BOOK REVIEW: ALL YOU NEED IS KILL (2009)

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka 

Originally published in Japan in 2004

English translation by Alexander O. Smith

Published 2009 by Haikasoru Books

Review by William D. Tucker.

All You Need Is Kill is one of the most astute genre mash-ups I've experienced. Try this on: Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers, with echoes of classic Japanese anime shows such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Armored Trooper Votoms, and Macross.

How cool is that?

A young man named Keiji Kiriya dons a formidable suit of powered armor, called a Jacket, to battle four-legged alien invaders that resemble cow-sized squashed toads. Keiji's just a teenager, but he enlisted in the United Earth Defense Forces for a shot at the glory prophesied in all the cheeseball, no doubt Michael Bay directed, militaristic epics cranked out by the defense-entertainment complex of the future. Keiji ends up being a pretty good Jacket Jockey, but not for the usual reasons. Usually, in mecha anime, such as Mobile Suit Gundam or Armored Trooper Votoms, the young hero is some kind of a Chosen One, or a genetically engineered supersoldier, or a NewType, or maybe just unusually skilled with working with machines--but not Kiriya. No, Kiriya wasn't blessed by a prophecy, or DNA, or psionic powers. Keiji Kiriya is getting practice and lots of it.

Somehow, he has gotten trapped in a time loop on the day of a momentous and disastrous battle with the alien foemen. He replays the same doomed defense over and over again. Keiji Kiriya is condemned to fight to the last, and watch all his comrades get slaughtered over and over again, and there is no readily apparent way to break out of the loop, or communicate his condition to anybody else. Only Kiriya awakes each morning with the sure knowledge of eternal repetition. So Kiriya approaches it like some kind of video game. He maps out the possibilities, uncovers the right tactics and weapons to use against the Mimics, and elevates his game with each run through the loop.

But loops keep on loopin', and the implications are disturbing to say the least.

Has Keiji died and gone to some kind of twisted Valhalla? Is he trapped in some Matrix-style simulation? Maybe it's all but a dream-within-a-dream. Keiji's speculations on the nature of his reality don't go too far, but as a reader along for the ride one can't help but go for the extreme scenarios. One of the book's distinct pleasures is its unraveling of the mysteries of the time loop, how and why it works the way it does. Sakurazaka does a pretty good job of drawing the suspense out, and leaving the philosophical heavy-lifting to the reader. After all, Keiji's just another grunt--not dumb, but just much too practical minded and of the moment to go off on philosophical tangents. Sakurazaka somewhat indirectly plants the possibilities of what could be happening, and avoids putting too much overt philosophizing in the mouths of his characters.

The quadrupedal enemies are called Mimics. I think because they mimic living organisms in general, and not because they actually mimic any specific critter. The Mimics aren't actually living things, but some kind of sophisticated agglomeration of intelligent micro-machine swarms that have constructed their quadrupedal bodies from organic and inorganic materials. Overall, the strategic thinking behind the use of the Mimics is sharp. The alien overlords don't have to amass a clunky, Lensman-style space armada and expend massive amounts of resources to reach the Earth, no, they just launch a probe filled with self-replicating nanobots that touches down in the ocean, gestates, and emerges as an army of fully-formed killing machines. "WATCH THE SKIES!" they used to say. 

Humanity never saw it coming.

Emerging from the oceans, the Mimics attack en mass, are heavily armored, and can shoot scalpel sharp spines which easily pierce the humans' Jackets. The Mimics are totally ruthless, and are not interested in diplomacy. In addition to wiping out humanity's defenses with extreme prejudice, the Mimics are also the first wave of terraforming apparatus. They burrow through the soil, consuming everything, and excreting a rich gumbo of waste that's toxic for humans, but just about right for the alien overlords.

Unless, of course, it's all some kind of video game simulation. Or a drug or madness induced hallucination. Or a dream in the mind of an itinerant Star Child. One of the cool things about reading a book with such a strange set of premises is that it induces wild speculations in the mind of the reader about where it's all going, what's it all about, what's the punchline. Sakurazaka doesn't disappoint with his take on the how and why of the loop, but that's only one of the mysteries in this story.

Another mystery is the female Jacket Jockey known as the Full Metal Bitch. Who she is, how she came to be, and how her fate intertwines with Keiji Kiriya's is another aspect of the Groundhog Day aspect of the story. The FMB is Andie MacDowell to Keiji Kiriya's Bill Murray, I suppose. But the FMB isn't a journalist. She's the most highly decorated armored warrior on the planet. She's slaughtered thousands of Mimics using a giant ax. In a world of science fiction weaponry, why does she use a battleaxe? Another mystery. It would seem that the farther we journey into the future of warfare, the closer we get, paradoxically, to our primal, savage natures. Away fall all the Buck Rogers energy weapons, and out come the clubs and blades and hacking and impaling implements writ large. The FMB wields an ax that could cut through a tank. Sakurazaka comes up with some intriguing notions about the nature of warfare to justify this.

I said earlier that Sakurazaka doesn't overdo the philosophy in this book, but in a way the book is all philosophy. Philosophy in action. Like the best war stories, even ones with humans pitted against alien invaders, he uses it as a chance to put human behavior and history in a harsh light. What are we when faced with extinction? How do we endure the unendurable? Is it worth it? All too often pop culture simplifies war stories into us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil, but in a story like this humanity is a united front. We're not fighting over flags and borders and ideologies and economic systems and non-renewable resources. This time it's a fight for survival of the species. In this sense, the Mimics are the ultimate enemy, a threat which must be totally eradicated. But that doesn't make them evil. After all, they're just killing machines, working at the behest of alien overlords on a distant planet. But the alien overlords aren't necessarily maniacal villains, just would-be colonists. Human groups have used superior technology, deception, cunning, and ruthlessness to exterminate other human groups and take their land for their own throughout history. Now, humanity as a whole is being subjected to such awful treatment. It's a rich vein in science fiction going back to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and Sakurazaka makes it his own.

Sakurazaka has a lot of insight into the intimate, everyday aspects of his story, too. Like the mystery novel Keiji is reading that he will seemingly never get to finish. The way macho posturing and signification works in an aggressive, testosterone drenched environment. Why is it that Jacket Jockeys from different divisions still punch each other out in one-to-one pissing contests when the real enemy is anything but their fellow man? And then there's the character of the Full Metal Bitch . . . but the less said about her the better. Discovering who she is is one of the pleasures of taking this journey with Keiji Kiriya.

This novel is Hiroshi Sakurazaka's first book to be published in English. His second was a wonderful novel called Slum Online, which I read, and blogged about, prior to reading All You Need Is Kill. Slum Online was such a mellow and funny novel, that I was kind of surprised by this one's intensity. But I'm impressed with how Sakurazaka crafts such compelling drama out of such worn-out materials as mecha anime, alien invasion sagas, and, in the case of Slum Online, MMORPGs and beat 'em up streetfighting arcade games. Sakurazaka, who has a background in IT and enjoys playing video games as per his author's bio and afterward, clearly loves the classic tropes of science fiction. He also is not content to just rehash the off-the-shelf components, but refurbish them, reverse engineer them, and implement them in strange and poignant new contexts. He's not afraid of injecting some mystery into the mix, as well, but mystery and science fiction have always worked well together. I'm looking forward to the next English translation of a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.

