While Snowman, as many people have pointed out, has a very grim life ahead of him, I found James Cole's life in 12 Monkeys considerably more disturbing. He experiences just about everything that could go wrong in a dystopian future: his life is manipulated by far more powerful people, he loses his grip on what is real and believes himself to be insane, and ultimately becomes a witness to his own death. As with many time-travelers, he is ultimately helpless in the past even though he has such extensive knowledge of it; Cole's story employs the Cassandra myth to find tragedy.

At first, I was a bit confused about why The Matrix was our movie to watch with Pattern Recognition, but having thought about it I think there are two major themes that run through both works, though Pattern Recognition clearly tries to stay grounded roughly in the present, while The Matrix extrapolates them to far more extreme situations. Both works, though, demonstrate the key challenges of defining history, through a character's ability to "see beyond" reality to some hidden truths.

I'm taking my second pass on this week's response.

Rather than talk about the many, many sexual metaphors and images that pop up in Existenz, I'd like to talk about the film in terms of narrative, and its particular brand of alternate reality. This movie was certainly not helped by being released around the same time of the Matrix, since they cover somewhat similar ground, but Existenz is a quiet, low-budget, semi-incoherent techno-horror movie, and the Matrix is the Matrix.

In case anyone wanted more information on the disease that spread through World of Warcraft, here's the official BBC article about it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272418.stm

And some experts discussing the practicality of modeling disease in a virtual world:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6951918.stm.

I'm amused the second one is actually in the "Health" section of BBC, rather than "Technology"...

I'm curious if anybody has any thoughts on the similarities and differences between Tank Girl and Barbarella -- the fact that they were both originally comic book characters got me started on this line of thought. Both seem to be a fairly extreme extrapolation of a certain notion of a strong female character; Tank Girl seems to operate through violence and general social domination, while Barbarella is, essentially, sex (though with the numerous shots of Tank Girl astride her tank's gun, I'm sure there's some overlap between the two).

I suppose the "Joyce of science fiction" review on the back should have been a warning, but I really thought I could make sense of this book. Maybe Cyteen will make up in clarity what it clearly lacks in brevity...

As we were talking about the role of genetics as well as how to determine some notion of species-based superiority ("should humanity cede their future to the Oankali" being one of the key discussions in these books), I started to realize that watching Alien would be an excellent avenue to have a similar discussion but in a very different direction. The xenomorph is an interesting counterpoint to the Oankali, because one can make many of the same arguments from Lilith's Brood about biological superiority, yet the arguments sound somewhat more preposterous.

I'd like to talk about the Orgota Creation Myth (p.237), because I think the origin myth that a genetically engineered people come up with is an interesting notion (and one that you could only pull off in sci-fi).

As we keep discussing Hollywood's destruction of some of the books we've read, I feel like I should mention that there's apparently a movie being made of Neuromancer, starring everyone's favorite emo-Jedi, Hayden Christensen, as Case, and directed by Joseph Kahn, who has offered us such masterpieces as Britney Spears' video for "Toxic". Hooray.