You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

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.

Warning: Contains spoilers

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.

The unavoidable question confronting both audience and Dr Grace himself is why he finds himself alone on a mission to save humanity. A series of flashbacks gradually reveals a backstory that withstands critical scrutiny about as well as a human withstands the vacuum of space. It takes an unreasonable number of accidental and unexplained deaths, combined with an astonishing lack of redundancy planning, to result in our lonely spacefarer, who then by a stroke of luck the size of Jupiter finds himself in Tau Ceti at the exact same time and place as Rocky. It is probably more plausible than the universe making me a cheese sandwich out of quantum fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, but not by much.

All of this is set in motion by an existentially threatening reduction in the output of the Sun, caused by the presence of a cosmic bacterium labelled the Astrophage. The Astrophage absorbs radiation at all wavelengths apart from infrared (not unlike chlorophyll, then) and is breeding on CO2 rich Venus while presumably covering the entire Sun in a shell of radiation eating bacteria. It is rather like that alien goo in Prometheus in possessing precisely the properties the plot demands: seeming faster-than-light spread, consuming the energy output of a star which is 1.5 million times larger than the planet on which it procreates, and then biochemically storing the output of a small fusion reaction in a petridish so that it can be easily harnessed as a stardrive to send our hero on his mission in the titular ‘Hail Mary’.

After Grace’s arrival at Tau Ceti the physics are fortunately grounded back in reality, enabling Project Hail Mary to elegantly interweave it with its narrative. The relativistic speeds attained by the Hail Mary have resulted in measurable time dilation, which means Ryland Grace is over 10 lightyears from Earth, yet has only aged 4 years since departure. Gravity on board is only available when under thrust or through an ingenious centrifuge mode, and the movie cleverly uses the presence or absence of gravity to telegraph what is going on. Orbital manoeuvres and the interior of the spaceship also feel authentic and produce some spectacular visuals, making it easy to see why the movie was filmed with IMAX in mind.

Dr Grace’s alien counterpart Rocky is also intriguingly and profoundly alien. Here we do not have some humanoid with pointy ears or purple skin, but a five-legged rock-based species (splendidly operated and voiced by James Ortiz), that has mastered the atomic level manipulation of xenon to construct vast structures, including the spaceship on which they traveled to Tau Ceti. It makes for a brilliant contrast between the messy complexity of humanity and the monolithic elegance of the Eridians, but it leaves the viewer with a lot of questions that the movie doesn’t so much not answer, as never even ask. I’m not an eminent exobiologist, but am nonetheless curious how Rocky’s species nervous system and metabolism function. Or how technology based seemingly on the manipulation of a single element produces the complex artefacts necessary for manned spaceflight. It is therefore somewhat of a shame that despite his putative past interest in alien life, Ryland Grace is astonishingly uninterested in Rocky and the world he hails from. We get an excessive number of scenes where Rocky and Grace bond over footage of Earth on the Hail Mary’s rudimentary holodeck, but there is barely any reciprocal interest in Rocky’s planet, culture or technology, and it takes until the end of the movie before Grace even visits Rocky’s spaceship.

Maybe Ryland Grace’s lack of interest is explained by how surprisingly human Rocky is, despite being an animated rock with a sensory apparatus based on echolocation. Although Grace has to construct his own universal translator to interpret Rocky’s vocalisations, it transpires that Rocky’s language is surprisingly amenable to English grammar and syntax, not to mention implausibly compatible with a human conceptual framework. Excepting a few recurring mistranslations that serve to remind the audience of the underlying language barrier, as well as for comic effect, Rocky passes seamlessly as American. Contrast this with Arrival, where the attempt to understand aliens who have a fundamentally different conception of reality is the point of the entire movie, rather than the work of a five minute montage.

Most of this can be forgiven because without the rapid establishment of common ground, the relationship between Rocky and Grace would never lift off, and it is here where the movie really shines. Ryan Gosling puts in an excellent performance, managing to strike the precarious balance between comedy and pathos in both the Hail Mary scenes and the pre-launch flashbacks. Gosling easily persuades us to emotionally connect with Rocky, an animated object with even fewer humanoid features than WALL-E, but who nonetheless evokes endearment and sympathy. This investment pays off across several moving moments when our heroes have to overcome the inevitable challenges and risks imposed by the harsh nature of space and the demands of the plot. In the scenes on Earth, Gosling plays the more familiar ‘outsider turned insider’ scientist, but without falling back too strongly onto one-dimensional stereotypes.

The flashback scenes back on Earth are also the ones infused with an almost surreal optimism, presenting us with a world where in the face of an existential threat, humanity does actually manage to band together to try and face it off. The international nature of the Hail Mary project is reinforced at every turn, showing us a global scientific community, Chinese cosmonauts, German administrators and Russian ground control all working together. The prominent shots of an American aircraft carrier are maybe a tad unfortunate at this particular point in time, but it would be unfair to hold that against the movie.

Drawing both strands together, Project Hail Mary is suffused with a profound optimism that acts as a welcome antidote to our present times. It wholeheartedly affirms that forging connections across boundaries, whether cultural, linguistic or technological, is possible, and that people will make the right decisions when it comes down to it, even if they sometimes need a little push to do so. The multinational cooperation to remove the Astrophage threat draws from a poorer cinematic tradition than the disaster movie elements of Project Hail Mary, but nonetheless recalls movies like Arrival or Pacific Rim, series like Stargate Atlantis, or videogames like X-COM and Mass Effect, all keeping a hope alive that we can work together across boundaries and borders to further the common good. At a time when a declining US empire seems intent on disrupting any attempt at global cooperation, reminders that another approach is possible are an unalloyed positive.

On the whole, Project Hail Mary is an eminently enjoyable movie with stunning visuals, a potent mix of comedy and scientific seriousness, and a heartfelt relationship at its core. Given its committed message of hope, it feels unkind to hold its basic premise of the sole, vaguely antiheroic man saving the world, against it. Nonetheless, it remained a discordant note for me throughout, diminishing the effectiveness of its emotional appeal through the sheer amount of contrivance deployed to fabricate a situation where this man – and as always it is a white, American man – must single-handedly save the world. If I was qualified to psychoanalyse, I might speculate that the movie is indicative of a profound anxiety afflicting affluent white American men who fear that even they no longer have any agency in our increasingly out-of-control world. The message of hope is thus tinged with a hint of frightened wish-fulfillment, complete with the stern Germanic mutti figure to take command and tell us that everything will be fine.

In the real world neither Germanic mutti’s nor metrosexual American men will come and save us. It will be a shared struggle, and insofar as Project Hail Mary inspires us to believe that humans can work together to overcome insurmountable odds and that every everyman will find it in them to do the right thing, while giving us some good laughs and cries along the way, it is a movie made for its time.

Notes & suggestions

• My unwillingness to accept the '‘single white male hero” trope has been sharpened recently by Ada Palmer’s writing on agency and protagonists in fiction, especially science fiction. This in itself draws on older writings, including Ursula K. le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. I have gone into this in more detail in my reviews of Mass Effect 3 and Andor.
• The theme of connection is also key to Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, and despite its more goofy superhero plot and self-referential B-movie vibes, I actually think it made the point better.
• Knowledge is power, which is why those in power so often hate science. US readers in particular may be worried about the attacks on science and scientific institutions in the US. Organisations like the Union of Concerned Scientists recognise the independence of science to democracy, and are fighting to keep scientific endeavours alive.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

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.

