Andrew at Geek Mountain State asked me to write a post looking back at nerdy stuff in 2011. I didn’t see every movie or play every video game, so this isn’t an all-encompassing year-in-review post, but as I made my notes preparing to write the thing, I realized it was a pretty full year, as nerdy pursuits go. What follows is a subject-by-subject look at some of the nerdy things that I personally enjoyed in 2011.

SUPER HEROES, SEQUELS & PREQUELS
There were several super hero films this summer (which seems to be typical nowadays). I missed the one most folks were panning (Green Lantern) but I think I caught the rest of them. The production design was lovely in X-Men First Class, but the film suffered from egregious retconning and some fairly blatant racism and sexism (I know the film is set in the 60s when these were bigger cultural problems than they are now, but did they really have to kill the black super hero first? Really?). I think I would have enjoyed seeing a whole movie devoted to scenes of Magneto jet setting around in the 1960s and hunting down Nazis.

My favorite super hero film was Captain America by a mile. It managed to live up to its source material and tell a compelling self-contained story (unlike Thor, for example) and managed to perk up my interest in anticipation of next summer’s Avengers film all at the same time.

My actual favorite genre film of 2011 is a straight up tie between Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing. Contagion is really more of a science thriller than a science fiction film. It’s beautifully shot, directed and edited and it will make you hyper conscious of just how much you touch your own face. It’s the 2001: a Space Odyssey of pandemic films in that it nails the science behind the story so well. Narratively, Contagion plays out a bit like Soderbergh’s war-on-drugs polemic, Traffic, as it’s populated by an ensemble cast of loosely connected characters in different parts of the world who are affected by the outbreak in various ways.

The Thing is something special and something I’ve never seen done on film before. Here’s what I wrote in a Candleblog post that I never published:

Remakes are tricky. The problem is that nobody wants to remake crappy movies — everyone wants to remake classics, which is problematic because the classic films are already great. Remakes have an uphill battle trying to live up to these great original films and few succeed. Go ahead. Try and think of a great remake. The list is really short. Indeed some will  argue that John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing is actually the best remake ever (though technically, Carpenter’s film is not so much  a “remake” of Howard Hawkes’ 1952 classic, The Thing From Another World, as it is a retelling of John Campbell’s science fiction short story, Who Goes There).

Prequels are even trickier. Just ask George Lucas. A successful prequel has to not only stand alone as its own film, it has to live up to the quality of the film it’s setting up and it has to do so while explicitly revealing the on-screen actions that led to what may have been merely throw-away backstory elements in the original. Think of all the acrobatic shenanigans Lucas had to go through at the end of Revenge of the Sith to get all the characters in the right places for the beginning of Star Wars — wipe the protocol droid’s memory, but don’t bother with the R2 unit, he seems harmless enough; Bail Organa always wanted a little princess; Yoda is the greatest Jedi master in the galaxy but he dropped his lightsaber once so now he must exile himself to a swamp world, etc.

Keep these issues in mind as you watch Matthijs van Heijningen’s new version of The Thing, because this film has done something I think no other film has ever done: it’s both a successful remake and a successful prequel. It achieves the goals of both.

I wouldn’t change a word of that. Van Heijningen made a film that is a loving tribute to the original, recreating the basic plot, tension and (nearly) specific scenes of Carpenter’s iteration. The characters’ names and faces are different, but the monster is the same, the setting is essentially the same, and up until the film’s final moments, the basic narrative is the same, as the eponymous Thing picks off the ice station crew members one by one. So it works as a remake of Carpenter’s film, but it’s also a very specific prequel — so meticulously crafted that an uninitiated viewer watching the films back to back might think they were made at the same time. And despite the perfect attention to detail spent getting all of the various pieces in place for the start of Carpenter’s film, almost none of it feels forced or tacked-on (one exception being the ice station crew member who commits suicide by cutting his own throat, just to establish one shot in the 1982 film). I’m hoping van Heijningen has started a trend and that Ridley Scott’s Prometheus will be the next example of this sort of film.

Honorable mention: Attack the Block.

Special Worst Genre Film of 2011 Award: Transformers: Dark of the Moon (see my review here)

WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES
I’m a terribly slow reader so my best-of list of genre books will be short. I recently finished Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which is part time travel adventure, part historical fiction and part romance, none of which immediately strike me as Stephen King genres. It’s a great yarn but the SF nerd in me kept asking needling questions about the mechanics of time travel that King never bothered to answer.

