Gyeongseong Creature (Korean: 경성크리처) is an ongoing South Korean web series written by Kang Eun-kyung, directed by Chung Dong-yoon and Roh Young-sub, and starring Park Seo-joon, Han So-hee and Soo Hyun.
The first season was released on Netflix on December 22, 2023 (The first season was divided into two parts: Part 1 was released on December 22, 2023 with seven episodes, while Part 2 with the remaining three episodes will be released on January 5, 2024.). A second season is already underway. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: set in a fictional galaxy ruled by the Motherworld, whose military, the Imperium, threatens a farming colony on the moon of Veldt. Kora, a former Imperium soldier, ventures on a quest to recruit warriors from across the galaxy to make a stand against the Imperium before they return to Veldt.
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (titled onscreen as simply Rebel Moon) is a 2023 American space opera film directed by Zack Snyder. An extended cut is set for release in 2024, and a sequel, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, is scheduled for release on April 19, 2024. (wiki)
Zack Snyder first conceived this as a Star Wars movie, and pitched it to Lucasfilm shortly after it was bought by Disney in 2012, but it never got off the ground.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a 2023 American epic Western crime drama film directed and co-produced by Martin Scorsese, who also co-wrote the script alongside Eric Roth, based on the 2017 non-fiction book by David Grann Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI Set in 1920s Oklahoma, it focuses on a series of murders of Osage members and relations in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on tribal land. The tribal members had retained mineral rights on their reservation, and white opportunists sought to take the tribal members’ wealth.
Probably this is one of the most expected pieces of SF this year. And it delivers and is excellent on several accounts, contrasting with most of what gets labeled as SF nowadays. There is no lack of visually stunning cinematic works that seem to lack something – be it plotwise, involvement, or character development or are bound to repeat some form of techno-orientalist cliche with super-advanced yet missing Asians.
Is there any type of exoplanetary SF possible today when most of the future visions are somehow retro vintage SF golden age or very derivative? This was contradicted at the end of 2023 by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner with a new independent, daring SF “eco-gothic” SF series production for the Max video-on-demand subscription channel that emanated out of the Californian animation industry. Scavengers Reign has somehow demonstrated that not everything is being consumed by the Disney Studios monster. Although I doubt there’s life after you fall into the D sarlacc’s capacious stomach.
Scavenger Reign stands closer to the European animation school and in particular the French comics and animation. It oozes Métal Hurlant and René Laloux with the geometric forests, panoramic vistas and its changeling alien ecosystems. But there is certainly also an anime/manga aspect – or the traces of the best of anime and manga. There is a touch of weird naturalism, of eerie transformations, and of horrific metamorphosis, particularly if one thinks in terms of the Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece Akira from 1982 which was stunning for its realism and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga (not anime!) by Hayao Miyazaki. Biological genomes get hijacked, and the extended virome that permeates alien planets trafficks information across the species barrier. Everything is inter-species, everything sporulates, and telekinetic parasitism abounds (something close to the rove beetle eating baby ants while the ants think it is one of them – thx Ben Woodard for reminding me of this crazy true fable), but also the dance of co-evolution.
It is also the first US SF product (with help from South Korean animators – Studio JDD) – and it is no accident that it is an animation piece that finally does justice to some authors that have never been adapted for the screen such as the exoplanetary works of Joan Lyn Slonczewski (The Children Star) or only partially so – Jeff VanderMeer (particularly Borne and The Strange Bird two of my favorite pieces of new weird & postapocalyptic post- biopunk SF).
Otherness participates here at every level – from hallucinations of even the most common kind, say your lover’s voice and image that is being somehow puppeteered by something really different (do not think Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris), a plethora of really alien creatures using human carriers via their feelings and thoughts, but these thoughts and feelings somehow animating the alien critters as well in return. To affect means to be also affected (thinking here of Deleuze, but also Whithead’s Critique of Pure Affect). Also, we should not expect alien sentience to conform to our technological imaginary – it can be really very much a creature of strange and lowly appetites, irrespective of its extra sensorial powers. So you could really imagine the corporate alien slugs from Charles Stross’s Accelerando leaving sticky marks on Scavengers Reign’s world.
It is also one animation that takes into account our new scientific knowledge about species being as complex communities, interplays, or choreographies of genes or societies of genes of entirely different species. This knowledge constantly reshaped our understanding of what an individual being is or offers us continuous glimpses into how tight-knit such relationships are or how human agency or artificial agency dissolves or is being constantly rerouted within these webs of agency, non-agency, and misplaced intentionality. Parasitism is pervasive but it is also just one expression of the complexity and mutualism of such an ecosystem – it’s fleas upon fleas all the way down and up. There’s also a bizarre in-betweenness, much on this planet actually thrives on cross-fertilization with non-alien, human intruders and their creations (robots). There is a great scene where Azi and Levi (a human and robot partnership that survived the crash of the Demeter 277 cargo ship) who was cultivating and gardening new earthly gardens – Azi the robot is itself a walking garden. Inside its machinery there is some kind of new hybrid semiconductor with slime molds as a partner (it seems to me), maybe something close to unconventional computing is aiming at since some time.
I really liked this short by Jimmy Marble (never heard or seen his stuff previously). I owe these last gems to Scotto Moore (and Erik D mentioning him in his last AI and Acid Western burningshore news) recommendations on This Newsletter Cannot Save You. Since the lockdown is over everything seems to live a FOMO existence – as if to catch up with everything that could have happened but did not. Maybe it is also a celebratory mood – a sort of death’s dance after death in the midst of several bloody wars, and the quadruple number of fossil lobbyists at COP27-Glasgow. COVID isolation seems suddenly to have evaporated in a purple cloud of vacations, still I am not the only one who feels this lockdown and what came after is one of the most significant and transformative events in our lives. What do we owe to the trail of the sick and dead? I deeply recommend a comics by Julia Gfrörer translated in Romanian by Dezarticulat about plague living then and now and the ongoing Plague Poems. Julia Gfrörer comics make it transhistorical and maybe such difficult anticipative comics make it easier to move with the difficult times we live trough. But zeitgeist is also something that gets pushed away, as there was hardly a recognition of that publication in the Romanian media I am told, even by the ones who should know better and have a long-time appreciation for the sequential medium. Gonna stop here with my toothless rant. I also did not write anything about the “Una cu Pământul” Laid Waste (2017) although it came out at such a significant moment, almost too painful to commemorate for a lot who did not have the luxury of working from home or actually being able to make a living.
The What on Earth heroine wades through the amalgamation of digital and the analog that always seems incomplete. It is not Pizza Delivery mob Wars and exclusive Metaverse clubs a la Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but a lot of bundled insecurities, worldwide misunderstandings and provocations, anxietities felt on many levels. It is the impending absurdist doom and slapstick world of imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, talking lamps and mumbling plants, AI hallucinations. Where are and who are the agents of change when we are following or posting on our foodie account or trying to make the perfect Insta Marble Smoothie? This seems peak depoliticized declinism (as Poenaru puts it). Yet it is good to go look into small creations and dablings into the sticky smoothie of today. Going out in the world or “the return” has never been so difficult, alienating and dumbfounding. We have to give up on thinking that things will be the same, or that we are all going to slide back into our lives.
TimeSpace Warps 