2355 – Scavengers Reign (animation mini series 2023)

timespace coordinates: planet Vesta in the far future when interstellar cargo ships roam the galaxy

adult animated science fiction drama television series created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner (here is an interview)

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.

imdb // wiki

1991 – Arhiva de Sunet s02 Timișoara eps 1 & 2

For our non-Romanian speaking viewers (which seem to be the large majority of our daily visitors), here is some tremendous research into the byways and routes of socialist and east bloc subcultures. There’s lots of legends and while it’s not mythbusting, they’re pulling the veil on a lot of things. The Arhiva de Sunet and Centrul Dialectic are making interviews and trying to orient non insiders through the Romanian cultural space – recovering and recording an oral history from the 1960s on, via the stories of its stil living protagonists. Anecdotes lay out the ‘thick’ tissue of daily life and embed it in lived examples. Hiw was it to make & consume music back then?

Even if very hard to recover or to convey the feelings of listening something the very first time – they allow imagination to do its work. You can hear the soundtrack of youth subcultures to back it up in between, even if the words may be unreachable to you, you can still check the Playlist.

This season of podcasts relates the history of music, rock music in particular (with its various offshoots and under currents) from the city of Timisoara in the region of Banat, an important urban cultural center, and yet with a marginal-central (in the words of the writer interviewed) geopolitical position, as more of a place of exile during the Ottoman & Austro Hungarian empires. Socialism in Eastern Europe was not a wasteland of passion and it was not all grim gulags. The regime tried to nurture pop phenomena in the hope they would revive its own stasis. There was repression yet there were also bizarre hybrids and traffic going on. The central power was sometimes overstretched when it had to deal with 500km away centers like Timisoara. It is a funny quirky joy ride through the way various people, bands & taste communities have received influences from abroad, interpreted them and how music and material culture from discs to tapes to venues helped circulate precious information under restricted controls of the Ceausescu era. It is a story of how political it was everything or how much control there actually was and how one wondered about other versions of home grown socialism (from Hungary lets say or ex-Yugoslavia) while listening to these bands. What I like most is the way – the escape to a western fr world is portrayed, as protagonists recall a certain disenchantment with the capitalist music production and a sobering effect emigration had on them. An overall remarkable work.

Cu ce a rămas Timișoara? Cum era Timișoara în muzică în anii ‘80? Cât timp a avut Timișoara dominație otomană? De ce era, pentru turci și austrieci, o catastrofă să fii trimis la Timișoara? Ce înseamnă să fii la periferie? Cât timp a fost Timișoara capitala Imperiului? De ce apare în Timișoara desantul rockist de la sfârșitul anilor ‘60? Care era avantajul pe care îl avea Timișoara? Cum intra muzica din Occident în România? Există un sound timișorean al rockului? Ce film i-a tușat iremediabil pe Nicu Covaci și Ilie Stepan în anii ‘60? Ce trupă maghiară îl face pe Ilie Stepan să înțeleagă că Republica Populară Ungară construia un alt fel de socialism? Sunt subculturile subversive de rock specifice în Est? De ce îi apreciau hipioții și pe Lenin, și pe Lennon? Ce putea fi folosit de la punkiști și rockeri pentru resuscitarea socialismului? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 1.

La ce terasă se întâlneau tinerii timișoreni în anii ‘60 și 70’? Ce operă rock a fost cenzurată în Timișoara? În ce s-au deghizat membrii formației Progresiv TM? Ce se întâmpla în România când apărea la Londra „Jesus Christ Superstar”? Care a fost reacția consumatorilor de muzică la lipsa de posibilități? Ce apare într-un magazin de casete din Timișoara în anii ‘80? Cum se vedea de la București teatralitatea din muzica timișoreană? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 2.

1733 – MURDERBOT Diaries by Martha Wells (2017 – 2020 series of novels)

timespace coordinates: distant future where corporate cyborgs, AI spaceships and enhanced humans are the norm.

All Systems Red (2017)

Artificial Condition (2018)

Rogue Protocol (2018)

Exit Strategy (2018)

Network Effect (2020)

Compulsory (2018) short story from the Murderbot published in Wired (The Future of Work)

