The official Star Wars website just made our day, and we have to say thanks. StarWars.com posted an article full of vintage Kenner Star Wars toy commercials, and they’re just about the best thing ever.
And yet seeing these commercials, it all makes sense. They’re no-nonsense, unabashedly cheesy, and some (like the Emperor and Boba Fett ones) even tease a first look at characters that fans didn’t know about yet. Imagine watching TV and seeing not just a Star Wars toy commercial, but one that includes your first look at a new villain? The pop culture world today would stop in its tracks. Thirty years ago, you called your friend on the phone or maybe talked about it in school. Then patiently waited months and months to get the toy, and maybe find out more.
Here are just a few more more commercials.
“Chewie says you’ve got great legs.”
Seriously, we could watch these all day. And thankfully you can. 12Back on YouTube has over ONE HUNDRED of these. Kiss your productivity goodbye, and visit them at that link.
In the DARPA-funded study, researchers at the University of Melbourne have developed a device that could help people use their brains to control machines. These machines might include technology that helps patients control physical disabilities or neurological disorders. The results were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
In the study, the team inserted a paperclip-sized object into the motor cortexes of sheep. (That’s the part of the brain that oversees voluntary movement.) The device is a twist on traditional stents, those teeny tiny tubes that surgeons stick in vessels to improve blood flow.
This souped-up version, which the team calls a “stentrode,” is a stent covered in electrodes and also sounds like it belongs in a cyborg. The strentrode snakes its way into blood vessels through a catheter that’s stuck in the patient’s neck, rather than in the skull. Existing brain-machine interfaces (BIMs) require cracking the patients’ skull open in a procedure called a craniotomy. This involves removing part of the skull to access the brain.
The new development makes it easier to stick a computer chip or stentrode into a patient’s head. Instead of open-brain surgery, the method of inserting a BMI through blood vessels in the neck reduces the risk of inflaming tissue and other risks involved in such horrifying, invasive surgery.
The team plans on testing the stentrode in humans sometime next year.
The Internet offers lots of opportunities for authors to connect with readers—but it can still be hard for an author to get noticed among the crowd of other aspiring scribes. So 10 authors, who include some bestsellers, have created their own platform.
The authors, who include Jay Allan (the Far Stars trilogy), Samuel Peralta (The Future Chronicles), Nick Webb (the Legacy Fleet trilogy) and Joshua Dalzelle (the Omega Force series), have launched their own site called DiscoverScifi.com. The goal, Webb writes, is “rising above the noise.” Webb explains further:
You’ve probably seen the slew of book promotion websites and mailing lists out there. We are not a book promotion website. We are not just a mailing list. We are authors, connecting with you, the reader. We’re going to bring you not only the best deals when our books launch, not only price promotions you won’t find anywhere else, but sneak peaks and inside looks, and direct access to the inner thoughts of some of today’s bestselling science fiction authors. Not to mention amazing monthly contests for stuff you won’t find on any other site.
These are authors who seem to have had a lot of success on Amazon, so it’s interesting to see them trying to create their own channel for connecting with readers and selling books (via “price promotions,” etc.) to them. The site just launched, so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.
Back in 1953, Galaxy Science Fiction and Simon & Schuster launched a huge contest to find a great new science fiction novel. The prize was $6,500 (a lot of money in those days). The winner? A brand new writer named Edson McCann. Except for one thing: Edson McCann did not exist.
Horace Gold was in the middle of judging a $6,500 prize competition for the best new science-fiction novel, co-sponsored by Galaxy and Simon & Schuster. The competition had been announced in the March 1953 issue of Galaxy and the deadline for submissions was 15 October. The novels Gold was receiving were generally poor and he asked [Fredrik] Pohl if he could treat Gladiator at Law as an entry if he and [co-author C.M.] Kornbluth were prepared to submit it under a pseudonym. Pohl did not think this was playing fair and declined. However, soon after completing Gladiator at Law Pohl began a new novel, Preferred Risk, this time with Lester del Rey. Here the huge corporations of the future were the insurance companies, which had refined every action and consequence down to a scale of probabilities and actuarial tables. By now the plot variations were becoming a little staid, and this novel is not a patch on the previous two. Nevertheless, Gold liked it—or certainly preferred it to the submissions he had received. He persuaded Pohl and del Rey to allow Preferred Risk to be entered under a pseudonym and it was duly declared the winner. The novel, attributed to Edson McCann, ran in the June to September issues of Galaxy.
Never mind that the contest had already closed. Never mind the clause about the prize “guaranteed to the author of the best original science fiction novel submitted.” In my mind, “best of submitted” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great novel; it means it was the best of those submitted. Never mind [the promise] that “contestants will not be competing with most of the established ‘big names’ of science fiction.” Oh, wait; it was only two of the names, so perhaps that aspect held up....
The story behind McCann was that he was a nuclear physicist who was working on top secret projects; therefore, he couldn’t risk public appearances or book signings. Such a dedicated, honorable man!
As Wuertz points out, this is really rotten: “I’ve entered contests in the past; in fact, I’m in one right now. If I found out the winner wasn’t one of the entries, I would feel cheated.”
Later editions of Preferred Risk bore the names of the actual authors, and Edson McCann was able to go back to his top secret nuclear physics projects in peace.
Deadpool wasn’t always a comics (and movie, and video game) superstar. The Merc with a Mouth started out much smaller, as a supporting character in one of the many X-Men comic books. We talked to the people who created and shaped him, to find out how Deadpool conquered the universe.
Deadpool was first introduced in 1991s New Mutants #98, which was co-written by Fabien Nicieza and Rob Liefeld. He was a bad-ass, wisecracking assassin with two swords, a ton of guns, and mysterious link to that series’ then-star, Cable. Liefeld and Nicieza are both credited with creating the character, and each of them feels not just a strong ownership of him—but also a sense that a part of themselves are in him.
“Unapologetically, absent me there is no Deadpool. Period,” said Rob Liefeld. “I am the name, the costume, the look, the origin and the attitude. Great one-liners are the result of other writers. But there’s no Deadpool at all in existence without me.”
Nicieza has a slightly different take.
“Deadpool exists because of both of us,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s actually a perfect combination of an artist and writer working together. Rob created an excellent design, character name and basic story background and it merged perfectly with the tragic twist, humor and personality that I brought to the work. I think the character was always stronger for the sum of its creative parts, as most successful characters are.”
The whole reason Deadpool was introduced was Liefeld wanted to emulate his idols. Comic book legends like Frank Miller, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, who wrote, drew and created their own characters. He’d already had a huge success with the mutant Cable, and he used that popularity to introduce several more characters. Among them was Deadpool.
“I spent a year with Cable, turning the New Mutants into this formidable fighting force, and this guy walks in the door, disrupts their tactics and takes them all down one by one,” says Liefeld. “It’s a great way to introduce a new character, walking in the door and taking all your favorites down.”
