Free of the watersuit and its exoskeleton, his shape was nothing bipedal at all; his almost globular, iridescent body, from which writhed six locomotive tentacles and six manipulators, moved through the water with boneless grace, gill-slits pulsating below the fringe of feeding-tentacles that encircled his beak.  It seemed odd to hear perfect home-planet S’sinn emerging from that alien mouth.

For all intents and purposes, then, Lost in Translation did indeed feature a talking squid in outer space. Which means a) I really shouldn’t bad-mouth Margaret Atwood’s definition, and b) Margaret Atwood reads my stuff!

What Atwood did not mention, and perhaps few people realize, is that everything is improved with the addition of squid. As my daughter and I have discovered: take any title, replace a word with “squid,” and the result is instant merriment!

Don’t believe me?  Consider this list of titles, the top 25 movies in the list of the top 250 movies of all time as voted on by users of the Internet Movie Database:

The Squidshank Redemption

The Squidfather

The Squidfather: Part II

The Good, the Bad and the Squid

Squid Fiction

Schindler’s Squid

12 Angry Squid

Squidception

One Flew Over the Squid’s Nest

The Dark Squid

Squid Wars: Episode V – The Squid Strikes Back

The Lord of the Squid: The Return of the Squid

Seven Squid

Squid Club

Squid Wars: Episode IV – A New Squid

Squidfellas

Casasquida

City of Squid

The Lord of the Squid: The Fellowship of the Squid

Once Upon a Squid in the West

Rear Squid

Raiders of the Lost Squid

The Squidrix

Squidcho

The Usual Squid

Best of all, this even (or especially) works with the titles of Margaret Atwood novels, like so:

The Edible Squid

Squidding

Lady Squid

Life Before Squid

Bodily Squid

The Handsquid’s Tale

Squid’s Eye

The Robber Squid

Alias Squid

The Blind Squid

Oryx and Squid

The Squidiad

The Year of the Squid

See what I mean? So infallible is this method of amusing oneself (if one is me, anyway, or my nine-year-old daughter), that I have become convinced that “squid” is the funniest word in the English language.

Squid! It’s not just for breakfast any more.

(The photo: Not a squid, but a jellyfish, at the Vancouver Aquarium.)

The much-diminished caravan of Freefolk Clan Diannan had only been on the road for an hour the next morning when the attack came.

Words today: 2,277

Words thus far: 42,652

A good morning’s work. I’m getting close to 200 manuscript pages on this story. I think it’s going to need considerable pruning when I get to rewriting, but the plot is advancing well.

I spent the mid-day wearing my editor-of-Fine-Lifestyles-Regina hat, then turned into Lee Arthur Chane in the afternoon and worked on Magebane. I’m still (again) rewriting more than writing, but I really think I’ve got my plot demons licked this time. (Sounds like a fantasy-novel curse, actually. “Oh, go lick a demon!”) So good progress there, too.

Tonight I watched The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (or is it the other way around?) with my daughter, then we played Barbies before bed. (Major Daddy brownie points! Score!) The movie, by the way, wasn’t half bad. I’d have adored it as a 10-year-old. My daughter liked it.

Science column tomorrow, otherwise it’ll be a rinse-and-repeat of today.

Today’s photo: a decorative lamp. Because it was there, that’s why.

I devoured these classic space operas as a kid. The scale of, well, everything was enormous: ships the size of moons (long before the Death Star–Star Wars is small potatoes compared to Lensmen series, although there are a lot of similarities). Psychic abilities magnified by mysterious Lenses created by an incredibly advanced race to help in the battle against an equally advanced but EEEVIL race…men in space armor battling it out in hand-to-hand combat in boarding actions that took place in the open space between ships and on the ship’s hulls.

I doodled this stuff, and lived this stuff, and those who detect a faint whiff of pulpy space opera goodness about my own books have “Doc” Smith to thank (or blame) as much as Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.

Man, I hope this movie gets made!*

*As long as, you know, it doesn’t suck.

Halfway through the second half of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s 10th annual The RSO Goes to the Oscars movie-music concert, Maestro Victor Sawa commented on the versatility of movie composers, who may find themselves writing theme music for sharks in one movie and mood music for superheroes in the next.

But it wasn’t just the composers’ versatility on display Saturday night — the RSO once again proved that it can tackle any style of music with verve.

It may have helped that superheroes Batman (on timpani) and Iron Man (on viola) were lending a hand, on a night that also saw a family dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz win the costume competition at intermission.

Here’s a bit from the middle:

For Sawa, switching from symphonies to soundtracks is natural.

In a strange way, he says, “we owe a debt of gratitude to the Nazis. Oscar Hammerstein, Max Steiner, Eric Korngold, Bernard Hermann, Franz Waxman — they all came over because they were being persecuted in Europe.

“The entire Hollywood sound was created by the classical composers of Europe.

“When we talk about classical music and how it survived the second half of the 20th century, everyone was going to the movies, they were listening to classical music.

“The snob factor is missing when you go to the movies.”

And today’s movie composers are just as good as those early ones, Sawa says.

“The modern-day ones learned from the best.”

