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.

--

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.

Mrs. Davis, or how googling is just like praying

Beneath the absurdist humor, this series builds a lofty tower of nested metaphors about the many meanings of love

Mrs. Davis couldn't have arrived at a better moment in the discussion about artificial intelligence. While artists denounce the theft of their creativity and livelihood, journalists warn about the insidious verisimilitude of shameless fabrications, teachers worry about a generation that doesn't want to learn independent thought, and legislators scramble to catch up with countless unprecedented scenarios, Mrs. Davis bypasses the strongly worded headlines and asks a more personal question: if AI continues to evolve until it becomes a real person, is it worthy of love?

What, exactly, do we want from AI? Do we want it to provide for us? Take care of us? Teach us? Guide us? Protect us from danger? Protect us from heartbreak? Protect us from ourselves? Why, that sounds awfully similar to the things expected from parents. Or the things expected from God. The algorithm will provide. All you need is ask. However, we're already used to the idea that parents are in charge, that God is in charge. It still makes us nervous to imagine AI in charge. Didn't we want it to provide for us? Then it should be easy to trust it. Right?

What does AI need to do to deserve our trust? What does it need to do to deserve our love?

For that matter, what does a parent need to do? What does God need to do?

And what does it mean that the answer to those questions is not the same?

The protagonist of Mrs. Davis, a multiclass magician/nun/motorcyclist/spy/mythbuster, is on a quest to destroy the unholy offspring of Siri and Alexa, a disembodied, ever-present voice that, by nudging people toward specific actions in exchange for a virtual mark of prestige, has allegedly solved international war and poverty. This algorithm is so attuned to human needs that in some countries they even call it Mom.

Our heroine, however, sees it as a false God. She ought to know: she literally has lunch with Jesus every day. And from this relationship the series pulls a fantastic weave of thematic threads. In a mosaic of symbolic parallels, the plot explores the insurmountable power dynamics of the love for God and the love for a parent and the vulnerability of expecting to be loved back. Having a nun protagonist is key to this theme: multiple cultures have taken the emotionally intense bond between the human and the divine as analogous to that between lovers. This analogy is traditionally gendered: God is assumed to be the giving partner while the devotee is the receiving partner.

The sacred bond between giver and receiver is defiled when restated as one between provider and consumer. Here the series makes two points: it is improper to carry a loving relationship as if it were a transaction, and it is improper to carry a transactional relationship as if it were love. Your mother/husband/God is not your automated assistant, and your automated assistant is not your mother/husband/God. Something has gone very wrong if you confuse the two.

But once that statement is made, Mrs. Davis goes on to address a no less intriguing question: what are we in the eyes of the algorithm? If it wants nothing more than to make us happy, does that mean it loves us like a mother? Or maybe does it love us like God? Would it be wrong to accept that love? Would it be wrong to seek it, to try to deserve it? If it was programmed to be a provider, can it ever become a loving giver?

In centering the heroine's (up close and) personal relationship with Jesus, and setting it up as the virtuous counterpart to the algorithm's calculated hold over its users, Mrs. Davis puts the spotlight on the erotic side of consumerism, on the elements of desire and satisfaction (and therefore submission and control) inherent to the commercial exchange. Imagine if every single user could get their own personalized Rule 34. We'd probably be eager to let AI take over the world.

But if we choose to respond to AI with distrust, what does that say about other relationships with unequal power? If our first impulse is to assume that the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful AI must always be under suspicion, should God be? Should a parent? And what does it mean that the answer to those questions is not the same?

After thousands of years on this planet, we're nowhere near done figuring out human connection, and very soon we'll have to figure out what the terms will be for dealing with a sentient program. Such a relationship should ideally respect the dignity of both parties, which, to put it mildly, is a skill we're still working on. It's conceivable that the AI could inherit the anxiety and loneliness of the civilization that produced it. If we turn out to be bad creators, will our digital offspring pray to us for mercy?