Speaking of time travel adventures and historical fiction, my favorite SF book of 2011 was Connie Willis’ All Clear, which was part two of a two-part story begun last year (the first part was called Blackout). These books are set in my favorite of Willis’ universes (visited before in Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog) in which our heroes journey from the time-traveling future of Oxford, England circa 2060 to various points during WWII and then get stuck there.

On my bookshelf now, waiting to be read next are two other 2011 publications, Neil Stephenson’s REAMDE and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Those will have to wait for my 2012 year-in-review post.

ALIENS, ZOMBIES & DRAGON EGGS
Game of Thrones is the obvious 2011 champion of genre TV. Its loving devotion to the source material is inspiring and its slow-burn storytelling is something I’d like to see more of on TV. Matt Zoller Seitz (one of the best TV writers working now, IMO) described the second half of GoT season one as “The Godfather with swordplay and dragon’s eggs.” Yup. It’s that good.

2011 was also the year my wife and I finally caught up with Fringe and I can safely say that seasons two and three of that show comprise some of the finest SF TV I’ve ever seen.

I should also mention that SyFy’s version of Being Human turned out to be surprisingly good. (As good at the BBC version? Opinions vary.) Falling Skies is the show V really should have been and Walking Dead had a marginally better season than last year.

I couldn’t do a year-end round up of genre TV for 2011 without mentioning the insipid and blisteringly stupid NBC show, The Cape. Cancellation is too good for this turd. Every copy must be destroyed.

PRESS START
I should mention at the outset that I am not a fan of RPG video games. I like my RPGs the classic way — with dice. I mention this because Skyrim does not top my 2011 list, nor does it even make an appearance. I played a little bit of Oblivion once and let’s just say it doesn’t matter how much better Skyrim is, I’m not going to play it.

I did, however, spend a few too many hours playing L.A. Noire from Rockstar Games. I’m a sucker for anything even vaguely GTA-related and LA Noir is like GTA in 1940s LA, only you have to question witnesses. If you play it, do it in B&W. It was designed to be played that way and it really adds to the experience.

Dead Island had the best video game trailer of the year, for sure. Game play is your standard zombie romp, but set in a beautiful tropical locale.

The best video game of 2011 for me was Portal 2. I actually finished it (I rarely actually complete video game stories). It one-ups the brilliant original in two important ways: first, it expands on the physics, introducing new ways to navigate the crazy puzzles that are just as fun as the stuff in the first game; and second, the story is greatly expanded, including a compelling back story, new characters (Wheatly FTW!) and some of the funniest writing in any genre of any storytelling medium this year.

MEANWHILE…
I wanted to include a best-of comics section in this post but I read so few comics this year it just wouldn’t be worth a damn. But I’ll take the opportunity to plug my friend Alex’s excellent SF romance webcomic, Artifice. I’ll make it a New Year’s resolution to read more comics in 2012.

MEATSPACE ADVENTURES
I had some pretty great nerdy real-life experiences this year too. In Austin in March during SXSW I saw Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool News interview Guillermo del Toro about horror/fantasy movies on the stage of the Paramount Theater. Also at SXSW, I caught a couple of podcast tapings of Doug Loves Movies, featuring Simon Pegg, director James Gunn (Slither, Super), Rain Wilson, Dave Foley, Kevin Pollack and others. That was pretty great. I also saw They Might Be Giants play a show with Jonathan Coulton on a beautiful late summer evening in Norwich, VT. I interviewed biologist Craig Venter for a magazine article last January. Venter is the guy who created “artificial DNA” in a laboratory and was on the team that first sequenced the human genome. And my wife Emily’s knitted creations got some podcast and twitter love from the Nerdist himself, Chris Hardwick.

I’m sure 2012 will be even nerdier. The Mayans predicted it! See you next year.

With that said, here is my own list of the top ten science fiction movies of the last ten years. For the purposes of this list, I’m allowing myself a fairly broad interpretation of “science fiction” (i.e. I won’t disqualify a film for having wonky physics at work) but I’m specifically omitting comic book superhero movies (e.g. The Dark Knight) and pure fantasy films (e.g. LOtR). Movies on the list must be premised on a specifically science fictional conceit. Here goes…

09 Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). Yes, Avatar makes this list, though it’s at the bottom. It’s possible a little additional hindsight will alter my estimation of the film (moving it higher on the list or taking off the list altogether), but as a science fiction film, it’s got a lot going for it — in particular the depiction of the moon of Pandora. See my review from a couple of days ago for more of my thoughts on the film.

