the casual critic

sf

Warning: Contains spoilers

#books #SF #fiction

Clarke’s Third Law teaches us that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but magic does not necessarily make for a good story. This is the fundamental weakness of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which starts with The Three Body Problem. Over the course of three books, Cixin Liu introduces us to a dazzling array of cosmic wonders. Amidst this onslaught of speculative tech, human agency becomes so marginal that the story devolves into a mere mechanism for delivering a steady stream of scientific curios.

I chose to review the series in its totality, so this is a longer post than normal. What follows is a brief overview of each book, followed by a conclusion on the entire series.

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#SF #videogames #cyberpunk #solarpunk

It has been a long time since a game has made me cry.

Towards one of the endings of Citizen Sleeper, there is a choice. It is not the common type of ‘moral’ videogame choice that is as subtle as being hit in the head by a careening trolley. It is not a choice about acting, but about being. About what it means to live, to connect, to relate. It does not have a right or wrong answer. It offers a beautiful gift and a profound loss either way you choose. It is a choice that makes the player think, and even now I still don’t know if I chose wisely.

Citizen Sleeper is a game set on Erlin’s Eye, a decrepit and gradually decaying orbital space station, abandoned by its corporate owners and left to fend for itself. You are a Sleeper; a copy of a human mind imprisoned in a cybernetic body. You are not human, because you are an artificial creation. You are not AI, because your mind is a human intelligence. Where you come from, you were property. Where you’ve arrived, you are a fugitive.

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About the author

A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

Posts will be cross-posted to my Mastodon feed, so feel free to leave a comment there. Any feedback or response is much appreciated. You can also subscribe to receive future blogs via email using the ‘Subscribe’ button at the bottom of the homepage, or by adding this blog to an RSS feed.

How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism

#tv #fiction #superheroes #SF

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

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