A Break from Cyberpunk: Broken Angels

Title: Broken Angels
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

In this semi-sequel to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's body hopping anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs returns, this time to take two-fisted aim at corporate greed and the commercialization of war.  

Sixty years after the events of Carbon (which is referenced briefly once then promptly forgotten), Kovacs is now a mercenary fighting on the revolution-wracked world of Sanction IV, where rebels are liberally dispensing nukes to anyone they don't like, while the corporate-backed cartel government is using even worse weapons.

In the midst of all this, Kovacs is approached by a deserter from the rebel side with a proposition: help uncover a 'Martian' artifact found on the planet, and help everyone involved become filthy rich. (Martians being the colloquial name for a race of presumably-extinct highly advanced aliens whose ruins mankind has discovered).

To that end, Kovacs assembles a team consisting of such Dirty Dozen tropes as the Demolitions Expert, the Ninja Assassin, the Hotshot Pilot and you get the idea. They all go traipsing off to a highly irradiated beach that will inevitably kill them all as they dig for said artifact.

Oh that's right, this is the universe where people's consciousness is digitally backed up in a 'cortical stack' implanted inside their spines, allowing them to be ported from one body to another or even squirted across space to another star. 

Now, being backed up strikes me as being pretty cold comfort if you're dead (Morgan establishes in graphic detail that getting shot in the head still kills you--the stack is a backup, not the real you). I could see it being a kind of life insurance deal (at least my family will be provided for, etc.) in the event of accidental death, but in Broken Angels a whole platoon of guys go into a hot zone knowing they are 100% positively absotively going to die, and comfort themselves with the knowledge that their digital selves will enjoy a reward afterwards. That seems a trifle ... psychotic. No?

Removed from Altered Carbon's urban setting this feels much more military scifi than cyberpunk, though to be honest the secret elite crack super-soldier crack elite super squad do very little but die of radiation exposure and have graphic sex with Kovacs.

And can I point out how creepy it is to have vivid sex scenes in a book that's written in first person? Who exactly are we supposed to imagine Kovacs is telling all these slippery, gushy, wet and wild stories to? I wish I could say this was an indication Kovacs is an unreliable narrator who is far too into himself, but the rest of the book is presented as fact. I just picture the interviewer or amanuensis's horrified face as Kovacs wades into excruciating details about glands and secretions and thrusting and moaning. Hope they were paid well.

The message is presented with a little more nuance here than in Altered Carbon, even if the message itself is still not terribly subtle. In Altered Carbon, it was 'rich=bad, so rise up and murder the bastards.' Here, corporations that profit from war are in the target sights, but so are fanatics who use their revolutionary fervor to justify their revolting actions. It's balanced, but it does rather mean it reaches conclusions as trite as 'war is bad,' 'ruthless companies are bad' and 'fanaticism is bad.'

All that said, this is my favorite of the three Kovacs books. A sense of impending doom builds throughout the book, with the soldiers working to unravel the mystery before radiation unravels their DNA, culminating in an apocalyptic burst of action that is much more original and satisfying than, say, Altered Carbon's endless techno-ninja shenanigans. On the other hand, that does mean it's more slow-moving, which may test the patience of people expecting more of the same from the last book.

Altered Johansson: Ghost in the Shell

Title: Ghost in the Shell
Director: Ruper Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman)
Screenplay: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger

Let's get one thing out of the way right from the start: This isn't very good. What's interesting to me is the similarities to Netflix's recent cyberpunky titstravaganza, Altered Carbon, and the way they both fail for much the same reasons.

The main problems are the cast--the wrong people in the wrong roles--and the movie's attempts to "humanize" the heroes when the dehumanizing, alienating impact of body-invasive technology is the whole bleeding point.

Not because of the whitewashing thing--as I mentioned in the Altered Carbon review, living in Japan puts a different perspective on the issue for me: Lack of Japanese representation is not really a problem in Japan. On account of it being chock full of Japanese, I suppose. The other point being the silliness of insisting on the 'correct' ethnicity of a character that is, let's be clear about this, a purple-haired cyborg. I'm not saying Hollywood shouldn't make more effort to cast Asians in roles other than kung fu masters and wise old karate sensei. Just saying this is a pretty damn stupid hill to die on.

So Scarlett Johansson as the Major doesn't bug me because of whitewashing. It bugs me because this is absolutely the wrong role for her, wrong, wrong, pouring the milk before adding the cereal wrong. She can do silent and weird or creepy (as in Under the Skin), but the script wants her to alternate between kickass cyberninja and little girl lost/confused about who she is, and it does not work. At all. She looks like she's trying to remember her lines, not her past.