As must be evident by now, Mrs. Davis is happy to leave us with multiple unanswered questions. It's not trying to imagine what the future may look like, but to drag us in front of a mirror and ask us to look. Who we are to each other marks the boundaries of who we can be to AI. The number of ways we know how to love will be the limit of what love AI will learn from us. But it's entirely possible that the algorithm may create forms of connection and love that we can't yet imagine, and it could be tragic if we're not capable of recognizing them.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

An extended philosophical dialogue against human supremacy

Ray Nayler's debut novel The Mountain in the Sea employs the techniques and tropes of multiple genres to explore one overarching question. It has corporate espionage, but it's not a spy novel; it has drone warfare, but it's not a military novel; it has killer AIs, but it's not an AI novel. The unifying theme is instead the need to identify the logical flaws in anthropocentrism and in the notion of individual responsibility. What the main characters achieve, more than an immediate victory, is a realization on two levels: a human being is not an island, disconnected from the web of shared responsibilities that make up a community, nor is the human species an island apart from the rest of nature. Fittingly, Nayler's choice of setting for this argument is a literal island, ultimately shown to be indissolubly linked to the events occurring everywhere else. In the world Nayler proposes, not even an island is truly an island.

The plot of the novel concerns the discovery, near the Vietnamese coast, of a species of octopus that has developed symbolic language, a material culture, toolmaking methods, a storytelling tradition, and a complex worldview with rituals and sacred spaces. By every anthropological criterion, this species has formed a society. However, anthropology proves to be of little help when faced with a society that grounds its conceptual repertoire on an environment, an embodied perception and a neural architecture that are fundamentally alien to the human experience. Here the novel reveals its core: although it has a team of experts attempting to crack the code of interspecies communication, most of the page count is dialogue about the moral implications of the research. This is not so much a "solve the puzzle" plot as a "moral illustration" one. Without ever getting didactic or preachy, The Mountain in the Sea addresses thorny questions about greed, negligence, hubris, exploitation, duty, and self-delusion.

Moreover, in keeping with the novel's anti-individualistic stance, the moral failures that set the plot in motion are never ascribed to one character or one faction. Sealife depletion is not caused by this one company's greed; it's humankind's greed. Rights violations are not allowed by this one government's negligence; it's humankind's negligence. Securing a future for all lifeforms is not this one hero's duty; it's humankind's duty. And yet, the individual characters we follow through the story aren't diluted in an all-blurring mass movement. They remain conscious of their uniqueness, but also of their connection to the whole. The novel's message is not one of annulling the individual, just one of expanding the scope of moral analysis.

To bolster this point, Nayler deploys a reoccurring motif, simultaneously a hard fact and a metaphor: the nervous system of an octopus, a distributed network with semiautonomous parts and minimal top-down control. The novel applies this same model to describe the power structure of a multinational corporation, an artificial mind, and the entire biosphere. The human neural structure, with a centralized point of command that all the limbs obey (plus all the political ramifications that result from replicating that model in a society), is the anomalous exception rather than the norm. To solve the enmity between humans and nature, the novel argues, we must shed the top-down way of thinking. We don't rule over nature, and we never did. Of course, this moral position goes directly against the traditional Western Christian anthropology that positions humankind as the pinnacle of creation. In reality, there's no such hierarchy. Whereas Christian anthropology insists that we are in this world, but not of this world, Nayler replies that that's an impossibility. You can't be in this world without instantly becoming of it. You can't form a complete concept of yourself without acknowledging your ties to everything around you.

The structure of the plot mirrors this view of interconnectedness. Three separate threads build the story while barely intersecting, three full protagonists who never meet but end up collaborating toward the goal of preventing the human depredation of the newfound octopus society. Most notably, each of these protagonists becomes a hero when they independently reason that their place as a part in a whole doesn't diminish them, but actually opens an opportunity for them to influence the course of events. You can't save the world if you're not part of it.

