Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Also, most of my reading and viewing this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral Night

J. S. Dewes, The Last Watch and The Exiled Fleet

Space opera mind candy. The Bear is good, as usual, but not quite her best. Dewes is new to me, and I'd say not quite as good at either world-building or character development as Bear, but still enjoyable, and I'll get the third book in this trilogy when it comes out.

(Parenthetical with implicit spoilers for Ancestral Night: I can't decide if Bear's characters are merely fooling themselves when they assert that the Synarchy has progressed beyond money, or if Bear has not thought through what "providing more value than you use up" is going to entail, especially when one needs to balance, say, a recovered spacecraft hull against expended fuel. Since Bear's narrator is, demonstrably confused about a lot of important matters, I am inclined to think this is the character's mis-apprehension, perhaps encouraged by propaganda. [But then, I would.])

Prometheus

Spoilers for this movie from 2012 follow.

I enjoy a good re-telling of At the Mountains of Madness more than the next fan, and am pleased to learn that xenomorphs are, in fact, shoggothim. (That is: originally amorphous bits of protoplasm, built as weapons or tools, which learned to imitate their creators and then destroyed them.) But there's a huge part of the plot which makes no sense: if you thought humanity was the creation of beings who were merely an advanced alien species, merely engineers, why of why would you think they have any more of an answer to the riddles of existence than we do, or even a way of making human bodies last forever? The fact that the existentially-befuddled human beings in this scenario have created intelligent androids would seem to make this obvious. (In fact the android character basically says as much!)

Also: Am I right in thinking that this is the first time "being infected by the alien parasite is like being pregnant" has moved from subtext to text?

2001: A Space Odyssey

Re-watched for the nth time as a palette-cleanser after Prometheus. Icy perfection from start to finish. (The iciness is part of the perfection.) --- The influence of Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star-Maker on Clarke, and so on this movie, is, naturally, very patent to me on this re-watch.

The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro

And since I was staying up late watching beloved classics... I can't remember exactly how old I was when my father took my brother and me to see a revival of The Hidden Fortress at the old Biograph Theater in Georgetown, but we couldn't have been more than eleven, and we both imprinted. I am happy to say these movies, too, only improve with age and re-watching.

Books to Read While Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Tales of Our Ancestors