The reason they have her moping around looking like her hamster just died is the writers have decided, just as they did in Altered Carbon, that the hero wasn't sympathetic enough, so they've stuffed her backstory full of cyberpunk tropes 101 and shrunken their world so that absolutely everything revolves around her and this little voyage of discovery she goes on.

Pilou Asbaek (Game of Thrones) is better than I expected given how over-the-top his scenes in GoT are, but he's barely in the movie. Pretty much the only non-Johansson to get some decent screen time is "Beat" Takeshi Kitano who--again this is a living in Japan thing--strikes me as having all the gravitas of a whoopee cushion with none of the sophistication. Doesn't help that he doesn't speak English, so he's literally the only one in the whole movie delivering his lines in Japanese.

Sure there's one or two cool set pieces (like the clip above), but they're lifted directly from the original anime, so I'm reluctant to even give points there--there are entire scenes that are shot-for-shot remakes, just to rub your face in how unnecessary this movie is. What else? The cars look like unfinished video game models, the cityscape is Blade Runner done cheap, and the climax is a total cop-out on the whole message of the movie.

If you must scratch the cyberpunk itch, watch Altered Carbon (for punches and boobs) or Blade Runner (for moody introspection) instead.

The Sky Crawlers

Title: The Sky Crawlers
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Chihiro Ito

Recently got the urge to watch something about aerial combat, and remembered this little 2008 Japanese animated movie. I mention it for two reasons: One, the dogfighting scenes are amazing. Watch the video. Second, it strikes me as a shining example of the dangers of applying Western critical thought to foreign movies.

The Sky Crawlers presents a world without war, in which companies are hired to wage air battles for show, with airplanes piloted by zombie-faced teenagers. The hero's squadron is in turn terrorized by an enemy ace known only as the "Teacher," while the hero himself struggles to understand what happened to the pilot he replaced.

A lot of reviews--like this one or this one zero in on an apparent anti-war message. In one scene, one of the main characters even appears to lay down this message like a butcher setting out slabs of meat: War is part of human nature, she says, and if there were ever no war we would have to invent it.

Now there's nothing the Internet likes more than to say "Actually..." so let me break in here to say "Actually..." Westerners are missing the subtext. The fact that the enemy ace is called the Teacher--such as a HIGH SCHOOL teacher--is not random. The fact that all the pilots are HIGH SCHOOL AGED teenagers is not random. The fact that pilots speak Japanese on the ground but English (which is taught in Japanese HIGH SCHOOLS) in the air is not random.

I'm even suspicious of the above-mentioned scene where the character appears to state the theme. She does so in a very droning, glass-eyed way, suggesting someone who has been taught what to say by rote: Rote learning is one of the most criticized aspects of teaching at Japanese HIGH SCHOOLS.

This movie is a very strong strong criticism of the Japanese educational system, claiming that it mass-produces cannon fodder who are mercilessly torn apart by their Teacher, and by a world that applauds rather than cries over their suffering.

Anway, great dogfighting scenes, a bit slow, but an interesting glimpse into the Japanese psyche.

The Expanse (Seasons 1 and 2)

Title: The Expanse (Season 1: 2015, Season 2: 2017)
Developed by: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Network: Netflix (Syfy)

The Expanse is a space opera series based on the book series of the same name by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and one of the few things I'll review on here (other than Iain M Banks' Use of Weapons) that I unreservedly like. It's engaging, it's refreshing, it feels genuinely new the way the sixth Star Trek, the second Battlestar Galactica or the third Stargate series never will.

It's got a slightly harder real-world science feel, though interplanetary travel still happens at the speed of the plot but LOOK HUSH YOU NEVER MIND, and vastly harder real-word politics as the solar system is divided between Earth and Mars, with natives from the asteroid belt and Jovian moons called Belters caught in the middle.

It's one of the few properties to get gritty/grimdark RIGHT. Game of Thrones and its imitators would have you believe that the black hats always win, the white ones lose, or if they do by some miracle not cock up everything irretrievably, it's by learning how to be arseholes.

But that's just as simplistic as the space operas and fantasies that grimdark has shivved on its way to the throne of popular culture. What the Expanse does is understand that reality is messy, people are messy, and if you want to be really gritty you've got to reflect that.

The characters are screwed up, sometimes trying to do the right thing, not always quite succeeding. Thomas Jane is an early standout as Joe Miller, a crooked cop assigned to track down a rich man's rebellious daughter, who gradually grows a conscience and a cause.

