Category: science fiction

Skibidi Megalon

Posted on by Liz

I went off to see Megalopolis excitedly knowing that a lot of people think it sucked, because even if it sucked I figured it would have some interesting thing to say about “the Future” and would also be something of a spectacle, part “neo Rome” and part art deco. But mostly, I am one of those people who often think about the Roman Empire! Danny, Mikayla and I escaped from the heat of this week at the Alamo Drafthouse, buckled up and ready for THE FUTURE.

It was ridiculous from the beginning. The signifying lesbians in the club (Girls licking each other performatively = Decadence!) The strange attempts to convey SCIENCE, the power hungry vamp, things that were like, vaguely Roman (?) And then the power to STOP TIME.

I complained to Danny that they did not lean in at all to the time stop power or any of the magic. “It’s because it’s meant to be ART – it’s like the power of ART!” OK fine…. it would be nice if the ART contained more artiness.

Aubrey Plaza leaned in hard to her part of the money and power hungry vamp “Wow Platinum” and I thought Adam Driver also did as good as could be done with his weird caricature of a Tortured Genius. They just played it as hard and cartoony as they could.

Things I liked: the trippy montages were embarrassing and pretty good at the same time. The dumb Megalon substance, never explained, that makes a beautiful 1920s World’s Fair park thing in the razed (and satellite-bombed) former slums. TBH I also liked the decadent performative-for-the-male-gaze lesbian gaggle. (I think it was Mikayla who pointed out that the first time they appeared it was like, oh they’re symbolizing decadent empire – but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th times you start thinking maybe Francis Ford Coppola just likes watching cute girls lick each other.)
The science startup montage in the office in the art deco skyscraper penthouse was so ridiculous it was good, at least at making me laugh, as they did a sort of trust exercise and spinned dramatically in spinny chairs while bouncing a basketball and unrolling scrolls on a drafting table. Maybe… maybe… the city planning aspect (while dumb as hell) kind of connects to how Rome would do very deliberate city planning??!

Every time Adam Driver referred to his Nobel Prize (often holding it up in its little case!) was a riot.

Another good laugh – when Adam Driver is partying because he’s upset (I can’t remember why – because his mom is nuts maybe?) And Julia mutters into her bracelet/smartwatch: “10:17pm. Drunk AND high.” The Caesar/Driver being drunk AND high montage is so silly! I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it’s like to be drunk AND high!!!!

Best, was when we got permission to laugh harder at the vestal virgin in her post-scandal, hellfire joan jett haircut & eyeliner phase. OMFG best scene of the whole movie.

I loved being in a theater with other people who were also bursting into laughter and kind of groaning during the Serious moments. It was irresistible to me during the last half of the movie to attribute everything to Marcus Aurelius. All the quotes made me kind of hit my head and groan. It was all so sophomoric! Even the things I kind of liked I also didn’t like! Or I thought they were badly done in some way.

BUT then I was thinking, well, it is not a “good movie” by what we expect to be happening in a good movie, or in its narrative style fitting what we think is good, but that doesn’t make it invalid artistically! No one is (now) telling Herman Melville to “show don’t tell” so maybe I can kind of treat these plonking philosophical bits and the entire speech from Hamlet as Melville-ish digressions. But did it achieve those digressive glories? No. Not quite enough for me.

Things that made me go hmmmmm:
– The basic horrible elitism and “great man” theory infusing it all.
– The mob scenes are all about “the people” being manipulated and used by a few unscrupulous elites. It chilled me to the bone to have “power to the people” be shown in that way by someone who was around for the civil rights movement. It felt deeply racist and also like a racist dog whistle. We can see it as FFC’s commentary on Rome I guess. But none of the Rome stuff went that deep. “The people” don’t have any agency or politics or thoughts or even art (the whole fucking theme of the movie presumably, “Art”)
– None of our (in the U.S.) actual cultural connection to Rome and the various myths of Rome were really touched on. Coppola’s take on Rome and Caesar and everything felt like it came from having read some very outdated historian’s fusty 1890s perspective on the OG sources.
– The hideous sexism. Does anyone go, hey, does Julia also have this magic time stop power since she sees you do it and sees through it? No. no one asks. She is just there to be a muse and to BELIEVE IN HER MAN, who is a GENIUS.
– The more hideous sexism of the mayor being like “can’t you just be daddy’s little girl?” and trying to cockblock her whole relationship
– His original animosity towards Caesar/Driver very much unexplained. Why did he hide his dead wife’s body etc? What??
– Though I guess Julia does have the power with her one year of medical school to surgically reconstruct an entire eyeball and brain and face with Megalon ™. (But maybe just by girlishly Believing. Unclear.)
– that bit at the end where they are entering the world’s fair ass looking park where apparently inventing shiny escalators has solved all world problems, but the same mob who was grimy and looking through a chain link and barbed wire fence a few moments ago is now dressed in their best holiday party gear. Are they stepping merrily into the world’s fair? no! they are looking UP at the platform of famous pop star/politician elites step onto the shiny escalator in the sparsely populated theme park.
– just a nitpick, but if Adam Driver didn’t know his dead wife was preggers when she died, how?! since she was VERY pregnant including maybe an entire baby growing inside each enormous boob

