Metatropolis Edited by Jack Scalzi Rating on an arbitrary 5-point scale: 4 out of 5

Metatropolis is a science fiction anthology exploring, as it claims, the “future of cities”.  That’s not strictly accurate. It’s really a collection of stories that explore the question: If we as a species are going to survive the mistakes of our forebears (particularly ecological mistakes), what will human society have to look like?  It’s pretty clear that we won’t be able to ratchet up world living standards to the stereotypical 2.4 kids in the suburbs mid American ideal.  Resources are too finite and indeed running out.  If our profligate carbon society doesn’t right itself soon, if we face a Century of Judgment, then what will emerge from the drowned coasts and droughted interiors?

The five authors (Jack Scalzi, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder) don’t really offer blueprints and white papers, of course.  They off five distinct tales, appropriately interdependent, that explore a possible future.  This is a shared world on the model of Aspirin’s Thieves’ World, though not quite so sprawling or tightly woven.  It is clear that the authors spent considerable time together thrashing out their shared world — though, in keeping with the theme, much of that might have been online and virtual.

So, does the book succeed?

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Addressing craft first, I’d have to say Yes.  The stories are uniformly well-written and engaging.  They each contain a nice mix of philosophizing and action, abstraction and characterization.  Each story has its own voice, as might be expected of an anthology; but even within a story the characters seems multidimensional and believable.  The slow-drip despair of the mid-to-late 21st century comes through nicely.  The world is running down and, for most of the main characters, that is their primary experience of it.  Each story includes a glimpse at what might replace the worn-out consumerist world; each story is a voyage of discovery.

As to the ideas behind the stories:  Most of the time, that works too.  While the thrust of each story is sustainability, there is no myopic utopian fantasies here.  The authors recognize that survival will come not from going back but going forward. In contrast to the environmental dystopias of, say, the 1970s, these authors understand that a call to abandon all technology will not be heeded by the mass of humanity; and, realistically, billions will not lay down and die to redress a balance they did not themselves upset.

Nonetheless, the citizens of these zero-footprint enclaves invariably come off as a tad, well, smug.  Perhaps they have the right to be, since they have unlocked a key to survival while most of the world burns and drowns.  But to present-day ears, it sounds a bit thin.  There is a steady undercurrent of derision and mockery for the “big society” thinking that got the world into the mess it’s in.  One story calls it big capital; another, corporatism; an third, consumerism.  Uniformly they denounce the past few centuries as a mistake run amok, a blight to be rejected and corrected.  This rankles me just a bit, because the actual proposed societies can only exist because of the larger, expansionist, consumerist, big-science world.  Without the technologies spawned by the governments and the markets, there would be no Cascadia with its reputation-based economy or New Detroit with its skyscrapes reclaimed for vertical agriculture.

The philosophy of the book is unsatisfying, because the new societies are every bit as parasitic as the one they strive to replace.  These new worlds feast on the carcass of the previous one (ours) and seem deliberately oblivious to it.  In the end, that didn’t ruin the book because, in my mind, that is very human — exactly how a new vibrant society would have to view its predecessor.  We all need myths of a heroic age.

The preachiness varies a lot from story to story.  It is worst in the introductory piece, by Jay Lake (“In the Forests of the Night”) and seems to dribble off from there. That might be a structural artifact; the need to explain the new world and hook the reader drives some of the choices Mr. Lake makes.  Even allowing for that, I found it to be the least successful of the stories

The second story (“Stochasti-City” by Tobias Buckell), on the other hand, is probably my favorite.  On one level it’s a more straightforward action tale with a unified narrator.  (Mr. Lake attempts a fractured, multifaceted narrative along the lines of Stand on Zanzibar; but he lacks John Brunner’s dexterity.) The big idea seems much more achievable and realistic, as well as something real people might actually attempt.  Of course it’s just my opinion, but Buckell does a better job than Lake in selling his reality.

“The Red in the Sky is Our Blood” by Elizabeth Bear works pretty well, too.  Like the previous piece, it’s about an outsider gaining access to the hidden new cities that underlie the collection.  In this case, the narrative is perhaps a little too linear, though the characters are well-drawn.

John Scalzi’s contribution (in addition to being editor) is “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”. It means “use everything but the squeal”, referring to a maxim about the high efficiency of pig.  And it is a pig story.  But don’t let that fool you, the way it does the narrator (at first).  It’s still a clever, if workmanlike, exploration of the role of labor in the new cities, which can’t base things on ever-increasing consumption.  I have a soft spot for the story, since it deals in no small measure with education and its impact.  But it must be admitted that it is probably the least adventurous or ambitious of the stories in the collection.

These middle three stories have the advantage of hanging together very well; they mesh to make the shared future world believable, whereas the bookend stories feel more shoe-horned in.  There’s an irony in the fact that Cascadia — the virtual, zero-footprint city that springs up in the Pacific Northwest — is more real and believable in the three stories that mention it obliquely, than in the one that describes it in detail.

