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.

Akira follows the exploits of Kaneda, leader of motorcycle gang the Capsules, as he finds himself and his gang in the crosshairs of a covert military research effort to create humans with psychic abilities (dubbed ‘espers’). A collision with an escaped esper imbues one of Kaneda’s gang members, Tetsuo, with psychic powers, resulting in him summarily being whisked away by Colonel Shikishima to a secret military facility for experimentation. Kaneda’s resolution to free his friend sees him join forces with Kei, a revolutionary, whose cell intends to liberate the espers. What follows is a chaotic crescendo of violence as the hubris of men inexorably raises the stakes, resulting in an epic final stand off between Kaneda and Tetsuo at the construction site for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Stadium, by which point large swathes of Neo-Tokyo have already been laid waste and the civilian casualties have mounted into their thousands.

The titular Akira himself is not so much a character as the loop around which the movie’s story is wound, functioning both as the point of origin of the movie’s events and their resolution. Though absent, he is the centre of gravity for many of the movie’s protagonists. For some of Neo-Tokyo’s denizens he is an object of cult worship, for the remaining espers a quest for transcendence, for Tetsuo his last hope of controlling his spiralling psychic powers, and for colonel Shikishima a dangerous secret to be supressed.

Both aesthetically and narratively Akira is a tour de force. We start with the high-octane energy of Kaneda’s futuristic motorcycle gang having it out with their rivals, and the movie sustains this frenetic pace until the credits roll. Its visuals embody the gold standard of 1980s Japanese animation, rendering the cyberpunk world of Neo-Tokyo in exquisite detail and its inhabitants with a vital energy. With the notable exception of mechas and kaiju, Akira is a catalogue of futuristic anime staples, from secret government programmes to towering skyscrapers and thinly-veiled references to nuclear destruction. If much of it feels familiar, it is because of how this movie inspired so much of what followed.

Even in the background details, there is a richness and depth that suffuses the film, never leaving the viewer in doubt that there is much more to this world than we get to see. We get snippets of debates in smoke-filled council chambers suggestive of political wranglings that are never explored. Exchanges between NPCs that are there purely as scenery convince us that Neo-Tokyo is filled with people living their own lives, wholly unrelated and oblivious to the unfolding story. Our protagonists come with their implied backstories to which minimal exposition is devoted. All this leaves us with the impression that all we get is a glimpse into this sprawling, chaotic, complex world.

That complex chaos is one aspect of Akira that diverges from many contemporary cyberpunk dystopias. Akira’s central dystopian anxiety is that of chaos and decay, not calamitous collapse or totalitarian control. Neo-Tokyo is a complex system disintegrating under the weight of its own internal contradictions where nobody is in command, and any attempts to exercise control only serves to destabilise the system further. The overriding sense is of a lack of order, apart from what groups such as the Capsules can locally impose, and this is further reinforced by the alienating effects of the inchoate storyline and the soundtrack. Contrary to the claustrophobic control of Silo or The Ten Percent Thief, the chaos in Akira is expansive, too big to contain. And unlike the external collapse of Interstellar or Oryx & Crake, in Akira it is the inherent instability of the society itself that is maintaining it in a state of permanent implosion.

If the rampant chaos and decay are one way by which Akira signals the dystopian status of Neo-Tokyo, the treatment of women is another. Using overt oppression of women as the signifier for dystopia is common, and while it can be done well (most famously in The Handmaid's Tale), Akira's uncritical use of this trope is problematic. Akira features three main female characters: Tetsuo’s girlfriend Kaori, revolutionary Kei, and esper Kiyoko. Kaori’s role is primarily to suffer. Early on in the movie an ill-fated escape attempt with Tetsuo sees her brutally physically and sexually assaulted. Rendered in Akira’s signature vivid style, the harrowing scene is compounded by the suspicion that the (presumed male) audience is meant to find the half-naked and violated Kaori vaguely titillating. Kaori’s only other key appearance is at the movie’s finale, where her ineffectual attempt to calm an out-of-control Tetsuo leads to him crushing her to death. Kaori is easily the most innocent and caring character in the film, and the only one who sees that Tetsuo needs compassion, not machismo. But in Neo-Tokyo, empathy is a fatal liability punishable by death.

