Tag Archives: science fiction

Exile to Hell

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I have reached the point in the Deathlands series where it has become two series. Which is weird. Now, if I understand the release schedule correctly, I’ll be alternating between the two series. It is very clear that Outlanders is in conversation with the original, but less clear if it will be a two way conversation. We’ll see, I guess!

Exile to Hell is set another hundred years in the future. That is to say, two hundred years after World War III all but wiped out humanity and gave rise to monstrous mutations both within and outside of humanity. And one hundred years after Ryan Cawdor, Mildred Wyeth, and friends have been striding the so-called Deathlands that are what remained of the United States.

So, what’s different? A lot of things, as it happens. Most importantly, the mostly horrible Barons who run the mostly horrible various settlements have come together and consolidated their power[1]. They have nine much larger fiefdoms in which all of the healthy, happy, neatly contained and regimented and let’s be honest controlled people live, while everything outside the barons’ control is known as the Outlands. Yes, another hundred years means that much less radiation and associated horrors, but it’s still not great out there, Bob.

Also, our characters are pretty different. Okay, is there a main character, his military buddy, a redhead, an old dude straight out of the past, and an albino? When you put it like that, you’re undercutting my point, fine. But my point is, the main character? He’s one of his baron’s secmen, now called magistrates. They have the tech and the firepower to be nearly invulnerable. We’re talking hardcore body armor, the best guns[2], black freaking helicopters. You go up against them? You lose. Kane really could not be more different from Cawdor, viewed through the lens of the latter’s adventures so far. And Krysty Wroth’s ginger mutant has been replaced by Brigid Baptiste’s ginger historian who Knows Too Much(tm). (The other characters, it’s too soon to tell yet.)

But the biggest difference is the environment. This is not (yet at least) a survivalist series. Civilization has begun to return. The redoubts full of teleporters are still a feature of the series, but it turns out they’re the tip of the iceberg. The old questions were “where are we going next using this tech we barely understand, and who will we have to kill to save people and then get back to the mysterious tech and jump to the next place?” The new questions are “where did this technology come from, really, and once we know the answer, are we content to live with it? Or should Something be Done?”

So, as I said, I’m really interested in seeing whether the Deathlands are in conversation with this series, and what secrets each will reveal going forward.

[1] Does this make future Deathlands volumes feel a little less hopeful than they had up to now? Prospectively, it does. All the work they’ve been doing to free people and wash away the human horrors, and, a generation or so later, it was for nothing? Yikes.
[2] I mean, obviously. Whatever else these books are, they’re still in the genre that glories in describing gun models, ammo types, and what that ammunition does to a body.

Wool

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There’s this show on Apple+[1] called Silo. The year it came out (2023 maybe?), I called it the best sci-fi on TV, and I stand by that assessment. A long time later, albeit by my standards pretty rapidly, I’ve picked up and read the first book in that trilogy (which covers the first two seasons of the show).

Wool tells the story of a, well, a silo. It is underground, some 140 or so levels into the earth as measured from the up top, through the mids, and into the down deep. It contains a large but necessarily limited number of people. They all have jobs (porters who run things up and down the silo, mechanical who keeps the generator running, farmers, doctors, a sheriff, IT, even a mayor), and eventually everyone in every job has a shadow, learning to do that job from the previous generation. It is a perfect closed system, and nobody ever leaves.

Well, that isn’t quite true. There’s an exit, right next to the jail cells in the sheriff’s office on the top level. The exit leads up a ways to the surface, where there’s a door to outside, and cameras in all directions surround the door. Those cameras show an utterly destroyed landscape in greys and browns, with constant windblown particles, constant rushing clouds in what might otherwise be called a sky, a decayed city full of what are no longer skyscrapers in any useful sense off in the distance, but with a ridge that prevents view of anything nearby. The silo is in a depression, is what I mean. The view from these cameras is shown in the nearby top-level cafeteria, a warning of what leaving the silo would mean. And yet, if anyone asks to leave, they are not only allowed to do so, but by law must. The only caveat is that they are asked to clean the cameras when they go out, since the view is forever being worsened by the blowing dust. For this, they are given a square of wool. Anyone who goes out does clean, even those who swear they will not, and anyone who goes out dies within minutes, soon enough to become a part of that pre-ridge landscape, a warning that it is not yet and may never be safe to go out.

