WALL-E in rep
Watched WALL-E at a cinema in Qingdao, which is the center of the Chinese film industry, similar to Hollywood in the US. Chose it as it was in English and family friendly. What with the spate of remakes, I wasn't sure if it was a new version of an old film. However, as they were also showing Shawshank Redemption, it didn't come as a surprise that it was in rep.
I was pleasantly surprised by WALL-E and found it alarmingly prescient (2008). A monopolistic company, 'Buy N Large', de facto controls the world and trashes it. Robots are left behind to clean up the mess while humans escape in a spaceship. The humans become infantilised and alienated from each other, as their lives are organized by a system of robots that control the ship. The humans degenerate both physically and mentally.
In the end, humanity is saved by a robot, WALL-E, who finds beauty in a single weed growing amongst trash on Earth, and love in a fellow robot. I enjoyed the themes of endstage capitalism, environmental destruction, technology leading to alienation and decay, and the unusual resolution that it was a robot that rekindles what it means to be human. I didn't understand the lack of cultural and ethnic diversity amongst the humans on the spaceship: were only English-speaking white people saved?
The Machine Stops
Read The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. I hadn't previously associated him with science fiction, so it was a surprise that he wrote this book. However, the book focusses on human connections and alienation and thus perhaps isn't dissimilar thematically from his other works. The book imagines a future where we live our lives through machines, including communication and experiences. I found the Machine's preference for $n$-th hand information intriguing: first-hand and second-hand sources were considered partisan and unreliable. The society thus prefers depersonalised, smooth, generic lectures and historical accounts. Any of this sound familiar?
Neuromancer
Read Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984). A seminal, genre-defining work of cyberpunk fiction. High-tech; low-life. The book is extraordinarily fast-paced and frantic, with rapid scene switches, character aliases, and twists, and no explanatory text on the technologies or lexicon. This makes it a challenging read.
Whilst I didn't especially enjoy it as a novel, I recognized it as a masterpiece of science fiction, introducing the cyberpunk vision of the future that felt so eerily like our present. There is no sign of global governance, order, or rules; only mega-corporations that control big tech. Humans are somewhat redundant: the hyper-wealthy aristocratic Tessier-Ashpool family are cryogenically frozen, awakening only periodically to check that AIs are running their finances appropriately. On his hero's journey, our protagonist, Case, saves no one, averts no disasters, and is manipulated by AIs. I did see Case as our hero, though. He survives the ruthless criminal underworld of Chiba and chooses to take a step closer to the truth and personal meaning.
Cyperpunk 2026
Tell me we are not living in a world predicted by cyperpunk.
The book [Neuromancer] established the filthy setting of an environmentally damaged, alienated, dystopian society dominated by global computer networks in which characters battle “artificial intelligences, monopoly capitalism and a world culture as ethnically eclectic as it is politically apathetic and alienated,” in the words of Webster’s New World Dictionary of Computer Terms.
From Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Neuromancer by William Gibson.
Tags: sci-fi
Robot
Read Robot by Adam Wisniewski-Snerg, written in 1973 in Polish, translated into English in 1990 by Tomasz Mirkowicz, and finally published in English in 2021.
This was a challenging read. The story is deliberately disorienting and confusing, as we experience the uncertainty of the protagonist. Who is he? Is he human or robot? Are the other characters real? Are there discontinuities in their reality? There are general themes of suspicion, paranoia, identity, personal agency and free-will. The robots in question aren't the mechanical sort of the AI sort; they are biological and possess a free-will. They are created by the Mechanism to follow their own instincts and will, which will somehow fulfill the Mechanism's wishes. I did not understand the plot entirely; but maybe I wasn't supposed to.
Are we in the Shelter?
'Haven't you yet noticed,' she said after a moment, 'how some of the Shelter's inhabitants, at times needlessly, strive desperately to appear exactly who they are? Hasn't it caught your attention how carefully they affect a certain innocence, how they mask their deepest feelings, even of repugnance, and how by feigning total compliance, pretend to be busy and, when the need arises, even by shamming greed and stupidity, they do everything possible to make their behavior appear absolutely normal; in short, haven't you noticed they are doing their best to hide in the crowd?''Robot, by Adam Wisniewski-Snerg