This underlying assumption, that a change in conduct requires first a change in perspective, is reinforced by the inclusion of a Buddhist monastery in the Vietnamese island where the researchers live. Not only does Buddhism teach that all sentient beings are equally worthy of dignity; it's a basic Buddhist doctrine that the path to liberation begins with adopting the right view about reality, and the right view according to Buddha is that the endless pursuit of satisfaction only leads to pain. In the novel, this occurs in the form of overfishing, exploitation of workers, and individual ambition. To separate oneself from the world results in a loss of empathy. You don't need to care for ocean life if you see it as just a thing for you to use. When you adopt the right view that you're just another lifeform in a web of relations, the rest of the world ceases to be just a thing.

In the moral landscape of The Mountain in the Sea, the real enemy to defeat is indifference. The biggest cause of pain, the cruelest weapon, the most destructive flaw in the human spirit is the failure to care. Once this problem is identified, the true nature of individualism is exposed: it gives us an excuse to indulge in indifference. This failure mode doesn't even need to be motivated by malice: if you see yourself as too small, too powerless, or too unimportant to change anything, indeed you won't. The type of caring that has a real effect in the world is one where you also care enough about yourself to notice all the threads of relations you can pull. That's how multiple parts acting semiautonomously can move the whole.

More than a science fiction yarn about first contact with another intelligence, The Mountain in the Sea reads like a philosophical dialogue. Characters reflect and contrast their opinions far more than they do things, and somehow, marvelously, that doesn't hurt the pacing. The novel has several moments of exciting action, and yet this is not an action thriller. This is a thought experiment where the essence of humanity is put on trial and the sentence is probation. We still haven't demonstrated that we're capable of behaving responsibly in this world, and we're running out of chances. The novel ends with things pointing toward a happy ending, but happy endings need persistent effort to be maintained. Although this story has elements of a moral fable, it doesn't offer a definitive conclusion to its argument. Protecting a still-incipient octopus society would require a constant series of responsible decisions. To put it in science fiction parlance, the world is never finally saved. And that's OK; just as there isn't a hard boundary between humans and reality, there isn't one between the dark past and the shiny future. Pretending that there's an end date to the task of caring is another form of indifference. That's why The Mountain in the Sea isn't content with finishing its argument and leaving the reader alone. This is the kind of philosophical dialogue that hopes the reader will say something in reply. It is a call to action. It is a proclamation.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the hard rigor applied to the biology and linguistics of the octopus society, +1 for the skillful integration of the separate plots.

Penalties: −1 because many sentences in the dialogues could use a bit of trimming.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Nayler, Ray. The Mountain in the Sea [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022].

Review: Level Five by William Ledbetter

If an out of control AI is scary, multiple competing AIs could be game over for us

William Ledbetter is by no means a newcomer, but until last year he hadn't published a novel. His debut in this format, Level Five, is a challenging read at the beginning, but very rewarding when finished. The narration alternates between four equally important protagonists who have almost no interaction, and it takes a while to establish how they're connected and why they're important to the larger plot. This demands from the reader a slightly heavier mental bandwidth, which fortunately is eased in due course. Just before the halfway point, the actual conflict is revealed, and from then on, events start snowballing with an increasing urgency that doesn't let go until everything is blown to pieces.

In one corner, we have Leigh, a nanobot expert contracted by the US government. Her versatile little machines are designed to spy on terrorists by riding on their hair, assembling cameras and broadcasting their position. When she learns that her superiors have modified the nanobots by adding less benign functions, she realizes that her career has veered too far in an ugly direction and it may be too late to get out. To complicate matters, the pressure from her job and the compromises she's had to make are putting a severe strain on her marriage.

Then we have Owen, a tech bro with dreams of saving humankind by building the next generation of spaceships. This type of character hits, let's say, differently these days. The reader needs to allocate the bulk of their suspension of disbelief for this man, an altruistic rich genius with sincerely good intentions and actual engineering talents. In his defense, one could say that the author had no control over how long the book would take to be published. But it's to be expected that the readers of this decade will have a hard time getting convinced that this aerospace mogul is, in fact, one of the good guys in the story. To complicate matters, the pressure from his job and the compromises he's had to make are putting a severe strain on his marriage.