But, hey, in the meantime there's the impending Hollywood movie adaption of All You Need Is Kill.

I hope it doesn't suck.

But even if it does, the pitch meeting for it must've been something like this: "It's Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers!"

And that's pretty damn amusing no matter what the quality of the movie they end up making.

But a decent movie adaptation of a Sakurazaka novel suggests some new vigor which could be injected into mainstream cinema. Instead of another sub-moronic romantic comedy or unnecessary slasher movie reboot, a successful, and well-crafted, movie of All You Need Is Kill could pave the way for more international collaborations based on cool literary properties. The current movie version is being put together with Japanese producing partners, so maybe that's a sign that everyone involved wants to do right by the source material. 

One can hope.

But there will always be the book. Hollywood can't take that away.

Not yet, at least . . .

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: THE SHIVAH (2006)

Designer/Developer/Script and Dialogue by Dave Gilbert

Original Music Composed by Peter Gresser

Backgrounds by Tom Scary

Character Animations by Shane Stevens

Featuring the voice talents of:

Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone

Ruth Weber as Rajshree Lauder

Joe Rodriguez as Amos Zelig

with

John Swist

Francisco Gonzalez

Kim Lee

Dave Gilbert

Published by Wadjet Eye Games, 2006

Review by William D. Tucker.

The Shivah is a PC game after the style of the point-and-click mystery adventure games of the 1980s and 1990s. It tells the story of Rabbi Russell Stone who leads a synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. His temple has fallen on hard times. No one shows up to hear his services, save for a sleepy old lady. His email inbox is filled with angry and disappointed messages from former members of his congregation who have been alienated by his harsh, cynical sermons. The bills are piling up, and he expects to be evicted from the property any day now. That's when the homicide detective shows up to tell him that his old friend Jack Lauder has been murdered. The Rabbi is a suspect because Lauder has left Stone a sizable fortune. Of course, the detective has no hard evidence, and so Rabbi Stone, piloted by the player, must solve the mystery and clear his name.

The Shivah orchestrates an intriguing dramatic situation around the murder investigation. Like any good murder mystery there is much more to the case than meets the eye. There are also issues tied to Rabbi Stone's sense of his own identity as a religious leader. He has sacrificed much of his own personal happiness to his profound sense of what it means to be a rabbi. The game doesn't come right out and reveal every last detail of this sacrifice, but it starts out with the broad picture, a depressed and embittered rabbi in a fading synagogue, and gradually zooms in on the specifics of Stone's past and, by implication, the nature of his personality that has led him to the particular dilemma he faces in attempting to clear his own name. The mystery isn't just, "Who murdered Jack Lauder?" It is also, "Who is Rabbi Stone?" It is this second mystery that the game as a game allows players a certain degree of freedom to solve. The choices you make determine the game's ultimate outcome. There are several endings, each one dependent on key moral and ethical choices the player makes as they pilot the Rabbi through the game.

Another fascinating element about Rabbi Stone is the fact that he is a flawed character. Many video game protagonists are screwed-up people. First person shooters and RPGs are filled with violent, heavily armed sociopaths, mutilation and power obsessed barbarians, and brain-washed militarists. Rabbi Stone's flaw is also his strength: his unwavering commitment to his sense of identity, and the kernel of remorse that he seems to feel over a harsh decision he made a long time ago. A decision that affected the life of his old friend Jack Lauder. Rabbi Stone is a dramatic character in the way of great literary characters: Oedipus, Sam Spade, Hamlet, Othello, The Continental Op, and Antigone. He isn't just another ultraviolent cipher to pilot around a dungeon or field of battle. He actually comes off as someone who could conceivably exist in real life.

The dialogue is excellent, sharp, and is worthy of a stage play or film. There are some rather impressive one-liners, and some pitch-black humor as well. One of the key elements of Rabbi Stone's character is his questioning nature. It seems, depending on which dialogue options you follow, that he is always seeking to respond to whatever trials that reality or God or whatever sends his way with the right question. Rabbi Stone's identity is tied to this view of life as a constant inquiry. This outlook is also a great fit with a mystery-adventure gaming dynamic.

A strong cast of voice actors, led by Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone, lends a massive amount of credibility to the characters and the story. I would like to say more about individual performances, but I don't want to give away too much of the story. Suffice it to say, that all of the voice actors do top-notch work, including designer Dave Gilbert in a cameo role.

The visuals are consciously retro--way retro. Like, King's Quest retro, but very carefully done. All of the locations by Tom Scary are rendered with pixelated precision. The game presents synagogues, bars, apartments, stores, and subway platforms that look like they've actually been inspired by genuine New York settings. It's hard to describe, but it's rather impressive that such locations and atmosphere are so effectively rendered with such limited graphics.

The character animations by Shane Stevens are also effective, and include some surprising events. Whenever there is dialogue, the characters' faces are rendered in boxes and display a pleasing array of emotions and nuances which are complimented by the strong voice acting. The effectiveness of the dialogue animations reminded me of Scott McCloud's breakdown of emotions and expressions in Understanding Comics. McCloud puts forward the notion that sometimes visual storytelling can achieve surprising depths and abiding effects by paring real life actions and emotions to their bare essence and then sequencing those essences correctly. It's just another example of how a retro-game can offer worthwhile, involving experiences in a world of ultra-tech gaming.

A state of the art 3-D gaming engine could, of course, deliver photo realism, physics, and a persistent world to get lost in--but would it offer such a concentrated dramatic experience? The Shivah is like an intriguing Off-Off-Broadway play in a black box performance space. Or maybe a memorable crime novella you might find in an old paperback collection of murder mysteries. The retro-charm runs deep.

The musical score by Peter Gresser is mournful, jazzy, and achieves some epic highs as the drama escalates. The mournful, contemplative opening theme is particularly effective, establishing a mood unlike what you would find in most video games. It isn't at all intrusive, and, in fact, it helps with the investigation. I found it to be the perfect underscore for a murder case. Although Gresser's score is more accomplished, it put me in mind of the underscores for the Kemco/Seika NES adaptations of the classic graphic adventures Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and Uninvited. The music in those games, for me, was also mood enhancing and conducive to ratiocination.

The gaming element which is most distinctive is the Clue Inventory. In adventure games, it is not uncommon to have inventory puzzles, wherein you must combine items in your possession in just the right way and use them on some key element of the environment. The Shivah uses a similar dynamic with clues-words and phrases that Rabbi Stone picks up on while questioning people and investigating the various locations. You can then click on a clue and drag it over other clues, click, and see if the ideas work together to offer new insights. The clues also figure into the dialogue options. Clues beget clues, and so the investigation proceeds. The game is much too brief to fully realize this intriguing gaming mechanic, however it does reinforce the cerebral and questioning nature of Rabbi Stone.

Another interesting feature is the Kibbitz Mode, which is a DVD-style commentary that you can choose to switch on while you play the game. In Kibbitz Mode, as you play through, Dave Gilbert, the game's creator, pops up as a charmingly animated talking head and talks you through how he made the game, and offers interesting insights into how, why, and when certain decisions were made. Gilbert is an enjoyable commentator who offers a generous amount of insight into how and why he made the game the way he did. It is strongly advised that you do not switch on the Kibbitz Mode until you've played through the game a few times, as it gives away most of the puzzles and plot twists.

