TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [Book]: Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Early Riser is a constrained experience compared to Fforde's more expansive series, but still sparkles with trademark wit and weirdness.

I am contractually obliged to begin all reviews of Jasper Fforde by thanking my mother, who got me in to his writing (and out of a period of teenage pretentiousness in which I thought I only wanted to read "the classics") by sending The Eyre Affair to the Eurasian continental pole of inaccessibility, where I was living at the time. The Thursday Next series, with its blend of whimsical worldbuilding and little England nostalgia, turned out to be a much better prospect than endless rereads of War and Peace, and a combination of further shipments and lucky bookswap finds meant I got to enjoy the entire series (regrettable incident with a US edition of Something Rotten aside*) at exactly the point where I was most susceptible to its charms. It's with that love for his work that I approach this new volume -- Fforde's first new book in four years -- so to say my expectations were high is something of an understatement.

Fforde's novels are all set in alternate visions of England or Wales, in which a recognisable set of British cultural elements have been broken down, stirred around, reconstituted with a completely different logical framework and a more or less authoritarian atmosphere, and embedded into the overarching "what-if" propelling that particular story. In Early Riser, the skew comes from the fact that humans in this version of Earth, where climate apparently works completely differently, have evolved to hibernate through winter. This single biological change precipitates a massive shift in how human society has developed, with a significantly altered pattern of mortality and technology; yet somehow the path of development has still thrown up such recognisable fundamentals as Mini Rolls, Rick Astley, the class system, and the Welsh seaside village of Mumbles. A few crumbs of worldbuilding hint at how the world outside Wales copes with hibernation, what with weather and seasons still not being the same everywhere, but this isn't very fleshed out: Early Riser isn't a watertight worldbuilding experience, but it's a very fun one.

It's important to note that writing nostalgically about 20th century British culture in 2018 is a significantly more politicised exercise than it used to be, and there's definitely an "edge" to the world of Early Riser that's more reminiscent of Shades of Grey, Fforde's foray into outright totalitarian dystopia, than Thursday Next's weird Swindon (jingoism around over a hundred years of the Crimean War aside). Hibernation means more than just cosy references to comfort food and trashy TV: there's also highly centralised governance and increased corporate power as everyone relies on giant dormitories and dubious technological innovations to survive the winter at the cost of human dreams. Throw in the state campaigns to encourage women to reproduce as much as possible, and unfair stigma directed at the "undeserving awake", people who for medical or personal reasons can't simply fall asleep all winter and therefore require more food and care within the dormitories, and you've got a world that can't possibly be mistaken for rose-tinted nostalgia. Like Shades of Grey's Eddie Russett, our protagonist Charlie Worthing starts out as an unthinking supporter of the system, but ends up caught up in events that force him to think more critically about his place in society. Early Riser's political stance is gently scathing, but it's scathing nonetheless, and the way the plot integrates the act of dreaming -- pointless timewasting, to Charlie -- is particularly hard not to read into.

The plot takes place over winter, as Charlie signs up to become a Winter Consul in order to secure his rights to a scarce drug that helps most who take it to survive the winter, but prevents people from dreaming and causes one in two thousand people to awake as a "nightwalker" (i.e. zombie). Charlie fails to question the cursory interview he undergoes to sign up for this incredibly dangerous job, and it's not until he finds himself stranded and overwintering in the dangerous Sector Twelve that the ramifications of his decision sink in. The mysterious happenings in Sector Twelve include a weird collective dream, a senior Consul and a Sector Chief who don't seem to realise they share the same body, and a wintry phantom which murders the unworthy to a Rogers and Hammerstein soundtrack. Charlie is a fairly reactive protagonist through most of this, and doesn't really have much agenda beyond survival, but the plot progresses at a decent pace anyway and the supporting cast are generally an enjoyable bunch. The unique Ffordian worldbuilding elements do not disappoint, and there are a few particularly fine moments where completely left-field elements of society or hibernation-human biology are casually mentioned in a way which makes it clear that they haven't come up before because Charlie doesn't think they're at all notable. It's a very satisfying way of constantly reminding us that we are dealing with a very different human culture, and it helps balance the obvious but plot-irrelevant holes in the wider worldbuilding.

