Although the movie, A Game of Shadows, comes in at a respectable 7.7 within the International Movie Data Base, the TV series eclipses this with a sublime 9.1 rating, and I’d say 9.1 was a bit harsh

With great restraint, I will avoid any spoilers and simply say that episodes like A Scandal in Belgravia will go down historically as being better than some of the original stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

One of the nice things about the BBC is they’re not afraid to take a gamble on proven writers, and so Steven Moffatt, one of the principle writers for Dr Who, and Mark Gatiss, a Dr Who contributor, were given free hand to craft a TV series that is going to be one of the classics in years to come. With only three episodes in a season, and each episode being 90 minutes long, they’ve thrown out the formulaic rule-book that governs so much television, particularly in the US, and come up with a format that allows them to craft some brilliant stories. As tormenting as it is to be limited to only three shows a season, the quality of the writing is superb. Moffatt and Gatiss have avoided the temptation to exploit the name and commercialize the series, staying true to form they have delivered a TV show worthy of representing the works of Doyle, and lending credit to the Sherlock Holmes franchise.

Bravo. Ten stars from me on the IMDB.

PS. Among others, Moffatt wrote the Dr Who episodes The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink.

The Doctor is a Time Lord, a humanoid alien with almost a thousand years under his belt, two hearts, and the ability to regenerate into a new body. His space-time ship is the TARDIS, an acronym for, Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It’s a police box, a relic from a bygone era when police in London would walk a beat, stopping off in small police boxes for a cup of tea or to call in to police HQ to report a crime or an arrest. Both Dr Who and the TARDIS are an example of low-tech science fiction at its best, using elements (that used to be common), and incorporating them into a fantastic escape from reality. Dr Who uses the concept of a hidden world that exists parallel to our own, running in harmony to the every day world, with great effect.

In this post, we’ll explore the Top Ten Dr Who Episodes since the rejuvenated series began in 2005, as voted for by my family. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on what makes these episodes great.

SPOILER ALERT

10 Impossible Planet & Satan’s Pit

Like so many Dr Who episodes, it’s the actors surrounding the Doctor that make the story, and in this story the audience seems to take on the role of one more crew member struggling to survive on the impossible planet. The writers of Dr Who have an audacity all of their own, not afraid to experiment and explore ideas, here invoking images of Dante’s inferno and the devil, while somehow avoiding any religious overtones.

09 Impossible Astronaut & Day of the Moon

Dr Who episodes are generally built upon a simple premise, in this case, having an enemy that wipes your mind any time you’re not looking at them, and this sets up a series of dilemmas for the Doctor and his companions. The slow reveal, with the protagonists writing on their arms to capture their fleeting thoughts, is simply brilliant and sets up some spine-tingling scenes. In a moment of dark humour, River Song asks Rory if their adversaries, the Silence, have arrived for battle. Rory, seeing the horde descending upon him, turns back to River, and, loosing sight of the aliens for a second, says, “Nope. Nothing here.“

08 Lodger & Closing Time

Although these two episodes occur a year apart and with entirely different story lines, we grouped them together  as they’re characteristic of the writers avoiding clichés in their scripts, giving someone other than the Doctor and his companions centre-stage. Granted, there is a tendency to dumb down these characters to almost a caricature of a simpleton, which I think is a little insulting to the audience, but somehow they pull it off and you still end up rooting for them. And any child that calls himself “Stormaggedon, Dark Lord of All,” can’t be all that bad.

07 Beast Below

In classic Doctor Who fashion, Beast Below fails to deliver a credible, believable concept while still having a touch of absolute brilliance. In this case, the last remnants of the English are aboard a spaceship travelling on a star whale, but, look past that, and there’s an intriguing sub-plot, with a glimpse of the dark side of a Time Lord. The Doctor commands, “Nobody talk to me. Nobody HUMAN has anything to say to me today.” And in that anger, he loses himself, only to have Amy Pond show him how human he really is, and stop him from making a grave mistake.

06 Vincent

Vincent is one of the rare tragedies in Dr Who. From the start, knowing this story is based on the historical character Vincent Van Gogh, you already sense the impending doom. What follows is a warm, light-hearted, engaging interpretation of Van Gogh’s genius, with the Doctor trying to change history, but even the Doctor has his limits. The sense of sympathy and emotion this episode stirs for Van Gogh’s tortured genius is quite something. It’s one of those episodes that has a surprising amount of depth for 45 minutes of footage.

