Tag Archives: science fiction

“Don’t let them know you’re awake”

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Watching Michael Tyburski’s Turn Me On for New Scientist

An eccentric visionary has created a commune centered around a pharmaceutical — a “vitamin” — that suppresses human emotion. The venture promises contentment to its followers, and to ensure their contentment, all memory of their lives before they join the cult is erased.

A cult member’s cancer treatment requires she miss her vitamin dose for just one day. So here she is, a young woman called Joy, played with exquisite precision by the young British actress Bel Powley, staring into her bathroom mirror, waiting for the affective life to roll over her like a tidal wave.

Nothing.

Still nothing.

And then a giggle. Not a sinister, half-hysterical giggle. Not an experimental, off-centre giggle. A genuinely delighted giggle, at finding herself alive.

Bel goes off on a beach holiday with her friends, still within the the project’s property line. (At the border, a sign planted in the gravel warns of “Unknown Dangers” in the world beyond). And a drab old time they have of it, too, playing the exciting-sounding VR game WOAH, which turns out to stand for “World Of Average Humans”. Joy’s friend Samantha (Nesta Cooper) breathlessly explains: “In real life I’m a wellness engineer, but in the game, I play an assistant wellness engineer.”

Bel finally takes matters in hand and throws away the house’s supply of vitamin. And after all, “it’s just for one day”.

The strange and wonderful thing about Michael Tyburski’s second feature (after 2019’s excellent The Sound of Silence) is that it is a dystopia built upon an essentially comic view of the human condition. Screenwriter Angela Bourassa creates revealing rules for this tyranny. You don’t have to take its vitamin. That’s entirely up to you. But heaven help you if you miss day of work. This hyper-utilitarian cult isn’t robbing its victims of their potentiality or their dignity. The crime here is that it’s stealing away all their fun and friendship. People are supposed to goof off, is the message here. This is what people are for.

When Joy and her friends discover sex, things get more fraught. Joy’s uncomplicated and public coupling with her friend Christopher (Justin Min) knocks him for a loop and makes her officially appointed partner William (Nick Robinson) sick to his stomach. Who could have predicted that?

One by one, as they confront the emotional consequences of their actions, the friends decide to go back on the vitamin. Alone again, Joy is taken aside and told she has what it takes to be an overseer of this place. All she has to do is never see William again, though its clear enough the two are falling in love. Will Joy accept this Mephistophelian bargain?

The superbly sardonic D’Arcy Carden is the nearest thing the cult has to an authority figure: essentially, she’s reprising her role in the sitcom The Good Place, to which Turn Me On bears a certain resemblance. Fairer to say, perhaps, that Turn Me On is a worthy addition to that small but admired genre that includes The Good Place, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Apple’s ongoing TV show Severance.

The target is, as usual, utilitarianism. The pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number works well on paper but falls foul, very quickly, of the Kantian imperative not to use people as a means to fulfil your ends. There’s a reason “For the greater good” is the go-to excuse for tyrants and killers.

What will the cult will do to Joy if she refuses to join their upper echelon? It’s almost certain to be unpleasant.

“Leave me a alone”, says a neighbour who came off her vitamins earlier in the movie, “and don’t let them know you’re awake.”

Doing an Elizabeth

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Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance inspired this Telegraph article about copies and clones

Hollywood has-been Elisabeth Sparkle didn’t look where she was going, and got badly shaken about in a traffic accident. Now she’s in the emergency room, and an unfeasibly handsome young male nurse is running his fingers down her spine. Nothing’s wrong. On the contrary: Elisabeth (played by Demi Moore) is, she’s told, “a perfect candidate”.

The next day she gets a box through the post. Inside is a kit that will enable her to duplicate herself. The instructions couldn’t be clearer. Even when fully separated, Elisabeth and the younger, better version of herself who’s just spilled amniotically out of her back (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) are one. While one of them gets to play in the sun for a week, the other must lie in semi-coma, feeding off an intravenous drip. Each week, they swap roles.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s script for The Substance is one of those super-lucid cinematic fun-rides that can’t help but put you in mind of other, admittedly rather better movies. In Joe Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), an actress’s personal assistant plots to steal her career. In John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Rock Hudson gets his youth back and quickly learns to hate it. In David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) biologist Seth Brundle’s experiment in gene splicing is a none-too-subtle metaphor for the ageing process.

Recently, I ran into a biotechnology company called StoreGene. They sent me a blood sample kit in a little box and promised me a lifetime of personalised medicine, so long as I let them read my entire genetic code.

I’m older than Elisabeth Sparkle (sacked from her daytime TV fitness show on her 50th birthday) and a sight less fit than Demi Moore, and so I seized StoreGene’s offer with both palsied, liver-spotted hands.

Now, somewhere in what we call the Cloud (some anonymous data centre outside Chicago, more like) I have a double. Unlike Elizabeth’s Sue, though, my double won’t resent the fact that I am using him as a means. He is not going to flinch, or feel violated in any way, as his virtual self is put through trial after trial.

Every year, more than a million medical research papers are published. It’s impossible to know what this deluge of new discovery means to me personally – but now my GP can find out, at the push of a button, what it means for my genetic data-double.

Should I take this medicine, or that? Should I take more of it, or less of it? What treatment will work; what won’t? No more uncertainty for me: now I am guaranteed to receive treatments that are tailored to me, forever. I’ve just landed, bang, in the middle of a new era of personalised medicine.

Now that there’s a digital clone of me floating around, I have even less reason to want to “do an Elisabeth” and make a flesh-and-blood copy of myself. This will come as a relief to anyone who’s read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, and can’t shake off the horror occasioned by that school assembly: “If you’re going to have decent lives,” Miss Lucy tells the children in her care, “then you’ve got to know and know properly… You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs.”

