Rebellions are Built on Hope: Andor S2E3

 Wrapping up the first arc of season two, “Harvest” is a gut-punch of an episode.

Content warning: discussion of attempted rape.

At first, I was suspicious of the three episode a week release schedule since it seemed like a way to quickly wrap up a show that could have gone on for months. Why hurry it out? As the structure of the season becomes clearer, the three episode chunks tell complete stories leading up to Rouge One (2016), where season two ends. “Harvest” also shows how they are using the three episodes to build smaller climaxes within the season.

Finally free of last of Maya Pei’s people on Yavin 4, Cassian makes contact with Luthen’s assistant Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) where he finds out Bix, Brasso, and Wilmon are in danger on Mina-Rau. In true Rebel fashion, Cassian breaks protocol to go help his friends, but he arrives too late.

As Bix, Brasso, and Wilmon are preparing to leave, the Imperial agents arrive earlier than scheduled. Wilmon is missing (as he promised his girlfriend he wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye), and Brasso goes looking for him while Bix finishes packing. While Brasso is gone, the Imperial officer who asked Bix to go to dinner with him in the previous episode arrives at their home. 

What follows has outraged some Star Wars fans as Tony Gilroy and his crew of storytellers remain dedicated to telling the story of empire, colonization, patriarchy—and sexual violence is part of that legacy. The Imperial officer threatens Bix by acknowledging her status: “I know you’re illegal. We’ve been counting visas.” He explains he recognizes that undocumented “help” is required in order to bring in the necessary harvest, but that the farmers of Mina-Rau are still breaking Imperial law. He then propositions her for sex by saying how “stressful” his job is: “Such a simple choice.” All she has to do is have sex with him, and he will leave them alone.

Bix proceeds to fight him off in a brutal scene. The struggle is bloody and painful, with Bix barely managing to protect herself, eventually causing the officer’s death. When the other officer tells her to come out, she shouts to him: “He tried to rape me.”

The sequence is made all the more jarring by quick cuts between her fight and Mon Mothma getting drunk and dancing at her daughter’s wedding. In Bix’s scenes, there’s no musical score, emphasize the quiet peacefulness of the wheat fields, broken by the violence. This moment cuts to loud galactic pop music and the bright colors of Chandril as Mothma drinks away her sorrows over the loss of her daughter to a predatory marital tradition that she also had to go through as well as realizing her friend, Tay, who helped her support the rebels, will have to be assassinated, as implied by Luthen. In order to cope, she proceeds to get drunk and dance.

This sequence for both women is absolutely crushing in different ways. Both are being threatened by the patriarchy—and in Mothma’s case, watching her daughter enter a predatory relationship—but each are also in different levels of danger, which the editing, sound, sets, even color mixing juxtaposes brilliantly. While Andor is quality storytelling, this sequence also demonstrates how well-made it is. 

For all its success as a piece of storytelling, “Harvest” immediately drew the ire of Star Wars fans. As I wrote in the last post, Tony Gilroy and his team are dedicated to presenting the banality and the evil of the Empire because it is a fascist empire. I’ve often thought of Star Wars as a failed piece of critical media because as much as George Lucas claimed he wanted to critique the U.S., he made the Empire too cool. You can’t have fans getting Vader tattoos, wearing Imperial symbols, or marching in Storm Trooper brigades at fan events and claim to have successfully critiqued empire. Andor works hard to reposition the Empire as deeply not cool and also as practicing the human rights violations that we know empires practice, such as sexual violence against women of color. 

For those of you who are familiar with my work or other pieces of criticism, I generally do not advocate for work that repeats the oppression of the real world. I’m a big believer that science fiction and fantasy can do different work by imagining worlds that are not oppressive or not simply repeating the same systemic injustices of today. To that end, after “Harvest,” I’ve been sitting with why I think this episode was necessary, including the attempted rape. Part of the reason is the fan reaction this episode generated. As written about by The Hollywood Reporter, an influential fan account on X, @StarWarsFanTheory with over 91,000 followers, wrote: “Vader wouldn't tolerate that shit [rape] nor does the Empire condone it.” 

This concept that the Empire and Vader would not tolerate sexual violence is surprising because of the amount of violence that the Empire does condone. Vader tortures Leia with a mind probe in IV, and when he tortures Han Solo in V, it’s implied there is no reason for the torture other than to do it. Additionally the Empire blows up Alderaan without evacuation—as in, destroys an entire people. Then, let’s add that Vader/Anakin mass murders innocent children not once but twice. This conceit that rape would not happen under the Empire when equally vile human rights violations are a traditional part of the storytelling demonstrates the need for Tony Gilroy’s commitment to displaying not only the Empire’s boardroom banality but also how power is wielded against the oppressed. If Andor season one wasn’t enough to strip the Empire of its coolness, then Gilroy is making sure there can be no mistake after this season.  

