The term was originally coined in 1980 by Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke for his short story, "Cyberpunk," which was first published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Volume 57, Number 4, November 1983, although it was quickly appropriated as a label to be applied to the works of Gibson, Rucker, and others.

In cyberpunk literature, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace - the clear borderline between the real and the virtual becomes blurred. A typical (though not universal) feature of the genre is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems.

Cyberpunk's world is a sinister, dark place with networked computers that dominate every aspect of life. Giant multinational corporations have replaced governments as centres of power. The alienated outsider's battle against a totalitarian system is a common theme in science fiction; however, in conventional science fiction those systems tended to be sterile, ordered, and state-controlled. In sharp contrast, Cyberpunk shows the seamy underbelly of corporatocracy, and the Sisyphean battle against their power by disillusioned renegades.

Cyberpunk literature tends to be strongly dystopian and pessimistic. It is often a metaphor for the present day, reflecting worries about large corporations, corruption in governments, and alienation. Some cyberpunk authors also intend their works to act as warnings of possible futures that may follow from current trends. As such, cyberpunk is often written with the intention of disquieting the reader and calling him to action.

Cyberpunk stories are seen by some social theorists as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The virtual world of the Internet often appears in cyberpunk under various names, including "cyberspace," the "Metaverse" (as seen in Snow Crash), and the "Matrix" (originally from Neuromancer, but further popularized by the roleplaying game Shadowrun and later by the movie The Matrix).

Notable precursors to the genre

Cyberpunk writers and works

Raymond Chandler with his bleak, cynical worldview and staccato prose strongly influenced the creators of the genre. The world of cyberpunk is the dystopian, hopeless world of film noir, but pushed just a little bit into the future. Philip K. Dick also had a strong influence on the genre; his works contain recurring themes of social decay, artificial intelligence, and blurred lines between reality and some kind of virtual reality. Dick's characters are also marginalized more often than not.

Cyberpunk films

The film Blade Runner (1982) based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in a dystopian future in which synthetic life forms have substandard rights. The Robocop series has a more near-futuristic setting where at least one corporation, Omni Consumer Products, is an all-powerful presence in the city of Detroit.

The short-lived television series Max Headroom also introduced many viewers to the genre.

The Japanese manga-ka Masamune Shirow often writes in the cyberpunk style. His most notable stories within the genre include Appleseed, Black Magic M-66, and especially Ghost in the Shell, which has been adapted into a critically acclaimed anime that questions, on several levels, the delineation between life and simulation. Ghost in the Shell has also been further adapted as a related television anime series called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

The most recent follow-up from Ghost in the Shell is the 2004 anime film from Mamoru Oshii called Innocence: Ghost in the Shell. Beyond his obvious reference to Blade Runner, Innocence: Ghost in the Shell achieves a unique spatial atmosphere and is one of the most philosophical tales related to artificial life. The story, replete with historical and literacy references, "does not hold the view that the world revolves around the human race. Instead it concludes that all forms of life—humans, animals and robots—are equal" (Mamoru Oshii).

Cyberpunk games

At least two role-playing games called Cyberpunk exist: Cyberpunk 2020, by R. Talsorian Games, and GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve Jackson Games as a module of the GURPS family of role-playing games. Cyberpunk 2020 was designed with the settings of William Gibson's writings in mind, and to some extent with his approval, unlike the perhaps more creative approach taken by FASA in producing the Shadowrun game (see below). Both Cyberpunk-titled games are set in the near future, in a world where cybernetics and computers are even more present than today.

Another cyberpunk RPG included the (out of print) game Cyberspace, released by Iron Crown (http://www.ironcrown.com/) enterprises. Corporate corruption is a frequent theme in these games' adventures. The characters often find themselves skirting the law, if not outright flouting it. Recently, the d20 Open Gaming Movement has brought several new entries into the arena, including Mongoose's d20 Cyberpunk and LRG's Digital Burn.

In 1990, in an odd re-convergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games's headquarters during Operation Sundevil and confiscated all their computers. This was—allegedly—because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public's impression. Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation. (See the GURPS Cyberpunk page.)

Role-playing games have also produced one of the more unique takes on the genre in the form of the 1989 game series Shadowrun. Here, the setting is still that of the dystopic near future; however, it also incorporates heavy elements of fantasy literature and games, such as magic, spirits, elves, and dragons. Shadowrun''s cyberpunk facets were modeled in large part on William Gibson's writings, and the game's publishers, FASA, have been accused by many as having directly ripped off Gibson's work without even a statement of influence. Gibson, meanwhile, has been reported to be less than impressed with the inclusion of elements of high fantasy within clearly derivative setting elements and storytelling techniques that he had pioneered. Nevertheless, Shadowrun has introduced many to the genre, and still remains popular among gamers.

The trans-genre RPG Torg (published by West End Games) also included a variant cyberpunk setting (or "cosm") called the Cyberpapacy. This setting was originally a medieval religious dystopia which underwent a sudden Tech Surge. Instead of corporations or corrupt governments, the Cyberpapacy was dominated by the "False Papacy of Avignon". Instead of an Internet, hackers roamed the "GodNet", a computer network rife with overtly religious symbology, home to angels, demons, and other biblical figures.

Another notable RPG based on cyberpunk is Uplink, Created by Introversion Software in 2002, in which the player works as a freelance hacker in 2010 and takes jobs from different corporations. Missions range from stealing files from rival companies to the final mission where the player tries either to destroy the Internet or save it from complete destruction.

Computer games have frequently used cyberpunk as sources of inspiration. The most prevalent of these are the System Shock series, the Deus Ex series and the Shadowrun video games.

Further developments

An unusual sub-sub-genre of cyberpunk is steampunk, which is set in an anachronistic Victorian environment, but with cyberpunk's bleak, film noir world view. The Difference Engine was probably the novel that helped bring this genre to the forefront.

The emerging genre called postcyberpunk continues the preoccupation with the effects of computers, but without the assumption of dystopia or the emphasis on cybernetic implants.

The early nineties saw the emergence of biopunk, a derivative sub-genre building not on informational technology but on biology, the other dominating scientific field of the end of the twentieth century. Individuals are enhanced not by mechanical means, but by genetic manipulation of their very chromosomes. Paul Di Filippo is seen as the most prominent biopunk writer.

Quote

"Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. We can do just about anything you can imagine to rats. And closing your eyes and refusing to think about this won't make it go away. That is cyberpunk." —Bruce Sterling

Neuromancer

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Published in 1984, Neuromancer was author William Gibson's first novel. It won the 1984 Nebula award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and Hugo Award the following year. The novel is considered to be the first proper cyberpunk novel.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Contents [hide]

Setting

Set in a dystopian future which many readers find chillingly plausible, this book explored ideas such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, multinational corporations dominating the world at the expense of the nation-state, and cyberspace (a computer network called the Matrix) long before these ideas were fashionable in popular culture. Gibson also explored the dehumanizing effects of a world dominated by ubiquitous and cheap technology, writing of a future where violence and the free market are the only things upon which one may rely.

Characters

Case: The anti-hero. A drug addict and cyberspace hacker whose nervous system was burnt out by some of his business partners who used a Russian mycotoxin after he ripped them off. When Armitage offers to help him he jumps at the offer.

Molly: A "Razorgirl" who is recruited along with Case by Armitage. She has extensive body modifications, most notably blades under her fingernails which can be used like claws, an optimized reflex system and implanted lenses covering her eyesockets with added optical enhancements.

Armitage: He is (apparently) the main patron of the crew. Formerly a Green Beret named Colonel Willis Corto, who took part in the Screaming Fist operation. He was heavily injured both physically and psychologically, and the "Armitage" personality was constructed as part of experimental "computer-mediated psychotherapy" by Wintermute, one of the artificial intelligences seen on the story (the other one being the eponymous Neuromancer) which is actually controlling the mission. As the novel progresses, Armitage's personality slowly disintegrates.

Peter Riviera: A thief who can project images using his implants. He is a drug addict, hooked on a mix of heroin and cocaine.

Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool: The shared current leader of "Tessier-Ashpool SA", a company running Freeside, a resort in space. She lives in the tip of Freeside, known as the "Villa Straylight". She controls the hardwiring that keeps the company's AIs from exceeding their boundaries of intelligence.

Reference

William Gibson, Neuromancer, published by Ace Books, ISBN 0441569595

External Links

Study Guide for Neuromancer by Paul Brians of Washington State University (http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/neuromancer.html)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer"

Categories: 1984 books | Dystopian novels | Science fiction novels | The Sprawl trilogy

Logan's Run

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Logan's Run (novel)

Novel by William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson
Released	1967
Original publisher (U.S.)	N/A
Genre	Science fiction
Professional reviews
SF Reviews.Net	T. M. Wagner	link (http://www.sfreviews.net/logansrun.html)
Logan's Run (movie)

Released	1976
Studio	MGM
Director	Michael Anderson
Producers	Saul David, Hugh Benson
Screenwriter	David Zelag Goodman
Music	Jerry Goldsmith
Cast	Michael York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter, Peter Ustinov, Farrah Fawcett
Aspect ratio	2.35:1 Todd-AO 35
Running time	120 min
IMDb listing	link (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/)

Logan's Run is a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, published in 1967. A film version was made in 1976, directed by Michael Anderson, which was filmed mostly in a Dallas, Texas shopping mall. A television version was made from 1977 to 1978, produced by Ivan Goff.

Contents [hide]

1 Exposition

2 Plot Introduction

3 Differences between Novel and Film

4 Plot Conclusion

5 Sequels and Spinoffs

6 Style

Exposition

"The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength.

By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on earth were under twenty-one years of age.

The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage.

In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 per cent.

In the 1990s, 82.4 per cent.

In the year 2000—critical mass."

Plot Introduction

In the future, the population's age is limited at twenty one years (thirty in the movie version). When people reach that limit — called Lastday — they are euthanized in a Sleepshop; in the film, there is a ceremony called Carousel, in which they believe they will be reborn. A person's age can be told by looking at a life clock crystal in the palm of their hand, that glows a different colour depending on their age. On Lastday it blinks red.

Runners are people who want to escape this fate. Logan 5 (Logan 3 in the novel), a Deep Sleep Operative, or sandman who polices the Carousel process, becomes a runner himself when his life clock is put forward so he can work undercover. Jessica 6, a contact Logan has because he terminated her runner brother, helps Logan to find the mythical "sanctuary", a place of safety for runners outside of the massive cities that the population is centered in.

Differences between Novel and Film

The film is reasonably faithful to the novel in its first half, with some specific differences. The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the final remnants of humanity live in a domed city sealed off from the outside. Thus the population control policy is designed to prevent overpopulation of the dome. In the novel there has been no worldwide apocalyptic war, but some cities from the past (such as Washington D.C.) have been ruined in a smaller war. Most cities are massive, global, and thriving, which makes the forced euthanasia premise much more cynical. The novel does not contain the Carousel nor the concept of life renewal. Also, in the movie, Logan is assigned by the city's computer to go undercover as a Runner to find Sanctuary and destroy it. In the book, Logan decides to undertake this quest himself on his own Lastday, so that he will be remembered as a hero. For most of the book, therefore, Logan is a much darker character, an antihero, with his character arc being his growing sympathy towards Runners and ultimate desire to reach, not destroy, Sanctuary.

In the movie, Logan finds an ankh pendant on the body of a Runner he has killed, which is a key to Sanctuary. In the novel he finds a card that allows him to contact an underground network of Runners, through which he meets Jessica.

In the novel, Logan and Jessica travel all over the globe. The character of Box, a psychotic cyborg whom the pair encounter, is much changed in the film. In the novel, Logan and Jessica find themselves trapped in an Arctic prison colony, and are told that Box, the colony's most violent and insane inmate, is their only key to escape. In the movie, Box has been placed at Runners' escape route from the domed city, where he captures and kills Runners so that their bodies can be recycled for food. This gives the film a subplot inspired by the earlier film, Soylent Green. Because of Box, in the film Logan concludes no Runner has ever really escaped and that Sanctuary is a myth.

The film's second half is even more markedly changed from the novel, as described in the next passage.

Plot Conclusion

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

In the novel Francis, another sandman, catches up with Logan and Jessica after they have managed to escape the cities. He reveals that he and Ballard, a friend of Jessica and Logan who has helped them escape, are one in the same (he was wearing a disguise). The 40-year-old Ballard is working from within the system, and he believes that it is starting to die. Sanctuary turns out to be an abandoned space colony near Mars. Logan and Jessica escape to the colony on a rocket from the remains of the John F. Kennedy Space Center. Ballard remains to continue to help others escape.

The movie version of Logan's Run had a different outcome. Francis is commissioned by the city's computer network to follow Logan and Jessica. They have found the frozen human remains of others who attempted to escape the city guarded by an android. Logan and Jessica narrowly escape the android and conclude that Sanctuary does not exist. In the ruins of Washington D.C., Logan and Jessica meet an old man -- well beyond the thirty-year lifespan that citizens are allowed, and in a confrontation between Logan and Francis, learn that the restrictions on population, Carousel, and the bases for their society are no longer necessary. Francis dies in the fight.

Logan, Jessica, and Old Man decide to return to the City Of Domes to prove the entire human race wrong. Old Man waits at the City borders while Logan and Jessica again penetrate city seals to return inside the Domes. As Logan declares to the city populace the truth about Carousel and the possibility of extended life, both he and Jessica are captured and arrested by the Sandmen and placed under the city computer for interrogation. Logan's denial of Sanctuary causes the computer and the City Of Domes' destruction. Logan and Jessica (and eventually the entire City Populace) escape and the under-thirty citizens meet the old man who accompanied them, thus the human race is freed from totalitarian control. The film's ending is much more sentimental than the book's.

Sequels and Spinoffs

Nolan wrote two sequels, Logan's World and Logan's Search, published after the film's release. A brief television series spun off from the film lasted one season in the late 1970s, starring Gregory Harrison as Logan. Marvel Comics also published a short-lived comic book series. A remake of the film has been announced for 2005.

Style

Logan's Run is fast-paced and at times graphic and sexually explicit for the time in which it was written. Although generally dark (forced self-mutilation, sadistic sexual torture), Logan's Run is also quite broadly drawn, with characters such as a cryogenics- and sex-obsessed cyborg, and an army of deadly American Civil War recreation androids.

Harrison Bergeron

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The dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, opens with the line "The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal."

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Unfortunately, this equality has been achieved by handicapping the most intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society down to the level of the lowest common denominator, a process central to the society which is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, who at the time of the story is the shotgun-toting Diana Moon Glampers.

Harrison Bergeron, the title character, is by age 14 exceptionally gifted in all three aspects -- already seven feet tall, "a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder" -- and outgrowing hindrances faster than the Handicapper General's office can think them up. When he is taken to prison for plotting to overthrow the government, for a moment he escapes and manages to break free of his imposed handicaps, and into a television studio:

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook. "Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

The ensuing hullabaloo is televised, with the Handicapper General herself eventually arriving to settle things; Bergeron's parents, Hazel and George, are at home watching television, and see the whole thing. However, thanks to their concentration handicaps, once it is all over, they forget what exactly it was that had caused so much excitement.

The story was adapted into a TV film in 1995 starring Sean Astin. It also formed a segment of the 1972 TV production and book Between Time and Timbuktu. It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1961, and is collected in Welcome to the Monkey House.

Oryx and Crake

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Oryx and Crake is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, which was published in 2003.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Returning to the dystopic themes of Atwood's earlier novel The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake presents a very different scenario than that novel's religious theocracy. However, in both novels the collapse of civilization quite noticeably echoes current events.

