Category Archives: New Utopia

This year we read tons of books. Whether we bought a hard copies at the local bookstore or checked out audiobooks from a library app, or consumed them via e-reader. Lots new authors wrote fantastic debuts in 2021, while many of our favorite authors continued their sprawling series ones we were extremely excited to jump back into.

If you love books then you know: They arent just escapism, they also inspire introspection, making us think harder about the world we live in. This is precisely the promise of great science fiction and fantasy categories weve chosen to consider in a list together, as fantastic books continue to blur the line between the two speculative genres (and besides, we love to read them all). These 20 books span genres and perspectives from space operas, to Norse mythology retellings, to romances with a dash of time travel. But all of them gave us something new to consider.

In a year with so many incredible choices, it was hard to narrow down the list. So weve also included some of our favorite runners up.

If youve read the Wayfarer series, then you know Becky Chambers has a talent for creating hopeful scenarios, despite characters facing down harrowing odds. A Psalm for the Wild-Built has a similarly comforting spirit. The novella is set in a world where robots developed agency and so humans allowed them to form their own communities.

A human named Dex decides to become a Tea Monk, traveling from city to city, offering weary people freshly brewed tea and a listening ear. Their wanderlust leads them to meet a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a Wild-Built who was created from parts spared from other robots. They form an odd friendship, as the two compare the realities of their day-to-day with the pursuits that fill a life. From its dedication For anyone who could use a break to its meandering spirit, the novella is a perfect read for anyone who wants to slow down a bit.

Black Water Sister is a contemporary ghost story, using the supernatural to weave a tale about intergenerational trauma and the Asian diaspora. Jessamyn Teoh is in the process of moving back to Malaysia with her parents when she starts to hear a voice in her head. But its not her own; its that of her estranged grandmother Ah Ma. Zen Chos portrayal of Ah Mas ghostly voice is halfway between chiding family member and portentous spirit and she uses Jess as an avatar to meddle with family affairs. She hasnt moved on, thanks to some unfinished business in the mortal realm. These themes are woven together to tell a suspenseful coming-of-age story, as Jess navigates adapting to a new culture and surviving family secrets, as well as her queer identity.

Roshani Chokshi brings her opulent, 19th century fantasy-heist series to a bittersweet conclusion in The Bronzed Beasts, which begins after Sverin seemingly betrays his friends to chase godhood. Because of the resulting rift, the book is missing a lot of the charming teamwork, trust, and banter that was so core to the previous two installments.

But Chokshis refusal to give readers exactly what they want is precisely what makes The Gilded Wolves series so compelling. Plus, all of the heart-wrenching interpersonal angst and introspection doesnt get in the way of the treasure hunts and puzzle solving that weve come to love and expect. Watching the team relearn how to work together after all theyve been through provides a fascinating new dynamic, as they race against the clock to discover how to save Lailas life and figure out whether this found family can ever be put back together again.

The final book in the Expanse series has been a long-time coming (10 years, to be specific) and it is well worth the wait. What started as a geo-political power struggle between residents of Earth, Mars, and the Belt told as an action-adventure set in the cold vacuum of space has evolved into an all out fight to save humanity.

The series huge questions are finally answered: Who are the ring builders? How, if at all, can we defuse the massive threat they represent? How does the protomolecule play into all of this? The Roci crew has changed over the many years that span the Expanse, and in Leviathan Falls their story comes to a satisfying, bittersweet end.

Adequin Rake is the commanding officer of the Argus, a run-down ship stationed at the edge of the universe, tasked with watching out for the potential return of humanitys alien enemy the Viators. Rakes crew of Sentinels is made up of the militarys dregs criminals, misfits, exiles, and anyone else the government would rather forget about, including a disowned prince.

But when the universe begins collapsing, this band of rogues becomes the last line of defense between humanitys survival and total annihilation. With no aid coming, tensions are high as the Sentinels have to figure out how to use their scant resources to not only outrun the encroaching edge of the universe, but figure out a way to stop it from collapsing any further. The Last Watch is a thrilling adventure that leans heavily on speculative science and humor, and Dewes experience as a cinematographer shows through in her ability to to translate the complex visuals and action onto the page.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a history-spanning tale about storytelling, following the perspectives of five characters in three different eras: an orphan and an outcast in 15th-century Thrace and Constantinople, an ecoterrorist and an octogenarian in 2020 Idaho, and a young girl on a 22nd-century spacecraft. Each of the novels vividly drawn characters is connected through the way stories have impacted their lives, particularly a fictional Greek tale about a fools quest to reach the mythical utopia Cloud Cuckoo Land.

With its spectacular world-building, rhythmic prose, and deeply empathetic character development, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a remarkable celebration of the comfort, magic, and connections to be found in books, as well as the stewards who preserve and nurture these tales across time.

Fans of Circe will find a lot to love in The Witchs Heart. Genevieve Gornichecs debut novel is a stirring and heartbreaking reimagining of Norse mythology from the perspective of the witch Angrboda. After being burned at the stake by Odin for refusing to share visions of the future with him, she begins a life of solitude in the woods where the vengeful god cant find her. But when she meets the trickster god Loki, the pair begin an unconventional marriage and family, setting the world on a path that ultimately leads to Ragnarok.

The Witchs Heart is a tragic tale about a beautifully complex, resilient woman who is willing to go against the gods and fate in order to protect her children, no matter the cost. And even though you may know how this story turns out, dont be surprised to find yourself weeping when Angrbodas story comes to an end.

300 years after the gods went extinct, their human descendants are hunted down and enslaved, while their bones are highly sought after by anyone desperate for riches or power. The brutal, Norse-inspired story follows three characters making their way through this dangerous land, and Gwynne is largely unparalleled when it comes to writing battle scenes. Despite featuring things like deities, ice spiders, and twisted tooth fairies, there is a sense of authenticity in The Shadow of the Gods thanks to the detail Gwynne puts into his world-building. Though he takes his time revealing where the three, largely disparate storylines are headed, by the time you reach the books nail-biting climax the slow burn more than pays off.

British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is hard to pin down, but who would want to? The stylistic and conceptual gap between his mannered historical novel The Remains of the Day, his dystopian science fiction novel Never Let Me Go, and his melancholy Arthurian fantasy The Buried Giant is vast, and each new Ishiguro novel winds up as a surprise.

But those books all connect around the pain of loss and the pressure of societal expectations around it. That builds context for Klara and the Sun, a mournful science fiction novel that starts out feeling like A.I. Artificial Intelligence and gradually becomes something more like a dreamy fable. In a future where the well-off buy android companions (or Artificial Friends) for their kids, Klara is an AF who becomes obsessed with her companion Josie, whose health is deteriorating due to genetic tinkering meant to improve her intellect.

Ishiguro filters everything through Klaras imperfect understanding of the world, giving readers a sense of Josies relationships with other people, while Klaras limitations cause her to miss key cues. Its a book full of constant, unexpected turns, but the distance between what Klara sees and what readers will intuit is masterfully handled, melancholy, and tense, to the point where this feels as much like constrained horror as science fiction.

T. Kingfisher loves her paladins. Ursula Vernons books under the Kingfisher pseudonym (to separate her adult novels from her several childrens series) have always focused on fantasy characters with an innate practicality and selfless determination. While the paladins in Clocktaur duology and the Saint of Steel books (currently a trilogy, projected as a seven-book series) are defined by their nobility and self-sacrifice, in the Saint of Steel series, theyre also defined by the death of the god they served, which has left them all purposeless and on the brink of madness.

The first three books in the series (Paladins Hope also came out in 2021) are all mysteries and romances, each focused on a different protagonist. Paladins Strength is the story of Istvhan, a bear of a man whos navigating the same despair and hopelessness, but still doggedly trying to help people.

He gets diverted by meeting a nun whose order has been kidnapped. Claras nature, hinted at in the margins throughout the book, is clear enough, but its worth not spelling out, for the fun of the reveal. As in previous books, Kingfisher highlights the protagonists mutual longing and misunderstandings, making this a sort of fantasy rom-com, but its also built around berserker violence, horrific monsters, and a kind of comforting humor thats one of Kingfishers best stocks-in-trade. The book can be read as a standalone or an introduction to the series; Kingfishers unique style and worldview makes for compelling reading. TR

The second installment in Arkady Martines Teixcalaan series is somehow even better than the first. A Desolation Called Peace finds Mahit Dzmare traveling to the edge of Teixcalaanli space to find a way to communicate with an encroaching alien fleet a difficult task made more challenging by the fact Mahit is still navigating her bond with Yskandr, as well as working out where her loyalties and home lie after her experiences on Teixcalaan.

