Category Archives: screen

“The time-suck is killing”

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Watching the documentary Picture a Scientist, directed by Sharon Shattuck and Ian Cheney, for New Scientist, 22 June 2020.

What is it about the institutions of science that encourages bullying? That pushes a young geologist down an Antarctic hillside, or blows grit in her eyes? That tells a black chemist to straighten her hair before applying for a job? Or swipes vital equipment from the lab (already tiny and ill-appointed) of a promising geneticist?

As a PhD student on her first research trip to Antarctica, the geologist Jane Willenbring was first insulted, then bullied, then physically abused by her supervisor. The second scientist featured in this film, Raychelle Burks, a black chemist, has been regularly mistaken for the cleaning staff and challenged when she uses the staff car park. The third, geneticist Nancy Hopkins, had her ground-breaking work on zebra fish constantly disrupted by colleagues who seemed to think they needed her equipment more than she did.

Willenbring deplores a culture which advantages those who put up and shut up. PhD students depend upon their supervisors for opportunities and funding. They are painfully aware that an ill-disposed supervisor can foreclose all avenues of professional advancement. It pays them, therefore, to be tolerant of their supervisor’s “quirks” — to see no evil in them, and speak no evil of them. In this dynamic of patron and client, the opportunities for abuse are rife.

In spite of this, all three women achieved success in their careers. Alongside her fulltime career, including her role as director of the Scripps Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory, Willenbring champions science education for girls. Raychelle Burks, an analytical chemist based in Washington, is quickly becoming the most visible chemist of her generation, and a STEM celebrity on YouTube. Hopkins initiated a sea change in the institutional culture of MIT, creating an example of best practice that institutions around the world https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18424676-400-its-a-womans-world/ are beginning to follow. This is not a bleak film, by any measure. And the women, for sheer charisma and smarts, are an inspiration and a delight.

At the same time, one is left with a profound sense how much good science may be lost, when accomplished scientists have to spend time fighting for their right to come to work at all. Willenbring studies the responses of the earth’s crust to climate change. Burks develops cheap, easy forensic tests for war zones and disaster relief. Hopkins researches cancer. All three have become passionate advocates for the welfare of women in science; all three insist that they would much rather have been allowed to do their jobs. “The time-suck is killing,” says Burks.

Picture a Scientist is not just about individual scientists. It is also about how institutions work, and about how science can improve our understanding of them. The idea that institutions embody bias and prejudice is resisted by managers. It took Nancy Hopkins years to convince MIT that its female staff were being crammed into campus’s smallest laboratories. She was met, not with conspiracy, but with incredulity. After all, no one at a managerial level at MIT had ever decreed that women should be treated this way! Managers were reluctant to even consider the evidence Hopkins presented. She herself feared that she would gain a reputation for being “difficult”.

In 1999, MIT and its provost Robert Brown decided to own and set about correcting the examples of sexual discrimination Hopkins and her fellows female colleagues at MIT http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html brought to light.

Moss-Racusin spells out the moral for deans and provosts. “The time has passed for intuition,” she says. “We have the evidence, the data.”

Hopkins regrets the research time she sacrificed to transforming MIT. “Such a waste of time and energy,” she sighs, “when all you wanted was to be a scientist.”

Watching this film, I cannot agree. There is nothing trivial — and certainly nothing easy — about making science measurably better.

Belgium explained

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Watching the sitcom Space Force for New Scientist, 2 June 2020.

As recruitment advertisements go, the video released to Twitter on 6 May was genuinely engaging. Young people stared off into the Milky Way, as rockets of indeterminate scale rolled out of unmarked hangers.

“Some people look to the stars and ask, ‘What if?'” drawled the voice-over artist. “Our job is to have an answer.”

This admirably down-to-earth sentiment was cooked up by the US Space Force, the most recently founded arm of the US military, officially brought into being by President Donald Trump on 21 December 2019.