05 Turn Left

Turn Left is brilliant for what is missing from the episode, the Doctor. Instead, we get to explore the character of Donna Noble and other companions, like Rose Tyler, as the writers explore a what-if scenario reminiscent of the Butterfly Effect. The Doctor, it seems, is a bit of a plot device in his own stories, a form of Deus Ex Machina, an easy escape from the most torturous of prisons. It’s all too easy for the writers to lean upon that crutch when crafting their scripts. Take the Doctor largely out of the picture, though, and some of the best writing emerges, with stories beautifully composed and full of depth. To me, it is no surprise the number one episode in this list is an extension of the same concept, but lets not get too far ahead of ourselves.

04 God Complex

With their usual outlandish penchant for staging the extraordinary in a dull, boring, below-par environment, The God Complex explores complex social themes within a science fiction story (honestly, how scary is that hallway?). Rather than fears, an alien predator feeds on beliefs, in a metaphor for society, which is so largely dominated by unthinking and irrational beliefs. In the midst of this, the Doctor is confronted over his “God complex,” stripping his persona naked before the audience. I would have rated this episode higher, but my kids voted me down.

03 Silence in the Library & Forest of the Dead (Vashna Nerada)

And I can understand why they voted me down, as these last three episodes are sublime. There’s no great social questions, no depth of character being exposed in Silence in the Library, just a heart-pounding story-line that keeps you on the edge of your seat, and a cliff hanger that has you begging for more in The Forest of the Dead. In classic Dr Who fashion, “Stay away from the shadows,” hails back to the low-tech origins of the story fifty years ago, with the alien baddies being nothing more than a shadow on the floor. Not scary enough for you? You haven’t seen the Vashna Nerada in action.

02 Girl in the Fireplace

What’s not to love about a story line that transports 18th century France into the 24th century? How can you not love a story that has a beautiful white horse wandering lost through the decks of a spaceship? The Girl in the Fireplace has it all, a tragedy with so much hope. The concept of stepping from a spaceship into various points in the life of Madame de Pompadore captures the essence of time travel like no other episode of Doctor Who. The characterisation is rich, with unique insights into the Doctor’s background when he reads the young woman’s mind, not realising “A door once opened, can be walked through both ways.” Yes, there’s plot holes in that the Doctor could have intervened later with the TARDIS to see Madame before her death, but this is one of those plot holes your suspension of disbelief is happy to overlook. And all through the episode you’re wondering why? Why her? It’s only in the final seconds of the show that you learn something the Doctor never does…

01 Blink

“Don’t blink. Blink and you’re dead. They’re fast. Faster than you can believe. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink. Good luck.” Blink is outrageous, audacious. The story line is entirely improbable, and yet it is woven together with sheer brilliance. Like Turn Left, the Doctor is largely absent from this unlikely contender for first place in Doctor Who episodes, but that seemed to have given the writers some latitude to construct a story that suspends disbelief like no other. It’s a shopkeeper that saves the day. There are messages from the past, woven together so they arrive in the present precisely when needed. It’s the Doctor battling evil over a distance of decades. The Weeping Angels are yet another low-tech common accessory to English life carefully woven into a clever and engaging story, more about the concept of Doctor Who than his persona. For years after seeing this, my youngest daughter would stare carefully at any statues of women in long flowing robes, wondering what would happen if she blinked…

In reality, there are two kinds of Doctor Who episodes, those that get just a wee bit silly, and those that faithfully hark back to the Golden Age of Science Fiction, where sci-fi stories had an unseen twist and accentuated our understanding of humanity. In reality, these ten stories are peers, each as brilliant as the next, each as thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining as the other, with so very little between them.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this reminiscent review of classic Doctor Who episodes. If you have any others you’d like to suggest, please feel free to add a comment.

You can find a full list of Dr Who episodes on Wikipedia.

Sometimes, images speak louder than words, as does this image, comparing the emergence of life over the last four and a half billion years to minutes in a day.

To put this in perspective, on this scale, the reformation happened one second ago. Christ walked the Earth four seconds ago, just a few milliseconds after Aristotle, Plato and Archimedes. The pyramids were built in the last fifteen seconds, so that’s all of human civilisation crammed into roughly the time you’ve spent reading this particular paragraph. At the 11:58:43 noted above, Homo sapiens had probably just emerged in their own right, after having wiped out the Neanderthals. It’s a lot of time to us, but barely 78 seconds on our clock.