I also thought, maybe this would have been a better movie if it had been made when he first thought of it! I don’t regret seeing it and I kind of like it better the further I get from being in the actual theater watching it and hitting my head groaning or shrieking with laughter. it did make an impression!

Maybe it wasn’t for ME… maybe it was for that 14 year old who is only starting to think about history and art, and looking for something to hook those thoughts on!

Well, anyway, I still love art deco curvey futurism.

But you don’t get to a place where the future is better and art is healing and the ecological interconnectedness of the Earth is respected, by looking to a Lone Genius Science Man to invent a magical substance that fixes everything and then having a bazillionaire donate a lot of money to fund it! And anyone sensible would know that because they would have thought about something that wasn’t the shallowest possible sophomoric Boomer-assed, Fountainhead-brainrotted, literary canon! They might have READ SOME SCIENCE FICTION which is literally a whole genre of people writing about the Future! Maybe even some feminist science fiction which deliberately writes about collective action, people’s relationships, people actually caring for each other day to day instead of giving an occasional speech about Love while totally forgetting birth control might exist, ETCETERA. The Earth / planet not even mentioned till the very last frame of the movie – I guess there were ecological problems (that weren’t fueled or caused by corporate/elite greed??????????????) that are all solved by MEGALON. Whew!

There is my review!

I definitely enjoyed the movie!

Happy 2024!

Posted on by Liz

I didn’t do a year in review for 2023 and I hope I will do something like that. But it’s too much for this morning and I feel like just starting fresh with a diary of this first week.

On Sunday, NYE, I officiated a wedding in Golden Gate Park and that was really a lovely experience!! A first for me (and for the women getting married). My license was from American Marriage Ministries, which is non spiritual and non theist and which you can get free online in like, 5 minutes. We had several discussions about their feelings and what they wanted, I drafted a ceremony, gave them some sample vows to work from as a template, and we did the thing on about one weeks’ notice. Lovely group of friends, and the most biting and wearing of cat ears of any wedding I’ve ever officiated! On Jan 2 I went down to City Hall to turn in the license and got to enjoy the gorgeous building, and visit the statue of John F. Shelley, who is (probably) our house’s most famous former resident.

I hung out at home on Monday with Danny, then at Poesía Cafe to do some writing in the Castro and got a haircut and saw my sister & nephew. Allergy shots – More appointments – Cole Valley and Noe/24th – And today is Trans Nerd Brunch at Zeitgeist.

For reading: Foz Meadows Strange & Stubborn/ All the Hidden Paths (gay fantasy romance, angsty, good), Bookshops & Barbarians (not actually that good alas). A super cheesy kids’ series called The Historical House which is set in a particular made up house in London over 300 years, with a different 12 year old girl starring in each book. Each girl is incredibly bland but has some kind of ambition, and the stories connect. (Why do people dumb down books for middle grade! unnecessary! ) These actually sucked (SO BLAND, so bloodless) and yet I was drawn to read them all. I think because I just like the idea of thinking about the lives of all the people who have lived in a particular house.

I also SCORED majorly as I picked up an old paperback copy of The Unquiet Grave by “Palinurus” aka Cyril Connolly. I dipped in and out of it but haven’t read it through yet. He must have been fun at parties. (All that Benzedrine.) He may get invited to my secret End of Greatness club.

