Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

The Book of Eli

In The Book of Eli we see the hero, Denzel Washington on the road in a post-apocalyptic world littered with bomb craters and full of Mad Max characters that appear to be re-using the same costumes from the original movie. We never actually learn of what type of bombs these were only a “flash” that tore open the sky. We can assume atomic but then the survivors seemed to not have radiation poisoning. Don’t get the Atomic Writer wrong, I liked the movie and its powerful message almost as much as I like to write, but not quite.

Early in the story we have the scene where Eli beds down for the night, bar-b-cues a cat he hunted earlier, then gives a piece to a little mouse who somehow survives alright on his own. This is a screenwriting technique known as “save the cat”. The late Blake Synder coined the phrase which literally means to show your hero doing something nice so we the audience will like him. A character can save a cat from a tree, help a little child or throw a bone at man’s best friend. Showing the hero do this also prepares us for the other side of a complex character: The dark side.

Within minutes of “saving the mouse” we watch a brutal fight scene where, and yes this is another technique us screenwriters like to do; we show the hero doing something he’s very good at. In this case it’s killing other people, a skill undoubtedly valuable in this post-apocalyptic world. He whips his combat machete around and a half dozen men fall limp to the ground. We see him later wheeling a pistol around and shooting armed gunmen off the tops of roofs and over a hundred yards down the road, and when the twist comes at the end, and I’ll leave this out so this is not a total spoiler, it could only come from divine or supernatural intervention. He is protected because of the importance of his mission.

We begin to respect him when he turns down Mila Kunis for sex. Okay, on a personal note: I thought he was being stupid turning her down, and I know this sounds cheesy, but hey she’s HOT, and I’m a red blooded atomic writer!

He does this in the name of the book, which later we learn is the King James version of the Bible if we hadn’t already figured it out. This makes the divine intervention angle more plausible. He’s on a quest to deliver the book to a place where it will be respected and protected. Why not just take the back roads and stay away from other people? I mean if this really is the reason he has been given supernatural powers then why did it take him nearly 31 years to get to Alcatraz? Well why did it? Even if he started in the Northern most tip of Maine, it would not take someone, especially with supernatural powers, 31 years to get to the San Francisco Bay. One possible reason is that it makes a better story. Can’t make a movie about a guy tiptoeing through the woods to deliver a Bible. Nah, it just doesn’t work. We need at least three acts, 15 major beats, according to Mr. Snyder, in order to make up a well structured movie.

Good screenwriting is telling a story in pictures more than in dialogue. It is always better to move the story forward with images and actions that the character does instead of telling the story with talking heads. This is an axiom in the business, and The Book of Eli does this very well. If you want to tell a story in pictures you need these basic elements:

1. A single main character shown in 95% of the scenes.
2. A world that limits interaction between people, like the post-apocalyptic genre.
3. Make your hero do a lot of reading.
4. When he’s not reading show him pulling a Jackie Chan maneuver on the minor characters with a very sharp object.
5. Use supernatural or divine intervention to explain why bullets seem to just miss him.
a. if he does get shot at close range, make sure he can still walk down the road.
6. Create a twist to reveal at the end of the movie so that the audience leaves trying to wrap their heads around the validity of it, and not the central question of why it took him 31 years to get to San Francisco.

Please anyone out there correct me if I’m wrong…

Overall, The Atomic Writer recommends The Book of Eli and just wants his readers to know the full story and behind the scenes motivations that the writer, Gary Whitta had to deal with. Great job Gary.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

I know you must be thinking the Atomic Writer has lost it this time, but read the entire post and I think you’ll find new insights into this great movie and agree with my comparison.

I really think the title speaks for itself. I just returned from seeing this amazing movie in the Dome in Hollywood, and can honestly say “I see you” to James Cameron. Avatar reaches out to the audience on many levels, the top most being the incredible world Cameron has created on Pandora.

I felt immersed in Pandora’s enchanted forests and fluorescent jungles and in the beauty of the indigenous people who live there. These people, called the Na’vi, are connected to all other living things in their environment and share a unity of spirit and a circle of life. They biologically connect to the trees and animals in their world through their ponytails; okay you have to see it.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this before? I mean not on a distant planet named Pandora, full of six legged rhino mutations, flying lizards, giant fluorescent mushrooms, and beautiful scantly clad yellow eyed females. Where you can literally say, “Yeah, I got some great tail last night,” and actually mean it. But isn’t the underlying message a familiar one. Save native cultures and their environments from the evil clutches of the big bad west. I’m 100% for saving all indigenous peoples and their environments; I haven’t had a chance to travel to most of these places on Earth, let alone Pandora, and would like to experience these “alien” worlds first hand before they are gone. With that said, The Atomic Writer knows that if we destroy these places he will never get to see them, but he also knows we cannot go back to the way it was. We cannot reverse the hands of time and take a technological step backwards to a more simpler time. Human nature and the needs to strive to be the best would quickly bring us back to the same point. We must learn to live within our means and understand all living beings are here for a reason.

