Movie Review & Book Review: The Unexpected Protocol of “I, Robot”

November 10, 2024September 2, 2024 / thealiennextdoor / 1 Comment

Early editions of “I, Robot”: 1950 1st edition hardcover by Gnome Press; 1950 dust jacket of 1st edition hardcover by Grosset & Dunlap; 1950 1st book club edition by Doubleday; 1952 1st UK edition by Grayson & Grayson; 1956 Signet cover; 1958 Digit Books UK; 1961 Signet 3rd printing; 1968 Signet 6th printing; 1970 Fawcett Crest; 1968 Panther Science Fiction

I reread Dr. Isaac Asimov’s 74-year-old masterpiece, I, Robot, in preparation for the 2004 Twentieth Century Fox motion picture of the same name, knowing fully well that to appeal to today’s action-thriller rollercoaster-addicted audience there was no way the movie and the book could even come close. I was right. But not the way I thought I would be.

The movie, directed by Alex Proyas, begins with the three laws of robotics:

First Law: that robots must not harm a human being;

Second Law: they must obey human orders, so long as this does not violate the first law; and

Third Law: they must protect their own existence, so long as that doesn’t violate laws one and two.

Apart from these three laws and the use of the same title and some of the character names, the motion picture appears to radically depart from Asimov’s book, first published by Gnome Press in 1950. To give Twentieth Century Fox credit, the film does not pretend to be the same as the book; I noticed that in the credits the movie was “suggested by,” rather than “based on” Asimov’s work. But how different was it, really? I submit that the two are much more similar than they first appear.

*The robot Sonny causes a great ruckus when he ignores the three laws*

Surficial differences between book and motion picture are nevertheless glaring. First off, Asimov’s, I, Robot, is essentially a string of short stories that evolve along a theme; much in the vein of Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The book is told largely from the point of view of Dr. Susan Calvin, a plain and stern robo-psychologist, who gets along better with robots than with humans. Dr. Asimov uses this cold and colourless character as a vehicle to stir undercurrents of poignant thought on the human condition through a series of deceptively mundane tales. I, Robot offers a treatise both of humanity’s ingenuity and its foibles and how these two are inexorably intertwined in paradoxes that speak to the ultimate truth of what it is to be human. Each of his nine stories discloses a metaphoric piece of his clever puzzle. The puzzle pieces successively tease us through the three laws of robotics, as ever more sophisticated robots toil with their conflicts when dealing with perceived logical contradictions of the laws. For instance, there is “Robbie,” the endearing nursemaid robot. Cutie (QT-1) is a robot Descartes in “Reason.” In “Liar,” Herbie has problems coping with the three laws as a mind-reading robot. And in “Little Lost Robot,” Susan Calvin must out-smart Nestors — or the NS-2 — model robots, whose positronic brains were not impressioned with the entire First Law of Robotics. The larger question and ultimate paradox posed by the three laws culminate in Asimov’s final story, “The Evitable Conflict,” which subtly explores the role of “free will” and “faith” in our definition of what it means to be human.

The book jacket of the mass market 1991 Bantam book aptly describes I, Robot this way: “…humans and robots struggle to survive together — and sometimes against each other … and both are asking the same questions: what is human? And is humanity obsolete?” Interestingly, the latter part of the book jacket quote, which accompanied the 1991 Bantam mass-market edition, can be interpreted in several ways.

Asimov’s stories span fifty years of robot evolution, which play out mostly in space from Mercury to beyond our own galaxy. Proyas’s movie is set in Chicago in 2035 and condenses the time frame into a short few weeks with some flashbacks from several years prior. This serves the film well but at some cost. What is gained in tension and focus is lost in scope and erudition, two qualities often best left to the literary field. Asimov’s tales are quirky, contemplative, and thoughtful. The film version is more direct, trading these for a faster pace, pretty much a prerequisite in the film industry today.

The original screenplay, entitled “Hardwired” by Jeff Vinter, was reworked by Akiva Goldsman into a techno-thriller/murder mystery directed by Alex Proyas (Dark City) with its requisite hard-boiled detective cop (Will Smith) and a ‘suicide’ that looks suspiciously like murder. Smith’s character (a Hollywood invention, so don’t go looking for him in the book) is a 20th century anachronism: a Luddite who wears retro clothes and sets his computer car on manual. The story centers on Spooner’s investigation of a so-called suicide by Dr. Alfred Lanning, robot pioneer and the originator of the three laws of robotics. Lanning was an employee of U.S. Robotics, a mega-corporation run by Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood). Robertson relies on the real brains, V.I.K.I, the corporation’s super-intelligent virtual computer.

*the NS-5 robot Sonny with VIKI in the background*

By this time, technology and robots are a trusted part of everyday life; except for robo-phobic police detective Spooner, who nurses a guilty secret for his prejudice.

With a “simple-minded” plot (according to Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) and a lead character who is little more than a “wisecracking … guns-a-blazin’… action-hero cliché” (Rob Blackwelder, Splicedwire), the motion picture rendition of Asimov’s ground-breaking book seems to promise little but disappointment for the literate science fiction fan according to many critics.

I disagree.

I was not disappointed. This is both despite and because of director Alex Proyas’s interpretation of Asimov’s book and his three laws. Several critics focused on the surficial plot at the expense of the subtle multi-layered thematic sub-plots contrived by a director not known for creating superficial action-figure fluff. I think this critical myopia was generated from critics admittedly not having read Asimov’s masterpiece. Familiarity with Asimov’s I, Robot is a prerequisite to recognizing the subtle intelligence Proyas wove into his otherwise playful and glitzy Hollywood techno-thriller.

*Detective Spooner talks to Dr. Lanning’s holo at USR after his apparent suicide*

While literate science fiction fans will certainly recognize the names of Lanning, Calvin and Robertson, these movie characters in no way resemble their book counterparts. Dr. Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) is a robo-psychologist, but in the movie she is far from plain and fails to disguise that she is clearly ruled by her feelings, unlike the coldly logical book character. The lead character in the film, Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) is, of course, a Hollywood fabrication, along with an entourage of requisite techno-thriller components: spectacular chase and battle scenes, explosions, lots of shooting, and some romantic tension. The film is also fraught with Hollywood clichés: for instance, repressed psychologist (Moynahan), who typically speaks in three-syllabic words, encounters cynical anti-hero beefy cop (Smith) whose rude attentions help transform her into a gun-slinging kick-ass warrior.

*Megalithic USR vehicles housing killer robots close in on Spooner’s car in a rousing car-chase scene*

Of course, there is also the ‘evil’ machine that turns against its masters to rule the world. But Proyas also treats us to some of the most convincing portrayals of a futuristic metropolis, complete with seamlessly incorporated CGI-generated robots and an evocative score by Peter Anthony. Dr. Asimov fans will, of course, also recognize certain aspects of the book in the movie, such as a scene and concepts borrowed from “Little Lost Robot.”

Despite the clichés and comic-action razzle-dazzle, Proyas manages to preserve the soul and spirit of Dr. Asimov’s great creation. He does this by allowing us to glimpse some of Asimov’s elevated theme, if not his more complex questions.

The most poignant scenes in the movie are those which involve the ‘humanity’ of the robot called Sonny (Alan Tudyk). A unique NS-5 model with a secondary processing system that clashes with his positronic brain, Sonny is capable of rejecting any of the three laws and hence provides us ironically with the most complex (and interesting) character in the movie. Sonny is both humble and feisty, a robot who dreams and questions. For me, this was not unlike the several stirring scenes in Asimov’s “Liar,” where the mind-reading robot, Herbie, when dealing with the complex nature of humans, unintentionally caused its own destruction (with the help of a bitter Dr. Calvin) by trying to please everyone by telling them what he thought they wanted to hear. Sonny’s complex character (like any character with depth) keeps you guessing. Sonny asks the right questions and at the end of the film we are left wondering about his destiny and what he will make of it. This parallels Asimov’s equally ambiguous ending in “The Evitable Conflict.”

*As Spooner searches for him, Sonny hides among his own*

*Sonny holds a gun to Dr. Calvin’s head*

Which brings me back to the foundation shared by both book and movie: the three laws of robotics, the infinite ways that they can be interpreted, and how they may be equally applied to robot or human. The laws may apply physically or emotionally; individually or toward the whole of humanity; long-term or short-term … the list is potentially endless. Asimov’s collection of stories centers on these questions by showing how robots deal with the conflicts the perceived contradictions present by the laws. Asimov’s last story describes a world run by a network of powerful but benevolent machines, who guide humankind through strict adherence to the three laws (their interpretation, of course!).

*USR vehicles dominate the streets of Chicago*

Taking his cue from this, Proyas cleverly takes an old cliché—that of ‘evil’ machine with designs to rule the world—and turns it upside down according to the first law of robotics. His ‘evil’ machine turns out not to be evil, but misguided. V.I.K.Y acts not out of its own interests, like the self-preserving HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in the best interests of humankind (at least according to the machine). Citing humanity’s self-destructive proclivity to pollute and make war, V.I.K.Y decides to treat us as children and pull the plug on free-will. Viewed from the perspective of the first law, this is simply a logical, though erroneous, extrapolation of ‘good will’; and far more interesting than the workings of simple ‘evil,’ which I feel is much overdone and overrated in films these days. The well-meaning dictator possessed of the hubristic notion that he holds all the keys to the happiness and well-being of others smacks of a reality and a humanity all too prevalent in well-meaning governments today. It is when the line between ‘good-intentions’ and ‘wrong-doing’ blur that things get really interesting.

*Doctor Calvin prepares to terminate Sonny*

Both Asimov and Proyas explore this chiaroscuro in I, Robot, though in different ways. The challenge is still the same: If given the choice of ending war and all conflict at the expense of ‘free will,’ would we permit benevolent machines to run our world? Or is it our destiny—and requirement for the transcendence of our souls—to continue to make those mistakes at the expense of a life free of self-destruction and violence?