The novel switches between the perspectives of Mahit, Three Seagrass, Mahits former envoy and the new Undersecretary to the Minister of Information; Nine Hibiscus, the captain of the fleet charged with fostering diplomacy with the hostile aliens; and Eight Antidote, the young clone of the former emperor. Martines astounding prose weaves together explorations of cultural identity, communication, imperialism, and identity in a tightly plotted story that burrows deep under your skin.

For those who prefer romantic comedies with a science fiction leaning, Casey McQuistons newest romance absolutely delivers. After a life of failing to lay down roots, August moves to New York for a fresh start. She meets Jane, the mysterious woman who is always on the subway at the right time, sporting the same well-loved leather jacket. As August falls for her, she realizes Jane has been trapped on this line since the 1970s and August is determined to set her free.

Come for the sapphic romance, and stay for the queer found family, late night diner runs, and 70s music references.

If youre a fan of magical boarding school stories, you might have noticed a theme: these schools are incredibly dangerous for the students who attend. But fantasy books dont usually acknowledge it focusing, instead, on the wonderment of becoming a witch or wizard. In Naomi Noviks Scholomance series, this violence is fully a part of the plot. Even making it to graduation alive is part of the challenge as the school is bursting with Malificers, deadly creatures that are hungry for students.

The Last Graduate is an energetic follow-up to the excellent A Deadly Education. El is a senior now, intent on translating the Golden Stone sutras and navigating the attention of numerous enclaves, which have finally caught on to her immense power. But will she and her friends even make it through graduation?

This novella is short, but it packs one hell of a punch. In Remote Control, a young girl becomes the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. With the new name of Sankofa, and the power of death in her gaze and touch, she travels from town to town with only a fox companion. The novella feels part folk tale, part technology-driven science fiction.

Like most of Okorafors work, Remote Control explores Africanfuturism, rather than the Afrofuturist label that is often applied to her stories. In a blog post, she explains: Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West.

A queer reimagining of the story of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, She Who Became the Sun is a lyrical exploration of gender, identity, and the cost of desire set against the backdrop of war-torn 14th century China. The brutal historical epic begins when a young peasant girl destined for nothingness takes on the identity of her late brother, Zhu Chongba, who was fated for greatness. At first, living as Zhu is only a means to survive, but over time it transforms into an all-consuming need to claim Zhus fate for their own. As Zhu works their way from being a novice at a monastery up through the ranks of the rebel army, they dedicate themselves so fully to being Zhu, even in their own head and heart, in the hopes that doing so will fool Heaven into believing theyre the one destined to achieve the unthinkable.

Teenager Vern is seven months pregnant when she finally escapes the cult she was raised in, and the abusive husband who led it. As the denizens of this compound, Cainland, chase her down, she gives birth to two children, Howling and Feral. Together, they survive in the woods, before a mysterious growth and her own need to survive force her to find refuge in other places.

This incredibly compelling, terrifying, and genre-defying book makes commentary on misogyny, racism, religion, and motherhood through its haunting prose. Rivers Solomon continues to be an absolute force.

In the far-future, humanity is fighting an antagonistic, god-like alien presence called the Architects, capable of obliterating entire planets. Only intermediaries can reach through the void of space, making a connection in the vain hope of telling the Architects to stand down. Thats exactly what Idris, a human engineered into an intermediary, did to stop the war 50 years ago. He hasnt slept a blink since. In the intervening years hes worked as a contractor on a salvage vessel, the Vulture God but hes spurred into action as it looks like the Architects might be coming back.

Shards of Earth is Tchaikovskys take on a space opera, full of intergalactic action and geopolitical conflict. The world is as unique and detail-filled as his spider civilization opus, Children of Time. Fans of The Expanse and Mass Effect will have lots to chew on here.

Its been eight years since Helene Weckers stunning fantasy debut The Golem and the Jinni, and her fans were about ready to give up on her promised sequel. But The Hidden Palace takes up the story seamlessly, and brings back all the elements that made the first book so indelible.

In turn-of-the-century New York City, a genie escaped from captivity and a golem whose master has died fumble through understanding themselves and their relationships to humanity. In The Hidden Palace, they become lovers, but the creation of a male golem and the arrival of a female jinn remind both protagonists of their own natures, and highlight their differences and their dissatisfactions with the world.

With this sequel, Wecker moves the story rapidly forward in time, showing New Yorks evolution and highlighting the characters unaging bodies and difficulty integrating with a human world. Those are just a few of the many, many threads she juggles in a rich literary novel that digs into what it means to be human, by setting up a series of meaningful contrasts from characters who arent.

With Project Hail Mary, Weir is back in full Martian mode, telling a story about a man trying to survive in space through scientific improvisation and experimentation. Project Hail Mary goes much further into speculative science fiction than The Martian it has the same focus on real physics, chemistry, and the scientific process, but its premise includes a single-celled organism thats eating the sun, pushing humanity toward extinction.

The protagonist, former junior-high science teacher Ryland Grace, wakes up alone in a spaceship, traveling toward a distant star, with no memory of how he got there. Bit by bit, he has to reassemble his own past and define his future, and Earths. The book goes to startling places that shouldnt be spoiled, and it gets a lot wilder than The Martian, but it keeps the science accessible and thoughtful as a grounding tool. Not quite a Stephen Hawking universe-explainer, and not quite a zippy beach-blanket adventure book, it has some of the best aspects of both.

In order to fend off the alien Hunduns, Huaxias military fight in Chrysalises, massive mecha built from Hundun corpses that are powered by the qi of two people: the male pilot, who controls the Chrysalis, and the female concubine-pilot, who acts like a qi battery until her lifeforce is completely drained. When Zetians older sister is killed by a pilot, the peasant girl enlists as a concubine-pilot in order to get close enough to assassinate the man responsible, and enact vengeance on the entire system. But when its discovered that Zetians willpower is strong enough to drive the Chrysalis and subsume the male pilots qi, she becomes a feared Iron Widow, avoiding a military death sentence by being paired up with another criminal pilot. Never one to be cowed by authority, Zetian becomes the biggest threat to the Hunduns and to Huaxias patriarchal society in this action-packed story about a woman determined to manipulate, destroy, and rebuild the system to get justice for silenced and sacrificed women.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka AokiRule of Wolves (King of Scars #2) by Leigh Bardugo

How to Talk to a Goddess (The Thinking Womans Guide to Real Magic #2) by Emily Croy Barker

The Fall of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #3) by M.R. Carey

Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4) by Becky Chambers

A Master of Djinn by P. Djl Clark

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna

Future Feeling by Joss Lake

The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

The Veiled Throne by Ken Liu

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat

Breeder by Honni van Rijswijk

Vespertine (Vespertine #1) by Margaret Rogerson

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson

No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot #6) by Martha Wells

Hard Reboot by Django Wexler

Original post:

The best fantasy and sci-fi books of 2021 - Polygon

Fatima Al Qadiri, Danny Harle, and UNIIQU3 all land on NPR Music's best electronic music of 2021 list. Photo Illustration by Renee Klahr/NPR; Getty Images hide caption

Fatima Al Qadiri, Danny Harle, and UNIIQU3 all land on NPR Music's best electronic music of 2021 list.

As the world began to open up in 2021, so did some of its dance floors and parties, and electronic artists arrived ready to map these spaces with sounds that pushed and challenged listeners to break free. The best electronic music of this year was often filled with heart-bursting passion, in the outright declarations of love for music-making in the work of Porter Robinson and MoMa Ready, and in the metallic, dizzying beauty of hyperpop's many rising stars. An A-list popstar turned to dance music for a remixed reinvention, and a veteran vinyl DJ dug in the crates to craft a joyous debut. From Jersey club to the U.K. underground, 2021's best electronic music looks like a complex melting pot of genre and history united by a fevered dedication to setting fire to the barriers and boundaries of what music can be. Hazel Cills

The centerpiece of Lakkis' brief album was good enough to make two of our lists, but its entire runtime is noteworthy; tongue-in-cheek, vaguely paranoiac, always bright and novel. Lakkis' brilliance is not only in her mastery of the dance floor groove, but the winking personality she imprints on it like a language-free journal. Andrew Flanagan

Throughout the worst of the pandemic, most of my social engagement was through "Zoom raves" live streamed parties with each person dancing alone from the comfort of their own homes. Despite the inconvenience of having to turn your bedroom into a warehouse, it reminded me that, despite the circumstances, the power of electronic music will endure. And for those of us who live for the dance floor, Danny L Harle's debut full-length album Harlecore encapsulated the specific joy that can only come from sharing a laser-strewn space with a thousand sweaty bodies. Anchored by Harle's four different alter egos DJ Danny, DJ Mayhem, DJ Ocean and MC Boing the LP darts back and forth between electronic subgenres with a maximalist nostalgia, creating a primer for the world of millennial rave. Reanna Cruz

