Ernest Cline - Ready Player Two Review

Ready Player Two is fan-fic of '80s and '90s culture along with fan-fic of Ready Player One. The navel gazing aspect of Ready Player Two's fan-fictioning of its own universe hurts the book immeasurably. A too-big chunk of the book is spent recounting the quickly fading glory of Ready Player One (and we can surmise, the quickly fading book sales and royalty checks now that the movie fanfare has quieted). I suppose if Player Three ever gets a turn at the controls, the narrative will be so bogged down by empty nostalgia that nothing new will happen at all.

Back to the Future and Unreliable Technology

Back to the Future has an interesting commentary on technology, namely that technology is not reliable. Tech breaks and, by breaking, negatively impacts those that use it. 

Let's consider all the ways that technology is unreliable in the narrative and how it affects its users.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”

The post-apocalyptic landscape is bleak in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Food is scarce, so many of the ashen faced survivors of a meteor strike that has devastated the world's ecosystems have turned to cannibalism.

The Road is about survival, identity, and care for others. The central relationship is between a father and his son. McCarthy didn't name his characters, so Man and Boy will have to suffice. 

Father and Son

McCarthy's inspiration for the book was thinking about his role as father to his son. The role of raising a child, teaching them what they need to know to not only survive but to live well, carrying traditions forward, letting go of control so that the son can mature and take on responsibility. But, McCarthy placed the time-honored tradition of raising a son in a disturbed world where survival is a battle. Living is often dependent on killing.

Review of Attack Surfaces - Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow writes the books that need writing. In 2020, that's a book about police surveillance and the firms hired to bootstrap big scary surveillance tech on the backs of militarized police forces, forces that were scary long before they could track the movement and communications of citizens. But Doctorow doesn't just pull back the cover on scary tech and the firms that operationalize it. He counterbalances the acceleration of surveillance and control with democratic resistance. Doctorow's heroes stand up to power and keep standing up to power until that power stands down.

12 Monkeys - I Want the Future to be Unknown

Transcript: 12 Monkeys, "I want the future to be unknown"

Railly: Uh, you were standing there looking up at the moon, you were splashing through the water looking at the moon, then what? 

Cole: I thought I was in prison again. 

Railly: Just like that? You were in prison? 

Cole: No, not really. Like you said, it was all in my mind. 

Railly: You disappeared! Okay, one minute you were there. The next minute you were gone. Did you run through the woods? 

Cole: I don't know -- don't remember. 

Railly: The boy in the well. How did you know that was just a hoax? 

Cole: It was? I didn't, didn't know. 

Railly: You said he was hiding in the barn! 

Cole:  I think I maybe saw a TV show about that when I was a kid. Where a boy... 

Railly: It wasn't a TV show! It was real!

Cole: Well, maybe this boy saw the same TV show I did and he copied it. Look, you were right, I am mentally ill. I imagined all of these things, these people. I know they're not real. I can trick them, I can make them do what I want. I worked on them a little bit and I got back here. I can get better. I can stay here.

Railly: What does this mean to you? 

Cole: I think I had a dream about this. 

Railly: You had a bullet from World War One in your leg, James! How did it get there? 

Cole: You said I had delusions -- that I created a world -- you said you could explain everything... 

Railly: Well, I can't. ... I mean...I'm trying to. I can't believe that everything we do or say has already happened, that we can't change what's going to happen, that five billion people are going to die. 

Cole: I want the future to be unknown. I want to become a whole person again.
I want this to be the present. I want to stay here this time, with you.