Yet, while what Gilroy is doing is important—forcing viewers to confront the violence of empire in all its forms—I still come back to my question: why does Andor feel so necessary right now when I usually prefer work that doesn’t repeat oppression but imagines alternatives? The conclusion I come to so far is that Gilroy and his team know the political stakes of the story they’re telling. While filming wrapped before the re-election of Trump and just after the beginning of the latest attempt to destroy Palestine, fascism was still on the rise. It was uncanny to watch these three episodes while people, myself included, protest for the release of detained immigrants and against mass deportations in the U.S. 

Another way Gilroy and his team overlay our world onto Star Wars is the racial politics. While Star Wars has always been “post-racial” in essence that skin color does not impact the everyday lives of the characters, the racialized casting in the original trilogy paired with the orientalism of the Jedi demonstrates the movies have always had racial overtones. Whether it’s Chewy (Peter Mayhew) being a stand-in for the Black sidekick or the only Black character, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), being a smuggler who betrays the (white) heroes, the racial politics of the world offscreen inform the characters onscreen (let’s not even get started on Jar Jar Binks or the Trade Federation). While Andor has continued the idea of a “post-racial” world in that the characters are not treated differently for their skin color, the creators have also allowed the racial politics off screen to inform the storytelling. 

For example, in the first three episodes, Mon Mothma—the rich, white woman—is not experiencing the same type of violence as Bix, an undocumented woman of color. When Mothma is pressured to give sexual attention to Tay or else he threatens to reveal her financial support for the rebels, it is not even a question that she would do such a thing. Instead, Luthen—the white, male high society leader—has Tay killed (or so it is implied in this episode, with the dirty work also being done by a person of color). In another example, the white Imperial officer attempts to rape Bix while his driver, a Black officer, waits outside—a stark contrast to Mothma’s experience with predation. 

While I often question the usefulness of this type of repetition of systemic issues, in Andor, the show counterbalances by demonstrating a variety of different tools for resistance. As Robert Evans, a host of the podcast It Could Happen Here, explained on Bluesky: "The point of Andor isn't 'only anarchists are right' or 'only terrorism works' or 'only liberals defeat fascism' it's that birthing a movement that can destroy an imperial regime requires a diversity of tactics and people all willing to throw their lives away for the cause." In careful detail, this show does not only demonstrate the inner workings of empire but also of resistance, whether it’s the leftist infighting of the Maya Pei delaying Cassian to practical depictions of operational security that inspired a whole popsec analysis of Andor. 

In the first arc of season two, Andor delivers with quality storytelling as well as striking visuals, use of sound, and set design. Much like season one, the show doesn’t shy away from depicting the dark side, but always in relation to why the characters fight. The danger is real, and these episodes demonstrate that for the most precarious—the undocumented person of color—the consequences are much more serious than the white high society senator, even as all sacrifice and work for the same goal: to win. So far, Andor season two demonstrates not only the tools of the enemy but how to powerfully resist.

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.   

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

The most charming, entertaining cold blanket to ever rain death on my joyful dream of space settlement

Cover design by Stephanie Ross; Cover art by Zach Weinersmith

Before Kelly and Zach Weinersmith released what would become a Hugo Award-winning Best Related Work, most people¹ only know of them through Zach Weinersmith’s webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. I’ve been an avid fan of SMBC for years, charmed and impressed by its clever willingness to combine deep discussions of philosophy, robotics, mathematics, economics, religion, literature and linguistics with some pretty crude humor. And sex.² So I was naturally curious to see what would come out of a writing duo composed of Zach Weinersmith and the woman who was willing to live with him, Kelly Weinersmith.

And the answer is a darn good book! A City on Mars is a discussion of the scientific, ethical, and legal obstacles that stand in the way of actually building settlements on other planets, asteroids, moons, or space stations. Since reality is no fun, the Weinersmiths bear the unenviable task of breaking the news to us that, honestly, space settlement is probably not going to be feasible for a very, very long time. They don’t like it any more than we do. They say so in the introduction: they started out wanting to write this book buoyed by the enthusiasm engendered of burgeoning space tech industries. We’re so close! they thought. What are those last steps before we have a city on Mars?

