Sci-Fi – Page 4 – Ash Clifton, Writer

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

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 Dream of 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?

Random Dose of Optimism

In his amazingly good sci-fi novel, The Peripheral, William Gibson describes a environmental cataclysm called The Jackpot. The name is perfect, in that it evokes not a single-cause catastrophe but rather a horrific alignment (like the diamonds on a slot machine) of multiple ones. Global heating. Drought. Pollution. Pandemics. Poverty. Et cetera.

But, as is ruefully noted by the protagonists of Gibson’s novel, The Jackpot hit at almost the same time as a technological revolution (actually several revolutions) that might have avoided it. Geoengineering. Nanotechnology. Artificial Intelligence. Fusion power. Genetic engineering.

All of these fields are exploding, right now, in the early 21st Century. That’s why I’m guarded optimistic about humanity’s chances of surviving the next fifty years. (Note that I said “surviving”; it’s going to be incredibly challenging, and will involve great suffering and sacrifice.) Many environmentalists scoff at this kind of optimism. There is no technological silver bullet, they warn, that will get us off the hook.

And, of course, they’re right. There is no big silver bullet. But there might be a lot of small silver bullets that, if aimed precisely (have I tortured this metaphor long enough?) might at least blunt the looming crisis.

After all, we’ve been here before. In the mid-20th Century, scientists were warning that current agriculture techniques would not be sufficient to feed the booming post-war population of Earth. A global famine was almost inevitable. But it didn’t happen. Why? Well, in a word, we innovated our way out of it. Improved science resulted in the so-called Green Revolution, which allowed farmers to feed millions more people on the same amount of arable land (which they continue to do to this day).

So, I like to collect articles about possible new “revolutions” that might help us survive, and even thrive, in this century. Here is an article for The Guardian about how scientists are manipulating natural enzymes to break down plastic into basic nutrients (i.e., food). Yes, plastic into food. Will it pan out? Will it be scalable? I don’t know. But it gives me hope.

Check it out…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Ringworld”

I started binge-reading science fiction when I was in 8th grade. That was the year that the local school board rezoned the kids from my White, suburban neighborhood to attend the largely Black, urban middle school, Lincoln, across town. This was a miraculous development for me because I had already attended Lincoln (back when my parents and I still lived in the ‘hood, or thereabouts), and I already loved it. But there was a downside—I had a really, really long ride on the school bus. Like almost an hour each way.

So, I started reading seriously, and as with a lot of boys at that age, my go-to genre was sci-fi. I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and John Christopher. But perhaps the most revelatory, amazing book I had read up to that time was Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Never had a novel held such wonder for me, such a Tolkienesque landscape of adventure and possibility. The fact that Niven was able to pull this off in a book which is, even today, a prime example of so-called “Hard SF,” in which every story element must be grounded in, or acknowledge the effect of, some scientific principle.

The fact that Niven’s novel (the first of a tetralogy) has never been adapted to film is perhaps testament to this fact, the book’s off-the-chart nerd factor. Set in the 29th century, the story concerns an Earth-man, Louis Wu, who goes on adventure with two aliens and a human woman to visit a distant, recently discovered artifact called the Ringworld. It’s basically a giant, taurus-shaped space colony, so big that it wraps completely around its sun-like star. The entire ring spins to simulate 1G of gravity, and thousand-kilometer high mountains along the rim keep the air from leaking out. An inner ring of smaller, checker-box squares creates a shadow pattern on the inside of the big ring, creating a day/night cycle.

And there you have it, a plausible sci-fi world with normal gravity and a recognizable biosphere, including oceans, forests, deserts, mountains, and so on, but with an unbroken surface area equivalent to three million earths.

Oh, how this idea fired my thirteen-year-old imagination. Forget Shangri-La or Cathay or Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars or Middle Earth or any of the other fantasy lands of pre-1970s literature. Here was an endless realm that you could explore for a million years and never reach the end of. And, sure enough, as Louis and his alien comrades (one is a humanoid, Tiger-like creature called a Kzin, the other a two-headed cowardly alien called a Puppeteer) wander across the Ringworld, they encounter many of the tropes of 19th century adventure lit, including castles, galleons, savage tribes (including sexy native girls), shamans, sword-wielding heroes, etc. Niven accomplishes all this by establishing that the once high-tech inhabitants of the Ringworld have long since fallen into a pre-industrial state, leaving open the mystery of how this apocalypse happened and what remnants of the original civilization might remain, if any.

It’s a great, great adventure book, and it has inspired a number of fine covers. My favorite is the one above by Don Davis. Davis was in some ways an inspired choice since he was best known as a “space artist,” doing representations of proposed space colonies for NASA. (And, as I said above, the Ringworld is basically a giant space colony.) Davis’s cover captures the sense of wonder and endless possibility that novel creates, depicting a typical (summer-like) day on the Ringworld. In the distance, you can see the arc of the ring itself (the primitive inhabitants think it is an “arch”), complete with light-and-dark sections from the shadow squares.

It’s a fine cover, and I have no doubt that it and the book itself probably inspired the current obsession on the part of certain high-tech billionaires with the idea of space colonies, a possibility for a kind of endless utopia in outer space. And why not? Deep down, we’re all still thirteen-year-olds. Right?

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

I went into my favorite used bookstore recently, and I was shocked to find only a handful of Michael Crichton’s old books on hand. When I was a kid, he was ubiquitous. He was guaranteed to have not just an entire shelf dedicated to his work, but often an entire case.

I mean, dozens of movies have been made out of his books, and that’s before I even need to mention his two most enduring franchises: Jurassic Park and Westworld. The guy was clearly a genius.

My early introduction to Crichton was when I was twelve and I read his first big hit, The Andromeda Strain. I would argue that this one book created the entire techno-thriller genre more than a decade before Tom Clancy took over the pop-novel world. The Andromeda Strain is packed with all things nerd: aliens (in the form of a lethal micro-organism that turns human blood to sludge and eats radiation for breakfast), lasers, supercomputers, a high-tech underground lab, and a nuclear bomb set to blow up in T-minus-Holy-Shit minutes.

The copy I read was an early edition with a cover by Paul Bacon. The cover depicts what appears to be the outline of a petri dish containing two colonies of microscopic life, but with all the shapes described by computer-generated digits. To top it all off, the image is superimposed over an image of planet Earth, looking very small and vulnerable as the Andromeda strain begins to literally invade it.

A simple design, but one that perfectly evokes the book’s theme of technology-plus-biology-equals-disaster. (The organism, as is revealed in the plot, was harvested by a top-secret military program to find extraterrestrial extremophiles for bio-warfare.)

You can read a great tribute to Paul Bacon here.