Skip to main content

Platform Decay



The 8th MurderBot novel by Martha Wells is another entry into this fine series of books at a security unit that isn't all machine, and also isn't all human. It has organic parts and looks mostly like a human. And yet it's pure killing machine, designed to keep it's assets alive, get them out of dangerous situations in a science fiction future where corporations are at war with each other, and do dastardly thing. 

There's an Apple tv show that is okay, based on it.

It kind of shows that a minimalist non-human narrator can run an action novel. Many of the 8 are pretty short, which is good. Does it's constant risk assessment tell us about our present? Does it's ruthless focus on saving individual lives tell us something?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manet and Degas

  Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special.  In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review
Post a Comment
Read more

movie versus book

I'm watching the movie a second time, and I'm halfway through the book. Among the movie's differences from the book. Sortilege starts off narrating. The movie doesn't have the school bell for the phone either, just a regular ring. It's really weird the way Doc shouts when he sees the photo of Amethyst as a baby. I guess it's to dramatize the negative impact of being pregnant and using, but the child we see looks pretty healthy. The child doesn't huff out because they're boring like she did in the book.  Superficially The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are similar but it's a completely different style of narrative. The Coen brothers are amazing, they have a very witty movie that I have loved for a long time. Pynchon is a whole other realm of fiction, and this conversion is fairly faithful, taking out the best lines and making it more compact. The audio book is 15 hours, the movie is 2 hours. Anyway, I like the different movies for different reasons. T...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introduction

Robert B. Palmer's introduction to his translation of Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult (p. ix-xi) Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands,  With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore?                                     Pan, Pan is dead. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING The Dead Pan W H E N Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these lines which sound so pessimistic and so limited to any lover of the beauty and truth of Greek mythology, she had in mind a famous passage out of Plutarch's De Oraculorum defectu {Mor. 419 A-E) in which it was reported on good authority that Pan had died. But let Plutarch tell the story (Philip is speaking):  As for death among such beings [i.e., deities], I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of...
Post a Comment
Read more