Deadline: “Nakoa-Wolf Momoa & Ida Brooke join ‘Dune 3’ as Twin Children of Paul Atreides”

In the new film from Warner Bros. and Legendary, the pair are set to play Leto II and Ghanima, the twin offspring of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya), born after the events of the original Frank Herbert novel. The project will mark the big-screen debut of Momoa, who is expected to be joined in the cast by his father, Jason Momoa, with the latter playing a resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho. Like Nakoa-Wolf, Brooke is a relative newcomer, who has heretofore been seen only in Apple’s sci-fi drama Silo and the film The Primrose Railway Children.

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It’s expected that Villeneuve’s third and final Dune film will adapt Herbert’s novel Dune Messiah, set 12 years after the events of Dune, which follows Atreides’ struggles with the consequences of his Fremen-led jihad upon his ascension to Emperor Muad’Dib. A release date and official title for the new film haven’t yet been disclosed.

Matt Grobar

Maybe I’m imagining things, but the tone of the second paragraph sounds steeped in sarcasm and incredulousness. Spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read Dune: Messiah and the third book in the series, Children of Dune: the twins of Paul and Chani are born at the end of the second book and are about 9 years old by the time Children of Dune starts. Casting young adults to play them implies more changes to the timeline and to characters – and I for one could very much do without Villeneuve’s paltry rewriting of the novels.

The New Yorker: “Dune and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages”

Although Peterson’s version of the Fremen language retains a vaguely Arabic sound, almost all other traces of the language have been expunged from Villeneuve’s “Dune” films. Peterson claims that this is in the name of believability. The time depth of the Dune books makes the amount of recognizable Arabic that survived completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible, he wrote on Reddit. When a user asked him to explain, he pointed to “Beowulf”, which was written around a thousand years ago and is uninterpretable to most modern English speakers. And we’re talking about twenty thousand years?! Not a single shred of the language should be recognizable. Key terms like shai-hulud and Lisan al-Gaib have made it into the films, but they’re treated in Peterson’s conlang as fortuitous convergences, not ancient holdovers, as if English were to one day lose the word “sandwich” only to serendipitously re-create it thousands of years later from new etymological building blocks.

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The second omission is evident in that powerful moment from the trailer, Paul Atreides’ call to his fighters. From what we’ve seen, Paul speaks Peterson’s fictional language. Without a subtitle, he would be unintelligible. In the book, however, the phrase Long live the fighters is written as Ya hya chouhada, a reference to a celebratory chant from the Algerian war of independence, which Herbert renders in Frenchified Arabic. This line, more than any other, connects the Fremen’s struggle to recent independence movements, turning them from outer-space sand people into portraits of anti-imperialism. The scholar Khaldoun Khelil, drawing on his Palestinian Algerian heritage, has described the whitewashing of these characters as an effect of Western media’s tendency to portray Arabs as bad guys—fanatics with unreasonable demands and a strange religion. Because Arabs can’t be heroes, Khelil writes, we must be erased.

Manvir Singh

The way language evolves over time has always fascinated me, how some words travel across the world reflecting ancient commercial ties between nations, a myriad of tiny, repeated interactions that coalesce into what we call ‘language’. While we can trace some of that back in time, it feels like predicting the future course of language would be just as difficult as predicting biological evolution.

ScreenRant: “12 Biggest Dune 2 Book Changes from Denis Villeneuve’s Sequel”

The director’s affinity for Herbert's original novel is well-chronicled, meaning that this adaptation should appease most readers watching Dune 2. Villeneuve once again did the work to adapt the second half of the book as closely as possible while still fitting within the confines of a nearly 3-hour runtime and building on any already established differences. However, this did mean that Dune 2 changed the book on more than one occasion. Whether it is entire characters missing from the story, character arc changes, or other story details differing, these are the biggest book differences in Dune 2.

Cooper Hood

As I suspected – and dreaded – Dune: Part Two makes several substantial changes to the book, revisions that are inexcusable to me and alter the narrative and characters beyond recognition. As I said before, I refuse to watch this movie in theaters, but from what I’ve read, this is nothing more than weak fanfiction that failed to grasp what drives the main characters and the intricate lore of the book. Then again, Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson worked as creative consultants – and praised the result; what better warning that the movie is disrespecting the original material than attaching these two to it?! I’m aware that commenting on a movie without watching it sounds presumptuous, and what follows is a rather long rant, so feel free to skip it if you don’t care about this topic.

