Here's another book which I did not yet know had been made into a movie. It tells the story of a young woman's blossoming career in the tech world of silicon valley where she works for the Circle. I think that's what it's called. Basically the company likes to track every place and every person because no information should be destroyed or forgotten, or private. Needless to say, not everyone is into this. Things go bad for some people. At the time of its advent I think this story was far more poignant. As of now, its concepts are old and not very scary.
Showing posts with label sci fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci fi. Show all posts
Wool by Hugh Howey
Here we go. People had been talking about this awesome sci-fi tv show with the enchanting Rebecca Ferguson, Rashida Jones, and Steve Zahn. And I watched a few episodes, after reading this book which I think tells the story of both seasons of the tv show. It's good. Immersive, dark, makes you wonder. If you like modern science fiction, you'll like it.
It's about people who live in underground silos after some sort of catastrophic event on earth, and there's a lot of control in the amount of information people can have. There's also a lot of climbing and going down stairs, which the tv show doesn't emphasize enough.
Severance by Ling Ma
For those who've seen the tv show Severance, this book is unrelated. It's an apocalyptic zombie type of story taking place in modern times with a narrating protagonist who doesn't like air conditioning. I think she's Korean, and lives in New York City. So maybe she's justified in that opinion.
Similar to the pandemic we've experienced, our heroine isolates herself properly and holds out at her job until everyone else is gone. Then she embarks on a journey to explore what's left while seeking a safer place, and joins a collective group. But what happens to them? There are some definite scary parts in this book. You'll like it if you like horror or zombies.
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
A couple years and a couple movies after I read and adored Dune by Frank Herbert, it was time to go ahead and read the sequel. While it's as touching, gripping, or magical as the original, Dune Messiah gives us more of a philosophical scifi in space opera set mainly on planet Arrakis.
Paul sure as heck becomes the emperor, but he finds it hard to be as good of a man as he had wanted. I imagine it is hard to be a good god, with all the enemies of Good out there. Trusty Stilgar is still around, maybe more important than ever. But what about our beloved heroes who didn't make it to the end of Dune? Will any of them come back to life and make our beloved messianic family feel Weird? I guess you'll have to read it.
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
From our two lords of cyberpunk, we are brought something collectively made and different. The Difference Engine is considered an essential in the forming of Steampunk as a subgenre. It was written collectively through the mail, as the two writers Mailed floppy disks to each other from Texas to British Columbia. It sounds crazy, doesn't it?
Instead of a regular novel, we got a collection of stories centering on a theme of analog computers, and the Babbage Machine. Instead of getting high tech low lifes in an imagined future, we get those types of characters in a less-imagined victorian setting. While it's not my favorite thing from either writer, I consider the book as successful experiment in form and genre.
Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny
Here's a one-off from our lord of pulpy scifi and fantasy. Damnation Alley is the nickname for the middle majority of the United States after all the nuclear bombs were dropped. The roughest toughest outlaw in the west must drive across country in a monster car, then a motorcycle to deliver an antidote to a plagued city in New England. There are monsters, storms, gangs, death, and guns. There was a B-movie made on the premise, but I'd skip it. Read the book if this sounds like your thing.
Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood
You guessed it, this is the conclusion to my beloved Maddaddam trilogy in which our heroes work together to go on a quest and plan to rebuild civilization, with many of the same problems that existed before the Flood. It's a great one, showing you can still have moving scenes and true heroism in a satirical speculative fiction.
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwod
You may have guessed it, this book is the sequel to Oryx and Crake, the 2nd in the Maddaddam trilogy. Like many good trilogies, this one stars a different set of characters and focuses on a religious cult that has predicted the events to come in Oryx and Crake (the end of humanity). The Year of the Flood gives a stronger glimpse of what life is like in this theoretical future for those who are both female and less fortunate than Jimmy and Crake. Needless to say, it's juicy and makes you wonder if the prophet was privy to the nature and source of the pending flood.
Jiu Jitsu (feat. Nicolas Cage)
Cage plays the funny old guy in Jake's band of plot exposing chosen ones. He should be in the movie more, but I get it. He's not the most qualified martial artist in this bunch. At least he gets to be a hero, if not The hero. Mostly I'm disappointed that the longest and fastest-paced fights are between our actors and our cgi god of death. I really don't care about watching action scenes of cgi characters. Still, I like this kind of movie. I like kung-fu and pointless cape-wearing. It also reminds me of Mortal Kombat meets Predator, which is a good thing in my book.