On the surface, Proyas offers the obvious answer. He likens the benevolent machine to an overprotective parent, who in the interests of a child’s safety, prevents the enrichment of that child’s heart, soul, and spirit otherwise provided by that very conflict. Asimov is far more subtle in “The Evitable Conflict” and while these questions are discussed at length, they remain largely unanswered.

In one of his most clever stories, “Evidence,” near the end of his book, Dr. Asimov expounds on the three laws to describe the ultimate dilemma: of defining and differentiating a human-looking robot with common sense from a genuine human on the basis of psychology. Asimov’s Dr. Calvin says: “The three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world’s ethical systems. Every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That’s Rule Three to a robot. Also every ‘good’ human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority. That’s Rule Two to a robot. Also, every ‘good’ human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That’s Rule One to a robot. To put it simply, if [an individual] follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man.” Proyas metaphorically (if not literally) explores the question of “what is human” with his robotic character, Sonny.

*Spooner discovers older robot models, grouped together in a storage container*

In a stirring scene of the motion picture where Sonny is prepared for permanent shut down, Dr. Lanning expounds on his belief that robots could evolve naturally: “There have always been ghosts in the machine… random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul… Why is it that when some robots are left in the dark they will seek the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space they will group together rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behaviour? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter moat of the soul?”

I found myself following a less dazzling but deeper thread in the movie version of I, Robot. One steeped in metaphor that pulled at my emotions. Throughout the film, we were given subtle and brief glimpses of old robot models discarded as new ones were designed and launched. I remember one scene in particular that saddened me; alongside the cheerful rollout of the NS-5s, the NS-4s were unceremoniously removed and stored offsite to spend their remaining days in the darkness of storage.

In a later scene in the movie, these older models are hunted down by newer models and violently destroyed. It’s a slaughter. When Spooner stumbles on this robot-carnage, one injured NS-4, fearing for Spooner’s welfare, urges him to run.

*Injured NS-4 exhorts Spooner to run away to save himself*

Why did I find these scenes so sad? Was it the curiously disarming design of the ND-4? They did not fight back; designed to be kind, they simply let themselves be destroyed.

Perhaps I was reminded of how we can so easily abandon an old thing once loved for a new and shiny toy. No longer useful they are carelessly cast aside as somehow less than they might have once been. We’ve seen what becomes of anything we deem inferior or unworthy of our compassion. How we treat a perceived lesser being can often be cruel and careless. One need only look to our long history of human slavery, of animal abuse, of environmental exploitation, and even of material destruction. Our capitalist world lies replete with examples of neoliberal consumerism that favours a throwaway ethic. We have become a user society, addicted to the next big thing; the next i-phone, the next shiny car, the next new friend… Toss the old away without a care while we embrace the new…

*Abandoned NS-4s left in storage with no purpose*

Near the end of the film, Sonny, having fulfilled his initial purpose (i.e., stopping V.I.K.Y. to save humanity from oppressive subjugation), asks Spooner, “What about the others [the NS-4s and the NS-5s, recalled for servicing and storage]? Can I help them? Now that I have fulfilled my purpose I don’t know what to do.” To this, an enlightened Spooner answers: “I guess you’ll have to find your way like the rest of us, Sonny… That’s what it means to be free.”

Proyas gives us a strong indication of what his film was really about by ending not with Spooner—his lead action-figure character who has just saved humanity from the misguided robot army—but with Sonny, the enigmatic robot just embarking on his uncertain journey. The motion picture closes with a final scene of Sonny, resembling a messianic figure on the precipice of a bluff, overlooking row upon row of his robotic counterparts.

We are left with an ambiguous ending of hope and mystery. What will Sonny do with his abilities, his dreams, and his potential “following”? Will his actions be for the betterment of humankind and/or robots? Will society trust him and let him seek and find his destiny or, like Asimov’s fearful “Society for Humanity,” will we squash them all before they get so complex and powerful that not only do we fail to understand them but we have no hope of controlling them? This parallels Asimov’s equally ambiguous ending in his book. In it, Stephen Byers (a humanoid AI), and robo-psychologist, Susan Calvin, discuss the fate of robots and humanity. Ironically, it is through her interaction with robots that Susan discovers a human trait that may be more valuable to humanity than exercising “free will”: that of faith. It is she who confronts the coordinator with these words: “…How do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its.” Then to his challenge that human kind has lost its own say in its future, she further responds with: “It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand … at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war…Now the Machines understand them…for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable.” This quote in Asimov’s final story may horrify or anger some, even as it may inspire and reassure others. But, if true “free will” is largely a self-perpetuated myth of the Western pioneer movement, then we are effectively left with respect and faith in oneself and in others. Perhaps, ultimately, that is what both Asimov and Proyas had in mind.

It is interesting to note that Harlan Ellison and Asimov collaborated on a screenplay of I, Robot in the 1970s, which Asimov said would provide “the first really adult, complex worthwhile science fiction movie ever made.” Am I disappointed that this earlier rendition, most likely truer to the original book, did not come to fruition? No. That is because we already have that story. You can still read the book (and I strongly urge you to, if you have not). Proyas’s film I, Robot is a different story, with a different interpretation. And like the robot’s own varying interpretation of the three laws, it is refreshing to see a different human’s interpretation expressed.

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.

TV Series Review: “Orphan Black” Mingling Its Own Nature With It…

August 18, 2024February 28, 2025 / thealiennextdoor / 1 Comment

“Oh, Brave New World that has such people in it!”—Minerva in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and John the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Canadian science fiction thriller Orphan Black, written by Graeme Manson and directed by John Fawcett stars the extraordinary multi-talented Tatiana Maslany in multiple roles of herself. If you haven’t yet watched the series (five seasons worth), you must on this point alone: to enjoy Maslany’s superb performance as seven clones, all different, yet all the same.

*The various clone identities of Tatiana Maslany*: *Sarah, Alison, Cosima, Rachel, and Helena*

Shot in and around Toronto, Ontario, the series focuses on Sarah Manning, a fringe-dweller with questionable friends, who assumes the identity of her clone, cop Elizabeth (Beth) Childs, after witnessing her suicide and stealing her stuff. In Season 1 alone, seven clones are revealed. Those still alive include suburban housewife Alison Hendrix, university evolutionary biologist Cosima Niehaus, corporate mogul Rachel Duncan, and crazed sociopath Helena.

Toronto is filmed brilliantly in a vague every-city pastiche that combines the look of London’s eastside, NYC and northern Europe all in one. Like its characters, the show is both sparsely existentialist and baroque funk. Besides Sarah’s own diverse clones there is foster brother Felix and his various friends or cronies who add significant colour to this film-noir set. Unsavory antagonists not only add intrigue but provide significant texture from sophisticated and subtle to the banal and truly terrifying. And like biology itself—perhaps the true main character here—all the characters are shape-shifters; looking for balance in a shifting world where “normal” keeps chasing itself.

*Sarah at train station where she will encounter her first clone*

“While other stories, including Jurassic Park and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, could certainly be categorized as biopunk science fiction, very few television shows and movies today delve into the idea of biology,” says Isabella Kapur in her 2013 article “Clones are People Too: The Science and Science Fiction of BBC America’s Orphan Black.” There was, of course, the 2005 film The Island and the 2004-2008 Canadian TV series Regenesis. And, since then, there have been some excellent films and TV series that have delved imaginatively into the wonders and terrors of genetic engineering, human cloning, and synthetic biology, including the German 2020-21 series Biohackers, 2022 film Vesper, and 2023 film The Creator. But Orphan Black was certainly one of the first to explore this topic with such unflinching depth.

Orphan Black is a slick, sophisticated and edgy exploration of human evolution that raises issues about the moral and ethical implications of bio-engineering and genetic tampering—specifically human cloning (currently against the law), personal identity, and intellectual property. Manson and Fawcett enlist symbols and clever metaphor to enrich the story with layers of depth—no item is free of meaning: from the seemingly innocuous naming of a transit station (Huxley Station) in the show’s premiere, or Delphine’s passing reference to “a brave new world” to a terse discussion between a religious extremist and a restaurant proprietor over the merits of factory-farmed eggs: “They’re not normal,” the extremist complains. “They’ve been interfered with.” There is nothing normal about Orphan Black.

*Clone identities: Alison, Helena, Sarah, Beth, Cosima, and Katia*

Episode titles in Season One quoted parts of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary text On The Origin of Species. Titles like “Natural Selection” (series premiere) and “Parts Developed in an Unusual Manner” elucidate concepts of evolution and survival of the fittest. Season 2 adopts the works of Sir Francis Bacon, reflecting the ethical and moral implications of scientific pursuit in a world of contrasting philosophies and values. “The frequently antagonistic relationship between ‘sound reason’ and ‘true religion’ and the attempt to reconcile the two,” says SlantMagazine, “emerges here as the structuring principle of Orphan Black‘s sophomore season—exemplified by the decision to title each episode after the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, whose body of work at once advocated empiricism and abhorred atheism.”

The Season 2 Premiere title, “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” excerpts Bacon’s “Plan Of The Work” published in 1620:

“Next, with regard to the mass and composition of it: I mean it to be a history not only of nature free and at large (when she is left to her own course and does her work her own way)—such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants, animals—but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded…seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.”
Sir Francis Bacon

Tatiana Maslany (center) plays several different clones on the BBC America series *Orphan Black*.

Mingling Its Own Nature With It…

Human cloning made a media comeback when three different research groups created embryonic stem cells out of embryos cloned from adult cells. Scientists insisted that the cloned embryos are meant for research and therapeutic purposes—not to create human clones (shades of The Island?). John Farrell of Forbes Magazine wrote, “The breakthrough also means that it is now just a matter of time before reproductive cloning is achieved. Probably within the next decade.”

Issues, brought on by GMO foods and medical genetic research, have propelled a major debate in gene patenting. The United States Supreme Court ruled against patenting sequences of the human genome in Association for Molecular Pathology Et Al. vs. Myriad Genetics, Inc., Et Al., reports Isabella Kapur in her 2013 article. “Myriad Genetics had patented two genes they had isolated that were identified as genes involved in increased ovarian and breast cancer risks,” said Kapur. “Companies, like Myriad, that spend money to identify nucleotide sequences want to be able to patent those discoveries. However, the patenting allows for monopolies on illness treatments and allows companies to have exclusive access to portions of human DNA. In 2013 companies like Myriad Genetics were not allowed to legally copyright portions of DNA they isolated in the human genome, but they were, according to the Supreme Court, allowed to patent synthetically created sequences of complementary DNA.” This is still the case, as far as I know.

