Peter Parker ne connait pas

They're rioting in France again.

And being French, they rebel with a certain elan. Burning cars now elevated to burning garbage trucks. Maybe not the healthiest way for frustrated youths in Ballardian ghetto suburbs to work out their boredom and rage, you say? Check out this amazing video of some Slavic immigrant kids turning the abandoned concrete shells of their banlieu into a giant skate park. You know, without the skateboards. Just sneakers and gymnastic dexterity and total commitment. Parkour. (bear with the slow start -- it's worth the wait)



Which for some reason reminds me of that obscure Kirby villain, Batroc the Leaper. From Marseilles, probably of North African origin. Maybe that's one of his illegitimate kids torching the Renault, bouncing off the housing project, and getting ready to kick Spidey's ass.

Things to do on a cold day off

By way of observance of this year's Buy Nothing Day, stay away from the stores, consider this wonderful James Stegall essay in Nerve concerning the sublimated homemaker eroticism of the Lands' End catalog, and use it as a launching point to crack open the rest of the glossy catalogs in your mail bin with an eye toward better exploring the covert semiotic archaeology of your mental landscape.



And then go make something of your own.

Blade Runner: The Borges Cut

Tonight I caught the new print of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Which causes me to wonder how many different versions of this film I have seen. The encyclopedia claims there are seven versions, of which I have seen at least five. The original 1982 theatrical release, with the expository Marloweian voiceover and the happy ending driving through the pines (apparently stock footage stolen from Kubrick's The Shining). The myriad hacked up television broadcast versions. The 1991 unofficial director's cut. The 1992 official Director's Cut. And this new "Final Cut," with a spiffy unicorn dream sequence that, tied up with Gaff's tinfoil origami in the final scene, definitely resolves the issue of Deckard's status as a replicant. At least, until the next cut comes out, perhaps around the time of the movie's setting in 2019.



The media barrage over this latest edition, shilling DVDs to put under the tree of your favorite middle-aged veteran of Reagan's first term, confirms the movie's status as canonical. As did the crowd at the screening at Austin's own WWI-era downtown movie palace. A full house of wired Bohemians, many of them born after the film's release, the rest of them applauding and cheering the opening credits like some post-cyberpunk Rocky Horror experience. Make it a double feature with The Road Warrior and you would pretty well cover the cinematic zeitgeist of my late adolescence. I took my 12-year old son and his buddy, figuring at this point the thing qualifies as an educational experience. While their whispers revealed they had the plot's punchline telegraphed well before the first unicorn, the pixel-free cinematography and old school effects blew their minds.



It holds up well despite a number of viewings that approaches my Stairway to Heaven listening count. The early exposition, as Bryant explains the setup to Deckard in a baffling mandatory science fictional As You Know, Bob, gets creakier every time, but the thing sails from there, carried by style and details that dress up the pulp skeleton of the plot. Like the three-dimensional photos from 1187 Hundertwasser, Deckard's suit and tie, Roy's fingernails, Pris's airbrushed harlequin mask, Zhora's political homicide dossier, Rachel letting down her hair, the backwash of blood into a battered man's shot glass. And the city, the movie's real star, in all its smoking, gasping, damp, drizzly, dark, Adbusted, multiculti, grimy, run-down L.A. meets 1979 NYC by way of 1980s Tokyo and future Shanghai. Old school soundstage and gnomic models inventing imminent dystopia through noir lighting and Vangelized muzak flickering on a big screen: the essence of cyberpunk, like Neuromancer being written on a typewriter.



Which makes you wonder why no one has really pulled off anything similar since, in the cinematic varietal of the genre. Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic, anyone? I think I now understand the answer. Blade Runner is the only true cyberpunk film, and there need be no others, for there will continue to be infinite cuts, each with subtle variations, same wines of different vintages. Like a Borgesian Heavy Metal cartoon, its attentive custodians and itchy auteurs forever modulating the space between the panels.

Halo Effect

This morning, I felt stressed out. This stemmed from packing to travel to Georgia to move my mother into assisted living, while having more than plenty to do in Houston. My mother might have picked a worse year to manifest the symptoms of Alzheimer's. She also could have picked a better one, as far as my own life is concerned.

Stressed out, I resorted to the very brief but exquisite order of individual morning prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Felt slightly better. Then dragged a basket of dirty clothes out through my front door toward the apartment laundry room. And saw a sundog in the southern sky.

It pushed the reset button on my outlook on life.

A sundog or parhelion is a bright rainbow patch in the sky not far from the sun. Houston is long way from Antarctica, which is the best place in the world for the sundogs, solar halos, tangent arcs, and other optical phenomena that stem from ice crystals in the daytime sky. But I notice these phenomena rather often. And they delight me every time. This morning was the first time I had a digital camera handy. Here is a sundog, above, and to the right a halo with what may be a blurred tangent arc (the brighter blob at the top of the halo.)