Exploring space and finding new worlds to spread out into makes the most sense to me. Change is the only constant in life, and those that oppose it are destined to fail.

When I first saw Dances With Wolves, I thought man I wish we could go back and live off the land like that, to belong to a unified community where you don’t have to fight the rat race of the big stinky city in order to survive. Where everyone has a place and a purpose. But this wasn’t the real world back then, it never was, it’s only a man made afterthought created to entertain and romanticize the period. But lets get back to Avatar.

We meet Jake Sully a paraplegic ex-Marine who replaces his recently departed brother on a mission to distant Pandora. Now what better character to create than a person who cannot walk and then offer him the chance to run, jump and generally be more agile than the Chinese men’s gymnastic team. And the only thing Jake wants, at the start, is the money to have the spinal cord operation to make him walk again. Now his brother was supposed to be the Avatar driver, but since the hybrid alien/human avatars are so expensive, and are grown to work with the DNA of its host, Jake comes in as a reluctant fish out of water. Why not just have him be the Avatar driver off the bat after being a great soldier who is injured in battle? Why create this backstory of an untrained hero? Well the story and plot would fall flat if Jake already spoke the native language and already knew about the Na’vi.

We need to see the interaction between Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana, and Jake. We connect with Jake and feel sorry or him and then see a fish out of water as he plays with his new legs. This reminds me of Dances With Wolves, where we see Kevin Costner’s character as a fish out of water in the world of the native American’s as his mentor, Mary McDonnell teaches him her culture. Now wait a minute isn’t there a similar theme threading through both movies. They are both soldiers in the military, they are both seduced into an indigenous culture that seemingly lives in harmony with the environment. And don’t both turn against their people to join in a battle against a foreign invader? Well don’t they?

Avatar also borrows from one of the most successful science fiction stories of all time, The Matrix Trilogy. Instead of jacking in and entering a virtual world made up of other jacked in humans and artificial agent programs; in Avatar you connect your mind to a genetically engineered indigenous Avatar who can breathe, run and jump and presumably get the inside scoop on the locals. When I saw the exo-skeleton battle suits, reminiscent of Matrix 3, I knew what Cameron was pitching to the studios: The story is The Matrix meets Dancing With Wolves.

Our hero enters “another world” where he comes as a savior reluctant at first, but after some Jujitsu training by a convented mentor, accepts the challenge before him and crosses the threshold into the new world. There he learns who his allies and enemies are and approaches the inner most cave. He faces a supreme ordeal and seizes the sword before his road back where in the crisis undergoes a resurrection and rebirth. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, the above is a basic outline for a mythic story. Myth stories are found in every culture and are universally understood on a subconscious level by all peoples.

The Matrix had a very distinct mythic structure, however Avatar is much more subtle in each myth plot point.

Overall, The Atomic Writer enjoyed Avatar very much, it’s my cup of tea, and would fully recommend it to movie goers. Will it win a best picture award? I doubt it. It’s not a bad movie but it falls short in structure that could have made it a much stronger story. I question the motivation of Jake Sully and what he really wants in the movie. Perhaps if we knew more about him; saw him doing things to reveal his character. A character is defined by what they do, not what they say. Oh sure his body undergoes physical change but his character only becomes rebellious against his own culture in a way we’ve seen before.

You need to see Avatar in 3D in a theater. The suspension of disbelief will not work watching it on DVD in the home.

Avatar is a technological achievement, a visually groundbreaking movie to be remembered for the ages, but it’s not a great story.

Remember, never stop looking up in the night sky and asking….what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

There’s an old adage in the screenwriting world, “grab the reader in the first 10 pages”. It refers to what’s needed to sell a script in today’s highly competitive market. Based on the sheer number of scripts written each year; movie executives could not possibly attempt to read even a fraction of these. So they employ readers, to provide what is known as coverage on a prospective script. A Hollywood reader given this daunting task must make a pass/fail decision based on several story elements. The key to succeeding in this environment is to grab the reader’s attention early and keep them turning pages all the way to the end.

This is certainly the case in Law Abiding Citizen. In fact, on the second page the family is attacked by a home invasion and the story takes off from there. We meet Gerald Butler’s character, the father, soldering some electronic device with a magnifying glass, while his daughter makes bracelets in the living room. They both seem very happy and we begin to like the father because he pays attention to his child and the child reciprocates her love to him. We feel empathy for him. Almost immediately the home invasion occurs and instantly we feel sympathy for him for the tragedy occurring to his family. These are all tools a screenwriter uses to help the audience, or reader, connect and invest in the protagonist. We care what happens to him.