And then they did the research, and discovered the full extent of the depressing Well Actually. And because they are killjoys (or perhaps because they already had the book deal), they decided to kill our joy too. But because they are not complete monsters, they do it delightfully, with sympathy and wit and a kindhearted touch that crushes all our hopes into stardust no less thoroughly for all the gentleness of their approach.

The book is organized according to the types of obstacles that need to be overcome. First, the Weinersmiths discuss the known biological complications of weeks or months in zero gravity, combined with the unknown—but, extrapolating from zero-g, probably non-trivial!—biological complications of long-term or permanent life in low gravity. There is an appropriate degree of poop-centered discussion, and due diligence given to the procreative act in space. Proposed technological ameliorations of various degrees of wackiness are laid out, of which a representative sample include 'sucking pants' (to encourage fluids to circulate more freely through the lower half of the body) and the 'snuggle tunnel' (to counteract Newton's third law, which complicates thrusting motions in zero-g). The broad takeaway is that, for a self-sustaining city with natural population growth (i.e., more births than deaths/departures), we would need to be able to gestate, birth, and raise children in lower-than-earth gravity; and given the known complications of reduced gravity on healthier-than-average, trained, consenting adults, it would be wildly unethical to impose such conditions on children.

Next, there is a discussion of where such a space settlement might be situated, with considerations not just of Mars, but also the moon, and space stations. We get some really fascinating discussions of the technology that would be needed to make such settlements airtight, including meditations on the convenience of lava tunnels and warnings about the dangers of regolith dust (very pointy particles). The broad takeaway here is that it would be so wildly expensive that there is no possible way that any degree of mining or resource exploitation from asteroids or planets could make it economically viable. Just because raw materials might be available in situ doesn’t mean they can be easily transformed into the resources needed to build and maintain a settlement, and transporting them back to Earth as an economic export isn’t any better. As the Weinersmiths put it, ‘It does you no good to know the asteroids are worth $700 trillion if it costs $700 trillion and ten cents to get them to market. After all, if you’re willing to just ignore the cost of acquisition, you’re really better off digging on Earth. Earth contains about 10^23 tons of iron. If we assume a value of $100 a ton, that’s roughly a bajillion zillion hojillion dollars’ worth of iron.’³

After a brief discussion of not-entirely-unsuccessful attempts at creating self-sustaining miniature biomes on Earth (in brief, the participants were not dead at the end of it), the Weinersmiths then move on to the less sciencey but equally important consideration of law. How does the philosophy of ownership work in space? (Latin figures here, as does John Locke.) How does public vs. private control work? How does international legal jurisdiction work? What laws are already in place? Are they adequate to govern settlements, and what would it take to change them? I found this absolutely fascinating—not least because so much of the discussion of space settlement focuses on the STEM-related challenges, while the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Jeff Goldblum turn out to have some important contributions.

The book concludes with an unnerving discussion that fans The Expanse are already familiar with: the ease of destroying a planet by chucking rocks at it from space. In brief: it’s very easy, and the more settlements in space we have—and especially the more contentious those settlement politics get (see: Humanities and Social Sciences)—the likelier it is to happen.

It’s rather a bleak picture. Space settlement is not going to solve any of the problems we have on Earth—not economic, not political, not philosophical. (There is no evidence that living in space grants any real novel perspective on life; post-space astronauts are as nutso as the rest of us. Also, they always lie on their psych exams.) And certainly it won't be any kind of solution to climate problems. Any environment off Earth is going to be wildly worse to live in than the most horrible worst-case climate disaster we can imagine here. The Weinersmiths propose a very revealing litmus test: if you run around outside naked for ten minutes, will you be alive at the end of it? On Earth, no matter how climate-changed, the answer will usually be yes. Anywhere else, the answer will most definitely be no.

However, the book is so charmingly written that I didn’t feel bad taking my medicine. Zach Weinersmith contributes lots of entertaining illustrations, and both Weinersmiths have absolutely nailed the right tone here: Look, they say. We’re like you. We’re not experts (or, at least, Zach isn’t; Kelly Weinersmith is a member of the faculty in biosciences at Rice University), but we’re pretty smart, and we’re super interested in this. And we spent a lot of time doing the research and talking to the experts and going to the conferences and reading the histories, reports, and other primary sources. We know all the bits and bobs of space trivia that caught your attention in the first place, and we can tell you what actually happened, not just that Twitter thread that you shared.⁴ And we really, really wanted the answer to be more encouraging. But it’s just not. It sucks, dude. Sorry.

Yes, it does suck. But if someone had to shatter my dreams, I couldn’t have asked for them to be shattered more nicely. A very well-deserved Hugo.