- Raising Arizona
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Leaving Las Vegas
- Red Rock West
- Adaptation
- Pig
- Birdy
- Wild at Heart
- Joe
- National Treasure
- Guarding Tess
- Snake Eyes
- Mandy
- Dog Eat Dog
- Color Out of Space
- Mom and Dad
- World Trade Center
- Peggy Sue Got Married
- The Rock
- Zandalee
- Prisoners of the Ghostland
- City of Angels
- Willy's Wonderland
-
Jiu Jitsu
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin
- Bangkok Dangerous
- Drive Angry
- Army of One
- Lord of War
- Gone in 60 Seconds
- Matchstick Men
- Vampire's Kiss
- Con Air
- Face/Off
- Trapped in Paradise
- The Boy in Blue
- Honeymoon in Vegas
- Deadfall
- Amos and Andrew
- Moonstruck
- Tokarev
- The Sorcerer's Apprentice
- Knowing
- Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
- Bringing Out the Dead
- The Family Man
- Stolen
- Season of the Witch
- It Could Happen to You
- The Wicker Man
- 8mm
- The Frozen Ground
- Left Behind
- A Score to Settle
- Pay the Ghost
- Primal
- Dying of the Light
- Grand Isle
- Looking Glass
- Arsenal
- Between Worlds
- Ghost Rider
- Trespass
- The Humanity Bureau
- Next
- The Weather Man
- 211
- Fire Birds
- The Croods
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
This is the first entry in one of my favorite scifi trilogies to date. It's about the end of humanity as we know it and how it came to be in a world of (of course) extreme capitalism with prestigious schools who specifially choose students who lack empathy and value for any life other than their own. It's a very fun, immersive trip with shades of clever social commentary tucked into every scene. I highly recommend it to anyone who isn't touchy about their privilege and social norms.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
I can't say enough good things about Gibson's writing. While it forces you to play close attention in an environment ever both familiar and outlandish, we get a nearly unmatched level of immersion. While eventually explaining to us what the Nueromancer is, the book follows the stories of Case and Molly on a dangerous hacking mission.
How did they get mixed up into all of it? In Gibson's cyberpunk future, it could happen to anyone. Nobody is safe from this ever shifting, augmented reality we inhabit.
Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee
I would call this a traditional sci-fi. A distant future Utopia. But Utopia never works, does it? I like the philosophical angle, fure sure. I'm not sure I appreciated having to read and reference so many made up words. I guess it's some kind of writing flex. Apparently there are more books in this series, and I'm somewhat interested in what other kind of stuff Tanith Lee does, so maybe I'll catch the next one.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I never read this book as a young one, so of course I had to check in on what all the hype is about. To me, this book is a funny sci fi adventure. There is a space opera element, but since the story starts on earth and it involves some paradigm stretching stuff, I'll disqualify its space opera status.
This is a funny book, as in on almost every page there's an attempt to make you laugh. And sometimes these gags fall flat. Sometimes they bog down the story. But it's all in good fun. The proglem is I could never figure out when to read fast and when to read slow, so I can tell what's happening in the story. I didn't have the patience of a true Douglas Adams enjoyer.
All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson
But with this Bridge trilogy, I chugged through it and finished this third book in a single day. It was that good. In this resolving story, we return to the autonomous civilization of San Francisco. Everything comes together with the most severe and exhilirating consequences. It makes you wonder. Are we all heroes, or are we all not heroes, merely hanging around while technology drags us through all our deepest terrors?
Idoru by William Gibson
I started reading this one before Virtual Light, because I'd found it on paperback and didn't know it was the 2nd in a trilogy. And as it turns out, I didn't need to start with the first book, as this one follows its own set of characters in its own setting, Tokyo, as rebuilt by nanobots.
Much of this story follows the dangrous misadventures of Laney, a man who works in celebrity technology, predicting fortunes with his unique ability to find nodes and patterns in data. He has this special gift because as an orphan in Gainesville Florida, he was injected with an experimental medication for adhd. While this gift is more dangerous than valuable.
Idoru is Japanese for Idol, a name used to define an era of japanese popular music. Idoru fandoms have always been a huge part of the economy and general consciousness over there, so it's only natural for this paradigm to take an occasional turn for the dangerous.
But what if the most powerful celebrity was generated by a computer, and lived in all places at once? If you're wondering, I strongly recommend this book. For a few days, it consumed me in such a fantastic, exciting way.