It’s been the butt of humour ever since. On 18 January the Space Force showed off its uniforms to Twitter. Apparently there’s a use for camouflage in space. Six days later it revealed its logo — a sort of straightened-out, think-inside-the-box version of — yes — the Federation symbol from Star Trek.

Then — the coup de grace — Netflix announced it would be streaming a sitcom about the whole enterprise, created by producer Greg Daniels and actor Steve Carell.

A lot of expectation has been gathering around this fictional Space Force. Greg Daniels’s writing and production credits include the US version of The Office, Parks and Recreation and King of the Hill. Everyone’s expecting a savage parody. So any initial disappointment with the show ought to come tempered with the realisation that the real Space Force, at its birth, would outcompete any television satire.

On the same day the U.S. Space Force’s recruitment video was released, 6 May, General Jay Raymond, its Chief of Space Operations, had a piece of advice for Carell, who plays the Space Force chief in the new sitcom: “Get a haircut,” he grinned, during a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Space Foundation. “He’s looking a little too shaggy if he wants to play [me].”

I’m glad he can see the funny side. While the fictional General Naird and his head of science Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich) spar spiritedly over the launch procedures of one giant-looking rocket after another, in the real world the redoubtable General Raymond is being tasked with defending US satellites from laser and projectile attack from multiple potentially hostile forces, all on a start-up budget of $40m. Think about it. There are streets in London where that wouldn’t buy you a house. Meanwhile the total US annual military budget stands at $738 billion.

Space Force the sitcom is, likewise, a labour of love, produced on an obviously low budget. It would not feel strange, at this point, if the showrunners abandoned parody entirely and went over to give General Raymond a hug.

Space Force’s small satisfactions take a while to build. Naird’s elevation means the family must relocate from Washington to an old NORAD facility in Colorado (an “up and coming” state, according to Naird. His wife, played by Lisa Kudrow, sobs softly into her pillow). At work, Dr. Mallory insists on taking two steps of at a time when he climbs a staircase, even though his fitness isn’t quite up to it: trust Malkovich to make comedy gold out of nothing. Other cast members underplay themselves. Improv comedian Tawny Newsome, as helicopter pilot Angela Ali, plays straight-woman to both Naird and his exasperated and lonely daughter. Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang gets decent lines, but in demeanour he remains the soberest of Mallory’s team of interchangeable scientists.

Trump wants boots on the Moon. American boots. What does that mean? Naird, in a speech, tries to clarify: “Boots with US feet in them, I mean. Can’t be certain where the boots will be made. Maybe Mexico, maybe Portugal.”

This is the main point: what does it mean to make nationalistic noises about space when doing anything worthwhile up there requires massive international cooperation? In a later episode, Naird demands to know what the foremost aeronautical engineering theorist in Belgium is doing on his oh-so-secret base. Gently, Mallory explains: Belgium is part of the European Space Agency, and that’s because Belgium is part of Europe.

Space Force arrives at an difficult moment. We may, after all, have had enough parody, and no-one on this show seems entirely sure what comes next. A little kindness, perhaps. An acknowledgement that the US is a nation among nations. A general agreement that we should not turn space into “an orgy of death”.

And if the show is not quite what we expected, still, there is real charm in watching gruff General Naird expressing his feelings at last, and learning to get along with his teenage daughter.

Because he loves his mother

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Watching Jeff Chan’s Code 8 for New Scientist, 7 May 2020

AROUND 4 per cent of humans are Special. Connor is one of them. Lightning shoots from his hands. His mother is Special, too. She freezes things, including – since a tumour began pressing on her brain – patches of her own skin. Connor needs money to save his mother. And, since Specials have been pushed to the social margins, this means he needs to rob a bank.

Code 8′s director, Jeff Chan, is a relative newcomer whose screenplays co-written with producer Chris Pare fold well-trodden movie ideas into interesting shapes. Grace: The Possession from 2014 was a retread of The Exorcist seen from the possessed girl’s point of view. Code 8, released to streaming services all over the world last December (but not, for some reason, in the UK until now), is a low-budget sci-fi crime thriller.