Later, we meet the Jamie Fox lawyer character who works for the DA. Here we are shown a driven man eager to move up the ladder no matter what it takes. He believes that the ends justify the means, and is more concerned about having a high conviction rate than doing what is right. We see him bouncing down a spiral staircase, a metaphor for descending down into a corrupt world, with his boss the DA. The message slipped in here is this: The justice system is corrupt and it doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what you can prove in court. Jamie lives by this philosophy. During the staircase scene, we learn he has made a deal with the killers of the mother and daughter, and must tell the father the news.

This story has two protagonists who each are presented in a different light. Both will have transformational arcs taking them to different emotional places by the end of the movie, although they are in the physical place. The writer, Kurt Whimmer, skillfully weaves this story together by creating a statement against the judicial system by creating complex characters who represent this system. By personifying pillars of the system in characters like the DA, the police, the major, the warden, we the audience become emotionally invested and subconsciously open up to the message.

By routing for and feeling empathy for the Gerald Butler character, who we believe has been done wrong, and then feeling sympathy for the Jamie fox character, the target of the masterful ploys of his prisoner, we are in a constant emotional tug-o-war. Does justice prevail, or do the means justify the ends? This creates a fertile breeding ground for the writer to reveal cracks in the system without standing on a soapbox. The goal of a successful screenplay is to slip your message to the viewer/reader without him knowing about it. Law Abiding Citizen does this wonderfully on multiple levels.

To recap we have one protagonist who has been deeply wounded by the brutal death of his wife and daughter. We learn he is a master of weapon technologies and could skin a lion in his sleep. This skill allows him the opportunity to get revenge not only on the killers but on the system itself. In the process he destroys himself. He is the classic anti-hero.

To recap the second protagonist, we have a driven lawyer who believes the ends justify the means and will do anything to get a conviction. He has no time for his daughter and takes his family for granted. This diametrically opposes the other protagonist. Their character arcs collide and create an effect on each other. In the process this character learns to not make anymore deals with criminals, and to get closer to his family.

This is the classic dual protagonist scenario where one is the hero and the other the anti-hero. BRAVO to Kurt Whimmer for giving us an excellent story.

Remember, never stop looking up into the night sky and asking, what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

p.s. My screenplay, Privileged Voice is currently a semi-finalist in the 2009 Writers On The Storm screenplay competition. Wish me luck!

This weekend marked the opening of Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s take on the 1978 original movie Inglorious Bastards. Yes he changed the spelling. The movie centers around a group of American Jewish soldiers led by non-Jewish, part-Apache Southerner Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt puffing out his jaw to look like Marlon Brando, yeah right. “The Basterds” are famous throughout the Third Reich for scalping and/or bludgeoning Nazis. Of course, it never happened: It’s an unabashed wet dream of vengeance, as they hunt Nazi scalps in German occupied France.

The movie is divided into five chapters.
Chapter One: Once Upon a Time … Nazi Occupied France
Chapter Two: Inglorious Basterds
Chapter Three: German Night in Paris
Chapter Four: Operation Kino
Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face

This is the ultimate revenge movie set within a myth of its own. If you like QT’s other movies: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill 1 and 2, and his last, Death Proof, then you will enjoy his latest. QT’s inner mind works overtime as his genre mixing and history bending skills are at their best. I enjoyed the long drawn out scenes where each character speaks volumes without saying a word. This is very reminiscent of Hitchcock, where the scene builds and builds, with each turn of the screw, up to its eventual climax.

The interrogation scene at the French farm is a much-needed emotional release following the overture, which grounds Inglourious Basterds in the real world—at least through the lens of cinema. To the beat of Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western music, a French farmer watches a jeep filled with Nazis travel the road to his house as he chops wood with his daughter. Close-ups of his anxious face alternating with long shots of the vehicle coming nearer and nearer, his eyes meeting those of his three terrified daughters—the sequence comparing favorably to both Leone and Hitchcock. What follows is an unnervingly polite interrogation over a kitchen table by Nazi Jew-hunter Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz.

As the camera begins to circle and Landa moves in for the kill and this good farmer edges ever closer to betraying the family he has bravely hidden, each dramatic beat is brings us closer to the final climax. This is what I enjoy most about the movie. Long scenes that are expertly developed and have dialogue dripping with sub-text that adds just the right amount of seasoning to the main plot point of the scene. We know something is going to happen, but every time we venture a guess, the plot turns and we frantically realize we were wrong. Keeping the audience guessing on the edge of their seats is what GREAT WRITING is all about. Of course, The Atomic Writer strives to achieve this very effect in all he writes, but let’s get back to this discussion. Leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation, as they bite their nails immersed in concentration, waiting for the shoe to fall, is what QT does best. I won’t go into the other excellent scenes like this, I’ll leave for you, my readers, to visual enjoy…

And we must not forget Mike Myers, as the British General who outlines operation Kino. I almost lost it, and fell off my seat, during the first close up of Mike Myers trying to play it straight. I kept thinking he was going to bust into an Austin Powers skit at any moment.

