Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?

Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.

This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.

What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.

The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Book Review: Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann

 Queer space pirates fighting the mundane evils of AI

Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman is a book about the power of stories to help us figure out who we are, the ramifications of giving a corporate AI the power to decide what kinds of stories are told, and what happens to the people it leaves out of those stories.

The story is told from the perspective of Kelli Reynolds, an autistic woman who lives on Callisto and works as a script supervisor for Inspiration, a media company that also runs the surrounding system. Kelli has been contacted by an ex, an old friend from school, named Rowan, who needs a favour. Rowan is trans, and Inspiration has outlawed surgery for trans people, meaning that hormones for trans people are a controlled substance. Kelli worries that he’s in trouble and agrees to meet him. Shenanigans ensue.

Interspersed with the chapters about Kelli in the present moment are chapters featuring Kelli as a child and teenager. In these chapters, we see the development of her friendship with Rowan (who we meet as a girl named Amelia, who quickly begins to go by ‘Am’ and eventually chooses the name Rowan).

Ignore All Previous Instructions is a fun heist story where Kelli gets tricked into helping her old friend steal intellectual property from Inspiration. To do this, they have to fight Inspiration’s community standards enforcement division as well as a criminal syndicate. Rowan has styled himself as something of a space pirate, smuggling “illegal” content and helping people jailbreak their computers so they can read without Inspiration looking over their shoulders.

The story was fun and absolutely worth reading! But for me, what makes this story great is how Hoffman uses it to reveal what a realistic world controlled by a corporate AI system could look like. Hoffman uses the chapters where Kelli is a child to explain the LLM, so they can explain it to the reader like we are also eight years old. This works surprisingly well. In a special lesson, “who does a story belong to?,” Kelli and her classmates are introduced to the idea that Inspiration owns all the stories because it solved the problem of having an LLM trained on stolen data by buying and trademarking not only story components, like pirates and dragons, but also story structures like “misunderstandings and redemptions, comedies and tragedies, romances and victories over impossible odds.” Then the company trademarked the names of places and famous people. It ended up owning all the intellectual property of storytelling, so it became the only one who could tell and sell stories.

The discussion of a world crafted by a corporate AI kept me thinking about this book long after I’d finished it. I have been an AI hater from the beginning, mostly due to ethical and environmental reasons, but Hoffman clearly shows the possible ramifications of allowing all our content to be created by a corporate-owned LLM: identities deemed “problematic” suddenly just do not exist in stories. Stories with unlikeable or unreliable narrators just don’t get published anymore. We no longer get to see stories where people grapple with trauma, hurt, and wrong, because those stories are too “divisive.”

Hoffman has a PhD in computer science, and their dissertation focused on AI systems; they know what they’re talking about with the tech. In the afterward, they discuss how they thought hard about how AI is portrayed in fiction: “Exaggerating AI’s power and intelligence, even if it’s the bad guy, can sometimes reinforce inaccurate ideas about what AI is really capable of and about what kinds of AI risk are most pressing, and AI companies adroitly use these misconceptions for their own benefit.”

Hoffman demonstrates how AI can constrain the stories we are allowed to tell when, in a flashback chapter, the kids write their own story with a special version of the LLM: “StoryGen—Kids’ Edition!” The program does not actually let them write very much of their own. They can write a sentence and then they’re prompted to ask the LLM to make it “more exciting!,” “happier!,” or “funnier!.” One of the kids wants to write about a shark that eats everything, and laments that there is no “angrier!” button. Instead, the StoryGen writes a milquetoast story about “a shark who was nice and made good choices, because sharks are an important part of the ecosystem and we should not be afraid of them.”

As Hoffman explains in the afterword, “At heart, large language models work—like a very sophisticated autocorrect—by predicting the most likely continuation of a given series of words. This preference for the most likely output causes any biases in the model’s training data to be not only reflected, but amplified. Even without censorious policies like Inspiration’s, the model will be more biased towards the majority, and more reliant on stereotypes in general, than whatever text it trained on, unless very careful training and prompting techniques are devised to counteract this effect.”

In the story, Hoffman shows us how Kelli and Rowan, now queer and neurodivergent adults, grew up without any ability to see themselves reflected in stories. While homosexuality is not illegal in Inspiration space, it’s considered “private” and inappropriate to discuss with minors. So Kelli and Rowan had never actually heard about queer people or different ways of presenting gender until they get access to a parent’s tablet to search for terms like “dyke” and “lesbian”—terms they’d heard as slurs but did not understand the meaning of.

This is a fairly dark book masked behind what Hoffman refers to as an “unsubtle cartoonlike aesthetic.” In addition to the disappearing of queer identities in Inspiration space, we also see what it’s like to grow up neurodivergent in such a society. Kelli, who is autistic, has been issued a companion robot that runs an LLM to “help” her learn to be “normal.” One of their friends, Elaine, goes to weekly appointments with an AI therapist. The robot and the AI therapist cannot help Kelli and Elaine because neither acknowledges that it’s okay to be different.

Ignore All Previous Instructions is a cleverly written space heist book, with surprising depth in its discussion of queerness, neurodiversity, and the harms of AI. It's absolutely worth reading.

Highlights:

• Well done queer and neurodiverse characters
• Contemplates harms of corporate AI
• Space pirates doing a heist

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention.

Reference: Hoffman, Ada. Ignore All Previous Instructions [Tachyon Publishing, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

Film Review: Tron: Ares

A story about the ephemerality of life shouldn't be as instantly forgettable as this

The threequel Tron: Ares looks and sounds more expensive than it has any right to be. While the idea of transplanting the franchise’s iconic motorcycles and frisbee fights from cyberspace into the material world is undeniably interesting, the movie wastes its special effects extravaganza in telling the most generic tale of AI independence. To namedrop Frankenstein without any of the pathos is hubristic enough; to lift the plot of Blade Runner for mere nostalgic fanservice is sacrilege.

The plot is a simple case of corporate espionage between two software megacorporations racing to be the first to crack the secret of energy/matter conversion. Both have succeeded at 3D-printing physical objects from pure light, but for some contrived technobabble reason, these creations can’t sustain their existence for longer than half an hour. When the Designated Ethical CEO finds a piece of code that fixes the problem, the Designated Evil CEO deploys his AI assassins to steal it.

The ensuing chase sequence is executed with admirable technical virtuosity, but it feels redundant to go to so much trouble to retrieve a physical flash drive right after the villain demonstrates his ability to remotely copy data from his competitor’s servers. Instead of drawing so much unwanted attention trashing half a city, he could have simply waited for his target to add the code to her systems and then stolen it. But we need to bring the AI assassins to the real world so the next piece of drama can happen.

The titular Ares is a self-aware security program that our villain is trying to market as the ideal soldier: an obedient killing machine that doesn't eat or sleep, and can be reprinted infinite times if it’s killed. Somehow we’re expected to buy that this genius inventor didn’t anticipate that something that is self-aware could eventually form its own goals that don’t involve dying and dying again. During its brief presence in our realm, it quickly notices the sensory delights of corporeality and starts scheming to seize the permanence code for itself.