The protagonist of Oryx and Crake is Snowman, clad only in a bedsheet, who appears to be the last human being on Earth. He's not entirely alone, however; strange hybrid beasts such as wolvogs and pigoons and rakunks are roaming freely. As well, a group of what he calls Crakers -- a mysterious community who seem, at first, to be both human and eerily not quite human -- lives nearby. They bring Snowman food and consulting him on matters that surpass their understanding; thus, Snowman comes across as a post-apocalyptic hermit guru. As the story develops, these assorted lifeforms are revealed to be the products of genetic engineering.

In flashbacks, we learn that Snowman was once a young boy named Jimmy, who grew up in the early 21st century. His world was dominated by multinational corporations which kept their employees' families in privileged compounds separated from the pleeblands. Shortly after Jimmy's family moved to HelthWyzer, where his father worked as a genographer, Jimmy met and befriended Glenn, a brilliant science student.

Atwood's satirical take on current society is presented most pointedly in the jaded activities of these two youths. Jimmy and Glenn spend a lot of their free time playing online computer games such as Kwiktime Osama and Blood and Roses, or watching live executions, Noodie News, frog squashing, graphic surgery and pornography.

Their favourite pastime, however, is an online game called Extinctathon, a trivia game which requires immense knowledge of extinct animal and plant species. Using the codenames Thickney (Jimmy) and Crake (Glenn), they try to work their way up the ranks to become Grandmasters.

On another trip through the dark underbelly of the Web, they come across an Asian child pornography site, where Jimmy is struck and haunted by the eyes of a young girl he calls Oryx, who will eventually become intimately involved in the lives of Jimmy and Crake as all three move toward their roles in the end of the old world and the birth of the new.

Crake used his prominent position at a biotech corporation to launch a project to create the hybrid Crakers. His goal was to create a peaceful society that will live harmoniously with nature. These genetically engineered humans are leaf-eating herbivores and they only have sexual intercourse during limited breeding seasons when they are promiscuous. Thus, many of the conflicts in human culture are removed.

At the same time, Crake created a virulent genetic epidemic that, apparently, killed off all humans except for Jimmy. Jimmy was unknowingly vaccinated with the intention of acting as a guardian for the Crakers. Thus, Crake could be argued to be a mad scientist, albeit maddened by the troubled society he occupied; alternatively, one might see Crake as rationally saving intelligent life from an inevitably dying society. In the story's climax, Crake arranged his own death by manipulating Jimmy into killing Crake for self-defense. At the same time, Oryx died and, thus, we find Jimmy obsessing over his vanished world and, especially, Oryx.

However, the story ends with some unresolved ambiguity as three, ragged true humans arrive and spend some time observing the Crakers. Then, Snowman, in turn, spies on these humans and, on the final page, Snowman walks in the open towards these humans.

The Handmaid's Tale

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Cover of The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale is a 1985 science fiction novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It describes the horrors of a United States in which a religious movement has gained ultimate power, at a time where pollution has caused the majority of women to be sterile.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Themes

A revolution has taken place in the United States. The Constitution has been abrogated and a new order - the Republic of Gilead - has been established, one that rules with the Bible in hand. Most citizens have been stripped of their freedoms. All religions - including Christianity - have been suppressed. African-Americans and others who do not conform to the new societal norms are deported to regions where pollution has reached toxic levels - if they are lucky. The government enforces its dictates with mass liquidations and ritualized executions of religious and political dissidents.

Women are most affected: no longer are they allowed to read, wear make-up, or to choose their clothes. There are five types of women in this new society: Wives, Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids and Econowives.

Wives are at the top of the social structure: they are infertile women married to the Commanders who are the ruling circle of the new military dictatorship.

Aunts have the duty of training and monitoring the Handmaids. In return they receive - relatively speaking - a substantial degree of personal autonomy.

Marthas are also infertile and are deemed unfit for membership in the ruling class but are willing to accept their status as servants to the Commanders and Wives.

A Handmaid is a fertile female whose sole purpose is to have sex once a month with her Commander, to provide him with children who will be treated as the offspring of his Wife.

The Econowives' place in the social order is not clearly defined: they are married to males who are below the status of Commander and expected to carry out all the tasks which, among the other women, are apportioned by class. Why the Econowives are required to do this when they are (implicitly) capable of bearing children and thus, would be as valuable as Handmaids, is not explained.

Plot

The story is told from the perspective of Offred, the handmaid. "Offred" is the name given to her by the new order, since she "belongs" to, or is "of" her Commander, whose first name is Fred. She does not state her "real" name. (In the 1990 film adaptation, Offred gives her real first name as Kate; however, this was not derived from the novel.) In fact, none of the characters in the novel are identified as having surnames, which enhances the atmosphere of other-worldliness.

Offred's assignment to the household of the Commander is not her first, but it differs from her prior experience in that she is given, in various disjointed episodes, glimpses that all is not as it seems in the new world and that the people in her life, while paying lip service to society's mores, seek various means of expressing their individuality.

Slowly, it begins to dawn on Offred that the Bible is only used as a crutch; she seems to remember that the verses quoted at her were not actually in the book, but how can she verify this if she is not allowed to read?

Appendices following the story proper treat Offred's narrative as a historical document, implying an academic setting even farther into the future. In this respect The Handmaid's Tale is similar to Egalia's Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg or Dune by Frank Herbert.

Adaptations

A 1990 film adaptation of the novel was directed by Volker Schlöndorff. It starred Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. The libretto of Poul Ruders' opera, which premiered in 2003, is also derived from the novel.

A Friend of the Earth

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T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel A Friend of the Earth (2000) is a story of environmental destruction. The novel is set in 2025; as a result of global warming and the greenhouse effect, the climate has drastically changed, and, accordingly, biodiversity is a thing of the past.

Due to habitat loss, many animal species have become extinct, but also the flora has considerably suffered. Many foods, including beef, eggs, beer, etc., are no longer readily available. Instead, rice is grown everywhere, and sake is the only alcoholic beverage available. Other vegetables are grown in domed fields. El Niño has become an everyday companion of the inhabitants of the United States: strong winds are continuously blowing, and there is heavy rainfall for several months every year. In the dry season, it is unbearably hot.

Deforestation has occurred for two reasons: (a) the storms, which have uprooted whole forests; and, (b) the timber industry's limitless destruction of primeval forests all over the world, including the tropical rainforest. On top of it all, modern science has invented lots of artificial ways to prolong human life (for example, there are TV ads for organ transplants), and longevity among humans is now a fact with life expectancy having climbed to over the 100-year mark. Consequently, the world is massively overpopulated. In the U.S.A., what used to be unspoiled nature is now residential areas, with condominiums having sprung up everywhere. Inside these condos, people who do not care about the environment live their lives in front of their computers and televisions.

At no point in the novel does Boyle enter into a discussion of the political situation, but there are various hints hidden in the text which tell us that the social security system has crumbled and that many older Americans are left to their own devices, without a regular income, many of them seemingly even without a roof over their heads.

Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

A Friend of the Earth is the story of Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a U.S. citizen born in 1950, half Irish Catholic and half Jewish ("I'm a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro-eco-capitalistico guilt: I can't even expel gas in peace."), whose personal tragedy fits in with, and adds to, the gloomy atmosphere created in the novel.

Egged on by Andrea, the woman he loves, he becomes a convinced and committed "ecoteur" in the 1980s, is imprisoned for several years, but eventually cannot change anything. On top of that, he suffers the loss of his first wife when their daughter is only three and of his daughter when she is only 25. When the novel opens, Tierwater is a 75-year-old disillusioned ex-con living on the estate of a famous pop star somewhere in California and looking after the latter's private menagerie.

Maclovio Pulchris, the singer, has had the idea of preserving some of the last surviving animals of several species in order to initiate a captive breeding programme at some later point in time, choosing to preserve the animals no-one else would. Tierwater has been working for Pulchris ("Mac") for ten years when, in 2025, Andrea, his ex-wife and stepmother to his daughter Sierra, contacts him after more than 20 years. She and a friend of hers, April Wind, move in with Tierwater, officially for April Wind to write a biography, or rather hagiography, of Sierra Tierwater, his daughter, who died in 2001 as a martyr to the environmentalist cause. (A "tree-hugging cunt", as their opponents called her, she falls off a tree in old growth woodland in which she has been living for about three years.)