08 Minority Report (Stephen Spielberg, 2002). This is Spielberg’s best SF film, hands down (sorry E.T.). I think it’s underrated by SF fans because it’s a Tom Cruise film but it succeeds despite that handicap, and the supporting cast (Colin Farrell, Max Von Sydow, Tim Blake Nelson, Samantha Morton, Peter Stormare) is outstanding. It’s also one of the precious few good Philip K. Dick film adaptations out there.

07 WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The film that (hopefully) created millions of SF fans. The message is good, the look is beautiful, the characters are charming and it’s pure SF. Love it.

06 Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005). The decade didn’t really have a lot of space opera (outside of the woefully disappointing Star Wars prequels, two of which were in the last decade and are notably absent from this list), but Joss delivers. If I was including TV shows on this list, Serenity/Firefly would likely rate higher up as a set.

05 Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). The best nostalgic franchise reboot since Casino Royale. This was a sacred cow of mine and I thought Abrams did right by the spirit of Trek. Plus it’s balls-out action awesomeness.

04 District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009). Expect great things from this Neill Blomkamp character. District 9 could have been at the top of this list had it not degenerated into a run-of-the-mill sci-fi action movie in the third act.

03 Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009). Quiet, internal, spooky, existential SF at its best. Sam Rockwell deserves an Oscar. So does Duncan Jones.

02 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). This one often gets left off of SF lists but it’s totally science fiction. It’s also the best performance of Jim Carrey’s career. I’d like my Christmas present to be Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry promising to make more films together.

01 Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). I still think this is a film that’s going to have a rich SF history and may be one that serious critics are talking about decades from now. If this was a list of the most important SF films of the decade, Children of Men would be in the top slot without question.

00 Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). I watched this film twice all the way through in the same night and then watched it with Emily the next day. The film took the top prize at Sundance and a peek at Shane Carruth’s IMDb page suggests that despite the honor, he’s been unable to make another film since. It’s a science fiction masterpiece but it’s utterly unmarketable. It does everything wrong from an audience-building standpoint. There are no stars, it’s incomprehensible on a single viewing and the real payoff only comes after much post-film cogitating. It’s easily the best SF film of the decade. It’s possibly the best SF film of all time. Too bad nobody will ever know about it.

Looking at the list, one thing becomes clear: 2009 was a pretty amazing year for genre films. Four of the top ten SF films of the decade were from this last year. And this list doesn’t include films like Coraline, Watchmen, Zombieland or The Road. It’s like it’s 1982 all over again!

Feel free to take my list apart in the comments.

Somewhere near the middle of James Cameron’s three-hour long sci-fi spectacle, Avatar, I had to pee. The “medium” Diet Pepsi I’d been nursing was making its presence known in my bladder and the matter was just becoming too urgent to ignore. So I waited until I perceived a relative lull in the narrative, took off my 3-D glasses and exited the theater for the men’s room. In the fluorescent glare of the bathroom it occurred to me that I was experiencing a little meta-moment at the movies. The film is in large part about a guy (our hero) who uses fancy technology to enter a different world and experience things unlike the things he’s used to experiencing. In the course of the film he goes into and out of that new world by connecting to or being disconnected from that technology. And here I was, under the bright men’s room light, having been disconnected from my own fantastic world by disconnecting from technology — my 3-D glasses. The real world (while also technically in 3-D) was vastly less exciting and exotic than the one playing out in the room down the hall from me at that moment. After relieving myself, I went back and reconnected myself to the technology and hence to the virtual experience of the film, making a mental note about this insight so I could blog about it later in yet another virtual world.

This insight about the various layers of reality at play in the modern cinema-going experience may be about as deep an analysis as it’s possible to get out of Avatar. For while the film is at heart a morality play with political and moral messages central to its plot, the politics are overly simplistic and the morals are black and white.

Indeed, this is the primary criticism I’ve seen of the film so far — that it’s messages are trite and it’s characters and politics are simplistic. This is true, but so what? Compare the morality play in Avatar to the one at work in, say, Star Wars. Compare Avatar’s political messages to the ones at work in District 9. Does Avatar fare better or worse in those comparisons? Then look at the rest of Cameron’s oeuvre. The Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies, Titanic. We should know what to expect from this guy by now and it’s not deep, meaningful message-films.

Let’s be honest. Cameron isn’t Lars Von Trier. He’s a director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, but of course he’s much more than that too.