1 Fine, okay, me! I’m most people! For the duration of this review I hold absolute power over words herein and the meanings thereof, and I so decree that my opinions of the world are, for the next 1200 words or so, shared by the majority of the rest of humanity.^↩
2 There is an awful lot of sex in SMBC, which I'm acutely aware of every time I consider whether some brilliantly erudite commentary on type vs. token phoneme frequency is appropriate to put on my office door.^↩
3 When I shared this gem of expository wit with my spouse, he responded severely, ‘That’s not the right number. It’s $10^25.’ My spouse is a mathematics teacher, and highly allergic to flights of fancy that neglect the basic tenets of scientific notation.^↩
4 The one about the 100 tampons being sent up with the first female astronaut? That wasn’t NASA dudes being clueless about menstruation. A female astronaut/doctor, Dr Rhea Seddon, was involved in making the decision. And the decision settled on 100 tampons because NASA’s approach to supplies was ‘take the absolute maximum amount you can imagine needing under any circumstances, double it, and then add 50%.’ Which is, y’know, not a terrible idea!^↩

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

• Buzzkill
  
• Killjoy
  
• Dream-crusher
• Full of fascinating facts about the challenges across sciences and humanities preventing us from settling space
• Cute illustrations
  

Reference: Weinersmith, Kelly and Weinersmith, Zach. A City on Mars [Particular Books, 2023].

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.

Microreview: The Mars House, by Natasha Pulley

 A political thriller that suffers from the strictures of science fiction as a genre

Natasha Pulley’s work tends to run to type: Delicately drawn queer relationships, exquisite images evoking the unknowability of (super)natural forces, an unmoored approach to time, and plots focusing on conquest and colonialism that usually involve Britain at one end or the other. The Mars House, a science fiction political thriller set on Mars, would seem like a striking departure from this mold, and yet, at its core, nearly all of Pulley’s key interests are represented. The problem is that what works beautifully in historical fiction tinged with the fantastic does not translate well to science fiction.

The book centers around January Stirling, a ballet dancer from England who must flee a flooded London as a climate refugee. The city of Tharsis, a Martian colony, is always looking for new people, and make a practice of taking in climate refugees like January. But people who have grown up on Earth are three times stronger than natural Martian citizens, due to the gravity differential, and because they do not know how to moderate their strength, they are deadly additions to society. One in 267 Earthborn people kills a Martian by accident every year, on account of their strength—a statistic that takes familiar arguments about immigration and gives them a decidedly fresh twist. It’s one thing to insist that taking in refugees is a humane and decent thing to do, or to show how immigration results in a net positive economic impact. It’s quite another when the cost of such policies is measurable in lives.

Tharsis has coped with this uneasy balance by creating a two-tiered society. At the top are natural or naturalized Martians: those who were born on the planet, or have undergone a grueling and not-entirely-safe medical procedure to render their physiology comparable to more fragile Martian norms. The underclass are the ‘Earthstrong’, people like January, whose comparative robustness makes them valuable workers in jobs like manufacturing, where manual labour and brute strength are valuable, but who are still seen as a peril in shops or on public transit. They are legally required to wear resistance cages, a metal mechanism that resists their movement in a manner evocative of Harrison Bergeron, reducing their strength to Mars-normal. Regulations restrict their movement: they can remove their cages only in certain places, under clearly defined circumstances. Public service messaging reinforces these regulations in dehumanizing language.

This strength-related division between Earthstrong and Tharses is bolstered by a gender-related divide. The Tharsese have done away with social gender entirely. Everyone is ‘they’. To a Martian, gendered language is rude, uncouth. It evoke back-alley thuggery, because on Mars gendered pronouns are only used by Earthstrongers, for Earthstrongers. Oh—and for animals. A Martian cannot be ‘he’ or ‘she’, but a dog or an Earthstronger can be. Again, immigrants are dehumanized.

Within this society, January Stirling makes a home for himself. He wears his cage obediently, works diligently in a factory to manufactor water from biowaste at a molecular level, and struggles to support himself in a grey market economy that runs on energy credits, since unnaturalized Martians are shut out of the currency economy. Then, in an unfortunate example of politics staining everything it touches, he catches the attention of Aubrey Gale, a militantly anti-refugee Tharsese politician on the rise. As a political stunt, Gale invites January to enter into a temporary political marriage, and January—now out of work and unable to support himself---has no other option but to agree. (This is rather typical of Pulley, whose queer relationships almost always feature a decidedly unhealthy imbalance of power.) From there, plottery ensues: explosions and dinner parties, talking mammoths and almost-ghosts, mysteriously missing persons and maybe-murdered marital predecessors, and a great deal of immigration policy and political intrigue in all directions.