I’ve already said rather a lot, so I’ll stop here. Either that description grabs you and makes you want to know where a story would go in this setting, or it does not. But I have a few pieces of additional commentary relative to the show. The main one is, for better or worse, the voice of Juliette and the voice of Deputy Marnes are just irrevocably overwritten into the voice of their characters in the book. I think probably for better, in both cases. The second is that most of the changes made for the show were probably improvements, even if they stretched out the story a bit. (Plus, some of them might turn out to be due to retcons for future books I’ve yet to read.)

Lastly… well, this one is complicated. I must say first of all that Wool is a complete story in itself. If nothing else had been written, I would be completely satisfied by its ending. That said, in discussions online about the TV show, I was lambasted for not really caring what was the source of the disaster that led to these people being trapped in this silo. Like zombies in that flavor of apocalypse, the blasted landscape is setting. Who cares why there are zombies? There just are, the story is influenced by the setting, the setting is not a part of the story. And honestly, I stand by that assessment. This book being a complete story in itself just proves to me that I was right.

However.

I will say that the book managed something the TV show did not, which is to make me interested in finding out how we got here after all. Cleverly, therefore, book two is all about that, and I suppose I’ll read it pretty soon.

[1] the streaming service whose name I may or may not have correct

Close to the Sun

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In the second half of December, right after I started the new Indiana Jones game and got my new PS5 Pro (halfway or more through the 5’s lifecycle), I… played none of those games, because I learned that a Nikola Tesla themed game I had been interested in was leaving Game Pass. Hence, another entry in my ongoing series of timely reviews for games you can no longer just get, as in for “free”.

Close to the Sun tells an extremely alternate history of the 1890s, where Tesla was successful enough with his electricity plans to corner that market worldwide, and then he built an enormous scientific research vessel, to which the main character has been invited by her sister. When the reporter sister arrives (as opposed to the scientist sister, you see), she discovers that nobody is home, but there’s a giant quarantine sign[1] and a lot of damage and weird shimmering images of people walking around.

Thus commences the barely not a walking sim exploration of the ship, to find and rescue her sister, figure out what went wrong, and ultimately escape, one hopes. As a game, it was I think only okay except for my interest in the whole Tesla / Edison thing, which elevated it somewhat. The four characters were all pretty good, the mysteries were mostly compelling, the ending was, I will say, “rushed”. All in all: decent and short enough to not crazy overstay its welcome, but marred by a truly awful save system that meant if for any reason I did not finish a chapter, I would have to start it over. So, be prepared to play for a while at a time whether you like it or not, since the XBox’s quick resume system is a complete failure on this game in particular as well as the lack of good saving I already mentioned.

In further conclusion, maybe it’s better as a game than I’m giving it credit for, and mostly the technical issues are why my estimation rounded downward a bit.

[1] I cannot explain precisely why, but it was particularly affecting to me that the quarantine sign was painted over the exit to the internal docks, in case anyone wanted to leave, but with no hint of any warning to anyone coming in.

Dune: Part Two

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Dune: Part One was honestly a pretty solid movie. It introduced a far-flung future that is implausibly focused on a medieval past, but it made up for that implausibility by the accompanying concepts being fun to imagine. And said future is chock full of interesting characters with wildly divergent motivations that are worth watching clash against one another. Shadowy prophecies, a macguffin that you can really understand why people care so deeply about it, betrayals, chases, escapes… I begin to consider that these movies should not be classified as science fiction. Well, whatever, unimportant.

Part Two, on the other hand, is a complete enigma of a film. It clocks in at nearly three hours, and two of those hours are Paul Atreides learning how to Fremen better than any Fremen has ever Fremened before, in fulfillment of messianic prophecy that was apparently set in motion by the Bene Gesserit, which makes it not entirely trustworthy[1], except for how it all keeps coming true nevertheless. And it’s not that these two hours are, moment over moment, bad. It’s that they somehow manage to simultaneously be boring in aggregate while still also managing to feel rushed. I don’t know if that means the five hour version of this movie would fix all the problems or heighten them to the point of absurdity, but it’s pretty definitely one or the other, and I’d like to at least know which, you know?

Then in the remaining hour we see the machinations behind the brutal climax of part one, leading into a brutal climax of part two, which… just straight up did not feel like the end of a story. I think I might have been better able to give long stretches of boring sand punctuated by worms and romance and guerrilla tactics followed by a climactic ending that perversely resolves nothing and arguably leaves things even worse than before, if I had known this was the middle third of a trilogy.

As it is… solid spectacle, lovely acting, total feh at the storytelling.