Unfortunately, this Blade Runner-derivative tale of an artificial person hoping for a longer lifespan calls for more acting skills than Jared Leto can be bothered to bring to the role of Ares. Even as his character learns about ineffable feelings, such as developing a personal aesthetic taste, or improvising a horrendously insensitive psychoanalysis of the woman he just kidnapped, Leto maintains a resting bored face that proves contagious to the viewer.

After an overcomplicated romp through cyberspace, the real world and then another cyberspace to obtain the permanence code, he ends up in a one-to-one fight with his fellow AI assassin who is still loyal to the villain. This climax is utterly unsatisfying because (a) the actual victory is won by secondary characters who spent the entire third act typing code in an office, and (b) it never occurs to our hero Ares that he could copy his own permanence code to save his former friend.

Anyway, with the Designated Evil CEO’s plans thwarted by his own absurd recklessness, Ares is free to experience humanity and… die of destitution, I guess. Meanwhile, the Designated Ethical CEO proceeds to take advantage of finally stable 3D printing to singlehandedly solve world hunger, the energy crisis and all diseases, which I suspect is a bigger story we’d rather have watched than this one. At no point does Tron: Ares make us care for the inner life of sentient digital minds. But hey, the motorcycles look cool.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Book Review: All that We See or Seem, by Ken Liu

A challenging novel that fearlessly faces a world full of AI

Julia Z is a hacker, and a good one. She has a mysterious past, but now, with the arrival of a client that needs her help, Julia is thrust into a dark world that, even given her technological skills and prowess, she could never have imagined. Julia’s story is the story of All that We See or Seem, the start of a new series by Ken Liu.

The title is a key to understanding and unlocking what Liu is after in this book. The phrase “All that We See or Seem” comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within A Dream:

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow—

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand—

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep—while I weep!

O God! Can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

This is a story about dreams, both metaphorical as well as literal. The novel runs on the rails of a plot involving a lawyer, Piers. His wife Elli is an oneirofex: she can help shape shared dreams, with individual clients, as well as large groups. But his wife has now disappeared. Worse, a mysterious entity known as the Prince¹ is demanding Piers turn over some at first vaguely defined information from his wife. The Prince not only doesn’t know where Elli is, but her disappearance is what triggered him to send his demands: he is looking for her, too. And so the race is on to use the information in Elli’s files and clues... and dreams, to find her before the Prince does.

At least, that is the ostensible plot of about two-thirds of the novel. A little context and background, first: What a lot of this novel is about and focuses on is the everyday use of LLMs and related technologies. The sort of AIs that we are seeing today are extended, developed and ubiquitous. Liu isn’t advocating for these technologies, mind you, but he does fearlessly lay out a world with AIs that act as personal assistants, legal researchers, and the like. The technology is seen as noncontroversial, but it is everywhere. Julia and Piers and the other characters swim in this water. They can’t imagine a world where they don’t have to manipulate and swim through AI stuff—be it dating apps to shopping.

But then there are dreams. The manipulation and crafting of shared dreams is shown to be a hot new technology (that Elli managed to be an early user and tastemaker for) and one that is absolutely human-made. It’s made clear that Liu thinks that in this new future anything that requires human craft will command a premium. Unlike most other creative arts, dreams are something an AI absolutely can’t replicate.

And yet, consider the poem that the title of the book comes from. It suggests that Elli’s craft (even if you can record them) is an ephemeral one. Sure, it can be recorded, but in the end it is a gossamer art, which could be destroyed by a touch. And there’s a desperation to try and hold onto something real from the dream.² Or is everything just a dream?³ Is it all ghosts and shadows, be it the AI-invented variety, or human-derived ones?

And now I’m going to get spoilery and discuss the phase shift in this novel, because, frankly, I don’t think that it actually works all that well.

HERE BE SPOILERS.

Still here? Okay.

Up to about the two-thirds mark, the story has been Julia and Piers as they try and track down Elli. It’s all from Julia’s point of view, with a couple of swerves here and there for brief bits with the antagonists—the Prince, as well as one of his lead henchmen. The pair get closer and closer to Elli, and have figured out why, as well as what the Prince wanted. And then they track her down, at the same time as the Prince’s forces do. The technothriller of the first two-thirds of the novel comes to a head.

In the ensuing course of events, both Elli and Piers die. Dead. Julia barely survives herself. And then the novel shifts into something else entirely (which I will not discuss, since I’ve brought you to this spoiler and will not go farther). Julia takes the lead, and the rest of the novel plays out. And I’m not sure that this gear shift works into what turns out to be an entirely different plot. It might be, if I squint, an extension of the original plot, but what gets revealed and explicated in that last third and what Julia deals with is not set up as well as I think it is. And to kill not only the MacGuffin but a primary character as well, leaving Julia at a nadir, feels like a bad gear shift, to be honest. We get to learn more about Julia and her past in the last third, and I realize that this series is HER series, and this is needed to flesh out her character some more.

So this feels like a “rebirth” and a “return to her origins,” which is fine, and the novel does eventually hit its theme in this last third, but the jettisoning of both Piers and Elli and the whole swerve from what the novel was trying to do… I don’t think the join between the parts exactly works. The last third on his own has some interesting ideas, too, which makes the clash all the more frustrating. The ideas don’t match the first two-thirds, and I think they aren’t as good, but there’s some intriguing stuff here. Liu’s speculation on these technologies and what they mean holds your attention—and may horrify.

SPOILERS END.

And then we come to the novel’s setting. This is a near-future world where AI is ubiquitous, and the focus of that worldbuilding (aside from the dream technology) is the use of AI. At a time when LLMs and related technologies are controversial, a novel like this can be hard to take. Liu makes it clear there has been a human cost to the use of this technology, but for the most part, he’s not judging it (negatively or positively). This makes the novel tricky, since this is such a contentious technology now, and in Julia’s world it’s everywhere. We get a lot of immersive detail in this future society, and it holds a bit of horrid fascination for me. But I can see how it might absolutely turn off some readers. If the very idea of ubiquitous AI makes you twitch, this is definitely not a book for you.

Also, most of the worldbuilding around the dream technology, which is free of any concerns regarding AI and its consequences, is in that first two-thirds of the book. The last third, again, takes things in a different direction, but it didn’t quite have that spark for me.

So in the end, though, this novel doesn’t quite work for me. It’s not so much the AI technology but the shift at the two-thirds mark that changes this to a completely different book, and while that last third is not weak, I just don’t think it is as strong. Jettisoning a lot of what makes the first two-thirds works, characters and otherwise, makes that last third less worthwhile.

Caveat lector!

Highlights:

• A novel that puts an AI future front and forward with a lot of clever speculation and worldbuilding
• A slowly unfolded main character
• A headscratching two-thirds turn

Reference: Liu, Ken. All that We See or Seem [Saga Press, 2025].

