Strange Evolutions
We must come together to build a world that can accept Ellie Fanning’s incredible ass
Come! It is time to dream of evolutionary trees, of mighty legions sculpted from foe-flesh, or the flesh of man, of humanity challenged, transformed, and of Ellie Fanning’s exciting lower half.
Five ‘Evolutionary Romances’; ‘Avatar An Activists Survival Guide’ by Maria Wilhelm, ‘Wildlife on the Planet Furaha’ by Gert van Dijk, ‘Predator: Badlands’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, ‘The Dragon Masters’ by Jack Vance and ‘Prophet’ by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy.
Both the ‘Activists Survival Guide’ and ‘Planet Furuha’ imagine whole alien worlds, with complex pseudo-natural evolutionary trees (slightly more pseudo in the case of Avatar) encountered by a future humanity. The Dragon Masters and Prophet both imagine war; alterations of man, and strange alien flesh across illimitable scales of time, while Predator: Badlands is ‘Scavengers Reign lite, and makes a scary planet for an xenos-teen to fight and understand, it also, ultimately these deep strange themes of war and human doom.
Avatar: An Activists Survival Guide
This book did nothing to soothe my complex feelings about the Avatar universe, but did at least allow me to experience them with more granularity. A metatextual ‘pleasure’ of these films for me has always been the abhorrence and hatred for corporatism, militarism and technology of the story, combined with the obvious and intense adoration of these things on the part of the creators. It reminds me a lot of the alleged letter Milton received half way through the publication of Paradise Lost, from some country Squire; “I’m not sure who this Lucifer fellow is, but by gad I hope he wins.”
Made to be Destroyed
While ‘Furuha’ will show us, calmly, a whole ecosphere, with the human elements secondary and truly, no grand story or core central moral, here in ‘Avatar’ the biosphere is theatre, only one part of an opera.
Being the detail-oriented environmentalist industrialist hippy militarist pacifist artist he is, Cameron delved deep to engineer a paradise drawn from dreams for his dark (but very cool) vison of humanity to despoil.
And this is very specifically ‘Paradise’ in Camerons eyes, made to be ruined by mankind. Spec Evo in service to a Boomers Medieval Morality Play. The setting goes to wild extremes to maintain a vision of the RDA as an almost laughably and pointlessly malignant force; they are apparently supressing research into synthetic Unobtanium purely so they can continue the hideously expensive task of mining it from Pandora, a whole star-system away. The RDA elite is bringing home alien fish and flowers as high-status luxury objects while also researching the possibilities of Pandoran flora in bio-reclamation to rescue earths biosphere from pollution, while also for some reason, repressing the same research. Also, they hunt intelligent whales for magic juice, they are just kinda nebulously and generally evil.
(The vast array of Pandoran flora with possible bio-reclamation properties does strongly tilt me towards my ‘Pandoran Invasion of Earth’ theory, in which the Avatar series ends with Earth hosting varied forms of altered Pandoran life that united into their own ‘Eywa’ entity.)
Only one part of the book actually describes Pandora, the rest being a militarist pin-up book of exciting human technology, and the Pandoran section is heavily tilted towards the kind of charismatic megafauna you can fight, and in the case of Jake Sulley, (and chud-king Mile Quaritch), fuck. We will go to space and we will have sex with those aliens.
Compared to works of pure art like Furuha, the Activists Survival Guide might seem a little sophomoric, but oh how soon we forget our flawed but mighty ancestors; when considered to its purpose, this is a massively superior, detailed, wide-ranging and in-depth look at the columns of imaginary life. What other film would produce a sourcebook, a significant chunk of which is about relatively un-cool glowing plants? Or the Na’vi weaving song? (Being a Na’vi seems very dull - mainly you just hunter-gather and tell stories of Ey’wa and the Balance?.)
All in all an excellent example of detailed (relatively) hard sci-fi worldbuilding. Superluminal communications and an apparent ‘psionic’ element to the Avatar link are almost the only soft science elements of this otherwise hard sci-fi world. The enormous focus dedicated to Na’vi textiles, tools and crafts is impressive.
Hexapede Fetish
A curious similarity between Pandora and Furuha is the prevalence of Hexipedal life. I half-feel that the Hexipede is becoming the Parralel-World Airship of Speculative Evolutionary Fiction. Of course this is an alien world look at the legs.