Wired: “I found David Lynch’s Lost ‘Dune II’ Script”

Inside the folder lay the stuff of fans’ dreams, never made public until now: 56 pages dated “January 2nd-through-9th, 1984”, matching Lynch’s “half a script” statement. Complete with penned annotations by Herbert, the Dune II script shows Lynch was still enthusiastic about the material, lending new significance to minor details in the ‘84 film. He also cracked a way to tell the complex story of Herbert’s 1969 novel Dune Messiah, easily the least cinematic book in the series due to its emphasis on palace intrigue over action, along with the inner turmoil of a reluctant dictator (Paul Atreides) in place of a traditional hero’s journey. It may ring of sacrilege to some, but Lynch’s Dune II would have bested Herbert’s book—and been one hell of a movie.

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Scytale’s 12-year odyssey reanimating “dead Duncan Idaho” into the ghola named Hayt on the nightmarish Bene Tleilax world (mentioned by Paul in Dune) constitutes the entire opening 10 minutes of the script. Lynch calls the planet Tleilax a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids. Those canals, Lynch writes, are lined with dead pink small test tube animals. Initiating Dune II with a focus on Scytale foregrounds him to primary antagonist, unlike Herbert’s book where myriad conspirators work against Paul.

Max Evry

I’m deeply skeptical of people claiming that a particular movie adaptation would best the original work – especially an adaption from which we only have an unfinished script and nothing else. The passages describing Lynch’s vision for the Tleilaxu are surreal, but for me they are quite removed from Herbert’s admittedly scarce description. My impression of the Bene Tleilax in the books is that they are disciplined and immensely secretive – very much opposed to the gaudy style of the Harkonnens. Their main area of expertise is genetic engineering – so flesh alterations: yes; machinery: not so much; even flesh alterations would be uncommon, as the Tleilax always strive to not draw unwanted attention to themselves and their agents.

Empire: “Dune: Part Two will have Gurney Halleck playing The Baliset”

For the most part, Denis Villeneuve’s take on Dune was everything fans of Frank Herbert’s epic tome could ask for. Even though it only covered half of the original novel, he did justice to the fall of House Atreides, nailed the awe-inspiring heft of the sandworms, carefully lined up the cascading dominoes that fuel the swirling political plot – and even made it so that Spice was visibly glimmering in the air on Arrakis. But there was one detail from the novel that didn’t make it to the screen first time around – and if fans were sad to miss it, Villeneuve was even sadder.

That detail was, of course, the Baliset – the unusual musical instrument that’s a particular favourite of Josh Brolin’s warrior Gurney Halleck. While Villeneuve (and Hans Zimmer) gave us unexpected space bagpipes last time around, a scene shot for Dune in which Brolin’s Halleck mournfully plucked at the Baliset’s strings sadly ended up on the cutting room floor. But no more – speaking to Empire in our world-exclusive Dune: Part Two cover feature, the director confirms the Baliset is back, back, back in the follow-up. The Gurney song survived Part Two! he declares victoriously, the notion of bringing it to the screen clearly having played on his mind. It became a weird priority for me. But Josh Brolin is a poet and we played it together. It was awesome.

Ben Travis

That’s weird, I would have thought a faithful adaptation of the characters should have been a priority from the start 😏. Seems to me some of the fans’ criticism of the numerous scenes cut from the source text has made its way to Denis Villeneuve – and he has decided to include perhaps the least consequential aspect that was previously left out.

The time traveler’s wife (HBO, season 1)

Since early childhood, Henry has found himself with a unique talent, or rather a curse in this particular situation: he can jump through time, backwards or forwards, to any place or time he has or will visit at any point during his life. The curse lies in how his power works: he has no control over when – or to when and where – the jumps occur (though he has noticed how they’re more likely to trigger as he experiences intense emotion), and he always arrives stripped of his clothes and nauseous (which evidently leads to awkward circumstances when he suddenly finds himself butt-naked in the middle of a busy street – and makes the series a prime target for a HBO adaptation). After a while, an interval that varies randomly and over which he has no control either, this superpower returns him to his proper time, naked once again.