That said, while Early Riser is another magnificent entry in Fforde's bibliography, it didn't wow me to the same extent as The Eyre Affair or Shades of Grey did; I'm quite happy that it's intended to be a standalone, and don't feel a great need to explore any more of this particular world beyond what this volume offers. Everything just feels more constrained than Fforde's other work, and while part of this is just the claustrophobic hibernal setting, I suspect it's also just built on a smaller scale. The weird details and tangents are just interesting enough to carry the story they are in, without leaving much additional food for thought. It's highly obnoxious to judge a work based on the timelines of the author's unfinished series, but I suspect for a lot of long-time fans, Early Riser might be a mixed experience: great fun, a promising sign of more to come, and yet not quite what we were waiting for. That said, being a standalone at least means it doesn't end with more tension, wrapping up Charlie's story and its world-changing implications in a swift but ultimately satisfying conclusion.

US readers might have to wait until 2019 for this one, no doubt due to the extensive localisation team required to research the cultural equivalents of Jaffa Cakes and Ambrosia Rice Pudding. However, for those with access to it, Early Riser is a recommended read for Fforde fans, and also provides an excellent introduction to his work for those who might  prefer to start with a completed story instead of an ongoing series. You can thank my Mum for the recommendation, if you like.

*To get real for a second, English toddlers don't pick "boogers" out of their noses. They pick "bogeys". I don't make the rules.

The Maths
(Sorry, but I can't write "Math" on a review of Jasper Fforde. I just can't.)

Base Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 Features a sisterhood of professional mothers with names like "Fallopia" and "Zygotia"; +1 Literally made me go out and buy Jaffa Cakes.

Penalties: -1 It's good Fforde, but it's not peak Fforde, you know?

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, "Well worth your time and attention"

***

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.

Reference: Fforde, Jasper. Early Riser [Hodder and Staughton, 2018]

Microreview [video game]: Tacoma by Fullbright (developer)

Enhanced Space

Tacoma is the not-at-all related followup to the critically acclaimed Gone Home and Fullbright's second game. The sophomore game stereotypes suffer the same problems as a sophomore album from a band. Can they repeat success? Will they try to strike out in a different direction and potentially lose their fans with a bold change, or will they try to recapture and build upon the success of their first release? In Tacoma, you will find less of the former and more of the latter. 

You are Amy Ferrier, a contractor for Venturis Corporation. Your task is to retrieve the AI named ODIN from Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma. While you're there, you can also learn the fates of the crew who are mysteriously absent. It doesn't take long to find out that a disaster aboard Tacoma is the cause of their disappearance. 

Playing Tacoma is going to feel extremely familiar to fans of Gone Home. You're in space, on a space station, but you're still largely picking through other people's stuff and listening to their stories as you collect data on ODIN. The mechanical twist to Tacoma is that the stories are told mostly through wireframe mannequins of the crew presented in an alternate reality (AR) interface. ODIN was recording these scenes and allows you to view some of them. You can fast-forward, rewind, interact with physical objects and AR interfaces as you follow the crew through these scenes. The way these scenes play out is easily the most natural feeling presentation of video game cutscenes I've ever seen. A scene may start with half of the crew present, but some will walk in, others will walk out, and you can follow them through the scene to catch different conversations. It's really cool to watch in motion, and allows the game to present multiple storylines in an extremely seamless way. 

Tacoma is packed with little side stories. If you were to solely follow the AR scenes or watch them only once, you'd absolutely get the gist of the main plot. However, in almost every drawer there's highly detailed notebook or tablet full of details that make Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma a place in the world, and make the wireframe cutouts into people. Tacoma accomplishes an incredible task of humanizing a seven person crew, in a video game, in a short amount of time.

The short play time is what will cause the most heartache for people. Like Gone Home, my personal playtime with Tacoma clocked in at a brief two and a half hours. I'm thorough too; I watched every AR cutscene multiple times to follow all of the characters in each scene, I read every AR interface, and I unlocked every locked door. A speedrun of Tacoma would only be limited to the amount of time it takes to watch each AR scene once, which is likely far less than 30 minutes total. If the short playtime doesn't discourage you, looking for anything more than a futuristic, AR-enhanced version of Gone Home might also bring disappointment. Make no mistake, for better or worse, Tacoma is very much a product of the team that made Gone Home. It didn't suddenly turn into System Shock or The Walking Dead. The puzzles to be solved are simple, and there is almost zero player input. In some ways, Tacoma would almost entirely complete itself without the player. In fact, you don't even need to watch the AR scenes. You can accomplish your mission by watching slow moving progress bars fill in over the course of three hours. 