I am not sure Hexipedal limbs make real sense on any of these creatures but if they are there, then surely the Na’vi should also be six-titted Hexipedes? Hopefully someone online has done some impressions of this. WAIT OF COURSE THEY DID THERE IS EVEN P*RN
Wildlife on the Planet Furaha
As if from nowhere; retired neuroscientist Gert van Dijk; a man whose name and profession seem so odd to me he may as well be made up (‘Wat noo?’ indeed), springs into being, fully formed, like a goddess from the head, or ‘thigh’ of Zeus.
‘Furaha’ is an imaginary world, it has a blog, and even a Youtube channel for everyone who was super-interested in the exact biomechanics of radially symmetrical space bugs. Now it exists as a book from Crowood press “A speculative biology guide to alien life forms.” And unlike every other entry on this list, the biosphere is not a stage, or a tool, theme or part of any other story, world or fiction; it exists for itself and for the pleasure of itself; world creation as an act of pure joy. Crystalline, jewel-like. A planet not to have adventures on. (Unless they are careful, scientific adventures).
Did you ever have a really precise dream? One where the precision was part of the pleasure? “We must imagine the clockmaker joyful.” I mean really vibing on those cog-teeth, absolutely in the mix like a dance DJ. ‘Furuha’ is colourful, vibrant, lively, and really really really carefully worked out, down to the smallest detail, down to the orientation of skeletal joints and the exact forms of varied radial symmetry. An act of world creation, in detail and in depth, as a perfect mirror to the world-discoverers of the 17th to 19th century. Really a calm book, of mild humours and deep curiosity. Very much an enlightenment text; this is not a demon-haunted world or an especially mysterious man, but one whose passions and intellect are fully synthesised. And he does have passions; one cannot paint, write, engineer and conceive a whole world of such depth, beauty and complexity, without being driven by strong, even overwhelming, passion. This is not the kind of thing a normal person does, but I suspect if one were to meet Gert van Dijk, one would not come away with the feeling one had met a passionate man.
For most humans, combining joy and precision is relatively rare, but not for this guy, and the metaphor of “clockwork” or clock-like action is probably wrong, limited; clocks are entropic, use-bound and wear down. They only do one thing. But for an act of exhultive* precision there are few metaphors. van Dijk takes the same pleasure in the deep mechanisms of evolutionary selection as a child does when confronted with a shelf of varied sweets, his is the joy of the naturalist, perhaps one from that borderlands period where a global awareness has become possible, but not yet splintered and degraded into micro-cults. He is a BIG MIND guy and his view and his pleasures are those of Darwin on the Beagle; getting out there and looking at a bunch of wonderful stuff and working out how it relates, except in this case, ‘out there’ is ‘in here’ and ‘working it out’ is literally building life from the ground-up.
And to some degree, a science-fiction sociology of a strange planet, populated by the descendants of scientists and explorers. Not quite an Eden, but an ascended world from the point of view of a scientist-artist himself; a world made the way they should be and perhaps not as they are. I wonder what kinds of stories one might tell about Furaha? This (comparatively) under-populated near-pristine wilderness where apparently the bugs and viruses of Furuha don’t immediately devour humanity, and where the bugs, bacteria, horses and factories of humanity don’t immediately ruin Furuha. It feels like the kind of place for murder-mystery, no doubt involving some environmental complexity or wonder, and with the motive being the kind of thing academics lose their toast over, like a love-affair wrapped up in the classification of a Ghnathocranium jaw or something.
Of course I want to go to Furaha, but sadly if I did, they wouldn’t let me do anything interesting. Maybe some very low-environmental impact Saffari’s would be available, or horseback tours.
Being who and what I am, I immediately find myself sympathising with whoever I imagine the Furuhan underclass to be. Some low-IQ non-academic types who don’t particularly care about animals or the environment, happen to have been born in this wonderland which offers nothing for them, and who just want to build a car-park or something. I wonder also, considering the nature of humanity, how long this tender softness in humanity can last. Surely there must be arguments over resources, or ideas, or something. I’m not trying to turn Furuha into 40k but someone at least has to stab someone, or lead them into the Pied Stickers hunting range at the wrong time of year (deniable). Who is the Furuhan Columbo? What are the Furuhan ethnic divides? Is everyone just upper-middle class? These are petty thoughts considering what the book is actually about, but they are at times, my thoughts.
