MANGA REVIEW: ROBO SAPIENS: TALES OF TOMORROW (2018, 2019, 2021)

 

by Toranosuke Shimada

English translation by Adrienne Beck

Lyric translation by Jelly Cat

Lettering and cover design by Nicky Lim

Interior layouts by Sandy Grayson

Logo designed by George Panella

Proofreading by Dawn Davis

Edited by Alexis Roberts

Original Japanese language serialization by Kodansha  in Morning Monthly Two July 2018-June 2019.

English language publication by Seven Seas Entertainment in November 2021.

. . .

"If I wander about the shore this morning

It will bring me back to good ol' times"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Humanity constructs intelligent machines as servants, but these robots end up-somewhat accidentally-carrying the spark of our consciousness into the far future. Humanity fell in love with technology even as it fell out of love with the biological world. We built the robots to serve our whims, to create answers to our desires, to serve our truest faith-our desire for immortality-and ended up shaping a product beyond all the cynical/cyclical schemes usually dictated by ideologies of planned obsolescence. The robots of the manga future history Robo Sapiens are built to last for tens of thousands of years. This defeat of product life cycles might be the most fanciful idea expressed by this manga. 

The future depicted is vast and tragic, but the tragic elements-global wars, nuclear meltdowns, environmental degradation-are viewed at a remove. The wondrous robots who embody superhuman fantasies are foregrounded, human frailty rests in the middle ground, and human cruelty looms in the background. Robo Sapiens could be described as dystopian, at least in part. I think it's more that dystopia is a thread in the tapestry, if you will. You strip that out and you can still make some sense of the work, but something is clearly missing. The same could be said for the idea of utopia-it's not the whole picture, but you can't just rip that out, either. 

Robo Sapiens is episodic. Each chapter seems like a stand alone story or observational vignette. Then characters from earlier chapters return, change, and secrets from the past unfold line by line, memory by memory. We meet a super robot who exists as a friend to all in need-think of a shiny chrome version of Christopher Reeves's Superman-who answers all the prayers and wishes that no deity or devil or genie in a bottle ever could. There's a dutiful caretaker of a massive subterranean nuclear waste storage facility. Early on, we meet one of the last hard-boiled detectives, complete with an old school ass-kicking certain set of skills, even though much of the rest of the narrative consists of interlocking mysteries across numbingly huge expanses of time that defy the efforts of any solitary protagonist to solve.

Much of the narrative, ultimately, is driven by a brilliant but disillusioned roboticist who creates a number of the robot characters in the story. This roboticist has become disenchanted with her fellow humans who fill the world with war and waste, but much of her contempt is expressed obliquely. During a TED Talk style presentation, we see the cruelly caricatured human audience-distracted by screens, badly dressed, ill-mannered, entitled-from her perspective. Interestingly, the robots never seem to absorb this contempt. Maybe it's an Asimov thing: robot minds are programmed to show humans the utmost benevolence. It could be that the disillusioned roboticist has taken a cue from Asimov's Laws of Robotics to prevent her contempt from being replicated inside these newly created minds. Robo Sapiens cleverly chooses to respect the privacy of one of its central figures-this bitter roboticist-and therefore preserves a sense of mystery. 

However, the robots are established as having capacious minds capable of downloading vast amounts of human history in an instant, and engaging with that infodump via fully immersive internal simulations. One of the robots is able to walk through a vast swath of human evolutionary history from cave people to present. This historically enriched robot doesn't seem to view humanity in a bad light. Ultra fast robo-brains capable of sophisticated multivariable analysis of vast amounts of historical/evolutionary/psychological/economic/sociological data results, intriguingly, in empathy and tolerance. (Compare and contrast with the sadistic supercomputer conjured up in the Harlan Ellison short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" who uses its vast intelligence and stores of data to inflict eternal punishment upon the last remnants of the human race.)

Robots are also constructed to be romantic mates for humans. This is, if you're wondering, handled in an extremely elliptical fashion. There's no explicit human-on-robot action, but the power dynamics are disturbing. For much of the timeline, robots are totally subject to human power. Even though they show intelligence and individuality, the living machines-designed in the image of humans-have no rights to disobey or resist their human masters. If a human tells a robot to do something-anything-it must comply. If a human desires a gendered robot, then the robot assumes whatever gender expression serves the human's wishes. 

