Revenge of the Return of the Interview Meme

Fred over at Occasional Fish has been answering a whole slew of interview questions, and I was starting to feel a bit envious, so I asked him to throw a few more my way. Mostly, of course, this just gives me an excuse to ramble on in my typical verbose fashion. According to the rules (see my initial post on the subject for details), I'm now supposed to ask once again if anybody wants me to inverview them, so consider yourselves asked.

Anyway, I present for you now the results:

1. If you had a time machine at your disposal, when and where would you go? Well, you don't specify that it has to be one time and place, so this'll be the first few items on what would doubtless be quite an extensive list. I'm assuming, by the way, that I'd be in no danger of messing up the spacetime continuum or something, otherwise I'd just have to stay home. I do not want the responsibility of altering the past!

So, given that, where/when would I go? Well, I know everybody says this, but I'd have to start with the Library of Alexandria. Not just to rescue books from the fire, either, although I'd certainly do that. I think it'd be nice to just visit the place while it wasn't burning down. Then I'd go take in a performance of Hamlet at the Globe theater. I'm not the world's hugest Shakespeare fan, but I adore Hamlet, and seeing it performed by Shakespeare would be a massive kick. Actually, while I'm taking in shows, I think I'd go see Pink Floyd doing The Wall live, too. Hey, who says time travel should only be used for Big Important Historical Events? Then I might head for July 20, 1969 and watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. Yeah, I know, I'd just be seeing it on TV, and I could do that perfectly well now, but there's something about the idea of seeing it as it's happening that appeals to me. Then maybe I'd drop by July 4, 1054, to watch the Crab supernova go off. After that, I'd head all the way back to the Jurassic to see some dinosaurs in person, then forward again into human prehistory to see how the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals lived. After that, I'm not completely sure, except that it would be fun to do the time-tourist bit for a while, walk the streets of ancient Rome, that sort of thing. I'd try to avoid places that were really dangerous, though. It'd suck to have a time machine at your disposal and get massacred by Mongol hordes on your first trip or something.

Actually, it suddenly occurs to me that the question doesn't specify that my destination has to be the past. In which case, it's definitely the future I'm off to! I'd probably jump ahead ten years or so and spend a few days looking around, then maybe 20, then 50, and so on, in larger and larger jumps, until I couldn't go any further. This is possibly not a wise idea, for a variety of reasons, but I really, really doubt I could resist.

2. You take a fair number of online personality quizzes, so if you could choose a character from science fiction literature that you are most like (or would most like to be), who would you choose? Well, the question of who you would like to be always seems utterly nonsensical to me, because if I were someone else, I wouldn't be me, obviously. So I'll answer the first one.

I did take a "which Farscape character are you?" quiz once which pegged me as Pilot, and I have to say that strikes me as surprisingly accurate. Let's see... Has beautiful romantic dreams about sailing the stars, but, in a certain sense, doesn't get out very much. Tries to be kind and accomodating and even-tempered but frequently gets irritable and frustrated at having to deal with people and with the annoyances of day-to-day living. Intelligent, but doesn't always keep his head perfectly well in a crisis. Has become considerably more self-assertive over the last few years. Yeah, that actually sounds quite a lot like me.

Oh, wait, that question said "literature," didn't it? In which case TV characters probably don't count. Hmm. Suddenly the question seems much harder. None of the written-SF characters who spring to mind seem very much like me at all, and a quick glance over my bookshelves isn't really helping that much. I will say that, if this even counts, I've always felt a tiny amount of identification with Trillian from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's series, based almost entirely on her explanation of why she ran off with Zaphod: "With a degree in maths and another in astrophysics, it was either that or the dole queue again on Monday." And I don't even have the math degree...

3. What's your favorite holiday? You know, I'm really kind of a humbug when it comes to holidays. I don't have anything against them, but I just don't get into them much. I'm actually tempted to say Labor Day, since there's a mailing list that I'm on that throws a big "party" around then and encourages everybody to post fan fiction and all kinds of fun stuff, which gives me lots of cool things to read.

4. Who is your favorite Farscape character and why? Hmm, you mean it isn't obvious by now?

Actually, first off let me say that I really do love all the characters on that show (well, with a couple of exceptions, notably Grazya). They're all interesting, well-developed three-dimensional people, and although John is in a technical sense the "main character," all of them have their own individual stories, and all those stories are fascinating.

That having been said, yes, I do have a personal favorite character. And it's an oddball choice, but I stand by it. I adore Stark. In part, I suppose, the reason is simply "because somebody's got to." He's really just not a popular character; in fact, he always seems to place pretty high in those annoying "which character would you like to see killed off?" polls. Many fans dislike him, his shipmates often tend to treat him badly, and he's just been dumped on consistently by the universe in general. So I think my fondness for him is, in part, a combination of sympathy for the underdog, fellow-feeling for someone who's basically treated as a social outcast (oh, how well I remember high school!) and perhaps even my latent maternal instincts, which leave me wanting to just step through the TV screen and give the guy a hug.

I think part of it is also in the way the word "tragicomic" might almost have been coined to fit this particular character. His antics can be funny as hell, but there's nevertheless always the sense of a lot of sorrow and suffering lying beneath them... And the stuff that happens to him over the course of the series is enough to make your heart ache. Personally, I'm a sucker for a good tragedy, and there's something about the juxtaposition of tragedy with humor that I find weirdly appealing. In fact, that may be one of the many reasons why I so love the series as a whole. The show's writers posess a remarkable ability to do comedy and angst simultaneously.

Then there's also the fact that I often find myself most drawn to characters who aren't fully explored onscreen. There's something I love about the challenge of trying to get into the mind of a character whose motivations and thought processes and backstory are to a certain extent mysterious. Stark definitely fits the bill.

Plus, that glowing-face thing is just cool.

5. Thinking up five questions like this is really hard, isn't it? Yeah. That's why when I was doing the asking, I mainly followed Ferro Lad's lead and asked a lot of silly off-the-wall stuff. Serious questions are much harder to come up with!