A couple of interesting things happened shortly before i left my flat to go watch Wall-E (2008).

First, i finished reading Citizen Cyborg by James Hughes. The book, which i will soon review on this blog, makes a compelling case for Democratic Transhumanism, and as a subset of this, for extending certain rights to non-Humans (be it Apes, Dolphins, Elephants, Robots or Aliens…), under the argument that we have an obligation to treat anyone or anything capable of feelings and of self-awareness in the same manner (or almost the same manner, depending on various criteria) that we would (should) treat our fellow human beings. The second thing that happened is that i came across two very recent articles that proved timely and appropriate in their relevance to Pixar’s new film: Emotional robots in the spotlight and When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans.

As a Democratic Transhumanist and Technogaianist who grew up absorbing large quantities of Science Fiction cinema and literature, i have never felt anything remotely bizarre or ‘abnormal’ in the idea of giving human rights (and one day, equal rights) to non-human creatures. It is a very arrogant notion to think that only human beings deserve the right to not be tortured, beaten or imprisoned. All animals today deserve at least to be treated with fairness and in a similar fashion to the way we (should) treat human beings who suffer from mental or physical handicaps. And the more intelligent animals are and then become (through genetic engineering), the more rights they should receive. The same applies to robots. Many people continue to harbor negative feelings towards robots, and most cinematic or media representations of robots and artificial intelligences still tend to focus on dystopic visions and worse-case scenarios for the future, but as soon as you place these people in front of a little machine that makes cute sounds or starts to even remotely act human (Honda’s ASIMO or Sony’s Qrio for example), their fear begins to alleviate and the possibility suddenly arises that this machine might be worthy of our empathy after all. As machines become more intelligent and more human, we will learn to treat them with respect, and one day, we might even forget that they are machines. This process will not be easy and we can expect to meet many Luddites and robot-haters (human-racists) along the way, the type of narrow-minded and hateful people that Steven Spielberg portrayed in his film Artificial Intelligence: A.I (2001). But ultimately, old-style humans will become just one of several types of creatures existing on Earth and on other planets, and issues of rights will turn out to be increasingly relevant and important.

Enters WALL-E, Pixar’s latest magical creation, a little box of a robot (who looks uncannily like E.T (1982)) designed to collect the waste that has covered the surface of the Earth. Humans have long left the planet, unable to co-exist with the garbage that they created. Instead, they now live in gigantic spaceships, their every need attended to by machines, and their humanity slowly disappearing as they become fat, illiterate and totally devoid of social aptitudes. This dystopic representation of the future is very much based on early 21st century fears regarding our abuse of the environment and of natural resources, obesity, sedentary lifestyles, addiction to the internet, and loss of old-fashioned values and traditions, but it fails to take into account the technological advances that will make some of these problems obsolete. Still, these issues are today very real, and even if progress helps us overcome them in the future, they must nonetheless be addressed today. The pollution of our planet, for example, by our relentless need for energy and consumption, and by the greed of corporations, is slowly turning into a global catastrophe with potentially dire consequences for Earth and its inhabitants.

It is thus on this fairly bleak canvas that Pixar paints a love story between two robots who risk their lives to help bring life and humanity back to a desolate Earth. Pixar has repeatedly shown with Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), and Ratatouille (2007) that animation has the power to move adults and children alike and that animated films deserve to be given the same credit as non-animated features. With WALL-E, they manage to develop a powerful and extremely moving love story between two machines, and to raise several pertinent current issues in the process. Some have argued that the film loses some of its edge as it goes along, especially with its fairly cliché happy ending. However, and i like bleakness as much as the next Frenchman, i personally see WALL-E as a fairy tale that needs no apology for its happy resolution. Pixar already pushed the envelope plenty with this animated feature and I don’t think that keeping the bleakness going to the very end would have been appropriate. So simply let the joy and entertainment of ‘WALL-E the love story’ overcome you and view its morale as a call for awareness and action rather than as an apocalyptic message. Oh, and don’t forget: robots can be human too.