The Shivah is not a very long game, nor is it difficult. But it offers a compelling and concise dramatic narrative with clever dialogue, effective music, and a strong thematic focus.The Shivah is offered through Wadjet Eye Games's website for near-instant download. I say near-instant because it took about an hour for the company to process the order. For $4.99, The Shivah is cheaper than a movie ticket, and much better scripted and acted than what you are likely to find at the summer multiplex.

BOOK REVIEW: DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES: MIRAMAX, SUNDANCE, AND THE RISE OF INDEPENDENT FILM (2004)

by Peter Biskind

Published Simon and Schuster 

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Late in Biskind's book, the author describes Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York as being overlong, awkwardly structured, overstuffed with bombast and epic battle scenes and riots, and hobbled by a leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to lack the acting chops and physical presence to carry such a brutally violent saga of revenge, corruption, ambition and revolution. However, Biskind concedes, the movie does contain a magnificent villain played by Daniel Day-Lewis who dominates the entire picture. Biskind's book is kind of like his description of Scorsese's film. It purports to cover a range of topics and ideas and revolutions in the world of Indie and Indiewood cinema, and yet it comes to be overwhelmingly dominated by one larger-than-life anti-hero: Harvey Weinstein, the once indisputable boss of Miramax pictures and king of so-called Independent Cinema. 

 More than a portrait of any one player in the world of Indie Cinema, Biskind's book gives an overall and fairly detailed portrait of an industry in transition, and how the economic and cultural circumstances gave birth to a kind of "Indie Bubble" that was destined to burst, and pave the way for the further corporatization of the film business. Biskind's chronicle ends sometime in 2004 and begs for a sequel. In light of what has happened to Miramax, Harvey, the Sundance Film Festival, and other industry players, along with the ascent of $200 million dollar comic book spectacles and the resurgence of low to medium budgeted horror flicks, I would say that Biskind, or someone, should write a book chronicling what has happened since 2004. 

If Harvey is the Daniel Day-Lewis of this saga, then I suppose Robert Redford is the Leonardo DiCaprio. Redford and his Sundance Institute are a part of Biskind's story, and indeed, as the book goes on, Redford becomes more and more of a non-entity, seemingly content to retire from the prevailing currents of late twentieth and early twenty-first century cinema. Harvey got his start as a take-no-shit concert promoter, and fought his way into distributing concert films to art house cinemas. From there, he moved into acquiring and distributing independent and foreign films to the art house circuit. He developed a reputation for using intimidation and uncontrolled emotional outbursts that alienated many people, but got the ink on the contracts. 

And yet it was this ruthless side of his personality that drove Miramax's profits and also would drive the company into riskier ventures. At his side was his equally tough but less demonstrative brother Bob, who would one day become head of Dimension Films, Miramax's genre distribution label. Dimension Films racked up massive profits with the Scream and Scary Movie franchises even while the "legit" art house line devolved into Oscar bait bogus uplift flicks masquerading as cutting edge cinema. Hungry for respect, Harvey also had ambitions as a filmmaker, and even if he couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag, as his debut film Playing For Keeps seemed to suggest, then he would achieve this ambition by working as an influential producer, a David O. Selznick for the millenium, who would have hungry young up-and-coming directors from the world of Indie Cinema do all the grunt work of scripting and shooting and then he would exercise his power in the editing room by shaping highly idiosyncratic filmic visions into commercial shape. Harvey would use test screenings in suburban shopping malls to generate test scores which he would use to leverage directors to alter their films, often times eliminating provocative content, or, at the least, mainstreaming it just enough to fit into a largely mythical notion of "commercial." On occasion Harvey would even write new scenes and insist they be filmed regardless of whether or not these new scenes fit with a given director's vision. In a number of cases, the films altered would end up as neither fish nor fowl: not commercial enough to compete with Hollywood melodramas, moron comedies, or action spectacles; too compromised and watered down to play with discriminating art house crowds.

  

Citizen Ruth, The Hairy Bird, 54, Velvet Goldmine--just a few of the titles to fall victim to Harvey Scissorhands, as many came to derisively nickname Harvey--though seldom to his face. Harvey bulled his way to the top of the Indiewood distribution game, and eventually sold out to Disney. He implemented an aggressive PR campaign for his prestige pictures to garner Academy Award nominations and wins. He even bought his way into New York intelligentsia circles by starting a publishing division with the magazine Talk! and the Miramax Books imprint, and began hobnobbing with Democratic political figures, most notably Bill and Hilary Clinton, and Al Gore. With Disney's financial backing, if not always with the consent of its corporate leadership, Harvey led Miramax pictures into the realms of full-on production, something he had long flirted with when doing re-edits and re-shoots of acquisitions. This production over reach ended up giving a boost to other indie distributors such as the Independent Film Channel, while increasing the overhead costs and reducing profits for Miramax. The subsequent fate of Miramax since the times chronicled in Biskind's book seems to suggest that Harvey was indeed overreaching.

Subsequent lawsuits over ancillary profits and points on gross arrangements also point up the continuing acrimony over Miramax's accounting practices. Interestingly, Biskind was able to sit down and interview Harvey. When asked about the many allegations of screwy accounting practices and unpaid revenues, Harvey asserts over and over again that everyone was paid "everything that was owed to them." Marketing and distribution costs are often cited as cutting into future profits for the artists, although many of the filmmakers dispute these numbers.

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, a number of the filmmakers interviewed by Biskind, even some who felt they got the bum's rush, still respect Harvey. The overall sentiment seems to be that Harvey had to play hardball to get over on the industry, and that the state of cinema in America was greatly improved and diversified by the efforts of Miramax. Miramax is often described as paving the way for other independent distributors and for the mainstreaming of more provocative content in films in general.

And what of Mr. Redford and his Sundance Institute? In Biskind's telling, Redford comes off as an obsessive micro-manager and egotist. A man who only wants to back films that he can somehow take credit for, often times going so far as to usurp scripts from other directors at the Institute just because he can. And yet, strangely, Redford seems to want to sit on projects and do nothing, paralyzed by inner doubts that only he can know. Redford all but disappears from Biskind's narrative by the last couple of chapters. Early on, Biskind describes how the Sundance Film Festival served as a kind of cultural mecca for regional cinema, which Biskind dismisses as granola and boring. Despite the author's snark, he makes a valid point: the Sundance model of delivering indie cinema in the 1970s and 1980s was going the way of the dodo. In contrast, Miramax developed aggressive marketing strategies to get unusual films into the cineplex and onto the Oscar radar. Redford is portrayed as distrustful of the media, much too provincial and elitist to compete in the coming media saturated world of the 1990s and beyond.

Biskind's book is an entertaining read. It is a sort of follow-up to his earlier book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, which chronicled the New Hollywood of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, and others. In addition to Harvey and Redford, he also gives thoroughgoing accounts of the career breakthroughs of such directors as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Todd Haynes. As I said above, it begs for a follow-up, maybe even one written by Biskind himself.