The best book I read this week was Wole Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon. This is just great, while it took a little bit for me to catch on to what was happening, about halfway through it built up to an amazing story of corporate gods and spirits and rebels, freelancer outlaws, power struggles between gods, a Nigerian and, I guess ancient near eastern (!) view of the world, a fantastic heist, a guest star spot by magician Aleistair Crowley & friend as well as his modern incarnation. The exotification of British magic was *chef’s kiss*.

It was so good also to have multiple times and locations within Africa, I don’t know how to express this in a way that isn’t clumsy, but, we get a sense of the greatness of history and huge diversity because of locations in Cairo, Tunisia (?), medieval Ghana, Axum/ ancient Ethiopia/Eritrea, and so on in addition to Nigeria past, present, and spirit-worldish.

This would make the BEST WEIRD MOVIE. Glitzy club scenes with terrifying rich people! Weird sex magic! Amazing historical panoramas! God wars! Spirit worlds! British Museum heist! Seriously.

As I read, I went on a zillionty Wikipedia and beyond spelunking expeditions, looking up people, places, myths, and so on. Any cultural reference I didn’t get, I looked up. I have to go back and make a list of the neat stuff I learned from my sidetrack habit while reading this book but one good starting point was the East African queen Gudit. And another neat one, the Eritrean Hawulti and other stelae!

Anyway, Talabi is another author I will follow with interest – I pre-ordered his next book, Convergence Problems!

And, if you haven’t read Africa Risen, it’s a very good anthology where I first encountered Talabi’s work, and I highly recommend it if you want to start getting into reading African science fiction authors!

Continuing the In Death series

Posted on by Liz

From “Imitation in Death”, which I find hard going because it is particularly disturbing as the murderer is imitating the styles of various serial killers. This was oddly comforting, amazingly meta, to come across right after I had skipped a chunk describing a brutal murder to get to the nifty police procedural/ detective stuff.

“Rape, Peabody was sure, just as she was sure it had to have been brutal. And she’d have been young. Before the job. Peabody had studied Eve’s career with the NYPSD like a template, but there’d been no report of a sexual assault on Dallas. So it had been before, before the Academy. When she was a teenager, or possibly younger. In automatic sympathy, Peabody’s stomach roiled. It would take guts, and balls, to face that, to revisit whatever had happened every time you walked into a scene that reverberated with sexual violence. But to use it, instead of being used by it, that took more, Peabody determined. It took what she could only define as valor.”

Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke are both survivors of extreme childhood trauma and it’s one of the hooks of this series that keeps me reading, as their healing slowly unfolds, they learn to trust each other and be somewhat less dysfunctional, and they build a “found family”.

By this time in book 17, Roarke has faced many past ghosts from his childhood in Dublin, his father and his father’s death, and found some details about his mother he had no idea about (with a ludicrously homey reunion with his mom’s family!!!) Eve often faces having disturbing flashbacks as she deals with murder scenes but explicitly calls out her experience and “damage” as something that has given her strengths and insight into evil.

I’m impressed with this series in general. The dubious consent issues between Eve and Roarke have improved and it explores really interesting territory. I imagine a lot of readers have found the series useful in their own healing from trauma.

The science fiction (especially the fashions!) is still entertaining as well. Roberts doesn’t predict surveillance culture very well – for example people have a cellphone-esque “comm link”, but it doesn’t track their location, and what few security cameras exist are easily hackable somehow or their “discs” can just be stolen. (Which is just hilarious.)

Inadequate notes on recent reading

Posted on by Liz

Am I ready to read The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley? Do I want a severe mindfuck experience? YES ABSOLUTELY.

*** hours later ***

Holy shit! This is a really good book. Very intense! Makes me think of Delany. Yes, and all the other logical things to think of like The Forever War. (And that Mary Gentle series too…) It’s so tight and beautifully structured & dense. I felt a little tempted to chart it out (maybe on a re-read!) Hurley just gets better & better as a writer.

Next book: Finder by Suzanne Palmer – Super fun space opera! If you like the Expanse I bet you will enjoy this interstellar repo man & his comrades.