[1] I don’t mean in the “is it real?” sense, because I don’t know enough about the BG, and the movie does not reveal enough about them, to determine where their knowledge (if indeed they have any special knowledge in the first place) comes from. I mean it in the “is it a trap?” sense, because it would appear that anything they do benefits themselves before anyone else. Also the Kwisatz Haderach, which is probably meant to be something more than a creepy pair of words, but is not particularly elaborated upon in any deeper way in these two movies.

Dune (2021)

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A couple of years ago, I watched maybe half of the Dune remake, but it was at night and I fell asleep. And then I never got around to returning. Which, I mean, plenty of time to make up before part two came calling. Which brings me to last weekend, wherein I did in fact watch the movie for real and true. And you know what? Not bad!

See, there’s this noble family, we’ll call them the Starks. And they are asked by the Emperor of All Cosmos to take over production of spice[1] from a different noble family, who we’ll call the Lannisters. The Lannisters are super rich and also not fond of having their golden goose forcibly taken away, so they plan a trap. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is that Paul Stark is possibly the first male Aes Sedai since the end of the Second Age, as evidenced by the fact that he is having prophetic dreams about Mary Jane Aviendha and by the fact that when he sticks his hand inside a ter’angreal that causes pain, he doesn’t pull his hand out. (Although arguably he was coerced by the threat of murder into leaving it there.)

So anyway, Paul goes off to desert world, where… oh, hey, *Dune*! I get it. Nice one.

He goes there, I was saying, with the rest of his family, to start harvesting spice. And they learn about the giant sandworms who leave behind teeth that you can turn into crysknives if you have a scroll of enchant weapon, and they learn about the blue-eyed desert people who are not fans of the Lannisters, and right as it seems like they might be able to get the hang of this whole spice-harvesting gig even though all the equipment keeps breaking down and may have been sabotaged, that turns out not to matter, because Baron Lannister and his nephew Drax “Sting” Lannister launch a surprise attack and kill every single last Stark. Weirdly, nobody got married.

Wait, sorry, I’m being informed that Paul Stark and his mother Moiraine survived, and wandered off into the desert to hook up with Mary Jane and the rest of the desert people so they could lay low until it’s time for their counter-revenge in part two. Which we’ll probably watch tomorrow!

Although I have been glib in the above review, it is worth mentioning that a) the ornithopters are extremely cool, b) I very much want to know what happens next, even though I kind of do know, and c) the entire aesthetic of the first movie is A+. You can really tell the difference between what Lynch was able to accomplish in 1984 and what Villeneuve has been able to now, from a technological stance. From an adaptive stance, well, Lynch definitely adapted a book, while this guy is putting the book on screen.

I guess the important difference is that Lynch makes me giggle continuously, albeit in a good way, while Villeneuve makes me watch.

[1] Spice is what makes warp speed possible. (Also, it improves food I assume.)

Demons of Eden

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I know I was just complaining about how these Deathlands books are just extruding titles now, but maybe someone else thought the same thing lo these 27 years ago? Because Demons of Eden is basically on the nose. I could wish the editors were better about paying attention to character continuity now that there are multiple authors, or for that matter about scene continuity within a single volume.

And I could especially wish the books had not suddenly remembered their genre and started turning all male gazey. 38 books in, plus owning all of them, I’m not likely to stop now. But I miss being able to recommend them with almost no reservations[1], back when they were subverting the expectations of their audience instead of pandering to it, and back when there was a little more science in my speculative fiction.

But my original point was that at least the plotting is a bit more interesting and on track and acting like it and the title are related, which is not nothing. This time, our heroes tackle ancient Sioux and conquistador legends about lost cities of gold, which might also hold the key to undoing a century of nuclear damage to the entire planet. But if the only way to reach that end is to despoil one of the last idyllic locales in the post-holocaust world, is it worth it?

In conclusion, ley lines and Gaia and leaning more into earth-based fantasy plotting is all well and good, but I miss when the characters were jumping into government funded teleporters all the time.

[1] Way too detailed about guns in use, which is its own kind of uncomfortable in these fallen times, and some pretty explicit violence on the regular. But otherwise? A+, for a long run of books.

Nona the Ninth

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It is my understanding that Tamsyn Muir wanted to name this book Nona, rather than Nona the Ninth, but her editor and/or publisher told her she couldn’t if she expected people to find the book and continue reading the series. The compromise position they reached was Nona the Ninth, and to my regret, this is not something I can reflect in the post name. So just be aware I would have if I could have.

