Tag: #sci fi

Dune’s success and (sort of) failures

March 22nd, 2024

Just watched Dune 2 for the second time and it was a very different movie this time. But this time, I tried a little experiment. I decided to pretend like I believed in magic and see how it came across.

That’s where Dunes 1 & 2 succeeded magnificently. The fact that you can choose to do that or not and the movie still works is ingenious.

I think Villeneuve managed to do something Damien Walter has been calling for in his essays: bring the mythos back to the modern world. He gave us a story that kind of reenchanted the world.

The modern world has improved a lot of people’s lives, but at the same time taken away a lot of meaning. I don’t think people live well without meaning.

The fact that people are discussing and arguing about their interpretations of the Dune movies and books is a very good sign. I look forward to seeing more like it. Hopefully Dune Messiah will get made.

Where it falls short for me

I’m not sure how effective Villeneuve or even Frank Herbert himself have been at spreading these messages: 1) Beware of following charismatic leaders and 2) absolute power will rob you of your humanity.

The problem with the first message is point of view. In Dune, the Fremen chose Luke Skywalker and ended up with Darth Vader. But the main character is not one of the Fremen.

Most people, particularly young men, are going to root for Paul Atreides all the way to the end, no matter how dark he gets.

Hollywood let the hero off the hook in the Star Wars trilogy. In this story, Luke was always going to choose the Dark Side.

To get the point across, I think we needed a main character who believed in Paul and became disillusioned. Something like a first person account of a Bedouin warrior who believed in T.E. Lawrence then saw his people freed from the Ottomans, only to wind up under the thumb of the British.

Villeneuve made Chani a stronger character than she was in the book in an attempt to get Herbert’s main point across. I felt it: Paul had betrayed his lover and the Fremen. What a shame.

But not everyone did (I saw someone say Villeneuve did it to please SJWs). The problem is Chani wasn’t the main character. People were still excited about Paul’s victory. Chani was just an acceptable casualty.

Watching Dune 2 as if I believed in magic made the power more… powerful. It felt like metaphysical cocaine, pouring out of the screen. Intoxicating.

Regarding point number 2, the darkness of power… well, that’s just a hard message for anyone to get across. I’ve never published a book or directed a movie so who am I to judge?

In particular, how are you going to convince young men who feel they have little or no power that absolute power wouldn’t be a bitchin’ great time?

It’s one of the worst addictions you can have, because you need it to survive. It’s like food. Not having it could kill you.

And yet I agree with Herbert’s point. Absolute power will take your humanity. The fact that major powers looking to one-up one another find it acceptable to threaten each other’s populations with nuclear destruction is rather monstrous, isn’t it?

Empires used to just sack each other’s cities and leave it at that.

Herbert makes his point by portraying power-hungry characters as ugly. The Baron Harkonnen is Jabba the Hut. Leto II turns into a worm.

Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings makes the same point: Don’t go for the One Ring or you’ll turn into a gigantic flaming eyeball.

The problem is, I think Herbert and Tolkien underestimated the number of guys who aren’t afraid of turning into a giant worm or a flaming eyeball.
Altered Carbon, is there more to a human body?

March 10th, 2024

Decided to give Altered Carbon another shot on Netflix. Season one. Not sure if I’ll try the second season.

It was better this time. Because I think it’s about an idea that’s on a lot of our minds lately: transhumanism. The idea that man and machine can and should become one and the same.

Is it ethical? Is it wise?

I remember liking both the book and the show, but I had a hard time suspending disbelief the first time around. The hard sci fi part of me wasn’t didn’t buying their method of space travel.

But this time around I realized I’d been looking at it all wrong. Whether it’s possible or not is irrelevant. These are the important questions: What is a human being and what is it worth? What, if anything, is the human soul? How are we different from animals or machines?

It has become common these days to think of the mind as software running on the hardware of the human body. Something that could be digitized and kept alive in an actual machine.

Is that possible and if so, what are the ethical implications? Especially if you think of the mind and the soul as essentially the same as I do?

I suspect that even if you could upload your mind into a machine or another body – something would be missing. Something important.