That shocking introduction came not just at the perfect time, but the perfect visual influences. For Deadpool’s look, Liefeld drew on two of the most popular comics characters of the time: Spider-Man and Wolverine.
“The visual of Deadpool was very informed by Spider-man,” Liefeld said. “Recently, I asked [some friends at Marvel], ‘How do you remember when I walked in the studio with Deadpool? They said, ‘You pulled it out of your bag and said ‘Spider-Man with guns and swords.’’ That’s how I pitched it to them. A smart-ass mercenary.”
As for the origin, Liefeld went to one of the most famous stories in their history. “I told Marvel, ‘You call Wolverine ‘Weapon X.’ Weapon X stands for 10. Have you ever shown 1-9?’ They said ‘No.’ This was 1990. So I said ‘Great. Deadpool was the guy they experimented on before Wolverine.’”
Then there’s his personality, filled with attitude and saturated in the mind of Nicieza.
“Unfortunately, his brain is my brain, in all its sad, pathetic glory,” Nicieza said. “Most of us have a filter. If I said a tenth of the things I think I’d get my ass kicked every day. Deadpool is that without the filter. He has the biological excuse that he can’t filter himself, so he can say the most inappropriate things, go off on complete tangents, and pull cultural references out of his ass all in one panel.”
“I scripted the book and gave Deadpool the sarcastic, abrasive personality as a counter to the stoicism and machismo of so many of the other characters in the book,” Nicieza continued. “Rob channeling his love for how [Todd] McFarlane was drawing Spider-Man into Deadpool’s costume also played into my giving him that trickster personality.”
Almost immediately, all of that came together and spoke to audiences in a big, big way. “Marvel said, ‘Rob, this is the biggest reaction to a character we’ve ever gotten,’” Liefeld said. “With only about 10 pages, he sparked.” Why? “You’ve got to start with the visual,” he added. “Fans know, de facto, that costume is a cool looking costume. And it looks good on all body shapes and sizes: young, old, large, small.”
After New Mutants #98, fans and editors alike demanded to see Deadpool again as soon as possible. Which was fortuitous timing. Two issues later, Liefeld and Nicieza were getting ready to end New Mutants, and launch a new X-Men book called X-Force. In August 1991, X-Force #1 came out, and to this day remains the second best selling comic book issue of all time. Liefeld’s original plan was for Deadpool to come back around #5. He came back sooner.
“I can literally tell you, he’s a product that the fans demanded,” Liefeld said. “X-Force #1 sold 5 million copies. By default, the second issue dipped and did 1.3 million copies. But the cover of X-Force #2 is Deadpool. It’s not X-Force, It’s Deadpool.”
And yet, even though the character was incredibly popular, he hadn’t even scratched the surface. “Huge love to Fabian and Rob for the inception, but I’ve always considered Deadpool to be a creation that had many parents,” said Gerry Duggan, who currently writes the character. “Like a less-horrible Freddy Kruger origin. Gail Simone, Rick Remender, Joe Kelly, Mark Waid, Jimmy Palmiotti, Dan Way, and so many more creators left Deadpool better than when they found him. I inherited a character that was already on the way to being a moonshot.”
That moonshot took some time, though. A few years after X-Force launched, like a lot of 1990s creations, Deadpool’s popularity began to slide a bit. In fact, when Joe Kelly came on board Deadpool’s solo comic in the late Nineties, it was almost a mercy job. “When I started on the[Deadpool series], I’m not kidding when I say they thought it was going to be cancelled after 3 issues,” Kelly said. But then the fans would write letters, and it just kept coming back. Kelly ended up sticking around for several years, and he believes that because the readership was small but vocal during this time, he was able to push the character’s limits further, with little consequence.
This resulted in Deadpool’s comic book personality evolving, changing, and solidifying into the character as we know him today. For example, Deadpool becoming a pop culture commenter. “We did Deadpool’s first baby book,” Kelly said. “I wrote an evil story about Deadpool and Barney and Deadpool had to eat Barney to survive, it was fantastic. I also got to kick Captain America in the nuts, which was a special moment.”
The most famous change in this time though was that Deadpool started breaking the fourth wall. Liefeld and others credit Kelly for coming up with that, but the writer himself isn’t so sure. “I never think that I actually came up with that, but everyone tells me I did,” Kelly said.
He said Deadpool addressing the audience came about simply because the character was “completely insane.” “So that really helps,” Kelly continues. “The fact he’s so nutty and out of his mind made it appropriate to do that stuff. And honestly, I was kind of finding my voice as a writer.”
Nicieza too gives Kelly the credit for the idea but points out Deadpool’s fourth-wall-breaking had happened before, and had served a more practical purpose early on. Marvel had started doing recap pages at the beginning of each comics issue, and Nicieza thought that was a bit “dry” for Deadpool.
“So I asked if I could have standing figures drawn for page one and I would have Deadpool talk to the readers about what happened,” Nicieza said. “Once you do that, you automatically start breaking the wall with a hammer.” Deadpool would also answer fan letters at the end of each issues. “So the title basically was being “bookended” by Deadpool directly addressing the readers on a monthly basis.”
At this point Deadpool had the cool costume, mysterious origin, could comment on the world he was in, talk to the audience, and kick ass all at the same time. For most characters, that might have been enough. But Deadpool was on a different path.
When you look at the biggest characters in the world, characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-man and Wolverine, they made their names not just in comics. They had major roles in other media as well, either on TV or in movies. And though Deadpool did appear on the Disney Spider-Man animated series, his popularity has decidedly more modern roots. Video games and the Internet made him the character he is today.
“Video games, in my opinion, are where he took on his new larger life,” says Liefeld. “Deadpool exploded for the youth around 2010 with Marvel vs. Capcom. He was the most popular character. He does kicks then mocks you as he hits you and dances around you when you hit the ground. My neighborhood kids, I walked into my living room, and there were 8 kids on the sofa and they all want to play Deadpool vs Deadpool, and they didn’t know who Deadpool was.”
Then there was the Internet. “Deadpool came of age on the web,” said Duggan. “There are kids that only know him from the pages and panels that get posted to Tumblr. The best of every era of Deadpool is distilled and shared. It’s obviously done the character a bit of good.”
Those hilarious snippets are usually in line with the cynicism associated with the Internet, too. “I always say I’m a happier person when I’m working on the character because he allows you to purge a lot of crap from your subconscious,” Nicieza said. “He is like a walking enema for foul thoughts. “
“It’s the tone,” adds Kelly. “There are a million Khaleesis at comic conventions, and they’re all regal. But Deadpool shows up as Elvis [or] a Stormtrooper, [and] he becomes a meme. He’s infiltrating your favorite thing, and that’s pretty great.”
