Science Fiction & Fantasy
Me hope momma be proud. Me grow big for to smash good guys.
There seems to be near unanimous consensus that Bioshock 1 and 2 are comments on the fiction and theories of Ayn Rand – and especially those in her colossal treatise thinly disguised as the novel Atlas Shrugged. It’s partially true: Bioshock is a counterargument to Rand, but only within the boundaries established by Atlas Shrugged. It might be a critique, but it’s not a very good one.
Paul has already given something of a vivid opinion on Avatar. And me being a serial cynic of all things existent, I expected that I too would grab the brass hate-ring and hold fast while the carousel of social mania swirled itself into the ground, waiting it out until the bluegasm subsided.
In a convulsion-inducing metascapade of blue boobies and G.I. Georgeous, Everyone has completely lost it over avatar. And I mean lost it in the picket-fence-frontal -lobotomy sense, the rule-34 sense (oh yes it's out there, no I will not link it), and the every-meme-has-already-done-it sense. Last week it progressed to the point that the only person left who didn't like the movie was the Pope. Or, more accurately, the Pope's press office, which thought the film lacked substance and was a boiled down plot-substrate that just didn't have backbone, much less depth of character or a Meryl Streep cameo. Everybody agreed, but nobody cared.
I am Goombax, son of Goombor the High Priest of the Goomba, and this is my story. It is the tale of a war, of a grave and unrelenting enemy: the nefarious slaughter-giant Mario, and his perverted brother Luigi. Ultimately, it is a story of revenge. It began on the Sacerdotal Festival of the Long [...]
On the advice of a good friend I spent last night reading Peter Watt's recent novel Blindsight. It was GREAT. Whiplash-and-flash scifi that is, at its core, the best that the genre can be: brilliantly speculative. Extrapolation, prediction, and what if: Peter Watts proves himself brilliantly fluent in building worlds of possible outcomes that dont seem that far away at all. Since this article contains a few mild spoilers, take a couple of hours and read the story online here. Watts wins two internets for making the whole thing available free online! Or, support the guy and buy a paper version. By creating a foreign world that is alien both in aesthetics and in epistemology, Watts boils plot into a single, viscous question: what is sentience good for? The answers that he provides are unvarnished and insightful, and while they are not always completely original (what is these days), they offer one of the most accessable in unique perspectives on humanity that I have read. His conclusions are unforgettably powerful, and have had me second guessing my own actions ever since.
I am writing principally to inform you, Mr. S_____, that your proficiency in the ascendancy of various and differential rock formations is highly desirous to us, particularly with regard to the area of, ahem, "human resources" and, ahem, the betterment of certain of our... "assets". You see, my agency conducts business of an occasionally clandestine nature...
AN OPEN LETTER TO SANTA, FROM THERESA AND THE DWELLERS OF VAULT 13 Dear Santa, Let me start by telling you that the dwellers of Vault 13 are dissapointed. We don't have many chances to celebrate down here, and pretty much our only two holidays are Christmas and Halloween. The latter has been getting progressively worse since we ran out of booze, and the only thing people can think to dress up as is mutants. Headless mutants, giant mutants, major chest wound mutants ... except of course for Lyle, who still thinks it's funny to dress in drag and hit on me. So you can understand why Christmas means alot to us.
Increasingly, videogames are striving to imitate the unexplored worlds of human imagination — from barely-probed ocean depths to the stalward nebulae and distant stars of space simulations. The accuracy of recent attempts, however, is remained as far from the mark asd early scifi pulp magazines. More often than not, the ocean depths and voids of space are filled with life, pirates, battles, and immidiacy — immitations that do not depict the true nature of these depths: cold, lonely, enormous and terribly hostile. It's hard to communicate the experience of deep sea diving, or to imagine space flight. A few haunting releases — like Wholfin's video of an underwater squid birth — offer us clues.
From the first moments of your existence, something registers as unmistakeably wrong: your eyes open to the blackness of space and you are alone. Then, yawning across the gulf of plangent time, a beeping hits your ears. It is a bitonal register, a dualistic dance, one part auspicious, the other nefarious. Up and down it goes, transmitting - what? Knowledge? Information? Light? None of these things. All you see now are the words: RAM CHECK OK! ROM CHECK FAIL!
