To be fair, beyond the fact that the game was so advanced technologically, the gameplay was decidedly clunky. The controls were awkward and the combat was slow and unwieldy, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious, as the characters continued to repeat the same dialogue over and over again while fighting.
Klepek believes that this clunkiness is in some way part of the game’s appeal: “The reason the game was so much fun to play, even now, is due to all the rough edges and the randomness and the weirdness. . . . It was clearly a labor of love, a game like this wouldn’t have existed without people who really wanted to make it.”
Origin Systems was known for their innovative work, and BioForge was part of this tradition. Originally, it started out as an “Interactive Movie”—which in those heady days of the early 1990s, was destined to be the next big thing. The form of the interactive movie was as yet pretty undetermined, so the studio wanted to take a stab at it and maybe even do some genre-defining work. As Demarest put it, “‘Go define what interactive movies can be, go do it.’”
Of course, interactive movies didn’t actually turn out to be a thing, and what the team ended up making is pretty clearly a video game. (“It may not be an ‘interactive movie,’ but there’s no doubt that BioForge is a compelling experience,” wrote PC Gamer in 1995.) But the idea of an “interactive movie” is obviously fundamental to the far more cinematic video games of today, the best of which combine solid plots, engaging dialogue, strong character development, and gorgeous visuals. Demarest believes that BioForge was one of the first games to do scripted cut scenes, as well as fully 3-D texture-mapped characters.
BioForge still has its loyal fans. A MobyGames user review from the early 2000s calls it “overlooked, underrated and unexplored.” Another terms it a “a highly underrated action adventure with a sci-fi feel to it.” Another calls it “a grand action adventure with one of the best plots, and best character-descriptions in the history of computer games.” In 2018, it’s more of a historical artifact than anything else . . . but still a fascinating and significant chapter in video game history.
The Massive Artificial Landscape of Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!
Though far from a household name in the United States, Japanese manga artist Tsutomu Nihei (b. 1971)—considered a mastern of modern sci-fi manga—has long maintained an enthusiastic cult following, wowing aficionados and collectors with the strength of his artwork, which manages to fit a sense of devastating vastness into each small panel. His vision of the far future is influenced by cyberpunk and biopunk, with a visual inventiveness that’s been invigorating and inspiring for creators beyond the bounds of manga and anime.
For instance, journalist Chris Priestman discussed Nihei’s influence on video game design, citing games from Aloft Studios such as NaissanceE, “an adventure taking place in a primitive mysterious structure.” Priestman writes, “What all these works have in common is that their creators have been inspired by Blame! and looked to transpose its design approach to a video game.”
Recently, the reach of Nihei’s work has grown significantly, since Netflix developed two of his manga series into anime features, both available to stream. Knights of Sidonia is a two-season show, with twenty-four episodes total. Blame! is a stand-alone film (106 minutes). The original graphic novels are also available in new, oversized editions from Vertical Comics.
Before he became a manga artist, Nihei was trained as an architect and also worked in construction. The influence is readily apparent in his work, which is filled with breathtaking depictions of futuristic built environments that begin to feel like characters in their own right. “Nihei’s art is simultaneously sparse and labyrinthine, his body of work defined by a unifying obsession with invented spaces,” wrote Toussaint Egan for Paste magazine.
Blame! premiered globally on Netflix in May 2017 (and also appeared in theaters in Japan). The film was directed by Hiroyuki Seshita, with story and writing by Tsutomu Nihei. A sequel is underway.
The effect is one of awe, alienation, and utter loneliness; humans both dominated by and disconnected from this massive artificial landscape their ancestors built long ago. Thematically, it’s akin to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books—a civilization overshadowed by the weight of its history, a world in decay. Aesthetically, it’s biopunk and cyberpunk, with cyborgs, aliens, and genetic engineering. This unique combination has been massively influential on the genre as a whole, its inspiration spilling over into fiction, film, and game design.