And the character has a million in-jokes, like the references to chimichangas. “Deadpool’s love of chimichangas was based completely on an in-joke between myself and the late Mark Gruenwald,” said Nicieza. “Years earlier we’d seen a Saturday Night Live skit where Jimmy Smits was over-pronouncing Spanish words, one of those, I think, was ‘chimichanga.’ Mark and I spent most of that Monday in the office over-pronouncing words with a bad Spanish accent, and cracking each other up.”
Later, he was inserted into classic stories like Moby Dick, put up against the god titan Thanos, played strictly for comedy in a kind of Mad Magazine sense and more. “All the other characters have the same boundaries,” said Liefeld—except for Deadpool.
“My secret weapon for Deadpool is always the element of surprise,” added Duggan. “I always want to surprise the reader. I’ve never felt restrained by Deadpool at all. His stories are always so tragic. We’ve managed to pack a lot of horror and drama into our run. The comedy is usually right before you turn the page and get hit upside the head with some tragedy.”
Tragedy would befall the character on the next place he’d infiltrate though. His first foray on the big screen came in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds was cast as the character, but they fiddled with the origin and took away Deadpool’s two biggest assets: his look and his attitude. What was left was a big hunk of violent goo, and fans were outraged.
“People forget, the Monday after Wolverine made $85 million they announced Deadpool with Ryan,” said Liefeld. “And I met with the producers. They called me up and said, ‘We know we went astray. Let’s talk, let’s meet.’”
That meeting was likely the first seed of the film that’s opening on February 12, written by Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese and directed by Tim Miller. It took seven years—but with this movie, we’re finally in the Deadpool renaissance. “Deadpool today is like the Wolverine of the nineties,” said Kelly. “Put him in anything, and he’ll sell.”
But, to his creators, Deadpool is more than just a cash register. He’s a tailor-made vehicle to do whatever you want.
“The great news about Deadpool’s popularity is that it’s supporting a lot of great stories,” Duggan said. “I’m grateful for the comics that Fabian, Cullen Bunn and Joe Kelly have been wrenching on. I love having new Deadpool comics where I don’t always know what’s going to happen on the turn of a page.”
When Furby hit store shelves in November 1998, it was an instant hit. Kids loved it. Parents loved it. People paid three times the Furby’s retail value just to get one for the holidays, and within three years, Furby had sold 40 million units. Now, nearly two decades later, it’s the seedy world of Furby hackers and circuit-benders that are keeping the legendary toy alive.
Furby hacking is a well-documented hobby dating back to the toy’s original release in the late 1990s. Entire web 1.0 websites depict how to hack a Furby, and feature detailed illustrations of the gruesome dissections, floating Furby heads that read you email, and disturbing videos of skinless Furby speaking in tongues. You can even watch a Japanese maid peel off Furby’s furry carapace—all because Furbies are cheap, easy to break open, and fun mess around with.
And the number of Furby hacks only appears to be growing. Late last year, students at Wroclaw University of Technology announced the Open Furby project, which walks people through the process of installing a custom controller into the toy so that it can be operated from any PC. This new Furby hack makes it easy for people to operate the toy however they’d like.
Brooklyn-based Furby hacker Lee von Kraus says the array of sensors and the low price have kept Furby popular within the circuit-bending community. He’s even published the grisly details of his own DIY Furby hacks on Instructables. von Kraus’ hacks are simple, like many Furby hacks, using the toy’s built-in IR sensor to detect heat and set off an external alarm. He similarly toyed with the other embedded sensors just to prove he could control them entirely.
It’s not unusual for Furby hackers to attack the sensor array and micro-controller. Some hacks even require adding new integrated circuits, which usually look like a mess of wires plugged into the Furby’s “brain.” The custom circuits let hackers manipulate Furby’s sensors and add extra capabilities like voice recognition. One person use a similar method to create bizarre machines with a choir of Furby zombies. The newer 2012 edition Furbys, which come with companion iOS and Android apps, have also been hacked without installing any new hardware at all, allowing Furby to perform specific actions if you receive an email or get an @ mention on Twitter.
Once you realize how many Furby hacking possibilities exist, it’s easy to get pulled into the wormhole of endless YouTube instructional videos and Github guides walking you through the process, but von Kraus thinks there’s a simple reason that hackers are so drawn to the toy.
“There aren’t many other platforms like it that allow you to do something cool by just hacking it,” he said. “Like if you hack a remote control car, you can make it go faster, and that’s pretty much it.” In other words, it’s easy to make the Furby do cool shit.
“It’s all controlled by just one motor,” von Kraus said. “When Furby came out everyone thought it was really advanced, but in reality, they were just projecting their own emotions into it, like pets.”
A zombie Furby whose only reason for existence is to read your email outloud. Via YouTube.
And that’s the second part of Furby’s success. A Furby, at its core, is just a giant face. It’s a simple electronic playground that inexperienced hackers can open up and experiment with—and they get immediate results thanks to the toy’s big stupid eyes and moving beak.
Hasbro, the current owner of the Furby franchise, still sees the appeal. In 2012, it released a new Furby with a set of two LCD screens for eyeballs, which when not hauntingly terrifying, can also open up an entirely new hacking frontier.
And that’s the frontier the Open Furby project wants to explore. This short demo is a glimpse of what they have in mind, using Furby’s new LCD screen eyes to display important information. Open Furby removes the technical barrier associated with toy hacking and will give everyone the tools needed to create any kind of Furby they wanted.
With a custom-created PCB board and software, the Furby transforms into a DIY robotic interface on the cheap. Depending on its popularity, the team says they’ll consider a Kickstarter campaign to help more people get in on the Furby-hacking fun.
A group of Furbies doing...something. Via YouTube.
Open Furby wouldn’t be the first time a hacking kit was made for a toy from decades ago (remember BearDuino?). But unlike other creepy automata, no toy has inspired 18 years of consistent online hacking how-tos and video walkthroughs. Those early hacking explorations have now blossomed into the DIY hacking platform that could one day introduce Furby to a new generation of would-be tinkerers.
Tests at a fusion reactor in China have hit a major milestone. The experiments have created plasma with a temperature of 90 million degrees Fahrenheit —hotter than the core of our Sun—and sustained the state for over a minute and a half.
The experiments were carried out in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak—known as EAST. Its design uses a donut-shaped reactor in which incredibly hot plasma resides. Careful control of intense magnetic fields allows the plasma to be contained in a tight ring running through the center of the donut’s circular cross section—which means that the walls of the structure are never directly exposed to the high temperatures of the plasma.