In Orphan Black, The Dyad Institute, a biotech corporation with arcane connections to invisible powers and eugenics, patented the clones as theirs to do with as they please—which might be anything. The ownership of the clones’ genomes by The Dyad Institute would be lawful if all the clones’ DNA was entirely synthetically made. The company would also have exclusive rights to study the clones’ genome, effectively placing the clone Cosima under copyright infringement if she decided to study and apply her research (on herself) outside of the Dyad Institute. If the clones were synthetic, like the DNA created by scientist Dr. Craig Venter, then the Dyad Institute would be in a unique situation with regards to ethics and newly emerging considerations of human rights yet to be determined. For instance, how much of the clones really belong to the company that made them? What even constitutes a person?

*Felix encounters several biohackers at a Neolution getogether*

Intrigue unfolds as Sarah and Felix discover that her clones are being systematically killed and/or getting sick. The series unravels a frightening panoply of stakeholders in this biological transhumanist game, spanning from the ultra-sophisticated to the deranged fanatic. Among the frightening stakeholders are the Proletheans, a religious extremist group who seek to systematically eliminate clones as “abominations” against the natural order of things. Pastor Henrick, a Waco-style cult “prophet” who quotes Einstein, conducts Mengele-style “breeding” experiments to recast humanity in his version of “perfection.”

*Neolutionist Dr. Aldous Leekie talks with Cosima about human self-directed evolution*

Sarah and Felix trace the origin of her clones to The Dyad Institute. One of the institute’s scientists, Aldous Leekie, heads Neolution, a transhumanist movement whose notion of “self-directed evolution” to recast humanity in the image of “perfection” evokes social Darwinism and the Übermensch. It brings to mind the early American eugenics programs that inspired the fascist sonderweg and Hitler’s aggressive application of eugenics in the Holocaust.

*Nazi poster promoting eugenics and sterilization*

The terrible question remains: why were the clones made? Who exactly is the Dyad Institute and who is behind them? In the Season Two episode Variable and Full of Perturbation, we discover that not only are the clones female prototypes (of what?) but that they were purposefully created to be sterile. Frightening motivations reveal themselves over the remaining seasons as we discover just how far some are willing to go to achieve their goals of a ‘perfect society.’

Conditions of Existence…

Where do we draw the line in our tightrope walk across the sea of chaos to find the Holy Grail? When does a Transhumanist’s individual expression of “transcendence” become a movement toward the Singularity? When does a singular powerful thought encompass an entire society?

The political ambitions that wish to use science to “enhance” humanity, based on someone’s idea of “perfect” carry great social implications. Enter the pseudoscience of eugenics and scientific racism, concepts as old as Plato that have haunted humanity since the biblical portrayal of Adam and Eve. Simply put, eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement’ and “planned breeding” which gained popularity during the early 20^th century; the practice of eugenics is based on the notion that not only physical traits but mental and behavioral attributes—like mental capacity, musical ability, insanity, sexual licentiousness and criminality—are inheritable and therefore can be directed through breeding, sterilization and now through genetic manipulation.

1883 Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, gave the practice a name. He called it eugenics, which comes from a Greek term meaning “good” or “noble” birth. Eugenic strategies flourished in the USA in the early 20^th Century when thousands of people underwent forced sterilization. Ultimately, these same principles inspired the Nazis to exterminate people with disabilities and “lessor” ethnic or philosophical backgrounds.

“Perhaps more than any other science, biology has consistently been employed as an accomplice to moral claims because it has tremendous social utility in translating scientific findings into political imperatives,” says Cosima Herter, science consultant for Orphan Black. “Historian of science, Garland Allen, argued that the “decline in economic and social conditions” gives strong indications ‘of our potential to find eugenical arguments […] attractive once again,’ albeit ‘clothed in the updated language of molecular genetics.’ The social importance of genetics lies not only in how genetic research has contributed towards advances in biology (and undoubtedly it does in many, many beneficial ways – medicine not the least among them), but because we have yet to counter ‘simplistic claims of a genetic basis for our social behavior’ with modern facts. Our understanding of genetics has changed, but many of our social aspirations for its uses have not. Deeply embedded in the public consciousness is the hope that social problems can be solved with ‘scientific panaceas’.”

Herter goes on to say that, “We may indeed have a richer understanding of the science of heredity and genetic mechanisms, but public attitudes as to their social relevance have changed very little in the last 100 years. And we might be well advised to remember that science can as easily act as an ally to existing institutions and justify pernicious prejudices – racism, sexism, homophobia, and class disparity to name but a few – as it can produce wondrous, beautiful, and beneficial fruits in the service of a better world where these prejudices could be overcome. Many of us still hold on to ambitions that we can build ‘perfect’ people and genetically engineer ‘perfect’ societies, yet do so without much pause as to how we measure what ‘perfect’ is, and what horrendous and inhuman costs this aspiration towards perfection might incur. Many traits we value, and are wont to consider ‘perfect,’ are historically plastic. And ‘genes are not rigid pieces of information’ that necessarily lead to a particular behavioral trait. If our definitions of many behavioral traits we study today are known to be highly subjective, then our attempts at studying the genetics behind them is likely to remain on precariously shifting grounds.”

*Cosima attends presentation by Neolutionist Aldous Leekie*

Eugenics: Designing A Perfect Society from a Perfect Human…

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World describes a society based on eugenic principles. It is a stratified genetic caste society where the lower orders are deliberately stunted both mentally and physically. The destiny of its five main strata is determined from an early age. The strata consist of Alphas, destined for leadership positions; Betas, who hold less exalted but still intellectually demanding jobs; Gammas and Deltas, who occupy roles needing some intelligence; and finally Epsilons, happy morons capable of only the most menial and unskilled tasks.

“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”
Aldous Huxley in a speech at the University of California

“Perhaps more than any other science, biology has consistently been employed as an accomplice to moral claims because it has tremendous social utility in translating scientific findings into political imperatives,” says Cosima Herter, science consultant for Orphan Black. “Deeply embedded in the public consciousness is the hope that social problems can be solved with ‘scientific panaceas’,” Herter adds. “…Science can as easily act as an ally to existing institutions and justify pernicious prejudices – racism, sexism, homophobia, and class disparity to name a few – as it can produce wondrous, beautiful, and beneficial fruits in the service of a better world.”

Transhumanism: Nature Under Constraint and Vexed…

In 1923 British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane predicted great benefits to humanity from applications of advanced sciences to human biology. He also suggested and that every such advance would be considered blasphemy or perversion, “indecent and unnatural”.

In 1929, Cambridge crystallographer J.D. Bernal, speculated on radical changes to human bodies and intelligence through bionic implants and cognitive enhancement. Two years before that, Fritz Lang’s expressionist SF film Metropolis introduced the first robot depicted in cinema: the Maschinenmensch, the machine-human.

Biologist Julian Huxley, brother of the writer Aldous, first used the word Transhumanism in a 1957 article, where he presented the concept of the technological singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of superhuman intelligence. Julian Huxley defined Transhumanism as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” As an aside, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932.

The founders of Transhumanism were educated wealthy individuals of mostly British and European descent. They were an elite ruling class, who considered themselves the forward-thinking intelligentsia. Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that promotes eugenic principles through science & technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. Transhumanists seek to expand technological opportunities for people to live longer and healthier lives and enhance their intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities through the use of synthetic biology: genetic, cybernetic and nanotechnologies. From the transhuman perspective, “in time the line between machines and living beings will blur and eventually vanish, making us part of a bionic ecology.”

While early Transhumanists advocated the elitest pseudoscience of Eugenics or “racial hygiene”, many of today’s Transhumanists argue that market dynamics and individual choice will drive twenty-first century eugenics. However, this argument contradicts the movement’s own dialectic: that of achieving the Singularity. The Transhuman quest for the Singularity of the Übermensch consists of the ability to upload the minds of all individuals to a Hive Mind, a symbiotic collective consciousness, in which all peoples can link to an artificial “brain” or global hard drive, to achieve super-intelligence. The Mind Upload Research Group (MURG) is currently researching this possibility.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines and co-founder of the Singularity University, predicts that humans will be uploading their minds to computers by 2045 and that bodies will be replaced by machines—essentially achieving “immortality”—before the end of the century. “We’re going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more,” says Kurzweil. “In fact the non-biological part – the machine part – will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part. So even if that biological part went away it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Author Paul Joseph Watson reminds us that—even if desirable—such a utopia would not be available to everyone; rather, it would remain the domain of a wealthy aristocracy, creating yet another class system. Kurzweil seems to agree: “Humans who resist the pressure to alter their bodies by becoming part-cyborg or are unable to afford such procedures will be ostracized from society. “Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do.”

In Kurzweil’s brave new world of “biological and non-biological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light,” will such an elite see the mass of humanity as worthless parasites and either prevent them from reproducing via mass sterilization programs or simply slaughter them outright?

What is perfect and how do we measure it? What is the risk of even suggesting a recipe for such a thing? A perfect society? Isn’t a Utopia an oxymoron of unresolvable paradox? Science fiction literature has given us many visions of where so-called utopias may descend (e.g., Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, A Stranger in a Strange Land, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Matrix, The Hunger Games, Elysium, Divergent, Clockwork Orange, Delirium, and so many more). The very act of being an individual provides complexity and diversity that promotes stability in change. Stable chaos.

Perhaps, what Orphan Black demonstrates the best is that even clones—who are exactly the same genetically—can differ significantly, given free reign in a diverse environment.

What Orphan Black does exceptionally well is ask those hard questions. OK. It’s not asking the questions so much as presenting the “then” scenario to some pretty important “what if” premises. It’s doing what all good art—versus polemic—does: it’s providing the seeds for viewers to engage in intelligent conversation on emerging social issues via Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media.