In the course of the next few months the situation deteriorates even more: The rain and the wind destroy the animals' cages, and subsequently they have to be kept in Pulchris's basement. One morning one of the lions gets loose, attacks the singer, and kills him and a number of employees. As a consequence, the other lions are shot -- and thus lions as a species become extinct. (There is just one surviving lion in the San Diego Zoo left.)

Jobless and penniless, Tierwater, who has fallen in love all over again with Andrea, is evicted from the estate by Pulchris's heirs, and he and Andrea are on the road, heading for a mountain cabin owned by E.F.! (Earth Forever!), a cabin somewhere in the forest which decades ago served them as a hideout. They arrive there with only one of Pulchris's animals in tow: Petunia, the Patagonian fox, which they now keep as their domestic animal, passing it off as their dog.

In the final scene of the book, a teenaged girl comes hiking along the trail where the forest surrounding the dilapidated cabin would have been, and Tierwater and Andrea, who again call themselves husband and wife now, have a glimmer of hope that life is going to be again what it was 30 years ago. In spite of everything, the novel ends on an optimistic note.

Some of the icons of the environmental movement mentioned in the text:

Edward Abbey [The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)]
Aldo Leopold [A Sand County Almanac (1949)]
Edwin Muir
Arne Naess (Deep Ecology)
Henry David Thoreau

Allusions to other novels by T.C. Boyle:

Officer Jerpbak, who makes his first appearance in Budding Prospects (1984).

In the neighbourhood of Maclovio Pulchris's estate, there is a walled-in community reminiscent of that in The Tortilla Curtain (1995).

A lot more background information can be found at http://www.tcboyle.com .

Fahrenheit 451

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Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a dystopian science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury. It is set in a world where books are banned and critical thought is discouraged; the central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a "fireman" (which, in this case, means "book burner"). 451 degrees Fahrenheit is stated as the temperature at which paper ignites and begins to burn. See fire point.

Contents [hide]

1 Plot

2 Analysis

3 Film and radio versions

4 Influence on popular culture

5 ISBNs

6 External links

Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

After meeting a girl named Clarisse McClellan, Montag, a fireman who sets fire to houses possessing contraband books, starts questioning the world he lives in. The plot is driven by Montag's rejection of the mindless world which he inhabits. He begins to collect books, to the horror of his wife, Mildred, whose only interest in life is the viewing of vacuous television shows (a parody of 1950's programming). When ordered to put fire to his house, he does so before turning his flamethrower on Beatty, his fire chief. With the aid of Faber, a well-educated but timid old man, he eludes a police search and escapes the Mechanical Hound, a robotic tracking device. Montag flees into the forest, where he joins a wandering band of intellectual rebels, who have committed books to memory. The book ends as he watches "the city" destroyed by an atomic bomb.

Analysis

Although given the time of the book's publication, its theme brings to mind the repression of intellectual freedom that characterised the McCarthy Era, Bradbury's critique of the censorial tendency also encompasses acts motivated by radical egalitarianism and what would today be called political correctness.

The book also deals with apathy toward and ignorance regarding one's surroundings and a devotion to the law of the sort characterized for many by Nazi Germany. Montag lived his life as a fireman without thinking about his actions: to him, books were banned and he was only enforcing the law. Montag is awoken initially to the possibility that the law might be wrong through encounters with the eccentric girl named Clarisse, and by watching a woman burn with her books. Montag then began to wonder what the books could contain that would make some give their lives for them and others want to destroy them. This drives him to an eventual meeting with the Fahrenheit 451's wise man Faber. Montag then realizes that all this time he had sought to destroy that which he didn't understand.

Film and radio versions

The book, with some plot changes, was made into a film in 1966 by François Truffaut, with Oskar Werner as Montag. There are plans for a remake in 2005, directed by Frank Darabont.

In addition to the movie, there have been at least two BBC Radio 4 dramatisations, both of which follow the book very closely.

Influence on popular culture

The title of Bradbury's book has become a well-known byword amongst those who oppose censorship, in much the way George Orwell's 1984 has (although not to the same extent). As such, it has been alluded to in dozens of later contexts, amongst them the ACLU's 1997 whitepaper Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning? and Michael Moore's 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Equilibrium (2002 movie)

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Equilibrium is an action-filled science-fiction film set in the future. Similarities to classic dystopian novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World are evident.

Contents [hide]

1 Story

2 Cast & Crew

3 Gun Kata

4 External links

Story

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The movie is set in 2072, where mankind has survived a nuclear war and has been to the brink of extinction.

Knowing that the next war would annihiliate them, the survivors decided that emotions were the cause of man's "inhumanity to man", and have decided to make them illegal. In the fictional city Libria, everyone has to take doses of the (fictitious) drug prozium, which prevents men from being sad or angry. The drug also removes emotions like love and hapiness, but the powers-that-be find that it is a small price to pay to have peace.

However, a group of rebels feeling that without emotions man is nothing, refuse to take their daily dosage of prozium and have moved out of Libria. These "emotional deviants" are hunted down and killed by the Clerics, Libria's ninja-like secret police.

Cast & Crew

Kurt Wimmer - Director/Writer
Christian Bale - John Preston
Emily Watson - Mary
Taye Diggs - Brandt
Sean Bean - Partridge
Sean Pertwee - Father

Gun Kata

Gun Kata is a fictitious gun-fighting martial arts discipline that features as part of the movie. Gun Kata is based upon the premise that the positions and actions of antagonists can be predicted to a high degree of accuracy in any given combat situation.

External links

IMDb entry on Equilibrium (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/)
Apple trailer (http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/equilibrium.html)
Gunkata the deadly martial art of handgun self-defense

The Domination

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The Domination is a dystopian alternate history series of four novels written by S. M. Stirling. The world of The Domination diverges from our world at the time of the American Revolutionary War, when the Netherlands declares war on the UK, resulting in the loss of its Cape Colony to the British. After defeat in Revolutionary War, the Loyalists who historically went to Canada are instead moved to the new Crown Colony of Drakia in South Africa. The Crown Colony of Drakia (later, the Dominion of Draka) is an aggressive militaristic slave-owning society reinforced over the course of the 19th century by Icelanders, French royalists, defeated American Confederates and other reactionary refugees.

Over 90% of the population are slaves (officially referred to as 'serfs', as the Draka maintain the fiction that they are part of the British Empire, which outlaws slavery). In fact the entire Drakan society, from sex to the economy, is based on slavery. Almost all Draka citizens own at least a few slaves.

The Dominion draws substantially from the ideology of Friedrich Nietzsche and can be viewed as an "Anti-America" - in the sense that like the United States, the Draka nation started off as a British settler colony, but evolved along diametrically opposite lines. While the United States had slavery, even slave-holders had to pay lip-service to the American values of liberty and equality, and the contradiction was eventually resolved by the American Civil War. The Draka, on the other hand view themselves as a master race and unlike the Nazis, actually try their utmost to be such - all Draka citizen children attend sex-segregated boarding schools with an extreme Sparta-like emphasis on physical fitness.

Politically, the Draka state is described as 'aristocratic republic' with a parliamentary system of government. The Archon, the head of state appointed by parliament (elected in free and fair elections), serves for a 20-year term. Draka citizens have a considerable degree of free speech, but fundamental criticism of the slave system is forbidden. The Draka economy is heavily dominated by cartels known as Combines, with ownership split between the state and the Landholders' League (Citizens can only own the right to use land, not the land itself, which can be confiscated in the event of neglect or misuse). There is also a considerable small-business private sector.