The real strength of this book is, I think, the politics of immigration in this Tharsese context. Pulley has always been quite interested in culture clash and colonization, and the interplanetary setting here allows her the freedom to explore familiar ideas in novel ways. By making Earthstrongers genuinely dangerous to indigenous Martians, Pulley neatly balances the two sides of an argument that most left-leaning readers of SFF would see as laughably unbalanced in its real-world incarnation. The world presented here has no good solutions: Earth’s climate crisis is catastrophically bad, and Mars has room. Yet Earthstrong people are genuinely dangerous, and the more of them arrive on Mars, the more they will threaten the Tharsese. Yet on Mars itself, they are an underclass, forced either to physically hamper themselves, or else undergo debilitating, irreversable medical procedures for the sake of reaping the benefits of Tharses citizenship. Integrating the two populations cannot be made safe or equitable. Segregating them into separate settlements would only create two groups who must share limited resources, one of which is vastly stronger than the other—an imbalance that will not end well.

On top of this quite sophisticated political world-building, there are also beautiful references to her earlier books. A reference to the Peruvian Andes is, I think, an Easter egg for readers who read The Bedlam Stacks (the finest of Pulley’s books, in my opinion). At one point a character pulls out a cell phone that is a family heirloom, a Mori cell phone. Mori is the name of the titular character from The Watchmaker of Filligree Street, and the idea that his craft would have evolved from 19th century watchmaking to 21st century cell phone manufacturing is a lovely connector between the very different worlds in Pulley’s books. (It’s also rather a nice touch that a key mark of the quality of Mori craftsmanship is that the cell phones can be easily taken apart so that damaged parts can be swapped out to effect repairs. *coughcoughApplecoughcough*)

Other characteristically Pulleyan touches abound, but with less delicacy or success than in her previous books. The growing intimacy between January and Gale is the core of their character arcs, but it feels a bit forced. Part of that might be the quite tropey marriage-of-convenience plot device. Part of it might be the fact that January has internalized the anti-Earthstrong sentiment to a distressing degree of self-loathing, which makes his growing feelings for Gale—a rabid anti-Earthstronger, remember—seem less like affection and more like another representation of that self-loathing. 

The evocation of the ineffable power of natural forces, too, is present, but less satisfying. For example, water is a scarce commodity on Mars—hence January’s job at the factory manufacturing it—but Gale’s family has made its fortune extracting it from the atmosphere. Several scenes take place among a plantation of solar mirrors, which power Tharsis, while also warming the surrounding air and nurturing a pine forest. The microclimate generates mist, and nearby is a herd of genetically reconstituted mammoths, who can communicate with humans. Some veery evocative imagery, to be sure, but also a little bit silly.

I think that the problem with this book lies almost entirely its use of science fictional devices, rather than fantasy, to generate these otherworldly touches. Because with science fiction things must be explained, and explained in a way that makes sense. And these explanations simply don’t. Take, for example, the misty forest: It’s misty, we’re told, because the air is warmer around the solar collectors. But how can that work? Mist precipitates when the amount of water vapor grows too high for the air to hold. But warm air can hold more water than cold air. This is why dew collects at night: the air cools down, and water precipates out. This is also why winter air is dry: even if the outside air is fully saturated with water, once we warm it up indoors we increase its capacity to hold water, and so its relative humidity will plummet. Now consider Mars: It’s so dry that water must be created at a molecular level in massive solar-powered factories. Warming up the air is going to make the problem worse. So where does the water come from, to saturate this warmed air so completely that mist appears?

Consider, too, the cages that Earthstrongers must wear. Their mechanism, we are told, is to resist muscular movement, which prevents an overly enthusiastic gesture from taking off a Martian’s head. (While we’re at it, I’m a little perplexed at the frequency of limb-removal being attributed to Earthstrongers. Certainly bones and muscles will be weaker, but I have difficulty seeing how life in low-gravity weakens tendons and ligaments enough that someone of typical Earth stature can rip off a Martian’s leg. If you'll forgive a gruesome comparison, I do not believe it is the case that one in 267 preschool teachers accidentally dismembers a toddler every year.) The cages counteract movement; they do not change anything about the internal density or composition of an Earthstronger’s body. So how is it that a fall in Martian gravity is harmless to an Earthstronger who is not wearing a cage, but deadly to an Earthstronger who is wearing a cage? How is it that a crowd-repelling water hose can be shrugged off by an Earthstronger who is not wearing a cage, but will sweep away an Earthstronger who is wearing a cage?  The Earthstrong muscle and bone density are not going anywhere. The narrative purpose of the cages is clear: make Earthstrongers like Martians. But the mechanism that we are given simply doesn’t match the effect that they are intended to generate.

