RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA

In the year 2130, a very large object happens through the solar system. It is so large that at first astronomers take it for an asteroid, and even give a it name, Rama, as they would for any newly discovered astronomical body.

Closer investigation of Rama reveals a startling fact. The object is a cylinder, 50 kilometers long and 20 kilometers in diameter. It is a made thing, not a natural object. Furthermore, the creatures who built it clearly had advanced technologically far beyond humankind.

Wonders increase when the survey ship visits Rama. The survey crew easily passes through the air-locks—the doors are not locked—and find an inhabitable, self-contained world in the hollow interior. But there are no signs of the intelligent life that built Rama. The crew explores the vast interior for days, but Rama remains virtually the same enigma as when first discovered.

Because Rama will pass dangerously close to the sun, the survey crew must abandon the vehicle. But before leaving, they prevent the Hermians (the human colonists on Mercury) from destroying Rama. The Hermians fear that Rama is preparing to take up a strategic orbit from which the Ramans—finally out of hiding—could control the solar system.

But Rama behaves in no way expected by humans. After rounding the sun, from which it draws energy, Rama continues on its way out of the solar system, its destination and purpose unknown to man.

In our critical attention to Rendezvous with Rama, we should first note that it is an extraordinary example of hard SF in the Vernian tradition. The giant vehicle is neither fantasy nor literary prop. It is very real, from the triple air-locks outside to the cylindrical sea inside. Further, its structure and movements are, until the last chapters, consistent with known scientific principles.

Very late in the novel, Rama shows propulsion capabilities that defy Newtonian physics (“There goes Newton’s Third Law,” one character says in disbelief). Until then, though, Rama is big, but not bigger than the potential of human understanding.

At another level, the Wellsian one, Rama is about the human reaction to an alien encounter. With considerable skill, Clarke develops in the narrative the two most elemental responses to aliens: first, that they could only want to conquer us, or, second, they will come to save us from ourselves. The first attitude we see in the Hermians, who consider Rama a threat. The second attitude we see in Boris Rodrigo, who, as a member of the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut, sees Rama as a giant ark, come to save the faithful.

As we have seen, though, Rama is neither (or reveals itself as neither). It has no apparent concern for earth, and has traveled this way entirely for its own purposes. Humans must face the possibility that they are too insignificant to be noticed, and play a very minor role in the universe.

But Rama may after all be carrying a kind of message. One of the most intriguing features of the storyline is that Rama is so unprotected from would-be vandals and predators. Do the Ramans assume that any species technologically advanced enough to reach the ship in outer space would also be respectful enough to leave it unharmed? This interpretation would link technological advancement with cultural maturity—even moral progress.

Such a theme is consistent with the tempered scientific optimism that we see in Clarke’s work throughout his career. Commander Norton, who leads the survey team, sees his role in Rama as that of a privileged caretaker. He is determined to leave the vessel in good order, and finally allows his crew to cut into one of the interior structures only after it is obvious that there is no other way to enter it.

Identifying deeply with the technological triumph that Rama represents, Norton sees a future in which humankind will someday enjoy the same achievements. His experience aboard Rama leads him to conclude that “There was mystery here—yes; but it might not be beyond human understanding.” Or, perhaps the universe is not stranger than we can know, and the universal language of intelligent life is science and technology. Rama itself—the very fact of its existence—speaks to humankind in the universal language of science.

Our appreciation of the novel takes an even richer turn if we consider closely the Hermians and their efforts to destroy Rama. Although they are considerably advanced scientifically and technologically, their behavior is hardly enlightened. The Hermians are evidence that Clarke is neither one-sided in his understanding of science, nor simple-minded in his trust of scientific advancement. It is only luck that places the right person at the right place at the right time to prevent the Hermians from destroying Rama. Furthermore, the Hermians might have been right—Rama could have been setting a strategic orbit from which it could control, militarily, the solar system. We know for certain that it isn’t only after it doesn’t.

Commander Norton acts on a “gut” instinct that Rama means no harm—and he is right. The Hermians reason from scientific logic to determine that it does mean harm—and they are wrong. Is Clarke telling us that, finally, science is subsumed in the fallible human domain, where chance, impulse, and irrationality supersede scientific logic? Is Clarke, after all, a closet humanist, speaking for the integration of “gut” instinct and scientific logic (just as many scientists insist that science is both Intellect and Passion)?