My outlook on that topic has changed over the years. Back when I was reading a lot of cyberpunk, I used to think I wanted that. Not anymore. Since it turns out we don’t understand consciousness, I don’t think they could get it all. And I don’t think that’s possible. I’m afraid I’d be giving myself a kind of lobotomy.

And if I’m wrong, if the soul CAN be copied, what does that imply? That it’s nothing special, only software. Would an exact copy of a person have rights ? The same rights as the original? Black Mirror has been all over that topic. The White Christmas episode… Shudder.

Assuming you could treat the human body as an expendable “sleeve,” what would that mean for society?

One obvious implication is massive disrespect for the human body.

And a massive loss of empathy. Especially from those who could afford multiple re-sleevings.

Which gets into the REAL point of the show as I see it: the immorality of immortality.

Notice the decadence of the Eternals. Notice the suffering in the world and how little they seem to care. Even the rich kids can’t grow up because there’s no place for them. No reason to be responsible.

Society is kind of that way as it is. The wealthy live longer than the rest of us. Better healthcare, better food, safer neighborhoods. Is that fair? And do we really want to make it eternal?
China Miéville’s The City and the City: Borders are a matter of belief

December 11th, 2023

Divided cities are an interesting phenomenon. You have cities that grow and merge, and cities that split apart, usually because of politics. They differ in their level of connectedness.

For a while we had East and West Berlin, with a wall in between. Until the 1870s Budapest, Hungary was Buda and Pest, with the Danube River in between.

In America, we have a lot of “twin” cities. In Texas we have the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Midland-Odessa.

Usually one of the cities in a “twin” relationship is more working class than the other, but when you come down to it, they’re still American. American culture, American social norms.

In The City and the City, China Miéville writes about fictitious cities Besz and Ul Qoma. The cities are physically adjacent – they have many “cross-hatched” regions – but their societies are kept strictly separated. This, despite the fact that they share streets, highways and railways,

By mutual agreement of Besz and Ul Qoma, a mysterious entity called Breach keeps citizens from mingling and interacting, on pain of arrest or worse. And you never know if Breach is watching.

The City and the City is a murder mystery that develops into an interesting study of society and law. A body is found in a crosshatched area. Did the crime occur in Besz or Ul Qoma and did anybody “breach”?

And could there be a mysterious third city flying under the radar?

Citizens of both cities have to be trained from childhood to purposely ignore any person or thing not of their city. Citizens learn to “unsee” (and even unsmell!) anything that doesn’t belong in their city. There are unificationist groups in both cities, but they are treated as radicals and suppressed.

It’s crazy when you think about it, how much the concept of a border depends on belief. There may be a fence or a wall or a line on a map, but the earth doesn’t care. It’s people who make borders happen.

I enjoyed the murder mystery and protagonist Tyador’s detective work, but the conceptual stuff was especially interesting. Enforcing a border via psychology.

Unseeing. Pretending you didn’t see to the point that for practical purposes you didn’t. Is that really possible?

It got me thinking of anti-memes – objects, creatures and phenomena that use forgettability as camouflage. qntm’s novel There Is No Antimemetics Division, takes that concept to ridiculous and extremes, but “anti-memetic” does seem to be a thing. Can you describe the last panhandler you saw while driving? Probably not. I can’t.

I actually forgot an entire city. I was talking about twin cities and totally forgot that El Paso, where I live is exactly such a city, or half-city. The Rio Grande officially separates El Paso from Juarez, as well as U.S. from Mexico. But the real separation is cultural.

Borders are imaginary until you make them solid, but still in the most important ways, they’re imaginary. Before it was part of the U.S., Texas has been territory of Spain, France, Mexico, itself, the Confederacy and the territory of various native American peoples.

Who will claim it in 1,000 years? It won’t be more than a claim. The earth doesn’t care about lines on maps.
There is no Antimemetics Division, or is there?

November 4th, 2023

I just read a wild book about an organization that protects us all by dealing with with monsters that don’t want to be remembered.

There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm (“quantum”), aka Sam Hughes came from a regular on the SCP Foundation Wiki. The SCP Foundation (Secure Contain Protect) is an online collaborative writing project about a shadowy organization that battles and locks up “anomalies” that would drive people insane if they knew.