Ensuring those temperatures can be sustained for long enough is essential to creating energy—the long-term goal of such fusion reactors. We’d need the reactions to run for long periods of time because getting them started requires a huge input of energy: If they stall too soon, the reaction is net negative in energy terms. But controlling such intense heat is difficult, because such high energies causes great instabilities that are hard to confine. So running an experiment at such temperatures for 102 seconds is a positive step indeed.
The news comes on the back of successful tests at the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald just last week, where hydrogen fuel was used for the first time in its Wendelstein 7-X stellarator.
It’s not the hottest temperature ever created on Earth. That accolade goes to the scorching conditions created by the LHC, which managed to create a plasma “soup” of sub-atomic gluons and quarks with an estimated temperature of 10 trillion degrees. That’s somewhere in the region of 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. But those conditions last for the merest flicker of time, which is useless for actually creating energy.
Indeed, most scientists suggest that the long-yet-intense burn required for fusion needs to be around 180 million degrees—so we still have some way to go. The consensus seems to suggest that it’ll be a decade or more before one of these rigs is capable of actually producing electricity for us.
But for now, we can celebrate a positive week for fusion science. Let’s hope there are many more.
I am pleased to report that in Dying Light: The Following, you can still dropkick a zombie off a cliff and into the sea. You also get to drive a car.
I liked last year’s Dying Light, so I was predisposed to like The Following. And I do like The Following; I like it even more than I was expecting to. It’s just what an expansion should be: more of the game I already liked, with a number of refinements and small, interesting tweaks. In one respect it’s altogether different: You have an automobile now, and an enormous new explorable area that requires the use of it.
The original Dying Light, released a year ago, was a video game for people who like video game-ass video games. Everything in it was familiar, but the game was no less fun for that. The developers at the Polish studio Techland mixed the first-person melee combat of Shadow Warrior, the sidequest-spattered open map of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, the persistent autosaving and progress-sapping deaths of Dark Souls, the randomized, color-coded loot chase of Diablo, the crafting and item degradation of their own Dead Island, the first-person parkour of Mirror’s Edge, the special super-zombies and asymmetrical multiplayer of Left 4 Dead, and the “great sidequests, forgettable main quest” backbone of so many recent Ubisoft games. Phew.
Those comparisons are all well and good, but at its heart, Dying Light was and remains a game about doing this:
In The Following, you’re still playing as Dying Light protagonist Kyle Crane, a dull slice of clench-cake who might as well be any other boring action game protagonist from the last 10 years. Following the events of Dying Light, Crane has been sent by his friends in the zombie-overrun city of Harran to the nearby countryside to investigate rumors of a zombie cure. He arrives and quickly falls in with a cult-like religious group that seems to have a way to keep themselves from being infected. This is also when he gets the car.
The story may revolve around discovering a cure for the plague, but the car is the thing, man. Crane’s nifty little dune buggy wouldn’t look out of place in a Far Cry game and allows The Following to move at a markedly different tempo than Dying Light proper. That’s largely because the car-friendly new region is, by Dying Light standards, humongous.
The Harran outback, while never explicitly assigned a geographic location, appears to exist somewhere in western Turkey, just off the Mediterranean. Most missions will send you careening from one side of the map to the other, bouncing through hay fields, ramping over train tracks, skimming across river crossings and plowing through undead hordes.
The bigness of the map and the constant availability of vehicular transport remix Dying Light’s formula without pushing things too far from the core of what was appealing about the main game. There’s still that sense of constant, gnawing peril; every pause to hunt for loot or repair your gear is fraught with the feeling that something has noticed you and is shambling (or in some cases, sprinting) your way. There’s still the feeling that you’re never fully in control, as the ever-ticking clock and the lack of fast-travel threaten to leave you marooned in the wilderness after dark. And nighttime is still a disaster; black as pitch and full of deadly “volatile” zombies who are unimpressed by your new wheels.
The buggy itself is a hoot. It’s fast out of the gate and handles very well, and it only gets tougher and more spritely as you level up your new driving skill-tree and unlock better upgrades. My buggy can now lay mines and act as a noise-making distraction. It’s got a cool blue paint job and a zombie-wrecking plow on the front. Eventually, it’ll be able to blast UV light from its headlights, electrocute zombies who get near, and—of course—melt anything in its path with a hood-mounted flamethrower.
Missions in The Following are fairly spread out, and I’d often finish one and groan as I saw the next one’s starting point, kilometers away. What grumpiness I might have felt about the lack of a fast-travel option often evaporated soon after I started driving, however. With its sun-kissed Mediterranean backdrops, strong sense of speed and frequent off-road detours through grassy fields, The Following’s driving reminds me of nothing so much as Turn 10’s fantastic Forza Horizon 2. With zombies.
The Following accompanies the new “enhanced edition” of Dying Light, which adds a laundry list of small tweaks and additions to the core game. You can quickly load out of The Following and back into Dying Light at any time, carrying your gear, skills, and XP between the two. It’s an unusually slick integration that helps The Following feel like an organic part of a greater whole.
Because of all those enhanced edition tweaks, I have a hard time reconciling my recent time with the game with the 30-ish hours I spent playing the original last year. Does it control better now, or was it always like this? Is the melee combat a bit tighter, the dodging a bit smoother, or am I misremembering? I suppose it doesn’t matter. I had even more fun with Dying Light this time around than I did the first time, and I had a lot of fun that first time.
As with the base game, the character motivations and overarching plot of The Following are a snooze. The cast consists mostly of sweaty, interchangeable dudes, and I had a hard time caring who wanted what, or what Kyle Crane seemed to think of any of them. The grand finale goes all-in on the loopy B-movie weirdness the game hints at throughout, but things could’ve stood to get a lot weirder a lot faster.
The moment-to-moment writing remains sturdy and plentiful, however, particularly in more out-of-the-way places like item descriptions, journal entries, and sidequest dialogue. Upon investigating the town’s abandoned post office, I found a number of long-lost letters that I could deliver to far-flung townspeople. Each time I delivered a letter I got a little story, my favorite being the guy who excitedly opened his letter only to realize I’d given him his old power bill. A great deal of thought and care has gone into some aspects of The Following’s script; I only wish the characters were more interesting.
Happily, unlike with the base game, none of the story missions or setpiece battles achieve truly unfortunate badness. It actually helps that there’s no proper villain this time; no capering madman at the fringes, challenging Kyle Crane to a duel or whatever. There’s just the hunt for the cure and all the bandits, zombies and other assorted hazards that get the way.
The flow faltered anytime I was forced to pull out a gun and fight through an outpost of human enemies, but the majority of the story missions were just more of the same cool climbin’, runnin’, explorin’ and evadin’ that I’d already been doing. Several of Crane’s most reliable tricks find new application in the more spread-out setting: The empowering grappling hook from the base game serves a different but no less crucial role in wide-open spaces, and the fields and roadways make it much easier to stretch out and explore Crane’s array of melee grapples, dodges, and tackles.
