Mammoth

Brief note: Somehow I’ve lost over half my general subscribers, and all of my Lost subscribers. What happened? What’d I do?? Unless feedburner is broken and given me inaccurate results, tell me so I can make it all better.

In my effort to keep up with my New Year Goal of reading 25 books this year, I can finally make another hash mark next to the massive one I already have from Steven King’s “Bag of Bones.” Next up was a surprise to me, because I just picked it up and started reading the first few sentances, and before I knew it a week had passed and it was done.

A week! I’ve never finished a novel in just one week! Some people can finish one in a few days, but for me it’s always at least two or three weeks.

Anyway, the name of the book was “Mammoth,” and it’s written by John Varley. And like I say when I finish any book I read, it was the best book I’ve ever read. I read another book of his last September called “Millennium,” about a group of people from the future who travel back in time before major catastrophic events and steal the human bodies before they all die, in hopes of repopulating their own world in the future where everybody is sterile. His ideas and writing style are similar to mine (or, at least, how I wish mine to be), so I picked up another one of his that sounded like it might be good, and that was “Mammoth,” and like I said, it was good.

It centers around two main characters, Susan, a circus performer and elephant trainer, and Matt, a brilliant but socially awkward physicist. They were both hired by billionaire Howard Christian for their unique talents… see, Howard, using all that money, has unearthed the greatest scientific discovery of our time: a frozen, in tact, woolly mammoth, complete with a frozen, in tact caveman. His goal is to clone the woolly mammoth and use it to make even more money. So he hires people to clone it, and Susan to oversee that project. But there’s the first twist: the caveman is wearing a wrist watch.

Wait a tick! Cavemen didn’t wear wristwatches! It’s either a hoax, or…

…time travel, friends, so Howard hires Matt to rebuild what can only be a time machine, which is in the form of a briefcase next to the caveman.

Well, Matt is (semi)-successful, and rebuilds something, which ends up throwing Susan and Matt 12,000 years into the past. They spend some time there before Matt can figure out how the time machine works, and when he does, they’re avoiding a group of mammoths… but when they blink back into the future, the mammoths have come with them.

So, now, Howard not only has a time machine but 6 or 7 mammoths. Well, you can imagine what would happen of 7 mammoths were let loose in downtown LA. One survives, Howard keeps it, trains it, etc., and it turns into a King Kong story. The whole caveman-wristwatch thing takes a backseat to that story, which is surprisingly entertaining, if not a bit padded and long. The whole story could have been about 100 pages shorter and not lost a thing, but any interaction between Susan and Matt (especially when Matt dorks out and gets all technical on her) is great.

I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say the caveman is not a caveman at all, and may or may not be someone we all know. But I will say that the book dealt heavily with what I like to look at as the cyclical nature of time, how time may not be linear at all, free will, pre-determination (or pre-destination?), all things that time travel conjures up.

If that’s not your thing, at least you have some pretty touching scenes between a woman and her pet mammoth.

Anyway, I’d recommend it.

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Battlestar Galactica, Season Four will premiere in exactly 1 week!

If you missed out on the first three seasons and don’t think 1 week is enough time to get them on DVD, you can catch the cliff notes online.

First, here is an eight minute, fifteen second (815??) recap of everything you need to know:

Also, this article sums things up as well.

Yer welcum.

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Creeptastic.

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A recent entry on one of the many blogs I read. I have no idea what the first one is, it’s the second one I’m passing along.

This weekend I stumbled upon two new obsessions.

1) Ra Ra Riot. I entered their sold-out show at Bowery Ballroom on Friday night a new listener and left a hardcore fan. The performance was incredible, the songs upbeat and catchy, and the band genuine. I found myself smiling the entire time, despite only hearing the songs for the first time.

2) Battlestar Galactica. Obsessed. Frooch and I watched the entire first season in about 72 hours. Before this weekend, and admittedly based on nothing but the name, I assumed Battlestar Galactica was some Star Trek-y, futuristic nerdfest. Now I realize that it is awesome. I find myself making an average of two Cylon jokes a day.