Martha Wells website

Martha Wells on Goodreads

Murderbot Diaries – takes an intimate look into the inner life, hesitations, thoughts, emotions, desires, protocols and delights of being rogue cyborg security agent that calls itself “Murderbot” in the 1st person. Diaries have this almost voyeuristic quality of allowing one to pry from behind the shoulder of someone else. They offer some sort of schematic view of what is inaccessible and probably will always remain so about the inner workings of what we normally call “a mind”. There is countless historical examples that come to mind from The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo (written btw AD 397 and 400) to the The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (completed in 1769) and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by  Thomas De Quincey (1821). The pre-modern novel rises as an intimate account of daily happenings being pioneered by two early Japanese woman writers Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon (at around year 1000) – keeping a close eye on the Heian court in their celebrated “pillow books”. If these examples easily come to mind, the challenge for such writers as Martha Wells would be to offer us glimpses into non-human minds, to translate their complicated circuitry and allow us to inhabit smoothly these minds via the science fiction idiome. The ways that AI process information at the current stage of development or evaluate existing data or even manage to hallucinate or what wr could call – ‘see’ are notoriously opaque. The merit of Murderbot Diaries is maybe to throw back at us, its readers, with unsettling, darkly funny and minute (even repetitive) detail – the farcical and even murderously unknown ways in which machines see themselves, of how they end up perceiving or scanning their environments, or how they might disparage their human counterparts or even enjoy the friendship of other sentient spaceships while outwitting hostile combat robots. Even more so – it allows us to see why a cyborg might enjoy having what we might consider an imagination. There is no such thing – or a thing lacking imagination. Imagination itself seems to be the prerequisite of enjoying media feeds, and these are feeds are themselves figments of an imagination that subtends the pleasure of the viewer, reader, fan, author. The Murderbot series does a great job at offering us a varied and exciting new way into what could be called (to paraphrase Martha Wells) an “artificial condition” of such a mind that has been able to hack its own governor module, to explore its autonomy, to challenge and change its own mission and safeguard (even without their knowledge) its human acquaintances while evading corporate vested interests and dangerous situations that include being perceived (or registered as it is) as what it is: a rogue saboteur, a cyborg element gone haywire.

It is clear that Murderbot is not just a diary but something that transforms the diary into a mental log – speculating about the trail of important events, turning points and decisions, calculations, risk-assessments as well as visible actions and effects of its ping backs and evasions altough they are do not make a sum-total of a mind, all of these allude to its composition. These are the invisible attractions, preferences and emotions that tug at the heart-strings of an “it”, of something that is never supposed to be bored or even passionate. This is what I enjoyed very much (not clear to me exactly why – because it grounds my or another’s own enjoyments of such science fiction and materials, series, comics, animations, movies, or our own guilty pleasure of binging hooked on netflix & chill?!) of what otherwise might be dismissed as ill-spent hours. Binging was there always, especially in the former East, and especially as a kid hooked on both Saturday evening documentary shows or Sunday afternoon anime/animation shows. Yet, nowadays binging is the rule – the one condition of Corona- quarantine that seems to not affect just the privileged (paying members of Netlifx and Apple TV) section and media omnivore classes of this world. Murderbot Diaries makes some interesting suggestions regarding pure enjoyment and even what artificial intelligence might consider enjoyable or even likeable or fictional as opposed to the ‘mere’ mimetic or realist. Not only Do Androids Dream but Androids Do enjoy fictions of various sorts.

Might it be, that being a robot or cyborg might pre-dispose one towards certain types of fiction, certain types of realism and not others? Binging comes to the rescue maybe in this case. Binging “Sanctuary Moon” cyborgs and Murderbots might offer us some unsuspected glimpses into this. Because binging might not only be universal affliction of the media bulimia syndrome but germane to artificial intelligence’s everywhere (maybe a sign of such delighted wasteful intelligence to start with) and so a thing to be enjoyed in itself even when one is on the run, a fugitive or when in hiding, when damaged or recharging or not having to do something, achieve something, or even NOT having access to the dreamed about hi-tech hi-end home entertainment system. During these weeks of quarantine lockdown in Berlin I have seen various people of various age groups, from my social housing unit sitting just in front of the house outside, or immigrant youth in the Nettelbeckplatz square in the Wedding hood watching stuff online their smartphones on benches, be it music videos or football or series. We are always keen on labeling this activity – as a loss, or as being exploitative, addictive, as damaging and keeping people from more relevant political self-realization and away from more socially valuable experiences or of just transforming us all into subservient slaves of the transmedia system. Yes, even if this may be so more nowadays than ever, even with Disneyification and media gigantism at every blink of an eye, at the same time we should never ignore the role of being hooked up on something, of wasting time, or of being open to carefree enjoyment at the most difficult moments. Although probably one never dares call them life-changing, such feeds can actually be enriching and even contribute to some measure of well-being in dire times.

Well, this series speaks volumes in this regard, and Martha Wells makes clear that this SecUnit enjoys media feeds as much as we do, or even more so, being able to download its favorite bulk space opera seasons during a transit loop or even to comment on why a certain soap opera is more appealing to itself as an artificial being. Martha Wells keeps us privy to the whole of the unseen, even impossible to follow blackbox AI chats and chittering between machines that never quite follow orders. There is a new vivacity and unpredictability to these recent machine- renderings that is highly attractive to me and others I guess. This is the actual crux I think, and this is why I think Murderbot makes strides across a wholly corporate universe (akin to ours), where you can feel completely subjugated, completely under equipped to dodge all the trappings, all the trackings and all the constant surveillance. This SecUnit invites us to inhabit it, to be on board this whole time, able to enjoy its camouflage, its ability to ‘fake’ the human, to ‘fake’ the enhancement, to cheat stronger and much more relentless machinery, and also to make mistakes, to err and catch itself during its ‘weak’ diary moments. We can literally sit back or run at incredible, impossible to achieve (more than human) decisional speeds or be involved in complicated strategic planning, while also see how such ‘fictional’ entertainment media content breaks bounce back, fill in the pauses, feedback on reality, multiply the enjoyments and even keep boredom at bay when hopelessness and depressive states abound. Murderbot rides on the rhythmically undulated inner lives of some things that are supposed to be coldly calculating, compulsory, wired, branded, labeled, governed and controlled by its corporate makers.