Before the uniqueness of Mad Max (1979), before the madness of Burning Man, and long before the flatness of Waterworld (1995), came the inventiveness of A Boy and his Dog. An unjustly forgotten apocalyptic tale of a young man and his telepathic dog wandering the desert in search of food and sex after the world has blown itself to smithereens, this film has become a cult classic and should be mandatory viewing for any Sci-Fi aficionados.

Satirical, disturbing, funny, unpleasant, anarchistic with strong macho undertones, critical of a petty middle class suburban mentality, A Boy and his Dog has got enough ammunition to rub many people the wrong way. Its social satire of the present is much more powerful than its representation of the future, and like other Sci-Fi films from the 70s, such as Logan’s Run (1976) and THX 1138 (1971), it certainly makes clear that our individual freedom and personal choice must prevail over potential collective, conservative and hygienic visions of the future.

Once in a while, one stumbles upon a work of such quality that one cannot help but to be baffled at how such a work could escape one’s notice for so long. Diaspora, written in 1997 by Greg Egan, is one of the most powerful, mind bending and far reaching book I have ever read.

As I have posted several times before, one of the drawbacks of many Sci-Fi representations and stories brought to the silver screen, is the difficulty in reaching the right balance between depicting a credible future, sometimes a distant future, while at the same time preserving some sense of ‘normality’ as well as traditional frames of references in order to not alienate the viewer. Unfortunately, this balance is rarely reached and most of Hollywood’s visualizations tend to be very limited and writers or directors seem content to show us the same old humans with the same old problems, values and physical characteristics, regardless of when in the future the story might be occurring. Just place these archaic visions of the past in front of a couple of futuristic looking buildings, add some fancy cars with doors that slide vertically and complete the package with the occasional gismo to obtain your average run-of-the-mill Sci-Fi flick.

While Sci-Fi literature offers many possibilities for more credible, fleshed out and geeky visions of the future, there has still been an over-reliance on ‘traditional’ humans as lead or even as only characters. This seems to have changed in the past few years, and the implications of Transhumanisn are increasingly being used as material for many Sci-Fi books. In Diaspora, Greg Egan describes in great detail how the ‘human race’ might split and evolve towards a post human future. While the process of becoming more than human will most likely be very gradual, with humans combining with machines and vice versa (a process that has already started with the adoption of pacemakers, Cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs, or even the mobile phone which has become a natural extension of ourselves), Egan portrays a future a few hundred years hence dominated by three main forms of beings: the Fleshers, ‘traditional’ humans with or without genetic modifications, the Gleisner Robots, robotic shells inhabited by human minds, and the Polis Citizens, the uploaded minds of humans ‘living’ in computer and simulated worlds. In addition, on rare occasions, the polis creates a new mind, a purely artificially conceived one, albeit very human in many ways.

Over a period of several thousand years, Egan traces the quest of some of these Polis Citizens as they attempt to prevent and then escape the destruction of our universe (an early consequence of this destruction is the end of the Fleshers, and thus, the end of humanity as we know it today). This quest will lead these highly advanced non-physical entities, our descendants, to some of the most far-reaching destinations the mind could possibly conceive.

Egan doesn’t shy away from grand mathematical and physical speculation, and for the average reader, his lengthy descriptions of the universe’s most innate workings will seem a bit tedious at times. But sticking through these sections is quite worth it as one is rewarded by an avalanche of fantastic and awe-inspiring concepts. There is plenty to ponder in Diaspora and anyone interested in what existence might be like as an uploaded mind, in a possible direction for the future of the human race, in parallel universes and multi-dimensions, in the potential for alien life, or simply in the infinite mystery and beauty of the cosmos, then this book is an absolute must-read.

I am still somewhat perplexed by Ken MacLeod’s decision to conspicuously display ‘A Space Opera’ on the cover of his book, directly below the title. Is he trying to inform us from the very start that because it is a space opera, we shouldn’t take some of its content too seriously? Is this a way to excuse or justify a certain lightness and comic approach to this story about the future of the human race 400 years from now, after a singularity-type explosion of technological advancement has led to war on earth and to the splitting of the remaining humans in various gangs that compete with one another in space? If yes, is this disclaimer powerful enough to lessen one’s disappointment when reading that the future will be led by a gang of swearing Capitalist Scots or by some East-Asian Communist community of terraformers? Is this fun for 300 pages? I certainly didn’t think so and was bored after 50. The ideas brought forth in Newton’s Wake do not feel challenging and thought provoking enough or have been better depicted in other novels. They seem to rely on a very 20th century understanding of human nature, communication and social interactions. In addition, the lead characters are all quite uninspiring and, in fact, not really likeable, as exemplified by one of the stories which revolves around two musicians who are, in my opinion, two of the most boring characters I have read in a book recently.
In conclusion, my first exposure to the work of a man who is supposedly a new force in Sci-Fi and transhumanist literature has not been a very enjoyable one and it might be a while before I attempt to read another one of his books.