Two years ago, Fatima Al Qadiri scored the Cannes Grand Prix-winning movie Atlantics a Senegalese, slow-bubbling, gently horrifying ghost film with an ice-cold electronic palette and a host of disturbing drones. This year, she's produced an album that seems to be possessed by the same phantom. Here her digital orchestra of lutes and pipes envelop bits of seventh-century Arab poetry in slow, serpentine emissions. Dread, lust, longing, all of it simmers patiently in this dark, ten song vat. At this point, it's Al Qadiri's high-concept hallmark to make disquieting pieces of art that mix grand psychological extremes alongside her muse in the Middle East, but as someone who is down with dangerously rich ideas and the concept of being pushed to emotional breakage, Medieval Femme does an excellent job at handing a listener the sort of delicious anxiety that makes life feel, temporarily, like good foreign cinema. Mina Tavakoli

Across her lengthy career as a vinyl DJ and rave evangelist, electronic producer Eris Drew has espoused her concept of "The Motherbeat," a testament to dance music's ability to heal. On her first full-length album, Quivering in Time, she harnesses that ability in full force for a collection of bouncy, exuberant dance music that blurs the borders of house and techno, rife with surprising samples of breaking plates and movie monologues. Recreating the loopy unpredictability of her DJ sets, Drew's debut delivers a mix of non-stop fun, with flashes of meditative beauty. Hazel Cills [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's The 100 Best Albums of 2021]

Anunaku, also known as TSVI, is an Italian-born composer and DJ who finds a further depth of sophistication in every new release within the baroque, overcast world he's sculpted for himself. It's all floor-appropriate, but the songs' cruxes are embracive, turned inward like a debate with the moon. That the communion is so easily and reliably found about halfway through "Ninfea," two-thirds through "Luminosa," the entirety of "Spirale" shows the strength of signal the producer has tapped into. Andrew Flanagan

Let's hear it for the all-killer, no-filler career. In a streaming environment when we can hear almost anything we want at any time, potency is at a premium, and Doss seems to realize that more so than most. She's released just 8 original tracks across two EPs during her seven-year recording career, and each and every one is a bop and, going by the title to this year's EP, she knows it. 4 New Hit Songs mixes house, shoegaze and pitched-up vocals for a 15-minute burst of endorphins. --Otis Hart [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's 26 Favorite Albums Of 2021 So Far]

Despite representing herself solely through 8-bit images of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," London's DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ transcends gimmick in creating immersive, sample-laden house records that can make three hours feel like twenty minutes. On The Makin' Magick II Album, her songs flow into one another like a stream (or perhaps a lazy river) of consciousness listening to just one track can be sacrilegious, but each song is like the sonic version of looking back to a treasured childhood memory. Throughout the record, indiscernible vocal samples build on top of each other (is that Celine Dion on "I'm Still High"?) cloaked in carefree nostalgia, and highlights like the 12-minute "Being Alone" feel as though your molly just hit in the garden of Eden. It's easy to lose yourself in DJ Sabrina; just relax and surrender to the evergreen magic. Reanna Cruz

Pauline Anna Strom's Angel Tears in Sunlight was supposed to launch her return to music. The electronic musician emerged in the early 1980s with her spacey, New Age-inspired compositions, but stopped making new work due to financial constraints. After over 30 years of silence during which time her work experienced a newfound resurgence among younger artists, Strom made what would tragically become her last album: Angel Tears in Sunlight. Released posthumously this year, its lush, analog synth sound falls right in line with her earliest recordings which are clear precursors to the work of contemporary artists like Avalon Emerson and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. It beautifully immerses listeners in Strom's playful musical utopia. Hazel Cills

2020's Chromatica was a quarantine spectacle, and for Lady Gaga a return to the stratospheric pop music that defined her first records. The Chromatica universe is a futuristic dystopia, founded on inclusivity and what Gaga calls "kindness punks," making it only fitting that a track-by-track remix album would look to a group of artists that aren't afraid to disrupt the system. Under executive producer BloodPop's curation, Dawn Of Chromatica enlists over 20 artists to take the bona-fide earworms of the original Chromatica and put them under the lens of what's bubbling in the underground: distorted house, shiny hyperpop, hardstyle, and even "Dragula"-esque industrial all make appearances on more than one track. Packed to the brim with transcendent potential, Dawn speaks to two separate generations of artists, creating a bridge between a boundary-pushing pop icon and the like-minded folks who follow in her footsteps. Reanna Cruz

Dwayne Parris-Robinson is a hyphenate in more ways than one. The London electronic producer runs his own record label, works at another, DJs at England's most adventurous clubs, and makes his own genre-defiant music under his first surname Parris. After spending the 2010s scattering 12-inch singles throughout London's underground, Parris finally released his debut LP in November, Soaked In Indigo Moonlight, and it takes that aversion to categorization one step further by adding pop music to the mix. "Skater's World," featuring the sugary vocals of Eden Samara, will catch the ear of even the most casual listeners and then leave them totally befuddled as the record proceeds through pointillist dub, polyrhythmic ambient and malfunctioning drum and bass. Soaked In Indigo Moonlight is an aesthete's treat and recommended to anyone who wants to hear something they've never heard before. Otis Hart

There's a touching backstory to this euphoric song by former EDM wunderkind-turned-hyperpop auteur Porter Robinson about falling back in love with making bangers after a festival-sized bout of self-doubt. While teenage stardom isn't exactly the most relatable background, his irrational obsession with music and the joy he feels producing it will strike a chord with anyone who can't stop, won't stop. "This is why we do it, for the feeling," Robinson belts out, his voice pitched up and poignant. And what better way to express that exuberance than that sample of Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two"? Otis Hart [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's The 100 Best Songs of 2021]

One pillar of the colosseum that is Haus of Altr, a Brooklyn-based label and DJ confederation, MoMA Ready has been releasing and playing his house and DnB-honoring cuts since 2017. "We Love Music" is exactly what it claims to be; a deep house distillation of New York club energy the whole album is good for that and a broader bow to the only thing that makes any sense these nights. Andrew Flanagan

The year in electronic music started on a mournful note with the loss of SOPHIE in January. Throughout her short-lived career, the producer and artist found herself straddling the line between abrasive industrial sounds and shiny bubblegum pop music, often blending the two together on a single track. Her final song came two days before her death in the form of "UNISIL," a pounding, galvanic B-side from her earlier 2015 compilation, PRODUCT. As the last release from a once-in-a-lifetime talent, the track stands as a reminder of the artist and potential art we lost. Reanna Cruz [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's The 100 Best Songs of 2021]

"Oddball," like "outsider" or "leftfield," is one of those uninspired, catch-all titles that's been foisted onto art that seems like it's been dropped randomly onto Earth. Nice Girl the nom de plume of Ruby Kerkhofs is both relatively unknown and extremely fluent in a mess of distinct electronic styles, which makes her an easy target for any of the banal labels above. She can be campy, Goa trancey, even full-on New Age, but she's deft in mixing unlikely forces in a way that feels welcome, if alien. Like the title of the track suggests, the song's thick with the moos and coos of longing, but she's draped them like a painted odalisque over a rug of skanking dub. Regardless of whatever you want to call her, "The Coming" signals Kerkhofs' arrival. Mina Tavakoli

As the reigning queen of Jersey Club music, UNIIQU3 has spent the last several years churning out bubbly club bangers, and "Microdosing" is a fast and furious addition to her excellent catalogue. "Stop microdosing my love," UNIIQU3 sings in the chorus over a frenetic beat, sweetening a demand to commit with the promise of a never-ending high, before spitting in the verses: "I ain't something you can reject." Cuffing season has arrived. Hazel Cills [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's The 100 Best Songs of 2021]

This band has always had a Mandelbrotian relationship to rhythm, keeping time in coiled spikes across a deep, warm core. Above it usually has hung a sort of pixelated and charming, if opaque, wonder at the world in general. Not so these days the title seems to be their recommendation for each and every one of us, over a string of increasingly desperate rhythmic pleas for action. Andrew Flanagan

When asked about the state of hyperpop, PC Music's Hyd once summed it up effectively by likening it to an "exploding container." The movement keeps growing, amplified by both its popularity and its possibility there are no genre lines to keep inside, no rulebook to follow. A perfect encapsulation of the lack of boundaries came from underscores this year with their album fishmonger. The record is equally digicore as it is emo, drawing on both Soundcloud rap and whatever you could classify the "Lorem" Spotify playlist as, resulting in a delightful blend of emotional sincerity and distorted chaos. On the record's catchiest track "Your favorite sidekick," underscores enlists fellow glitchcore artist 8485 for a sweet duet about realizing you're growing closer to someone; their words are always in your mouth, and killing time feels like the most exciting thing in the world. "It's the new wave of the future!" a voice proclaims. Believe them. Reanna Cruz