Before we delve into the politics of Andor, it must be said that this is one of the best products to ever come out of the Star Wars stable, and the fact that there are no Jedi involved is certainly not a coincidence. Andor has the gritty realism and suspense of the best Cold War spy thrillers (I’m reminded of Deutschland 83), with excellent structure and pacing keeping it compelling all the way through its twelve episodes. The absence of lightsabre duels and space battles creates space for the human sacrifices, both large and small, that form a resistance made up of ordinary people. Its brilliant cast of strong and relatable characters, whether the ruthless spymaster, despairing politician, or zealous apparatchik, gives it true complexity and depth.

The honest and unflinching focus on the psychology of resistance is one of the things that makes Andor brilliant. Revolution is not easy, and we see Andor’s main characters struggle with the sacrifices it demands, frequently failing or falling apart. A variety of motivations and dispositions leads to the usual disagreements over strategy and tactics, sometimes pushed to infighting by the siege mentality that results from constant pressure and secrecy. Andor’s is not the idolised and idealised vanguard party or guerilla cell formed solely of comrades sharing the unbreakable bond forged from common struggle. This is a messy affair. An ecosystem of actors, factions and precarious alliances barely held together by a common purpose. In other words, convincingly familiar to anyone involved in real left-wing organising.

Similarly, Andor excels in its depiction of the repressive apparatus of the fascist state, especially through its casting of two fanatical Imperial bureaucrats as annoyingly relatable characters. Central to the plot of season 2 is the Empire’s need to gain access to strategic minerals on the planet Ghorman. As Ghorman is not some Outer Rim backwater but a core planet, a suitable pretext needs to be found or fabricated to turn it into a sacrifice zone. With season 1’s Dedra Meero in charge, the Empire’s Internal Security Bureau embarks on a plan to justify permanent occupation of the planet that reads as a Who’s Who of authoritarian tactics. Ghorman’s population is dehumanised by the Empire’s propaganda machine, its resistance infiltrated and goaded, its economy strangled and its leaders incarcerated, before it all culminates in a ruthless double false flag operation as a coup de grace to justify a full scale occupation. Elsewhere in the galaxy, we see the violence, repression and abuse of power that comes with a militarised bureaucracy. If this feels familiar, that is because it is. Showrunner Tony Gilroy was reportedly inspired by the Wannsee Conference in Nazi Germany, but this is equally the story of Chile, Gaza, the Prague Spring, Xinjiang, Minneapolis, Moscow, or Tehran.

The ruthless exercise of state power against its own populace is one of the most powerful aspects of Andor, but it is also where the series chafes most against the constraints imposed by Star Wars’ canonical lore. This is after all an incongruent universe of sentient androids running on vacuum tubes, and faster-than-light travel organised via telephone exchange switchboards. It may be the future, but it is the future of the 1970s, and so it is no surprise that Andor feels like a John le Carré novel set in space. Cassian Andor does not need to worry about ubiquitous surveillance or his digital footprint, nor is there a galaxy-wide network full of Imperial bots and propaganda farms. Instead we have listening devices the size of iPods, ambushes under cover of nothing but darkness, and heroic last stands with flags and barricades that walked straight out of Les Miserables. It works for the viwer, because it taps into tropes that we have seen a thousand times before, but it doesn’t make much sense within the context of a technologically highly advanced society, nor does it offer much use as inspiration for anyone organising against power in the present day.

This isn’t just because our own organising environment poses challenges that are absent from Andor, but also because, embedded as it is within the Star Wars canon, Andor does not have a theory of political change. The Empire is preordained to fall when the evil overlord is slain by a young hero, with the Rebel Alliance acting solely in a supporting role. Star Wars has never had a conception of politics, only of political corruption and drama, and so it has no political or social forces for Andor’s rebels to tap into. Resistance in the real world is built on the existing infrastructure of left-wing political parties, revolutionary cells, activist campaign groups, or militant unions. None of these exist in the Star Wars imaginary, so it is no surprise that when the Ghorman rebels broadcast their last desperate plea for help, there is nobody out there to hear it.

Maybe this is an unfairly harsh criticism. After all, Andor is a sci-fi television series made by a multibillion dollar corporation, not a revolutionary handbook. Yet as Ada Palmer cogently argues, where we place agency in fiction matters:

When SFF authors offer portraits of how people change the world, we exercise enormous power over worldview, over expectations, over hope.

Despite centering ordinary people, Andor’s implicit premise is that all we can hope to do is prepare the ground for the hero to come and save us. Star Wars is a story of resistance acting from the outside, having sought refuge beyond the boundaries of the Empire. It is a guerilla riding to victory because a combination of magical heroism and helpful enemy hubris allow it to strike at the core of imperial power, after which the Empire falls apart and we can all go home (except not really, as we discover in The Mandalorian). But there is no outside in Minneapolis, Jerusalem or Hong Kong, nor can we rely on a hero with magical powers to come and save us. Real resistance can only spring from collective action within the societies in which we live, founded on tenacious organising in order to push back authoritarian power and control.

None of that takes away from the brilliance of the series and its value as inspiration. Andor pushes the Star Wars canon probably as far into a realistic analogy of resistance to fascism as its lore allows it to go. It shifts Star Wars into the morally grey area where every action is a compromise, and where nobody has clear sight on the path to victory. Andor doesn’t give us a hero’s journey, only comrades who stubbornly, desparately cling on to the hope that the struggle might at some future point bear fruit. Which returns me to the words of the late Tony Benn that:

There is no final victory; there is no final defeat; just the same battles that have to be fought over and over and over again.

It is hard to keep hope alive in the face of the vast forces arrayed against us, and many of us will never know if our small contributions made a difference. But the same was true for our ancestors, whose victories and defeats brought us the world we live in today. We may not have the Jedi to come and save us, but like Cassian Andor and his comrades, we do have each other, and the faith that in the long run, the people united will not be defeated.

Notes & Suggestions

• The struggles with despair, grief, survivor’s guilt, and suspicion all feature in Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, which is an excellent resource for activists dealing with the stresses of organising.
• Another recent depiction of the struggle against authoritarian repression, One Battle After Another not only has a more recognisably contemporary setting, but is also more interested in the role community plays in organising resistance.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has two interesting episodes (recorded some years apart) about representations of fascism in science fiction, and while Andor itself isn’t specifically covered, Star Wars is unsurprisingly one of the key works discussed. The first episode is here, and the second one here.
• Andor may serve as an inspiration for people standing up against nascent fascism, but it would be remiss not to note that Disney, the company that produced it, is clearly no ally in this struggle. Not only did it readily concede to demands from the Trump administration’s to suspend voices critical of the government, but it is also one of the key targets in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign due to its complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine.
• You are unlikely to find the Rebel Alliance in this part of the galaxy, but absent that, joining a trade union, tenants association, campaign group or political party is not a bad way to help build collective power.

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#tv #fiction #anime #SF

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.

Gesicht has a personal investment in this investigation. As more robots and humans fall victim to the mysterious murderer referred to as the titular Pluto, we learn that all of them are connected to the ‘39th Central Asian War’: the invasion of the ‘Kingdom of Persia’ on the ostensible grounds that it illegally stockpiled robots of mass destruction – a very thinly veiled reference to the 2003 Iraq War. The robots being targeted are the world’s seven most advanced robots, which includes Gesicht himself. All were to some degree involved with the invasion of the Kingdom of Persia, while all human victims were on the ‘Bora Inquiry Commission’, an international inspection team sent in ahead of the invasion to determine whether the Kingdom did indeed possess robots of mass destruction. Someone is out for vengeance, but the question is who, and why.

