Fox's new pilot Virtuality brings the holodeck to NASA

Via Andrew Liptak's Worlds in a Grain of Sand.

The pilot movie for Fox's potential new series, Virtuality, has been moved up to June 26, at 8 Eastern, presumably on Hulu soon thereafter. It's helmed by Ronald D. Moore, the man behind the Battlestar Galactica reboot, much of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and a decent chunk of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This is the first I've heard of the show, but it seems the original airdate was July 4th, which even Fox realizes would be suicidal because even sci-fi nerds won't be inside in front of our TVs on July 4th. The press release:

The crew of the Phaeton is approaching the go/no-go point of their epic 10-year journey through outer space. With the fate of Earth in their hands, the pressure is intense. The best bet for helping the crew members maintain their sanity is the cutting-edge virtual reality technology installed on the ship. It's the perfect stress-reliever until they realize a glitch in the system has unleashed a virus on to the ship. Tensions mount as the crew decides how to contain the virus and complete their mission. Meanwhile, their lives are being taped for a reality show back on Earth in the World Broadcast Premiere of VIRTUALITY airing Friday, June 26 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

I'll be honest: the description doesn’t particularly turn me on. The whole VR thing seems so ’90s now, with the element of "reality-TV in space!" added to make it topical to the 2000s, which are themselves almost over. And the ship is a clunkier Serenity with a satellite tower, but from the costumes it looks like they're going for a relatively near-future setting, so I can see why they opted for something that looks just slightly post-NASA, not a design like the Starships Enterprise (Starship Enterprises?). Essentially it's a series of holodeck episodes set on the ship from 2001.

Nevertheless I’m definitely willing to give this a try since any new (read: wholly original) space-travel sci-fi is very welcome right now, with Battlestar Galactica off the air and no Star Trek series foreseeable anytime soon. The first sentence of the release reminds me of J. Michael Straczynski’s short-lived Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade, where the mission was to search the galaxy for a cure to a nanovirus plague that would devastate the Earth within five years. (It turns out that Bill Lumbergh makes a good starship captain after all.)

io9’s script peek from May 2008 looks respectable as well, with some elements that make it sound a lot more interesting. I.e. the ship's doctor has Parkinson's Disease, which means they risk losing their doctor during the mission, but on the other hand the next mission attempt would not be for another 20 years.

It remains to be seen how many of those script elements have made it into the final series, of course. I'm just hoping this is one of those shows whose execution is better than it sounds on the label.

UPDATE (via sleepysheepie): The FutonCritic reviews the pilot, explains the various subplots, and deems the show "without a doubt worth your time."

Earth's first starship is The Phaeton. Its mission: search for extraterrestrial life around Epsilon Eridani, one of our nearest Sun-like stars. Its 10-year journey is being financed by The Consortium, a mega-corporation that hopes to make back its investment through various sponsorships, most notably a "Big Brother"-esque reality show about the ship's 12 astronauts.

True nerds will note that Babylon 5 was stationed above the third planet of the Epsilon Eridani system, although of course this star is located only 10.5 light-years away and has therefore appeared frequently in science fiction.

Book review: The Suicide Collectors by David Oppegaard

"The Despair has plagued the earth for five years. Most of the world’s population has inexplicably died by its own hand, and the few survivors struggle to remain alive. A mysterious, shadowy group called the Collectors has emerged, inevitably appearing to remove the bodies of the dead. But in the crumbling state of Florida, a man named Norman takes an unprecedented stand against the Collectors, propelling him on a journey across North America. It’s rumored a scientist in Seattle is working on a cure for the Despair, but in a world ruled by death, it won’t be easy to get there."


The author is an '02 grad of my college, so I showed up at a recent signing/reading on campus and scored an autographed copy.

I know that listing comparisons is lazy and inexact, but with so many parallels suggesting themselves so easily here it's a handy shorthand to convey the "feel" of Oppegaard's story--so bear with me.

As seen in the description, the setup is very much in the vein of Children of Men (though with the depopulation a few stages further along), as well as M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. The plot is basically a post-apocalyptic road picture, with our protagonist Norman encountering various groups of survivors and overcoming hazards natural and manmade. The mysterious Collectors, who spirit away the remains of the fallen, reminded me of the Strangers in Dark City, and the descriptions of a crumbling, recently abandoned America evoked The Postman--the movie not the book since I haven't read it, and I want to note that I reference it not sarcastically but as a compliment, since I really enjoy that movie despite the detractors.

As io9 pointed out, it "may be the first novel ever to have a blurb from Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and reviews comparing it to Cormac McCarthy's The Road." (Incidentally, the film adaptation of the latter is scheduled for October 16.)

Verdict: It was OK but not great. You can definitely tell it was a first novel. It had a solid plot and some great individual elements, but didn't quite live up to the promise of the setup, and the prose itself varies between really good and extremely uninspired. I suppose vocabulary and simple sentence structure is silly to get hung up on, but that's me. (I can't stand Hemingway for the same reason, which is probably why I never became an English major. I grant that there's probably a lot of great stuff of his that I'm missing out on; if that makes me a Philistine, so be it.)

I give The Suicide Collectors 3.5 out of 5. Then again, my expectations were high because reviews were very positive--for example, it's been named a finalist for the 2008 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel--so your mileage may vary. It's pretty short and is definitely worth a read if you enjoyed any of the plots/films I mentioned above, but I'd check it out of the library or wait for the paperback.

I will say that I am looking forward to seeing what else Oppegaard comes up with. His followup novel Wormwood, Nevada will be released in December 2009, also from St. Martin's Press.