Most dance tracks that extend past the 10-minute mark attempt to establish a hypnotic state, someplace you can lose all concept of time. And then there's "1" by rising Canadian hyperpop producer Petal Supply. The neon paean to immaterial infatuation unfolds like an epic prog-rock journey through the metasphere. That's largely due to the guests in parentheses above each remixed Petal Supply's original demo for "1," but instead of taking the results and compiling them on an EP, she sequenced them to create a Voltron unlike anything I've ever heard before. If only its runtime was 11:11. Otis Hart [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's The 100 Best Songs of 2021]

There's a mesmerizing pull to Tammy Lakkis' "Notice," its stripped-down house shape-shifting by the second. "When the clock tick-tocked before, I didn't notice," Lakkis sings, her breathy vocals a siren call at its center. Inspired by the dance floors of Detroit, "Notice" is the sound of a mind carried away by a beat, blurring the edges of time enough to let the bliss rush in. Hazel Cills

Berlin-based electronic producer Sofia Kourtesis created "La Perla" in memory of her late father, inspired by the trips to the ocean they would take together when she would visit her native Peru. With a heart-beat evoking drum as its strong center, "La Perla" unfolds delicately outward in glittering layers of warm synths, soft percussion and hazy, mournful vocals, enveloping you in sound like a salty ocean wave cresting the shore. Hazel Cills [This review originally appeared in NPR Music's The 100 Best Songs of 2021]

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The Best Electronic Music of 2021 - NPR

More than 25 years after the original chapter, it finally arrives Beyond a Steel Sky, a 3D graphic adventure that offers not only a recovery of that canon so dear to the British studio already author of the Broken Sword series (do you remember it? Here is our review of Broken Sword 5: The Curse of the Snake), but a restyling of it accurate and modern. The hours spent solving the well thought-out puzzles of this second chapter have proven us how much the graphic adventure genre can still be a harbinger of good design insights, aesthetic and narrative. And now we are ready to talk to you about what, without a shadow of a doubt, is much more than an antiquarian celebration.

After saving Union City from authoritarian drift and deposing his robotic friend Joey in charge of it in Beneath a Steel Sky, Robert Foster he decided to return to the Glade in order to finally be able to live in peace with his community. A peace which, however, is broken precisely in the opening words of this new chapter, when on a peaceful day of fishing a mecha quadruped emerges with a crash from the water and kidnaps Milo, the son of a close friend of the protagonist.

Although visibly aged, Robert still retains all the reckless spirit of the past, and therefore does not take long to track the missing child: a path that will lead him right in front of the gates of Union City, the banner of the futurist utopia from which he had taken leave ten years earlier. Under its metal sky, the megalopolis appears inexplicably immutable, as if it were stranded in a synthetic perfection, the result of technological progress which has been able to reconstruct the routines of citizens by offering them new standards of life.

Robert Foster will therefore find a very different Union City, in which the inhabitants always smile and seem to spend their time on amenities of all kinds, but where there is also the disturbing suspicion of an unspoken reality much less pleasant, whose murky mystery deepens precisely because of the events that led our protagonist there.

The creative forge made up of is also making its return to the field Charles Cecil And Dave Gibbons (well-known illustrator of Watchmen, Green Lantern and The Secret Service), the duo who in 1994 gave shape to one of the most fascinating cyberpunk imaginaries in the field of graphic adventures. In Beyond a Steel Sky the original bitmap leaves room for a subtle and inspired cel-shading, capable of tracing the light-hearted but incisive comic book attitude of the first chapter, and which goes well with the futuristic script of this new epic.

And after all, even here the world building speaks for itself and carries the message of a decisive social criticism in its dystopian staging. Retracing the footsteps of an artistic direction that still today evidently manages to achieve impressive qualitative peaks, the game world unveils the story of a perfect society, exposing all the contradictions with surprising effectiveness and placing the player inside a visceral experience.

In a desperate attempt to find Milo we will meet several characters, all characterized properly as in any self-respecting graphic adventure. These will give us very useful information on how to penetrate the cybernetic arteries of Union City which remains a technologically inaccessible bulwark for any foreigner and will also allow us to deepen the hidden background of the timelapse of ten years that separates the two episodes.

A period of time in which crucial events have taken place including Joeys disappearance, which is why it is advisable to have made the acquaintance of the original chapter before approaching this new adventure (even if its plot stands well on its own legs). Here too, in short, the narration plays a central role, and is exciting and stylistically well constructed, with excellent dialogue writing and flashes of humor that dissolve the otherwise pervasive tension of a frantic race against time. Net of some directorial stumbles that will require some more effort than the simple suspension of disbelief, the work of Revolution can be said to be satisfactory, capable of evoking nostalgic sensations to long-time players and bewitching even the youngest players with irresistible storytelling. In the course of his 10 hours of campaign the story becomes more and more pressing, composing the mosaic of a modern sci-fi thriller which however contains intact and perfect the winning formula of its predecessor.

In this sense, the Revolution branded production stands both as a very successful sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky, and as a virtuous tribute to the old glories of graphic adventures in general. AND although the plot certainly does not shine for originality, the narrative sector appears to be one of the main strengths of the title.

In addition to having to converse with NPCs to obtain essential information, the gameplay of Beyond a Steel Sky focuses on solving the inevitable environmental puzzles. From the vestiges of the point and click more classic, the Revolution team recovers a truly inspiring puzzle design, original and only in rare cases a bit cumbersome.

Thanks to the spatiality offered by the 3D setting, which masterfully adapts to the retro canon of the playful mixture, the resolution of the puzzles joins the exploration of the city, requiring a fundamental but never redundant backtracking. The latter takes place via monopod, that is the automated capsules that allow the movement between the different areas of the city center: a ploy that fully benefits from the speed of the uploads on PlayStation 5, canceling the dead times of rapid travel. An important novelty is the introduction of hacking: at the beginning of the adventure, in fact, Robert will obtain a device capable of connect to city systems to modify its operation.

Replacing the logical nodes of an electronic device to be able to view, for example, the data on a characters tablet, or even start various machinery using the lever of a toaster as a switch are just some of the possibilities offered by this tool, which contributes to significantly raise the caliber of puzzles, provided you have a good deal of lateral thinking. This, together with the discreet amount of objects that can be found and the rough but inseparable crowbar, extends the range of the puzzles to an even wider dimension 360 where intuition and observation skills will be the masters.

The result is a graphic adventure equal to the expectations it brings with it, satisfying and ingenious just like those of the great classics such as Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island (by the way, if you have lost it we recommend you to recover our review of Grim Fandango). The headlines brain-bending streak should not, however, be interpreted as a lack of accessibility: in fact, Revolution has made up for this with a brilliant system of optional suggestions useful, intuitive and never too explanatory.

Beyond a Steel Skys main flaw lies in its technical implementation. Although on the whole it appears visually more than appreciable, the graphic sector is plagued by a constant and annoying pop-in effect, various interpenetrations and too little defined textures. Added to this are the problems of the camera, which does not fail to frame the characters often and willingly inexplicably too close, and the sporadic but unexpected frame drops.

Fluctuations of a technical nature that certainly do not undermine the general quality of production, which as we have said reaches very high standards from an artistic, narrative and gameplay point of view, but it is also true that given the low demand in terms of hardware resources we would have expected a much more dignified yield. However, the sound design and the soundtrack remain of a good level, and above all the work done with the dubbing, available only in English, but with a rather accurate translation in the subtitles.

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Beyond a Steel Sky Review: the return of a great graphic adventure - InTallaght

Space was hard to avoid thinking about in 2021. We entered a new era of star treks, with the long-promised era of space tourism finally upon us at least for those who are extremely well-funded. The rest of us terrestrial plebes made do with video clips and telescopes, watching the six-hour partial lunar eclipse last month, the longest in duration since the days of the Medicis.

Conspiracists and alien enthusiasts rejoiced at reading headlines about U.F.O.s in reputable outlets such as The New York Times. Thinking about the infinite cosmos also provided a psychological release from the grinding pandemic, when space tended to be measured in square feet.

Here are some highlights.

Space became a retreat for plutocrats more exclusive than Bohemian Grove this year, as two billionaire earthlings Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson took maiden voyages as space tourists, and made the term masters of the universe just a bit more literal.

In this space race, Mr. Branson went first on July 11, soaring 50 miles above the New Mexico desert aboard the V.S.S. Unity, which looked eerily like a hood ornament from a 1956 Chevy.

