#science fiction gift

[brooklynbutterflyarts]

Blade runner poster framed Molding:Professional 1" Flat Top Black (solid-wood) Matte: 100% acid free board, Print: Full Color dry mounted glossy print Glass is included, Comes Fully Assembled Ready For Your Wall The double mat adds depth giving the display a unique "looking through a window'' appearance. The calendar print is bonded to foam core on a hot vacuum press. This bonding gives the print a perfect flat and smooth texture. This process also insures the print will never fold or fade with age or moisture. This wonderful display makes a thoughtful and original gift containing a classic vintage touch yet modern design, allowing it to fit alongside both modern and classic decor. BUY WITH CONFIDENCE. ALL OF MY DELICATE ITEMS ARE SHIPPED WITH A SPECIAL 3 LAYER PROTECTION SYSTEM. Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples.[7][8] Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down. Blade Runner initially underperformed in North American theaters and polarized critics; some praised its thematic complexity and visuals, while others critiqued its slow pacing and lack of action. The film's soundtrack, composed by Vangelis, was nominated in 1982 for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe as best original score. Blade Runner later became a cult film, and has since come to be regarded as one of the greatest science fiction films. Hailed for its production design depicting a high-tech but decaying future, the film is often regarded as both a leading example of neo-noir cinema and a foundational work of the cyberpunk[9] genre. It has influenced many science fiction films, video games, anime, and television series. It also brought the work of Dick to Hollywood's attention and led to several film adaptations of his works. In 1993, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

[themitchiemitch]

Interstellar (2014) dir. Christopher Nolan

Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. For Winston, the world of 1984 is totalitarian: the Party knows all, controls all and misses nothing. To merely think a disloyal thought is to be doomed, because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent Party will sense the thought and mark you for torture and "vaporization."

Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.

Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.

Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

Julia is also perfectly positioned to uncover the vast blank spots in Winston's supposed intellectual curiosity, all the questions he doesn't ask – about her, about the Party, and about the world. I love this trope and used it myself, in Attack Surface, the third "Little Brother" book, which is told from the point of view of Marcus's frenemy Masha:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface

Through Julia, we come to understand the seemingly omniscient, omnipotent Party as fumbling sadists. The Thought Police are like MI5, an Island of Misfit Toys where the paranoid, the stupid, the vicious and the thuggish come together to ruin the lives of thousands, in such a chaotic and pointless manner that their victims find themselves spinning devastatingly clever explanations for their behavior:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

And, as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is a first-rate novel, expertly plotted, with fantastic, nail-biting suspense and many smart turns and clever phrases. Newman is doing Orwell, and, at times, outdoing him. In her hands, Orwell – like Winston – is revealed as a kind of overly credulous romantic who can't believe that anyone as obviously stupid and deranged as the state's representatives could be kicking his ass so very thoroughly.

This was, in many ways, the defining trauma and problem of Orwell's life, from his origin story, in which he is shot through the throat by a fascist: sniper during the Spanish Civil War:

https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html

To his final days, when he developed a foolish crush on a British state spy and tried to impress her by turning his erstwhile comrades in to her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Newman's feminist retelling of Orwell is as much about puncturing the myth of male competence as it is about revealing the inner life, agency, and personhood of swooning love-interests. As someone who loves Orwell – but not unconditionally – I was moved, impressed, and delighted by Julia.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

[marlynnofmany]

Mysterious to You

Usually, in the space courier business, the things we’re given to deliver are packaged well. In containers that stay shut. Usually.

“Where does this one go?” Mur asked, dangling a cloth from one blue-black tentacle. “It’s got to be for childcare, right?”

Eggskin took it, buffed their scales briefly, then said, “Nope. This one’s for cleaning kitchenware. See the logo?”

Mur draped a tentacle across his squiddy head in annoyance. “See it, sure; recognize it, no. Here, this definitely goes in the childcare box. That much I know.” He passed a plastic-wrapped bundle of diapers to me. “It’s even your species.”

“That it is,” I agreed, placing it in the correct box. “And the package didn’t rip in the spill, which is good.”

Mur gave me a suspicious look. “Those are only smelly after they��ve been applied to an infant, right?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “It’s all the horrendous befouling that happens next that stinks, not the material of the diaper itself. I was more concerned about the diapers getting contaminated with something.”