Nihei’s first big work, Blame!, is set in a far-future megastructure the size of the world, or possibly even larger—its inhabitants are unable to measure or even estimate its total size. This self-replicating megastructure is simply called The City. It’s a smart city, and in its own uncanny cyborg way, it is alive, and hostile. Once humans had the ability to control the machines with their minds, and thus the city. They lost that ability, and now they’re refugees in the world they built, hiding out from the Safeguard, killer robots whose only job is to eliminate them. A mysterious young man named Kyrii (also spelled Killy) traverses this landscape, empowered by a lethal device (aka a gun) called the Graviton Beam Emitter, in search of a human who still possesses the “Net Terminal Genes”—which could allow humanity to take control of their world once more. But as with every quest story, the narrative is less about the destination and more about the journey, using Kyrii’s perspective to explore the world.
As Jason Thompson wrote in Manga: The Complete Guide, “The amazing thing about Blame! is that it’s such a good read even though it has almost no story or characters. It’s all about the art and the experience of being there, of not knowing what will happen next, of the contrast between landscapes of endless sameness and bloody eruptions of chaos and gore.”
The anime feature capitalizes on this by honing in on one story and one adventure among many (leaving the option open for a sequel or even a series). The movie centers on a handful of kids in an isolated, struggling village that’s running out of food and on the brink of starvation. We see the story from their perspective, as the mysterious stranger named Kyrii arrives in town (after rescuing them from the Safeguards) and, while continuing to pursue his own search for the net terminal genes, also helps the village carve out a new means for survival. While the story may be small-scale, the world it depicts is just as massive as it is on the page, and the film’s biggest strength is its wide panning shots of tiny humans miniaturized by the awe-inspiring scale of their empty and desolate surroundings.
Kyrii is a hero of few words, a mostly silent and enigmatic figure—especially to the curious and grateful villagers. Their first introduction to him is via his Gravitational Beam Emitter, a rare, powerful weapon capable of blasting massive holes in the landscape.
Knights of Sidonia is set in a similarly artificial environment, but this one is a spaceship, traversing the desolate wilderness of empty space a millennium after the solar system has been destroyed. “Nagate Tanikaze has only known life in the vessel’s bowels deep below the sparkling strata where humans have achieved photosynthesis and new genders,” reads the cover copy from Kodansha Comics. Much like in Blame!, humanity is menaced by a hostile and alien life form—this time actual aliens—whose sentience and perspective is so foreign to our own that negotiation is impossible.
Nihei’s third major work, Biomega, is also set on earth, in another brutal and decaying artificial landscape, which is in the process of succumbing to a zombie plague. Its synthetic android protagonist, immune to the zombie virus, traverses this apocalyptic world on a motorcycle in search of humans who are also immune.
With its preoccupation on the distant future, the built environment, and the augmented human in an artificial world, Nihei’s work tackles the biggest questions of science fiction: What human thread connects us to the future, and what remains when everything is changed? But it’s not all philosophical. With intensely choreographed fight scenes and breathtakingly gorgeous visuals, there’s plenty of eye candy there, too.
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ROBERT LEVY
Raëlism:
The Space-Age Message of the Elohim
A great many of us earthlings—and presumably a decent percentage of this book’s readership—have a fascination with the potential for extraterrestrial life. But who among us can claim that the existence of aliens forms the core of our religious views? Enter the Raëlians, the real-life believers in a theological doctrine centered on the premise that life on Earth is a result of alien experimentation, and that these technologically advanced beings walk among us still. They are called the Elohim.
The faith was established in 1974 by a French journalist and racecar test driver named Claude Vorilhon. During an initial close encounter with a kindly ET named Yahweh at the Puy de Lassolas volcano park, the alien shared with him the first of many messages to impart to humankind. Vorilhon was subsequently brought to a distant planet, where he learned that he himself was half-Elohim, as well as the Last Prophet to humanity that would herald the extraterrestrials’ final return. Renamed Raël and introduced to other fellow ambassadors such as Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, Vorilhon became determined to spread the Elohim’s message, as well as prepare us for the reemergence of our alien designers.