A friend of mine recently commented that, as a child, he couldn’t get into Iron Man because as far as super heroes went, IM was pretty lame. I also never quite got into the exoskeleton-wearing playboy myself, and I must agree that without fancy super powers, radioactive bugs, hammers from the Gods, extravagant nemesis, or mystical origins, Iron Man in fact offered very little to tickle the imagination of young men looking for something beyond what can sometimes be perceived as the boring limitations of reality.

Iron Man in 2008 tries to connect us to the realities of terrorism and war, attempting perhaps to distance itself from the traditional comic book approach and target market. The Man of Steel (of nano fiber would be more appropriate) can help us win the war on terrorism and the world would be a better place if all the greedy businessmen like Tony Stark, Iron Man’s alter ego, would realize that there is more to gain by helping their fellow human beings than by profiting from them. Thus, a weak and overly simple morality angle underpins a film that also happens to have very little action in it. Following unsuccessfully in the footsteps of the Spiderman franchise, Iron Man tries to be too smart for its own good and is filled with cheap lessons about life. Oh and it banks all of its coolness factor on everyone’s latest and most favourite celebrity: Robert Downey Jr.

Don’t get me wrong; I like the guy as much as anyone else. He oozes so much coolness, he ought to patent it. And ever since I watched Less than Zero (1987) eons ago, I learned to appreciate his mannerisms and the overall modus operandi that is so specific to his acting. But I have also come to understand that this is exactly where the problem is with his performances. One is always watching Robert Downey Jr., and rarely the characters that he portrays. Whatever film of his one watches, one can always expect to see Robert Downey Jr. turning up. But because he is so likeable, and now bankable, roles are made to fit around this set of mannerisms. Whether in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), Fur (2006), A Scanner Darkly (2006), Zodiac (2007), and now Iron Man, the Robert Downey Jr. persona is stronger than the character he is supposed to impersonate, even if this character is perfectly suited to his mannerisms.

There are so many comic book film adaptations these days that each film must find an edge, a unique selling proposition, to make it appealing and marketable. Personally, I think the angles that they found as an excuse to resuscitate Iron Man - current world events, Robert Downey Jr., and possibly the relevance of some of the technology (building such an exoskeleton with the capacity for enhanced strength, vision, communication, endurance, etc…has today nothing to do anymore with Sci-Fi. This is one of the many things that DARPA has been working on for years) on display in the film - are not enough to make this a compelling picture. The characters are by and large poorly developed (which can sometimes be tolerated in comic book adaptations, as long as something else compensate for it), the storyline is fairly weak and predictable, and the action sorely lacking. If one is not going to include much action in such a film, they should ensure that at least other aspects of the film are strong enough to support the overall experience. The end result is that Iron Man is unfortunately a bit bland.

In 2001, Judith Berman stated that Science Fiction literature was suffering from a failure of imagination and that the best most writers could offer us these days is Sci-Fi without the Future. This point was made again more recently by Alex Steffen in WorldChanging. After all, even Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk supremos William Gibson and Neil Stephenson have decided to take a break from the future in favour of the present or the past. In the words of Gibson himself, ‘the future is already here. I have become convinced that it is silly to try to imagine futures these days‘. Some writers now find it difficult, and perhaps also less fun and challenging, to write about a future, the near future at least, that has caught up with us. Cyberpunk’s not dead some might retort, but a strong case can be made that we are today experiencing the future more strongly than ever before.

