Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 40

by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com; Peter Watts; Megan Arkenberg; Brian Trent

  What I don’t like in movies is empty pretence. All art is pretension, but when there’s a shoddy script, desultory acting and directing, and almost everything good about the picture falls under the umbrella of production values, you have a basic Hollywood movie: pretension without substance; thrillers in which there is no suspense, and the only thrills are jump scares.

  I have an honest affection for many types of films that aspire to be no more than what they are: farces, romantic comedies, martial arts flicks, etc. I like combat sports, so any picture that focuses on aspects of the martial arts or mixed martial arts has an appeal to me. As with anything, for every Ong Bak there are dozens of crapfests — I won’t watch everything, but as a friend of mine said, I’d watch a knife fight in an alley, so I tend to be less judgmental as regards this sort of film. I’d much rather watch a movie like Office Space or The Hangover or Hard Times than have to sit through five minutes of a piece of dreck like, say, American Beauty.

  Your recent retrospective, The Best of Lucius Shepard (Subterranean Press), catalogues much of your career thus far. Looking back at the collection, your career seems to have changed in terms of landscape focus, from outside the US, towards the inside. Was this trajectory natural or considered? (or am I off base here?)

  Well, I did have a big short story collection in 2004 entitled Trujillo that incorporated close to a 100,000 words of Latin American material. The last five years, I’ve spent less time down there, though. Some of that’s due to the death of Robert Izdepski, an activist who operated in Honduras and Nicaragua, and who I counted as a friend and by whom I was inspired to lend my efforts to various projects in the region. No one has come along to fill his shoes, and I simply don’t have the connections to act on my own down there. My new collection contains one new Latin American story, however, and I’m planning to do some traveling in 2010 and 2011, again, though perhaps toward the Far East. Hopefully that area of the world will start appearing in new stories soon.

  While best known for novellas, you’ve also had early and current success with novels such as Louisiana Breakdown and Softspoken, both with very different female protagonists. Did you finding writing a novel from a female POV challenging?

  Not particularly. I have no trouble writing characters based on women I know, women who’ve been part of my life — I’ve concentrated on them and likely know them better than I know my male friends. If I had to make up a female character out of whole cloth, that might be a challenge — I haven’t yet tried that. Still, I’ve had enough close relationships with women that I feel comfortable writing American and Latin female characters of various sorts. We’ll see. I’m fussing with a novella called The Iron Shore that features a female protagonist quite different from the run of my other female characters.

  The publishing world and genre worlds have changed since you started publishing in the early 1980s. From the horror boom and bust of the late 1980s, to the rise of online markets and the death of many traditional avenues for print publishing. What’s the biggest change in publishing now from when you started out, and do you think things are better or worse or just different now?

  Oh, I don’t know. I’m not the person to ask about this, because I’ve never concentrated on career concerns. I’m not saying that’s a good thing — on the contrary — just that it’s true. I suppose things used to be better for writers, at least as far as the illusion of publishing went. Even when I started publishing, though, I heard constant proclamations of doom, and I never bought into the idea that publishers and editors were your BFFs.

  I’m somewhat excited by the advent of companies that don’t adhere to the old publishing model, like OR Books, that intend to publish small print runs, invest heavily in advertising and concentrate on ebooks and POD. That model seems more author-friendly. But to tell the truth, I’m clueless about the situation and always have been.

  Where can folks find your most recent work, and what future projects can we expect?

  I have a short fiction collection that’s due out any day (it’s now Dec 14th) from PS Publishing called Viator Plus, which contains the rewrite of Viator, now a work of some 65000 words. I suffered a breakdown (clinical depression) while finishing the book, and did not complete it as I would have had I been healthy. So this is a make-up call, with 20 plus thousand words added. I also have a Dragon Griaule novella, The Taborin Scale, out from Subterranean in February, and a novella collection from Golden Gryphon, Five Autobiographies, out in late 2010, early 2011. I’m currently engaged in writing two novels, Piercefields, the long genre novel I mentioned earlier, and a slipstreamish YA novel, as yet untitled.

