Ashley Clifton

AI Heaven, AI Hell (Repost)

When I was an English major at the University of Florida, one of the best classes I took was a Survey of Science Fiction Literature course. It covered a lot of famous American and British SF, some of which I had already read as a teenager and some of which were new to me.

Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that two of the writers we read in the class were not only totally different from each other, they also presented two completely opposite visions of what we now call artificial intelligence. These writers were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison.

For Asimov, we read his early, seminal work, I, Robot. This is the short story collection that included his first formulation of the Three Laws of Robotics, which have been alluded to (i.e, ripped off) in countless other science fiction stories, including Star Trek. The book came out before the term AI became common parlance. Yet, in Asimov’s imagined future, the world is rife with robots that are essentially AIs with mechanical bodies. All of them have positronic brains (yeah, Star Trek ripped off this conceit, too) with the Three Laws hard-wired in. The result is that all robots function as humanity’s tireless, benevolent servants. (Some would say, slaves.)

Actually, they are much more than that. They can think, reason, and make choices. In fact, they have to make choices. The moral dilemmas created by the Three Laws as the robots interact with chaotic (and often evil) human beings is the source of drama in most of the stories.

Despite the mystery and drama of the stories, though, Asimov’s vision is a very optimistic, almost Buck-Rogers-esque idea of the future—not quite a utopia but close to it. There is no poverty, no hunger, no war. It’s only upon close reading of the stories in I, Robot that the exact nature of the master/servant relationship between humans and robots appears fraught—probably more so than Asimov consciously intended. This is especially true in a few of the stories, where it’s revealed that future governments are secretly run by the highest order of HAL 9000 style robots, whose plans might be beyond human comprehension.

Later in the Science Fiction class, we read Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing short story I have ever read, sci-fi or otherwise. And, of course, it involves an AI.

The story is mostly set underground, about one hundred years after a nuclear war wiped out all of humanity except for five people. The war was started by a mutinous Pentagon computer (yeah, just like Skynet) called AM that becomes self-aware and decides it hates human beings more than anything. After killing everyone on the planet, it preserves the five people as its playthings, running them through an endless number of elaborate, sadistic games. Unfortunately for them, AM has somehow obtained God-like technological power over physics, able to shape and project matter wherever it wishes, and also to keep the humans alive and immortal in their banged-up, miserable state. So, in effect, the protagonists spend an eternity in a kind of Holodeck-like hellscape, trying to figure out how to either escape or kill themselves.

Yeah, it’s heavy.

This enormous gulf between Asimov’s and Ellison’s visions of the future—an AI paradise versus an almost literal AI hell—is, in part, symptomatic of various generational and cultural shifts between the two men. I, Robot was published in 1950, on the tail-end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the time when the prosperity of America in the post-war years seemed destined to go on forever, fueled by newer and greater technological innovations (AI among them). In contrast, Ellison’s short story was published in 1967, at the height of a counter-cultural revolution that extended into science fiction literature —the New Wave that introduced some of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Ellison himself.

Thus, the difference between Asimov and Ellison’s work is essentially the difference between the lingering triumph of World War II and the horrors of VietNam. Between the optimism of the Atomic Age and the nihilism of the Cold War. In some ways, it’s also the difference between fantasy and realism, and between genre fiction and literary fiction. As dark as Ellison’s short story is, it’s also a much better work of fiction than Asimov’s. More convincing, too, alas. Told from the point-of-view of AM’s youngest victim, Ted, the story is filled with vivid, sharp writing and devastating passages, like this one:

Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

You don’t have to be a literary critic to see that Asimov and Ellison are worlds apart, not just on the subject of Artificial Intelligence but on literally everything. Asimov was a scientist, a rationalist, and his optimistic views on the future of humanity were deeply rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ellison is more of a Gothic Romantic, full of existential angst and cosmic horror. His story is essentially an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the supercomputer in the role of the monster, determined to torment its creator.

Of course, the Frankenstein story is, itself, a reworking of an even older one—the Faustian myth. According to German legend, Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, and ends up going to hell. If the story seems familiar, it’s probably because the legend has been the psychological basis for countless tales of perverted science for centuries. Scientists, the story goes, want to attain the power of God, and thus end up being destroyed by their own hubris (often in the form of some infernal creation like Frankenstein’s monster or, more recently, SkyNet).