A whodunnit at a surface level, Pluto’s real story is an existential reflection on the nature of humanity, and how a robot might attain it. While not programmed to have them, Pluto’s most advanced robots start to experience emotions as an emergent property driven by a desire to emulate and understand their human counterparts. Humans might remark on robotic superiority in terms of intellect, durability and the absence of emotional complications, but many robots feel afflicted with a pervasive melancholia because they cannot access the human way of relating to the world. They want to experience a sunrise, not merely detect the appearance of a nearby star over the horizon.

Trauma is the key that unlocks the emotional door for Gesicht and others who fought and killed thousands of robotic adversaries in the 39th Central Asian War. As we encounter the robot victors, we see them struggle with depression, hate, grief, regret, and guilt, exacerbated by their unfamiliarity with emotional feelings, and a lack of human understanding, bordering on callousness, for what they are going through. Robots prove particularly vulnerable to traumatic events because their memories don’t fade or alter with time, causing one to desperately ask a human whether the hate it feels will ever diminish.

Hate is at the centre of the paradox that Pluto interrogates. If attaining humanity requires a robot to feel, then how can it remain subject to Asimov’s First Law? A robot that can feel, can hate. A robot that can hate, could kill. After all humans kill other humans all the time. Some characters contend that might be the necessary ingredient for emotional awakening, and it is certainly a driving force for many characters, both human and robot. Attempting to answer whether hate can indeed be overcome, Pluto explores if and how a cycle of hate and vengeance, both at the personal and societal level, can ever be broken. In the end, it affirms that it can, arriving at similar conclusion to Thunderbolts* in showing how kindness, forgiveness and love are the way out of the hateful doom spiral.

Pluto executes its introspection on the nature of humanity intelligently and with real sympathy for all its characters, villains included. Compared to my recent read The Interdependency, there is a remarkable amount of backstory and character development in a mere eight episodes. There are some aspects though where Pluto’s evocation of the Golden Age of science fiction leads it astray. Most unforgivable is the extremely limited presence of female characters, who are relegated to either loving wives or emotional sisters. There is no reason why all of the seven main robots should be male, nor for the overwhelming majority of the support cast to be the same. And while the patriarchy may be the most obvious, Pluto on the whole exhibits the problematic lack of diversity that sadly remains emblematic of much anime. An upgrade to the 21st century was absolutely warranted here, and the absence of it is disappointing. Environmentally Pluto has equally remained in the 1960s. We see plenty of flying cars, but no mass transit. Skyscraper cities, but no renewable energy. For an otherwise very carefully composed series, this is a crude techno-optimist streak, with technological development serving to both magically overcome environmental destruction and reimpose traditional gender norms.

These are not trivial critiques, and I would have preferred for Pluto to reinvent utopian futurism for the 2020s rather than simply importing it wholesale from the 1960s, if only because we could all do with an alternative aesthetic to the all-pervasive cyberpunk or Terminator derivatives. Choosing this traditional Golden Age of Sci-Fi setting places Pluto outside the contemporary utopian aesthetic of solarpunk, but it is not a bad thing to have multiple utopias to choose from. Despite these flaws, Pluto is a beautifully crafted, emotionally compelling and intellectually engaging series that most certainly deserves viewing. It is more than redeemed by its optimism on the potential for human/robot coexistence, its belief in empathy, care and love as the real keys to humanity, and its insistence that our future isn’t determined by technology, but by what we choose to do with it. And possibly, by what it chooses to do with itself.

Notes & Suggestions

• Another excellent meditation on technological advance, utopian possibilities, what it means to be human and how synthetic constructs fit into all of this is animated series Pantheon. Similarly, Citizen Sleeper is a comparatively short but beautifully crafted game that also mixes musing son synthetic existence with an insistence on kindness and mutual aid, although in a distinctly more cyberpunk dystopian setting.
• For a running commentary on all things wrong with AI, I recommend following Cory Doctorow. I reviewed his excellent book The Internet Con some time ago.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has an episode on solarpunk, as well as one on architects imagining other possible futures.

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Warning: Contains some spoilers

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.

None of this is as apparent in the first book, which I felt to be the strongest in the series. The Collapsing Empire benefits from introducing us to Scalzi’s intriguing world, its characters, and the central point of the plot. We learn that the Holy Empire of the Interdependency is a refuge for a spacefaring human civilization that has long since lost contact with Earth, consisting mostly of habitats either on or orbiting otherwise inhospitable planets. The precarious nature of the Interdependency is due to its reliance on the ‘Flow’, an interdimensional network of hyperspace lanes that allow for faster-than-light travel, but only between specific star systems, most of which do not contain planets capable of supporting human life. Despite their high level of technological sophistication, the Interdependency’s systems could not function in isolation, therefore the overriding purpose of the empire is to maintain both inter-system trade and enduring political stability and stasis.

Of course, this system works better for some than for others, and it works particularly well for the noble houses and guilds that have monopolies on the manufacture and trade of life’s essentials. The political economy of the Interdependency is the logical endpoint you would get to when applying Cory Doctorow’s process of enshittification to an entire economy: everything, from starships to citrus fruits, can only be produced by a single house and is legally and technologically shielded against reverse engineering. One cannot wonder if the architects of the Interdependency read Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism as an instruction manual:

A monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government and all other “details”.

This, however, is all about to come to an end as the Flow connections begin to fail, threatening to leave each system isolated and facing slow but certain collapse. By the end of The Collapsing Empire, this news has finally reached the new emperox (yes, the title is gender neutral) Grayland II, who as the second-in-line made an unexpected ascencion to the throne and is already finding herself beset with intrigue, assassination and attempted coups. On top of which, she now has the imminent collapse of all human civilisation to contend with.

Unfortunately, the imminent collapse of civilisation remains eclipsed by said intrigue, assassinations and attempted coups in the remaining two novels, as Grayland II is under continuous assault from the ambitious Nohamapetan noble house. That is not to say that the Flow collapse disappears from the story, but for much of it it functions more as a political complication or liability within the ever shifting allegiances of different factions. Apart from a handful of paragraphs, we learn nothing about the response of the billions of people whose existence is at stake. The denizens of the Interdependency suffer from what I’ve come to think of as ‘prole syndrome’: a debilitating lack of agency and presence, which means their salvation can only ever come from the outside or the top down. We also saw this in Oryx & Crake, and it is taking 1984’s O’Brien at face value when he says:

Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant.

There is a potential comparison here with the contemporary response to climate change. We, too, live in a society faced with an approaching existential threat. We too are governed by elites that are either unable to avert catastrophe, or have decided that they will be just fine, actually, and the death of millions is a small price to pay for ‘number go up’. Scalzi himself has indicated the analogy was not intended as directly, but that he was nonetheless inspired by the realisation that it will take us caring for one another if we are to survive because, to borrow a phrase from one of his characters , ‘the universe doesn’t give a fuck’.

Yet for all that, care or mutual aid are conspicuously absent from the Interdependency. We are told most of the Interdependency’s citizens assume matters will work themselves out, and only a handful either prepare for the End Times, or beseech their representatives to avert it. If this is a reflection on our contemporary state of affairs, it is a cynical and fatalistic one. Yes, more could be done, but we know that the vast majority of people want more action to be taken. Any limited progress we have made in the fight against climate change has been extracted from elites through organised collective action, rather than being benevolently gifted to us from above. Maybe an alternative version of the story could have seen boycots of trading guilds, occupations of space stations or the hijacking of starships as the citizenry of the Interdependency forcefully asserts its right not to be annihilated.

