C L Walker
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Movie Review: Transcendence

22/9/2014

 
Picture

There are so many things in this movie that are wrong. There’s a big one that really ruined it for me (and, it seems, me alone), but we’ll go through a couple of other things first.

In this movie Johnny Depp dies after being shot with a radiation bullet by some anti-technology terrorists. His wife and his friend scan his brain and they manage to boot him up in a computer, apparently in part thanks to a quantum processor.

At this point we are clearly meant to be rooting for him, because otherwise the movie is asking us to root for the terrorists. And they wouldn’t do that.
I’m fine with the science-fiction. I think you’d need more than the scans they did to get a good image of a consciousness, but I’ve never actually done it. When someone pulls it off I’m sure it’ll be really complicated and way more tedious than this movie portrays it, and when writing my fiction I’ll just make it all look simple anyway. Because people don’t care, and neither do I. Unless your story is about the process of uploading someone, you can do some hand waving about how.

The terrorists attack and Cyber-Depp escapes onto the internet (more on that below). He then manipulates data all over the place and builds a high-tech facility out in the desert, where he is free to create the future.

The terrorists, now in league with Cyber-Depp’s former friend and the government (somehow), attack the facility and shut down all technology to get him. The movie starts and ends with the friend walking through the low-tech dystopia that follows this fight and this decision.

I’m skipping over a bunch of stuff here, because I just don’t care. At no point did I care, because the way the film is structured points me toward thinking of Cyber-Depp as the good guy. He is clearly a good guy, and the terrorists (and then the government) are the bad guys, and I know they’re going to win.

This isn’t just my bias either; the core question of the movie appears to be “Cyber-Depp, a good idea or not?” At the end of the movie, once they’ve shut down all technology (really?) Cyber-Depp chooses to die, because he was really human all along. So we’re shown the pod-people (there are pod people, and I still think they’re the good guys) and the raw power this one individual has over the whole planet, to set him up as a potential bad guy. But he was actually kind of a good guy at the end, by choosing to die. The answer to the central question seems to be: Maybe?

Either that or the answer they came up with was that Cyber-Depp was awesome and the government choosing the side of terrorists was wrong, in which case they did it badly.

None of that matters though, because the movie was ruined for me at the end of the first act. The terrorists attack shortly after Cyber-Depp is turned on. To help him escape, Mrs Cyber-Depp hooks up a satellite dish so he can get out into the world. He escapes onto the internet in a few minutes.

Cyber-Depp is a huge program, I’m sure, and a satellite uplink is pretty shitty. But I don’t mind; this is more hand waving. Nobody wants to spend the time dealing with the ridiculously slow upload you’d actually get from this sort of setup. It would be boring, and it wouldn’t add anything to the story.

Cyber-Depp appears online, now able to manipulate banks and basically do whatever he wants.

Bullshit. The internet doesn’t work like that. You can’t hack the planet. You can’t infest a bunch of servers, all sitting behind firewalls you have to crack first, and then reprogram them so they work as a single unit you can use to house your brain (or anything else).

“But, hand waving!” I hear you say.

No, random voice on the internet. No.

The climax of this movie posits a scenario where the terrorists and the government are able to outsmart Cyber-Depp. I think the idea at the very end was that Cyber-Depp could have flattened them anyway (my bias), but he was still taken by surprise when they first attacked. If he was capable of doing the “escape onto the internet” thing, then there is nothing he can’t do. Nothing. He has all the power, and having the terrorists use old cars and mortars wouldn’t matter because they live in the 21st century and Cyber-Depp owns the 21st century.

Cyber-Depp is also shown to have nanotech all over the place, so he would have seen them coming and he would have overheard them planning. There are lots of reasons he wouldn’t have been caught by surprise and none of them matter because of the main reason he should have won:

He is super smart. He can see this coming and he can outthink them a million times over. In fact, if we judge his abilities purely by the escape-to-the-internet scene, it’s ludicrous. In his facility he has a warehouse full of processing power that he designed himself, which is quite a bit more than his one processor origins. Origins in which he took control of every internet facing machine on the planet, including at least some government ones.

I saw the escape scene at the end of act one, and I knew from the trailer how the whole thing was going to end, and I couldn’t believe it. Ruined an otherwise Meh movie for me.

Do yourself a favour, go read a book.

I Miss Bookstores

21/9/2014

 
I haven’t been to a bookstore in years. (Bookstores are one of those places with physical books lining the walls. No, not the library, the other one. You know, like video stores, but for books. Video stores? They’re like Netflix, but they don’t have what you want and they’re too expensive.)

I used to love bookstores. When I first moved to London I worked a little way up the road from a bunch of them, and as I started work quite late in the morning I had time to go browsing. I didn’t have any money to actually buy anything, but somehow I still ended up with a wall covered in books.

Travelling for a few months, I had to buy a second suitcase to cart my books around. There were always bookstores wherever I went, and I discovered some great authors by stopping for a coffee and a browse.

The last time I went into a bookstore to browse, let alone buy something, was years ago. I was an early adopter of ebooks and had a Compaq iPAQ filled with everything I could find. Back then you still had to buy physical books if you wanted to keep reading your favourite authors, but for that I had Amazon. Actually going into a bookstore was a hassle when everything I could ever want was a few clicks away, and cheaper too.