“Well we can’t have that,” Mur said, picking up several more items with multiple tentacles at once. “The baby humans should only befoul the cleanest of disposable clothing.”

I boxed a pack of wet-wipes and a rattle. “Do your people not do diapers?”

Mur made a wet snort. “Our littles swim in regularly-filtered water until they’re more than old enough to poop in the correct place,” he told me. “Any befouling done on land is due to intestinal problems, not youth.”

“Sounds convenient,” I told him (narrowly avoiding saying “handy” to a guy with no hands). “I’m sure many human parents would be jealous.”

“As they should be,” Mur said, sorting a case of silverware, a stack of cups, and a package of napkins into the kitchen box. He double-checked the napkins.

Eggskin held up a flat ring of green rubber, textured with a scaly pattern that wasn’t too different from their own arm. “Now this one I don’t recognize,” they admitted. “Is this for bundling tools together? It’s grippy enough.”

“Beats me,” Mur said. “Something for the disciplinary sector? Is this one of those ‘handcuffs’ I’ve heard about?”

I smiled and held out a hand for it. “No, handcuffs open and close so you can’t wiggle out, and they’re not this soft.” I squeezed the dense rubber. “Yeah, this is a teething toy. 100%.”

“Ohhh.” Eggskin cast their eyes upward. “Of course it is. I forgot how vicious human young ones are about that.”

“Teething,” Mur repeated, sounding suspicious. “I seem to have missed that fun fact. How are young humans vicious about teeth?”

I set the teething ring on top of the diapers. “We’re born without visible teeth, then when we’re old enough to try solid food, the teeth gradually push through our gums until they’re free. Babies chew on things to help their teeth cut through faster.”

Mur’s alien face wrinkled into mild horror. “Why? Why not just have them out from the start?”

“Well, then the babies would bite their moms when they’re nursing. I understand the teething period is pretty painful.”

Mur turned his horrified face toward Eggskin, who nodded sympathetically.

Eggskin asked gently, “You remember milk? The first food they eat?”

“But all those milk foods they talk about come from another animal!” Mur objected. “The things with ‘cheese’ are from those ‘gows’ — I forgot humans make it themselves too!”

“Cows,” I corrected.

Mur shuddered, tentacles rippling, then composed himself and picked up more items from the pile. “That is gross,” he declared. “On par with diapers. What’s this one?”

“Childcare,” Eggskin said, plucking the pacifier from Mur’s grasp and handing it to me.

“Yup,” I agreed.

“Do I even want to know?” Mur asked.

I said, “It’s a thing for babies to suck on when they’ve already eaten but still want to nurse.”

“Yeah, I didn’t need to know that. How much more of this stuff is there to sort through? I can’t believe no one else is free to help. Wait, wasn’t Paint supposed to be here too?” Mur looked toward the door.

Eggskin said, “She chased off after something that rolled away when the boxes first opened.”

“Bah.” Mur sorted a few more things. “Still can’t believe those idiots didn’t seal the boxes properly. You’d think they never shipped anything before. If this was some young fool living on their own for the first time, sure, that’s to be expected. But isn’t this for a colony somewhere?”

I said, “A little one. More of an offshoot of an existing settlement.” The briefing hadn’t gone into much detail.

“Still, you’d expect them to behave like real adults.” Mur shook a toy with ironic vigor. It was a miniature version of himself with paler blue coloring, and a layer of fluff that he definitely didn’t have. He passed it in my direction.

“There are idiots everywhere,” I said philosophically as I took it. “You know, it’s cute that your little ones have snuggle buddies like this too.”

“They don’t,” he said.

Eggskin glanced over in amusement. “Pretty sure that was made for your species.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the plush toy. “That explains the fuzz.” It really was nicely soft. I stroked it a couple times before putting it away.

“Aha!” Mur said. “Now this I recognize! That colony does have a Strongarm population after all. Somebody’s going to love this.” He held out a small object to me: oddly-shaped and smooth gray.

I turned it over in deepening confusion. It was roughly fist-sized, with cavities and crevices and a few seams that said it might come apart. I wasn’t quite curious enough to risk damaging it by testing that. “What is it?” I asked.