I’m reminded of that scene at the end of Die Hard when Holly Gennaro McClane realizes that the “terrorists” were really just in it for the money and she says to Hans Gruber, “you’re nothing but a common thief,” and Gruber crawls over to her and spitefully hisses, “I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane!”

Well James Cameron isn’t just your common director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, he’s an exceptional director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films.

On the level of storytelling, narrative exposition, yarn spinning, whatever you want to all it, Avatar is quite simply a masterpiece. Cameron has built a complete world — the moon of Pandora — and populated it with a dense and deeply interconnected system of flora and fauna and an indigenous culture that seems real (if a pastiche of various tribal Earth-born cultures). He’s also introduced human characters in a sci-fi setting with backstories and a world of their own (a world, it’s worth noting, that seems almost indistinguishable from the one that the Aliens characters inhabited in terms of technology and corporate/military relationships). A lesser filmmaker could not have gotten the audience hooked into the story of the film without a metric ton of clunky exposition and information-dumps. That Cameron was able to get us to care about the characters and stakes and still spend the last act on a giant action set-piece is simply amazing in this light. Leaving Avatar, I had learned a tremendous amount of information about a completely alien world and I never once became awkwardly aware of story exposition.

In hindsight I can see that Cameron took all of the standard expository shortcuts – he told the story of Avatar through the eyes of an untrained n00b so the audience learned about the world along with the main character (both the world of the human science/military project and the world of Pandora). He used voiceover narration in the form of a video log that said n00b was required to keep, thereby allowing Cameron to tell us things about the world rather than having to show us, which takes more time. He used a time-compressing montage during which we understand our hero to be developing his skills as a Na’vi hunter as well as developing his relationship with Neytiri. Again, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, these tropes would have seemed obvious and clichéd. But Cameron is a master storyteller, and as a result, we audience members don’t even notice the enormous amount of exposition going on constantly throughout the film.

Cameron also lets his actors really inhabit their roles. As stated earlier, the material in Avatar is pretty two-dimensional. The only moral ambiguity present in any of the characters exists in space of their waffling over whether to choose the just and moral path or the craven and evil one. There is no middle road for any of these characters to tread. Some are unambiguously good (Jake, the scientists, and pretty much all of the Na’vi), some are unambiguously evil (Col. Quaritch) and some just need to make up their minds about it (company man Selfridge, marine pilot Chacon). Given such limited constraints on the characters, it’s impressive how real they seem for the most part. Giovanni Ribisi, for example, does a great job of playing the role of the Half Ted company man. Without many lines, he’s able to convey his moral quandary admirably well.

There are a couple of sour notes that are worth noting because they’re just so bad. The mineral that the humans are looking to obtain from Pandora (the mining of which is the cause of the central conflict in Avatar) is called… wait for it… “unobtainium.” Unobtainium is a word historically used “for any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material needed to fulfill a given design for a given application.” Okay, so why not just call it “Macguffinite?” Seriously, why not just make Pandora rich in gold? Why make up a mineral?

And while Avatar is much closer to Aliens than it is to Titanic in form, Cameron decided to use a James Horner-composed theme song (ala My Heart Will Go On from Titanic), crooned by Celine Dion imposter Leona Lewis, for the end credits. The Celine Dion song was easily the worst thing about Titanic but at least it sort of fit the material a bit. Here such a song is totally out of place.

It’s too bad that Cameron needs to reinvent filmmaking and outspend the GDPs of most of the world’s nations in order to come out with a film. He’s quite skilled at making these sci-fi adventures. It would be nice to see him do it more often.

Here’s the thing: I want to like your show. I saw your extended trailers online and on movie screens this summer and I was totally intrigued by FlashForward’s premise and excited by the star power in the cast. But seriously? You’re blowing it. You’re treating me like I’m an eight year-old.

In this most recent episode (the 2nd episode in the series) half the episode was spent in exposition. I mean you folks pulled out the expository stops! There was a “previously on” montage preceding the episode, and then all of the characters ham-handedly restated the overall premise and their own personal struggles with that premise in every scene in the first half of the episode. And the characters repeated the information throughout the show, hitting the same dramatic beats over and over. You even resorted to flashbacks to events that occurred EARLIER IN THIS VERY EPISODE.

