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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Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.

A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.

It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.

Interstellar starts in the near future of 2067, when a mysterious blight is slowly poisoning the atmosphere, causing increasing crop failures and threatening human survival through starvation and suffocation. For this, technology offers no cure, and so like most of humanity, former astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is engaged in a progressively more futile effort to maintain agricultural production. That is, until mysterious messages guide him to a secret NASA facility where a last ditch effort is underway to find a new home among the stars for humanity. A wormhole has appeared near Saturn, leading to another star system with potential habitable planets. And so Cooper, the last astronaut, is drafted into a plan for a small crew to transit the wormhole and link up with an earlier recon team sent to establish whether any planets on the far side might support human life.

Cooper must leave his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet, Casey Affleck) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Fry, Jessica Chastain) behind, not for a few years, but possibly for a lifetime. For the planets on the far side orbit a supermassive black hole, warping time and space around it. Interstellar is serious about its physics, both the orbital mechanics of spacecraft and the uncanny time dilation of general relativity theory, and the movie feels partly like a love letter to (and some product placement for) a NASA that may only ever have existed in our collective imagination. The increasing age difference between the away team and Earth caused by relativistic forces is central to the story, with Cooper forced to watch his children age decades in what to him are only a few hours, viewing their mounting frustration at his lack of reciprocal communication.

Cooper and Murph’s separation by space and time is the heart of Interstellar, and if its concluding message that love can transcend both risks being saccharine, the movie is more than salvaged by the respect with which it treats both the impersonal forces of physics, and the deeply personal struggles of Cooper and Murph. And by the incomparable soundtrack, of course.

With the relationship between Cooper and Murph the emotional core of the movie, the intellectual heft lies with the desperate attempt to secure a future for humanity, and the moral dilemmas inherent in the leap into space. And while adequately compelling courtesy of the usual accidents and interpersonal conflicts that beset missions like these, this is where Interstellar falls into a depressingly familiar pattern of stories featuring mysterious catastrophes that can only be overcome via a single technologically sophisticated but highly dangerous gambit, placing the burden of humanity’s survival on the shoulders of an intrepid and often reluctant few. For Interstellar it is crop failure. In Project Hail Mary it was space bacteria. Elsewhere it might be asteroids, or the Earth’s magnetosphere, or some other quasi-plausible disaster. Regardless of their precise nature, these putative apocalypses can all easily be read as allegories for climate change, which itself remains firmly taboo on the silver screen, presumably because it is too confrontational for the audience. This displacement conveniently redefines the existential threat as something that is emphatically not amenable to radical social or political transformation, but can only be overcome through a single, ‘neutral’, technological fix. To do otherwise might after all lead the audience to inadvertently imagine a world beyond capitalism. The effect of stories like Interstellar, even if achieved unintentionally, is to enclose our political horizons and obscure the fact that the technological solutions to our actually existing existential threat are already available to us.

Interstellar does present varying responses to the blight, ranging from the reluctant hero willing to suffer personal hardship for family and humanity but unable to sacrifice the many so that a few might survive, to the scientists who hold fast to the technological breakthrough that might save humanity in some form, even if it does require cold moral calculus. There is however one character which represents the stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable and, quite literally, plough on in the face of adversity: Cooper’s son Tom, who inherits the family farm and holds the agricultural frontline against the encroaching blight. Tom is neither astronaut nor scientist. He is emphatically not special, but one of millions if not billions of farmers like him desperately trying to keep humanity alive. Adherence to Interstellar’s techno-optimist tendency however requires that he is portrayed as a stubborn Luddite, engaged in a futile and even harmful rearguard action as dust storms and crop failures make his situation increasingly untenable.

And yet, we are more akin to Tom than any of the other characters. No convenient wormhole will come to our rescue. No single technological breakthrough will be our salvation. We do not need a futuristic technological fix to traverse the cosmos or go to Mars. The manifold solutions we have to our predicament, technological or otherwise, are already at our disposal. What is standing in our way is not our failure to unify quantum theory with general relativity, but a system optimised for the generation of short-term profit at the expensive of all else, including the future habitability of our planet. Our solution is the collective power of many, coming together to save the world we have from the billionaires who would happily watch millions of us die to safeguard their wealth and status.

Interstellar is objectively an epic movie, admirably rooted in real scientific knowledge and with an affective father/daughter relationship at its heart. But despite its ostensible hopeful ending, its intellectual core is fatalistic and tacitly reactionary, reinforcing the narrative that we cannot collectively solve our problems here on Earth, but must wait for a heroic saviour to lead us to the stars.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will not save us. We can only save ourselves, if we collectively decide not to go gently into that good night, but to rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Notes and suggestions

• The blight may be an invention, but the collapse of agricultural production due to soil exhaustion is a real risk. We live in an age of ecological polycrisis after all, and while soil degradation doesn’t have the profile of climate change, it is no less real.
• Want to know why technology won’t save us in significantly more detail? Then why don’t listen to the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast?
• Like Tom, and admittedly the other characters in Interstellar, we are not alone in fighting for the survival of people and planet. If you feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and are unsure about what you can do, consider supporting or joining organisations such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Other options (not mutually exclusive!) are local environmental campaign groups, green political parties, or even local (guerrilla) gardening groups. And if you are looking to slow down and work out how to stay sane in a world that feels like it is going insane, there are others who write inspiringly on how to do just that.
• Regular readers may remember that I’ve recently written about Project Hail Mary. Having now watched Interstellar for the first time, Project Hail Mary feels not only inspired by, but to some extent derivative of Interstellar, although it takes the subject into a more humorous direction.
• For an in-depth discussion of the Californian Ideology, you can listen to one of the early podcasts from General Intellect Unit.