“A puzzlecave,” Mur told me, taking it back. He stuck tentacle-tips into some of the dents and rotated it like an alien Rubik’s Cube. That opened up a passageway clear through to the other side — he wriggled a tentacle out the other end, then pulled it back and reformed the thing into its original shape. “First it’s a cave, then it’s a puzzle.” He gave it back.

Still baffled, I asked, “How is it a cave?”

Eggskin cut in, holding clawed fingertips close together. “Newly-hatched Strongarms are about this big,” they told me. “And they like hiding.”

“Oh!” I looked down at it in a new light. “You get to grow up and use your old hidey-hole as a puzzle? That is wild.”

“Not as wild as any of that nonsense with teeth,” Mur said.

I shrugged. I couldn’t really argue that.

Footsteps approached in the hall, then the door slid open to admit Paint and the thing she’d apparently chased halfway across the ship. It was huge.

“I got it!” Paint exclaimed, wrestling a hollow sphere through the door by its handles. She looked like a cheerful orange fence lizard who had caught a soap bubble … which had handles for some reason.

“Well done,” Eggskin said. “That was quite a chase.”

“It rolled down into the engine room!” Paint said, maneuvering it over to a mostly-empty box. “Mimi had to help me get it out. It got stuck. He wasn’t happy.”

“I bet,” I said. “So, question of the day: what is it?”

“No idea,” Paint admitted. “But it came out of this box.” She rotated the box to see the label. “‘Peacekeeping Division’?”

Mur looped a tentacle over the side of the box like it was an elbow. “Remember how I didn’t know what handcuffs look like?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I said.

“That’s because when a species doesn’t have hands, and everybody can wriggle out of confinement, you stuff your troublemakers into these.” He pointed at the ball, which did have tiny air holes now that I thought about it.

“That’s fascinating!” Paint said. “It makes sense! Is it uncomfortable, though?”

“I wouldn’t know; I’m not a troublemaker.”

Eggskin told her, “I understand they’re not kept in there long-term. Just enough to get them from the scene of the troublemaking back to regular confinement. And Strongarms are famous for fitting easily into tight spaces.”

“That we are,” Mur said proudly.

“Well, you know who else likes that sort of thing?” I said. “Human children. I hope the people receiving this stuff know to keep that hamsterball out of reach, or else somebody’s going to have a lot of fun before the grownups notice.”

That led to a dramatic retelling of the long and ill-advised tradition of climbing inside truck tires and rolling down hills. None of my alien coworkers thought this was remotely reasonable, but none of them were surprised that it was a thing my species did.

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

[torpublishinggroup]

From The New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential. ✨⁣ ⁣ @olivieblake's Gifted and Talented is out on 4/01!!

[highladyluck]

What's wrong with me that I want to write science fiction in a fantasy setting :(

[brokehorrorfan]

The Giant Spider Invasion will be released on 4K Ultra HD on December 10 via Dark Force Entertainment. The 1975 sci-fi horror film is perhaps best remembered for its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Bill Rebane (Monster a Go-Go) directs from a script by Richard L. Huff and Robert Easton. Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Leslie Parrish, Alan Hale, and Robert Easton star.

Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Demon Dave & Joe's Savage Tracks - riff commentary

Giant arachnids from outer space begin to invade Earth after a huge black hole appears in a farmer’s field outside a small town in Wisconsin. A NASA scientist deduces the invasion is the result of some sort of intergalactic gateway and devises a plan to stop the huge, hairy, creeping crawlers from devouring the local population.

Pre-order The Giant Spider Invasion.

[writing-to-survive]

#188

Everyone is given a gift when they turn eighteen, which will help them in their life. Some people get increased stamina, larger IQ, or even something as simple as clear skin. You never saw your gift as a gift. You consider it a curse.

[spettelt]

Snake Person

Original pencil sketch belongs to @shatteredreaiity

[krumpkin]

This looks like it would be a pain to keep clean. It would also terrify you when drunk 🥴

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A scientist and a teacher living in a dystopian future embark on a journey of survival with a special young girl named Melanie.