Kei’s portrayal is much more sympathetic, and as a revolutionary she has significantly more agency than Kaori. Nonetheless, she is gradually eclipsed by Kaneda even though of the two she ought to be the more capable warrior. Her flaw is a tendency to think before she acts, unlike Kaneda who blunders into situations but surmounts them through sheer force of will. This disempowerment begins shortly after the two characters meet, when Kei’s disinterest in Kaneda’s flirtatious overtures immediately results in an aggressively abusive response from the latter. This is portrayed not as a flaw in our hero, but as an acceptable if maybe somewhat immature way for a man to express frustration at the rejection of his advances towards an attractive woman, and will be painfully recognisable to any female viewers. Akira avoids a a standard romantic arc for Kei and Kaneda after this inauspicious start, but we are nonetheless to understand that Kaneda's boisterous energy and dedication to Tetsuo gradually win Kei over.

Kiyoko, finally, is probably the most effective of the three espers. But while her two male counterparts are depicted as miniature adults, Kiyoko retains the trappings of a little girl, stuck in a slightly bizarre and unsettling father/daughter relationship with colonel Shikishima.

Between them these three characters are undeniably instrumental to the resolution of the story, and the organised, capable and thoughtful Kei in particular contrasts positively with loose-cannon goofball Kaneda. Over the course of the film however, the agency of the female characters progressively erodes, and combined with overt violence against women as an indicator of the dystopian nature of Neo-Tokyo, a latent misogyny suffuses the movie. One might argue that this is simply reflective of the movie’s times, were it not for the fact that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind came out four years before Akira, proving that dystopian anime with a much more positive female depictions was eminently possible.

A potential counterargument here is that the entire movie could be interpreted as at least in part a critique of toxic masculinity. It is after all propelled by Kaneda and Tetsuo’s inability to express their friendship other than through competition and violent one-upmanship, and it is the incessant desire of men to obtain power and exercise control that pushes Neo-Tokyo deeper and deeper into crisis. Multiple times characters choose coercion and anger over compassion and understanding, fuelling the spiral of violence until it comes to a catastrophic terminus. In this sense, Akira falls squarely in the ‘things men do to avoid going to therapy’ category, although in fairness it seems likely that in Neo-Tokyo mental health services are even more eviscerated than they are in austerity Britain. In the end, Akira doesn't have the self-awareness to pull off this critique, as it does not manage to point at any alternatives, but rather forecloses them as it did with Kaori’s brutal death. At its heart, Akira is too excited about being a movie for boys about boys doing boy things, with fast motorcycles and big explosions.

None of this invalidates Akira’s status as an iconic and historically significant movie, nor detract from the its exquisite craftsmanship, raucously immersive story, and its dystopian critique. It is nonetheless intriguing that its overwhelming spectacle appears to have stunned contemporary reviews into a mere reaffirmation of the cult status we already knew Akira possessed, preventing engagement with aspects of the movie that have aged for better or worse. With nearly forty years between now and the movie’s release, it feels like an opportunity was missed to more critically evaluate Akira and ask what it can offer those who live in the future it sought to anticipate, as well as which of its cultural descendants may have transcended their source material.

Notes & Suggestions

• This review was inspired and greatly influenced by my partner, and I want to thank her for her suggestions and contributions.
• Despite the obvious violent or dismissive treatment of women, I only found one mildly obscure commentary on this aspect of Akira. An interesting and more holistic evaluation of many of the themes present in Akira, including alienation, Japanese history and the ubiquitous references to nuclear warfare in anime can be found here.
• The aesthetic influence of Akira can be clearly seen in Pluto, although there the skyscrapers and technological prowess appears in utopian rather than dystopian guise.
• A worthwhile counterpoint to the usual failure of action heroes to communicate (or go to therapy) is Marvel's Thunderbolts.

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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: '#AI #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: 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 some spoilers

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, is an observation attributed to Marxist critic Frederic Jameson and popularised by Mark Fisher. And indeed, our culture is rife with stories that tell of the end of the world, often as a result of capitalism, yet rarely do we see stories about capitalism’s transcendence. Post-apocalyptic stories walk a fine line between serving as a warning, and expressing our fears that the trolley can no longer be switched to a track where it will not kill all of us. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake sits within the latter category, being less a warning and more a bleakly cynical tale of human powerlessness.

We see the world of Oryx & Crake through the eyes of Snowman/Jimmy. Snowman is the last surviving human, an obsolete relic from a vanished civilisation. Through Snowman, Atwood shows us that an individual human is a contradiction in terms. Devoid of relations with other humans or a shared humanity, Snowman is a subject without purpose, who doesn’t so much survive as merely exist. His only role is to look after the ‘Crakers’, a group of post-human humanoids who have inherited the Earth, and who could probably have done without Snowman’s guidance if it wasn’t for the dangerous trash humanity has left behind.