One man for whom the very near future continues to be a source of inspiration is Vernor Vinge. Vinge, an ex-mathematician and computer science professor from San Diego State University, whose novels A Fire Upon the Deep (92) and A Deepness in the Sky (99) I can highly recommend, achieved notoriety in Futurist circles when he proposed his theory of The Singularity at a NASA conference in 1993. Vinge, along with many other fellow futurists such as Raymond Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, believes that we are fast approaching the point at which technological advancement will become so rapid that the possibilities will become endless.

In Rainbows End, which won the Hugo prize in 2007, he explores, by way of a cyber thriller, the impact of this exponential growth in technology on the merging of the real world with the 4 scenarios described in the 2007 report The Metaverse Roadmap issued by The Acceleration Studies Foundation: Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality and Lifelogging.

What makes this novel a convincing and compelling read is not necessarily its big ideas or even the underlying plot. Instead, it is the amount of details that Vinge uses to describe everyday life circa 2025. Almost any field of progress that is being discussed today is represented and elaborated on in Rainbows End, providing for an overall depiction of a richly constructed ‘reality’ that feels extremely believable. While great strides have been made in areas such as health, transportation, building and construction, and genetic engineering, it is around the 4 Metaverse scenarios mentioned earlier that Vinge builds its portrayal of a near-term society. As it is envisioned in The Metaverse Roadmap, reality in 2025 is a mishmash of the ‘real’, the virtual and the augmented, with the later two (both enhanced and complemented by lifelogging) increasingly replacing the first one as the preferred choice for socializing, learning, communicating, and for entertainment. Vinge uses an ‘old-fashioned’ character, Robert Gu, a man born in the 1960s and cured of Alzheimer in 2025, to not only advance the plot of the story, but also to contrast two worlds and sets of beliefs and to attempt to answer the question: what would life be like for a person with prejudices about the future and about technology if this person woke up in 2025? How would he or she deal with a society where most people below a certain age now wear special contact lenses connected to an astounding amount of computer power embedded in their clothing, thereby allowing them to access instantly information about anything they could possibly want to access, to communicate immediately with anyone on the planet, to create whatever virtual spaces they desire to enable this communication and to see in various layers of augmented reality the fruits of their creation or the results of their requests for information and interaction? In short, how would such a person feel if reality as they knew it had pretty much ceased to exist?

But Vinge doesn’t stop there. He also goes into a fair amount of details about the technology itself and about issues that are already important today with regards to the internet and the WWW and that will obviously become even more so in the future: open source vs proprietary, free vs fee-based, security, privacy, gender, identity, laws and regulations, universal currency, trust, reputation…

If this sounds like a lot to chew on, credit must go to Vinge for adroitly incorporating these discussions into the plot and into the daily life of the characters without the dialogue ever sounding preachy or pedagogic. It’s good entertainment all the way but skilfully mixed with all that you might need to know about the technological, social, economical and philosophical benefits and challenges facing humanity within the next 20 to 30 years.

As we approach the fourth and final season of the TV series Battlestar Galactica, based on the 1978 cult Sci-Fi series of the same name, and with the recent release of the excellent Razor, it is worth stating how surprisingly addictive this modern version is. I can’t remember ever following a TV series for three years in a row, but that is exactly what I have been doing with Galactica, even though I initially got into it somewhat reluctantly, assuming that modern television, which I have come to associate for the most part with trash TV, could not possibly deliver on the promise of the original series, and to a larger extent, could not, week after week, year after year, provide intelligent Sci-Fi.

But Galactica has done just that. There have been many moments when the different style and vision of a new director became too obvious and created a disjunction in the viewing experience and, in some cases, resulted in quite boring episodes, but overall, the series has been consistently solid, entertaining and clever.

Being the cynic that I am, I spent the first few episodes listing all the inconsistencies I could find (and there were many) and why certain things such as fashion, books, pens, products designs, allergies, cancer, city architecture, and much more, all looked and felt so terribly 20th century. A civilization that has mastered the ability to build ships that travel across space but that still writes with pens, uses notebooks and can’t find a cure for breast cancer…At that point, I felt that the problem with Galactica was that it failed where so many Sci-Fi films or series have failed before…it failed to effectively and convincingly create the world that it is supposed to create. Whether for budget reasons or for wanting to keep the viewers in an area of familiarity, or simply, for lack of trying, Galactica uses a large number of current human metaphors, traditions, and habits to portray a world that exists far into the future (or into the past)….but that world should in fact look nothing like today’s world. A civilisation that is capable of building faster-than-light ships, a civilisation that split a long time ago from the civilisation that lived on earth, so long ago in fact that new myths have had time to develop, would dress, eat, behave, live, and possibly even look very different from the way we do today.