British astronomer Fred Hoyle once famously declared that the probability of cellular life evolving was so highly improbable as to be compared to a tornado hitting a junk-yard and randomly forming a fully functional air-plane. For decades, I thought this was a convincing argument, as the appearance of design in nature is compelling, but it is an illusion. We see design because we are designers, but consider other, uncontroversial systems that have an intrinsic beauty and complexity without deliberate design.

Stars may seem simple, just a ball of hydrogen burning in space, but nothing could be further from the truth. Stars are comprised of a variety of convective and radiant layers, with fusion occurring at rate that allows them to shine for billions of years, slowly converting lighter elements into heavier ones, like the fabled alchemist. They have life cycles, analogous to birth, middle-age and death. There are classes of stars, generations of stars. They have complex interactions with their environment, simultaneously forming planets, comets and asteroids during their own fiery birth. From producing solar winds, to pushing up bow waves through deep space, stars are remarkably complex systems, and they’re entirely natural. The same is true of planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, with their beauty and complexity devoid of any design. Life, some would argue, is different to an inanimate system, and that’s a fair point. Life extends the concept far, far more than any inanimate system, but it is an extension, not an entirely different notion. No rational person would content that God created asteroids as disfigured lumps of rock in space, they simply formed that way according to natural laws. In the same way, so did planets, and stars and life, as they all share the same chemical composition, it’s just their arrangement, complexity and ability to replicate that differs.

Going back to Hoyle’s tornado, and looking at our clock, there’s an interesting observation we can make. Look at the vast stretches of time involved in our one day analogy. Life originated in the dark night. By dawn, there’s simple forms of life capable of leaving fossils for us to uncover billions of years later. Not a lot happens from dawn till dusk. Our day seems pretty boring. In reality, evolution is inching forward, slowly accumulating gradual change, and so, after lunch, we’ve got single-celled algae. Do you know how remarkable that is? How astounding something as simple as algae are? They’re the basis of all plant life, applying photosynthesis to transform Earth’s atmosphere into the wonderful, breathable, oxygen-rich environment we enjoy.

By early evening, sexual reproduction is occurring. Apart from the wonderful benefits that has brought to us Homo sapiens roughly a billion years later, there is a very serious side to sex. Sex represents a unique way of distributing genes throughout a population. It’s a significant step forward in evolution, improving the quality of genetic material being passed from one generation to the next.

But, have you noticed something odd? Our junk-yard tornado is moving with the speed of a light breeze blowing against a gate. We’re billions of years along the path to the kind of complex life we see around us today, and yet there’s nothing to write home about yet. If an alien astronaut was to visit Earth at this point, it would be a bland experience. Lots of activity at a microscopic layer, but nothing at the macroscopic layer we consider so important. It’s still hundreds of millions of years before we get life as simple as seaweed!!! Millions of years after that, the invasion of the jellyfish begin, only the jellyfish find there’s not too much in the way of competition for millions of more years. I don’t know about you, but I’d be in bed asleep before dinosaurs arrived on the scene just before 11PM. If it was New Year’s Eve, we’d be popping champagne and singing Auld Lang Syne, getting ready to countdown to midnight when humans finally came to the party.

You see, Fred Hoyle’s Tornado junk-yard 747 analogy is not a reflection of reality. In fact, it ignores reality. Life evolved slowly, gradually, at a pace that, for most of the actual time involved, would have been barely recognisable as progress at all. I can understand why people are sceptical about evolution, because it occurs so slowly it is nigh on impossible to recognize within our lifetimes (although Lenski did). And yet, relative to the last four billion years, it is racing along at the moment. You think evolution is slow now? You should have been here when algae was formed. LMAO.

____________________

3 February 2012 -Edit- To clarify, the rate of evolution actually hasn’t changed at all over billions of years, as is demonstrated by the molecular clock, but as gradual changes have accumulated in various branches or streams of development, the observable effect of evolution compounds over time, and so we have a hockey stick type effect, where a long tail leads over billions of years to a sharp increase over 500 million years, as a “runaway effect” occurs. Only our “runaway effect” is still really, really slow from the perspective of man. In other words, more genetic diversity gives rise to more change across a broader range of species, that rate of change, though, is largely the same. It’s a bit like giving your kid’s soccer team a bag of oranges at half time in a game, lots of oranges will be peeled by the players, but no one player will peel theirs that much faster than anyone else.