Does the Hermian’s near-success tell us anything about the Ramans themselves? We could argue that perhaps Rama after all had a defensive system; there was simply no reason to use it, since Norton and his crew took care of the Hermian threat. Or perhaps we see an ultimate naivete at the far end of the spectrum of scientific development—have the Ramans forgotten that violence is possible? Or perhaps the Ramans are fatalists—”what will be will be.” Or do they in some intuitive way “know” that a Norton will always come along to prevent vandalism?

These issues are a quantum leap beyond shoot-outs in outer space (and yet the novel is no less entertaining than good space opera), and they enrich the novel considerably. When a science fiction novel poses questions of this sort, it is on its way to becoming literature.

-Steve Anderson

Quantum Theory and Alternate Universes

One of the major innovations in SF has been a turn to a whole new basis in the physical sciences—the quantum theory. In Newtonian/Einsteinian physics, reality has a definite existence, and conforms absolutely to the rules of the universe. Furthermore, these rules are, at least to physicists, relatively simple; they give law and order to a universe that we assume is knowable. Quantum theory, on the other hand, forces us to revise all our thinking about the construction of the physical world. Whole books cannot manage a complete layman’s discussion of quantum theory, so here we can only look at some major features of the revolution in thinking that quantum theory represents.

Scientists long enjoyed the assurance that at the visible level of reality matter behaves according to Newtonian/Einsteinian laws. And because objects behaved orderly at the visible level, they assumed that matter would behave orderly at the subatomic level.

But as physicists looked closer and closer at the atom, they found that its particles (its “quanta”) behaved unpredictably, even randomly. Quantum theory seriously challenges the centuries-old assumption that beneath the complexities of appearance lies the simplicity of law. (Einstein, in arguing against the assumptions of quantum theory, protested that God does not play dice).

Physicists discovered that a thousand electrons moving from point A to point B will move along a thousand different paths. This discovery was against all expectations of how subatomic particles would behave. The only way to predict the movement of particles is through statistical average. That is, the average path from A to B is straight—but no one path necessarily is.

Although we cannot predict the movement of any one electron, each electron seems to know where to go. This is yet another startling feature of the behavior of subatomic particles. The famous two-slit screen experiment shows that individually fired electrons know where to go to form an appropriately distributed light interference pattern.

is reality made of alternate dimensions?

How can any one electron know where to go (especially as no one electron has to go anywhere)? Some interpretations of the two-slit screen experiment involve the existence of alternate realities. The actual path that the electron takes in our reality is influenced by the paths in other realities. Because the available paths in the other realities are taken, the electron must take the path that is available to it.

The several schools of quantum theory have different approaches to the alternate realities. One school says that the alternate realities are merely mathematical models, having no concrete reality. But another school theorizes on an infinite number of concrete, existing alternate realities for every instance of reality that we perceive. Where are these realities? Presumably they transpire in some dimension totally inaccessible from our reality (unless, of course, you read or write SF).

It is this last version of quantum theory that interests SF writers. The alternate worlds, after all, make for an infinite number of new conditions under which to write SF. At the simplest level they provide a scientific basis for “what if?” stories that illustrate the probable results of taking a different turn at a significant historical juncture. Michael Moorcock (The Warlords of the Air, 1971), Norman Spinrad (The Iron Dream, 1972), Harry Harrison (Tunnel Through the Deeps, 1972), Joanna Russ (The Female Man, 1975), and Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, 1962)—just to name a few—have set stories in alternate time tracks. Whether they are in any significant way illustrating the role of quantum theory in our daily lives is another matter.

image by NoorR

It is an open question as to whether quantum theory has any significant relationship to human behavior. The moral extension of Newton and Einstein was that the universe was comprised of relatively simple and consistent laws (to the end-of his life, Einstein was looking for the unified field theory that would place all phenomena under one set of laws). The orderliness of the physical world translates, according to some, into orderliness in human behavior. If we follow nature, we at least have a reasonable model to imitate.

Does quantum theory make any similar kind of impact on human values? It is perhaps too easy a generalization to say that quantum theory reflects the indeterminableness, the randomness of modern civilization. Still, a writer like Philip K. Dick seems to reflect a chaos in the moral realm that he often links with the physical realm. And other writers have used quantum theory to illustrate a universe that is queerer than we can know, a universe that ultimately is indecipherable. It doesn’t seem unlikely that the physics of the quanta could provide a framework for pessimism, if pessimism is what we want.