Connor, played by Robbie Amell, works in construction, wiring up houses with his bare hands. A nicely understated sequence sees his workmates walk past carrying concrete bollards under their arms, when a police raid on “illegals” drops robots from the sky that shoot a worker in the back.

After this, Connor decides he can’t take any more and ends up under the wing of Garrett (Stephen Amell, Robbie Amell’s cousin in real life), a thief whose professionalism is sorely tested by his boss, the telepathic drug lord Marcus (Greg Bryk).

Code 8 is a masterclass in how to wring a believable world out of unbelievably few dollars. This doesn’t come from its premise, which is so generic that it is hardly noticeable. Instead, what sets the film apart is the way it marries contemporary American crime fiction to sci-fi. This fusion is harder than it looks.

Since James M. Cain wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, American crime fiction has primarily been an exercise in social realism. It’s about life at the bottom, steeped as it is in poverty, addiction, ignorance and marginalisation. The American crime genre tries to tell the truth about these things, and the best of it succeeds.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is a literature of ideas. Detective plots are tempting for science fiction writers. Put a detective in a made-up world and get them to ask the right questions, and they can show your audience how your made-up world operates.

But that, of course, is precisely the problem: it’s only a made-up world. We aren’t being told anything about the way the real world ticks. Inventive sci-fi can feel an awful lot like under-researched crime fiction.

Somehow, Code 8 manages to be both a cracking crime caper and a solid piece of science fiction. While spotting influences is a hazardous game, my guess is it is an homage to Michael Mann’s L.A. Takedown, a fabulous TV pilot from 1989 that provided the skeleton for Mann’s much more famous 1995 blockbuster Heat.

But it is Code 8′s science-fiction element that impressed me most: a cleverly underplayed cat-cradle of a plot, tangling superpowers, social prejudice, drug addiction and state prohibition so as to create a set of intractable social problems that are both strange and instantly familiar.

Robbie and Stephen Amell have championed the film and its ideas since working on the 2016 short film of the same name. Now a TV spin-off is in the works. I do hope Stephen, in particular, attaches his name to this. Anything to get him out from under his role as the DC Multiverse’s Green Arrow…

Pollen count

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Watching Jessica Hausner’s film Little Joe for New Scientist, 11 March 2020

THEY are red, they have stalks that look like eels, and no leaves. But Karl, the boss of the laboratory – played by the unsettling David Wilmot – has his eye on them for the forthcoming flower fair. He tells visiting investors that these genetically engineered creations are “the first mood-lifting, antidepressant, happy plant”.

Ben Whishaw’s character, Chris, smirks: “You’ll love this plant like your own child.”

Chris is in love with Alice, played by Emily Beecham, who is in love with her creations, her “Little Joes”, even to the point of neglecting her own son, Joe.

Owning and caring for a flower that, treated properly, will emit pollen that can induce happiness, would surely be a good thing for these characters. But the plant has been bred to be sterile, and it is determined to propagate itself by any means necessary.

Little Joe is an exercise in brooding paranoia, and it feeds off some of the more colourful fears around the genetic modification of plants.

Kerry Fox plays Bella, whose disappointments and lack of kids seem to put her in the frame of mind to realise what these innocent-looking blooms are up to. “The ability to reproduce is what gives every living thing meaning!” she exclaims. Her colleagues might just be sceptical about this because she is an unhappy presence in the lab, or they may already have fallen under the sway of Little Joe’s psychoactive pollen.

Popular fears around GM – the sort that dominated newspapers and scuppered the industry’s experimental programmes in the mid-1990s – are nearly as old as the science of genetics itself.

At about the turn of the 20th century, agricultural scientists in the US combined inbred lines of maize and found that crop yields were radically increased. Farmers who bought the specially bred seed found that their yields tailed off in subsequent years, so it made sense to buy fresh seed yearly because the profits from bigger crops more than covered the cost of new seeds.