But Amazons 200 billion dollar man refused to concede. Nine days later, Mr. Bezos soared 65 miles above Texas wearing a flyboy-meets-cowboy ensemble not seen in aerospace circles since Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, and claimed victory, noting that he actually crossed a boundary known as the Krmn line 62 miles above sea level into so-called real space.

Yes, a rocket is a phallic symbol. But does it have to be so blatant, like something Carrie Bradshaw might have picked up at the Pleasure Chest?

Mr. Bezos had scarcely blasted off for his 10-minute maiden voyage to space when social media erupted with X-rated memes. One porn site even created a line of sex toys called the Billionaire Flesh Rocket Series.

After the snickering died down, engineers pointed out that the rockets bulbous tip and roomy shaft allowed for maximum occupancy and, also, stability on re-entry. No jokes, please.

U.F.O. sightings no longer occupy the same cultural space as Bigfoot or Jim Morrison sightings at Burger King.

In June, the federal government declassified an intelligence report in which it admitted there is no earthly or, at least, governmental explanation for more than 120 reports of objects in the skies, as former President Barack Obama put it on The Late Late Show With James Corden.

Sure, that mysterious Kubrickian metal slab in the red canyons of Utah was likely an artwork or a hoax, not alien. And an eerie radio signal from the direction of Proxima Centauri was, alas, probably just human radio frequency interference. Given the state of the world, though, you cant blame people for hoping to find intelligent life somewhere in the universe.

When the United States Space Force unveiled its uniforms in September, it was hard not to make joking references to Star Trek, or the Netflix show Space Force, starring Steve Carell, that parodies the sixth and newest branch of the military.

The asymmetrical dark blue coat with gray pants looked to many observers like it had been designed by science fiction nerds. The U.S. Space Force Will Wear Battlestar Galactica Uniforms, declared a headline on Giant Freakin Robot, an entertainment website.

The rivalry between the United States and China extended far beyond national borders. In February, NASAs Perseverance rover touched down on Mars and achieved a Wright Brothers moment by launching the first powered flight on another planet (a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity).

Then in May, China landed a rover called Zhurong in a huge basin known as Utopia Planitia, which was not only its first exploratory trip on Mars, but also ushered in a new era of space competition, as it showed its ability to compete in a space race long dominated by Americans and Russians. The Chinese rover even planted a wireless camera on the red dirt and snapped a picture of itself. How 2021. Whats the point of traveling if you dont get the selfie?

Space travel movies are as old as cinema itself, thanks to Georges Mliss landmark 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon. In 2021, however, a Russian film crew spent 12 days aboard the International Space Station, filming scenes for The Challenge, the first feature-length drama containing scenes shot in space.

Time will tell if the film, about a surgeon rushing to space to save an ailing cosmonaut, will become a science fiction classic. If nothing else, however, the filmmakers beat the Americans to the punch. (Plans for a Tom Cruise action-adventure movie shot in space were announced last year.)

First Sputnik, now this. At least the Americans got that gold medal in hockey.

In July, Oliver Daemen, 18, the son of a Dutch private equity executive, became the youngest person to travel to space when a would-be Blue Origin passenger, who had paid $28 million for the privilege, had to drop out for a scheduling conflict. Must have been some conflict.

Humans being humans, we leave a mess wherever we go. In May, a 10-story, 23-ton piece of a Chinese rocket came crashing down to the Earth in an uncontrolled path, leading some to wonder if it would fall on their heads. Luckily, it landed harmlessly in the Indian Ocean.

In November, the Russians created another mess when they tested an antisatellite weapon on a defunct spy satellite, creating an enormous cloud of debris that forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to batten down the hatches.

Some fear that all that space junk may make space travel difficult or even impossible in the future. But maybe theres hope. In March, a Japanese company launched a space vacuum of sorts to suck up some of the 3,000 inactive satellites orbiting Earth. If only we could recycle them.

William Shatner, the actor who made space travel safe for sideburns and Beatle boots a half-century ago, seized the record for oldest person to travel to space in October, by tagging along with Mr. Bezos on a Blue Origin voyage.

It was fair to wonder if Mr. Bezos was just using his billions to indulge a boyhood fantasy. Mr. Bezos, after all, is a confirmed Trekkie who once competed with his fourth grade classmates for the right to play Kirk. Wed have little cardboard phasers and cardboard tricorders, you know, he said at an event for The Washington Post in 2016.

Mr. Shatner seemed to be a fanboy himself. Yes, its true; Im going to be a rocket man! he tweeted before the trip. He even promised to write a song about the experience. Too bad Space Oddity is taken.

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The Year Space Got Sexy All Over Again - The New York Times

For the first time, the term metaverse was mentioned in Neil Stevensons fiction novel Avalanche in 1992. In the cyberpunk genre, the author described the double life of an ordinary pizza delivery man, who rarely had luck in everyday life, however, in the cyber universe he was able to become a famous hacker and warrior, who was responsible for saving the world. The work received a good response from fans of fiction, but the developers of the entertainment industry were seriously carried away by the creation of a utopian universe only recently, almost 30 years later.

The metaverse is an online ecosystem concept that combines the virtual online world and offline reality. There are different ways to enter it: the most common way that tech giants plan to use is VR helmets to get together for video calls. However, the concept of metaverse is broader than just working with virtual reality in fact, in the context of modern IT, a metaverse can be called an infrastructure on the network, inside which a user creates his avatar and quietly exists, performing actions: creating content, changing currency, playing games. In fact, this is any world created on the web. But can any network structure be called a metaverse?

The metaverse strives to become useful, full, like real life. Corporations specializing in IT and technology, realizing that metaverse is the new black, hurried to declare that their products will certainly be combined into the metaverse. Microsoft has announced an innovative Mesh system that, using VR and AR headsets, will allow people to work in a team while being in different parts of the globe, as well as create 3D models and interact with them. The US Armyis currently working with Microsoft on the HoloLens 2 augmented reality headset, in which soldiers will be able to train and fight. Expertsbelievethat mixed reality can be the key to improving teamwork.

On October 28, 2021, Facebookannounceda name change now the global network is presented as Meta. Despite the fact that virtual reality is not developing as fast as we would like (it may become mainstream onlyin 5-10 years), corporations are already making a huge contribution to the development of cyberspace. Meta has made large investments (to be more precise,2.3 billion US dollars) in virtual reality for example, it acquired Oculus, which produces entire lines of VR and AR headsets.

However, the problem with all that is that the concept of metaverse does not imply an exclusive environment into which strictly users of a certain network can penetrate using strictly defined gadgets. The idea of the metaverse is inclusive at the root: in fact, it is an additional reality to the existing one, into which everyone can penetrate. And the key aspect is communication and sociality: the conditional avatar inside the metaverse should socialize and communicate as in real life. It is really quite difficult and expensive to build such a universe, and it can only be done by joint efforts not within the ecosystem of a certain brand. However, it is possible to build ecosystems according to the principles of metaverse and, oddly enough, games were the first to take this path.

The metaverse is a product that appeared as a result of studying the trends of generation Z that appear in games. In games like Roblox and Minecraft, modern users focus not only on the entertainment process: social aspects play a more significant role for young people. In the online world, they can communicate and learn to work in a team: it turns out to be a kind of training of interaction with people, for example, before joining a work, school or student team. This type of gaming activity is especially useful for introverts: since communication takes place in a space in which the player is comfortable, he is relaxed and disposed to talk about common gaming topics.

Unlikemillennials who prefer watching TV programs or movies in their free time, Ganz has the fifth most popular virtual reality vacation. 87% of Generation Z members play video games almost daily. In addition, a study conducted by The Center for Generational Kinetics (The Center for Generational Kinetics) showed that it is zoomers who practically do not see the boundaries between the physical and online worlds and are more integrated into cyberspace. For companies engaged in the development of metaverses, the younger generation is a kind of trendsetter. It is their preferences that set the vector of development.

The developer of computer games Epic Games has also taken a step towards building metaverse in his brainchild Fortnite. Celebrity concerts take place in augmented reality: Ariana Grande and Travis Scotts shows are spectacular spectacles that have garnered millions of views on YouTube. There are also debuts of music albums. You can even witness Martin Luther Kings famous speech I Have a Dream (from English I have a dream).

Having studied the most famous games that converge with the concept of metaverse an open world in which you can freely move and interact with other players you can understand that they follow several basic principles that can be applied when building an ecosystem:

In an ecosystem built on the concept of the metaverse, users create their own avatars, with which they communicate with other participants of the system. Despite the fact that in games the avatar is perceived as something virtual and unreal, in each individual ecosystem, the approach to avatars is different. For example, in Likee, it means a digital fingerprint of creativity and creativity of each user. These avatars are immersed in the ecosystem and interact in it with the help of available tools. Such tools can be both game mechanics and social ones for social platforms

A metaverse-based ecosystem cannot exist without UGC it does not function without the investments of other users. Content here refers to any contribution: from short videos to a simple user path within the ecosystem. In addition, it should be as simple and accessible as possible to enter it only basic gadgets are needed.