Whatever our feelings about the moral dimension of the quanta, the theory has an important role in SF. Space-time SF is still a viable direction, but it cannot sustain another generation of creative writers. Quantum theory opens up a considerable amount of new and strange real estate for SF writers to build on.

-Steve Anderson

Are Ghosts Information Patterns?

When we think of ghosts and paranormal activity, our minds usually conjure up white ephemeral shapes drifting through attics and basements, fears of possession by demonic and supernatural forces, and the echoey utterances of deeply unhappy spirits hell-bent on avenging their earthly mistreatment. Rarely, if ever, do we conceptualize ghosts as the embodiment of information, the leftover spillage of energy patterns slowly being stamped out by the inexorable passage of time.

Now that I’m in the process of making a horror film, this is what I’ve been thinking about lately. My movie, HellHouse, is not about paranormal activity, but rather a much more human terror caused by dementia and sadistic violence. The research I’ve been conducting, however, has found me revisiting a lot of old classics—The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining—and even newer films about struggles with the spirit world, including The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echos Paranormal Activity, 1408, and The Ring.

The idea of the spirit realm is not new. In fact, it’s one of the defining concepts in the collective psyche of our race. The earliest humans grappled with the idea of a spirit world. Philosophers like Descartes contemplated the divisions of the material world and the world of the mind. We are ‘haunted’ by the idea of our own mortality. Over the years we’ve struggled with the possibility that those who have died before us are not completely gone, that part of them lives on in some kind of supernatural realm that spills over into the world of the living.

simulation of dark energy distribution

I want to now lay out a concept of ghosts that is probably not new but certainly not boring. It centers around the idea of energy and information. To be sure, the physical universe—everything from galactic formation to organic intelligence—is constructed of energy and patterns of information. Underneath the velour of the macroscopic world the matrix of our reality is comprised of constantly shifting quantum particles, intertwined dimensions, and amplitude distributions the true nature of which is hardly understood. After all, over 90% of our universe is comprised of “dark energy” and physicists readily admit they have no idea what it is.

Let us consider for a minute the research that has been conducted in the last couple decades regarding the role of consciousness in the physical universe. Pioneering groups such as PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) and the Global Consciousness Project have been working to prove that consciousness has a physical impact on the world around us, that it can in fact influence random systems. Many of the researchers involved in these projects say the data collected shows nothing less than powerfully comprehensive evidence that mind does affect matter, albeit in small, sometimes negligible ways. By small they mean we can’t crunch cars, fly, and telekinetically control the world, like the recent film Chronicle would suggest. However, the research shows there is a strong likelihood that mind, matter, and energy are interconnected and affect one another.

face behind face belongs to Freddy Jackson who died two days before the pic was taken

Let’s take this conversation and embed it within the context of death, the cessation of the human mind. Let’s say the PEAR researchers are right, and the human mind affects the information of the physical world around it. If our consciousness affects matter, it stands to reason that our subjective state of mind would be a factor in the nature of the affectation. We already know that death is a tremendously powerful physiological process. Could it be that people who suffer extremely unpleasant deaths, or die under extreme physical and psychological duress, could leave behind traces of that information which remains in the general flow of energy? Perhaps paranormal visitations and hauntings are real and represent interactions with poorly understood remnants of human energy. Are ghosts information patterns?

Since I have no clue as to the answer, I will simply pose the question. Don’t haunt the messenger.

HELLHOUSE

click on picture for teaser trailer

Most people don’t openly profess an interest in serial killers or the subject of murder, as these topics are considered morbid and untoward. But the 24 hour news cycle has it’s own sardonic obsession with brutality, and you can see evidence of this every night on the local news and CNN. For months at a time, people crowd around their television sets, listening with bated breath for the salient details of a buried baby or a raped teenager. But we are not obsessed with violence and terror. I repeat, we are NOT obsessed with violence and terror!

But for those of us who do secretly wonder about the final thoughts of a tortured soul, or the sounds a serial killer makes when no one else is around, have I got a film for you! My film, HELLHOUSE, which I am co-writing/directing with my friend and fellow horror movie fanatic, Jared Salas. We have launched a KICKSTARTER campaign for our movie and are expecting to begin shooting principal photography in spring.

HELLHOUSE is about a financially desperate couple, Collin and Aria, who decide to start robbing houses in order to pay their bills….they pick the wrong house. What they find inside will keep law enforcement officers and scientists baffled for years to come, and hopefully moviegoers too!