Thus a religion (though some would say cult) was born, one that has swelled to many thousands of followers across the globe (just how many thousands is a source of dispute). There is no sacred text in Raëlism, though Raël is himself an author of many books, including The Message Given to Me by Extra-Terrestrials, Space Aliens Took Me to Their Planet, Sensual Meditation, and Yes to Human Cloning. Oh, and their symbol is a swastika integrated into a Star of David, a conflation later obscured when the logo was redesigned during the church’s effort to build an embassy for the Elohim in Jerusalem (the attempt was ultimately rebuffed by the Israeli government).
Raëlism is known for its disavowal of theism as well as its many pro-science and sex-positive stances and initiatives, which can be traced back to the movement’s principal tenet that human life is shaped in the alien Elohim’s own image. Take Clonaid, for example, a project launched by Vorilhon and Raëlian bishop and chemist Dr. Brigitte Boisselier in order to advance cloning, and in 2001 Dr. Boisselier and Clonaid claimed to have secretly cloned the first human being. Another noteworthy endeavor is Clitoraid, a clitoral reconstruction mission started in 2006 that seeks to open a “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso to combat female genital mutilation. And then there’s Go Topless Day, an annual (and self-explanatory) celebration in August timed to coincide with Women’s Equality Day.
Blurring the boundaries between human and alien, pseudoscience and science fiction, self-promotion and legitimate activism, Raëlism might not be the largest or most famous UFO religion—it’s certainly not the one with the most celebrity devotees—but it just might be the most forward-thinking. As for the future of the Raëlian movement, it depends on how enthusiastically we embrace the return of our extraterrestrial creators. Let’s try not to disappoint them, shall we?
CyberCity: Hackers, Virtual Reality, and the Games Of War
So you know how the shockingly plausible scenario of WarGames aroused the concern of President Ronald Reagan (see this page), and led to the United States’ first major cybersecurity initiative? Science fiction has always been majorly intertwined with the more forward-thinking elements of the U.S. military, and vice versa.
Today, the military is using virtual reality worlds to anticipate and prevent potential cyberattacks that seem like something cyberpunk writers like William Gibson or Neal Stephenson might have once dreamed up. With recent reports of Russian state hackers penetrating U.S. utilities like electrical grids, these fears are becomingly shockingly real.
One expert at the forefront of the video game/cybersecurity nexus is Ed Skoudis, owner of the company Counter Hack, and a highly sought-after instructor on cyber incident response. Skoudis’s first claim to fame was a video game called NetWars, where the player’s goal is to stop cyberattackers from . . . well, cyberattacking. Both corporate computer security experts and military defense personnel used NetWars as a training tool. But they also wanted something more; they wanted something that felt less like a video game and more like real life.
Skoudis recounts the conversation to Eric Molinsky on the Imaginary Worlds podcast. He’d been presenting NetWars on a military base when a commander told him, “What we need is something that teaches our warriors that cyber action can have kinetic effect”—i.e., that stuff cyberattackers do doesn’t just affect our digital lives. Malicious hackers can impact our physical surroundings by targeting traffic signals, water treatment plants, hospital systems, the power grid. Skoudi took the commander’s words to heart and began brainstorming a more tangible approach. The result is CyberCity, a “fully authentic urban cyber warfare simulator” built with the support of the U.S. Air Force.
CyberCity is a digital world, but it’s a model of a real city, too. The model town, deep in Skoudis’s lab (in an undisclosed location on a secret military base), is just 6′ × 8′, but it has all the amenities of a real town of 15,000 people—a bank, a coffee shop (with unsecured WiFi), an elementary school, a power grid, a water treatment plant, a hospital, public transit, business offices and residential cul-de-sacs, and even a local newspaper.
A sunny day in CyberCity. Photo taken by radio producer Eric Molinsky, host of the Imaginary Worlds podcast.