In the 2000s, Monsanto, a multinational agribusiness, added “terminator” genes to the seed it was developing to prevent farmers resowing the product of the previous year’s crop. This didn’t matter to most farmers, but the world’s poorest, who still rely on replanting last year’s seed, were vociferous in their complaints, and a global scandal loomed.

Monsanto chose not, in the end, to commercialise its terminator technologies, but found it had already created a monster: an urban myth of thwarted plant fecundity that provides Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe with its science fictional plot.

What does Little Joe’s pollen do to people? Is it a vegetal telepath, controlling the behaviour of its subjects? Or does it simply make the people who enjoy its scent happier, more sure of themselves, more capable of making healthy life choices? Would that be so terrible? As Karl says, “Who can prove the genuineness of feelings? Moreover, who cares?”

Well, we do, or we should. If, like Karl, we come to believe that the “soul” is nothing more than behaviour, then people could become zombies tomorrow and no one would notice.

Little Joe’s GM paranoia may set some New Scientist readers’ teeth on edge, but this isn’t ultimately, what the movie is about. It is after bigger game: the nature of human freedom.

Nicholas, c’est moi

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Watching Color Out of Space for New Scientist, 12 February 2020

Nicholas Cage’s efforts to clear his debts after 2012’s catastrophic run-in with the IRS continue with yet another relatively low-budget movie, Color Out of Space, a film no-one expects much of. (It’s in US cinemas now; by the time it reaches UK screens, on 28 February, it will already be available on Blu-Ray.)

Have you ever watched a bad film and found yourself dreaming about it months afterwards? Color Out of Space is one of those.

To begin: in March 1927 the author H. P Lovecraft wrote what would become his personal favourite story. In “The Color Out of Space”, a meteor crashes into a farmer’s field in the Massachusetts hills. The farmer’s crops grow huge, but prove inedible. His livestock go mad. So, in the end, does the farmer, haunted by a colour given off by a visiting presence in the land: a glow that belongs on no ordinary spectrum.

This is Lovecraft’s riff on a favourite theme of fin-de-siecle science fiction: the existence of new rays, and with them, new ways of seeing. The 1890s and 1900s were, after all, radiant years. Victor Schumann discovered ultraviolet radiation in 1893. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896. J. J. Thomson discovered that cathode rays were streams of electrons in 1897. Prosper-René Blondlot discovered N-rays in 1903 — only they turned out not to exist: an artefact of observational error and wishful thinking.

And this is pretty much what the local media assume has happened when Nathan Gardner, the not-very-effective head of a household that is downsizing after unspecified health problems and financial setbacks, describes the malevolent light he catches spilling at odd moments from his well. The man’s a drunk, is what people assume. A fantasist. An eccentric.

The film is yet another attempt to fuse American Gothic to a contemporary setting. Director Richard Stanley (who brough us 1990’s Hardware, another valuable bad movie) has written a script that, far from smoothing out the discrepancies between modern and pre-modern proprieties, manners, and ways of speaking, leaves them jangling against each other in a way that makes you wonder What On Earth Is Going On.

And what is going on, most of the time, is Nicholas Cage as Gardner. Has anyone before or since conveyed so raucously and yet so well the misery, the frustration, the rage, the self-hatred of weak men? Every time he gets into a fist-fight with a car interior I think to myself, Ah, Nicholas, c’est moi.

Even better, Cage’s on-screen wife here is Joely Richardson, an actress who packs a lifetime’s disappointments into a request to pass the sugar.

Alien life is not like earth life and to confront it is to invite madness, is the general idea. But with tremendous support from on-screen children Madeleine Arthur and Brendan Meyer, Cage and Richardson turn what might have been a series of uninteresting personal descents into a family tragedy of Jacobean proportions. If ever hell were other people, then at its deepest point you would find the Gardner family, sniping at each other across the dinner table.

