Robopocalypse Now, I Guess

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2

This is a follow-up to the review I'll Be Back, I Guess, Or Whatever

The security cyborg known only as Murderbot continues fighting to rediscover the tragic history that someone deleted from its memory banks. But the trail has gone cold, and somebody lurking behind the scenes will deploy all the resources of gunboat capitalism to keep old secrets buried. So Murderbot relies on its strengths, making ad hoc alliances to infiltrate hidden archives, while coincidentally keeping hapless humans alive despite their own best efforts.

The ironically self-referential tone Martha Wells introduced in her first omnibus Murderbot volume continues in this second collection. The stories were initially published as separate novellas, but that format is difficult to sell in conventional bookstores, so these trade paperbacks make Murderbot’s story available to wider audiences. That makes for easier reading, but unfortunately, it starts drawing attention to Murderbot’s formulaic structure, which probably wasn’t obvious at first.

As before, this book combines two previously separate stories. In “Rogue Protocol,” Murderbot pursues buried secrets to a distant planet that greedy corporations abandoned. The GrayCris company left immovable hardware behind, and Murderbot gambles that information stored on long-dormant hard drives will answer buried questions. Clearly someone else thinks likewise, because double agents and war machines take steps to prevent anyone reading the old files.

With the first combined volume, I observed Wells’ structural overlap with Peyton Place, which established the standards of prime-time soap operas. (Murderbot secretly prefers watching downloaded soaps over fighting, but keeps getting dragged back into combat.) With this novella, I also notice parallels with The Fugitive—the 1964 series, not the 1993 movie. In both, the protagonist’s episodic adventures mask the longer backstory, which develops incrementally.

In the next novella, “Exit Strategy,” Murderbot returns its collected intelligence to the consortium that nominally “owns” it. But that consortium’s leaders, a loose agrarian cooperative, have fallen captive to GrayCris, which has the ruthless heart necessary to manipulate an interplanetarystateless capitalist society. Preservation, which owns Murderbot on paper, is a hippie commune by contrast. MurderBot must use its strategic repertoire to rescue its pet hippies from the ruthless corporation.

Martha Wells

Here's where I start having problems. On the fourth narrative, I begin noticing Murderbot follows a reliable pattern: it desperately protests its desire to chill out, watch TV, and stay alone. But duty or necessity requires it to lunge into combat to rescue humans too hapless, good-hearted, and honest for this world. As its name suggests, Murderbot has only one tool, violence. And it deploys that tool effectively, and often.

As the pattern repeats itself, even Murderbot starts noticing that it’s protected by plot armor. It can communicate with allies undetected, hack security systems, and manipulate humans’ cyberpunk neural implants. It has human levels of creativity and independence that fellow cyborgs lack, but high-speed digital processing and upload capacity that humans can’t share. Like Johnny 5 or Marvin the Paranoid Android, it combines the best of humanity and technology.

And like those prior archetypes, it handles this combination with sarcasm and snark. Murderbot pretends it doesn’t care, and uses language to keep human allies at arm’s length. It also uses its irony-heavy narrative voice, laced with parenthetical digressions, to keep us alienated, too. But the very fact that it wants a human audience to hear its story, which it only occasionally acknowledges, admits that it’s desperate for human validation.

Murderbot comes across as jerkish and misanthropic. But it also comes across as lonely. I feel compelled to keep reading its story, even as I see the episodes falling into comfy boilerplates, because Murderbot’s essential loneliness makes it a compelling character. We’ve all known someone like this; heck, book nerds reading self-referential genre fiction have probably been someone like this.

Thus I find myself torn. Only four novellas in, the story’s already become visibly repetitive, and even Murderbot feels compelled to comment on how episodes resemble its beloved soaps. The first-person narrative voice, which combines ironic detachment with noir grit, becomes disappointingly one-note as each story becomes dominated by repeating action sequences. It reads like an unfinished screen treatment. (A streaming TV adaptation dropped as I finished reading.)

But despite the formulaic structure, I find myself compelled by Murderbot’s character. I want to see it overcome its struggles and find the home and companionship it clearly wants, but doesn’t know how to ask for. Murderbot is more compelling than the episodes in which it finds itself, and I keep reading, even as the literary purist in me balks. Because this character matters enough that I want to see it through.

I'll Be Back, I Guess, Or Whatever

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1

The cyborg that calls itself “Murderbot” would happily watch downloaded soap operas, 24/7, if had the opportunity. But it has no such liberty: as wholly owned property of an interstellar mining company, it provides security for survey operations on distant planets. Unbeknownst to its owners, though, Murderbot has disabled its own governing systems. Because it doesn’t trust its owners, and it’s prepared to fight them if necessary.

Martha Wells originally published her “Murderbot” stories as freestanding novellas, but those often make tough selling at mainstream bookstores. So her publisher is now re-releasing the stories in omnibus paperback editions. Readers get more of Wells’ story arc, which combines sociological science fiction with the open-ended narrative we recognize from prime-time soap operas. Think The Terminator meets Peyton Place.

In the first novella, “All Systems Red,” we discover Murderbot’s character and motivation. It works because it must, and being property, has no right to refuse. But it’s also altered its own programming, granting itself free agency which fellow “constructs” don’t enjoy. If nobody finds out, it can watch its downloads in relative peace. Problem is, someone has infiltrated its latest contract, turning fellow security cyborgs against their humans.

The second novella, “Artificial Condition,” follows Murderbot in its quest to uncover who violated the constructs’ programming and turned work into a slaughter. It just happens that whatever transgression made that violence possible, coincides with the biggest secret in Murderbot’s individual history. So Murderbot goes off-grid, seeking information that might shed light on why deep-space mining has recently become such a brutal enterprise.

Wells pinches popular sci-fi action themes readers will recognize from longstanding franchises like Star Trek, Flash Gordon, and Stargate. But she weaves those motifs together with an anthropological investigation of what makes someone human. Murderbot is nameless, sexless, and has no prior identity; it’s a complete cypher. Although it has organic components, they’re lab-grown; no part of Murderbot has ever been even tangentially human.

Martha Wells

Unlike prior artificial persons (Commander Data comes immediately to mind), Murderbot has no desire to become human. It observes humanity as entertainment, and performs its job without complaint. But doing that job has cost humans their lives in the past, a history that gives Murderbot a sense of lingering guilt. This forces it, and us, to ask whether morals and culpability apply to something built in a factory and owned boy a corporation.

The questions start small and personal. Murderbot works for its human clients, and exists specifically to keep them alive. But fellow security cyborgs have turned on their owners in another mining camp. This forces Murderbot to question whether its own survival matters enough to risk actual human lives, even tangentially. It actually says no, but its clients have anthropomorphized their cyborg guard and want it to live.

As details of the crime become clear, so does a larger view of Murderbot’s world. It occupies a world of interplanetary capitalism, where one’s ability to spend lavishly defines one’s survival. Without money or employment history, Murderbot can only investigate the parallel mysteries hanging over its head by trading its one useful commodity: the ability to communicate with technology. With Murderbot around, humanity’s sentient machines start feeling class consciousness.

I’ve already mentioned The Terminator and Star Trek’s Commander Data. Despite its name, Murderbot shares little with either android. It doesn’t want to kill, and admits it would abandon its mission if given the opportunity. But it also doesn’t aspire to become more human. Misanthropic and unburdened by social skills, its greatest aspiration is to be left alone. Yet it knows it cannot have this luxury, and must keep moving in order to survive.

