Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
In light of asshole publishers attacking archive.org: Hachette Book Group, Inc., Harpercollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC.
Libraries are important, and we need to do everything to protect the biggest one in the world.
So here's some SF, mostly cyberpunk, mostly POC or marginalized protagonists, mostly collapsing urban environments. Plus Zeitgeist, which is an optimistic view from 1999-2000, remember when that was possible?
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Finally the novel length treatment I've been asking for. Murderbot, calling itself just "SecUnit" in the company of friendly non-corporate Humans, does a perfectly adequate job protecting them from their poor decision-making, and becomes somewhat… not exactly social, but what passes for it.
“She grimaced. “Right, sorry.” Then she looked away and rubbed her eyes.
And I’d made her cry. Good job, Murderbot.
I knew I’d been an asshole and I owed Amena an apology. I’d attribute it
to the performance reliability drop, and the emotional breakdown which I
am provisionally conceding as ongoing rather than an isolated event that
I am totally over now, and being involuntarily shutdown and restarted,
but I can also be kind of an asshole. (“Kind of” = in the 70 percent–80
percent range.) I didn’t know what to say but I didn’t have time to do a
search for relevant apology examples. (And it’s not like I ever find any
relevant examples that I actually want to use.) I said, “I’m sorry for …
being an asshole.”
—Martha Wells, "Network Effect"
Then a rather familiar transport/gunboat shoots them up, and abducts them to another solar system, with some odd, hostile inhabitants, or "Targets" as Murderbot calls them.
Finally we get a little explanation of the wormhole transit system, much better detail on drone and network systems, and Corporation Rim colony setup. There's even a planetary surface described in… not great detail, but any detail? So that's different. Since reading this book I'm going back to reread the novellas with more background information.
There's as much internal chatter of Murderbot as ever, which is the thing that draws us weirdos to this, but also a lot of feed and voice chatter with others forcing some character development the novellas can't achieve.
It's organized almost along episodic A- B- plot beats, Murderbot kills everyone, there's a social/investigation sequence, backstory piece, repeat (four times? More or less).
The Targets and what's driving them takes a long time to be revealed, and how some of their software attacks are possible isn't clear until very late in the book.
And it's left set up for more stories, which is all Murderbot's after, too.
★★★★★ — inhaled it in a couple sittings.
Also, there was a prequel short story in Wired a couple years ago, which I just learned of:
This is up on 'zon prime, and written by Jerome Bixby, who (very relevantly) wrote the Star Trek TOS episode Requiem for Methuselah.
An apparently 30-something history professor (David Lee Smith) is leaving his job and town, and a few colleagues and friends (hey, the asshole biker professor is William Katt! He looks like shit 30 years since I last saw him, but he's still alive!) show up for a going-away party. They notice some oddities in his furnishings, and he tells them a story, that he's a 14,000 year old caveman, and the things he's seen, people he's met. They react with incredulity, get a shrink in…
The entire thing is shot in and just outside a little cabin, with a fireplace. Mostly one-camera, calm, long shots, actors mostly in character and reacting appropriately. I could wish for them to all speak a little more Howard Hawks, New Yorker speed instead of slow and laconic, I don't buy that some of these people are professors, but you work with what you can get on indie flicks.
The writing's not fantastic; he does question & answer, with often terse answers, not technical or detailed, and often interrupted by snarky people. There's one or two, where he's recalling scenery or people, that get something like actual SF writing. What I would like is long monologues about his people, about life in Sumeria, or Rome, or Paris. There's a Poul Anderson book, The Boat of a Million Years which covers a similar character, which has much longer expositions of the nature of living forever.
He has a story of meeting another unnamed immortal, which he puts in the 17th Century. It might possibly be a reference to Le Comte de Saint Germain, a reputed immortal and courtier, though he did eventually die. This is the kind of detail that would've improved the story.
And then there's a religious argument, with a devout true believer, because apparently one random decade in the Mideast 2000 years ago is more important than the other 14,000 years. I think this argument scene is defective in a few ways. First, the believer thinks the King James Version is a "recent" and "accurate" Bible, when in reality it's 400 years out of date and a known shitty translation, most modern Protestants (the theist here is openly anti-Catholic, which is hilarious if you're screaming "blasphemy!" at someone; a "religion" that splits into reformations every couple years is obviously not divinely inspired) use the New International Version, New Living Translation, or New American Standard Bible (for hardcore Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek literalists). I mostly quote KJV because it's poetic and used in so much English literature of the last 400 years, but I'm absolutely not trying to receive "truth" from it.
