The Right Kind of Question
Quin wants to be Qin, title the sequel to Made, Maden,
and his ambition is to build a new 'great wall of iron and steel'...

Right...

Some days characters are just soooooo cute. (Especially the ones who're in sequels to as yet unwritten books and thus almost completely pain free)

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So, I'm having one of those days... where everything is possible, my brain is powered up and sleep deprived and...

I'm busy contemplating that prose fiction is evolving from being media-tie-ins for story-tellers, and the hangover from the past century when people read books *to* each other. And maybe it's romances/genre that made reading to oneself more acceptable (because having your nose in a book etc wasn't... actually we're a lot less judgmental of solo entertainments now) because who wants to be reading the hero man-handling the heroine while Great Aunt Doris's eyes are glazing over and her hands are trembling...

Then there's stereotyping, and possibly how written and visual media have so reinforced it, that even where it makes no sense to accept the stereotype... we do. We're even fond of it.

And I wonder whether one could decoupage an Escher print.

And then there's thinking about Stargate... and how it's odd, considering when Stargate started, and the film it was derived from, that the series presents a really different form of geek hero journey, along with a culturally subversive way of the warrior...

Daniel Jackson begins as pure geek. Including an irresponsibility of ideas - the notion that one is not responsible for what comes to trouble the world if you get someone else to do the implementation. And yes, it's been an age where the attraction of ideas, of knowledge being power, has found a deal of favour. So long as those with the ideas are, as in Star Trek, having suitable ideas. But Daniel does something rather odd -- he journeys away from that. Now, in geekery the quest for knowledge (and evolution to a higher plane of existence) is pretty much enshrined, but Daniel not only learns and develops a moral compass beyond the simple one of knowledge = light = right he starts drifting alarmingly close to a warrior code... When he dies, he does so not as a pure geek but in a moment of pure action, and taking action in a way that he would never have been able to contemplate at the start of the story. It is pure, it is direct, and he comes very very close to the same philosophy as O'Neill's been demonstrating for multiple years. And after he's died he is frustrated by and rejects greater knowledge to return to a physical state, to a life of action rather than contemplation. It's pretty much the anti-singularity. And the entire series backs up the idea... The Nox, one of the most positively presented superior aliens, are quite clearly well on the way to 'ascension' and yet they've chosen to simplify and to hold on to their physical lives.

Jack O'Neill isn't a geek. He's quite clearly rejected the worship of knowledge, and pursued a different path. It's incredibly irritating to anyone (like me) who has the same instinct as Daniel, that knowledge is valuable beyond the immediately useful. Kind of like leaving off 'or believe to be beautiful' from the William Morris exhortation. That you can't know too much. Jack, however, is very very smart. We're not only told this repeatedly by people who should know, he regularly *demonstrates* it. He's just not smart in the approved tamed geek way. That and he has avoided education. He's ruthlessly suppressed his intellect, and uses it to direct and simplifies data to what is relevant to the needs of his situation. It's that whole 'he is the arrow' business... and more than half the time I hate him for it. More than half the time I hate him because it does make sense, and very often trumps the notion that knowledge = understanding = identifying the most effective course of action. Jack O'Neill clearly is not a character designed to play well with the current notions of warrior = soldier = too-stupid-to-live (as a society we expect people who choose a physical line of work to have done so because they can't manage the math for better, or are looking for a way into a different career). He's the general with the unworthy master. There are repeated reminders that O'Neill has chosen his way, including when his clone decides to take a slightly different path (not, one senses, because he believes it to be better, but because he needs to achieve his own identity - and given that O'Neill's life demonstrates a ruthless ability to go after what he wants, to shape himself, that's incredibly cool too). He deliberately avoids expanding his horizons, he insists on limiting unnecessary information, he's quite clearly been avoiding promotion as well. When Jack tells Daniel he doesn't care about the Brocca divide or similar, he's entirely reversing the SFnal/geek concept that all knowledge is important, that it has intrinsic worth. That more is better. Yes, he's out looking for a better bomb, you can watch his struggle sometimes to define whether a piece of information is making him more or less effective, but to have a better bomb, not because knowing how to build it has any value beyond increasing the effectiveness of a chosen action.

And yes, watching the character development between the two is fascinating. The interplay through stories of Daniel learning to think like Jack, and Jack being tempted away from his path... and I am left not entirely certain whether Jack has gained or lost... I suspect the latter.

::winds down a little::

Of course, Stargate also has that loffly set of recurring older men characters... of the hot and pretty smiles persuasion.