As for specific sex acts, Robo Sapiens is, as I said, elliptical. Presumably, anything goes. Later in the narrative, humans seem to grant robots full civil rights including autonomy of thought and action. Later still, humans and robots have separated from each other, with the human population on the decline. Wars are alluded to, and it's possible the humans were defeated by the robots in some global conflagration. The robots don't seem bitter or hostile towards humans, even though the final remnants of homo sapiens do seem to be fearful of the robots. Overall, robo sapiens as a species don't seem to hold on to grudges or vendettas despite their long history of subjugation by humans. It's never completely clear if this easy going attitude on the part of robotkind is a moral stance of not antagonizing a non-threatening group of beings, or if this confidence came about after thoroughly defeating their former masters. Robo Sapiens contains no explicit depictions of warfare, so you kinda have to decide for yourself. It's eerie. It's ambiguous.

The art is curved, rounded, and non-threatening for the most part. There's a strong influence from Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka. Late in the timeline robots choose more imaginative forms, and are no longer bound to resemble their human creators. Writer/artist Toranosuke Shimada's robots evoke a formidable benevolence, as if the gods humanity prayed to for deliverance for countless generations could only be realized by futuristic comic book science. 

Robo Sapiens left me with the sense that humanity's yearning for immortality could ironically outlive the species by finding expression in robotic, artificially intelligent beings.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #1: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

Prometheus done fucked up again!

VIDEO GAME NOVELIZATION REVIEW: ALIEN: ISOLATION (2019)

 Novelization by Keith R. A. DeCandido. 

Based on a video game developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA in 2014.

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This novel tells the story of Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley, the heroine of four Alien movies played by Sigourney Weaver back in the day. Amanda spends her childhood separated from her mother who goes out on various long-haul space trucker assignments, and she is left in the care of her deadbeat alcoholic stepfather back on Earth.

Ellen disappears on a job somewhere out in the cosmos, and teenage Amanda decides to cut loose from her piece-of-shit stepdad, and get out into space to find her mother come hell or x-tro infestation. 

Amanda knows that her mom worked for the Company, and the Company only cares about profits, not people. However, the Company is also into covering its ass, and so they provide financial relief and job assistance to young Amanda, who initially resists their offers, but caves when she realizes that they're offering the only viable path to uncovering the truth of her mother's disappearance. 

What I like about this novel is how it portrays the Company's invasion of all aspects of life planetside. Amanda's earthbound existence consists of an obstacle course of hyper-corporatized, make-work beauracracy and an education system that seeks to strip people of all humanity according to a regime of bogus standardized tests and credentialing ordeals. This is next-level crapitalism.

The putrid norms established by the Company infect all levels of society, creating a social reality where everyone is trying to get over as best as they can, even if that means fucking over your friends, your family, yourself. 

Amanda takes after her mother, and refuses to let a world constructed upon greed, incompetence, and lies keep her down, and this strength of character inevitably puts her on a collision course with human evil. 

And, yes, there's the iconic double-jawed beastie from beyond the stars . . . this novel plays the hits for sure.

Look, this is media tie-in product. It ain't Proust. But it's a worthy elaboration of the cynical nightmare world of the original Alien flick. So, if you're into that . . . here's some more punishment. 

The Lynch Meditations 21: Eraserhead Stories (2001)

Here be some yarns, all right.

The one that is most obvious to talk about is how Lynch got hold of a dead cat, and all the stuff he did to the feline corpse . . . was this deceased animal used to make the monster baby whatsit? Lynch doesn’t say that, exactly, but he says some other things about it. Yeah . . .

This is an entertaining watch, but it is also the “official story,” produced by and centered upon David Lynch, so keep that in mind while watching. I found it generally convincing, but it is on-brand with Lynch’s policy of not explaining the why of things, what the movie means, things of that nature. There is a lot of how here, though, and that’s as it should be. There’s quite a remarkable story behind Eraserhead, one of absolute devotion to the pursuit of an uncompromised artistic vision despite every kind of hardship. Lynch and his collaborators lived and breathed this movie for about six years or so. Kind of unbelievable. But it’s all true.

And, yes, this does seem to be the start of a kind of brand identity for Lynch as an independent filmmaker, which he would carry on with Inland Empire a few years later. Eraserhead Stories seems to be the start of Lynch taking a hand in how he is documented as an artist at work, and more of his process as a filmmaker would be documented as it happened in behind the scenes special features for Inland Empire and Twin Peaks Season 3. Lynch seems to have an interest in controlling how he is perceived as an artist, which is interesting considering how cagey he can be in interviews. I get the impression that he wants to shift the emphasis solidly from why questions to how questions in this regard.

