Archive for August, 2005
Orion’s Arm
August 18th, 2005
Orion’s Arm is, quite simply, the most impressive, most well-developed, and most extensive collaborative “shared world” science fiction milieux I have ever encountered either on the Net or in oldskool static print.
Orion’s Arm sets itself a lofty goal - map out the next ten thousand years of terragenic civilization and sapience utilizing only hard sci-fi principles either already known to current physics/biology/cognitive-sci/etc. or logically extrapolated therefrom (no moronic psi powers, FTL maguffins, or treknobabble, thank you very much) - and actually achieves it through the collaborative imaginative superpowers of a number of hardcore sci-fi freaks n’ geeks from all over the world. I cannot stress the following point enough: this is not a piecemeal environment compiled higgledy-piggledy by various nerds obsessed with Farscape and other such ludicrous tropes - Orion’s Arm is self-consciously styled on fairly traditional Space Opera grounds in order for it to be engaging, fascinating, and dramatic to everyday readers…yet is founded in rock-solid scientific, sociological, and psychological principles. Orion’s Arm is as richly-textured as real life, with a consistent historical and technological model that give rise to a world that remains convincing and flat-out exciting even as it’s populated with such trans-trans-transapient beings as “AI Gods” with constellations of Jupiter-sized brains processing thoughts powerful enough affect the quantum vacuum itself!
The foundations of the Orion’s Arm universe are laid in the very near future, deriving primarily from three paradigm-shifting technological developments: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and the interfacing of human neurologics with machine circuitry. These are three technologies virtually every transhumanist on the planet (like myself) are looking forward to and keeping tabs on, for they promise to lead to truly revolutionary changes in the basics of human life on Earth and, eventually, beyond it. From there, the next ten thousand years of terragenic history, involving the founding of interstellar empires, the development of godlike machine intelligences, the fragmenting of humanity and its robotic cognates into literally billions of separate species, clades, phyla, and so forth, and encounters with alien intelligences and the remnants of extinct civilizations, are mapped out in the most incredible detail. All of this background information is provided in a simple graduated timeline, a glossary, and a “galactography” illustrating the current distribution of civilizations through the 8000-lightyear volume of the “Civilized Galaxy,” as well as an amazing index of sophonts detailing the evolution and nature of the millions of different thinking things populating the galactic scene.
Best of all, Orion’s Arm is NOT just an exercise in transhumanist futurology–were it such, it would still be amazing and Mad Fun to read…but all of this worldbuilding has not been done just for its own sake! Orion’s Arm is fundamentally a collaborative world which anyone can contribute to and use for his/her/its own creative development. “Cafe OA” showcases various forms of short fiction inhabiting the OA universe. The Orion’s Arm universe is also uniquely suited to gaming possibilities, as well, and there are a number of RPGs based in various eras of the OA universe are currently in the works. The site also includes a large gallery of graphic works, a HUGE collection of links to various scientific whitepapers and other resources designed to help out potential OA-builders, and all manner of other supplementary materials.
In fact, the site is so thoroughly developed, expect to spend a few days wading through it all.
The OA community is particularly vibrant and friendly, as well. Expect to find me contributing to the site a great deal in coming times–and while you’re at it, if you find yourself as inspired by the construction as I have been, then feel free to contribute! Best of all, the entire project is licensed under Creative Commons!
On a personal note…I’ve been working on a novel lately whose core concepts have turned out to be dramatically similar to many of the ideas developed in the OA universe. It won’t take much work at all to tweak it in order to fit into the OA world. So expect to see something of that emerging in the near future as well!
In the meantime, lose yourself in one of the most perfectly realized future histories ever developed. I’m sure you’ll find me kicking around in there someplace, careening from wormhole to wormhole in my Archailect-powered starship The Inevitable Middle Finger, with my Muuh astrogator riding shotgun and a Greater Archive stuffed in the hold, headed for the Periphery where I heard I might be able to jack into some ancient transcension network and upgrade myself to AI God….
The Devil’s Rejects
August 17th, 2005
I’ve been a big fan of Rob Zombie ever since I first heard White Zombie (via a KMFDM remix of “Thunder Kiss ‘65″) waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1995. His music and public persona were both high-camp psychobilly metal, so obviously influenced by ’60s and ’70s horror/sci-fi/exploitation kitsch that I couldn’t help but love the dude - especially his artwork, which was so clearly derived from the artistic stylings of Vault of Horror and all those dear old comic shlock masterpieces, and his film-sampling mentality. You see, Herr Zombie is a fanboy: a bigger-than-life grungy nerd with an obsessive love of Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, Jess Franco, late-nite horrorfest hosts, giant killer robots, lesbian vampires, and all the blood-drenched schlock that made drive-in slasher flicks such a fun time in the 1970s. And when I heard he had a film coming out, rumored to be so gory and despicable that no major movie company wanted to touch it, well…I just had to see what might be this decade’s Cannibal Holocaust!