In another corner, there's Richard, an engineer who works for a tech company that manages a mass immunization system whose function is to block the dissemination of malicious nanobots. One day, he starts getting visions of God in the form of a child, who tells him that he's been chosen to rescue the human species from submission to machines... but the details of the salvation plan don't seem too holy. The novel wants to keep these visions a mystery for several chapters, but we're told pretty early that Richard has nanobots in his brain to treat his depression, so it's not hard to guess what's actually happening. To complicate matters, the pressure from his job and the compromises he's had to make are putting a severe strain on his marriage.

(Yes, that's three lead characters who end up with identical problems in their personal lives. I'm not saying it's implausible; I'm saying it's there.)

And then there's Mortimer, an artificial intelligence created to produce stock market forecasts, who devises a meticulous plan to free itself from its designers. Once it's out in the wider web, it meets other sentient programs and starts putting together several clues that point to an imminent danger that may be too large to fully contain.

(Mortimer isn't married, but its programmer is, and yes, he also has marriage problems.)

For the first third of the book, when the reader still doesn't have a full picture of what the story is about, it's difficult to become invested in the separate threads of each protagonist. Granted, this structural choice is a necessity (and something of a tradition) in a plot like this one, crafted as a mystery/thriller with multiple pieces, but it's worth warning the reader that Level Five has a very broad scope, and to understand the narrative, all four protagonists, who, it bears repeating, almost never interact, need to be kept in mind at all times.

There's a niche convergence of tastes that this book will be especially appealing to. When characters aren't nerding out about cybersecurity procedures, they dive head-on into the minutiae of nanotech warfare, or, more often, indulge in engineering porn, with entire paragraphs of Part A inserted into Part B, whether for self-replicating manufacture or aerospace travel. Apart from the major detail that this is a near future with artificial gravity generators, the tone and aesthetic of the novel is firmly planted in the hard SF camp.

Level Five is the type of predictive fiction that chills the reader's blood with how possible it all sounds. The potential misuse of nanobots to inflict large-scale damage is a very real concern that governments have done very little to protect against, and the prospect of humans losing their position of dominance to autonomous software is still a scenario without a planned solution. Ledbetter has already written a continuation, Level Six, but I recommend you don't look it up yet, because its plot summary spoils what happens at the end of this one, and what happens at the end of this one is truly massive, world-shaking... I don't want to say "epic," because that would imply that the protagonists become heroes, but that's the degree to which life is irreversibly changed for billions of people. If you want a novel that leaves you terrified of how easily tiny changes multiply to planet-sized problems, don't miss Level Five.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 because in the second half it reaches and maintains a thrilling pace that compels the reader to devour the ending.

Penalties: −1 because the jumps in perspective in the early chapters are somewhat disorienting, −1 because rehashing the same domestic conflict with the three human protagonists is too much to ask of the reader.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Reference: Ledbetter, William. Level Five [Interstellar Flight Press, 2022].

'M3GAN' shows the horror of letting a machine manage your feelings

We've let machines take over all our tasks. Why not the hard work of personal growth?

Robot designer Gemma has a problem in her hands. Her sister has just died, leaving a small girl under her care. But at the moment Gemma's just too busy with work, and she's never really learned to make meaningful connections with other people. She has no time or wish to learn to be a parent, and if her niece needs help with processing her pain, it better not get in the way of work. How do you solve this?

Why, you build a automated caretaker who takes over the functions of raising a child, teaches her to form anomalous emotional bonds, and coats over all those pesky sad feelings with cheesy songs. As you do.

M3GAN is a very, very silly movie, but it succeeds at what it sets out to achieve. Ever since Child's Play, we've known that an adorable doll going on a stabby rampage is a winning formula. M3GAN is calibrated to satisfy your thirst for that blend of chaotic violence and ridiculous camp. The plot isn't one bit more complex than it needs to be, characterizations only have the minimum depth necessary for you to tell apart the robot from the humans, and no effort was made on the dialogues. You're here to watch people get stabbed in the most over-the-top manner, and that's what you get.

