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Martin MacInnes: ‘Science fiction can be many different things’

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Martin MacInnes, author of In Ascension

Gary Doak

Martin MacInnes is the author of the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club: In Ascension, the story of a marine biologist, Leigh, from her childhood to her adventures among the stars. He sat down with our culture editor Alison Flood to answer some of her questions about his novel. But be warned – as this is a book club discussion, there will be some spoilers about the plot ahead, so do read the novel first before diving into this interview.

Alison Flood: Martin, welcome to the New Scientist Book Club! How would you describe what’s going on in your novel?

Martin MacInnes: I’ll give a slight caveat in that, as a former bookseller, I’m quite sceptical of the ability of a quick synopsis to do justice to a book, but I’ll do my best. It’s about the story of one life and of life itself, from a young Dutch marine biologist to 4 billion years of evolution, from difficult childhoods and complex family dynamics to voyages to the seabed and far beneath, and to the edge of the solar system. It’s a novel of connections, and loneliness.

Lots going on there then! So, we are the New Scientist Book Club, and so far the books that we’ve read have all been science fiction. Are you happy to describe this as a sci-fi novel?

Yes, I am. I know that’s a difficult question for some people and maybe some readers would take issue with its science fiction status. But I love reading science fiction and I don’t have any problems saying this is science fiction. It has a spaceship in it! But just because it’s science fiction, it doesn’t limit it in any way. Science fiction can be many different things.

How about a climate change novel?

Maybe, sort of surprisingly, I’m kind of less happy with that, because I’m really against the ghettoising of fiction into climate change fiction, as if that’s something we can section off and say “here are the books that aren’t ignoring ecocide and the devastation of the planet”. Everything being published just now, regardless of what it thinks it’s doing, kind of is climate fiction, because that’s the world we’re living through. It’s less dramatically climate fiction than something like Kim Stanley Robinson‘s The Ministry for the Future, but it is a novel about ecology and about what humans have in common with the natural world. So yeah, in those senses, it kind of is a climate novel, but I kind of resist that.

Yes, I see – so we don’t need to separate it out into its own little enclave. Where did it start from, the idea to tell this story?

There are two ways of answering that one. The first would be that I visited a really special place, Ascension Island, in 2008 and as soon as I arrived there, I thought: “I’m going to write about this place.” It always stuck with me.

Then, my second novel was very difficult to write. I felt a huge sense of relief after publishing it, and I wanted to do something big, both in length and in scope, next. This was just before the advent of covid. And I thought “OK, I want to do something about a journey, I want it to be a first-person narrative, I want it to be epic”. I was thinking about circular journeys. I was thinking about Atlantic green turtles, and the impulse to return to where one was born. I was thinking about that in humans, our psychological preoccupations with our past, with childhood especially, and from that fractal patterns repeating through the animal kingdom. Then suddenly the world changed for everyone. I was living in alone in an isolated village without wi-fi, and my story grew more epic.

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A green sea turtle on Ascension Island

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How about Leigh – why tell the story through her eyes?

This is probably unusual for a writer, but character and voice come very late on for me. So I knew it was going to be someone around Leigh’s age, and I knew she would be from the Netherlands for a couple of reasons: the risk of inundation in the Netherlands is as great as anywhere in the world because of the lowness of the territory, so it was the Netherlands as a sort of advanced example of what will increasingly happen throughout coastal regions across the world. So that’s why she was Dutch. And I don’t want to say too much about this aspect of it, but Leigh does have a historical precedent. Aspects of her biography are based on a very little known, early 19th-century Dutch East India Company employee, someone I found out about when I was researching Ascension Island, who lived through a period of extraordinary loneliness. So that was a starting point.

One of the things I was looking at was, why does she need the natural world so much, what happened during her childhood, and from that the aspects of her character and her family circumstances arose.

A few of our members have found some of the early bits of the novel hard to read, about the trauma that she goes through in her childhood. I didn’t, personally, and in fact I knew I was going to love the book from the very moment that you have her go into a river and experience a sort of epiphany with nature. Can you talk us through that bit?

That’s a really important scene. She’s 9 or 10, and she’s feeling particularly hopeless and she goes for a swim, feeling a dread and a hopelessness about her life. She enters the water and opens her eyes to what’s around her and she sees that everything around her is alive. She’s a part of it. She’s not separated from it and she sees that the river is not a medium to pass through, it’s an assemblage of life itself, and that activates her sense of wonder. It’s almost comparable to what many astronauts report when they go into space and they look down on Earth, which I think is referred to as the overview effect, when you have this sense of wonder and egolessness.

At that moment, she finds something that she knows she can cling to, that will keep her alive, will possibly allow her to find some sort of satisfaction, meaning or even happiness in her life. So everything that happens in the novel is sort of made possible in that moment. In fact, I would say she experiences a greater sense of wonder in that moment than when she reaches space and looks back on Earth as well.

For me, that idea of the sense of wonder was really at the heart of the book – particularly the moment when Leigh learns about the asteroid that isn’t an asteroid, and where it might have come from.

I’m not a scientist by any stretch, but I have a similar need for wonder to Leigh. That has enriched my life in all sorts of ways, and it’s really one of the reasons I turn to writing, to evoke that sense for myself. I know that probably seems hopelessly earnest, but it’s true.

Did you ever feel slightly daunted by what you were setting out to do – moving from the wilds of space to a deep trench in the Atlantic Ocean?

Absolutely, I’ve never done anything like this before, and especially at the start, I almost gave up so many times. One of the things that helped was I wasn’t writing to contract, I was just writing for myself. Another thing that helped was being able to go on long walks every day. I had a very strict routine. I was living in a flat on my own, but with thin walls surrounded by loud flats. So I worked from about 4 to 6:30am every day, when the building was silent because everyone else was asleep. Later, I would go for a long walk towards some standing stones about 3 miles away and think about what I’d written, and it really helped me picture the scope of what I was doing. I tried to make the material more manageable by breaking it down as well, into parts, sub-parts, with quite clear distinctions, almost like separate books themselves, before integrating them all again.

Do you think writing it during the covid-19 pandemic affected your writing – the claustrophobia of the crisis compared with Leigh, who is claustrophobic in her spaceship or diving?

Definitely. And I think I was also drawn to writing about the biggest possible journeys because I couldn’t leave my own flat. I was reading a lot about mountaineering, and the idea of expansion and voyages and mystery and pushing on that was thrilling to me and was something that was sort of self-sustaining for me during this period, like, there will be other journeys to go on.

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Martin MacInnes: “I was drawn to writing about the biggest possible journeys”

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You write about all sorts of areas of science here, from marine biology to the emergence of life to space travel. Tell us a bit about your research for the book.

These are all things I’m interested in and have been for a long time. I feel especially sheepish talking about this to New Scientist because I’m a novelist, I’m not claiming to have any kind of scientific authority, I’m just an amateur and an enthusiast doing all of this with love. I think some of these perspectives, like cell biology, can have a place in fiction and so I’m just trying to experiment with that. So I did read a lot, but I was also careful not to cleave too closely to research, as I think that can have a deadening effect. My aim with research was to get to a stage where I felt I knew stuff well enough that I could also invent, and that invention would appear strong. So yeah, the science is really important, but it’s not a research book.

There was originally a lot more in the part where Leigh is talking about the emergence of eukaryote cells – that conversation went on for many more pages, and my editor was like, “people are dropping the book right now Martin, you know you really can’t do that”. So it’s become much more concise.

When the book first came out, a letter was sent to reviewers talking about how you believed that “climate disaster has been and continues to be enabled primarily through our refusal to accept human integration in the natural world”. Can you tell us a bit about what you meant by that?

I think sending that letter out was a mistake, actually, because I’m not particularly articulate as a polemicist. Fiction is where I do my thinking. But I want to talk about this particular topic and I’m trying to talk about it in every interview I do, in every event I do. I’m not sure the phrase I used was the best – “human integration”, I’m not sure that’s fluent enough.