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It’s a slow week with nothing much to talk about. I am in the middle of a great book called “Mammoth” by John Varley, and have a few work related tasks keeping me busy. I’m working on a story that is, for once, coming along nicely. Saturday was my birthday, and even though I turned 25 for some reason my auto insurance rates didn’t go down. That, or my insurance guy is a moron, which could very well be true. Also, I’m learning the guitar since Katy bought me one for my bee-day.

Other than that, I was thinking about science fiction the other day, and what exactly makes it science fiction. For example, stories about aliens are automatically science fiction because life forms other than those on Earth are both scientific in nature and fictional, since they (to our knowledge) do not exist. But on the day that aliens arrive on Earth, are we going to have a mass re-categorizing of all alien-visitor related science fiction to just fiction? I don’t think so. It would be too expensive. For that reason alone, we’ll never make contact with aliens and we’ll never invent time machines. Evil robots remain a possibility since the first thing on their agenda is always annihilating everything with nuclear weapons, thereby destroying all of the fiction anyway.

Anyway, I do not have a point. But Arthur C. Clark died last week, and that means people will automatically like his books more. Case in point, I bought one of his books thanks to a memorial article recapping his work. I was also reminded of the story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” which I read in 2003 and remember, almost word for word (okay, paragraph by paragraph), which is huge considering I forget nearly everything.

Read it here. (It’s short, I promise, and like biscuits and gravy, will stick with you).

Also, if you are a sci-fi fan like myself, you sometimes lose sight of how awesome (as in awe, not “duuuude”) the universe really is. It’s hard to believe that stuff like this actually exists out there:

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Well, I made my last post real quick after the episode yesterday, and I’m still in denial about Rousseau’s “death.” I’m putting it in neat little “quotes” because I hope by doing “that,” it might end up being an apparent “death,” and not a real one. I don’t really care about Karl, except that I feel terrible for Alex (who has become incredibly good-looking all of the sudden)… but Rousseau?! Was it really her time to die?

After sixteen years on the island, that’s how she meets her end? Don’t misunderstand me, if she really is dead, I’m not complaining about the story. Some people die senseless deaths, and if she’s one of them, that’s fine. I just will miss the character, moreso than a lot of others, because in a lot of ways she represents the first big mystery. When I first starting watching season one, I thought it was all about people surviving on an island after a plane crash, and then… the french woman was introduced. Who had been there for 16 years. Her crew dead, thanks to a mysterious sickness. And she knew about the whispers in the forest and that they were bad news.

I think, ultimately, she was a victim of the storytelling. I think perhaps she was introduced hastily in season one, before the rest of the island’s story was fleshed out, and as soon as the island’s history was determined by the writers, they realized Rousseau didn’t really fit. Sixteen years on the island and no idea about who the Others really were, or that they even had houses? If she really is dead, I think it’s a death we’re all supposed to accept quietly as a botched storyline put to sleep. Otherwise, it just doesn’t make sense to me. But I definatley have more faith in the writers than that, so…

…not dead. Can’t be.

But who might be the shooters? I have to believe the scene involving the macho men on the boat who were shooting machine guns off the side meant something other than convincing Michael these people were not exactly “the good guys.” Frank Lapidus took the helicopter in the last episode and we haven’t seen those same macho guys sense, so perhaps they went to get something important to Ben in order to coax him out since Miles was captured.

But, man, that last scene was intense. The music that was playing when Alex got up and shouted, out of desperation, “I’m Ben’s daughter! I’m Ben’s daughter!” sounded right out of a horror movie.

But enough about the last scene. We met Kevin Johnson!