Too bad House of 1000 Corpses turned out to be more like this decade’s The Hills Have Eyes infernally crossbred with Orgy of the Dead: a very fun, sometimes creepy, but ultimately piecemeal pastiche of psychotronic kitsch that was more like a filmic Frankenstein’s monster built from pieces and images harvested from all those schlocky ol’ gorefests and creeper movies Zombie loved when he was growing up. Mind you, I still loved the movie…but, then again, I never believed any of the hype that Fangoria and other horror mouthpieces were slathering over the film (you know, “Zombie’s unique vision is going to revolutionize horror” and “Zombie singlehandedly reanimates the ’70s horror film” and blah blah blah) because I knew none of it could be true. C’mon, people: Rob Zombie is a very creative guy, but his creativity is much in the same vein as the creativity of some of the world’s finest mash-up artists - he takes bits and pieces of his influences and remixes them into new, but of course strangely familiar, creations. He’s not a pioneer breaking new ground in music and/or film, and I don’t think he ever meant to be. He just wants to make music and films based on his favorite influences. Nothing at all wrong with that, mind you, and I watched House of 1000 Corpses for the first time expecting it to be what it more or less was: a horror fanboy’s tribute to the lurid, bloodsoaked craziness of ’70s horror American and Italian horror cinema.
As such it was very amusing, and full of great performances - particularly veteran character actors Sid Haig as the hilariously psychotic Captain Spaulding and Karen Black as Mother Firefly, though Zombie’s own wife Sherri Moon does a great job as giddy sexpot Baby and Bill Mosely literally sweats criminal insanity as Otis - but it was ultimately just a glitzy, gory, 90-minute snuff film in which your standard bunch of lost young people get offed one after the other but a collection of backwoods crazies and comicbook monsters. Hell, I watch the film now as more or a very, very, very dark comedy with a uniquely sick sense of humor rather than as a horror film.
When I heard Zombie was working on another film, tentatively titled The Devil’s Rejects, I didn’t expect it to be a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses: it sounded like a whole new idea. Then I discovered it was going to be a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, and I got the usual sinking feeling in my gut: the first was fun, but do we really need a follow-up film that would probably just try to repeat all the tricks and concepts from the original and thereby run them into the ground? What more could you do with the Firefly family, Dr. Satan, Captain Spaulding, and the rest? Just feed them some more college kids to grind up? Well…as more and more detail came out about The Devil’s Rejects, I started to feel a lot more hopeful. Yes, it was still more or less a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, but Zombie was doing something totally different with this film. He had an actual story to tell with this one, and I wondered with a little trepidation just how he was going to handle taking a different tack–the film could make up for all of House of 1000 Corpses‘ weakness, or it could just magnify them….
The Devil’s Rejects is not so much a sequel to the first film as it is a complete re-imagining of it, a reworking of its characters into truly terrifying madmen, and a much better film that tells a harrowing and EXTREMELY intense tale of sunbaked, bloodcaked “Murder, Mayhem, and Revenge”…and does so with style, humor, and a vision 1000 times more cohesive and developed than House of 1000 Corpses. It’s still a fanboy film, but this time it shows just how good a film directed by a man who truly loves his subject can be.
Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham
August 3rd, 2005
Yet another awesome discovery brought to light via the incomparable web-scouring skillz of BoingBoing.net: Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham, an intriguing and beautifully-drawn webcomic based - obviously - in HPL’s Arkham, Mass. The comic’s author used to be involved with Chaosium, makes of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and as such the comic is rather dependent on the game’s particular flavor of Arkham (which I, as something of a Lovecraft ultra-purist, have often found to stray a bit too far from HPL’s original vision), but it’s still freakin’ awesome–Grandpa Theobald would most definitely have been proud of this work.
Thought “Lovecraft Country” is a trademark owned by Chaosium, the comic itself is released under a non-commercial Share-Alike 2.5 Creative Commons license that allows derivative works. Something that HPL would’ve certainly applauded highly, since he originally intended his “Mythos” to be something of a community property to which all weird comers could contribute. Something tells me Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos may have to be writing a theme for this piece soon….
