Why Dr. McCoy was not a whiny bitch

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

McCoy, Kirk and Spock are all about to die as their bodies are de-atomized over a period of several agonizing seconds.

Everyone in the original Star Trek was quite condescending to Bones whenever he got fretful about using the transporter.

Yet Dr. McCoy had solid, philosophical reasons for being freaked out by the device. Basically, the transporter disassembles all your molecules, and then reassembles them somewhere else. (Assuming something doesn’t go horribly wrong in the process, as it did in pretty much every other episode.)

It’s an existentialist nightmare.

So that means when you voluntarily use the transporter, you’re opting for death via de-atomization over a period of several agonizing seconds. Sure, a copy of you will go on, but who knows, maybe it will be the evil copy of you, or perhaps the machine will screw up, and you’ll end up with Mr. Spock’s wang protruding from your forehead. In either case, it doesn’t really matter, because the you that you are at this moment (which granted, is also an illusion of sorts, but that’s a subject for another time) is going to die. And presumably it hurts a bit to be de-atomized. Did anyone else ever think it took quite a long time for them to stop “sparkling”? It’s seconds at least. Now imagine what that feels like, having your atoms ripped apart over a period of several seconds. Having trouble? Pluck out a few nose hairs. Now imagine that in every molecule of your body for several seconds.

His crewmates should have cut Bones a little slack; let him take the shuttlecraft if he wanted. Besides, when you’re fighting Tiranglian Lizard people, or reprogramming a rogue computer, the doctor’s only going to be helpful in stitching you up afterwards. (Or whatever “non-barbaric” technology” Dr. McCoy used.)

If anything, McCoy was pretty stoic about the whole thing. If it had been me, there’s no way you’re getting me onto the transporter pad:

“Mr. Rayner, put on your red shirt and step onto the transporter pad, we’re going down to the surface,” Kirk ordered the pudgy and pale-looking ensign.

“Nuh-uh!”

“Mr. Rayner, you’re going down to the surface with the rest of the landing party, where we’re all going to die. Well, you’re going to die. Bones and Spock and I will be fine.”

“We all die every time we use the transporter!” Ensign Rayner cries.

“Don’t make me beat you.”

“Frankly …” Mr. Rayner lifts shoulders. “I’d prefer that…” Mr. Rayner raises hands. “Jim.” Mr. Rayner thrusts hands forward.

Then Kirk decks him (ripping his shirt in the process).

Green-skinned dancing girls appear on the transporter pad and begin doing the Hippy Shake, while Spock raises an eyebrow.

Your Turn

Now, what other science fiction inventions would suck? High on my list would be the notion that “food in pill form” is a good idea. I definitely think that would be awful, though obviously not as much as soylent green. Also, artificial intelligence seems like a bad idea too. Am I missing any?

Alltop is also not a whiny bitch. Originally published May, 2009.

This appears in my collection of shorts, Pirate Therapy and Other Cures.

The Chair That Sat Back

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

Evil chair Mephistopheles relaxed after a good (evil) day’s work, buying souls.

He’d chalked up three witches, a magus, a brick-maker who’d had too much to drink, and Michael Bay. (Boob, explosions and flash-cuts could only get you so far.)

The day’s coup had to be snagging the eternal mojo of an untalented, passive-aggressive tenured professor of Comparative Literature. Few outside the world of academia were willing to sell their souls, period, but usually they required at least world-wide fame, or in the case of the brick layers, as much beer as they could drink.

That prof really wanted to be Chair of the Department.

Alltop does a lot of hellish sitting to produce funny links. Originally published on Name Your Tale, July 2009. Evil chair photo by E. Monk via Flickr.

The inspiration for The Fridgularity (discussion post)

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

red chair on beach with beach bag next to it

This is a beach chair where I have contemplated humans turning into monkeys, or fridges taking over the Internet:

A bit of a departure for today’s Skwib. I’m currently engaging in a lively discussion of The Fridgularity over on Goodreads with The Next Best Book Club (TNBBC), and I thought I’d pull out some of my answers and repost them here.

You can join the discussion any time, but you’ll have to join Goodreads and TNBBC. (Of course you can view it at your leisure without participating, except on a quantum level.)

General question first: where did the “inspiration” for this madness come from?

Like many of my ideas, the genesis of The Fridgularity began on the beach, where I like to walk. I had been musing quite a bit about how much time I spend on the Internet — this would have been about the summer of 2010 or so — where I was Tweeting up a storm and generally exploring social media as a way to promote my earlier books. I’d also been noticing amongst my students that they were TOTALLY absorbed by social media, particularly Facebook. (I teach web design, information architecture, digital imaging and so on at a university here in London.) So absorbed, in fact, that I started to notice they had trouble paying attention to everything. Even when I was sitting next to them, helping them with their own projects, their FB pages were open in a tab, they had their mobiles buzzing away, and their attention spans were about 5 seconds. And then I thought, what if all that was taken away? (Yes, it was a little professor’s fantasy.)

And in my lecture on web standards (my day job is teaching web design to bemused students at Western University), I had been joking for years about how we would need to design websites for all kinds of screens, including those in refrigerators. Then that began to happen — fridges with web connections — and it started to jell. What if the web itself became aware, and it only wanted to talk to us through our web-enabled fridges?

My first novel, The Amadeus Net, also features a self-aware network, though it is the network of one finite city, and its a secret. I thought it would also be interesting to see what effects the idea of self-aware machines would have on humanity in general, and then I was off to the races.

HAL is definitely an inspiration. As are many of the self-aware machines we’ve seen before … the terminators, the androids in the Aliens franchise, Asimov’s robots, and so on. So it’s a tested trope in SF, but I wanted it to be a little more off-beat from what we’ve seen before, but still thought provoking and (I hoped) accessible to a wider audience.

The discussion is here. You can get the book wherever books are sold online, though if you want to save a few bucks, you can buy it here for $3 off with this code: YGMVF2ZY. It’s also available on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc.

Alltop is practically a literary discussion unto itself.

Ask General Kang: I’ve heard that one of the first things women check out is your footwear. What if I wear sandals?

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Mark A. Rayner

Ask General Kang Wow, this is a tough one. First of all, I don’t put anything on my feet, so I’m not really sure what this “footwear” concept is all about. (Don’t be fooled by my picture, those boots were added with Photoshop.)

However, I do know a little something about the human female, from hours of observation and from my own (ahem) extensive experience with females of my own species.

They’re probably trying to figure out how much money you make. Human females seem to be primarily concerned with money and power rather than attractiveness, so they are probably not making an aesthetic judgment on your shoes. That’s what this “footwear” is called, right, shoes?

My advice would be to wear something made out of solid gold or platinum or perhaps something studded with diamonds and other gems. The shinier and gaudier the better. Don’t leave any room for her make a mistake. Ensure that she knows you are loaded.

Or you could go with the “shock and awe” option and purchase some jet-propelled clogs armed with tactical nukes (and it probably wouldn’t hurt if they were studded with jewels and a few rotating knives).

Or, it might be a sex thing. Get extra large shoes, just in case that’s it.

And for Klugnar’s sake, dump the Jesus boots!

Next time: I think my boyfriend is cheating on me with some kind of alien space-bimbo. What can I do to win him back?

Author Archives: Mark A. Rayner