There are lots of examples of this: ideas that are evocative and useful for plotting and pacing and tension and stakes, but which simply don't work if you're trying to come up with a science-fictional type solution for them. With Pulley's approach to fantasy, she can leave it in the misty background, generating spectacular stories that aren’t dragged down by mechanics or unconvincing science. With SF, she can't. 

So, in sum, this is not Pulley's best work. Nevertheless, I devoured it in a day, and will devour her next, because even Pulley's not-best work is still pretty good stuff.

—

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Mars
  

• Politics of immigration and gender
  

• Queer-normal society
  

• Unconvincing SF mechanics
  

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.

References: 

Pulley, Natasha. The Mars House. [Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024].

´The Ark' makes a plea for mutual trust to save humankind

This story proves you don't have to be a ruthless cynic to apply game theory to hard survival choices

Future Earth has gone to hell in a stinking, toxic, burning handbasket. Entire continents are up in flames, the atmosphere is either unlivably hot or fatally poisonous, and what's left of human governments is as good as finished. Superstar tech bro Jeff Bezos no, sorry, Elon Musk no, sorry, Steve Jobs no, sorry, Will Trust (really, that's his name) has funded a space colonization project that will send a dozen generation ships in various directions to search for the next home of our species. The first of these ships, the Ark 1, has been traveling for about five years until it suddenly reanimates its frozen occupants. A mysterious accident has killed their commanders and damaged the engines, and the few people left have to figure out what happened, where they are, how they're going to survive for the remainder of their journey, and how they're going to rebuild society from scratch.

With this premise, it sounds like the newest Syfy production The Ark should be a delight to watch. And at times, it is; these characters have to improvise on the fly with every bit of brains they've got in order to deal with brutal life-or-death choices under unforgiving circumstances. But often, especially in the first couple of episodes, it's difficult to get into the tone that the series wants to adopt. The urgency of the stakes, literally the survival of the human species, doesn't quite fit with the light-hearted dialogues, the melodramatic characterizations, and the silly brand of humor that fill the scripts. But if you manage to get used to the tone, you'll be rewarded with a profound demonstration of how civilization can be saved if the ages-old exchange of hostilities is abandoned in favor of an exchange of goodwill.

Unfortunately, there are multiple hiccups to overcome before full enjoyment is possible. The social dynamic between the ship's crew members is too dependent on the needs of each episode, shifting from animosity to camaraderie to resentment to intimacy with little time to let the characters (or the viewers) process the change. Although this uncertainty helps communicate how fragile this new society is in its first steps, it makes it very hard to follow whose loyalties we're supposed to believe. It's like the writers tried to emulate the cutthroat power dispute from Battlestar Galactica but wanted to also keep the ban on crew conflict from Star Trek plus the chaotic management style from Futurama.

This problem is of a kind with the overall tonal mismatch. One gets the impression that one writer was in charge of plotting a heavy drama with constant crises and impending doom, and then another writer was tasked with painting a coat of rom-com whimsy over it. Of the focus characters, the most notable (and hardest to swallow) are Alicia Nevins, the adorkable teen genius with no speech filter and advanced degrees in everything; James Brice, the imprudent pilot and resident eye candy who somehow only seems to own tank tops; Cat Brandice, the dating advice vlogger conscripted as the galaxy's least professional ship counselor; and Spencer Lane, the protagonist's Designated Foil whose entire role in the show consists in whining about having a woman boss.

So, what's actually good about The Ark? The plotting. This series is a brilliant example of how to write an unfolding story with interweaving parts where solving one problem leads to discovering more problems that lead to unexpected solutions that open yet more problems. This is an incredibly solid structure that maintains an unbroken momentum from one episode to the next. The Ark doesn't have the most consistent characters in space opera, but it does boast an expert command of the chains of consequence that make up a story.