My bookshelf kept growing for a few years, if a little slower. I found a science fiction author I enjoyed and bought his entire backlist, or tracked down a copy of a book I read when I was a kid. I bought physical copies for books I already had an electronic version of, just to have them on my shelf.

At some point I stopped buying physical books. My wife still did, following her favourites and avoiding ereaders, and so my bookshelf kept growing. It just did so even more slowly.

I saw a bookstore yesterday and tried to remember the last time I went into one. My wife now has an ereader, and though she’s still getting used to it she’s actually pretty happy. Our bookshelf hasn’t grown in a year. I read on my phone mostly, but I use a Kindle if I’m at the beach. I haven’t read a physical book in a long time. Not even my own.

At some point, while I was ignoring them and revelling in the huge selection and options of Amazon, the bookstores I loved went away. There are still a few dotted around, but they aren’t actually bookstores anymore, not the way they used to be. The staff have no idea what they’re talking about and the selection sucks. The atmosphere just isn’t the same.

This is my fault. I get that.

There are people who kept going, who kept browsing and buying from actual stores. There are bookstores that are as cool as they ever were, just none near me.

Here’s the thing: I’m not going to change. I’m not going to start buying books from my local bookstore because I’m not suddenly going to start reading physical books again. For those special books, the ones I need to have on my shelf, I’ll try. I’ll go to the store and I’ll get them to order a copy for me (because they won’t have it on the shelf), but this is too little, too late.

Bookstores will never be more than a niche in my life, and as more people shift to using Amazon (or some other online store) for their book needs things are only going to get worse. I say worse only because of nostalgia, of course. The new world is fantastic, or I wouldn’t be using it.

But I will miss the shelves crammed with potential. I will miss the hunt. No matter how good, no matter how much more efficient it is, a recommendation algorithm just isn’t the same.

OK, I’m done being an old man for today.

Go read a book.

Openings: The Bridge

21/9/2014

 
Here's another opening. This time it's The Bridge

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Openings: The Algorithm

14/9/2014

 
Here's the opening to my new novel, The Algorithm.

Click Read More to...read more.

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Different Heroes

10/9/2014

 
I think I was worried about who to pick for the hero of The Algorithm. If I was reading a series and I was invested in the characters and the world, would I be alright with my heroes from the first book not being in the second book? Even if there are other characters that carry over, will the lack of a familiar headspace be a problem?

For Isaac’s Story: London I decided to have different protagonists in every book. They exist in the same world and they run across some of the same larger-than-life people populated it, but every book will have a different lead character or two. With the series I want to show the evolution of the city and of the world, leading to the big climax in book 5.

I don’t have a problem with a hero sticking around for sequels. Die Hard requires John McClane and wouldn’t make sense without him. Jaws, on the other hand, doesn’t. The hoops they had to jump through to keep a narrative going between those sequels were ridiculous. Why not just have a world where there are large sharks and sometimes they enjoy munching on a bit of human? Because reasons.

I’ve got this other series, Dead Men, which has the same hero in every entry. It’s a serial with a different plot arch in every episode, but every episode is shorter than a book. This might seem like cheating on the premise of this post (as I could just move to a different character for the next season), but I’m going to keep using West as the hero once I’ve finished this season. There will be continuity for her character.

So what’s the difference?

Dead Men stars “Captain” West, a soldier, and a group of other people who are also soldiers. Getting into adventures is what they do, and carrying the same people from book to book makes sense. It isn’t weird when they step from one group of people shooting at them to another, because they get paid to do exactly that.

Isaac’s Story: London is about more normal people, and how they deal with the weirdness and danger of their city. Howard (from The Bridge) is an accountant and Jon (from The Algorithm) is a digital security guy. I can come up with ways Jon could get into another adventure, but beyond that it would be a stretch. Howard getting caught up in something else would be ridiculous.

As the series moves along there will be more action oriented characters with a more appropriate skill set, but even then I don’t see why they would necessarily get into other adventures, and certainly not the larger adventures that are the focus of the novels. They then become secondary characters, dropping in and out as their own lives dictate.

Also, have you seen the latest Die Hard movies? John McClane isn’t relatable anymore. He’s a superhero, shrugging off bullets and dancing on the wing of a fighter jet. What (arguably) made this character so great (the everyman) is gone, replaced by an action hero. And everybody knows it, but we go watch the films anyway because we love what the character used to be.

I could have done that with my series, and there are many better writers who have, but it wouldn’t have made sense to me. These characters don’t want to dodge bullets for a living and as soon as they can they will run the other way. Those that don’t (Kazumi Amaya, Salmon, Angel, Devil) don’t get to be the focus of every big thing that happens in the city, because that wouldn’t make sense. To me, at least.

Isaac’s Story: Hong Kong, coming early next year, will have characters that we stick with between books, because they are the major reason the world is changing. Just like West in Dead Men, they instigate the adventure, bending the world around them. Though that series follows directly from this one it will have a different feel, and carrying the characters from book to book makes sense there.

I’m done babbling; I have stuff to write. West is about to ******* *** a ******* if he doesn’t stop ********* her ***, and I need to get back to it to see what she does next.

Go read a book.
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    C.L. Walker

    Author. Nerd. Long-Haired Slacker

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