Might we one day farm clones of ourselves to provide our ageing, misused bodies with spare parts? This is by far the best of the straw-man arguments that have been mounted over the years against the idea of human cloning. (Most of the others involve Hitler.)

It at least focuses our minds on a key ethical question: are we ever entitled to use other people as means to an end? But it’s still a straw-man argument, not least because we’re a long way into figuring out how to grow our spare organs in other animals. No ethical worries there! (though the pigs may disagree).

And while such xenotransplantation and other technologies advance by leaps and bounds, reproductive cloning languishes – a rather baroque solution to biomedical problems solved more easily by other means.

Famously, In 1996 Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Scotland successfully cloned Dolly the sheep from the udder cells of a ewe. Dolly was their 277th attempt. She died young. No-one can really say whether this had anything to do with her being a clone, since her creation conspicuously did not open the floodgates to further experimentation. Two decades went by before the first primates were successfully cloned – two crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. These days it’s possible to clone your pet (Barbara Streisand famously cloned her dog), but my strong advice is, don’t bother: around 96 per cent of all cloning attempts end in failure.

Science-fiction stories, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), have conjured up hyper-utilitarian nightmares in which manipulations of the human genome work all too well. This is what made David Cronenberg’s early body horror so compelling and, in retrospect, so visionary: in films such as 1977’s Rabid (a biker develops a blood-sucking orifice) and 1979’s The Brood (ectopic pregnancies manifest a divorcée’s rage), the body doesn’t give a stuff about anyone’s PhD; it has its own ideas about what it wants to be.

And so it has proved. Not only does cloning rarely succeed; the clone that manages to survive to term will most likely be deformed, or die of cancer, or keel over for some other more or less mysterious reason. After cloning Dolly the sheep, Wilmut and his team tried to clone another lamb; it hyperventilated so much it kept passing out.

***

It is conceivable, I suppose, that hundreds of years from now, alien intelligences will dust off StoreGene’s recording of my genome and, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, set about growing a copy of me in a modishly lit plexiglass tank. Much good may it do them: the clone they’re growing will bear only a passing physical resemblance to me, and he and I will share only the very broadest psychological and emotional similarity. Genes make a big contribution to the development process, but they’re not in overall charge of it. Even identical twins, nature’s own clones, are easy to tell apart, especially when they start speaking.

Call me naive, but I’m not too worried about vast and cool and unsympathetic intellects, alien or otherwise, getting hold of my genetic data. It’s the thought of what all my other data may be up to that keeps me up at night.

Swedish political scientist Carl Öhman’s The Afterlife of Data, published earlier this year, recounts the experiences of a young man who, having lost his father ten years previously, finds that they can still compete against each other on an old XBox racing game. That is, he can play against his father’s saved games, again and again. (Of course he’s now living in dread of the day the XBox eventually breaks and his dad dies a second time.)

The digital world has been part of our lives for most of our lives, if not all of them. We are each of us mirrored there. And there’s this in common between exploring digital technology and exploring the Moon: no wind will come along to blow away our footprints.

Öhman’s book is mostly an exploration of the unstable but fast-growing sector of “grieving technologies” which create – from our digital footprints – chatbots, which our grieving loved ones can interrogate on those long lonely winter evenings. Rather more uncanny, to my mind, are those chatbots of us that stalk the internet while we’re still alive, causing trouble on our behalf. How long will it be before my wife starts ringing me up out of the blue to ask me the PIN for our joint debit card?

Answer: in no time at all, at least according to a note on “human machine teaming” published six (six!) years ago by the Ministry of Defence. Its prediction that “forgeries are likely to constitute a large proportion of online content” was stuffily phrased, but accurate enough: in 2023 nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots.

At what point does a picture of yourself acquire its own reality? At what point does that picture’s existence start ruining your life? Oscar Wilde took a stab at what in 1891 must have seemed a very noodly question with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. 130-odd years later, Sarah Snook’s one-woman take on the story at London’s Haymarket Theatre employed digital beauty filters and mutiple screens in what felt less like an updating of Wilde’s story, more its apocalyptic restatement: all lives end, and a life wholly given over to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure is not going to end well.

In 2021, users of TikTok noticed that the platform’s default front-facing camera was slimming down their faces, smoothing their skin, whitening their teeth and altering the size of their eyes and noses. (You couldn’t disable this feature, either.) When you play with these apps, you begin to appreciate their uncanny pull. I remember the first time TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” filter, released last year, mapped itself over my image with an absolute seamlessness. Quite simply, a better me appeared in the phone’s digital mirror. When I gurned, it gurned. When I laughed, it laughed. It had me fixated for days and, for heaven’s sake, I’m a middle-aged bloke. Girls, you’re the target audience here. If you want to know what your better selves are up to, all you have to do is look into your smartphone.

Better yet, head to a clinic near you (while there are still appointments available), get your fill of fillers, and while your face is swelling like an Aardman Animations outtake, listen in as practitioners of variable experience and capacity talk glibly of “Zoom-face dysphoria”.
That this self-transfiguring trend has disfigured a generation is not really the worry. The Kardashian visage (tan by Baywatch, brows and eye shape by Bollywood, lips from Atlanta, cheeks from Pocahontas, nose from Gwyneth Paltrow) is a mostly non-surgical artefact – a hyaluronic-acid trip that will melt away in six months to a year, once people come to their senses. What really matters is that among school-age girls, rates of depression and self-harm are through the roof. I had a whale of a time at that screening of The Substance. But the terrifying reality is that the film isn’t for me; it’s for them.

The most indirect critique of technology ever made?

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Watching Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast for New Scientist

“Something or other lay in wait for him,” wrote Henry James in a story from 1903, ”amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.”

