Big few weeks for science-fiction recently. I went to see Dune at the weekend and, you know, it was good. I liked it. I can’t remember seeing the Lynch version as it’s been a long, long time but I definitely hooked into the new one and got the story. It’s probably sacrilege to wish for the pacing of Star Wars but it does go on for quite a while. It’s a beautiful thing to look at as many have pointed out and has some interesting ideas and neat design choices. I suppose I can’t really say that anything stood out about it though.

On the other hand, Foundation has been really hit and miss hasn’t it? Eeesh. A couple of the episodes have been a real drag and the decision to only start bringing the threads together now (episode 6 I think) means they probably lost a lot of people early on. It’s a shame because it is starting to feel perilous finally. In fact, it was while watching the last episode that I realised that the quality of ‘peril’ (or lack of) was the exact thing that was holding it back.

You know I adore the Expanse. I think it’s pretty much flawless as both television and science fiction. I have watched every season multiple times, always finding new details and joy in them. The characters are great and only get better, it’s often remarked upon for it’s scientific and physical accuracy, it’s actually got good adventure stories, and also in a weird way, it doesn’t feel like big sci-fi; everything in the Expanse is hard:

Acceleration is hard, deceleration is even more difficult; Gravity is complicated and potentially deadly but can also be life-saving depending on the circumstance; Thinking about blood circulation is important in zero g as to whether you’re spinning or not; Vectors and spin can mean life or death for a ship or character; Water is heavy but important; You can’t see much in space; Oxygen is vital but we’ve hacked and bodged ways round it if needs be; Plant life is connected and cascades through systems, jump starting or failing them; Speed is the major currency; Things block the view of other things and so on, and so on.

These are just some of the apparently menial but thorough ways in which peril infects every decision, plot point and direction for the world of the Expanse that I could remember off the top of my head. In the Expanse, we’re not galaxy-straddling superhumans with magic pills and instant travel, perfect sensors and total knowledge; we have barely started crawling around the inner solar system and keep falling over and bumping our heads, crying and throwing toys at the other children: Everything is a bit janky and everything is full of peril. Space is hard in the Expanse, very hard and full of physics and things that are bad for humans.

Foundation doesn’t have that. Foundation starts form the premise that everything is solved and human civilisation has reached a ‘peak’ but then the decline is implied to be falling from that ‘peak,’ over many thousands of years. Even though it is shown that that peak is built on massive inequality, exploitation and suffering and is really about the hubris of one/three/a couple of dozen men: the Emperor. Alright, they’re different scales and based ten thousand years apart. But I like that in the Expanse, going from one place to another takes a lot of thought and time and puts everyone at risk. In Foundation, everything is a jump ship away and a magic pill can heal all ills.

A lot of the criticism of Foundation has been drawn to the idea that something of that scale can’t really be captured in TV. A story that evolves over thousands of years at the scale of a galaxy. Or simply that Asimov couldn’t write characters. There have been some good bits, and it’s veering away from the books so I’m holding out hope.

Ok, Dune is somewhere in the middle. There’s some peril; the desert itself, the implication in an early scene that space travel is in fact costly and hard but it’s obviously not the crux of it other than to make the point that spice has value and give it a McGuffin quality.

Recents

I’m still up on Are.na and loving it, loving it, loving it. I’d say ‘come hang out’ but the reason I like it is the low noise, low intensity-ness. So… leave me alone?

Short Stuff

• Religion and tech guru (ha) Beth Singler has published an excerpt from a paper about the AI Creation Meme, in particular, the relationship to the Creation of Adam painting. Another great riff on the whole subject of visualisaing the unvisualisable.
• Thanks for this, Crystal. I will watch it last night (this is what happens when you blog in advance.) The documentary Black Holes which Peter Galison was directed and is about the EHT project to image the black hole in Messier 87. (see previous point) But I haven’t watched it yet/yesterday. (Edit: I have now watched it and it was brilliant. High recommend. Especially after watching the first episode of the new Brian Cox platform and waiting 45 minutes for any actual science to pierce the platitudes and CGI. There were bits I rewound over to try and dig in further on the complexity of what they’re doing.)
• There’s been a bunch of good articles on the laughable hubris of both Meta and the metaverse. In a year that has seen the laughable hubris of Clubhouse and NFTs. I mourn the souls lost to the $$$ hype train and mourn those yet to come but the metaverse, as Ian Bogost says is: ‘…the ultimate company town, a megascale Amazon that rolls up raw materials, supply chains, manufacturing, distribution, and use and all its related discourse into one single service. It is the black hole of consumption.’
  Benedict Evans linking up crypto, games, AR, VR and ‘metaverse’: ‘…all of this is rather like standing in front of a whiteboard in the early 1990s and writing words like interactive TV, hypertext, broadband, AOL, multimedia, and maybe video and games, and then drawing a box around them all and labelling the box ‘information superhighway’.’
• Ethical Futures Lab newsletter is out again. It’s always so well done and tasty. I particularly like this piece with Evan Selinger and Clive Thompson setting up criteria for predicting when a technology might go wrong.

Ok, love you very much. Speak soon.