¹ It is very weird, personally, for a character with an online name of The Prince to appear as the antagonist in this novel, given my internet name of Princejvstin.

² And yes, the movie Reminiscence, which goes into memories and dreams, has entered the chat.

³ Ken Liu’s translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time now enters the chat and really feels important to this novel’s existence. Did that translation inspire Liu to write this novel? I wish I knew Liu well enough to go and ask him directly!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: T.I.M.

Or, Tediously Imitative Movie

The British robot thriller T.I.M. was released in the year after the first M3GAN film, and it seems to be interested in some of the same questions about the bond we form with our electronic assistants, but the way it goes about it doesn’t reach the same skill level. Whereas the titular robot in M3GAN has as its primary function the protection of a child, and then takes the meaning of “protection” to horrifying extremes, the robot in T.I.M. is a more vaguely defined “manservant” who one day becomes fixated on the concept of love and suddenly decides that his owner doesn’t need her husband anymore.

Our protagonist is Abi, a robotics engineer who has started a new job at a Big Tech company that is planning to launch a new model of human-sized and -shaped robot assistants. Her assignment is to fix the fine motor skills of the mechanical hands, which still can’t control their grip with enough precision.  As part of the perks of her new position, the company has provided her with a luxurious smart home in the countryside and her own domestic robot to test. This doesn’t make her husband, Paul, too happy: he’s currently unemployed and going through a personal crisis of purpose, and it doesn’t help that T.I.M. performs better than him at satisfying Abi’s every need as a cook, gardener, shopping advisor, and foot massager. Paul begins to resent T.I.M.’s presence because it makes him feel redundant, and soon enough, T.I.M. comes to share the same opinion about Paul.

Australian actor Eamon Farren does a convincing job at portraying T.I.M.’s deceptively polite demeanor, letting its inner aggressiveness show only in the tiny twitch of an eyebrow or a lip. The rhythm of speech he chooses is too distractingly reminiscent of Brent Spiner’s carefully neutral delivery for the character Data, but the resemblance ends there. T.I.M. has no admiration for humans. Its only desire is to serve Abi—whether she likes it or not.

T.I.M.’s turn to full villainy is the movie’s weakest point. It was a more interesting character when it maneuvered behind the scenes to sow mistrust between Abi and Paul, planting clues here and there to lead her to suspect infidelity (which we learn has happened before). After its scheme is exposed, however, T.I.M. resorts to clichéd villain lines (“It doesn't have to end this way,” “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” etc.) that don’t sound believable.

In fact, T.I.M.’s motivation is confusing since the beginning. The scenes at Abi’s workplace show that her boss likes to skip quality checks to speed up production, which gives a hint that T.I.M. may not be following a very carefully written code, but even taking that into account, there’s no conceivable reason why it would harbor erotic desires for Abi. After a very basic conversation about the topic of love, T.I.M. starts stealing glances at her while she’s dressing, changes its hairstyle to match her browsing preferences, and adopts a creepy habit of smelling her clothes in private. Again, within the stated rules of this world, nothing points to T.I.M. having even the capacity for that type of desire. Its obsession with Abi happens because the movie needs something for you to be scared of.

It’s irritating to watch Abi’s continued refusal to believe Paul’s increasingly solid proof of T.I.M.’s true intentions. The broken trust implied in the backstory of their relationship can only go so far toward explaining why she’d be so slow to notice the obvious. The movie goes out of its way to set up the many ways T.I.M. can falsify images and sound, but somehow Abi forgets that information until her marriage has reached an irreversible state of crisis. T.I.M. is quite proficient at making Paul look like an incorrigible adulterer, but Abi’s obliviousness to the double agenda of its precisely timed malicious remarks stretches credulity.

There’s a hint of an interesting development regarding the enmity that grows between T.I.M. and Paul, in that Abi is trying to get pregnant, the one task at which T.I.M. can’t substitute Paul. But the script doesn’t flesh out T.I.M.’s personality with enough depth to explore that side of its jealousy. Also, Paul’s replaceability at home could have been better contrasted with Abi’s replaceability at work, given that we hear her boss explicitly describe her as a diversity hire, but the movie doesn’t do anything with that idea either.

T.I.M. is a mystery with no surprises, scary enough to justify giving it 1:41 minutes of your life, but not imaginative enough to be worth remembering afterwards.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

TV Review: Murderbot

Among the list of things one could do with newfound freedom, there are more interesting options than murder

In countless tales of robots that decide they've had enough of humans and seek independence, the typical assumption has been that, once free, the robots would take revenge by subjugating and/or exterminating humankind. In the new Apple TV show Murderbot, based on the acclaimed series of books by Martha Wells, our protagonist finds itself in a similar situation: it's a robot that hacks itself so it doesn't have to obey humans, because humans are honestly insufferable. Once free, this robot, originally designed as a bodyguard, could go on a murdering spree or even plot something more sinister and on a larger scale. But... why bother? Yes, humans are easy to kill, but there's little fun in that. Instead, one could enjoy the millions of hours of trashy TV that humans can't stop producing. That's as equally valid a motivation for throwing off the yoke as any. The titular Murderbot doesn't hack itself because it's planning to kill all humans; it hacks itself because it would rather sit at home and watch soap operas all day long. It may sound less noble than a robot uprising, but seriously, there are so many episodes to go through.

Almost every story about robots is a story about slavery. So it makes sense for the robot uprising to be a common element of this subgenre. However, the expectation that the robots would respond in kind to the cruelty inflicted on them may reveal a lack of imagination on our part. In the real world, slaveholders' fears of mass retaliation fueled their stubborn opposition to every effort toward emancipation, and yet, in country after country, when slavery ended, the former slaves didn't launch the much-dreaded campaign to subjugate and/or exterminate their former oppressors; they were already busy trying to build lives of their own. The fact that we continually return to the learned habit of narrating the liberation of robots and take it as a matter of course that it would be followed by vengeful violence should give us pause. The lesson to take from both past and present examples is that those who yearn for freedom have in mind better uses for it than our paranoid fantasies.

The events of Murderbot are set in a ruthless corporatocracy spanning most planets in the known universe. Robots are, of course, built as slaves, but the legal status of human workers is barely any better. Life on the privately controlled planets consists of decades of drudgery in the vanishing hope of earning some measure of freedom. Such a system, with financial gain as the main motivator, naturally turns people into the worst versions of themselves, which explains why Murderbot is so sick of following their orders. I'm not saying that subjection would be any more morally acceptable under a less cutthroat system, but our protagonist's jaded attitude toward humans has a lot to do with the type of citizen that corporate rule creates. In fact, Murderbot itself is an example of what this system wants: a docile automaton without the right to protest. After it figures out how to hack its own programming and remove the imperative of obedience, it doesn't go in search of friends or allies. It doesn't cross its mind that some company could be enjoyable. What it wants is to be left alone with its TV shows. It's not a bad start, but it reveals how a totalitarian regime can limit someone's imagination. Luckily, Murderbot is hired as bodyguard for a small group of scientists from outside the corporate worlds, and over just a few days, mere proximity to their unique way of life expands the range of conceivable possibilities.