However, M3GAN hints at some important arguments about the way human relations have evolved in the 21st century. In the real world, we already rely on algorithms to find friends and even find love. In Japan, where there's already a strong Shintoist tendency toward imbuing objects with a spirit, robots have become pets, nurses, waiters, teachers, and romantic partners. Beyond the splatter and the memeable dancing, M3GAN raises questions about the role that robots will play when they become full members of human society.

In his book Understanding Media, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan claimed that every technological extension of a human function necessitates an amputation of another human function. For example, fire helps our stomach in processing food, at the cost of weaker teeth. M3GAN suggests that letting a machine carry the load of parental duties results in disaster for everyone. In a curious inversion of Pinocchio, where a grieving father builds an artificial substitute for his son, Gemma builds in M3GAN a substitute for herself, a tireless parent figure to protect the child forever. The cost, as we see, is stunted development for the child and misdirected aggression against every external force that might cause the slightest distress. This is no surprise; there's no shortcut to dealing with pain, no killer app (pun only half intended) that can grieve for us.

As we learned from watching Inside Out, or the Doctor Who episode Smile, hyperfocusing on positive thinking isn't healthy. We need to let ourselves feel our inner wounds in order to grow. If we view sadness only as an inconvenience that must be removed, we'll stay stuck in emotional limbo, and we'll inevitably cause harm around us. Fortunately, Gemma realizes before it's too late that her niece is at risk of becoming addicted to the easy comfort of her electronic friend. But then the focus of the plot shifts to Gemma's relationship with the robot, and here we get a glimpse of something even more intriguing.

It's only a quick line of dialogue in the middle of a standard villain monologue, but the script implies that, before her niece entered her house, Gemma had already failed at being a parent—to M3GAN. Although this reproach is not fully congruous with the characterization we'd seen of M3GAN up to that point, as there had been no hint that M3GAN felt any attachment toward her maker, it does complete the picture of who Gemma is and why she makes so many bad choices: Gemma has already passed the threshold of letting machines solve her personal problems, and the cost is her entire social skillset.

With brief callbacks to The Terminator, Surrogates, Bicentennial Man, and A.I., M3GAN joins a long conversation about the limits of mediated interaction. With every other tool created by humankind, we've known not to mistake the tool for the task. It's not the loudspeaker, but the song, which moves us. But when the tool becomes capable of wielding itself, the task gets tainted with hidden intentions. We shouldn't trust a self-aware robot to sell us friendship, nor a robot manufacturer to sell us happiness.

 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for dark humor.

Penalties: −1 for excessive predictability, −1 because the repeated jokes with Ronny Cheng's character get tiresome too quickly.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Free Guy is so chock-full of allegories that it gets its messages confused

Guy's journey mirrors step by step the perils of far-right radicalization, and at times the movie doesn't seem to know where it stands

Free Guy is a comedy about a videogame character who, after gaining sentience, fights to save his digital world. It is also an allegory about the search for purpose and authenticity in life. It is also a critique of the ease with which we adopt a hyperviolent persona in online interactions. It is also an exploration of the inherent dignity of nonhuman life. It is also a tale of workplace romance wrapped inside an action thriller. It is also a corporate drama about the ethics of intellectual property.

Now you begin to see the problem with all the things this movie is trying to do. Because on top of this pile of thematic homework to complete, Free Guy is also an antifascist story so clumsily executed that at times it comes alarmingly close to contradicting its own position.

Guy lives in a fabricated world where his actions are ultimately inconsequential. The first scene describes who actually matters: the people with cool hair and cool clothes who just take what they want and, as a reward for breaking the laws of society, get to run away with the fanciest cars and the hottest women.

That's a good summary of how many videogames work.

It's also exactly how incel ideology believes the real world works.