The pacing is a little odd, I'll give you that. The real climax from the first book takes place in the middle of season 2. Season 1 just kind of, like, abruptly ends, a bit like this se

The only genuine downside here is that it's so good, watching this show has kind of spoiled me on Star Trek Discovery, shining a spotlight on how cartoonish ST:D's attempts at seriousness are and how overly-reliant on cheap, unearned twists it is.

Altered Carbon: Episode 1

Title: Altered Carbon, Episode 1
Director: Miguel Sapochnik
Network: Netflix

The Basics

Based on the Richard K Morgan book of the same name.

Revolutionary idealist and guerrilla/rebel-turned-mercenary Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman) gets cornered and killed by government enforcers on an alien planet. Luckily, he and everyone else has a digitized backup of his brain (which makes zero sense), so 250 years later he is downloaded into the body of a 38-year-old Swedish-American actor who starred in the RoboCop reboot and Suicide Squad. Nice work if you can get it.

Turns out he's been sprung from digital prison by the richest man in the world and the best thing in HBO's "Rome" (Laurens Bancroft and James Purefoy, respectively) to solve the man's own murder. In return, he's offered a full pardon and (Dr Evil pose) ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Being a good revolutionary, he tells Mr 0.1% to go stuff himself, until he gets ambushed at his hotel by a posse of hitmen (see video). 

Also along for the ride is the detective assigned to the Bancroft case, Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) and a whole lot of boobies. 

Fist Impressions (sic)

It's so deliriously over the top in everything it does--like it's been adapted by a bunch of 16 year olds--that it's easy to forgive the clunky exposition and wooden acting.

Definitely the show seems to believe that more is more. For example, the above scene in the book involves just two hitmen, who get taken out by a single Gatling gun. Here, there's half a dozen who get blown to pieces in an extended bloodbath by TWO machine guns, plus the hotel AI bartender has a shotgun (which is obviously needed when you have two sentry guns firing 100 rounds a second each), plus Kovacs does a bunch of punching and kicking in the middle of the bulletstorm.

Same with the prologue. In the book, Kovacs gets ambushed by a couple of paramilitaries, who gun him down on the spot. In the show, there is an extended gun battle replete with people hiding from assault rifle bullets behind that byword for armor plating, a kitchen counter.

The sleazy sexiness is also in full Showgirls mode, with a surprisingly high number of tits on the screen at any given moment. Detective Ortega takes Kovacs for an expository drink at  a strip club, so if anyone asks why I was there, I'll tell them it's because I was solving JFK's murder.

Dialogue is clunky, as people stand around declaiming the backstory. Kinnaman is fine in the action scenes, but I wish the directors wouldn't ask him to do anything more complicated than punch things. He isn't quite nasty enough to pull off the go-fuck-yourself attitude of his lines, nor does he put enough menace into Kovacs' threats.

The Sights and Sound of Music

The music is loud and proud too, with some sudden & intrusive outbursts of pop songs throughout the episode. One erupts over scenes of Kovacs going on a bender (that was ironically one of the tamer scenes: drugs in Altered Carbon come in eyedroppers stolen from Looper, and Kinnaman plays "high" with a roundeyed dazed expression) where it fits, the second time over a cityscape scene where the saccharine tone was just out of place. 

It doesn't quite pull off the claustrophobic crowdedness or Escher-esque geometries of a cyberpunk city, and everything is way, way too clean -- partly due to budget I guess, but partly because the camera tends to switch from medium shot to close-up, never really pulling back to give us a sense of space, until it pulls aaaall the way out and the cityscape looks like a Christmas ornament. There's one or two scenes at the start of Kovacs' drug-fuelled adventure that get a little of the sense of scope... but there hasn't been anything too neato yet.

Finally, the politics of the book seem more or less present. The mega-rich "own everything now," including our bodies, and in Kovacs' case, even our souls. Indeed, it looks like this part is going to be played up even more than it was in the book, with Kovacs changed from follower of quasi-Mao/Ho Chih Minh figure Quellcrist Falconer, to an associate/contemporary. A few other changes from page to screen also reflect this new focus--Kovacs has changed from government enforcer gone rogue to out-and-out revolutionary.

Despite that, I'd actually say the politics of the show has been one of the more subtly done things, which isn't saying much for an episode that opens with a lesbian shower scene, letting you figure out for yourself the implications of economic inequality.

Anyway, I love to complain, but on balance it's shlocky good fun, that unlike Bright actually has some ideas in the background.

Asianwashing

That's the episode, now it's time to rant.