And while the voices of reason in the room explain the places where Christianity is copied from prior less-shitty religions, the theist is only capable of denying and crying, can't make any rational arguments. SIGH. Look, I'm an aggressive, mocking atheist, but we should be better about presenting the opposition argument than the Christian God's Not Dead idiots.
But I do like his 100-word New New Testament better than anything Christians have ever written in the last 2000 years. They would all be massively improved by switching to this belief.
★★★½☆
There is a sequel, Man From Earth: Holocene, written by the director of the first with no input from Jerome Bixby who was by this time dead, and the comments are harsh: "I've just finished watching Man From Earth: Holocene and this is less a review than a warning." Well. Maybe if I'm angry at myself I'll watch that for punishment.
There's also a movie on Netflix, He Never Died, starring Henry Rollins(!!!), about another immortal, though it's more religious/magical, if played for… not comedy, but funny horror? ★★★★☆ for that.
Egan's always been best at short story length, writing an idea that cuts away your Human delusions of self-importance and self-awareness, and then terminates. His characters have maybe more depth now than they did 30 years ago, but it's focused on the task at hand. A number of these skip forward in time rapidly, sketching out a scene and then a # section break and it's months or years later; generally obvious from context, but I'd prefer timestamps.
I'll try to be vague but it's impossible to say even how a story worked for me, without some hint of what it is; you might want to read these cold. If so, you can probably skip Uncanny Valley or Break My Fall.
★★★★★ despite a couple clunkers
Brazilian show about pervasive personal drone (annoying little robot bees that don't need to recharge?) surveillance and a murder that somehow isn't recorded, but the premises are so stupid it Black Mirrors itself:
Girl protagonist (Carla Salle) is super cute, tho. Gidget/Amelie/Audrey Hepburn type.
So I may watch another to see if it sinks further into Black Mirror/The Scary Door territory.
I'm much more a fan of George R.R. Martin's SF than his fantasy/"English history for C-average history students" aka "A Song of Ice and Fire". "Nightflyers" is a good novella, but it has maybe an hour or two of content, so the show at 10 hours is ridiculously expanded and bears only the slightest resemblance to the story.
Royd Eris in the book is enfeebled, a pasty white slug in an acceleration couch, has no immune system, has never touched a living Human, has no crew, and runs the ship by advanced automation. In the show, he becomes Roy, big black dude, and while he hides in his deck for a while, he's fit and strong and can totally come out and fuck the passengers when he wants. I had a theory about how they reconciled this, which was later revealed to be (mostly?) correct. I would have preferred the original cameras & holograms version.
In the show there's an angry mob of crew and a bald Picardian asshole XO so you can get reactions, and as victims.
The big reveal of the book was the force on the captain's side of the ship, and the horrible logic of how you survive it. In the show, that's introduced early and it doesn't have any of the original powers, personality, or origin. It's the least of your problems.
Telepathy and telekinesis are big drivers of the book, and while there's a telepath on the show, he's irrelevant, a walkie-talkie would be just as useful but they don't seem to have any. The second teep was changed in the show, probably so they could film more psychic sex scenes. Later they talk about "teke" as some kind of magical psychic powerup energy, not "telekinesis".
In the book, Humans have FTL and know (and have warred with) many alien races, thousands of years after leaving Earth, the volcryn are a legend of a slow-moving STL fleet in the void between the stars, where no FTL race goes; a mystery but not Humanity's one big chance. In the show, Humans have only recently reached space and have STL, and the volcryn are the only hope of getting FTL before using up the Solar System or some such nonsense.
So, as opposite as you can get.
First few episodes are setup and world-building, and here it's pretty good. It's Actual Science Fiction (that is, fiction about science, and not contradicting reality) in most parts. The ship looks pretty good, a big spinning ring with habitat pods on the ends, and the "ship" in the middle. Gravity is never really addressed; they have artificial gravity in the book, so I don't know why there's a ring here. We rarely see any pod interior except the "terraform" pod with a forest and bees, and a cargo pod full of crates and the telepath's shipping container.
Halfway thru, something goes very wrong with the writers.
S1E6, the show introduces a derelict ship, and this suddenly becomes a terrible episode of Space:1999. I'll just say this: Human cloning requires a food source. You can't make food from nothing by jerking guys off and cloning people; it's so fucking stupid. At least in Rick & Morty's Froopyland (S3E9, "The ABC's of Beth") there's an entire world of biological matter, and breeding hybrid babies just makes edible food out of them.