Definitely the best episode this season, for a number of reasons, most notably my man Brian K., who co-wrote this one. His previous one, “Confirmed Dead,” kind of lagged, but this one made up for it. I was not bored for one second during this one, and loved seeing Michael again. I hated him by the end of Season Two, but now that he’s been gone all this time I kind of got to thinking that he’d do what any of us would have done in the same situation. Obviously to an extreme, but I was reminded how surprised he looked when he shot both Ana Lucia and especially Libby — he didn’t mean to. It was an accident. And now, here he is, trying to save his friends, knowing that they all hate him. So, welcome back, Michael! I’ve missed you.

Obviously the Michael-time-traveling-to-the-past theory was not correct, because we got to see everything that happened to him, and it seemingly happened in real-time. Or did it? I noticed that the very first establishing shot of Michael’s flashback was a shot of a running water faucet. Much like the one shown in “The Constant,” during the bathroom scene when Widmore purposely didn’t shut off the water faucet as Desmond collapsed and time traveled. I think “water” signifies time travel, somehow (come on, why would Widmore just NOT shut off the water after washing his hands?), so I have not yet ruled out the possibility that Michael isn’t when he should be, but I have no theory with which to elaborate.

And Tom is gay. Not a shocker, after he told Kate last season she wasn’t his type, and then the producers saying “one of our characters is gay,” in a podcast. Big deal? Not really. The only reason I mention it is because I guess it was a “mystery” that was revealed.

Speaking of! Another mystery was revealed last night that we didn’t even know was a mystery. Remember Jack’s suicide attempt at the end of Season 3? He was going to jump from a bridge, end it all… and then conveniently there was a distraction, an auto accident right behind him. Jack (and Michael, and presumably all of our Oceanic Six… maybe even Ben) can’t die in the real world, because “the island won’t allow it.”

Huh? Are we speaking literal, here? The island won’t allow it? Assuming the island is not a living being, or a VALIS that influences events by it’s own free will (I think that would be cheesy), I think it’s more likely that the spacial and temporal anomalies that surround the island won’t let him. In other words: course correction. Let me explain!

In Season Three, when we first saw Desmond time travel, he met up with a strange woman named Ms. Hawkings who seemingly knew he was time traveling. She explained to him that he cannot alter the past, because the universe is essentially pre-determined and follows a specific path. So, anything you do in the past can’t change the future because “the universe has a way of course correcting.” This was proven when Desmond thwarted Charlie’s death, only to have to keep doing it again and again, because the universe was now out to get him. To use a better analogy, course correction essentially means: if you go back in time and kill the mosquito that caused a worldwide plague, the plague will still happen in the future just as it did before because the universe will have another mosquito do the job.

So, the universe is not allowing Jack, Michael, or any of the other survivors to die, and I think it has to do with course correction. Something is not right. What that something is, I have no idea, but I’m sure it has something to do with Ben saying “you were never meant to leave the island.” Thoughts?

And who else is thinking that we got a pretty good idea that it’s probably Michael in the coffin at the end of Season Three? The neighborhood he was in looked pretty much the same. When he was walking through the city I kept looking at the names of the buildings, hoping to see the “Hoffs/Drawler” funeral home where he likely later ends up. It would make sense, and Jack’s reaction after reading the newspaper clipping might very well have been something like, “oh, my, he finally found a way.”

One more wild thought I had… that Sayid is already working for Ben. I half expected him, after hearing Michael tell his story, to pull out a gun and shoot Michael point blank in the face. Something like this:

Sayid: So, you’re telling me you work for Benjamin Linus?
Micahel: Yes.
Sayid: So do I. [SHOT TO THE FACE]

This obviously wasn’t the case, but would have been a cool twist. It seems like the Captain already knows about Kevin/Michael, or he’s just too cool to let his surprise show, so I’m anxious to see how this all turns out in five weeks. This episode was definately one of the most pivotal of the entire series, I’m sure.

So cheer, up, Alex! It’ll all be over soon.

Until then… Battlestar Galactica is back soon, just in time for Comcast to give me the SCIFI HD channel, then Lost AND Battlestar Galactica for 5 more weeks. Can’t wait!

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