But I suppose only Sci-Fi nerds like myself would let that bother them, and in all fairness, I fully realize that sustaining a TV series for 4 years without making these types of mistakes would require a higher budget and/or an increasing reliance on animation and, ultimately, the series would probably end up with a much smaller audience due to a lack of familiar, earth-like, frames of reference.

Despite these initial concerns, I found myself slowly captivated and sucked into this world that adroitly combines human and personal stories with larger issues that draw on current events (torture, war, terrorism, tolerance, politics, genetics….) that also seem fairly plausible as potential issues for the future; well, for the near future at least, since if one looks seriously deep into the future, one would expect some of these issues to be resolved, or at least, to have taken on a very different meaning.
Most of the characters are well developed and cast, and each episode (with the occasional exception) has at its core a strong storyline that offers its own rewards but rarely seems disjointed from the overall and consistent thread of the series.

In the end, it is refreshing and pleasing to see a Sci-Fi TV series being handled with such genuineness and earnest. Battlestar Galactica has definitively done its bit towards restoring credibility to televised Sci-Fi and to Sci-Fi in general.

So here I am, at this party in the Hollywood Hills, hanging out with my loser screenplay writer friend, when Michael Bay walks in with a girl around each arm. Out of all the parties in LA, Michael Bay has to walk into mine. Determined not to let it get to me, I undertake a precise and thorough strategy of avoidance, which works for most of the evening, until another loser friend of mine, this time a Foley operator, who mysteriously appears to know Bay, decides to introduce me to this evilest of all evil directors. Doing my best to hide my repulsion, I reluctantly shake the man’s hand and immediately start to feel nauseous all over, as if I had just put on the ring to rule them all, and had acquired the ability to see the darkness and shadows around me, or in this case, in front of me. And, clearly wanting my death, some guy who evidently exists on a different cinematic plane than I, barges in and exclaims some idiocy along the lines of ‘loved your Transformers Michael’, which naturally brings me closer to regurgitating my Shirataki noodles dinner. Not that I would mind plastering Michael Bay with some no-carb, no-fat vomit, but even Themis, the Greek Goddess of Justice, is not on my side this evening, and I must try to take consolation in the belief that, while slightly more successful than me, Michael Bay remains a cinematic barbarian with no appreciation of cinema as an art.

This British low budget mishmash of cyberpunk, horror and exploitation has become a bit of a cult classic in certain circles. The idea was apparently entirely stolen from a story called Shock! that appeared in the 80s in the comic book 2000AD, which is a bit of a shame since it takes away from one of the film’s main attributes: its originality (in spite of several commonalities with Terminator).
Nonetheless, equipped with a meagre budget of 100,000 dollars, Richard Stanley managed to create quite a dreadful, claustrophobic and apocalyptic atmosphere that effectively captured the spirit of decay, waste and techno-paranoia associated with Cyberpunk. The film also contains several musical references that many connoisseurs will enjoy.
Unfortunately, beyond the visual and musical aspects, and with the exception of a few cheap thrills and a couple of funny cheesy lines, the film has little to offer and feels quite amateurish and boring at times.

For a certain crowd only.

Godard’s Alphaville, shot on a very low budget in 1965 Paris, is the director’s take on Orwell’s 1984, capitalism, modernism and the eradication of free will through rationality and efficiency.

The city, beautifully shot by Raoul Coultard, is turned into a cold, modernist island where buildings of glass and concrete stand as an effigy to science and dehumanization. Most of the scenes are shot in modernist interiors and exteriors, which could have been designed by Le Corbusier himself. But Godard’s vision turns the modernist dream upside down and associates the architecture with the end of free will and the disappearance of non-conformity.

