Wayne Barlowe's _Expedition_ on Discovery Channel...
Phillip Thorne
...on 14 May and it's called "Alien Planet" and it's another of the
channel's "Walking With Dinosaurs"/"The Future Is Wild!"-type
speculative-biology productions, but, Woo! Neat-o!
http://www.discovery.com/alienplanet/
SF/F artist Wayne Douglas Barlowe (_Barlowe's Guide to
Extraterrestrials_, visual design for the B5 telemovie "Thirdspace")
once wrote an art book called _Expedition_ in which he designed an
alien planetary ecology, with lots of funny-lookin' but dramatic
creatures. They image gallery shows 14, but the CG Alien Anatomy
section only six -- Daggerwrist, Unth, Butcher Tree, Trunk Sucker,
Groveback and Littoralope.
The Discovery Channel adaptation (its website, anyway) manages to
avoid mentioning this, although Barlowe is listed on the Contributing
Scientists page. Also, I'm not sure why physicists Michio Kaku or
Stephen Hawking would have any special insights into xenobiology.
It appears that some of Barlowe's tripedal designs have been changed
to conventional quadrupeds. (Maybe the animators couldn't devise a
convincing three-legged gait?) The third-party aliens who hosted
poor, benighted humans on their mission have been replaced with a
human-built uncrewed antimatter/fusion-drive probe, which looks cool
but doesn't have nearly enough radiator area. (Charles Pellegrino
would say it's overbuilt.)
At least the use of robot probes will preclude the absurd forensic
scenes of "Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real" (March). ("Let's wear
cable-knit sweaters while digging in a frozen carcass!")
http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/dragons.html
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Andrew Plotkin
>
> It appears that some of Barlowe's tripedal designs have been changed
> to conventional quadrupeds. (Maybe the animators couldn't devise a
> convincing three-legged gait?)
*I* couldn't devise a convincing gait for some of those critters. Not
the big walking-hill monster, at least. Looks cool, couldn't move a
foot, in either sense.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
I'm still thinking about what to put in this space.
Logan Kearsley
-l.
------------------------------------
My inbox is a sacred shrine, none shall enter that are not worthy.
Andrew Plotkin
> OK, who else is watching it and what do you think?
Pretty good job, they did. Albeit, a good one-hour show stretched out
to two hours with liberal padding and repeating of clips.
They put on a different frame story, but for a good reason -- they
wanted to show how a medium-near future planetary probe would look. So
sublight robot ships instead of manned FTL, and blimp probes instead
of antigrav landers.
There were some weird holes, though. Having the probes project
holographic messages to communicate with native life is cute, until
you remember that all the native life is blind and sonar-based. :) And
the narrative referred to "beach quills" and "littoralopes", the names
used in the book, even though the show placed those creatures in
savannah areas instead of shoreland. You'd think someone would catch
that.
The science commentators did a lot of dancing around to avoid saying
"Well, that creature is cool, but it makes no damn sense." :)
jere7my tho?rpe
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
> There were some weird holes, though. Having the probes project
> holographic messages to communicate with native life is cute, until
> you remember that all the native life is blind and sonar-based. :)
Well...sort of. There's a lot of bioluminescence in the book, which
didn't make a whole lot of sense on the face of it for a sightless
ecology. The special referred to "poor eyesight" a couple of times.
----j7y
--
jere7my tho?rpe | "The land knows whom it sent out;
(440) 775-1522 | In the place of human beings
jere...@oberlin.net | Their ashes in urns
http://www.livejournal.com/~jere7my | Come back to each man's house."
--- Aeschylus, The Agamemnon
IsaacKuo
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>There were some weird holes, though. Having the probes project
>holographic messages to communicate with native life is cute, until
>you remember that all the native life is blind and sonar-based.
The mission designers are only human, after all, and don't
know what sort message is appropriate to the natives. In
this special, there's at least some sort of vision but it's
not as well developed as on Earth.
>The science commentators did a lot of dancing around to avoid saying
>"Well, that creature is cool, but it makes no damn sense." :)
They're scientists. They're used to seeing phenomena which
is highly unexpected and initially makes no sense. Each
and every one of them expects that if we do find alien
life forms, it's going to be defy expectations in ways we
can only imagine.
Even without life, every one of the planets in the Solar
System has surprised scientists when first visited.
There's a lot of scientists going, "Okay, that's weird.
That doesn't make any sense." And then months or years
later, they (partially) figure out what's going on based
on the data and it makes sense.
I thought it was a nice touch and plausible the way they
did it. What would have been weird is if everything DID
make sense initially.
Isaac Kuo
Logan Kearsley
news:d66ba7$mtk$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> In rec.arts.sf.written, Logan Kearsley <chrono...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > OK, who else is watching it and what do you think?
>
> Pretty good job, they did. Albeit, a good one-hour show stretched out
> to two hours with liberal padding and repeating of clips.
A good job compared to expectations, anyway. I was still disappointed at the
lack of detail, though. They didn't once even mention that all of the
predators eat by predigestion. It was explicit in the dagger-wrist, and
implied in the... waddayakallem, jet-flying-things, but left completely
unexplained in the arrowtongue. But then, every once in a while, they
*would* put in a detail that just didn't fit with the general lack of
detail, like the fact that the Eosapiens' gas bags are filled with methane.
