1949 – THE HUMANOIDS by Jack Williamson

In the 1943 story “With Folded Hands,” Jack Williamson first created the humanoids, sleek black robots whose “Prime Directive” is “to Serve and Obey, and guard men from harm” (it would’ve been great if this bit of gendered language had saved women from humanoid intervention, but that’s asking a lot from a 1940s story).  As the story unfolds, we see that the robots take their Directive a little too seriously, and they create a totalitarian state which carefully monitors everyone’s behavior and drugs or lobotomizes people who refuse to properly avoid potential harm. It’s a dark take on the trade-offs between security and freedom, and a relatively early take (maybe the first?) on what has become a well-worn technophobic trope. “With Folded Hands” may be Williamson’s signature work – it’s probably his most anthologized.

Rather than an expansion or reimagining of the novella, Williamson revisited the concept with a full-on novel-length sequel, The Humanoids, serialized in three parts in John Campbell’s Astounding in 1949. In the process he adds lots of new concepts and themes and comes up with a work that rapidly flits between ideas and never really finds a center.

We learn that the Humanoids were created over ten thousand years in the future, after humanity has spread across the stars and created scores of different planetary cultures (this background isn’t very apparent in the original story, though in both we do learn that the robots were created after a devastating war on the planet Wing IV). The planet Starmont is in a sort of cold war with the totalitarian Triplanet Powers. In his finest speculative moment, Williamson comments on the burgeoning Cold War by warning that “threatened with the inevitable fruit of its own exported know-how, the democratic republic was already sacrificing democracy as it armed itself desperately.” The technology in question is rhodomagnetics, which is like magnetism, but works on interstellar distances and allows Williamson to break Einsteinian laws of physics whenever necessary.

Our protagonist is Dr. Clay Forester*, the world’s foremost expert on rhodomagnetics. At the beginning of the novel, a group of powerful psychics, including a young girl who can teleport vast distances named Jane Carter, contact Forester and warn him that the humanoids are coming. Forester is skeptical of psychic phenomena and wary that these strangers know so much of his research. When the humanoids do land, Forester does little; they are around to help after all, and they promise to remove the threat of the Triplanet Alliance. Then, they begin forbidding science (which could be used to make weapons) and drugging people who are hostile or depressed, including Forester’s neglected wife. Forester’s only hope to defeat the humanoids is to turn to the team of psychics and attempt to unlock the powers within his own mind.

*Yes, for the entire novel I imagined him looking like this:

Yep, it’s psychics versus robots! And it gets weirder from there. I’m not sure if it’s just the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink nature of Golden Age sf (John Campbell’s fingerprints are all over this story – he was a big fan of “unleashing the psychic powers of the human mind” stories), or maybe it’s a case of a serialized story going off the tracks due to lack of planning, but this is a real mess. The pacing is bizarre, as Williamson zips by the key moments (like the humanoid takeover of Starmont society); characters disappear (the entire psychic team mostly fades away after an elaborate introduction – wherefore art thou, Graystone the Great?); and plotlines are foreshadowed without paying off (there are lots of hints about the mysterious origin of Forester’s friend Ironsmith, but he’s really just a robot-loving, wife-stealing jerk). The ending is also a bit of a mess – there’s some intentional ambiguity, but there also seems to be some confusion about the political message.

However, despite this messiness, I really enjoyed this book. It juggles interesting concepts and has some big sf set-piece moments. Overall, the book has a real “anything goes” Big Idea attitude that is both its greatest virtue and failure.

Grade: B+  

2009 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – WALL-E

Normally, I’d cover this category in the first week of covering a year, but this is actually my last “catch-up” review (at least, unless I start tackling short fiction Hugo winners somewhere down the line), and I wanted to end on a high note. And it doesn’t get much higher than this.