Jimmy is Snowman’s pre-apocalyptic incarnation. Flashbacks tell us of Jimmy’s childhood, teenage years and adolescence. It is in these chapters that we discover the world before the fall. It is a world already ravaged by climate change, with American society split between those living a nasty, brutish and short existence in the ‘pleeplands’, and those, like Jimmy, who are fortunate enough to live in the highly competitive but at least vaguely secure Compounds of a handful of biotech megacorps. We don’t see a lot of the world beyond the United States, but the implication is that is riven by war, plague, and famine.

However, the bleakness of Oryx & Crake does not lie in the actions of the unscrupulous corporate giants whose actions threaten to destroy the world. If anything, the megacorps have a somewhat cartoonish feel to them, with names like HealthWyzer and RejuvenEssence. They are also by now a fairly worn trope, and although Oryx & Crake predates cultural products such as WALL-E or The Outer Worlds, we had already seen this representation in Snowcrash, Fallout or Bladerunner. Instead, the cynicism comes from the fundamental lack of agency of almost everyone in the book, creating a pervasive feeling of inertia and fatalism.

The inertia is most pronounced for Snowman. Although he eventually goes on a pilgrimage, it is difficult to be invested in the outcome of anything that happens to him, because he serves no other role than acting as the story’s narrator. The ambiguity about his fate at the end of the book evokes indifference rather than any sense of dramatic tension.

The same holds true for the Jimmy chapters, because in the end Jimmy is a fundamentally uninterested and uninteresting character, and those two things are not unrelated. Jimmy’s is a stereotypical story of emotionally deprived childhood, detached adolescence and damaged early adulthood. Jimmy neither cares for nor is interested in the world he inhabits, apart from his imbalanced friendship with the titular Crake and his bizarre and unhealthy obsession with a child seen in a pornographic video, who turns out to be the titular Oryx. Like Snowman, Jimmy doesn’t really have a purpose in life and so more or less drifts through it rather than exerting any real agency.

The same lack of agency is evident in all the other characters in the novel, who are also disappointingly one-dimensional, from the emotionally distant mother and the disinterested but jovial father, to the corporate goons and the overwrought artists of Jimmy’s university years. Apart from Jimmy’s mother, none of them exhibit much interest in the world they inhabit, or any desire to act upon it.

The only character with a real sense of purpose is Crake, and this is something Jimmy senses when they first meet. Crake is a boy/man with a vision, and this alone makes him different, mysterious, enviable and above all, powerful. Crake is also a sociopathic genius, as evidenced by his effortless hacking of his uncle’s bank account as a child and his inevitable ascendance to the most prestigious university and employer.

It is this position of Crake as the only character with any real capacity and will to act which turns Oryx & Crake’s message into one of fatalistic cynicism. For what hope is there of averting the apocalypse if the only people who can change anything are superhuman geniuses who believe that humanity is the virus? The book presents no alternatives to the mad scientist theory of history: its mundane characters are powerless and uninterested, its bright intellects are corrupted, and the denizens of the pleeplands are as useless as the proles in Orwell’s 1984. What little collective action the book presents is only there as background, and in any event is totally ineffective.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Atwood’s warning is about the dangers of collective inertia. But with Crake presented as the only counterpoint, it is unclear what lesson we are expected to take away from this story. The pervasive sense of futility also makes the book generally quite boring. Jimmy/Snowman is just not very compelling as a character, nor is the support cast, which makes it difficult to care about anyone in the book, or what happens to them, including the billions of humans who ultimately die, though generally off stage. On top of that, Crake’s role in the story is telegraphed with a 12 foot neon sign as soon as he is introduced, making the sequence of events quite predictable. One doesn’t introduce a mad scientist in Act I if one doesn’t intend to use them.

This is not to say that Oryx & Crake doesn’t provide some interesting food for thought: on the nature of being human, the point of the arts and culture, or the capitalist death drive. But on the whole, its characters and plot are too superficial to be compelling, and its world is neither an effective warning nor an imagining of an alternative to our current trajectory. We remain trapped in the neoliberal frame where there is no alternative: the trolley has only one track, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Notes & Suggestions

• Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is an excellent short primer on how our culture remains caught within the neoliberal event horizon, and how it is preventing us from moving on, both culturally and politically. Hegemony Now! tackles the same subject matter in more detail and with more academic rigour.

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