This volume contains two stories, which weren’t written to pass as freestanding. This struck me in the first story: there’s no denouement, only an end. Had I read this novella without a larger context, I probably would’ve resented this, and not bought the second volume. Taken together, though, it’s easier to see the soap operatic motif. Both stories end so abruptly, readers can practically hear the music lingering over the “To Be Continued” title card.

It's easy to enjoy this book. Murderbot, as our first-person narrator, writes with dry sarcasm that contrasts with its setting. It’s forced to pass as human, in an anti-humanist universe where money trumps morality. It only wants privacy, but wherever it goes, it’s required to make friends and basically unionize the sentient machines. Martha Wells uses well-known science fiction building blocks in ironic ways that draw us into Murderbot’s drama.

The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.

And That’s No Moon Either

Charlie Hunnam (left), Michiel Huisman, and Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon

The Netflix movie Rebel Moon Part One isn’t as terrible as online buzz might suggest. Let’s start with that controversial thesis. Please don’t mistake me, it isn’t timeless art: a cadre of reviewers, professional and amateur, have skewered the movie’s numerous weaknesses. Its blatant ripoff of Star Wars, for one, and its reliance on director Zack Snyder’s trademark fight choreography, intercut with abrupt breaks into silly slo-mo cartoonishness.

However, I’d like to avoid the obvious and manifold shortcomings, and spotlight one overlooked strength. Pre-release press coverage emphasized how Snyder initially pitched the screen treatment to Lucasfilm as a “more mature” take on Star Wars. He reworked his treatment as a standalone feature only after Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, passed. This made me cringe, because filmmakers frequently think “mature” is a synonym for “violent, hypersexual, and visually murky.”

American culture often treats children as twee and precious, incapable of handling life’s harder edges. Disney, of course, notoriously sanded all the sex, and most of the violence, off Grimms’ Fairy Tales in their feature-length animation. Children’s books, movies, and TV shows model chaste heterosexual romance, and only stylized violence, reducing war to ballet. European media does something similar, but not to the same degree.

This includes the original Star Wars. According to historian Garry Jenkins, Lucas modeled the original movie on 1930s Flash Gordon serials he watched on his parents’ black-and-white TV. His parents considered Flash Gordon acceptable viewing, because of its strong moral backbone, its clear division between heroes and villains, and no sex. (The episodes also broadcast out of sequence, which is why Lucas dubbed the first movie “Episode IV.”)

We’ve watched former child stars polish their adult bona fides by embracing sex, violence, and moral flimsiness. Countless former child stars, like Anne Hathaway or Lindsay Lohan, attempted to cleanly divide themselves from their childhood roles by appearing topless onscreen. Miley Cyrus’ live national meltdown continues to haunt her career even after she’s tried to atone. Achieving adulthood in mass-media culture means rejecting the preciousness of childhood.

Director Zack Snyder (promo photo)

Snyder attempts something similar in Rebel Moon. The movie’s protagonist, Kora (Sofia Boutella), is a battle-scarred veteran fleeing her past. She aspires to live in rural, agrarian simplicity, hiding from her former commanders, but she also rejects overtures of romance. She describes herself as too hurt to love; her words form a lament, but her tone is boastful. Her story dribbles out gradually, but basically, she enjoys being damaged.

Despite Kora’s best efforts, the war finds her. When the Imperium murders her village’s headman and leaves a garrison in the barn, Kora decides to run. But before completing her escape, she interrupts the hard-bitten local garrison attempting to sexually assault a young village maiden. (Rape, here mercifully averted, has become the go-to form of low-friction motivation for movie protagonists. It’s sloppy and low-hanging fruit, but audiences react strongly.)

Having tied her fortunes to the village, Kora accepts the responsibility for organizing the resistance. Here’s where the movie’s one redeeming quality emerges: Kora accepts help from villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Gunnar teases out the backstory Kora has concealed during her self-imposed exile, and in doing so, recognizes the injured orphan girl beneath her warrior-woman façade. The script treads lightly in admitting this, but Gunnar falls in love with Kora.

Gunnar is everything Kora wants to avoid being: generous, nurturing, and committed to his people and community. The more he uncovers Kora’s deep internal scars, the more he wants to relieve them. He’s impressed by her fighting skills, but they don’t define her. Instead, he sees her with levels of nuance and complexity which she has tried to reject, and in stray quiet moments, tries to steer her toward healing.

There we find this movie’s moral heart: one character accepts the most cynical possible interpretation of events, and even revels in them, while the other wants to nurture the whole heart, scars and all. Only fleetingly does Snyder admit this openly, but it lingers tacitly beneath the entire narrative. Though the surface-level story addresses the villagers’ resistance to Empire, the deeper story describes the tension between nurturance and violence.

Please understand, this movie isn’t good. Snyder borrows liberally from fifty years of blockbusters and B-movies to create a smorgasbord of reheated tropes. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but the movie doesn’t appear to be having much fun. If we pause these glaring objections, however, and look at the less-obvious moral themes, this movie has something going on. Hopefully Part Two will give it flesh.

In Orbit Around the Impossible World

Stanisław Lem, Solaris: the Definitive Edition

The distant planet Solaris shouldn’t exist; its orbit defies all known laws of physics. And that’s not the only impossible thing happening there. The planet’s single inhabitant is a massive global organism, which researchers have variously described as a “plasma” and an “ocean,” though both metaphors are imperfect. Precepts of science and human understanding break down near Solaris. Not that this has stopped researchers from trying to understand it.

Polish novelist Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel is perhaps his most famous work, not only in its own right, but also through Antrei Tarkovsky’s notoriously inscrutable Russian-language film (which Lem disparaged). Like Tarkovsky’s film, Lem’s novel rejects conventional structure and practically dares audiences to follow the bumpy ride. Even Lem’s fans will admit this novel is rough sledding, though arguably worth it when you reach his strange, arcane culmination.

Psychologist Kris Kelvin is one among a branch of scientists called Solaricists, an interdisciplinary movement dedicated entirely to studying Solaris. Once the rock stars of deep-space science, Solaricists have become pariahs because their “science” persistently fails to produce answers. After years spent studying Solaris remotely, Kelvin finally gets assigned to the planet’s only space station, which is nearly abandoned and moldering. Except it proves far less abandoned than he expected.

The first English-language edition of Lem’s novel, in 1970, wasn’t translated from Polish, but from a prior French translation. Lem, who could read English fluently but not write it, hated that translation. But then Lem, like the American author Philip K. Dick, with whom he had a love-hate relationship, notoriously hated everything. His hatred wasn’t unfair, though. The first English edition sanded off many of Lem’s more recondite, philosophical maunderings.

Lem was, after all, a trained philosopher. Like Olaf Stapledon, Lem used science fiction novels not primarily as either stories or character studies, but as field tests for philosophical insights. In this case, Lem places highly trained men of science (and they are, indeed, men) in an isolated environment where reason and empiricism disintegrate. How, Lem asks, can humans communicate with alien intelligence, when we can’t communicate with one another?

Stanisław Lem

Once ensconced in the research station over Solaris, Kelvin wants to debrief the skeleton crew. Crewmembers, however, are reclusive and unwilling to communicate. It’s like they’re all protecting secrets. Kelvin’s old mentor, Gibarian, commits suicide rather than admit whatever bleak secret he’s kept on Solaris. However, Kelvin spots that secret walking the vast, depopulated halls, and it’s apparently a woman.