The beast in this tale was (just to spoil it for you) fear itself, for it was fear that stopped our hero from living any kind of worthwhile life.

Swap around the genders of the couple at the heart of James’s bitter tale, allow them to reincarnate and meet as if for the first time on three separate occasions — in Paris in 1910, in LA in 2014 and in Chengdu in 2044 — and you’ve got a rough idea of the mechanics of Bertrand Bonello’s magnificent and maddening new science fiction film. Through a series of close-ups, longueurs and red-herrings, The Beast, while getting nowhere very fast, manages to be an utterly riveting, often terrifying film about love, the obstacles to love, and our deep-seated fear of love even when it’s there for the taking. It’s also (did I mention this?) an epic account of how everyone’s ordinary human timidity, once aggregated by technology, destroys the human race.

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay play star-crossed lovers Gabrielle Monnier and Louis Lewanski. In 1910 Gabrielle fudges the business of leaving her husband; tragedy strikes soon after. In 2014 an incel version of Louis would sooner stalk Gabrielle with a gun than try and talk to her. The consequences of their non-affair are not pretty. In 2044 Gabrielle and Louis stumble into each other on the way to “purification” — a psychosurgical procedure that heals past-life trauma and leaves people, if not without emotion, then certainly without the need for grand passion. By now the viewer is seriously beginning to wonder what will ever go right for this pair.

Somewhere in these twisty threaded timelines are the off-screen “events” of 2025, that brought matters to a head and convinced people to hand their governance over to machines. Why would humanity betray itself in such a manner? The blunt answer is: because we’re more in love with machines than with each other, and always have been.

In 1910 Gabrielle’s husband’s fortune is made from the manufacture of celluloid dolls. In 2014 — a point-perfect satire of runaway narcissism that owes much, stylistically, to the films of David Lynch — Gabrielle and Louis collide disastrously with warped images of themselves and each other, in an uncanny valley of cross-purposed conversations, predatory social media and manipulated video. In 2044 mere dolls and puppets have become fully conscious robots. One of these, played by Guslagie Malanda, even begins to fall in love with its “client” Gabrielle. Meanwhile Gabrielle, Louis and everyone else is undergoing psychosurgery in order to fit in with the AI’s brave new world. (Human unemployment is running at 67 per cent, and without purification’s calming effect it’s virtually impossible to get a worthwhile job.)

None of the Gabrielles and Louises are comfortable in their own skin. They take it in turns wanting to be something else, even if it means being something less. They see the best that they can be, and it pretty much literally scares the life out of them.

Given this is the point The Beast wants to put across, you have to admire the physical casting here. Each lead actor exhibits superb, machine-like self-control. Seydoux dies behind her eyes not once but many times in the course of this film; MacKay can go from trembling Adonis to store-front mannekin in about 2.1 seconds. And when full humanity is called for, both actors demonstrate extraordinary sensitivity: handy when you’re trying to distinguish between 1910’s unspoken passion, 2014’s unspeakable passion, and 2044’s passionless speech.

True, The Beast may be the most indirect critique of technology ever made. Heaven knows how it will fare at the box office. But any fool can make us afraid of robots. This intelligent, shocking and memorable film dares to focus on us.

What’s not to like?

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Watching Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting for New Scientist

A bratty 12-year-old girl. A feckless stepfather who loses her trust and feels increasingly out of place in his own home. Oh, and a giant spider.

Kiah Roache-Turner, a relatively new director on the horror scene, understands that real originality has almost nothing to do with who and what you put in front of the screen. What matters how is you set those elements to dancing. Like 2023’s killer-doll hit M3gan, with which it shares a certain antic humour, Sting cares about its characters. Charlotte (Alyla Browne) hero-worships her absent father, and this is slowly driving her stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) up the wall, since he knows full well that Charlotte’s real dad lives only half an hour away “across the bridge”. (Sting is ostensibly set in Brooklyn, New York; actually it was shot in Sydney and aside from a couple of establishing shots its action takes place entirely within a brownstone apartment house, all drywall and ducts.)

Ethan’s a struggling comic book artist who finds himself borrowing (and spoiling) Charlotte’s own much livelier ideas. When Charlotte’s pet spider (it arrived in a meteor during an ice storm — never a good sign) grows to man-eating size and drags Ethan off through the air duct, Charlotte, plugged in to her earphones, her videogames and her anger, simply fails to notice. The scene tries to hit the sweet spot between horror and comedy that M3gan struck again and again, and if it doesn’t quite succeed, I think it may have less to do with the writing or direction as with the film’s basic premise, which is, when you come down to it, very thin.

Comparisons to the original Alien are inevitable, if only because of the spider’s break-neck growth rate and all those ducts. And as far as the special effects go, Sting the Spider stands up pretty well. Wisely, the film prefers glimpses, shadows and one or two very well-judged sight gags to full-on goo and muppeteering.

The house — a realistically over-stuffed gothic interior full of corners and cabinets — is the family in metaphor. The ducts connecting Charlotte’s bedroom to the sitting room of Helga, her senile grandmother (Noni Hazlehurst, having more fun than the rest of the cast put together), are the torturous lines of communication by which these good people struggle to maintain a sense of family. Sting favours suspense over surprise. We learn very early on that Charlotte’s fast-growing pet cannot bear the smell of mothballs and that Helga, wrapped in umpteen threadbare shawls, stinks of them. For a second we teeter on a fairytale in which an old woman and a young girl will save the “real” adult world.

True, nothing kills a good story faster than cleverness — but a few more touches of that sort wouldn’t have hurt. Instead we have an efficient, entertaining light-hearted script, very ably realised, and one and a half hours of light entertainment that, though not at all wasted, are not exactly filled to the brim, either.

Why, then, has Sting acquired global distribution and, even before its release, such glowing trade coverage?

