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In the memorable Babylon 5 episode "War Without End" (for which spoiler alert but I will, like the character who sings this song, try to keep them vague), the alien Zathras is assigned by Cmdr. Sinclair to a time travel mission in which he is taken prisoner by Sinclair at an earlier point in the timeline. To avoid, well, spoilers, at first all Zathras will say to the earlier Sinclair is "Not the One!"

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Still the One" by Johanna Hall and John Hall

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Skroderiders are one of several iconic alien races in Vernor Vinge's classic A Fire Upon the Deep— cyborgs consisting of a sessile, frond-like intertidal animal and a wheeled cart with computing faculties. Behind this marriage of organic and machine components lies a long-forgotten legend and ultimately a deep tragedy (but spoilers!). "41 Thunderer" by Dave Carter also tells a tragic story of a person whose soul becomes entangled with a machine.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "41 Thunderer" by Dave Carter

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Explorators are sentient, self-replicating and self-improving space probes sent out by a race of makers who developed AI but not the technology to sustain organic life across interstellar distances. Outliving their makers, they've since colonized the galaxy and built a lasting machine civilization based on wonder and curiosity— and, in accordance with the known laws of physics that rule out any form of FTL travel or communication, network protocols that are robust to very long ping times.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Beacons in the Darkness" by Gary McGath

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In Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, "Rappaport Digby" is the (translated) name of the host of the radio show "The Children's Hour of Science" on the home planet of a race of spider-like aliens. And of course that sounds just like "Eleanor Rigby", but there is also one particular episode of the show, memorable both to the Spiders themselves and to the humans surreptitiously watching them from space, which touches on some similar themes — who are we and why are we here? Do our timeless traditions still hold true in the face of the passage of time? Is anyone watching, and will anyone remember?

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Eleanor Rigby" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

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326-3827, the number of the trash compactor unit in Star Wars: A New Hope, may not have anything in common with 236-6132 besides being someone's telephone number, but something about the tone of the song seemed to fit the scene, setting it up to join a long list of Dave Carter/Star Wars parodies — once I figured out the extremely tangled rhyme scheme.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "236-6132" by Dave Carter

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This one was done just for the pun at first, but it ended up as a touching (I think) crossover fanfic mashup.

It will make more sense if you've seen Babylon 5 and read A Fire Upon the Deep: In each story arc, at a climactic moment (the turning point in the middle of the story in one case, the denoument in the other), one of the many protagonists in the ensemble cast chooses to fulfill their destined role in the battle against an ancient trans-human evil, bidding their companions a fond farewell and stepping into a Transcendent machine, never to return in the same form.

In B5 the character is (or will become) the legendary hero Valen, while in aFutD some of the companions are members of the species known to the reader as Tines, a race of wolf-like creatures with hive-minds where several individual bodies come together to be one individual person. Valen... Tines... you get where this is going.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "To My Valentine" by S.J. Tucker

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Rain World is a very strange video game, combining exploration, survival, the ruins of a lost technological civilization, and a richly simulated ecosystem — full both of things to eat and things to be eaten by, and inundated every so often by torrential rains that wash away everything that doesn't take shelter. It's inscrutable and mysterious, poorly (or just un-) explained, punishingly difficult if the player isn't prepared to take each death as a learning opportunity, and yet somehow endearingly charming — I guess the slugcat is just that cute.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "The River, Where She Sleeps" by Dave Carter

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This song completes a trilogy (so far) of Sondheim parodies, curiously not merely all about Star Wars, but all about Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Something about the bitter bite of certain of Sondheim's songs (they're not all like that) lends itself to that dark chapter of the saga — or maybe it's just me.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Last Midnight" from Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

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I wish I could claim credit for this terrible pun, but the idea of being able to shift into alternate realities while waiting at the airport "because one is already between planes" is original to Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin's charming and haunting collection of world-hopping vignettes. I call them "vignettes" rather than "short stories" because they mostly have more world-building than plot — and, like everything by Le Guin, a good deal of wonder, reflection, and heart.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Second-Hand Songs" by Jonathan Turner

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Galaxy Quest, just like Peter Pan, is about the power of imagination, and about erasing the line between pretending to be on a ship fighting pirates and actually being on a ship fighting pirates. And the catchphrases are a good match, too.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: "Neverland" by Heather Alexander