The final tale is “To Hie from Far Cilenia” by Karl Schroeder.  Compared to the others, it’s right off the map.  (There’s a bit of a pun in that sentence but — I’ve decided to be spoiler-free.)  The earlier tales all split their focus between technology and sociology.  Not only do the authors explore what sort of devices we will need to survive the Century of Judgment; they also pick about what must change in our social interactions.  But Schroeder goes far deeper than that.  He ponders whether near real-time resource mapping will open up the unexpected vista of a whole new reality — or, at least, of a way of perceiving the world that is so radically different from what our monkey brains are used to, that it might just as well be a new reality.  I’m not sure he really succeeds at making this clear, but I’ll have to reread the story before I could say he failed.

Overall, the book is well worth the time spent in reading it and pondering its questions.  Although the prose is modern, its spirit harkens back to the early days of science fiction, where authors used grand visions to explore unseen possibilities.  Metatropolis is light years removed from the pulp fiction of the 1930s, but it aspires to some of the same larger purpose: to serve as a sort of handbook of the future, helping us navigate its unseen shoals by throwing a light on what might be.

Inception
a Christopher Nolan Film
Arbitrary 5-Point rating: 5 out of 5

Inception is a weird, ambitious, action-packed sci fi thriller-cum-heist flick.  It is, in its own way, as ambitious as The Matrix and suffers from the comparison only in that it didn’t come first.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Tom Dom Cobb, a thief of a singular kind: He can enter the dreams of others and “extract” information they’re trying to keep secret.  On the run for (at first) unspecified horrible crimes, he parlays his skill into a lucrative, if high-risk, lifestyle.  But in the end all he really wants to do is get to go home again and pick up the shards of his former life, including two small children.

More detail, and spoilers, to follow, but in short, this is a fantastic film that’s better than it has any right to be.  The pacing is superb, the acting is above-average, and the setting and technology are remarkably well fleshed out.  Although everyone draws comparisons to The Matrix, the real spiritual ancestor of this film is The Thirteenth Floor (which, ironically, came out at the same time as — and got lost in the glare of the hoopla of — The Matrix).

Spoilers ho!
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Any movie that involves dream technology is going to mess with the audience’s perceptions, and this is no exception.  By the end of the film, we’ve delved three levels “deep” : a dream within a dream, itself within a dream. And the film ends by (of course) going one further and asking, Is this the real world?  Or is Tom Cobb just locked within another nested level?  Has he returned to reality?  Was he ever there to begin with?  By transparent design, the question is left open.  Within the movie, we are told that every dream adventurer must fashion his or her own “totem”, an object he/she can use to assess whether the current setting is real or someone’s dream.  Arthur uses a loaded die, whose balance only he knows.  Adriadne makes a chess piece (a bishop). Cobb uses a peculiar top.  (It belonged to his deceased wife Mallorie, and would keep spinning forever in a dream world but flop over in a real one.)  You can’t share your totem because then someone else could simulate it in one of their dreams and you’d be lost.

The totems raise a couple of questions.  For example, while it might tell you you’re in someone else’s dream, could it tell you if you were lost in your own?  Cobb warns Adriadne that one must never use whole memories in building a dream world, because you might lose grasp of the distinction and never find your way out.  But you can, of course, perfectly dream your own totem — so it must be useless in distinguishing your dreams from reality.

Adriadne’s totem never comes into play, oddly enough, considering the screen time spent on explaining its purpose and on her fashioning it.  But the top is crucial.  At several places, after Cobb begins to get drawn more and more obsessively into the dreams they are making, he uses it to reassure himself that he’s still got a handle on reality.  There’s something almost heartbreaking about this process, because by the very rules of the game, he must check his sanity alone.  You can never share the thing that keeps you anchored.

But the most important — if most glaringly telegraphed — use of the top comes at the end of the film, after Cobb has rescued the sponsor of the last job and so gotten his life back. He sets the top to spinning, but is distracted by the arrivial of his children.  For the first time he (and we) can see their faces, and he moves off to their embrace.  Behind him the top keeps spinning.  Just before the camera cuts, it starts to wobble, but we never see it fall.  So… is Cobb in the real world?  Or has he fled into yet another dream, one he fashioned himself, so that he can have the life he’s been missing?  (This is even set up by a projection of Mallorie, that asks him whether his actual life — chased by shadowy agents of an unseen conspiracy — is true or just another psychological immune reaction.)

To me, the far more interesting point is:  The top was Mallorie‘s totem.  That fact is mentioned repeatedly, in important scenes.  But you can’t share totems … so why does Cobb think it’s valid for him at all?  Every one of his reality checks is suspect, not just the final one.  We might be far more than one level “down” at the end.  There are hints, I think, that the nesting is infinite.

It’s been a while since a movie had me thinking this hard after the credits rolled.  I heartily recommend it.

For about ten years, I’ve been running a project in my Honors Physics course called Days of Miracle and Wonder (yes, title taken from a Paul Simon song).  In it, the students are asked to create a business case for a product or service not available today but likely to be so by 2030.  Although they are expected to construct a likely technological path from today’s state-of-the-art to that future product, they aren’t expected to actually build their device because, after all, it’s supposed to be 20 years away.