Because the Draka are so heavily outnumbered, meaning that a general slave rebellion could well mean their extermination, the Draka are utterly ruthless. Impalement is the favoured Draka method of executing rebellious slaves.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

By 1900 the Draka have conquered and enslaved all of Africa. The last areas to be conquered were the jungles of the Congo, due to the danger of tropical diseases. Meanwhile, the United States has annexed Mexico outright after the Mexican-American War. William Walker's Southern adventurers conquer Central America. During the American Civil War the Draka supply massive amounts of aid to the Confederacy, including steam-powered armored cars. However, the Union still wins the Civil War, and annexes Walker's central American empire, along with Hawaii, the Caribbean islands and the Philippines. All these territories eventually give the United States a total of 62 states.

In World War I the Dominion of the Draka loyally joins the Allied side, and conquers the Ottoman Empire, before declaring independence from Britain, renaming itself the Domination of the Draka. It then takes advantage of the Russian Civil War to take over much of Central Asia, and partitions China with the Japanese Empire.

At this stage, under the influence of Draka philosophers such as Elvira Naldorssen, the traditional Draka white-supremacism is replaced by Draka-supremacism, with the Draka viewing all of non-Drakan humanity as their cattle. Elvira explains the ideology of the Domination, the utter amorality of which will lead enemies of the Draka to refer to them as 'Snakes':

"...so the Draka are not different from other peoples because they violate the Golden Rule or Bentham's derivative idolatry 'the greatest good for the greatest number'. Everyone does. We do not violate them, we reject them.

"Others have conquered and ruled; we alone conquer for conquest's sake and Dominate for no other purpose than Domination itself; the name we half-consciously chose for our state is no accident. We, and we alone have spoken aloud the Great Secret; that the root function of all human society is the production and reproduction of power - and that power is the ability to compel others to do your will against theirs. It is end, not means. The purpose of Power is Power.

"The Draka will conquer the world for two reasons; because we must and because we can. And yet of the two forces the second is the greater; we do this because we choose to do it. By the sovereign Will and force of arms the Draka will rule the Earth, and in so doing remake themselves. We shall conquer and beat the Nations of the Earth into the dust and reforge them in our self wrought Image; the Final Society without weakness or mercy, hard and pure. Our descendants will walk the hillside of that future, innocent beneath the stars, with no more between them and their naked will than a wolf has. THEN there will be Gods in the Earth."

The first book of the series Marching Through Georgia is a war story set during the Eurasian War, the Domination timeline's equivalent of World War II. Due to the additional danger of invasion on its southern border by the Domination, the Soviet Union was completely crushed by the Nazis, with only a Siberian rump state surviving under a junta led by Marshal Timoshenko. The Domination entered the war just before the Nazi invasion of Russia, conquering Italy with the tacit consent of the Nazis. Now the Draka have attacked the Third Reich itself, in the Caucasus region. Much of the story is told from the point of view of the Draka centurion Eric von Shrakenberg and the American journalist Bill Dreiser.

The Draka citizen soldiers, female as well as male, are honed killing machines, each equal to several of their enemy on the battlefield. They are equipped with superb weaponry - while the German army is equipped with Panther and Tiger tanks, the Draka have 14,000 Hond III tanks - equivalent in armor, engine size and gun caliber to the M1 Abrams and other real-world tanks of the present day.

For attritional warfare the Domination uses it Janissary slave soldiers, who make up 60% of the Draka army. Draka soldiers neither ask nor give quarter - all captured enemies are killed or permanently enslaved.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor annihilates the entire American Pacific Fleet, with the States of Hawaii and the Philippines under Japanese occupation, and fighting a desperate battle to expel a Japanese invasion of the mainland, the United States is totally unable to open a second front in Europe, while alliance with the Nazis against the Draka is blocked by the Jewish lobby (which naturally see the Nazis as a worse evil due to the Holocaust), and by a Draka threat to supply Japan with nuclear materials and research information in the event of US-German peace.

As a result, once the United States eventually defeats Japan, the Draka have conquered all of mainland Europe and most of Asia. One of the most powerful and horrific aspects of "Marching Through Georgia" is most non-Jewish readers will find themselves rooting for the Nazis, who try in vain to defend Europe against an enemy whose atrocities dwarf those of Hitler and Stalin. In total, the Eurasian War claims some 200 million lives, over three times the death toll of our own World War II.

The second book Under the Yoke is a horrific vision of Europe under Draka rule. Tanya von Shrakenberg is establishing a plantation in formerly-French Touraine Province. Her slaves include Marya Sokolowska and Chantal Lefarge, formerly a Polish nun and a French Communist respectively.

In 1943 the United States set up the "Alliance for Democracy", an economic and military union of the 11 remaining free countries - the United States, the countries of South America, the UK, Japan, India, the South-east Asian and Australasian Federations, and the Indo-Chinese republic. Fred Kustaa, agent for the Alliance secret service, the OSS, is attempting to keep a resistance movement alive in Europe. He smuggles weapons to guerillas in Finland, and latter attempts to smuggle the German professor Ernst Oerbach, who has vital knowledge on nuclear fusion. Marya Sokolowska is Fred's contact in this second mission.

Eventually Draka ruthlessness crushes all resistance in Europe. Finland is eventually almost totally depopulated, and in 1952 when a rebellion takes over the city of Barcelona, the Draka respond with a thermonuclear bomb.

The third book The Stone Dogs tells the story of the Protracted Struggle - the ultra-nasty Cold War between the Domination of the Draka and the Alliance for Democracy. There is a far more intense space race in this world, with colonies and military bases established on the Moon, on Mars and in the asteroid belt.

In the 1970s, just as in our world, there is a major setback for the Free World. An OSS covert operation, designed to discredit a Hindu nationalist party and keep India in the Alliance, backfires as the Draka assassinate the Indian president and plant a suicide note implicating the OSS in the scandal. As a result India secedes from the Alliance - and is conquered and enslaved by the Draka within weeks (except Burma, which counter-seceded and rejoined the Alliance). After the 'Indian Incident' the Alliance for Democracy is formally converted into a single superstate.

The much larger free population of the Alliance give it an edge in physics and computer technology, while the Domination gains the upper hand in the biological sciences by carrying out vivisection on its slave population. Both sides develop their respective super-weapons with which to launch the first strike of the inevitable final war...

In "Drakon", the Domination is pitted against the world of Samothrace, which is populated by the descendents of the Alliance's peoples. The Draka stumble upon an alternative timeline, and the Samothracians rush to counter the impending invasion with an incursion of their own. The showdown between the Draka and the Samothracians culminates in an epic clash in New York City.

External links

Timeline of the world of the Domination (http://www.angelfire.com/fl4/eagle18/nightmares.html)
A criticism of the Draka series

Time out of Joint

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Philip K. Dick's novel Time Out of Joint was originally serialised in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds Science Fiction

The hero, named Ragel Gumm, lives in a quiet, early 1960s American suburb. His unusual occupation consists of repeatedly winning the cash prize in a local newspaper competition called `Where will the little green man be next?' However, he has a problem: every now and then, some object around him, like a hot dog stand in the local park, fades away into nothingness, leaving behind only a small slip of paper with the name of the object printed on it. There are other mysterious aspects: children exploring the basement of an old, ruined house nearby find a pile of magazines. One features an actress, apparently well-known, who Gumm has never heard of, named Marilyn Monroe.

Confusion gradually mounts for Gumm, and the plot then moves to one of his neighbours observing this, who starts worrying `What if Gumm were becoming sane?' In fact, Gumm does become sane, and the deception around him (erected to both protect and exploit him) is unravelled.

The novel epitomises many of Dick's novels, with its concern about the nature of reality, and ordinary people in ordinary lives having the world unravel around them.

Blade Runner

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Film poster for Blade Runner

Blade Runner is a very dark science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott released in 1982. It presents a bleak dystopic vision of Los Angeles in the not too distant future. Harrison Ford stars as "Blade Runner" Rick Deckard.

In the future world of the movie artificially manufactured androids called replicants are used for dangerous and degrading work in Earth's "offworld colonies". Replicants are considered dangerous and are illegal on Earth, and the Blade Runners are bounty hunters who track down and "retire" (kill) any trespassers. Deckard is called out of his own retirement to "retire" several advanced "Nexus-6" replicants who are illegally present in Los Angeles.