I adore this movie; that’s about the only way to describe my reaction to it. It’s my favorite Pixar film, and that’s saying a lot. It’s a masterpiece of animation, of science fiction, just of film in general. It takes place in the 28th century, on an Earth so polluted that it has become inhospitable to life. Robots have been given the task of collecting the mountains of trash that litter (pun!) the planet and condense and stack them, but most of the robots (called “Wall-E” units) have worn out, except for one resourceful little guy who replaces his own worn out parts. He manages to find some pleasure in his dreary work, collecting little pieces that amuse him to decorate a little lair. He also loves “Hello Dolly!” One day, a more advanced, feminine robot shows up to look for plant life, and Wall-E falls in love. When they do discover a sprout, a spaceship picks them up, and they end up running around on a space cruiseship amidst a decadent consumer culture of the surviving humans as they try to trigger a recolonization and renewed clean-up of Earth.

The robots all have limited speech, yet they get most of the screentime, so the film is short on dialog, and yet it moves briskly and manages to entertain and keep forward momentum. I haven’t seen physical storytelling this funny, effective and powerful outside of Charlie Chaplin. And, Wall-E does a great job balancing a bleak vision of future Earth, right out of those ‘70s eco-dystopias, with the beauty in the trash. Nothing hits my aesthetic sweet-spot quite like a sense of wonder, hope or love in the midst of ruin and despair, and few movies hit that sweet-spot as perfectly as this. It’s also a rich sf film full of references to the sf canon: 2001, Star Wars, and, hey, Sigourney Weaver even makes an appearance. There are lots of cool rockets and robots to boot. I can’t say that the film asks probing speculative questions about robot emotions – Wall-E and EVE are in love; deal with it.

The film isn’t particularly nuanced or detailed in the environmental questions it raises either. There’s a satire of consumerism with the brand Buy N’ Large (fronted by the almost-always welcome Fred Willard), but it’s pretty broad. Also, of all the environmental problems we face, burying ourselves in trash really isn’t one of them – landfills may be an eyesore that no one wants in their backyard, but there is ample space for our trash. But, mountains of trash and yellow noxious sky serve as a strong enough metaphor. People may have found the critiques here heavy-handed, but, considering the state of climate change legislation in the US, maybe people do need to be smacked in the head with broad metaphors. Again and again. And then some more. And the film, for all of the dirty, trashy, hopeless world it depicts, still gives us that sprout, and still has its bloated consumerist humans stand up for hope in the end. And I love it for that.

Grade: A

2001 Saturn SF – AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I have been looking forward to rewatching this film since I added the Saturns to my reviews – not because I enjoyed it so much the first time…in fact, I hated it.  I just really wanted to make sure that I hated it.

This film has as good a science fiction pedigree as you can get.  It began as a project by Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg decided to complete it himself after Kubrick’s death; it’s based on a short story by British sf legend Brian Aldiss called “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long;” and, it concerns the very Asimovian question of whether a robot artificial intelligence can love, and, more importantly in this case, would he be loved back?

In a catastrophic future caused by global warming, there are strict population controls.  Some people choose to fill the gap left by not having children with robotic “mecha” children.  David (Haley Joel Osment) is a prototype with the aforementioned lovin’ upgrade.  He is placed with a couple whose real son is on deep freeze, and they come to like him.  They allow David to imprint on them, but when their real son comes back, David is a fourth wheel (cars in this future have three wheels, get it?), and the mother leaves him in the woods with his robotic teddy bear.  Inspired by his mother’s dramatic readings of Pinocchio, David goes off to find the Blue Fairy and become a real boy.  He meets sex-bot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), who joins him on his quest.

The visuals are pretty fantastic, and there’s a few human-face-on-robotic-chassis effects that were pretty cutting edge ten years ago.  That’s really the nicest thing I can say about the film.  Yep, I still didn’t like it.

I have several problems with it.  Haley Joel Osment’s performance is impressive, but in a creepy way.  Watching him in this film is just plain unsettling, as you suspect he may actually be a robot (the Child-Actortron 3000).  An even bigger problem is the pacing.  Kubrick hadn’t gotten past the story stage, so this is mostly Spielberg, but he tried hard to do a Kubrick impression. That’s where the film starts to fail, I think.  He begins with a much more deliberate pace and imbues every scene with a weighty sense of suspense or dread.  These are old Kubrickian tricks, but I think only Kubrick can pull them off.    