An image of evolution on a massive scale, (van Dijk even removed his balloon-flyers when the physics didn’t work out), ‘Furuhan’ is also a kind of tacit commentary on evolutionary theories. van Dijk creates not one, but two species who honestly seem like they might be about to get intelligent; the Wardens and the Snafe. The fact that neither of these, especially the Snafe, despite superficially seeming to be smart, have not kindled into tool-use and self-reinforcing complexity, is perhaps a kind of joke, or mildly sardonic aside on the part of van Dijk; ‘we really still have no idea what makes it “go”.’
A great book if you like beauty, evolution, quiet wonder or long BBC documentaries about the sea.
Predator: Badlands
Another entry in the slightly-woke pretty-good Dan Trachenberg Pred-Renaissance ouvre. I enjoyed this and have mixed feelings about it. This film makes a lot of ballsy ‘big van Dijk’ calls, and is also rather broad and a bit Disney.
tldr; a young, weird predator who everyone thinks is a nerd (wait, is this guy a Disney Princess?), gets betrayed and as a last-ditch effort, goes to the most dangerous planet ever to hunt the mega-super monster that has killed every other Predator who tried; surely if he can behead this thing, the clan will stop calling him a loser. Once there, things go horribly wrong and he runs into two android Ellie Fannings; one bisected android is curious and adaptive, the other, whole and ass-intact, is a more pure expression of the Wayland-Yutani ethos.
It was ballsy to make an actual Predator the main character in the story. The inversion of a de-powered Predator having to adapt to a complex dangerous environment and a mechanistic enemy, essentially re-running the Arnold sequence from the original movie, is good. The bones of the story are good, the cross-relationship drama between the Predator-family and the pseudo-sibling relationship of the Ellie Fannings is dramatically very solid. Probably Dan Trachenbergs strongest single virtue is his sold, creative and capable grasp of what makes good drama.
This is broad though. It is very broad, with many more outright comedic elements and general goofiness than you would usually see.
Where this crosses over with the rest of this gathering of fictions is; this is unusually, but only slightly, spec-evo in its ‘world of monsters’, and, like Avatar, (which it could almost cross-over with), the ‘Dragon Masters’ and ‘Prophet’, this is in part about humanity facing a vast and mutable void. Crucially there are no humans in this film, but the presence and ethos of what feels like a corrupt, manipulative and dying race, impregnates everything humanity has touched. A species sending its expendable Android drones off into space, carefully organised and supervised to be certain that they stay on mission, all in search of, what else? Magic immortality juice. It’s the same exact motivation as the whale-hunts in Avatar 2 and 3; somewhere out in space there is bodily immortality, if we can only be evil, effective, corporate and extractive enough to get it. And in all this hunting out of endless life, the only truly immortal things humanity creates are its corporations and technology, which synthesise and sustain themselves, even without the core humans they were made to serve.
This implied world of ships traversing the cosmos, stuffed with A.I.’s and corporate law, serving entities technically ‘owned’ by a species that is dying, on-ice or may no longer exist, crosses over deeply with ‘Prophet’, which also has strong themes of worlds and cultures made by and from the abandoned weapons of forgotten wars. A society of abandoned AK 47s getting up and walking around, going to the shops, the school, making little bullet children. So.
I have a heuristic in my mind for stories from this paracosm, which is that these movies are either; icily cold, visually beautiful but ethically brutal Ridley-type panoramas, (which may well also be utter shit, but at least they look good) or utter garbage shlock. Predator: Badlands is neither, its normative - a little goofy, heartwarming, almost family-friendly. I think normies and Funko-Pop enjoyers will really like this one, I quite liked watching it but am ambivalent about parts, though I do have genuine respect for its general competence and willingness to try something new, and for being broadly ‘good hearted’.
But the Weyland-Yutaniverse is not a good-hearted place.