What I’m really talking about is a total lack of separation between us and everything else. That’s how I see the world. That’s how my fiction presents the world. But a lot of the time, when I’m reading English-language contemporary fiction, I get the sense that there’s a glass wall around the characters sealing them off from everything else, with all non-human life existing on the other side of that wall. So characters occupy a sort of zone of privilege inside, one of safety, and it’s almost like it doesn’t really matter what else happens out there, because we’re the main actors in the world. The world was prepared for us and has no meaning beyond our drama, ignoring the 4.5 billion years that preceded our species. I think fiction should challenge this consensus view – it’s wrongheaded and it’s dangerous.

With those tacit assumptions, it’s easier to continue the habitual behaviours that enable ecocide. Perhaps if we keep chipping away at some of these assumptions, we might take away some of the barriers to changes in behaviour. And I’m not in any way trying to diminish humans at all – for me, it just makes our existence all the more remarkable and interesting that we are merely animal life and that we are intimately connected with not just animal life, but viral life and bacterial life, all of this recombinant matter swirling around for billions of years. And that our species can be lost just as easily as any other species.

At one point, Leigh says that life is already alien, is already rich and strange. We don’t need to say it arrived seeded on a meteor to make more so. I guess that’s the same thing right?

Yes – and that’s why I’m writing science fiction even if I don’t take my characters into space, because that’s the lens to me. It is so incomprehensibly strange that we exist.

Why did you decide to have a section towards the end of the book, set in the future and told from the perspective of Helena, Leigh’s sister?

I always knew I was going to switch things at the end. I always knew the narrative was going to return to Earth and I was going to switch narrator. Obviously, that is a very risky thing to do, 400 pages into a 500-page novel, but on an instinctive level I knew had to do this, I had to shift it. When I was writing the space parts, knowing I was going to go back to Earth from a different perspective, that made it so much more interesting for me writing the bits in space. I was thinking, “OK, this is going to be placed next to a very different voice and world.” That gave a different energy to what I was writing, so it influenced what went before it. And I wanted to just challenge the idea of Leigh’s perspective being our only access to reality – that there might be a slightly different way of looking at her childhood.

And how about your extraordinary finale, “Oceana”, when you have your astronauts returning to a much-earlier Earth, and to a new beginning? Was that always the plan, when you were writing – and how has it been received by readers? It certainly shocked me!

It definitely wasn’t always the plan, but a return to beginnings came to feel more inevitable as the writing process went on. It still wasn’t there in the first completed draft of the novel. In that original draft, the “Ascension” part was considerably longer and contained several possible “endings”, including one similar to what became “Oceana”. So the seed was there. But the decision to commit to something less ambiguous came through conversations with my editor.

It’s obviously a really grandiose, melodramatic ending, and I was a little uncomfortable with that at first because I’ve never done anything like it before. Ultimately, I think it works as a scaled-up version of a theme that’s there more intimately throughout the novel: we are connected to everything around us. This is never clearer than in the moment of death, which is not an ending, but a transformation. And I think it’s possible to see something beautiful and optimistic in this.

As for how it’s been received by readers, this is something I’ve deliberately stepped back from. Readers can interpret it in their own way, and I don’t want to get in the way of that. I don’t think it’s healthy for writers to examine reviews and reader responses – you can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t try to.

Martin, is there anything else you’d want to say to our readers?

First of all, I would say like thank you for reading, that’s a real honour for me. And hopefully I’ve given the sense in this interview that I don’t see this as being a dystopian novel or a doom-filled one. Writing it was celebratory for me, and it occasionally had moments with a sense of the ecstatic, and I hope that comes across. That’s really important to me, that one should ideally leave the novel with a sense of possibility and looking around slightly differently, even on a moment of hope.

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The best new science fiction books of March 2024

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A female robot is created to be the perfect girlfriend for her owner in Sierra Greer’s novel Annie Bot

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From Adrian Tchaikovsky to Hao Jingfang and Natasha Pulley, a host of big science fiction names have new titles out this month. We readers can choose if we want to peer into the ruins of an alien civilisation, follow the possibility of a coming singularity and its fallout or enter the world of a sex robot – to all of which I say,  yes please, bring it on. I think I am most excited, though, about Stuart Turton’s new high-concept thriller, in which a murder takes place on an island surrounded by a fog that has destroyed the rest of the planet – crime and sci-fi, one of my favourite blends.

If all these new titles aren’t enough to keep you busy this March, you could dive back into Cixin Liu’s epic The Three-Body Problem, in anticipation of Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation. Or why not come and join us at the New Scientist Book Club, where we have just started reading Martin MacInnes’s novel In Ascension. Moving from a mysterious trench at the bottom of the Atlantic to deep space, it is just out in paperback and is a stunning read.

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Is Tchaikovsky propping up the science fiction industry single-handedly? He is so prolific and reliably excellent that I think he might be. Alien Clay is the first of two new novels out over the next few months and is set on Kiln, a far-distant world where the ruins of an alien civilisation have been discovered. Professor Arton Daghdev, who has always wanted to study alien life, is exiled to Kiln for his political activism, and must work in a labour camp there. Can he discover the world’s secrets before it kills him?

I am a big Turton fan: I adore his clever, high-concept murder mysteries, from his debut, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, to his most recent historical crime novel, The Devil and the Dark Water. His latest outing has a definite science fiction tinge to it. It takes place in a world destroyed by a killing fog that swept the planet. The only thing to survive is the island, where 122 villagers and three scientists live in harmony – until one of the scientists is found stabbed to death, triggering a lowering of the island’s security system that will allow the fog to sweep across and kill everyone within 107 hours if the murder isn’t solved. That is already a lot to take in, but everyone’s memories have also been wiped by the security system. This sounds complex, but I trust Turton to be brilliant, so it is next on my list.

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Mars is the setting for Natasha Pulley’s new novel

Pulley is a relatively recent discovery for me, after my mum finally persuaded me to find time to read her historical, fantastical novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (it was a joy). This latest is set after an environmental catastrophe. January, a refugee from Earth who is now a second-class citizen on Mars because his body has yet to adjust to the lower gravity, enters a marriage of convenience with xenophobic Mars politician Aubrey Gale – who turns out to be very different from how they appear in the Martian press. I love a good romance – couple that with a sci-fi setting, and this is a must-read for me.

2054: A Novel by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

Stavridis is not just a novelist, but also Admiral James Stavridis, formerly supreme allied commander at NATO. He and Ackerman are the authors of the bestseller 2034. In this follow-up, it is 20 years after the nuclear war between the US and China when the US president collapses and dies during an address to the nation. Conspiracy theories spread, and civil war ensues. Meanwhile, computer scientists and intelligence experts believe they know what lies behind the assassination: a profound breakthrough in AI. This sounds thrilling and provocative, and one to devote a good chunk of time to reading.

The Hugo award-winning Jingfang’s new sci-fi thriller takes place in a future in which a mysterious and highly intelligent alien race makes contact. Three scientists who aren’t convinced the aliens are a threat join forces in an attempt to prevent a potentially disastrous military response.

Our sci-fi columnist Emily Wilson rates this novel very highly. Described as a great fit for fans of Never Let Me Go and My Dark Vanessa, among which I definitely count myself, it is the story of Annie Bot, a female robot created to be the perfect girlfriend for her owner Doug. Trouble is, she starts to wonder what she really wants from life.

High Vaultage by Chris Sugden and Jen Sugden

By the authors of the podcast drama series Victoriocity, this novel is described as perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams – hi, that’s me. It is set in 1887 “Even Greater London”, an “urban plane” covering the entire lower half of England, where the “engineer-army” of Isambard Kingdom Brunel builds and demolishes whatever it thinks needs it. Meanwhile, Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle have set up the country’s first private detective agency and take on a kidnapping case the police, unable to crack a series of impossible bank robberies, are too busy for.