I know that there will be some new viewers who didn’t see the first episode and those people need to be brought into the fold, but seriously, we’re adults. This is complex drama and fans of complex drama don’t need to be spoon-fed the relevant dramatic elements. We’re sophisticated people. We watched The West Wing for crying out loud. We can handle a little confusion if the drama, writing and acting are all up to snuff. Hook us with compelling drama, not a list of plot and character points.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Other great and successful shows have shown how exposition can be minimal and effective. LOST (right there on your own network) actually handled this pretty well. The aforementioned West Wing is another network example. HBO does this particularly well, allowing themselves long “previously on” montages with lots of information so they can keep in-show exposition to a minimum.

I’m rooting for you, FlashForward producers. I want your show to be good and to succeed. So please take a few moments to read the chapters on TV in Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You and re-watch the early episodes of LOST. You want your audience asking questions. You want us a little confused every now and then. When you reveal something to us, let us feel like we figured something out by connecting some dots — don’t explain it to us with lots of pretty pictures and single-syllable words. Give us a little credit.

Thanks for listening.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman sat down to have a conversation with Hugo Award winning author Charles Stross at Worldcon in Montreal last week. This stuff is chicken soup for the nerdy soul. Listen to an mp3 of the talk here and read a transcript of the conversation here.

Krugman starts from the position of the “where’s my jetpack” set, explaining why he thinks technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years, but Stross points out how Krugman is judging current technological advances in the context of what futurists were predicting in the mid twentieth century. Things have progressed very rapidly, just not in the ways that people were predicting they would. The discussions about AI and genome mapping are particularly worth your time. The Q&A is really smart too. I guess Worldcon audiences are full of some pretty bright people.

Charles Stross: …Now, if I remember correctly, the original price prediction of the Human Genome Project when they got started around 1990 was about 20 years and 100 million pounds or thereabouts of that order. They finished it several years early under budget and they did 90% of the work in the last six months… Gets better. At that point, sequencing an individual human genome could be done for about ten million pounds. A while later it got cheaper and now we’re seeing gene sequencers coming on the market over the next year or so where its basically on an integrated circuit that should be able to do personalized genome scans to the same level of detail for about $5,000 in three hours. And it’s still getting cheaper. They have sequenced quite a few mammalian and other genomes since then it is getting cheaper all the time. Craig Venter came up with an interesting project a couple of years ago to sequence the Pacific Ocean. If you have a bucket of seawater, it contains probably on the order of a billion organisms most of which are viruses, probably single virus particles in that bucket from a number of species. It turns out when they did shotgun sequencing on a bucket of seawater 98% of the genes they discovered were hitherto unknown. There’s a lot of stuff out there that we do not have a clue about. About 90% of those unknown genes were from viruses and we have no idea what the host organisms of them were … basically, viral soup. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about how the genome works. It’s not, as was widely thought in the 50’s and 60’s, a blueprint. It’s more like a very very messy snapshot of a running computer program. In fact, the bits we’ve been looking at and referring to as genes, the exons are, if anything, just the static data strings encoded in the program while it’s running. Things such as the actual text in a variable containing the copyright date and the name, stuff that doesn’t change. A lot of the interesting work seems to be epigenetic as various enzymes tag methyl groups onto genes to activate and inactivate them. And we’re not quite sure what we’re looking at except … pointing a debugger at the running program and saying let’s change the value in this variable and see what it produces.

• Attend the national Alliance for Community Media conference
• Visit with new and old friends
• See The Decemberists and Andrew Bird play an outdoor show
• See the movie Moon
• Attend a live theater-in-the-park performance of the classic Star Trek episode, Amok Time. Yes, you read that correctly.

Does that sound like a perfect week or what?

Here is the list of original Trek episodes that Kate has either seen or is about to see. Can you suggest others that are worth her time? Note: the point is to avoid campiness, so don’t suggest the really bad ones like The Turnabout Intruder and Spock’s Brain, despite their appeal as cheesy pop cultural artifacts.

-where no man has gone before
-the naked time
-the enemy within
-the corbomite maneuver
-balance of terror
-the galileo seven
-court martial
-the return of the archons
-space seed
-the devil in the dark
-the city on the edge of forever
-amok time
-journey to babel
-the trouble with tribbles
-the menagerie part I
-the menagerie part II
-shore leave
-errand of mercy
-a piece of the action
-assignment: earth
-the motion picture
-the wrath of khan
-the search for spock
-the voyage home
-the final frontier
-the reboot

next up on my list:
-doomsday machine
-i, mudd
-the ultimate computer
-undiscovered country

I have already insisted she see Mirror, Mirror (my personal favorite episode) and sypathized with her having to endure Star Trek V The Final Frontier. Any other thoughts, Trek nerds?