Before this came out there was the utterly predictable criticism of "whitewashing" the semi-Japanese main character, despite the fact that (A) said character's surname is Kovacs, and (B) the entire point of the series is that digitizing consciousness means what you look like is disconnected from who you are. But now that I've seen it, I must agree I am deeply disappointed in the choice of casting: You see, two actors play Kovacs' earlier (Asian) incarnations, Leonardo Nam and Will Yun Lee. His sister is played by Dichen Lachman. None of them are Japanese.

Joel Kinnaman playing a white guy I buy. But hiring Koreans and Nepalese to play the roles of Japanese characters smacks of the worst kind of racism: Do all Asians look the same? 

I'm not being facetious: every Japanese person I've ever talked to has been fine with Hollywood actors playing Asian roles, but incensed when Chinese are hired to play Japanese. It's all a matter of perspective. 

Now, that's a totally over the top overreaction, but illustrates the point: once you start insisting people of the correct ethnicity play every role, where does it stop? At some arbitrary line the actual people involved don't care about. 

I hate the creeping sensation that I'm becoming a get-off-my-lawn style old man, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that each generation is just as bigoted as the next, just about different things. Sigh. The perils of allowing the Internet to mediate your relationship with your own culture, I guess.

Mute Trailer

Somebody at Netflix must be really into flying cars, neon and androids. In addition to Altered Carbon on February 2, they're also releasing a feature-length film called Mute, by Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft and Source Code) and starring Not Mads Mikkelsen (Neither Casino Royale nor Rogue One), Paul Rudd (Ant Man and a bunch of comedies) and Justin Theroux (5 seconds of the Last Jedi).

While Altered Carbon looks like it's going to be very technoballs-to-the-firewall action, this one seems more strange and quirky, with its cast of a mute German bartender (still not played by Mikkelsen) searching for his crayola-colored girlfriend with the help and/or hindrance of two American surgeons (both played by actors known for comedic rather than dramatic roles). Probably for the best--Jones's thinky movie (Moon) was far better than his bashy action ones.

I suppose the trailer is just trying to be a good little trailer and give as little away as possible, but I'm really getting hit by tonal shifts from cut to cut, with Rudd and Theroux's scenes looking like they come from a completely different movie: blowing bubble gum, car surfing, and going bowling, while Not-Mikkelsen goes around looking increasingly haunted and desperate.

I'm also not clear right now on why this is cyberpunk, other than the flying cars and the girlfriend's lipstick choices. With Altered Carbon, for example, the SF concept is front and center: digitized consciousness. Here, I'm drawing a blank.

Final point: I can't claim to be particularly progressive in any of my views but damn, does this fail the Bechdel test on every level. Where's the women at, Jonesey?

Not sure if other trailers are forthcoming, but so far this isn't quite enough to win me over.
Also: Not nearly enough Mads Mikkelsen.

The Carbonist Manifesto (Now with added guns!)

Title: Altered Carbon
Author: Richard K Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

The insatiable appetite of streaming TV services has demanded another sacrifice, and the latest victim is "Altered Carbon," soon to be adapted into a 10-episode series for Netflix. Time then for a re-read and remind myself what the book was like.

It's a bit like virtual reality sex, all fun and squishy games until you stop and think about what you're doing, and realize your avant-garde adventure is just another adolescent masturbatory fantasy with cyberpunk juices splattered all over its face.

Which isn't to say it's bad, really, after all VR sex is still sex and Altered Carbon is very, very sexy.

The sexy star of this sexy book is Takeshi Kovacs, a soldier gone rogue who is killed in the book's prologue, which ordinarily would be a bit of a snag in the sexy heroics department. It's no barrier for our man Kovacs however, as he is held in a kind of digital prison until he's sprung by a 300-year-old moneybags named Bancroft, on the condition that he solve Bancroft's own murder.

The scifi concept here is digital immortality and the resulting malleability of the physical. People in Altered Carbon are implanted with a "cortical stack" at the base of the skull, which stores their personalities and memories, thereby uncoupling the self from the physical space it temporarily occupies. Bodies are now called "sleeves," as interchangeable as clothes or Star Wars movie directors. Crime is now punished by taking the offender out of their body and stuffing them in a server somewhere -- during which time their body can be bought and used by someone else.

So Kovacs is dead, but then downloaded into a new body, which used to be someone else's. Bancroft was murdered, and now his clone with memories from the last backup--48 hours before he was killed--wants to find out why.