Readability level

Okay, so this is the new test/gadget/meme/thingy sweeping the blogosphere this moment. And since Chris Roberson and John Klima have already taken the plunge, I'm sort of honor-bound to submit the blogs I participate in, right? So how does No Fear of the Future hold up?



Oh. My. I'll give you three guesses as to why this humble blog has achieved such a high-falutin' rating (here's a hint: It's not yours truly).

Lost Books, Part IV: Evolution's Darling, by Scott Westerfeld

Last weekend, I was Guest of Honour at a small cyberpunk-themed con, Night's Edge, and speaking on a panel titled "I'm Only Interested in Her Mind: Love and AI", at which we spent much time enthusing about Scott Westerfeld's Evolution's Darling - which is, like too many excellent sf books, out of print, though there are second-hand copies available through bookfinder.com.

Evolution's Darling is a 'bootstrap', an AI who has achieved sentience despite frequent downgrades by its last owner. Under the laws of the Expansion, any machine that reaches a Turing Quotient of 1.0 legally becomes a person, rather than legal property - and needing to replace the shipboard computer would wipe out a year's profits for Darling's owner, Isaah. Darling is also the tutor and companion of Isaah's fifteen-year-old daughter, Rathere, and after Isaah disconnects Darling's sensors, Rathere re-connects them to save her friend, who then becomes her lover. He buys himself a humanoid body, then he and Rathere leave Earth together.

Two centuries later, Darling has become one of the Expansion's most astute dealers in artworks, collecting originals and ideas and sex-related body modifications. When a new sculpture allegedly done by fellow bootstrap Vaddum comes onto the market, years after Vaddum's disappearance, Darling and many other dealers rush to see it. While some are prepared to murder their rivals to own the piece, Darling is more interested in its origin. Is Vaddum dead? Can robots actually die? Can intelligent software be copied, and if so, is the copy a forgery or the real thing?

Evolution's Darling contains some wonderful inventions: as well as the Turing Quotient as a solution to the ethical questions of owning intelligent machines, Westerfield gives us a wide range of very individualistic robots, from the fiercely competitive hyper-intelligent starships writing anonymous academic papers on passenger service when they're not hurling insults at each other ("Number-cruncher!" "Intuitionist!"), to Vaddum, the robotic laborer turned sculptor, to the sub-Turing Wardens, cunning but rigid justice machines. I also loved the lithomorphs, alien statues on a thousand-century-long migration towards their breeding grounds. Along with this sparkling inventiveness comes a beautiful prose style: the only flaw, and that a minor one, is the erratic pacing, with two-hundred-year jump cuts and a fistful of flashbacks disguising a very simple and straightforward plot.

Aldiss and Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree defined science fiction (in part) as "the search for a definition of mankind and his status quo in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge". By this definition, Evolution's Darling is uncommonly pure science fiction, because of the questions it raises about the nature of humanity. When machines can score higher than biological humans on Turing tests, which is really human? Are two beings with identical Turing ratings actually the same person, and is the art they produce equally authentic? Is there a difference between justice and aesthetic considerations? What is alive? What is dead? What is original? What is a copy? Will any of these concepts still be relevant in a few centuries? Westerfield quotes Wilde's essays frequently - and it's Wilde the philosopher, not just Wilde the wit - as well as Wittgenstein and Locke, plus sly nods to Alfred Bester and Samuel Delany... but the book sparkles with ideas and questions, rather than being weighted down with pontification. It manages to combine character-driven and ideas-driven science fiction, and even begs the question of whether there's any real difference between the two.

P.S. Last week, I was informed that there's a Lost Books website, specializing in science fiction, formerly a tributary of Orson Scott Card's Hatrack River. It's worth checking out, though in the interests of strict accuracy, I should say that many of the books that it lists are not exactly lost: R. A. MacAvoy's Mayland Long novels are back in print (well, there goes two columns), Grimwood's Replay is a Gollancz Masterwork, and John Marsden's Ellie books are bestsellers here in Australia. Wizard of the Pigeons, alas, is still MIA... but that's another story.

New! Diet Soap!

Daydreaming of revolution while you sip on your latte and admire the grey carpeting on your cubicle walls? I have just the prescription: from metafictional mad bomber Doug Lain and company, issue 1 of the new zine Diet Soap, featuring work by Doug, Tim Pratt, Darin Bradley, Brendan Connell, and others. The theme: Surveillance. A feast of food for thought as you walk under the obscured eyes of the security cameras. From Doug's intro --

"[T]he cameras are there to maintain the viewers' mastery, to provide scopophilic domination, but these cameras are also symptomatic of the viewers' weakness. The fact that we are kept under surveillance means that the people behind the cameras do not consider us passive spectators of a world we did not create. The cameras suggest that they expect us, eventually, to act. And some of us do."

For a spiffy printable PDF of your own, email the good folks at: info@dietsoap.org.

P.S. If you are not familiar with Doug's work, it is mandatory that you get yourself a copy of his recent collection from the fine fellows at Night Shade Books, Last Week's Apocalypse.