the plot of the show, had to be strong as many of the main characters changed personalities every week. That strength was missing in this last episode—conversations were more about things not being said than said, which was a departure. And that felt untrue to the characters we had come to care for. One notable exception was one scene where DeWitt (Olivia Williams) attempted to come to terms with what happens to Topher. There was genuine compassion and sorrow there, which we have often seen in DeWitt, even though some of the decisions she made in the past two seasons were just baffling. In fact, the scenes with DeWitt and Topher in this episode were perhaps the most powerful of this entire season.

Also unfortunate was the decision to put a little coda on the end of the episode. I won't spoil it, but while it was utterly logical, it was also utterly predictable and extremely saccharine, leaving a final impression to the viewer that did not approach the heights the show had reached. The end result was a little sadness that he show had ended but also some relief if this was the potential direction the show would have gone in if the miracle renewal had happened. Honestly, I think airing this last episode was a mistake. Instead, every effort should have been made to ensure that the lost episode, "Epitaph I," was the last taste of Dollhouse its fans would have.

The result is what will probably only be a blip in the history of speculative fiction on TV. It's a shame that management meddled, delaying the show from finding its true voice and thus its true audience. When Dollhouse hit its stride, it was thoughtful and powerful. But when it wasn't on its game, it was capable of producing some real clunkers. I'm grateful to have seen it, as I believe that it represents both the potential of what can be done with the genre and the sad reality it faces when it is generally attempted on network television. This show would have been much better served had it been on a cable channel that would have given it a chance to grow into its potential. If only there were some kind of speculative fiction based cable channel….