  About the Author

  Jason S. Ridler’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as Nossa Morte, Big Pulp, Crossed Genres, New Myths, Necrotic Tissue, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. “Billy and the Mountain” appeared in Tesseracts Thirteen, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell. His popular non-fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

  “Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age” by Brian Trent

  Ever since 1978’s Space Invaders, science-fiction has been a mainstay of the video game revolution. The genre itself had already been in films for fifty years — dating back to Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis — and debuted in books somewhere between Lucian’s True History and Voltaire penning the alien visitation story “Micromegas.” Video games were a sparkling new form of entertainment, and science-fiction itself was perched on the cusp of being revitalized thanks to Star Wars. William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer was just a few short years away.

  Today of course, science-fiction is grafted onto the very bones of our culture. Quality films like Minority Report, Gattaca, or Moon explore its sociological aspects, TV features the acclaimed reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and new scientific sensibilities have permitted today’s literary practitioners to push the realm into new frontiers.

  And what of video games? For many years they remained frozen in a shallow, space-opera adolescence. The bread-and-butter of science-fiction — speculating on themes of society, technology, and discovery within a rational framework — was brazenly traded up for the glitz and instant-gratification of blowing things to pieces. Even when Space Invaders fell aside in favor of more graphically-enhanced games, the storyline remained as undercooked as ever. Whether it was 1987’s Contra (belligerent aliens in the South American jungle,) Mega Man (belligerent robots in the urban jungle) or Blaster Master (belligerent mutants in the subterranean jungle) the overriding lesson was as deep as a Flash Gordon serial: Thrillingly kill the bad guys and you win!

  Times are steadily changing.

  Technological upgrades and new demands from the game-buying public have matured the game industry in startling ways. Today’s games routinely feature cinematic cut-scenes, professional voice-over work from Hollywood talent, full orchestral scores, and an art direction rivaling big budget films. The stories have grown to match. The best of today’s science-fiction video games dare to tread philosophical, ethical, and sociological territory usually reserved for literature. Evocative settings, layered characters, and imaginative plots are finally lifting games into the spotlight of serious consideration.

  The claim can be submitted that games are making legitimate contributions to the genre.

  Tangible Futures

  Sci-fi is speculative fiction rooted in science. It puts society and the human condition through an imaginative filter. It builds structured worlds and histories. We can loosely group its contributions into the Verne and Wells camps; the former wrote optimistic odysseys of techno-exploration, while the latter probed a grimmer (and often dystopian) depth.

  Interestingly, one of the most notable features of the gaming industry’s growth is the overwhelming adoption of the Wellsian pers
pective. Societal collapse, war, and the negative consequences of technology feature prominently in today’s story-based sci-fi games.

  Consider the Fallout series. Fallout was the spiritual successor to 1988’s Wasteland; both boasted a setting derivative of Mad Max, yet both outstripped their inspiration. A consistent, multilayered post-nuclear culture emerges across the series’ mythos: Nuclear survivors build barter-based societies (the only hard currency is bottle-caps), and malls, aircraft carriers, museums and subway tunnels are used for desperate shelters. Apocalyptic lit tends to divide everything into good-versus-evil; Fallout achieves something more complex as myriad factions try carving niches on a radioactive planet. Added to this toxic stew is a host of mutated competitors; humanity is no longer top predator. Fallout manages to be uniquely stylish about its proceedings, too: a retro-future 1950s look permeates the ruins, and this decaying shell of a jingoistic “Red Scare” culture forms a chilling contrast to the steaming biohazard of your surroundings.

