Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  Science fictionally, oh, it has its imperfections. There’s plenty of handwavey science, and other iffy logistics. (How is it their time machine can send them anywhere on Earth? Where are they getting their supplies in this post-apocalypse world? Who’s manufacturing Dr. Jones’ cigarettes?) Even so, season one is a confident and stylish reimagination of the film, full of clever loopbacks and continuity details.

  The series manages to improve even further in season two, however, when it goes in more unexpected and interesting directions. Throwing off the shackles of its source plot, season two embraces the greater possibilities of time travel, transporting its characters to many more eras, from World War II to the Cold War to the grungy fashions of the 1970s. The personas of the characters become more loreworthy, and the ensemble is bolstered by shrewdly cast guest stars like Battlestar Galactica’ s Michael Hogan and The Shield’ s Jay Karnes. Midway through the season, the show turns a creative corner with a number of stellar setpiece hours, including an inevitable, but superbly executed, riff on Groundhog Day. In a way, 12 Monkeys’ second year reminded me of Fringe in season three, when it transformed from a serviceable skiffy procedural to truly epic SF television. (Is the “Acevedo Factor” a thing?) 12 Monkeys ’ change is more modest, but similarly impressive. While I’m nervous about certain developments in the finale, it does set up a potentially intriguing new paradigm for season three. All in all, for such an unlikely serial reboot, 12 Monkeys does well for itself.

  Even more rewarding is the stylish, scathing USA series Mr. Robot, a contemporary drama that, among other things, brilliantly examines the science fictional nature of the present. If 12 Monkeys bounces back and forth over a world-altering cataclysm, Mr. Robot is rooted squarely in the cataclysm itself, a dystopia-in-progress that presents a chilling alternate version of now. The sensational Rami Malek stars as Elliot Alderson, a disaffected internet security expert whose bland exterior masks a genius-level hacker. At first, Elliot’s goals are edgy but modest: using his brilliant technical skills to right society’s wrongs, one creepy jerk at a time. But when Elliot crosses paths with a shifty man known only as “Mr. Robot” (Christian Slater), he’s drawn inexorably into a revolutionary hacker group called fsociety. Its goal: take down the world’s largest and most powerful financial conglomerate, E Corp, and create an economic revolution.

  Right out of the gates, Mr. Robot is riveting stuff; the pilot is a masterpiece, each shot a carefully composed work of art, and the high quality continues throughout. It’s cyberpunk by way of the 1970s conspiracy thriller, an irresistible blend of day-after-tomorrow technoparanoia and artful, old-school filmmaking. It’s also blisteringly political, with a cynical, misanthropic worldview that’s given unforgettable voice by Malek’s intense performance. The political content is on the in-your-face side, but it’s no less penetrating for it; the rant is shrill but effective, taking aim at the ugly underside of capitalism and the dispiriting subtexts of modern reality. That may sound like miserable subject matter for entertainment, but this highly critical portrait of the status quo is painted largely in order to set its heroes in opposition to it, which is rallying. This is, like many conspiracy thrillers, a David-versus-Goliath story, with a clandestine rabble pitted against a massively powerful corporate monolith. The stakes are world-changing, and you feel it.

  Another element in Mr. Robot’s arsenal is a glorious meta streak. Did I mention you’re a character on the show? Malek’s chilling monotone narration, outwardly reminiscent of Michael C. Hall’s murderous mutterings on Dexter, is directed straight at the viewer: you are Elliot’s imaginary friend. If it were less sure-handed, this playful touch of fourth-wall breaking would be a risk to the suspension of disbelief. But the execution is perfect, and in the context of this paranoid scenario, it’s chillingly immersive. The device is deployed sparingly, but never abandoned; a casual, self-aware joke in the pivotal fourth episode, “eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4,” even critiques TV distortions of hacker culture. I keep waiting for these touches to rip me out of the story, but even in the most extreme case—season two’s disturbingly funny “eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes,” which possesses a premise too outrageous to spoil—it works in the show’s favor.

  Mr. Robot is so unique, and pushes my serial-viewing buttons so well, that even the devil’s advocate side of my brain struggles to find fault with it. For example, I want to protest the presence of Christian Slater, whose persona is so distinct it can often overwhelm his characters. But here, that heightened persona actually works to both the character’s and the show’s benefit. I also want to challenge the credibility of its supporting female heroes, Elliot’s childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) and fellow fsociety hacker Darlene (Carly Chaikin). But while they can’t match Malek for acting chops, they ultimately mesh so thoroughly with the show’s style that I now can’t imagine replacing them. Even the show’s more predictable plot twists are cleverly subverted.