While often gorgeous at a cursory glance, The Following feels janky and in need of extra tuning from time to time. Some of that could’ve been the pre-release PC build I played, though much of it lines up with what I remember from last year’s game. Things would pop into view as I’d drive around; the game crashed on me a few times; bladed weapons still outperform other types by too great a margin; enemies clip and behave in improbable ways; optional endgame bosses can be easily cheesed simply by standing at a distance and shooting them until they keel over; human enemies are dumber than a bag of golf balls. None of that was too bothersome, in the end. While Dying Light may be more careless than some of the games it emulates, it is also often more carefree.
That playfulness comes across most strongly in the built-in co-op multiplayer, which lets up to four players tear around in one player’s game (and even ride shotgun in one another’s buggies). You can team up to complete story missions, sidequests, or anything else you’d like. I played a couple of hours of co-op with my colleague Nathan Grayson and we had a hell of a time. The familiar sense of lonesome peril was quickly replaced by goofy one-upsmanship, as we lined up to see who could boot a zombie farther.
A built-in “competition” detector adds some structure to the mayhem, occasionally letting you set up sanctioned competitions with your teammates at the press of a button. Who can kill the most zombies the fastest? Who can drive faster, and who can reach the supply drop first? All that and I’ve yet to try out the newly expanded zombies vs. humans PvP mode. I certainly plan to once more people are playing.
After more than 20 hours with The Following, I’m impressed by how much I have left to do. There are corners of the map that I’ve left unexplored, sidequests I’ve left incomplete, missing persons I’ve all but abandoned, and hidden loot I’ve left undiscovered. I’m just as impressed that, after so many hours, I still want to go do all that. What do you know: I’ve grown fonder of a game that I already liked a great deal.
To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com.
This is the best possible choice. Bryan Fuller—who worked on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager back in the day, before going on to create Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls and Hannibal—will be the showrunner of the new Star Trek TV show.
In a statement, Fuller was quoted as saying:
My very first experience of Star Trek is my oldest brother turning off all the lights in the house and flying his model of a D7 Class Klingon Battle Cruiser through the darkened halls. Before seeing a frame of the television series, the Star Trek universe lit my imagination on fire. It is without exaggeration a dream come true to be crafting a brand-new iteration of Star Trek with fellow franchise alum Alex Kurtzman and boldly going where no Star Trek series has gone before.
Fuller has been trying to get a Star Trek series off the ground for nearly a decade. Back in 2008, he told IF Magazine:
I told my agent and told the people of J.J. Abrams team I want to create another STAR TREK series and have an idea that I’m kicking around. I would love to return to the spirit of the old series with the colors and attitude. I loved VOYAGER and DEEP SPACE NINE, but they seem to have lost the ‘60s fun and I would love to take it back to its origin.
The new Trek series (which is being executive produced by Alex Kurtzman) will premiere on CBS in 2017, before moving to CBS’ digital “CBS All Access” platform.
Entertainment Weekly points out that Fuller has teased a few different ideas for Star Trek TV shows in the past. At one point, he said it would be interesting to see how the Next Generation era looks, in the altered timeline of the recent J.J. Abrams films. In another interview, he said it would be cool to have a show that follows another starship, the U.S.S. Reliant, and that he’d love to cast Angela Bassett as the captain and Rosario Dawson as the first officer.
Fuller is already showrunner of the American Gods series on Starz, and is also spearheading the new version of Amazing Stories.
Fights broke out today in New Hampshire between anti-Marco Rubio robots and pro-Rubio humans. It could not yet be confirmed whether the robot uprising has begun, but someone needs to tell that woman that you can’t strangle a robot. It only makes them stronger.
It’s believed that the robots oppose Marco Rubio because the Florida Senator has been posing as a robot in recent debates and Republican primary rallies. Rubio, an alleged human, has been seen as pandering to the robot community in an attempt to secure the robot voting bloc in the Granite State.
All varieties of robots have been spotted in New Hampshire of late, including the gray-kinda-looks-like-a-bondage-outfit model and the cardboard-robot-with-a-colander-for-a-hat model. Today’s scuffle sent the latter falling to the ground.
Rumors that Rubio is at least 1/16th robot on his mother’s side could not be confirmed, though the robot community has reportedly denied that Rubio has any claim to robot ancestry. The Rubio campaign has yet to release the long form version of his manufacturing certificate, an equivalent to the human birth certificate.
Marco Rubio has not posed for a photo-op with the robots in New Hampshire, though he has been chased by them.
We’ll update this post with any news about a potential robot uprising in New Hampshire as it develops.
Update, 3:58pm EST: Here’s video of the robot wrestling match from earlier today:
Last night, Lucifer and Chloe solved another murder despite their constant squabbles. But “The Would-Be Prince of Darkness” also introduced the amusing but provocative concept of someone trying to steal the Devil’s identity. Demons: they’re just like us!
Lucifer is horrified, mostly because his imitator is a “cheap knock-off” who’s “diluting the Lucifer brand” (and endangering Lucifer’s reputation with the ladies!)
The fake Devil is said to have committed the following offenses:
Performed at a rap battle in the Valley
Destroyed the honeymoon suite at the Budget Hut in Tarzana
Skipped out on a $2,000 tab at “Zany Wings”
Started a modeling agency
Pitched a web series
Been a “two-pump chump” who cries after sex
HORRORS!
Of course, Lucifer’s identity being stolen is mostly used as a way for the character to literally confront himself; his surprising evolution into something more human than demon is clearly going to be a major theme going forward ... along with, of course, those incessantly show biz-themed homicides that Los Angeles apparently has no shortage of.
Racing drones still isn’t considered as challenging as other vehicular sports given the pilots aren’t actually inside the vehicles they’re controlling. But watching the first-person footage of this drone absolutely tearing through a packed warehouse, you can’t argue there isn’t a ton of skill required.
And remember, while you’re probably watching this footage on your computer screen, the pilot at the controls of this drone, YouTuber PROPSMAN, saw this through a pair of video goggles strapped to his head as it happened. There’s no way you wouldn’t get a rush of adrenaline from that.
Artist Mauro Balcazar draws inspiration for his mixed-media work from his favorite movies and TV shows—with a focus on expressive, colorful portraits of scifi and fantasy characters who’ve become pop-culture icons.
Despite all the speculation that “Home Again” would revisit the classic episode “Home,” we instead got an episode that tried to recapture the brilliance of season one’s “Beyond the Sea.” It didn’t exactly work out.
But this scene of a monster attack set to Petula Clark’s “Downtown?” That was great.
Spoilers from here on out.