Nona was much easier to read than Harrow, but I find that it is much harder to describe without spoilers. Part of that is because it is the third book in a nominally four book series, of course. Part of it is because Tamsyn Muir never met a plotline (or a character development) she couldn’t obfuscate inside out and backward[1].

So let’s see. If Gideon is a book written from the perspective of the Nine Houses, and Harrow is a book written from the perspective of The Emperor and his Divine Saints, then Nona is a book written from the perspective of the citizenry of the Empire that exist outside the Houses[2]. Nona and her friends (and the citizenry that surround them) live in a city on a planet under siege. Under siege by the [let’s say] terrorist organization Blood of Eden, under siege by the Empire, under siege by the glowing blue light in the sky. Within five days (as heavily implied by the early text of the book), everything is going to go straight to hell, and Nona (and her friends, let us not forget) must balance the razorwire to make it through those five days. Also, not for nothing, that’s when Nona’s birthday is!

Before I go, I will introduce you to Nona, by telling you that her primary concerns are her job at school, and her upcoming birthday, and dogs, and absolutely none of the dangers that surround her. (And her friends.)

[1] To be clear, this is a compliment. I think a grudging one, and that is probably what makes it not be clear, but a compliment nonetheless.
[2] Which is already sort of a spoiler for the series, because as far as I could tell reading Gideon, the Nine Houses were the entirety of the Empire; I had no idea a separate citizenry existed!

Solyaris

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A long time ago, I saw the George Clooney remake of Solaris, a movie about which I remember essentially nothing except that I sort of hated it. The open (and unanswerable) question is: was past me wrong? Later, my horror(?) movie podcast decided to watch the original[1] Russian Soviet adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel, which is what brings us here today. Arguably, having watched these movies in reverse order, I should next pick up the book.

Solaris, in a non-spoilery nutshell: there’s this guy, and he wanders around his family property staring distantly at the lake and the underwater reeds and the empty road. Later, a second guy comes to visit and recap his history with the largely oceanic planet Solaris, which we[2] have a station in orbit around. Some people went missing, and the second guy piloted a failed solo rescue mission in which he saw a lot of weird things that his onboard camera system did not corroborate, as a result of which he has advice for the first guy, who is a psychologist going to the station to decide whether it should stay open. Also, the second guy has a son who seems unfamiliar with the concept of horses, and then afterwards the second guy and the son go on a long, pointless[3] drive in [probably] China. Later yet, the psychologist goes to the station, and discusses with the remaining two residents a) what happened to the until recently remaining third resident (who was the psychologists’s friend) and b) why there are in fact rather more than two residents. Then he spends the remainder of the movie coming to grips with the answers they provide him, as well as the answers they do not provide him.

I think I might have gotten more out of the film if I had a better grasp on the painting where those hunters(?) are returning to town on a ridge while everyone ice skates in the valley town below, or more fully caught the Tolstoy and Dostoevsky references, for examples. But even at three hours, it only wears out its welcome once or twice during the most drawn out and inexplicable scenes, or when director Tarkovsky gets a little too clever by switching to various black and white shades as though we’re meant to know what is being conveyed by this change in that moment. The rest of the time, we are presented with a slow (nay, lingering) meditation on what it means to be human, and to behave humanely, in the face of the unknown.

And really, you cannot ask for much more out of your science fiction than that.

[1] False! There was a TV movie in the USSR four years earlier, which, huh, okay.
[2] humanity? The Soviets? It’s not perfectly clear, but probably humanity.
[3] Okay, that’s editorializing. I have no idea whether it was in some way central to the plot or it wasn’t.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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I played a good deal of the then-new Zelda game in 2018, but kind of too fast? I mean, I rushed it. I mean, I did tons and tons of main quest and did not treat it like a sandbox RPG where you luxuriate in exploring every nook and cranny, and fulfill the need of every minor and major person you come across, even those who it would seem will not actually trigger a quest at all but you just have a sense that they ought to, and only after all of that is completed do you fiddle with the main quest. Or at the very least, you spread out the main quest pieces amongst all this luxuriating and fulfilling, such that you’re only thinking about that last little bit of game when you’re also running out of anything else to do anyway,

Then, for reasons that are lost in the mists, I stopped playing it.

Now, five years and one already-released sequel later, I have played a great deal of Breath of the Wild. Previous Zelda games have been a) smaller, which okay is a contributing factor, but mainly b) have been in fantasy settings. Sure, there are monsters around and a bad guy to defeat, and eventually villages and villagers and various races of creatures besides generic green elf-costumed heroes with swords, but all in service of a bit of magic trinketry and a giant boss fight and a princess of some kind to rescue and/or be rescued by.