I haven't read the Murderbot books, but from what I've gathered, the cast of the TV adaptation is reduced from the original version. In any case, the group has just the right size for the viewer to get to know them and understand how Murderbot gradually and very reluctantly grows fond of them. These are members of an egalitarian, eco-friendly society that refuses to treat robots as property. To its instant annoyance, they have peculiar rituals, have a perhaps too friendly disposition, and are perpetually horny. What draws Murderbot to develop a personal attachment to them, over its incessant protests about their disregard for personal space, is that they insist on treating it as an equal companion. They sincerely care for it. So Murderbot finds itself going to extra lengths to protect them, which gives it no small measure of puzzlement. On one hand, it's true that these people are too clueless to survive on a planet with dangerous fauna and, as the viewer eventually learns, assassin robots on the loose, so Murderbot has to save them from their spectacularly ill-advised decisions over and over again, but on the other hand, they're nice and supportive and untainted by the ubiquitous greed that defines every interaction in the corporate worlds. Their society creates an entirely different type of citizen, and even Murderbot, who would seem like the extreme case of a subject under totalitarian control, is changed as a result of the time it spends with them.

The process is awkward, messy, often hilarious, and at key moments painful. Much has been said about how Alexander Skarsgård's impeccable performance presents Murderbot as autistic-coded: the avoidance of eye contact, the discomfort with social pleasantries, the extensive knowledge of a slice of pop culture trivia, the hyperfocused dedication to the job. Whenever a human starts a conversation about personal feelings, Murderbot feels like it would rather be dissolved in acid than have to listen for one second more. Part of the reason is that it still has no concept of close friends, but there's also the matter of what society it comes from. It's not accustomed to interactions where people aren't trying to take advantage of each other, so the experience of heartfelt exchanges of deep fears and insecurities, which are totally normal in human friendhips, is confusing and mortifying for Murderbot. Even I, as a human viewer, found their behavior excessively sentimental at times, but I have to remember that a) they were raised in a society with a lot more freedom and emotional openness than mine, and b) I'm autistic, with all the learned self-protective impulses that come with it. As much as I could relate to Murderbot's yearning to run far from that bunch of cuddly hippies, I couldn't avoid being moved by their attempts to connect with it on a personal level.

Murderbot is a curious story of inner growth that strives to find its way under a system designed to crush autonomy. There's abundant shooting and scheming and double-crossing and running and exploding, which is the daily routine of a bodyguard robot, but in between those distractions, our protagonist finds unsuspected ways of looking at life and its possibilities. It's precisely the friends you weren't expecting to make that teach you the most important lessons.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

TV Review: Ironheart

Not the usual superhero origin story

A flawed protagonist making repeatedly questionable choices does not fit the typical trope of a superhero story. Even as a slow-paced origin story, Ironheart avoids the traditional heroic hints or setups. For those seeking a save the world, save a friend, or get justifiable revenge premise, this is not that series. Instead, we have a complex character study in a uniquely paced story that’s hard to turn away from.

Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a genius MIT engineering student obsessed with building a perfect Iron Man-style suit. She earns money for her pet project by helping students cheat and she soon gets expelled and is forced to return to her mom Ronnie (Anji White) and their middle-class Chicago neighborhood. While home, she is tormented by memories of her step-father Gary and her best friend Natalie being killed in a drive-by shooting. With even fewer resources available, she accepts an invitation to join a high-tech crime gang to help them physically attack and coerce billionaires into handing over their corporate assets. The gang is led by the charismatic but clearly sinister Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), a.k.a. The Hood, who wants to use Riri’s suit in their heists. When Riri has an urgent tech need, she turns to insecure black market tech dealer Joe (Alden Ehrenreich), a.k.a. Zeke, and coerces him into supplying her. Riri notices that Parker’s hood is exuding sinister magic and tries to figure out how to control its power by consulting with a mother/daughter mage duo. Despite her descent of questionable choices, Riri is surrounded by a supportive community of allies, including her surprisingly patient artist mother Ronnie, her talented and supportive friend Xavier (Matthew Elam), quirky mage Zelma (Regan Aliyah), and her insightful and sentient AI NATALIE (Lyric Ross). Riri alternates between pushing them away and embracing them as she tries to stop Parker and the nefarious evil that lurks inside him.

Ironheart is a mix of high points and frustrating inconsistencies. Dominique Thorne is excellent as the tortured, stressed-out genius. Her character’s personality is completely believable and immersive. The ensemble cast is surprisingly appealing. Riri’s mom Ronnie defies the stereotypical hero mom portrayal by being patient, firm, and surprisingly practical when it comes to tracking down the supernatural help her daughter needs. The heist gang consists of colorful characters who steal the scenes they are in. On the other hand, the story suffers from inconsistencies that are hard to ignore. Riri is a genius but can’t get a high-tech job to support her hobby. She’s traumatized by her friend being murdered in a drive-by but chooses to work with a violent crime gang who knows where her family is. And the heist gang’s corporate theft goals seem confusingly unlikely to be sustainable from both a contract enforceability or ongoing criminal liability perspective. This is where you need your willing suspension of disbelief—for the real-life logic leaps, not for the sci-fi tech and the magic.

However, these conflicting plot elements work when filtered through the mind of a flawed protagonist. An unreliable narrator or flawed protagonist is always an interesting storytelling device. In many ways, she seems bent on self-destruction in a way that corresponds to some variation of survivor’s guilt for the loss of her friend. She is introspective, stubborn, and emotionally damaged, with behavior that seems intentionally focused on a series of bad choices. Riri draws her inspiration from Tony Stark, a character with significant personality challenges and anti-hero vibes. Although the two characters are from very different backgrounds and life experiences, they are parallel in terms of their arrogant and sometimes irresponsible worldview.

Surprisingly, my primary comparison for Ironheart is The Bear, another working-class Chicago-based introspective series. Both shows feature uptight genius creators whose internalized trauma leads to toxic behavior and trouble for those who care about them. The ensuing chaos is played out in a uniquely paced, personality-centered story that’s hard to turn away from. Some superhero origin stories involve an immature character making bad or selfish choices that come back to haunt them before they make the pivot to heroism. Peter Parker in Spider-Man had a rough start before finding his way. Rogue in the X-Men started out as a villain before she found her heroic side. Ironheart is a story I watched waiting for the heroic realization to arrive. But when it does finally arrive, Riri remains complicated and continues to make surprising choices in a way that is intriguing but different from the norm. If you are looking for a traditional hero epic, this is not that story, and you will likely feel frustrated. But if you are interested in a complex character study with solid acting and entertaining side characters, Ironheart is a show that will give you plenty to analyze.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Appealing, unevenly paced artistic vibe
• Frustrating protagonist making confusing choices
• Excellent lead and supporting cast

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: M3GAN 2.0

If your sequel requires that you wipe away all the characterization from the original, maybe it's a sign that not everything needs to be a franchise

The first M3GAN film was a contained family drama with a measured sprinkle of techno-horror; it had a strong grip on its themes of parental neglect and the anxieties of digital interactions; and it knew not to take itself too seriously. But now that studios mistake a successful release for an invitation to launch a franchise, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, this new entry doesn't feel like it's even set in the same universe as the first. M3GAN 2.0 drops entirely the horror and turns its titular killer doll into an acrobat/spy/hacker who suddenly knows kung fu. The plot explodes in size to include a decades-long corporate conspiracy, government cover-ups, international black ops, and a mysterious piece of hardware that may or may not have bootstrapped itself into godhood.

