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.
Showing posts with label sci fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci fi. Show all posts
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.
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
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
It's the story of Ender, a little boy, who the army decides is the only human who can save the world from the alien bugs. To do this he must lead the world army and commit genocide to the "buggers". He trains in space fighting like it is a sport and then an advanced video game. It almost sounds fun, right? More fun as a book than as a reality, I guess.
Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer
I think Catfishing on CatNet provides a good example for how LBGTQ+ characters can be used in a story without being gratuitous or making the story about sex and gender. I've often questioned the media's insistence that Sex play such a domineering role in our Attractions and Identities. However, my two cents on gender-identity don't matter much. I'm here to talk about books. This was a pretty good one.
Next (feat. Nicolas Cage)
This 2007 film is a mix of many things: scifi , romance, and political thriller. It's loosely based on an old short story by Philip K. Dick. Many of its sci-fi tropes were exhausted by the film industry long before 2007.
Cage plays Cris Johnson, an intentionally bad stage magician with clairvoyant abilities. The FBI figures him out, and they need him to save Los Angeles. Cris can tell everything about his (current) future, except for the parts that involve a certain love interest, played by Jessica Biel. She does a reasonable job acting, considering the blankness of her character.
Character three is a one-note, hard balling FBI agent, played by Julianne Moore. I'm preconditioned to like her despite my natural aversion to law enforcement. The Dangerous Milf always wins, tearfully gripping her nine millimeter. To further prove her competence, she uses her phone's speed dial. Aside from these traits, we don't know anything about this one dimensional character who actually drives the story.
Since this dive into Nicolas Cage's filmography keeps pulling me deeper, I need to thus get deeper in these critiques. Cris Johnson is our protagonist, and we are supposed to like him and think he's cool. However, Hollywood often fails to sell us on the winning traits and personalities of their heros. In fact I'm often annoyed by the values they expect me to buy into. But maybe our real hero is the vanilla love interest... Yeah right.
Why should I expect anyone to use effective communication to solve their problems when they could engage in disastrous action sequences? Cris's clairvoyant powers really make a difference in his capacity to kick butt and escape death. If there is any aspect of quality in this film, it lies with the action scenes.
I hate to be a spoiler, but the story of Next never resolves itself. Despite its teasing flavor of hard scifi with good practical effects, Next is a bad, incomplete film. It shouldn't have been made.
1. Raising Arizona
2. Leaving Las Vegas
3. Adaptation
4. Birdy
5. Wild at Heart
6. Color Out of Space
7. Peggy Sue Got Married
8. City of Angels
9. Gone in 60 Seconds
10. Matchstick Men
11. Vampire's Kiss
12. Face/Off
13. Honeymoon in Vegas
14. The Family Man
15. It Could Happen to You
16. 8mm
17. Ghost Rider
18. Next
19. The Weather Man
20. The Croods
Virtual Mode by Piers Anthony
I started with the audio book, but the audio book went bad. That's what I get for using Soulseek, you might say. Anyway, the hook for Virtual Mode was so good I had to finish it, for better or for worse.
It starts out as the story of a suicidal teenager Colene, who finds a man (Darius) from another dimension, passed out in the ditch by her house. Darius is from another dimension, out of infinite dimensions (called Modes). Darius is the Cyng of Hlahtar (all the names are ridiculous) and came to Colene's Mode to find a wife; one he can keep instead of divorcing once he depleted her joy. People in Hlahtar can't produce their own joy, so the Cyng has to do it for them.
In Colene's Mode people can produce their own joy, which is great for Darius. Or is it? I don't want to spoil too much for you, but Darius and Colene go to a bunch of different Modes. Don't let the beginning give you an idea of what this story will be like. Virtual Mode changes trajectory several times and ends eventually. It's part of a series, so it doesn't really end, and I'm gonna take my time before reading the other four books in this series.
"Jurassic Park" by Michael Crichton
Is Jurassic Park in your top ten films? It's in mine. The book was extremely satisfying. I didn't want to put it down. What a great time! After all, there's only so much that can be shown in a film. I should have read this years ago, like I always meant to, but somehow other things were more urgent. Did I even enjoy those other things? Probably not as much as I enjoyed reading Jurassic Park.
Color Out of Space (feat. Nicolas Cage)
Weird for a movie, not weird for Lovecraft, Color Out of Space was grotesque and terrifying... eldritch if you will. Like most new/high budget films, I was put off a bit by some of the visual enhancements, especially earlier when nothing terrible has happened yet. Once the scary stuff starts happening, the visuals are awesome. Cage does an awesome job as an uptight, intellectual dad. I get Vampire's Kiss vibes when he freaks out, and I'm glad he's still pulling from that side of himself. All the other actors are great, too. We even get to see Tommy Chong in action, hopefully not for the last time.
1. Raising Arizona
2. Leaving Las Vegas
3. Adaptation
4. Birdy
5. Color Out of Space
6. City of Angels
7. Gone in 60 Seconds
8. Matchstick Men
9. Vampire's Kiss
10. Face/Off
11. Honeymoon in Vegas
12. The Family Man
13. 8mm
14. The Weather Man
15. The Croods
Knee Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh
In 6th grade, I went to Walden Books in the mall with my friend Paul. He bought this novelization of Doom and I bought a novelization of Myst. For those of you who don’t know, Myst might be the most boring game ever released on the Sony Playstation (but on PC there are definitely more boring games). I should have bought Knee Deep in the Dead though it likely has more value to my adult self than whatever jerk I was in 1998.I’ve never read a military-type story so this is a new thing for me. Like the computer game, Knee Deep in the Dead is mostly about shooting monsters. These monsters are being produced on Deimos and Phobos, the famous moons of Mars, and must be stopped from going to earth and destroying humanity. It’s a fun read especially if you’re addicted to action games and want to build up your literacy.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
I decided to browse a list of Nebula Award winning books, hoping to mix some stellar reads into my research of fiction. I'd already heard of this one and knew it was about a man who is mentally handicapped and has an operation, making him eventually the most intelligent man ever.
I thought maybe Flowers for Algernon could make a nice gift to those of my friends and family who like to throw around the word "retard". It's not that they're bad people. In fact, they're too good to be passively insulting those who are less fortunate than them. These are people who are reactionary to political correctness; so fragile whenever anyone questions their morality. They are the good people. You can't tell them they're wrong or else they'll respond by being extra wrong.
You know the type. I don't understand why we can't normalize admitting our mistakes and helping each other to make things better.
This may not be the book you want to give as a gift, as if people do read the books they're gifted. It's a "hard read". It sucks you in and makes you feel the dark emotions, achieving what so many authors only dream. As an aspiring writer, I couldn't trust myself to narrate from the perspective of the most intelligent man ever. Daniel Keyes knocked it out of the park.
It's sci fi but there are no robots, gadgets, aliens, or zombies. Rest easy, nerd haters. Even the most insensitive of woke-reactionaries can get into this book. I might dare to say they should get into it.
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction by Philip Athans
I think when writing my first novel, I must have googled "How to write a fantasy novel". As it turns out I had a lot to learn. Not just about syntax and plot formation, but in world building and the paradigm of fantasy writing. So before each writing session, I would read a few posts from Philip Athans's supplementary blog until I read every one of his posts. For some reason, I never brought myself to spend $10 on a used copy of this paper back.
It's a good read, especially if you have any interest in writing these specific genres. It gave me a lot of authors to put in my "to read" list and a lot of films to my "to watch" list. Also, the blog is regularly updated and still holds up. Check it out!
I have crossed the meridian
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