I’ve long been a fan of Roger Ebert’s film criticism, so how could I resist “The Thinking Molecules of Titan”? Chaz Ebert (his widow) introduces it thus:
In honor of World UFO Day we are reprinting Roger’s unfinished science fiction story about a phenomenon on Saturn’s moon, Titan. In 2013, I invited readers to write an ending to Roger’s tale and we got so many good ones that I asked our Far Flung Correspondent Krishna Shenoi to illustrate all of the finalists. They are also being reprinted today in a separate Table of Contents on this website. Please note that the version of Roger’s short story printed below is slightly altered in that it contains a couple of sentences added from a second version he wrote.
I know lots of Hatters are sf fans and will appreciate both the story and the artist’s rendering of the “cover of Amazing Stories from the Gernsback era” mentioned therein; furthermore, the central question of what kind of pattern might be coming from Titan resonates with the themes used by Peter Watts in his novels Blindsight (see this post) and Echopraxia (which bulbul gave me and which I am reading with great enjoyment now). What is communication, anyway? Something to ponder.
Oh, and here’s an amusing bit:
“An act of God,” said Alex, needling Regan. He knew Regan was a Unitarian and so would both reject God and maintain an open mind in the subject.
Good heavens, U of I nostalgia.
The point that Peter explores is what if human communication is a virus to most other species.
That kind of thing also comes up in “The Things,” Watts’s fan fiction about the 1982 film.
Huh, it got published in Clarkesworld. I was initially looking for it at his blog. Was it really 15 years ago? It seems like yesterday.
I know lots of Hatters are sf fans …
There’s also a lot of Hatters delight in Bad Fiction/Writing awards. This story could appeal to either constituency.
I wonder how he’d review this story? I found the first three paragraphs unreadably clunky. In the interests of fairness and science, I persevered. But found no need to revise my opinion. Mostly platitudes. The characters seem to be ciphers.
Contrast, I’ve just started (re-)reading a Dorothy Sayers story. It similarly starts in media res, needing to thread a complex back-story without derailing narrative momentum. Within three pages, a couple of dozen characters get introduced (admittedly half of that is the jury), each with enough personality sketched to lock them in memory for later.
Is ‘The thinking Molecules’ regarded as average/mediocre/whatever for the genre, vintage 2013?
Unitarians reject the Trinity, not God – or is Alex just being ignorant?
I think that’s a reference to the wisecrack
There is somewhere an Alan Bennett sketch with him doing his inimitable Anglican Bishop bit, where he talks about mutual understanding between “those of us who worship God in His aspect of existence, and those of us who worship Him in His aspect of nonexistence.”
Is ‘The thinking Molecules’ regarded as average/mediocre/whatever for the genre, vintage 2013?
Boy, you’re really determined to crap on the genre. Obviously it’s not a “good story” — it’s not even finished, let alone published (except on the internet, as an interesting curiosity). It’s not regarded as anything but a sketch of an idea by an amateur who was a fan of the genre. If you’re using this as an example by which to judge the genre, why don’t you dash off a page or two of a mystery story and I’ll judge mysteries on that basis.