The premise of the show, and the book it’s based on, is very compelling. Over the years, science-fiction has imagined various alternatives for time travel, one of which being that past, present, and sometime future, are immovable, thus any time traveler can observe events, but not influence them in a way that could cause changes or temporal paradoxes later. This story is largely based on this variant of time travel: Henry can live through his past from a different perspective, even interact with people close to him, but that never alters the outcome of events. The theme goes back further to philosophical debates over free will versus predestination – clearly this story leans heavily into the predetermined camp.

‘Love, Death & Robots’ (Netflix, seasons 1–3)

Short stories have a somewhat awkward place in the world of science-fiction. While there are many great ones, big authors are generally famous for their lengthier works, even as some started by publishing short stories and others can deliver gripping narratives in both short and long forms. In many cases, short stories serve to flesh out the world building of grand space sagas, as a string of satellites embellishes an already splendid planet.

Ironically the situation is largely reversed on screen, at least in my opinion. Short stories have served as inspiration for excellent movies, from Minority Report to The Adjustment Bureau, Predestination, Edge of Tomorrow, and Arrival, while renowned science fiction novels have struggled to receive on-screen adaptations to do them justice. The prime example is obviously Dune, where despite wide acclaim I found the recent movie lacking, unable to capture the complexity and subtlety of the written original.

With Love, Death & Robots (❤✖🤖), Netflix tried to go a different route and adapt several stories in animated format. The results were… mixed at best. I won’t comment much on the animation styles and quality, as many reviewers have done, as I don’t have much expertise in the area, nor do I think the visual aspect of the narratives is the most essential. Much more important to the overall impact are the science-fictional concepts, however summarily described, and the characters, their reactions and emotions, and how they develop in the short span depicted in the story.

In prime Netflix fashion, seasons 2 and 3 have dropped both in quantity and in quality; season one has more episodes than the other two taken together, and more quality stories. The titular thematic is also more closely followed in the first season, while in the others the themes veer towards fantasy and horror (not to mention the occasional vampire, werewolf, or zombie excursion, which I feel have little in common with science-fiction topics); I could barely pick out one or two stories that I would rate higher than three stars.

Dune: Part One

Despite my worries about the high numbers of coronavirus infections, I bit the bullet and reserved tickets to Dune’s opening night on IMAX last Friday, curious too see how this new adaptation by Denis Villeneuve looks on the big screen, and whether it can live up to the source material. As I wrote before on my blog, I had low expectations that he can deliver on the richness and subtlety of Dune – his previous movies that I watched, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, left me with the sense that Villeneuve is more adept at creating grand and stunning, yet impersonal and detached, imagery, less so at depicting raw, personal drama. And this impression has not changed after watching his latest Dune: Part One.

As I have read all six of Frank Herbert’s novels (twice) and rewatched the previous adaptations over the past year, I will not shy away from spoilers in this review, nor from comparisons with previous movies or the book.

‘Brave New World’ (Peacock, season 1)

Classic science-fiction novels do not have the greatest track record when it comes to movie adaptations. The most successful was arguably Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but his work is far more extensive. I, Robot converted Asimov’s nuanced ideas about robotics into a blunt Hollywood action movie; the upcoming Foundation series on Apple TV seems completely divorced from the source material. Dune’s adaptations so far have struggled to accurately reproduce the complexity of the novels; I have serious doubts whether Denis Villeneuve will achieve something better with his much-delayed movie. And nobody dared to touch the gut-wrenching 1984. The SF writer with the most successful film adaptations is likely Philip K. Dick, whose works inspired Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau.

Having said that, the resurgence of TV has allowed longer and more complex stories to be shown onscreen, and I think Brave New World makes a good example of successful adaption from a book that is almost a century old. The setup and plot follow the novel closely, while adding new elements that complement it rather well.

In a distant future, New London is a shining oasis of order and advanced technology in a desolated world. Each citizen has a well-defined place in the social hierarchy, predetermined at birth by his genetic makeup: Alphas at the top, enjoying the most privileges and occupying the positions of leadership; then Betas as knowledge workers and sexual companions for the Alphas; Gammas serving as house-staff for the upper casts; Epsilons doing repetitive, menial work like gardening, cleaning, and maintenance. As in the novel, despite their distinct roles, everyone is content to play their part for the greater harmony because negative emotions and thoughts are actively suppressed by the regular use of soma, a mood-altering drug that comes in many flavors for each of humans’ many feelings.