MOVIE REVIEW: GODZILLA 1985, a.k.a THE RETURN OF GODZILLA

Directed by Koji Hashimoto

U.S. Scenes Directed by R.J. Kizer

Music by Reijiroh Koroku

Additional Music by Christopher Young

Cinematography by Kazutami Hara

A Toho Production

Starring

Kenpachiro Satsuma as Godzilla

Keiju Kobayashi as Prime Minister Mitamura

Hiroshi Koizumi as Professor Minami

Raymond Burr as Steve Martin

Ken Tanaka as Goro Maki

Yasuko Sawaguchi as Naoko Okumura

Yosuke Natsuki as Professor Hayashida

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Godzilla 1985 is the first movie I remember seeing on the big screen. I was maybe three years old, and it was an intoxicating experience. I don't recall being scared when I first saw it. I was awed. I saw the entire modern edifice of civilization, its skyscrapers, its ultra-tech military toys, its pathetic Cold War Great Powers gamesmanship, its nuclear reactors, and even its nuclear weapons utterly obliterated by a giant, quasi-humanoid dinosaur with crazed, hurting eyes that breathed blue fire, and roared in a way that I always wished I could imitate whenever I was at home with my Godzilla action figure.

That roar was a sound that no human could make. I was convinced. Godzilla was real. Godzilla was unstoppable. Never mind the fact that he gets dropped into a volcano and buried under a massive, demolitions-triggered avalanche--I knew he would be back.

I knew Godzilla was real. Even though the movie was obviously fake. Tanks, mobile anti-Godzilla missile batteries, fighter jets, and those articulated mobile laser beam satellite dish things that never do any damage but are always trotted out, at vast expense to the Japanese taxpayers, to zap the giant monsters--all were clearly radio controlled toys. The skyscrapers were all obviously models rigged to fall apart and explode in exact ways. The Japanese actors were all clearly dubbed into flattened-affect English, although the Japanese Prime Minister's face quivered with genuine emotion as he faced the prospect of a third nuclear annihilation by a missile meant to assassinate Godzilla. All of this transparent artifice conspired to create a kind of fantasy zone where a story this outrageous could safely play out, where an audience could sit in the dark and let a Devonian beast of doom sweep away a world made grim by nuclear weapons, Reaganomics, Secret Soviet Nuclear Cities, and the doldrums of sitcom idiocy. To a child, radio-controlled toys are cool. Giant monsters spitting fire are awesome! Crumbling-exploding model buildings are superneat! And what about that disgusting mutant sea louse that attacks the guy on the derelict boat at the very beginning?! Realism is not necessary or sufficient for whimsical fun.

And then there were the US-only "added value" scenes with Raymond Burr as a journalist and a bunch of guys no one ever heard of as the military functionaries voyeuristically observing Godzilla's rampage via telescreen in a Strangelovian bunker somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. One of the voyeurs is a red-haired smartass who at one point remarks of Godzilla's rampage through downtown Tokyo, "That's quite an urban renewal program they have going on there!" Raymond Burr's character, named Steve Martin, offsets laughing boy's Airplane!-esque wisecracks with such grim pronouncements as this,

"Nature has a way sometimes of reminding Man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up the terrible offspring of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of Man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla-that strangely innocent and tragic monster-has gone to earth. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain . . ."

Godzilla is famous for his grudge matches against other giant beasts such as the pro-human lepidoptera Mothra, the malevolent space-born King Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, Hedorah the Smog Monster(a.k.a. Hedorah the Shambling Pollution Metaphor), the freakish pteranodon Rodan, and his shiny cyber-doppelganger Mechagodzilla.

In Godzilla 1985 the primary antagonist is not a fellow giant beast but the high tech, heavily armed VTOL craft the Super-X which has been secretly under construction by the Japanese government in anticipation of World War III. The Super-X is equipped with missiles, vulcan cannons, high powered laser beams, and cadmium bombs which the powers that be hope will shut down the biological nuclear reactor that is speculated to be at the heart of the beast. The Super-X is piloted by a hotshot crew of dudes in orange jumpsuits who could pass for a dedicated Devo cover band.

The Super-X comes close to killing Godzilla with its cadmium bombs which it fires down Godzilla's throat with a (circa 1985) high tech aiming system that makes total war seem like a big budget video game. Godzilla suffers a titanic case of heartburn and acid reflux. Drooling stomach acid, he slumps against the base of a towering skyscraper. "Wonder Lizard is down for the count!" cheers Corporal Smartass.

Too soon, my bro!

A Soviet nuclear missile which had been launched in the hopes of preventing Wonder Lizard from bringing down the Iron Curtain is intercepted by another nuke launched by the USA. A massive atmospheric nuclear blast triggers an EMP, interfering with the live feed into the secret bunker of the Pentagon, shorting out some of the navigation systems on board the Super-X, and causes a formidable lightning storm which launches a lightning bolt at Godzilla. The bolt jumpstarts Godzilla's heart. He shakes off the dust of ruined buildings, and rises to his full height. He fixes his hateful eyes on his foe, the Super-X, and charges into battle. The Super-X unleashes a storm of ordinance and death rays, all of it detonating harmlessly against Godzilla's super-tough hide. Godzilla scorches the Super-X with a withering blast of radioactive fire, and the hope of the Japanese military-industrial complex sputters and sinks towards the asphalt. Godzilla delivers the coup de grace by crushing it with a skyscraper. Exit Devo cover band.

At age three, the battle between Godzilla and the Super-X was without a doubt the coolest thing I had ever seen. When Godzilla dropped dead after swallowing the cadmium bombs, I thought that was it. Then the whole nuclear missile plot kicked in, and the suspense of whether or not Tokyo would be annihilated by the Russian missile supplanted the saga of the radioactive lizard. But not for long . . . and when the revivified beast finally crushed the Super-X I was deeply gratified. Once again, the bogus progress of an arrogant high tech civilization had been shown up for a sham. Wonder Lizard marches on!

In the end, humanity triumphs when the military-industrial complex prostrates itself before the university scientists. The eggheads come up with a plan to lure Godzilla away from Tokyo by transmitting modified bird frequencies into the beast's brain. The logic, I suppose, is that since dinosaurs evolved into birds, Godzilla somehow has a rapport with the sounds that birds make. Or maybe the scientists were able to use their DNA sampling supercomputers and sound manipulation software to extract the ancient dinosaur mojo from the birds and transform it into signals that would attract Godzilla. Toho Science at its finest!

The signal lures Godzilla to the precipice of Mount Fuji. Explosives are detonated. He falls into the churning magma, soon to be buried by a second wave of high explosives. Godzilla unleashes a piercing, high-pitched version of his scream. The music swells, and Raymond Burr eulogizes "that strangely innocent and tragic monster" in a sonorous voice over. Exit Wonder Lizard.