The movie suffocates under this weightiness, it’s slow, depressing, and dull, and it doesn’t have nearly as much to say as it seems to think it does.  What is the message?  What do we learn?  People are mean to robots?  Spielberg is good at sentimentality?  People will wear glow sticks in the future?  The future will look like Las Vegas meets a State Fair?  I don’t know. The movie actually feels very New Wavey, which makes sense with the Brian Aldiss roots, but it’s the worst of New Wave misanthropy and pretension.

After meandering for two hours, the film does take a crazy left turn in the last half hour, that’s…well, at least it’s interesting.  There are a lot of contrivances to get the film to an awkward sense of closure that only barely mitigates the slow-burn creepiness that bogs down most of its running time.

Grade: C-

2011 Not-a-Hugo Nominee: Dram. Pres., Short Form CAPRICA

Caprica was a fascinating show. Its ideas and themes were fascinating, how it presented them was fascinating, and its utter failure was perhaps most fascinating of all.

Let me start out by saying: I like Caprica. I wasn’t always sure that I did, but, in the final analysis, I liked it a great deal. Here’s the shocker: I liked it better than Battlestar Gallactica, and I’m more likely to revisit it in the future.

Caprica takes place some seventy years before the Battlestar reboot, and it tracks the creation of the robotic cylons. The series follows three families connected by terrorism. Daniel Greystone (Eric Stoltz) runs the massive corporation that makes highly popular virtual reality goggles. His daughter Zoe (Alessandra Torressni) is a genius who designs an artificial copy of herself. His wife, Amanda (Paula Macolmson), gets into some zany hijinks over the course of the series. The Adama family are immigrants to Caprica from Tauron. Joseph (Esai Morales) tries to assimilate while his brother Sam remains involves in Tauron crime family activities. Joseph has a son named William, a name that should be familiar to BSG fans. Zoe, and Joseph’s wife and daughter Tamara, are killed in a terrorist attack on a shuttle orchestrated by monotheists. Clarice Willow (Polly Walker) is the local monotheistic mastermind; she’s part of a large polygamous family. Zoe was a devotee of Clarice, and her surviving friend, Lacy (Magda Aponowicz), ends up getting drawn into Clarice’s plans as well.

That was probably hard to follow if you haven't seen the show - basically, it's an exploration of robotics and VR in a society riven with decadence and religious conflict. It’s also sprawling family drama with a meandering plot. It doesn’t have the clear-cut character and plot hooks of BSG, where humankind is running for its life and most of the characters are obsessed, crazy, and/or take-no-prisoners badasses. Caprica is more complex, which is why I liked it better, and probably why it failed. On top of that, you have BSG fatigue (that last half season was weird), and the overall change from an action show to a highly speculative family drama. Prequelitis shouldn’t really be a factor – we know so little about the start of the cylon war that there’s plenty of surprises possible, and the character you’re least likely to think can die actually does. Still, the show has so many strikes against it, it’s failure seems like a foregone conclusion in hindsight.

Not to mention the fact that the show is far from perfect. The first half can move extremely slowly, while the second half (with cancellation looming) zooms at an insane pace. The plots, as I mentioned, seem to wander around randomly. Amanda’s story is especially indicative of this – she’s with Daniel, then she’s not, then she is again. She hates Zoe, she loves Zoe, she has to expose Zoe, she has to save Zoe. She’s suicidal. She’s dead? She’s an undercover agent? Paula Macolmson is a trooper through it all, but the character really is a trainwreck. There’s a similar stop and start/back and forth with Joseph Adama and the avatar of his dead daughter Tamara. And, they can’t seem to decide if Daniel is pure evil or misguided and overconfident.

So, it does go off the rails on occasion, but the show has a lot to offer. The VR culture is interesting and compelling, and this may be the finest realization of cyberpunk themes on television ever. The show also does much more to establish the twelve colonies setting in one season than BSG did in four. One of my biggest complaints about BSG is that it never felt like a coherent universe. The twelve colonies on Caprica are still a bit too similar to our own Earth, but at least we get some more details about the different ethnicities and their traditions. The look of the show is fantastic as well.