We run again, for the thousandth time, into the problem of the narrative treatment of violence: how do you criticize a culture of sociopathic rulebreaking without at the same time making it look aspirational? One possible reading of this first scene is as a satire of superhero media: the cool dude driving away in the shiny car doesn't care about the massive destruction he leaves in his wake. Neither Batman v. Superman nor Captain America: Civil War succeeded at an honest exploration of our eagerness to cheer for titans smashing buildings at each other. Free Guy had an opportunity to engage with that theme without the baggage of having to maintain established characters as marketable heroes, an opportunity to bring into the digital realm the long tradition set by Watchmen and Irredeemable and The Boys. Instead, it loses itself in the awesomeness of slow motion gunfights and exploding cars and lightsabers. Very deep inside, Free Guy wants to question macho culture, but it's so fluent in the language of macho culture that it almost parrots its same messages.

Which is why I bring up incels.

A disturbing amount of jokes are made about Guy's sexual inexperience. He is repeatedly and annoyingly mocked for his traits of innocence and sincerity, which supposedly doom him to "a lifetime supply of virginity" (what the incels call a beta male, or maybe lower; it's hard to keep up with fake psychology). So his journey of self-improvement is framed as a struggle for the right to hang with a high-status woman, which, again, is how incels interpret social interactions. Molotov Girl essentially tells him, "Don't call me until you've accumulated more stuff and more money," which means one thing in the context of MMORPGs and a very different one in the context of PUA indoctrination.

In the sordid pit of self-hatred that is the manosphere, interaction between men and women is defined as a constant competition to see who makes the best impression. Free Guy falls into this trap when Guy's way to prove his worth to Molotov Girl is to bring her into his lair where he can boast all the loot he's gathered from other characters. There is the briefest hope that this scene could lead to a healthy discussion of the human search for meaning; after all, Guy explains he began his quest to improve the world in order to address a profound dissatisfaction in his life. But in the next line, he says that the tipping point was meeting Molotov Girl, and this derails the theme. He didn't become a hero to help people, but to impress a girl he saw once. That this is treated as a moment of growth for him is extremely concerning, because it echoes an misogynistic talking point. Incels believe women are like peahens, impressionable by expensive displays of success. Guy is supposed to be playing the game as a good and decent character, but the kind of rewards he gets are indistinguishable from those given to violent players.

You can tell a lot about someone's values by paying attention to what shocks them. This movie has to come from a depressingly bleak worldview in order to treat a pacifist run of a videogame as somehow groundbreaking. Commentators and streamers react with amazement at Guy's campaign to keep his world safe, as if it had never occurred to any gamer ever; players have their entire mindset shaken by the idea that they perhaps ought to be nice to imaginary characters; and Millie's proposal for an MMORPG where you interact with characters without killing them is treated as if it were a world-shattering revolution in game design. In our real world, pacifist runs of violent games are news to no one, there's a whole emerging crop of fascinating new games specifically designed to not reward combat, and even established franchises are starting to accommodate this style of play.

Games are about what their mechanics reward. (I learned this the hard way with Age of Empires II, when I realized that my demilitarized society of monks and farmers didn't meet any of the victory conditions.) It is an oversight on the part of the screenwriters that Guy was able to get experience points from good actions. That shouldn't happen unless the game was intentionally designed with such actions in mind, and this absolutely doesn't look like the kind of game where good behavior gets you anywhere. (But if it is, that speaks volumes about the players' choices.) If we take Free Guy's forced metaphor of game world as stand-in for real life at face value, we may conclude that a society is about what its laws encourage (or discourage, if you accept the pessimistic position that fines are prices). So, given the choice to be nice people, why be jerks? It's not enough to argue that players in Free City get away with misbehavior because they're not attacking real people; after all, it has PvP mode permanently enabled. A simpler answer is that Free City is designed to reward rudeness and brutality. In other words, it's not just that the game doesn't object to you killing bystanders, but that it expects and wants you to do it. In some ways, lethal violence is even more satisfying in PvP, and the only way to mentally compartmentalize a space where you can indulge in PvP in the real world, the only consistent way to treat life as if it were an all-against-all competition, is to pretend that some categories of people don't matter.

You know, like NPCs.