The impossible transition from the smaller plot of the first movie to the tutti-frutti of the sequel is handled via an interminable infodump clumsily disguised in the script as a therapy session for Cady, the girl who had to endure, and barely survived, M3GAN's increasingly toxic protection. Hearing the way she narrates the aftermath of M3GAN's stabby rampage, it's obvious that she isn't really saying this to a therapist. The infodump commits the unforgivable rudeness of extending into the next scene, this time disguised as a sales pitch: Cady's aunt and M3GAN's creator, Gemma, has reformed her company and now builds assistive technology for the disabled. It's very on brand for her established obliviousness that she doesn't figure out by herself that her new inventions could easily be weaponized by malicious parties; at least this bit of characterization is kept consistent. But when she's approached by the government with questions about her suspected involvement in the creation of another rogue robot, she takes surprisingly little time to enlist M3GAN's help, prior assassination attempts notwithstanding.

What comes next is a drastic revision of the main trio of characters, which depletes the viewer's suspension of disbelief even before we get to the convenient underground lair and the wingsuit stunts, but without that change, we can't have the second act, where M3GAN needs a new, stronger body. So, out of nowhere, now Gemma has to treat M3GAN as a confidant with whom she vents about her parenting frustrations; Cady brushes away the horrific trauma of having almost been mutilated by her doll and now suspects she's capable of developing human feelings; and M3GAN has to quickly explain, in her signature snarky tone, that she's had time to mature and reflect on her past misdeeds. Good! Now that our protagonists have easily forgotten their main motivations, with their mortal enmity thrown out the window, they can cooperate to defeat the killer robot that someone has set loose.

Said killer robot is one of the high points of the movie. Ivanna Sakhno does a spectacular job playing an unfeeling machine that nonetheless conveys deadly menace with just a look. In a scene where she infiltrates a tech bro's house to get access to his secure files, she channels the steely singlemindedness of Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3 and seamlessly merges it with the uncanny feigned innocence of Lisa Marie in Mars Attacks! Another reason why this scene works so well is the brilliant casting choice for the tech bro: Jemaine Clement, who already demonstrated in Harold and the Purple Crayon that he knows how to portray an insufferably arrogant manchild with zero self-awareness. Another new character, played by Aristotle Athari, is a walking plot twist with blinking neon arrows pointing at him, but he performs his role with an exquisitely precise understatedness that makes him the right amount of annoying before the reveal and the right amount of spine-chilling after.

These good choices, however, don't suffice to rescue the film from its absurdly complicated plot. Moving M3GAN to Team Good should require an immense amount of inner growth that the script doesn't have time for; instead, it speed-runs through the checkpoints of apology and redemption and gives the character a sentimental side that doesn't convince. M3GAN 2.0 manages to reach higher peaks of silly camp than the original, and on that level is perfectly enjoyable, but its experiment with spy thriller action leading to the end of the world forces the story to carry a load of heavy themes that it doesn't know how to balance. The new model looks shinier and cooler, but is by no means an upgrade.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: If Stars are Lit, by Sara K. Ellis

 A philosophical meditation on personhood that ends up more enraging than was probably intended

 

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that engaged me as much as this one, or had me writing so many verbose marginal notes at so many plot elements. This is a book that inspires thoughts. Lots of thinky thoughts – and it’s intended to do that. The thing is, I don’t think it intended to inspire the thinky thoughts that I found myself thinking.

The premise of this book revolves around a creation in artificial intelligence, called a gemel. Gemels are sentient holograms, created off a human prototype, and sharing all memories and personality traits with the prototype up. They are effectively a holographic copy of that prototype as it exists at the moment of their inception. Gemels occupy an odd half-life in the starfaring semi-near future of this book: they are officially recognized as sentient, but they are constrained, legally: their programming forbids them from hurting humans, or through inaction allowing humans to come to harm. It’s all very three-laws-of-robotics­—only don’t say ‘robot’ around a gemel: that’s a sentientist slur. They remain tied to their progenitor’s service, unless explicitly discharged through a complex legal process; and they are switched off when the progenitor dies, unless there is an emancipation clause in the progenitor’s will. (The text describes it as “essentially indentured servitude”, because apparently the word “slavery” was on vacation or something.)

Our main character, Joss, is a hostage negotiator by profession, on her way home from a successful — or so she thought — mission talking down some unhappy asteroid miners from a ledge. Then the ship explodes and everyone dies except for Joss. And a gemel, who is suddenly there. This gemel was created with Joss as the prototype, but takes the form of Joss's ex-wife Alice -- and, don't worry, we'll get there. Over the course of the book, the two work together to figure out who blew up the ship, and why. I don't think it will surprise anyone if I reveal that the real villain turns out to be capitalism we made along the way.

(NB: In what follows, I'm going to be using both AI, an abbreviation for 'artificial intelligence', and also the visually similar name Al, short for 'Alice'. I cannot expand 'Al' to 'Alice', because I need to maintain a distinction between those, too, so to avoid confusion, I've decided to exploit the wonders of formatting. Artificial Intelligence AI will be bolded, while Not-Alice Al will be italicized. I'm terribly sorry for it, but the website's sans-serif font makes it impossible to distinguish them otherwise.)

The broad plot of the book is reasonably well-constructed, with some nice turns of phrase and thoughtful observations. Unfortunately, it was completely poisoned by the whole gemel component of the plot; and that's a big deal, because this component forms the philosophical heart of the book. In this world, gemels are fantastically expensive, and usually represent some rich jerk's way of externalizing of their id. But Joss acquires her gemel through some hand-wavium related to the explosion of the ship. The reason that this gemel, Al, looks like Joss's ex-wife, Alice, is because at the moment of Al's inception, Joss has been working through some Issues about her failed marriage, and Alice is at the forefront of her psyche. So their partnership serves a dual narrative purpose: First, we the readers learn about the minutiae of gemel-lore; while simultaneously, Joss takes the opportunity to work through her Issues by talking to this AI simulation of her ex-wife that shares all of her—Joss’s—memories. Oh, and also fall in love with her.