Well, for one thing, it’s refreshing to see a movie that puts its characters through the wringer in psychologically believable ways. Charlotte saves Ethan from the spider. Ethan saves Charlotte. In the face of a Fate Worse Than Death (trust me on this), the pair learn to cooperate. A weak man gains strength, a lonely child learns there’s value in other people, a cowardly exterminator loses his head and a bitter landlady plummets down a lift shaft. What’s not to like? Storytelling this pure looks effortless, but if it was, films in general would be a lot better than they are.

An entirely predictable square-dance

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Watching Stefon Bristol’s Breathe for New Scientist

Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis) and Maya (Jennifer Hudson) live behind the hard-to-open bulkhead doors of a homemade bunker in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. If you can call it living: their every breath has to be calibrated and analysed, as the oxygen-producing machinery constructed by their missing husband and father Darius (a short, sweet performance by the former rapper Common) starts to fail.

The Earth’s oxygen has vanished. So has all its plant life. The oceans are all dried up. Survivors are few, and trust between them is a thing of the past.

Had Maya simply listened to her daughter and let in the two mysterious visitors who want to study their oxygen plant (Tess, played by Milla Jovovich, and Lucas, played by Sam Worthington) Breathe’s plot, such as it is, would have barely filled a quarter-hour. (Zora has been monologuing to her presumably dead dad over the shortwave radio for months now. If Tess has overheard her, then her claim to be Darius’s colleague may simply be a lie.)

As it is, no one trusts anyone and everybody shouts a lot, while performing an entire predictable square-dance around door codes, pass keys, key-cards, dead and dying batteries, cable ties, unreachable switches — we’ve been here before, oh, so very many times. Breathe’s sole highlight is Sam Worthington’s manic, dead-eyed Lucas — incapable, after a lifetime of horrors, of thinking more than thirty seconds into the future.

Low-budget science fiction favours the global catastrophe. What better alibi could there be for squeezing your cast into small, affordable sets? Though hardly one-room dramas, two recent sci-fi thrillers have shown what can be done with relatively few resources: 2018’s Bird Box (in which Sandra Bullock’s character Malorie must shield her and her children’s eyes from entities that prompt people to suicide) and, in the same year, A Quiet Place (whose gargoyle-like aliens chomp down on anything and anyone that makes a sound). Whether the world beyond that armoured door is as uninhabitable as we think fuels the paranoia of both 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, and the rather more expansive Silo, a TV adaptation of Hugh Howey’s series of sf thrillers.

Still, it’s hard to think of a movie genre so resistant to innovation as this one. While it solves the problem of small budgets, the one-room scenario doesn’t at all play to genre’s manic strengths. The best one-room thrillers aren’t science fiction at all, but regular thrillers. In Geoffrey Household’s unforgettable 1939 novel Rogue Male, to take an extreme example, Hitler’s would-be assassin is foiled and has to go hide under a hedge.

The trick, when writing science fiction versions of such stories, is to treat seriously the macguffin that created your scenario in the first place. The psychocidal monsters of Bird Box, first invented by Josh Malerman for his 2014 novel, are a wonderfully insolent, high-concept proposition. The big-eared raptors of A Quiet Place are only marginally less convincing.

Come 2020’s The Midnight Sky however, and the scraping of the barrel has become almost deafening, as radiation (that’s it, that’s all you’re getting: “radiation”) comes to stand in for what we tuned in for: a display of malign and cackling inventiveness. 2021’s Tom Hanks vehicle Finch was a winningly goofy proposition on paper — a grumpy old man, dying in the End Times, invents a robot to look after his dog — but the entire enterprise had the charm sucked out of it by that cursory macguffin: a massive solar flare used merely to excuse a smorgasbord of unrelated bad-weather CGI.

In 2010 Breathe’s screenwriter Doug Simon co-wrote a low-budget film called Brotherhood. Tellingly enough, that was a far more successful one-room thriller, about a college fraternity initiation rite gone horribly wrong. Turning to science fiction, Simon seems to have made the frequent and fatal assumption that SF comes with all the necessary inventiveness somehow “built in”.

Why has the oxygen vanished, more or less overnight, from Breathe’s gasping Earth? Its not even as if we needed a rational explanation; we just needed a compelling one. In its place we get a story as sterile as the planet it’s set on.

Boo-hoo

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Watching Johan Renck’s Spaceman for new Scientist, 27 March 2024

Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) is dying of loneliness, six months into a solo space mission to visit a mysterious purple cloud. His wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant and, being already a lot lonelier than Jakub (who’s been a wholly unsupportive husband), she decides to leave him. The mission controllers keep the news from Jakub, but he knows what’s going on, and it’s his sense of despair that, quite early in the film, draws in help from beyond — a telepathic spider who can pass through walls but is otherwise as real and solid as anything on Jakub’s spaceship (a sort of inside-out junkyard full of believably outdated but serviceable machinery, ducts, keyboards, lights, and a toilet pump that won’t stop screaming).

Spaceman is directed by former singer-songwriter and video maker Johan Renck, better known these days for his Emmy-winning direction of the 2019 docudrama Chernobyl. It’s an assured, wholly deliberate experiment in pacing that will frustrate many. This is a film delivered at a single, unvarying, trancelike pace — and entirely right for a story that’s not at all about a man losing his grip on reality, but rather the very reverse: Adam Sandler’s astronaut Jakub must come to grips with what reality turns out to be, after all — extraterrestrial clouds, telepathic spiders and all. “The universe,” his strange companion assures him, even as they both face extinction, “is as it should be”. And here’s the kicker: the alien spider is right.

Spaceman is monotonous only in the sense that time itself is monotonous, and the film’s transcendental aspirations are very well served by Hans Zimmer’s shimmering, shuddering score; it’s more sound art than music, and easily as powerful as anything he wrote for Villeneuve’s Dune films — which is saying a lot.