How the heck was the probe supposed to know that? Possibly it could've been
deduced by scientists back on earth by comparing the size of the creatures
and their gasbags and using the density of the atmosphere to figure out how
much lifting power would be needed, etc., but if so they should've said how
they knew it.
> They put on a different frame story, but for a good reason -- they
> wanted to show how a medium-near future planetary probe would look. So
> sublight robot ships instead of manned FTL, and blimp probes instead
> of antigrav landers.
And now I'll be waiting for the sequel (alas, probably never to come about)
in which they show what a near future manned mission would look like, and we
get to see second contact with the Eosapiens.
> There were some weird holes, though. Having the probes project
> holographic messages to communicate with native life is cute, until
> you remember that all the native life is blind and sonar-based. :) And
> the narrative referred to "beach quills" and "littoralopes", the names
> used in the book, even though the show placed those creatures in
> savannah areas instead of shoreland. You'd think someone would catch
> that.
As for the hologram, there's no way that the mission designers could've
known that Darwinians used sonar instead of sight beforehand. But I'll agree
about the beach quills and littoralopes. It was rather dissapoiting that
they didn't focus on the littoralopes at all, really. It was just "hey,
there's another creature, it's called a littoralope and its a prey animal.
The End".
> The science commentators did a lot of dancing around to avoid saying
> "Well, that creature is cool, but it makes no damn sense." :)
Yup. I agree with Isaac that that's partially the point of the thing- a lot
of stuff is expected to *just*not*make*sense* at first glance- but it
would've been nice if they could've just come out and said "this doesn't
make sense; we have no idea how or why this would actually work, but let's
speculate on it for a bit".
suzy charnas
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> In rec.arts.sf.written, Logan Kearsley <chrono...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > OK, who else is watching it and what do you think?
>
> Pretty good job, they did. Albeit, a good one-hour show stretched out
> to two hours with liberal padding and repeating of clips.
>
> They put on a different frame story, but for a good reason -- they
> wanted to show how a medium-near future planetary probe would look. So
> sublight robot ships instead of manned FTL, and blimp probes instead
> of antigrav landers.
>
> There were some weird holes, though.
Yes indeed -- I suppose they were attended to in the book (I didn't realize there
was a
book til I read about it here), but the show felt wierdly choppy and *very* narrow
in focus and incomplete in basic ways. It seemed to be pretty much 100% fighting,
killing, and feeding -- although I saw no basic food animal on which a predation
pyramid could be raised, like the lowly field mouse here, nor in fact any
vegetation
that any of the animals seemed to be eating -- apart from the spiny trees getting
their sap sucked. The terrain was so incredibly barren that I kept wondering what
the blazes all these very big animals were living on. The sea-striders soaking up
nutriets through their feet was a neat idea, but since nothing else seemed capable
of preying on or consuming these monsters, that appeared to be largely a closed
feeding loop.
What was missing? Any social organization that wasn't just an imitation of
Earth's
(the hunting pack, the tuskers fighting eachother over -- presumably -- mating
rights and territory, but territory exploited how? They just seemed to be hanging
around waving their electrified antlers at each other); consideration of the birth
and raising of
young (a nymphet-stage of one creature was mentioned and that was it); the whole
bundle of questions around reproduction -- one scientist said, with astounding
naivete I thought, "at this point we don't even know who's male and who's female",
as if the whole damn universe *has* to be organized in these pairs. What about
three or more sexes,
or some entirely other arrangement? What did the apparent uniformity of size
within species mean (nothing like our common phenomenon of sexual dimorphism, for
example)?
It all boiled down to a bunch of intriguing looking creatures doing pretty much
nothing but fighting or trying to kill and eat each other, which gave it a very
thin, comic-
book-adventure feel for this viewer. Fun to look at, a few neat ideas (I liked
the idea
of the sea creatures uniting into one funcitonal community, although the
"predatory"
sea action was just more of the same monomaniacal fix on predation as the only
form of interaction on offer) -- but disappointingly shallow.
SMC
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>
> >There were some weird holes, though. Having the probes project
> >holographic messages to communicate with native life is cute, until
> >you remember that all the native life is blind and sonar-based.
>
> The mission designers are only human, after all, and don't
> know what sort message is appropriate to the natives.
What I meant was, the show depicted the critters *responding* to the
hologram, without any awareness of the contradiction.
> In this special, there's at least some sort of vision but it's not
> as well developed as on Earth.
...Okay, I suppose. (I remember them saying that at some point.) On
the other hand, there were several Eosapiens-POV shots which were
clearly meant to depict perceiving the world by sonar.
> >The science commentators did a lot of dancing around to avoid saying
> >"Well, that creature is cool, but it makes no damn sense." :)
>
> They're scientists. They're used to seeing phenomena which
> is highly unexpected and initially makes no sense.
If that was the intended point, they should have made it explicitly.
(In the commentary/frame level, not the fictional narrative.) Or at
least made a clear distinction between the science people who
contributed to the show (decided what would go into it) and the ones
who viewed it afterwards and tried to analyze it. SF, unlike science,
is a two-player game.
James Gassaway
news:Vfxhe.1967$pb1.1530@trnddc08...
> OK, who else is watching it and what do you think?
>
Neat. :)
Not enough info on how some of the critters work, but looked really cool.
--
Multiversal Mercenaries
You name it, we kill it. Any time, any reality.