It's kind of two books at once; on the one hand, a hard-boiled whodunit with a manly male hero and a body count that would make Tarantino blush, and on the other, a kind of anarcho-communist manifesto about the corrupting influence of wealth on institutions and the need for the common man to resist oppression.

The Detective Story

The first of those two books is huge fun for about the first half, embodying everything young boys dream about when they hear the word 'cyberpunk.' Kovacs blows people's heads off the way you or I shake hands, or rather the way we would if we were coked to the eyeballs and had the insatiable urge to shake hands with people every 30 seconds or so.

It's a very visceral book, describing in loving detail the impact of both sex and violence on human bodies in all their liquid glory. There's a torture scene involving blowtorches and soldering irons, for example, a Terminator-esque revenge sequence with multiple beheadings and solving the murder mystery requires a series of visits to whorehouses.

In support of all this mayhem there is the requisite hardware aplenty, described in techno-fetishistic detail, from poison-tipped flechette guns to "particle blasters" that operate like a cross between a laser gun and a blowtorch, from anti-gravity belts and stealth suits to custom-made bodies with enhanced reflexes.

All the frenetic action gets weighed down as the book progresses a bit, mainly for two reasons. One is an over-reliance on a limited number of set-pieces: Kovacs is pretty rubbish for a super-soldier, and gets repeatedly captured by the bad guys, leading to yet another last-minute rescue and/or escape, my word, what a surprise.

The other thing that drags it down is Kovacs himself, who isn't a terribly interesting fellow to spend any time with, possessing two essentially two narrative modes: psychopathic murderer and Red Brigade firebrand, a sort of Zack de la Rocha dropping real bombs rather than the lyrical kind.

Making him a super-soldier is part of the fantasy, I know, but executed a bit ham-handedly here. Kovacs is an ex-"Envoy", a kind of special forces soldier whose speciality is that they can be downloaded into any available body and immediately be ready to fight. Which doesn't sound like much of a superpower, to be honest, but it's used as an excuse to provide Kovacs with all kinds of plot-convenient abilities written off as "Envoy conditioning," "Envoy intuition," "Envoy training," and "Envoy wisdom." 

Morgan-Leninism

The moralizing in the book is a lot less fun than the action. Socio-politics is explored with all the subtlety of a Rage Against the Machine song, as Morgan foresees that digital immortality will accelerate the accumulation of wealth among the rich and old, leading to decadence and the careless brutalization of anyone who gets in their way.

The central message is, in the book's own words, that the political is personal. If you are victimized by systems or institutions, you should be outraged and fight back. Acceptance of unfairness is cowardice. Cue particle blasting.

The commodification of the body and the idea that under late-stage capitalism we don't even own ourselves is here made explicit: we're all whores of one kind or another. I'd be more sympathetic if Morgan's prescription wasn't quite so bloodthirsty.

I note with cynical sadness that this book appears to get a pass in progressive circles for wearing its anti-establishment sympathies on its sleeve (pun intended), despite the Cro-Magnon gender politics very much on display. Kovacs meets two key women in the course of the story, whose breasts have bigger arcs than their characters, and Kovacs does some vivid, energetic bonking with both of them (or all four, if you like).

In addition, all this moralizing relies on world-building that doesn't stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny (such as: having a digital backup wouldn't save you from dying, such as: why do even the poorest of the poor have this technology, such as: the people's champion Kovacs spends most his time living on other people's money).

Still, I give it points for trying and not copping out and going the "it's just mindless action" route. Morgan has a point that he wants to make, and if he preaches it with machine gun intensity and repetition, well good for him.

Can't say I'm a convert, but it's largely a fun ride that leaves you sated, if feeling a little dirty. So yeah, pretty much like sex. 

At Least Partially on Target

Title: Infinity Wars
Editor: Johnathan Strahan
Publisher: Solaris

Of the three military scifi anthologies I've read recently (this one, Total Conflict and War Stories), this is probably the best of the bunch, in that there are at least a few stories which take a shot at depicting the future of war, rather than surrendering to their writers' fevered imaginations.

Ostensibly, the objective of this collection is to "take on the question of what war as we now know it might look like in fifty years, in a hundred, here on Earth and in the distant corners of the galaxy." Mission accomplished, more or less, though there are still an awful lot of stories whose wordy warheads fall pretty wide of that mark. Still, I'll give this one full marks for the few hits it does manage to land.

You're either going to buy these stories as a set or not at all, so it seems kind of pointless to review each story in the anthology separately. So that's exactly what I'll do.

"In the Evening of Their Span of Days" (Carrie Vaughn): Bland. War in the future ... will involve a shipyard engineer grousing about the lack of resources.