Color Out of Space mashes up psychological drama, horror, and alien invasion. It’s not a film you admire. It’s a film you get into internal arguments with, as you try and sort all the bits out. In short, it does exactly what it set out to do. It sticks.

An embarrassment, a blowhard, a triumph

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Watching Star Trek: Picard for New Scientist, 24 January 2020

Star Trek first appeared on television on 8 September 1966. It has been fighting the gravitational pull of its own nostalgia ever since – or at least since the launch of the painfully careful spin-off Star Trek: The Next Generation 21 years later.

The Next Generation was the series that gave us shipboard counselling (a questionable idea), a crew that liked each other (a catastrophically mistaken idea) and Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, who held the entire farrago together, pretty much single-handed, for seven seasons.

Now Picard is back, retired, written off, an embarrassment and a blowhard. And Star Trek: Picard is a triumph, praise be.

Something horrible has happened to the “synthetics” (read: robots) who, in the person of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner, returning briefly here) once promised so much for the Federation. Science fiction’s relationship with its metal creations is famously fraught: well thought-through robot revolt provided the central premise for Battlestar Galactica and Westworld, while Dune, reinvented yet again later this year as a film by Blade Runner 2049‘s Denis Villeneuve, is set in a future that abandoned artificial intelligence following a cloudy but obviously dreadful conflict.

And there is a perfectly sound reason for this mayhem. After all, any machine flexible enough to do what a robot is expected to do is going to be flexible enough to down tools – or worse. What Picard‘s take on this perennial problem will be isn’t yet clear, but the consequences of all the Federation’s synthetics going haywire is painfully felt: it has all but abandoned its utopian remit. It is now just one more faction in a fast-moving, galaxy-wide power arena (echoes of the Trump presidency and its consequences are entirely intentional).

Can Picard, the last torchbearer of the old guard, bring the Federation back to virtue? One jolly well hopes so, and not too quickly, either. Picard is, whatever else we may say about it, a great deal of fun.

There are already some exciting novelties, though the one I found most intriguing may turn out to be a mere artefact of getting the show off the ground. Picard’s world – troubled by bad dreams quite as much as it is enabled by world-shrinking technology – is oddly surreal, discontinuous in ways that aren’t particularly confusing but do jar here and there.

Is the Star Trek franchise finally getting to grips with the psychological consequences of its mastery of time and space? Or did the producers simply shove as much plot as possible into the first episode to get the juggernaut rolling? The latter seems more likely, but I hold out hope.

The new show bears its burden of twaddle. The first episode features a po-faced analysis of Data’s essence. No, really. His essence. That’s a thing, now. How twaddle became an essential ingredient on The Next Generation – and now possibly Picard – is a mystery: the original Star Trek never felt the need to saddle itself with such single-use, go-nowhere nonsense. But by now, like a hold full of tribbles, the twaddle seems impossible to shake off (Star Trek: Discovery, I’m looking at you).

Oh, but why cavil? Stewart brings a new vulnerability and even a hint of bitterness to grit his seemlessly fluid recreation of Picard, and the story promises an exciting and fairly devastating twist to the show’s old political landscape. Picard, growing old disgracefully? Oh, please make it so!

A pontiff set upon by angels

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Watching Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela for New Scientist, 15 January 2020.

WINTER in southern Siberia. By a long-winded, painstaking method involving levers, ropes and a fair amount of cursing, vehicles that have fallen through the thawing ice of Lake Baikal can be hauled back onto the surface.

The crew working on Aquarela were filming one such operation when an SUV shot past in a shower of ice, then plunged nose-first into the freezing water, killing one of its occupants.

There is nothing exploitative about the footage that, after much soul-searching, Russian film-maker Victor Kossakovsky used to front his poetic, narrative-less documentary about the power and weirdness of water. Locals and police slip and topple, hacking frantically at the ice, while the accident’s sole survivor stumbles about, frenzied with terror and getting in everyone’s way.

