Red Saturn Run by Marianne Plumridge, www.marianneplumridge.com. By permission of the artist

If you haven’t been keeping track of the Obama administration’s plans for the future of NASA, check out what Buzz Aldrin has to say in an article on Huffington Post.

He sums up the administrations actions so far and the proposed NASA budget, and then goes on to discuss where this change of direction might take the space program. He says,

Image: BuzzAldrin.com

“…A better way to spend our taxpayer dollars would be not focused on the Moon race, but on something … called a “Flexible Path.” Flexible in the sense that it would redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons. Many different destinations and missions would be enabled by that approach, not just one.”

The new direction would be great news for all us space junkies (like this one, who got sucked into watching Apollo 13 the other night on HBO, even though I own it and have watched it a zillion times).

And just as important to this blog, it’s also great inspiration to everyone whose worldbuilding and storytelling is drawn to near future-space travel settings.  Among the possibilities Aldrin mentions: commercial space flight becoming an established industry; a ship that cycles between Earth and Mars; and a space program that would soon be able to take us anywhere in the solar system! And from the Space.com news article about the new budget: inflatable space houses!

Space-travel worldbuilders and storytellers, fire up your rockets!

Clearly, it’s Avatar week here at WorldBuildingRules! I  can’t resist sharing Rolling Stone magazine’s fabulous riff on the world of Avatar: “Pandora’s Music Box.”

Some Photoshop genius on RS’s staff has taken images of a dozen or so gods and current stars of Rock and Pop, and transformed them into Na’vi avatars.  Here’s a taste:

Bono's avatar. An RS reader suggests he might go instead for the pink tinted glasses with this look! Image: Rolling Stone

See the rest here. Its a wonderful visual selection of celestial musical beings.  The only one missing that I wish had been included is Michael Jackson, but I suppose it’s still too soon for that to be considered in good taste. Too bad. The King of Pop would look fabulous in blue!

Avatar takes aim at movie history. Image: 20th Century Fox

Cameron is still king. Avatar is ruling the awards nomination season, and holding its place at the top of the box office for the 7th straight week, the first movie since Titanic sit in the top for so long. And of course, like anything hugely successful, there’s plenty of debate about whether it’s really that good..

So this seems like a good time to introduce you to Professor Henry Jenkin’s  analysis of all the critical baggage people are bringing with them into the biggest movie of the decade. Prof. Jenkins, who pioneered the study of fandom as an aspect of popular culture and media, sees five different ways that people are looking at this movie. In his blog Confessions of an Aca/Fan, he writes,

Smart guy Henry Jenkins. Image from his blog.

“Cameron is trying to balance and satisfy at least five different sets of interpretive expectations which sit uneasily in relation to each other. Clearly most viewers experience the film first and foremost on the level of audiovisual spectacle and thus this is often the first thing anyone wants to comment on. How they feel about the plot and characters, though, has to do with which of these other levels enter into our interpretation.”

Read the rest here. Longer than your usual blog post, but very insightful.

Prof Jenkins’ analysis is worthwhile for worldbuilders, not just because it’s about Avatar, the most remarkable original world to hit movie theaters in over 30 years. All of us who are creating worlds for public consumption, are going to have to contend with these five kinds of interpretation from our fans. We might have an easier time understanding our audience if we know where they’re coming from.

After you’ve read and thought, you might ask yourself, which kind of viewer are you?

The title of this post comes from this week’s version of the blog Lost In Books weekly meme, “The Book List”. Since the blog is devoted to books, I’ll confine myself to fictional worlds on the page (which will make it a tiny bit easier to pick just 3!).

This questions seems particularly suited for worldbuilders. Are you building a world that others would like to hang out in? At least I can say I’m building a world that I want to hang out in:

1. Khasran

The outer wall of Khasran looks like this mesa

Of course! I’d like to gallop across the grasslands with the horse people and share their telepathic bond with their horses,  see the terraces, waterfalls and hanging gardens of Khasran, listen to songs and poetry in gardens by the river in the City of Poets, ride the waters of the southern sea with the boat people. I want to watch people playing kargat and feel the flow of powers through the game, and lie out under the sky on a summer night to watch the Rain of Stars.

Let me say first that while I was watching Guy Ritchie’s update of Sherlock Holmes, I enjoyed every minute. Robert Downey and Jude Law have terrific chemistry; and as a lifelong fan of the literary Holmes, I never was worried about many of the objections people were making in advance of the movie.

To take these one by one:  Downey’s Holmes can indeed be a man of action, since Doyle makes very clear that Holmes was not only physically fit, but skilled in a number of martial arts. Changing Irene Adler from the retired adventuress of the story, to a very active one – also no problem: it’s a bit of artistic license that brings much needed estrogen to the leading cast. If Downey’s Holmes is much more lively and emotional than most of his big screen predecessors, that also is true to the stories. It was only the movie versions of Holmes who were Spock-like in their cold rationality, while Doyle’s Holmes is so mercurial that these days, we might suspect him of having bipolar disorder. And Jude Law’s Watson is beyond praise because he’s the first actor to portray the good doctor as Holmes’s equal in all but deductive powers, not the dim bulb of most previous films. Since Watson is the narrator of Doyle’s stories, he can’t boast of his own abilities, but he must have been Holmes’s equal. Why else would the world’s most famous detective choose him as his partner and best friend?