The Antimemetics Division is a barely-remembered part of the SCP Foundation tasked with protecting the world from anomalies that can steal or modify memories, and monstrous creatures that can’t, or shouldn’t be remembered.

It reminds me of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, but with a bit of sardonic humor. Memory loss is so existentially disturbing, and this is a horror book as well as imaginative science fiction, but qntm manages to find the humor in it.

An anti-meme is the opposite of a meme, a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to describe any idea that spreads through a culture.

An anti-meme resists spreading. Anti-memes are real, by the way. Dirty secrets, passwords, strings of random numbers. That includes the memory-thieving variety.

The smartphone should be an SCP if it isn’t already. Think how many phone numbers you forgot.

So much of this book has blown my mind. The degree to which memory determines what we think of as existence, the SCP from another universe changing everyone’s reality, the SCP that they have to “contain” OUTSIDE a hermetically sealed box.

There’s even a kind of afterlife that consists of self-aware memories. Craziness.

Most if not all of this book can be found on the SCP Foundation Wiki or in video format on YouTube, but I paid for the book, cuz I think this guy deserves it. Very imaginative stuff!

Maybe this will whet your appetite:

We Need to Talk About Fifty-five (SCP Orientation)
Travelers and the ethics of sacrificing others

July 13th, 2023

I’ve decided what I think makes the Netflix Show Travelers so interesting. It’s a time travel story, but really it’s a story about the ethics of human sacrifice.

The fact that the time travelers arrive in the 21st century by taking over other people’s minds, sets the tone right away.

They take the high road by (mostly) taking the minds of people who are about to die, but that’s a rather weak justification.

They area clearly trying to do the right thing, but they are still playing a hardcore game of Trolley Car Problem.

You know, the dilemma where one person is tied to one track, five people to another. You can throw a switch and kill one or do nothing and five will die. Which is the moral choice?

Travelers raises the stakes even higher. Which and how many individuals must be sacrificed in the past to save humanity in the future?

We make similar decisions in the real world. We can’t know the future, so there’s no way to justify the sacrifices of others that our society makes for supposedly greater cause. But we sure try don’t we?

The Director is in a better position than we are. It can know the future, sort of. But because it exists in multiple timelines, it can’t base its decisions on certainty, only probability. It’s very smart and it means well. But it makes mistakes, so do its operatives.

There’s no way to “win” the trolley problem. You have to make a bad choice. But you know the main characters are the good guys – because they’re the main characters.

Just like all of us. The stakes might not be as high as they are in Travelers, but everyone gets into damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.

We also know when we didn’t really have to make that bad choice… But we know we’re the good guys – because we’re the main characters.
What would a relationship with a superintelligence look like?

July 12th, 2023

Waiting for the Director entity to arrive inside Ilsa, a 21st century super computer.

Netflix’s Travelers is a real head trip. It’s like a brutal version of Doctor Who, trying to “fix the timeline” where the Doctor is an artificial superintelligence with human special ops.

There are so many heavy topics I could get into with this show, but the one that just really hit me was the idea that you could have a relationship with an AI.

What would that be like? It could be like a grandparent who’s stuck around for a thousand years. You could get attached. Or it might come across like a boss, or a general, or maybe a prophet.

The main characters talk about it with respect and awe. I also get a sense that the entity also feels attached. To both humanity and to favored individuals.

I don’t know if machine consciousness is possible, but let’s just pretend that it is. What would it be like having a relationship with a superintelligence?

Imagine the awe you would feel. Because benign or evil, it would have power over you and you would be well aware of it.

It could outthink you. It could access more information in a second than you could learn in 100 lifetimes. It could compute an unimaginable number of probabilities.

In that scenario, you’re not talking to an individual, you’re talking to a POWER. It would be a bit like talking to a god, an angel, or perhaps a genie.

Frightening, but that’s also the best case scenario, imo, the one where you can have a relationship with the machine and it doesn’t just decide turn every atom it can into more of itself.