“Hokey” isn’t the result of a story point, “hokey” is the result of the execution of the story point, something “Notorious” proves definitively.

Why have we allowed ourselves to buy into the idea that uplifting endings are old-fashioned and “hokey?” Nihilism may never be hokey, but it sure can be lazy. Ending a film on a downer and calling it complicated and nuanced requires almost no work compared to crafting a climax that lifts the human spirit.

“Notorious” ends on an emotional triumph that requires a genius for mature filmmaking that’s all but vanished. Irony and nihilism have their place but too often they’re a refuge for mediocrity.

I think his points apply equally well to fiction. High school students trying to be deep write ironic stories with nihilistic endings. Mature writers should be capable of more.

We who write such stuff are occasionally asked (and occasionally wonder) if our works can continue to compete in a media universe in which “science fiction” and “fantasy” conjure up for most people Hollywood special-effects extravaganzas first, and the written word second (if at all).

I was therefore heartened to read of a recent scientific study that indicates that books are every bit as good at stirring emotions as movies.

(Alas, the particular emotion being studied was disgust, which is one most writers–Stephen King perhaps being the exception–only occasionally wish to invoke for fear the disgust will spill over from specific scenes to the entire work…but the study probably holds true for other emotions, as well.)

Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen and Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab (love that name) at the BCN NeuroImaging Center of the University Medical Center in Groningen, The Netherlands, conducted the study, published in the online science journal PLoS one.

In the abstract, the authors point out that scientists already know that the same parts of the brain light up whether we, say, kick a ball ourselves, watch someone else kick a ball, or simply imagine kicking a ball. They wondered if the same thing held true for emotions.

They chose to study disgust because it’s pretty easy to generate within the artificial confines of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which measures blood flow to various areas of the brain, an indication of the amount of activity occurring in those areas.

Their twelve volunteers, evenly divided between men and women, were each scanned while the researchers induced disgust in three different ways: by showing the subjects a three-second clip of actors tasting the contents of a cup and looking disgusted, having them taste a disgustingly bitter liquid, and having them read and imagine scenarios involving disgust.

How disgusting a scenario? Keysers, quoted in an article on the LiveScience website, gives an example: “Walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth.”

If that scenario disgusts you (and if it doesn’t, I don’t want to know, because that alone would be disgusting), then a portion of your brain called the anterior insula just became active, and would have lit up the screen of an fMRI machine, if you happened to be sitting in one as you read it.

At least, that’s what the Dutch researchers found: no matter how the disgust was generated, the same region of the brain lit up.

There’s additional evidence that the anterior insula is home of the feeling of disgust: people with brain damage in that area lose the capacity to feel disgusted–they can happily drink sour milk.

In evolutionary terms, disgust helps us survive: many of the things that disgust us could make us ill if we ate them. Our ability to feel disgust second-hand also provides a survival benefit: if we feel just as disgusted watching someone else spit out something they find disgusting–and therefore possibly hazardous–as if we’d tasted it ourselves, we’re less likely to taste it ourselves, which might just possibly save our lives.

Which is wonderful from the point of view of survival of the species (and individual members of it), but I’m more concerned about the survival of that peculiar subspecies known as the fiction writer (and, indeed, one particular individual member of that subspecies, me), and thus for me the most fascinating thing about this study is that indicates that a good book can still move people just as much as a movie can.

As Keysers puts it, “Whether we see a movie or read a story…we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted. And that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”

So can books continue to compete with movies?

Absolutely. Scientists say so.

As a science fiction writer, that’s good enough for me.

Such is the case of Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, the family physician of Charles Dexter Ward, and ultimately the hero of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. (The image at right is of the late actor Frank Maxwell, who portrayed Dr. Willett in Roger Corman’s 1963 movie version of the story, The Haunted Palace (he took the title from an Edgar Allan Poe story, but the main inspiration for the film was definitely Lovecraft).

Wikipedia has more about the novella here, including this note on the good Dr. Willett:

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia compares Willett’s character to other “valiant counterweight[s]” in Lovecraft such as Thomas Malone in “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925)[8] and Henry Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror“; like Willett, Armitage “defeats the ‘villains’ by incantations, and he is susceptible to the same flaws–pomposity, arrogance, self-importance–that can be seen in Willett.”[9]

“Wait a minute!” I hear you cry (if I happen to be sitting behind you as you read this, creeping up on you, breathing down your neck, about to…Ha! Made you look!). “What does all this stuff about Hitchcock, and your rather lame attempt to capture some of the Hitchcockian spirit in the first half of this paragraph, have to do with science? Have I stumbled upon a new film criticism column by mistake?”

Nay, dear reader. I have not strayed from my allotted subject matter in the slightest: science, you see, has just measured what goes on inside the brains of audience members when they watch certain kinds of film–and in the process, provided empirical evidence that Vermiere knew what he was writing about nine years ago in Boston.

Neuroscientists at New York University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a technique called inter-subject correlation (ISC) to examine the brain activity of multiple subjects as they watched the same films, and figure out which responses were similar from viewer to viewer.