Lynch speaks into a microphone. There are curtains in the background. It’s in black and white. Great stories. Goes deeper than the usual behind-the-scenes puff pieces. You get an actual sense of what went into the making of Eraserhead.

Not much more to say about it on my end. Watch it after you’ve watched Eraserhead, is the only thing I can think to tell you.

Onwards . . .

The Lynch Meditations -21

David Lynch produced a documentary about the years he spent in the 1970s making Eraserhead back in 2001. I’ve never seen it, ‘til now. My understanding is that it is sort of the precursor to the special features on the Inland Empire DVD, but who knows?

Going in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 20: The Straight Story (1999)

We begin with stars, with cosmos.

We don’t see our hero, elderly World War II veteran Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth in the role of a lifetime), right away, but we see the exterior of his house. We hear a noise as he falls to the floor of his kitchen inside his house, but only because we are an audience for a movie, and the movie’s sound design is made for us to pick up on such cues. But the next door neighbor is oblivious.

Down at the neighborhood bar, people are waiting up for Alvin. Alvin is rarely if ever late, despite only being able to walk with the use of two canes, and so one of the gang decides to check in on Alvin, and it is revealed he has suffered a serious fall.

Life is quite precarious. It is possible, in this world, especially for those who are vulnerable, to fall through the cracks, to suffer in silence, unnoticed, and, in the event of death, maybe even die unmourned.

Alvin gets word that his estranged brother, Lyle, has suffered a stroke, and may not be around much longer. Alvin and Lyle have hated each other for years, the cause of this animosity long forgotten, and now Alvin feels the need to make amends, to patch things up before it’s too late, before everyone is dead and gone. Alvin is poor, he cannot legally drive, and he doesn’t even own an automobile to break the law if he was inclined to do so, and so he decides to drive from his home in Iowa to his brother’s home in Wisconsin-a journey of 260 miles-on his riding lawnmower.

Alvin is a stubborn man. He sees his doctor after his fall, and has little interest in taking advice, or getting anymore treatments or procedures. Alvin senses the presence of the reaper, and he no longer sees the point of submitting to the will of his healthcare provider. Alvin’s been to war, raised a family, lost a family to his own alcoholism, and now is only connected to his grown middle-aged daughter Rose (flawlessly played by Sissy Spacek) who was declared mentally incompetent in a court of law and lost custody of her kids after a tragic house fire for which she was held responsible. Both father and daughter tried to raise families, and ultimately lost them.

During an evening thunderstorm, Alvin sits in his living room, while the the shadows of rain pouring down the front window crawl across his anguished face, like amplified tears of the very soul, in a possible homage to the 1967 movie version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood,  in which a similar scene plays out involving a psychopathic murderer contemplating his impending execution. Alvin isn’t exactly a serial killer, but he does carry significant guilt from his World War II service, a guilt which he has held onto for decades without any kind of relief. We don’t know this until much later in the film, but I mention it here, because, well, the scene takes on a new significance once you know that . . . and if you’ve never seen this movie before . . . spolier?

Sorry, but I shouldn’t say too much more. I’m not sure how popular The Straight Story is among Lynch’s films, but it’s a journey you will be grateful for taking. The journey takes many sharp turns, and if your primary understanding of Lynch’s work comes from movies like Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Dr. you are in for a shocker of a different kind. Yes, this is a G-rated film, so, yes, you could watch it with just about anyone, including children if you got some of those. But . . . dammnit, you really need to see this one. Although it is not my favorite Lynch work, it might be the one I would absolutely recommend above all others. It is firmly set in the real world-excepting maybe one scene of mechanical comedy-with not a trace of Lynch’s surreal supernatural weirdness. As much as I love wild fantasy, a movie set firmly in unforgiving, unadorned reality has increased value in this era of nonstop comic book spectacle, rampant online misinformation, and endless lies emanting from authoritarian governments around the world. The Straight Story does not exist to distract you, to anesthetize you,  or to whip you into a frenzy against a scapegoat. It exists to get you to pay close attention to a vulnerable human being making a profound series of existential choices as he nears the end of his life.

The DVD has no chapter skips. You can skip back to the very beginning. But you can’t skip ahead. (This was also done for the Mulholland Dr. DVD release-but we’ll get to that one later.) You’ve got to take this ride from the beginning, with no interruptions, no distractions-I mean, you can pause the DVD, if you want, if you need a piss break or something like that, but the film is intended to be watched in its entirety, and all in one sitting. If you can, do It.

One last spoiler: the film ends in stars, cosmos.