Arrival is a melancholy movie, very deliberately built out of paradoxes: fear commissions the operation of reason. Violence induces compassion. Visitors arrive without traveling. Hope exists in the sure knowledge of tragedy. Being a piece of art, it expresses these paradoxes with particular symbols, from the lexical to the musical to the visual idiom that we’re used to in the movies around us. And being a piece of science fiction, it’s concerned with the world of the creators far more than with the world of the fiction, which serves as an extended metaphor for the human experience.
Category: Reviews
Escaping The Habitats of Our Own Making: an interview with Simon Roy
Simon Roy’s new comic, Habitat, is, in the best way, horrifying. It connects the greatest taboo among most human cultures — cannibalism — with the sort of quotidian oppression that humans have lived with throughout most of our existence.
Continue reading “Escaping The Habitats of Our Own Making: an interview with Simon Roy”
New World: Spike Trotman’s Bold Entry into Science Fiction Comics
First contact stories, with their inherent and explicit contact with The Other, approach the Platonic ideal of Science Fiction. They highlight what we think is true about ourselves (for whatever value of “ourselves” the author cares about) and contrast it with an alien that possesses a critical difference in that dimension. Through the meeting of “us” and “them”, the author then gets to make an assertion about the society in which they live, for better and worse, and then get to stretch their imagination to do all the really fun, skiffy stuff, like determining how their aliens’ different physiological needs presents them with different cultural options.
Continue reading “New World: Spike Trotman’s Bold Entry into Science Fiction Comics”
The Question Is Not Whether Deckard Is A Replicant, But Whether Roy Is A Person
Blade Runner is a near-perfect vision. What I love most about it is its willingness to embrace the Noir idiom, not just in its visuals, but in the ambivalent moral position of its protagonist, Roy Batty. Continue reading “The Question Is Not Whether Deckard Is A Replicant, But Whether Roy Is A Person”
Galactic Geographic 3003 Annual Review
One of the great sources of fun one can have in the worldbuilding process is making it so your ideas are all compatible. When the components all sing together, you can find yourself with an entire universe of ideas; one where you canlook from all different directions at the philosophical assertions that sit at the core of your exploration.
…Look from all different directions at the philosophical assertions that sit at the core of your exploration.
Other times, a creator stretches their creative muscles to make a universe that’s beautiful and weird, conceding as little as possible to recognizability.