Recommended episodes:

“Pilot” – The show is heavily serialized, so you have to start at the beginning. I also think that this is where the show went wrong with the audience, who were expecting something different. If you go in with an open mind, I think the show’s potential is clearer. Grade: A-

“There is Another Sky” – My favorite episode of the series explores the virtual version of Caprica City for some cyberpunk action. Grade: A

“Dirtearters” – An exploration of Tauron history through Sam and Joseph’s childhoods. This episode really offers that grounded exploration of ethnicity that I found lacking in BSG, which was more likely to bring up characters ethnicities out of the blue to serve melodramatic one-off plots late in later seasons. Grade: B+

“Here There Be Dragons”/“Apotheosis” – The premature conclusion of the series does its best to tie up loose ends and bridge the gap with BSG. It works surprisingly well, and the ending montage is especially effective. Grade: B+

Overall series grade: B

1998 Hugo and Nebula – FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman

1977’s Forever War won both the Hugo and Nebula and is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. I wasn’t sure it lived up to the hype, but I did like it, and it’s stayed with me since I read it. This novel is not a sequel to that earlier book – it takes place in an entirely different world; in keeping with the times, it’s much less space opera and much more cyberpunk – but it’s at its best when it evokes the same sense of war and world weariness that seems to have come from Haldeman’s experiences in the Vietnam War.

It’s 2043 and nanotechnology provides everyone in developed countries with all of their basic needs…though not always particularly well. Another common technology is mental ”jacking” which allows people to link their minds to others’ or to machines. The novel’s narrator, Julian Class, is an African-American man who uses his jack to remotely control a “soldierboy” fighting robot, deployed in an intractable war with most of the southern hemisphere (Julian spends most of his time fighting in Central America and Colombia). A linked group of rebels under the banner of “Ngumi” provide the ubiquitous enemy there, and they have also managed a nuclear attack on Atlanta (though there are suggestions that elements within the US government have worked to continue the war). Between missions, Julian is able to fly back to his home in Texas and observe the media coverage of the war, which most Americans follow like a sport. You could say that the Ngumi War is a kind of “War on Terror,” and Forever Peace shows excellent foresight on this front.

Piloting a soliderboy, and fighting the Ngumi terrorists, causes a great deal of mental stress, and Julian is especially tormented by the experience. He’s often on the verge of suicide. The first half of the novel allows us to see Julian in military actions, effectively portrays his own unhappiness, and establishes a richly drawn future America. In the second half, his older girlfriend Amelia Harding takes on a larger role as her own scientific research raises the stakes of ongoing war. The titular “forever peace” refers to a sort of pacifist revolution that Julian joins, as well as the possibility of death or even the end of the world, which Amelia’s research shows to be a real possibility. I found this second half much weaker. Actually, it’s flat-out bad. There are a lot of contrivances in how the bigger threats and possible resistance emerge; Julian knows exactly the right people to move the plot along. And, as the plot gets bigger and crazier, it simultaneously becomes a by-the-numbers thriller with some rather generic villains (a sexy fundamentalist-Christian super-assassin, in particular, is very over-the-top, and she takes over the novel in the last hundred pages).

The novel does fall down because of these second-half problems. It’s certainly no Forever War. It is very well-written though, and there’s an interesting trick with the narration, which occasionally switches to third person-omniscient rather suddenly (though I did think this kind of gave away the ending). More importantly, just like Forever War, it’s a very wise cautionary tale that relates closely to the world of today. Haldeman knows war, and he knows how to convey its horrors. Throw in an excellent first half and a host of interesting ideas, and I would recommend this novel, despite its weaknesses. Maybe quit around page 150…

Grade: B-

1993 Arthur C. Clarke – HE, SHE, AND IT by Marge Piercy

I’m surprised by how little I get to talk about robots on this blog.

This novel, like the first winner of the Clarke award, The Handmaid’s Tale, generally fell under most people’s “literary fiction” rubric – which meant that the other science fiction prizes ignored it. Regardless of both this fact and Piercy’s own efforts to distinguish herself from the genre, it does exemplify some of the trends of the era while making some classic sf observations.