“Home Again” desperately wanted to be “Beyond the Sea,” the episode where Scully’s father dies, she questions her faith, and Mulder doesn’t believe in the supernatural powers of a death row inmate he helped put away. “Beyond the Sea” was an early indication that The X-Files had more than monsters and conspiracies to it. It delivered emotional punches and a lot of insight into Scully’s character in a natural way.
Nothing about “Home Again” felt natural. It all felt contrived. Margaret Scully’s death should have been a big deal. She’s a character that we’ve known for a long time. But so much of her death isn’t even about her but about the child Scully’s put up for adoption. And the actual X-File is badly related to the theme of the episode. Scully unconvincingly rants about how “putting things out of sight” so it “won’t be your problem” is as much a failing of the “heroes” as their opponents.
So while we should have spent the episode connecting with Scully and her pain, the only thing that actually stands out is the “Downtown” sequence. Which was a ray of light in an otherwise deeply uncreative episode.
And if you’re wondering how he morphed a hoverboard into a cool anime prop, here’s a video how-to. My question is... isn’t styrofoam flammable? Goku’s a Super Saiyan though, so I’m sure escaping a flaming half-Segway would be cake.
I am rarely in the company of children, which I’ll use as my excuse for not knowing about Nick Jr. show Mutt & Stuffuntil now. Get this, though: it stars the “nephew” of H.R. Pufnstuf—arguably the biggest star* to emerge from the psychedelic world of Sid and Marty Krofft, kings of 1970s kiddie TV shows.
And it gets better, nostalgia fans. The folksy Mayor of Living Island is set to make a guest appearance on Mutt & Stuff—which was co-created by the Kroffts, who are still going strong at 78 (Marty) and 86 (Sid)—next week.
The show’s human star is Calvin Millan (the intensely cheerful son of the show’s producer, Cesar Millan, aka the Dog Whisperer). His Krofftian co-star is “Stuff,” a giant, talking stuffed dog. Together, they run a school for (real) dogs. (How Stuff the dog is the nephew of H.R. Pufnstuf, who is a dragon, is a question probably best left unanswered.)
In addition to showcasing adorable puppies and dog tricks, the series sets out to balance moments of heart and comedy with a social-emotional curriculum that helps preschoolers identify and manage emotions, build interpersonal awareness and develop social skills.
Aww. (Also, in addition to real canines, there are sassy cat puppets commenting on the action ... but no Living Island-style comical witches dreaming of sabotage, alas.)
On a special double episode (first teased last fall) that will air on Monday, February 15, worlds will collide, according to TV Line. Good ol’ H.R. drops by for a visit with sidekicks Cling and Clang AND Freddy the Talking Flute along for the ride.
Hasn’t aged a day!
The Mayor, looking sharp in his trademark white cowboy boots, comes bearing magic seeds that spawn talking trees, in the grandest trippy Krofft tradition; TV Line has a clip. Otherwise, tune in Monday for the full episode, and in the meantime, here’s the eternally mindblowing intro for the original H.R. Pufnstuf show.
Researchers from 21st Century Medicine have developed a new technique to allow long term storage of a near-perfect mammalian brain. It’s a breakthrough that could have serious implications for cryonics, and the futuristic prospect of bringing the frozen dead back to life.
By using a chemical compound to turn a rabbit’s brain into a near glass-like state, and then cooling it to -211 degrees Fahrenheit (-135 degrees Celsius), a research team from California-based 21st Century Medicine (21CM) showed that it’s possible to enable near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain. The achievement has earned not just accolades from the scientific community, but a prestigious award as well; the 21CM researchers are today being awarded the $26,735 Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, which is run by the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF).
The new technique means that neuroscientists will now be able to study brains, both animal and human, in unprecedented detail. But it could also apply to cryonics —the practice of preserving a person in cold storage in the hopes that they’ll eventually be brought back to life once the requisite technologies exist.
Brains don’t fare well during the cooling down process, even when advanced cryopreservants are used to protect the brain from freeze damage. This limitation has made it difficult for scientists to properly preserve and study the brain and its detailed web of connections following death. Reversible cryopreservation—that holy grail of cryonics—has so far remained out of reach.
To change that, the BPF launched two contests back in 2010, one for successfully demonstrating the reliable long term preservation of a small mammal’s brain, and a similar prize for doing the same in a large mammal (the Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize). To win either, a research team had to demonstrate that the ultrastructure of a mammalian brain—including the animal’s entire connectome and synaptic structure—can be reliably preserved indefinitely after death.
“Fortunately this work has been successful, as we have been able to validate the small mammal protocol, and are now working on evaluating the large mammal protocol,” noted BPF vice-president and co-founder John Smart in an email to Gizmodo.
The 21st Century Medicine team, led by cryobiologist Robert McIntyre, discovered a way to preserve the fragile neural circuits of an intact rabbit brain using a glutaraldehyde-based fixative along with with cryogenic cooling. The details of this procedure, called Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC), can now be found in the journal Cryobiology. The new protocol was verified independently by neuroscientist and BPF president Dr. Kenneth Hayworth and Princeton University neuroscientist Dr. Sebastian Seung.
“Every neuron and synapse looks beautifully preserved across the entire brain,” noted Hayworth in a press statement. “Simply amazing given that I held in my hand this very same brain when it was frozen solid...This is not your father’s cryonics.”
As an idea, cryonics has been around for decades. Back in the 1960s, futurist Robert Ettinger speculated that deceased individuals may eventually be revived after prolonged storage in vats of liquid nitrogen. Half a century later, cryobiologists are still struggling to preserve dead individuals, let alone bring them back to life. As already noted, reversible cryopreservation has proven difficult owing to the intense damage inflicted on brains during preservation—things like fractures and damage to cell membranes.
This fundamental limitation has inspired a new generation of cryobiologists, who are focused on techniques that preserve the delicate pattern of synaptic connections, known as the “connectome,” that encodes a person’s memory and identity. Called plastination or chemopreservation, the new approach involves chemical fixation and the embedding of brain tissue in a plastic-like form for long-term storage. McIntyre’s system is unique in that it combines chemical fixation with cryonics.
But unlike conventional cryonics, which attempts to preserve the biological components of a person’s body or brain, this new school of cryobiology envisions “synthetic revival”—a process in which the complete database of a single individual’s neurological information can be used to create a new digital version. The revived digital brain, also known as a whole brain emulation, could be uploaded into a computer simulation or robotic body. But because the system involves destructive scanning, the biological components of the original brain would be destroyed by the toxic chemical bath during the preservation process. Following preservation and stabilization, these brains would be cut into extremely fine slices, and then individually scanned. Together, the collection of digitized brain slices would represent an uninstantiated individual.
This idea fits with recent evidence suggesting that long-term memories are not altered by the preservation process. And indeed, the latest research suggests that memories and personal identity are physically encoded in the brain. Scientists recently demonstrated that it’s possible to target and erase memories in mice, while also “incepting,” or introducing, episodic hippocampal and cortical memories into mice via optogenetic alteration of individual neurons. “This important work [and others] tells us more than we’ve ever known before about the specific cellular and molecular processes by which memories are made and stored in mammalian brains,” Smart said.