This first-contact novel is the sequel to Johnstone’s The Space Between Us and sees the alien Enceladons now disappeared into the water off the west coast of Scotland. I am going to start with the first in this series I think. I really rate Johnstone as a crime author (his Skelfs series is laced with morbidly dark humour) so I am keen to give his sci-fi a try too.

This satirical slice of cyberpunk sounds like fun. It follows a TV sensation of the novel’s title, as its next season is set to be hosted in the neo-medieval statelet Inner Azhuur, which has been shut off from the world (by choice) for almost a century…until now. A group of misfits who will attempt to run the country must be assembled by the show’s producers, to entertain viewers around the world.

We are promised plant-based skyscrapers, a zombie apocalypse and the effects of time dilation on married life in Adam Marek’s third short story collection, as well as reluctant sex robots, and the bad parenting skills of billionaire space industrialists.

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The top 10 movies about the multiverse according to a physicist

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‘Groundbreaking’: Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix

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I am a physics professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the author of 18 popular science books. While my training was in theoretical physics, specifically finding and interpreting unusual solutions to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, I have had a lifelong appreciation for science fiction and fascination with the manifestations of physics in culture. In my latest book, The Allure of the Multiverse, I apply my experience and interests to a study of the scientific debates and popular beliefs surrounding the notion of parallel universes and alternative strands of reality. Here are my 10 favourite films on that topic, listed chronologically, each chosen for being thought-provoking and fun.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Beyond the treacly aspects of this Christmas classic lies much worthy to chew on, including the question of what the world would be like if we didn’t exist. In theoretical physics, the hypothesised anthropic principle cordons off from all reality the realm of possibilities that eventually lead to conscious observers. Alas, unlike the film’s protagonist George Bailey, we have no guardian angel who might reveal to us what the universe would be like without humanity. But maybe, in George’s spirit, we might appreciate the fact of our existence as sentient beings on a fragile planet and take that responsibility seriously.

Back to the Future (1985)

Children dream about changing their parents. Through the wonders of a time-travelling DeLorean, Marty McFly inadvertently manages to make that happen. In physics, the feasibility of backward time travel is debatable. Might the paradoxes engendered by past-directed voyages, such as actions precluding the time traveller’s birth, make those impossible? Marty’s voyage to 1955 almost prevents his parents from falling in love, until he finds a way of convincing them to do so. He returns to his present-day 1985, to realise that he is in a parallel reality in which his parents are far cooler. Such a multiverse avoids paradoxes and offers hope to teenagers.

Groundhog Day (1993)

In quantum physics, actuality is a blend of different particle histories – as if denizens of the subatomic world need to try all possibilities to get things right. Eastern philosophy likewise stresses that reincarnation leads ultimately to perfection. Similarly, in this hilarious film, weather forecaster Phil Connors seems destined to repeat the same awful day over and over again, until he is able to cast aside his self-centred attitude and become more sensitive to others. In the process, he not only finds love, but also experiences ample time to master French, ice sculpture and the piano. Courtesy of a kind of multiverse of recurrence, he contains multitudes.

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‘Contains multitudes’: Bill Murray in Groundhog Day

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12 Monkeys (1995)

Inspired in part by the excellent La Jetée, 12 Monkeys offers a plotline like a twisted knot of wires. But does it constitute a single, consistent strand or contain loose ends? James Cole, its protagonist, travels back in time from an imagined 21st century to the 1990s to try to collect clues as to the origin of a devastatingly lethal pandemic. Although his superiors emphasise that the past cannot be changed, he seems at times to be affecting reality – only to be confronted with its apparent resilience. While the hope of him preventing the catastrophe ultimately vanishes, even in the final scene there are hints of alternatives.

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‘An astonishing juxtaposition of fates’: Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors

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Sliding Doors (1998)

Who hasn’t missed catching a train by mere seconds, and cursed the ensuing lost time? Yet if that delay resulted in avoiding an accident, it would rather seem a blessing. Brilliantly, through the magic of cinema, we see both strands of a multiverse in which the protagonist Helen alternatively misses and catches a tube train. In the former case she fails to witness her boyfriend having an affair, and persists in a state of ignorance. In the latter she does witness the affair, and soon meets Mr Right. Both strands, though, have common elements – marking the way to an astonishing juxtaposition of fates at the end.


Run Lola Run (1998)

If two versions of reality aren’t enough, try three. In this inventive German film, fate awards Lola three opportunities to save her boyfriend, who lost a whopping sum of cash and needs it to fulfill a task for a crime boss. Each time, she has 20 minutes to acquire the loot somehow and run with it across the city to her frantic lover. Echoing the butterfly effect in chaos theory, minute discrepancies lead to vastly different outcomes. While the first two attempts prove fatal, the third time’s the charm. Our passion for a multiverse, the film demonstrates, reflects our desire for multiple chances in life.

The Matrix (1999)

Cinema enables us to envision whole new worlds. Artificial intelligence bolsters that illusion. Imagine if an incredibly powerful, malicious electronic entity exploited our capacity to be fooled, and manufactured a false world for us to experience our lives. Meanwhile, it drained our bodies of energy for its own evil purposes. The film’s groundbreaking science fiction plot and special effects remain relevant to today’s discussions of AI’s capabilities and threats. Some thinkers speculate that the observable universe is a simulation. If so, its script writers, ensconced somewhere else in the multiverse, ought to win an Academy Award for most inventive screenplay.

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‘Haunting’: Jake Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone in Donnie Darko

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Donnie Darko (2001)

One of the most profound enigmas in theoretical physics is the concept of wormholes: hypothetical connections between otherwise disjointed sectors of the cosmos. Theorists have derived wormhole solutions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and demonstrated how they potentially could be used as time machines. In practice, nobody has a clue how to assemble the extraordinary amount of mass – including a special negative-mass ingredient called “exotic matter” – required to create such objects. Nonetheless, they serve as an effective plot device in this haunting movie about a troubled teenager who strives by means of time travel to save the world from imminent apocalypse.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Mention “multiverse” today, and many think of Marvel Comics and its incorporation of the concept into its blockbusters. One such recent hit resolves the question of whether or not there can be more than one Spider-Man. With jaw-dropping animation, the film follows the life of a boy named Miles Morales who, like Peter Parker in the classic comic series, finds himself bitten by a radioactive spider and granted extraordinary powers. In teaming up with an ageing Parker from another universe to stop the villain Kingpin’s fiendish plan, he feels inadequate at first. Wonderfully, the film shows how he finds confidence and saves the world.

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Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Only one multiverse flick has bagged numerous Academy Awards, including best picture. Its plot is surreal and its acting exquisite. As in some of the previous films mentioned in this list, it features an improbable hero fighting to rescue reality amidst a plethora of competing timelines. In our universe, Evelyn Quan Wang runs a launderette, but in others she has mastered martial arts, crooning, cooking and other pursuits. Meanwhile, her estranged daughter has a powerful, nihilistic multiverse counterpart determined to destroy all creation by means of a singularity called the “Everything Bagel”. Remarkably, the film ends in self-awareness, family reconciliation and cosmic harmony.

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Read an extract from Julia by Sandra Newman

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Suzanna Hamilton as Julia in the 1984 adaptation

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Fiction, along with a dozen other departments, had its Hate in Records. Records had the space; half the office had been cleared out in the Small Adjustment of ’79. It also made a nice break for Fiction, because they worked in the lightless depths, while Records was on Floor Ten, with banks of windows on all four walls. The catch was that they weren’t to use lifts – healthy exercise, comrades! To add insult to injury, there were three “ghost” floors, which had once contained bustling offices but now stood empty, so Floor Ten was really Floor Thirteen. This meant not only three extra flights, but that you had to pass those floors-of-the-dead.