In one of the early years, a team chose as its device a free-standing holographic display a la the chess scene on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.  They presumed it would involve some sort of fast-spinning mirror.

Today, I came across this – a SIGGRAPH paper and video demonstrating a free-standing three-dimensional display utilizing a fast-spinning mirror.  It’s about 20 years early.

I guess I have to revise my project rubric. 

… but this looks awesome.

… but this looks awesome.

Apparently, the release date is 2010 December 17.

Just for completeness, the original Comicon 2009 trailer is embedded below the fold.

As mentioned in a previous post, recently two of my favorite shows reached their conclusion.  While the Battlestar Galactica finale left a lingering bad taste in my mouth (The Cylons had a plan all along?  Bollocks!), the conclusion of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was gripping and satisfying.  In fact it was one of the best hours of TV I’ve seen in a long time.

More below the fold.  Warning: Indiscriminate spoilers follow.

“Born to Run”, the second-season finale (and possible show closer) took that and dialed it to “11″.  First off, the FBI agent now pursing the case is played by Josh Malina, of Sports Night and West Wing fame.   I admit to seeing a little of Will Bailey in Agent Auldridge but that was OK.  He made it work as a sympathetic but tough agent of the law (which doesn’t put it beyond possibility that he is in fact a T-888 trying to trick Sarah into revealing the location of her son).

Much of the episode revolves around Sarah using her contact with a Latino priest to get a message to John: Forget me and run.  Sarah’s been trying to get John free of entanglements for a while and has clearly been positioning him for when he lost her — though she suspected it would be from cancer, not the LA cops.  Cameron is in full agreement: John should disappear with her and regroup.

There’s a truly excellent and disturbing scene when Cameron decides that John has to check if her atomic core is leaking.  This involves her disrobing and having him climb on top and cut open her chest and feel around inside.  Given the long-running sexual tension between the two, the overtones were obvious and creepy and tremendously effective.

Ellison tracks down John to extend an invitation to meet Catherine Weaver, the shadowy CEO whom (we know) is a liquid-metal shapeshifting Terminator.  He also passes along a message, or rather a question, from Weaver:  “Will you join us?” (a nice call-back to the flash-forward in which future John Connor asks this of a different [or not?] liquid-metal Terminator).  The question disturbs Cameron visibly.

We get to see a Terminator-esque assault on LA County Jail, with obvious visiual homages to the scene from the first movie.  This time, the Terminator isn’t coming to kill Sarah; it’s coming to free her.  Cameron gets in and gets her but is banged up pretty badly.  Now John feels its time to meet Weaver, and does… and everything goes sideways.

First, Weaver is first to mention SkyNet, and as a common enemy.  Weaver speaks past Sarah and directly to John, in recognition of where he’s headed.  Ellison is understandably confused as these people conduct a conversation about things he’s only half-glimpsed.  But the big reveal is cut short by the arrival of a flying H-K unit (seen a few episodes earlier) that crashes into the office.  Weaver morphs into a liquid-metal shield saving John Connor (!) and then hustles them to the basement.

We’ve previously seen Cameron come upon John Henry, the AI evolved from the Turk and now housed in the body of defunct T-888 Cromartie.  And John Henry asks Cameron, “Will you join us?”  To which her response is to pull a knife and close the door.  When Sarah, John, Weaver, and Ellison arrive in the basement lab, Cameron’s deactivated body is slumped in a chair and John Henry is gone.  John examines Cameron’s robo-corpse and discovers that John Henry has taken her chip.

Sarah recognizes the Turk (her infamous “three dots”) and accuses Weaver of attempting to build SkyNet — to which the terminator replies she was building something to stop SkyNet.

Meanwhile, over on the Turk console, a single line repeats over and over: “I’m sorry John.”

And then everything goes not only sideways but into a whole new dimension.

Weaver activates a time-jump thingy, Sarah pulls back out of the bubble, and then bamf! John and Weaver are in a burned-out hulk of a building, naked (of course).  Soldiers approach — it’s members of the Resistance.  Wait, it’s Derek Reese and he’s never even heard of John Connor.   John has barely begun to process this when Kyle Reese — Derek’s brother,  John’s father — steps out of the shadows.  And just as he’s getting used to that, John’s eyes rove to Kyle’s companions and he sees Cameron.  Except, no, wait, it can’t be Cameron, because she’s bending down and petting the quiescent watch dog, and (as everyone knows) dogs hate terminators and bark incessantly when one is near.  This isn’t Cameron — it’s Alison, the girl from “Alison from Palmdale”, upon whom Cameron was specifically modelled in order to assassinate the future version of John Connor.

And then, before you can even begin to piece this together, the shot cuts back to where John arrived and, into the empty air, drifts Sarah Connor’s final, “I love you too”, responding to an earlier unbidden declaration of familial love by John.  And then we fade to black.

Wham!