The Book of Flora by Meg Elison – Another freaking awesome book, last in the trilogy started off by Book of the Unnamed Midwife. I nommed it for the Tiptree immediately on finishing it. Read the whole trilogy together – Book 1 stands on its own but the second and third books are better if you read them together (so that you don’t forget all the stuff that happened in the Book of Etta, which is important for Book of Flora). It is sort of a gorgeous gulliver’s travels of post apocalypse societies and how people of various genders and queernesses adapt to those different cultures & their rules (and keep leaving to try and found something new). Must add how much I loved the Librarians, and also Cheyenne – I would definitely visit though not join either!

Next book. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter. It’s ok, nicely written, but left me a little flat. It’s a little too easy for the protagonist to be forgiven and forgive herself for her actions and the whole book was so heteronormative that it didn’t grab me. I have another thing to say but it’s a little spoilery that I’ll put it in the first comment to this post.

The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach – Good, so good, but so unquestioningly and unnecessarily sexist. Why must people. So disappointing. (Like Gene Wolfe – such claims to all compassing profundity while having this absolutely ludicrous blind spot for gender.) When you hit the ending bit with the tall blond young woman and the archivist you will scream and mentally throw your book across the room. If you bracket all that and just kind of pretend everything is like some surreal leave it to beaver universe then it’s a nifty book.

A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age

Posted on by Liz

I’m enjoying Henrietta Dugdale‘s utopian SF, A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age. Millions of years in the future, we and the disembodied narrator follow along as highly evolved humans discourse on education and the history of the Christian Blood Age. Australia sank into the sea and a new continent, Alethia, rose, though Melbourne is rising again and has this giant museum/school exhibit hall built on it with what sound like fancy study carrels next to elaborate dioramas of “torture instruments” ie corsets, low necked dresses, and high heels; or just like, men being sexist while drinking the Demon Alcohol and denying women a right to education whilst cheering on their various wars and not doing any of the housework.

The evolved teenagers (2 per family) gratifyingly listen to the smiling lectures of their evolved moms, then we weirdly follow one of them, Veritée, to her private study where she divests herself of our rational dress outer garments (loose trousers with a tunic and a short jacket, none of which are constraining in any way) to reveal her silk undergarments (similar to the top ones), does calisthenics, studies next to her giant pet tiger-dog, has some vegetarian food (delivered by the one family servant who is educated, evolved, and only works till noon after which she goes off for recreation and philosophizing, and who emerges bearing the trays of fruit and bread from a weird mirrored pillar with a spiral staircase). Veritée then has a bath (slightly creepily we see her beauteous form in the bath – better than any Blood Era statue of beauty since unconstrained by Torture Instruments and well calisthenicked.)

Some of the teenagers then fly off in an aircar (run by some sort of power plus kept safe by the Repelling Engine) to the beaches of the West Coast at 80 miles per hour. They frolic, have a picnic, and probably discuss Evolution some more. In one interlude we are treated to a description of the inventresses of the Repelling Engine (inspired by the corpses which used to rain down from aircar crashes!) They go on a test flight and then are welcomed by parades, honors, costly gifts, job offers (which they refuse unless they both get the job together) as the cheering crowds celebrate the new age of safer air travel.

Space travel is mentioned as a possible future but not really given much thought.

Henrietta does not seem to like church or the organized religion of her time, or the “myth-men” who run it, much.

I have returned to our earth. Oh, what cruel disorder here reigns! Truth crashed and persecuted! “Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone,” flaunting in every myth temple! howling in every community! checking progress at every avenue.

Fools and rogues! You who profess so much love and reverence for your skeletons. I tell you it is all useless that you noisily rattle their offensive bones before my vision. That bright light of truth from the far-off age shines to me through your blackest screens! Go, hug your loathsome relics of a loathsome era in privacy—if you can—and say not again to my ears what you dare not utter to the Infinite in your solitude.

Ha! I see I “obey” and do the “work” that was commanded, for the light shines more brightly!

A dream? What is dreaming? Some explain most learnedly how it is caused by certain conditions of the body. May not some dreams cause those certain conditions?

Dream, or what else it has been, I see always the beautiful light bright with truth and hope. No one can extinguish it!

Not really a review but I loved Captain Marvel!

Posted on by Liz

Definitely see it if you love watching women be all super badass and determined and blow stuff up and also if you love cats. It was adorable! It was fun! Stuff blew up! There were more than 2 women who talked to each other about, well, about blowing stuff up I guess but also how amazingly they love each other and how they’re like family. Starry eyed children – a perfect set up for that future Captain Marvel.