The problem was, we can scan the heavens so well and so fast that there simply aren’t enough trained astronomers to categorize all the galaxies that are out there. Galaxies, it seems, are a dime a dozen. In fact, with an estimated two hundred billion to five hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, they’re a dime a billion. Computers can count them, but their shapes and the angles on which we see them make it nigh on impossible for a computer to categorise them. There clearly aren’t enough astronomers to tackle the task, although, wouldn’t it be nice if there were billions of astronomers, and so the university did what no government department would ever do, it asked the public for help with Galaxy Zoo.

Zoouniverse is an extension of the Galaxy Zoo civilian scientist program, asking for our help with a number of other crowd-source projects:

• Categorizing galaxies
• Exploring the surface of the moon to categorize craters, identify old weathered craters, spot irregular geological features and, perhaps, stumble upon Apollo landing sites
• Assist in understanding how galaxies merge
• Search for supernova in distant galaxies
• Help Kepler in the search for planets around other stars (highly recommended)
• Assist in identifying the formation of new stars in nebula
• Find possible targets in the asteroid belt for the New Horizons probe to explore
• Categorise solar storms raging across the surface of our sun
• Model climate change from records made by the British Royal Navy
• Gather information to assist in the study of ancient Greek ruins
• Categorize whale calls

In short, there’s something in the zoo for the whole family. I sat with my two girls for about an hour tonight, going through galaxies, looking at their subtle differences, pointing out irregular shapes, bars in the core, and two wonderful examples of gravitational lensing.

Crowd-sourcing is an interesting phenomena. Essentially, it says all of us are smarter than any one of us individually. You or I may not be geniuses, but, pool our thinking together and, hey, presto, genius. And there are hundreds of crowd-sourcing projects exploiting this immense resource pool we call humanity.

Got some spare time on your hands? Fancy looking at some photos of the heavens? Instead of surfing the net, why not surf the stars?

Be sure to check out the Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse as a whole, and give science in the 21st century a helping hand.

Jules Verne was prescient in his novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon. In hindsight, it’s tempting for pundits to point out how his scheme of firing a cannon at the moon was laughable, but it is the concepts not the particulars that are important. His recognition of the need to offset the violent acceleration of a cannon shot with collapsible boards separated by baffles of water may be quaint and almost steam-punk Victorian in its notions, but his vision to reach out toward the stars was correct in every respect.

Over Christmas, I got hold of Explorers, a video tribute to Jules Verne by Buzz Aldrin and James Cameron. Although the video doesn’t explore as much of Verne’s vision as I would have liked, it does highlight that Buzz Aldrin, who, along with Neil Armstrong, landed on the moon, and James Cameron, the film maker that personally explored the sunken wreck of the Titanic, both share the same vision as Jules Verne.

Science fiction, it seems, anticipates science.

Perhaps the most overt example of this in the past generation has been TV shows like Star Trek, with it’s communicators pre-empting the mobile phones of today, and its non-intrusive medical scans being a precursor to the CAT scans and PET scans of today. It seems, we are boldly going where science fiction has gone before.

I’d go so far as to say not only has science fiction predicted and anticipated the future, it has changed the future. The case in point here, being, George Orwell’s 1984. In our mostly benign, modern western world, it is easy to forget the overwhelming threat posed by fascism and communism after the Second World War. These were very real threats in 1948 when Orwell inverted the decades to come up with 1984.

With bidirectional communication between individual homes and the state police, the advent of electronic surveillance was anticipated with the horrifying recognition of what Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin could have accomplished if they’d lived just a few decades later.

Orwell’s publication of a dystopian future in 1948 ensured 1984 never came to pass. Concepts like newspeak and Big Brother became seared into the public conscience and the free world has kept its politicians accountable, avoiding all Orwell feared.

And so, in the best traditions of science fiction anticipating the future, Matthew Mather has brought together a raggedy band of degenerate cyborgs intent on… oh, wait, they’re a bunch of science fiction authors, but the effect is the same, they’re intent on looking forward and anticipating Phuture News.

Phuture News is an experiment in social intelligence where anyone can propose a potential future story and then, in an example of crowd sourcing, readers are invited to vote on the likelihood and timing of that future story. Although some of the stories are humorous, like Justin Bieber becoming President of the United States in 2053, Ronald Regan accomplished pretty much the same thing in his generation, so it’s not as far fetched as it may at first seem.