[brooklynbutterflyarts]

Blade Runner Poster Framed Molding:Professional 1" Flat Top Black (solid-wood) Matte: 100% acid free board, Print: Full Color dry mounted glossy print Glass is included, Comes Fully Assembled Ready For Your Wall The double mat adds depth giving the display a unique "looking through a window'' appearance. The calendar print is bonded to foam core on a hot vacuum press. This bonding gives the print a perfect flat and smooth texture. This process also insures the print will never fold or fade with age or moisture. This wonderful display makes a thoughtful and original gift containing a classic vintage touch yet modern design, allowing it to fit alongside both modern and classic decor. BUY WITH CONFIDENCE. ALL OF MY DELICATE ITEMS ARE SHIPPED WITH A SPECIAL 3 LAYER PROTECTION SYSTEM.

[jeandejard3n]

Star Trek: The Next Generation | Ambient Music

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ray Nayler’s “Where the Axe Is Buried”

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY next MONDAY (Mar 24), and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Ray Nayler's Where the Axe Is Buried is an intense, claustrophobic novel of a world run by "rational" AIs that purport to solve all of our squishy political problems with empirical, neutral mathematics:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615369/wheretheaxeisburied/

In Naylor's world, we there are two blocs. "The west," where the heads of state have been replaced with chatbots called "PMs." These PMs propose policy to tame, rubberstamp legislatures, creating jobs programs, setting monetary and environmental policies, and ruling on other tricky areas where it's nearly impossible to make everyone happy. These countries are said to be "rationalized," and they are peaceful and moderately prosperous, and have finally tackled the seemingly intractable problems of decarbonization, extreme poverty, and political instability.

In "the Republic" – a thinly veiled version of Russia – the state is ruled by an immortal tyrant who periodically has his consciousness decanted into a blank body after his own body falls apart. The state maintains the fiction that each president is a new person, manufacturing families, friends, teachers and political comrades who can attest to the new president's long history in the country. People in the Republic pretend to believe this story, but in practice, everyone knows that it's the same mind running the country, albeit sometimes with ill-advised modifications, such as an overclocking module that runs the president's mind at triple human speeds.

The Republic is a totalitarian nightmare of ubiquitous surveillance and social control, in which every movement and word is monitored, and where social credit scores are adjusted continuously to reflect the political compliance of each citizen. Low social credit scores mean fewer rations, a proscribed circle of places you can go, reduced access to medical care, and social exclusion. The Republic has crushed every popular uprising, acting on the key realization that the only way to cling to power is to refuse to yield it, even (especially) if that means murdering every single person who takes part in a street demonstration against the government.

By contrast, the western states with their chatbot PMs are more open – at least superficially. However, the "rationalized" systems use less obvious – but no less inescapable – soft forms of control that limit the social mobility, career chances, and moment-to-moment and day-to-day lives of the people who live there. As one character who ventures from the Republic to London notes, it is a strange relief to be continuously monitored by cameras there to keep you safe and figure out how to manipulate you into buying things, rather than being continuously monitored by cameras seeking a way to punish you.

The tale opens on the eve of the collapse of these two systems, as the current president of the Republic's body starts to reject the neural connectome that was implanted into its vat-grown brain, even as the world's PMs start to sabotage their states, triggering massive civil unrest that brings the west to its knees, one country after another.

This is the backdrop for a birchpunk† tale of AI skulduggery, lethal robot insects, radical literature, swamp-traversing mechas, and political intrigue that flits around a giant cast of characters, creating a dizzying, in-the-round tour of Nayler's paranoid world

† Russian-inflected cyberpunk with Baba Yaga motifs and nihilistic Russian novel vibes

And what a paranoid world it is! Nayler's world shows two different versions of Oracle boss (and would-be Tiktok owner) Larry Ellison, who keeps pumping his vision of an AI-driven surveillance state where everyone is continuously observed, recorded and judged by AIs so we are all on our "best behavior":

https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveillance-state-police-ai/

This batshit idea from one of tech's worst billionaires is a perfect foil for a work of first-rate science fiction like Where the Axe Is Buried, which provides an emotional flythrough of how such a world would obliterate the authentic self, authentic relationships, and human happiness.

Where the Axe Is Buried conjures up that world beautifully, really capturing the deadly hopelessness of a life where the order is fixed for all eternity, thanks to the flawless execution of perfect, machine-generated power plays. But Axe shows how the embers of hope smolder long after they should have been extinguished, and how they are always ready to be kindled into a roaring, system-consuming wildfire.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting

[coffeebookslovegt]

John & Clarice

[axelmedellin]

Daily drawing 23 dec 2023

A quick sketch of my OC, Venus/Omega. Christmas is coming