Most of my other complaints are partial, piecemeal; how is Predator Tech made, is it artisanal? That would make sense. Why don’t Predators often seem intellectually capable of building their own technology? This one is very young and others have been blank slates, so that might be a reason. Isn’t it odd that this and Avatar both seem like they are from the same Universe and have almost the same themes? Same with Blade Runner. It’s strange that these derivations of core ideas, even though they evolve, seem also to converge. There is a lot of smiling in this movie, though almost nothing in it has cause to smile. The drone-Synths seem to have an I.Q. of about 80, which honestly makes sense considering that adaptive intelligence itself is both a vital tool and dangerous corrosive for this mission, but I would have preferred if that was directly-stated at some point rather than perhaps-accidentally inferred.
We must come together to build a world that can accept Ellie Fanning’s incredible ass, a cinematic wonder brutally excised from this fiction via CGI. This is the wrong use for technology.
The Dragon-Masters by Jack Vance
(Fragmentary on detail as I read this on holiday and am writing some time after I actually finished it)
Not even a full book, this is a novella from 1962. There is so much I could say about this slight, thematically dense, short, flawed, book. What a pile of crossing themes in just one tale.
Texas Valley Family Feud
Set on the feudal backwater planet Aerlith (which might be the last surviving human world), the story is split between two Feudal families occupying different valleys and, for the large part, utterly stupidly consumed by thoughts of petty vengeance towards each other, even in the midst of genocidal alien war.
Vance’s emotional and social range to me often feels like it was sealed some time around the great depression and his fundamental weight of what-humans-are-like is brutally cynically material, Machiavellian, short-termist and greedy. To an extent this can provide a useful counterweight both to more idealistic views of history and to high-level ‘grand narratives’ which skate over the bit-rate of history, the dirty mire where so many things actually happen and where so much of what people are concerned with is petty and day-to-day. Over time it does become brutal, cold and depressing to read though. Not unlike the works of K.J. Parker; materialist and cynical to a chilling degree, simply through the relentless application of small minds who believe in nothing.
Humanity at-large is fallen, hunted to near-extinction by the queer philosophical lizardlike ‘Basics’, who use as their troops and slave-race; altered humans, warped and mutated into useful forms. Some years before our story starts, a Basic ship arrives on Aerlith with exterminating intentions. During this expedition, the Basics miscalculate and are captured by the charismatic Kergan Banbeck. Without Basic instruction the slave-man craze and perish, and the captured Basics themselves enter a philosophically uncomprehending state. (Souls and species trapped by their own heightened philosophy is one of many themes in ‘Dragon Masters’.)
This incredibly cinematic and exciting series of events is described briefly in the foreword and we cut to ‘Present Day’ Aerlith. The free humans have done to the Basic eggs just what the Basics did to man; bred, trained, subverted and made tools of them. Now their spawn are Dragons! (Or at least big somewhat-intelligent lizard-beast slaves of various kinds, some of whom can be ridden.)
The story is split between two families lead by two Dragon Master nobles, each differently obsessed; the wise, subtle, deep-seeing philosophical Joaz Banbeck obsesses over the return of the Basics and the final extinction of humanity, he plots and plans, digs and builds towards some future confrontation with the lizards in space. Meanwhile his neighbour Ervis Carcolo wants more Valley. The guy literally just wants stuff, land, tech, women, status, whatever. A little rat shit bastard, Carcolo is stuffed with Conquistador energy. He does not think; he acts!
Which is the more-true, most-useful, more effective vision of humanity? Being deep, subtle, philosophical and Machiavellian? Or being a raw dumb little cunt of a man? (These are the only choices). The book is about this.
Flesh War
With two opposed species at war, the Human Empire is gone, humanity has virtually lost. The main military of the Basics is made up of genetically and behaviourally altered humans reformatted to particular tasks, huge line breakers, trackers, weapons-wielders, all kept physically and mentally focused on a single function, overseen by small numbers of the Basics. The Basics have ‘won’ but have they become decadent in the winning? The few we meet seem to lack ‘virtu’, adaptiveness and raw thrawn.
Now mankind has its own incredibly creepy alien eugenics project; the war is flesh-v-flesh, each side in a war operationalising the very being of a species as a weapon against them. If we were to do a ‘realistic’ version of this theme, it would take place over huge stretches of time; ‘blood for the morrow, steel for the day’, technology tends to govern in the moment, but flesh rules the tide. In ‘Dragon Masters’ we only get this brief fragment of consequential time, but all the lore and development and background for the book practically calls out to be turned into some kind of massive epic, RPG sourcebook or something.