  Most strongly, I want to recoil from the show’s proclivity for transgressive shock tactics and toxically masculine worldbuilding. This is the show’s most troubling element, and probably its least defensible. And yet, it does goes a long way to establishing the sky-high stakes of the secret war that’s being fought, and the ruthless formidability of Elliot’s enemies. It depicts, without condoning, male brutality. Meanwhile, it possesses a refreshingly diverse cast. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Mr. Robot’s more sympathetic figures are women, minorities, members of the LGBT community: from Elliot’s kind psychiatrist Krista (Gloria Reuben) to his earnest boss Gideon (Michel Gill), from his drug-dealing neighbor Shayla (Frankie Shaw) to his fellow fsociety hackers Romero (Ron Cephas Jones), Mobley (Azhar Khan), and Trenton (Sunita Mani). Meanwhile, the primary villains are white men in suits, particularly the ambitious and sinister junior executive Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) and, later, the mega-powerful Philip Price (the scene-stealing Michael Cristofer, basically reprising his memorable Rubicon turn as the scheming Truxton Spangler). This is a show that wears its political heart on its sleeve, and let’s face it, it’s the left sleeve. Still, there’s enough rough-edged fare here, particularly in regards to violence and mental health, to justify multiple trigger warnings; I wouldn’t feel right not mentioning that.

  Season one is such a compelling and seamless blend of style, substance, and structure that it’s tempting to be more dismissive of the fuzzier, less driven second season. But, while different, I found the second year equally engrossing. Its focus is more internal than external, more psychological than mechanistic. And yes, structural finesse takes a back seat to stylish extravagance, as creator Sam Esmail gains authorial confidence, possibly dangerous levels of it. But cleverly enough, the show’s meta streak plays neatly into interpreting season two: its arc, one can argue (and the show slyly does), is necessarily messier, as the characters struggle to cope with the consequences of their world-shaking actions. Emboldened by critical achievement, Mr. Robot leans further into artistic risk-taking in its second year, often to eye-widening and jaw-dropping effect. It comes at the expense of a more streamlined narrative, perhaps, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay if it makes for a singular TV viewing experience—and Mr. Robot is most certainly that.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christopher East is a writer, editor, reviewer, and avid consumer of science fiction, fantasy, and spy fiction. His stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Cosmos, Interzone, Talebones, The Third Alternative, and a number of other speculative fiction publications. He’s attended the Clarion and Taos Toolbox writing workshops, and served for several years as the fiction editor for the futurism, science, and technology blog Futurismic. He blogs extensively about writing, fiction, film, television, music, comics, and more at www.christopher-east.com. Currently he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works for an occupational and environmental health and safety consultancy.

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  Book Reviews: October 2016

  Andrew Liptak | 1287 words
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  In my last couple of columns, I’ve been going with a sort of theme for each group of books that I’ve put together. However, for this month, I’ve decided that sometimes, you just have to read what catches your eye. In this instance, I picked up a cyberpunk murder mystery, a debut space opera, and a Lovecraftian horror novel that fittingly takes place at a Lovecraftian horror convention .

  Behind the Throne

  K. B. Wagers

  eBook / Paperback

  ISBN: 978-0316308601

  Orbit, August 2016

  432 Pages

  Starting a new series can be a daunting task, especially when you are playing with space opera. There’s an entire world to construct, in which you need to dump a compelling story. Science fiction’s history is littered with all sorts of false starts, but K.B. Wagers seems to be off to a good one with her first installment of her Indranan War trilogy.

  The novel follows Hail Bristol, a gun runner who fled her royal past only to be dragged back by a team from the Indranan Empire. They come with bad news: her sisters, heirs to the throne, have been assassinated, while her mother is growing sicker. Bristol will soon inherit the throne that she wanted nothing to do with. As she tries to navigate the halls of the palace, another plot is afoot that could change the course of the Empire.

  There are some rough patches as the book starts off, in that Wagers essentially lays out two interesting stories, joined in the middle by something that is less so. The beginning is fantastic, setting up a vivid world and some interesting characters, which quickly slows down as Bristol is returned to her home.

  It’s here where things get tricky: Bristol cut ties from home for several specific reasons, and it’s difficult to parse her motivations as she’s thrust into a place that she essentially doesn’t want to be. We see her go back and forth between protecting her family and longing for escape, all within the confines of palace intrigue. For most of the first half, I wish that Wager had adopted Ann Leckie’s structure from Ancillary Justice, to provide any sort of context for her actions, and that Bristol had been allowed to carry over her experience as a gun runner to running an empire.

  However, once the palace intrigue is settled, the real plot begins to kick in, and the book races to the finish. The plot at hand is essentially one in which external parties to the throne have conspired to topple the matriarchal line, using one of the Indranan Empire’s sort-of-kind-of enemies as cover for their actions. What Wagers has set up is smart and intriguing, and lays the groundwork for the next installment of the series, After The Crown, which comes out later this year. Getting to the end of Behind The Throne was rewarding, but what it really did was get me excited for the next installment.

  I Am Providence

  Nick Mamatas

  eBook / Paperback

  ISBN: 978-1597808354

  Nightshade Books, August 2016

  256 Pages

  I picked up Nick Mamatas’s latest novel at what was likely the best time in the world for this book. One of fandom’s numerous squabbles about the state of a convention had just flared up, something that began filling up Twitter, Facebook and blogs with reactions, think pieces, and the like. I Am Providence is possibly the best book to read if you’ve ever wanted to understand the arcane and byzantine nature of fandom, expertly skewering the Lovecraft community while at the same time recognizing that it’s part of it.