Right now we need help funding this movie. We’re not asking for much and the money we do get will be used for camera equipment, lenses, and for the creation of a haunting prosthetic mask for the film’s antagonist. Anyone out there who wants to support an independent avante garde horror film in the vein of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, The House of the Devil, and Quarantine is encouraged to visit our KICKSTARTER page, watch the teaser trailer and get on board the HELLHOUSE production!

Vote for The Methuselah Generation On IndieWire

The Methuselah Generation, a documentary about life extension, biotechnology, and the doctors working at the edge of science and philosophy, needs you! Anyone interested in the delicate balance between life and death and humanity’s tenuous tightwalk rope between exponential growth and self-destruction, should take a keen interest in this film, which features Terry Grossman, Aubrey du Gray, Gregory Benford, and Robin Hanson. Please vote for it as IndieWire’s Project of the Week, and also donate to the Kickstarter campaign. There are rewards for pledging, including being a Producer on the film. Who knows, it may just grant you an extra hundred years of life, though that’s not one of the official tiers!

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE “CREATURE”

Frankenstein the novel is a significant enhancement on one of the most important mythic trends in western civilization. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, a god himself, steals heavenly fire for man. Having violated the heavenly order, he is punished (the subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus). In Medieval legend, Faust made an unholy—and supernatural—bargain for knowledge, and his eventual punishment was to be dragged off to Hell. Frankenstein the character has both Promethean and Faustian elements, but he’s also different in an important way. He carries the responsibility for his own creations, whether for good or ill. Nobody, not even god, can bale him out.

Future Frankenstein

Frankenstein is about bearing the responsibility for having broken the natural order of things. And that is the source of the dark agony in this story—Victor Frankenstein breaks the natural order; he causes a rupture in the wholeness of things that no external agency could repair. But this is common in SF: characters who have broken the natural order of things. Or if not characters who have themselves broken the natural order, then characters who must nonetheless suffer the consequence—or the responsibility—of the broken order.

We assume that the factories of the Industrial Revolution had some influence on Mary Shelley’s fable. Couldn’t that be seen as a breaking of the natural order? and wasn’t there a responsibility there to be taken? Do we not continue to break the natural order?

But there are other features to consider. The vastness of external nature is here—Victor Frankenstein visits the Alps, even confronts the creature there. And in a sub-plot, we have a character trying to circumnavigate the globe, to explore the farthest reaches of vast nature. The universe will get bigger and bigger—and bigger. But never bigger than the capacity of SF to hold it. This capacity to hold external nature in a narrative is a trait that grew out of its Gothic origins.

The novel offers, too, an apocalyptic vision of the new age to come. Mary Shelley’s own impulse was somewhat conservative. Her tone is moral, as she seems to be pointing out the dangers of breaking the natural order, the unleashing of the forces that would sweep us into a new age. Yet one of the most the attractive features of the novel is the vision of that energy unleashed.

SF has never stopped flirting with the new age that is always on the horizon. But, then, neither have we.

-Steve Anderson

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS: 1984 and the Literature of Future Doom

Dystopia and Escape

Some science fiction writers would argue that humankind in the future is far more likely to destroy itself altogether than it is to colonize the solar system, much less the stars. Problems such as nuclear warfare, overpopulation, and pollution of the environment are much closer to the reality of the future than a technology that will take us away from earth. They would further argue that humankind, unable to solve its problems on earth, would have no better chance of solving them in another star system.

In short, not all SF writers are scientific optimists, and their pessimism shows up in many forms, the best established being the dystopia.

The dystopia is the opposite of the utopia. The term utopia (which, in Latin, means “nowhere”) comes from Sir (and now Saint) Thomas More’s work of that title, Utopia (1516). His fictional land of Utopia, set on an island far removed from his native England, is an ideally organized society that allows for maximum human happiness. The point of his story, though, isn’t to suggest that humankind can build that perfect world. He makes, instead, a critical point. By comparing his world of sixteenth century England to an ideal one, readers become aware of ways in which they could improve their world. This is the general pattern of utopian literature written before and after More’s work.

Dystopia As Prophecy

The dystopia (sometimes called “anti-utopia”) is the worst possible world humankind can envision, and typically it is set in the future. It has the same critical intent of the utopia. By looking at how bad things can become, we look to the present to take corrective action in order to prevent those projected ills from coming about.