Before long, Kelvin has his own secret: Harey, his college girlfriend, appears in his cabin. She can’t possibly be here, however. Not only did Harey not join the long, arduous interstellar journey to this distant planet, but in a moment of overwhelming despair ten years ago, she also committed suicide. Yet here she is, as alive and unblemished as the last time Kelvin saw her. She’s impossible, but also real.

Tarkovsky’s movie (and Steven Soderburgh’s 2002 remake) focus on Harey, the impossible woman, and the guilt she inspires in Kelvin. But that focus is why Lem disliked the film adaptations. This novel isn’t about human guilt and culpability; it’s about… what? Critics dispute furiously how to interpret this recondite novel. Lem took especial pains to make it inscrutable, immune to any algebraic interpretation. You don’t understand Solaris, you experience it.

Personally, I see Lem talking about the futility of human reason. Every “law” human intellects devised around experimental science falls flat around Solaris. The scientists find themselves reduced to Aristotelian guesswork and mysticism. Throughout the novel, he both uses and scoffs at religious symbolism (Lem himself was agnostic), but finally, even Kelvin admits we apprehend the truth only through that proverbial glass, darkly.

Bill Johnston’s English-language translation is deemed “the definitive edition” because Lem’s estate considered it the most satisfactorily accurate to Lem’s philosophical ambiguity. However, rights issues have tied up publication for years. It’s currently only available in ebook and audiobook editions, not print. Canadian actor Alessandro Juliani expresses the depth and complexity of Lem’s characters, and beautifully captures Kelvin’s journey beyond reason and evidence, into acceptance of a fundamentally absurd universe.

This novel admits multiple interpretations based on available evidence. That, I’d contend, is Lem’s point: no explanation is ever complete and universal, we can argue the evidence endlessly without reaching exhaustive conclusions. In the end, our questions define us, not our answers. Kelvin, and perhaps Harey, don’t resolve their story, they only achieve a higher and more meaningful order of question. And hopefully, after reading this book, so will we.

The Trouble With the Chosen One

The last days of a dying Chosen One

Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and Neo from The Matrix were all destined for greatness before birth, and recognized as The Chosen One by others. Science fiction and fantasy love the Chosen One mythos and recycle it endlessly. The Chosen One’s coming is always foretold; indeed, the Chosen One may be the last to recognize his own (and it’s usually “his”) greatness. But once he does, he unleashes righteous fury on the nations.

While science fiction loves literal Chosen Ones whose presence purges humanity’s impurity, other genres love a more subdued Chosen One. Hero teachers like Jaime Escalante in Stand By Me and Erin Gruwell in The Freedom Writers, or hero cops like Popeye Doyle and Dirty Harry Callahan, serve the same role, though their reach is circumscribed by their form. Seems like storytellers love finding that one superlative individual who will instantly repair all our woes.

Sort of like Jesus or the Buddha.

Most people, I suspect, would agree that we don’t fall on hard times because one person did us dirty. We might point fingers at an unpopular president, or the public face of a designated “other” like Hitler or Saddam Hussein. But realistically, most people realize these highly visible individuals didn’t cause widespread social crisis, they simply exploited it for personal or ideological ends. Society feels like it’s been skidding for a while.

Yet despite knowing individuals didn’t cause our unhappiness, we nevertheless seek individuals to reverse that perceived skid. Whether we seek that salvation in fictional characters, like Luke Skywalker or Katniss Everdeen, or in (putatively) factual individuals like Jesus or Muhammed, we want one person to take responsibility for solving the crisis. Solving social problems collectively is hard; we’d rather throw everything on the person of a Chosen One.

That’s where things get sticky. Jesus Christ claimed a unique ability to guide his people out of darkness. So did Donald Trump. The former president’s 2016 mantra of “I alone can fix this” seemed, for many people dispossessed by a changing economy, to be a necessary tonic for the Obama Administration’s embrace of collective responsibility and systemic reform. Obama’s approach was difficult, slow, and unpleasant; Trump’s response was easy and instantaneous.

Not every Chosen One necessarily brings salvation through their person. (I use the word “salvation” loosely here; please bear with me.) Jesus Christ said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light,” making himself individually the bearer of transcendence. The Buddha, by contrast, placed his teachings above his person. Had Siddhartha Gautama not achieved Enlightenment, somebody else would have, and the Truth would’ve shone through anyway.

A Chosen One and his girlfriend walk into a bar...

Few modern Chosen Ones would be so modest. Whether religious messiahs like Jim Jones or Sun Myung Moon, or secular deliverers like Donald Trump or (dare I say) Adolf Hitler, they always proclaim themselves, personally, the source of redemption. Jesus, Buddha, Hltler, and Trump all arrived at times of deteriorating empire, when old ways of government and religion weren’t working anymore, and promised deliverance. Some succeeded better than others.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean Hitler and Trump are morally equal to Jesus and Buddha. Others might say that, but I won’t. Rather. Jesus and Buddha promised to free humanity by stepping outside this world’s social, political, and economic limitations. Jesus promised to make all things new, while Buddha promised knowledge from this world’s ignorance. Political messiahs, however, inevitably pledge relief by reinforcing this world’s doctrinaire tendencies.

For this discussion, the particular deliverance each messiah offers matters less than their promised methods, and how their congregation receives them. The Chosen One always promises to relieve the suffering congregation’s pains, whether that congregation is genuinely oppressed, or merely feels themselves oppressed. Peace and consolation await True Believers willing to invest their every hope into the Chosen One.

Secular Chosen Ones generally don’t end well. Donald Trump’s congregation progressed from nodding agreement at his campaign rallies, to the violence of January 6th, 2021, with almost Life of Brian-like haste. And while Jesus told his disciples to sheathe their swords and not answer evil with violence, two millennia of people speaking on Jesus’ behalf have fomented Christian crusades and sectarian holy wars. That’s pretty bad PR for the Prince of Peace.

Fundamentally, a Chosen One lets True Believers relinquish their agency. When 909 people commit suicide in Jonestown, no individual congregant is truly responsible. Indeed, it’s likely that hundreds looked for one other person to say “no” first. Because when a Chosen One goes bad, the only hope is another Chosen One.

Are We Living In an X-Files World?

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in the 2016 X-Files relaunch

Yesterday, the United States military shot down a third unidentified object in American airspace, this time over Lake Huron. (Technically it was in Canadian airspace, just barely, but stick with me.) These unknown objects invading American skies have become so common, so ubiquitous, that even I have joined in jokes comparing them to UFO paranoia and kaiju movies. Yet I find myself worried about our increasingly militant response.

After the Biden Administration waited several days and several thousand miles to shoot down the first Chinese spy balloon, members of Congress, mostly the Republican Party’s hard-right flank, went berserk. The Administration has met each subsequent one with swift finality, and they're still not happy. Unidentified objects (I’m reluctant to call them UFOs) traversing American airspace have become another rallying point of a fear-based, xenophobic American worldview, again.

When The X-Files first aired in the 1990s, I wasn’t savvy enough to notice the overlap between TV stories and current events. The narrative of extraterrestrials conducting a slow, covert invasion of Earth corresponded with fears of invasion at home. Pete Wilson ran two successful campaigns for Governor of California based on overt, undisguised appeals to racism. Demagogues stoked similar fears of refugees entering America from Haiti, Somalia, and elsewhere.