But you should watch those AR scenes, and interact with the objects around you, and get attached to these very human characters. Tacoma has some of the finest video game storytelling you will ever find. Just don't go looking for something more than that, because you won't find it. Tacoma is excellent, but it rides on the shoulders of Gone Home.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 AR cutscenes are a unique and well-done method of storytelling

Penalties: -1Gone Home in space isn't too far off the mark

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Fullbright(developer). Tacoma [Fullbright, 2017] 

Microreview [novel]: Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

A cinematic tour through worlds that are and never were...

The Meat:

Formally innovative and stylistically daring, Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente takes a lot of risks in its pursuit of slowly revealing a mystery among the stars, or at least among the planets of our solar system. Imagined here with the wonder and improbability of early film where the moon was a short drive away and where every planet was home to different delights, the novel mixes texts, compiles sources surrounding the disappearance of an entire settlement and the disappearance of one woman, Severin Unck, a woman whose entire life has revolved around making movies. From the earliest age she was captured on film by her father, a director of ridiculous (though awesome-sounding) gothic horrors. The form the novel takes makes for a book that I found a little difficult to pierce, at first. This is not a traditional structure, but it quickly establishes its game and by the end I was enthralled by the mosaic it created.

Severin becomes both the star of the story and it's greatest absence. She's a young woman striving to throw off the past, to make something for herself free of the fame that has followed her because of her father. She's someone who wants to be an artist and wants to do something meaningful and wants so many things, perhaps most of all to figure herself out. Her past is revealed in home movies, through her own exploits as a director, through the accounts of her friends, family, and lovers. What truly happened to her…well, the book does an amazing job of building that mystery, of showing the people left behind trying to make sense of it. Perhaps most telling and shocking is the project of her father to make a movie about her life and about her disappearance. To make sense of it.

The book is full of magic. Movie magic, I suppose, but magic all the same, and a nostalgic gleam over the solar system. These are the worlds as people imagined them, hanging up in the sky like foreign countries, no further away than China is to Europe. The planets are hilariously drawn up along national lines, Mars belonging to Russia and China, Pluto to America, Venus open to all because it is home to the callowhales, creatures whose "milk" is what allows humans to travel between worlds, providing all the nutrients they could ever need. And this early SF vision of the solar system cast as an alternate past is striking and quite charming. I fell in love with the romantic vision of it colliding with the dirty, often violent and chaotic reality.

And I think the book does a great job of exploring that space where the movie magic meets reality. Where even the magic of this alternate universe cannot cover the oppression and the exploitation going on. The riots and the extremes of the planets are only touched upon, after all, and yet those small caresses are enough to show that beneath the Hollywood glamour there is something dark and deadly. The secret of the callowhales is not one unique to the fictive world of the book, after all. That exploration often walks hand in hand with enslavement, with not only a lack of empathy or understanding but a conscious rejection of it in favor of something that seems so easy, so right. The mindset of the imperialist insisting his actions just because some sort of God does not put a stop to them.

And here we see an extension of that. Of course in the visions of early SF the planets are either virgin land waiting for us or else populated by monsters the brave Earthmen must subdue. This is captured brilliantly in the art seen within the novel, and the glimpses at the film plots and the radio serials are great, funny and depressing at the same time, because they promote a vision of the solar system that is much simpler than it is. Easy for advertisers to spin callowhales as the cows of space, but it becomes increasingly clear that's not the case, in the growing desperation of Severin's father, Percival, to explain what happened to her. It's telling of the craft of the novel that it can build so tightly to its climax using only found texts, bits and pieces of movies and scripts and recorded conversations. There is an air of authenticity this lends the novel, in good Gothic tradition, but it also plays with the idea of texts and truth, asking what is most true out of all of them, the texts that profess to be true or those sold as fiction.

In the end the novel captures the feeling of a time when space was full of new countries to explore. The setting is beautifully rendered even as it creates a dark and muddy place where the only things black and white are the movies. Life is not so simple, filled with shades and colors and luminance. It's a dense novel, challenging but rewarding and very, very good.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10 

Bonuses: +1 for a pseudo-nostalgic science fiction that builds an amazing mystery, +1 for a risky structure and form that pays off big time

Negatives: -1 for a somewhat steep learning curve

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 "like looking into a callowhale's eye" see our full rating system here.

--

POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

REFERENCE: Valente, Catherynne M. Radiance [Tor, 2015]