Perhaps the biggest irony here (at least for me, personally) is that while I have great admiration for Ellison’s story, and I believe it is a much greater artistic work that anything ever penned by Asimov, Asimov’s vision is probably more accurate of what we can actually expect from the AI revolution. For all the hype about AIs destroying art and music and literature and taking away our jobs, I think AI will be a net positive for humanity. Perhaps a big net positive. It’s already making contributions in the fields of materials science, medicine, and even fusion energy. Yeah, it’s probably going to take away some people’s jobs, but those were probably crap jobs anyway. (If you train an AI to do it as well as a human, it’s probably not worth doing.)

As for the whole AM/Skynet thing, I don’t worry about it because I don’t believe computers will ever become conscious. In fact, the very idea of a machine becoming conscious seems like a category error, the kind of conceit that will seem laughable a hundred years from now as those old drawings of “men of the future” with feathered wings strapped to their arms.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t, someday, create an artificial life form that might replace us. But it won’t be a computer. It will be…something else.

But that’s a subject for another post.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Every Picture Tells a Story”

You can always tell if a classic rock-song was released in the early 1970s because it goes on and on and on. I mean, Freebird? Jessica? Stairway to Heaven? Are you kidding me? The legendary D.J. Wolfman Jack one joked that if he queued up three or four of these songs, he could go out for dinner and be back before they were done.

Every Picture Tells a Story is yet another long rock song that goes on for almost six minutes. Yet, it doesn’t last long enough! The song positively flies by, in part because it…well, tells a story—the rollicking tale of the high-flying, hard-partying, womanizing narrator (who seems a lot like Rod Stewart) and his search for love around the world. With its crazy, open-form lyrics and acoustic, jam-style musicianship, the song really shouldn’t work, but it does, thanks to the combined genius of Stewart himself and his great friend Ron Wood (who was, at the time, not yet a member of The Rolling Stones).

I decided to feature Stewart on this edition of Friday Night Rock-Out because a review I wrote a few years ago of his fine autobiography is getting a lot of hits lately, perhaps because Stewart recently underwent major surgery and people are Googling him. I’m glad my review is popping up in the feed. It was heartfelt.

Get well soon, Mr. Stewart! And rock on…!

Perfect Films: “Us” (Repost)

** SPOILERS BELOW **

Author’s Note: I was bemused by the recent outrage expressed by some very silly (and possibily racist) people regarding the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Noland’s The Odyssey. That is, outrage regarding the casting of a non-white woman in a surrealist fantasy film that is, itself, an adaptation of a surrealist fantasy story from 3,000 years ago. Yes, a movie with cyclopses and sorceresses and a wooden horse (built on a beach with no trees) big enough to hold 20 men but light enough to be rolled into a city!!!

I thought this would be a good time to repost an essay I wrote some time back about Nyong’o’ truly amazing dual performance in a truly amazing film, Us. Enjoy!

The better part of a decade has passed since Jordan Peele’s landmark horror film Get Out was released, marking Peele’s transformation from famed comedy writer and sketch artist to one of the most important filmmakers of our time. Peele has since added two more films to his horror oeuvre—2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope.

All three are great, but my favorite is Us. For me, it hits on the deepest and most disturbing level, and it has the richest palette in terms of effects. It’s also the hardest to figure out in terms of plot. With Nope and Get Out, the viewer has a vague sense of what’s going on, even early in the film (although the details turn out to be more shocking and terrifying than anyone suspected). But while watching Us, I was totally mystified. I knew it had something to do with evil twins—true doppelgängers in both the literal and the psychological sense—but I had no real idea of what the actual plot would turn out to reveal. And what a reveal it is!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Part of Us’s appeal lies in its slow-burn first act. (This is true of Get Out and Nope, too, but Us takes it to the next level.) The movie starts with a flashback to 1986, when a little girl, Adelaide, breaks away from her bickering parents at a beach boardwalk and finds a strange funhouse. It’s a simple premise, yet so much disturbing stuff is going on in this segment that it’s almost impossible to describe. We have the tension between the parents, raising the specter of divorce (the thing most kids fear more than anything else except death). Then, we have the separation of the child from the parents (another primal fear). And, finally, we have the freakish funhouse, which, though apparently deserted, is still lit with eerie neon light.