Wired: “Ex Machina has a Serious Fembot Problem”

While interviewing Garland for a magazine piece, I asked him about the roles of men and women in his film; his response was that Ava is not a woman, she is literally genderless. Despite using female pronouns, he said, the things that would define gender in a man and a woman, she lacks them, except in external terms. … I’m not even sure consciousness itself has a gender.

In a way, Garland is right; pure intelligence wouldn’t have a gender any more than it would have a race. But to say that and then place that consciousness into a body that it will immediately recognize its likeness as female negates that point. If Ava has truly been educated about the human race, then she knows her face and form appeal to certain segments of the population. But even thornier is the fact that Ava falls squarely into so many of the tropes of women in film. She’s a femme fatale, a seductress posing as a damsel in distress, using her wiles to get Caleb to save her from Nathan and his Dr.-Frankenstein-with-tech-money quest to build a perfect woman. (Women: So much better when you can construct them out of bespoke parts and switch them off if they’re not working properly, amirite?)

Angela Watercutter

I have recently watched Ex Machina as it became available on Netflix, and I have to say, it has way bigger issues than fembots. This article captures them reasonably well, but at the end of the day, I found the movie utterly boring, lacking in action and original ideas. To call it ‘thought-provoking’ is a massive overstatement and I seriously cannot comprehend why so many people are so enthusiastic about this movie – then again, I had the same reaction to Her. Man building docile wife is a concept as old as ancient Greece at least, if we count the myth of Pygmalion, though I doubt the director had that in mind when he made the movie. Human-created artificial intelligence rebelling against its maker is a common SF trope at this point, so no points for originality here either.

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ (CBS, season 3)

After successfully thwarting an AI menace to biological life, the USS Discovery traveled through time to the 32^nd century following the Red Angel to protect the Sphere data from falling into the wrong hands. They now encounter a vastly different galaxy: a century prior to their arrival, a mysterious and sudden event called The Burn has wrecked immense devastation. Dilithium was temporarily rendered inert, causing uncontrolled reactions in active warp drives and many ships immediately exploded. With its fleet decimated, the Federation is much diminished, a couple dozen member worlds struggling to fight off aggressive rivals, such as the Emerald Chain, a criminal association between the Orions and Andorians.

Having followed online discussions about this season on its dedicated subreddit, I started watching it with low expectations – and despite the warnings finished it with a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction. The great premise, a jump forward a couple of centuries in the future, to a period not explored previously in Star Trek material, was mostly squandered, with poor worldbuilding, weak characters and implausible storylines.

One of the things that bothered me during this season were the constant emotional outbursts from the Discovery crew. I do not remember them being this volatile in previous seasons, cheering their pilot after routine maneuvers, needlessly bickering over minor things. I have never watched Oprah, but this is the first association that came to my mind. Most of the crew, apart from Dr. Culber, behaves like a bunch of teenagers, or rookies on their first flight, not an experienced Federation crew. It does not help that we as viewers barely know any of their names after three seasons…

Polygon: “Star Wars novelist Alan Dean Foster’s Disney royalties issue, explained”

This November, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a professional organization for genre authors, dropped a bombshell announcement that shook the science fiction community: For several years, author Alan Dean Foster had been trying, without success, to get paid for several major tie-in novels adapting movies from the Star Wars and Alien franchises. While Disney has kept the books in print with other publishers, with Titan handling Alien and Del Rey on Star Wars, Foster says he hasn’t received royalty payments for new editions. So, he had turned to SFWA for help, and the #DisneyMustPay hashtag was born.

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Disney’s argument: it wasn’t obligated to pay royalties or provide royalty statements for the Alien novels because Foster had signed a contract with the publisher, Warner Books. And because Disney now owns the copyright to each of the novels, it can redirect them to whatever publisher it deems fit. Those involved with SFWA believe that Disney’s interpretation of copyright law isn’t accurate and that there are still obligations that carry over with Foster’s contracts.

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A long trail of author royalties, however small, would be a logistical and bureaucratic commitment. If an author’s contract doesn’t specify that Disney is on the hook for royalties, but the publisher that they signed with, then the issue would seem straightforward. Furthermore, absent any specific prohibition about assigning rights under or to contracts with authors, a company may assign that contract to another without approval from said author. But SFWA says that it’s spoken with its own attorneys who uphold its interpretation of the situation. Kowal also notes, There are plenty of things that are perfectly legal, but which are completely immoral.