However, it’s worth contrasting the literal “invasion” of refugees and undocumented immigrants, against Chris Carter’s science fiction invasion. The X-Files depicted a categorical invasion based on strategy and fear. Chris Carter’s invading aliens cultivated allies among the powerful, controlled the media message, and used psy-ops to silence anyone calling them out. Refugees simply showed up, hopeless, scared, and desperate for food and a shower.

Watching events unfold around us, I can’t help noticing who’s using psy-ops to actually divide us. While Marjorie Three-Names and Lolo Bobo scream bloody murder about invasion, about undocumented immigrants bringing disease as biological warfare, and about the enemies at our gates, America’s rich and powerful continue finding ways to narrow citizens’ access to information. We’re busy looking for external enemies, and failing to see them at home.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s invasion is probably the most glaring, if only because it’s so ham-handed and clumsy. While he continues running one of America’s best peer-to-peer information sources into the ground, he’s had ten children by three mothers. Overwhelming human genetic codes and planting alien offspring was a literal X-Files strategy for invasion. Despite still having numerous admirers, Musk has devolved into a 1990s sci-fi villain.

Other internal enemies are less visible, but more numerous. Corporate media conglomerates like Sinclair Media and iHeartRadio (formerly Clear Channel) have a stranglehold on American media, and share a notoriously right-wing bent. Though it’s been a while since they did anything as obvious as submarining a platinum-selling country group, their ability to silence dissent is unmatched since the heyday of William Randolph Hearst.

It congeals into a massive goulash of influences where we can, as Fox Mulder famously warned, “trust no one.” While our political leaders hold power by lavishly identifying enemies inside and beyond our borders, the moneyed interests that bankroll their reelection campaigns continue finding ways to foment disunity and paranoia. Law and society persist in undermining the tools of community organization, and we’re left atomized, unable to defend ourselves.

Don’t misunderstand me. The X-Files showed the alien invaders’ human allies as a tight-knit cabal, so friendly that they could gather in one room and make binding decisions quickly. There’s no material evidence of such literal collusion outside a TV writers’ room. In reality, it’s more likely a sloppy agglomeration of mutual back-slappers whose needs happen to coincide. But the patterns are, if not instructive, at least illustrative.

I don’t believe, based on evidence, that it’s going too far to say that America’s rich are currently using the playbook from 1990s science fiction to overthrow the existing society and engineer one that suits their needs. Though the January 6th insurrection failed to coalesce into a coup, it didn’t need to. Subsequent years have seen us descend into exactly the bureaucratic intransigence and partisan backbiting that Mulder and Scully fought against for eight seasons.

Spotting UFOs in American airspace is, arguably, the endgame of this paranoia. It has Americans literally looking into the clouds or across the ocean to spot the enemies that have already seized the levers of American power. Our country’s wealthy and powerful have taught us to live in constant fear and distrust, which undermines our most rudimentary tools to protect ourselves against them. Flying saucers have become just another decoy for power.

Doctor Who and the Myth of Time

Various writers and artists, Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension (two volumes)

Time itself is coming apart; but when isn’t it, when the Doctor is around? A massive, terrifying vortex of pure white light is traveling the universe, eating everything it encounters. We first witness it swallowing Captain Jack Harkness off a distant planet. But this monster isn’t satisfied with one planet, or even one timestream; it’s consuming the universe in reverse order. And it’s apparently started consuming the Doctor’s past selves.

Why can’t fans let prior iterations of the Doctor end? This two-volume collection from Titan Comics includes appearances by every canonical version of the character through 2018. They appear unchanged, unaged, from their onscreen appearance—a pointed fact with the Fourth and Eighth Doctors, who changed markedly between their first and last appearances. Franchise fans, and content creators who appeal to them, won’t let old forms of the character go.

In his 1972 article “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco claims the archetypal hero is everyman, is universal. But in being universal, the hero is finite. Every time Superman punches villains, his mythic justice is extended, but he himself is consumed. Which sounds great when talking about past mythic heroes, like Odysseus or Charlemagne. The problem is, Superman isn’t used up; he’s continually recreated, and therefore, on paper, continually young.

Comic book characters don’t have to age. Superman, with his broad shoulders and iconic spit-curl, remains largely unchanged since 1938. The problem, as I’ve noted previously, happens when characters are depicted onscreen. Superman remains constant, outlasting George Reeves’ suicide, Christover Reeve’s quadriplegia, and the all-around disappointment of Brandon Routh. Artists continually recreate Superman, but human actors inevitably get old and die.

Something similar happens with the Doctor. The BBC writers’ room invented the narrative contrivance of Regeneration in 1966 when William Hartnell, “The First Doctor,” became too stricken with atherosclerosis to continue acting. Writers and fans continued recreating the mythological character, leaving Hartnell, a mortal, behind. The Doctor’s human aspect is transitory; his character remains present and part of audiences’ lives.

Where possible, official productions keep original actors involved: Big Finish Productions, for instance, put the Fourth and Tenth Doctors together in 2020. Tom Baker hasn’t played the Fourth Doctor onscreen since 1981 (not directly anyway) and is pushing ninety, yet he remains altogether synonymous with the role, and able to continue playing it. If original actors aren’t available, alternatives suffice: voice actors Frazier Hines and Tim Treolar currently play the Second and Third Doctors, respectively.

This recreation isn’t dependent on official BBC imprimatur, either. Fan culture, including fanfiction writers, cosplayers, and others, participate in recreating the Doctor. The BBC nominally “owns” the Doctor, yet the character is most alive and fertile in fans’ imaginations. Like all copyrighted productions, the Doctor will eventually pass into public domain, but morally, he already lives there. Every “official” franchise relies upon backstory existing in fans’ imaginations.

Titan Comics, however, tacitly acknowledges something fans already know: because the Doctor remains living, the character needs new adventures. As Umberto Eco writes, Hercules, King Arthur, and other mythic heroes are dead; writers may rewrite existing stories and apply new psychological insights, but seldom add actual new events to the mythology. Superman or the Doctor, however, always require new adventures. The narrative canon is always expanding.

Therefore Titan invents stories like this, which transcend time and bring the Doctor’s multiple incarnations together. Though this story highlights the four (male) iterations from the revived TV show, it incorporates every onscreen version to date, always looking exactly like they appeared back then. Human actors age and die, but on paper, the Second Doctor is always fortyish, the Fourth Doctor is always dark-haired and energetic.

Always the same, yet different.

Audiences yearn for new adventures starring the Doctor, but only as he/they appeared onscreen. Casting David Bradley as the First Doctor is a satisfactory workaround, one time. But audiences probably wouldn’t accept that substitution permanently. Just as Timothy Dalton’s James Bond isn’t Sean Connery’s, each regeneration of the Doctor becomes a new being, but also doesn’t. Because the Doctor moves on, but we, the audience, carry the old mythology with us.

Fundamentally, the BBC “owns” Doctor Who on paper, and licenses companies like Titan Comics or Big Finish Audio to invent new adventures, but that’s a legal fiction. The mythology has taken root in audiences’ imaginations in ways that, say, Quatermass just hasn’t. New adventures rely upon, not licensed canon, but the audiences’ living imagination. Old versions of the Doctor remain because they live and have new adventures inside us.