The dystopian mode is often considered the most prestigious form of SF, probably because its ideas are, in the opinion of some readers, more serious and relevant than the ideas in the usual run of SF. It is certainly the case that mainstream talents, when they write SF, most often chose the dystopian mode in which to work. For example, neither George Orwell (author of 1984) nor Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) is considered an SF writer (at least they didn’t consider themselves SF writers), but each wrote a dystopian work. Although mainstream talents tend to write dystopias when they chose to write SF, standard SF writers also write dystopian literature. C. M. Kornbluth“s “The Marching Morons” (1951), Fritz Leiber‘s “Coming Attractions” (1950), and Harlan Ellison‘s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967) are excellent exercises in the dystopian mode.

ORWELL’S 1984 Dystopia

The “worst possible world” that we have chosen to concentrate on here is Orwell’s 1984. An interesting side issue concerning 1984 is the fact that mainstream critics are reluctant to place it in the category of SF. They point out that Orwell drew on only a few of the SF conventions in order to build his story, and had little interest in SF as such. (1984 is, in fact, one of the rare instances in which Orwell used SF conventions. Although Animal Farm has a displaced setting, Orwell does not attempt to make the story scientifically plausible.) SF fans, though, suspect that mainstream critics consider 1984 too good to be SF.

Whatever, 1984 doesn’t bank much on technological hardware. The one technological innovation that is in the novel–the telescreens—aren’t necessary for the premise of the story. That is, 1984 as a vision of a totalitarian future could have been worked out without a technological premise. If it is SF, it isn’t hard SF of the Vernian kind.

Instead, Orwell deals with social and behavioral sciences, sciences that are human- centered. Orwell shows us the people of the future in their social, psychological, linguistic, and political dimensions. We see people forced into new social relationships, psychologically conditioned to think differently, taught a new use of the language (Newspeak), and controlled by an evolved form of totalitarian government. Finally, the novel is about the use of political power, and the threat that the misuse of power holds for the individual.

Image via Wikipedia

In focusing on human-centered issues, Orwell shows us a new perspective on the technological applications of science (at least science as we’ve seen it in SF). That is, optimistic SF has shown science leading the way as humankind conquers the galaxy. In 1984, we see that science is in the hands of the people who hold political power. “Science” does not save Winston Smith; It is just one more tool that the Party can use to mold him to its will.

1984 has come and gone, and Orwell’s projections have not literally happened. Others argue that Orwell’s projections have come about, but in a figurative sense rather than a literal sense. Orwell himself probably had no precise timetable for his projections. He came by the title by transposing the last two numbers of 1948, the year during which he worked on the novel.

But if we take his title as a literal prediction, we might note that what he projected for 36 years into the future (from 1948 to 1984), when compared with what had happened in the previous 36 years (from 1948 to 1912), isn’t so far-fetched. In the 36 years between 1912 and 1948, the world had seen two global wars, the rise of three totalitarian systems (Russian Communism, German Nazism, and Chinese Communism), mass annihilation of civilian populations, formation of secret police organizations, and the mechanization of warfare—these just to name some major developments. With another 36 years comparable to those 36 years, the scenario depicted in 1984 doesn’t seem so unreasonable at all.

Actually, his working title for the novel was The Last Man in Europe (meaning, we assume, that Winston Smith was the end of the line for the humane traditions of western civilization), and the decision to publish the novel as 1984 was a late one. Although the first title is in many ways more descriptive of the theme, no reader will deny that the precision of the date on when these dire events were to come about give a special punch to the story. (Although the punch might have been stronger before 1984 than after.)

But we must realize that Orwell, finally, wasn’t making predictions so much as he was giving warnings. He saw how in the post-World War II years, the Eastern Bloc countries and the Western countries were settling down for the Cold War. War hysteria was on the rise in the late forties, and many feared that once again humankind would be plunged back into warfare. Orwell shows us a horrible world that he hopes we will never let happen. Such warnings are one of the uses of dystopian fiction.

FUTURE DYSTOPIAN DISASTERS

Since the 1950s we’ve seen a growing number of stories about future disasters. In several cases, the disaster stories seem similar to the dystopian fiction. Some scholars, however, argue that disaster fiction represents a whole new type of SF, one that has largely replaced the dystopias.

Disaster fiction, which predicts some untimely end or (more usually) near-end of earth, has several major categories: over-population, post-nuclear war, and ecological disruption. The over-population stories include Harry Harrison’s Make Room. Make Room (1966), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), C.M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl’s Space Merchants (1953), and J.G. Ballard’s “Billenium.”