Andrew Liptak

A thorny legal situation, and a reflection of how convoluted copyright law can be. Disney certainly has the money to pay these royalties, and refusing them with questionable arguments makes it appear as a greedy and unprincipled corporation – which Disney likely is, just as any other company beyond a certain size. But in this case I can’t imagine that the legal expenses to sustain the argument in court would be smaller than actually paying the royalties to these authors.

‘Annihilation’ (Netflix)

Annihilation – Poster Concept by Kyle V. James

After mentioning Peter Watts earlier this week, I went back through his blog posts and found his review of the Annihilation movie adaptation. Because it was immediately available on Netflix, I watched it shortly after release and have been meaning to write a couple of thoughts about it. I have not read any of novels in this trilogy, so I cannot compare the result with the written original, as Peter Watts did.

The overall idea behind Annihilation sounds similar to Roadside Picnic, maybe even Greg Egan’s Teranesia, though I have not read either book yet. The movie does a nice job of setting up a mysterious, tense, even threatening atmosphere once the characters reach the alien zone where many disappeared before them. There is a constant sense that the group is being watched, that something is moving and closing in just off screen, out of their field of view.

Despite this, and various complaints from critics, I felt that the movie was not weird enough. The oddly shaped animals and strange plants are mostly recognizable, having added relatively minor random parts from other species. There is some emphasis on the human element – we get a bear with eerie human voice, in a scene that veers towards horror rather than sci-fi, and bushes that grow in the shapes of people – which could have been interpreted as an attempt by the unseen entity to communicate with the explorers, but the movie does not follow up on this idea in any meaningful way.

‘Away’ (Netflix, season 1)

On the eve of the first crewed mission to Mars, its Commander Emma Green is struggling with confidence and personal issues. After a brief fire in the central module of the Atlas, NASA is investigating her handling of the emergency, with crew members offering conflicting accounts of the events: Kwesi, a novice astronaut and the mission’s botanist, and Ram Arya, the mission’s pilot and second-in-command, are supporting her decisions in the heat of the moment, while the Russian and Chinese astronauts, Misha Popou and Lu Wang, are questioning her reactions under stress and overall leadership capacity. Back on Earth, her husband Matt Logan has just had stroke and is recovering in the hospital instead of guiding the launch from mission control, leaving their teenage daughter in the temporary care of a family friend.

Away starts with a interesting premise: a show about space exploration that combines the hard science aspect with a softer, more personal touch, allowing the audience to get to know the human side of these explorers, their emotional attachments and family sacrifices that come with this risky career. Ironically, Away has managed to portray the second part reasonably well in my opinion but failed miserably on the science aspects.

The series manages to pull off some spectacular and tense scenes in space, especially in the second episode, as well as clever problem-solving in the latter episodes. It was impressive how special effects maintained the illusion of weightlessness for scenes set in the central section of the ship.

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ (CBS, season 2)

After successfully negotiating a truce with the Kingon Empire and thus saving the Federation from the brink of extinction, the USS Discovery quickly finds itself under new leadership. Captain Christopher Pike from the USS Enterprise takes temporary command to investigate a series of mysterious signals originating from unexplored parts of the galaxy – and to search for his missing First Officer Spock in the process.

Apparently, I am getting into a habit of writing about Star Trek: Discovery only as the next season airs, so it is high time to put down a couple of thoughts on the second season. Overall, I enjoyed it more than the first, but some new story lines felt more forced, straining my suspension of disbelief to levels seldomly reached by other series. Having a galaxy-threatening conflict as the main thread each season changes the structure and atmosphere significantly compared to classic Star Trek – more fast-paced action, less reflection and moral dilemmas.

I was impressed by the dramatic camera angles used frequently throughout the show, leading with an upside-down view of the scene – maybe it was supposed to remind viewers that the action takes place in space, where this unusual viewpoint would be natural. The pacing is tighter and more focused than in the first season, with each episode contributing significantly to the central plot, skipping occasional filler. This still allows for an interesting excursion into Kelpian culture and for several connections to places and events from The Original Series, something other Star Trek fans may appreciate more than me.

Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon: “A long-form interview with Reaktor magazine”

Reaktor: If you woke up in one of the settings or worlds you have written about, which would mean a “whoa, cool!” awakening and which would be an “oh no…”?

AR: I think there are bits of both in all the settings and worlds – places and times where it’s fairly comfortable, bordering on utopian, and others where it’s very much the opposite! Although I’m very content with the time and place into which I was born, I could see the attraction of living in the epoch of galactic civilisation depicted in House of Suns, in which a group of relatively happy-go-lucky humans are given this awesome technology of interstellar travel and basically just told to go out there, explore, learn things and have fun. On the other hand, although I really love writing in the setting, I’ve never had any desire to live in the Revelation Space universe. It’s like the Dark Ages, with plagues, madness, and apocalypse at every corner.

Alastair Reynolds

In other words, basically living in 2020…

Asking the Wrong Questions: “Deus Ex: Thoughts on Westworld’s Third Season”

Take, for example, the crux of the season, the concept of an AI-run society. On paper, this is a brilliant expansion of the show’s central conceit – that there is effectively no difference between humans and hosts except that the latter have been designated, through the logic of capitalism far more than the realities of technology and biology, as inherently disposable, their suffering and death justified because they provide entertainment and distraction for the rich and powerful. What Dolores discovers when she arrives in the real world is that most humans live exactly the same kind of life. Like hosts, they have “loops” and “storylines” decided upon by a god-like AI of whom they aren’t even aware. Like some hosts, they can be rewritten, assigned to new roles and stories with only a faint awareness of the life they once lived – Caleb, we learn, was once designated a troublemaker, one of the small percentage of humans who don’t take to Rehoboam’s guidance, and was subjected to personality-altering treatments and the erasure of his memory in order to make him a constructive member of society. When Dolores releases Rehoboam’s profiles of each citizen, allowing them to see how their lives have been guided and constrained, she likens it to revealing the reality of the park to the hosts, and the result is entirely similar – violence and destruction (and, as in the park, it eventually turns out that these are false flag operations, funded and directed by Dolores as a cover for her attempts to get to Rehoboam).

Abigail Nussbaum

After a rather disappointing season two, I had almost no expectations for this series. The third season was similarly met with bad reviews and criticism online, but this time I do not fully agree with this sentiment. Maybe I am biased precisely because of my low expectations, but I enjoyed the ideas and themes laid out throughout the season, which reminded me of the philosophical aspects of the first season.

The primary thread underlying the action is the analogy between the former existence of hosts in the park in the first season and the life of humans in the real world, both shaped and controlled by obscure forces, beyond their knowledge and reach. Whereas hosts were created this way, programmed with sets of predefined actions to fit certain scenarios, humans were driven into a similar situation by a massive hidden surveillance complex, controlled by an AI and its reclusive maker for the overt goal of insuring humanity’s security and continued survival. This naturally touches on current questions in our society, from the manipulation of voter intentions through data collected on social networks, to the balance between safety and freedom, between the Western liberal society and the Chinese authoritarian society, to something as recent as the pandemic response (how many people can we sacrifice for the overall ‘good’ of society, and more importantly, who gets to decide that). On a more general level, the central theme continues to be free will, with Dolores on a crusade to return free will to humans, after liberating the hosts.

Vanity Fair: “Astronaut Chris Hadfield Reviews Space Movies, from ‘Gravity’ to ‘Interstellar’”

Retired astronaut and engineer Chris Hadfield fact checks notable space movies using his NASA experience and vast knowledge of outer space, including ’Gravity’, ‘Passengers’, ‘Armageddon’, ‘The Martian’, ‘Interstellar’, ‘First Man’, ‘Hidden Figures’, ‘Ad Astra’, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, ‘Sunshine’ and ‘WALL-E’

I’ve had pretty much the same reaction watching Gravity, and that whole ending based on ‘the power of love’ spoiled Interstellar for me as well. I mostly agree with the opinions of Chris Hadfield from this YouTube video, for the sci-fi movies I’ve watched anyway. Some supposedly ‘science-based’ stories veer so far from reality that it’s hard to enjoy them instead of criticizing their questionable writing and ideas. I may not be a scientist, but I have read enough good science-fiction books to develop low tolerance for faulty logic and bogus science.

Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon: “The Far Future in science fiction”

If the far future is a recurring staple of literary SF, it is remarkable how infrequently it is a setting in the visual media. Star Wars may feel estranged from our own era by a vast gulf of time, but we are told explicitly that the action takes place in the past. Star Trek, for all its forays into Earth’s history, rarely had anything to say about events significantly further into the future. Other than the aforementioned Time Machine, filmed twice, and various efforts to translate Frank Herbert’s Dune into visual terms, cinema has not been much interested in distant times. Perhaps the concern is that audiences need a familiar proxy, easier to achieve when the setting is close to the present. Guardians of the Galaxy may look and feel like a golden age space opera, but the action is near the present and the main character is a contemporary human with a handy liking for antiquated pop-rock.

Modern science fiction cinema rarely ventures more than a few decades into the future, and even when it does the setting is purposefully set-dressed so as not to be too estranging. Characters might pilot starships or drive flying cars, but they will also wear jeans and leather jackets and affect a taste for contemporary rock music. Known brand names will proliferate, and reassuring anachronisms abound. The future is really just the present, but with more stuff in it. Attempts to visualise more remote times, such as the far future strands in the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas, adapted from the David Mitchell novel, have not generally been met with unanimous critical or commercial success, although the efforts should be applauded. It would be a brave director, though, who trusted her audience to embrace a story set a million or more years in the future.

Alastair Reynolds

Interesting essay by one of my favorite science-fiction authors, Alastair Reynolds. The observation quoted above is one of the reasons I’m skeptical that the upcoming adaptation of Dune will achieve box office success. It feels almost a paradox: if the complex story of Dune is adapted faithfully, it will probably be too arcane for viewers and it won’t be a movie hit; but if it’s distilled enough to be popular, it will lose its essence and originality.

The essay is also full of great recommendations for science fiction novels set in the far future, imagining worlds vastly different from our mundane society. I was glad to see many of my favorites getting mentioned, from Schild’s Ladder to Ninefox Gambit, including one of Alastair Reynolds’ best works so far, House of Suns.

Ursula K. Le Guin – The Telling

În comunitatea interstelară a Ecumenului, procesul de adeziune se desfășoară de regulă treptat, în ritmul fiecărei specii noi. Strămoșii tuturor umanoizilor care fac parte din Ecumen provin de pe Hain, o cultură străveche, care a trecut de numeroase ori prin propriile‑i faze de expansiune, timp în care au răspândit colonii pe planetele vecine, și de izolare, în care coloniile, lipsite de influența planetei-mamă, au crescut în direcții diferite dezvoltând propriile culturi și obiceiuri. De aceea contactul inițial dinspre Hain este discret, măsurat, prudent, pentru a nu genera șocuri inutile în aceste civilizații mult mai tinere. După descoperirea ansiblu‑lui, Ecumenul căpătă brusc o nouă metodă de coeziune, capacitatea de a comunica instantaneu între planete, deși călătoriile rămân limitate sub viteza luminii.

În ciuda politicii prudente, unele misiuni de prim-contact nu decurg conform planului. Însuși Pământul, aflat sub mâna de fier a unei teocrații anti-științifice la momentul contactului cu Ecumenul, a fost cauza unui astfel de contact nepregătit: cu puțin înainte de destrămarea teocrației, un grup rebel a transmis un mesaj neautorizat prin ansiblu către o planetă recent contactată de Ecumen, Aka. Decenii mai târziu, Observatoarea Sutty de pe Pământ sosește pe Aka pentru a evalua consecințele acestui gest necugetat: de la recepționarea mesajului terran, societatea akană a suferit o metamorfoză majoră. Vechea lor cultură de milenii a fost complet ștearsă din analele istoriei, fiind înlocuită de o ideologie aproape fanatic științifică, care reglementează până în cele mai mici detalii viețile cetățenilor. Misiunea de istoric a lui Sutty este se scoată la iveală ultimele vestigii ale culturii originale, dacă ele mai există pe undeva – și să contemple prejudiciile ireparabile cauzate de acțiunile necugetate ale concetățenilor ei.

“Read this and listen to the music here in the library, please, and then erase it”, he said. “Erasure is an art we must learn from the Akans. Seriously! I mean it. The Hainish want to hang on to everything. The Akans want to throw everything away. Maybe there’s a middle way? At any rate, we have our first chance to get into an area where maybe history wasn’t erased so thoroughly.”