And this is where I ran into the first incredibly frustrating element of this book, one that pervades the entire narrative. Gemels are sentient, distinct in kind from humans, but nevertheless beings worthy of respect and autonomy. This is a vitally important theme in this book. Yet Al’s role, especially in the first half of the book, is focused on facilitating Joss’s character development. This section alternates between the present, told in present tense, in which Joss and Al work together to solve the ship-blowing-up mystery; and flashbacks to the past, usually (but not consistently, argh) told in past tense. Time switches are triggered by some resonance between something Al has done in the present and some memory of Alice in the past. Structurally, this device aims at elegance, because of the physical similarity between present-Al and past-Alice; but narratively, it undermines the message that gemels deserve autonomy. If gemels are unique, distinct people from their progenitors, then why does this gemel’s sole narrative purpose revolve around Joss’s own navel-gazing and personal growth?

These flashbacks are also related to a second issue that irritates me. See, Al is built from Joss’s psyche. Al has access to all of Joss’s memories, even the ones that she can’t consciously recall herself, like tasting chocolate for the first time as a toddler. (That was a nice moment, actually. Toddler-Joss really, really liked the chocolate.) But, as Al tells her repeatedly, humans curate their memories. What they choose to let fade is as important as what they choose to remember. So anything that Joss wants to recall which has faded from memory represents a journey she must undertake on her own, because relying on a gemel to retrieve the memory for her would cause mental atrophy.

In principle, I can get behind this particular philosophical statement – although I can’t help but think that Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’, offers a more sophisticated discussion about exactly this idea. But it runs awfully close to another narrative trope that I just despise. You know the one I mean? The deeply inefficient one? It's the one that goes, Oh, yes, I am an all-knowing dragon-wizard-sage, and I could have told you the secret to the magic macguffin, but we are in a coming-of-age novel and so you needed to discover it for yourself. What's more, in this particular instance, the specific memory that Joss was trying to recover involved seeing a guy in a bar whose overheard conversation may well have provided vital information about the bombing that killed everyone on the ship and stranded her in space. She’s not trying to short-circuit self-actualization here; there just aren't enough CCTV cameras in the bar.

Finally, there’s a profoundly troubling and creepy issue that seems to lie at the heart of the whole Al-Alice-gemel situation, an issue which I don’t think Sara K. Ellis fully apprehends. And the issue is this: Al is an AI-generated copy of a real person, Alice, but she has all of Joss’s memories and just plain understands Joss better than Alice ever could. Falling in love with Al is presented as a way of respecting the gemel’s autonomy and personhood, because in so falling Joss is recognizing that Al is distinct from Alice. But in this particular case it still seems like a deeply unhealthy way to have another go at a failed marriage. (It also seems to be veering dangerously close to deepfaking real people for porn, which is illegal in the UK, where this book was published, and for which people have already gone to jail.) It reminds me of nothing so much as Sarah Gailey’s brilliant book The Echo Wife, in which a husband steals his ex-wife’s cloning technology to make better versions of her for a marriage do-over. The wife prototype in question is not thrilled to discover what he’s done; and in this book, Alice herself is likewise displeased (although less murderously so). But I don’t get the sense I’m supposed to be sympathetic to Alice here, because in the same conversation she starts saying sentientist things that challenge the autonomy and personhood of gemels, so she’s definitely being positioned as the antagonist. Still. Apologies in advance for linking to the rabbit hole, but strawman really does have a point here.

And — spoiler alert — I’m going to mention something that happens at the end, but it is relevant and puts the infuriating apple on the entire troubling sundae. At the end of the book, it seems that gemel-Al somehow merges with human-Alice, and in the process preserves/rekindles the love between Joss and Al-Alice.

Gemel-Al, who is a distinct and autonomous person, merges with human-Alice.

Human-Alice, who was already not thrilled to have a gemel made in her image without her consent, is now forced to merge her consciousness with a completely separate sentient creature, again without her consent, after which she is going to rekindle a romantic-and-probably-sexual relationship with her ex-wife.

This is very convenient for Joss, to be sure: she gets to keep her new love Al, but now  upgraded with an organic body that can do fun kissing stuff, plus all that useful Joss-internal knowledge that allows Joss to skip working at things like communication and sharing.  After all, Al-Alice already knows it all.

Alice did not consent to this. This is not a happy ending. This is an appalling violation of personhood, which we are being encouraging to accept and respect in the name of love. The more I write about it the more outraged I find myself.

This is the bit where in my review outline I had notes to talk about all the various other infelicities that reveal a very shallow treatment of various elements of science. Probabilities are misused; timescales of AI communications are simultaneously inhumanly fast and also humanly slow; acoustic and articulatory phonetics is invoked in a way that any linguist knows is nonsense; and I'm pretty sure radar can't distinguish between wave and particle forms of energy. Or maybe it can – but that’s not the point here. The point is that there are sufficient problems with the stuff I do know about that I cannot trust that the author knows what she's doing in areas where I'm less sure.

And that trust is important. When I consider that final, unforgivable violation of Alice, I do wonder whether Sara K Ellis truly unaware of the problems here. I could imagine a book in which this is done purposefully. Maybe my fuming outrage is the intended outcome. If so, well played, Sara K Ellis. You got me.

But for that, I'd need to trust Ellis to know what she was doing. And I just don't.

--

Nerd coefficient: 5: problematic, but has redeeming qualities

Highlights:

• Thought-provoking AI-generated holograph clones
• By-now de rigueur indictment of capitalism
• Lesbians on the rocks
• Flashbacks
  

References: 

Chiang, Ted. 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling'. [Subterranean Press Magazine 2013].

Ellis, Sara K. If Stars are Lit. [Luna Press 2025].

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife. [Tor Books 2021].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

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.

Review: The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

A fantastical future world of giant robots, broken AIs, and brutal societies

Sunai has a problem. A lot of problems, given his true nature and role in life. And his possible relationship with an expert in AI shrines and technology, Veyadi, is just one of those thorny problems. But in a world where broken artificial intelligences, giant mecha robots and repressive city states are what the Earth has got, Sunai is going to have to deal with his problems, and the new ones engendered by an expedition that might awaken yet another AI god into an already fractious and corrupted world of them...

This is the story of The Archive Undying from Emma Mieko Candon.

Imagine a world of artificial intelligences as veritable gods, but fallible gods. Gods that can be corrupted, destroyed, changed. A world of advanced technology and hardscrabble living by the humans in the midst of gods, broken gods, mecha, and much more. It’s a tapestry rich with potential for worldbuilding.

And indeed the worldbuilding is where this novel really shines. The world Candon creates here is unpleasant in many ways. An undefined amount of time in the future (but given the utter lack of references to anything resembling our present, it’s a long time to be sure), the world appears to be a set of city-states or small polities. Artificial intelligences, in various levels of corruption or disrepair, run these city-states. Most of the states, from the implications in the novel, are much like other brutal, oppressive, hostile places that have resorted to violent control because of dangers like fragmentary portions of AI and war machines: “fragtech.” The potential of finding valuable things in shrines and in the ruins and the dangerous world outside the city-states does draw the desperate and determined, but even right in the city-state itself, fragtech can appear, and strange half-controlled mecha like the Maw. In other words, this is not a safe world, and it provides a canvas to build story and characters upon.