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There's something profoundly Jewish about Pixar's WALL-E — the theme of exile, represented visually by broken city-scapes; the way that salvation is communal and primarily concerned with returning to right relationship with the land; and certain very Biblical narrative tropes which I hope to explore in more depth in another post else-web. Running through it all is EVE (the name is not a coincidence, of course) and her "directive", as close to "mitzvah" in robot-speak as we could hope. So (besides the word "wall" being right there) it seemed appropriate to choose "City of Walls", Neshama Carlebach's haunting prayer for Jerusalem, as the base for a WALL-E song.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "City of Walls" by Neshama Carlebach

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This is another song that started when I realized the title scanned — "Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen", the full name of the protagonist of Ann Leckie's space opera trilogy (beginning with Ancillary Justice), to "wa-wa-wa-wa-wa, waltzing with bears".

Of course the Dr. Seuss et al song is very silly and doesn't fit the mood of the novel at all, but with a slight shift the waltz becomes a ballad, almost a march (if not metrically), and the punchlines become ironic stings, appropriate to the novel's tradition of satirical protest songs which the Empire has tried to suppress but which are preserved in the memory of a cyborg soldier.

Spoilers for pretty much the whole plot of Ancillary Justice.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Waltzing with Bears" by Dr. Seuss, Eugene Poddany and Dale Marxen

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Like the singer in Blake's song, the humans in WALL-E have been in space on a generation ship for a very long time and no longer remember exactly why — and, likewise, when they begin to discover the truth, they respond with a call to action.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Boundless?" by Blake Hodgetts

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Deep Rock Galactic is one of my favorite multiplayer games — a class/squad based co-op miner/shooter with missions just the right size for a casual play session, and a truly friendly online scene. I highly recommend it (unless you balk at enclosed spaces, chasms, darkness, or swarms of creepy crawly things).

Anyway, you play as classic-RPG-trope Dwarves mining a hostile planetoid on behalf of a heartless sci-fi megacorp — or, as the song puts it: Dwarves, workin' for the Man... in spaaaaaace!

Of course I had to write this as a parody of that most famous of Dwarven ballads, from The Hobbit, and it was the animated movie's setting of it that stuck in my head first, but for this I went with the setting from the Peter Jackson film.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Misty Mountains" by Thorin Oakenshield & Co., as recorded by J.R.R. Tolkien

set to music by Plan 9 and David Long

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This mashup — based on a typo! — of The Last Unicorn (and its theme song) and the Transformers movie may be one of the most 80s things I've ever written.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman
ttto: "The Last Unicorn" by America

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I saw Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith in the theater the weekend it came out. It so happened that I also attended a live production of Sweeney Todd that same weekend. The similarities stood out to me, as they so often do, like a bright, hot blade in a dark place: both Sweeney and Vader start out in promising careers in which they owe their success to their skill with a gleaming blade; both are disgraced, transformed by a consuming rage and hatred, and return under a new name seeking vengeance; both murder their wives but blame others for it; and both leave behind children who have to sort it all out.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" from Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim

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According to Tracy Grammer, Dave Carter was on the verge of coming out as transgender at the time of his* untimely death. You can catch fleeting glimpses of trans self-awareness in some of Dave's songs, especially the haunting "Phantom Doll". Of course, what I latched onto is that "Doll" rhymes with "Maul" and Darth Maul is "the phantom menace". But I did give Darth Maul a gender swap for this song.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Phantom Doll" by Dave Carter

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I couldn't find a way to make the chorus of "307 Ale" work here, particularly in that the brand name of the product is the final pun drop and would curdle if repeated too many times.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "307 Ale" by Tom Smith (verse)

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This poem is a style parody of Edward Lear's nonsense poem "The Akond of Swat", mainly notable for its distinctive rhythm and the way it dangles and drops rhymes. Swat was a real princedom in what is now Pakistan, and its prince was indeed titled Akond — Lear's poem of course has nothing to do with the real place, and uses the title merely for its strangeness.

"S.H.I.E.L.D.", on the other hand, stands for "Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division". ("And what does that mean to you?" "It means that someone really wanted our initials to spell 'shield'.")

by Benjamin Newman

after "The Akond of Swat" by Edward Lear

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Almost nothing in "The Rainbow Connection" needed to be changed to make it about Babylon 5. Just replace "rainbow" with "Vorlon" throughout and every line falls into place.

Really, that's it.

lyrics and music by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher, adapted by Benjamin Newman

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