I’ve thrown a few stories into the mix, looking at them as micro fiction. To my surprise, in thinking about these concepts I’ve realised that they’re an extension of viable current thinking, asking the question ‘what if?’ Like Jules Verne and his moon cannon, I doubt any of the stories on this site will actually come true as written, but the concepts underlying them may very well anticipate future progress.

If you haven’t checked out phuture news, you should.

As an independent author, Amazon has given me, and countless others, a unique opportunity to explore the deep, dark forests of the publishing world in a way that couldn’t be dreamt of a generation ago. In the midst of this, the 99c e-book market has arisen as a niche category, a bargain bin in the basement, something from which readers take a punt on new/emerging authors (like myself) with dubious literary ability (again, like myself). This is, quite serendipitously, a mirror of the cheap pulp fiction of the 1930-1960s that spawned the science fiction genre.

Most, if not all, of the great science fiction authors like Clarke, Heinlein, Dick and Asimov had their origins in the cheap paperbacks of this era, so there’s hope for me yet. I can’t help but wonder if, with the advent of electronic self-publishing, we are on the cusp of another era of great science fiction. Maybe, maybe not, as the ease of publishing has also led to a lot of electronic pulp, making it hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.

Enter Hugh Howey, the man who diverted the course of the Amazon. The 99c price bracket continues to be a launching point for budding authors, like myself, but it is saturated by trash pulp, some would say my trash pulp, but it is hard to find the gold nuggets. For example, consider these comments selected at random from some of the more questionable entries in the Top 10 Hard Science Fiction e-Books.

…the book quickly descends into moronic drudgery…
…Five star reviews? Amazing. Did they read the same book?
…I wish I’d read something else.
…reads like a massively annoying list of trite sayings strung together with pronouns and adverbs

So how do you distinguish the good from the bad, the great read from the grammatical nightmare? Reviews, themselves, are quite subjective and, it seems, easily distorted if you have 25 friends with Amazon accounts willing to lend you five stars a piece.*

The 99c e-Book pulp fiction represents an interesting dilemma for an author. Amazon pays lousy commissions in this bracket to encourage higher prices, but moving a new book to 2.99 or 3.99 takes it outside of the bargain bin and into obscurity. So the question facing budding authors is, sell your book for peanuts and enter competition with pulp that, in some cases, is a poor substitute for spam in your inbox, or price your unknown work out of the market?

And this is where Hugh Howey had a stroke of genius. He has effectively redefined the 99c price point, reinventing it as the region of high-quality short stories/novellas. His Wool series is essentially a series of related short stories, longer than chapters, but not full books in their own right. They are a return to the spirit of pulp fiction in the 1950s, engaging stories that can be read in a single setting and continued if the reader chooses to buy the next one in the series. Howey has been criticised for short-changing readers, as he doesn’t describe these books as short stories with roughly 20-25,000 words a piece, but he points out that if someone purchases all five novellas they will have spent 4.95 on 100,000 words, a fair price by anyone’s estimate. How much would you pay for a cup of coffee? How much would you pay to rent a Blu-ray for the night? Or to go to the movies to see a new release? (You need a second mortgage to finance a family outing to the cinemas in Australia) Yeah, it puts a 99c e-book in a very favourable light.

What Mr Howey doesn’t point out is that this approach is not advantageous to him, it is something that is advantageous to the readers. The reader starts with a low-cost appetiser. If they don’t like the amuse-bouche, they’ve reached a natural end to the story without wading through 100,000 words, and saved themselves four dollars. I’d be interested to know Mr Howey’s stats on Wool purchases as it would be fascinating to know how many people go on to buy successive editions.

In both scenarios, selling Wool as in a series or compiled into a book, the cost to the reader is 4.95. But for Mr Howey, there is a significant difference in commission, 35% or 70%, so he is clearly putting the reader’s interests before his own.

And he’s given himself the time and space to grow as a writer. The stories improved in quality, characterisation and plot as the series progresses. Take a look at the reader ratings for the Wool series.

• Wool 1 Avg 4.6 stars over 90 reviews, only 2 one star reviews
• Wool 2 Avg 4.8 stars over 27 reviews, no one star reviews
• Wool 3 Avg 4.9 stars over 18 reviews, nothing below four stars
• Wool 4 Avg 5.0 stars over 18 reviews (some duplicated reviewers from Wool 4 but not all of them)
• Wool 5 Yet to be released

Now, this is not to say Wool is perfect, far from it. I picked up a minor blemish today in Wool 3. Will Wool get more one star reviews over time, without a doubt, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but, damn, these are dream stats.