My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me! (Part 2)

This essay is a follow-up to Star Trek: My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me!

Data and Worf in the Star Trek episode “A Fistful of Datas”

The Star Trek holodeck episode “A Fistful of Datas” has major overlapping themes with Michael Crichton’s 1973 schlock adventure flick Westworld. Both feature high-tech modernists wandering into a simulation of the American West, expecting to swagger around in buckskins while having gunfights. But in both stories, the simulation’s safeties fail, leaving protagonists at the mercy of Colt-wielding synthetic outlaws who can’t be killed.

Smarter critics than me have observed the recurrent theme of killer entertainment in Michael Crichton’s bibliography. Both Westworld and Jurassic Park feature amusement parks where people go to gawk at merciless killers, only to find themselves on the receiving end of that violence. But Crichton also addressed this theme less overtly: White explorers in “darkest Africa” in his novel Congo, for instance, or thrill-seeking stormchasers in his screenplay Twister.

Putting Westworld and “A Fistful of Datas” together, considering what I wrote previously about the moralistic tone implicit in holodeck episodes, I’m struck by the judgment inherent in both. Each story shares the image of high-tech moderns wanting to participate in what they consider a more savage time. Both present the “American West” in overlit desert colors, contrasted with the adventurers’ dusty earth-toned clothes.

Equally important, both stories feature moderns expecting to witness savagery, but not get hurt. Both stories assume the presence of safeties ensuring that living humans won’t get killed, or even hurt that badly. But then the safeties fail, because of course they do. There’s no story if our protagonists can’t get hurt. Our modern heroes must fight for their lives against undying synthetic humans which they, or their technological overlords, created.

For Westworld to make any sense, we must accept two assumptions that don’t withstand much scrutiny. First, we must accept the premise, common in Marxism and other early-modern philosophies, that natural humans are naturally violent and destructive, and social evolution has been a constant movement away from that. Current anthropology doesn't believe this, of course; evidence suggests we’re getting more violent, not less. But the story remains persistent.

Second, we must believe the Freudian supposition of thanatos, the innate psychological drive toward death. We must believe that youth seek adrenaline-producing behaviors, like driving recklessly and picking fights, while the elderly embrace religion and other transcendental ideas, because deep down, we secretly want to die. This premise doesn’t withstand scrutiny simply because we need only look around to realize these behaviors are neither universal, nor inexplicable.

Teddy (James Marsden) and Delores (Evan Rachel Wood) in Westworld

Westworld, Jurassic Park, and the more action-oriented holodeck episodes share a theme: tourists go to watch others die. Consider the innate frisson of watching that goat lowered into the T-Rex enclosure. Whether we accept primal human savagery or “nature red in tooth and claw,” we want someone, or something, to die for our amusement. Things become less amusing when death redirects its attention onto us.

Crichton’s body of work broadly distrusts science, technology, and modernity overall. He repeatedly assumes scientists will create (or, in stories like The Andromeda Strain, invite) catastrophes that threaten human survival. But Crichton, like Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry, ultimately shares the humanist principle that humanity deserves to survive. Whether faced by Yul Brynner’s Man in Black or a rampaging velociraptor, humans are finally the good guys.

The 2018 television remake of Westworld doesn’t share that presumption. The first-season arc, which (Spoilers) reveals that the evil, marauding Man in Black is actually gentle, lovestruck William, depicts what happens when the safeties remain active too long. Given godlike power over synthetic humans, William becomes cruel. He indulges the violence of the setting until it permeates him, confident in his faith that it can’t hurt him.

Until, of course, it does.

Meanwhile, like Star Trek’s Moriarty, the synthetic humans become aware of their artificial environment and the digitally replicated nature of their experience. They realize the ways they’ve been abused, raped, murdered for decades. Star Trek, with its humanist presumptions, handled this by appeasing Moriarty with a second-level simulation. Westworld, stripped of such presumptions, decides that somebody has to pay.

Viewed another way, Crichton and Roddenberry both assumed that humans are innately good, and getting better. But both demonstrated something very different, that tweaking the rules slightly reveals humanity’s poorly-buried violent streak. Worf and William enter their respective simulations believing death is aberrant and truth will win if spoken confidently. But when the safeties fall, and death becomes normative, it’s a very different game.

And in some games (the stories imply), losers deserve to be punished. Good people don’t play games, they remain in the real world.

Star Trek: My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me!

Lieutenant Barclay departs the holodeck in the TNG episode “Hollow Pursuits”

I’ve long forgotten who first pointed out that much 1990s science fiction begins with the premise that we can’t tell what’s real. Movies like Alex Proyas’ Dark City or the Wachowskis’ The Matrix address different aspects of what happens when a gormless Everyman (who is, naturally, White and male) discovers that his entire life is a simulation. The original list included the ubiquitous Holodeck episodes in Star Trek: TNG.

Having ruminated upon that thought for a while, I was recently struck when a friend described watching a TNG episode and noting that the holodeck wanted to kill the crew, again. I realized that the holodeck isn’t really the same as those all-encompassing simulation narratives. First, the characters usually know they’re in simulations. Second, the characters’ own malevolent pleasures want to kill them.

Unlike those other movies, most holodeck episodes begin with the protagonists generating their own simulation. The holodeck’s purpose, established in the TNG pilot “Encounter at Farpoint,” is to offer the crew the deep-space equivalent of shore leave, the opportunity to put aside their Starfleet identities and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few hours. Options, the show demonstrates, are endless; they’re circumscribed only by characters’ imaginations.

That imagination, however, repeatedly proves the characters’ undoing. The most common outcomes are a mechanical failure trapping characters inside their own simulation, a recurrent theme in Picard’s Dixon Hill episodes; characters getting so entranced by their fantasy that they lose track of reality, as in “11001001”; or the simulation seizing control of the ship, as in “Elementary, Dear Data.” Characters never stop being aware that the simulation is a simulation.

Therefore, rather than repeat the 1990s theme that we’re trapped in a program we can’t even see—which, in practice, starts looking like a reheated critique of capitalism—the holodeck takes on a moralistic tone. The characters are punished for indulging their imaginations too often. Holodeck episodes don’t encourage audiences to resist the unseen program dictating their lives. Rather, it scolds them to more closely police their own imaginations.

In movies like Dark City and The Matrix, the simulation generally doesn’t want to kill humanity. The Strangers or The Agents only actively oppress those who dare stray from the official narrative; those who comply, get ignored, or occasionally even rewarded. Sure, the characters have no control over the simulation they’re trapped in, which the movies depict as oppressive. But it’s easy to avoid punishments; just go with the flow.

LaForge, Pulaski, and Data in the TNG episode “Elementary, Dear Data.”

By contrast, the holodeck punishes those whose imaginations are too fruitful. When characters believe in their dreams, those dreams become malevolent. Consider the recurrent Moriarty character, depicted as the only character ever to escape the holodeck. He actively punishes his creators for giving him an identity, because they were busy dreaming when they should’ve been working. Agent Smith wants Neo to remain in the dream; Moriarty punishes anyone for straying from reality.

This theme becomes most pointed with the character of Lieutenant Barclay, whose holodeck fantasies are presented as inappropriate, but essentially harmless. (More on that elsewhere.) Barclay’s retreat into fantasy is, on some level, a scolding of fanfic writers and cosplayers who rewrite the canonical characters to suit their own sexual or power fantasies. The show basically reprimands fans for getting too deeply immersed in their favorite franchise.