This game, though… it is post-apocalyptic, and it is lonely. Okay, yes, there are obviously a lot more people to interact with than in any prior game in the (let’s say) series, and a lot more ways to interact with them, but the world is so huge, and so full of formerly rampaging sci-fi behemoths, and so full of monsters, and so devoid of people on a moment by moment basis, and even more devoid of people who aren’t huddled together in tiny enclaves of light against the darkness… It’s hard to hit every nook and cranny. And it’s a little depressing to try.

Well, no. What I mean is not depressing, it’s melancholy. Every action you take that isn’t directly related to fulfilling someone’s quest, you are either wandering around in the wilderness (hence the name) fighting things or looking for immeasurably old tombs to raid or collecting ingredients, or else you are unraveling the tragedy of a hundred years ago when everyone you hypothetically care about was killed.

I’ve noticed I’m making the game sound not fun, which is just spectacularly not true. There are so many puzzles to solve, so many stories to discover, so many things to collect, and upgrade, and defeat. I think I’m over 150 hours into the game at this point? There are still things I want to accomplish, but not many more that I feel I must. Uh, wait, you are asking yourself. If you didn’t finish, and especially if you are close to finishing, why the review?

So, funny story. I was killing time on Sunday while waiting for the in-game clock to reach night time, as a few quests I’m working on can only move forward at that time of not-day, and I was exploring Hyrule Castle plus trying to kill guardians to collect their cores (which they do not drop nearly often enough), when I wandered into a room that seemed to me not nearly high enough in the castle to be the place I would have been going for the big boss fight, only I noticed something that made me say wait, I probably shouldn’t be- and before I finished the thought, cut scene. And then, somehow, I won the boss fight on my first attempt, counter to expectations. And all in all, it feels like waiting to write the review after seeing the end of the game would be a mistake. So here we are!

The thing where most of the equipment in the game is consumable / degradable, i could do without. And some things are maybe a little too hard to accomplish. (Which arguably it would be more accurate to say, I haven’t figured out how to accomplish, but it isn’t actually all that hard. I have reason to believe this is the case.) But man, I understand why this game received the acclaim it did. It’s practically perfect in every way, as long as you don’t mind feeling melancholy.

Harrow the Ninth

I have been reading one book for the entire summer. I just… what even is this? And it did not help that I found Harrow the Ninth extremely difficult to read. If I had not come off the high of Gideon, I might have just quit a few chapters in. But then again, it’s the act of reading the first book that made this one so distasteful to me. It’s hard to explain without spoilers.

I mean, everything about this book is hard to explain without spoilers. In the first book, the necromantic flowers of the Nine Houses, and the cavaliers who defend them, are called to the God-Emperor’s home to become the new round of Lyctors, his hands who help him, I don’t know, run the empire or something? This has not happened in 10,000 years, so it’s kind of a big deal. But then they start <spoiler>ing.

This book picks up with the newly graduated(?) Lyctors, learning what it is exactly that the Emperor needs them for, and how to deal with their new jobs as well as the endless aeons of immortality that await them. Simple as far as it goes, except… yeah, legitimately anything I said by way of explanation would be a spoiler of the book’s central conceit. I compared the prior book to Rendezvous with Rama, and I stand by that. Half the joy of both books so far is in the act of discovery under an almost entirely alien set of circumstances; well, “joy” for the reader, I’m not sure that word plausibly applies for the characters, but still, the similarity is real.

Still though, I simply must get this off my chest, and so the rest goes under the spoiler-cut line. But I’ll say this one other thing: half the book is written in second-person. This is awkward and difficult to get used to, far moreso than I’d ever have guessed. A good friend, lost to me for seven years, used to joke about making a second-person shooter video game, and while the untenability of that is obvious… second-person narration is nearly as off-putting. The only difference between this and the game concept is, you can eventually get used to it in print. Or maybe I’m wrong, and you could eventually get used to having to turn around constantly to affect whatever is coming up behind you, or to walking backwards through the places you’re meant to go. I guess the mind can acclimate to anything, given sufficient time and cause.

Oh, actual last thing: I sort of think that saying whether I liked the book or not would still count as a spoiler, for reasons that would probably be obvious to you if you loved the first book and were only a few chapters into this one. But I will say that I have every intention of reading the next book.

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