With its focus on court intrigue as it is, the Interdependency series can’t help but invite comparison with other galactic empire stories, perhaps most immediately Frank Herbert’s Dune. Despite being mostly confined to a single planet, the narrative in Dune feels grand, whereas in the Interdependency the interpersonal conflicts resemble the scale of a dysfunctional university fraternity. In Dune, the conflict between its noble houses is encoded into the fabric of its society in a way that believably inflects everything about how the nobility acts and reacts, relying on careful long-term planning to attain victory. In the Holy Empire of the Interdependency, violence is deployed so casually that the universal incompetence of everyone’s security services begs the question how anyone in the leading houses is still alive by the time the story rolls round.

Of course this comparison is unfair, and so is judging the Interdependency series for something that it is not, but the contrast was productive in helping me identify that my disappointment with the novels traced back to the separation between the world and the story set within it. The concept of the Interdependency holds much creative potential, yet the series never fully realises it. Whether that is due to the focus on the upper classes, the pace of the stories or the limited length of the series, is hard to tell.

That is not to say that the Interdependency series isn’t worth reading, as there is still much to enjoy in it. For one, although functionally Scalzi leans heavily into the Great Person Theory of History, he is happy to show us that up close, these people are anything but Great. Scalzi’s heroes are flawed, with doubts and foibles and endearingly humane concerns. Even his villains, while mainly murderous sociopaths, have compelling and interesting characters. All three novels are pleasantly fast-paced, which means it is neither surprising nor problematic that none of the characters show any real development over the course of the story, and have neatly Newtonian trajectories that can be predictably inferred from their starting positions. Instead, the plot proceeds through a couple of only mildly contrived deus-ex-machinas that move the story in an interesting direction without nullifying all dramatic tension the way we saw in Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The Last Emperox then sticks the landing with a solid and satisfying finale, handing the villains their just desserts without making it too easy on the heroes. The Interdependency is easily enjoyed as a literary light snack, and I will certainly give other Scalzi’s a go. Yet I cannot help but wonder if, with the same ingredients, something more substantial wouldn’t have been possible.

Notes & Suggestions

• In the last few months, I have enjoyed The Ten Percent Thief and One Battle After Another as examples of artworks that centre the agency of ordinary people, rather than ruling elites.
• Unfortunately I have not yet found the time to read Cory Doctorow’s recent hit Enshittification, but his previous book The Internet Con is equally worth a read, and also covers the dangers of unfettered monopolies reaching directly into our homes and lives.
• If you don’t want to feel like a mindless prole, unable to exert any power or agency in the world, consider joining any form of collective organising. Whether it be a workplace or tenants union, environmental campaign group, or political party, we can show the pessimists that people power can still change the world.
• The scenario where the elites simply exterminate the surplus population in order to achieve fully automated luxury communism is one of the four paths discussed in Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
• If you haven’t yet read Dune, but you enjoy science fiction and space operas, go and read Dune.
• And if you want to be thoroughly depressed and read about how some really existing elites happily let millions of people starve to death in order to protect profits, consider picking up Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts.

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Warning: Minor spoilers

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.

Pantheon starts small, with teenager Maddie Kim receiving strange messages encoded only in emojis from an unknown sender. We discover these were sent by Maddie’s deceased father, David Kim, who had been illegally and secretly uploaded by his employer two years prior after succumbing to cancer. From this starting point, Pantheon rapidly covers serious philosophical ground, establishing that once a mind exists on a server, it really isn’t that much different from an mp3. It can be copied. It can be deleted. It can be modified. It can be used. David Kim may be immortal, but rather than this enabling an infinite journey of self-actualisation, he finds himself pruned and stuck in a virtual cubicle, forced to work for his erstwhile employer, Logorhytms. Because, like an mp3, a UI can be treated as someone’s property.

Things get worse when we learn that uploading a mind destroys the organic original, which is why Logorhytms developed the technology covertly. Eventually though, the secret gets out, and Pantheon lifts its perspective from the personal to the societal level. While UIs are at first the preserve of national security agencies engaged in an arms race to use their superior digital capabilities in destructive acts of cyberwarfare, it is impossible to contain the technology once its existence is revealed.

There are obvious parallels here with the splitting of the atom, another dangerous technology that moved from theory to ubiquitous societal adoption via the crucible of national security. Like nuclear power, UI proves divisive, with some people refusing to regard it as proper life, and others desperate to escape illness or age.

Pantheon firmly takes the perspective that once the technological genie is out of its containment chamber, there is no putting it back, but it also rejects technological determinism. In the world of Pantheon, choices about how we use technology matter, as does who gets to make those choices. Compressed within its limited runtime are multiple possible futures, from those imagined by sociopathic techbros and megalomaniac UIs to emergent intelligences and humanity at large. Pantheon convinces you that all these futures are plausible, and that it is our actions, rather than the technology, that will determine the path we take.

Ultimately, Pantheon’s future is an optimistic one, though it does not come without struggle, conflict and suffering. It is one of the series’ strengths that even as it zooms to a global view, it never loses sight of the human condition. Its treatment of its characters is mature, and it manages the rare feat for animated television of portraying both its adult and teenage characters as relatable, believable and interesting.

The show does have to make some debatable assumptions to achieve its optimistic, heartfelt and mind-bending ending. For me, it skated too easily over the question of how an increasing population of virtual citizens would be sustained by a decreasing organic population. Pantheon avoids the fallacy that uploading represents complete transcendence of the physical realm and recognises that even virtual minds run on material substrates (i.e., servers) that need energy, water and upkeep. To avoid this materiality trap Pantheon envisages a political economy where UIs acting through robots can efficiently replace most human or machine-assisted labour, delivering on the promise of fully automated luxury communism. At a time when running barely coherent LLMs requires the use of most of the planets GPUs and a projected electricity consumption equal to a medium-sized country, this is not particularly convincing. Similarly, the conceit that a long-term solution to human/UI conflict is to move all the servers into space rather uncritically copies current Silicon Valley fantasies without giving due regard to the phenomenal technical challenges that would entail. Even Mass Effect, which otherwise doesn’t excel in the hard science department, understood that heat management in space is decidedly non-trivial.

Notwithstanding the excellent animation quality, Pantheon also struggles to depict the virtual existence of its uploaded characters. This is a common challenge for visual art that depicts a virtual environment, which must balance presenting something suitably alien with keeping things visually intelligible for the audience. Unlike The Matrix or Tron, Pantheon did not adopt a specific aesthetic to represent its virtual domain, but renders them as quite similar to the material world. Regardless of an early acknowledgement that, like Neo, UIs don’t need to be constrained by a mere three dimensions or physical coherence, Pantheon’s virtual environments are mostly familiarly human, like the Metaverse. The computational prowess of UIs is expressed through changes to the virtual environment and superhuman abilities, and the resulting conflict between UIs is rendered somewhat discordantly like the combat you’d expect in Dragonball Z or Bleach. It is possible that this is a deliberate homage, but it felt like more creative options were missed.

These are minor quibbles compared to Pantheon’s excellent story and inquisitive treatment of its subject matter. There is far more to the series than I have covered here, but revealing more would deprive potential viewers of many of the shows best moments and revelations. Suffice to say that Pantheon’s exploration of its subject causes it to fractal out to unexpected spatial and temporal scales. And yet, at the end, it brings it back to the profoundly and deeply human. What Pantheon really shows us is that in the face of (im)mortality, real power lies not in our technological prowess, but in how as humans we choose to relate to one another.