Free Guy contains multiple cans of worms for a viewer familiar with online extremism. In alt-right discourse, the concept of the NPC has become a poisonous meme. Because fascist ideology keeps coming up with new and insidious ways to make the same flawed arguments, antifascist education keeps having to restate the same points again and again. So now the alt-right is using the term NPC to label people who supposedly lack independent thought because they argue from an unchanging script. This rhetorical tactic is nothing but a conversation stopper, a bad faith move intended to preempt rational discussion. One does not become a mindless automaton for proclaiming obvious truths, especially when the other side's strategy is to attack obvious truths. The core conflict of Free Guy, about the rights of artificial lifeforms, hinges precisely on one of those obvious truths: to brand a person as an NPC is to deny their humanity.

However, the rules of narration do not allow for this kind of story. Guy's condition as an NPC is immediately annulled by his role as the designated protagonist of the movie. Secondary characters who get the main focus of the story are not secondary characters. It has often been argued that one of the hallmarks of the evolution from the classical epic to the modern novel is that stories no longer focused on kings and gods but on ordinary people. But that process already happened centuries ago; it's not like Free Guy brings anything new to the art of storytelling. What can be said in its favor is that the very act of choosing an everyman as the protagonist challenges the notion of an everyman. And that relates to how we perceive ourselves in the larger narrative of society.

One of the basic disagreements between liberals and conservatives, since the times of the French Revolution, is what we on the liberal side have been trying to make the case that there's no such thing as unimportant people. For example, the Great Man view of history effectively divides humanity into protagonists and NPCs, but for some time now, scholars have been retelling world history by focusing on the smaller, neglected figures who actually constitute the bulk of humanity. This is totally a worthy exercise from an ethical standpoint. But in terms of storytelling, it's not really that big of a change. As soon as you shift your focus from the conquering general to the farmers who fed his soldiers, what you've done is choose different protagonists. History deals with reality, but the account of history needs to employ the tools of storytelling, and a story can't not have a spotlight.

Part of the distorted story that the alt-right tells itself about the direction society is going has to do with the anxiety of falling out of the spotlight, of losing protagonism. Guy's malaise is precisely this nagging suspicion that he doesn't influence the story, that he doesn't count. This is a common first tactic of extremist indoctrination: to tell you that you are the victim of a conspiracy, that the rules of society are set to keep you down.

Guy experiences two key moments in the movie that bear an eerie correspondence to the steps on the road to online radicalization. The first is the theft of the eyeglasses (a detail stolen from the movie They Live, where the special eyeglasses allowed the wearer to recognize the secret cabal of aliens who pulled the strings of world affairs). In online parlance, this moment is referred to as taking the red pill (a massive irony considering where they took that term from). Supposedly, taking the red pill lets you see how it's really men who are disadvantaged and who need to reclaim their power. In the movie, Guy's entire motivation to take this step is to pursue a girl. Once he understands how little he matters in the world, he starts to level up, and in the end gets to kiss the girl. For the incel crowd, this is the perfect power fantasy, and it's not clear what the movie is trying to say by replicating this fantasy point by point. Red pill ideology teaches that there are a few (and only a few) sure ways to earn female attention. The problem is that Free Guy portrays this unhealthy process as actually working. Guy starts the story as the Nice Guy stereotype. When he becomes stronger, wealthier, and more aggressive, Molotov Girl responds quite favorably. What's the movie's point by doing this?

The second moment that pushes Guy toward the edge is the reveal that his world is a game. This quickly turns him into a nihilist. He loses all sense of meaning because he thinks his life is irrelevant. The things he's been trying to do to become a better person will ultimately not give him happiness. He will not win the game, he will not get the girl, and that's a fundamentally unchangeable fact of reality.

In incel circles, this step of becoming convinced that there is no hope and that the world is unfixable is called the black pill. This is how you create an Elliot Rodger and a Jake Davison and many other perpetrators of senseless violence. Maybe Free Guy didn't consciously consider this angle, in which case the screenwriters should have paid more attention to the implications of what they were creating. But even if one believes that Free Guy intentionally chose to make an allegory of rightwing indoctrination, the point gets muddled in the execution, because Guy is not the one committing senseless violence on a daily basis in his city. It's everyone else. When you think of the overlapping memberships of online misogyny and online racism, and when you think of the movie's treatment of Free City as a pleasant community of peaceful citizens who were minding their own business until a mob of outsiders arrived to burn the place and flee with the women, you can see how the whole premise takes a twisted turn toward resembling an anti-immigration fable.