Kossakovsky is one of those rare documentary makers who still believes that the camera alone can capture truth. His expensive and time-consuming method of waiting, watching and witnessing the world is rarely supported by an industry obsessed with narratives and sound bites. Bravo, then, to Participant Media and the film’s many other backers, large and small, for Aquarela: the strangest, most powerful eco-documentary you are ever likely to see.

Captured at a staggering 96 frames per second, Aquarela‘s tracking shots, even in extreme close-up, are completely flicker-free. This makes them surreally present, in a way that demolishes scale and has you gripping the arms of your chair. Virtually no cinemas are equipped to screen such footage: this is a film made with an eye to posterity, and the plaudits that come with being a cinematic first.

Just as much study – and, no doubt, expense – has gone into the super-stabilisation of the camera used to capture the swells of a storm-tossed mid-Atlantic. If ever a present-day sequence could recreate the urban myth surrounding L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, in which early audiences were convinced an on-screen train was going to drive into them and fled to the back of the cinema, it is a ride over one of Aquarela‘s impending waves.

Why recommend a film that no cinema chain can yet screen properly? Buying the Blu-Ray disc or watching it on a streaming service (we will tell you when it arrives in our Don’t Miss column) is likely to convey only a fraction of its magic. But that fragment is jaw-dropping. After so many eco-docs, with their predictable 5-second glimpses of calving icebergs, here, finally, is a film that lingers on the berg as it sinks and rises, turns and crumbles, until an ice fragment floats by that looks for all the world like a pontiff set upon by angels.

This is a film that makes even a placid ocean surface strange, as oblique light catches the ripples within each little wave. Those ripples, in such a harsh, angled, almost monochrome light, resemble the stress fractures you find in flint or bottle glass. As such, the water, for all its movement, looks like a weirdly animated mineral, and those ocean swells really do look like mountains – the cliche made vivid at last.

This isn’t a film about our relationship with water. From continent to continent, glacier to ocean, burst dam to waterfall, Aquarela is about water’s indifference to any relationship we might try to strike up with it. It is a most disconcerting film.

Worth losing sleep over

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Watching Human Nature, directed by Adam Bolt, for New Scientist, 27 November 2019.

Mature and intelligent, Human Nature shows us how gene editing works, explores its implications and – in a field awash with alarmist rhetoric and cheap dystopianism – explains which concerns are worth losing sleep over.

This gripping documentary covers a lot of ground, but also works as a primer on CRISPR, the spectacular technology that enables us to cut and paste genetic information with something like the ease with which we manipulate text on a computer. Human Nature introduces us to key start-ups and projects that promise to predict, correct and maybe enhance the genetic destinies of individuals. It explores the fears this inspires, and asks whether they are reasonable. Its conclusions are cautious, well-argued and largely optimistic.

Writers Regina Sobel and Adam Bolt (who also directs) manage to tell this story through interviews. Key players in the field, put at their ease during hours of film-making, speak cogently to camera. There is no narration.

Ned Piyadarakorn’s graphics are ravishing and yet absurdly simple to grasp. They need to be, because this is an account hardly less complex than those in the best popular science books. As the film progressed, I began to suspect that the film-makers assume we aren’t idiots. This is so rare an experience that it took a while to sink in.

There are certain problems the film can’t get round, though. There are too many people in white coats moving specks from one Petri dish to another. It couldn’t be otherwise, given the technology involves coats, specks, Petri dishes and little else by way of props the general viewer can understand. That this is a source of cool amusement rather than irritation is largely due to the charisma of the film’s cast of researchers, ethicists, entrepreneurs, diagnosticians, their clients and people with conditions that could be helped by the technique, such as schoolboy David Sanchez, who has sickle-cell anaemia. We learn that researchers are running clinical trials using CRISPR to test a therapy for his condition.