Rutger Hauer and Darryl Hannah play two of the fugitive replicants, and Sean Young plays Rachael, Deckard's love interest, whose own humanity is in question.

Contents [hide]

5 Blade Runner and today's issues

6 Blade Runner Trivia

7 See also

8 External links

Creators

Based loosely on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the screenplay was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. The soundtrack was composed by Vangelis.

The term "Blade Runner", used in this film as a designation for people of Deckard's profession, comes originally from a 1974 novel by Alan E. Nourse, The Bladerunner, the protagonist of which is a smuggler of black-market surgical implements. Nourse's book inspired William S. Burroughs's book, Bladerunner, A Movie, a script treatment in the form of a novel. Neither Nourse's novel nor Burroughs's had any influence on Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner except that Hampton Fancher happened upon a copy of Bladerunner, A Movie while Scott was looking for a snappier title for his film - Scott liked it, and obtained the rights to the title (but not any aspect of the plot).

Significance

Blade Runner operates on an unusually rich number of dramatic levels. The movie's dark cyberpunk style and futuristic design have inspired many subsequent science fiction movies, The Fifth Element and The Matrix for example. It also owes a large debt to film noir, containing such conventions as the femme fatale, a Chandleresque first-person narration (removed in later versions), and the questionable moral outlook of the Hero - extended here even to include the humanity of the hero, as well as the usual dark and shadowy cinematography. One of the key subtexts of the plot is to question the nature of reality, particularly with reference to Cartesian dreams which the human and android protagonists may or may not experience; it is therefore probably no coincidence that 'Deckard' is pronounced the same as 'Descartes'.

But it is also perhaps the most literate science fiction work of recent years, both thematically -- enfolding the philosophy of religion and moral implications of the increasing human mastery of genetic engineering, within the context of classical Greek drama and its notions of hubris -- and linguistically, drawing on the poetry of William Blake and the Bible. It also features a chess game based on the famous immortal game of 1851.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Multiple versions

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Six versions of the film exist but only two are widely known and seen:

The original theatrical release (1982), also called the domestic cut.
Two workprint versions, shown only as previews to test audiences' response; one of these was distributed in 1991, billed as a Directors Cut, but was not approved by Ridley Scott. These workprints have occasionally been shown at film festivals.
The Ridley Scott-approved Director's Cut in 1992, prompted by the unauthorized 1991 release. It does not include Deckard's explanatory voice-over. One scene was added: a dream Deckard has when he's dozing off at home drunk playing the piano. It shows a unicorn running through a forest. The final scene, where Deckard and Rachael are driving off into the wilderness, was removed from this edition. A couple of other scenes were extended slightly (mainly just city shots and flying scenes). This is the only version so far released on DVD.
The international cut, with more graphic violence.
The broadcast version, with some profanity removed.

Ridley Scott decided both the voice-over and the happy ending were not suited to the movie. The ending in the Director's Cut has to do with the following included scene: Deckard picks up a small origami unicorn he noticed on the ground when it was knocked over by Rachael as she was walking towards the elevator. This suggests Gaff knew about his dreams, insinuating that Deckard too has fabricated or copied memories, making him a replicant as well.

Scott ended much speculation on the issue stated in a 2002 interview that Deckard is indeed a replicant, although this raises a number of obvious questions. Despite this authorized opinion, some Blade Runner fans have various reasons to think the story is better if Deckard is not a replicant, mainly related to the strength of the conflict and some philosophical implications.

Making Deckard a replicant makes the film less interesting in a number of ways. If Deckard is human, the question of What it is to be human clearly becomes a central issue of the film. When Roy saves Deckard, a replicant is showing a behaviour so human that it makes the definition shake. When Deckard falls in love with Rachel, a human is feeling something for a non-human. If replicants are hunting and falling in love with replicants there is no ambivalence and therefore no conflict.

In 2002, Scott completed a new cut of the film - creating a new digital print of the film from the original negatives, updating the special effects, and remixing the score into 5.1 surround. Unlike the rushed 1992 Director's Cut, Scott personally oversaw the new cut. The Special Edition DVD is said to be a three-disc set including the original theatrical release, the 1992 director's cut, and the newly enhanced version, as well as deleted scenes, extensive cast and crew interviews, and a BBC documentary. Unfortunately, as of 2004, this "Special Edition" release has been delayed indefinitely due to legal disputes with the film's original bond guarantors, who were ceded ownership of the film when the shooting ran over budget.

Related works

Three more Blade Runner novels, which are sequels to the movie rather than the book, have been written by Philip K. Dick's friend K. W. Jeter:

Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1988)
Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996)
Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon (2000)

There are also two computer games based on the movie. One for Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum by CRL Group PLC year 1985 and one PC game (Westwood Studios, 1997), based on the world described by the film.

A good account of the film's history is available in the book Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner by Paul Sammon (ISBN 0061053147).

Blade Runner and today's issues

The world of Blade Runner depicts a future whose fictional distance from present reality has grown sharply smaller during the past twenty years.

The first draft of the entire human genome was decoded in June 26, 2000 by the Human Genome Project, followed by a steadily-increasing number of other organisms across the microscopic to macroscopic spectrum. The short step from theory to practice in using genetic knowledge was taken quickly: genetically modified organisms have become a present reality, with genetically-modified food ingredients an everyday part of human daily diet (at least, in North America).

The embryonic techniques of somatic cell nuclear transfer from a specific genotype via cloning, as well as some of the problems pre-figured in "Blade Runner", were demonstrated by the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996. Since 2001, political efforts have been mounting in many countries to ban human cloning, impelled by a sense of its abhorrence and imminence, while rumors abound that that the first human clones may already have been produced, the most famous example being a claim by the Raelians, a religious group who believes in extraterrestrials.

In all of these developments, a clear tension between commercial and non-commercial interests is apparent, as scientific and business motivations conflict with ethical and religious concerns about the appropriateness of human intervention in the deepest fabric of nature.

Such issues are deeply troubling to many. At core, the creation of life and the ordering of the natural world has been the traditional raison d'etre of gods, and the substance of various creation myths. In the classic Greek tradition, the term hubris denotes actions by humans that usurp roles properly reserved for the gods; heroes who display hubris invariably meet nasty ends (nemesis). Blade Runner has been praised for immersing us in these conflicts, successfully blurring any standard expectations of moral correctness.

Blade Runner Trivia

It has been confirmed by Ridley Scott that the character of Deckard is indeed a replicant himself.
The reference to the sixth replicant from Bryant's description of the escaped replicants is not Deckard but another replicant who was subsequently removed from the movie. Replacement dialogue was recorded for the scene but it was never used.
The final scene in the original theatrical cut was actually unused footage from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
A panel at the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1290561,00.html) votes Blade Runner the best science fiction movie ever.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotes by or about Blade Runner.

Blade Runner entry (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/) at the Internet Movie Database
Blade Runner fan site (http://www.brmovie.com/)
- Special Edition News Page (http://www.brmovie.com/BR_Special_Edition.htm)
- Deckard Is Not A Replicant (http://www.brmovie.com/Analysis/D-a-H_by_MC.htm), essay by Martin Connolly
2019: Off-World (http://scribble.com/uwi/br/), a fan site
- "Was Deckard a replicant?" discussion at 2019: Off-World

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. It tells the story of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, stalking almost-human "Nexus-6" androids (referred to derogatorily as "andys") through the gloomy, partially deserted streets of a future San Francisco. It was adapted very loosely into the screenplay for the 1982 film Blade Runner.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The plot and characterizations of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are different in a number of ways from that of Blade Runner. The novel is both more surreal and more complex than the movie, as the movie was based on the themes rather than the plot of the novel.

The future portrayed is a bleak one, in which the Earth is dying after a nuclear war, and many people have emigrated "off-world" to the space colonies. Animals are extremely rare, and hence extremely valuable. In fact, owning an animal is something of a status symbol. For many, an artificial animal is the only affordable alternative. Rick Deckard himself owns an electric sheep, a replacement for a living one which had died some time ago. His peers are ignorant to the change, and it is a source of shame to Deckard.