Every landing on the stairs was dominated by a telescreen. Syme and Ampleforth, who struggled with the climb, kept pausing to comment in apparent fascination on whatever the telescreen was saying, while panting and mopping the sweat from their brows. Julia had a habit of smiling at each telescreen as she passed, imagining some bored man in surveillance being cheered by her appearance. Stairs held no terrors for her. At twenty-six, she’d never been stronger, and certainly never so well fed. Today she was especially lively after the long, dull hours of idleness, and trotted up, chattering with everyone she met, pressing hands and laughing at jokes. Syme’s name for her was “Love-Me”, which sometimes gave her pause, but could have been far worse. Only at the end did she slow abruptly, when she saw she might overtake O’Brien. As a result, she was right on his heels when the group came pouring into Records.

The first thing she saw was Smith – Old Misery. He was moving chairs into rows, and, absorbed in this chore, looked surprisingly likeable. A lean man of roughly forty, very fair and grey-eyed, he resembled the man from the poster “Honour Our Intellectual Labourers”, though of course without the telescope. He appeared to be dreaming of something cold but fine. Perhaps he was thinking of music. He moved with obvious pleasure, despite his slight limp; you could see he liked to have physical purpose.

But then he noticed Julia, and his mouth thinned with revulsion. It was startling how it changed him: hawk to reptile. Julia thought: “Nothing wrong with you a good shag wouldn’t fix!” This almost made her laugh, for of course it was true. His real trouble wasn’t that his parents had been unpersons, or that he couldn’t keep up with Party doctrine, or even his nasty cough. Old Misery had a bad case of Sex Gone Sour. And naturally the woman was to blame. Who else?

Without giving it much thought, when Smith sat down, Julia went to sit directly behind him. She justified it to herself because it was the seat right by the windows. But when he stiffened, uncomfortable with her presence, she was meanly pleased. Beside her was a low bookshelf with only one book: an old Newspeak dictionary from 1981, now lightly rimed with dust. She imagined running her finger through the dust and writing on his nape with the dirt – perhaps a J for Julia – though of course she never would.

The only trouble was, from here, she could smell him. By all rights, he ought to smell like mildew, but he smelled like good male sweat. Then she noticed his hair, which was thick and fine and might be quite nice to touch. So unfair that the Party warped the good-looking ones. Let them take the Ampleforths and Symes, and leave the Smiths to her.

Then, wouldn’t you know, Margaret came to sit next to Smith, and O’Brien followed after and sat on Margaret’s other side. Margaret and Smith ignored each other. All the Records people were like that. It was a treacherous job, reading oldthink all day, and Records workers kept each other at arm’s length. But what troubled Julia now was the question of why O’Brien was tagging after Margaret. Surely he couldn’t enjoy plain Margaret simpering and sighing at him?

Julia looked away – always the safest option when anyone was doing something peculiar – and gazed out of the bank of windows. At that moment, a scrap of newspaper sailed past, hectically spinning in the air, before it abruptly spread itself and dived to the rooftops far below. From this height, you couldn’t tell prole neighbourhoods from Party neighbourhoods; that was always queer. It also took a moment to pick out the gaps where bombs had fallen; on the street, they were all around you, and London sometimes seemed more crater than city. There was a private-use fuel ban for daylight hours, and you could make out the rare wisps of smoke where the A1 dining centres were. Electricity cuts were in force as well, and the grubby, unlit windows of office buildings had the gloomy radiance of the sea.

A little chunk of the view was obstructed by the massive telescreen on the nearby Transport building, whose moving pictures created the illusion that the daylight kept flickering and subtly changing. The images repeated on a simple loop. First one saw a group of pink-cheeked children innocently playing in a playground. On the horizon, a shadowy group of perverts and Eurasians and capitalists grew, reaching towards the children with brutish hands. Then a cut-out of Big Brother rose and blotted the villains out, and a slogan appeared in the sky: THANK YOU, BIG BROTHER, FOR OUR SAFE CHILDHOOD! After this, the same children reappeared, now in the uniform of the children’s organization, the Spies: grey shorts, blue shirt and red kerchief. The jolly Spies marched past with an Ingsoc flag, and the slogan in the sky became: join the spies! Then all faded, and the first image returned.

Weaving busily above this scene were helicopters. First you noticed the large ones, whose passage was audible even behind thick windows. These were manned by a pilot and two gunners, and you sometimes saw a gunner sitting casually in the open door of a copter with his black rifle resting against his knee. Once you thought of copters, you started noticing the flocks of microcopters below; then the big ones looked like the little ones’ parents. The micros weren’t manned but operated by remote control. They were only for surveillance, and in Outer Party districts, you’d often glance up from a task to find a micro hovering by your window like a nosy bird.

But by far the most striking thing in the view was the Ministry of Love. It rose from the jumble of ruins and low houses like a white fin breaching turbid brown water. On its gleaming surface, you could make out the tiny figures of workmen, attached to a slender tracery of cables, scrubbing its eerily snow-white flank. Apart from the tiny detail of those workmen, the building was so white it gave the impression of being an absence: a portal to nothingness cut through the shabby city and the cloudy sky. Love had no windows at all, giving its austere beauty a suffocating effect. Julia had heard a story that the mice there had no eyes; with no light, they had no need. That was bollocks, of course. Even when there was a power cut, the four big Ministries always had electric light. Still, those mythic blind mice troubled her. They stood for the real terrors behind those walls, terrors one couldn’t see and must imagine in ignorance.

Julia by Sandra Newman (Granta) is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

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The scariest sci-fi horror movies for Halloween, chosen by an expert

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“David Cronenberg’s penchant for body horror has never been put to better use” … Jeff Goldblum in The Fly

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I’m a horror nerd by trade. I completed a PhD on the subject and now I am the creator of Talking Scared, a podcast of conversations with the biggest names in the field. To settle on a concise list of science fiction horror films for spooky season, I had to winnow down the cross-pollinating history of the two genres. After all, horror and science fiction have had their tentacles entwined since Frankenstein’s monster first opened his yellowed eyes. My solution is to focus on films in which science and technology are the most substantial source of terror. That excludes a lot of amazing movies – there is no Alien, The Thing or Nope on this list – but here, in reverse order, are my choices for the greatest science fiction horror movies of recent decades.

Science may seek answers, but this adaption of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel is more interested in ambiguity. The film follows an all-female group of scientists on an expedition into the “Shimmer”, a zone of high strangeness colonising Florida after a meteorite impact. The interior of the Shimmer is far more alien than any simple extraterrestrial encounter: there are fungal humanoids, mutated animals and a final confrontation that will leave viewers bewildered and bouncing between awe and despair. Alex Garland’s film aims for the psychedelia of Kubrick’s 2001, but it also contains a bear attack that will scare you in far more earthly ways.

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Natalie Portman and Gina Rodriguez in Annihilation

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As mentioned above, sci-fi horror began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the character of the mad professor has been a staple of the genre ever since. In this schlocky, technicolour adaptation of a H. P. Lovecraft story, the sinister Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is busy perfecting his technique for reinvigorating the dead. However, they come back wrong, leading to both violence and a squirmy, oh-so-80s sleaze. Everything about the film is lurid, from the Day-Glo colours of the chemicals to the copious glistening innards, but Re-Animator is not a film that could ever be accused of taking itself too seriously.

If Re-Animator is a fun offspring of Frankenstein, Splice is the truly monstrous progeny. Vincenzo Natali’s film is another take on laboratory hubris, but what begins as a cautionary tale about genetic engineering becomes something wholly more disturbing. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play a pair of scientists in love, whose attempt to splice animal and human DNA births the humanoid Dren. She’s cute to begin with, but we all know this act of godlike creation isn’t going to have a happy ending. Dren’s development provides some quite stunning creature design, as well as a shocking series of events that may constitute the most violent puberty of all time.

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“Monstrous progeny” … Splice

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It’s hard to say too much about The Endless without spoiling the intricacies that make it tick so perfectly. Let’s just say that time travel is an under-exploited source of terror in sci-fi horror and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are perhaps the first to plumb the sheer existential dread of temporal displacement. The film begins with two brothers paying a visit to the cult they were members of as children. That set-up is creepy enough, but the truth they discover is frightening in that 3am way, when thoughts of eternal torment rise to your mind. (Or is that just me?)