The Raw Power Of Stupidity
Joaz Banbeck; a smart, deep history guy who thinks about the past, is a calm but disconnected ruler and has some idea of the range, scope and seriousness of the human condition, is opposed by Ervis Carcolo, a clever, violent cunt bastard narcissist guy who is intolerable. The story is a good, if very cold, view on how smart people can lose (or nearly lose), to horrid little rat men, and oddly, conversely, a complement to the ferocity of the human spirit embodies in horrid shitbag Pizzaro-types.
Banbeck treats Carcolo carefully, outwits his first betrayal and, mind focused on deep history and long-term survival, largely forgets about him. Meanwhile Carcolo stupidly and ferociously attacks anyway, gaining a surprise victory, largely through doing something utterly irrational, at just the wrong time, (aliens are invading). Having broken his word the Carcolo then demands Banbeck join up with him to fight the aliens. This is actually, strategically and coldly the right thing to do, but Banbecks moral disgust at this stupid, lying narcistic self-destructive piece of shit, for once, stops him making the rationally-correct choice. Eventually, the two sides do end up sort-of accidentally teaming up, and win. Finally Banbeck orders the necessary execution of Carcolo, though he can’t stand to do it himself.
The push and pull between these two different kinds of souls and their concerns, almost between mind/culture and the feral atavistic shameless and awful body, is nasty but fascinating and has the tinge of reality.
Fate And Violence
There is yet another huge theme, maybe not so much between fate and violence, as activity and inactivity, or something like Jainism and Worldism.
Planet got Elves basically. Mysterious guys who wander around naked and live under the earth. Sort of human they have a forgotten technology, hidden ways and a strange intense religion/philosophy. The accepted ritual is that when they turn up everyone looks through them, that they don’t ever interact but if you do ask them questions they have to tell the truth, but they will always do so in such a way as to make the smallest difference possible. They wander in the dark and their philosophy is a shape, or nest of angles, containing layered meanings.
The elf-guys are waiting for humanity, and the basics, to go extinct. Once this happens, they will rise up, pure, unstained by blood or effort, and fill the Galaxy with pure, philosophical, platonic peace. This being a Jack Vance book, this does not work, but they are interesting as part of a kind of hierarchy of philosophical ascension within the book and also as a kind of image of Jack Vance, in that the only things he can imagine are a brutal, nasty reality and an escape from that reality through a philosophical ascension and deep disconnection that proves itself ultimately futile.
In order of ascending ‘worldlieness’ we have; Strange Elf Humans - naked, passive, sworn not to interfere. Basics and their Slaves - distant and dispassionate, so utterly convinced of their own inevitable rule that they literally cannot conceive of an alternative (which helps to ruin them), but still worldly enough that they relentlessly pursue mankind. Joaz Manbeck - a hero, a human concerned with deep history and the meaning of things, but fundamentally fighting for his tribe, his land and a future for humanity. Ervis Carcolo - literally just killing for his own relentless pride and domination, not only unknowing but even uncomprehending of the morals and desires of anyone above him in this scale, YET; this very worldliness seems to lend him a relentless, vivid, visceral DRIVE and will to exist and to just keep fighting in the face of almost any disaster, which is almost admirable in itself, and which leads him to at least some temporary but unexpected victories.
A three out of five book but thematically and in its potential depth of setting, five out of five.
Prophet by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy
A great but flawed Comic-book series.
A long-buried hibernation pod whirrs its way out of the earth on an unknown world. A solder crawls from the pod, assess his weapons and equipment, and begins a mission for a long-dead Empire.
The man is always John Prophet, a gene-line and to some degree, Psyche, cloned and re-worked in a million different ways, transformed into a soldier-agent for the long-dead Earth Empire. As John Prophet explores and adapts to a strange, alien environment, (which may or may not be a far distant Earth, or some other human colony), he encounters a range of strange alien species, meets complex, sometimes incomprehensible, moral challenges, and comes into direct contact with the high aims of the Earth Empire. The John Prophet then decides; will they remain a servant of the Empire, or turn against it?
Humanity is gone, and even the later derivations of man lie deep in the past. What remains is weapons; the Prophet-line, the psychic ‘Brain Mothers’, these were made as military tools to sustain an Empire. Now those who ruled that Empire are gone, but the tools remain, and are attempting to resurrect the rulership. Why? This is perhaps a deeper and more interesting question than the psychic re-plague, hyperdimensional conspiracy-thing that actually ends this series.