While the model town might look like the kind of project a particularly obsessive hobbyist might build in his garage, it’s connected to an advanced virtual reality. Molinsky says, “The city itself is built pretty cheaply—they just went to a hobby shop. But the power grids that run this model, that run the lights and the little train that goes around this town, they had to be tiny duplicates of the kind of equipment that Amtrak or Con Edison use.” That power grid is hyperrealistic, designed by a real engineer who also designs power grids for military bases. And the residents of CyberCity have digital lives too, with email and bank accounts, and even a social networking site called FaceSpace.
So how do U.S. defense forces use this as training tool?
The assignments vary from day to day. Skoudis’s team plays the role of cyberterrorists. They hack into the networks that power CyberCity, contaminating the water at the reservoir, targeting the natural gas pipeline, shutting off the lights, or derailing the local train. The cyber-defense trainees must figure out how to use cyber-warfare tools to stop them. They are training from all over the world—but as they solve the puzzles, they remain hooked into a live visual feed of CyberCity, a reminder that virtual actions have physical consequences. When real-life cyberattacks happen, there are lives at stake.
The charming verisimilitude of CyberCity is part of that psychology. On Imaginary Worlds, Skoudis offers a little tour of CyberCity’s homey qualities: “There’s fire hydrants, there are mailboxes. Now let’s go over to the houses, over in the residential quadrant. There’s a dog, there’s a rug that’s airing out, there’s a rocking chair on the porch. I told you, it feels kind of like home.”
There are also some fun nods to CyberCity’s science fiction roots. For example, the DeLorean parked along a quiet street. In one mission, zombies invade the city. After the cyber-defenders prevail, they’re supposed to hack into the billboards to let the CyberCity populace know the zombies are defeated and it’s safe to emerge. (Don’t panic—this was not a specific request of the U.S. military. Skoudis’s team designed the zombie outbreak mission solely for their own amusement.)
But despite the quirky details, CyberCity is deadly serious.
“CyberCity provides insight into some of the Pentagon’s closely guarded plans for cyber war,” writes investigative reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr. for the Washington Post. “It also reflects the government’s growing fears about the vulnerabilities of the computers that run the nation’s critical infrastructure.”
“It might look like a toy or a game,” said Skoudis. “But cyberwarriors will learn from it.”
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nbsp; K. M. SZPARA
On the Internet, No One Knows You Aren’t a (Gay) Wizard:
An Ode to Fan Fiction
Like many nineties kids, I grew up with Harry Potter. Literally. We were both eleven in 1997. We both wanted to be wizards. We both faced adventures during school—though mine involved fewer dragons. He had spats with teachers and friends, and experienced all the angst of growing up as a pubescent teenager. He was everything I wanted except for one thing. He wasn’t gay.
I didn’t know I was gay then, because I didn’t even know I was a guy then. I was a teenage girl reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by lamplight while Harry watched Draco Malfoy’s every move on the Marauders’ Map, by wandlight. But while an abundance of magic stopped technology from working at Hogwarts, in the muggle world, the Internet was taking off. On the Internet, Harry Potter could be gay. And so could I.
I’m not the only queer writer with this origin story—nor is Harry Potter the only fandom through which baby queers experienced personal revelations—but those stories go something like this: Many of today’s twenty- to thirtysomething authors grew up during a time when Young Adult was beginning to take shape as a defined category and become part of the larger popular culture conversation, and during which the Internet provided a way for people to discuss their interests. Though fanfic has existed for much longer, through zines and other creative works, our generation experienced it with unprecedented speed and convenience.
Those of us with Internet access could spend hours online, often during which our parents had no clue what we were doing. I was privileged to attend a high school that instituted a laptop program, and, in the early 2000s, Internet safety extended to “don’t use your real name online.” So, while I was waiting for J. K. Rowling to finish writing the next Harry Potter book, I filled the void with wizarding worlds where Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy ventured from enemies to lovers. Where a magical war chewed them up and spit them out, jaded, angry, and mottled with scars. Where they were the only ones who could understand each other. Where they were G-A-Y.
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