Since his lead turn in the Safdi Brothers’ 2019 crime movie Uncut Gems, Sandler the serious actor has little left to prove. Here, he embodies and expresses Jakub’s terror, melancholy, anger and self-hatred with absolute commitment and truthfulness — five years ago, who would have bet money that the words “egoless” and “Adam Sandler” would ever appear in the same sentence? Paul Dano voices Jakub’s arachnid companion, with a poetic pathos that would be cloying in a more regular movie, but works superbly well here — almost as if his every word were a prayer.

In its effort to be a spiritual experience — more church mass than movie — Spaceman simplifies the already fairly simple plot of its source material, Jaroslav Kalfař’s novel The Spaceman of Bohemia. This was a mistake.

Jakub is lonely. So is his wife. She leaves him. Counselled by his extraterrestrial friend, Jakub makes up with her (a neat trick, involving a wonderfully goofy faster-than-light phone called CzechConnect and a glowing purple fragment from the universe’s beginning). They reconcile, and Jakub begins his long return.

At which point, I must report I woke from my aesthetic trance and thought to myself: hang on, why does the story of a man reconciling with his wife six-months into a work assignment require a space mission, a mysterious cloud, quantum telephony and a telepathic spider?

Spaceman has many virtues but it is, when you come down to it, a film about someone trying to fix their work-life balance, and doing so in the most expensive, baroque, and portentous manner imaginable. He’s lonely? Boo hoo. She’s leaving him half way through his solo flight? What a lousy, selfish thing for her to do. Bang their heads together, I say, and to hell with the limitations of spacetime!

And this, just to spoil it for you, is pretty much what happens.

“We cannot save ourselves”

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Interviewing Cixin Liu for The Telegraph, 29 February 2024

Chinese writer Cixin Liu steeps his science fiction in disaster and misfortune, even as he insists he’s just playing around with ideas. His seven novels and a clutch of short stories and articles (soon to be collected in a new English translation, A View from the Stars) have made him world-famous. His most well-known novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo, the nearest thing science fiction has to a heavy-hitting prize, in 2015. Closer to home, he’s won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious literary science-fiction award, nine times. A 2019 film adaptation of his novella “The Wandering Earth” (in which we have to propel the planet clear of a swelling sun) earned nearly half a billion dollars in the first 10 days of its release. Meanwhile The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels have sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Now they’re being adapted for the screen, and not for the first time: the first two adaptations were domestic Chinese efforts. A 2015 film was suspended during production (“No-one here had experience of productions of this scale,” says Liu, speaking over a video link from a room piled with books.) The more recent TV effort is, from what I’ve seen of it, jolly good, though it only scratches the surface of the first book.

Now streaming service Netflix is bringing Liu’s whole trilogy to a global audience. Clean behind your sofa, because you’re going to need somewhere to hide from an alien visitation quite unlike any other.

For some of us, that invasion will come almost as a relief. So many English-speaking sf writers these days spend their time bending over backwards, offering “design solutions” to real-life planetary crises, and especially to climate change. They would have you believe that science fiction is good for you.

Liu, a bona fide computer engineer in his mid-fifties, is immune to such virtue signalling. “From a technical perspective, sf cannot really help the world,” he says. “Science fiction is ephemeral, because we build it on ideas in science and technology that are always changing and improving. I suppose we might inspire people a little.”

Western media outlets tend to cast Liu — a domestic celebrity with a global reputation and a fantastic US sales record — as a put-upon and presumably reluctant spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party. The Liu I’m speaking to is garrulous, well-read, iconoclastic, and eager. (It’s his idea that we end up speaking for nearly an hour more than scheduled.) He’s hard-headed about human frailty and global Realpolitik, and he likes shocking his audience. He believes in progress, in technology, and, yes — get ready to clutch your pearls — he believes in his country. But we’ll get to that.

We promised you disaster and misfortune. In The Three-Body Problem, the great Trisolaran Fleet has already set sail from its impossibly inhospitable homeworld orbiting three suns. (What does not kill you makes you stronger, and their madly unpredictable environment has made the Trisolarans very strong indeed.) They’ll arrive in 450 years or so — more than enough time, you would think, for us to develop technology advanced enough to repel them. That is why the Trisolarans have sent two super-intelligent proton-sized super-computers at near-light speed to Earth, to mess with our minds, muddle our reality, and drive us into self-hatred and despair. Only science can save us. Maybe.
The forthcoming Netflix adaptation is produced by Game of Thrones’s David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood’s Alexander Woo. In covering all three books, it will need to wrap itself around a conflict that lasts millennia, and realistically its characters won’t be able to live long enough to witness more than fragments of the action. The parallel with the downright deathy Game of Thrones is clear: “I watched Game of Thrones before agreeing to the adaptation,” says Liu. “I found it overwhelming — quite shocking, but in a positive way.”

By the end of its run, Game of Thrones had become as solemn as an owl, and that approach won’t work for The Three-Body Problem, which leavens its cosmic pessimism (a universe full of silent, hostile aliens, stalking their prey among the stars) with long, delightful episodes of sheer goofiness — including one about a miles-wide Trisolaran computer chip made up entirely of people in uniform, marching about, galloping up and down, frantically waving flags…

A computer chip the size of a town! A nine-dimensional supercomputer the size of a proton! How on Earth does Liu build engaging stories from such baubles? Well, says Liu, you need a particular kind of audience — one for whom anything seems possible.
“China’s developing really fast, and people are confronting opportunities and challenges that make them think about the future in a wildly imaginative and speculative way,” he explains. “When China’s pace of development slows, its science fiction will change. It’ll become more about people and their everyday experiences. It’ll become more about economics and politics, less about physics and astronomy. The same has already happened to western sf.”