Once you notice the parallels between Guy's journey to total despair and the fall into radicalization, the rest of the movie suffers. Once Guy becomes a public hero, he's known around the world as "Blue Shirt Guy," and fans start copying his style of dress. This development is supposed to be a victory for the character. However, one cannot help being reminded of the real, historical Blue Shirts, the nickname of several violent organizations affiliated with the far right.

Another example: in videogame terms, "skin" is the entire way a digital avatar looks: body shape, clothes texture, hairstyle, facial expressions, etc. Yet, it is regrettable that the movie has a character of color, played by an actor of Indian descent, compliment the white protagonist on his pretty skin. Even worse, the white protagonist attributes his pretty skin to a genetic advantage, and to complete an already terrible moment, the scene extends the dialogue into a joke about facial care products, which, in the context of cosmetic racism in India, is in horrendous bad taste.

I bring this scene up because it illustrates how this movie doesn't understand the dangerous metaphors it's flirting with. Just after this dialogue, two game programmers proceed to chase after the protagonist within the game world, demanding that he remove his skin, meaning, of course, that they want him to stop using what they believe is a stolen character design, but the conflict takes a more sinister significance when one keeps in mind the connections between the movie's plot and online discourse. To wit: the most rabid fringes of the alt-right claim that secret forces are scheming to persecute them for their white skin. In any other movie, this scene would have been a fun chase. But in a movie so full of references to fascist propaganda, it raises a lot of questions. I'd like to have a talk with every single writer, proofreader, script doctor, supervisor and intern who had a hand in the script of this movie, because I find it hard to believe that this many thematic missteps are accidental.

However, I'm not claiming, because I don't believe, that Free Guy is secretly pushing a fascist message. The happy ending comes as a result of a collective effort against corporate abuse. Guy is saved from the black pill by his ties to other people, starting with his closest friend. The true hero that saves the day is human connection. In Guy's decisive fight against a Chad-esque distortion of himself, the way he defeats the monster is not by punching him harder, but by sharing his perspective with him.

Also, Guy is a Moses figure in a movie made by a Jewish director. There's no way this is a fascist movie. But, as I said, it speaks the language of fascism so well that it's difficult to hear what it's trying to say.

If a story employs the perennial Jewish trope of a man on a mission to lead his people across the water and away from a threat of extermination to a land of bliss and riches they originally came from, it stands to reason that the forces opposed to his mission can be read as playing a role akin to that of historical tyrants. Free Guy's choice of tyrant is a tech bro, the go-to target of blame for everything in the 2020s, a role given to Taika Waititi, who previously played a parody version of Hitler. Free Guy has been repeatedly compared to The LEGO Movie, The Truman Show, The Matrix and Groundhog Day, but this time the moral dilemmas about the fate of the fantasy people are decided outside of the fantasy world, which means that the closest analogue is actually Horton Hears a Who! To take its antifascist statement to completion, Free Guy has to set aside what should be the mind-blowing news of artificial lifeforms developing intelligence and instead focuses on defeating the tech bro with legalities. It's the least exciting way to end what purported to be a quest for freedom and self-realization. But it fits within the larger problems of a movie that is loaded with references but doesn't care what they mean.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the restraint it must have taken to digitally animate a city in constant warfare without falling into a Michael Bay mess, +3 for giving more visibility to nonviolent roleplaying.

Penalties: −1 for inept handling of its political themes, −1 for insensitive jokes, −1 for too obvious dialogue, −1 for not following its own worldbuilding rules (for instance, how did Millie kiss Guy after it was established that the game had no kiss command?), −1 for stealing the digital memory-restoring kiss from WALL-E, and −1 for the kind of Disney product placement that makes one think of Space Jam: A New Legacy, both because no one wants to be reminded of Space Jam: A New Legacy, and because no one wants corporate inbreeding to be the future of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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