Within such ecosystems, their own currencies work. In games, for example, there are coins that can be spent on new skins or features. Sucheconomicsystems can be found inmany platforms including social media apps as well, where the special currencies are designed for users to exchange for items only available in that special community.

A community should be formed in the metaverse ecosystem and this is not a matter of one day at all. So, Minecraft, a game whose principles of operation resemble metaverse as much as possible, was launched in 2009 and built a full-fledged community by about 2013 it was this year that its popularity peaked. Animal Crossing, also following the metaverse concept, gained recognition during the pandemic also mostly based on the community of previous games. In order to exist, the metaverse needs a permanent core of users-avatars who will use it regularly. Without it, it does not exist as, in general, any other reality.

We hear your silent question: but it turns out that there is no metaverse as such? True, so far metaverse only exists as a concept, and without combining technology giants to work on a system with a low entry threshold which any user who follows the rules of metaverse can enter this idea remains a utopia. However, we can create ecosystems built on the principles of the metaverse, which we have outlined above. Such systems help the community to be more cohesive and motivate them to use these systems more and better. So, Likee, like any social platform, in fact, works according to the principles of metaverse we give users tools for existence and interaction on the Internet. This allows them to open up creatively, communicate and create something new without leaving the application. In addition, our metaverse allows their digital avatars to try out several options for interaction: from personal messages and communication in a group of friends to joining mini-games.

Meta-universe is a much broader term than just an ecosystem in virtual reality powered by expensive gadgets. There is a very long way to go to create a universal accessible metaverse, which we will be able to do by overcoming more pressing problems: providing an even larger part of the population with the Internet, making equipment more accessible However, the creation of ecosystems within social platforms based on the principles of the metaverse is the first step to allow users to feel comfortable in the virtual space, to let them understand how an additional reality can coexist with the main one. Naturally, the community plays a huge role in this issue if you build a friendly community, there is a chance that the future of metaverse will come as soon as possible. The only question remains who will be the first and on the basis of which infrastructure the future metaverse will be built. Would there be only one mage metaverse for all and for good? Or would there be various multiple metaverses thriving in a symbiotic relationship, of which one would be the metaverse for a certain group of users like what Likee is doing? The answer is for you, the users, to build.

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Utopia or everyday life? Why it is too early to talk about metaverse - TechJuice

The City Council of Charlottesville, Va., voted on Tuesday to donate a statue of Robert E. Lee to an African American heritage center that plans to melt the bronze monument, the focus of a deadly white nationalist rally in 2017, into material for a new piece of public art.

The 4-0 vote by the council followed years of debate over the fate of the statue. Four years ago, a plan to remove the statue drew scores of white nationalists to Charlottesville for a Unite the Right rally that led to violence, including the killing of a counterprotester by an Ohio man who plowed a car into a crowd.

The statues fate was left to a prolonged fight in court that concluded in April, when Virginias Supreme Court ruled that the city could take down two statues of Confederate generals, including the Lee monument. Over the summer, workers hoisted it off its granite base.

After taking it down, the city accepted proposals from bidders who wanted the Lee statue and a nearby statue of Stonewall Jackson, another Confederate general, that was also removed.

The Statuary Park at Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, asked for both, saying in its proposal that it wanted to rescue unwanted statues associated with the Civil War. LAXART, a Los Angeles-based visual arts organization, wanted both statues for a planned exhibition. Frederick Gierisch said in an interview on Tuesday that he offered to pay the city of Charlottesville $10,000 for each statue so he could display them in his ranch in Utopia, Texas.

What to Know About the Charlottesville Rally Trial

I dont think they should all be taken down and destroyed, said Mr. Gierisch, 55. And I think it is a part of history.

The council on Tuesday decided to give the Lee statue to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which submitted a proposal under the name Swords Into Plowshares.

An Indiegogo campaign page for the project said that its leaders wanted to transform a national symbol of white supremacy into a new work of art that will reflect racial justice and inclusion.

The projects leaders have not decided what the new artwork will look like. The campaign page said the decision would be informed by a six-month community engagement process where residents of Charlottesville can participate in forums to help determine how the social value of inclusion can be represented through art and public space.

Andrea Douglas, the centers executive director, said in an interview on Tuesday that Swords Into Plowshares is a community-based project.

Were taking something that was harmful, taking something that was the source of trauma, and transforming it into something that is more respective of the democratic, communal space, which those original objects absolutely were not, Ms. Douglas said.

On Monday night, she had been watching the live broadcast of the City Council meeting, listening as council members appeared to be preparing to postpone a vote on the statue.

She stepped away from her computer and went to bed, believing no news would come that night.

But in the final 15 minutes of the nearly six-hour virtual meeting, which stretched into early Tuesday morning, almost every resident who called in during the public comment portion expressed frustration that the officials had yet to decide the statues fate.

How much more do you want to drag out the trauma that these statues represent? one resident asked.

Seven minutes later, Councilman Michael Payne said, Im happy to vote on it tonight and just get it done with.

So is there a resolution? Mayor Nikuyah Walker asked.

That was when Ms. Douglas pulled up the meeting again on her computer after receiving texts from friends.

The vote to donate the statue to the heritage center was unanimous.

So I had a glass of wine, Ms. Douglas said.

The councils decision followed an announcement from Virginias governor, Ralph Northam, on Sunday that the pedestal where a Robert E. Lee statue had stood in Richmond would be removed soon. Mr. Northam said that the removal process of that pedestal would be substantially complete by Dec. 31.

This land is in the middle of Richmond, and Richmonders will determine the future of this space, Mr. Northam said. The Commonwealth will remove the pedestal and we anticipate a safe removal and a successful conclusion to this project.

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Charlottesvilles Statue of Robert E. Lee Will Be Melted Down - The New York Times

Space exploration doesn't happen in a vacuum. Instead, our ideas of space exploration are shaped by our cultural contexts, according to architecture and urban design professor Fred Scharmen.

Scharmen grew up obsessed with human spaceflight and has returned to the topic as an architect to explore how ideas about spaceflight are influenced by the hopes and fears and fashions of the culture in which they are developed. He analyzes seven different spaceflight visions spanning 150 years in his new book, "Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space" (Verso, 2021). (Read an excerpt from "Space Forces.")

"Space Forces" highlights not just rocket designers and science-fiction authors but also artists and strategists and, of course, today's space billionaires. Space.com sat down with Scharmen to talk about the book. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Related: Best space and sci-fi books for 2021

Space.com: How did this book come about for you?

Fred Scharmen: Like a lot of people, I've always been interested in space stuff, ever since I was a kid. But when I started to get into architecture more seriously, first as a designer and practitioner, and then later as an academic and teacher, I had the opportunity to go back and sort of interrogate that early obsession that I had as a kid that a lot of us had as kids.

We get caught up in the cool, pretty pictures, and in architecture and urban design, we love making pretty pictures, too. But it's also always worth interrogating those pretty pictures and going, "What's really going on here? Where's this coming from? What's the context? Who is it aimed at?" I got really interested in, like, going deep into some of the renderings that I had grown up with as a child of the '80s ... and so my first book is about those.

Coming out of that first book, I realized that there are a lot more stories that could and should be told in the same way. I found all the same kind of weird and interesting connections between like, anxiety, politics, pop culture [and] science fiction 150 years ago. I tried to put these moments into those same kinds of contexts: what's going on in culture, what's going on in science fiction, what's going on in politics? What are people afraid of? What are they hopeful about? And what do these ideas about living in space tell us about what it means to live in a world generally, whether we make that world from scratch out in space or we're producing and making and negotiating with each other in the world we have?

Space.com: How does your background as an architect shape the way you look at space exploration?

Scharmen: The things that I learned about in architecture school, the things that I worked with working in offices and the things that I was trying to teach students, they all come right to the foreground when the question is, how do we make everything? We're out here in nothing, we need space to occupy and live in what do we want to make? All the stuff we take for granted becomes really fraught because you've got to choose. You've got to choose the composition of the air. If you're spinning for artificial gravity, you've got to decide, do we want to be light and be able to jump around, or do we want to have one gravity [like on Earth] and prioritize health concerns?

Everything becomes a design choice, basically. As architects, we design the air. We do all this stuff all the time, but we kind of forget about what a weird and important decision that is, designing the air, designing the wall, letting in the light, stairs and mobility issues and accessibility all these things are about who's able to use the space. In space exploration, I found all the same issues, just writ large, with the volume turned up, that I'd been familiar with from another direction.

