Some Smart Sci-Fi

Two recommendations for sci-fi lovers:

1) if you're overly worried about the surveillance state we live in . . . or if you're not worried at all about the surveillance state we live in, then take some time off from the screens and read Normal, the new Warren Ellis novel: it's short (148 pages) and fast-paced and vivid, a locked-room mystery set in a high-end asylum/refuge for depressed futurists broken by the digital age . . . and there are lots of bugs;

2) if you're overly worried about alien invasion . . . or not worried at all about alien invasion, then watch Arrival, where Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) truly get lost in translation; screenwriter Eric Heisserer takes a page out of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five: his heptapods see time all at once, like the Tralfamadorians, but this story doesn't have the surreal breezy irony of Vonnegut . . . it's paradoxical, cerebral and byzantine-- and done very realistically-- it's definitely not a thriller, and rather sad, but I loved it and so did my eleven year old son.

These Are A Few Of William Gibson's Favorite Things

Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, "The future is already here-- it's just unevenly distributed," and the characters in his new novel zero history definitely live in the positive agglomeration of the futuristic present . . . rhenium darts, penguin shaped floating surveillance drones, and ekranoplans are all de rigueur in this universe; in fact, things, especially fashionable things linked to the military, play a more important role than people in the book, which makes the novel hard to follow . . . the people are bystanders to the fashion, technology, intrigue, and marketing that surrounds them . . . and, appropriately, people in the book are constantly "Googling" things because they are beyond their ken, and they are worried that their knowledge of these secret, obscure, often technological things might be ersatz, and meanwhile, in my less futuristic present, I was Googling things in the book as well, to see if they were real or not: I'm glad I finished the book, I've read everything William Gibson has written and I don't want to stop now, but this is the weakest effort in the "present-future" trilogy (the other two are Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).