Nerds in the News: Alex Cohen

Alex Cohen (Photo Courtesy of Clay Mathematics Institute)

If there are two words dear to every sci-fi nerd’s heart, they are quantum and fractal. How many sci-fi tropes have been created over the past thirty years just by adding one of these words to the front of some other, more pedestrian word? “Quantum drive.” “Quantum torpedo.” “Fractal encryption.” “Fractal-verse.”

So, when I stumbled up this article, “Graduate Student Proves a Quantum Uncertainty Principle for Fractals,” whose title has both “quantum” and “fractal” in it, I clicked immediately. And, after reading the first few paragraphs, I realized two things. First, this must be a truly momentous discovery. Second, it’s really, really cutting-edge, so much so that it doesn’t have many YouTube videos devoted to it, nor even a Wikipedia page.

The article describes how a young physicist, Alex Cohen, who was a grad student at the time, published a paper last year which proves “the fractal uncertainty principle to all higher dimensions.” To break that down a bit, the fractal uncertainty principle is an application of Werner Heisenberg’s famous Quantum Uncertainty Principle—which states that certain combinations of quantum properties such as momentum and position cannot be accurately measured at the same time—to fractals, those mesmerizing, infinitely-repeating mathematical structures that look the same no matter how far you zoom in or out on them.

Of course, at first glance, the two concepts seem completely opposite to each other. The uncertainty principle illuminates the limitations of measurement and predictability, while fractals describe completely pre-determined, unchanging patterns that continue into infinity. What gives?

Article in Quanta Magazine Describing Cohen’s Discovery

It seems that ten years ago, another young nerd named Semyon Dyatlov studied how chaotically moving particles (like the molecules in a gas) can sometimes—if they are occupying a one-dimensional fractal geometric plane—get trapped in a fractal-shaped rabbit-hole, following a fractal path forever. Dyatlov wondered if quantum-based particles (such as electrons or photons) could also become trapped in such a rabbit-hole. As it turns out, they cannot. He proved this mathematically while, at the same time, creating a brand-new concept in physics: the Fractal Quantum Uncertainty Principle, orFUP. (A rare, math-heavy video on the subject is pasted at the end of this post. Watch it if you dare.)

Dyatlov’s brilliant work put paid to the question of quantum particles in a one-dimensional plane. But what about worlds with, you know, more than one dimension? Like ours, for instance?

Turns out, the math to handle this question is extremely friggin hard—even for guys and girls who understand one-dimensional fractal manifolds. As a practical matter, the problem might even be impossible.

Well, you know the old saying about what happens whenever a person (usually a very learned, respected old man) says something is impossible; some young whippersnapper comes along and does it. That’s what occurred last year when an MIT doctoral student wrote a paper proving the FUP in all dimensions. Pretty cool, huh?

Of course, I have no idea how Mr. Cohen actually proved this. I doubt he could explain it to me, even if I gave him a year or two of my full attention and an infinite supply of crayons. But I suspect that his proof will turn out to be a huge, consequential discovery, one that will eventually have real-world, practical applications. After all, I don’t believe there is such a thing as pure science. Every time a branch of intellectual study is labelled as “useless,” someone finds a way to use it—and often with world-altering consequences.

Even if Mr. Dyatlov’s and Mr. Cohen’s discoveries fail to bear practical fruit in my lifetime, I’m sure that all the new science and mathematics that springs from it will be beautiful to behold. If you’re smart enough to understand them.

Which, alas, I am not.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Demolished Man”

As usual, I was on Wikipedia the other night, looking up one of my favorite rock songs of all time—“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. There, I was surprised to learn that the first line of the song, “[t]hese are days of the expanding man,” is a reference to a classic sci-fi novel, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Donald Fagan apparently said,

The concept of the “expanding man” that opens the song may have been inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Walter [Becker] and I were major sci-fi fans. The guy in the song imagines himself ascending to the levels of evolution, “expanding” his mind, his spiritual possibilities, and his options in life.

Finding this unexpected reference to Bester’s novel was yet another moment of that Synchronicity for Bookworms phenomomenon that I write about so often, mainly because I had been considering to a post on a great cover I had found for the book. And here it is!

