Tag: Hard Science Fiction

Book Review: ‘Return to Enceladus’ by Brandon Q. Morris.

Anyone who has been reading my reviews of Science Fiction novels will surely have noticed a certain trend of late. I am getting rather tired of interesting ideas that produce a really good single novel being turned into an entire series of books. The second book in a series may still be worth reading but it will certainly be inferior to the first. And the quality of the stories really decreases after that.

Author Brandon Q. Morris. (Credit: Mal Warwick on Books)

A case in point is the ‘Ice Worlds’ series by the author Brandon Q. Morris. The first novel ‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good hard SF story about an unmanned probe discovering signs of life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A manned expedition aboard the space ship ILSE (which stands for International Life Search Expedition) is sent to both confirm the discovery and learn more about the life forms.

Cover of ‘Return to Enceladus’ by Brandon Q. Morris. (Credit: Amazon.com)

The description of ILSE was quite realistic and the entity on Enceladus was both different and intriguing, it was sort of one of those ‘group mind’ aliens that appear in some SF novels. All in all ‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good book that I still recommend.

‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good ‘hard SF’ novel with an interesting alien. (Credit: Audible.com)

The second novel ‘The Titan Probe’ also wasn’t bad. With the ILSE and her crew already at Enceladus the idea of them taking a little side trip to Saturn’s biggest moon Titan made sense and again the life form that they found there, if not as well described as the one on Enceladus, was at least interesting and different. One part of ‘The Titan Probe’ needs to be mentioned. During the story, one of the ILSE crew, the ship’s doctor Marchenko sacrifices himself to save several other crew members but his consciousness is implanted on the ship’s computer by the entity on Enceladus.

The possibility of life on Enceladus has engineers and scientists at NASA already planning for a mission to probe beneath the icy crust of the moon of Saturn. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)

The third novel ‘The Io Encounter’ was a real disappointment. The crew of ILSE are on their way back to Earth when they’re ordered to stop off at Jupiter’s moon Io. Again signs of life have been found there. And while most of the crew are on Io’s surface the ILSE turns back toward Enceladus only to stop halfway there and return to Io!

Jupiter’s moon Io is squeezed and stretched by the immense gravity of Jupiter. This makes Io the most geologically active body in out solar system and hardly a place to find life. (Credit: Astronoo)

All this is completely unrealistic; space missions are planned out years in advance and are simply not equipped for any major changes in trajectory. Having actually calculated a couple of, admittedly rough, space missions I know very well how a side trip another planet is rarely possible. Jupiter could be on the other side of the solar system from Saturn for example, and such changes in the mission would require double the amount of fuel if not much more. In fact the delta Vee needed to go into orbit around Jupiter is really enormous. What had started as a believable SF story had become little more than a cartoon where the laws of physics are ignored. Worse yet, the quality of the story had also suffered.

The starship Enterprise may be able to change course for a new destination at the orders of Captain Kirk but real spaceships require years of planning to accomplish their missions. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

The fourth novel ‘Return to Enceladus’ is no better. The crew of ILSE are back home on Earth where they get a proposal from an eccentric Russian billionaire who wants them to go back to Enceladus. He is making money by mining near Earth asteroids and is looking to expand his business to the outer solar system. The crew’s reason for going back would be to retrieve the body of their dead comrade Marchenko so that his consciousness can be reinstalled; no description of how this will be done is ever given.

The idea of mining an asteroid has become a common idea in SF stories. It’s probably going to be harder than most people think. (Credit: ExplainingTheFuture.com)

Problem is that the ILSE has been left on a course that will take it to be destroyed in the Sun so the first thing the crew, now joined by the Russian’s daughter, have to do is take one of his ships to rendezvous with the ILSE and stop it from plunging into the Sun. Once on board they set course for Saturn, no mention is made as to how the ship is refueled or resupplied with enough food for a two-year mission.

The idea of downloading a human consciousness onto a computer is also quite old an old one. (Credit: Live Science)

At this point the story becomes a mystery novel as several attempts are made on the lives of different crewpersons and the mission itself. Actually the guilty party is pretty obvious from the start but the crime plot still it takes up half the novel. And when we finally get back to Enceladus the entity there has gone into hiding, it’s now afraid of us, so we don’t even learn more about it.

I have to admit I’m not a fan of murder mysteries in general and adding one to a SF novel is just not a good idea. (Credit: Illinois River Road)

Anyway the whole trip wasn’t worth it in my opinion. The ‘Ice Words’ series by Brandon Q. Morris is just another series of novels that starts out as being fresh and interesting but by the end has just simply run out of steam. ‘Return to Enceladus’ just isn’t a very good SF novel.