  The Deus Ex series is not so apocalyptic, though it is more realistic. Deus Ex is arguably the masterpiece of gamedom, serving up an intricately-crafted near-future marked by disease, terrorism, and economic collapse (Deus Ex came out in 2000.) The theme here is fear, control, power and transformation, and it comes off as powerful as anything handed down to us from Orwell. A dark, gritty, cyberpunk noir about a frighteningly credible plot to take control of world governments under the guise of “protection,” the story weaves techno-speculation with historical conspiracy theories. It’s also enhanced by stunning political acumen: fictional newspapers read like press releases from post-9-11 America. With a vast open world and riveting script, Deus Ex single-handedly poses the argument for games as art.

  The Legacy of Kain series is chiefly dark fantasy, not science-fiction, but it bears mention for its astonishing inventiveness, time-travel, interdimensional concepts and steampunk milieu. Technically a vampire story, the games’ antiheroes Kain and Raziel are defiant cosmic forces who would be at home in William Blake’s convoluted mythos. In the series’ strongest entry, Soul Reaver, the story begins on the world of Nosgoth where a decadent vampire civilization has crushed the human race. Raziel, once a prince of Kain’s empire, is executed for betrayal. His soul is saved from oblivion by a Cthulhu-esque abomination calling itself the Elder God which feeds on the “life-force” of the planet; but since vampires have established an immortal dynasty, there isn’t so much “life-force” floating around any more. The Elder God (masterfully voiced by the late Tony Jay) returns Raziel to life, letting him get revenge against his brethren while simultaneously using him to overthrow the vampiric blight.

  Raziel reanimates to discover that centuries have passed. Worse, his bloodthirsty enemies have devolved into monstrous things (vampires of Nosgoth undergo a kind of self-Lamarckian metamorphosis.) The planet is appropriately gloomy with smokestacks blotting out the sun, but the real dazzle comes when Raziel shifts to the spirit realm… a warped version of the normal world inhabited by its own creatures.

  The Legacy of Kain series is the video game industry’s answer to Olaf Stapledon; just when you think you have a handle on the world, the story pulls back to reveal that all your actions were the merest wink in an unthinkably large canvas. Other installations in the series have Raziel shuttling to different eras on the timeline, trying to make and unmake a grandiose history. The quality of writing and voice-acting is perhaps the best in gamedom.

  Also worth mentioning is the game BioShock, another moody contribution to the dystopian field. Set in 1960 in the undersea city of Rapture, it introduces us to eccentric industrialist Andrew Ryan. Rapture is a city where, he tells us, “the artist would not fear the censor, the scientist would not be bound by petty morality… the great would not be constrained by the small.” It’s objectivism on steroids, and ultimately casts judgment on laissez-faire capitalism. Rapture quickly becomes a degenerate nightmare.

  Like Fallout, BioShock utilizes the retro-future look for its underwater Xanadu. Striking colors blossom upon Rapture’s malls, hospitals and haunted corridors, while deranged citizens prowl the gloom. Like most modern games, player choice results in one of several different endings.

  The upcoming game Brink promises to form a contrast with BioShock: instead of occurring beneath the waves, Brink will be set on a floating city called The Ark. Inside, the last batch of humans cling to life after an environmental catastrophe.

  War Among the Stars

  Voltaire and H.G. Wells let aliens out of the bottle, but today’s games like Gears of War, Halo, and the spectacular Mass Effect move well beyond the Space Invaders mentality.

  The popular Gears of War (2006) provides a lightning-fast combat experience, although it’s the most derivative of the bunch. Coming across as a hybrid of John Steakley’s novel Armor (the main character Fenix hearkens back to the novel’s Felix) and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, it nonetheless portrays a complex tale of survival against overwhelming odds. The planet Sera has been colonized by humans. All seems well until “Emergence Day,” when the hapless colonists learn an indigenous species — nicknamed The Locust — has awakened from hibernation and is none too pleased at finding its world invaded. Gears of War is gamedom’s exploration of futuristic war, and it does so with a visceral, energetic crackle. The conflict is a grudge match between two species hell-bent on genocidal victory.