S1E7, the telepath wanders around being a plaything for the crew, who again shouldn't exist. The cyberneticist has her fantasy world of a 1950s diner shattered by a little black girl being there. Karl goes more crazy about his dead daughter.
S1E8 is the terrible Michael Crichton bio-horror ep with bad mushrooms. The show's really coming apart, no semblance of main story arc, just disconnected events.
S1E9 finally remembers the mission exists, the telepath makes contact with the volcryn in a way that greatly contradicts the book, the annoying xenobiologist goes crazy and there are deaths, but not the ones of the book.
S1E10 has everyone else go crazy, "Mom"/cyberneticist gets dumbass Picard to sabotage the drives which we know only genetic superwoman can fix, Karl goes out to meet the volcryn/hallucination of his dead daughter. Show comes to a confusing, incomplete end.
Happily this mess has been cancelled.
If they'd kept the tone of E1-E5 and just finished up the original volcryn story, "Mom" killing almost everyone, and genetic superwoman and what's left of Royd flying off forever, this could've been salvaged. I don't know what happened to the writers at S1E6, but that should never have happened.
★★★☆☆ at the start, ★☆☆☆☆ by the end.
The "Gate" could open the way to distant galaxies—
or destroy the whole Universe…!
Saw the cover in a tumblr SF feed, and the title and summary caught my eye.
Despite the year, it's a pretty current story of corporate engineering management. The engineer, Robert Collins (a newbie in way over his skill level), and the company "lawyer"/gun thug/investigator Scarlyn Smith (basically Mike from Breaking Bad), try to figure out why the former chief engineer Norton was vanished from his funeral and turns up in pieces throughout LA. Collins manages to spare time from playing detective to do his job and build the Gate…
Spoiler discussion hereafter.
So the "one fictional science idea" of this book is a matter transporter. Originally somewhat short-ranged, but it allows you to build: Instant teleports across the world, or up to orbit (how conservation of motion is handled is not addressed; jumping to a space station moving 100x faster than the surface should plaster your bits on the wall), or to make a drone ship move FTL by transporting itself forward over and over (apparently biology can't handle the slight deviations in many ports, but electrically-driven starships can).
The Gate is just a giant transporter, with a reach measured in thousands of light years. In its first operational test it targets Tau Ceti, 12 light years away, and rips an asteroid-sized chunk of matter from a planet, including plant life. There's a few sentences about Collins having moral qualms about this. The villain's plan is rather more ambitious, but insane.
Even with just the "normal" application, this is a horrific device. Interstellar war? Just tear the enemy's planet apart from the comfort of your own orbit. You can use it to instantly travel across the Galaxy, or… the plot has another application for it.
There's an adage from Larry Niven's Known Space series, the efficiency of a star drive is directly proportional to its value as a weapon; there meaning that fusion drives, laser sail launchers, and interstellar laser comms make weapons as good as any main cannon. But this is far beyond that. Instant travel means you can kill a planet or a solar system instantly.
Not a particularly well-written or interesting book as literature, but piecing together the dangers of this thing, especially from the crazy scientist who shouts about "the crab!", gives it more value.
★★★½☆
A French 6-episode series on the 'flix.
Very brief warning at the start of the episode, that there's suicide themes and discretion etc., which vastly understates it: This is a meditation on death.
On the 137th birthday of the oldest person alive, long after emortality/regeneration is developed, a number of suicides/murders wash up on a beach, and a cop and a girl, a former suicidal cultist, investigate.
The show is French, and as I've previously noted they seem to be more casual about casting normal, even ugly people in their shows. The girl especially has the ugliest skull and bad hair I've ever seen in a character not meant to be a freak. The cop has a broken (or just naturally ugly?) nose and is a little worn down and sad looking for an emortal, but he has reasons to get less regeneration than he needs.
The blue jellyfish, which presumably (later in the show confirmed) provided the drug or gene which gave them regeneration, is all over as mascots, pets, color theming.
Oh, color theming. Like every damned thing from Hollywood, half the show is cyan/orange duochrome. They have other gels or color filters and use them in a few scenes, but don't use them for anything else. If you're not in Hollywood, you're free to use actual colors! You don't have to imitate their worst feature! But it does, often making it very hard to see people and details because it's all a muddy blue blur.