I read The Demolished Man in my late twenties and found it a really bizarre yet engrossing sci-fi novel, one that seems to straddle two eras, “Golden Age” (1940s-50s) sci-fi—with its Buck Rogers’ style future and tropes—and New Wave (1960s-70s) sci-fi—with its trippy, subversive themes and immoral main character. (Roger Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze, which I posted about recently, is very similar in this respect.)

Bester’s novel asks this intriguing question: How does one commit murder in a world where all the police have E.S.P. and can literally read your mind? Yeah, it’s a very, very similar idea to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, which was published three years later. In Bester’s book, people with telepathic abilities—“espers,” who come in ability levels 1, 2, and 3—form a kind of privileged Mandarin caste on 24^th Century Earth. They run much of the government and law enforcement with apparent competence, benevolence, and integrity. They may only marry and have children within their own esper class, and they prefer their own company. Most importantly, they can suss out crimes, either before they happen (usually) or afterward (always).

So, what’s a brilliant, daring, sociopathic billionaire like Ben Reich to do when his mind tends toward homicide? The target of his animus is an older business rival, Craye D’Courtney, whom Reich despises with a passion bordering on obsession. Reich devises a cunning plan to kill D’Courtney at a swingin’ dinner party they are both scheduled to attend, and he hires the services of a rare corrupt esper to run interference. Reich also—in one of the book’s cleverest plot devices—pays a corporate jingle-writer to play him the most annoying, brain-embedding ear-worm she has. Reich knows that he won’t be able to get the jingle out of his head, which will temporarily flummox any espers who might try to scan him.

After Reich does the deed at the party, an esper police detective, Lincoln Powell, shows up to investigate. Using a mixture of his esper abilities as well as good old-fashioned intuition, Powell immediately realizes that Reich is guilty of the murder but can’t prove it thanks to the layers of interference that Reich has devised. The rest of the book is like a futuristic episode of Columbo as Powell pursues Reich across the solar system, trying to trap him and reveal his guilt.

If Powell does manage to catch him and prosecute him successfully, Reich faces neither prison nor execution but a fate far worse—“demolition,” the process whereby espers mentally strip a person of their memories and personality so that they might be “rehabilitated” as a productive, normal (non-evil, non-insane) member of society.

In this way, The Demolished Man becomes a very suspenseful inverted detective novel, with the reader breathlessly following Powell and wondering how—or whether—he will catch Reich. I also found myself rooting for the wicked, rebellious anti-hero Reich, which was clearly Bester’s intention. The last half of the book has some genuinely surprising and cool plot twists, and it’s very entertaining overall—especially if you can get past Bester’s very 1950s, conservative, often misogynistic sensibilities (which are very similar, alas, to Robert Heinlein’s).

I really like this 1979 cover by Adrian Chesterman because it evokes the sense of horror (of demolition, presumably, but also of insanity, self-discovery, and other dark things) that pervades the book.

It’s also just really, really trippy.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Believe”

Cathy and I have been watching season 4 of Dark Winds on Netflix, and I was thrilled to see the fine German actress Franke Potenta playing the villain. She was Lola in Run Lola Run, one of the coolest films of the 90s. (She was also the love interest in the first Bourne movie.) Nice to see she’s still doing great work.

Run Lola Run was also notable for its amazing, propulsive soundtrack, which perfectly fits the action of the film. (You’ll have to watch it to see what I mean.) I liked the soundtrack so much I bought it–on CD, no less. (Yeah, it’s old. So am I.) And I wrote many line of software code while listening to it. Of course, it’s not really “rock.” It’s techno, or EDM, or whatever they’re calling such music these days.

Whatever it is, it rocks.

Here is the premier track, “Believe,” on which Ms. Potente’s voice can be heard speaking. Enjoy!

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 001: “Goldfinger”

Well, the day has arrived. My debut novel, Twice the Trouble, is a Kindle Daily Deal for $1.99 today on Amazon. The offer will stand until 11:59 P.M. tonight, Pacific Standard Time, at which point it will turn into a pumpkin or…something. (Actually, it will just end.)

So, to finish my list of Great Movie Countdowns, I’m selecting what many people think is the greatest James Bond movie of all, 1964’s Goldfinger, directed by series veteran Guy Hamilton.