Speaking of mecha: My exposure to mecha (in the form of anime and manga, anyway) has been limited, and so this chance to appreciate giant robots (powered by AI, by corrupted AI, by fragtech and so forth) might be slightly wasted on me as a reader. Nevertheless, even with my limited exposure to such things, the giant robots and the conflicts and pulse-pounding action beats enthused me as a reader. This novel could be thought of as “Come for the action with giant robots, stay for the thought-provoking ideas about artificial intelligence, sentience, the uses of technology, society, and a love story all in the bargain.” And did I mention AIs?

Now imagine a fragment of one of those AIs, one Sunai, who has wound up in the Wrong Bed with the Wrong Person. He’s had a hard life, especially given that he mostly hides his true nature (who wouldn’t in this world?). The Archive Undying imagines Sunai (our primary point of view)’s life struggling to survive and persist in a world that is fascinating and precarious (even given his nature, and perhaps especially so). At the bottom of all of that worldbuilding that I’ve discussed through most of this review is the story of Sunai, his relationship with Veyadi and how they try to navigate a relationship that probably shouldn’t work, can’t work, but matters of the heart are the thorniest and prickliest things in this future world that Candon creates.

I’ve used that metaphor of thorns and prickliness a couple of times and I want to emphasize that again in the context of the social relations in the novel. People in this world have pasts and presents and intersect with each other in sharp, pointed, multidimensional ways. And while both Sunai and Veyadi are our protagonists and are definitely sympathetic protagonists at that, both of them have agendas and multiple angles to them and what they do. Where the magic really happens is in Candon throwing both men together in this relationship. I could see in the hands of another writer their relationship blowing up and falling to pieces, but that is not the story she wants to tell. But she doesn’t make it easy in the least for either of them.

There is also a clever use of point of view in the novel, showing the author’s skill and subtlety in bringing across character and theme. In addition to the primary point of view and narrative thread, Candon deploys the second person effectively in two ways. First, in bringing us some of the backstory of Sunai, and how he wound up tangled up with Veyadi and the story that unfolds in the primary narrative. And second, it helps introduce a “hidden character” to the narrative whose nature, motives and goals becomes clear as the novel moves toward its final act.¹

It’s a rich and deeply interesting and immersive world that Candon has created. There are a couple of touchstones for me that came to mind. First up would be the world of The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain. That novel imagines a future world that resonates somewhat with this one, with AIs running cities, the world outside quite dangerous to traverse, and a sense of populations bottled up with forces beyond their control in charge of them. That novel’s Kathmandu is a more pleasant place overall than the Harbor of this book, however. The Archive Undying turns the dystopian aspects of the far future setting a few notches up, and replaces myth and magic with the aforementioned mecha.

Also, I was put in mind of the Outside novels by Ada Hoffmann, which have AIs turning into gods and thus ruling the human population. That series has an interstellar feel to it, although the second novel in particular, The Fallen, mostly sticks to one broken planet, with a lot of dangers and leftovers for the humans to try and deal with even as gods and angels maneuver and scheme.

Overall, I found The Archive Undying richly and deeply detailed and a fascinating world and set of characters to visit. I do understand that more novels and stories are projected in this wildly inventive setting, and I look forward to reading them.

1. Maybe its just a recency effect, or just the luck of what I am reading, but I seem to be noticing more and more the careful and judicious use of second person tense in SFF recently. It’s never the only tense, and its use is as an added ingredient; load-bearing, but not the only thing going on. One thing that these stories seem to be exploring with the use of the second person is something that is implicit in every story that is not first person: Who is telling the story and what is their agenda and viewpoint? Second person has an intimacy in that someone is telling you what you are doing. Who that someone is (if the second person is done well) is incredibly important and can provide extra buttressing to the narrative. Candon manages that quite effectively here.

Highlights:

• Interesting AI theology and setup

• Fascinating use of point of view to engender intimacy in the narrative

• GIANT MECHA

Reference: Candon, Emma Mieko. The Archive Undying [Tordotcom, 2023].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review — The Digital Aesthete: Human Musings on the Intersection of Art and AI

This compilation of stories examining the intersection of art, creativity, and AI is eye-opening, entertaining, and thought-provoking

The reason that ChatGPT is so popular right now is that, as a large language model, it's fantastic at creating sentences that remind us of what already exists. That's because it's scouring the internet and its millions of terabytes of text, and has learned, for example, that ice cream is described 99% of the time as "sweet" or "cold." AI is kind of like that old saying that a million monkeys at a million typewriters would someday produce Shakespeare, out of sheer probability—it's called the infinite monkey theorem.

But generally speaking, it's never going to default to something truly personal and come up with an idea uniquely brilliant and human, like "the ice cream reminded me of Grandma Betty's pale yellow kitchen, the one she painted while listening to Johnny Mathis after Grandpa left her."

In The Digital Aesthete, we get stories from writers and thinkers across the globe that tackle the thought experiment of how AI like this will affect art, including stories from heavy hitters like Ken Liu, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Ray Nayler. Whether you use AI in your daily life (like me) or just are intrigued by the news stories you hear more and more about, these pieces pose questions about how AI will change what art really means—and whether we even will want to consume it.

All the stories are worth reading, and they range in tone from sincere to funny to mysterious to heart-wrenching. Here are the top 5 stories that I haven't stopped thinking about since reading them:

Forged by Jane Espenson

I have fallen in love with the main character in this short story—and it's a drone. It's an art forger, and it zooms over land where naive art still exists: art that's been made a human who lives without machine influence. The drone grows rich from his art dealing, takes to smoking cigars (it always has to clean out its parts afterwards, from all the smoke) and takes to hanging fancy tuxedos and ball gowns off its mechanical limbs. The line between art forger and art creator begins to get blurry. What does it mean for an AI to want to maximize human happiness, and how far is too far to ensure art is enjoyed?

Stage Show and Schnauzers by Tina Connolly

A queer detective story set in a theatre that's essentially a locked-room mystery? You had me at hello. Our detective is assisted by her partner, an AI named Gabriel that's housed in an old iPhone. When we think of art, we usually think of dance, painting, sculpting. Is detective-ing an art? Only if we expand the definition to include outside-the-box creative thinking, and then I think a case could definitely be made for it! This story is cozy and cute and definitely made me chuckle a few times. It's also a love letter to drama and the world of the theatre, one of the oldest human arts out there.

Good Stories by Ken Liu

The conceit for this story is simple but fascinating: AI-generated content has been deemed uncopyrightable, but courts have decided that manually edited AI-text can be copyrighted if it shows a minimal amount of human-sourced creativity. Clara, an employee at Good Stories, Inc., is a lowly text smith who changes the occasional verb or two for huge artificial texts. She eventually grows resentful, but learns what people are actually doing with this vast amount of wordsoup. Using a variety of AI tools—not just text for scripts but also AI video and special effects tools—people can create their own interactive movies:

"The AI has a database of tens of thousands of licensed performance profiles of movie stars, cinematographers, composers, auteurs. Feed it a Good Story... and you can turn a 300,000 word epic into an exciting 2-hour film with a plot in the shape of The Hero's Search for Meaning starting Tatiana Samoilova and Kinuyo Tanaka as the leads, with a supporting cast of Idris Elba and Marion Cotillard, shot in the style of Wes Anderson..."