Virtual Light by William Gibson
Taking place primarily in the San Francisco bay area in the the future year of 2005, Virtual Light tells the story of an ex-cop and ex-rent-a-cop named Berry Rydell. At no real fault to himself, he finds himself at the bottom, taking a freelance job with some associates of the security company he'd been fired from, to do their dirty work. This job coincides him with a once-homeless bike messenger, Chevette Washington, who lives in a makeshift hut, piled at the top of the golden gate bridge.
In fact, the bridge has turned into an autonomous zone for the lower class. And when the lower class collides with the powers in place, crimes and frames for crimes are inevitable. This is how Chevette finds herself with a pair of Virtual Light glasses, containing a coorporation's top secret plans to rebuild San Francisco with endlessly working nanobots, as they were doing in Tokyo.
I love the setting of a dystopian future because everything is familiar but different, parodied with a shifting nature. Every scene is dangerous a dangerous feast for the imagination. Every character with the privilege for double agency takes what they can get. If you are not big shot, then the best you can hope for is a job in the business of reality tv.
While I wouldn't say the story here is perfect, I had a wonderful time with it and rapidly consumed the rest of this Bridge trilogy. So be ready for reports on Gibson's Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties.
Pstalemate by Lester Del Rey
This man is Harry Bronson, an engineer who hangs out in literate circles that do drugs and write science fiction. There are a lot of good scenes in this book, written by the husband of Del Rey publishing's founder, Judy-Lynn Del Rey. I feel like this was a great time for scifi and fantasy, when great writers were getting out of the pulp magazines and into novels.
Novels about weird, adult things were written with an exciting pace and efficient language, rare in today's epically thick fantastical novels. And for me, this was the right book at the right time, because new fantasy is starting to grate on me. I've never been especially interested in uplifting fairy tales about 'weird' kids who are secretly mega special, and heroes for their idiosyncrasies. Only in fairy tales.
In Pstaleamte, newly telepathic Harry goes through all manner of psychologically perverse hell, trying to fix what others might imagine is a gift until it occurs to them.
Between Worlds (feat. Nicolas Cage)
I respect Cage's inclination toward weird and artsy films. Between Worlds is one of those, sort of. It is, but not very much until I'd already decided the movie wasn't very good and that there wasn't much that could save it. I think writer/director/producer Maria Pulera felt the same way. She got halfway through her supernatural thriller and realized it was lame, and thought she could save it by making it as weird as possible, deliberately taking cues for style from Twin Peaks.
In Between Worlds, Cage plays another Joe, a down-on-his-luck trucker with a tragic past. By chance, he finds an innocent woman, Julie, getting strangled in a gas station bathroom. The catch is Julie wanted to be strangled. Getting close to death allows her into the 'other' world, where she can revive her comatose daughter.
So Joe strangles Julie too, but the magic at play goes wrong and bad stuff happens to everyone. The story is more interesting when told in a few sentences than when stretched out over an hour and a half of bad movie. I should have known this movie would be bad when I saw, for no reason at all, a close up of the gas station attendant's butt crack, a shot I found analogous to the quality of this film.
- Raising Arizona
- Leaving Las Vegas
- Red Rock West
- Adaptation
- Birdy
- Wild at Heart
- Joe
- Dog Eat Dog
- Color Out of Space
- Mom and Dad
- Peggy Sue Got Married
- Zandalee
- City of Angels
- Bangkok Dangerous
- Drive Angry
- Lord of War
- Gone in 60 Seconds
- Matchstick Men
- Vampire's Kiss
- Con Air
- Face/Off
- Honeymoon in Vegas
- Amos and Andrew
- Moonstruck
- The Sorcerer's Apprentice
- Bringing Out the Dead
- The Family Man
- It Could Happen to You
- 8mm
- Between Worlds
- Ghost Rider
- The Humanity Bureau
- Next
- The Weather Man
- 211
- The Croods
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
I Am Legend also gets philosophical, for all of you who prefer books that are super deep. Who hasn't felt like they were all alone in the world, or at the very least, the last of their kind? If you don't already feel that way, then you could probably try to fix it by drinking a lot of whiskey; exclusively whiskey, boarding up the windows of your heart.
Jokes aside, I thought I Am Legend was a good book. It starts at an interesting point in the story, and goes back in time when the past events become relevant. It doesn't wait until the last minute to tell you things that you deserved to know a hundred pages ago, and it doesn't tell you too much stuff that's not scary and not part of the story. I haven't yet seen the movie of it, but I bet it's pretty good.
Dune by Frank Herbert
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