Notes and suggestions

• Another excellent interrogation of the dilemmas posed by virtual existence is Iain M. Bank’s novel Surface Detail, in which interstellar civilisations go to war over the nature of the virtual afterlife.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has an episode on Pantheon featuring some of the people connected with the show.

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Warning: Some minor spoilers

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.

The novel’s first move is immediately brave and unconventional. The Ten Percent Thief foregoes protagonist and linear plot for a linked chain of chapters that carry the narrative arc over a period of, I’m guessing here, about fifteen years. From the first chapter where we meet the titular Ten Percent Thief, we jump to a middle-manager within Bell Corporation fearing their performance review. Then we jump back over the force field separating the glittering Virtual city from the Analog slums to a young teenager drawn into the resistance, then back to a Virtual citizen stuck on a trajectory down into the bottom 10%. And on it goes. Each chapter offers both a different vantage point for the workings of Bell Corp society, and a different character through which our perspective is filtered. We meet frantic influencers and supervised retirees, upper management and frontline workers, exiles and infiltrators. The Ten Percent Thief does precisely what Ada Palmer and Jo Walton call for in their essay on the Protagonist Problem, and it does so brilliantly.

It is a creative and courageous choice, with excellent results. The kaleidoscopic view that Lakshminarayan gives of the world of the Ten Percent Thief helps us see it from different angles and perspectives, much more so than a story confined to the point of view of a single or small set of characters. Lakshminarayan artfully uses her succession of vignettes to construct a holistic picture of the world of the Bell Curve emerges, showing us the injustices of this world at both the macro and micro level, and the harm it inflicts on both its victims and its supposed victors.

For while Apex City’s Virtual citizens may have access to the latest technologies and amenities, the constant spectre of potential demotion for insufficient productivity prevents any real enjoyment. The ‘virtual’ in Virtual citizen denotes an abundant access to technology that fosters isolation and conformity rather than connection and community. This is not fully automated luxury communism, but fully automated precarious capitalism.

Capitalism though, but to what end? From what we can tell, Bell Corp is a monopolistic megacorp with full control over the Earth’s remaining resources. It is not in competition with anything, is mostly autarchic, and has achieved remarkable levels of automation. In other words, while its ethos is based solely on the valorisation of productivity, it is never clear what this productivity is for. Most of Apex City’s citizens appear to be engaged in proper bullshit jobs, with productivity measured through social media presence, body function monitoring or online popularity contests.

This paradox allows The Ten Percent Thief to deliver its satire with a two-punch effect, because you realise that every element that seems implausible does actually have a parallel in our own world. From the ultra-wealthy influencers to the pointless upper management, every time your willing suspension of disbelief is about to break, you remember that Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and their ilk exist.

If I was being critical, I would say that Lakshminarayan trades off the impact of her satire against the coherence of her political economy. Absent a market economy, BellCorp has to simulate competition through internal contests. Cultural conformity is enforced through social pressure or, failing that, electroshocks and cybnernetic neural rewiring. There is an obvious critique of online culture here, and while it is largely on point, it misses the nuance that under actually-existing-capitalism it doesn’t matter if people tire of your flagship superhero franchise, as long as you also own all other shows available. For capitalism, diversity is just another opportunity to sell people the means of individuation.

Neither do Apex City’s top 10% need the armies of impoverished and precarious workers that underpin our own capitalist economies, as most socially necessary production (manufacture, teaching, healthcare, agriculture) has been automated. It is difficult to say for sure as you never really get a feel for the size of Virtual society, but it’s reasonable to wonder if its lower rungs merely serve to make the elite feel good. There is no point in being on top if you cannot lord it over some other humans in a sort of Nietzschean master/slave dynamic. Maybe the purpose of the Bell Curve is simply to sustain the Bell Curve. It wouldn’t be the first system that came to care mostly about perpetuating its own existence.

Still, I was reminded of one of the futures in Peter Frase’s Four Futures, in which the elite eventually conclude that they don’t need the proles anymore, and the sunlit uplands of fully automated luxury communism are reached by deleting the entire ‘surplus’ population. It is not entirely clear why the upper echelons at Bell Corp haven’t long reached the same conclusion. It is not as if we’re short of Malthusian ultra-rich in our own world, after all.

The weaker political economy in The Ten Percent Thief’s worldbuilding is maybe the reason why the novel’s ending, while satisfying, feels a bit contrived. Having thoroughly disempowered the subaltern classes in her world, Lakshminarayan has to reach for a technological deus ex machina to resolve her plot.

These criticisms, however, are minor. On the whole, The Ten Percent Thief is an excellent novel that captures and excoriatingly satirizes our present moment, while also managing to step away from the eurocentrism that remains so pervasive in science-fiction. Its creative form brilliant supports its substantive argument, and it was great to read an example of a novel that overcame the ‘protagonist problem’ so effectively. On the Bell Curve of works of speculative fiction, I would most certainly put The Ten Percent Thief in the top 10%.

Notes & Suggestions

• It was particularly stimulating to read a novel that overcame the protagonist problem so soon after grappling with it in my review of Mass Effect 3.
• For a more in-depth analysis of how neoliberal capitalism manages to extract value and maintain compliance without the type of direct coercion we see in The Ten Percent Thief, Hegemony Now! is a good starting point.
• It has been nearly a decade since I read it, but I remember Peter Frase’s Four Futures as a short, sharp, stimulating essay on four potential extreme endpoints of our current capitalist trajectory.
• The depiction of a ‘resistance without a centre’ reminded me of the precepts from the Tao Te Ching and The Art of War that a formless or empty force cannot be defeated.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

Weaving the threads from its two predecessors together, Mass Effect 3 brings the trilogy to an an epic conclusion. As war erupts across the galaxy and sentient life fights for survival, the game brilliantly reflects the stakes in its narrative and pacing. Mass Effect 1 was a spy thriller and Mass Effect 2 a heist movie, but Mass Effect 3 is the disaster film. With the Reapers (sentient AI that exterminate all advanced organic life every 50,000 years or so) swarming across the galaxy and conquering Earth before the game even properly begins, Mass Effect 3 sets a frenetic pace from its opening salvos, and rarely gives you time to catch your breath. You escape Earth to be sent to Mars, then to the Citadel (the galactic capital) to ask for aid, only to immediately divert to the home planet of another species which is also under Reaper assault. The pace does let up somewhat as you get further into the game and the number of sidequests proliferates, but I was easily 10 hours in before it felt like I had any opportunity to choose what to do next, rather than running from one disaster to another. Combined with the significant and effective use of cutscenes, the dramatic pace and the cinematic feel of the game are seriously improved.

Much rests on the shoulders of Commander Shepard, and hence the player, as they are sent off to rally a reluctant galaxy to humanity’s aid. This is a marked departure from Mass Effect 1 and 2, where the player was the hero of their own story, but those stories were embedded in a greater galactic whole. Not so in Mass Effect 3. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that Commander Shephard is the fulcrum on which the entire war effort moves, and without whom no successful action can be taken. Heroes holding the fate of the known world in their hands is a story as old as Achilles, but where the known world is a galaxy of trillions engaged in a collective struggle for surival, positing that only one person can be its saviour plays dangerously with our willing suspension of disbelief. All games have to make the player feel important enough to entice them to continue playing, but Mass Effect 3 does so excessively, diminishing both the potential of its worldbuilding and the emotional pay-off we might feel on its completion.