Space.com: You spend the bulk of the book digging into history what was the most surprising or telling incident you found during that research?

Scharmen: I really wish I could have gone more into J.D. Bernal's connection with Rosalind Franklin, who was the discoverer of the DNA molecule they worked together. J.D. Bernal was an English-Irish chemist and scientist who was creating some of these early ideas for, like, let's create a habitat for millions of people that's floating in orbit and they can do science up there and they can expand and live and create a whole culture of their own up there. In his books from the 1940s, he's writing about how genetic modification might be possible. This is before DNA was discovered, and then the person who would later be his colleague was the discoverer of the means by which that kind of thing could happen. I wish I could have had the chance to go more into that coincidence.

And I think I'll never look at a figure like Wernher von Braun the same way again after digging into some of this research. We're used to hearing in basic histories of space science how von Braun was just obsessed and interested in rockets and wanted the chance to make rockets that could go to space, and since he was in Germany, the only chance he had was to go work for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and create ballistic missiles. And yeah, they were used in World War II, and that's too bad, but then he came to the United States and he converted to Christianity and he became politically active in America and now he's not a Nazi anymore.

I think there are a lot of aspects to von Braun's thinking [that suggest otherwise], especially his proposals when he first came over to the U.S. to use a future space station as a new terror weapon. He was pushing the idea of the space station to the American military on the grounds of that same kind of fear of random death from above that was essential to the V2 rocket that he designed. That was the most powerful aspect of the V2, that uncertainty you never knew when it was going to come for you or where it was going to land if you were in London during the V2 campaign.

That was his major selling point: this would be a new kind of scare weapon, and it would win a future World War III. It's not just the German Nazi rocket science that von Braun brought over, but it's sort of Nazi methodologies for waging war that he brought over that were essential to his worldview.

Space.com: There's this sentence you write about him that I thought was just so powerful: "What kind of world are you willing to make, or at least tolerate, in order to get the kind of world that you want?"

Scharmen: It was a tough chapter to write, going into the memoirs of Holocaust survivors, people who had survived the workcamps that mass produced the V2s, which he visited several times. It wasn't a situation that he was oblivious to at all. There is, I find, a kind of a tacit acceptance it's not an explicit acceptance that this is a necessary period of pain and suffering but we're headed for utopia, that I find in von Braun's worldview.

It comes through in his science fiction, too. Maybe not surprisingly, he was a writer of science fiction on the side as well. In his science-fiction novel, a future united world government after World War III, which is won by the nuclear-armed space station that he convinced the Americans to build, the new goal is to mount this huge expedition to Mars after they discovered that Martians exist. When his people get to Mars, the elder Martians even tell them, "Yes, it's necessary to go through periods of war and suffering and slavery to find peace and to find technical prosperity in the future, and we know that and you're learning those lessons too, you young humans."

That moment in his science-fiction novel is the kind of thing that I picture him thinking about when he's looking out over these tunnels inside a mountain where enslaved people are building his rockets and basically being worked to death. More people died building the V2s than died in the explosions that they caused.

Space.com: I think you must have had the book written before the private spaceflights this year from Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX. What's your perspective on those flights and how does that relate to the stories you tell in the book?

Scharmen: Yeah, it was totally complete before we hit this rapid explosion in private spaceflight. But what I saw in NewSpace generally was this looming image problem that was a disconnect between audiences that they needed to address because they're private operators.

Private spaceflight companies have to speak to investors on the one hand and say, "Oh, no, this is going to be a profit-driven enterprise, we're going to realize the return on investment. It's safe, it's not going to be about risk-taking, or the construction of any new or weird economics or politics." But they have to turn to public audiences and say, "This is breaking new ground, this is a dangerous adventure undertaken on behalf of all humankind, and we're building access to space for everybody."

NASA, like any institution, has its critics but it's probably one of the most beloved brands, one of the most beloved government operations in history. Everybody loves NASA. NASA is so good at connecting actions to ideals, and since they're a public agency and they're using public money, it feels like we're all in it together.

I think that's something that the private space companies are grappling with. That's why [SpaceX mission] Inspiration4 is named what it is: they're trying to reconnect to that feeling, that sense of wonder that we link up to the idea of humans going to space and the adventure and the danger that comes along with that. And it's interesting to see the different ways that the different companies are trying to do that.

Space.com: What do you hope readers take away from "Space Forces"?

Scharmen: What I hope that audiences can take away is that it's time to have a bigger conversation that is more nuanced than, "Should billionaires go to space or shouldn't they? Should they be called astronauts or shouldn't they?" I think there's a lot more to talk about that's more interesting than just these binaries. "Should we fund NASA or should we solve world hunger?" Of course we should do both of those things, and all those things and more.

I think for too long, it's been about, "Are you in favor of a human future in space or not?" and any criticism is seen as like, "Oh, you want to stop everything. You want to shut this whole thing down and defund NASA and take away the rockets." It's not about that. That kind of either-or situation is at this point a little childish, because nobody's gonna shut this stuff down. We've got way too much invested in it. It's way too cool and exciting.

We can say, let's have that conversation more collectively: What sort of world should we invest in both here and elsewhere? It's not a matter of taking away the toys, it's a matter of using the toys for the best possible outcomes.

In my world, as a design teacher and as a designer, critique and criticism is a good thing. It's what we want, because it makes what we're trying to do better. We invite our peers to sit in on our project presentations and give us feedback. That kind of criticism is what I hope more people find valuable: positive feedback that leads to things getting better and more productive and cooler and more interesting and more exciting.

You can buy "Space Forces" on Amazon or Bookshop.org.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Read the rest here:

New book 'Space Forces' examines the cultural drivers of space exploration - Space.com

OurBroadband Breakfast Live Online events take place on Wednesday at 12 Noon ET. You can watch the December 15, 2021, event on this page. You can also PARTICIPATE in the current Broadband Breakfast Live Online event. REGISTER HERE.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021, 12 Noon ET How Public Private Partnerships Represent an Opportunity for Broadband Deployment

In the past two years, public and private entities have greatly increased their collaboration to expand broadband access for Americans. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the telecom industry has been forced to find innovative solutions to connect households to essential online services. In this Broadband Breakfast Live Online event, we will explore the factors driving public-private partnerships in telecom and look at where such partnerships can take us next. Various economic and business forces underlie these partnerships. Well also discuss the urgent need for these partnerships in the fight to connect the country.

Panelists for this Broadband Breakfast Live Online session:

Jim Baller is a partner at Keller & Heckman. He was founder of the US Broadband Coalition, a diverse group that fostered a broad national consensus on the need for a national broadband strategy and recommended the framework that was subsequently reflected in the Federal Communications Commissions National Broadband Plan. A consultant to Googles Fiber for Communities project, he is also the co-founder and president of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice, an alliance that works to prevent or remove barriers to the ability of local governments to make the critical broadband infrastructure decisions that affect their communities.

Roger Timmerman has been serving as UTOPIA Fibers Executive Director since 2016 and has been a technology management professional in telecommunications and information technology for over 15 years. Roger has been designing and building networks throughout his career in various roles including Vice President of Engineering for Vivint Wireless, CTO for UTOPIA Fiber, Network Engineer for iProvo, and Network Product Manager for Brigham Young University. Roger earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Information Technology from Brigham Young University.

Dwight Doc Wininger (pronounced WINE-ing-grr) has worked on telecommunications policy issues since the 1980s, first as Executive Director of the Nebraska Public Service Commission and then for a variety of private sector providers and consulting firms. He has worked on fiber optic deployments in multiple states and has been a featured speaker at various conferences on rural broadband deployment. In his current position, Wininger is responsible for local, state and federal government relations for ALLO Communications and is also heading up market development for the companys expansion into the State of Arizona.

Drew Clarkis the Editor and Publisher ofBroadbandBreakfast.comand a nationally-respected telecommunications attorney. Drew brings experts and practitioners together to advance the benefits provided by broadband. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, he served as head of a State Broadband Initiative, the Partnership for a Connected Illinois. He is also the President of the Rural Telecommunications Congress.

WATCH HERE, or onYouTube,TwitterandFacebook.

As with all Broadband Breakfast Live Online events, the FREE webcastswill take place at 12 Noon ET on Wednesday.

SUBSCRIBE to the Broadband Breakfast YouTubechannel. That way, you will be notified when events go live. Watch onYouTube,TwitterandFacebook.

See a complete list ofupcoming and past Broadband Breakfast Live Onlineevents.

