Sci-Fi – Ash Clifton, Writer

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Snow Crash”

It’s hard to believe that 32 years have passed since Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash was published. Not only is it one of the best books of the 1990s, it’s also one of the definitive novels of the cyberpunk genre. In retrospect, one of the most surprising things about Snow Crash is that it’s not really a dystopian novel. It’s more like a satire, a spoof of corporate America’s relentless pursuit of wealth and power in the 21st Century. Its hero (deftly named Hiro) is a Ninja-level hacker by night and a pizza-delivery guy by day. The pizza company he works for is run by the mafia (which has become legal), and if he fails to deliver a pizza in thirty minutes or less, Hiro faces summary execution.

Yeah, it’s that kind of book. It also has some really kick-ass fight scenes.

I love this cover by Bruce Jensen because it’s photorealistic and immediately suggests a narrative, which is perfect for this kind of sci-fi, quasi-adventure novel. More importantly, it captures the crazy melange of elements that Stephenson squeezes into the novel. you’ve got a hero with his samurai sword walking towards a clearly futuristic, cyberpunk city. Paradoxically, he’s passing through an ancient stone doorway that might be a relic from Bronze Age Persia.

It’s an enigmatic cover but also thrilling and stimulating to the imagination. Which is exactly what one expects from a great sci-fi book cover.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Childhood’s End”

When I was in high school back in the early 1980s, Arthur C. Clarke had already been a legend for decades. He was, in fact, one of science fiction’s “Big Three” writers, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. And so, the reprints that Del Rey books released of Clarke’s catalogue were especially clever in their cover art. Created by commercial artist Stanislaw Fernandes, they were minimalist, glossy, and retro (even then). In fact, they were almost art deco in style, somehow managing to suggest the “classic” quality that Clarke’s work had attained. After all, if people already know the author’s name, you don’t really have to “sell” the story itself.

My favorite cover from this line was for Clarke’s best novel, Childhood’s End. I love how it only details two objects: the U.N. building in New York, and the giant flying saucer hovering over it. (This isn’t a spoiler, really, since it happens in the first chapter.)

It’s a very simple cover, yet somehow evocative and beautiful. I especially like the little trident (or is that a pitchfork?) that sits atop the saucer. (I would reveal the significance of this in the story, but that would be a spoiler.)

Perfect Films: “Altered States”

I did not grow up in the 1960s, and I can’t claim any special knowledge of the magical and tumultuous period of American culture. However, I did grow up in the 1970s, when there was still just a faint afterglow of that glorious time. I vividly remember that day in 1975 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, and thus ended the most divisive and catastrophic the U.S. has ever fought. I also remember the election of Ronald Reagan, which finished, once for all, the last vestiges of what was once called the counterculture—that semi-revolutionary, underground movement characterized by sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. (Especially the drugs.)

I remember, in fact, some of my parents’ friends, who were obviously adherents to this so-called counterculture. They wore cool clothes (lots of paisley), drank run-and-cokes, and laughed at everything, as if they were seeing a different world through their bloodshot, dilated eyes. (I am pretty sure some mind-altering substances were involved.)

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

Most of the art I’ve included in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series has been from the 1970s and 1980s. Two golden ages of sci-fi, surely, which, more importantly, marked my golden age of sci-fi—my middle- and high-school years when I devoured all kinds of science fiction novels from the previous decades.

And so it is with some surprise that I submit this episode’s sci-fi cover, which is only from 1998. But it’s still a classic. An instant classic, actually, and not just because it was done for one of the most influential sci-fi novels of all time, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep. Calling PKD a science fiction writer makes a bit more sense that calling Kurt Vonnegut a science fiction writer, or Franz Kafka a science fiction writer, but not much. Like Vonnegut and Kafka, Dick wrote surreal, even psychedelic novels that deal with issues of compassion, violence, identity, sanity. Most of all, they describe the problem of discerning reality from the fake. (The “ersatz,” as Dick likes to call it in his typical Germanophilic style).

Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep is Dick’s most famous book, in part because it inspired Blade Runner but also because it’s just a fine, complex, and vivid novel. Rick Deckert, the protagonist, is a bounty hunter who finds and kills runaway androids (called replicants in the film, these are flesh-based artificial people who look and act like human beings, only crueler.)