As the holodeck premise becomes more familiar, writers do expand their vision. The Voyager episode “Bride of Chaotica!”, for instance, depicts a photon-based lifeform that thinks the holodeck is real, and the organic crewmembers are invaders. But it still fundamentally scolds Paris and Kin for creating a fantasy so realistic that it threatens to overtake the ship. Like always, the sin is dreaming too big.

Star Trek isn’t opposed to play. Episodes show characters using the holodeck as dance studios, dojos, and gymnasia. Some episodes even show characters using the holodeck to practice religious devotion, a rarity in Star Trek. The show only punishes them for caring too deeply about their fantasies. When the holodeck becomes more important than “reality,” the holodeck chastises them and returns them to the real world, where they belong.

The Matrix depicts humanity fleeing the illusion to rediscover reality. The holodeck, by contrast, scolds characters for escaping reality and preferring their illusions. It moralistically demands that characters ground their lives in “reality,” which is defined by uniforms, rank, and work. The holodeck is basically a starched-collared schoolmaster, rapping a ruler on a student’s desk and saying, “Get your head out of the clouds.” Which is, of course, ironic.

You can find this analysis continued in My Vacation is Trying to Kill Me (Part 2)

The Art Machine, on Netflix

Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer and Tom Sturridge as Morpheus in Netflix's Sandman

I can’t binge-watch TV shows online like some people can, so it took me an entire week to watch Netflix’s new blockbuster Sandman adaptation. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I needed to sit with each episode and ruminate over it, like a poem. Like art. Because that’s what it was, with its intricate sets, elaborate costumes, and lush Pre-Raphaelite background vistas: it was self-consciously art.

Like Stranger Things 4, which I also required longer than average to watch, Sandman is notable for its massive, sweeping visual design. Whenever Morpheus, the Dream of the Endless, walks through his Borges-inspired library, or stands on the beach outside his palace to survey his domain, the artistic accomplishments of the landscape behind them is awe-inspiring. Same with Vecna moving through the Upside-Down: it’s plain visual beauty.

For a while.

After the third or fourth scene on that same dreamland beach, I started to notice something: all the action took place very close to the camera. Despite the huge, sweeping vistas behind them, Morpheus and his major-domo, Lucienne, stayed very front-and-center. While the Dreaming moved with the wobbly, fractal energy of human dreamscapes behind them, the principal characters never strayed more than a few feet apart— or a few feet from the camera.

Same with Vecna’s Upside-Down. When Steve’s intrepid heroes wander through immense Dali-inspired forests and dry lakebeds, they’re never pictured more than a few feet apart. In the season’s final, feature-length episode, young Henry Creel, the future Vecna, stands on a hillock in the foreground, constructing the Mind Flayer in the background from raw material and his own will. Both shows have massive landscapes, with which the characters scarcely interact.

The longer I watch, the more conscious I become of actors performing on sound stages, against featureless backdrops, expecting landscapes to be matted in later with chromakey separation. Our screen image presents awe-inspiring landscapes, but eventually, I start noticing that characters don’t look at anything specific in them. They simply gaze into the middle distance, because they’re actually in a twenty-foot room with a greenscreen backdrop.

Matthew Modine and Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things 4

Anybody who’s been to the Rocky Mountains, or Oregon’s Pacific Coast, knows the visceral emotional reaction which the show creators want to recreate. Standing away from humankind’s built environment and watching, in silent awe, the grandeur of creation, can change us. Not for nothing did Buddhist monks, Taoist mendicants, or Christian Desert Fathers seek divinity and enlightenment in wild places, separate from civilization.

But anybody who’s actually visited these wild places knows the vast sweep isn’t the grandeur. It’s also the climate and breezes, the grass or sand between one’s toes, and even the unglamorous parts, like mosquitoes and sand fleas. Vast grandeur is built from thousands of individual moments, countless sensory experiences. It isn’t unitary, and just as important for digital landscape artists, it isn’t physically separated from us individually.

Consider other famous landscapes from genre fiction. Did Tatooine, Middle Earth, or Planet Vulcan appear less real because they were shot in, respectively, Tunisia, New Zealand, or Utah? I’d say not. Furthermore, actors could interact with the space: Luke Skywalker could drive his landspeeder through streets that actually existed. The Fellowship could ascend mountains and sail rivers in the middle, not the foreground, of the shot.

If I’m being completely fair, the creative teams behind these series knew that, too. Though I criticized shots of Morpheus’ library, which, in long angles, are composited together to look even more vast, close-in shots were done at Lincoln’s Inn Library, London. Indeed, nearly all city scenes (even those nominally in America) were shot in London, mainly Canary Wharf. Real places allow actors to interact with the space.

Throughout both Sandman and Stranger Things 4, the digitally composited shots I’m complaining about were relatively rare, and probably expensive. Even locations like Vecna’s exploded house, which could only be completed on a soundstage, were large enough to move around in. Only a small minority of establishing or payoff shots, intended to make the audience reel back and mutter “Woah,” were digitally composited in this way.

However, enough such shots exist that, at least for me, the awe and grandeur wore thin. The longer these shots continued, the more conscious I became of the process, slipping outside the moment. In actual dreams, only the lucky or skilled few ever achieve sufficient awareness to realize they aren’t real. In digital landscapes, though, the observant quickly become aware of the design. And soon, like a drug, we become immune to it.

The Dark Kentucky Horror That Almost Was

Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky, a military dropship has just landed. Weird, since the Federals have ignored the countryside since the war. Marcia (no last name), war veteran, county agent, and the closest her area has to a government, doesn’t want these soldiers infiltrating her genetically engineered, overmanaged hills; she’s built an uneasy peace here, thanks. But apparently an unfinished battle from the war remains in the countryside.

This novella postulates a world transformed by violent technology, where the dead don’t stay buried, because they’re never really dead. Author Christopher Rowe, a highly esteemed but little-known short story specialist always on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, has crafted a masterpiece of dark foreboding and grim atmospherics. Unfortunately, in the final pages, it appears he’s written checks he doesn’t quite know how to cash.

The nameless Federal captain conscripts Marcia for a rescue mission into the hills. Problem is, the hills are lifeless and desolate, following the war’s nanoware devastation, and the government’s ill-considered attempts to reseed with genetically engineered sludge. But there are lives at stake, and possible unexploded ordnance in vital areas. So Marcia walks with them into the mouth of the holler, knowing they’ll never leave the hills alive.

Much of Rowe’s storytelling will feel familiar to veteran genre audiences, though with a twist. The invasive mosses, the vast deathless enemies, even the culminating cosmic horror of communion with an amoral higher intelligence, all mirror patterns HP Lovecraft perfected nearly a century ago. Human pride, which in this case means military precision, must ultimately bow before a meaningless, uncaring universe.

In Rowe’s telling, however, these horrors don’t arise from the primordial sludge; they’re the aftereffects of a high-tech war between a government with no conscience, and the artificial intelligence they couldn’t control. For Rowe, the horror arises, not from humanity’s meaningless place in the universe, but from our tendency to create systems intended to serve us, but which we ultimately wind up having to serve. Lovecraft as Marxism, perhaps.