In the show, the Director seems to have a paternalistic relationship with the human race. I don’t like the idea of giving it that much power over us, losing that much free will. There is an insurgency in the future that feels similarly.

But there are worse ways it could go. It could be a master-slave relationship. Talking to a machine like that might be like dealing with a dictator or a mafia don.

Or we could just be tools, being told where we need to go to keep the machine running. No more a relationship than we have with our cells. Even worse, we could be seen as raw materials, or just in the way.

There’s no way to predict how all this will go, but we might as well start thinking about it.

What should Humanity as a whole, do if something like that arises? If we can’t stop it and can’t turn it off and they can outthink us and command every resource of the planet, we will have no choice. We will have to petition for a relationship.
Harnessing the full potential of science fiction

July 9th, 2023

Science fiction helped keep me sane when as a kid. Whatever troubles might be going on in my life, I could dive into a book and be halfway across the galaxy.

But science fiction is more than just an escape, or it can be. The wild adventures and mind-bending scenarios can actually make you better.

If you let them.

I really enjoyed the above discussion by John Vervaeke and Damien Walters about ways science fiction can be a framework to help us find meaning.

I had to chuckle at the last part, starting around 1:13. They could have been talking about 20-year-old me. That isn’t me anymore. But I remember the mindset.

Ringworld – the quintessential “hard SF” novel.

For a long time, “hard science fiction” was almost all I read. (Think Andy Weir’s The Martian, or Jurassic Park.)

Back then I thought all fantasy other than Lord of the Rings was a waste of time. That shelf space could be better filled by the likes of Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, I figured.

Obvious science mistakes pissed me off. Han Solo “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs”? Please. Parsecs are a distance measurement.

Which gets to the heart of my snobbery about hard SF.

I wanted the science to WORK. I wanted to believe the adventures I read about were at least possible.

Walters and Vervaeke get into the Hugo Awards controversy. The Sad Puppies, protectors of the old guard, battled it out with writers and fans who wanted to expand the definition of science fiction.

There was a time when I would’ve rooted for the Sad Puppies. Walters was close to the mark when he speculated that the fight is really about personal fantasies.

I had a personal fantasy that I was almost unconscious of. Science fiction helped me deal with existential angst.

I might not get to be the adventurer in that somewhat scientifically accurate sci fi novel, but one day someone would.

A lot of people are mad at John C. Wright over his role in the Hugo Awards fight, but his Golden Ocumene trilogy is pretty damn good. I’ve read it and I got my mother to read it.

It bothered me to know the sun would swallow the earth one day. I coudn’t handle the idea of human extinction, even billions of years in the future. I thought, why not colonize the stars and outlive the sun?

Good Christian or not, I kept that possibility in my back pocket just in case. I wanted to go to heaven. But failing that, I thought maybe science would give us a kind of immortality.

The reason I never got laid in college.

A few stars seemed to be within reach. When I took Astronomy in college, I made a little chart of some of the likely candidates. Anti-matter might not take us as far as it took the Enterprise, but 3 or 4 light years ought to be doable. Right?

And once we had a couple of nearby stars under our belts, who knew what we might accomplish. I still have to scratch that itch sometimes. Movies and shows that do that for me are far too few.

Movies like Ex Machina, Interstellar and series like The Last of Us and Westworld kind of do it for me. I also enjoy watching videos by futurist Isaac Arthur, who explores those massive engineering feats that might be possible if we put resources and effort into them.

Futurist Isaac Arthur digs into one of my favorite concepts: the space elevator, something I think humanity could, and should pull off. If there’s one thing I haven’t changed my mind about, it’s that: we must continue to fund space technology.

When it comes to science fiction novels, I’m a lot less interested in the scientific rigor than I used to be, especially now that I understand how hard it is to separate perception from reality.

Phillip K. Dick is more my speed these days when it comes to sci fi. I figure if we can’t figure out the human mind and tame our irrational behavior, there isn’t much chance of accomplishing those grand projects anyway.

I’m no longer particular about how I define science fiction. I really enjoyed N.K Jemisen’s Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth Trilogy, which contained a lot of fantasy elements. (The world-building was incredible.)

