Review: Multiverses: An anthology of alternate realities
I myself have been a fan and enthusiast, one might even say a connoisseur of multiversal fiction, since I got into a car with Prince Corwin and Prince Random and drove from Westchester all the way to Amber.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Another ambiguous Utopia: Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars
So you see, Return from the Stars is a most ambiguous Utopia, indeed, and anyone who reads The Dispossessed (and if you haven’t yet, you should go fix that, too) should also read Return from the Stars and ponder its questions.
“The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080”: An Exegesis
I want to come to recent events in another way. All of this reminds me of a story that I want do a deep dive on: “The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080” by Ian Watson (published in 1980). This is a short, very inside baseball story of Worldcon, Worldcon fandom and science fiction, and it is quite revealing.
Review: She who became the Sun
The style of how Parker-Chan writes all of this is vivid, immersive and striking. She uses a variety of imagery and metaphors that describe individuals, gestures, actions and maneuvers that bring the writing to life. Everywhere, the text is rich in detail.
The Measure of an Artificial Person: Stina Leicht’s Loki’s Ring
In Loki’s Ring, the inciting incident that kicks off a series of characters’ journeys and adventures is an artificial intelligence named Ri on board. Ri and her ship have crashed on a ringworld, the titular Loki’s Ring. …
S1m0ne, or another predictive movie about AI
Niccol’s films, almost universally, are obsessed with the idea of artificial realities. This can be a mundane sort of affair … Or it can be something like S1m0ne, where an actress and her whole career and presence, are digital creations. It is notable that Niccol is a cautionary tale sort of director. In each of these, the artificial realities break or are broken, showing the cogs and the gears of what is behind them.