Leigh Whannel transmuted the familiar Invisible Man into a tech-driven tale of domestic torment. Elisabeth Moss plays Cee, wife of wealthy “optics engineer” Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who is abusing her. When Griffin appears to die, it seems that Cee is finally free, but soon she comes to realise her husband is very much alive and is using his own tech to remain invisible. It’s a kind of technological haunting, a genuine white-knuckle piece of cinema, in which every dark corner contains potential menace. The Invisible Man was released on the cusp of the pandemic, meaning most people saw this at home. If anything, that makes the viewing all the more effective. You think your living room is empty… but is it?


Japanese film-makers were well ahead of the techno-horror curve around the turn of the millennium. From the cursed videotape in Ring (1998) to the, erm, cursed mobile phone in One Missed Call (2003), J-horror captured the anxieties of our newly digital culture. Pulse, however, offers the scariest proposition of all: the internet is sending ghosts to kill us! In the decades since, the web has become a more commonplace site of torment (see 2020’s pandemic-defining Zoom horror Host), but Pulse was the first to really tap into the way that online spaces can make humanity disappear, both literally and figuratively.

In good hands, the social sciences can be every bit as frightening as the most malign technology. The Spanish-language thought-experiment, The Platform, is set in an absurdist many-tiered prison, through which a descending platform carries a daily feast. There is enough for everyone if the prisoners take only what they need. If they don’t, those at the bottom starve. Cue an astonishingly vicious satire of personal greed versus community good. It may be my favourite film of recent years and I only wish more people could see it. The Platform could change the way we think about our consumption and our responsibilities, but it also has an awesome swordfight.

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“An astonishingly vicious satire of personal greed versus community good” … The Platform

Brandon Cronenberg is the son of body horror maestro David Cronenberg. In Possessor, the inheritance is clear. This is a gnarly movie, full of blood splatter, eye trauma and gore of the highest calibre. The technological premise is ripe for nightmares: Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos, an assassin able to commandeer the bodies of others to carry out her hits. When Vos ports herself into Colin (Christopher Abbott), he won’t submit easily, leading to most brutal identity crisis ever seen on screen. Possessor resembles a Black Mirror episode on amphetamines: not for the faint-stomached, but brimming with ideas.

What the son can do so well, the father can do even better. The Fly is a B-movie elevated to tragedy, when Jeff Goldblum’s handsomely mad scientist inadvertently mingles his DNA with that of a common housefly. His slow, transformative deterioration into “Brundlefly” is chronicled in hideous detail, but it’s his loss of inner self that hurts. David Cronenberg’s penchant for body horror has never been put to better use, but by injecting some warmth into his typically frigid film-making, he created a masterpiece of mad science.

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“A haunted-house-in-space movie” … Event Horizon

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After nine movies, we finally get off our planet with a true cult classic. Maligned on release, Event Horizon rivals Alien as the best film ever set on a terrifyingly Gothic spaceship. Science is more central to Paul W. S. Anderson’s movie, though, with wormholes, hyperdrives and “folded space” playing their part in the titular ship’s mysterious reappearance. The question is: where has the Event Horizon been? And what has it brought back with it? This is a haunted-house-in-space movie, in which a rag-tag rescue crew is killed and/or psychologically unravelled by the demonic spaceship, but it is the few seconds of video footage revealing the horrific fate of the original crew that will really stay with you beyond Halloween.


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Review: Sci-Fi Action ‘The Creator’ – This Movie Isn’t Really About A.I. | FirstShowing.net

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Review: Sci-Fi Action ‘The Creator’ – This Movie Isn’t Really About A.I.

by Alex Billington
September 28, 2023

“Whose side are you on, huh?” Let’s get right into it – time to dig into this one… For the record, I’ve been a huge fan of Gareth Edwards ever since his first feature Monsters, writing a glowing review out of Cannes 2010 after catching a small screening. Now 13 years later he’s back with another original sci-fi movie titled The Creator, a big budget studio picture that is entirely his idea. The script is credited to Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz, but Edwards gets the sole “Story by” credit on this movie. First things first, The Creator is visually astonishing and deserves to be seen on the big screen for the visuals alone. However, the rest of the movie feels rather empty, without much of a story besides another Lone Wolf and Cub rehash built into a bigger A.I. vs humans / America vs Asia world. Despite the movie being set in the future where humanoid robots are as common as regular fleshy human beings, it needs to be stated clearly – this movie isn’t actually about Artificial Intelligence at all. It’s really another Vietnam War tale turned into an action sci-fi spectacle.

In an era of reboots, sequels, adaptation, and remakes, it’s really, really nice to see a completely original sci-fi movie. And this stands out being so big and bold and fresh. In terms of the visuals and world-building, this movie is off the charts spectacular. In terms of the story and script, this movie is underwhelming. It’s a good movie but lacks depth exploring any themes beyond just the basics. There’s not even that much to talk about after. Here’s a guy, who you don’t know much about (as usual with John David Washington in a lead role), who lost his wife, who we also don’t know much about. He just wants her back. That’s the main plot of this movie, wrapped around the “but there’s also robots & America hates them” near-future context. Edwards’ world-building is phenomenal because he builds it all around what they shot. He has explained in interviews for The Creator that they went out and shot all of it, then came back and created everything else and designed the world to make it feel big and exciting. Yes, that is exciting, and it’s enjoyable and satisfying to watch, but by the time it was over I felt empty. Even trying to discuss it, what is there get into? Not much.

Once the movie gets going, there’s a reveal part of the way in that it’s essentially America against Southeast Asia. They don’t like this generic “New Asia”, as it is known in the future, because they’re friendly with the A.I. and have learned to integrate and live with them. Americans don’t like this A.I. because, well, something happened and a nuke exploded in Los Angeles and they blame the A.I. All this context is based not only on America’s response to 9/11, but also America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. That is really what the film is about – American imperialism and military might. They even have this gigantic aerial battle-station called “NOMAD“, which is also an obvious reference to the very real “NORAD” located in a mountain in Colorado Springs. Except this one can fly anywhere around the planet and destroy anything. Somehow the American’s have unlimited, unchallenged authority to go wherever and attack anyone with this ship. This is also an interesting reference to what happened during the building of the atomic bomb – and why some scientists leaked info to the Russians, because they didn’t believe America should have complete, monopolistic control over the ultimate weapon. In this movie, they do. However, the how & why of this thing is left unexplained.

Going in to watch The Creator, I was thinking wow it’s impressive how Gareth Edwards was able to capture the zeitgeist of 2023 with its eerily relevant story about Artificial Intelligence. As everyone knows, A.I. has taken over the tech world in 2023, including in Hollywood – the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are partially about A.I. and how they will use it. However, watching this movie I realized – it doesn’t actually tap into the zeitgeist at all. Robots and A.I. have been a major part of sci-fi storytelling for decades. All of the conversations around The Creator involve everyone projecting 2023 thoughts about A.I. onto a movie that was conceived of years ago and filmed in early 2022. I’ve heard critics wondering if the movie is supposed to make us wonder if we should bow down to our benevolent A.I. overlords, instead of be against them (as is happening in the real world in 2023) because it depicts them as being so kind. One of them even says at one point that they would never harm humans, it’s not in their coding to do so (a reference to the first law of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics“). But thinking this is missing the point of the entire movie. These robots aren’t really the same as A.I. in 2023, they’re actually foreigners: Vietnamese, Thai, and other Asians.