The novel takes place in 2059. Global warming and pollution have ravaged the Earth (it’s like we’re back in the 70s!) making most of the planet’s surface unlivable. Corporations control a few domed livable spaces, there are a few utopian “free towns” with their own domes and socio-political structures, and then there are dystopian hellholes of rampant poverty like “the glop” that sprawls over most of the East Coast of North America. The central character, Shira Shipman, resigns from one of the corporate domes after a nasty divorce and retires to her home of Tivka, an idyllic little Jewish free-town in what was once Massachusetts. Once there, she learns that her grandmother Malkah has become involved in a project to construct a powerful and detailed humanoid robot (called a “cyborg” in the novel) known as Yod. Unfortunately, the creation of so humanoid a cyborg is illegal, and it also draws the interest of corporate saboteurs from Shira’s former employers. When Yod develops romantic feelings for Shira, things get even more complicated.

It’s a very nice character piece that creates a very rich environment for Shira. She has troubled or complicated relationships with her mother, ex-husband, ex-lover, her ex-lover’s father, her mother’s lover, and her son, and all of these come into play in interesting and believable ways as the novel goes on. Piercy gives us intermittent chapters narrated by Malkah that tell the story of a golem in Prague circa 1600 AD, and this story is a nice contretemps to Yod’s while being quite good in itself. The emotional world of the novel feels very real. I would say there’s a bit of romance wish-fulfillment in Yod – a strong, heroic, dependable, and devoted man who loves Shira and will always love her without wavering. Considering how often typically male fantasies have dominated sf, I don’t think I have any right to complain, especially since Piercy shows an acute awareness of this aspect of the novel.

It’s a good novel, but I’m not sure it’s as good a science fiction novel. I’m not trying to draw arbitrary genre lines here, but I do think the novel is good at examining its characters and not nearly as good at examining sf concepts. The people have texture and complexity; the ideas not as much. While the rapid environmental deterioration seems exaggerated and Piercy avoids the technological details of the simulated computer environments into which characters can readily slip, all of these aspects of the world are still richly realized. Honestly, I’d rather avoid the Stephenson-style explanation of virtual environments if it’s not a major plot point. But, I’m still left with the question of what this dystopian world does other than provide convenient challenges for the characters.

A larger problem in the same vain is with Yod himself. The question of whether a sentient robot has rights is one of the sf classics, from Capek’s invention of the concept to Asimov's stories in the 1940s to Star Trek’s Data in the years just before this novel came out. This novel doesn’t add to this debate – Piercy’s position seems to be “of course Yod is sentient because I say so and any of my characters who question his rights are stupid jerks.” That’s fine, I guess. She’s not doing a remake of an Asimov story; she’s telling Shira’s story. Still, I expected Piercy to have more to say about gender, especially considering the title. This is considered a work of feminist science fiction, but other than early depictions of the corporate world’s dismissal of Shira’s talents and rights as a mother, it’s much more about the politics of sex. There’s a lot of discussion of who’s had sex with whom and why, but not much of an examination of what that all means in this speculative world. There are even some references to Yod’s feminine aspects that seem somewhat reductive – being sensitive and wanting to be held are feminine aspects attributed to Malkah’s programming while we can blame Yod’s propensity for callous violence on his male builder, Avram. There’s not much discussion of how these roles are culturally constructed or how Yod’s existence changes our understanding of them.

In summation, it’s a strong tale with some of the finest character work you’ll find in sf, and I would recommend it. I just couldn’t escape the feeling that it could have been so much more.

Grade: B+

1992 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation and 1991 Saturn – TERMINATOR 2

The second (and FINAL!) Terminator film is another one of those sequels that’s better than it has any right to be. The scenario of the first film is pretty self-contained: woman runs from killer robot and survives. Sending another killer robot risks repeating the whole thing. Doing it with a huge budget and new special effects techniques threatens to bog the film down in mindless spectacle. Part of the charm of the first Terminator is that it’s a small budget, extended chase. It’s taut and intimate like a good horror flick. T2 threatens to be bloated and unnecessary, but, instead, Cameron manages to build on the mythology he created in the first movie.

John Connor is now a young, troubled teenager. In the future, Skynet decides to make a second attempt at destroying him with a more advanced Terminator – the liquid metal T1000 (Robert Patrick). This time, future Connor sends back a reprogrammed Terminator to protect him (Schwarzenegger). You could cynically see this as future politician Schwarzenegger redeeming his most villainous role, but the character’s conversion does make for some fun moments, especially in his interactions with Connor. The T1000 exists mainly to provide cgi shots; at the time they were so revolutionary, and thus so expensive, that this film infamously destroyed Orion Studios financially. In less than a decade, people could do the same thing on home pcs.