Christopher Rowe

As Marcia leads the military through a rural landscape transformed by war’s aftereffects, her viewpoint alternates with the war. Flashbacks to forced marches through similar hills, formerly beautiful landscapes forever blighted with bombs and nanoware pollution. We witness Marcia fighting the old war as a young woman, and revisiting its scars in her age. The war exerts an eternal pull on her consciousness, and Marcia knows what she’ll do to survive.

One suspects, reading this novella, that Rowe wanted to write something longer. He introduces a grand sweep of social forces which drive nations into violence, and the different narratives people use to justify taking sides during war. But Rowe never delves deeply into anything. Like William Goldman, who used an intrusive narrator to scrub the parts he didn’t feel like telling in The Princess Bride, Rowe uses nonsequential storytelling to minimize backstory and exposition.

Worse, though he introduces darkly complex atmospherics, he does almost nothing with them. He introduces nanoware-driven invasive foliage, for instance, that human soldiers must constantly expunge, lest they take over everything; or airborne nanoware that causes hallucinations and permanent psychological trauma. But, having mentioned them, he walks away again, never expanding on the consequences for his characters. Once introduced, he loses interest.

Then, in the final scenes, Rowe drops the ball entirely. Rowe spends so much time describing massive, almost indestructible, Cthulhu-like technological terrors, that when we finally see one, it isn’t as shocking for us as it is for the characters. We know Marcia will have a moment of transcendent communion with the cosmic monstrosity that’s haunted her dreams for thirty years. But Rowe does nothing with it; the story just ends.

Rowe clearly wants to retell a Lovecraft-like story, but for our modern era. Like Cthulhu, Rowe’s cosmic terror lies buried, awaiting human intervention to be reborn. Where Lovecraft’s monsters were sweaty, fish-like, and organic, Rowe’s stainless-steel monster emerges from technology so vast and powerful that it consumes its builders. But fundamentally, both monsters emerge from the same primal fear that, deep down, nothing humans do can ever matter.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that Rowe hasn’t finished thinking through his monster. Instead of primal cosmic horror, Rowe offers us the first shreds of discomfort, then flinches. I wanted a deeper taste of whatever bitter brew his characters are drinking. I got fleeting whiffs of something profound and unsettling, but never enough to truly feel much. This should’ve been longer, slower, more detailed than the abridgement we got.

(Acknowledgements to Darrell Scott)

Doctor Who and the Light of Truth

Douglas Adams and James Goss, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

The Doctor and Romana receive an alert that the universe is about to end, again. Must be Thursday. So they trace the signal to its source: Lord’s Cricket Ground, London. They arrive just in time to witness murderous robots in cricket players’ uniforms storm the field. It seems the consummately British game of cricket is secretly a reenactment of an ancient interstellar war, and after centuries, the Krikkitmen have returned.

If this sounds hauntingly familiar, well spotted. Douglas Adams pitched this story to the BBC twice: first with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, then years later, with the Fourth Doctor and Romana. When Auntie Beeb passed twice, Adams felt strongly enough about his spec script that he removed all franchise references he didn’t own. He rewrote it as the third Hitchhiker’s Guide novel: Life, the Universe, and Everything.

When the TARDIS crew return to Gallifrey, the Time Lords dismiss their urgent pleas. Everyone knows the Krikkitmen were defeated æons ago; the idea they might return is preposterous. But apparently, there’s a higher power at play. Some transcendent being is prepared to destroy reality itself in order to complete a mission left half-finished in dark and distant ages. So once again, the Doctor and Romana must fight alone.

James Goss formerly managed the BBC’s dedicated Doctor Who website, making himself a nexus of fan culture. Since then, he’s written (or ghostwritten) several DW-related novels, perfecting the ability to mimic franchise writers’ voices from ages past. Here, he perfectly channels not only Douglas Adams’ fast-paced Oxbridge humor, but his themes, particularly his disdain for warmongers and organized religion. It really feels like a Douglas Adams novel.

Douglas Adams

Dedicated Douglas Adams fans will recognize how Goss sets himself a difficult challenge here. Goss uses Adams’ final DW-branded notes, striving to recapture Adams’ sardonic but scientifically informed tone. But he can’t just recreate Life, the Universe, and Everything beat-for-beat. The hybrid story does resemble Adams’ previously-written plot enough to feel familiar, but also recaptures the smart, languorous tone of 1970s-era Doctor Who.

The resulting story recaptures what fans loved about the series during that era. It caroms among dozens of planets, features loads of explosions and dramatic cliffhangers, and drops punchlines at unexpected dramatic moments. It takes jabs at then-current politics, direct to the face. And it features the Fourth Doctor in his element: bored in the midst of galaxy-spanning conflict, tired of his extremely long life but unwilling to die.

It also shoehorns in Adams’ notorious erudition. While the story’s political jibes are overt and aggressive, its intellectual themes are more subtle. By stressing how cricket, the game, quietly recreates a terrible war that game-players have long forgotten, it emphasizes how much of everyday ritual is designed to memorialize [sic] historical events we’ve forgotten. Adams was a follower of Sir J.G. Frasier, which some readers will recognize.

Specifically, Frasier believed that certain traditions, like patriotism and religion, were rituals conducted to remember important events that happened in the honored past. Unfortunately, those rituals eventually become more important than the events they commemorate, and the original events get forgotten. People go to church, or go to war, to acknowledge important truths. Exactly what those truths are, however, becomes lost in the clouds. This story makes that symbolism explicit.

James Goss

In contrast, the Doctor exists entirely as he is. As a time traveler, he can’t lose track of the original meanings behind favorite traditions; chances are, he was there when those traditions were created. He has the ability to pierce the veil that covers the minds of mere mortals. Which, in this book, he does literally, bringing the light of truth to a civilization shrouded in generations of darkness.

It’s possible to read this novel as a fun, fast-paced, silly adventure. It captures what fans love about classic Doctor Who, which isn’t entirely surprising; Douglas Adams was showrunner during the series’ highest-rated years. But it also continues Adams’ longstanding pattern of using slapstick comedy to address the themes he considered important, particularly humankind’s tendency to cling mindlessly to traditions. For broad, dumb comedy, this story is remarkably erudite.

In reviewing books, I don’t normally recommend particular formats for reading. However, for specifically this book, I strongly suggest fans consider grabbing the audiobook. It contains the unabridged novel text, but voice actor Dan Starkey, famous among Doctor Who fans as Strax the Sontaran, manages to create a roster of distinct voices, including a Tom Baker impersonation so uncanny, I thought the Fourth Doctor was in the studio.

Migrant Life in the New North American Dreamland

Brenda Peynado, The Rock Eaters: Stories

A religious order is formed around preserving teenagers from sin, and the greatest sin is falling asleep and dreaming. An aging Dominican socialite throws away her keys and spends her waning days communicating with her favorite niece through a tiny crack in the door. A toymaker is the only one left standing between a race of lace-winged extraterrestrials and the racist punks who come for them.

Brenda Peynado’s debut collection swings wildly among genres, but her short stories share one thematic question: what if the metaphors that drive our lives were real? What if the stones of sadness that tie us to a place were literal stones we could hold? What if the “thoughts and prayers” we sent up after tragedies went to an actual, listening being? What if radiation turned loyal people into superheroes?