The Creator Review

The movie’s actual commentary and concept is about America’s perceived ultimate superiority and desire to eradicate anything it wants or deems a “threat”, including going to over to countries in Southeast Asia, like Vietnam, and killing Vietnamese people (estimates are that upwards of 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the Vietnam War). In The Creator, the “threat” is A.I., but only because the A.I. are supposedly responsible for the nuclear explosion in Los Angeles. Instead of the movie being about Artificial Intelligence, it’s using A.I. robots as the main metaphor for striking commentary on America’s militaristic ego and imperialism. It just so happens that A.I. became a major topic in 2023 and thus the movie found the right time to debut in theaters. Aside from the world-building, there is no actual dialogue or conversations or commentary in the movie about A.I. and what it means and how it works. The simple question of, can we co-exist with A.I., is a remarkably common question in most sci-fi; it’s something that almost every sci-fi writer over the last 60 years has pondered and considered in their work. This movie adds absolutely nothing to that conversation.

Ultimately, The Creator is just another sci-fi action spectacle with lots of guns and explosions that could use a much better script. Many of the quieter scenes where Joshua is laying low waiting for the next attack could have become scenes where they discuss Artificial Intelligence, technology, and the ‘bots that are everywhere. There’s not much backstory or explanation as to how the robots came to power, how they got blamed for the nuclear explosion in Los Angeles, how they got so advanced, how New Asia successfully integrated them into their society, how they learned how to be human-like, who invented them, who profits off of building them, etc. Movies like The Matrix and Blade Runner explore these topics right in the plot, but The Creator does not – it wants to be more of a cinematic experience based on sci-fi aesthetic than anything else. As for the script, it’s entirely about the connection between Joshua and the young robot he finds and names Alphie (played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles). The whole time, I could not stop thinking – this guy is a really bad dad. He never learns how to be a better caretaker of this kid, like Mando does in “The Mandalorian” series.

One of the movie’s highlights is Allison Janney starring as Colonel Howell, who is Joshua’s commanding officer from the government watching over the mission. Much like Stephan Lang’s iconic performance as the mean bastard Quaritch in Avatar, she’s another grizzled badass villain character in a big sci-fi movie that many will remember. While at first it may seem like unconventional casting, she handles the role with the right amount of grit and calm to stand out among the rest of the cast. There’s a scene in the first half where she connects with Joshua as they’re flying to Asia, as if she gets him and understands him. This bit of well-played empathy worked because it even got me, at first I thought she might end up being one of the “good guys.” Not much later we find out, oh right, she’s just another mean military tool whose jackboot mentality continues to threaten lives no matter where they go or what Joshua does to put an end to this dangerous pursuit. Madeleine’s performance as Alphie is also endearing, though at times she’s a bit hokey and phony.

If I’m honest, I do hope this movie ends up being a big hit anyway because it will mean good things for sci-fi and original storytelling. Hollywood needs to know a completely original creation like this is worth making and worth investing in, and movieogers will connect with it. That said, it’s far from the sci-fi masterpiece it could be, and I still must emphasize how simplistic and empty it is thematically. I wish was walking out of this movie engaging in deep philosophical discussions about Artificial Intelligence, but I’m not. Because it’s not about A.I., it’s about how America will exterminate anything it deems a threat to its way of life, without any desire to understand anything more beyond “they’re bad and we need to get rid of them.” Which is one of the lessons of this movie that is nice for humanity, but not right for real world tech. Earlier in 2023, one of the creators of modern A.I. left Google so he could “sound the alarm about A.I.” and its danger. This is the opposite of the message in The Creator because these are different conversations about different ideas, and we shouldn’t conflate the two. Enjoy this movie for how beautiful looks on screen, but not for anything else.

Alex’s Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing

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The best science fiction films about time travel, by a metaphysicist

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“An example of an inconsistent time travel story” – Marty McFly (right) and Doc Brown in Back to the Future

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I am a professor in philosophy and joint director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. My research focuses on the nature of time and on our relationship with it. I work in the metaphysics of time in philosophy, but my work intersects with both physics and psychology. My next book will look at how our temporal experiences inform our preferences about where in time we want good and bad experiences to be located – for example, whether we should prefer that bad things are located in our past, not our future, and good things in our future, not our past. Below is my list (in reverse order) of some of my favourite time travel films. I’ve tried to include a range of films from different genres that explore different aspects of time travel – but be warned, discussing them properly means there are some spoilers!

10. Midnight in Paris (2011)

Unlike many time travel films, Midnight in Paris isn’t focused on the metaphysics of time travel. It has no interest in exploring how time travel works or what implications it has for how we think about time, free will and the past. It is really a film that explores nostalgia. It follows disillusioned screenwriter Gil Pender, who is visiting Paris with his girlfriend. Every night at midnight, he “catches” an old car that takes him back to 1920s Paris. This is an interesting time travel film because unlike many such films, it isn’t about wanting to change the past. Rather, Gil is caught up in the romance of the past, constantly thinking about how much better life was in 1920s Paris. He comes to realise that wherever we are located in time, we often pine after earlier eras, mistakenly believing them to be the golden age. It is rare that time travel films explore the idea that the past is somewhere we want to go, rather than somewhere we want to change, and that is why this film is on my list.

9. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

This is an example of what metaphysicians call a consistent time travel story – one in which time travellers don’t change the past, although they do causally interact with it. In inconsistent stories, the time traveller is depicted as altering the past so that it goes from having once been one way (a way in which there is no traveller present) to later being a different way (a way with the time traveller present). Since philosophers think there is no way to change the past in this manner, they take these stories to depict impossible (and hence inconsistent) things. By comparison, consistent time travel stories are those in which the time traveller has always existed at the past time; the traveller will no doubt causally interact with the past, and in doing so they will make the past be the way it always was.

There is a single scene in this film that alone makes it worth watching. Bill and Ted need keys to get into a building. They don’t have the keys, but they reason that as long as they will, in the future, be able to get access to the keys, they can travel back in time and leave their younger selves the keys. Moreover, they figure that the keys will already be there waiting for them if they succeed, in the future, in travelling back and leaving them. And they are. This is a classic illustration not only of consistent time travel, but of a time travel loop: the keys are where they are because they will put them there, and they will decide to put them there because that is where they now find them.

8. Back to the Future (1985)

This is a classic time travel film. I include it because it is an example of an inconsistent time travel story, in which, by travelling back to the past, Marty McFly accidentally changes the past and puts his parents’ relationship in peril. As a result, not only is the future that Marty knows imperilled, but his own existence and that of his siblings are jeopardised. After all, if his parents never become a couple, then they will never be born. Faced with his non-existence, Marty has to try to get his parents together to ensure the future of him and his siblings.

This is an example of the so-called grandfather paradox. If someone travels back in time and kills their grandfather before their father is born, then they themselves won’t be born – but, as a result, they won’t be present to kill their grandfather, and as a result they will be born and be able to travel back in time. Most philosophers think that the grandfather paradox can be resolved by noting that no time traveller will ever succeed in killing their grandfather even if they try. Since Marty almost accidentally succeeds in changing the past in a way that undoes his existence, this is an impossible story. But that doesn’t make it any less entertaining.


7. About Time (2013

This is a film about changing the past in myriad small ways. Tim, the protagonist, learns that he can go back in time and do things differently the second, third and fourth time around. This isn’t really a film about the metaphysics of time travel, though if it were, it would depict an impossible story. It is an exploration of what we value and what we would change. Tim discovers that in changing the past to protect his sister, he thereby changes the identity of his future child. He realises that the present is the sum total of all the tiny choices we make along the way; change the past and we change the present. Ruminating on what he values, Tim not only changes the past back to how it was, but learns to value the present for what it is.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

“A meditation on the startlingly different lives we might have had…” Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once

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6. Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

This is an amazing surrealist film. I don’t know if it really counts as a time travel movie; it might be better described as a universe-hopping film in which the body of Evelyn, the protagonist, is periodically taken over by a version of herself from a parallel universe. The film explores the idea of life choices, depicting a world in which every choice-point creates multiple universes in which different choices are made. It is a meditation on the startlingly different lives we might have had, had things only gone a little differently.

5. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

This is a great consistent time travel story. It depicts Henry, who, as an involuntary time traveller, lives his life largely out of order as he bounces around time. He is largely disconnected from others until he meets Clare, who is later to become his wife. The film explores the connection between Clare and Henry, who keep meeting each other at different times in their lives. Sometimes, an older Henry meets a very young Clare; sometimes, a much younger Henry meets an older Clare. The film is a rumination on the ways in which our lives intersect and on what it would be like to lead a life in which events don’t simply unfold from past to future, but instead one jumps around in time.

4. Interstellar (2014)

At last, a science fiction film. The story follows Joseph Cooper as he tries to find a wormhole through which humanity can escape a dying Earth. This film is unusual since it explores travel to the future, rather the past, via time dilation. What makes this particularly interesting is that it is the only film here that is even remotely scientifically plausible. It is the closest we are going to get to an investigation of the only kind of time travel we are ever likely to encounter.

Interstellar explores the effects of a supermassive black hole on a crew who go down to investigate a planet and come up only a couple of hours later, from their perspective, but find that 23 years have passed due to the time dilation caused by the massive gravitational effect of the black hole. Since time passes much more slowly nearer a black hole than it does outside of it, this is a way of travelling to the future (though without hope of return).

3. Tenet (2020)

This is definitely a film that bears watching a few times. It certainly takes the idea of time travel to a whole new level. Rather than simply having people travel to an earlier time, it incorporates the idea of objects and people who are “inverted” with respect to entropy, and hence are moving backwards in time in the same way that you are I are moving forwards. So, from our perspective, these people look they are doing everything in reverse, while from their perspective we appear to be moving in reverse.

It is a fascinating premise since we know that, in principle at least, these kinds of processes can be reversed. Our laws are time reversal invariant, which means that, for any process that can occur, the reverse process can also occur. In that respect, at least, the film gets the science right (though it remains much less easy to see how a device could invert the entropy of small local regions in the way that it does). This is another film that depicts consistent time travel. At one point, we not only have the protagonist fighting with a time-travelling version of himself, but fighting with an inverted version of himself too. I can see why it took Christopher Nolan some years to write, but it is well worth the watch.

2. 12 Monkeys (1995)

This is one of my favourite time travel films, and a fantastic example of a consistent time travel story. It also depicts a causal loop, which occurs when it is both the case that an earlier event causes a later event, and also that the later event causes the earlier one. In this instance, James Cole is sent back in time from 2035 to 1996 because in 1996 there is a deadly outbreak of a virus. He isn’t sent back to try and prevent the outbreak, since in 2035 they know that the outbreak occurred and that the past can’t be changed. But they want to find the origin of the virus to help develop a cure. Having looked at historical records, Cole believes that an organisation called the Army of the 12 Monkeys, headed by Jeffrey Goines, is responsible for disseminating the virus. As it turns out, the Army of the 12 Monkeys wasn’t the source of the epidemic. But here’s where the causal loop comes in: it turns out that Goines started the organisation because he heard about it from Cole himself. And of course, Cole heard about it because Goines started it. So we have a causal loop.

Predestination

“A fantastic example of a consistent time travel story” – a still from Predestination

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1. Predestination (2014)

This is my top pick. It is based on a story by Robert Heinlein and is a fantastic example of a consistent time travel story. Predestination is fascinating because although it appears to contain three distinct characters (two men and one woman), in fact there is a single person who is both her own mother and her own father. Jane  (who as it turns out is intersex and has both sets of reproductive organs) meets and falls for a young man and bears his child. When he subsequently vanishes, she is heartbroken and her life runs off the rails. Later, she becomes a man, John, and he travels back in time to meet Jane.

The film explores the idea of free will and predestination. John remembers the events from the perspective of being Jane, but despite how painful those moments were, when he travels back as John, he meets Jane and fathers their child, then abandons her. To complicate matters, it turns out the baby that Jane bears is then transported back in time and left at an orphanage, growing up to be Jane (and then John). Thus, Jane’s very existence is a causal loop. She is both her own mother and her other father: she comes into existence from nothing. The film is a study in the ways in which we do, and don’t, have control over our lives.


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Wonkette Book Club Part 1: A (Climate) Change Is Gonna Come

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We’re starting off our summer 2023 edition of the Book Club with a book that’s about as timely as you could hope for: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, which imagines a very near future of catastrophic climate change and a decades-long process of humanity’s attempts to bring the climate crisis … well, not under control, but to at least to remake politics and economics in a direction that’s better suited to survival of the Earth’s inhabitants.

For this week, I asked you to read the first chapter, which is fairly short, and and tends to stay with you after you read it. If you just got here and want to catch up, the publisher, Orbit Books, conveniently posted Chapter 1 in full right on the interwebs for free! The discussion from here will involve spoilers for the first chapter, so take a few minutes to go read it … or maybe the discussion here will make you want to go read it.

Last summer, novelist Monica Byrne tweeted for a lot of us who have read the book:

I feel like my circles have divided between those who’ve read the opening chapter of The Ministry for the Future and those who haven’t.

If you haven’t….you should. Because I basically can’t think about my future without it now.

Let’s jump in, shall we? In this brief chapter, we meet one of the novel’s many main characters, Frank May, an American everyliberal from Florida who’s working at the local office of an unnamed relief NGO in a small city in Uttar Pradesh state in India. A perfect storm of atmospheric conditions leads to a long heatwave, with heat and humidity at levels — a “wet bulb” temperature of 38 degrees C (103 degrees Fahrenheit) at dawn, with 35 percent humidity — that’s right on the edge of what human beings can survive.

Then the overstressed electrical grid goes down, all over the region. Things go from bad to worse. No one is coming to help. Frank does what little he can for several local families, inviting them into the clinic where he works, where there’s a single window air conditioner connected by an extension cord to a portable generator on the roof. He keeps for himself the last of the water in the clinic’s refrigerator, in a thermos jug he’s careful not to let anyone see.

The toilets back up, the temperature keeps rising, the oldest and the youngest start dying. On the second day with no power, a group of young men break in and point a gun at Frank, telling him they’ll be taking the AC and the generator.

“We need this more than you do,” one of them explained.

The man with the gun scowled as he heard this. He pointed the gun at Frank one last time. “You did this,” he said, and then they slammed the door on him and were gone.

And really, dear reader, Frank did. So did you. So did I. America and Europe filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for 150 years, and then other countries, like China, began adding their own greenhouse emissions. The countries already suffering from the worst effects of climate change — such as last year’s floods in Pakistan, which killed over 1,700 people and left millions homeless — are not the countries that caused the climate disaster.

By the end of the chapter, everyone in the city except Frank is dead. He’s the only person still alive in a shallow lake filled with corpses.

I’m reminded of the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (spoiler coming!), where the murderous serial killer the Misfit says of the grandmother he’s just killed — after her sudden realization that all humans are family to each other — “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

The first chapter of The Ministry for the Future may just be the gun we all need pointed at our own heads to make us pay attention.

So let’s discuss a few things!

1) How are you doing? This chapter hits hard, but I also want to shake every elected leader in the country and tell them they have to read it. At Slate, Rebecca Onion, in an interview with Robinson, told him that the first chapter “gave me insomnia, dominated my thoughts, and led me to put the book down for a few months. Then I picked it back up and found that the remainder of it is actually quite optimistic.”

Robinson replies:

I wanted pretty much the response you described. Fiction can put people through powerful imaginative experiences; it generates real feelings. So I knew the opening scene would be hard to read, and it was hard to write. It wasn’t a casual decision to try it. I felt that this kind of catastrophe is all too likely to happen in the near future. That prospect frightens me, and I wanted people to understand the danger.

2) Did it work? That is, did the chapter make climate change more real to you? Or did it squick you out so badly that you stopped reading? (If so, do you think you’ll pick it up again?)

