Just finished : Empire of Bones, by Liz Williams, transformations (including genetic ones) and mixed feelings of a Phoolan Devi-like female protagonist in front of posthuman alien colonialism. Very nice indeed.
Saw yesterday, for the first time in (too many) years, Tron (while eating foie gras, it was great). It’s still very beautiful and since the last time I have seen Aelita, Metropolis, etc, so that beauty is not so alien anymore. What was striking this time : the religious and a bit silly relationship between the program-characters in the virtual world and their users in the flesh and blood world and the fact that those users are also the programmers. There is no difference between those two categories, it was the beginning of the eighties. Surely, the film would be very different today. Also suddenly the temptation of making a new audio dubbing for the film to make it more precise : ins’t it after all the political struggle of free softwares against a big bad corporate and proprietary Master Control Program with a lot of security issues?
And now, Ken McLeod has a blog. He’s one of the best scifi writers. Try it.
On the global network of dreams you can explore maps of writers, movies or bands : the closer they are, the more likely an overlap in their audience. Overlap in audience as only criteria is a bit simple, but still, it’s nice. I tried Bruce Sterling.
Just got back from Barcelona (one of these days we’ll explain why we were there as it is manga&scifi related) so I can start blogging again. Loads of manga translated in Spanish, some of them I had never heard of. Even if my understanding of Spanish is limited, it is still significantly better than my Japanese ^_^ so I bought some of them. If it’s the same for you, you can get an idea of what’s available on the spanish market on www.mangaes.com
A really nice interview with Cory Doctorow in Strange Horizons, contains loads of interesting stuff, including this very good summary of what’s happening in computer oriented science-fiction today:
“I think if you look at cyberpunk fiction, you’ll see that computers are primarily a metaphor for lots of other things, and that they’re rarely treated mimetically, and so they’re never really come to grips with. So we have gods in the machine, we have the Loa of Gibson’s [Sprawl trilogy], and we have viruses that are completely technically nonsensical, but are kind of a metaphor for how bad ideas spread and so on. And by treating computers and the Internet as metaphors, I think that we have foreclosed our imagination. I think it would be interesting to find some of the science fiction writers of the generation that came before the generation that I’m part of, to turn their hand to writing rigorously and mimetically about computers, and treating some of the technology that’s further out, like nanotech and biotech, metaphorically.
I think that would be a very interesting thing in fact, and obviously there are some writers who are doing this. Charlie Stross is certainly a master of this, and Rudy Rucker and Rudy Rucker Jr. had a story this morning on the Infinite Matrix that is pretty damn mimetic about computers, and Sterling is actually pretty mimetic about computers, but there’s still a lot of very, very metaphorical stuff, including the new Gibson novel — which is brilliant, but treats watermarks in a way that is completely at odds with how watermarks really work. [The novel] uses them as this great and daring metaphor for the unconscious intention of the artist and so on — but really turned out to be as a work of speculative fiction . . . kind of flat, at least in respect to this watermarking stuff, because it was ill-informed about this. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to give the impression that Pattern Recognition was a bad book or a failure of a book or even a deeply flawed book, but it wasn’t the book I would’ve hoped for, given the elements that Gibson marshaled, which are brilliant. Gibson can still write circles around 99% of the people writing today, so I certainly don’t want to give that impression.”
My last movie at the bifff: Teknolust by Lynn Hershman with 4 times Tilda Swinton.
Fairy tale with 3 + 1 ladies: red, yellow and blue one, replicants of the biogenetics Rosetta Stone, who made her clones by a combination of her DNA and a mother board. She keeps her clones like oncomouses trapped in her laboratory, but dressed in colorful silk kimonos, being able to download from the internent and dvds whatever is necessary for their minds to become human. That’s the problem what is a human being: the movie tends to lead us to the conclusion: culture, heterosexual love and family defines what is human. So much imagination to arrive to that conclusion! That could have been more exciting threads to follow: could a human be virused by computer virus/bug (man contaminated by woman being the interface between flesh and code)? life should be patented? do clones exist really? do we learn love words from movies?
“(…)elle n’est pas sur une rampe de lancement pour la vraie vie, (…) elle-même est une vie, à consommer tout de suite comme les groseilles.” Sans Soleil, C. Marker.
Again at the biff: Suicide Club a film by Sono Sion. Why quote ‘Sans Soleil’ then, because as a spirit, as a sigh it was haunting me during the movie, sometimes, as well as Lain by Nakamura, where teenage girls bear a secret, maybe before blood is coming from them. The 1st scene is highly symbolic: 54 schoolgirls throw themselves under a train, launching, blowing a stream of blood on the machine, on the crowd, on the screen. Then a roll of regular stitched bits of skin is found on the crime scene. Do they loose their virginity on the road to another world?
In front of them, a bunch of policemen: embodying the father, the lover, the cynical, … But how could they understand the world of teenagers full of sweet pop groups, fans, copycats, mobile phones, websites, following a fashion one day and leaving it the day after: today suicide is in fashion, let’s die together.
Today death is in fashion: let’s sell it as song, as gadget, let’s use it as a setting for a rock’n roll star.
Today suicide is just an image, a fact in a landscape, a data on a webpage,a family routine…
When the film stays on facts, on crowds in subways, it could have this melancholy or this gore-humor, but when it enters imaginary, it comes with old clichés, and girls are the first victims of these clichés.
Designated victims or mighty mistresses of images, mass cossumption, and death, who is afraid of teenage girls?