Join in.

Crossing into the Ecotone to Write Meaningful Eco-Fiction

July 21, 2024July 6, 2024 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”—George Bernard Shaw

At Calgary’s When Words Collide some years ago, I moderated a panel on Eco-Fiction with publisher/writer Hayden Trenholm, and writers Michael J. Martineck, Sarah Kades, and Susan Forest. The panel was well attended; panelists and audience discussed and argued what eco-fiction was, its role in literature and storytelling generally, and even some of the risks of identifying a work as eco-fiction.

Someone in the audience brought up the notion that “awareness-guided perception” may suggest an increase of ecological awareness in literature when it is more that readers are just noticing what was always there. Authors agreed and pointed out that environmental fiction has been written for years and it is only now—partly with the genesis of the term eco-fiction—that the “character” and significance of environment is being acknowledged beyond its metaphor; for its actual value. It may also be that the metaphoric symbols of environment in certain classics are being “retooled” through our current awareness much in the same way that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four are being re-interpreted—and newly appreciated— in today’s world of pervasive surveillance and bio-engineering.

I would submit that if we are noticing it more, we are also writing it more. Artists are cultural leaders and reporters, after all. I shared my own experience in the science fiction classes I was teaching at UofT and George Brown College, in which I noted a trend of increasing “eco-fiction” in the works in progress that students were bringing in to workshop in class. Students were not aware that they were writing eco-fiction, but they were indeed writing it.

I started branding my writing as eco-fiction a few years ago. Prior to that—even though my stories were strongly driven by an ecological premise and strong environmental setting—I described them as science fiction and many as technological thrillers. Environment’s role remained subtle and—at times—insidious. Climate change. Water shortage. Environmental disease. A city’s collapse. War. I’ve used these as backdrops to explore relationships, values (such as honour and loyalty), philosophies, moralities, ethics, and agencies of action. The stuff of storytelling.

Environment, and ecological characteristics were less “theme” than “character,” with which the protagonist and major characters related in important ways.

Just as Bong Joon-Ho’s 2014 science fiction movie Snowpiercer wasn’t so much about climate change as it was about exploring class struggle, the capitalist decadence of entitlement, disrespect and prejudice through the premise of climate catastrophe. Though, one could argue that these form a closed loop of cause and effect (and responsibility).

The self-contained closed ecosystem of the Snowpiercer train is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a stony militia. Those at the front of the train enjoy privileges and luxurious living conditions, though most drown in a debauched drug stupor; those at the back live on next to nothing and must resort to savage means to survive. Revolution brews from the back, lead by Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), a man whose two intact arms suggest he hasn’t done his part to serve the community yet.

Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), an imperious yet simpering figure who serves the ruling class without quite being part of it, reminds the lower class that:

“We must all of us on this train of life remain in our allotted station. We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position. Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on the head. You belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket: First Class, Economy, and freeloaders like you…Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.”

Ecotones are places where “lines are crossed,” where barriers are breached, where “words collide” and new opportunities arise. Sometimes from calamity. Sometimes from tragedy. Sometimes from serendipity.

When environment shapes a story as archetype—hero, victim, trickster, shadow or shape shifter—we get strong eco-fiction. Good eco-fiction, like any good story, explores the choices we make and the consequences of those choices. Good eco-fiction ventures into the ecotone of overlap, collision, exchange and ultimate change.

In my non-fiction book Water Is… I define an ecotone as the transition zone between two overlapping systems. It is essentially where two communities exchange information and integrate. Ecotones typically support varied and rich communities, representing a boiling pot of two colliding worlds. An estuary—where fresh water meets salt water. The edge of a forest with a meadow. The shoreline of a lake or pond.

For me, this is a fitting metaphor for life, given that the big choices we must face usually involve a collision of ideas, beliefs, lifestyles or worldviews: these often prove to enrich our lives the most for having gone through them. Evolution (any significant change) doesn’t happen within a stable system; adaptation and growth occur only when stable systems come together, disturb the equilibrium, and create opportunity. Good social examples include a close friendship or a marriage in which the process of “I” and “you” becomes a dynamic “we” (the ecotone) through exchange and reciprocation. Another version of Bernard Shaw’s quote, above, by the Missouri Pacific Agriculture Development Bulletin reads: “You have an idea. I have an idea. We swap. Now, you have two ideas and so do I. Both are richer. What you gave you have. What you got I did not lose. This is cooperation.” This is ecotone.

I think we are seeing more eco-fiction out there because ecosystems, ecology and environment are becoming more integral to story: as characters in their own right. I think we are seeing more eco-fiction out there because we are ready to see it. Just as quantum physics emerged when it did and not sooner, an idea—a thought—crystalizes when we are ready for it.

Don’t stay a shoe … go find an ecotone. Then write about it.

*Thirty-Six Eco-Fiction Books Worth Reading…*

Montreal 2140: Hopeful Futures in Science and Storytelling Conference

October 29, 2023October 22, 2023 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*McGill University, view from main gate on Rue Sherbrooke (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

I’ve just returned from Montreal, where I was invited to participate in a two-day conference hosted by McGill University’s Bieler School of Environment at Esplanade Tranquil. Named after Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-fiction novel New York 2140, the conference brought together a diverse assemblage of scientists, academic researchers, urban planners, speculative fiction writers, artists, and students in a small setting dedicated to encourage cross-pollination of ideas and visions through panels and workshops. I sat on a panel and a roundtable with other writers, urban planners, engineers, scientists and activists to discuss futures through science and story. Much of the event focused on the literary genre called Hopepunk—a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction devoted to optimistic themes of scientific transformation, discovery and empathy. Resulting dialogue explored forms of communication, expression, and ways not just to deal with growing solastalgia, eco-grief, and environmental anxiety but to move forward through action and hope.

*Breakout groups in Seeds of Good Anthropocenes Workshop (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

*McGill faculty in Panel on ‘Turning Research into Hopeful Stories’ (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

In the Thursday morning writer’s panel, in which we explored the role of science knowledge and hope in story, I shared the writing process I underwent with my latest published novel A Diary in the Age of Water, which I categorize as a hopeful dystopia (‘Hopeful dystopias’ are much more than an apparent oxymoron; they are in some fundamental way, the spearhead of the future—and ironically often a celebration of human spirit by shining a light through the darkness of disaster):

The main character in A Diary in the Age of Water was a limnologist like me who kept a journal (the diary referenced in the title of the book). This part of the story took place in the near-future when the water crisis and associated climate change phenomena had become calamitous. Being a scientist with so much intimate knowledge of the crisis, the diarist became cynical and lost her faith in humanity. I recall my own journey into despair as I did the research needed to convey the character’s knowledge and situation. I found myself creating a new character (the diarist’s daughter) much in the way a drowning swimmer takes hold of a life-saver, to pull me out of the darkness I’d tumbled into. The daughter’s hopeful nature and faith in humanity pulled both me and the reader out of the darkness. The cynical nature of the diarist came from a sense of being overwhelmed by the largeness of the crisis and froze her with feelings of powerlessness. The diarist’s daughter rose like an underground spring from the darkness by focusing on a single light: her friend and lover who pointed to a way forward. As Greta so aptly said once, “action leads to hope” and hope leads to action. Despite the dire circumstances in the novel, I think of A Diary in the Age of Water as a story of resilience. And ultimately of hope.

I came to the conference as a writer, scientist, mother, and environmental activist. What I discovered was an incredible solidarity with a group so diverse in culture, disciplines, expression and language—and yet so singularly united. It was heartwarming. Hopeful. And necessary. This conference ultimately felt like a lifeline to a world of possibilities.

Organizers brought in a wide variety of talent, skill, and interest and challenged everyone through well-run workshops to think, feel, discover, discuss, collaborate and express. Workshops, panels, and multimedia art incited co-participation with all attendees in imaginative and fun ways. On-site lunches and drinks helped keep everyone together and provided further space for interaction and discussion.

*Student-led break out group discussing ways to transform eco-emotions into hope (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

At every turn, I made contacts across disciplines and interests and had stimulating and meaningful conversations. I discovered many hopeful ‘stories’ of Montreal and elsewhere on hopeful visions and endeavors. These included “Seeds of good Anthropocenes” (small ground-rooted projects and initiatives aimed at shaping a future that is just, prosperous, and sustainable); turning scientific research into hopeful stories; and world building as resistance. I talked with artistic creators, students doing masters in Hopepunk literature and co-panelists on all manner of subjects from urban encampments, greening and rewilding Montreal, to how Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring informed a main character in Liu Cixin’s novel The Three Body Problem.

*Creating visual art via MAPP (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

*Marc-Olivier Lamothe stands next to a MAPP projection (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Conversations often led to an acknowledgement of art as an effective means of expression and creative therapy in the context of the climate crisis. I met creatives such as Marc-Olivier Lamothe and his colleagues at MAPP and had the chance to experiment first hand with his creative tools. I had wonderful discussions with storytelling visual artist Alina Gutierrez Mejia of Visual Versa, whose evolving mural of each day’s events was truly mesmerizing to watch—and rather revealing.

*Alina Gutierrez Mejia creates a visual representation of the day’s conference (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

In future, I’ll post more on these and other creatives I encountered at the conference.

Program for Montreal 2140

THURSDAY morning began with an introduction by BDE Director Frédéric Fabry.

This was followed by a panel entitled Hopeful Stories Across Science and Fiction, in which I participated, along with fellow writers Su J. Sokol (author of Zee), Alyx Dellamonica (author of Gamechanger), Rich Larson (author of Annex and Ymir), Genevieve Blouin (author of Le mouroir des anges) and Andrea Renaud Simard (author of Les Tisseurs). The panel was moderated by McGill geographer Renee Sieber and McGill urban planner Lisa Bornstein.

After lunch, a panel entitled Faculty Workshop: Turning Research into Hopeful Stories was moderated by McGill researcher Kevin Manaugh and Annalee Newitz (journalist and author of Four Lost Cities). McGill researchers included: Caroline Wagner (bioengineering), Hillary Kaell (anthropology and religious studies); Jim Nicell (civil engineering); Sébastien Jodoin (law); and Michael Hendricks (biology).

