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.
The two books really feel like to me a study and critique of decaying imperial power, and what happens when that eroding power slips to the point where the imperium is visibly decaying, and starts to overcorrect and do truly shortsighted and ill-advised things in the quest to not only maintain the decaying status quo, but to reach back to a mythical golden era before that never really existed in the first place.
Ada Hoffmann’s The Infinite completes the Outside Trilogy, revealing not only the future of the world of A.I. Gods and extradimensional powers, but also, its origins.
Perspective, point of view and what this story really is are at the heart of the book and what it is trying to accomplish, on top of a strong fantasy story and tale.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s THE HIGH SIERRA: A LOVE STORY is a large and somewhat rambling depiction of the favorite place of SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, through a variety of lenses.
The news of the Writer Author’s Guild going on strike, followed by the SAG-AFSTRA Strike, and the desire for studios to use so-called A.I. not only in scripts and writing, but, more crucially, to scan the images of background actors without their knowledge and consent, convinced me that I needed to rewatch this 2013 movie that has proven rather prescient.
