As Ursula K. le Guin never tired of pointing out, good science fiction tries to tell us something about the here and now, not the then and there. That is true even for science fiction set ‘a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away’. Insofar as scifi is a commentary on, or even an inspiration for, real world events, does that make it fair to critique it on that basis? I think the answer is affirmative, but given the overall excellent qualities of Star Wars series Andor, I did worry I was holding it to an excessively high standard. Ultimately though, if a television series is so easily perceived as an analogy for how to resist authoritarian oppression, it is worth scrutinising where it locates the agency for that resistance, notwithstanding what many other merits it has.
Season 2 of Andor returns to thief-turned-spy Cassian Andor after he fully committed to the Rebellion. It covers the period between the end of season 1 and the start of Rogue One, the prequel that acts as the opening salvo for the original Star Wars trilogy. It is one of the grimmer series in the Star Wars franchise, set at the zenith of the Galactic Empire and tracing the formation of the Rebel Alliance via its eponymous hero and his comrades.
Despite being an escapist fantasy, Star Wars has always been political, and it certainly is not hard to read Andor as an analogy for our present moment, with democracies sliding into authoritarianism (examples of this take are here, here, here, and here). Of the entire Star Wars universe, Andor has the strongest focus on the banal cruelty of the Galactic Empire and the human cost of resisting it. It’s not surprising that it has become a source of inspiration for activists across the Anglophone world, with the show’s highlights seeping out into the real world. As a compelling depiction of fascist repression and a rousing inspiration for resistance Andor certainly delivers. Yet we should be careful not to treat its path to victory as a template for the work that needs to be done in the real world.
“There is no magic money tree” is the stern injunction invoked by politicians, central bankers and economists to explain to a fiscally imprudent public why it cannot have nice things. Fiscal rectitude is now the primary virtue of government, perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom where the Treasury has shackled itself to the need for approval from an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. Running deficits or printing money, we are told, is only one tiny step away from Weimar Republic levels of financial calamity.
But what if it wasn’t thus? That is the alluring promise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which first gained prominence in the wake of the Great Recession and argues that not only can governments print money to cover expenses, but they should do so to fully realise a nation’s productive capacity. It is a provocative and controversial theory that repudiates the need for permanent austerity in the name of balanced budgets, and finds one of its most ardent advocates in Stephanie Kelton, erstwhile chief economist to US senator Bernie Sanders. In her book The Deficit Myth, she takes her argument for a ‘people’s economy’ built on the insights of MMT to a wider audience.
The Deficit Myth faces the triple challenge of any non-fiction book that assails an existing orthodoxy. It must set out a compelling argument, be intelligible to a lay audience, and dispel hegemonic common sense. This is a daunting task, and the meagre evidence base, weaknesses in Kelton’s writing style, and a different perspective on political economy meant I was left unpersuaded by the book’s stronger claims. Nonetheless, it is a thought-provoking read that provides ample critique of economic orthodoxy, and left me receptive to exploring more rigorous defences of MMT in future.
Something is rotten in the Republic of Korea. Its shining reputation as a miracle of post-war economic development obscures deeply troubled gender relations. Misogyny is more prevalent and firmly entrenched than in most other parts of the developed world, fueled by a combination of strong patriarchal traditions and increased economic insecurity. This is the backdrop against which Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize and superbly translated by Debora Smith, emerges.
At under 200 pages and written in a minimalist style evoking the surrealism of Kafka and Murakami, The Vegetarian describes the events that take place after Yeong-hye, a young woman, stops eating meat. The seemingly simple decision to adopt a vegetarian diet is met with increasingly aggressive incomprehension by her family, and their attempts to ‘cure’ Yeong-hye of her deviation have calamitous consequences. The Vegetarian is a powerful story of a woman who refuses to be an object and against all odds tries to eke out some agency in a world that is set against her.