*McGill students who lead the workshop on Hope and the Future stand with one of the conference organizers Daniel Lukes (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

The faculty panel was followed by the Student Workshop, Hope and the Future, led by McGill students Tom Nakasako, Rachel Barker, Tatum Hillier, and Lydia Lepki.

*Annalee Newitz gives her keynote (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Annalee Newitz closed the day with their keynote presentation Worldbuilding Is Resistance that explored the dystopia binary of environmental science fiction. A theme to which the next keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson would touch on as well.

*Elson Galang presenting Seeds workshop (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

FRIDAY morning started with Elson Galang and Elena Bennett (McGill University), who led the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes Workshop, which introduced the concept of seeds programs then further explored through breakout discussion groups they moderated.

This was followed by faculty-led Teaching and Learning for Hopeful Futures Workshop, in which McGill instructors from varied disciplines (including education, political science, environment, urban planning and planetary sciences) discussed translating science into hopeful narratives.

*pre-meet on Zoom of participants of the Roundtable*

I then participated in a roundtable of authors, scholars, researchers and planners entitled Telling the Story of the Future, moderated by Chris Barrington-Leigh (McGill BSE/Health and Social Policy). The roundtable included fellow authors Alyx Dellamonica and Su J. Sokol. Other participants of the roundtable included Stephanie Posthumus (languages, literatures, cultures at McGill), Jayne Engle (public policy at McGill) Richard Sheamur (urban planning at McGill), and limnologist Irene Gregory-Eaves (biology at McGill).

*BDE Director Frédéric Fabry introduces the conference (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

The final keynote was given by Kim Stanley Robinson (author of New York 2140 and The Ministry of the Future).

*Storyboard of the first day of the conference by Visual Versa (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Nina Munteanu’s “The Way of Water” now in Best of Metastellar Year Two Anthology

September 24, 2023September 7, 2023 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

She imagines its coolness gliding down her throat. Wet with a lingering aftertaste of fish and mud. She imagines its deep voice resonating through her in primal notes; echoes from when the dinosaurs quenched their throats in the Triassic swamps.

Water is a shape shifter.

It changes yet stays the same, shifting its face with the climate. It wanders the earth like a gypsy, stealing from where it is needed and giving whimsically where it isn’t wanted.

Dizzy and shivering in the blistering heat, Hilda shuffles forward with the snaking line of people in the dusty square in front of University College where her mother used to teach. The sun beats down, crawling on her skin like an insect. She’s been standing for an hour in the queue for the public water tap.
The Way of Water

My short story, The Way of Water, which was recently reprinted in Metastellar Speculative Fiction and Beyond (rated the second most popular online sci-fi magazine), is now in The Best of Metastellar Year Two, an anthology of forty-eight stellar short stories previously published with Metastellar.

The Way of Water was first published as a bilingual print book by Mincione Edizioni (Rome) in Italian (La natura dell’acqua, translated by Fiorella Moscatello), and English along with a recounting of what inspired it: The Story of Water (La storia dell’acqua) in 2016. The Way of Water has been reprinted several times, in magazines and anthologies, since its first appearance in 2016.

It all started with an invitation by my publisher in Rome in 2015 to write about water and politics in Canada. I had long been thinking of potential ironies in Canada’s water-rich heritage. The premise I wanted to explore was the irony of people in a water-rich nation experiencing water scarcity: living under a government-imposed daily water quota of 5 litres as water bottling and utility companies took it all.

I named the story “The Way of Water” (“La natura dell’acqua”), about a young woman (Hilda) in near-future Toronto who has run out of water credits for the public wTap; by this time houses no longer have potable water and their water taps have been cemented shut (as was done in Detroit in 2014); the only way to get water is through the public wTaps—at great cost. She’s standing two metres from water—in a line of people waiting to use the tap—and dying of thirst.

“The Way of Water” captures a vision that explores the nuances of corporate and government corruption and deceit together with global resource warfare. In this near-future, Canada is mined of all its water by thirsty Chinese and US multinationals—leaving nothing for the Canadians. Rain has not fallen on Canadian soil in years due to advances in geoengineering and weather manipulation that prevent rain clouds from going anywhere north of the Canada-US border. If you’re wondering if this is possible, it’s already happening in China and surrounding countries.

The Way of Water, in turn, inspired my recent dystopian novel A Diary in the Age of Water, which explores the lives of four generations of women and their relationship to water during a time of severe water restriction and calamitous climate change.

*Publications (excluding online pubs) that featured* The Way of Water

“The Way of Water evokes a sense of awareness about issues of access to water and about the dangers of imbalances in that access.”
Derek Newman-Stille, Speculating Canada

“In a short story in which every word has its weight, Nina Munteanu manages to describe a dystopia with ecological, political, social and economic elements and Hilda’s reactions to her situation with a great emotional intensituy. To avoid thirst, Hilda ends up embracing an extreme idea, a last hope linked to water. The Way of Water is a story of the kind you hope is science fiction but you fear is not.”
Massimo Luciani

Movie Review: Advantageous

August 6, 2023January 31, 2024 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

“There are women with voices and brains and power and intelligence that have been waiting for this moment.”—Director Jennifer Phang

Advantageous is a low budget indie film by Jennifer Phang that explores a near-future world—a kind of “pre-dystopia”, according to Katharine Trendacosta of io9—where jobs have become heavily automated and opportunities for education are cutthroat. Women have been generally forced out of the workplace and onto the streets: the logic being that they will be less violent while living on the street than men.

While the world vaguely resembles a vibrant City with flying ships and some bizarrely futuristic architecture (including a high rise that functions as a giant water feature), a sense of unease permeates most scenes, punctuated by occasional terrorist explosions and snippets of disturbing news reports. Artificial intelligence has supplanted most people in middle management, “The people you do see are either impoverished and disenfranchised or are hidden in the upper floors, the protected places,” says director Jennifer Phang. Unemployment is close to 50% and there are no public schools. The only options for a young girl—if she is not to end up on the streets, either as a beggar or prostitute—is to attend a highly selective free magnet school or a very expensive private school.

Gwen Koh (Jacgueline Kim) is the spokeswoman of the Center for Advanced Health and Living, a wellness corporation that offers health and beauty treatments to an elite who can afford it. When the Center informs her that she looks too old, Gwen—desperate to secure her bright daughter’s expensive education—submits to the experimental treatment she was initially hired to promote. Jules hadn’t made it into the free magnet school, leaving Gwen to come up with extensive funds to get her into a private school. The corporation has subtly backed Gwen into a corner by reminding her that her generation doesn’t have the skills to compete—all of education currently being STEM-based—and they fully understand that she is too old and too unconnected to do anything other than offer herself up to their new procedure to secure her position and a future for her daughter Jules. Constantly walking the edge of privilege, Gwen struggles to make the elite-connections necessary to place Jules. “Gwen is too old, too female, and too unconnected to do anything other than offer herself up as a sacrifice,” writes Trendacosta.

*Gwen and here daughter Jules share a moment*

The true nature of her sacrifice is not understood at first; it unravels slowly, like an internal wound, until we learn that the procedure—putting her memories into a younger person’s body—means that Gwen’s “mother-connection” awareness with her daughter will be lost when her original body dies in the procedure. This is particularly significant, given their close and loving relationship, which is evocatively conveyed throughout the film.

Advantageous “is riveting, emotionally gripping, and offers up a vision of the future that is disturbingly easy to picture, even as some of the technologies it imagines seem out of reach,” says Ariel Schwartz of Business Insider Magazine. While the trope of mind-upload into a younger, prettier body has been around for while in standard SF, how Phang presents it, in the muted notes and pace of “everyday” and “mundane” events, brings a kind of realism to it that both invigorates and chills. Like watching a building explode in person rather than on TV. The immediacy and reality of it is visceral. Phang does this through sparing use of sound, language and colour. And all presented in a pace that does not rush, but lingers and reflects. Long moments of quiet punctuate scenes of significance, giving us the chance to examine, resonate and reflect in “real-time” with the character. These, in themselves, provide some of the most poignant footage of the film as we are given the time to descend into deeper reflection. Each plays out, short vignettes of life that string together like pearls on a necklace. Life moments. Unflinchingly and confidently performed at the pace of life.

In one of many quietly powerful scenes, Gwen stumbles upon a street woman, huddled in a small grassy alcove under an old blanket. When Gwen asks her if she is okay, the woman instead responds, “Are you okay?” This is a natural response for a woman; we think of others, of their welfare. We carry the “mother” archetype within us, everywhere we go, no matter what befalls us. This natural sense of compassion and altruism runs through our blood.

And, yes, it makes us a different kind of hero.

Gwen’s heroics are not accompanied by percussive violence or gut-wrenching action; they are silent choices that percolate from deep within. They are choices that ultimately bleed into great consequence.

*Gwen and Jules read something together*

“The plot suggests a standard ‘body swap’ sci-fi storyline,” says Danielle Riendeau of Polygon. “But Advantageous is much more about motherhood, the sacrifices women make for their children, and to a large extent, the difficulties of being a non-white woman in an increasingly intolerant society. The writing, directing and performances are so strong that they elevate the film far beyond a simple twist on a classic trope. Advantageous is a potent, heartbreaking meditation on parental love and the sacrifices women make for their families. It has a lot to say, and it does so with clear-eyed, fearless intensity.”

Trendacosta writes, “People are going to judge Advantageous by the things it lacks. There are no battles, no mustache-twirling villains, and not even any giant science fiction spectacle sets. People are also going to judge it for what it has. There are some intense discussions of classism, racism, ageism, sexism, and elitism. But don’t judge this movie for either of those things—instead, it’s worth appreciating for all the things it does so incredibly well.”

What Advantageous does so incredibly well is portray a near-future vision worth pondering and discussing.