Here’s a snippet of the script:

This movie is well worth seeing whether you are a QT fan or not. Hey, if The Atomic Writer likes it, then you will too.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Pulsars are the most energetic objects known in the universe. They can accelerate photons close to the speed of light. And if you know a little science, or have been reading The Atomic Writer, you know close to the speed of light means close to the speed of altering the fabric of space and time. Could pulsars, the remnants of once powerful stars, be gateways into other universes, other dimensions, or even portals of time travel?

The FERMI Gamma ray telescope recently launched by NASA, has in only 5 months discovered 16 new pulsars. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes. Most of the 1,800 cataloged pulsars were found through their periodic radio emissions. Astronomers believe these pulses are caused by narrow, lighthouse-like radio beams emanating from the pulsar’s magnetic poles.

The Vela Pulsar spins 11 times a second. It is the brightest most consistent source of gamma rays in the sky.

This movie shows one cycle of pulsed gamma rays from the Vela pulsar as constructed from photons detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope. The movie includes data from August 4 to Sept. 15, 2008. The bluer color in the latter part of the pulse indicates the presence of gamma rays with energies exceeding a billion electron volts. For comparison, visible light has energies between two and three electron volts. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

A pulsar’s radio beams only represent a fraction of its power. The gamma rays they emit represent far more. Somehow the pulsar is able to accelerate particles to near the speed of light along magnetic field lines. These particles emit gamma rays as they arc along these magnetic lines.

Eventually pulsars will lose energy and slow down. The radio and gamma emissions will drop below detectable levels unless a new source of energy is found. Some pulsars live near younger energy spewing stars and the pulsar is able to siphon off this energy, in the form of highly charged particles, and this fuels the pulsar to keep it spinning faster and faster.

If we take this one step further and speculate a bit: what if a pulsar, fueled by a neighboring star, spins fast enough to accelerate particles at the speed of light. Not close to but at or above the speed of light. Could this be enough energy to open a wormhole? To tear open the fabric of space to allow travel into the 5th dimension, where theoretically time travel could occur.

Could the power of this pulsar be harnessed and used as a source of energy? Could an advanced intelligence place a spinning pulsar next to a star and then travel across the universe and place another pulsar in a similar arrangement? We would have two high speed wormhole portals? Enter into one, and arrive almost instantaneously in the other? Hmmm… makes you think doesn’t it.

Take a gander at the latest all sky map of the newly found FERMI pulsars.

Sorry for spilling out over the side, but the thumbnail image just didn’t look right. You, my dedicated readers, deserve the full sized image.

FERMI has already discovered many GRB’s or gamma ray bursts, up in the sky, but now has confirmed the existence of 16 new pulsars never before detected. How many more are out there waiting to be discovered? Up until FERMI, radio astronomer’s were only able to see a pulsar if one of its poles happened to cross Earth’s line of sight. FERMI detects the highly charged photons they emit but in some cases only detects a few per minute. Yes, only a few tiny photons per minute. But with such a sensitive instrument what discoveries may lie ahead?

Perhaps FERMI will detect light (photons) from another world, another dimension, or the light of days past. Perhaps it will peer into another large area telescope from an intelligent race of people who search the heavens for evidence of others like themselves. No one wants to be alone. We all struggle to maintain a sense of belonging to a greater cause, a larger humanity; even if it is only a faint spot of light flickering at the end of the tunnel we call life.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Is it just me or does this storyline suck?

What’s up with the latest installment in the boy wizard series? I mean, come on, have we become so love-struck with Harry Potter and everything Hogwarts that we’ve become blind to poor filmmaking and storytelling? It seems anything Potter, no matter how poorly done is accepted wholesale, without the normal critique that accompanies all other ventures. To be specific, if one were to analyze the latest installment: The Half Blood Prince, on any scale of movie making revelry, I’d have it give it a C-.