As a writer that’s been harshly criticised for lacking depth, I find the focus on a series of high-quality short stories intriguing. And so, in the spirit of exploration and experimentation that has underpinned my writing with Amazon, I’ve come up with Serengeti using the same concept. Serengeti is the first of three stand-alone short stories in which I’ve focused on the quality of writing, the quality of characterisation and dramatisation over simply trying to pump out 100,000 words to compete with the deadheads in the trash pulp section.

My prediction for the future? The great science fiction writers of this century will come from the high-quality shorts in the 99c bargain bin on Amazon.

Thank you, Mr Howey, for carving out a niche for a series of high-quality novellas and changing the course of the river.

*  In the interests of transparency, two of my friends offered initial reviews of Anomaly, one of whom rated the book with four stars. This review continues to be a popular, judged relevant by a decent number of unknown readers. Both reviews are clearly labelled as being from friends. Also, in the interests of fairness, one of the negative comments above is from one of my one star reviews (ouch).

Science fiction is a fascinating genre in that it puts science, be it speculative, imaginary or real, in the spotlight, but the truly great science fiction stories expose how much more there is to learn about ourselves. The dramatic conclusion of Blade Runner, with the dying replicant saving the life of Deckard, his mortal adversary, is, perhaps, the greatest scene in science fiction history – an android comes to understand the true value of life while mankind treats life with disdain. I still remember the first time I heard that speech and the delivery of the final line, “Time to die,” with its ambiguity about who would die. Roy had him. Deckard was dead to rights, but Deckard lives as Roy chooses not to waste another life. And Deckard learns the lesson, in turn saving Rachel.

If you haven’t seen the sketchbook for the set design, it’s well worth flipping through.

I have mixed feelings about a reboot. I just can’t see how Blade Runner could be improved. The script writers have their work cut out for them.

Hillary’s memoirs reveal the final ascent as a somewhat whimsical moment. As the two explorers climbed, Hillary all of a sudden became aware that every direction he moved in was down. It was only then he realised they’d conquered the mountain and were standing on the summit. Hillary and Tenzeng enjoyed the view for a few minutes, buried some sweets, along with a small wooden cross, and then headed back down the mountain, knowing the descent was equally treacherous.

Since 1954, over a thousand people have climbed Everest. Although the mountain has a fierce reputation for fatalities, with around 120 corpses still littering the frozen wasteland, it is possible to climb Everest. If you have the right training, the right frame of mine and a proper expedition, it can be done. Although, it must be said, a friend of ours tracked to Base Camp and lost 25kg in the arduous, month-long process, so moving on from there to the summit is no trivial task.

Finding a cure for cancer is very much like climbing Everest. There are assaults on the summit coming from every direction. Cancer will never be trivial, but it will be conquered, and the conquest has already begun with the cervical cancer vaccine.

My wife and I have a special interest in these medical expeditions, as she survived breast cancer in 2009. Having had surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, she is doing wonderfully. I am so very thankful for the medical assistance she has received. Cancer, though, has robbed the world of so many brilliant minds, Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, Steve Jobs, Michael Crichton and, today, Christopher Hitchens, to name but a few.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I invested a significant amount in Ecobiotics and its subsidiary QBiotics, two related medical research companies here in Queensland, Australia. Using a holistic approach to drug discovery in the Australian rainforest, they’ve isolated a compound known as EBC-46 that has had some spectacular results in breaking down solid tumours. With stage I/II human trials due to start in 2012, the drug holds significant promise. It is a good assault on the summit of Mount Cancer.

Every couple of months, though, an article appears where other researchers are pushing for the summit. This week, the results of a vaccine trial showed significant results in mice, breaking down breast cancer tumours in triple negative cases, where all other current therapies would fail. If these results with mice translate into humans, this vaccine will save tens of thousands of lives.

For me, it’s tempting to worry about our investment in QBiotics, but then I remind myself why we invested in the first place. We invested to go on the offensive against cancer, to be an active part of the campaign regardless. For me, it matters not who plants the first flag on the summit of Mount Cancer. What matters is that the mountain is conquered. And, like Everest, once it is, it will be conquered again and again, from different routes, by different means, and each of these will enrich our world for the better.

Fifteen years ago, someone invested in the development of Herceptin and that, along with so many other incremental steps, saved the life of my wife. So it is nice to be an active part of further medical research that will help stem the tide of this insidious disease for others.