The book was published in 1968 and has gone through dozens of editions and covers. But this cover, created by commercial artist Bruce Jensen, is my favorite. It depicts a male figure who might be a Greek statue, or a wax dummy (or an android), and yet whose expression conveys a sense of pathos that the viewer can’t quite look away from. This sense of pathos is amplified by the fact that lying between the viewer and the figure is a grid of what seems to be hog-wire, evoking a plot point in the book. Deckert, like many people in his dystopian future, keeps a farm animal as a pet—in his case, a sheep. But the wire also has echoes of the Holocaust, which is especially interesting since Dick’s inspiration for the book came after reading the diary of an S.S. Officer guarding a concentration camp. The figure is, we sense, a prisoner, although we don’t know what of. (Spoiler: it’s modern civilization.)

And then there is the sheep itself, rendered in a hallucinogenic little box over the male figure’s left eye. The only point of color in the work, the sheep draws the viewer’s attention the same way Deckert’s sheep draws out his latent humanity—it represents nature, vitality, warmth. Most importantly, it serves as something to love.

Love, as it turns out, is the last human quality that the androids learn (and most never do). It is also, Dick strongly suggests, the defining aspect of living things.

Today I Learned a Word: Extremophile

Recently, I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for panspermia—a concept I was already familiar with, relating to the theory that life on Earth might have originated from an external source. Specifically, a primitive microorganism might have landed here on a meteorite (or, in some versions of the theory, on an alien probe).

While reading about panspermia—a theory that has gained a lot of scientific traction in recent years—I encountered a term I hadn’t seen before: extremophile. It refers to “a microorganism, especially an archaean, that lives in conditions of extreme temperature, acidity, alkalinity, or chemical concentration.” In other words, a really tough bug. Tough to live in the deepest of the ocean, or even in the earth’s mantle.

While reading about panspermia—a theory that has gained a lot of scientific traction in recent years—I encountered a term I hadn’t seen before: extremophile. It refers to any microorganism that has evolved to exist in an environment so extreme that most other life would be prohibited. Examples of such environments are hydrothermal vents, salt-ridden lakes, and frozen ice sheets.

Or, perhaps, outer space.

Apparently, the concept of extremophiles—and of panspermia, in general—has taken on new relevancy in the past ten years. Even as we find more and more exoplanets (the most recent count is around 2,000), we have yet to find a single sign of life, intelligent or otherwise. This has led some cosmologists to adopt the so-called Rare Earth Hypothesis, which stipulates that while earth-like planets are a dime-a-dozen, actual Earths—that is, planets with life—might be fabulously uncommon. In fact, there might have only been a few in the early universe, from which all the other life-bearing planets were seeded. This could happen either accidentally (from asteroids; hence the extremophiles) or intentionally (from aliens deliberating spreading life across the galaxies).

All this speculation struck a chord with me. For one thing, it took me back to my youth, to all the sci-fi books and films I consumed. The idea of alien invaders taking the form of germs or seeds goes all the way back, I think, to Jack Finney’s classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the evil “seed pods” are actually alien weeds that travel from planet to planet on the solar wind.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

One of the first books I ever checked out by myself from the library was Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. I was a tween-aged sci-fi nerd at the time (as opposed to a middle-aged sci-fi nerd now), and this book started my life-long love affair with Bradbury’s fiction. More magical realism than actual sci-fi, his work always evokes a sense of the wonder I first felt when reading great science fiction.

Like Bradbury’s other masterpiece, The Martian Chronicles, this book is actually a “fix-up”—a collection of previously published short stories that are grouped together by a framing device. In this case, the “frame” is an unnamed drifter and former carnival worker who has tattoos all over his body (except for one crucial, bare spot on his upper back; you’ll have to read it to find out why). If you stare at any of the tattoos long enough, it comes to life and shows you a story—which leads directly into the short story in question.

It’s a very clever idea, and hauntingly rendered. Some of the more famous stories in the collection are “The Veldt,” “Zero Hour,” and (my favorite) “The Long Rain.”

The cover for the book’s first edition, by artist Dean Ellis, is still the best, and is also the one on the edition I checked out from the library, lo those many years ago. A work of trippy surrealism, the man in the painting does not look like the character in the book (who is flabby and middle-aged and has hair) but it captures brilliantly the sense of intellectual lyricism and magic, of which Bradbury was a master.