The trick is to capture this neurological information at the sufficient level of resolution, and then store it for future use. To pull that off, McIntyre perfused a rabbit’s vascular system with a chemical fixative called glutaraldehyde. This quickly stopped metabolic decay and fixed the proteins in place. Once stabilized, the tissue and vasculature was brought down to an optimal temperature. The researchers added cryoprotectant slowly over four hours to avoid damaging the brain’s structure. Normally, a brain starts to degrade after just 30 minutes following death. But as McIntyre explained to Gizmodo, the “glutaraldehyde [bought] us weeks and the cryoprotectant [bought] us centuries.” The resulting brain was fixed and frozen—both literally and figuratively—such that its synaptic elements remained intact.
McIntyre likened the process to preserving a book.
“If brains are like books, ASC is like soaking a book in crystal-clear epoxy resin and hardening it into a solid block of plastic,” he explained. “You’re never going to open the book again, but if you can prove that the epoxy doesn’t dissolve the ink the book is written with, you can demonstrate that all the words in the book must still be there, preserved in the epoxy block like a fly in amber.”
If someone wanted to restore the contents of the book, McIntyre said they could carefully slice it apart, digitally scan all the pages, and then print and rebind a new book with the same words. But that’s only possible if the data is still intact, unaffected by the preservation process. Think of the brain’s connectome as the words on the pages of a book.
“Overall, I think it is a neat step forward,” explained Oxford University computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg. “Not a giant leap for mankind, but one of those useful things you need to do the eventual giant leaps.”
In terms of cryonics and the prospect of whole brain emulation, Sandberg said it improves the overall outlook—at least if one believes that scanning and emulation is the way to go. But not everyone is convinced that destructive scanning is the right approach, or if cryonic techniques in any manifestation will ever work.
“To a functionalist like me, this is good news,” he said. “But I know people who hold the body-identity view of personal identity: to them this is absolutely useless. And of course, others think brain emulations will not be possible for other reasons—like uncomputability of minds, or simply because there might be some fragile property that is [somehow] disrupted in the preservation. They will not be moved. But it is not clear what evidence would change their views.”
It remains to be seen how this new approach to brain preservation will affect the cryonics community as a whole. Classicists at Alcor and the Cryonics Institute steadfastly believe that brains (and bodies, for that matter) must be preserved with as little damage as possible. But the “plastinators,” as the new breed is called, believe it’s important to preserve the information embedded in the brain, while placing a low premium on preserved biological parts. As Sandberg pointed out to Gizmodo, a degree of tension is now emerging between the proponents of these two approaches, as witnessed by this tongue-in-cheek slide prepared by Greg Fahy of 21st Century Medicine.
When asked which of the two techniques he would use for himself, Sandberg pointed out that AMC has not been proven on larger brains, and that he’d rather use a method predicated on reviving tissue “just in case.” But given the recent improvements in fine structure and preservation, he said he may shift to this method once it’s been demonstrated in human brains.
McIntyre agrees, and said the technique needs to be discussed more before it can be considered in cryonics. “It needs to be much more extensively tested and made robust in a research setting,” he said. “A big claim like this needs a lot of evidence to support it.”
The deal doesn’t include everything you’d need to build a PC, but you’ll find cases, RAM, power supplies, an SSD, and more to get you started. And even if you’re not interested in upgrading the guts of your rig, you’ll find some great mechanical keyboards (including several from yourfavorite Corsair K series), mice, and other popular peripherals.
As with all Gold Box deals, these prices are only available today, but the most popular items could very well sell out early. [Corsair Gold Box]
Note: There are two pages of deals. The navigation buttons are at the top of the page, and easy to miss.
Dorco makes some of the best razors on the market, including the ones you get every month in your Dollar Shave Club box. If you don’t mind buying directly from the source though, you can save even more with an excellent promo code today, plus free shipping. [$10 off any $20 Dorco order, promo code SECRETFIFTY]
Apple’s expansive (and expensive) iPad Pro is finally starting to get some discounts, and today, you can save $100 on the base 32GB Wi-Fi model. Plus, most buyers won’t have to pay any sales tax. [Apple iPad Pro 32GB, $700]
Once every few months or so, we’ll see the fantastic Sonos Play:1 speaker discounted to $170, and basically never less. Today on Groupon though, a discount stacked with a promo code will knock it down to $161, the best price we’ve ever seen. I can think of worse ways to spend your tax refund. [Sonos Play 1 Speaker, $161 with code EXTRA15]
We see Xbox One console deals almost every day. The PS4...not so much. So if you’re in the market for one, I wouldn’t hesistate with this deal. [PS4 Uncharted Bundle + 1 Year PlayStation Plus, $350]
Want to get into espresso without breaking the bank? This refurbished Cuisinart can make a single or double shot with 15 bars of pressure for just $75. Sure, there are better espresso makers out there, but you’d be hard pressed to find one for under $100. [Refurb Cuisinart 15-Bar Espresso Maker, $75]
Amazon’s Prime Pantry program is great for stocking up on household goods and non-perishable foods without actually having to visit a store, but the $5.99 per box shipping charge has always been a drag. This month though, if you buy five select items, you can get that fee waived.
There are hundreds of eligible items running the gamut from granola bars to bandages to toilet bowl cleaner, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding five that you need. Just add them to your box (plus anything else that will fit), and use code PANTRYFEB at checkout to get free shipping. [Free Prime Pantry shipping with five eligible purchases, promo code PANTRYFEB]
Bonus: If you already have a no-rush free shipping credit in your account, this deal actually appears to stack, netting you an extra $6 discount.
Whether you need more space to store your photos, an extra hard drive for your Xbox One, or a backup drive to replicate all of your files, you usually won’t find a better price than $70 for a 2TB portable drive. [Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB Portable Hard Drive, $70]
We post a lot of deals on Brother mono laser printers, but if you’d prefer a Canon, the imageCLASS MF212w is on sale today for $90. That gets you a workhorse of a printer that can spit out 24 pages per minute, and includes a flatbed scanner and wireless networking. The best part though? It’s not an inkjet. [Canon - imageCLASS MF212w Wireless Mono Laser Printer, $90]
Rather than try to sell you on this pillow, I’m going to turn it over to our deal researcher Corey, who actually owns one:
The pillow slowly conforms to my head position each night and remains comfortable. If it ever gets flat or bulgy in a way that’s not to my liking, a couple squishes here or there makes it perfect. Never going back.