TV Series Review: Living With Scarcity & Uncertainty: The Merits of “3%”

July 16, 2023October 12, 2024 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*Michele and Fernando collaborate in the cube test*

Candidates have three minutes to make nine cubes out of a pile of blocks in the centre. Those who complete the puzzle in time will move on to the next test; those who don’t are eliminated and must return to the slums—their one chance at a better life dashed. Among the nine candidates in the room are Rafael (Rodolfo Valente), who steals a cube from another candidate to get his nine. Michele (Bianca Comparato), who initially out of kindness helps Fernando (Michel Gomes), who’s reach to the pile is limited, is in turn helped by him when she is shy one cube: at time-end, he cleverly piles her eight cubes into one large cube—the ninth—and she passes the test.

So begins Netflix’s 3%, a Brazilian dystopian thriller series created by Pedro Aguilera and directed by Cesar Charlone. In a kind of Hunger Games contest, candidates cheat in self-service; others violently impose Darwinian entitlement and survival of the fittest; yet others rely on reciprocal altruism.

3% is set in the near future after the planet has fallen into a divided haves and have-nots through some calamity. Three percent of the population live well on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, called Offshore (Mar Alto). The remaining 97% struggle Inland with poverty and scarcity. A selection process lies between them.

Every year the 97% send their 20-year olds to undergo The Process, a grueling Hunger Games-style contest run by the Offshore elite to replenish their numbers. Only 3% of the candidates will be considered worthy. They must pass psychological, emotional and physical tests to earn a place in Mar Alto.

By the time Season 1 is over, candidates will have committed a full range of desperate and unsavory acts to make the cut—the stakes are high, after all: secure a position in the 3% elite or die in squalor and poverty. After being eliminated during the interview process, one youth throws himself off a balcony of the testing centre.

“It’s not so far from our own world, where the competition to get into a good school and land a good job drives many to self harm,” writes Matthew Gault on Motherboard. “In the 3%, as in our own world, society looks down on those who don’t achieve and there’s a certain kind of person who believes that life’s losers earned their place at the bottom.”

*Ezekial, who runs “the Process” speaks to the new contestants*

Inland is valued by the elite only for its reserve of youth to recruit Offshore’s strictly controlled population (you only find out how in the last show of Season 1). As for what personality and fitness The Process tests for is also uncertain. “You each create your own merit,” says Ezequiel, who runs The Process, to the candidates. “No matter what happens … you deserve this.” The corollary is that if they don’t have merit—value, as determined by Ezequiel’s Process—they don’t deserve to move Offshore. There is, of course, a resistance to The Process, called The Cause. They cause stirrings of unrest and may even be responsible for the first murder in Offshore in over 100 years—which puts Ezequiel’s Process under question. Ezequiel dismisses The Cause by suggesting that it operates “in the name of a false or hypocritical equality.”

There is no inherent equality or fair entitlement in a land of scarcity; there is only proof of merit to a limited resource. This meritocratic notion—and the need to prove one’s worth to be accepted—is so ingrained in society that not even the poor question it. It was American writer John Steinbeck who argued that socialism would never take off in America because the poor see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.”

*Michele and Joana in the poor section of town*

We find out in the first show that the first murder in 100 years has occurred Offshore—which puts Ezequiel’s Process under question. And there are stirrings of unrest—some likely instigated by The Cause.

“3% is a brutal commentary on the world’s rising income inequality and the lengths we’re all willing to go to improve our lot,” writes Gault. “It’s a world of extreme income inequality where techno-fascists rule with an iron fist…Brazil has some of the highest income disparity on the planet,” writes Gault. “São Paulo is a megacity where the ultra-rich travel the skies in rented helicopters and cruise the streets in bulletproof cars. It’s a city where the poor live in makeshift favelas that resemble something from William Gibson’s nightmares. It’s a city where plastic surgeons do a brisk trade in reconstructive ear surgery because kidnapping is common and the easiest way to prove you’ve got a mark is to send their ear.”

With each episode, 3% examines the motivations and paradoxes of heroism and villainy, sometimes turning them on their sides until they touch with such intimacy you can’t tell them apart. At its deepest, 3% explores the nature of humanity—from its most glorious to its most heinous—under the stress of scarcity and uncertainty. How we behave under these polarizing challenges ultimately determines who we are.

3% joins the ranks of several other films and shows about near-future scarcity-driven societies, with two examples below:

Snowpiercer—a stylish post-climate change apocalypse allegory. The train’s self-contained closed ecosystem of scarcity is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a stony militia. Those at the front enjoy privileges and luxurious living conditions, though most drown in a debauched drug stupor; those at the back live on next to nothing and must resort to savage means to survive. Minister Mason, an imperious yet simpering figure who serves the ruling class without quite being part of it, reminds the lower class that: “We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position. Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn’t wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn’t belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on the head. You belong on the foot. Yes? So it is. In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket: First Class, Economy, and freeloaders like you…Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.”

Advantageous—Jennifer Phang’s “pre-dystopia”, where jobs have become heavily automated and opportunities for education are cutthroat. Women have been generally forced out of the workplace and onto the streets: the logic being that they will be less violent while living on the street than men. Artificial intelligence has supplanted most people in middle management. “The people you do see are either impoverished and disenfranchised or are hidden in the upper floors, the protected places,” says director Jennifer Phang. Unemployment is close to 50% and there are no public schools. The only options for a young girl—if she is not to end up on the streets, either as a beggar or prostitute—is to attend a highly selective free magnet school or a very expensive private school.

In his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, author Peter Frase considered effects of climate change and automation in possible outcomes of a post-Trump election America. Frase envisioned four scenarios based on abundance and scarcity and whether a society operated by equality (e.g., communism or socialism) or hierarchy (rentism, exterminism).

With scarce resources, socialism (aka Ecotopia) may arise within an egalitarian society if driven by altruistic notions of self-limitation. Ecologists describe such a self-limiting system as K-selected (see my discussion of K-selection and r-selection in “Water Is…”). A K-selected population is at or near the carrying capacity of the environment, which is usually stable and favors individuals that successfully compete for resources and produce few young. The K-selected strategy runs on a successive gradient of maturity, from initially competitive to ultimately cooperative. Competition is a natural adaptive remnant of uncertainty and insecurity and forms the basis of a capitalist economy that encourages monopolization and hostile takeovers. Competition results from an initial antagonistic reaction to a perception of limited resources. It is a natural reaction based on distrust—of both the environment and of the “other”—both aspects of “self ” separated from “self.” The greed for more than is sustainable reflects a fear of failure and a sense of being separate, which ultimately perpetuates actions dominated by self-interest in a phenomenon known as “the Tragedy of the Commons.” Competition naturally gives way to creative cooperation as trust in both “self ” and the “other” develops and is encouraged through continued interaction.

Exterminism (aka Mad Max) may arise under a hierarchical model, driven by greed and exacerbated by uncertainty in the environment—not unlike what we are currently experiencing with the planet’s system and cyclical changes. In this scenario, in which resources are both limited and uncertain, those with access to them would guard or hide them away with desperate fervor. Frase writes:

“When mass labor has been rendered superfluous [through automation], a final solution* lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor.”

Gault says it best: “3% hits so hard because it seems bizarre and distant, but as the show unwinds and reveals its mysteries, audiences will come to realize that we’re already part of The Process.”

*the Final Solution was originally used by Nazi Germany as “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”; the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews during World War II, formulated in 1942 by Nazi leadership at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, culminated in the Holocaust, which murdered 90 percent of Polish Jews.

References:

Fisher, Mark. 2009. “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” Zero Books. 92pp.

Frase, Peter. 2016. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.” Verso. 160pp.

Gault, Matthew. 2016. “Netflix’s ‘3%’ Turns the Google Job Interview into a Dystopian Nightmare.” Motherboard, November 27: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/netflix-3-percent-review

Munteanu, Nina. 2016. “Water Is…The Meaning of Water.” Pixl Press. 584pp.

Book Review: A Plea for Nature and ‘Us’—The Novel “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin

July 2, 2023January 30, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / 1 Comment

“We shall break down all walls—to let the green wind blow free from end to end—across the earth.”
I-330 in ‘We’

Just last week, I read for the first time Yevgeny Zamyatin’s masterpiece We. My first thought upon finishing it was: why have I waited until now to read it? I’m rather embarrassed to say that I’d only heard of its existence recently during some research I’d conducted on another article. The novel, written in 1920, decades before Brave New World and 1984 (two novels it is often compared to and which I read when I was a budding writer, long ago), was suppressed in Russia. It has remained in the shadows of these two works since. Mesmerized by Zamyatin’s fluid metaphoric prose, I read it in a few days.

I usually savour a good novel, but this one compelled me to take it in like an infusion.

The book jacket of the Harper Voyager edition provides the following tagline and description:

“Before Brave New World…before 1984…there was…We. In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall…”

*Illustration of “We”* *masses marching during their personal hour*

We is told through a series of entries by the main protagonist D-503, mathematician and chief engineer of the Integral (the ship that will take humanity to space). The novel takes place in a glass-enclosed Panopticon-like city of straight lines, and scientifically managed using Taylor’s principles of scientific management. No one knows or cares about the outside environment from which they have been separated. Citizens in the totalitarian society of One State are regulated hourly by the Table of Hours, and ruled by the ‘Benefactor’ who dispenses order through arcane methods such as The Machine (a modern ‘guillotine’ of sorts that literally liquidates its victim, reducing them to a puff of smoke and a pool of water), The Cube, The Gas Bell, and the ruthless precision and vigilance of the Bureau of Guardians. All this is “sublime, magnificent, noble, elevated, crystally pure,” writes D-503, because “it protects our unfreedom—that is, our happiness.” In the foreword to the Penguin edition of We, New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen reminds us that, “Zamyatin imagined [We] twenty years before Nazi Germany began sanitized, industrial mass murder of people who had been reduced to numbers.”

Citizens subsist on synthetic food and march in step in fours to the anthem of the One State played through loudspeakers. There is no marriage, and every week citizens are given a “sex hour” and provided a pink slip to let them draw down the shades of their glass apartment. Every year, on Unanimity Day, the Benefactor is re-elected by the entire population, through an open (not secret) vote that is naturally unanimous—given the singular “we” nature of the population.