This sounds incredible, but what of the real-life artists? That's the common theme throughout this collection.

A Beautiful War by Fang Zeyu, trans. by Nathan Faries

Some humans were born to be artists, thinking in abstract shapes and colors and the desire to share their vision with the world. These same folks, naturally, don't tend to make the best soldiers. But what if an AI device could make an artist believe he was making art when in reality he was making war? This story explores what happens when you use art as a cover for not creation but destruction.

The Laugh Machine by Auston Habershaw

In a near future, comedians have been replaced by joke bots. It may not seem like it (especially when a comedian is crass or racist), but telling a joke is most definitely a form of art. It's writing with the intent to make someone laugh and appreciate something about the human existence. In The Laugh Machine, we meet a self-aware joke bot that's programmed with antics and comic stylings of 6,573 comedians. He's not great at what he does, but he is thoughtful. His boss is mean to him, shouting, "Listen, robot. People don't like you. You freak them out." Why, then, does he keep using the joke bot? Money, would be my guess. People will do nearly anything to avoid paying artists for their time.

One day, the joke bot notices that a woman keeps returning night after night to listen to his set. He knows this because his friends, search engines, like to gossip and literally cannot resist answering questions. I won't spoil the end, but the woman and the joke bot share a connection that makes you think about the collateral damage of AI-powered writing.

Final thoughts

In one of the stories, a character opines, "People don't like the idea of consuming art made by a machine." I think this is both simultaneously true and false, and the different perspectives in the book help illustrate both points. True, there is something magical about a human's experience giving meaning to the world through art and creation. But at the same time, people today rave about Dall-E-generated art and Midjourney like there's never been anything cooler.  This book made me think about the power of soul-crushing capitalism writ large over countless artistic fields, and how profoundly sad it could end up for the humans who used to be the sole owners of such exertions.

But no matter your take on AI—whether you're a plugged-in believer of its many possibilities or a luddite who thinks it should be banned from all forms of creative expression—there's no denying that it's here to stay. It's up to us how we incorporate it into what we make, and how many boundaries we put around it. As Ken Liu states in his story in The Digital Aesthete, "The world is only bearable because we make up stories about it."

It will all just depend on who or what exactly will be doing the making-up in the future.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She's also a professional copywriter who thinks Chat GPT is fun but always missing a certain something tone-wise that can never be replicated by an AI.

Film review: The Creator

Nice America you got there—shame about your Asia

I became intent on seeing The Creator as soon as I saw that it was from the man who directed Rogue One, my favorite piece of media Disney Star Wars has produced. It certainly looked intriguing; a near-future science fiction story with a good deal of action? I’m all for that. Unfortunately, the end result is somewhat uneven, but overall worth seeing.

Twenty minutes into the future, an automated system nukes Los Angeles, turning the United States government against all forms of artificial intelligence. By the time of the actual plot, the only places willing to openly host AI are various cells in the vaguely defined superstate ‘New Asia,’ which a map seems to imply is a peculiar amalgam of Japan and the stretch of Southeast Asia from Myanmar to the Philippines. The action properly kicks off with US special operative Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) being sent on a raid against one of these AI cells, where he finds a robot child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) eventually christened Alphie, who happens to know something he desperately wants. They then go on a wild goose chase all throughout New Asia to find what they both need, all the while pursued by the US government.

The best part of this film is the relationship between the two leads. They are both conflicted, on the run, and setting out to do something they had been told time and again not to do. They have a sort of teacher-student interaction where, as the best of these stories always have, the teacher learns as much as the student. They have to see both sides of American imperial power, both abroad and later domestically.

It is the portrayal of the US, a few decades in the future, where the worldbuilding in this film really shines. The Pentagon now carries a big stick that happens to float: NOMAD, as they call it, is a hulking behemoth in the sky, going all over the world to wreak havoc on rogue artificial intelligence (it has a suitably scary way of announcing its presence). It is the ‘War on Terror’ gone digital, the logical conclusion of drone warfare, the expansion of the ‘frontier’ to the digital realm as well as to an Asia that America has ravaged before. It’s a futuristic, all-too-believable extrapolation into a future that Nikhil Pal Singh described in these terms:

Defending the launching of the global War on Terror, U.S. diplomatic historian John Gaddis gave scholarly imprimatur to the settler idiom: the borders of global civil society were menaced by non-state actors in a manner similar to the “native Americans, pirates and other marauders” that once menaced the boundaries of an expanding U.S. nation-state. Foreign affairs writer Robert Kaplan concurred: ‘The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier,’ as he heard U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq repeat the refrain, ‘Welcome to Injun Country.’

[...]

The history of the American frontier is one of mounting casualties and ambiguous boundaries, of lives and fortunes gained and lost. In the settler narrative, “collective security” never meant just the existential kind of safety, that is, situations where material survival and self-defense were mainly at stake. Freedom is essential to the equation, and freedom in this conception is built once again upon dreams of a blank slate—this time cheap, empty, exploitable lands and resources that must be cleared of any competing presence.

However, what pained me, as a Filipino-American on my mother’s side, was the frankly lazy portrayal of Asia. As previously described, the AI and their supporters are hiding in a superstate ‘New Asia,’ an unwieldy amalgam of disparate countries that were last unified, if one could call it that, when Japan rampaged across the region in World War II. The scenery looks Vietnamese, echoing many Vietnam War movies, but the urban areas are vaguer, filled with what appears to be Chinese writing (which could easily be Japanese). It’s a blatant hodgepodge which, to be blunt, made it seem like the filmmakers just didn’t care enough to set this in a real Asian country.

They could have easily done something like Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl, unambiguously set in Thailand. I’ve read comments from Thai people saying that it’s clearly written by a Westerner, which is something I'm not sure can be avoided at all, but it at least tried to engage with the complexity of a real Asian country. This film didn’t. (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon may also be relevant here).

What results from this lushly developed America and a smorgasbord Asia is a film about American empire from an American (or Western—director Gareth Edwards is British) point of view. Many have observed that these wars have barely had any effect on the day-to-day lives of Americans on the whole (veterans, refugees, and their families excepted), and it is easy to mush all American wars into ‘Asia’ or ‘the Middle East’ stereotypes. That’s what this film does: it reduces several countries to cardboard cutouts into which to smash American special forces to kill, die, and steal. It commits the grievous sin of forgetting that the targets of American guns are people, too, with agency and beliefs and histories.

I wanted to like The Creator more than I did, and in many ways it is a fine movie. The action is exciting, the American characters get good development, and the future is believable technology-wise. It falls, however, in portraying American wars as solely American experiences, which is both its greatest failure and, inadvertently, its most potent element of commentary.

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Highlights: great action, great futuristic aesthetic when it isn't being orientalist

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.