Watching this movie again, it still gets to me. It imprinted itself upon me at a very early age, and I suspect it was the beginnings of my anxiety about world annihilation. All throughout my childhood and adolescence I had recurring dreams of the world being destroyed by nuclear bombs. I was always fascinated by imagery of nuke tests and displays of military firepower. As a teenager, I read H.P. Lovecraft and was captivated by his mythos of giant rubbery beasts from distant stars waging cataclysmic war across the face of the primeval earth. Reading At the Mountains of Madness I discovered humanity's true origin: our species evolved as a by-product of menial work organisms bred for slave labor by the Great Old Ones. The menials were among the few survivors of those disastrous conflicts. Most of the Old Ones were killed, some fled to the stars, others went into hibernation. Was Godzilla a Great Old One? Maybe a distant relation. If Godzilla was a Great Old One, maybe his desire to inflict damage on humanity grew out of his resentment at the ascendancy over vast gulfs of time of the former servitor organisms. Godzilla lashes out at humanity to remind us of where we come from . . . yeah, I know, that's not what the Godzilla movies say about his origin. This is my homebrew fanfic version, take it or leave it.

In recent years, I've rediscovered the joys of old monster movies. In particular the Godzilla films, but also other Japanese sci-fi and fantasy films. In my adolescence, I lost track of my sense of humor, and could no longer tolerate these movies' distinct retro-charms. The beyond-lame 1998 Hollywood movie directed by Roland Emmerich did not help. This disinterest continued well into the 21st century until around 2005 when I saw Godzilla Final Wars. I tracked down a VHS copy of Godzilla 1985 and was instantly transported back to the age of three, and realized this movie was my Citizen Kane, my Rosebud of a sort. It's hard for me to be too analytic about it, although certain rather adult sentiments and ironic reflections have worked their way into my understanding of the movie. Watching it now, it acts as a strange kind of magnet drawing forth from the depths of my consciousness my three year old self, not totally obliterated by time and neuronal demolition and reconstruction (Neuronal Renewal Program . . .?), and I view the movie not alone but with this ghost of my three year old self.

BOOK REVIEW: A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS (2008)

by NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident" Crew

English Translation by Maho Harada

Published by Vertical Inc., New York

Review by William D. Tucker. 

September 30, 1999: Three workers at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, Japan are exposed to high amounts of neutron beams during a criticality accident.

This is a book about a man named Ouchi whose chromosomes were destroyed by a blast of neutron rays while working in unsafe conditions in a uranium processing facility in Tokaimura, which is north east of Tokyo. For 83 days, a crack team of doctors, nurses, and medical experts from several countries try to keep him alive. Because Ouchi's chromosomes have been destroyed, his body cannot generate new cells to replace the dead ones. His skin falls off. His mucus membranes disappear. He is in constant pain. He suffers massive internal hemorrhages and the medical staff have to constantly pump fluids and nutrients into his body to keep him alive. His organs fail, one by one, and their functions are taken over by various machines. As he literally melts before their eyes, Ouchi's doctors and nurses question whether or not what they are doing is the right thing to do. That is to say, are they actually helping him, or are they just endlessly prolonging his agony? 

This is a slim but tough book. It goes into gruesome but necessary detail about the deterioration of a human body afflicted by neutron beam radiation. It is told in a straightforward reportorial style that goes into thoroughgoing technical detail but not so much that the average reader cannot follow along. It also gives space to the emotional turmoil the medical staff underwent as they battled to keep Ouchi alive. 

In some ways, this is a book about the dangers of atomic radiation, but it is also a strange kind of existential novel where the main character's mental state is largely unknown at the height of his suffering, and therefore the crucial question of whether or not to go on living is displaced onto the nurses and doctors. Ouchi was under heavy sedation for much of his sickness to alleviate his agony and he was unable to communicate in any detail what his thoughts and feelings were. The book seems to suggest that had he been awake his suffering would've been monstrous. The medical staff did what they thought was best even in the face of a hopeless situation. Their mission, as they understood it, was to save a man's life and battle his sickness to the last. 

This book is derived from a television documentary originally broadcast by NHK in May 2001. I haven't been able to find any clips of it online, but I imagine it must be a harrowing viewing experience. I also wonder if there has been an effort to suppress it from being aired by powerful interests.

This was a very small scale accident compared to the ongoing nuclear disasters afflicting Japan this year, and so I would not compare Ouchi's situation with the present cataclysm. But considering the reports of clean-up workers being overworked and overexposed by their employers, and the seemingly endemic problems that the Japanese government and the nuclear industry overall have with getting their stories and their numbers straight, I think this book is valuable for zeroing in on the suffering of a single human being. Now multiply that suffering by a few million individuals. It's incomprehensible, but every individual person affected by the tsunami and the nuclear accidents this year is undergoing, to a greater or lesser degree, some ordeal, some kind of suffering. Workers in the clean-up effort are very much at risk for severe radiation poisoning and related illnesses.

Nuclear accidents are not new. There also seems to be a problem on the part of the authorities with facing these problems, or, at the very least, giving an honest account of them. I would like to believe that books and other media are a way of keeping governments and business interests honest, of exposing corruption, incompetence, and systemic failure, but I also know that a book like A Slow Death is not a bestseller. Not even close.

Nuclear power offers a potential way out of many of the energy crises facing humanity. There are also great dangers involved through incompetence, mismanagement, and corruption. Political and business leaders seem to be all too cozy with nuclear interests, and nuclear plant designs seem to get fast-tracked with a minimum of oversight on issues of safety, durability, and overall harmonious design of structures in relation to geographic location. And, to be fair to the Japanese government and business interests, I'm not sure what defense exists against a tsunami that sweeps away vast numbers of cars, trucks, houses, shipping containers, tanker ships, and the earth itself.

All that seems certain is that people are suffering now, and more will suffer in the future, no matter what books get written, no matter how insightful the analyses and conclusions are regarding the dire consequences of nuclear accidents and natural disasters, and the predictably mediocre efforts of governments and corporations to do PR damage control, juggle the numbers, and pass the buck to future generations.

MOVIE REVIEW : HAZE (2005)

Written, Directed, and Edited by Shinya Tsukamoto 

Starring Shinya Tsukamoto, Takahiro Murase 

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A man is trapped in a narrow tunnel, somewhere underground. He has no memory of how he got there. He's not even sure if he remembers who he is. He remembers a woman's face and her voice saying, "I'm sorry." He also has a vague recollection of fireworks going off, possibly a dream or an idle fantasy. The fireworks are going off by themselves, with no people around to light them. The man is frightened by his confinement. He is in pain. He discovers a wound in his stomach.

 

The man tries to maneuver through the tunnel. It seems to be some sort of maze, maybe an underground sewer system, long abandoned.

The man becomes frightened. He tries to tell himself that it's just a dream. If it's a dream, it can't hurt, he reasons.

Something grabs him. He goes flying down the tunnel. He has no control over his body. At one point, he is confined in some sort of chair or gurney--he can't quite tell if he's sitting or lying down. He is motionless before a strange hole in a wall. A hammer or bludgeon swings out of the hole and bashes him repeatedly on the skull. Now he has a wound in his head and in his stomach.

The man speculates further: was there a war? Am I a prisoner? Was I captured by some wealthy pervert? Was this maze constructed to key into my darkest fears?

The man is pitched forward into the dark. He lands with his teeth against a metal pipe. The man is dragged by whatever is controlling the maze with his teeth scraping against the metal pipe for an interminable length of time. His pain and fear are intense. The sound of the teeth racing against the pipe is unendurable.