Foundational researchers like Jennifer Doudna and Jill Banfield, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Fyodor Urnov provide star quality. Provocateurs like Stephen Hsu, a cheerful promoter of designer babies, and the longevity guru George Church are given room to explain why they aren’t nearly as crazy as some people assume.

Then the bioethicist Alta Charo makes the obvious but frequently ignored point that the Brave New World nightmare CRISPR is said to usher in is a very old and well-worn future indeed. Sterilisations, genocide and mass enslavement have been around a lot longer than CRISPR, she says, and if the new tech is politically abused, we will only have our ourselves to blame.

There is, of course, the possibility that CRISPR will let loose some irresistibly bad ideas. Consider the mutation in a gene called ADRB1, which allows us to get by on just 4 hours’ sleep a night. I would leap at the chance of a therapy that freed up my nights – but I wonder what would happen if everyone else followed suit. Would we all live richer, more fulfilled lives? Or would I need a letter from my doctor when I applied for a 16-hour factory shift?

The point, as Human Nature makes all too clear, is that the questions we should be asking about gene editing are only superficially about the technology. At heart, they are questions about ourselves and our values.

Now we use guns

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Talking to Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (better known as the sci-fi writer James S. A. Corey) for New Scientist, 20 November 2019

Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck began collaborating on their epic, violent, yet uncommonly humane space opera The Expanse in 2011 with the book Leviathan Wakes. The series of novels pits the all-too-human crew of an ice-hauler from Ceres against the studied realpolitik of a far-from-peaceful solar system. The ninth and final book is due out next year. Meanwhile, the TV series enters its fourth season, available on Amazon Prime from 13 December.

The Expanse began as a game, became a series of novels and ended up on television. Was it intended as a multimedia project?

Ty Franck Initially it was just a video game that didn’t work, then it evolved into a tabletop role-playing game.

Daniel Abraham And then books, and then a TV show. I think intention is a very bold word to use for any of this. It implies a certain level of cunning that I don’t think we actually have.

What inspired its complex plot?

TF I’m a big fan of pre-classical history. I pull a lot of weird Babylonian and Persian and Assyrian history into the mix. It’s funny how often people accuse you of critiquing current events. They’re like, ‘You are commenting on this elected politician!’ And I’m like, ‘No, that character is Nebuchadnezzar’.

How have the humans changed in your future? Or is their lack of change the point?

DA If you really want a post-human future, change humans so that they don’t use wealth to measure status. But then they wouldn’t be human any more. We are mean-spirited little monkeys, capable of moments of great grace and kindness, and that story is much more plausible to me and much more beautiful than any post-human tale.

TF I find that the books that I remember the longest, and the books that I’ve been most entertained by, are the ones where the characters are the most human, not the least human.

You’ve mentioned Alfred Bester’s 1959 novel The Stars My Destination as an influence…

TF Exactly, and there you have an anti-hero called Gully Foyle. Gully is everything that we fear to be true about ourselves. He’s venal, and weak, and cowardly, and stupid, and mean. Watching him survive and become something more is the reason we’re still talking about that book today.

You began The Expanse nine years ago. What would you have done differently knowing what we know now about the solar system?

DA We would have made Ceres less rocky. We imagined a mostly mineral dwarf planet, and then it turned out there’s a bunch of ice on it. But this sort of thing is inevitable. You start off as accurate as possible, and a few years later you sound like Jules Verne. That the effort to get things right is doomed doesn’t take away from its essential dignity.

Other things have happened, too. Deepfake technology was still very speculative when we started writing this, and now it’s ubiquitous. One of our plot points in Book Three looks pretty straightforward now.

I don’t see many robots

DA We’re in real danger of miseducating people about the nature of artificial intelligence. Sci-fi tells two stories about AI: we made it and it wants to kill us, or we made it and we want it to love us. But AI is neither of those things.