For as long as humans have dreamt of robots, they have dreamt of them becoming human. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains the ambition of most AI companies, despite current LLMs exhibiting worrying tendencies to ramble, hallucinate or engage in the mass production of child pornography. With this aspiration comes the attendant fear that, once sentient, the robots will take our jobs, murder us all in our sleep, or simply transform us into paperclips. Genocidal AIs are such a science-fiction staple that introducing a robot in Act One almost inevitably leads to the AI Apocalypse by Act Three.
Compared to this pervasive trope, 2023 anime series Pluto offers a refreshing alternative. Inspired by the 1960s Astroboy comics, Pluto is a short and sympathetic meditation on the nature of humanity, delivering an emotional gut punch with almost every episode. Its story and beautifully rendered aesthetic are a homage to the High Futurist optimism of a bygone era, composed of flying cars, skyscraper cities embraced by bucolic countryside, and peaceful robot and human coexistence.
Not that there is no conflict in Pluto. Episode one starts us off with not one, but two murders: a highly advanced robot and a renowned roboticist. Symbols left at the crime scenes suggest the murders are connected, but this presents an enigma: forensics indicate a robotic suspect, yet Pluto’s robots obey an equivalent of Asimov’s First Law of Robotics and hence cannot harm humans. It is up to Gesicht, Europol’s foremost robotic detective, to crack this case.
Interstellar empires. They are a staple of science fiction, but we don’t often see how they arise. They’re just…sort of there, with their ‘Romans with spaceships’ vibe. John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy departs from convention by giving us both a backstory and a look under the hood. The series, comprised of The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox, tells the story of the eponymous interstellar empire confronted with an existential crisis, as its interdimensional hyperspace network starts to unravel. Like other human societies that preceded it, what the Interdependency does not do is pull itself together to avert disaster. Instead, its ruling elite descend into lethal court intrigues to gain control over the limited number of proverbial escape pods on the rapidly decompressing imperial spaceship. Across three fast-paced books, Scalzi puts the reader at the centre of power to find out whether the ruling class will pull itself together, or apart, and the rest of society with it.
Scalzi’s worldbuilding makes for a really interesting setting, and a creative new take on the interstellar empire trope, with plenty of nods to our contemporary world that are either humorous, insightful or both. Which is why it is such a shame that as the series progresses, the Interdependency itself fades increasingly into the background, obscured by the interpersonal dramas and vendattas of the main characters. The end result is something akin to what you might get if Frank Herbert’s Dune was the basis for a season of Eastenders.
Hamnet is a Shakespeare movie, except it is not actually about Shakespeare. Sure, William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) features, but a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another, he is neither its central character nor commands the majority of screentime. According to my local cinema’s blurb, Hamnet concerns ‘the healing power of art and creativity’. That is not untrue insofar as the movie culminates in a performance of Hamlet, which the movie portrays as Shakespeare’s means of processing his son’s death. Yet to interpret the movie by its finale alone seems to me to deny the centrality of Anne ‘Agnes’ Hathaway (played by Jessie Buckley), and her embodiment of the universal grief over the loss of those who die before their time.
Hamnet’s unflinching portrayal of visceral sorrow has ignited a debate among critics on whether the movie emotionally manipulates its audience to the extent that it could be considered ‘grief porn’. This is a surprising argument to me. Objecting that a movie about the death of a child centres grief feels like objecting that a Marvel movie contains superheroes and mediocre CGI. Rather than fault a movie for our discomfort, it is worth considering if it is not our cultural inhibitions around emotions that is to blame.
Something is wrong with the internet. What once promised a window onto the world now feels like a morass infested with AI generated garbage, trolls, bots, trackers and stupendous amounts of advertising. Every company claims to be your friend in that inane, offensively chummy yet mildly menacing corpospeak – now perfected by LLMs – all while happily stabbing you in the back when you try to buy cheaper ink for your printer. That is, when they’re not busy subverting democracy. Can someone please switch the internet off and switch it on again?