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Hope is hard in a world ravaged by ecological breakdown, especially for the young. Ten year old Iris struggles to have hope. Hers is a world of natural disasters, inexorably sliding further and further towards climate catastrophe, all while the adults in the room act as if everything is normal. The year is 2075, and all is not well.

That is, until Arco literally crashes into her life. Titular Arco is another ten-year-old, but whereas Iris is from our near future, Arco hails from a distant future where humans have relocated to gigantic cloud arcologies and mastered time travel. Even in that future though, children are not supposed to play with time until they’ve passed time-travellers exam. Impatient Arco steals his his sister’s device, only to lose control and end up in Iris’ time by accident. In the tradition of all good children’s movies, our two youngsters embark on a series of capers and adventures, supported by the friends they make along the way, to get Arco back to his own time.

Arco is a beautifully drawn animation, evoking the traditions of Studio Ghibli both in terms of style and narrative. It is a story of perseverance and hope against the odds, its generally light-hearted tone giving its emotional moments all the more impact. Like all good science fiction, it is a story not of, but for our times, reminding us that hope is a radical act.

Arco breaks with conventional time travel script by having its time traveller arrive not in the present day, but the future. In doing so it creates a double contrast: between Iris’ time and our own, and Arco’s time and Iris’. Set in the near future, Iris’ time is a plausibly familiar continuation of our own. It is the world of overshoot, of simultaneous technological progress and ecological degradation. This combination affords a precarious balance, symbolised by the protective domes that shield buildings from successive natural disasters, though Iris’ hopelessness suggests that the overall trend is downwards. Inverting the description of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossesed, Arco might be called a ‘realistic dystopia’. This is not a world ravaged by Mad Max or 2012 style cataclysms, but a society adapted to climate change yet possibly losing that struggle in the long run. It is a more believable and hence more relatable depiction of what the future might hold for us.

For Arco though, Iris’ time is as alien as ours. Not only is he astounded that humans live on the ground and cannot communicate with birds, but much of 21st century technology is bizarre to him. Interestingly, this includes the omnipresent robots that perform so much of necessary labour in Iris’ time, suggesting that humanity at some point divested itself of AI and robotics. The evident contrast between Arco and Iris’ experiences creates a profound sense of discontinuity. Iris’ world still feels connected to our own, but Arco’s cannot be understood as a simple linear extrapolation of current trends. Through this disconnect between its two futures, Arco subtly argues that human survival through harmonious coexistence with nature will require a rupture with our present social and technological trajectory.

A second unusual aspect of Arco is the absence of direct antagonism. While Iris and Arco face multiple threats in their quest to return Arco to his time, none of these are enemies. Interpersonal conflict arises from misunderstanding or miscommunication and is therefore open to resolution through dialogue. Yet the greatest threats are impersonal, with our heroes having to face storms and wildfires. The calamitous unpredictability of the natural environment is deeply symbolic of the imbalance it has been pushed into by decades of human (in)action.

This is not to say that nature is portrayed exclusively as a threat. Interspersed between storms and wildfires are moments of tranquillity where the nature is depicted with reverent care, and our heroes traverse biomes rendered in lush, tender and exquisite detail. Even when quiescent, nature is not merely the background on which Arco plays out, but is integral to it, and shows us the complex, verdant and sometimes alien beauty we stand to lose. This is another way in which Arco is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli movies such as Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, or Princess Mononoke, with which it also shares its strong, young female character and its endearing, slightly dreamlike childhood logic. Our heroes face their challenges head on with a heedlessness that would make adults flinch, and while Arco ultimately remains on the safe terrain of a children’s movie, there are stakes and consequences, though they are more likely to affect the adults in the audience.

Aesthetically and narratively, Arco is riding the wave of increased interest in solarpunk, with its focus on harmony with nature and gentler, more caring technologies. Yet while the overall message is one of hope, there is an undercurrent of pessimism in Arco. It reminded me of Terra Nil, where humans have been removed from the scene altogether. Arco is not as drastic, but its solution to the degradation of the Earth’s biosphere is for humans to relocate away from the surface, implying that that actual harmony is (not yet) possible and that vacating large swathes of the Earth is the only viable option.

Regardless, Arco’s overall message is one of hope, and it is not coincidental that Arco’s restoration to his family is brought about through an act of kindness rather than ingenuity. By restoring Arco to his future, Iris regains her belief that there is a future, and that it can be better. It is that belief that, as we learn in the credits, will motivate her to make her own contributions to restore humanity to a place of balance within the web of life.

