But what if we add a bit of sci-fi to the concept, along with a splash of water? Then we’d have one neat natural resource on our hands because, as anyone with basic knoledge of chemistry might know, with carbon, hydrogen and a handful of other elements you can make a lot of stuff. Broken down into atoms, not many percent of what we eat is anything other than carbon and hydrogen. The same goes for many of the plastics that much of our stuff consists of. And a lot of construction can be done with fullerenes made out of carbon itself.

It would take some major advances in nanotechnology (which might be on the way…), but the thought of turning global warming into stuff is kind of neat. Especially if you’d end up with a magic fabricating box that anyone could own and use to tap into this resource. I believe this civilization thing we have going won’t work properly before the means of production are in the hands of the individual – but that’s an entirely different story.

I watched Renaissance last night, which for those who don’t know it is an animation feature co-produced by British, French and Luxembourgian interests. Set in Paris in the year 2054, it plays as a sci-fi noir thriller about a jaded police captain, Barthélémy Karas (viced by Daniel Craig in the English version), on a mission to find the kidnapped Ilona Tasuiev, a researcher for the ubiquitous health and beauty corporation Avalon. With the aid of Ilona’s sister Bislane, he gets further into a mystery with roots reaching back to 2006.

The story might be a bit thin, and not very original, but it’s a solid one and does its job of keeping the film together. The theme is simple but comes with a twist that adds a bit of depth at the end to make it more a little worthwhile.

Now, what really makes Renaissance stand out is the visuals. Its graphic novel style is brilliantly executed. I think it’s as close to bringing the black ink style alive as anyone has come. There’s a minimal use of grays for lighting effects, but otherwise the appearance is very graphic. The result is very vivid, so much that I first thought the characters were live actors animated with some sort of rotoscoping technique, but it appears they are digitally created, with motion capture recorded movements. Even facial expressions work well, and that’s something that often makes the illusion fail. In short, it’s a film that would be worth seeing only for the style. If I get an opportunity to see it in a theater, I would gladly pay the admission just to see how it works that way.

While it was animated for English voices, I was recommended to watch the French version with English subs, and it worked well. Maybe because it is set in Paris, but maybe there’s something else to seeing animation in a language you don’t understand. I’ll watch the English version later.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. If I should rate it, I’d say its an 8/10. There are aspects that aren’t perfect, but the overall experience is great. Maybe it isn’t something for anyone, but that’s true for all films.

And here’s a bit of links and shopping information:
Imdb entry
Official US DVD site
Rennaissance DVD at amazon.com
Rennaissance DVD at amazon.co.uk

In Broken Angels we find Kovacs employed in an elite mercenary force fighting in a bloody corporate out on a colony planet. While recovering after a failed strike he is approached by Jan Schneider, a pilot looking for someone to handle the tactical arrangements for an archaeological expedition. Kovacs decides to go along, and after busting the archaeologue Tanya Wardani out of prison camp and getting some corporate backing he assembles a colorful group of soldiers and sets out to explore what could be the most significant Martian artifact uncovered so far.

The Martian connection was mentioned briefly in Altered Carbon – and while you would think that Martians would be quite passé as a sci-fi subject in this century, Morgan still manages to create an interesting “vanished civilization”-scenario. I think it adds some balance to the novel, because no matter how fascinating the complex psyche and ultra-violent rampage of Kovacs might be, it would probably become rather dull quickly without that substance and purpose.

With a strong and complex protagonist, a very well conceived setting and a good yarn, it all adds up to an excellent, “unputdownable” sci-fi thriller. With the two great novels I’ve read so far, Morgan has earned himself a place in my “got to read everything ASAP”-list.

After a miscalculation a spaceship crashes onto the planet Eden, and while figuring out how to repair it its six crewmen (who we get to know only by their roles: the Captain, the Engineer, the Chemist, the Doctor, the Cyberneticist and the Physicist) set out to discover the surroundings. Step by step it leads to an encounter with an alien culture that is, well, very alien. They discover an automated factory that appears to be stuck in a loop, encounter strange vehicles and the creatures that they call “Doublers”. As more discoveries about these Doublers are made, questions arise regarding the health of their society.

Written in a way that is elaborate but still not excessively wordy – perhaps “dense” is the correct term – Eden feels like more of a heavy read than its 260 pages hint about. Much of it is dialog, whenever they encounter something new the involved characters debate their finding, but even if they reach an agreement Lem leaves many loose ends for the reader to speculate about. And I think that is the strongest point of Eden, the way in which Lem both creates an alien world, and skillfully uses it to ask questions and stimulate thoughts about how we would perceive something so utterly alien (with a few reflections about how someone utterly alien would perceive our world as well).

All in all, Stanislaw Lem’s Eden is a good novel that is well worth to be remembered – a classic, but still a bit from something I’d mention as “one of the great…”.

Related links:
Stanislaw Lem, Official site and Wikipedia entry
Eden at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Altered Carbon

Kovacs has been, by way of what we could call “an offer he can’t refuse”, contracted to investigate the death Laurens Bancroft – one of those who have money. The police have written off the case as suicide, but Bancroft himself insists, contrary to the evidence, that he was murdered. Ah, yes – in the the future crafted by Morgan real death only happens if the “cortical stack” in which the mind is digitized is damaged, and men like Bancroft evade even that risk by remote storage. Still, there is a gap since Bancroft’s last back-up, and Kovacs sets out to find seek truth in a web of corruption and vendetta.