The many well-written post-nuclear warfare stories include Russell Hobby’s Riddley Walker (1982) and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957).

image by Taichi Takeuchi

The stories concerning ecological disaster are more miscellaneous and varied, as they seem to cover a host of ills that beset earth (typically in the near future). A number of these stories show humanity, greatly reduced in numbers, attempting to live without the technology to which it is accustomed. In George Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), an unknown virus kills most of the world’s population. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), a giant meteor does the same job. In Piers Anthony’s Rings of Ice (1974), perpetual rain and world-wide flooding wipes out humankind.

In many of these stories, the title alone gives us an idea of what goes wrong: John Christopher’s The Long Winter (1962) and No Blade of Grass (1956), Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967), J.G. Ballard’s Drought, The Drowned World (1963), and The Wind from Nowhere, and Philip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide (1932)

The Meaning of Dystopia Theories

The very large number of these future mishaps invites a consideration of their meaning. Scholars have, in general, speculated that all these visions of future disasters reveal the deep uneasiness that humankind feels in the modern world. But some of the more focused theories are as follows:

Fear of science and technology. If space fiction shows humankind a way out of its predicaments, the disaster stories tell us that there is no way out.Science and technology are, after all, a devil’s bargain, and the payment has come due.

Warning against humankind’s pride. Humankind assumes that it has mastered nature. Uncontrollable disasters show us that nature still has a few tricks up her sleeve.

Warning of class conflict. Bruce Franklin, a Marxist critic, says that disaster fiction reveals the fear that the capitalistic exploiters have of the underclasses. In this interpretation, the coming disaster is the end of capitalistic exploitation.

Depth psychology. Some readers speculate that the disaster stories reflect a species death wish, a desire to be punished for inborn guilt. Although this abstraction may strike us as far above the details of most disaster SF (and pretentious besides), we should not dismiss it too quickly. J. G. Ballard, a highly respected SF writer, has stories in which the inner torment of the central character becomes projected into planetary holocaust. The external world functions as metaphor for a character’s inner world of torment.

In general, the dystopian visions and future disasters stand in opposition to the optimism of the space fiction. They represent one more direction in which SF explores the issues of the modern imagination.

-Steve Anderson

Strange Days Have Found Us: Commodification Via Technology

Image via Wikipedia

“Bodies confused

Memories misused”

-from The Doors song “Strange Days”

The film Strange Days depicts Los Angeles in the year 1999, when a technology known as SQUID (super-conducting quantum interference device), has made it possible to literally inhabit someone else’s experiences. The device, which looks like a squid and toupee combined into one, was initially created by the Feds for criminal inquiries, but eventually fell into the hands of peddlers on the black market. Also on the black market are thousands of clips, or ‘wire hits’, that affect the user in much the same way that drugs do, providing a real yet distorted experience that leaves the user strung out and ravenous for more.

The film’s protagonist, Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), is a dealer of SQUID products, whose clientele ranges from wealthy businessmen to down and out info-junkies, addicted to other people’s experiences, or perhaps simply the feeling of being outside one’s self. Lenny is also a user of his own product. Early in the film, he picks from a number of tapes of him and his ex-girlfriend, Faith, roller-skating and making love. Undressing, Faith asks: “Are you going to watch or are you going to do?” Lenny does, of course, but the fact that the experience is from the past suggests that he has, to a certain extent, lost control over his present experiences. He no longer cares to make the distinction between real experience and mediated ‘playback’.


The film grows progressively more violent and perverse in its depiction of the wire-tripping technology. In one scene, we watch from the point of view of an unknown assailant as he rapes a prostitute in the following fashion: he captures the assault on playback and ‘jacks’ the girl in to SQUID so that she can feel, see and hear what he feels, sees and hears, augmenting her fear and thus enhancing his excitement. The girl is literally experiencing rape from the point of view of both the victim and the aggressor. The scene, albeit profoundly disturbing, is a prime example of the convergence of subjectivity and technology displayed in the film: sexuality, entertainment and technology welded into the same experience.