  In Halo, the alien threat is not a creature defending its homeworld, but a theocratic confederation known as the Covenant. It’s one of the less desirable First Contact situations: Upon encountering human beings, the Covenant High Priests decide we’re the devil and must be purged from the galaxy. The subsequent war is just the starting point for an intriguing take on the Pandora’s Box legend, with galaxy-wide implications.

  One of the most well-crafted stories in this subset is to be found in Mass Effect. Here’s a galactic epic that makes an entirely credible effort at justifying its fiction in scientific terms. Humanity has begun to spread into the galaxy and finds a millennia-old political structure called The Council already in place. Cordial but not especially fond of us, The Council is privately alarmed by the human race’s ceaseless adaptability and ambition — a probably unintentional nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rescue Party.”

  The game provides less warfare than political maneuver and investigation, with plenty of pragmatic side-quests such as surveying worlds for mineral, gas, and metal deposits on behalf of Earth Alliance. Of course, the main story is a “save the universe” theme, but it’s done in a surprisingly well-conceived implementation that is more original than the bulk of films and books put together.

  Tampering with Nature

  Man’s tampering with nature, one of the earliest sci-fi conventions dating back to Mary Shelley’s seminal work, is popular in modern games. Usually it has to do with bioweapons research; a tangible enough worry in our age of genetic engineering and terrorism.

  Megacorporations are the cold-hearted villains in this subset of games: In the Resident Evil series, Umbrella Corporation is experimenting with the mutagenic T and G viruses. In the Red Faction series, Ultor Corporation is performing gruesome experiments on Martian miners. The game System Shock offers a double-whammy of man’s inventiveness gone bad: a malevolent artificial intelligence named SHODAN (itself the product of the unethical TriOptimum Corporation) decides to set itself up as god and then unleash mutagenic compounds against the Earth.

  In these and other examples, the specters of disease and deformity are prevalent; we are reminded of James Woods’ mantra in the David Cronenberg film Videodrome: “All hail the new flesh!” Cronenberg himself was a popularizer of this concept in Hollywood, gleefully blurring the line between the human body and mutation in films like The Fly and Existenz.

  In late 2008, the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland inspired a thrill of paranoia around the world. Here was something beyond cloning or genetic engineering, people said. The collider supposedly threatened the very fabric of th
e universe. Ten years earlier, the game Half-Life anticipated this with its fictional “Black Mesa Incident” in which high-energy physics experimentation punches a hole into a nearby dimension. No harm done, right?

  The main character is a theoretical physicist named Gordon Freeman. He sports black-rimmed glasses and a goatee, is employed at a secret Nevada testing facility known as Black Mesa, and happens to be working when this incident occurs. The first game in the series is simply his attempt to escape the facility alive… even when the “hole” is repaired, our otherworldly competitors are aware of us now and they’re coming through on their own.

  Half-Life is a terrifying and claustrophobic epic. Freeman encounters some of the most imaginative aliens in sci-fi’s visual media. Even when he escapes the facility, it becomes apparent that the “Black Mesa Incident” is no longer confined to the labs. It’s the proverbial “gray goo” scenario on a planetary scale; exotic flora and fauna are literally transforming the ecology of Earth.

  Half-Life 2 plunges the tale into the grimmest levels yet. While the alien antagonist from the original, a freakish being named Nihilanth, has been defeated, it turns out to be a case of winning the battle but losing the war. An entirely new force called the Combine has moved into the vacuum created by Nihilanth’s defeat, and then kept moving right into Earth. When Half-Life 2 opens, the entire human race has been decimated, with survivors forced into ghettos (there are even some defeated aliens from the first game to be seen, forced into manual labor by the Combine’s shock troops.) Human reproduction is outlawed by a “suppression field” that makes procreation impossible, and there are disturbing hints that the world’s children have been eradicated.