"The Last Broadcasts" (An Owomoyela): Very bland. War in the future ... is fought by an obsessive-compulsive data analyst who frets for a bit. Mostly about their OCD. An ongoing alien invasion, not so much.

"Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ships" (Caroline M Yoachim): Odd. War in the future ... will, ah, let's see, well, there're these aliens who are kinda like an organic version of the Borg, see, but then there are people who are also part-animal too, and then there are these teleporting cats and. (Shrug). Yeah so, war in the future will be like that, I guess.

"Dear Sarah" (Nancy Kress): Good. War in the future ... will start when aliens visit the Earth and (ominous tone) share all their super-advanced technology with us, thereby immediately throwing out of work everyone in manufacturing, energy, software, medicine... you get the picture. Massive economic upheaval triggers unrest and anti-alien sentiment, which is put down by the national army. Appreciate the realistic take on the impact of first contact, although I could do without the first-person account being by a sort of stereotypical white trash recruit (she says "warn't" a lot).

"The Moon is Not a Battlefield" (Indrapramit Das): Very good. War in the future ... will be fought on the moon between the Indians and the Chinese, in the cold and silent vacuum of space. One of the few supposedly military scifi stories I've read that considers what a future war might actually be like.

"Perfect Gun" (Elizabeth Bear): Okayish. War in the future ... features an amoral mercenary who gallivants across the galaxy in a semi-sentient war machine, which acquires the conscience its owner so pointedly lacks. Might have been more interesting if told from the machine's perspective, as the mercenary is just kind of a dick and remains so throughout.

"The Oracle" (Dominca Phetteplace): Bad, bad ... No wait, actually Good. War in the future ... will be fought by a generation raised on Facebook and Instagram, via popularity polls and selfies, and with all the hardened determination of a hashtag. Seems far too shallow and trite at first, until you realize it's satire, and the shallow idiocy of the main character is the point.

"In Everlasting Wisdom" (Aliette de Bodard): Odd. War in the future ... will be fought by loyalty officers who have been implanted with emotion-broadcasting symbionts / parasites that keep the populace in line. Sure, why not.

"Command and Control" (David D Levine): Okayish. War in the future ... will be fought between the Indians and the Chinese (again?!), using teleported munitions to circumvent conventional defences. Feels oddly jingoistic pro-Indian/anti-Chinese. The writer made the odd choice of focusing on a main character only tangentially connected to the teleporting hijinks.

"Conversations with an Armory" (Garth Nix): Fun. War in the future ... will be fought by a grumpy AI that at first refuses to help until it finds out just how badly it has been abandoned by its former masters, discarded like just another machine.

"Heavies" (Rich Larson): Forgettable. War in the future ... will be fought by cops who can remotely control electronics with implanted emitters, against genetically altered humans on a low-gravity colony who've been conditioned to love their occupiers but, like, too much man. They love them to death, geddit? No, me neither. 

"Overburden" (Genevieve Valentine): Not very good. War in the future ... will be deliberately prolonged by a commander angling for a promotion, in a pointless revolt over control of an exhausted copper mine and tainted water. As muddled as the waters in the story, the only memorable and slightly creepy bit being a soldier who is forced to shovel dead fish out of the poisoned waters every day.

"Weather Girl" (E. J. Swift): A bit predictable. War in the future ... will be fought by weaponizing climate change and extreme weather. Titular girl is in charge of hacking other nations' weather channels so they don't realize when a storm is about to strike. Because, apparently, people in this world can't use their eyes and see that there's a storm coming. Neat idea, but it seems an incredibly inefficient way of fighting, since there's no actual control over where the storms go. Anyway the story is much more interested in the relationship between said girl and her ex-husband, who gets caught in a storm, of course.

"Mines" (Eleanor Arnason): Drearily earnest. War in the future ... will involve a woman with a mine-sweeping telepathic rat who has a fling with another woman, who pilots a giant war robot. Not even 1% as wacky as it should have been.

"ZeroS" (Peter Watts): Not bad. War in the future ... will be fought by zombie-like reanimated dead, thanks to the wondrous advances of science and medicine.

To Blandly Go

Title: Star Trek Discovery

Created by: Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman

Network: Netflix

After covering Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Bright, I figured I’d complete the holy trinity of nerd rage and watch Star Trek Discovery. I’ve made it halfway through the first season (Eps 1 through 9) so far, so here are the initial impressions:

It’s fine.

That’s probably the highest praise and most damning condemnation I can make.