Made over a decade ago,  Strange Days‘s prophetic powers about an age of sexually deviant, memory-based virtual reality will, I believe, prove to be uncanny. Very few dystopian films–another being the modern masterpiece Children of Men (2006)–manage to paint a picture of the future so compelling it makes the viewer physical uncomfortable.  Strange Days presents a distorted but all-too-familiar paradigm of the postmodern crisis: sensory overdose. The mass production of experience threatens to erode the quality of the the individual’s own subjectivity by disconnecting one from one’s experiences. One of the fundamental building blocks of film theory is the idea that a moviegoer frequents the cinema to absorb someone else’s experiences, to live vicariously through the protagonist. Strange Days re-inscribes this idea into a science fiction premise in which the moviegoer can actually be the protagonist, and, moreover, be a protagonist of the real world. This is not exactly interactive in the sense that a video game is, but it spins the idea of voyeurism in such a way that the commodification of experience appears open to innovation. During these strange days, our experiences are no longer solely ours; we can buy new ones and sell our old ones.

-Jake Anderson

Future Movie Review of a movie called Future Dead

Every once in a while a film comes along that is so ground-breaking, so cinematically revolutionary, so awe-inspiringly vital that all you can do is sit back, take a deep breath, and say “wow.” The Future Dead is not one of those films. Despite the fever pitch fanfare and sociological hysteria accompanying the release of the first artificial intelligence-directed feature film, the payload delivered was about as enticing as a sack of mealy apples. If this is the kind of cinema we have to look forward to with the arrival of the Singularity, voices calling for technological relinquishment may have cause to turn up the volume.

The story starts appealingly enough—Sarah Plume (played by a ravishing Janet Ashara), awakens in only her panties and a bra to the sound of a siren echoing through the streets of suburban Chicago. She will come to learn that a secret government project has turned a chunk of the human population into red-eyed brain-hungry derelicts. The president has declared martial law and is evacuating the citizens to an underground facility. It is here she meets intrepid molecular biologist Reese Ryans (Dale Reinhart), who believes the entire situation was actually caused on purpose in order to weed out the weaker genes in the human blood-pool. This idea of evolution-by-zombie-uprising is perhaps the one resonant note in an otherwise quacking duck of a script.

Where Future Dead fails as a horror film—or even as an utterance of creative expression—is it’s auto-populated cache of characters. Even Ashara seems stale and awkward in her role as heroine-turned-investigator. We won’t even address the love scene between Ashara and Reinhart, which was about as steamy as a donkey in a sauna. In his attempt to create compassion for the side characters, director Art 5 seems to have gone embarrassingly overboard. Case in point, the sequence in which Sarah must rescue a room full of blind, handicapped children seems excruciatingly desperate, and not in a way that is beneficial to the narrative. Blind or handicapped alone for one kid would have been enough to build dramatic tension. Both for a room-full of kids is just funny. Which is not to say I laughed. The only time I even cracked a smile during this film (even though there are numerous attempts at lowest common denominator gallows humor) was when one of the 3D holographic zombies stumbled a little too close to an elderly woman in the front row and she swung her purse irritably into the light.

In perhaps Art 5’s only overt reference to the heritage of advanced technologies predicating the film’s release, Janet Ashara’s character is seen wielding a virtual reality cypher that allows her to lead the blind (literally) in a daring escape from the horde of post-humans. There’s little else to imply that this film was helmed by a non-human entity, which is perhaps a call for both shame and a joy to  humankind and artificial intelligence alike.

If you believe the industry gossip rags one of the early conflicts during pre-production of the film centered around whether Art 5 should inhabit an android body or simply reside in studio mainframe, issuing directives through his assistants and producers. Executives opted for the latter, and it is easy to see how the actors’ inability to interact with their director played into a general atmosphere of confusion and disconnect on the set.  To make matters worse, all reports point to Art 5 losing the faith of his crew early in the production.

With Hollywood gripped by paranoia over “the new workforce”, the conversation over humanity’s dying monopoly over creative industries may be overhead by more than a view ticketholders leaving the theater after Future’s credits roll. Now it’s not only digital doubles threatening to fleece jobs from the once recession-proof entertainment industry, but powerfully trained artilects with the very real ability to replace Hollywood’s writers and directors too. We’ll need more than an uncanny valley to stop this uprising, we’re going to need an impossible canyon.

While Art 5 may have attempted to tap into the human fear of reanimating the dead, he may have unwittingly tapped into a much bigger fear. Some critics have said he embraced that fear and that the movie itself can be read as a satire, with a pro-sentient rights agenda built in. Unfortunately, if there was an agenda here it was buried under a million feet of bad film and a production budget equaling some countries GDP. Though the film saved money by using nanotechnology to reconfigure the sets, the final price tag (upwards to a billion dollars by some tallies) doesn’t seem to mash well with the Sentient Filmmakers Union’s assertion just last week that artificial intelligence will restore financial parity to America in a time of economic hardship.

