Meteor, Right? [Reviews: Nemesis and Wormwood]

While I love gung-ho tales of brave oil miners being drafted into the astronaut core and nuking meteorites, giving their lives so that their colleagues can marry Liv Tyler, I'm pleased to report that, at least in written sci-fi, there are some excellent novels that take the meteorite theme somewhere a bit more original.

Bill Napier's novel of asteroid deflection, nuclear stand-offs and medieval heliocentrists, Nemesis, may not be the most accurate depiction of this topic: but it certainly feels like it. The CIA has brought together a group of world-class scientists to form a secret think tank, as they suspect an asteroid has been diverted towards Earth by the Soviets. Up against the clock, the scientists' main challenge is to actually find the asteroid, and tensions rise as they theorise and try out different strategies - while most of the team focus on different telescopes, Webb, the hero, wonders whether the asteroid might have been sighted historically and starts a search for a 17th century manuscript he suspects is the key. Meanwhile the military engage in larger and larger simulations of the impact, and international tensions rise as leaders debate a nuclear response to the attack. Impressively, the scientific, political and military strands are all convincing and while the initial scenario is similar to that of Meteor or Armageddon, the plot develops from pure disaster novel into a much murkier political thriller.

Wormwood, by author of Shadowmancer G.P. Taylor, features a comet bound for Earth, again apparently predicted in an ancient tome. The setting is London, 1756, and the comet is identified by Dr. Sabian Blake, a scientist with alchemical and spiritual leanings very much in the Newton mould. The story is told from several viewpoints but the two main characters are Blake and his thieving housemaid Agetta. It quickly becomes clear this is no scientific romance but a dark tale of Kabbalistic sorcery, ghosts and fallen angels: the comet is the focus for a series of paranormal events and horrors.

Greatest Hits

Two more meteorite-based dramas:

Meteor was an original meteorite disaster movie and follows the formula of interwoven survival stories. Unlike the two more recent films most of the action is set on Earth, although the opening sequence is of a Skylab-like space mission that goes badly wrong. With no hi-tech CGI and with fairly generic special effects, the film really relies on it's cast (lead by Sean Connery) and script and there's a lot of action, tension, brow-mopping and increasing sartorial damage as the film progresses.

The Last Train was an underrated terrestrial TV series about a meteorite impact in the UK - survivors, accidentally cryogenically suspended in a railway carriage (don't ask) wake up to an England gone feral and have to search for signs of civilisation while fending off attacks by stray dogs. Again, as this is a very low-tech production, it relies on its' ensemble cast, including a particularly noteworthy performance by Amita Dhiri.

Meteorites vs Comets

Two films so similar in plot there must surely have been at some point a defection from one studio to another. And yet the differences are so extreme as to make one film a sfg-only experience while the other has much to recommend it. Ten reasons why Deep Impact owns Armageddon:

1. Gravity
2. Gravity

3. Gravity

4. Gravity

5. Gravity

6. Gravity

7. Gravity

8. Gravity

9. Gravity gravity gravity

10. see 1 to 9 above.

Gravity refers to the universal gravitational force first described (almost correctly) by Newton. No! merely spinning up Mir (referred to here as The Russian Space Station) does not allow you to walk up the central axis and along a side coridoor. No! you can't walk from the back to the front of the Space Shuttle crew compartment just because the engines are running. No! sucking the AIR out of a VACUUM CHAMBER in an Earth-based training centre does not make you weightless! I'm sure many sci-fi fans share at least part of my phenomenal ability to suspend disbelief but this scene just took the piss.

Surprisingly Armageddon was filmed with extensive NASA cooperation - I'm not sure whether this was also true of Deep Impact, where much more of the focus was on the human experience of those caught up in the events whether on Earth or in space.