TF What people mean is: where are the computers that talk and act like people? Robots are everywhere in The Expanse. But when you build a machine to do a job, you build it in a form that most efficiently does that job, and make it smart enough to do that job.

Is your future dystopian?

DA When Season One of the TV version came out in the US, we were considered very dystopian. Then the 2016 election brought Donald Trump to power, and suddenly we were this uplifting and hopeful show. Of course we’re neither. The argument the show makes is that humans are humans. We bumble through the future the way we bumbled through the past. What changes is technique: what we learn to do, and what we learn to make.

TF We don’t murder each other in a jealous rage with pointy sticks any more. Now we use guns. But the jealous rage and the urge to murder hasn’t gone away.

DA What we’ve managed to do is expand what it means to be a tribe. From a small group of people who are actually physically together…

TF …and mostly genetically related …

DA …we’ve expanded to nation states and belief systems and…

TF …fans of a particular TV show.

DA The great success of humanity so far isn’t in abolishing tribalism, because we didn’t. It’s in broadening the size of the tribe over and over. Of course, there’s still work to be done there.

“You made a person!”

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Watching Ang Lee’s Gemini Man for New Scientist, 30 October 2019 

“You made a person!” cries Will Smith (tearful, stressed, and twenty-five years younger than he ought to be). “Out of another person! And then you sent me to kill him!”

He’s facing off against his adoptive dad Clay Verris (Clive Owen) who makes perfect soldiers for a living — or tries to. (Smith’s “Junior” is his latest wheeze.)

Why Junior must kill his “clone-father” Henry Brogan, an exhausted hitman (also played by Will Smith, this time at his real age — and has a black actor ever been given a whiter name?), is never made entirely clear.

Junior wants answers, as do we all, though it’s obvious by now we’re not going to get them: not from a script that’s been kicking around Hollywood for 20 years, and not from a director whose bleached, hectic, high frame-rate 3-D cinematography lends walls and machinery greater physical presence than faces.

Gemini Man hurls itself into not one, but two gaping logic holes. First, the film relies on the inherent menace implicit in the idea of human cloning. But who in their right mind would ever be afraid of a mere clone? We deal with far more serious incursions of the uncanny every day, from the bodyless ubiquity of digital personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, to the creepy co-evolutionary pals-for-ever antics of our pet dogs and cats, to the not inconsiderable challenge that is other people, many of whom look, speak, and behave quite differently to ourselves.

The only film that ever made clones scary was The Boys from Brazil (1978), in which a Brazilian clinic starts churning out copies of Adolf Hitler — and even here the hero comes to realise that the clones themselves are utterly harmless, that it’s the Nazis who should be commanding our attention.

Problem number two: by the time you’ve made your “perfect soldiers” flexible enough to do the job you want them to do, you’ve given them enough agency to disobey you.

This bind has driven the plot of much good robot-infused literature, from the synthetic human’s birth in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1920), to its entanglement in some famous puzzle-stories by Isaac Asimov (who famous Three Laws of Robotics are basically three laws of slavery with a sugar coating).

Algis Budrys set the capstone on this sort of tale in 1957 with the short story “First to Serve”, in which a government engineering team are driven round the bend in the effort to create an obedient military robot. “Haven’t you got it through your head?” a researcher cries in exasperation: “Pimmy’s the perfect soldier, all of him, with all his abilities. That includes individuality, curiosity, judgment — and intelligence. Cut one part of that, and he’s no good. You’ve got to take the whole cake, or none at all. One way you starve — and the other way you choke.”

A word about Gemini Man’s de-ageing technology, which supposedly took 20 years’ development before it was good enough to halve Will Smith’s age. First, it didn’t. David Fincher made The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008. Second, it needs a script to make it work. (Scorcese’s The Irishman (still in cinemas when this was written) is so involving, you never notice that young De Niro’s face is wobbling about on a more than seventy-year-old body). Third: Will Smith looks way better now than he did as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Hit the gym, dear middle-aged readers, you have everything to live for.