The other great achievement of The Ark is its moral stance. Whereas the big space opera franchises seem to have forgotten how to write a thrilling climax that doesn't rely on who pew-pews harder, The Ark is set on a civilian starship with no weapons, so the big resolution has to rely on the decency of human nature, not on brute firepower. In the season finale, the protagonist argues that the dog-eat-dog methods that one can find both in warfare and in corporate competition are exactly what ruined Earth, and the survivors of humankind shouldn't take that habit with them into space. Instead, she's willing to try openness, sincerity, empathy. That's a way more interesting approach to watch, and the writers do it justice by concocting a way more interesting problem to solve. The crisis in the last episode, which our protagonist doesn't overcome with battle tactics but with kindness and generosity, illustrates beautifully how to survive an iterated prisoner's dilemma, a well-known thought experiment in game theory that serves as a microcosm of everyday life in a society. Nonviolent heroes FTW!

Often it seems like these contentious times have made us forget how to live as humans. By every objective measure, the survival strategy of our species is not perpetual hostility, but cooperation. The Ark makes a powerful case for the position that, if we want to found civilization again, our best chance for it to endure is to build it on the recognition of our common vulnerability and the willingness to be vulnerable with each other. Watching that noble message bear fruit is well worth all the cheesy dialogues.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Avatar: the way of self-indulgence

James Cameron's new toys are pretty and shiny, but do they mean anything?

Back in 2009, it seemed like the first Avatar film would set the standard for visual effects for decades to come. It was a completely unexpected technical masterpiece that wowed audiences with hyperrealistic landscapes capable of lulling the mind away from the embarrassing flatness of the characters and the story.

Look at us now, jaded and benumbed by four Avengers, one Gemini Man and three Hobbits. We're in an era when digital magic doesn't impress the way it used to. The sequel Avatar: The Way of Water is doubtlessly gorgeous, with lifelike beasts that look solid and tangible, and edge-on shots of 3D ocean surfaces that make the viewer sway in the chair with the waves. But moviemaking isn't just composing beautiful frames. Despite all the trailblazing technical innovation created expressly for this film, the three hours of Avatar: The Way of Water end up feeling like a three-meal course made entirely of plain water.

We return to the exomoon Pandora, where humans continue to exploit natural resources with no respect for the native population. It's been roughly 15 years since the events of the first Avatar, and our human-reincarnated-into-alien protagonist Jake Sully is now a family man. But the greedy humans are back with a vengeance, and Jake has to flee with his family to avoid bringing any further destruction to the natives. And here we have the first eyebrow-raising choice in this film: the implication that 15 years of Jake integrating into an alien ecosystem and culture to raise four kids of another species doesn't seem worthy of telling, and only when humans reenter the scene do we get to continue the story. For all the lip service that this franchise professes to respecting indigenous communities, it's, at the least, noteworthy that director James Cameron only tells the parts of this community's story in which their colonizers get involved.

Once the basic conflict is established (emphasis on basic), the rest of the movie is an extended theme park ride followed by an admittedly good battle sequence. Avatar: The Way of Water repeats numerous plot beats from the original, dropping our focus character into an unfamiliar environment where he needs to learn the rules of survival, earn the trust of the locals, and fight to defend his new home. We hear the same vaguely New-Agey platitudes about interconnectedness and the cycle of life, we're told again that the whole world functions as a hive intelligence, we watch yet another predatory expedition to destroy a natural beauty for (literally) astronomical profit, and we're left with the same simplistic message: nature good, humans bad.

Worse still, this repetition of preachy talking points occurs without the already minimal character development of the first Avatar. Four alien teenagers are introduced with the single personality trait of "they're teenagers." The lead duo are reduced to the most commonplace clichés of married couples in movies, with a Jake who has confused martial discipline with parenting, and a Neytiri who only reacts to events by making concerned faces but leaves no footprint on the plot. The return of archnemesis Colonel Quaritch might suggest a thematic statement about the damaging effect of human intervention (mirrored in Jake's clumsy attempt to raise his alien kids by introducing them to all the bad parenting techniques of Earth), but that's not what Cameron is interested in exploring. We're here to gasp at picture-perfect fish, not to reflect on the mistakes of humankind.

Even when the dialogue alludes to the ecological problems back on Earth, that crucial piece of context isn't afforded the prominence it should have. Colonel Quaritch's personal vendetta against the Sully family feels absurdly small compared to the actual problem of the entire human species planning to move to Pandora permanently. A plot development that raises the stakes of the main conflict in exactly the way a sequel is supposed to doesn't get more than a throwaway line that Cameron evidently doesn't intend to address until a future movie. The same frustrating approach is used with the character of Kiri, the only truly interesting addition to the story, who spends the length of the movie carrying a neon sign that flashes "I'll matter later."

