NERD MUSIC Album Spotlight: Posthumanity by Unitra

Unitra's cyberpunk-themed single "Parallel Memories" is one of my favorite recent darksynth tracks, so I was super excited when I first heard about the new full-length! Posthumanity is, as the name implies, strongly inspired by science fiction (and cyberpunk in particular). But like actual cyberpunk literature, it's not all neon rain and cartoon dystopia. Unitra demonstrates range on this album, from the classic cyberpunk aesthetic of "Human Enhancement" to the to the romantic dreamwave of "Take a Deep Breath."

Now where'd I leave that copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive...



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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Void & Meddler, Episode 1

Bathed and Confused in the Neon Rain

Though our Cyberpunk Revisited series is largely finished, this new release necessitated its revival. After all, it's a: (1) cyberpunk-themed; (2) point-and-click adventure game; that is (3) published by Mi-Clos Studios, who gave us the exquisite space survival game Out There. In some ways, I guess you could say I've been waiting my whole life for this game--or, at least, the thirty-odd years since I first played Manhunter: New York. Could this title possibly live up to my expectations? The answer, as far as Episode One is concerned, is "yes and no."

In Void & Meddler, you star as Fyn--a hardboiled DJ who has lost her memory of the past two years and wants it back. So you search for clues across a city that feels a lot like what New Yorkers might have imagined the future to look like in 1980. In other words, gritty, grimy and bathed in neon rain.

The art design draws inspiration from both the warm, cartoon-like style of Broken Sword and pixelated Sierra and LucasArts classics. But Void & Meddler also features some of the best use of color I've ever seen in a video game--buildings are bathed in the proverbial neon rain, while raindrops pitter and patter on a virtualized camera lens. It is absolutely stunning, and manages to feel nostalgic and progressive at the same time.

Unfortunately, the puzzle design doesn't evoke the same feelings. In the classic point-and-click mold, you basically move Fyn from place to place, picking up and interacting with objects for use in one of the game's many puzzles. Void & Meddler gets extra credit for creating multiple solutions to its puzzles, which means you don't have to spend hours just trying to find that one thing, without which you can't proceed.

On the other hand, there's no narrative momentum--something games like Gemeni Rue, Lost Echo or Stasis all use to great effect. Instead, you just click on anything--in the hopes that you might be able to accomplish something that is, at best, vaguely defined. Simply put, it's never really established why we should care about Fyn getting her memories back, and never all that clear how the things we do in the game relate to that endgoal. That formula might have worked for King's Quest, but it's not 1984 anymore.

Still, the game has enough style to keep my interest. I do, however, hope for more dynamic puzzles and a clearer sense of story from Episode 2.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 the color; +1 in the neon rain.

Penalties: -1 for retrograde puzzles; -1 for narrative issues.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. "A mostly enjoyable experience."

Our scoring method explained in full.


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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather editor/blogger since 2012.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Dossier: Stross, Charles. Accelerando (Ace, 2005)

Filetype: Book.

File Under: Cyberpunk Legatee

Executive Summary: Accelerando is a generational story, starting with Manfred Macx and following his descendents. Welcome to posthuman Earth. Macx is an idea man who gives it all away to escape his ex-fiancee. He lives half inside his own mind, and half through his computer agents, that are always bringing him fresh information through the internet. He lives on the cutting edge of computing, AI, corporate structure, and law. He’s always connected and he is the future of humanity. However, the future learns that exchanging humanity for efficiency comes at a cost.

High-Tech: From the start, Macx is simply more connected. His computer is wearable, and he receives all his information through a visor not unlike a souped up Google Glass. He’s largely accompanied by his cat, Aineko, which is an artificial cat that becomes increasingly intelligent. However, the story moves quickly into external minds, collective intelligences, wetware implants, artificial intelligences, simulated human existence, living corporate entities, nanoconstruction, planetary terraforming, the singularity and weakly godlike intelligences.

Low-Life: While most of humanity is riding the posthuman train to the singularity, there are some holdouts, largely concentrated in the highly religious populations. They reject implants and genetic manipulation. They prefer to do things the old fashioned way. There aren’t many of them, and their numbers diminish as the decades pass.

Dark Times: Early on, Macx learns that having your memories stored outside your own mind, such as a wearable computer, makes them susceptible to larceny and leaves Macx utterly helpless. However, this is a small problem when compared the challenges of uploading an entire race into the cloud. To say more would give it away, but let’s say that the challenges we face with our computers (not enough hard drive space, internet too slow, hardware out of date before you unpackage it) apply to humanity.

Legacy: Accelerando is a visionary depiction of the future as envisioned by Stross following the dot-com bubble. Reading it today feels as if he wrote it yesterday, and it’s a decade old. It’s a dinosaur in technology time. It won a Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for best novel in the Hugo Awards, an Arthur C. Clarke award, and a BSFA award. His novel, The Rapture of the Nerds, is a not only a phrase that appears in Accelerando more than once, but a continuation on some of the ideas. Though its legacy is shorter than most novels we’ve discussed, it’s clearly a book that will be relevant for quite a while.

In Retrospect: I did this backwards. I read The Rapture of the Nerds a year ago, and Accelerando for the first time this month. Still, Accelerando is dense with jargon and buzzwords. It’s kind of hard to read unless you’re a real dork for computing and information technology. Fortunately, I am a real dork and the ideas don’t escape me even if the descriptions do. Stross has somewhat infamously cancelled a pending novel for being too close to reality after the Snowden files started being published, and I think he would’ve done the same for Accelerando if he wrote it today. 

For some perspective, this is the augmented reality future to Neuromancer's virtual reality future. The world Stross builds is instantly recognizable when you read about people who feel like they can't live without their cellphone, or how a smart watch is going to change their life. Most people don't want to stick their head inside a heavy virtual reality visor. They're fine with just having their life generally improved by having information at their fingertips. Don't get me wrong, I love the cyberspace, meta reality future as much as anyone, but Accelerando's future seems much more plausible.

Unlike most novels that would dump someone in an unfamiliar world, there is no reader avatar in Accelerando. This isn’t a problem though, as the near future Macx lives in is so close to our reality that it’s not hard to get on board. As the story progresses, it takes leaps and bounds by decades. We’re filled in, as readers, by a narrator that gives us a timedate stamp and brings us up to speed with the world as a whole. However, when many of the characters can exist in emulated realities, it can be hard to keep track of when, where, or what they are.

And even though the galaxy is on its fast ride to utter consumption, this isn’t the dystopian hellscape that most cyberpunk futures depict. It’s bright and sunny in its own ways. The dark clouds over it are dinosaur legal infrastructures, the economy and your mom. If you can get past the jargon, it’s a story that’s more relatable than some science fiction as it picks you up gently, and throws you into the sun.

Accelerando is available for free in many, many formats under a Creative Commons license.

Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read/watched/played today: 4/5
Cybercoefficient: 8/10

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