Time for an A.I. Sanity Check

Ever since the first publicly available AI SaaS offerings (that’s Software-as-a-Service for all you non-geeks) like ChatGTP hit the market, the media ecosystem has been in love with the subject of AI as a major disruptive force. Disruptive, that is, in the creative industries hitherto regarded as safe from any kind of automation: illustration, film-making, acting, and writing. Story after story has run about how AI-generated art, screenplays, journalistic articles, etc. might soon replace the work of human content creators.

Within this maelstrom, a smaller, subset of articles has begun circulating related to whether AI will ever achieve consciousness. (Some experts believe it already has.) And, within this subset, there is a sub-subset devoted to what I call AI alarmism. That is, the idea that AI, if left to its own devices, might soon overthrow—and perhaps even exterminate—humanity itself, ala the “evil AI” tropes of the Terminator films, the Matrix films, the Tron films, et cetera, et cetera.

Such visions of an AI apocalypse are not new. Hal, the murderous supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is perhaps the most famous example of an AI gone bad. And a cool but largely forgotten movie from the 1970s called Colossus: The Forbin Project lays out exactly how a psychotic AI (in this case, one entrusted with the care and maintenance of the American nuclear arsenal, just like SkyNet) could take over the world by force.

What I’m Reading: “The Girl with All the Gifts”

If there is a single genre that has been totally overused, tapped-out, wrung-dry, and exhausted, it would have to be the Zombie Apocalypse genre. From books to movies to TV shows, the idea of a world overrun with mindless, brain-eating zombies has been so fertile that it even engendered a classic spoof in Shawn of the Dead (and that was fifteen years ago!).

Having said that, it’s nice and even uplifting to remember that great writing, a kick-ass story, vivid characters and a hideously evil villain can overcome anything.

Oh, and a brilliant twist. That helps, too.

The “twist” in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts is that the novel’s young heroine is, herself, a zombie. Or, at least, infected with the fungus that has caused the “Breakdown” which has reduced human civilization to a few small, besieged cities. Other than having a genius I.Q. and an almost uncontrollable hunger for human flesh, Melanie is an ordinary ten-year-old. She likes school (actually a prison filled with other infected kids), and she especially likes her teacher, Miss Justineau (actually a psychologist tasked with studying the kids’ neurological responses).

Ten Things I Love About “Alien”

Next year will mark the 45^th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s landmark sci-fi horror movie, Alien. I saw the movie when I kid way back in 1979. Here are ten things I (still) love about it:

The Opening

For a movie that has the second-most disturbing scene in the history of cinema (the shower scene in Psycho is #1), the film starts with an empty field of quiescent darkness. The single letter I appears in the middle of the screen, and over the next few minutes as the opening credits appear and disappear on the screen, the I is joined by other letters to eventually form the single title: ALIEN. Talk about building tension. And what a great title it is! Both a noun and an adjective, it sums up everything frightening about this film. Namely, the fear of being consumed by the other, (the one outside and the one inside).

What I’m Reading: “The Peripheral”

A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie apocalypse story—and found a way to make it fresh and vital.

As luck would have it, the next novel I chose to read was William Gibson’s latest book, The Peripheral. I tore through it over the course of a weekend, and at some point, it occurred to me how similar the book is—in spirit, if not content—to Carey’s. Gibson, after all, faced a similar challenge to Carey in that his preferred genre, the cyberpunk novel, was also played out, in large part due to his (Gibson’s) own amazing success. His iconic works like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome helped define the cyberpunk aesthetic, that weirdly prescient vision of a future divided between poor street people and the ultra-rich. It was Gibson who coined the term cyberspace, and, by the end of the 1990s, the cyberpunk vibe had permeated not only popular fiction but movies (Blade Runner, The Matrix) and anime (Akira).

Now, in 2019, reality itself seems to have caught up with Gibson’s work. We live in a world where the vast bulk of humanity is virtually impoverished and uneducated. These teeming masses distract themselves with 3D games and social media (literal cyberspace) while a few fantastically rich individuals build spaceships and private islands for themselves. We live in a world where teenaged soldiers kill people via satellite-controlled drones on the other side of the planet, and where rogue Chinese scientists make designer babies.

How’s a poor science fiction writer supposed to keep up?