There's minimal effort made on sets and props. They filmed in industrial, brutalist, or Scandinavian spartan architecture, but the cars, shitty cell phones, and iPhones, iPads, & MacBooks are unmodified other than black tape on the Apple logo. Other than some people in tracksuits, who may just be Slavic, fashion is modern. Magazines are in print, instead of just being on their shitty phones. Dance scenes at parties with bad modern house music are spazzy fishstick wobbling, exactly like the present. You'd forget it's set in the future, until a wall-sized screen advertises at you, or some other visual prop like the "source gas" (stolen directly from Transmetropolitan) which is a nanotech camera/sound wire, or a "true mirror" which shows an actual-age image of everyone in the mirror, useful when surrounded by centuries-old people.
The oddest parts are when they try to be futuristic, with the grief counsellor and his glowing ball ("they used to use puppies"), or the half-wit intern who rides around on a beeping wheeled hoverboard, or the dumbest "weapon" in the history of dumb BDSM-inspired weapons.
"It must be comfortable. Having that attitude. Thinking everything is absurd and pointless." —Cop Darius
"So what we're doing has a point?" —Young punk Christa
Of course, everything is absurd and pointless. Darius is wrong but is so ingrained in his rut of life, 99 years as le flic, he can only see things as crimes or victims, not as transformations which may be necessary.
The scientist who invented regeneration says children are no longer necessary, and there's a breeding control bill supporting him. Christa isn't quite aware enough to be a nihilist yet, but she rides along passively thru most events, only taking initiative when her hallucinations push her forward.
The suicides turn out to be something more interesting. I'd been hoping for a Charles Sheffield's Proteus inspired plot, something really changing the way mortality and form shaped Humanity, but they half-assed the plot in the end, turns into a very pedestrian conspiracy, rich old people getting their kicks. All the hints of a new world, or of protecting youth to get new blood, totally dumped in E6.
★★★★☆ for initial premise and being actual Science Fiction, ★★☆☆☆ for execution and ending.
Styx famously sang:
"The problem's plain to see
Too much technology
Machines to save our lives
Machines dehumanize"
But of course that wasn't the problem at all. People were the monsters all along. Machines only suck because people program them to suck.
The solution is clear.
Apparently this is the season of low-budget time travel movies, because I get another one. This was a much better ride.
An asshole archaeologist goes caving alone except for his dog, trying to find some hippies who went missing 40 years ago. He passes thru a weird wet invisible wall and never returns.
So then his two students go looking for him. They pick up a random girlfriend, younger sister, and "Furby" who is (as they point out) like Chunk from the Goonies but not as heroic or competent. They rappel down thru the wet invisible wall.
The cave areas are mostly classic Dr Who quality warehouse floors with dust and plaster stalagmites, but the centerpiece tower chamber looks OK.
SPOILERS ahoy
They get many clues that something's wrong with time, even if they can't read the title, but don't put it together for a long time. The wet field is of course condensation at the time barrier. The "Furby cut the rope!" hypothesis is kept up much longer than is plausible, but they do eventually figure out why ropes break.
It's great that they all have gopros, so we can see the same scenes multiple times on tiny phone screens (or a projector but with no silver screen in a cave) in lieu of anyone talking it over. The mythology is finally explained in some detail, but it's after much too long of everyone saying "what is happening?!"
Finally the random encounters start. The cavemen are ridiculous, scampering on all fours. There ought to be generation after generation of invaders, instead of just cavemen, conquistadors, lone gunslinger, hippies, archaeologists, and spacemen.
There's some unexamined bits. What do the cavemen eat? Where do they get wood for fires, leather for clothes? Cannibalism and healing in the spring? Where does the Fountain come from? Why is it able to do this? No idea.
[Update: I just realized. This is set in Texas. Where the hell did they get cavemen? Native Americans got here only 15-20KYA, and they're the same Homo sapiens as everyone else, not these sorta-Neanderthal/Homo habilis looking grimy monkey men. There have never been non-Sapiens hominids in North America, Bigfoot claims aside.]
The final scenes are a bit neat and tidy, and really could've used a freaky post-Human Martian coming in to say something, but it did fine for a limited cast.
Minor point against it: The dog is never seen again, even though he should've been hanging around the truck when the students arrived. Maybe he survived, but probably the coyotes got him. I want a happy ending for the dog, too.
This is an interesting time for indie films, because even cheap cameras look good, so if you have a decent script and the special effects are just Photoshop on a few frames, you can make a professional film on a shoestring budget.
★★★½☆