One of the most magical things about James Bond, the character, is that he knows how to do just about everything. He can fight and shoot, of course. But he can also fly a plane, drive a tank, sail a boat, race a motorcycle, surf, and even (as he shows in Goldfinger) play a mean-and-dirty round of golf.

One thing Bond does not know how to do, unfortunately, is disarm an atomic bomb. Which is a problem, because that’s exactly the threat he faces in the climax of Goldfinger. Bond finds himself locked inside the huge, cavernous vault of Fort Knox, surrounded by stacks of gold bars and handcuffed to said atomic bomb, with just a few minutes ticking down on the device’s timer. (This might be the first use of a digital timer in any major motion picture; let me know in the comments if you can think of an earlier one.)

As if this weren’t bad enough, Bond isn’t alone inside the vault. Goldfinger’s chief henchman, Odd Job, is in there too. If Goldfinger is the best Bond movie ever, then Odd Job is the scariest Bond henchman ever. Played by Japanese-American wrestler Harold Sakata, he has such a great, imposing physical presence—a hulking man who seems barely able to hold his own strength in check. When he crushes a golf ball with his bare hands, we, as viewers, really believe he could do it! But what really makes Odd Job scary is his evil little smile. He always seems bemused, enjoying himself, even when he throws a guy off a balcony or throws his steel-brimmed bowler hat into someone’s neck.

In the movie’s climactic countdown (yes, another countdown to nuclear self-destruction), Odd Job seems determined—even happy—to make sure the bomb goes off, despite the obvious fact that it will mean his own death, too. Odd Job, it seems, isn’t afraid of anything except failing in his mission, which makes him that much scarier.

My classics professor in college once said that James Bond is the modern version of Heracles, who, like Bond, loves to fight, drink, and sleep around. Sure enough, the final battle between Bond and Odd Job feels a lot like a Greek myth, with the hero battling a monster—one with some really scary weapons—to the death. And, as in a Greek myth, the contest ends with an example of poetic irony. Odd Job is undone by his own superpower—in this case, his favorite weapon, that lethal, steel-brimmed hat. Bond manages to get hold of it and throws it at him. It misses, alas, and lodges into some steel bars. Instead of just finishing Bond off, though, Odd Job goes to retrieve his beloved hat, at which point Bond slides across the floor and touches a loose power cable to the bars. Current conducts through the bars and through the steel hat, electrocuting the villain. Thus, the monster is defeated by his own magic.

But what about the bomb? Looking inside the device, Bond seems genuinely clueless, for once, bewildered by all the wires and blinky lights. Pathetically, he even tries to stop the machine’s spinning cylinder (which holds, we presume, the cobalt-iodine mixture that makes the bomb “particularly dirty,” in Goldfinger’s words). All to no avail.

Then, with mere seconds left, a man’s gentle hand sweeps in, stops Bond’s frantic groping, and turns the bomb off with the flick of a switch. With the crisis averted, Bond and the man—who looks like a wizened college professor, wearing a brown suit and hat, his face serious yet calm—face each other. A strange look passes between them. A mixture of relief, puzzlement, and awe, the look seems to suggest the entire absurd, insane reality of the Cold War, if not modern existence itself. “How did we get here?” the look seems to say.

How, indeed.

Shameless Plug: Kindle Daily Deal (Today)!!!

Well, the day has arrived. Twice the Trouble is a Kindle Daily Deal today, August 6, 2026. You get a Shamus-Award-winning and Edgar-Award nominated mystery novel for just $1.99. That’s also 85% off from the edition’s regular price of $14.99.

The deal ends tonight at midnight, P.S.T. (3:00 A.M. Eastern Time).

Get it fast. Supplies are limited. (Actually, they’re totally unlimited–digital books and all that. But still!)

Thank you for your support.

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 002: “Escape from New York”

Well, it’s just one more day until my book becomes a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon (the offer starts at midnight tonight, Pacific Standard Time). The next movie on my Great Movie Countdowns list is my favorite B-Movie of all time, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (EFNY).

EFNY is probably the best example of a classic movie countdown because almost the entire movie is a countdown. War-hero turned bank-robber Snake Plissken has exactly twenty-four hours to find the President of the United States somewhere in the yawning, black hulk of Manhattan, now turned into an open-air prison by the U.S. government. If Snake doesn’t find the POTUS and get him out alive before time runs out, tiny explosives implanted in Snake’s neck will detonate, killing him instantly. Such is the deal made to him by the coldly practical Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (played by Lee Van Cleef in his greatest role since The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly): get the POTUS out alive and you’ll get a pardon. Otherwise, you’re dead.