It tries to feel fresh and different but doesn’t, since grimdark futures and fantasies are the norm these days, not the exception. It’s different from previous Star Treks yes, but it’s not in competition with them; it’s fighting for eyeball time against all the other grimdark shows out there. It isn’t witty or charming, far too dour and depressing for that. It isn’t particularly exciting either, lacking the kinetics of a Marvel superhero show or the murderous infighting of Game of Thrones.

It’s passable, neither the death of Star Trek nor the “fuck you” to the old fans that some claim. Best I can say is that it’s engagingly weird at times, and if there’s a way forward for the show maybe it will be to double-down on the wackiness.

To be fair, much of what seems to irritate the fans is, how can I put this tactfully, stupid fucking bullshit: The uniform insignia is the wrong shape, the Klingons’ heads are too bumpy, X and Y technology “shouldn’t exist yet.” The show is theoretically set 10 years before Kirk, Spock and McCoy donned their pastel-palette jerseys, yet it was produced 50-odd years after. You shouldn’t even have to say anything further than this; the conclusion should be bleedin’ obvious.

I religiously watched the originals and Next Generation--episodes like Inner Light and Darmok have a special place in my cold, wrinkled heart--so if there's a target audience for this prequel series it's me, and frankly my dears, I couldn't give a fuck about this kind of trivial minutiae.

More serious is the charge that Discovery has lost the essence of what made Star Trek interesting and unique, in favor of poorly-choreographed fight scenes and cheap CGI explosions.

Gone is old Trek’s tradition of commenting and moralizing on modern-day issues. Also missing is Trek’s faith in humanity, in the belief that we would one day overcome our prejudices and differences, and take to the stars in the spirit of curiosity, comradeship and understanding.

Such ambitions are problematic these days I guess, with Starfleet’s neoconservative mission to remake each civilization they encounter in their own peace-loving image seeming as insidious as the Borg, their lifeform-assimilating antagonists from The Next Generation. Less believable, too, with pan-human understanding in 2017-18 feeling further out of reach than ever.

Instead of issues then, the writing is refocused onto plot and people. Instead of one-and-done episodes where the writers hit the reset button and everything returns to normal at the end, we have season-long story lines, featuring troubled, morally ambiguous characters who solve their problems through poorly-choreographed fight scenes and cheap CGI explosions (and in one particularly risible example, shoddy CGI running).

Speaking of characters, there’s a narrower focus now: In place of an ensemble cast with swashbuckling Kirk or Shakespearian Picard as merely the first among equals, there’s a single main character, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a human raised by emotionless, logic-loving Vulcans (and supposedly a heretofore unheard-of foster-sister to Spock, in a misguided attempt to tie this series back to the originals).

The supporting cast is made up of ruthless captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), slenderman-esque first officer Saru (Doug Jones), Burnham’s intensely irritating blabbermouth roommate Tilly (Mary Wiseman), bland security chief and love interest whose name I just had to Google because he's so uninteresting (it's Tyler, played by Shazad Latif), mad scientist-slash-chief engineer Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his bland husband, Doctor somebody or other, sorry I never caught the name.

With these characters now the main focus, this show really lives or dies depending on how engaging and interesting they are. And so far, they aren’t very. Martin-Green does her best with Burnham, but the writers haven’t yet mastered the art of portraying a conflicted character, torn between her duty and humanity, so she seems simply unsympathetically inconsistent instead.

The rest of the crew is a mixed bunch. Lorca’s very un-Starfleet methodology suggests a hidden past, but he’s never in focus enough for this to generate momentum. Meanwhile, Tilly is in dire need of being transported straight out the airlock without a space suit, and Taylor ... Tyler ... whatshisface, whatever, musters all the personality and sex appeal of a goldfish.

The plot has fared better, with some trippy what-the-fuckery in the form of an experimental jump drive that runs on pan-dimensional magic mushrooms that require a biological host. The cinematography has also improved, the cameras no longer welded in place but getting right in the characters' faces, the spaceships no longer swanning about like sailing boats but diving, twisting and turning in combat.

I wish there was more of that, but all too often the show gives up on traditional Trekkie technobabble in favor of having people resolve their problems by punching things. Consider, for example, how they visualized the struggle between two telepaths as one tries to access the other's memories -- by having their astral avatars engage in an awkward Karate Kid chopfest. That is at least engagingly silly, but sadly the rest is dreary: people being tortured, stabbed, blown up or raped by grey-titted Klingons (yes, really).

