This year saw the remaster of critically-acclaimed Akira, probably the movie most credited with introducing anime to a Western audience. Like 1982’s Blade Runner from which it draws inspiration, Akira imagines a future so proximate that we are now living it, in this case a vision of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Remasters generate renewed interest and the potential to bring a classic to new audiences, as well as the chance for the more elderly among us to indulge in nostalgia. It also presents an opportunity for a critical contemporary reappraisal of art that, by virtue of the passage of time, has taken on a second nature as representative of a specific cultural and historical context from which it is ever further removed. Such reappraisals have seen some movies retroactively acquire cult status, while others have fallen from grace and found themselves relegated to the dust heap of history.
Akira appears however to have escaped such re-evaluations, with recent reviews generally reaffirming its cult status and importance to the cultural exchange between Japan and the West, in particular with regards to animation. This is a missed opportunity given both Akira’s richness and its historical and cultural specificity, which should provide plenty of stimulating touchpoints for dialogue with our present moment, especially considering our dystopian zeitgeist and the enduring popularity of the cyberpunk genre. A film that dared to imagine our present moment deserves better than being engaged only in terms of its cultural legacy.
Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.
A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.
It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.
Hope is hard in a world ravaged by ecological breakdown, especially for the young. Ten year old Iris struggles to have hope. Hers is a world of natural disasters, inexorably sliding further and further towards climate catastrophe, all while the adults in the room act as if everything is normal. The year is 2075, and all is not well.
That is, until Arco literally crashes into her life. Titular Arco is another ten-year-old, but whereas Iris is from our near future, Arco hails from a distant future where humans have relocated to gigantic cloud arcologies and mastered time travel. Even in that future though, children are not supposed to play with time until they’ve passed time-travellers exam. Impatient Arco steals his his sister’s device, only to lose control and end up in Iris’ time by accident. In the tradition of all good children’s movies, our two youngsters embark on a series of capers and adventures, supported by the friends they make along the way, to get Arco back to his own time.
Arco is a beautifully drawn animation, evoking the traditions of Studio Ghibli both in terms of style and narrative. It is a story of perseverance and hope against the odds, its generally light-hearted tone giving its emotional moments all the more impact. Like all good science fiction, it is a story not of, but for our times, reminding us that hope is a radical act.
Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.
Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.
Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar.
You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.
Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:
#boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
#protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.
A man wakes up, alone, aboard a spaceship near a strange star. The man does not remember who he is, how he got here, or most crucially, what has happened to him. He soon discovers however, that the survival of mankind rests on his shoulders. Project Hail Mary is the story of how he responds.
Project Hail Mary the movie is based on the eponymous book by Andy Weir, known from previous novel-made-movie The Martian, which similarly tells the story of a lone man surviving against the odds. It continues a venerable tradition of movies about cosmic calamities that require a brave few to boldly go where no man has gone before to blow up an asteroid (Armageddon, Deep Impact), rekindle the sun (Sunshine), or find a new home for humanity (Interstellar). This time, our reluctant hero is Dr Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), disgraced microbiologist, who is sent to Tau Ceti to find a cure for an interstellar infection that is dimming the Sun. At Tau Ceti he joins forces with an alien astronaut, baptised ‘Rocky’, from 40 Eridani, who was sent to Tau Ceti on a similar rescue mission.
Project Hail Mary works on two levels, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the personal. And despite its stunning visuals evoking the vastness of space, it is decidedly stronger at its smaller scales, in no small part to strong acting by Ryan Gosling, who must carry much of the movie on his own. As I noted in my previous review, good sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, but holds up a mirror to the present day. Project Hail Mary works convincingly as a story about hope, friendship, and collaboration, but it does require a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get there.
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.
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.
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.