The Taco Conspiracy got published today.

There's a free preview up, and you buy a copy of the magazine for $2.00.

Which, you know, you should.

In many ways, the sage makes the supreme astronaut.

I read at some point that all of the effort put into the scientific revolution in the west was, in China, instead put into developing a science of the mind. A practitioner of Chi Gong learns, as a standard thing, to do things that no one in the West really thinks to do: to monitor one's own heart rate, blood pressure, healing, digestive function, development of kidney stones, you name it. And, beyond that, to effect each of these.

In addition to this, the sage can find peace within himself. He can spend days, weeks, months, even years simply sitting in stillness, enjoying the intricacies of his own existence.

To such a man, what would be so bad about life alone in a space capsule? It would be but one more place, a place to exist, and he would have no desire to be anyplace else. And, for the people who would build the capsule, there could be significant savings: if your astronaut can monitor his own vital signs and make changes as necessary, the extensive and expensive ground crew could be reduced considerably.

Of course, there is a contradiction inherent in such an astronaut. To go into space is the ultimate act of ego, an act of exploratory restlessness that says "No, I am not content to be only here, but must personally go and see what is everywhere else as well." This compared to the Taoist ideal, which says that a truly content man should be able to live with another village within easy walking distance his whole life, without ever feeling a need to go there.

And, of course, an individual who has spent his entire life learning to control his own body is unlikely to have spent his life worrying about things like the technical specs of a ship he's in, or how to work complex scientific equipment. He might have no interest in feeding another man's interest in what is in the far reaches of the solar system. After all, telling the people who sent you into space that there's something exciting out here would only encourage them to follow you out, to leave behind inaction and pursue a wasteful existence of restless space travel.

No, better to stay silent. Though, in the end, for a government that would send a sage into space, that might suit them just fine. If the goal is only to get a human to some arbitrary point before, say, the United States, it doesn't really matter if those people need to be there. A silent man in a still, windowless container could be just the thing. Or, better yet, a couple dozen. That way, even if one doesn't make it, you can still say that you got a man there first.

A man who, once there, will be able to accept that he's never coming back. Will be able to look at death and consider it just another state of living. And when at last the food runs out, the oxygen runs out, they can sit quietly, there in their capsule, and ask their heart to stop beating.

(Warning: As usual when I start pulling movies apart to see where I think they went horribly wrong, there will be spoilers. Oh, will there be spoilers.)

28 Days Later was a great movie. Sure, it was a little slow at times. Sure, it's the primary reason why every damn zombie has to break the sounds barrier before it's considered movie worthy. But it also returned the zombie movie to it's roots of social commentary. It went above and beyond the standard "what happens to a small group of people trapped by zombies" and considered "How will people try to rebuild afterwards, and what will that society looks like?"

28 Weeks Later picks up where the last one left off. It turns out the zombies *were* contained in Britain, that it spread so fast that no one made it off the island. Now, years later, all the zombies have starved to death.

Everything in the first act is done right. The opening scene goes back to the days of the zombie apocalypse, and sets up the main character as a guy who saw his wife being attacked by zombies, considered going back to help her, and ran instead.

Followed by after the zombies dying, where an occupying US Military spies on the population not because they're bastards, but because they're been sent with sniper rifles to a combat zone where nothing has happened in months, and they're bored out of their mind.

The military, really, is done interestingly throughout the movie. These are your standard cold motherfuckers who are ready to kill everyone and everything that moves. Except that, as the movie continues, they're also right. The military characters, too, are some of the most interesting: the ace sniper who can't bring himself to shoot innocent people, and so fails to help stop the plague's spread. The medical officer who wants to save two children, not because she cares about the children, but because they might be immune to the disease, and she thinks anyone who would kill a potential cure is an idiot. (Though the actress, sadly, is not as interesting as that makes her sound. But there's that.)
 
But the film lost me when it stole the single lamest trick in the zombie movie book: the special zombie.

Somebody you know becomes a zombie, and suddenly *they* don't behave like a zombie. The 28 Days Later zombie rules are so simple, too: zombies travel in packs. If one sees you, it will bring others. They operate on sight, looking for movement, and once they see you will pursue you until you're dead. Otherwise, they have barely animal level intelligence.

Well, except for the father in this movie. Remember that main character who ran away from his wife getting killed? Yeah, well, instead he becomes a special zombie. This is a zombie that can not only open doors, but operate electronic slider card locks. A zombie who can be by himself, in the subway system, a quarter mile farther into the city than any other zombie has made it. A Super Zombie, in a world that worked so well because it rose above that kind of cheesy shit.

And if that isn't enough cheese for you, you can throw in the fact that the two main characters are kids who have no personality whatsoever, and that every other character in the movie shows up as a "You! Be a panicked Englishman, and then die." So many characters have the primary motivation of "Redshirt."

Sure, that's all standard horror movie fodder. But 28 Days Later did so much better. It never made the mistake of throwing out plot, character development, and ideas just to have one more zombie chase scene. 28 Weeks makes it clear that it will sacrifice anything, anyone, and any good idea if it means they can have one more screaming dude get eaten.

It makes me sad.

I once got into an argument, as tends to happen, as to who would win in a fight: the Silver Surfer or Superman.

At the time, I was a Silver Surfer fanboy, but it's not as uneven of a fight as you might think. Both can fly, are invincible, can fight in space as easily as on earth, have super strength, etc.

Of course, Superman has spent more time having Protagonist invincibility, which is significantly stronger than Antagonist invincibility. But I felt that the answer was clear: the Silver Surfer was just more awesome.

Looking back at it now, I realize that my original analysis left out a number of things. For starters, there's the fact that Superman is an A list DC character, while Silver Surfer is a B lister for Marvel. So the odds that anyone from DC would have the balls to sign off on loaning out Superman to get his ass kicked by a dude who feels compelled to ride a surfboard in space are not good.

But assume that someone from DC outside of Vertigo grew a pair of balls and signed off on it. To this day, I'd still put my money on the Silver Surfer for two reasons.

Reason 1: The weakness. Superman's is fragments of rocks that float in space. The Silver Surfer spends all of his time finding specific components in rocks floating in space. Meanwhile, the Silver Surfer's weakness is that Galactus can take away his power. So Superman would have to willingly walk away from a fight and go make a dirty deal with a giant dude who, for all he knows, was the reason Krypton is destroyed in the first place (which would explain why he wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, trying to figure out why he can hear someone shouting "Galactus hungers" in his sleep.)

But the larger reason is that the Silver Surfer has a far stronger plot device.

Superman is pretty well spelled out. He's got super strength. He flies. He has heat ray eyes, etc.

Silver Surfer's powers?

He's got "The Power Cosmic." What does that do? You know. Cosmic stuff. Like... things in the cosmos.

It's like a tricorder spawned with a chroniton particle. What *can't* it do.

Superman: Argh! I punch you with my super strength!

Silver Surfer: Oh yeah? Well... COSMIC!

Bam. Game over. The end.

This has been a completely useless tangent. Have a nice day.

A bit ago I entered a writing challenge for a blog called Looking for Strange. That story is now posted tere

If you've stumbled upon this blog from Looking for Strange, and are looking for other finished stories by me, visit the Places I've Been Published post for an up to date list.