#books #fiction #SF #cyberpunk #dystopia

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.

#SF #videogames

Warning: Contains spoilers

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

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

#videogames #SF

Warning: Contains Spoilers

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

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

#SF #videogames #fiction #boundedimagination

Contains spoilers

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

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

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.

#fiction #videogames #SF #cyberpunk #solarpunk #dystopia

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.

#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.