The androids are given as slaves as an incentive to colonizers of Mars, but their presence is illegal on Earth. They can be differentiated from true humans in only a few ways: the Voigt-Kampff empathy test, an inferior and obsolescent "Boneli" test based on timing reflex responses, and a bone marrow scan. Strictly speaking, the term android is an accurate one as the term suggests biological composition; the beings in the novel are genuinely organic. (In modern SF, the term has come to refer to machines instead, as in the Star Wars movies, which in a strict sense might be inaccurate. Excessive debate on such finer details is likely to encounter deep complications, the very issues which Dick—and Isaac Asimov before him—explored along the human-mechanical boundary.) The androids live a maximum of roughly four years, since their cells cannot be replaced as they deteriorate. The novel states that this is a shortcoming of the android technology; in contrast, the film Blade Runner depicts the four-year lifespan as a safety feature, deliberately included so that the android beings could not grow into fuller humanity.

Unlike the film adaption, Deckard is not an android; he passes the Voigt-Kampff test. He is, however, alarmed to find that unlike another bounty hunter, he has started to develop empathy for androids. At one point Deckard proclaims that the androids are alive, in meaningful if not legal ways.

Another significant feature of the novel, entirely absent from the movie Blade Runner, is the religion of Mercerism. Founded by Wilbur Mercer, a man who had the power to reverse the decay process and restore life into dead animals, Mercerism blends the concept of a life-death-rebirth deity with the scientific theory of entropy. Worshipers use an empathy box, an electronic device which instills in its user a hallucination of sharing Mercer's sufferings. Androids, even the advanced Nexus 6 models, cannot participate in Mercerism, as they lack the necessary trait of empathy. It can be assumed that asking a suspected android to use an 'empathy box', as they are called in the novel, would be a simple way to determine if they are indeed an artificial human.

Another feature of the scenario is the 'Penfield Mood Organ', which induces emotions in its users. The user can dial a setting to obtain a mood. Examples include setting 481, "awareness of the manifold possibilities of the future", 888, "the desire to watch television, no matters what's on it", and 3, the "desire to dial." Many users have a daily schedule of moods to which they adhere.

ISBN numbers

ISBN 0345404475 (paperback, 1996)
ISBN 0783895186 (hardcover, 2001, Large Type Edition)

Candide

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Candide (1759) is a short novel by the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire.

Sardonic in outlook, it follows the naive protagonist Candide from his first exposure to the precept that "all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds," and on through a series of adventures that dramatically disprove that precept even as the protagonist clings to it. The novel satirizes the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz. In "Candide", Leibniz is represented by the philospher Dr. Pangloss, the tutor of the title character. Despite a series of misfortunes and misadventures, Pangloss continually asserts that "tout est au mieux" ("everything is for the best") and the he lives in "le meilleur des mondes possibles" ("the best of all possible worlds).

Voltaire never openly admitted to having written the controversial Candide. The work is signed with a pseudonym: "Monsieur le docteur Ralph," literally "Mr. Dr. Ralph."

Leonard Bernstein based an operetta (1956) on Voltaire's story. For information on this, please see Candide (musical).

See also: panglossianism- dystopia

Memorable passages of Candide

The one which begins with the Venetian senator Pococurante's summing up for his visitors his views of the authors whose works comprise his library.

<< Les sots admirent tout dans un auteur estimé. Je ne lis que pour moi ; je n'aime que ce qui est à mon usage. >> Candide, qui avait été élevé à ne jamais juger de rien par lui-même, était fort étonné de ce qu'il entendait ; et Martin trouvait la façon de penser de Pococuranté assez raisonnable.

English translation:

"Fools admire everything in an author of reputation. For my part, I read only to please myself. I like only that which serves my purpose." Candide, having been educated never to judge for himself, was much surprised at what he heard. Martin found there was a good deal of reason in Pococurante's remarks.

External links

French text from University of Virginia: [1] (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-french?id=VolCand&tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/french-parsed)
English translation at the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford (http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/x_voltfnd/etc/e-texts/prose/voltaire/index_prose_candi.html)
Candide by Voltaire - electronic text (http://www.elook.org/literature/voltaire/candide/)
A letter written by Voltaire to the Journal encyclopédique in which the author denies being the author of Candide: [2] (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/Candide/Candide.letter.html)

Twelve Monkeys

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Twelve Monkeys is a science fiction conspiracy theory movie directed by former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam and inspired by the short film La Jetée. It deals with problems of time and memory, and features a memorable performance by Brad Pitt as a seriously deranged animal liberationist.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, who believes he has been sent to our time from a future in which apocalyptic events (initiated by a group calling itself the Army of the Twelve Monkeys) have killed 90% of humanity and forced the survivors into a bleak subterranean existence; his mission is to study the events leading up to the apocalypse. Alternatively Cole could be just plain insane.

On his arrival back in 1996, Cole is arrested and institutionalised, whereupon he encounters Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt's character) and also meets Dr Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), an expert in insanity related to prophecy. Initially Railly has Cole down as delusional, but as events unfold she begins to take him seriously.

Struggling with his own sanity, Cole, assisted by Railly, strives to unravel the mystery of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. As Railly starts to believe his story, Cole begins to doubt his own knowledge of the future. In the end it transpires that Goines and the Twelve Monkeys were not responsible for the spread of the disease which afflicted mankind but another person altogether...

Trivia

Towards the end of Twelve Monkeys there is a scene set in a movie theater. The film seen playing in the background of these shots is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the scene that appears is that of Scottie and Madeleine in Big Basin Redwoods State Park where Madeleine looks at the growth rings of a felled giant redwood and traces back events in her past life as Carlotta Valdez ("here I was born... and here I died"). As well as obviously resonating with larger themes in Twelve Monkeys, this scene can also be considered Gilliam's tip of the hat to Chris Marker, whose La Jetée inspired Twelve Monkeys. La Jetée features images of tree rings in several museum scenes, and the connection between La Jetée and the scene from Vertigo is also observed explicitly by Marker in his 1982 documentary montage Sans Soleil.

A "making of" documentary about the film, The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys, was made by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe.

Technical data

writing credits: David Webb Peoples, Janet Peoples
music: Paul Buckmaster, Tom Waits, Bernard Herrmann (from Hitchcock's "Vertigo")
runtime: 129 minutes
sound: DTS-Stereo / DTS
aspect ratio: 1.85 : 1
release date: January 5, 1996 (USA)
budget: $29,000,000
BBFC Certificate: 15
MPAA rating: R

External links

IMDb entry for Twelve Monkeys (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/)

A Clockwork Orange

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A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, adapted as a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. It is widely regarded as a successor to earlier great British dystopian novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.

Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression, "As queer [meaning strange] as a clockwork orange", but that he had found that other people read new meanings into it¹. For instance, some believed that the title referred to a mechanically-responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay for person). Burgess states in his later introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked", that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange -- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil." Rumour had it that Burgess had intended to name the work "A Clockwork Orang" and was thus hypercorrected to the form we know. In his essay "Clockwork oranges"² he says that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's conditional negativistic responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.

The book was inspired by an event in 1944, when Burgess' pregnant wife Lynn was robbed and beaten by four US soldiers in a London street, aborting the pregnancy³.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Contents [hide]

1 Synopsis

2 Film

3 Spin-offs

4 Unrealized adaptations

5 Soundtrack

6 References

7 Related topics

8 External links

Synopsis

Set a few years in the future, it follows the career of fifteen year old Alex. His main pleasures in life are classical music, sex --- both consensual and otherwise --- and random acts of violence ("ultraviolence" in Alex's idiom). He tells his story in a teenage slang called "Nadsat", which uses a Russian vocabulary mixed with English slang.

Eventually Alex is caught and "rehabilitated" by a programme of aversion therapy, which, though rendering him incapable of violence (even in self-defence), also makes him unable to enjoy his favourite classical music as an unintended side effect.