However, the film’s real genius comes through the journey that it takes Sarah Connor on (Linda Hamilton reprises her role). The directionless waitress of the first film has become dedicated to training her son for the apocalypse. She’s tough, well-trained, and ruthless, but she also spends most of her time contemplating fate. She knows that the world will explode in a few years, and she’ll do anything to prepare for it…or maybe stop it. I think Connor might be Cameron’s greatest achievement as a filmmaker. Sure, he’s made a few billion dollar films and revolutionized special effects filmmaking two or three times, but Connor is the kind of vivid and complicated, tough female character that I’d really like to see a lot more of.

If I had a complaint, it might be about the film’s casual violence. There are actually jokes made about assaulting and shooting innocent people (e.g., “He’ll live.”) It actually doesn’t bother me all that much, though I do have the nagging feeling that it should.

So, the effects were great, and they still look good, even if they should not have cost quite so much. There are several fantastic action set-pieces, interesting characters, and a further exploration of time travel/destiny. I’m solidly in the camp that this is a far better film than its predecessor, although I know a lot of people who are in the other camp.

And they never made anything else in the Terminator franchise….

Grade: A

1984 Saturn - THE TERMINATOR

Yes, there was a time when James Cameron had to work with budgets under $200 million, and his films generally made less than a billion dollars. The Terminator had a relatively low budget of $6.5 million, and there are times when it feels like a low rent action flick…I think mostly because so many low rent action flicks (starring the likes of Dolphe Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme) have imitated it.

The plot, for those who are somehow unaware, follows a struggling young waitress in LA named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who is being chased by two naked men from the future. One of them is a steroid-sculpted cold-blooded killer and future governor (Arnold Schwarzeneggar). The other is a scruffy dude named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). Schwarzeneggar kills a whole mess of people, but Reese protects Connor and eventually tells her that he is from a war-torn future that only her womb can save. But that damn Terminator keeps coming!

‘70s films were obsessed with overpopulation and ecological disasters. ‘80s films were obsessed with the threat of humanoid robots. This seems kind of bizarre, considering that a quarter century later we still can’t really make a robot that can walk on two-feet or understand human language the way that we do, but I guess robots were changing the world economy in the ‘80s – propelling Japan to near superpower status and speeding the erosion of America’s industrial base. I don’t remember people really talking about it at the time (and mechanization seemed to be a much more explicit worry of ‘50s and ‘60s sf), but maybe Blade Runner and The Terminator are playing on these sub-conscious fears. Maybe an even more likely explanation is that this is a manifestation of anxiety about the growing importance of computers.

Anyway, the film is pretty thrilling; it’s really more of a horror film than an action film. I think the low-budget feel works to the film’s advantage, though the big ending has aged pretty poorly (stop-motion fx!). The scenes in the future are among the best, and I wish that Cameron had made a film about the resistance in the '90s instead of McG's in the '00s. The film even manages to say some interest things about destiny (and creates a nice time loop). The score is terrible though – the signature rhythm is great and unforgettable, but the rest is awful synthesizer music (just try not to laugh at the music that accompanies Linda Hamilton’s first appearance).

Cameron’s Avatar has been accused of ripping off a whole host of stories, films, comic books, concept albums, performance art pieces, dream journals, etc. He actually set a precedent for this here in his first real film. Harlan Ellison sued, claiming that the story ripped off two of his Outer Limits episodes: “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand,” and now all releases say “acknowledging the works of Harlan Ellison” at the beginning of the end credits.

Grade: B+

1983 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation - BLADE RUNNER

People will endlessly tell you that Blade Runner is a brilliant exploration of identity and artificiality in a corporate universe. It is those things, though I’d have to say that the source material, Philip K. Dick’s amazing novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, explores these themes in much more daring and challenging ways. No, the real brilliance and influence of Blade Runner is the rich world that Scott creates for the story and characters to inhabit. Every time I watch it, I find myself almost ignoring the plot and characters to stare at the sets and art direction. The city is gorgeously dark and forboding with its giant ad blimps, stark pyramidal mega-buildings, and flying cars zooming through polluted darkness. Scott also does a great job blending noir and sf. This film almost single-handedly plants the seeds for the genre of cyberpunk.