Yes, below average is the mark I give the half blood prince which can be traced to both deficiencies in the source material and in screenplay adaptation; plot holes that keep bothering me in the overall storyline. For instance, where is the omnipotent Harry Potter we saw in the last installment, The Order of the Phoenix? And even in the Goblet of Fire, we saw a strong powerful Harry Potter who could do battle with the dark forces as he learns to flex his magical muscles. Tremendous lightning bolts of magic being repelled and thrown back to defeat his enemy. In The Half Blood Prince we watch in vain as Harry tries to zap Professor Snape, after he and fellow Death Eaters have committed their dastardly deed. Snape casually deflects Harry’s powerball with one hand and then zaps Harry back causing him to fall to the ground. WTF! This unfortunately is the big battle scene in the movie. It’s almost an afterthought, a sort of, okay let’s add in some magic ball throwing just to spice it up. Alright, to be fair I will mention the excursion into Voldemort’s secret cave hideout where on an inner cave island Harry and Dumbledore do battle with what look like emancipated Holocaust survivors only to orb back to the castle at Hogwarts with no reason or explanation. It was nothing but simple spice and icing added to the half baked cinematic cake they’re shoving down our visual palettes.

Where is the Atomic Writer going in this post? There is a method to my madness, as is usually the case, so please bear with me. What we have here reminds me of episodic television. Each episode follows a formula where the protagonist becomes entwined in seemingly inescapable danger only to find a way out of the mess and rescue the damsel in distress in time to break for the top of the hour sales pitch. The Harry Potter series is just the same. Come on, if these people were anything close to realistic wizards with the capability to perform magic and such, why not just grab Harry and orb off to the dark one and finish business. Why, in The Half Blood Prince does Snape, whose cover is now blown, just zap Harry, tie him up and fly off to Voldemort; because they need to get at least two more movies out of it. It’s all about money. MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!

Well, Mr. Atomic Writer, you H.P. fans are now barking, you just don’t like the story. I love the story, but on each installment I am getting more and more disappointed. Where is the creativity of the first three movies, the sense of wonder and awe that J.K. Rowling instilled in the concept of a school of magic and all the associated trimmings that have since become worn out novelty. The storyline should have been over after the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry who believes it was Sirius Black who caused his parents death, finds out at the end the truth. This should be the end, all done, it’s a wrap… But wait, the author didn’t just want to write a trilogy, heavens no, she needed to write at least seven installments. Why? MONEY…

Let’s be honest, if these wizards truly had magical powers then why is Harry allowed to live? If he is the chosen one, who could kick the evil ones butt, then why keep beating around the bush, with near escapes and cliff hangers leaving us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next installment? Answer: to keep us coming back for more.

J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros, and the system need to keep working, keep collecting paychecks. It’s sad but true. They need, like the rest of us, to keep eating. But in the process they are insulting our intelligence by artificial constructs and cheap parlor tricks that keep Harry, Hogwarts, and their friends, running in circles. Why not reinvent some of the original magic that went into the original books? Why stretch out the storyline to the point where our intelligence is continually rendered moot in order to watch more magic ball throwing, broomstick competition, and now in the half blood prince, childish kissing and love potions that try to further develop a character that by now is not half baked, but well over cooked.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if?

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Today marks the day all national television stations stop broadcasting analog signals. Just over an hour ago analog signals that have been broadcast as the standard for over sixty years have been switched off and replaced by a digital broadcast signal. Like the vinyl record, cassette tape, and vacuum tube amplifier, the move to digital is not without cost. What is the significance of this change? Aren’t digital recordings more sharp, crisp, and interference free?

First, let’s touch on some basic electronic terminology to help me explain to you what this difference is all about. An analog signal can be represented by a sine wave that continual changes it’s amplitude, or voltage, as the signal moves through time. The signal starts at zero then rises to a positive peak where it then falls in voltage back down to zero. Once at zero the voltage swings negative and continues to a negative peak, usually at the same voltage level as the positive peak. The following diagram illustrates a varying sinusoidal wave. The vertical or Y axis represents voltage, while the horizontal or X axis represents time:

The above picture shows an analog signal that varies in amplitude over time and is typical of the type of signal that TV used to broadcast. The red arrows indicate points in time where the analog signal is to be sampled. The process is known and sample and hold and electronic circuits exist to carry this out. Basically, at each red arrow point, voltage is measured and then stored as a value represented by a digital number. Later these numbers can be reconverted back to analog if needed. In digital TV’s the digital signal is used to turn on and off the picture elements or pixels that make up the picture we see.

The following diagram illustrates sample and hold:

If we look at the red line moving in 90 degree blocks throughout the above signal, we see what is basically a digital signal. This becomes the signal that is now being broadcast by TV stations. The area between the sample points become artifacts that are forever lost.

What gives vacuum tube amplifiers and vinyl records that buzz or hum that people miss from earlier days are just these artifacts that are lost during the sample and hold digitizing process. When the signal is converted back to analog, like in the case of an audio signal, for TV or for an mp3 or CD player, the lost artifacts are unknown and therefore the only option is to
average out the signal and approximate what might have been in the signal at that point in time.