The moral question of the book is that Alex is now "good", but his ability to choose this has been taken away from him; his "goodness" is as artificial as the clockwork orange of the title.

Eventually Alex falls afoul of some of his former victims, and the political fuss that ensues results in the state removing his conditioning; he gleefully returns to his early habits but finds he has lost the taste for it. The 20th chapter ends on a dark note, with Alex listening joyfully to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and eagerly anticipating his return to creating havoc.

At this point some editions of the book end, but there is a 21st chapter which was dropped at the time of US publication. Burgess claims that the original American publisher dropped his final chapter in an effort to make the book more depressing. The intended book was divided into three parts of 7 chapters each, which added up to be 21, a symbolic age at which a child earns his rights (when the novel was written). There is controversy as to whether the 21st chapter makes the book better or makes the book worse. In the 21st chapter, which takes place a few years after the 20th, we find Alex realising that his violent phase is over, but that it was inevitable. A few of the old characters are reincarnated as new friends of Alex. He thinks of starting a family, while thinking that his children will be as violent as he was, for a time.

Film

The book was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, starring Malcolm McDowell as Alex and featuring a soundtrack by Wendy Carlos. It would appear, from one of Burgess' later novels, The Clockwork Testament, that Burgess himself may not have been too pleased by the adaptation that made it to the screen.

Rated X on its original release in the United States, the film was nonetheless nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture (it lost to The French Connection) and reinvigorated sales for recordings of Beethoven's ninth symphony. Later, a censored R-rated version was also released in the US; both the original X-rated and the later R-rated version are today available on VHS and DVD. Notably, the MPAA has since reclassified the X-rated version of the film to R. The film was rated C (for "condemned") by the United States Catholic Conference's Office for Film and Broadcasting because of its explicit sexual and violent content (such a rating conceptually forbade Catholics from seeing the film so rated; the "condemned" rating was abolished in 1982, and since then films deemed by the conference to have unacceptable levels of sex and/or violence have been rated O, meaning "morally offensive").

In Britain the sexual violence in the film was considered extreme at the time, with the press blaming the influence of the film for an attack on a homeless person. It was widely believed that Kubrick's annoyance at this response led to him withdrawing the film from distribution in the United Kingdom. However, in a television documentary made after Kubrick's death, his widow Christiane confirmed rumours that Kubrick had withdrawn A Clockwork Orange from UK distribution on police advice after threats were made against Kubrick and his family. (The source of the threats was not discussed.) That Warner Bros. acceded to Kubrick's request to withdraw the film is an indication of the remarkable relationship Kubrick had with the studio, particularly the executive Terry Semel. Whatever the reason for the film's withdrawal, it could not easily be seen in Britain for some 27 years, until after Kubrick's death.

Spin-offs

Seven years prior to Stanley Kubrick's production of A Clockwork Orange, Andy Warhol had produced a low-budget, artistic version, titled Clockwork (also known as Vinyl). Reportedly, the only two recognizable scenes are those where Victor (Alex) wreaks general havoc and undergoes the Ludovico treatment.

Cast Information, Short Synopsis and Stills (http://www.geocities.com/malcolmtribute/aco/vinyl.html)
Internet Movie Database entry on Vinyl (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215619)

In 1995, a highly-acclaimed pornographic video, titled A Clockwork Orgy, was produced. The video remains very close to Stanley Kubrick's version, in its high-quality sets, production values, and reasonably coherent storyline. The only illogical (but necessary) nuance is that Burgess's "ultraviolence" is replaced by "ultra-sex," and the men "attacked" by Alex(andra) and her "droogs" have a really hard time pretending to be abused.

Cast Information, Short Synopsis and Stills (Partial Nudity) (http://www.geocities.com/malcolmtribute/aco/acoorgy.html)

Unrealized adaptations

Members of The Rolling Stones proposed to film their own adaptation before Stanley Kubrick decided to do so. Other unrealized versions were to contain girls in miniskirts or senior citizens instead of the teenage rowdies.

Soundtrack

As with most major movie releases, a soundtrack was issued for A Clockwork Orange. It may be considered to be a monumental album in that it contains a "first": the song "March From A Clockwork Orange" was the first recorded song to feature the use of a vocoder. It is available on the Warner Bros. label and the tracks are as follows:

Title Music From A Clockwork Orange - Walter Carlos
The Thieving Magpie (Abridged) - A Deutsche Grammophon Recording
Theme From A Clockwork Orange (Beethoviana) - Walter Carlos
Ninth Symphony, Second Movement (Abridged) - A Deutsche Grammophon Recording
March From A Clockwork Orange (Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement, Abridged) - Walter Carlos and Rachel Elkind
William Tell Overture (Abridged) - Walter Carlos
Pomp And Circumstance March No. 1 - Sir Edward Elgar
Pomp And Circumstance March No. IV (Abridged) - Sir Edward Elgar
Timesteps (Excerpt) - Walter Carlos
Overture To The Sun - Terry Tucker
I Want To Marry A Lighthouse Keeper - Erike Eigen
William Tell Overture (Abridged)- A Deutsche Grammophon Recording
Suicide Scherzo (Ninth Symphony, Second Movement, Abridged) - Walter Carlos
Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement, (Abridged) - A Deutsche Grammophon Recording
Singin' In The Rain - Gene Kelly

Three months after the official soundtrack was released, composer Wendy Carlos released a version (Columbia KC 31480) containing unused cues and other musical elements which had not appeared in the film. Kubrick had only used part of Carlos's Timesteps, for example, and the synthesizer rendition of the Scherzo from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony had been shortened. In addition to these materials, the second soundtrack LP contained a synthesizer version of Rossini's La Gazza Ladra, for which Kubrick had used an orchestral performance. In 1998, a compact disc was distributed containing a new, digital remastering of the synthesizer material. The CD contains Carlos's compositions, including those Kubrick did not use, and the cues Biblical Daydreams and Orange Minuet which the 1972 LP had not included.

It is interesting to note that Wendy Carlos had composed the first three minutes of Timesteps before reading Burgess's novel. Originally, Carlos had intended Timesteps to introduce a rendition of the Ninth Symphony 's Choral movement, played with a vocoder. Timesteps was completed roughly the same time Kubrick had wrapped photography for his film; it and the vocoder performance of Beethoven's Ninth became the foundation for Carlos and Kubrick's collaboration.

References

¹ A Clockwork Orange: A play with music Century Hutchinson Ltd, 1987. An extract is quoted on several web sites: 1 (http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/burgess.html) 2 (http://pages.eidosnet.co.uk/johnnymoped/aclockworktestament/aclockworktestament_anthonyburgessonaclockworkorange_page2.html) 3 (http://kubricks0.tripod.com/burgesam.htm)
² Clockwork Oranges: in 1985, Anthony Burgess, Hutchinson, 1978 ISBN 0091360803. Extracts quoted here (http://pages.eidosnet.co.uk/johnnymoped/aclockworktestament/aclockworktestament_beingtheadventures_page1.html).
3 Gore Vidal 'Why I am 8 years younger than Anthony Burgess' United States p411.

External links

Internet Movie Database entry on A Clockwork Orange (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921)
Official site (http://www.clockworkorange.com/)
Review by Tim Dirks at filmsite.org (http://www.filmsite.org/cloc.html)
Quotes from "A Clockwork Orange" at Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange)

Clockwork Orange is also the nickname of Glasgow Underground, the SPT metro line of Glasgow, Scotland.

	transmission time: 31 minutes
	keywords: The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, director's commentary, Andy Wachowski, Warner Brothers, the Oracle, the machines, Agent Smith, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the four quadrants (I/we/it/its), "What Is Integral?," evolution, the Big Bang, your Original Face, satori (sudden spiritual breakthrough), ontogeny, phylogeny, microgeny, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Carrie-Anne Moss, Keanu Reeves, Joel Silver, Stanley Kubrick, non-dual awareness, Los Angeles, metrosexual, A Theory of Everything.
	most memorable moment: "The whole key to The Matrix trilogy is given in the last twenty minutes of the third film...."

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