I did find it very satisfying when the one dude was negging her (near the end) and she’s just like…. Nuh-uh. (Ka-POW!)

I liked the Supreme Intelligence scenes – the montages of Carol falling over and grimly getting up again as a child and young woman – and all the 90s nostalgia stuff was very well done & more fun than I realized it would be.

Of course, I especially enjoyed the scene on public transit.

The computer scene! OMG! “It’s loading.” Entire theater busted out laughing.

It just felt so good to get this kind of superhero movie and this level of superhero, well done & with fairly minimal bullshit. I cried during some of the final battle scenes when she was blowing even more shit up even more competently. Did I mention that I really like explosions…. Well…. I just do.

If you’d like a little background before watching the movie I recommend reading up on Captain Marvel’s history and various incarnations and plotlines in Wikipedia. Here’s an actual review, too.

Early astronomer commitment schemes

Posted on by Liz

Today I learned that early astronomers were hella clever. I was looking up good colony sites or just interesting topographic features for each planet or other solar body that I think would make a good future BART stop in Transitory and came across this:

Early astronomers used anagrams as a form of commitment scheme to lay claim to new discoveries before their results were ready for publication. Galileo used smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras for Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (“I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form”) for discovering the rings of Saturn.

Working on this game is an endless delight!

Huygens did it too.

Huygens observed Saturn and in 1656, like Galileo, had published an anagram saying “aaaaaaacccccdeeeeeghiiiiiiillllmmnnnnnnnnnooooppqrrstttttuuuuu”. Upon confirming his observations, three years later he revealed it to mean “Annuto cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam coherente, ad eclipticam inclinato”; that is, “It [Saturn] is surrounded by a thin, flat, ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic”

The Terraforming Wiki is very useful for my descriptions of the Solar Line stations.

Meanwhile, have a look at this cool delta-v subway map of the solar system!

I also direct your attention to the fabulous Interplanetary Transport Network wikipedia page.

Heading over to CripTech

Posted on by Liz

Heading over to the CripTech symposium now. Its full title is: CripTech: Disability and Technology in Japan and the United States – an International Symposium. I spent the morning yesterday with some of the conference speakers as we toured SF Lighthouse.

Technology has the potential to greatly improve access and the full social participation of disabled individuals in Japan and the United States. Both countries have invested considerable sums in these directions, but often this research is being conducted separately from the key stakeholders. This symposium brings together technologists, anthropologists, educators, and other researchers who are working on the nexus of technology, access, and design in Japan together with scholars, engineers, researchers, and activists in the United States for a four-day symposium and workshop in Berkeley, California, the home of the independent living movement. The majority of the participants identify as disabled people.

I’ll be speaking Saturday morning after the showing of Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement, on a panel with Ian Smith and Gregor Wolbring, moderated by Franchesca Spektor.

CripTech-Poster-small

Excerpt from A House by the Sea

Posted on by Liz

Reading Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction and loving it. Some great stories and essays – I have more to say in detail but for now a quick note and an excerpt from P.H. Lee’s “A House by the Sea”, which describes the life of the former residents of a certain basement in Omelas.

Do you believe it now? Can this really be how they live out their lives, so close to the City that they can hear the bells clamoring and the processions proceeding? Can they really live together, in a house by the sea? No? Let me tell you this, then. There used to be a doctor—a nice man with a real white doctor’s coat, who still lives in the City—who came out to their house every Wednesday to check up on them, but that didn’t work out, because he kept feeling uncomfortable and trying to euthanize them. So now, whenever one of them gets sick, a woman comes in on the train from Vallcoris. She doesn’t have a doctor’s coat. She just has a sweater. She doesn’t know about the basement, she doesn’t know about anything, not really. She just takes their pulse and asks them to cough, and leaves them with prescriptions, and no one tries to euthanize anyone.

Putting this in a sort of mood-file in my imagination, along with the title story of The Open Cage by Anzia Yezierska.

By Degrees and Dilatory Time by S.L. Huang, and Nisi Shawl’s The Things I Miss the Most also struck me as amazing – exploring the complexities of feelings about our bodyminds over time.