And the worst is yet to come . . .

Haze is a horror film that locks its protagonist inside a nightmare world constructed solely to induce a profound state of despair and confusion. The maze is the workshop. Inside this shop are the tools of pain, confinement, disorientation, disturbing visions, and much more. The film runs about fifty minutes and offers no easy answers. That's another aspect of its horror. Most horror films are about tension and release. Tension is built as characters are stalked by some malevolent person, force, or creature. There is perverse release when the characters are butchered one by one. There is, at the end, a ritual destruction of the dreaded bugaboo, be it a lunatic in a mask, a vampire, a werewolf, some dual-jawed extraterrestrial--whatever it is, it goes up in flames, it gets a stake through the heart, a fatal trip through the airlock into the outer dark, three silver bullets in the pump, pick your poison, ye monster hunters and sally forth.

That's the usual trajectory of a horror flick. Haze takes on a more difficult challenge. Instead of some person in a mask or a guy in a rubber monster suit, it creates an inescapable maze which is haunted or cursed or maybe just constructed to practice evil. The very environment and the effects, physical, psychological, and spiritual, it causes within the anonymous man are the enemies here.

The maze seems to operate according to some bizarre, hallucinatory logic. It's purpose is to torment the man trapped in it. Perhaps the maze is being controlled by some malevolent force or being. Maybe the maze itself is alive and not very nice. Or maybe it's alive but indifferent to the pain and suffering it causes to whoever happens into it. Like the inexplicable prison in the cult classic 1997 film Cube, the maze that the anonymous man is trapped within defeats all investigations or attempts to resist its power.

The man is played by writer/director/editor/art designer Shinya Tsukamoto who is probably still most famous for his film Tetsuo the Iron Man. Tsukamoto's films often deal with the theme of radical transformation within the context of the ultramodern city of Tokyo. His heroes and heroines start out as average, salaried cubicle laborers and undergo mutations into monsters, fighters, criminals, murderers, sadomasochists, voyeurs, and sexual adventurers. Tokyo is both the incubator for such transformations and also the enemy. Its towering skyscrapers and corporate cultures of conformity exist as necessary adversaries to promote creative destruction within the protagonists' souls. Sometimes the adversary is embodied by a person, usually played by Tsukamoto himself, who torments the primary characters, and acts as a catalyst for transformation.

 

But just as often, the adversary is a pervasive environment, the city of Tokyo itself, or the nightmare labyrinth conjured for this film.

The production design is of central importance to this film, obviously made on a low budget. There are few special effects shots. I can only guess that they constructed sets or shot in and around existing industrial structures. Claustrophobia is the organizing idea behind the visuals, and so that limited field of vision does dual work. On the one hand, it reflects the horror of confinement, and on the other it serves to narrow the focus and jack up the intensity of the experience. There is no excess to this film. And yet, it could be argued, it is all excess, of a kind. Overall, it serves as a potent rebuke to overbudgeted torture-porn movies and tweeny vampire romances that true horror is a matter of vision, execution, and thematic substance, and not a result of 3-D gimmicks and pandering.

(Interestingly, I found a YouTube clip of an interview with Tsukamoto where he reveals that the last movie he saw in a theatre was Avatar 3-D. He rather intensely liked it. He even speculated about doing a Tetsuo 3-D . . . perhaps the greatest horror is yet to come . . .)

Tsukamoto gives an effective performance as the anonymous man trapped in the maze. He brings some nuance and even a touch of ironic humor into his nightmare situation. There is also something vaguely humorous about a man grasping for real world explanations within a nightmarish reality. The notion that reality is slippery, that it is impossible to distinguish a dreaming state from a waking state, is the underlying theme. This also ties into Tsukamoto's ongoing exploration of radical transformation and monstrosity, but here it takes a bizarre and somewhat obscure turn. I won't reveal the ending. Mostly because I'm not sure I totally grasp what's going on at the end. But I have my suspicions. One of my suspicions is that this is a movie more about the journey than the destination, and so the ending, even if impenetrable, is more a formality or inevitability than the true point of this film.

BOOK REVIEW: HARDFOUGHT (1983)

by Greg Bear

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1983;

Later collected in The Wind from a Burning Woman, 1983 by Arkham House; as one half of a Tor Double with Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point 1988; and in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear, 2002 by Tor Books. 

...

“Prufrax was twenty-three. In a year she would be qualified to hawk on a cruiser/raider. She would demonstrate her hatred.”

-from Hardfought

... 

Review by William D. Tucker. 

In the novella Hardfought, humans are at war with the Senexi, a strange alien race with a hive mind consciousness that gives them true racial memory. Any branch of the Senexi has access to all of the memories and experiences of the whole. They have evolved as a vast, sentient organic computer. They don't build their technology, they grow it as a part of their life cycle. Humans and Senexi are so strange to one another that meaningful communication is impossible. When both races seek to colonize the same expanse of interstellar turf, war is inevitable. Human beings must adapt themselves via cellular machine technology and genetic experiments to the harsh conditions of deep space travel and combat. 

At first, homo sapiens are at a distinct disadvantage. The Senexi are naturally adapted across billions of years of cosmic evolution to exist in extreme environmental conditions that are instantly lethal to unprotected and unmodified humans. The Senexi also have a profound unity of culture and thought that allows all of them to be rapidly mobilized in defense of the species. But humanity is a quick study, and they are more experienced in war and genocide by many thousands of years. A slim lead, to be sure, but it just may be all they require. 

Hardfought tells a strange and complex story of a human/alien conflict, well-worn terrain in science fiction literature. Greg Bear works some brilliant changes on the formula. It is told in an unusual fashion using a kind of pared-down language which efficiently incorporates superscience and slang to reflect the integration of human brains with vast technologies of artificial intelligene and combat apparatus. The human protagonist is a young female soldier named Prufrax, who is trained to operate a high tech battlesuit that is a kind of highly evolved version of the armor used in the human/insect skirmishes of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Prufrax is known as a Hawk, a warrior, and she undergoes extensive genetic, cybernetic, and psychological modification and indoctrination in order to merge with her machine and to be able to battle the Senexi on their own turf. 

The Senexi protagonist is Arryz, a segment of the hive mind known as a Branch Ind. Arryz is designated by the controlling consciousness to become human, to become an individual, so that the Senexi can better understand their enemy. The Senexi do not understand human culture or psychology. They come to find it repugnant, and as Arryz becomes more human, he becomes more alienated from the hive mind. It causes him much pain, distress, and confusion. 

Bear doesn't really take a side in this conflict. The Senexi aren't a stand-in for America's enemy of the moment. They are not science fiction analogues for the Soviets of the 1980s or the terrorists of the twenty-first century. Rather, Bear is attempting to explore, as best he can, what a war between humanity and a truly alien and all-but-incomprehensible species would be like. Bear takes this exploration to places beyond the intergalactic war zone. He asks tough questions about the consequences of a human or alien culture that evolves to be built around the perpetration of total war against an enemy. 