Unlike Lang’s vision of an ultra-modernist city of the future, with its skyscrapers reaching for the sky, Godard’s Alphaville is more spread out and few very tall buildings emerge. The elite continues to live in different areas of the city from the ‘little’ people, but the boundaries are less clearly defined and the sense of height as an association of power seems to dominate less than in Metropolis or even Things to Come. A man of his time, Godard seems to have been able to anticipate post-modernist concerns towards architecture and the city.

Excerpt from Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema.

If, like me, you enjoyed Rapture, A raucous tour of cloning, Transhumanism and the new era of immortality, you will undoubtedly be captivated by Radical Evolution. Whereas Brian Alexander focused mainly on the history of genetics and Transhumanism, Joel Garreau propels us full speed ahead towards the future, not only by discussing some of the various ‘enhancements’ that await human beings in the short to medium term, but also by exploring what the term ‘human nature’ really means through the examination of three possible scenarios for the future of the human race….

The Heaven scenario is exemplified by such illustrious people as Raymond Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, Nick Bostrom, Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, and Gregory Stock (who actually stands slightly outside of this group based on his stronger beliefs in the benefits and practicality of germline genetic engineering over what he describes as cyber exuberance) and is based on the belief that the Singularity is near, the point at which technological advancement will become so rapid that the possibilities will become endless…

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Recently, at work, I mentioned that I felt that we humans are living at the most exciting time of our history in terms of changes, opportunities and dangers. The reply was that surely there have been many other periods before when humanity faced major opportunities and challenges and managed to continue moving up the ladder of moral and technological progress.

I have since read Brian Alexander’s Rapture, and I am now convinced that, indeed, Humanity has never been confronted with such possibilities, and in the process, with such risks and perils. We, the people of this Earth, are about to redefine the meaning of human nature (if such a meaning ever truly existed in the first place). We are about to take control of our own evolution.

Visions of Utopia have been around at least since the days of Plato’s Republic, gaining momentum in 1516 and 1627 with the publications of Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, and finding a new energy throughout the end of the 19th century and the early stages of the 20th, at a time when the promises of the industrial revolution filled people’s heads with dreams and a hunger for the possibilities of the future.

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How to begin an explanation of Illium and of Olympos, two novels published in 2003 and 2005 by Dan Simmons, the remarkable author of the Hyperion series?
Where to begin is even more problematic. Four days after finishing Olympos, i am still trying to make full sense of what i just read, and to determine if it is even worth attempting a summary. Or perhaps the only kind of summary worth attempting is a simple list of concepts and ideas that permeate the two books:

Quantum energy and teleportation. Multiple universes. Time travel. Post humans. Old style humans. Nanotechnology. Brane holes. Avatars. Logosphere. Noosphere. Marcel Proust. Shakespeare. The Tempest. Caliban. Setebos. Greek Gods. Achilles. Moravecs from Jupiter. Olympus Mons. Mars. Ariel. Odysseus. Burning Man. Technological singularity. Nuclear apocalypse. Prospero. Sycorax. ARNists. Rubicon virus. Global Caliphate. Wandering Jew. Nabokov. Pantheistic solipsism….

But whereas Illium successfully and wonderfully sets up this amazing and insane concoction of ideas, themes and concepts and made the reader hungry for more, Olympos fails to deliver and to fulfill our expectations. Too many unanswered questions, and too much delivered too early or over too many pages. Still, if you are interested in stretching your imagination and indulging in a little mind bending space opera, this is it.

This Korean flick should serve as a case study on the terrible use of music in film. In fact, might as well turn it into a case study on the terrible use of everything in film. What starts as an intriguing rip off of Blade Runner, AI and Minority Report dissolves into a lamentable and pitiful semblance of a film with enough soapy music to make you reach for your DVD incinerator.

Why, why, why? I know why, but why? Why do solid and intelligent science fiction concepts and stories (especially this one by the master Asimov) have to be turned into comic, light hearted and action driven spectacles? Yes, i know, because it sells more. But what a shame. Great story turned into a mediocre one, top notch special effects (the robots are amazing), stereotypical and annoying hero who can’t deal with his past, isn’t afraid of anything, makes silly jokes even at the most dangerous times and has a way with ladies (of course), and you have standard Hollywood fare, another film contributing, sadly, to the reputation of Science Fiction as a non-serious genre.