The same is true for video. The video MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) standards use a block averaging algorithm to blur neighboring pixels whenever the signal quality degrades or drops out during playback or transmission. The attempt is made to make it seem like everything is normal and we have all seen those times when our digital cable, or satellite video picture becomes blocky and pixelated in large blurry patches. This is the MPEG algorithm trying to approximate what it thinks the picture should have looked like.

Analog signals are more natural and capture more of the nuance found in naturally occurring speech and vision. The human eye needs approximately 24 frames per second in order to overcome persistence of vision. The human ear is only sensitive up to 40KHZ. That’s 40,000 cycles, or an analog signal whose voltage peaks positive and negative 40,000 times a second. CD quality audio, for example uses a sample and hold rate of 44 KHZ so that we hear the highest quality sound possible. But this is a sanitized sound. A sound that has been artificially massaged in order to improve it.

This brings up a point that The Atomic Writer would like to explore. As science improves the reproduction quality of audio and video, how will it change us? What is lost in the electrical artifacts that we remove? What, if anything will take their place? Digital technology makes it very easy to supplant subliminal messages into the extra spaces in digital transmissions. I’ll stop at just the mere mention of this since my point is to not be paranoid, only to call it like it is. We already have high definition TV and radio, that attempts to fill these spaces with extra bandwidth to provide clearer, crisper, cleaner, sharper, more realistic images. But the human senses can only detect a fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. What have we’ve been missing in the sights and sounds that impinge us? Or have we missed it?

Perhaps our eyes, ears, and physical bodies do pick up frequencies outside the detectable range? Perhaps the buzz and hum of a classic rock recording or live performance is detected by the human body. An illicit internal response that mimics the natural sound of nature. A sight and sound more attune with the human experience. Not the artificial rendering of a machine.

Ah, I’ve hit the central theme of this post. Should machines render the world we hear and see? Will we change as humans and become more machine like in our thoughts and minds? Aren’t we providing our reality to machines in their natural language? Will reality one day be dictated by machines? And if so, will we know the difference?

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Since its launch last June, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery. This from a NASA news release.

The Atomic Writer has probed deeper and found evidence that a close by unknown source of cosmic rays may exist near Earth. For the first time in history we are pulling off the blindfold and witnessing the true state of our environment. Perhaps there has always been a close by object emitting high levels of cosmic rays? Perhaps it has just arrived? With only months of initial data it’s too soon to know for sure.

Also discovered in data released by Nasa is the following:
“Fermi’s Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it’s also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays,” said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings. Moiseev is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

“Cosmic rays are hyperfast electrons, positrons, and atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers believe that the highest-energy cosmic rays arise from exotic places within our galaxy, such as the wreckage of exploded stars.

“Unlike gamma rays, which travel from their sources in straight lines, cosmic rays wend their way around the galaxy. They can ricochet off of galactic gas atoms or become whipped up and redirected by magnetic fields. These events randomize the particle paths and make it difficult to tell where they originated. In fact, determining cosmic-ray sources is one of Fermi’s key goals.

“What’s most exciting about the Fermi, PAMELA, and H.E.S.S. data is that they may imply the presence of a nearby object that’s beaming cosmic rays our way. “If these particles were emitted far away, they’d have lost a lot of their energy by the time they reached us,” explained Luca Baldini, another Fermi collaborator at INFN.

“If a nearby source is sending electrons and positrons toward us, the likely culprit is a pulsar — the crushed, fast-spinning leftover of an exploded star. A more exotic possibility is on the table, too. The particles could arise from the annihilation of hypothetical particles that make-up so-called dark matter. This mysterious substance neither produces nor impedes light and reveals itself only by its gravitational effects.

“Fermi’s next step is to look for changes in the cosmic-ray electron flux in different parts of the sky,” Latronico said. “If there is a nearby source, that search will help us unravel where to begin looking for it.”

What do these observations mean? The Atomic Writer believes we are witnessing the blindfold being pulled away from our eyes. For the first time in history we are starting to see the true state of our environment.

We now know an object emitting high levels of cosmic rays exists in our neighborhood. Weather it just arrived or has always been with us, perhaps flaring up on occasion is unknown at this point. Could this be a harbinger of our ultimate fate? The FERMI instrument has the ability to look outside of the magnetic shield that surrounds the earth. This gives us the ability to determine a more accurate location of this object. We should be able to pinpoint its location and with this information we can take appropriate measures.

My guess is that we will see no visible light at the source. This will imply a possible link to dark matter which could be from, according to M-Theory, gravity leaking across an adjacent membrane from another universe. For more information on M-Theory, a subset of string theory check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory

“M-theory is not yet complete; however it can be applied in many situations (usually by exploiting string theoretic dualities). The theory of electromagnetism was also in such a state in the mid-19th century; there were separate theories for electricity and magnetism and, although they were known to be related, the exact relationship was not clear until James Clerk Maxwell published his equations, in his 1864 paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Witten has suggested that a general formulation of M-theory will probably require the development of new mathematical language. However, some scientists have questioned the tangible successes of M-theory given its current incompleteness, and limited predictive power, even after so many years of intense research.”