“Some films lead most viewers through a similar sequence of perceptual, emotional and cognitive states,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (a journal I had no idea existed until I read about this study). Films with such a tight grip on their viewers’ minds, in other words, produce a high ISC. Other films, either deliberately or by accident, exercise less control, and thus produce a low ISC.

The researchers showed three thirty-minute film clips to stimulate their subjects’ brain activity: one from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I apologize for having now planted that movie’s famous whistled theme in your head for the rest of the day), an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled “Bang! You’re Dead,” and an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As a control, subjects also watched a 10-minute, unedited video shot during a concert in New York City’s Washington Square Park.

Hitchcock’s reputation for being a master of audience manipulation was born out by the results: “Bang! You’re Dead” evoked similar responses across all of the viewers in more than 65 percent of the neocortex, the portion of the brain responsible for perception and cognition.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn’t quite as involving, but still evoked similar responses in more than 45 percent of the neocortex.

Curb Your Enthusiasm had a much lower ISC, at 18 percent, and the Washington Square Park video, a.k.a. “unstructured reality,” had an ISC of less than five percent.

What this also means is that, if its content, editing and directing style all line up properly, a movie can exert a considerable amount of control over an audience’s brain activity, and get most of those present to experience it in pretty much the same way.

Possibly fearing a backlash from the makers of Curb Your Enthusiasm (or worse, the Creator of “unstructured reality”), the researchers hasten to add that just because a film clip results in a low ISC doesn’t mean it’s not an engaging piece of work. Some art films, the researcher say by way of example, may elicit intense brain activity, but it differs from person to person depending on their own interpretation of what they’re seeing.

The researchers weren’t just interested in proving that Hitchcock made films that successfully manipulated audiences (Psycho alone proved that). They believe that their technique can lead to more “neurocinematic” studies, allowing other researchers and those in the film industry to better judge a film’s effect on an audience.

Or, if you’re paranoid, to create films and commercials and political ads scientifically designed to suck you in and make you turn off your critical facilities.

Well, at least that last thought drove that spaghetti-western theme music out of my head.

For some reason all I can hear now is the opening to The Twilight Zone.

Somewhere in the Roger Moore era I petered out, partly because I was finally running into films I had seen in theatres, partly because…well, some of those films don’t hold up all that well.

Take all that crazy spy technology. Who could believe in that stuff? It was obviously impossible.

Except, as New Scientist magazine’s Technology blog pointed out May 28 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, nowadays it isn’t. (Follow that link for more links to details on all of these gadgets, including photos, videos and more.)

New Scientist took a stroll through some of those old movies and stories and found that what once seemed like science fiction is now well on its way to becoming science fact.

Diamonds Are Forever, for example, features fake fingerprints–and in 2002 a Japanese cryptographer named Tsutomu Matsumoto showed that you really can copy a person’s fingerprints, using nothing more complicated than the gelatin used in chewy candies. Matsumoto successfully lifted a latent fingerprint from a glass and with it fooled 80 percent of the fingerprint scanners he tested.

In the relatively recent Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond remotely drives his car from the back seat, using a cell phone with a touchpad that shows him the view out of the front window. Today, free software called ShakerRacer that lets you use a mobile phone with a built-in accelerometer to control toy cars. And you don’t have to slide your fingers over the touchpad: you just hold the phone like a steering wheel and tilt it in the direction you want to go.

U.S. researchers have also demonstrated military robots controlled with the Nintendo Wii-mote, and they plan to add Apple iPhones to the mix to display the video from the robots.

Thunderball and Die Another Day both featured a cigar-sized mini-aqualung holding four minutes’ worth of air. Alas, the smallest existing emergency supplies are still the size of a fist and only last about a minute…but still, that’s in the ballpark.

Also in Die Another Day, Bond’s car becomes invisible: cameras on one side capture what someone looking at the car would see if the car weren’t there, and projectors on the other side display it.

That’s a clunky way to achieve what scientists now believe can be done by using specially designed metamaterials capable of steering light right around an object so that it will appear…er, disappear…as if it weren’t even there.

Way back in Diamonds Are Forever, Bond uses a high-tech gadget containing a cassette tape to alter his voice. Today, cheap or even free software and your computer’s own microphone lets anyone do the same thing. You can sound male if you’re female (as some female gamers like to do when playing online), female if you’re male, old if you’re young, young if you’re old, and so on.

A device of special interest to skiers would be Bond’s ski-jacket emergency pod, which surrounded Bond in a protective, air-filled sphere when he was caught in an avalanche. That particular gadget doesn’t exist, but you can buy a backpack that releases two airbags to increase buoyancy when caught in a snow slide.

Finally, New Scientist notes A View To A Kill’s wheeled snooper robot, which, at about the size of a small dog, wasn’t really all that inconspicuous.

In real life, any number of spying robots, most of which fly, are now in use. Some look like birds. In the works are “bugs” that look and move like, well, bugs.

And if you want something a bit larger, more like Bond’s Snooper, several models on the market are available to patrol your home while you’re away. You can look through their eyes and even speak to whomever you see.

It would almost be worth finding an intruder just so you could roll up to him and say, in your best English accent, “The names Bot. James Bot. And I’m licensed to kill.”

If that doesn’t leave them shaken–if not stirred–then nothing will.