I’m proud to support cancer research.

User ratings on IMDb give Apollo 18 a five out of ten, while Rotten Tomatoes, another user-driven rating system, has the movie at two out of ten.

Ouch!

As an author that has been criticised for weak characterisation, I think that’s part of the problem with Apollo 18. We, the audience, never really got to identify with the astronauts before they were thrown into the fray.

Warning! Spoilers

On a technical level, the movie has also been criticised for things like the footprints being too close together and too evenly distributed. With the exception of the actual Moon footage, the motion of the astronauts is too much like a shuffle and lacks the free, flowing, bouncing motion of an actual moonwalk. Clearly, faking a moon landing in the 21st Century, with a multimillion dollar budget, is not easy. It makes you wonder how they faked four moon landings in the 60s, or, perhaps they didn’t, perhaps Armstrong and Aldrin actually walked on the Moon. (Of course they did. I’m being facetious)

The use of sound within sections of Apollo 18 was misleading, with the astronauts hearing the alien creatures while on an EVA, something that’s impossible in a vacuum.

Also, the alien/rock creatures have absurdly fast motion/metabolism for something living in the coldest place on the moon, a crater that never sees sunlight. And one wonders what these critters feed on when there’s not an astronaut to munch on.

Having said all that, however, I think Apollo 18 deserves far more than a two or a five out of ten. I’d rate it as seven out of ten stars. It is an ambitious movie, carried out with an admirable level of detail, particularly within the LEM. The slowly building crescendo of suspense worked well for me. Alien life on the Moon was always going to be a tough sell, but I think they succeeded far more than Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which, ironically, rated better on both IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

I found the discovery of a cracked Soviet cosmonaut helmet particularly poignant. It was a stunning, vivid reveal within the storyline. And, as for the original poster, with the three-toed wolf-life footprint, I was hanging out for the point we’d see what made those tracks, but it never came. Perhaps it was a case of the marketing department outpacing the writers.

I would have liked to have seen a different ending. The conclusion seemed rushed and was a bit of a let down. But, hey, I’ve been criticised for both of those points as well with Anomaly, so there’s some learning here for all. A slightly different ending and Apollo 18 could have escaped the horror genre, which really doesn’t suit the movie at all.

If you have low expectations, you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by this movie. It’s not Apollo 13, but it’s nice to see someone going back to the Moon

Mars has methane, which implies the presence of volcanic or tectonic out-gassing or microbial life. We know Mars has been geologically inactive for hundreds of millions if not billions of years, so that’s leaving the methane looking decidedly like an organic by-product. This is one of the things NASA’s Curiosity Rover is going to investigate when it lands on Mars in 2012.

Methane, or CH₄ as it’s known to its friends, is simple molecule, but it cannot survive in the Martian atmosphere for any significant length of time because…

• The lack of a planetary magnetic core leaves it vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation that breaks the molecule apart
• The lack of substantial gravity and lack of protection from solar wind, means the thin Martian atmosphere gets stripped off into space quite easily

It’s interesting to note that micro-organisms, on Earth, at least, produce methane through a simple process known as methanogenesis, an anaerobic reaction (that doesn’t require oxygen). It’s a reaction that’s perfectly suited to the red planet as the principle pathway required for this chemical reaction is carbon dioxide and the result is methane and water. With all three molecular suspects and one element present on Mars, there’s a good case to go looking for bugs.

CO₂ + 8 H⁺ + 8 e^- → CH₄ + 2 H₂O

Methane has also been detected on Titan, although this may be from geological activity.

Titan, on the other hand, has its own peculiar mysteries. Hydrogen, which is abundant in the upper atmosphere, is curiously absent lower down, which implies it has probably been absorbed by something, something that just might be alive.

If this bears out under more scrutiny, it would raise the fascinating prospect that there could be lifeforms using hydrogen as we use oxygen.

If Mars and Titan both have life, and I know it’s a big ask, but if they do, then we would have the remarkable prospect of living in a solar system that has three habitable environments and two, possibly three, distinctly different types of lifeforms. If that turns out to be the case, then the prospect of finding life elsewhere in the universe, and possibility of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life, would leap up exponentially.

Now, there’s plenty of other avenues for methane production to consider before the champagne corks get popped, but what a tantalising possibility. These are exciting times in which we live.

I’m intensely curious about what Curiosity will uncover on the red planet, aren’t you?