The Worst Line in Science Fiction... Ever

 

I've read a lot of science fiction books and seen a lot of science fiction movies over the years. And in all that content, one line sticks out to me as the worst line in science fiction. If there's a worse line, I don't know about it. 

It come in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (or as some call it, "The Slow-Motion Picture"). 

Star Trek: TMP has a lot of problems. It was directed by Robert Wise who direct The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951. Which is a good movie, for a 1950s science fiction film.  However, he also directed The Sound of Music and West Side Story, two musicals. In The Sound of Music, he almost spends as much time on the Alps as he does on the Von Trapp children. 

The other science fiction movie he directed before ST:TMP was The Andromeda Strain in 1971. That movie was mostly confined to a laboratory. Not really suited for a big-screen adaptation of Star Trek. 

In ST: TMP, the story moves so slow and there's little action. I remember when I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in the theater (opening night) and when the Klingon ships came on the screen, everyone cheered because finally there'd be some action.

According to the Internet Movie Database, the screenplay of ST:TMP was written by Harold Livingston (never heard of him) and the story was by Alan Dean Foster. I've read some books by Foster and I've never been impressed. So I don't know if Foster or Livingston are responsible for that awful line.

SPOILERS if you haven't seen ST:TMP.

Toward the end of the movie, they discover V'Ger is actually a Voyager spacecraft launched from Earth. And Commander Decker says, "It fell into what they used to call a black hole."

(Aside: How close was that black hole to Earth? Voyager 1, launched in 1977, 49 years ago, is now less than a light day away from Earth. It'll take it another 1,765 years to be one-tenth of a light year from the Sun. ST:TNG is set 246 years in the future. And how did he know it fell into a black hole if no information gets out of a black hole?)

The "what they used to call a black hole" just makes me crazy. You wouldn't say "He drove to town in what they used to call a horseless carriage." And why would the term for a black hole be changed? 

I don't know who wrote that line (Livingston or Foster), but it is, in my opinion, the worst line in science fiction history.

Do you know of a worse line in science fiction? Let me know in the comments below.

Original Ideas

Not long ago I posted this on X (formerly Twitter):

I thought it was a pretty original idea. (Plus only two people saw it when I have over 19,000 followers, what's up with that?)

Then someone posted this in response:

(I assume they mean the television show Person of Interest.)

I thought it was a pretty original idea. But I guess not.

As a writer, you try to come up with new, original stories. But it's hard or nearly impossible. You can't read all books (or even all science fiction books). You can't watch every television show and movies. How do you know the brilliant idea you came up with wasn't written about 80 years ago in Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

One time I was coming up with an idea for a story. And it was coming together nicely in my head. Then I realized it was the plot of the movie Forbidden Planet, which was based of Shakespeare's The Tempest. And The Tempest was written 400 years ago.

I thought my Adept series of books (First book Hammer of Thor) was pretty unique. Then someone said they reminded them of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, first published in 2000. Hammer of Thor was published in 2011. 

The weapon my main character, Rick Bailey, carries in Treasure of the Black Hole (and subsequent novels) I think is pretty unique. It reacts to his thoughts and has a distinctive aiming system. So far, no one has told me that it reminds them of something else they've read or seen. (He first uses the weapon in his timeline in The Smugglers of Mars.)

I doubt any idea is 100% unique. But you can take a unique angle on it, maybe. 

Do you think there's any new ideas in the world? Let me know in the comments below.

Two Tutus to Tie Dye

A tutu

The power of the internet!

For about five decades I've had this phrase in my head: "Two tutus to tie dye."

I knew I'd heard it somewhere when I was a teenager (actually younger I found out) and found it hilarious. But I had no idea where it came from

So one day recently, I googled "Two tutus to tie dye." And I found it. 

Someone in this group said it's from 1972's "Rock and Roll Classroom" (So I was 11 or 12, not quite a teenager). I had a title. So I searched for "Rock and Roll Classroom" on YouTube. And I found it! Had to scroll through a lot of stuff but eventually I came to the whole thing. The part about tie dying starts at 3:22. "Two tutus to tie dye" is said at 4:13. The whole thing is 4:41 long.

I'm thinking it was played on the radio. How else would I have heard it in 1972?

I'm not sure how you would tie dye a tutu since they are made of tulle (usually) which is basically fine netting. But it's a joke about tie dyeing a tutu so that's okay. 

Have you had a phrase stuck in your head for years that you don't remember where it came from? Let me know in the comments below.

Temperature

I was watching The Fifth Element the other day. Don't ask me why. It's not a great film and the Chris Tucker part stops the narration dead. For more about that, see here.

There's a scene early in the movie when a military spaceship is confronting an object. And someone says their instruments are registering -5,000 degrees. I don't know what units of measure they are using, but in no existing temperature system can you get a reading of -5,000 degrees.

Anyone who knows much science knows that the lowest temperature something can be is 0 Kelvin (-273.15 C or -457.87 F) or absolute zero. While temperatures can go into the trillions of degrees (Quasar 3C 273, powered by feeding supermassive black holes, their intense gravitational pull and friction heat their surrounding accretion disks to an astounding 10 trillion degrees Celsius), cold can only go until there is no heat any more. 

Cold is simply the absence of heat (as dark is the absence of light). You can add heat all you want but you can only take away heat until there is no more. Reaching absolute zero (no heat) takes infinite energy. The coldest natural place is the Boomerang Nebula. It is roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Centaurus constellation. With a staggering temperature of 1 degree kelvin, it is colder then the 3 degree background radiation of the universe. Humans have made things colder.  A cloud of chilled rubidium atoms was cooled to 38 picokelvin (38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero).

So, nothing can be -5,000 degrees. In defense of the movie, they didn't say the object was -5,000 degrees, they said their instruments were reading that temperature. So maybe it isn't that bad.