In 2019, Los Angeles is a densely populated, overcast, polluted hellhole in a world run by amoral corporations. Lifelike robots called replicants have been invented to serve humanity, especially in space, but these robots have a tendency to rebel. Some escape and try to blend in to the human population. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a blade runner, tasked with finding and “retiring” rogue replicants. Deckard is drawn out of retirement to hunt a group of replicants that are trying to extend their brief lives. He also begins to fall in love with an especially complex replicant named Rachel (Sean Young), in the film’s best scenes.

I’ll readily admit the film’s greatness, though I’m personally not as fond of it as most sf fans. Really, anytime the replicants Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy (Rutger Hauer) are at the center of attention, my eyes glaze over…and that’s most of the film’s final third. I think Scott was more interested in creating threatening villains than exploring the aforementioned complexities of identity. So, these replicants spend all of their time threatening and killing (and flipping around and punching Harrison Ford), and we don’t get much of a sense of the emotions they’ve developed or the moral complexities of their situation. On paper, this should be a very ambivalent situation, but Scott can’t resist a brutally physical confrontation between “good” and “evil” at the film’s climax. Things do thankfully get more complex at the end of the fight between Roy and Deckard, but that only serves to make the preceding twenty minutes of flipping, punching, and shooting feel all the more pointless. The film has gone through several different cuts, but I’m still yet to see one that’s paced well. But, the subtext is there if you look for it, and, most importantly, the film looks gorgeous.

1982 was a great year for science fiction films. It also saw the release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is still the best Star Trek film, in my opinion, and easily one of the top five science fiction films of the ‘80s. Still, it’s hard to argue with Blade Runner beating it for the Hugo. I’m not as keen on E.T. beating both Khan and Blade Runner for the Saturn, but that is an understandable decision as well.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo, Campbell, and BSFA, 2009 Nebula Winner: THE WINDUP GIRL by Paulo Bacigalupi

My Hugo votes are in (the deadline is this weekend), and we're in the homestretch of our coverage!

In early 2008, high oil prices led to food riots in more than a dozen countries around the world. Paulo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, focuses on these sorts of connections between food and energy within the framework of globalization. In this future dystopia, the world has suffered a "calorie crisis" in which both fossil fuels and food sources have been exhausted by over-consumption, climate change, and genetically modified organisms gone wild. Electricity is a luxury. So is fruit. The automobile is virtually extinct. People depend on genetically modified animals such as mammoth-like "megadonts" to do much of their work. And, there are myriad new killer diseases that can ravage a population.

Bacigalupi sets the action in Thailand, a nation that has survived the worst destructions of the contraction caused by the calorie crisis with some nationalist and sometimes isolationist policies. Yet, it's still vulnerable to the big agribusiness/bioengineering firms of the West, the Calorie Companies. Bacigalupi writes in third person, but he alternately focuses on four interconnected storylines: Anderson Lake is an American "Calorie man" (or economic hit-man) whose duty is to gain access to Thailand's seed bank. Lake's employee, Hock Seng is an ethnic Chinese refugee from Malaysia who has lost everything and will do anything to regain success as a business man. Jaidee and his assistant Kanya work in the Ministry of Environment and try to protect Thailand from foreign business interests and their own government's corruption. Finally, Emiko is a "windup girl" from Japan. She has been genetically modified to serve as a sex slave, and she is hated and horribly abused for her differences. All of the characters face a series of dramatic crises that eventually explode with major geopolitical implications.

The Windup Girl is the heir to Stand on Zanzibar. Bacigalupi takes a set of contemporary problems and an understanding of global politics and projects forward a worse case scenario for a dystopian future. It's a chilling vision, but also a fairly grounded one. That's not to say it's a likely future (most alternative energy sources are inexplicably missing), but much of it is plausible, and thus it has a lot to say about the world we live in.