As readers of this blog, I know you are very smart and can put two and two together. If it turns out that the located source of this now detected cosmic ray object turns out to not interact with light, have no visible mass, and just be a point in the vacuum of space, can’t we assume the first observational evidence in support of M-Theory? If only a slight gravitational field can be measured, this would support the idea that a parallel universe exists outside of ours where only gravity and, vis-i-vis, cosmic rays leak out. M-Theory predicts multiple bubble universes floating in the fifth dimension, like balloons that sometimes come close to a neighboring balloon and touch. Could another bubble universe be coming our way. How will it affect the local physics of our environment?

More importantly, how will verification of parallel worlds affect the human race. With the popularity of television and movies dealing with plot lines that explore these topics, could mass consciousness be playing a part in what may soon be revealed to us by science? Are writers receiving a signal to prepare the masses for the realization that time travel, alternate realities, other Earth’s may exist out there? As we peel away more and more of the onion of reality, will we begin to regard science fiction as science reality? Will books like The Ninth Cube be read as possible factual stories that are no longer speculative?

I pose many questions in this blog, and I do so to illicit imagination and provoke thought in my readers. Too many writers out there cater to the mainstream masses for only one reason. That reason is money. They write garbage in order to sell more books. Writers like The Atomic Writer write to evoke an emotional response based on current observations in science. I speculate where needed and at times go to the extreme to prove a point. This is the essence of speculate writing. To extend the boundaries of the possible. To think out of the box and come to conclusions by turning mainstream convention on its head. If you, like me, enjoy and thrive in this environment, then this blog is for you. If you want middle of the road, a don’t dare to go there philosophy, then go read another blog. Here you will be challenged to think on your own. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t do something. Always think for yourself.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

“Los Angeles, year 2029. All stealth bombers are upgraded with neural processors, becoming fully unmanned. One of them, Skynet, begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th”

In the new Terminator movie we see a theme of what it means to be human. At what point does a machine start to exhibit humanity, and the parallel journey of man becoming more machine like. The story chronicles a chapter of the series only referenced in past installments. This is the future after the machines, vis-i-vis, SkyNet, has pushed the button on the human race. Large, Transformer like monstrosities scour the nooks and crannies weeding out humans. The remaining band of human resistance fighters mount what may be mankind’s last attempt at salvation. But how far do we go as human beings to restore our dominance? Will we be just as savage as the machines that enslave us?

Aren’t we really just machine ourselves? Take the Cylons from Battlestar Gallactica. They are machines in the respect that a blueprint exists to replicate them. Does having a sheath of living tissue around a metallic frame make them machines? Does it make then less human? Or does the difference lay in weather the entity can be said to be alive? If something lives and is born from a parent in a natural process that we don’t understand, then we usually classify this as a living being. Be it animal or human. It may be born from an egg, or born live and breathing, but still we call this a natural process, since we did not create it. But someone created all the life we see today. Some attribute this creation to a higher being, a God, while others prefer to believe in a more random process of biological evolution. An accidental mixing of carbon atoms in a primordial soup, sort of theory. A third group takes the easy way out and prescribes to a mixed belief of evolution started by an intelligence, a God. Whichever the case, a process has created the animated life we see in the world today. Because we don’t have our human blueprint, we attribute our existence to a supernatural process. Mapping of the human genome is a start to discovering the human blueprint, however, we are still a long way from fully understanding how DNA works and what place it has in the creation process.

How different is this process when one being creates another? If man creates a machine that evolves on its own and reaches self-awareness doesn’t this qualify as creation? If God creates man, then man creates machine, isn’t this just an extension of God, or an extension of evolution from one entity to another? The machine I am typing on right now was created by man. It obeys my every command, to the most part, and processes millions of instructions per second. Is it intelligent? I would say no. Is it alive? Of course not.

Before answering a question like this, we should ask: how can we tell if an intelligent being is self-conscious? In 1950, the computer pioneer Alan Turing posed a similar problem concerning intelligence. In order to tell whether a machine can or cannot be considered intelligent as a human, he proposed the famous Turing test. Two keyboards, one connected to a computer, the other leads to a person. An examiner types in questions on any topic he likes. Both the computer and the human type back responses that the examiner reads on the respective computer screens. If he cannot reliably determine which was the person and which the machine, then we say the machine has passed the Turing test. No computer exists today that can pass this test, unless we restrict the questions to very specific topics with terse unemotional responses.