New Weird also does for me what science fiction used to do, with elements of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Annihilation, from Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is a good example. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville is another. They seem rather appropriate for the times we’re in. How to deal with the world when it makes no sense…
Facing my pronoun problem

April 30th, 2023

I have a problem with pronouns. Sometimes I say “them” when I mean “us” or “us” when I mean “them.” I can’t tell these days. But the hardest ones of all are “him” and “I.”

That thing I did 30 years ago, was it me or him? It sure feels like it was me, but what about the things that I would never do? That had to be somebody else…

Change your singular pronouns and you also change your plural ones. It gets really confusing.

Few people get to see your true face. Sometimes you don’t even see it yourself. The one you show the world is usually a mask, a persona.

You kinda know it’s not really you, but it’s your “Sunday go to meeting” face, your “go along to get along” face. You take it off when you get home.

(Interesting how not wearing a mask can also be a mask.)

Identity is trickier. That’s the mask you show yourself. It might look like a “go along to get along” face, but you’ve been getting along so well, it doesn’t feel so much like a mask. Until it does.

But as you live and learn, something changes.

One day you the mask doesn’t feel like an “I” anymore. It becomes “him” (or her or they or it, but for me it was “him”).

The people you considered “us” tell you it’s beautiful, but you no longer love it and it’s heavy and it chafes and you want to take it off, but you know they won’t let you.

Gradually “us” turns into “them.” Which is rough, because in your dreams, you’re always “me” and the people you love are always “us.”

All day, every day, we are judged for the masks we wear and judged if we don’t wear mask – especially then. Mask salesmen abound, telling us “this is the last one you’ll ever need,” if you can afford it.

Jeff Noon, the most psychedelic sci fi writer since Rudy Rucker, wrote an interesting novel called Mappalujo about a mysterious land where masks play a major role. I didn’t understand the symbolism when I read it the first time, but I do now.

I’ve worn many masks over the years. I identified so strongly with some of them, I refused to believe that’s what they were, even as they began slipping off. But sooner or later I had to admit it. This is not who I am.

When enough “I’s” turned out to be “hims,” the message started to sink in: They’re all masks.

Though it still hurts like hell when you take them off. Especially when you have no idea what’s underneath, and people you considered “us” suddenly become “them” to you. That’s the pronoun problem I wish I could solve, because I like my people like I like my music – eclectic and all over the world.
On being a different kind of sci fi guy…

March 25th, 2023

Once my dad handed me a copy of Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast my fate was sealed. I would forever be a serious sci fi guy, not a typical fan.

I remember drawing a spaceship during Sunday School once and another kid goes, “That doesn’t look like the Star Trek Enterprise.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” I said. “I made it up.” He just said, “Eh, you just don’t know how to draw it right.”

Story of my life. Always out of sync with what’s popular.

As I got older, Dad and I shared books, browsed for hours in used bookstores. Our house became a library.

He turned me onto people like Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Isaac Asimov of course, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester and Clifford Simak.

On my own I found writers like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I read tons of Golden Age stories. All those books changed the way I think.

I still like “regular” sci fi for an escape, but it’s more like candy. I need science fiction that blows my mind.

OK, so it was a little bit derivative.

One of my trippy sci fi things that no one else got. Organic spaceship. Cool right? (Messed up the sky and gave up.)

I love when a high concept series or movie gets popular. I was so happy when Amazon saved The Expanse, though I wish they’d had more episodes to flesh out the last season.

I also loved Prime’s take William Gibson’s The Peripheral. More Gibson please!

I’m even more impressed when someone pulls off something like that on the cheap.

Everything Everywhere All at Once was everything I wanted and more. Big ideas, social commentary, existential questions, not to mention funny as hell.

I’ll watch anything The Daniels make now. Don’t sleep on Swiss Army Man, btw. It’s weird, but it’s deep. Deeper than you think.

I hate when people think I’m a snob about this stuff. I like what I like. Plus it reminds me of those times I shared with Dad. The only sad thing is he’s not here to discuss it with.

The Legendary Pink Dots – Rainbows Too? Edward Ka Spel’s mythos is steeped in high concept science fiction. One of the many reasons I’m obssessed with the Dots.