3) As you’ll see as we go along, this isn’t whizbang laser gun science fiction. There’s almost no technology we don’t have today — Robinson doesn’t even cheat by bringing cheap infinitely abundant fusion power online a decade from now. If anything, I think the “science” being fictionalized is about equal parts sociology and economics. Gee, I guess that was more a comment than a question.

4) Colonialism is a running theme in the novel, not only as a historical backdrop but, as is the case right now, in terms of how the damage from climate change hits less wealthy nations who had virtually nothing to do with wrecking the planet’s atmosphere. And yet our focus character for Chapter 1 is Frank, an American in India. We don’t get the perspective of any of the Indian characters, just the white outsider who witnesses their deaths. He’s also close to death, but he is the lone survivor. As we keep reading, I’d like to hear your thoughts on how Robinson navigates questions about affluent nations and the parts of the world that have climate change landing on them like a million-pound shithammer.

Those are just starters, of course, it’d be terribly boring if y’all only address those like essay questions. Feel free to disregard them if you want to talk about other stuff, including just your visceral reactions to the story — one of the things I loved about Glen Reed, my American Lit professor at Northern Arizona University, was that on the day we discussed “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” he didn’t start off with the standard stuff about O’Connor’s work, her Catholic faith, and the way her stories often rise to a crisis and a “moment of grace.” Instead, he said that every time he’d read the story, it just scared the hell out of him to think of his own family in such a situation: having a car wreck out in the middle of nowhere because of a bad turn, and then the person who finds you is a killer. I loved him for that.

So let’s also talk about this chapter, and climate change, as humans. Let’s talk about the whole book that way.

Your assignment for next Friday is a lot more than for today: Let’s read through Chapter 30 (they’re mostly short chapters, some only a page or less).

And if you haven’t read the book (THIS week you can go do the reading right now of course), always feel free to join the conversation. It’s not a class and there won’t be a quiz. Also, no worries about spoilers, since for the most part this is an idea-driven book, not a plot-driven one. (We’ll talk about that more next week, including the fairly common complaint from some readers that after that holy shit first chapter, the rest of the book reads like a collection of white papers, not a novel.)

The one rule I am going to enforce strictly for this post is that, to keep the conversation focused, I will remove any off topic comments and ask you to save ’em for the open thread in a couple hours, please. I’d honestly like to keep the conversation going all weekend, and if you wanna come back and say more, please do so!

So talk!

[The Ministry for the Future (Wonkette gets a bit of sales from this linky) / Slate / Chapter 1 at Orbit Books]

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Three Wild Technologies About to Change Health Care

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Feb. 3, 2023 – When I was a child, I watched syndicated episodes of the original Star Trek. I was dazzled by the space travel, sure, but also the medical technology. 

A handheld “tricorder” detected diseases, while an intramuscular injector (“hypospray”) could treat them. Sickbay “biobeds” came with real-time health monitors that looked futuristic at the time but seem primitive today.

Such visions inspired a lot of us kids to pursue science. Little did we know the real-life advances many of us would see in our lifetimes. 

Artificial intelligence helping to spot disease, robots performing surgery, even video calls between doctor and patient — all these once sounded fantastical but now happen in clinical care.

Now, in the 23rd year of the 21st century, you might not believe what we’ll be capable of next. Three especially wild examples are moving closer to clinical reality. 

Human Hibernation 

Captain America, Han Solo, and Star Trek villain Khan – all were preserved at low temperatures and then revived, waking up alive and well months, decades, or centuries later. These are fictional examples, to be sure, but the science they’re rooted in is real. 

Rare cases of accidental hypothermia prove that full recovery is possible even after the heart stops beating. The drop in body temperature slows metabolism and reduces the need for oxygen, stalling brain damage for an hour or more. (In one extreme case, a climber survived after almost 9 hours of efforts to revive him.) 

Useful for a space traveler? Maybe not. But it’s potentially huge for someone with life-threatening injuries from a car accident or a gunshot wound. 

That’s the thinking behind a breakthrough procedure that came after decades of research on pigs and dogs, now in a clinical trial. The idea: A person with massive blood loss whose heart has stopped is injected with an ice-cold fluid, cooling them from the inside, down to about 50 F. 

Doctors already induce more modest hypothermia to protect the brain and other organs after cardiac arrest and during surgery on the aortic arch (the main artery carrying blood from the heart). 

But this experimental procedure – called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR) – goes far beyond that, dramatically “decreasing the body’s need for oxygen and blood flow,” says Samuel Tisherman, MD, a trauma surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center and the trial’s lead researcher. This puts the patient in a state of suspended animation that “could buy time for surgeons to stop the bleeding and save more of these patients.”

The technique has been done on at least six patients, though none were reported to survive. The trial is expected to include 20 people by the time it wraps up in December, according to the listing on the U.S. clinical trials database. Though given the strict requirements for candidates (emergency trauma victims who are not likely to survive), one can’t exactly rely on a set schedule. 

Still, the technology is promising. Someday we may even use it to keep patients in suspended animation for months or years, experts predict, helping astronauts through decades-long spaceflights, or stalling death in sick patients awaiting a cure. 

Artificial Womb

Another sci-fi classic: growing human babies outside the womb. Think the fetus fields from The Matrix, or the frozen embryos in Alien: Covenant.

In 1923, British biologist J.B.S. Haldane coined a term for that – ectogenesis. He predicted that 70% of pregnancies would take place, from fertilization to birth, in artificial wombs by 2074. That may seems unlikely, but the timeline is on track. 

Developing an embryo outside the womb is already routine in in vitro fertilization. And technology enables preterm babies to survive through much of the second half of gestation. Normal human pregnancy is 40 weeks, and the youngest preterm baby ever to survive was 21 weeks and 1 day old, just a few days younger than a smattering of others who lived. 

The biggest obstacle for babies younger than that is lung viability. Mechanical ventilation can damage the lungs and lead to a chronic (sometimes fatal) lung disease known as bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Avoiding this would mean figuring out a way to maintain fetal circulation – the intricate system that delivers oxygenated blood from the placenta to the fetus via the umbilical cord. Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have done this using a fetal lamb.

The key to their invention is a substitute placenta: an oxygenator connected to the lamb’s umbilical cord. Tubes inserted through the umbilical vein and arteries carry oxygenated blood from the “placenta” to the fetus, and deoxygenated blood back out. The lamb resides in an artificial, fluid-filled amniotic sac until its lungs and other organs are developed.

Fertility treatment could benefit, too. “An artificial womb may substitute in situations in which a gestational carrier – surrogate – is indicated,” says Paula Amato, MD, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health and Science University. (Amato is not involved in the CHOP research.) For example: when the mother is missing a uterus or can’t carry a pregnancy safely.

No date is set for clinical trials yet. But according to the research, the main difference between human and lamb may come down to size. A lamb’s umbilical vessels are larger, so feeding in a tube is easier. With today’s advances in miniaturizing surgical methods, that seems like a challenge scientists can overcome.

Messenger RNA Therapeutics 

Back to Star Trek. The hypospray injector’s contents could cure just about any disease, even one newly discovered on a strange planet. That’s not unlike messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, a breakthrough that enabled scientists to quickly develop some of the first COVID-19 vaccines. 

But vaccines are just the beginning of what this technology can do. 

A whole field of immunotherapy is emerging that uses mRNA to deliver instructions to produce chimeric antigen receptor-modified immune cells (CAR-modified immune cells). These cells are engineered to target diseased cells and tissues, like cancer cells and harmful fibroblasts (scar tissue) that promote fibrosis in, for example, the heart and lungs. 

The field is bursting with rodent research, and clinical trials have started for treating some advanced-stage malignancies.

Actual clinical use may be years away, but if all goes well, these medicines could help treat or even cure the core medical problems facing humanity. We’re talking cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease – transforming one therapy into another by simply changing the mRNA’s “nucleotide sequence,” the blueprint containing instructions telling it what to do, and what disease to attack. 

As this technology matures, we may start to feel as if we’re really on Star Trek, where Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy pulls out the same device to treat just about every disease or injury.

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