Of course, it’s a moot point whether anything at all will be written by then. Liu reckons that within a generation or two, artificial intelligence will take care of all our entertainment needs. “The writers in Hollywood didn’t strike over nothing,” he observes. “All machine-made entertainment requires, alongside a few likely breakthroughs, is ever more data about what people write and consume and enjoy.” Liu, who claims to have retired and to have no skin in this game any more, points to a recent Chinese effort, the AI-authored novel Land of Memories, which won second prize in a regional sf competition. “I think I’m the final generation of writers who will create novels based purely on their own thinking, without the aid of artificial intelligence,” he says. “The next generation will use AI as an always-on assistant. The generation after that won’t write.”

Perhaps he’s being mischievous (a strong and ever-present possibility). He may just be spinning some grand-sounding principle out of his own charmingly modest self-estimate. “I’m glad people like my work,” he says, “but I doubt I’ll be remembered even ten years from now. I’ve not written very much. And the imagination I’ve been able to bring to bear on my work is not exceptional.” His list of influences is long. His father bought him Wells and Verne in translation. Much else, including Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, required translating word for word with a dictionary. “As an sf writer, I’m optimistic about our future,” Liu says. “The resources in our solar system alone can feed about 100,000 planet Earths. Our future is potentially limitless — even within our current neighbourhood.”

Wrapping our heads around the scales involved is tricky, though. “The efforts countries are taking now to get off-world are definitely meaningful,” he says, “but they’re not very realistic. We have big ideas, and Elon Musk has some exciting propulsion technology, but the economic base for space exploration just isn’t there. And this matters, because visiting neighbouring planets is a huge endeavour, one that makes the Apollo missions of the Sixties and Seventies look like a fast train ride.”

Underneath such measured optimism lurks a pessimistic view of our future on Earth. “More and more people are getting to the point where they’re happy with what they’ve got,” he complains. “They’re comfortable. They don’t want to make any more progress. They don’t want to push any harder. And yet the Earth is pretty messed up. If we don’t get into space, soon we’re not going to have anywhere to live at all.”

The trouble with writing science fiction is that everyone expects you have an instant answer to everything. Back in June 2019, a New Yorker interviewer asked him what he thought of the Uighurs (he replied: a bunch of terrorists) and their treatment at the hands of the Chinese government (he replied: firm but fair). The following year some Republican senators in the US tried to shame Netflix into cancelling The Three-Body Problem. Netflix pointed out (with some force) that the show was Benioff and Weiss and Woo’s baby, not Liu’s. A more precious writer might have taken offence, but Liu thinks Netflix’s response was spot-on. ““Neither Netflix nor I wanted to think about these issues together,” he says.

And it doesn’t do much good to spin his expression of mainstream public opinion in China (however much we deplore it) into some specious “parroting [of] dangerous CCP propaganda”. The Chinese state is monolithic, but it’s not that monolithic — witness the popular success of Liu’s own The Three Body Problem, in which a girl sees her father beaten to death by a fourteen-year-old Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, grows embittered during what she expects will be a lifetime’s state imprisonment, and goes on to betray the entire human race, telling the alien invaders, “We cannot save ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Liu has learned to be ameliatory. In a nod to Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he points out that while wars continue around the globe, the bloodshed generated by warfare has been declining for decades. He imagines a world of ever-growing moderation — even the eventual melting away of the nation state.

When needled, he goes so far as to be realistic: “No system suits all. Governments are shaped by history, culture, the economy — it’s pointless to argue that one system is better than another. The best you can hope for is that they each moderate whatever excesses they throw up. People are not and never have been free to do anything they want, and people’s idea of what constitutes freedom changes, depending on what emergency they’re having to handle.”

And our biggest emergency right now? Liu picks the rise of artificial intelligence, not because our prospects are so obviously dismal (though killer robots are a worry), but because mismanaging AI would be humanity’s biggest own goal ever: destroyed by the very technology that could have taken us to the stars!

Ungoverned AI could quite easily drive a generation to rebel against technology itself. “AI has been taking over lots of peoples’ jobs, and these aren’t simple jobs, these are what highly educated people expected to spend lifetimes getting good at. The employment rate in China isn’t so good right now. Couple that with badly managed roll-outs of AI, and you’ve got frustration and chaos and people wanting to destroy the machines, just as they did at the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

Once again we find ourselves in a dark place. But then, what did you expect from a science fiction writer? They sparkle best in the dark. And for those who don’t yet know his work, Liu is pleased, so far, with Netflix’s version of his signature tale of interstellar terror, even if its westernisation does baffle him at times.

“All these characters of mine that were scientists and engineers,” he sighs. “They’re all politicians now. What’s that about?”

A safe pair of hands

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Watching Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 for New Scientist, 23 February 2024

So here’s where we’re at, in the concluding half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune:

Cast into the wilderness of planet Arrakis by invading House Harkonnen, young Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) learns the ways of the desert, embraces his genetic and political destiny, and becomes in one swoop a focus for fanaticism and (with an eye to a third film, an adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s sequel, Dune Messiah) the scourge of the Universe.

From Alejandro Jodorowosky’s mid-1970s effort, which never bore fruit (but at least gave Swiss artist H.R. Giger his entrée into movies and, ultimately, Alien), and from David Lynch’s more-than-four-hour farrago, savagely edited prior to its 1984 release into something approaching (but only approaching) coherence, many assumed that Dune is an epic too vast to be easily filmed. Throw resources at it, goes the logic, and it will eventually crumble to your will.

That this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw was perfectly demonstrated by John Harrison’s 2000 miniseries for the Sci Fi Channel and its sequel, Children of Dune (2003) — both absurdly under-resourced, but both offering satisfying stories that the fans lapped up, even if the critics didn’t.

