I watched Blade II on DVD this evening, having somehow failed to catch up with it during its cinema run despite my having hugely enjoyed the original film.

I did enjoy the sequel, but not as much as I expected to. Partly it was that the story was fairly predictable and unfocused, lacking the single enemy for Blade to work against which Deacon Frost provided first time round. Partly it was the overuse of CGI people in action scenes - it worked better than in, say, Attack of the Clones, but it still wasn’t particularly convincing. To a degree it was that the female lead just didn’t have the same sort of chemistry with Blade as the heroine of the first film. Finally, the storyline this time round didn’t really give us much reason to care which side won: the battle was essentially to decide whether humanity would be the prey of vampires or Reapers. You can get away with that sort of thing in a TV series like Buffy, where the writers have time to let us get to know the characters on all sides, but in a film running less than two hours there just wasn’t time. Finally, the way the story pressed the Reset button with respect to the fate of Whistler was awful: within the first ten minutes of the film he’s been de-vamped, and that just ain’t right.

I don’t want to be entirely negative: there were plenty of spectacular fight sequences - which, after all, is the main selling point for the franchise - and Wesley Snipes and Kris Kristofferson make a good team. The film was beautifully shot, with several action sequences which worked every bit as well on film as I’d imagine they would have in the original comic format. Snipes can certainly handle both the martial arts duties and the laconic one-liners convincingly. It’s just that it would be nice to see the writers deploy the characters in the service of a really good storyline next time round.

Millions of spiders have woven a web which stretches 60 acres across a field in British Columbia.

Bang goes any prospect of my having a nightmare-free sleep this evening.

In the comments on my post about whether Michael Crichton is a science fiction writer, Ray Girvan mentioned H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Coincidentally, I’ve just spent half an hour inspecting a terrific collection of covers from more than a hundred editions of the novel over the last century or so.

My three favourites (in no particular order) are: Vincent Di Fate’s unused cover for Pocket Books in 1982, the rather elegant Eaton Press edition of 1984, and Chris Hopkins’ view from afar as London gets trampled by the Martian War Machines.

Just read it.

Well, at least Timmy had a good ten years without having to know who Henry Kissinger was.

There’s something so precious about a young child’s first encounter with Henry Kissinger. At least it takes their mind off terror threats and Saddam Hussein.

Mommeee! Who’s the scary old man standing at the podium with President Bush? And why is there a huge pile of skulls and dead bodies all around him?

A terrific quotation from Fred Hoyle:

“Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted a tantalising excerpt from an article by Oliver Morton in the New Yorker’s book review section about why Michael Crichton isn’t a science fiction writer, no matter how often he writes about genetic engineering, chaos theory, dinosaurs and robots:

[Chrichton is] forever describing things that could change the world–but don’t. The Andromeda strain of space germs mutates into harmlessness and goes away; the lost city of the Congo is wiped from the map by lava; in Sphere, the discoverers of the extraterrestrial artifact of untold power use that power to wish it into retroactive nonexistence. The fact that Crichton has no interest in showing what might have happened is what makes him a writer of suspense fiction, rather than of science fiction. A science-fiction writer would naturally want to see what would happen if the technologies stayed out of control (as most do), and might even want to ask whether the consequences would be all bad (as they often aren’t). Might not free-range dinosaurs make Costa Rica an even more interesting place than it is today?

Unfortunately the full article isn’t available online, so I’ll have to see if I can lay my hands on a copy of the magazine before I can decide whether I agree with the writer’s argument.

The segment quoted above is true as far as it goes, to be sure, but I’d like to see if the full article tackles another facet of the question, namely whether anyone who could mangle chaos theory as badly as Crichton did could possibly be considered a science fiction writer?

(OK, that’s a little over the top. Scientific accuracy isn’t an essential requirement for a science fiction writer, provided that they make it clear that they’re not trying to predict the future but to use the standard props of the genre to tell an interesting story - see, for example, Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. But it would be good to see Morton spell out how addle-brained the thinking of Ian Malcolm, the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum in the film of Jurassic Park, was.)