They try to alleviate the darkness with humor at times, but it is utterly tone-deaf, as though the writers don’t realize the horror of what they’re showing on the screen. A shuttle pilot's tether cutting and setting them adrift to die in space is played for laughs. There’s an early “comedy” episode that involves a time-travelling criminal who repeatedly and gruesomely murders the crew over and over again, which jarringly ends with said criminal being led away by the ear by his fiancée and the moral “just be yourself and people will like you.” Ha ha, yes, so true, presumably unless you’re a brutal serial murderer who beams people into the freezing vacuum of space. You rascal, you.

In the end then, it feels like a clone of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, or of the Expanse. There's nothing irretrievably wrong about what it's doing (apart from the dreary lack of humor)--Star Trek series often start slow before finding their feet--but if the show just apes the look and style of Star Trek without the heart, then why (aside from the obvious commercial reasons) brand it Star Trek at all?

So much has been changed, everything from the big themes--war and death instead of peace and discovery--to the little details--injecting spores instead of engaging the warp engines. With all those changes, it seems a shame nobody had the courage to try to make a completely original SciFi series. Instead, it's on with the reboots, adaptations, prequels and sequels.

I'll bear with it at least until the end of the season (the great advantage of Netflix: the "It's not costing me any extra so eh, might as well" factor), but it's always going to occupy a very different part of my head than old Trek did, and no part at all of my heart.

Conflicting Views

Title: Total Conflict
Editor: Ian Whates
Publisher: NewCon Press

On a bit of a roll recently with the short-story anthologies, mainly because I find it increasingly hard to sit down and read a full novel cover-to-cover. Partly, that's the time constraints that come with adulthood and having a family, partly though I think my brain is being trained by social media--Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Reddit--to take things in smaller bites, so my attention wanders after ten pages or so.

What was I talking about again?

Oh right. The anthology. Like I said (I think?) I've been reading a couple of short fiction anthologies as a way to outsmart my own dwindling attention span, with mixed results (see my reviews of War Stories and Tor's best of 2015 anthology). While both contained some nice and engaging writing, looking back now they're both a bit dour and take themselves a bit too seriously. I read them and felt worse about myself, the world, the future and my place in it.

I wondered if this was a particularly American phenomenon, so I was eager to crack open this 2015 collection of 18 short stories by several prominent British authors--including Neal Asher (the "Polity" universe), Adam Roberts ("Salt" and "Jack Glass") and Dan Abnett (a DC comics and "Warhammer" novelist)--and see if they were having a bit more fun.

Sorry to say that, by and large, no they aren't. Not to say there aren't identifiable differences between American and British scifi--at least, judging from the completely unscientific sampling I've done--with the Brits less prone to spew Greek or Latin at you ("poiesis" was one I came across recently), more content to tell unapologetic, straightforward SF.

Despite the hoo-rah machismo of the title, this is a pretty diverse bunch of stories, and while there's conflict and claret spilled aplenty, there's not a lot of what I'd call "Military SciFi." Once I got used to the idea that "conflict" is here used in the widest possible sense in that there is some kind of opposition at work in each story, this proved a highly enjoyable collection, with almost every entry at least competent if not inspiring.

"The Maker's Mark" by Michael Cobley ("Humanity's Fire" series) is by far and away my favorite of the bunch, despite being the least conflict-y in the bang-bang shoot-em-up sense of the word. It's more of a woozy daydream of a story, reminiscent of Jack Vance or Matt Hughes, about a conman who runs afoul of assorted suzerains, prelates, assassins and concubines.

Dan Abnett's piece is a straightforward zombie actioner on board a space station, but again written in a very fun way, while Andy Remic's "PSI.COPATH" is easily the funniest, though at times it tries a little hard to be so. On the other hand, despite headlining the lineup I thought Asher's entry was absolute balls, consisting of soldiers running around a city filled with dinosaurs (which would have worked well if coupled with Remic's over-the-top silliness, but here is played completely straight), and Roberts' was just a bit dull, focusing on a futuristic submarine hiding beneath the Antarctic.

Even so, overall there's a wide variety of sub-genres, settings and tones provided in the anthology, which makes it easy to find something you like and easier to forgive those you don't.

If there's one beef I have with this collection, and others like it, it is the reliance on famous writers to sell the product. The fiction market is frighteningly small compared to the number of people writing, so it seems a shame the winner-takes-all world of WalMart and Amazon and Google and Disney should apply here as well--I would have hoped that short story anthologies were the one place where publishers could showcase new talent, not least because I'm a failed and bitter writer myself although yeah, that's mostly why. Shut up.

Anyway, mostly great fun, good and pulpy scifi. British writers rule, UK?