Now we have Villeneuve’s effort, and like his Blade Runner 2049, it uses visual stimulation to hide the gaping holes in its plot.

Yes, the story of Dune is epic. But it is also, in the full meaning of the word, weird. It’s about a human empire that’s achieved cosmic scale, and all without the help of computers, destroyed long ago in some shadowy “Butlerian Jihad”. In doing so it has bred, drugged and otherwise warped individual humans into becoming something very like Gods. In conquering space, humanity teeters on the brink of attaining power over time. The “spice” mined on planet Arrakis is not just a rare resource over which great houses fight, but the spiritual gateway that makes humanity, in this far future, viable in the first place.

Leave these elements undeveloped (or, as here, entirely ignored) and you’re left with an awful lot of desert to fill with battles, sword play, explosions, crowd scenes, and sandworms — and here an as yet unwritten rule of SFX cinematography comes into play, because I swear the more these wrigglers cost, the sillier they get. (If that’s the sandworm’s front end on those posters, I shudder to think what the back end looks like.) Your ears will ring, your heart will thunder, and by morning the entire experience will have evaporated, like a long (2-hour 46-minute) fever dream.

As Beast Raban, Dave Bautista outperforms the rest of the cast to a degree that is embarrassing. The Beast’s an Harkonnen, an alpha predator in this grim universe, and yet Bautista is the only actor here capable of portraying fear. Javier Bardem’s desert leader Stilgar is played for laughs (but let’s face it, in the entire history of cinema, name one desert leader that hasn’t been). Timothee Chalamet stands still in front of the camera. His love interest, played by Zendaya, scowls and growls like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz.

Dune Part Two is an expensive (USD 190 million) film which has had the decency to put much of its budget in front of the camera. This makes it watchable, enjoyable, and at times even thrilling. Making a good Dune movie, though, requires a certain eccentricity. Villeneuve is that deadening thing, “a safe pair of hands”.

The man who drew on the future

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Reading The Culture: The Drawings by Iain M Banks for the Times, 9 December 2023

“If I can get it to 155mph, I’ll be happy,” said Banksie (“Banksie” to all-comers; never “Iain”), and he handed me his phone. On the screen, a frictionless black lozenge hung at an odd angle against mist-shrouded hills. It was, he said, his way of burning up some of the carbon he had been conscientiously saving.

The BMW came as a surprise, given Banks’s long-standing devotion to environmental causes. But then, this was a while ago, 2013, and we were not yet convinced that clutching our pearls and screaming at each other was the best way to deal with a hotter planet. It was still possible, in those days, to agree that Banksie was our friend and deserved whatever treat he wanted to get himself. He was, after all, dying.

When Iain Banks succumbed to gallbladder cancer he was 59 years old and thirty years into a successful career in the literary mainstream, He’d also written nine science fiction novels and a book of short stories. Recently reissued in a handsome uniform edition, these are set in a technically advanced utopian society called the Culture.

The Culture is a place where the perfect is never allowed to stand in the way of the good. The Culture means well, and knows full well that this will never be enough. The Culture strives to be better, and sometimes despairs of itself. The Culture makes mistakes, and does its level best to put them right.

Yes, the Culture is a Utopia, but only “on balance”, only “when everything is taken into account”. It’s utopian enough.

Banks filled the corners of this galaxy-spanning civilisation with real (mostly humanoid) people, and he let them be giddy, inconsistent, self-absorbed, and sometimes malign. He believed that with consciousness comes at least the potential for virtue. The very best of his characters can afford to fail sometimes, because here, forgiveness is possible and wisdom is worth pursuing.

His effort went largely unrecognised by the critics. It fed neither our solemnity nor our sense of our own importance. The Culture was a mirror in which we were encouraged to point and laugh at ourselves. The Culture was comic. (The sf writer Adam Roberts calls it sane; I’m pretty certain we’re talking about the same thing.) As a consequence, the Culture is loved more than it is admired.

The first glimmerings of The Culture appeared in the 1970s in North Queensferry, among a teenager’s doodlings: maps of alien archipelagos, sketches of spaceships and guns and castles and tanks. Lovingly reproduced in The Culture: The Drawings, out this month, Banks’s exquisitely drawn juvenalia chart the course of the Culture’s birth. Bit by bit, pencilled calculations start to crowd out the drawings. The alphabets of the Culture’s synthetic language “Marain” grow more and more stylised, before being pushed to the margins by strange doughnut figures describing the cosmology of a speculative universe. Components emerge that we recognise from the books themselves. Spaceships — a mile, ten miles, a hundred miles long — predominate.

The book is a bit of a revelation; while he was alive Banks kept this material to himself. He was far too good a writer ever to imagine that readers needed any of it. Thumping literalism was never his style. These were the visual props from which he constructed his literary tricks.

The Culture is a loose civilisation formed from half-a-dozen humanoid species and whatever machine intelligences they bring along — or by whom they are brought. Artificial “Minds” are very often seen to outperform and outclass their creators. Spaceships and space habitats here tend to nurture their living freight rather as I look after my cats — very well indeed, albeit with a certain condescension.

Spacetime is no barrier to the Culture’s gadding about, so its material resources are functionally infinite. Nostalgic value is therefore the only material value anyone bothers about. No-one and nothing lasts forever. Everyone in this world is mortal. The Culture is canny enough to realise that in this world of hard knocks, opportunities for curiosity and play are so rare as to be worth defending at all costs, while beliefs (and religious beliefs in particular) are mere defences against terror. With terror comes exploitation. In Surface Detail (2010) the Culture must somehow take to task a society that’s using a personality-backup technology to consign its ne’erdowells to virtual hells.

The great thing about the Culture — the brainchild of a lifelong and cheerful atheist — is that nothing and nobody is exploited.