Compared to its two predecessors, Mass Effect 3 operates on a grand scale. As the war continuous, you travel to parts of the galaxy referred to but never visited in the previous games, including the homeworlds of all of the key species. As you return to the Citadel, increasing numbers of refugees, injured and casualties make tangible the impacts of the ongoing war, with news updates from distant fronts and defeats adding to the sense of impending doom. And the game makes this personal, with key NPCs from previous games joining the lists of those KIA.

Those casualties are part of a thread woven through Mass Effect 3 that reflects on the decisions, actions and friendships you made along the way. Assuming you carried forward your character from Mass Effect 1 and 2, you discover how your actions influenced people, and how they perceive the person you have become. There is a deliberate, and generally successful, effort here to humanize Commander Shepard and to make the player connect with them as more than a mute protagonist carrying a gun around. This representation of ‘Commander Shepard, the person’ is an essential counterpoint to core thread of ‘Commander Shepard, the saviour’, and without it the narrative would have collapsed in on itself under the weight of its own messiah complex.

Mass Effect 3 is an excellent example of the ‘protagonist problem’ as proposed by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton. Their original essay is available via Uncanny Magazine and I strongly recommend giving it a read. What Palmer and Walton diagnose is an unhealthy overabundance of stories that centre a protagonist, someone without whom the story cannot progress, and the effect that has on our collective imagination. As with any systemic condition, any individual instance is never in and of itself the problem. It is the aggregated impact of a multitude of individual instances that creates the systemic effect, but I think Mass Effect 3 is an instance worth highlighting. Both because of the extreme level to which it takes its ‘protagonismos’, and the game’s own struggle with how to parse this.

The endgame of Mass Effect 3 is predicated on the notion that only Commander Shepard can save the galaxy. This is the inevitable culmination of a narrative arc that makes our character central to every major action during the Reaper War. Nothing moves without Commander Shepard. Alliances are forged, interstellar disputes dating back to a time when most humans would barely travel a few kilometers by cart are settled, ancient artefacts are uncovered, but only by Commander Shepard. We are told there is an entire galaxy out there engaged in a fight for its very existence, but for all that we can tell, they might as well all be playing Space Invaders.

And it is not just the key missions or diplomatic interventions that rely wholly on Commander Shepard. While you are busy saving the galaxy, the game offers a plethora of side-quests. So while you are trying to make peace between a race of synthetics and their creators who have been at war for centuries, you have to make a brief detour to pick up some fossils or acquire some encryption keys, because you overheard a random NPC express a desire for these. All of this feeds into a game mechanic where you acquire ‘assets’ to help you in the final assault on the Reapers, with a higher asset score securing a better outcome. Both your main missions and the side quests contribute to this, in a way that can often feel somewhat uncalibrated, as individual NPCs rate equally to entire squadrons of warships. But what it comes down to is this: only Commander Shepard can make the number go up.

Mass Effect 3 does try to undercut this overwhelming focus on its protagonist with humorous self-reflection and greater investment in your companions. Your allies make frequent references to your inability to dance or complete any mission without causing extensive property damage. As you walk around your spaceship, you can overhear your allies have conversations with one another, unlike in either of the previous games. The game works hard to create the impression of a world outside Commander Shepard, where people have experiences not mediated by you. But it cannot help itself, and still makes the ultimate fate of your companions at the end of the game dependant on whether you engaged them in conversation at crucial points or not. It is Commander Shepard: Galactic saviour, courier, and therapist.

Some degree of protagonismos is of course unavoidable in an action-RPG or first-person-shooter (FPS) where you inhabit your character. A videogame has to give you the power to act in the world, and for it to be compelling those actions must be meaningful. But it is not necessary to make the entire universe revolve around the player. I am reminded of Half-life, featuring perhaps the most famous mute protagonist, where despite your centrality to the plot it is clear that things happen in the world that are unaffected by your actions, and that you are only one of many heroes sent to deal with the game’s core threat. You just happen to be the only one who succeeds. Or Citizen Sleeper, a game where your actions make small but meaningful change to a community at the edge of civilisation. Or Subnautica, a game based entirely on surviving a natural environment that is fundamentally indifferent to your existence. Or Helldivers, where you are indistinguishable Starship Trooper #588102, until you are killed and become indistinguishable Starship Trooper #588103. Even the original Mass Effect itself was more grounded in the limited role it had you play in a wider galactic context.

None of this makes Mass Effect 3 a bad game. On the contrary, I regard it as the best of the trilogy, keeping the best parts of its predecessors while discarding the worst. The combat is fluid and challenging but not frustrating. The story is great and excellently paced. The annoying minigames have been removed. The morality system is still there, but feels better calibrated than in Mass Effect 2. And evident care and attention has been given to deepening the relationships between the player and their companions. But in the end the game simply tries to do too much. It cannot restrain itself. Even its attempts at self-deprecating humour or humanising reflection still end up having life-or-death consequences. So strongly does the game desire to make the player feel consequential, that it makes you into a black hole for everyone else’s agency.

Of course it is fun, and flattering, to be the hero, but as Palmer and Walton remind us, no actual conflict or problem depends so critically on the actions of only one person to resolve it. By making the player so central to everything that takes place, Mass Effect 3 diminishes the world it has created and makes its universe feel oddly empty. It feels like a play with only one actor, on a stage otherwise filled with lifeless props. Its culmination in an act of self-sacrifice that ushers in a new galactic era is the antithesis of One Battle After Another’s recognition that we all make our contribution to an intergenerational struggle for justice that may never really end.

Palmer and Walton persuasively argue that a surfeit of protagonismos in our cultural environment can disempower those of us who do not identify as heroes, and cause reckless arrogance in those who do. At a time when so many of us feel a distinct lack of power in our lives, there is great attractiveness to an escapist fantasy in which we, and we alone, can solve an entire universe’s problems. Yet Mass Effect 3’s very excess of heroic agency leaves us feeling smaller and more depleted when it is game over. At that time, it is worth remembering that instead of cosmic heroism, it can be the small acts of kindness that save the world.

Notes & suggestions

• As noted in the blog itself, I strongly recommend the original essay on The Protagonist Problem by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, which you can find here.
• Citizen Sleeper is an excellent little science-fiction game that isn’t interested in saving the galaxy, but explores how being human means being part of a community. In Other Waters by the same developer plays with similar themes and is also worth it, but does veer even more to the meditative side.
• I’ve already linked to them earlier, but for completeness, here are my reviews of Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2.
• Zero Punctuation (of course) also has a review of Mass Effect 3, as well as the previous two games, which you can find here.
• It may be that theatre as an art form is more amenable to stories lacking a clear protagonist. It’s not something to which I have given much thought (yet), but writing this blog reminded me of Small Acts of Love and its insistence on the agency we have in each and every one of us to make the world a kinder place.
• If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenges that face us in the present day, from inequality to climate catastrophe, consider joining a collective effort to make a difference. This could be a workplace union, a tenants association, a community organising group, a political party or something else. Unlike Commander Shepard, you do not need to save the world on your own.

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Warning: Contains Spoilers

At the conclusion of Mass Effect 1 we foiled the plan of the Reapers, sentient robot ships bent on eradicating interstellar civilisation, to teleport into the galactic capital and start their murderous rampage. Mass Effect 2 picks up the story shortly after, with our hero Commander Shepard relegated to patrolling the far reaches of space so that galactic politicians can more easily ignore your constant pleas to prepare for the delayed but not averted Reaper attack. No change here from the previous game where all politicians are inept and only the Space Marines™ can be relied upon to save the galaxy.