The movie spins along at a gallop, but still takes the indispensable time to show Holmes’s ingenuity and deductive processes and even gives him a few minutes to reveal them at the end. And the story is convoluted and cleverly plotted enough to keep us guessing. It is indeed a lot of fun to watch, mostly because of Downey and Law. So what was  the problem? After it was over, it just evaporated from my mind. Really good movies stay with me afterwards, and I began to realize that  something essential was missing. I went back to the stories to figure out what it was.

People have been looking for “El Dorado” or “The City of Z,” a lost civilization in the Amazon basin, for over 500 years. Countless expeditions, from the Conquistadores to the 20th century, have gone into the rain forest hoping to find cities of gold, and never come out again; and countless storytellers, including Conan Doyle and the Indiana Jones team, have been inspired to tell stories about the search for the lost city.

Archaeologists always assumed that El Dorado was just a legend dreamed up by gold-hungry Conquistadores. Unlike the rain forests of the Yucatan and Southeast Asia, no one had ever found any traces of the large constructions that civilizations leave behind them. The scientists have assumed that Amazonian peoples have always been simple tribal societies, because the Amazonian soil was just too poor to sustain the agriculture that a large, complex society needs.

These earthworks date to 200 AD. Photo: National Geographic

All those assumptions evaporated when satellite imagery and deforestation revealed the remains of huge, orderly earthworks, not in just a few places, but scores of them, spread over hundreds of kilometers in western Brazil. And the archaeologists studying these sites think they have found only 1 tenth of them so far!

The Guardian has a news story here that gives most of the basic information. Or, if you’re a real archaeology junkie, you can download the original research article which was published in Vol. 83:322 of the scholarly journal Antiquity. It has much better photos of different sites, and a number of maps and diagrams.

I don’t know about you, but this news makes me want to start reading about ancient rain forest civilizations, and looking for a rain forest or two in Khasran where I might discover one!

The floating mountains of Pandora. All images, 20th Century Fox

Two and a half hours can seem endless in a movie, or it can go by in a flash. In Avatar, it does both. There’s no drag anywhere in this movie, no scenes where you might sneak out to the rest room without missing something significant. The storytelling pace is admirably balanced between adventure, humor, intimacy, catastrophe, helpless rage, and pure wonder, and the time flies by.

Yet at the same time, you come out of Avatar feeling as if much more than a couple of hours has passed. As if, in fact, you’ve just made the trip of a lifetime. This two-hour visit to Pandora is the nearest any of us may come to experiencing an alien world – at least, until James Cameron makes more Avatar movies, and other entertainment prodigies come up with still more immersive technologies than Cameron’s wondrous 3D motion capture.

Some might say that, culturally and biologically, the world of Pandora is thin, and rather stereotyped. And so it would be, if Avatar were a novel. For a movie, though, the level of original worldbuilding is extraordinary.  I can’t remember anything comparable since Star Wars. And James Cameron is a much more thoughtful worldbuilder than George Lucas.  [some spoilers ahead]

There’s a wonderful LinkedIn group called Science Fiction Readers, Writers and Collectors, whose members regularly fire off fabulous discussion topics then carry on smart, engaging and entertaining debates about all things science fiction and fantasy. Not long ago, I asked this group what they thought of Stargate Universe. The responses were black and white; fans either loved it or they hated it, for dozens of fiercely argued posts.

SG-1's O'Neill checks out a stargate. Image: MGM

The debate crystallized my understanding of the fundamental difference between Universe and the 2 previous Stargate shows: they represent opposite approaches to telling a story.

To illustrate these 2 approaches, I use the metaphor of visiting a museum.  You can take a guided tour, or you can ramble through on your own.

Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis used the guided tour approach. The showrunners took their audience through the “museum” step by step, pointing out the major exhibits and explaining their importance: “These are the good guys, these are the bad guys, this is the conflict, these are the choices the heroes have, this is what you can look for in the next scene.”  Suspense in this kind of story comes from wondering how the heroes will deal with the stuff in the “next room;” while emotional engagement comes mostly from liking the characters enough to want to spend time with them and watch their relationships grow.

Stargate Universe, in contrast, is a free ramble, and that’s what has shaken up the fan base.

Cartoonist K Beaton, creator/owner of Hark! A Vagrant, just posted this perfect illustration (double meaning intended) of two opposing approaches to worldbuilding:

If you have trouble reading the words in this image, you can read the full-size original here, among a wide spectrum of cartoon reflections and speculations about life, the universe and everything. And history. Lots of history. Just my cup of ink!

My friend Carol, a hula instructor with extensive knowledge of Hawaiian culture, recently sent this email to a group of friends planning to visit Salem, MA:

Kuka'ilimoku, Hawaiian war god. 19th century temple statue in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum

“When you go to Peabody Essex Museum please don’t forget to pay your respects to Kuka`ilimoku, King Kamehameha I’s war god, who lives there.  (Ku the Island Seizer)

“He is one of a very few ki`i (tikis) that escaped the destruction of the gods’ images perpetrated by the Hawaiians themselves after contact w/ the British (but years before the Christian missionaries got there: It was a political, secularist, and feminist move led by one of Kamehameha’s widows.)

“He is “asleep,” a state the museum had a kahuna put him in to prevent him from being too powerful without the required constant attention of a caregiver.  But I think you will still feel his mana (energy) if you visit him..“

This made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, at the idea of a statue being so awake, so powerful, it has to be put to sleep. And notice that Carol says that Ku lives at the museum, not that he is “exhibited” there. When I asked her about it, she added this:

“Hawaiians don’t believe that a piece of carved wood has power per se; it’s more that the god with his power inhabits the physical statue.