We don’t have the benefit of the future manifest to give us the hope and courage to struggle forward. But neither are we the first generation to face the dark clouds gathering on the horizon. As Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his prison in the fascist Italy of 1929, times of adversity require us to confront them with pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. Hope is the catalyst that helps us act in the absence of certainty. We can never know if our actions will bring forth the future we desire, but it is certain that if we don’t act, it will never come to pass.

Notes & suggestions

• Of course, we don’t have to look to the future to see the catastrophic impacts of climate change. For many outside the sheltered Global North, they are already here, and have been here for some time.
• Hope may be a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient, and it needs to be tethered to clear analysis and radical action. Simply ‘being hopeful at things’ is not going to be sufficient. For a critical appraisal of ‘hopepunk’ as a political project, see here.
• The use of robots is incidental in Arco, but it was nonetheless pleasant to have a movie that didn’t agonise over the ability of humans and robots to coexist with mutual respect. In that it reminded me of Pluto.
• The intractable problems of our age (ecosystem collapse, poverty, emerging fascism, racism and the legacy of colonialism, etc.) are not as easily solved alone as, surprisingly, sending a boy back to his own time. Taking action is easier together, for example through a trade union, tenants union, political party, or campaign group. If you are in work and not in a union, join or start one. See if there are local campaign or activist groups organising in your area. And if you’re not sure what to do, be like Iris: find a problem and take the initiative to solve it.
• For a starting point to engage with the solarpunk aesthetic movement, check out the Story Seed Library for copyleft artwork and story ideas.

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Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.

Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest asset is Mal itself, yet the main character is also its main weakness. All the interesting dynamics in the novel are rooted in Mal’s alienness from, and therefore profound disinterest in, humans. The consequent misunderstandings, miscommunications and poor decisions are the source of the novel’s comedic moments, and also give direction to the plot The problem with Mal Goes to War is that the joke wears thinner the longer it goes on for, and it is stretched well beyond the point where it remains either funny, interesting or convincing. The novel requires Mal to remain inept at human interaction throughout, but personally I was not convinced that a supposedly hyperinteligent sentient AI with an urgent need to improve its capabilities would decide to waste its time playing number guessing games against itself rather than running analyses or simulations to of its recent suboptimal interactions with its human companions.

These companions are the usual ragtag band of strangers reluctantly thrown together by fate, with each representing a human tendency within the world of Mal Goes to War. We have the involuntary augmented human, the voluntary cyborg, and the (converted) human purist. Their status as archetypes leaves the characters underdeveloped as people, which combined with Mal’s general disinterest as the main point-of-view character means that the motivations of the human characters remain opaque, and their interactions therefore superficial. The same logic holds for the nature of the background conflict.

That, in turn, is the reason why Mal Goes to War did not deliver on its claim to satire. Satire is a form of critique, and for it to work well, requires a sophisticated understanding and treatment of the object of that critique. In Mal Goes to War, the civil war remains simply the background canvas on which the story is painted. We don’t know the motivations, causes or stakes, which means that Mal Goes to War’s satire, such as it is, remains stuck at the level of “war is bad, and possibly silly.” It also means that despite the atrocities committed by both sides, I could not get invested in the conflict or its resolution, as neither Mal nor the humans seem to care that much either. And in any event it becomes fairly predictable early on that despite his detachment from the war, a series of contrivances will place Mal at the centre of concluding it. It reduces a potentially interesting conflict over the role of human augmentation in a surveillance and class society to a mere plot device to make the hero do a heroism.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest challenge is however that it simply compares unfavourably to Martha Well’s in all aspects superior Murderbot Diaries series. Like Mal Goes to War, the Murderbot Diaries also centre a sentient, artificial construct as the protagonist, but unlike Ashton, Wells uses this as a jumping off point for profoundly interesting explorations of interpersonal relationships, gender, personal growth, exploitation and alienation. While equally baffled and frustrated by his human companions, Wells’ Murderbot puts in the work to understand both them and his own identity. It is this process, the movement beyond the initial setup, that makes things interesting, and that is what Mal Goes to War fatally lacks.

None of this means that Mal Goes to War is a bad book. It is an enjoyable diversion with a fair share of humour and vivid action, and reads as something that can easily be adapted to a screenplay. Its flaw is that it doesn’t live up to the grander claims it sets up or are made on its behalf. Readers looking for a thoughtful exploration of AI/human interactions in a dystopian world with real stakes will find the Murderbot Diaries much more rewarding.

Notes & Suggestions

• I am not the world greatest fan of audiobooks, but the audiobook version of the Murderbot novellas grew on me and I would definitely recommend it.
• There are of course many works, and not just books, that centre the interaction between humanity and artificial sentience. Examples that I have written on before, and which do it better than Mal Goes to War, include Citizen Sleeper, Pluto, Pantheon and Mass Effect.
• The sense of detachment from the background conflict reminded me of Civil War, which also sees a group of people traverse a United States sundered by a civil war the origins or stakes of which are never really explained to the audience. But while Civil War did not work for me as a movie, at least one can argue that the sense of detachment was intended.

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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: '#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: 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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