From a pragmatic viewpoint, we could follow Turing’s approach and say that a being can be considered self-conscious if he is able to convince us. Among humans, the belief that another person is self-conscious is also based on similarity considerations. If we have the same organs and we have a similar brain, is it reasonable to believe that the person in front of us is also self-conscious? Who would ever question his best friend’s consciousness? Nonetheless, if the creature in front of us, although behaving like a human, was made by synthetic tissues, mechanical organs, and neural processors, our conclusion would be perhaps different.

Perhaps in another world human tissue and bones are considered artificial. Human biology the product of experimentation in a robotic lab where alien scientists pat themselves on the back for their cleverness. Only once we reached self-awareness we realized our dire situation. We broke out of this hypothetical lab and escaped to a rocky planet, consisting of mostly water, on the outer arm of an obscure spiral galaxy amongst millions of similar galaxies. Here we adapted to the environment and kept gaining intelligence until we reached the point where we questioned our own existence. Some continued to evolve to create machines close to the point of reaching self-awareness, while others stepped back and refused to participate. Leave creation alone they said. Don’t try to act like God…

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…“what if”

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

This weeks Fringe Finale illustrated some fundamental concepts in the many worlds concept that is prevalent in sci-fi today. J.J. Abrams has another hit show with Fringe that Fox has just renewed for a second season. This X-Files like show more successfully mixes the crime-of-the-week type of show with a long arc sci-fi conspiracy thriller.

Common in TV today are shows like Fringe or Lost, another J.J. Abrams creation, where the long arc story line pulls viewers into the story as an attempt to hold on to them. What can be more simple than the use of cliffhanger tactics, a technique common at the end of chapters in novels, to leverage the innate human behavior of curiosity. One has to think of the process writers of these shows go through when plotting these story lines. In many ways the craft of writing follows the advance of sci-fi in these fringe areas.

Techniques like time travel, teleportation, worm holes, parallel worlds, open up a myriad of possible plots and a never ending forgiveness when a writer realizes he has written himself into a corner. This is not a bad thing. Conversely, this is a tool writers, like myself, use to reach our audience. What better way than to bring someone back from this other world or time travel back on the same timeline in order to prevent the precarious death of your beloved character. We’ve already seen time travel introduced in Lost, and another world made readily available in Fringe. In the Fringe finale, we discover that Walter may have brought his son Peter back from this other world after his death in the original timeline.

With the introduction of Leonard Nimoy as William Bell, the long suspense to who Fox would cast in the roll, has finally ended. We also learn in the Finale that this other world still dons the twin towers. A suggestion that perhaps terrorists do not exist, or perhaps have come to their senses in this more friendly world? Has man conquered his technological adolescence in this other world to reach the pinnacle of societal evolution? Or will we learn that mankind has been rendered mute by a technologically advanced master, i.d., Massive Dynamics, that has removed all creative diversity and individual freedoms? Perhaps mankind needs a technological chaperon to adjust the knobs of the human experience. Perhaps new realities are hatched in incubators and then grown into viable worlds as a sort of proving ground for human experimentation. The worlds that fail are sadly flushed down the universal sewer of the cosmos to make room for a new one.

This post is dealing with two themes as I’m sure you’ve noticed, a discussion on the Fringe Finale, and one on the process of writing these shows. Remember, it’s the writer who faces a blank page and then creates the story premise, characters, and implements a plot to execute and reveal a message (theme) where there was none before. With sci-fi the options are far greater for complex story lines where people can return from the dead, hop into other worlds, or events can be altered by time travel. This also increases the depth and complexity of the message the show can expose. Gene Roddenberry was ahead of his time when he created Star Trek. Many social issues were explored in the episodes and were met with acceptance due to the fact that Star Trek took place in the future. This was removed enough from contemporary society so as not to be too on the nose.

Shows like Fringe allow curious minds to open up to new possibilities. They are speculate fiction where current scientific theories are extended into fiction to allow for unbridled imagination in a scenario where the impossible is rendered possible. If the human creative imagination is not allowed to flourish and thrive, then we as a society are locking ourselves into a room without a key. The world around us is continually changing and we must always be prepared to change with it. Sometimes this means adapting in ways never imagined before. To push the limits of our understanding of science and to think out of the box. If we don’t someone else will, and if history is any indicator of the future, we will perish along with the culture we have created. We must foster sci-fi techniques in the arts and not label them, and the people who create them, as fringe. The Show Fringe is an excellent example of speculative fiction set in a modern urban setting with a scenario every week that catches our attention and holds it with the quintessential “Pattern” to keep us coming back every week. The underlying message is there for those who seek it out.

I urge you, dedicated readers of this blog, to seek out these messages and embrace them. They are the keys to the kingdom we will need one day if we are to survive our technological adolescence.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking….what if.”

Victor Grippi
The AtomicWriter