On Zamyatin’s novel, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that, “Equality is enforced, to the point of disfiguring the physically beautiful. Beauty–as well as its companion, art–are a kind of heresy in the One State, because ‘to be original means to distinguish yourself from others. It follows that to be original is to violate the principle of equality.”

According to Mirra Ginsburg, who translated the book into English in 1972, Zamyatin and his book explores the oppression of two principles of human existence: eternal change and the individual’s freedom to choose, to want, to create according to his own need and his own will.

*Quiet bay of the Otonabee River, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)*

In some ways, Zamyatin’s satire is as much about our separation from the chaos, ever-evolving and functional diversity of nature as it is about our separation from the unruly thoughts and emotions of the individual. Both are feared and must be defeated, controlled and commodified (I refer to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics).

D-503 writes in his journal: “we have extracted electricity from the amorous whisper of the waves; we have transformed the savage, foam-spitting beast into a domestic animal; and in the same way we have tamed and harnessed the once wild element of poetry. Today poetry is no longer the idle, impudent whistling of a nightingale; poetry is civic service, poetry is useful.”

D-503’s thirteenth entry takes place on a particularly foggy day. When new friend I-330 ‘innocently’ asks him if he likes the fog, he responds, “I hate the fog. I’m afraid of it.” To this, I-330 says, “That means you love it. You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.”

*Cedar swamp forest, Trent Nature Sanctuary, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)*

D-503 appears content as a ‘number’ within a larger unity of regimentation and draws comfort from a universe of logic and rationality, represented by the predictive precision of mathematics. For example, he is disturbed by the concept of the square root of -1, the basis for imaginary numbers (imagination being reviled by the One State and which will eventually be lobotomized out of citizens through the mandatory Great Operation). The spaceship’s name Integral represents the integration of the grandiose cosmic equation following the Newtonian hegemony of a machine universe.

*The human-machine working the great clock in* Metropolis

In the following scene in which D-503 watches men work on the spacecraft Integral—itself likened to a giant slumbering machine-human—I am reminded of an iconic scene from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis:

“I watched the men below move in regular, rapid rhythm…bending, unbending, turning like the levers of a single huge machine. Tubes glittered in their hands; with fire they sliced the glass walls, angles, ribs, brackets. I saw transparent glass monster cranes rolling slowly along glass rails, turning and bending as obediently as the men, delivering their loads into the bowels of the Integral. And all of this was one: humanized machines, perfect men…Measured movements; firmly round, ruddy cheeks; mirror-smooth brows, untroubled by the madness of thought.”

All is indeed sublime … Until he meets I-330, Zamyatin’s unruly heroine who is determined to change D-503’s perspective—and his vacuous state of dutiful ‘happiness.’ She is, of course, a member of an underground resistance, Mephi, bent on overthrowing the One State. I-330 is the herald of change and wishes to use D-503’s connection to the Integral to incite a revolution. In a particularly pithy scene, I-330 challenges D-503’s complacent logic with mathematics to make her point:

“Do you realise that what you are suggesting is revolution?” [says D-503]

“Of course, it’s revolution. Why not?”

“Because there can’t be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.”

“My dear, you’re a mathematician: tell me, which is the last number?”

“But that’s absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can’t be a last one.”

“Then why do you talk about the last revolution? There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite.”

Confident, powerful and heroic, the liberated I-330 is clearly the driving force of change and the philosophical voice of Zamyatin’s central theme. Her competent manipulations within the system successfully orchestrates a revolution which includes interfering with the unanimous vote, breaching the Green Wall, and braving torture to the end–all the kind of feats usually relegated to a male protagonist in novels of that era. It all starts with a tiny crime and escalates from there. Early in the novel, I-330 lures D-503 to the Medical Office, where the Mephi doctor gives them a sick card so they can play hooky from work. D-503 doesn’t even realize how I-330 has so completely caught him. His description of the facility and the officer is telling:

“A glass room filled with golden fog. Glass ceilings, colored bottles, jars. Wires. Bluish sparks in tubes. And a tiny man, the thinnest I had ever seen. All of him seemed cut out of paper, and no matter which way he turned, there was nothing but a profile, sharply honed: the nose a sharp blade, lips like scissors.”

Biblical references appear throughout We, the One State likened to ‘Paradise’, D-503 to the naïve ‘Adam’, I-330 to the herald temptress ‘Eve’, and S-4711 to the clever snake, with his ‘double-curved body,’ who turns out to be a double-agent. The revolutionary organization named Mephi appears to be after Mephistopheles, who rebelled against Heaven and ‘paradise.’ While these similarities suggest a criticism of organized religion, the novel clearly embodies so much more. It is also so much more than a political statement. Journalist and translator Mirra Ginsburg calls We “a complex philosophical novel of endless subtlety and nuance, allusion and reflections. It is also a profoundly moving human tragedy and a study in the variety of human loves … And, though the people are nameless ‘numbers,’ they are never schematic figures; each is an individual, convincingly and movingly alive.”

Zamyatin wrote We years before the word “totalitarianism” appeared in political speech and he predicted its defining condition: the destruction of the individual. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism was a novel oppression: previous tyrants demanded obedience; but obedience was not enough for the totalitarian regime, which sought to occupy the entire person and obliterate their very core. As the self disintegrates, humans—like worker bees—fuse into what Arendt called “one man of gigantic dimensions.” Zamyatin’s word for it was: “we.”

“In a world without personal boundaries, a world without deviation, serendipity, difference, a world without ‘I,’ there can be no ‘us.’ The ‘we’ of We is a mass rather than a community of people. Arendt wrote about loneliness as the defining condition of totalitarianism. She drew a distinction between loneliness—a sense of isolation—and solitude, a condition necessary for thinking. One could be lonely in a crowd. But in Zamyatin’s world of transparent houses and uniform lives, one could not have solitude.”
Masha Gessen on the ‘we’ of We

*Winston Smith writing his diary out of the view of the ‘Big Brother’ screen*

Comparison of We with Brave New World and 1984

As I was reading We, I could not help comparing it to George Orwell’s 1984, written over twenty-five years later. Similarities in plot and theme abound, right down to the inverted language of the government: the tyrant is the ‘Benefactor’ just as Orwell’s Ministry of Love is where dissidents are tortured or Oceana’s paradoxical ministry slogans–Freedom is Slavery … Ignorance is Strength … War is Peace. Three years before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, Orwell reviewed We and compared it with Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932:

“The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.”
George Orwell, 1946 review of “We”

*Montage of images from 2020 film of ‘Brave New World’*

While Orwell criticizes Zamyatin’s book as being “less well put together—it has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize,” he praises it for making a political point that according to him Huxley’s book lacks (for the record, I disagree with Orwell on this; Huxley’s political point is just more subtle, just as his characters are). Orwell found Zamyatin’s We more convincing and relevant than Huxley’s Brave New World given that in the technocratic totalitarian state of We “many of the ancient human instincts are still there,” not eradicated by eugenics and medication (such as soma). Citing the many executions in Zamyatin’s Utopia, all taking place publicly in the presence of the Benefactor and accompanied by “triumphal odes recited by the official poets”, Orwell suggested that, “It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—that makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s.”

*1976 Penguin cover of ‘Brave New World’ cover; ‘1953 Signet cover of Nineteen Eighty Four’*

Noam Chomsky considered We more perceptive than Brave New World or 1984, the latter which he called “wooden and obvious” despite clever and original nuances such as “newspeak,” which provided a medium for the world view and principles of Ingsoc and to make other forms of thought impossible (“it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…” says Syme in 1984). I agree with Chomsky. Next to the bleak and hopeless polemic of Nineteen Eighty-Four, We is less dialectic, more visceral, it is full-bodied, ribald, tender, emotional and immediate. But above all, it is hopeful. Again, Mirra Ginsburg says it best:

“We is more multifaceted, less hopeless than Orwell’s 1984, written more than twenty-five years later and directly influenced by Zamyatin’s novel. Despite its tragic ending, We still carries a note of hope. Despite the rout of the rebellion, ‘there is still fighting in the western parts of the city.’ Many ‘numbers’ have escaped beyond the Wall. Those who died were not destroyed as human beings—they died fighting and unsubmissive. And though the hero is reduced to an obedient automaton, certain that “Reason” and static order will prevail, though the woman he loved briefly and was forced into betraying dies (as do the poets and rebels she led), the woman who loves him, who is gentle and tender, is safe beyond the Wall. She will bear his child in freedom. And the Wall has been proved vulnerable after all. It has been breached—and surely will be breached again.”
Mirra Ginsburg, on ‘We’

It may seem like a tragic end, particularly for the two main protagonists: D-503 is lobotomized into an obedient drone of the sterile system and betrays his lover; I-330 is no doubt liquidated under The Machine, after refusing to submit and betray her comrades. To the end, she is the messenger of hope and resilience and the force for removal of barriers. The wall does come down–even if for just a moment towards the end of the book–and the Green Wind blows furiously through the land, bringing with it birds and other creatures previously unseen along with the scent of change.

Zamyatin’s We is ultimately a cautionary tale on the folly of logic without love and a profound call to connect to our natural world to nurture our souls. Before he is rendered inert by the Great Operation, D-503 gives O-90 a child. It is no mistake that O-90, who tenderly and selflessly loved and refused to surrender her child to the One State, makes it outside (with the help of I-330) into the natural world. Driven by love (not rationality), she represents the future.

About the Author and His Work

Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in 1884 in Lebedyan, Russia, which according to Mirra Ginsburg was “one of the most colourful towns in the heart of the Russian black-earth belt, some two hundred miles southeast of Moscow—a region of fertile fields, of ancient churches and monasteries, of country fairs, gypsies and swindlers, nuns and innkeepers, buxom Russian beauties, and merchants who made and lost millions overnight.”