If Cameron gets his way, we'll have three more entries in this franchise. The problem with multiple sequels in the Age of Marvel is that directors have forgotten that films are not, and should not try to be, TV episodes. Avatar: The Way of Water would have been a serviceable filler episode in a streaming show, with its temporary change of setting, a self-contained chase subplot, and just enough links to the larger arc. But as the standalone movie it should have been expected to be, it's drowned in blue pixels that enchant the eye but have very little of substance to say.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +100 for once again pushing forward the quality of visual effects in cinema.

Penalties: −100 for having only the faintest, digitally rendered shadow of a plot, a theme, or actual characters.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Microreview [book]: Half Way Home, by Hugh Howey

Howey, Hugh. Half Way Home. 2010 (Print version: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).

Buy the e-book here (on sale, apparently!).

The Meat

The short version: it's good enough, but Wool it ain't! 

My comments below, which might seem rather harsh at times, should be interpreted in light of the fact that I think the world of Wool and the subsequent books in that series; I wonder what I might have thought of this, apparently Howey's first effort, had I not had my expectations ratcheted up into the stratosphere by reading Wool first and expecting the same level of brilliance here. On the other hand, must we remain eternally chained by chronology, and be forever barred from unfavorably comparing, say, Picasso's Blue Period with his later work because it somehow isn't fair to judge an artist by earlier, more tentative efforts—will only a later masterpiece do?

But wait! Perhaps we should question the entire notion that the career of an artist necessarily follows a shaky/tentative early work->mature/brilliant later work trajectory? Isaac Asimov, somewhere in the Foundation series, had his mouthpiece emphasize the fact that (he believes) scientists are only really brilliant, only capable of exploding existing paradigms and so forth, when they're in their twenties; after that, creativity plummets, and scientists tend to settle down into more conventional patterns of thought. Might that not be equally true of literary artists?

And we should probably distinguish between two different types of quality, while we're at it: stylistic/writing quality versus the quality of ideas a given work presents. Elsewhere I tried to make the case that a writer's first work is likely to be very high in the latter, ideational category, especially when contrasted with sequels set in the same world or following the same characters. But as for the former, a first book might not be particularly well-written, since in this technical sense, at least, writers (or painters, etc.) often have plenty of room to improve over the course of their careers.

So why do we read books/look at paintings/watch movies? There are doubtless many reasons, but I at least give more weight to the content/ideas of a given work than its technical perfection. I'm not trying to deny there can be plenty of pleasure in a well-crafted but essentially vapid story (I enjoy Michael Bay movies: Q.E.D.!), or that ideas by themselves are somehow more entrancing than ideas when packaged in slick action scenes or what have you (I like the breathtakingly beautiful first eight minutes or so of Melancholia a lot more than the equally philosophically fascinating but less visually stunning rest of the movie, because I like pretty things!). I only mean to say that, on balance, ideas are (or should be?) more important than technical wizardry.

Since it was his first book, we might expect Half Way Home to be somewhat inferior in writing style and so forth to Howey's later works like Wool, and sure enough, it is—the dialogue is a bit less snappy, the descriptions less vivid/emotive. But great ideas can cover all manner of slight imperfections like that. Trouble is, I'm not sure the ideas at the center of the story are great enough to do so; they certainly aren't *as* great as those behind the Silo saga.

That said, the story is certainly engaging, and plenty interesting. It concerns one possible (if, I would say, rather improbable) model for human colonization of other worlds, when such colonization is under the purview of an entity eerily similar to the villain placing 13th on the AFI's all-time list. One can detect a glimpse or two of Howey's brilliant 'What if...' approach to science fiction (brought to glorious fruition in Wool) here, as many of the parameters of the story are fascinating. But the characters, particularly the first-person narrator, don't have quite the vitality of our Wool-en friends, and their trials and tribulations are consequently less emotionally engaging. Moreover, I found it quite difficult to swallow the idea that some humans would willingly ally themselves with "Colony" (the AI) after seeing such stark evidence of what it was capable of (think Shia LaBoeuf's Eagle Eye, not the much better Asimov story on which it is extremely loosely based), even though it's an interesting thought experiment.

Does all this mean that you should skip this and go straight to the Silo saga? Not at all—you should do what I say, not what I did, and read this one first, *then* graduate to the main course in Wool.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for conjuring up an intriguing thought experiment about human colonization

Penalties: -1 for not managing anything like the polished style (or, more importantly, the brilliant ideas at the heart) of Wool

  

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

[Remember that a seven from NOAF is practically the equivalent of a 10/10 from many of the more effusive review sites or reviewers; see here for more information on our scoring system.]

Brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f book and movie aficionado and main cast member of Nerds of a Feather since early 2013.