  I Am Providence takes place as the annual Summer Tentacular starts up in Providence Rhode Island, a convention dedicated solely to the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft. New, up and coming horror author Colleen Danzig is appearing for the first time, and she’s amused and disturbed by the mix of people that she finds there. Her roommate is an eccentric author who has pissed off his fair share of the Lovecraftian community and turns up dead, with his face removed.

  What follows is an absurd comedy of an investigation as the police swoop in to track down the murderer, while the convention continues on, almost as though nothing happened. There are detours as Lovecraft devotees argue and bicker over the legacy of the author they so admire, attempt to track down his long-dead cat, and perform strange rituals.

  Mamatas spins out a razor sharp story that is all too much fun to read, even as it’s a book that can generously be described as “inside baseball.” There are in-jokes and memes aplenty, and even though he has made an effort to change up some characters, the real Lovecraft community contains a number of strong personalities that come through pretty clearly.

  As we’ve all watched or even participated in any number of these fandom dustups over the last couple of years, I Am Providence shines a light on the absurd scale of it: they’re tiny fights waged by outsized personalities with stakes that are inflated so high that parodying them takes little effort at all.

  False Hearts

  Laura Lam

  eBook / Hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0765382054

  Tor, June 2016

  384 Pages

  I kept stumbling on Laura Lam’s latest novel, in part because of the cover: it’s a beautiful, minimalist piece of work, but nothing that screams the word cyberpunk.

  And this is totally a cyberpunk novel, one with all the trappings of the mobile phone age.

  Set in far-future, utopian San Francisco, it features Taema and Tila, who were a pair of conjoined twins who had grown up in an isolated cult amidst California’s Redwoods. As teenagers, they had escaped and fled to the modern world, where they were separated and forged new lives. Ten years later, Tila appears, covered in blood and swiftly arrested—a rare occasion in a city that hasn’t seen a murder in years. Taema finds herself in a unique situation, where she can save her sister by taking her twin’s place within a vicious criminal gang that is attempting to take over the city with the use of a potent drug.

  Lam does a lot of heavy lifting to make a ton of separate elements come seamlessly together through an exciting murder mystery. Central to this story is the relationship between two conjoined sisters who suddenly discover that they have secrets between one another. Teama and Tila find themselves deep in a criminal plot that goes all the way back to their home in the cult, and in a situation that they are uniquely suited to take control of. As Teama takes Tila’s place in the criminal underworld, she discovers that there’s more to her sister than she thought, and that they might have become unrecognizable to one another.

  Another layer to this story is one of beauty. Lam puts together an intriguing, technologically advanced society, where everyone is beautiful because everyone has the means to do so: Technology has removed scarcity, and everything is perfect. By contrast, Teama and Tila are not, by San Francisco standards. They’re conjoined, a byproduct of their upbringing and genetics in the isolated cult, and while they’re accepted there, they attract stares after leaving. Even once they’re separated, they’re different.

  Lam’s technological utopia has its downsides. The local government helps to maintain order and peace through the use of a drug called Zeal, which allows users to act out their aggression in an Inception -like dream state. It’s this system that the Ratel gang is looking to exploit, with a dangerous variation that threatens to undermine society.

  Each of these plot lines come together with a single murder, and as a straight-up murder mystery, False Hearts hits all the right buttons: it’s loaded with excellent characters, it has a wonderfully conceived of world and all the right stakes.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Liptak is the Weekend Editor for The Verge. He is the co-editor of War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, (Apex Publications, 2014). His writing has also appeared in io9, Gizmodo, Kirkus Reviews, Tor.com, BN Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Clarkesworld and others. He lives in Vermont.

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  Interview: Allen Steele

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 7319 words

  Allen Steele is the author of such novels as Orbital Decay, V.S. Day, and Ocean Space, as well as the eight-volume Coyote series about colonizing a habitable moon in t
he 47 Ursae Majoris system. His short story collections include Rude Astronauts, The Last Science Fiction Writer, and Sex and Violence in Zero G. He’s also a highly regarded expert on space travel who has testified before the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics. His new novel, which is out now, is called Arkwright.

  This interview first appeared in March 2016 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.

  • • • •

  Tell us about your new book Arkwright. What’s that about?

  Arkwright is a story about a family, the descendants of a science fiction writer of the twentieth century, Nathan Arkwright, and their effort over many generations to build the first starship and launch it to a world twenty-two light-years from Earth. Nathan Arkwright was one of the four great science fiction writers of the twentieth century. There was Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, and Nathan, who is fictional, of course. I credit him as being the grandmaster of space opera. He created the Galaxy Patrol series, which the name, right there, is kind of an homage to E. E. Doc Smith. These stories, which first were a series of novels, and then a radio series, and then a TV series, and finally movies, made him a very wealthy man. At the end of his life, he decided to bequeath his fortune to a foundation with the goal of building that first starship. It’s really a story about, not just a long-term effort to build the ship itself, but the family keeping itself together and trying to preserve the old man’s vision. In a way, it’s kind of a story about faith—not religious faith, but faith in ideas.