Showing influences by Jerome K. Jerome’s 1891 short story The New Utopia and H.G. Wells’ 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes and the Expressionist works of Kandinsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin created We in 1920. His political satire was denied publication in Russia but Zamyatin managed to smuggle the manuscript to New York, where it was published in English in 1924 by Dutton. Mirra Ginsburg writes of Zamyatin’s death in 1937: “[it] went unmentioned in the Soviet press. Like the rebellious poet in We, and like so many of the greatest Russian poets and writers of the twentieth century, he was literally ‘liquidated’—reduced to nonbeing. His name was deleted from literary histories and for decades he has been unknown in his homeland.” The first publication of We in Russia had to wait until 1988—after more than sixty years of suppression—when glasnost resulted in it appearing alongside Orwell’s 1984.

Zamyatin called We “my most jesting and most serious work.” His credo, written in 1921 in I am Afraid, proclaimed that “true literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”

We directly inspired the following literary works: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov, Anthem by Ayn Rand, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Penguin classics edition describes We as “the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-Utopia: a great prose poem detailing the fate that might befall us all if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom.”

Nina Munteanu on The Role of Stories in the Climate Action Movement

February 26, 2023August 5, 2023 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*Jackson Creek after a fresh snowfall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)*

Issue #128 of Apex Magazine featured an interview that Rebecca E. Treasure did with me. We discussed the power of story, the use of dystopian narrative, and the blur between fiction and non-fiction to create meaningful eco-fiction. Below we talk about the role of stories in the climate action movement. For the complete interview go here:

AM: Your work takes complex topics that are nonetheless critical to humanity’s future and pulls stories with compelling characters out of them, making the science accessible, the warnings personal to the reader. This has always been one of the callings of science fiction. What is the role of stories in the climate action movement?

NM: Our capacity and need to tell stories is as old as our ancient beginnings. From the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux to our blogs on the internet, humanity has always shared story. Story is powerful in how it helps us define who we are, what’s important to us, and where we are going. Stories compel with intrigue, stir our emotions, connect with our souls through symbols, archetypes and metaphor. Stories inspire action. We live by the stories we tell.

For too long, our stories have promoted a dominant worldview of exploitation and capitalism. We’ve been telling the patriarchal story of “othering” for too long; we need a new voice and a new worldview to replace our old stories of conquering and taming a “savage land” and “savage people.” When Copernicus proclaimed in 1543 that the sun did not revolve around the Earth, it took a long time for the world to accept and let go of its Ptolemaic Earth-centered view. But the world did come around eventually to the point now that this is common knowledge and lies embedded in our daily lives and language.

Storytelling about how the Earth takes care of us and how we can take care of Earth is urgently needed.

This means shifting our stories from an exploitive capitalist narrative of separation toward an inclusive partnership narrative. This means embracing a more eco-centric worldview; a worldview in which humanity is not central, but lies embedded within greater planetary forces and phenomena. A worldview that sees humanity only as part of a greater entity, as participant in a greater existential celebration of life and the elements. A humanity that must learn to play along, not bully and take over. A humanity that must embrace compassion, respect and kindness; a humanity directed by humility—not hubris. It is my firm belief that until our worldview embraces humility in partnership with the natural world—until we cast off our self-serving, neo-liberal, capitalist ideologies—we will remain hampered in our journey forward. When we change our stories, we change our lives and we change the world along with it.

This is already happening with the emergence of a strong eco-voice by writers through the feminine voice, the gylanic voice, the voice of the marginalized, of ecology and the environment itself. Authors such as Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, Emmi Itäranta, Jeff Vandermeer, Cherie Demaline, Christiane Vadnais, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Chen Qiufan, Paolo Bacigalupi, Grace Dillon, Andrew Krivak, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Coleen Murphy … These all give Nature a face and voice to care about. And caring is the first step.

For the entire interview, go to Apex Magazine, December 10, 2021.

*Nina Munteanu and her award-winning eco-novel “A Diary in the Age of Water”*

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.

When Writers Use the Present—or the Past—to inform The Future in Their Science Fiction Novel

January 15, 2023October 12, 2024 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*The Darwin duology by Dragon Moon Press, depicting the late 21st Century, by Nina Munteanu*

In my 2007 novel Darwin’s Paradox and its 2010 prequel Angel of Chaos—dystopian tales set in an unrecognizable post-climate change Canada at the end of the 21^st Century—the father of the main character lectures his impressionable young daughter about how climate change helped create the heathland scrub that replaced the mixed woodlands of the old Carolinian and sub-Boreal environments:

“What’s over there?” She points to a far, dark hill.

“Woodland. This was all forest before the cities got built and the climate changed.”

“Climate changed?”

“Yes, honey.” He focuses on the distance. “Caused the revolution thirty years ago. Since then the Ecologists have virtually eliminated our greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the planet will be feeling the effects of global warming for decades to come. Perhaps centuries.”

“They saved the planet, didn’t they?”

His brows knit. “Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn’t,” he says enigmatically.

I’d originally written the novel and its prequel in the seventies, before entering university. So, you might think that I was incredibly imaginative and prescient to come up with such climate devastation. But this simply isn’t so (well, not entirely, anyway). Just as with Margaret Atwood—who says: “When I wrote the Handmaid’s Tale, nothing went into it that had not happened in real-life somewhere at some time”—I was simply reading the signs.

*Margaret Atwood demonstrating a fire-proof version of her book The Handmaid’s Tale*

When it came to climate change, of course, I had some help. During my days at university, studying limnology, and in the 1980s and ‘90s when I worked as an environmental scientist and consultant, I encountered evidence of a changing environment and climate; people in the environmental sciences certainly knew the dangers of climate change long before it entered the common zeitgeist.

Science fiction dystopias aren’t so much predictive as realistically projecting possibilities based on current or past social patterns (these past social patterns, as Santayana notes, have a way of returning to us when we don’t pay attention to them). This notion lies at the root of the term cautionary tale and what makes one truly harrowing or terrifying; we sense to our very core how likely these scenarios are.

*My near-future climate dystopia released by Inanna Publications in 2020*

Response to my 2020 cautionary tale A Diary in the Age of Water reflects this visceral reaction by readers who shared that this blur of fiction with non-fiction and sense of realism—a “this could happen” quality—totally unbalanced them and engrossed them. Comments included “unique and captivating,” “unsettling and yet deliciously readable,” “strangely compelling” “scary and comforting at the same time,” “made my heart clench,” “a book of genuine power.”

*Scene from Michael Radford’s film “Nineteen Eighty-Four” released in 1984, based on George Orwell’s 1949 novel*

Indeed, many successful predictions have been made in speculative fiction. In 1961, Stanislaw Lem’s novel Return From the Stars predicted the invention of the touch pad, iPhone, iPad and Kindle. The telescreens that monitored the citizens of George Orwell’s Oceania in his dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was reflected, twenty years later, in the first CCTV installed in the United Kingdom. Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report accurately predicted personalized ads, voice-controlled homes, facial and optical recognition, and gesture-based computing. Self-driving cars were showcased in many speculative books and films such as Bladerunner, and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.

*Scene from the film Minority Report with Tom Cruise*

But many speculations have also not been realized. No flying cars—OK, some companies such as Toyota, Hyundai and Tesla are working on prototypes. While NASA plans to construct a surface habitat called Artemis Base Camp so that astronauts can remain on the moon’s surface for days or perhaps even weeks, it is far from happening soon. Also, no rotating space stations and space elevator—yet.

Many envisioned totalitarian/dystopian states in speculative fiction have also not been realized (e.g. We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games, The Dispossessed, V for Vendetta )—though one could argue that aspects of each world envisioned by an author has occurred or is occurring in some form. One need only recall Edward Snowdon’s disclosures of NSA’s insidious surveillance to see parallels with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And as Margaret Atwood famously said in the quote above, nothing goes into her stories “that have not happened in real-life somewhere at some time.”

“The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future but to prevent it.”
Ray Bradbury

There are, in most cases, no technological impediments to the flying car, the jetpack, and moon-bases; only cultural ones. “These SF predictions ought to be viewed as visions of where we could be, as opposed to where we will be, or, keeping Bradbury in mind, visions of where we don’t want to go and, thankfully, have mostly managed to avoid to date,” says Steve Davidson of Grasping for the Wind. “Perhaps it’s all cultural,” he adds. Science fiction writer and futurist David Brin says that he is “more interested in exploring possibilities than likelihoods, because a great many more things might happen than do.”

In his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism Peter Frase writes: “the importance of assessing possibility rather than likelihood is that it puts our collective action at the centre, while making confident predictions only encourages passivity.” In his 2010 essay, David Brin cites Orwell’s 1984 as a “self-preventing prophecy” that helped prevent the scenario (at least in its fullest).

George Orwell wrote his dystopian satire in 1949 about a mind-controlled society in response to the Cold War. The book was a metaphor “against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism,” said Orwell in his 1947 essay Why I Write, adding that, “Good prose is like a windowpane.” Was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four a failed novel because the real 1984 didn’t turn out quite like his 1984? Hardly. Hugo Award-winning novelist Robert J. Sawyer argues that we consider it a success, “because it helped us avoid that future. So just be happy that the damn dirty apes haven’t taken over yet.”

References:

Brin, David. 2010. “The Self-Preventing Prophecy: Or How a Dose of Nightmare Can Help Tame Tomorrow’s Path.” in Abbott Gleason et al. eds., On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future. Princeton University Press, Princeton, p.222.

Frase, Peter. 2016. “Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.” Verso Press, London. 150pp.

*Country road in the Kawarthas during a foggy morning, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.

Nina Munteanu Writing Coach

futurism

Movie Review & Book Review: The Unexpected Protocol of “I, Robot”

TV Series Review: “Orphan Black” Mingling Its Own Nature With It…

Crossing into the Ecotone to Write Meaningful Eco-Fiction

Montreal 2140: Hopeful Futures in Science and Storytelling Conference

Nina Munteanu’s “The Way of Water” now in Best of Metastellar Year Two Anthology

Movie Review: Advantageous

TV Series Review: Living With Scarcity & Uncertainty: The Merits of “3%”

Book Review: A Plea for Nature and ‘Us’—The Novel “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Nina Munteanu on The Role of Stories in the Climate Action Movement

When Writers Use the Present—or the Past—to inform The Future in Their Science Fiction Novel