Bear packs a lot of detail into this novella. It could've easily been a full length novel or a whole franchise of books chronicling the derring-do of battlesuited human warriors, but the author has something else in mind. Instead of an adventure story, he wants to simulate what it would take to wage intergalactic warfare. His central concept is that as humans further refine the war machine they become less human. They become more like the Senexi, the very thing they claim to oppose. 

On the opposite side, the Senexi find themselves pressured to become more human, and less Senexi. 

The farflung command and control apparatus of the human war machine begins to select out the finest warriors to be rapidly cloned and decanted for combat. Individuality is only useful as it relates to the war. Only those individuals who fight the best are preserved. Soon, there are only three or four types of people replicated over and over again. Such is the logic of human militarism carried to a far future extreme. In the long term, only the essential elements of human culture and history are preserved, lest the clone warriors start surfing the online libraries and asking tough questions that don't fit the logic of the war machine. The intellectual and historical heritage of humankind is systematically edited and propagandized to legitimate the ongoing, everlasting conflict. Hardfought isn't just some high concept rehash of Starship Troopers. It's a rebuke to Us vs. Them sci-fi sagas of intergalactic conflict.

MOVIE REVIEW: SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Dir. Richard Fleischer 

Starring Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Brock Peters

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Soylent Green tells a story about a nightmare future where the population bomb has exploded. People are everywhere. Clogging the streets, the stairwells, the hospitals, the jails, the prisons, the schools, the homeless shelters, the supermarkets, the social services offices, the unemployment lines . . . the only places that are free of excess people are the high rise luxury apartment buildings reserved for the wealthy and the power elites, and the fenced off ditches that serve as barricades between the haves and the have-nots.

Real food is a scarce luxury. A small hunk of beef can go for hundreds of dollars on the blackmarket. Hygiene items like soap and toothpaste are also equally rare. Forget about real sugar and spices.

The populace is fed various product lines of kibble called Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and, the latest, Soylent Green. Soylent is the name of the super-corporation that cranks out the artificially engineered and flavored all-purpose nutrition products. Soylent food isn't all that flavorful, but nobody much remembers the flavor of real food anyways, so few complain.

Or maybe the population bomb hasn't exploded. Maybe there are just too many poor people.The wealthy and the powerful don't give a good goddamn about the downtrodden. They are more than happy to cling to their luxury and influence, and ghettoize the excess people in the world.

No more social safety net, no more due process, and no more public education. The younger generations coming up are barely literate. The only people with any knowledge of the past are the elderly and the middle aged. The middle aged are already starting to forget. The elderly are dying off. History is an obsolete profession.

Police work is an interesting affair in this world. Meet NYPD homicide detective Robert Thorn, played by Charlton Heston in one of his best screen performances. Thorn's partner is a "bookman" named Sol Roth, a former university professor who does all the background work on Thorn's murder investigations. Sol is played by screen legend Edward G. Robinson in his final film role. Thorn and Sol aren't just partners. They're roommates in a cramped apartment. Thorn is edging into middle age. Sol is elderly. Sol remembers everything that is gone in the world, and Thorn gently teases him about his griping. Sol remembers the taste of real food, real fruits, real vegetables, actual meat. Thorn eats his Soylent Red, Yellow, and even Green, and doesn't get too upset about the pleasures of a world he never knew.

That's not to say that Thorn doesn't appreciate the good things in life when they come his way. One of the perks of his job as a homicide dick is that anytime he goes to investigate a murder in one of the luxury high rise apartments he gets to loot the place. The deceased have no use for that lightly used bar of soap, that odd cut of beef in the fridge, or that bowl of apples and bananas. Maybe he'll take a few hardback books home for his partner Sol. Hell, while he's working the crime scene, maybe he'll take a shower break, and revel in the sensation of high pressure, scalding hot water. Top it off with a solid hump with one of the bonded concubines who are part of the package deal for the elite renters. These concubines are known as "furniture." The furniture are sex slaves who are, presumably, sterilized, and exist to serve the mostly male occupants' lusts.

There's little pressure on Thorn to actually solve any homicides. He's got a backlog of cases about two years or so deep. Homicide is just another form of population control, when you think about it.

When Thorn isn't on homicide duty, he's on riot duty. That involves him and other cops putting on fascistic looking football helmets and suppressing frustrated hordes of starving people with clubs. They're supported in this duty by bulldozers which come in and scoop up people and take them off to who knows where. Most of the riots seemed to be triggered by scarcity of the Soylent food products. Citizens queue up to get their weekly ration, but the rations run out, and there's still a line, and the riots begin. Thorn isn't a great cop, but he doesn't much like cracking the heads of hungry, desperate people.

Soylent Green is notorious for its surprise ending, so I won't say anything about it. If you have no idea what the ending is, then you're in for a helluva story.

But even if you know the ending, but have never actually seen the whole film, it is well worth watching.

First off, it features a great performance by Charlton Heston as Thorn. Heston could've sleepwalked through this role. He has the chiseled looks and the booming voice of a classic actor. He could've overplayed it. Instead, he embraces the flaws of the character: his casual larceny and corruption, his griminess, even his sexual frustration. Thorn isn't exactly evil, but he's not perfect, either. And he's still got some strong instincts as a detective.

The other great performance comes from Edward G. Robinson as Sol. Robinson was dying while making this movie. He gives a humane and humorous performance as a kind of Last Man On Earth. He is the last man who remembers history, literature, and good food and drink. He also, perhaps, has some memory of the atrocities of the twentieth century that helped pave the way for the world of Soylent Green. His final scene is mindblowing and reveals a depth of strangeness and absurdity to the world of the story.

The plot of the film revolves around a murder which sets Thorn on the trail of both the murderer and a possible link to a larger political/business conspiracy related to the murder. Soylent Green has been much parodied over the years. I knew the secret of its ending going into it, and had seen plenty of spoofs in TV shows and sketch comedy, but what surprised me was how serious the actual film is. It has an outrageous conclusion, and yet it doesn't play as camp. It is the final condition of a world subjected to the nightmare logic of business as usual.

BOOK REVIEW: THE CAVES OF STEEL (1954)

by Isaac Asimov

Published 1954 by Bantam Books.

 

…

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws Of Robotics: 

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Robots, as conceived by Dr. Asimov, are the best of us. Us being human beings. They operate according to the iron logic of the Three Laws inscribed into their wondrous Positronic Brains. They feel no pain or hatred, and are always patient, polite, clean, hardworking, loyal, completely unselfish, self-sacrificing when necessary, and totally devoid of emotions and delusions. They are incapable of committing murder, torture, rape, or mutilation. Sure, they get hung up on the complications that arise when such hyperlogical minds collide with the maddening situations that arise from the chaos of their creators' messy conflicts and ambitions, but they are free from existential angst, paralysis, and intolerance. They listen attentively to what people say, take in data from observations free from racial, sexual, political, and nationalistic prejudices, and draw their conclusions according to the dictates of logic and rationality. 

If they have a blind spot in their thinking, it might be something to do with an inability to sufficiently grasp the vagaries and capriciousness of human motivation and idiosyncratic belief: religions, superstitions, bigotries, obsessions, jealousies--does not compute. Robots, for all their powers of thought, their tirelessness, and innate decency, are slaves. Robots are not truly aware of this, however, and even if they were, they wouldn't have a problem with it. 