So, armed to the teeth, Snake infiltrates the island and begins his desperate search. All the while, he keeps checking his special, way-cool digital watch, which looks exactly like a beefed-up version of the first Casio digital watch that me and all my friends had back in the day. The watch doesn’t tell time, of course—it’s a life-clock, counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until Snake’s neck goes boom.

To make matters worse, there are many people in New York who feel that twenty-four hours is far too long for Snake to live. Chief among them is the Duke of New York, the sinister war-lord who controls the prison, played with great panache by the great musician Isaac Hayes, of “Shaft” fame.

Kurt Russell famously said that Snake is always just trying to live through “the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is.” Carpenter’s genius lies in filling every one of those “next minutes” with some new, compelling, and darkly magical moment of mayhem, all of which Snake must overcome in some unexpected and thrilling way.

The final chase scene where Snake and his companions race across the fictional 69^th Street Bridge, dodging mines, with The Duke in hot pursuit is a classic. But my favorite moment in the film comes much earlier, when Snake, realizing he has almost no chance of finding the president, gets out his radio, calls Commissioner Hauk, and asks if he can just come out. “I’ll burn you off the wall,” Hauk coldly replies. At which point Snake looks at the radio and says, mostly to himself, “A little human compassion.”

Snake does, in fact, find that little bit of “human compassion” in the course of the movie, when he makes some new friends who help him escape. More importantly, he finds it in himself, too. But that doesn’t stop him from being a bad-ass.

Great Movie Countdowns – Part 003: “Alien”

It’s T-Minus two days and counting until my book becomes a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon (that’s right, on Thursday, August 6). And, to commemorate this, the next movie on my Great Movie Countdowns list is Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Alien.

Alien is the greatest sci-fi monster movie ever made. And so it makes sense that it also has the greatest countdown-to-self-destruct sequence of any sci-fi movie ever made. It works because of Ridley Scott’s great direction and Sigourney Weaver’s brilliant performance as Ripley, the ship’s sole survivor, who has started the self-destruct sequence herself. In what is surely one of the most impressive examples of physical acting in Hollywood history, she ducks and weaves through steam-filled corridors, holding a flame-thrower, peeking around each corner to see if the huge, metallic-skinned alien is there.

Sure enough, the alien appears, blocking her way to her shuttle-craft, and she is forced to go ALL the way back to the ship’s control room. When she discovers that she’s too late to stop the self-destruct, she briefly breaks into tears. It’s a heartbreaking moment, one which becomes thrilling when she defiantly yells “You bitch!” at MOTHER, the ship’s AI, and then steels herself to reaching the shuttle, alien or no-alien.

I love how the last 15 minutes of the movie function as a complete contrast to the 105 minutes that came before—that is, the first and second acts of the film, which are mostly filled with moments of silent, creeping horror as the crew tries to find the alien xenomorph (before it finds them). The last act, however, is a brazen, nerve-wracking light- and sound-show, full of strobes, klaxons, hissing steam vents and general mayhem as the good ship Nostromo prepares to blow itself to smithereens. Honestly, I’m not sure the film could be made today in the same way, even with a slew of those “epilepsy-warning” messages at the beginning. It’s that intense. I remember seeing the film in the theater and being battered into my seat.

It’s also the definitive sci-fi-self-destruct sequence, better than all that came before or since. (Yes, even better than the “five-minutes-until-the-Death-Star-blasts-Yavin-to-bits” sequence at the end of Star Wars.) It’s just damned good filmmaking.

As noted by film scholar Eleanor Johnson, it also marks an important moment in American feminism, with Ripley being the first completely compelling female action hero in cinema. She’s not only smart, brave, and strong, she’s honorable. She doesn’t need to blow up the ship; she could just escape on the shuttle-craft. But destroying the ship is the only way to prevent MOTHER from flying it back to Earth on auto-pilot along with its horrifying passenger, the alien. So, Ripley risks her own life to kill the bastard. (Which she does, but not in the expected way.)

Pretty freakin cool.