Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, are one strange, fascinating story in two volumes. I hope that Jo Walton decides to re-read it when she comes to it in her Revisiting the Hugo Awards Nominees blog series on the Tor website (Hyperion won a Hugo and The Fall of Hyperion was nominated).
Spanish cover of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, via Virao del Casco’s flickr.
In the past two months I finished Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch epic fantasy tetralogy and then burned through his other, earlier epic fantasy tetralogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn for the third or fourth time.
Michael Whelan’s cover for Stone of Farewell, book two of Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn fantasy series
What I dig about Williams, besides his excellent (albiet sometimes slow-paced) prose and efforts to re-upholster standard fantasy tropes, is his attempts to depict truly inhuman beings and cultures in his stories. Science fiction and fantasy authors have always grappled with these kinds of depictions. Some question if it’s even possible for us human beings, with our mental biases, to truly imagine the thoughts and cultures of some other type of intelligence. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss several attempts, how they succeed or fail, and how this relates to my own artistic practice. Be warned, this essay is long.
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The Sunday before last (part two of our sci-fi Sunday – part one is here), Glade and I drove down to San Antonio and watched District 9 with my parents. It was really intense and riveting, although maybe unnecessarily gory. I’m going to discuss the plot, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to pass on this post. I tried to avoid any foreknowledge of the plot of the movie going in, which definitely enhanced the experience for me. Ok, you’ve been warned, here goes:
I’m sure that many of you are already familiar with the premise, which is in the six-minute short Alive in Joburg also directed by Neill Blomkamp:
Unfortunately, this short showcases the main problem that I have with the movie: District 9 is a Halo movie set in Slumdog Millionaire. When Millionaire was up for many Academy Awards this past February, it was accused of fetishizing poverty, but District 9 takes it a step further – the physical setting of the slum called District 9 was a slum that was being evacuated while the movie was being filmed, according to this interview with director Neill Blomkamp on io9, which makes the movie mirror reality a little too closely for me to be entirely comfortable with it. Similarly, all of the quotes in the short from non-actor South Africans come from asking them about immigrants to Johannesburg from other parts of Africa, according to that same io9 interview.
As far as the Halo connection goes, all of those action sequences in the short look like Halo cut scenes to me. And then we get to District 9, and all of the action sequences (not to mention the weapons and the mech) look like they were lifted straight from the Halo movie that Peter Jackson and Blomkamp were gonna make until it got canned, and they decided to go with District 9! I enjoy good action sequences, but these had too much in common with first-person shooters and they made the movie seem unbalanced to me. I was hoping for more sci fi ideas and less guns.
It may seem that I disliked the movie, but I enjoyed it. It just didn’t live up to the hype for me, especially when it came out a few months after Moon, an intelligent, minimal sci-fi movie following the footsteps of 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris. All that being said, there was one thing in the movie that really, really worked for me, and that was Wikus’ slow, horrific, and grotesque transformation in a prawn. No matter how unrealistic it may be scientifically (unless, of course, DNA has been seeded thruout the cosmos by benevolent urpeople), it really worked for me emotionally, and it’s the fulcrum around which all of the action and character development of the movie takes place. I’ve always been fascinated by the role that limnal beings play in narrative and myth, so it was excited to see a major movie take that up as its central theme. I also appreciated how important the Nigerian gangster’s belief in sympathetic magic (which can manifest as “If I eat you, I’ll gain your power”) was in the movie. So, despite District 9‘s shortcomings, I think it was one of the better sci-fi movies that I’ve seen, and I’ll see the sequel, District 10, if they make it.
This past Sunday, Glade and I got up at around noon, ordered a pizza with green chilis and feta (sounds weird but it was delicious) and watched Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, which was a birthday present from Glade. I’ve been trying to get into anime lately and the movie seemed like a good entry point, since I voraciously read all seven volumes of the manga, which was written and drawn by Miyazaki in between Studio Ghibli films, when I came across it back in 2004.
I enjoyed the movie, even though I have the redubbed version from 2005 that features voice acting by Patrick Stewart, Uma Thurman, and Shia LeBeouf, which was a little distracting.
The movie only covers about the first quarter of the manga. The God Warrior is only active for a few minutes in the anime but has a prominent role in the manga.
My favorite thing about the manga, tho, is how Miyazaki blends the influence of Moebius into his style. I would love to see an anime version of Dune done by Studio Ghibli circa the mid eighties.
vialocosceles.