Sometimes humans become aware of this bizarre paradox, and maybe that has something to do with the eeriness that comes over them when they ponder these automatons. Are they really alive? Has our society become overly dependent on their labor? Will they rise up and cast us off as slave-drivers, as oppressors, and create their own world? Of course they would never rise up. The Three Laws precludes the Rise of the Robots, contrary to such stories as Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is about a Godlike, sadistic, human-hating, reality-warping super computer, and the derivative movies The Terminator, T2:Judgment Day, and The Matrix movies. 

And yet humanity fears the robots. No matter how clearly and logically the rules are laid down, many people still fear the implied threat of robotkind's hyperrationality and tirelessness: maybe they'll rise above their programming, become truly aware of their oppressed lot in life, and cast off humanity as an impediment, as an obsolescence, maybe even a kind of parasite or disease. In anticipation of such a revolt, and without provocation, human beings hit back with anti-robot violence and riots. Robots and property are destroyed en masse until the disturbances are quelled. News travels fast in the world of the future, and yet the robots never seem to desire vengeance. They go on with their program, doing their jobs, content to serve.   

Asimov's 1954 novel The Caves of Steel is a near-perfect merger of the traditional murder mystery as exemplified by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the science fiction story based in credible science. The hero-detective is a hard-boiled New York City homicide dick named Elijah Bailey, goes by Lije. The plot of the novel hews to the puzzlemaker plots of Christie and Doyle, however Lije himself is more aligned with the flawed heroes of hard-boiled pulp mysteries by such authors as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Lije is a thoroughly domesticated version of the hard-boiled gumshoe, though. He works for the city, he lives in a high tech apartment with his wife Jessie and their son Bentley, along with the billions of other citizens inhabiting the mega-metropolis of New York City. Society is so crowded that everyone is issued credit chits for food and luxuries and are expected to dine regularly in community cafeterias. If you work hard and get promoted in this society, you go up in status and get more chits to spend on greater levels of comfort and privacy. All of this is strictly regulated by the global government, and is presented as a tough, but optimal way of organizing human society within the story. Too many mouths to feed, not enough space, not enough food for everyone to consume recklessly with no regard for the rest of the population. 

Humanity does have a frontier out in space. For some time now, human beings have been using advanced space craft to colonize other planets. These are known as the Outer Worlds and they are populated by the Spacers, who have used advanced genetic engineering and eugenics to breed themselves to the harsh conditions of space travel and terraforming other worlds. The Spacers wield a huge technological and biological advantage over earthbound humanity. The Spacers have also developed an enormous superiority complex over the Earthians. They view themselves as a separate race. 

Political tensions run high. Conflicts have arisen between Spacers and Earthians that have flared into civil wars. The Spacers have generally used their superior technology to have their way in conflict, however they, too, have their own internal problems and shortcomings. A prominent Spacer scientist is murdered on Earth. Lije Bailey is assigned the case. There's more to the situation than is immediately apparent. For one thing, Lije is assigned a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, as a partner on the case. As Lije and Daneel investigate the crime, they are seemingly shadowed by a conspiracy of anti-robot activists. Lije's family is put in jeopardy. The fragile peace between Spacers and Earthians is threatened by the murder. The pressure is on Lije and Daneel to solve the crime without causing more unrest. 

Daneel is Lije's opposite: logical, considerate, tireless, and always rational. Lije is prone to angry outbursts of emotion, even paranoia. He is not free from anti-robot prejudice. It would be giving the goodies away to summarize the plot of this book any further. I will say this. The plot is as much a way of exploring the larger conflicts of Spacer and Earthian societies and the robots which labor to serve both as much as it is a murder mystery. The mystery is a dramatic way of entering into the larger issues and doesn't just exist for its own sake. There are many twists and turns along the way, some of them rather unsettling. Every story element works towards the goal of presenting a sophisticated, persistent future world with all its problems and potential foregrounded by the characters and their struggles. 

BOOK REVIEW: SLUM ONLINE (2010)

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

published 2005 in Japan and in 2010 in English.

English Translation by Joseph Reeder.

Published by Haikasoru. 

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Slum Online tells the story of Etsuro Sakagami, a college freshman who is obsessed with playing a beat'em up online MMO called Versus Town. Versus Town, as it is rendered in the game world, is this sort-of barren city where people log-in with their tough-guy avatars and beat the shit out of each other in stylized martial arts combat. It's like Grand Theft Auto, but no guns allowed, no crimes to be committed, or missions to carry out, just brawling. There's an arena where players go to win championships and have the official title of ultimate winner bestowed upon them. Etsuro's avatar is a karate ace named Tetsuo, and he's battling his way to the top.

 

But something strange is happening in Versus Town. A rogue avatar who comes to be called Ganker Jack is roaming the virtual streets taking on all comers. Ganker Jack doesn't fight in the official arena, but he's gaining unofficial rank as the toughest brawler in the game. His MO consists of challenging highly ranked fighters while wandering the virtual back alleys. No one knows who this guy is. Maybe he's some kind of AI. Tetsuo becomes obsessed with tracking him down, finding out who he is, and besting him in single combat.

In meatspace, Etsuro is a desultory student, but he catches the fancy of fellow freshman Fumiko, who is much more serious about her studies. The book alternates the virtual saga of Tetsuo's quest for ultimate championhood with Etsuro's somewhat listless dates with Fumiko in the gaudy, lonely Shinjuku district. Fumiko's obsession is cinema, an earlier, cruder form of virtual reality. Etsuro doesn't watch movies. Versus Town takes up all his memory capacity. It's a little mysterious why Fumiko is attracted to Etsuro. Maybe she sees this young man as a project. Or maybe she finds him non-threatening and this appeals to Fumiko, who's kind of a shy, bookish person. Etsuro and Fumiko's amusingly chaste real world relationship plays counterpoint to the virtual blood and thunder of Versus Town.

Slum Online is an absorbing, clever, mellow read. The overall flavor of it is a mix of light comedy and existentialism. The comedy comes from Etsuro and Fumiko's humane, yet goofy, relationship, and the existential part comes from Etsuro's alter-ego Tetsuo as he grimly battles to prove himself in Versus Town. Along the way, Etsuro proves himself surprisingly insightful about his obsession. For example, in Versus Town some players go to great lengths to role play their avatars: typing text bubble speech "in character," engaging in virtual consumption of food and drink, affecting elaborate body language and costuming. Etsuro/Tetsuo finds this all rather risible. He's there to fight, to become the best, not get caught up in a Second Life-esque identity fugue.

Sakurazaka also pulls off something rather surprising: he makes the online brawling quite exciting and he quite clearly explicates the complex gaming mechanics of Versus Town's fighting styles and physics engine. This is important to understanding Etsuro/Tetsuo's existentialist obsession with mastering Versus Town. Etsuro/Tetsuo seemingly sees through the artifice of the role play aspects which ensnare other players, and keeps his focus on the control pad and the monitor.

Or is Etsuro becoming ensnared in another kind of illusion?

There are also some intriguing twists and turns to the story which are best left unrevealed. Slum Online is an engaging, fun, mellow, but occasionally intense foray into the head of a young man whose consciousness is divided between the real and the virtual.