Though not even the Space Marines, as it turns out. In an unexpected turn of events, Mass Effect 2 kills off the player within the first five minutes, only for Commander Shepard to be resurrected two years later by our old friends Cerberus. Yes, the same human-supremacist, experimenting on live test subjects, rogue-black-ops-gone-terrorist Cerberus we encountered in Mass Effect 1. This setup presents excellent potential to challenge the player through the game’s morality mechanic, but predictably Mass Effect 2 is too timid to exploit it. You can agree with Cerberus’ ‘the end justifies the means’ philosophy or not, you can file your disagreement with their methods or not, the game will unfold as it unfolds. It is morality as aesthetics rather than ethics, and maybe there is a reflection here of a contemporary politics that is equally vacuous and free of stakes.

If the template for Mass Effect 1 was a spy thriller then Mass Effect 2 is a heist movie. There is the scene setting at the start and the big mission at the end. The intervening time is devoted to assembling and getting to know your crack infiltration team. This structure may work for a 2 hour movie but doesn’t manage to sustain narrative tension across a 20+ hour game. The sense of urgency simply dissipates when most time is spent solving your people’s petty personal problems. Nor does the story come to the rescue, given its sheer implausibility. Mass Effect 1’s ‘evil robots want to kill us all’ story was effective in its simplicity and had enough innovative elements to be engaging. By contrast, Mass Effect 2’s evil robots have decided that humanity is the apex species in the galaxy and as such deserves to be preserved through a Reaper built in its image. Despite their vast technological superiority though, Reaper biotech is more 1970’s comic book villain than Bene Tleilax and so they have to abduct thousands of humans to liquefy them to harvest their DNA.

This is taking the series’ anthropocentrism to a new level. Where in Mass Effect 1 humanity was still the new kid on the block, it is now presented as one of the dominant galactic players. This is despite humanity having at least a thousand years of catching up to do compared to the galactic community. This proposition is about as plausible as a small clan of lost Vikings arriving on the coast of North America today, fighting the US Navy to a standstill with their longships, and then managing to become a global superpower. It is not that I object in principle to making humans the centre of the universe, though stories that don’t do this like Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past or Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series tend to be more interesting. It is that Mass Effect only achieves it through the inexplicable complete technological, social, industrial and territorial stagnation of every single other species in its galaxy. Both story and worldbuilding are entirely reverse-engineered to somehow put the human player at the centre of the galaxy.

Gameplay wise there have been some updates. Gone are the hilariously uncontrollable APC and your sidehustle as an arms dealer, replaced by a tedious resource mining minigame and collectible weapons upgrades. You have even more romance options, making any dialogue with a potential romantic partner a conversational minefield where statements ranging from “Hello” to “I am sorry your parent died” can be interpreted as a declaration of undying love. Combat has seen a simplification of the space magic system and replacement of Mass Effect 1’s innovative heatsink mechanic with standard FPS magazine clips. Cover is now more important, but this has the comical side effect that every environment is littered with convenient chest height objects to hide behind. And of course, we still have the morality system.

Ah, the morality system. The main reason why despite the uncompelling plot and the unconvincing worldbuilding I still decided to write a post about this game. Because the odd thing about Mass Effect’s morality mechanic is that for something the game leans into so heavily, it ultimately matters so little.

Of course, one can argue that morality in games never matters, given they don’t have real life consequences. But it is definitely possible for a game to present moral choices in a way that makes the player think about them. In Mass Effect, your moral choices are linked to one of two tracks: ‘Paragon’ for altruicist/noble choices and ‘Renegade’ for selfish choices. Picking paragon or renegade dialogue options or quick-time events awards you with points in the chosen category, which in turn opens up more options further down the line. Regardless of your choices, Commander Shepard has to remain a hero, and so the Renegade path isn’t so much about being evil as preferring to use intimidation and coercion to resolve conflict, as well as having the Emotional Intelligence of a bolt gun.

Throughout the game, the player will encounter situations that can only be resolved with a sufficiently high paragon or renegade score, but because it doesn’t want to deprive you of content, either of the pathways will work provided you maximise it. That might seem like Centrism Is Not an Option, but in actuality the game firmly keeps you on its central narrative railroad regardless of your moral flavouring. You cannot, for example, decide to switch sides back to your Space Marine buddies and turn in your terrorist benefactors. Nor can you lean into your new human-supremacist allegiance and terminate any Space Marine standing in your way, because the game instead throws dozens of rent-a-goon mercenaries at you precisely to avoid creating this moral dilemma. The obvious moral quandary of Mass Effect 2’s setup is whether the player would actively murder a platoon of Space Marines if this helped fight the existential Reaper threat, but that is exactly where the game dare not go.

Instead, we can choose to be nice or obnoxious in conversation, or whether or not to adopt a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach in specific circumstances. An early mission exemplifies the inanity of this approach. You are offered the opportunity to taser a mechanic to prevent them from fixing an aircraft’s shielding, making a later fight easier. Doing this is a ‘renegade’ action. Yet less than five minutes later you will be slaughtering this mechanic’s entire mercenary company (aircraft included), and the game takes no moral view on that at all. The inference here is that subterfuge is somehow dishonourable, but setting up a killzone to snipe a platoon to death is fine because it is done in open combat. Or something. Killing enemies is intrinsic to a first-person shooter of course, but the consequence is that morality can only occur on the game’s margins and by disavowing what Commander Shepard actually does for 90% of the game.

To provide a counterpoint, I’d like to contrast Mass Effect 2 to three other games I have played that manage morality in a much more interesting way: Citizen Sleeper, Ixion and Frostpunk.

Citizen Sleeper and Ixion are both built on managing scarcity, of your own energy or your spacefaring society’s resources respectively. Both games force you to make choices on how to spend those resources. In Citizen Sleeper, I made more commitments than I could honour and landed a friend in prison because I had to prioritise my own survival. In Ixion, I abandoned dozens of colonists in stasis pods because I didn’t want commit the necessary resources and risk being vulnerable to disaster later on. What matters is those are real choices and trade-offs that you have to think about. I didn’t want to desert my friend or forsake those colonists, but it was a choice I made because there was something else that was more important. Nor is there a helpful colour-coding to tell you what moral flavour you’ve picked. There is simply you, the choice, and the consequences.

Frostpunk takes this logic to an extreme rarely seen in videogames. In Frostpunk you lead a small community through the frozen dystopia of a new ice age. Resources are scarce and disasters are frequent. The game offers you a policy tree with options to boost morale and increase resource production. But there is a catch. The whole tree is a slippery slope from ‘faith will bring us together’ to ‘I am your God King and we must kill the unbelievers’. Each step down this path is only marginally more ethically questionable than the last, and can always be justified on the grounds that it will improve your odds for survival. In one playthrough, I refused to put the children to work, only to see my entire city starve further down the line. So on the next playthrough, I did put the children to work. Frostpunk is a real ethical thought experiment masquerading as a game, asking the player how far they would go to ensure survival. To what extent will the ends justify the means?