Maybe such a feat is beyond Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, but it would not be for want of trying. Doctorow is a vociferous, veteran campaigner at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prolific writer, and an insightful critic of the way Big Tech continues to deny the open and democratic potential of the internet. The Internet Con is a manifesto, polemic and primer on how that internet was stolen from us, and how we might get it back. Doctorow has recently gained mainstream prominence with his neologism ‘enshittification’: a descriptor of the downward doom spiral that Big Tech keeps the internet locked into. As I am only slowly going through my backlog of books, I am several Doctorow books behind. Which I don’t regret, as The Internet Con, published in 2023, remains an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with the internet.
At a time when you’re only ever six feet away from a ‘thinkpiece’ about how AI will take our jobs, kill us all, or possibly both, it is easy to forget that General Artificial Intelligence is just one of the many aspirations of our techno-futurist overlords. Memento mori comes easy to the narcissistic, and Musk, Bezos, Thiel and their ilk are aggrieved that eventually they will have to die like the rest of us losers. Serious money is being thrown at various anti-aging schemes such as dietary supplements, hormone therapy, or vampirism to stave off the inevitable. But all of those really just extend the shelf life of our mortal coil. The real prize is to shed it altogether and transcend the physical realm by uploading our mind to the cloud. But say that we manage to upload our souls to the Metaverse, horrifying though that thought might be, what would happen next?
That is the question that Pantheon, a short but remarkable animated series, attempts to answer. Pantheon imagines a future where not Artificial Intelligence, but Uploaded Intelligence (UI) is the revolutionary technology ushering in the singularity. Based on a series of short stories by Kevin Lui, Pantheon covers an impressive range of philosophical, technological and social questions in its mere sixteen episodes. It’s excellent animation and strong voice cast make it a pleasure to watch. For Silicon Valley’s elite, UI is the answer. For Pantheon, it is a dialectical question which spirals outward to cosmic dimensions.
There are two common misconceptions about meritocracy. The first, that we live in one and that our position in society results from merit rather than luck, wealth or other structural factors. Second, that living in a meritocracy would be desirable in the first place. We have forgotten that ‘meritocracy’ entered the English vocabulary as a pejorative and something to avoid. Evaluating people on merit rather than connections or wealth is certainly desirable, but the corollary of granting power based on merit is the disenfranchisement of everyone considered insufficiently deserving.
The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s debut novel, skillfully takes aim at both misconceptions. It is a bold, creative and excellent satire of contemporary fixation on merit and productivity, true to Ursula K. le Guin’s dictum that the best science-fiction illuminates the present rather than prophesises the future. The title of the book is derived from an eponymous stratum in Lakshminarayan’s fictional society, which divides its citizen into an upper 20%, middle 70% and lower 10% based on their productivity. One’s placement on this curve within the corpocracy of BellCorp, a self-described ‘meritocratic technarchy’, determines one’s rights, privileges and access to consumer technology, creating a constant race to the top. Failure to perform results in demotion, expulsion from BellCorp’s Virtual City to the adjacent Analog slums, or a one-way trip to the vegetable farm. The Ten Percent Thief is not always subtle in drawing its parallels with the present, but that makes it no less effective.
If unions had a collective mythos, then the union-buster would be its demon. Called in by employers to thwart unionisation drives, the union-buster sows fear and discord wherever they tread, skirting and sometimes crossing the bounds of legality. All is fair in love and class war, after all.
In accordance with Sun Tzu’s dictum in The Art of War that warfare is the Tao of deception, union-busters operate, if not in secret, then at least under the cloak of deception and misdirection. Their art consists of appearing to do one thing while actually doing another. Countless organisers have seen their campaigns end in defeat without being fully aware of the forces arrayed against them. However, some of these covert tactics have been illuminated by repentent deserters. One such convert is Martin J. Levitt, a former union-buster from the United States who had his Damascene Moment and revealed the union-buster’s arsenal of deceit and discord in his Confessions of a Union Buster.