Movie Review: ‘Ad Astra’

In his first interview with the press promoting his new movie ‘Ad Astra’ director James Grey described it as a combination of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.  I’m quite certain that’s exactly how he sold his concept to the studio heads that funded ‘Ad Astra’. Not a bad idea when you consider that both movies are considered to be classics. The problem is that in that in ‘Ad Astra’ the combining is clumsily executed and quite frankly, unimaginative.

Poster for the Film ‘Ad Astra’ (Credit: Connect Savanna)

Let’s begin with ‘Apocalypse Now’ which was itself a adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ to fit the War in Vietnam. In ‘Apocalypse Now’ a U.S. Army Captain named Willard is sent into the deep jungle along the Vietnam / Cambodian border to make contact with a Colonel Kurtz. According to the Army Kurtz has gone rogue, fighting the Vietnamese Communists with native troops his own way, in other words just slaughtering them without regard for the rules of war.

In Apocalypse Now Marlon Brando played an eerie Colonel Kurtz, a man driven mad by the horrors of war. (Credit: Electric Palace)

Once Captain Willard finds Kurtz his orders are to terminate Kurtz’s command, ‘Terminate with extreme prejudice’, in other words the Captain has been ordered to assassinate the Colonel. The majority of the movie however concerns Willard’s journey to Kurtz’s location and is composed of a series of scenes depicting the insanity of war but which have no real connection to the actual plot.

The plot of ‘Ad Astra’ is quite similar. At the beginning we learn about an astronaut named Clifford McBride (Played by actor Tommy Lee Jones). McBride is the commander of the Leto Mission to the outer Solar System in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Leto mission we are told was assumed lost some 12 years ago. 

In Ad Astra Tommy Lee Jones plays Clifford McBride who has been driven mad by Space. (Credit: USA Today)

We also learn that McBride murdered the other members of the Leto’s crew and is actually still alive around the planet Neptune where he is now using his spaceship’s anti-matter to cause power surges that are threatening all life in the solar system. I suppose by now you’ve guessed that McBride is the Kurtz character.

The Captain Willard character in ‘Ad Astra’ is named Roy McBride (Played by Brad Pitt). Now if you happened to notice that the two main characters have the same last name you’re right, they’re father and son which adds a lot of psycho-drama to the movie without making it any more interesting. As in ‘Apocalypse Now’ Roy McBride’s journey to his father is punctuated with such meaningless scenes as an attack by Moon pirates and a Mayday from another spaceship. So much for the resemblance to ‘Apocalypse Now’.

Brad Pitt plays Roy McBride who is journeying through the solar system to stop his father from destroying all life. (Credit: Polygon)

As far as I’m concerned the resemblance to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ consists mainly in the production values, that is the sets and special effects which look pretty good. Not as good as 2001’s or The Martian’s, but pretty good. It’s apparent that someone has paid a lot of attention to such things as the spacesuits, the look of the spaceship’s and the scenery such as the Moon, Mars and finally Neptune.

While the production values of Ad Astra are good they can’t make up for an awkward script. (Credit: Fox News)

The problem is that the attention to detail only extends as far as the look of the movie. You remember I mentioned that the senior McBride is doing something with anti-matter around Neptune that is causing ‘power surges’ back here on Earth. Well that’s about all you ever learn about those surges, you never even get to find out if the older McBride is causing them deliberatly or not.

There are in fact a large number of physically unrealistic events in ‘Ad Astra’ the most egregious of which is when the younger McBride uses a special laser on Mars to send a message to his father around Neptune. Now Neptune at its closest is more than four light hours from Mars so a round trip message has to take nearly nine hours minimum. Well that Martian laser must be real special because the reply comes back in about two minutes. Such a cavalier attitude toward the laws of physics and science in general is not a good thing for a movie that is trying to promote itself as hard Sci-fi.

2001: A Space Odyssey still holds place of honour as the best hard sci-fi movie! (Credit: MGM)

In the end the two McBride’s finally meet and we discover that the search for alien intelligence has driven the old man mad. He’s lost all of his humanity in the emptiness of space.

The real plot of Ad Astra is simply mankind becoming lost in the vastness of space. (Credit: IMDb)

I think that’s the moral the creators of ‘Ad Astra’ were trying to portray. If you want to find intelligence you should look right here on good old Earth.

Just don’t look for it in the movie ‘Ad Astra’!