Compared to these games, Mass Effect 2 offers the only most shallow of moral dilemmas: Choose the blue track to kill 1,000 people but be a nice person and feel some remorse. Or choose the red track to kill 1,000 people and revel in it. In my review of Mass Effect 1 I reflected on how it exemplified the lack of a political imaginary under late-stage capitalism. In turn, Mass Effect 2 feels like it exemplifies the contraction of politics into hegemonic centrist consensus. You can choose between the red team who will feel bad about implementing austerity, and the blue team who won’t, but what you can’t do is choose something else altogether.

In the end, you again foil the Reaper’s plan and terminate your employment with your fascist boss, either on good terms or bad. All we can do is hope that in the real world, we have some more options open to us.

Notes and suggestions

• Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s 5 minute review at Zero Punctuation covers much the same ground as this review, but is much more entertaining. Croshaw can now be found at Fully Ramblomatic.
• Despite its flaws, Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy has a much more interesting take on humanity’s discovery it is not alone among the stars. Other good examples are Ted Chiang’s Arrival, Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series and Olivia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy.
• Citizen Sleeper is a different type of game, but certainly worth it for a reflection on what it means to connect to rather than murder the people you meet.
• The inability of culture to do anything other than reproduce our contemporary political arrangements is touched on in both Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams’ Hegemony Now. Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void is an excellent disection of the evacuation of meaningful choice from the domain of politics.

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Contains spoilers

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his now infamous The End of History and the Last Man, commonly understood to proclaim that with the victory of liberal market democracies, history had run its course and we could all kick back and relax in the knowledge that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. A lot of history has happened since then, and continues to happen. Yet our collective cultural imaginary remains singularly foreshortened, giving rise to the oft-cited observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we might say that Fukuyama’s book would have been better titled ‘The End of the Future’.

The hegemony of the present and the absence of a plausible alternative future is particularly noticeable in much science fiction. I’m with Ursuala K. le Guin in that good science fiction tells us something about the present, but sadly much of it simply is the present, with added spaceships. Mass Effect, originally released in 2007 but re-released as a remaster in 2021, is a prime example of the latter type of science fiction. I decided to replay it partly for nostalgia, and partly because I never played the third installment of the trilogy.

In Mass Effect you play as Commander Shepard*, the first human to become a ‘SPECTRE’: special operatives acting for the Galactic Council (think Iain M. Banks’ Special Circumstances, but far less cool). You get this promotion as the result of another SPECTRE having gone rogue and destroying a human settlement. The plot of the game is to hunt your rogue colleague down, but in doing so you discover that he is working at the behest of ‘Reapers’: intelligent machines from beyond the edge of the galaxy. For reasons known only to themselves, the Reapers occasionally cull sentient organic life. It is your job, and that of the merry band of allies you make along the way, to prevent this.

Mass Effect’s gameplay is very of its time. You build your company of heroes and level them up, although space marine regulations dictate you can only ever take two of them on a mission simultaneously. These missions are of the ‘go to place and shoot enemies / retrieve object / push button / have dialogue’ variety. The main story is a linear path, but there are lots of sidequests available. There is the obligatory romance option, which makes conversation with any NPC the game deems a potential love interest extremely awkward, and the obligatory morality system that requires you to guess the consequences of the the cryptic conversation options the game provides you with. Some elements of Mass Effect didn’t survive into future iterations. Nobody will miss the planetside missions where you drive a tank that controls as easily as a drunk ping-pong ball in a washing machine. The game also spams a bizarre amount of loot at you, so that by the end of the story, my Commander Shepard had managed to become a multimillionaire through a lucrative sideline as an arms dealer.

Even on replaying, the conceit of Mass Effect’s story still feels interesting. It takes the somewhat worn trope of the Ancients, but this time, the player discovers that what they assumed were the relics of a past civilization are actually an elaborate trap created to contain successive evolutions of organic life. And while the game’s ultimate baddies are synthetic lifeforms bent on exterminating all organic life, elsewhere the game takes a more nuanced approach to synethic/organic conflict. When introduced to a companion whose species (the Quarians) has been driven off their homeworld by a robot revolt, the player can point out that this might not have happened had the Quarians’ response to their robots asking if they had a soul not been to instantly try to genocide them all.

It is thus extra disappointing that Mass Effect doesn’t know what to do with this interesting premise and fails to escape the gravitational pull of reactionary neoliberalism at both the level of the story arc and of the worldbuilding.

Mass Effect’s problem at the story level is that it is constrained both by what the game is – a first-person shooter – and its need to put a human at the centre of the story. It therefore needs to contrive a situation where the existential threat is not adequately handled by any of the galactic community’s more established institutions, and where the solution to the problem is necessarily the use of force. Granted, it would otherwise make for a dull game, but this narrative cul-de-sac leads Mass Effect to construct its story out of the most banal and reactionary tropes: politicians are incompetent, security services too constrained, intelligence services backstabbing, and criminals rampant. The only honourable institution in this morass of incompetence and corruption is, of course, the military (specifically the Marines), which therefore can be trusted to always make the right calls and shoot the right people. In theory a player could play the ‘bad’ Shepard and subvert this narrative, but that wouldn’t change the institutional logic that the game is built on.

This outcome is perhaps not surprising given the world that the story is embedded in. The game is so focused on its cool spaceships, diverse planets and plethora of barely distinguishable armaments, that it had no attention to spare to consider what multi-species galactic community might plausibly look like. The result is an utterly mundane world where any potentially interesting concepts fail to develop in the hostile environment of actually existing space neoliberalism. As the newcomer on the galactic stage, humanity is confronted by a range of, mostly conveniently humaniod, other species. The game tries to introduce variety by telling us that species X is violent and aggressive, species Y is short lived but very scientific, and species Z is long-lived and matriarchal. We are also told that many of these species have possessed faster-than-light capability for centuries and been in contact with one another for a similar length of time. And then, after lining up all this alien variety, we discover that the best the universe could come up with is an intergalactic market economy, complete with poverty, MegaCorps, corruption, unrepresentative democracy, and, for some reason, a lot of sleazy nightclubs. Neoliberalism clearly must be the ultimate governmental form, given that across centuries and lightyears, every single alien species landed on it. Is your species strongly communal? Doesn’t matter, you can just adopt a mercantile client race. Are you a long-lived unisexual matriarchal society? No worries, you can be excellent mercenaries and night-club dancers. All interstellar roads lead to the Washington Consensus.

Of course, there are reasons for this. To make a human hero even faintly plausible, the game needs to have arrested the technological development of every other species at the same level, and kept the world sufficiently intelligible for a 21st century human player to navigate. Still, would it really have broken the game to have a species of feudal jellyfish or fully automated luxury communist amphibians? To have something that isn’t just more of the world as we know it, but with spaceships?

But no, there is no future. There is just the endless present. With spaceships, talking robots and obligatory sexy blue space elves, but still, ultimately, functionally, the present. You can almost understand why the Reapers put an end to it every so often. What, after all, is there left for a culture that has neither history nor future, but extinction?

*Characters with a variant of the surname Shepherd seem oddly common in (science) fiction.

Notes & suggestions

• After finishing Mass Effect, I’ve used reviews of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 to explore other elements of the series and how it interacts with contemporary culture.
• Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has a reliable entertaining review at Zero Punctuation. Croshaw has now moved to Fully Ramblomatic.
• Although I was not particularly impressed by the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, at least it imagines the universe in all its bizarre possibilities.
• While Citizen Sleeper starts with the same cyberpunk dystopian world as much science fiction, its purpose is to explore how to go beyond it, even if just at an individual or communal level.
• Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series is a much, much richer exploration of the possibilities of other futuristic social forms.

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