If you’re trying to eat healthier at work, this portable salad holder includes separate compartments for all of your different ingredients, including the dressing, plus a perfectly sized ice pack to keep everything cold and crisp. [Stay Fit Deluxe Salad Kit, EZ Freeze, $8]
You spend a good chunk of your computing time on phones and tablets these days, so why should your desktop be the only one that can use external storage? These flash drives include a microUSB connector to interface with your Android phones and tablets, and you can pick one up for just $12-$17.
These would be perfect if you were on vacation, and didn’t have enough free space on your phone to store all the photos you wanted to take. Or if you wanted to store some HD movies to watch on your tablet during a long plane ride. And of course, it never hurts to have an easy, offline way to move files back and forth between different devices. These prices are right in line with what you’d expect to see on normal flash drives, so if you own any microUSB devices, there’s really no downside to picking one up.
Like the idea of a Belkin WeMo Switch, but not willing to spend $40 to try one out. This TP-Link alternative has a nearly identical feature set for half the price.
Just like a WeMo switch, TP-Link’s Smart Plug will let you turn appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set schedules to toggle them automatically. The only major feature it’s lacking is IFTTT support, but it will integrate with an Amazon Echo for voice control. [TP-Link Smart Plug, $20]
I’m guessing that most of you already own an external battery pack or two, but if your new phone includes Quick Charge 2.0 support, you’ll want to upgrade your portable charger to take advantage.
I was hoping Amazon would have a deal on the Echo today in light of its Super Bowl commercial appearances, but alas, we’ll have to settle for a $40 Fire tablet and $20 off Kindle e-readers.
Aeration is an important part of any healthy lawn, and these strap-on shoe spikes make it easy (and cheap). Also great for combat! [Ohuhu Lawn Aerator Shoes, $20 with code KKPJADB2]
Today at Best Buy, if you buy one gift card to PSN, Xbox Live, Nintendo’s eShop, and more, you can get a second for 20% off. Buying digitally usually isn’t the cheapest way to buy full games, but this deal should pay off when it comes to DLC. [Gaming Gift Card Sale]
Protip: Xbox Owners can use the discount on this particular gift card pack, which includes a $5 free bonus credit. That means you can get $100 of credit for $81.
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If a primary task of fiction is to explore the human experience—who we are and what we mean to each other—then the fantastic and unreal must surely be key elements in that exploration. But plenty of people still claim that fantasy and other genres are less “real” than purely mimetic fiction. And Kazuo Ishiguro has the best answer to those people.
This is kind of surprising, since for a brief time last year, Ishiguro appeared to be one of the people who was pooh-poohing fantasy. When his Arthurian romance The Buried Giant came out, Ishiguro told the New York Times that he was worried that readers would be “prejudiced against the surface elements” in his tale of a sleeping dragon. “Are they going to say this is fantasy?” This remark drew the ire of fantasy legend Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ishiguro was quick to clarify that he was on the side of the fantasists , and that, in any case, “any stigma around sci-fi and fantasy is fading.”
(Read our review of The Buried Giant here. Since I read this book last year, it’s stuck in my mind, and its parable of the way nations choose to forget wartime atrocities has started to feel more and more profound to me.)
But now, with The Buried Giant coming out in paperback, Ishiguro has gone on the offensive. In a recent interview (quoted in the Independent) he made a powerful argument in favor of genre fiction. For example, he asks why crime fiction is taken less seriously than stories about relationships and marriage:
Crime is very important in our society. Why is it regarded as less serious than middle-class divorce? Why is middle-class divorce a subject for literary fiction, but [the] relationship between the drugs trade and politics is not?
And Ishiguro also argued that our whole educational system, and thus our cultural values, have been based on creating productive citizens who can help grow our economies. There’s been an emphasis on conformity and a certain type of seriousness, because that’s what our fast-growing economy demanded over the past few decades.
Said Ishiguro, “Education’s task was to get pupils to abandon the fantasy that comes naturally to children and prepare them for the demands of the workforce.”
But Ishiguro sees the rise of fantasy and science fiction themes among literary writers as one of many signs that this is changing. Even as writers like Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell are taken seriously and J.K. Rowling rules the world, tech companies are looking for people who can think imaginatively, who keep one foot in the world of fantasy. Geeks are in demand, in part because we think creatively. Europe is lagging behind the rest of the world economically, because “we need more fantasists.”
I can’t actually find the full text of Ishiguro’s interview, so I’m relying on the article in the Independent—whose author, Terence Blacker, actually disagrees with his views. In Blacker’s estimation, fantastic elements tend to crowd out nuance and human elements—even a beautifully observed book like Ishiguro’s own Never Let Me Go—and a story about a middle-class divorce really is the best way to explore “the small subtleties of human personality.” Added Blacker, “Life is more like bullshitty literary fiction than a fantasy.”
I obviously agree with Ishiguro, even if his argument—as I understand it, based on the Independent write-up—seems a smidge oversimplified. It’s true that geeks are in the ascendant, but I’m not sure if that’s entirely due to our nonconformity or our steady diet of escapism. (A facility with science and math, in the age of computers and biotech, might also be a factor.) And dismising respectable literary fiction as all being about “middle-class divorce” is a bit of an old saw, that is clearly not true and includes some assumptions about the trivial concerns of a (largely female) readership for domestic stories.
But that said, Ishiguro’s larger point is clearly right—by now, anybody who’s not overly invested in preserving a certain type of subject-matter hierarchy has to have recognized that fantastical themes are increasingly central to our shared storytelling vocabulary. And our rapidly changing, technology-inflected world only really makes sense through a Black Mirror lens. Plus if literary fiction does want to claim a kind of genre-neutrality, or a sense that it is not a genre, but rather the absence of genre, then it has to be able to encompass all possible story ideas, real and unreal, right?
As someone who devoured all of Anita Brookner’s small, tragic relationship stories and adores both Kingsley and Martin Amis, I’m all for the small, personal story. And I think that many writers, including Ishiguro, have proved at this point that a story can be both speculative and personal, including plenty of “small subtleties” of human behavior.
I also think that one of the things that written fiction does especially well, more than other forms of storytelling, is exploring the intersection of time and consciousness. Our minds are machines for turning moments into experiences—for processing things that we’ve done and seen, and transforming them into pieces of our identity. Few of us really understand how we do this, and how our minds, trapped in linear time, intersect with each other’s.
Any fiction, whether it takes place in a bungalow or on a starship, is in part exploring that clumsy collision of past and present, me and you, by depicting a series of events that add up to something.
And I think that the boundary between memory and fantasy is porous at best. Daydreams are often indistinguishable from real thoughts of the past or future, and you can’t really understand the whole of the human psyche without including the imaginary and the questionably real. And putting people into an extreme or bizarre situation is often one of the best ways to interrogate that stew of personhood and identity—as Ishiguro does, in fact, in the amnesia narrative of Buried Giant.