Mozilla 1.2 has been out for a couple of days now. The most notable new feature is Type Ahead Find. The idea is that you bring up a web page and type the text you want to find, and as you type Mozilla highlights the matching text on the page. There are prefixes you can type to tell Mozilla to search only links or to search all text, and once Mozilla has highlighted the link you want it’s a simple matter to open the link from the keyboard.

In short, a lot less mousing around is required: this can only be a good thing.

I looked at the first public beta of Opera 7 the other day, but nothing I saw suggests that it’s significantly better than Mozilla, in terms of features and usability, and the difference in performance when it comes to rendering pages is too small to matter. Bear in mind that I’m running Mozilla on a PC significantly below the minimum recommended specification. When I finally replace this PC I expect Mozilla to fly.

Pong: The Text-Based Game. Words fail me.

A combination of Demon Internet having severe connectivity problems tonight and my having worked later than planned means that I haven’t done any web browsing this evening, so I’m afraid I don’t have any interesting links to post.

Happily my day wasn’t a total loss, since I took a trip to my local sorting office to pick up the box set of My So-Called Life on DVD which I ordered from Amazon after AnotherUniverse turned out to be untrustworthy.

I’ve just watched the pilot episode for the first time in about five or six years since the show was last repeated on Channel 4, and I’m delighted to report that it’s every bit as terrific as I remembered. Although the DVD presentation is nothing to write home about (very basic packaging, tacky menus) the content is just fine. After all, the bottom line is that I’ve got one of the five all-time classic US TV shows of the 90s on DVD, and that’s what counts.

For what it’s worth, the others on that list are Twin Peaks, Homicide: Life on the Street, Murder One and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Roseanne would have made the list, probably displacing Murder One, but it started in 1988.

Babylon 5 doesn’t quite make the cut, but it comes very close. Although it deserves credit as an ambitious and successful attempt to plot a complex but coherent science fiction story across the course of five years, on reflection some of the acting and dialogue was sufficiently workmanlike that it can’t quite live with the standards set by the Top Five. (But then, none of them had any planets blowing up, cool spaceships or multiple, overlapping, millennia-spanning alien conspiracies!)

A Californian firm has signed a deal which will allow it to use Russian ballistic missiles to dump rubbish on the Moon.

Or rather, to put items in orbit around the moon for about three months, after which the capsule will crash-land on the lunar surface and stay there until the first lunar colonists get round to establishing a litter patrol.

Ain’t capitalism wonderful?

Naked Blog presents the 100 Greatest Gay Britons competition. The list of nominations to date can be found here.

Dan Hon has spotted a wonderful story about what happens when your TiVo decides it knows you a little too well.

Not that it’s just TiVo. Amazon have some very strange ideas about what I like, and seem to be given to wild spells of enthusiasm for a particular sub-genre or product type. When it comes to science fiction novels or books about computers and the internet they’ve got a reasonable sample size so they do an OK job, but as soon as I added the DVDs of Yes, Minister to my wishlist they immediately added every 70s UK sitcom available on DVD to my DVD recommendations. As I’ve ordered very few music CDs through Amazon, their idea of what music I might like is similarly subject to wild fluctuations. After my first ever music CD from them (Danny Elfman’s Music From a Darkened Theatre) they started recommending Britney Spears’ current album to me. Then again, as a male in my late thirties I was already in one of Britney’s major customer demographics…

The early word from Danny O’Brien on Festival of Fools, the forthcoming novel by Charlie Stross, is very promising:

It’s great fun, especially if you like singularities, time-travelling godlike posthumans, sassy future UN weapons inspectors, and superintelligent space-faring viral hive minds that appear to be based on the cultural flotsam of the Edinburgh Festival. Or, indeed, if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Imperial Russian Navy tried to take on a post-scarcity nanotech orbital flotilla.

What’s not to like?

In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson writes In Praise of Amateurs in all fields of science.

In recent years the field of astronomy has seen notable contributions from amateurs who have exploited the power of cheap computers and the global communication network made possible by the internet to coordinate and carry out long-term, intensive observations of astronomical phenomena. The most notable example is Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which memorably disintegrated and crashed into Jupiter almost a decade ago, but amateur observers like part-time air-guitarist Sir Patrick Moore have been reporting detailed observations of the Moon and other objects within the solar system for years.

The real question, Dyson suggests, is simple: which field of science is going to be next to move back into the age of the amateur?