Purring

The other day I was giving our cat, Lily, scritches behind the ears and she was purring, which I took as a sign that she liked the attention. 

When Lily first came to us (rescued from an animal shelter) almost nine years ago, she purred nearly constantly. I have videos of her purring such as this one:

I got to thinking... do cats intentionally purr? So, of course, I googled it. This was before Google AI but here's what Google AI says now:

Yes, cats purr both involuntarily and voluntarily. While often linked to contentment, purring is largely an involuntary reflex used for self-soothing when stressed, injured, or in pain. It can also be a voluntary behavior to communicate needs, such as demanding food or attention from humans.

That made me wonder if she was stressed, being in a new home, and that's why she purred a lot. 

Not long after we got her, I was watching TV and Lily came into the family room purring loudly. And I wondered why she was purring so much until I remembered I forgot to feed her her second meal. She was hungry and/or wanted my attention. 

She doesn't purr as much now, but she will when she's content. Like when I'm scratching behind her ears.

Here's a recent picture of Lily just because. She turns 9 next month:

Shifting Cars in Movies

Recently I watched Ford v Ferrari.  It's a pretty good movie about a true story. I don't know how historically accurate it is, but it's still enjoyable if you like cars and racing (and I do). 

However, there was one scene where accuracy took a tumble. During the race at Daytona, Carroll Shelby told driver Ken Miles to keep the engine on the Ford GT-40 below 6,000 RPM to protect the engine. They were in second place. Shelby had bet his whole car company on Miles winning so with just a few laps to go, he got a sign board, wrote "7,000" on it, and showed it to Miles as he drove by (this was before there were radios in the cars), giving Miles permission to go to 7,000 RPM.

What did Miles do in the movie? He upshifted (based on the RPMs dropping) twice. And then went to 7,000 RPM and won the race.

The GT-40 had a 5-speed transaxle so the film makers indicated he was running in third so he could upshift twice? No, he would have been in 5th gear all along and just mashed the throttle. But shifting is so much more dramatic in movies.

Movie makers use shifting dramatically all the time. In some movies (I'm looking at you "Fast and Furious" franchise) cars will seem to have endless gears as the drivers keep shifting and shifting.

The worst offense to me, however, is downshifting to pass in a race. Yes, when you're driving your car on a highway and it has a manual transmission, you likely cruise in the highest gear to get the best gas mileage. Then, if on a two-lane road when you want to pass, you downshift to put the engine into the power band (where the engine has the most power) because you need to accelerate quickly. Movie makers seem to think this translates to the racetrack. It doesn't.

On the racetrack, you downshift for corners because you have to slow down and then downshift to get the engine back in the power band. But for passing, you don't downshift. You press the throttle harder. If you're at maximum RPM, you might try passing on a corner. But you're not going to downshift on a straight to pass another car. You're already at maximum RPM. If you downshift you'll over-rev the engine (and maybe have pistons coming out of your hood) and possibly lock up the drive wheels (on a race car they are invariably the rear wheels) causing you to lose control. Downshifting to pass didn't seem to happen in Ford v Ferrari because I was watching for it. Maybe Rush was the movie where they downshifted to pass. I don't remember.

Have you noticed bad shifting in movies? Let me know in the comments below.

 

The Final Countdown Movie

I recently watched the 1980 movie The Final Countdown (no relation to the song by Europe).

This movie was a big production starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross. It was filmed mostly on the aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz and had aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat flying on missions. For an airplane buff like me, it was enjoyable although there were some aircraft I didn't recognize which was frustrating. The script seemed to be written to showcase various carrier operations such as aerial refueling* and putting up an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane to see what's going on around them. I enjoyed that. 

And it was a science fiction movie. Really.

SPOILERS if you haven't seen the movie.

The Nimitz and its crew and aircraft and weapons and everything are sent back in time to December 6, 1941 due to a bizarre storm. There's no explanation of how or why the 1,000-foot long ship is suddenly taken back in time to a crucial spot in U.S. history other than the storm. It takes a while for the captain (Douglas) to figure it all out but then there's a dilemma. A single modern aircraft carrier could have stopped the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor easily. (Could have sank the whole Japanese fleet but they never discussed that possibility.) Should they stop the attack? Should they change history?

At the end, the captain decides to, yes, stop the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and launches F-14s and other planes to do that. I think the filmmakers wanted to show as many planes being launched as possible because some of the planes didn't look like combat aircraft.

But then, just before they are about to attack the Japanese planes, the bizarre storm comes back and they are all taken back to 1980, including the planes not on the carrier. Sort of a cop-out ending if you ask me.

They reused footage from the 1970 movie Tora Tora Tora for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

And, yes, the special effects were cheesy (lasers and smoke). 

For "let's make a movie on an aircraft carrier" it was great if you like airplanes and military stuff (and I do). For science fiction, it was dumb. They had this opportunity to film on a real aircraft carrier and they ruined it with a stupid science fiction plot. In 1980, it was the height of the Cold War (there was actually a Russian "trawler" spy boat in the movie). Couldn't they have come up with, oh, a plot about Soviet spies or the possibility of a shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? No, they did a dumb time travel story.

Have you seen The Final Countdown? What did you think of it. Let me know in the comments below. 

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

*The refueling in the movie was done by a variant of the A-6 Intruder. But since the Navy no longer flies the A-6 nor its variants, I wondered if there was a way to do aerial refueling now. According to Google, now the Navy uses "buddy refueling" where one F/A-18 Super Hornet with extra fuel tanks will refuel another F/A-18. And, according to Google, the Navy is developing the MQ-25 Stingray: This upcoming drone is designed to be the first dedicated carrier-based aerial refueling aircraft. It will allow F/A-18s to focus on combat missions rather than acting as tankers.