Banks very roughly mapped The Culture’s story over 9000 years — more than enough time for humans on their unremarkable blue marble to merit least a footnote. (The Culture’s first visit to Earth in the 1970s causes mayhem in the 1989 short story “The State of the Art”.) Groups join the Culture and secede from it, argue, influence and cojole and (rarely but terribly) go to war with it. Countless species have left the Culture over the years, retreating to contemplate who-knows-what, or chiselling their way out of the normal universe altogether. Now and again a passing reference is made to some vast, never-before-suspected epoch of benign indifference or malign neglect.

Consider Phlebas (1987) set the series’ tone from the first, with a story of how a devout religious society comes up against the Culture, goes to war with it, and promptly implodes. The Culture is well-intentioned enough towards its Idiran foes, as it is towards everyone else — but who said good intentions were enough to avert tragedy?

The last Culture book, Hydrogen Sonata (2012), asks big questions about belief and meaning, many of them channeled through a subplot in which one person’s efforts to play a virtually impossible piece of music on a virtually impossible musical instrument play out against the ground of a society for whom her task is trivial and the music frankly bad.

My personal favourite is Excession. By 1996, you see, a significant number of us were begging Banks to kill the Culture. Its decency and its sanity were beginning to stick in our craw. We knew, in our heart of hearts, that the Culture was setting us a moral challenge of sorts, and this put us out of temper. Why don’t you break it? we said. Why don’t you humiliate it? Why don’t you reveal its rotten heart? Banks indulged us this far: he confronted the Culture with a void in space older than the universe itself. It was a phenomenon even the Culture couldn’t handle.

Such sideways approaches to depicting the perfect society are, of course, only sensible. In fiction, utopian happiness and personal fulfilment make fine goals, but rotten subject matter.

But Banks’s decision to stick to edge cases and intractable problems wasn’t just pragmatic. He knew the Culture was smug and safe, and he spent entire novels working out what might be done about this. He was committed to dreaming up a polis that could avoid the catastrophe of its own success, and what he came up with was a spacefaring society, free of resource constraints, devoted to hedonistic play at the centre, and fringed with all manner of well-meaning busy-work directed at cadet civilisations (like our own on Earth) deemed not yet mature enough to join the party.

“I think of the Culture as some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works,” Banks wrote in 1993; “she spends a lot of time shopping and getting her hair done, but she goes out and visits the poor people and takes them baskets of vegetables.”

It’s an odd-sounding Utopia, perhaps — but, when all’s said and done, not such a bad life.

Apocalypse Now Lite

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Watching Gareth Edwards’s The Creator for New Scientist, 4 October 2023

A man loses his wife in the war with the robots. The machines didn’t kill her; human military ineptitude did. She was pregnant with his child. The man (played by John David Washington, whose heart-on-sleeve performance can’t quite pull this film out of the fire) has nothing to live for, until it turns out that his wife is alive and working with the robots to build a weapon. The weapon turns out to be a robot child (an irresistible performance by 7-year-old Madeleine Yuna Voyles) who possesses the ability to control machines at a distance. Man and weapon go in search of the man’s wife; they’re a family in wartime, trying to reconnect, and their reconnection will end the war and change everything.

The Creator’s great strength is its futuristic south-east Asian setting. (You know a film has problems when the reviewer launches straight in with the set design.) Police drones like mosquitos rumble overhead. Mantis-headed robots in red robes ring temple bells to warn of American air attack.

The Creator is Apocalypse Now Lite: the Americans aggressors have been traumatised by the nuking of Los Angeles — an atrocity they blame on their own AI. They’ve hurled their own robots into the garbage compactor (literally — a chilling up-scaled retread of that Star Wars scene). But South East Asia has had the temerity to fall in love with AI technology. They’re happy to be out-evolved! The way a unified, Blade-Runner-esque “New Asia” sees it, LA was an accident a long way away; people replace people all the time; and a robot is a person.

Hence: war. Hence: rural villages annihilated under blue laser light. Hence: missiles launched from space against temple complexes in mountain fastnesses. Hence: river towns reduced to matchwood under withering small-arms fire.

If nothing else, it’s spectacular.

The Creator is not so much a stand-alone sf blockbuster as a game of science fiction cinema bingo. Enormous battle tanks, as large as the villages they crush? think Avatar. A very-low-orbit space station, large enough to be visible in the daytime? think Oblivion. Child with special powers? think Stranger Things. The Creator is a science fiction movie assembled from the tropes of other science fiction movies. If it is not as bankrupt as Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant (now those were bad movies), it’s because we’ve not seen south-east Asia cyborgised before (though readers of sf have been inhabiting such futures for over thirty years) and also because director Gareth Edwards once again proves that he can pull warm human performances from actors lumbered with any amount of gear, sweating away on on the busiest, most cluttered and complex set.

This is not nothing. Nor, alas, is it enough.

As a film school graduate Gareth Edwards won a short sci-fi film contest in London, and got a once in a lifetime chance to make a low budget feature. Monsters (2010) managed to be both a character piece and a love story and a monster movie all in one. On the back of it he got a shot at a Star Wars spin-off in 2014, which hijacked the entire franchise (everyone loved Rogue One and its TV spin-off Andor is much admired; Disney’s own efforts at canon have mostly flopped).

The Creator should have been Edwards’s Star Wars. Instead, something horrible has happened in the editing. Vital lines are being delivered in scenes so truncated, it’s as though the actors are explaining the film directly to the audience. Every few minutes, tears run down Washington’s face, Voyles’s chin trembles, and we have no idea, none, what brought them to their latest crescendo — and ooh look, that goofy running bomb! That reminds me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow…

The Creator is a fine spectacle. What we needed was a film that had something to say.