Tall order for a horror movie marketed to the already frightened. But with so much of the film’s box office take supplied by moviegoers who are simply too scared to not see it (lest they offend their AI boss or neighbor), the world’s first feature film written and directed by artificial intelligence is set to make a killing.

This reviewer finds the tongue-in-cheek cuteness of the whole thing a little hackneyed for an event billed as the most significant cinematic movement in history. In this age of exponential irony (when futurist Ray Kurzweil can die just hours before the invention of mind uploading), it seems worth noting that perhaps we should feel uncomfortable with the idea of humans assisting machines on a movie set.

The day a computer sent a human on a mail run was the day irony passed from this earth and was reborn—reanimated, so to speak, from the dead.

-Jake Anderson

eXistenZ: Biological Video Games and New Arousal

Are moviegoers and entertainment seekers bound to gradually incorporate more and more computer technology into their daily life until they are indistinguishable from a mutated piece of software? Well, yes. The transformation has begun: digital technology is everywhere and it mediates everything, work and leisure, from telecommunications to interactive video games. Is a convergence between digital computation and human consciousness banished to the realm of science fiction? Ray Kurzweil answers in the negative.

In his writings he imagines a 21st century world in which quantum computers and nanotechnology change mankind’s proscriptions for the mind and the body. Foreseeing an age of neural implants, he predicted that by 2007 “haptic” interface technology would provide the human mind with alternative sources of sensory input, drawn from virtual reality environments. Well, he was a little off–but still maintains that in the near future there will be computer displays built into eyeglasses and digital “objects”, like movies, video games, and music, distributed as data files through the wireless network. The real world will gradually become fused with virtual reality, and human subjectivity will grow increasingly integrated with technology.

Surely, the moviegoer pleads, somewhere in the cinema’s vast annals of science fiction reels there are forewarnings of such a mind boggling transformation. Indeed, there are many (far more than the following list): Blade Runner, 2001, Alphaville, Tron, Johnny Mnemonic, The Fifth Element, Strange Days, Minority Report, A.I, The Matrix, and existenZ all confront aspects of cyborg culture, or the human-computer interface.

eXistenZ approaches near-future speculation from a different avenue: the video game industry. Directed by David Cronenburg, whose scripts often dabble in bio-technology, the film depicts a world in which video game and virtual reality technologies biologically converge. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra, the “game pod goddess”, a VR game designer and guru for the company Antenna. The first scene introduces Allegra’s latest game, eXistenZ, and situates its first test enclave, whom she will provide with 12 prototype meta-flesh game pods. The game pods– through she which she downloads eXistenZ into each player– look like rubber fetuses, fidgeting and whining. They are virtual animals, “grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with DNA” and charged by the gameplayer’s body.

Before the test enclave can begin its game, an assailant (whom we will later learn is a ‘Realist’) attacks Allegra. She escapes with Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing trainee, who rushes her to a car and out into the countryside. We are to assume this is part of reality. Soon, Allegra convinces Ted , who has never played one of her games before, to be fitted for a bio-port (it takes some work, for Ted has a phobia of being penetrated). Afterward, they lube up one another’s bio-ports, which pucker excitedly, and insert the umbilical cord-like firewire.

Throughout the film, the process of downloading a game takes on an overtly sexual nature, culminating when Ted performs fellatio on Allegra’s bio-port. eXistenZ imagines a game world of polymorphously altered bodies, in which the bio-port has become both an invitation to play out fictional romances, as well as a new organ, subject to arousal and penetration.

By game’s end, the film, having supposedly disengaged from the interwoven game sub-plot, reveals that the entire test enclave scene was not even grounded in reality, but was actually part of the eXistenZ game. And Allegra is not the true game designer. That was her particular game avatar. In whatever ‘game-reality’ of eXistenZ the film started off in, Allegra and Ted work for the Realist cause, seeking to destroy eXistenZ before it bleeds into reality. As the film draws to a close, the final question– ultimately left unanswered– is whether the characters are still playing the game. The characters can no longer decipher what is real and what is game-based.

Cronnenburg’s sub-textual implication is that the film itself evolves into a version of the game, a blueprint for an interactive virtual reality game. Its gamers (film viewers) are left free to draw their own conclusions as to where fiction ends and reality begins. Of course, just as in the game, Cronnenburg provides “just enough [free will] to make it interesting.”

-Jake Anderson