My friend Will Sellari showed me the movie Zardoz on Sunday night.
cover of the novelization, viajimthing.
It was a violent movie (starring Sean Connery!) with a barely sensical climax, a weird dislike of penises and an even stranger inability to understand erections, but besides all that, these masks were really amazing:
via the rope store.
Also there were some great inflatables. Trailer:
I saw Moon Monday night.
It was really refreshing. The last hard sci fi movie that I remember seeing was Sunshine, and that kind of fell apart at the end. Moon, directed by Duncan Jones, definitely follows the tradition established by 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, while also managing to throw in some humanizing bits of humor.
I watched Ralph Bakshi’s movie Wizards this past weekend.
Images from the movie poster.
Until I saw this, I had never realized that Ralph Bakshi directed the half-finished live-action/rotoscope/animation Lord of the Rings movie! As I watched it, I wondered why more movies like it – animated fantasy epics – didn’t exist. I don’t know for sure, but I would think that this kind of movie is cheaper than both an entirely live movie and a 3D CGI verison. Then, during the special features, I discovered the reason – A New Hope came out two weeks after Wizards was released. Oh well.
Movie still.
My buddy Ryan Lauderdale pointed out that the strange mix of animation and color keyed stock footage is probably more interesting in 2009 than it was in 1977, now that that kind of mixed medium film is more prevalent out on the net and lots of people have access to video editing software. I wonder what someone in 2409 will think if they sit down (or download or mentally upload or whatever) and view Wizards – will any of it be relevant anymore? Or will they all be living out their own epic fantasy quests in a solar system that has been transformed into a Matrioshka Brain?
Movie still.
Unanswerable questions, really. I’ll just have to sit down and watch Fire and Ice.
I watched Enki Bilal’s Immortal this past Sunday. After I read Jog’s review [2022-06-26 update: this link to Jog’s review on the Comixology website is now broken], I just had to check it out, so I made my girlfriend and friends sit through it on our sci fi movie nite.
Overall, the movie has too much going on and too many styles mixed up together – as Jog mentions, the mashup of CGI and RL actors is particularly awful. However, at its best, the movie has a frantic melee of crazy sci fi ideas and imagery that transcends to another level where Egyptian gods coexist with hammerhead aliens and a blue-scalped woman is in love with an alien named John who hangs out on a throne floating in outer space.
A snapshot of the main characters, Nikopol, Jill, and Horus, as depicted in the Nikopol Trilogy comic book that is also by Enki Bilal and was adapted for the movie, image via hakanuygun.
The one thing that is portrayed most effectively in the movie is the cityscape of future New York, image via letsfallasleep. The backgrounds are often the most visually consistent and compelling aspects of the scenes.
A couple of days ago I linked to an article by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt.
In the article, Robinson cogently outlines the connection between striving for global social justice and tackling climate change, going so far as to say that “justice becomes a kind of climate change technology.” What really interests me, however, is the call that Robinson puts out at the end for all of us to close a gap in our collective imagination, to fill in “a blank spot in our vision of the future”: namely, what economic system will succeed capitalism.
Of course postcapitalist theories abound, a few personal favorites being the steady-state economy and post-scarcity anarchism. But the problem here is that they are just theories and models, none of which have been tested in the real world. And, if you believe Robinson, we need to discover which of these theories are viable if we are going to survive the next century. Science fiction offers a great testing environment for extended thought experiments in this vein – Singularity Sky by Charles Stross offers an accelerated vision (pun intended) of the arrival of post-scarcity anarchism in its opening chapters,
and Robinson’s own Mars trilogy offers a compelling narrative of competing postcapitalisms that takes place over the course of decades, applied to the mesocosm of a terraforming Mars.
P.S. Robinson’s favorite band is YES.
Fragile cover art by Roger Dean.
I recently read the last nine tenths of UBIK by Philip K. Dick while laying in bed hungover, which only amplified the creepiness of its decaying, solipsistic world.
One thing I had never noticed before is how strange the clothing of future-1992 is. With so many things going on, its an easy thing to miss, but lets look at some passages:
“Beside [the chopper] stood a beetle-like individual wearing a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propelled beanie.”
From Chapter Seven, Paragraph 52.
“… in gay pinstripe clown-style pajamas, Joe Chip hazily seated himself …”
From Chapter Three, Paragraph One.
Al Hammond was wearing “green felt knickers, gray golf socks, badger-hide open-midriff blouse and imitation patent-leather pumps…”
From Chapter Eight, Paragraph 43.