In all honesty, Altered Carbon is pretty much raw pulp, but it is well written pulp that, as Peter F. Hamilton blurbs, “hits the floor running and then starts to accelerate”. The first person narrative – you can’t write a detective tale any other way, can you? – is the kind that manages to be graphically vivid while keeping the pace up as an intriguing yarn with plenty of twists is unraveled.

I loved Altered Carbon, and I doubt anyone who is appealed by the concept of cyberpunk and gritty noir blended will be disappointed. I am certainly going to grab the sequels as soon as possible.

Related links:
Altered Carbon at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Official Homepage
Richard Morgan at Wikipedia

Set in 2166, some 80 years after the devastating events known as the Gene Wars, Lethe presents the reader with a quite damaged world. Due to the the harsh climate remaining pure humans are forced to live in protected reservations under the control of the League of New Alchemists – an organization controlled by a small group of disembodied, networked brains known as the Heads.

Jenae Kim is doing research for the League together with the dolphins, with whom she can communicate telepathically after changing to an aquatic form known as Altermode. This research leads Jenae to stumble on a piece of significant information – knowledge which forces Jenae to flee outside the reach the heads.

Meanwhile, Daire Morales passes through an unexplored gateway at the mystercial celestial object dubbed Underkohling. What he finds is an Edenic world, populated by a small colony of human children and adolescents.

While it doesn’t make me want to throw superlatives around me, I must say Lethe is a solid, quite skillfully executed work. The characters are well defined and come through vividly. The story is intriguing and well laid out – using the term fast-paced would be an exaggeration, but it flows on well, with enough surprises to keep the interest up – and the future it is set in is well thought out. To put a label on it, I’d call it a dystopy (though with a glimmer of hope) half-way to hard sci-fi. In short, not much to complain about.

Availability suggests that it is out of print by now, but here are direct links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for those who want to track down a copy in the Amazon Marketplace.

In another place and time Meniscus, a cloned test subject locked up in a sealed chamber, is waging his own battle against the viruses he has been infected with.

Of course the two storylines are connected and together will affect the future of humanity. I quite liked that connection, but going into further detail would probably give away too much.

Having picked up Maul (along with Lethe by the same author, but more about that one later) when browsing the library’s sci-fi section while waiting for a bus one rainy day, I didn’t know what to expect – but I have to say I’m not very disappointed with this discovery. While the author herself describes the science in the book as “pure fudge”, the concepts she writes about are quite clever. Sun’s world is full of glorified consumerism – not without an underlying reason – and Meniscus’s future is an interesting take on a world where men have become an endangered gender and propagation is big business.

To conlude, I’d say that my opinion of Maul is “a bit better than not half bad” – a not too heavy but still stimulating read. “Good for lazy summer afternoons” may be the appropriate description.

(and the links for those who want to check it out at Amazon.comor Amazon.co.uk)

Now it seems fans have decided to take matters into their own hands, and started Browncoats Rise Again, a campaign to raise enough funds to finance a new series. I don’t know if it’s possible to raise the kind of money such a project requires – and I’m personally not sure about giving money to a website that lacks any information about who’s behind the initiative, but hopefully that’s just information lost in the burst of enthusiasm that created the project.

But it did get me thinking about how far off using the web as a medium for productions of that size is – to simply produce a series and sell the episodes online. Something like Firefly, that already has a dedicated fan base, may be a good starting project. If people pay $29.95 a month to get access to naked ladies doing naked things, maybe it isn’t impossible to find a large enough audience that is willing to subscribe to something with the quality of a tv-series. And since I guess that many Firefly fans are in the more tech-savvy demographics, many probably have what is needed to take something from the net and comfortably watch it on a TV. (Personally I’ve never been really comfortable watching anything but short clips on my PC, I prefer to be more active when I’m in front of this screen.)

Anyway, The Butlerian Jihad, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson is set about ten thousand years before the events of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in a time when thinking machines are ruling over the Old Empire, including Earth. This period is the source of the technophobic aspects of the society in the original Dune novels. But humanity still clings to life, many as slaves under the machines, but some on free worlds such as Salusa Secundus. Here we find Serena Butler, the idealistic daughter of the planet’s viceroy, and Xavier Harkonnen, officer in the Salusan Armada – two people dedicated to standing up against the machines.

In the machine dominated worlds we find Vorian Atriedes, the son of Agamemnon, one of the original cymek Titans (disembodied human brains living as machines) who initiated the machine rule a millenium ago. Atriedes is a trustee human, at service on a ship delivering updates of Omnius, the ruling evermind distributed over the Synchonized Worlds. On earth we also find Iblis Ganjo, another trustee human in charge of building monuments in hohour of the Titans.

The story told is pretty straight-froward, I suppose that even people who havn’t read the original novels can figure out that it will eventually lead up to an all-out rebellion against the machines. But that the overall story is obvious doesn’t really matter, as the whole work is meant “history book”, giving background information to the societies and concepts in the original setting – on Arrakis a young Zensunni gets exiled to the desert, on Rossak Zufa Cenva is training Sorceresses, on Poiritin the Savant Tio Holtzman works on field generation technologies.

So, for some sort of conclusion: It’s in no way a masterwork, maybe a bit lacking in the sort of depth which in my opinion makes the good science fiction stand out from the rest. The storytelling has a quite good flow, the language is generally good (perhaps with too many grand adjectives making some descriptions sounding too pompous, though), with short chapters that make it a relaxing read. So, my verdict is that its not at all a bad read.

Various editions availible from Amazon…