The core story occurs again and again. A new world, a new ‘Prophet’, all different, engineered for task and mission, each aim separate and each set of moral and physical challenges different. Each time the empty soldier must encounter again the world, each time the very act of exploration, of meeting complex problems, forces them to grow and change, and each time one way or another, they meet, or feel some conflict with the core mission they are set.
This is the story engine of the series and it’s a really really good one, that unifies immediate survival-drama, exploration of strong strange environments and the ‘higher’ matters of morality and politics into one. When ‘Prophet’ is doing this, it is doing well, and when it isn’t, it is doing poorly.
It’s almost a perfect conceit, you can truly do anything with it, and it plays to the strengths of the creators in world creation and wild imagination, but can go almost anywhere, while remaining comprehensible to new readers. You always know what is going on; John Prophet has a mission, and you never know where he is, what’s going to happen or entirely how he will respond. You also don’t know where the story will end.
When we get away from this core concept things get slightly rubbish, or at least, less clear. The complex interweaving fates of the Prophets is one thing, but the weird cross-laced plots and shifting final aims combined with the changing art styles, for me, robbed the story as-read of energy and drive.
The structure of the tale deals inherently in unknowns, in meetings, discoveries, disclosures of complex backstories, and when the core story-engine was still working, these pass reasonably, because we always know what the main character is doing, and what they want, even if we understand very little else. But when the story structure become much more complex and vague, its aims based on strange things we don’t yet understand, this mixes badly with the super-complex background of this absolutely gigantic deep-time cosmos.
Case in point; the two strands of ‘Troll’ (a character inherited from the original Liefield comic), now in utterly changed form), manipulating two opposed sets of Prophets to do something or other with the Giant Stone Men, turned into him provoking super-stone guy to emerge from subspace, then merge with him in some super-sex-murder thing, and then that plot strand gets drawn into the evil-red-glow plot, which involves a Brain Mother of the Earth Empire investigating the Red Glow, an insect captain getting devoured by it, then that guy getting abandoned by the Red Glow, which ends up with the Four-Armed Prophet, who is sort of enslaved by it but not really, then the Four-Armed Prophet and the Brain Mother get converted into sub-space, where the whole crystal plague thing is going on, (another sub-plot), and a giant psychic Wildstorm character is hanging around, they fight and/or devour each other, and the Brain Mother/Giant Psychic gets merged with the Red Glow and breaks through into realspace to do a megapocalypse, but then just doesn’t.
For a series that is already very weird, there is simply too much shit going on, and too much of it changing too often, which constantly validates, invalidates or alters the arcs or intentions of all the little characters following the plot around. I was disappointed long ago when I was getting this in comic form as it came out, as I missed the final arc and many of the explanation points, but now I have read the whole thing in one go, measured as a story its fucking mid.
It does have deep and genuine virtues; worldbuilding, speculative evolution, deep time, species change, deep history. At its best Prophet gives a reader a true sense of eons passing, of very long reaches of change and history, and of these immortal characters being in a sense, very lost and lonely, with memories that mean little to anyone but them. There is a deep melancholic sadness which comes from examining the dot of human-like life against reaches of Deep Time and Prophet deals in this emotion well. Memories so deep that even grief pales to nothing.
The Strange Deep Future of the Wildstorm Universe; I don’t actually know that much about most of the Wildstorm Universe but it at least seems to me like the creators here have done a pretty good job at building this crazed, cosmic extrapolation of galactic drama based on these classic adventure tales of largely earthbound superfellows. I am sure a lot of stuff that happens here would mean a lot more to me if I was actually familiar with these stories; and how many of the readers of ‘Prophet’ actually read the first Rob Liefelt ‘Prophet’? I mean I know who ‘Supreme’ is and I know about the ‘Bleed’ from Warren Ellis, but that’s about it.
I’m glad I finally got the last issues where the actual history of this reality is set out, and the fact that Wildstorm has this ‘future history’, makes me oddly more interested in the Wildstorm Universe as a whole now. I’m glad this happened, wish it could have been different, but I will treasure it.
[*Exultant? I made this word up.]
Do you like books? I have a bunch up on eBay. Sale ends in a couple days;