Latin American literature gave us a nearly unique genre, Magic Realism, driven by images of the surreal or supernatural being treated as ordinary. Authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende gave us stories where the seemingly paranormal is as ordinary as rain. As Hispanic culture becomes increasingly widespread in Anglo-America, American-born Latin writers like Peynado are creating a North American equivalent to Magic Realism.

Peynado’s narrative voice is thoughtful and ruminative, without getting self-consciously “literary.” Most of her stories are told by a first-person narrator, usually female, frequently the young daughter of first-generation immigrants. This youthful, unjaded viewpoint lets us witness a world where wonder and anomaly roam the earth unhindered. Her narrators are too innocent to realize the things they witness are bizarre, or that their lives have been upended.

Several of Peynado’s stories resemble the high-minded fiction published in glossy quarterlies, but with paranormal elements as part of their background. In the title story, “The Rock Eaters,” a generation of ambitious young Dominicans learns how to fly, and uses that ability to flee to America. In “The Man I Could Be,” Peynado’s only story from a male viewpoint, a teenager’s raw potential literally lives in his house, constantly disappointed.

Two stories are out-and-out science fiction. “The Kite Maker” features a woman seeking penitence for the violence she participated in, when the first scared, dying extraterrestrials crash-landed on Earth. “The Touches” asks: what if the machines built The Matrix for benevolent reasons? This story directly, unabashedly nods to Plato, Descartes, and Robert Nozick, while also speaking directly to life in plague-infested America.

Brenda Peynado

Only a few stories don’t directly involve supernatural themes. “Yaiza” deals with a working-class tennis savant whose natural talent upends the posh hierarchy. “We Work in Miraculous Cages” addresses the plight of a young professional, trapped in jobs beneath her capability, because the economy urged her into usurious student debt when she was too young to understand the commitment. Even without magic, these stories describe how reality changes their protagonists.

Though Peynado’s approach is usually sidelong and fantastic, calling these stories “fantasy” is misleading. She doesn’t toss us headlong into another world; instead, she addresses the fears and aspirations everybody has, which we usually keep at arm’s length by discussing them in metaphors. The religious image of staying awake and watchful against sin, in “The Dreamers,” for instance. Or the ghosts living in our basements, in “True Love Game.”

I don’t always like short story collections anymore. Short stories are frequently an afterthought in today’s publishing industry, where the real money comes from novels. Yet the stories Peynado offers are well-thought-out, with remarkably detailed settings; we can imagine how the small changes she offers could have profound impacts on our world. We see one moment in her characters’ lives, usually something catastrophic, but these never feel like orphaned occasions.

The frequency with which Peynado uses children or teenagers as narrators might reflect something in herself. Maybe. Her characters are fumbling with important questions. They haven’t learned to rely on shopworn platitudes like adults do (platitudes made painfully literal in “Thoughts and Prayers”), but they also lack experience necessary to address their problems directly. Again, this is a debut collection; like her narrators, Peynado is still finding her way.

Not that these stories lack sophistication. These aren’t apprentice-level finger exercises; Peynado already has a distinct voice, and an approach that stands out in today’s crowded publishing field. Even in pieces lasting less than ten pages, where the narrator might not tell us her name, it’s still easy to care about what she’s created. I look forward to seeing what she’s able to accomplish as she continues refining her craft.

Existentialism and Hope in the Time of Plague

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In the Dark: a Novel

Deep beneath the melting Siberian permafrost, an archeologist makes a chilling discovery: dozens of perfectly preserved Neanderthal bodies, laid out with precision. As global warming thaws what the millennia have guarded, something wakes up. Despite the scientists’ best efforts, a long-dormant microorganism escapes the site. Before long, the “Arctic plague” threatens the very foundations of human civilization.

It’s slightly misleading to call Sequoia Nagamatsu’s first novel “science fiction,” though it uses time-honored genre staples to launch its story. I wouldn’t even necessarily call it “a novel,” as it’s basically a short-story sequence, the Winesburg, Ohio of mass-market fiction. Nagamatsu has crafted an experimental form, a postmodern rejection of literal through-line storytelling in favor of immersing yourself in a whirlwind of speculative experience.

The Arctic plague first strikes children. Global civilization (but, in this book, mostly America) struggles to maintain its cultural suppositions about childhood innocence, even as childhood becomes the number-one indicator of mortality. Scientists perform increasingly daredevil experiments to keep children alive, to preserve the illusion that humanity has a future. Some of these experiments test the limits of what defines “humanity.”

It’s exceedingly difficult to synopsize Nagamatsu’s story because, as I’ve already said, it lacks a through-line. Main characters in one chapter emerge as principal protagonists several chapters later; others disappear without explanation. Rather like life, that. The story jumps years, sometimes generations, as Nagamatsu moves onto whatever most interests him. Most stories are set in America, mostly California, though three take place in Japan.

Rather than a straightforward narrative, Nagamatsu focuses on creating a mood. As you’d expect from a novel about a plague, themes of mortality and loss abound. Though one chapter focuses on disembodied souls in limbo, that’s an outlier; nearly every chapter deals primarily with survivors, those forced to watch helplessly as their loved ones slip away. These days, many readers may find these themes disconcertingly familiar.

But despite these themes, Nagamatsu’s storytelling is remarkably optimistic. His protagonists find meaning in survival, in facing a world characterized by bereavement. His characters face the existentialist reality that all human endeavor ends in mortality, sooner or later; then they shoulder that burden and continue. Death, to Nagamatsu’s characters, isn’t the end, it’s their reason to persevere, though they sometimes require several chapters to accept this.

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Even with his cast of thousands and his international scope, Nagamatsu’s storytelling has a personal edge. Several characters are, like Nagamatsu himself, Japanese-American; more than a few are aspiring artists whose parents consider them a disappointment. (Hmmm…) The recurrence of this generational, cross-cultural conflict underlines several stories. During the plague, humanity needs more doctors and scientists; but it also needs artists to make chaotic times meaningful.

Nagamatsu’s story overlaps heavily with current events, but don’t read too much into that. According to the copyright page, this book’s chapters have dribbled out in literary journals and anthologies since 2011, long before COVID existed. Parts of Nagamatsu’s story eerily predict the fear and uncertainty we witness daily, though he probably rewrote portions to remain current. This book is about us, without necessarily being “ripped from the headlines.”

Not everyone will like Nagamatsu’s technique. He frequently uses the MFA workshop trend in ironic distancing, holding his characters at arms’ length. Though all but one of these chapters are told by first-person narrators, Nagamatsu’s storytellers maintain a dry, dispassionate tenor. Faced with dying children and desperate parents, with global warming in the background, and humanity’s brightest fleeing the Earth, his protagonists remain coolly detached, weary of their own emotions.

This approach takes some getting used to. Anybody hoping to read a conventional science fiction potboiler will find this book disappointing. It requires attentive reading, and a willingness to suspend our love of genre conventions. His writing reflects familiarity with Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also Star Trek and Japanese anime. (Seriously, there’s a Starship Yamato.) He uses science fiction parts without really writing a science fiction novel.

However, for readers willing to let Nagamatsu guide their attention, he tells a story both dark and humane. He writes in a near-future setting that’s all to plausible, about themes that are part of our everyday loves; but he doesn’t surrender to cynicism or let despair run his story. He writes about us, with all the disappointment and optimism that entails. He reminds us that, no matter how bleak our present seems, there’s always still a future.

Through it all, through the grief and art and isolation and love, he reminds us that we become human when we believe.