The characters are very complex - they all do terrible things, and they're all obsessed with their own success or survival. Yet, they also all got moments of compassion and redemption. There was some talk recently on the social science blog Crooked Timber as to whether Bacigalupi's Asian characters fall into stereotypes, and I'll admit to having a similar reaction early in the novel. Hock Seng, especially, seemed like a duplicitous schemer right out of a yellow peril story from a hundred years ago. As the novel continues, though, I do think that Bacigalupi presents some very complex motives and personalities for the characters that pushed them beyond stereotype. It's the kind of book where I didn't necessarily *like* any of the characters, but I had moments of sympathy and understanding with all of them.

Bacigalupi is also a great writer, though there seemed to be more lyrical moments in the first half than the second. Overall, I likes the beginning of the book more than the end. It's such an unremittingly bleak picture that it did begin to drag me down. It eventually begins to feel like more of an anti-GMO, anti-neocolonialism screed than a novel with rich characters and insight into the human condition - the characters still shine, but they also get ground under heel to the point that they almost fade to the background. But, that's true for most of the great dystopian novels.

Despite the bleakness, I can understand why this novel has received the praise and awards that it has. It's a cautionary tale with rich prose that exposes the moral conundrums of global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, and genetic engineering through fascinating characters. The Windup Girl is a pretty clear contender for the best science fiction novel of 2009.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo nominee, novelette: "Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09)

I thought this was one of the most successful short stories I’ve read from the nominees so far this year. The title refers to three of the Greek words for “love;” they distinguished between romantic love, familial love, and a sort of deeper love (important to know when you’re, say, translating the Bible, most of the original of which was in Greek). The distinctions are pretty clear even to we modern non-Greeks, though the lines also blur in interesting ways, and this story really focuses on when and where those blurrings take place.

So, it’s a love story, and the focus switches between the two lovers at various points in their relationship. Adriana is a young woman overshadowed by an abusive father who decides to buy herself a robotic lover, Lucian. Lucian is, of course, programmed to love and serve Adriana, but eventually, a genuine relationship develops between the two, and they adopt a child. However, Lucian is unsure who he really is; he was literally born to love Adriana, and he has never lived without her. So, he embarks on a quest to find his true self. The strength of this story is Swirsky's amazing character work. It’s a brief series of vignettes, but I really felt like I got to know Lucian and Adriana (and their young daughter Rose…and a bird who plays a fairly important role). I wanted to read more about them. The sf elements are used to perfection, as Lucian can represent and highlight a lot about human emotions through his articficial situation.

The story is available for free (and as an audio podcast, which I like for shorts) from Tor.com. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good character piece.

Grade: A-

1957 Hugo - er....

The only Hugos given out in 1957 went to magazines, not specific novels or stories. I really don’t know why and haven’t seen an explanation anywhere on the internet tubes.

I’m unilaterally giving the award to Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun. This is the sequel to The Caves of Steel, the robot detective story I’ve raved about a couple of times already. If you like ‘50s sci-fi or Isaac Asimov and you haven’t read these, you should go do that. I’ll stop talking about them now.





Meanwhile...

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into space. It emitted a repetitive beeping noise to scare the crap out of Americans for the next 22 days. In less than four years, Yuri Gagarin would become the first man in space.

Obviously, this is an important moment in world history. But, it’s also an important moment in the history of sci-fi. There are three main ways that I think we can see this event impacting science fiction for the next generation and longer.

1. It was a big step in the humanity’s movement into space. When you think about the fact that a dozen or so years after the first rocket launches, we’re launching satellites into space, Heinlein’s 50-years-to-Jupiter timeframe is a bit more understandable. Things were moving fast (especially compared to post-1969), and that translates to a lot of the ideas flying around in these novels.
2. It increased interest in space and space travel. In some ways, the ‘50s is a heyday for science fiction, and I think the immediacy of technological developments played a key role in that. The government also begins to invest massive amounts of money into science education (the National Defense Education Act of 1958), increasing scientific literacy among American students, and perhaps increasing the number interested in science fiction…
3. It was part of a period of rising tensions in the Cold War. Sputnik by no means caused deteriorating relations, but it was symptomatic of them. The Space Race was really all about showing how far and accurately you could launch a missile payload and thus demonstrating your strategic edge. Sputnik and Gagarin made it seem like the Soviets were winning and nuclear annihilation was becoming more imminent. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi is right around the corner….