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Broadband Breakfast Live Online on December 29, 2021 New Years' Party, and Looking to 2022 - BroadbandBreakfast.com

December 10, 2021

December 10, 2021

Robert Moses has an almost demonic status in the lore of American cities. As depicted by Robert Caro in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography The Power Broker, Moses was a racist, antisemite, and bully who combined vast power over New York City's built environment with a paradoxical contempt for urban life. Favoring automobiles over mass transit and foot traffic, Moses presided over the destruction of whole neighborhoods to make room for highways. He even tried to demolish a Central Park playground so patrons of an expensive restaurant would have somewhere to leave their cars while dining. He paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.

Moses wasn't all bad, though. Despite his sins against democracy, sociology, and good taste, the master builder was driven by a vision of a living city that offered affordable comfort to a growing population. Though they weren't always pretty, the highways, bridges, and housing developments Moses planned met genuine needs. And while Moses implemented discriminatory policies that were standard in his day, claims of special animus against minorities (revived last month by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) are overblown.

If Moses looks better in retrospect than when Caro published his book, his critics now seem less appealing. Preservationists like the author Jane Jacobs are celebrated as heroes who saved historic buildings and walkable neighborhoods from Moses' obsession with modernization and automotive convenience (Caro reportedly cut an admiring chapter on Jacobs from The Power Broker). Their unintended legacy, though, is proliferating regulations that stifle development, raise prices for infrastructure, and constrain the housing supply.

The tensions between brutal dynamism and romantic preservationism were revived this week the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation recommended that the complex including Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, and the 2 Penn Plaza office building should be added to the National Register of Historic Places. If successful, the designation would add another layer of uncertain approvals to plans to renovate or replace the structures. Ironically, the demolition of the original Penn Station beginning in 1963 was a turning point in the struggle against Moses. Although he was not personally responsible, the rapid and politically unaccountable destruction of a Beaux Arts landmark galvanized opposition to his domineering approach.

If you don't see why the historical designation sounds utterly insane to New Yorkers or almost anyone who travels to the city it's important to understand that Penn Station is one of the worst places in the city and possibly the world. A warren of dingy passages and bleak tunnels, the present design moved art historian Vincent Scully to pronounce that "[t]hrough [old] Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god. ... One scuttles in now like a rat." Look at it:

The poster in that first image actually pledges "higher ceilings" as an improvement to come. There's no mystery about how miserable this building is, how totally unsuited to human happiness, let alone convenience.

After decades of advocacy, the Daniel P. Moynihan train hall opened this year in a former post office building across the street. It's much nicer, but it's designed primarily for Amtrak riders, who make up just a fraction of Penn Station's traffic. Long Island Railroad and especially New Jersey Transit passengers still rely on the underground monstrosity.

Moses is not entirely to blame for this state of affairs, but he is implicated. He did notcausethe bad decisions of the struggling Pennsylvania Railroad, which allowed theoldstation to deteriorate for years before it was finally demolished. Andpreservationists weren't wrong to treat Moses as an avatar for the historically insensitive, aesthetically blind attitudes that informed its replacement. For Moses and other midcentury planners, remnants of the prewar city were at best impractical luxuries and at worst dysfunctional anachronisms.

That attitude encouraged mistakes with more serious consequences than the annoying but socially trivial demise of old Penn Station. The disfigurement of the Bronx by expressways encouraged a spiral of depopulation and dysfunction from which the borough has never really recovered. Yet "Moses seemed to glory in the devastation," wrote social critic Marshall Berman. The combination of moral certainty, unconstrained power, and personal grandiosity Moses displayed were magnifications of qualities that he shared with a whole generation of American public officials. That's why Caro was drawn to him, not only for his idiosyncratic characteristics but as a symbol of the failures of postwar liberalism.

For all their dangers, though, those qualities also made it possible to rectify mistakes. If it fell short of atonement for the damage he inflicted to the South Bronx, Co-op Citynear the Westchester border reflects Moses' better side. While not exactly the "working class utopia" he promised, the semi-enclosed development provided relatively affordable housing to around 60,000 people. In his 1972 novel Blood Brothers, Richard Price depicted Co-op City's virtues and vices as a genuine community rather than the collection of isolated towers it appears from the adjacent Hutchinson River Parkway (another Moses creation).

Compare that to the fate of lower Manhattan, which Jacobs and other preservationists defended from Moses' proposal to drive a highway through Washington Square Park. Thanks to their success, Greenwich Village, Soho, and other neighborhoods remain a legally-protected wonderland of low-rise prewar construction and street-level commerce(although restrictions are beginning to ease). For precisely that reason, though, they include some of the priciest real estate in the city. The quaint shops and social mix of intellectuals, immigrants, and workers Jacobs cherished have long since been replaced by chain stores catering and a population dominated by the young or rich.And, once in place, preservationist rules like those she helpedinspirecan be used to preserve less charming buildings, too, apparently including new Penn Station.

Jacobs and her various allies and followers can't be blamed for the awfulness of that building, and they deserve credit forprotectingsome beautiful buildings andbirthing an influential, high-profile preservationist movement. But they also hold some responsibility for new Penn Station's undeserved preservation if this designation proposal succeeds.

The legacy of their efforts and the legal doctrines they generated have turned out to be counterproductive. By subjecting projects to endless processes of regulatory review, multiplying veto points, and promoting the policy thatwhole neighborhoods, not just specific buildings, deserve historical protection, Jacobs et al. have inadvertently helped choke out the diverse, unpredictable, organic life they hoped to sustain.

And while a Robert Moses city might be uglier, more dependent on cars, and more politically centralized, it might also be cheaper, enjoy better infrastructure, and less easily influenced by well-connected activists. Maybe that would be worth the trade.

Excerpt from:

What if Robert Moses was right? - The Week Magazine

This fall has been an exciting time for fans of classic science fiction, given the big-screen success of Dune and the new small-screen adaptation of Isaac Asimovs Foundation. Its rather fitting that Foundation had to wait 80 years following its first appearance in a pulp magazine to be adapted, and while some purists have been unhappy with the modern retelling, personally, as a lifelong fan of the novels, I thought that David Goyer and Josh Friedman made several smart choices to update the story while remaining faithful to the source material and themes.

For me, the most exciting aspect of these new adaptations was the chance to see stories come to vivid life and hear the names of characters that Ive been thinking about for decades finally spoken aloud.

The Golden Age and the New Wave of science fiction are absolutely loaded with amazing stories and worldbuilding that fans would love to see translated to the screen (preferably with as few changes as possible). At the same time, the reality is that Hollywood is in the business of mass entertainment. Finding a balance between the two is a challenge that those shopping around a potential adaptation have to face. That is why David S. Goyer pitched Foundation as Game of Thrones in space. Is that reductive to the vision? Maybe, but the series got made, and as a result, we ended up with one of the best new science fiction TV shows fans have seen in some time.

So the question I asked myself is: What are the 20 best Golden Age and New Wave properties that can and should be adapted next? The resulting list is below, covering works largely published between the 1940s and the 70s, along with discussions of how each book or series could be adapted, who should be involved, and notes on why the work continues to resonate with modern readers/potential viewers. Some of these I consider slam dunks that Hollywood should have started filming yesterday, and some are admittedly more far-fetched as potential hitsbut a serious retro SF fan can dream, cant he? Either way, what better way to find some excellent books to read or revisit

The Pitch: The Expanded Asimov universe. This one is obvious and it seems that Goyer and Friedman were already thinking along these lines, as hints to this expanded universe were made multiple times in Foundation. Since the novels extend very far into our future, the Foundation universe encompasses more than whats covered in the AppleTV series. Asimov wrote a trilogy (and then eventually a fourth book) of robot detective noir novels that take place closer to our time but set in the same universe. The Robot Series follows robot-hating detective Elijah Bailey, who has to solve a series of murders with a robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw. Each season would have a different look as they would take place on different worlds. These are the most commercial of all of Asimovs properties. The first book was adapted into a single 1964 episode of BBCs Story Parade starring Peter Cushing, but it needs a modern take to do it justice.

Dont take my word for it: Caves of Steel works incredibly well on two levels. It paints a compelling picture of a very plausible future for humanity. The strife over jobs, automation, prejudice, and culture, are eternally relatable. With modern FX, the New York of the novel would translate to the screen brilliantly. I can see the walkways and crowds just the way I imagined them when reading the book for the first time. On top of this vibrant location, we are treated to a classic locked room murder mystery that stands up to anything by Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Seeing this play out over a season would be fantastic. And following the characters to other, equally rich worlds in future seasons makes this a no-brainer. Issa Diao, filmmaker and lead vocalist of Good Clean Fun

Format and filmmakers: This would be perfect for an Apple TV series that connects to Foundation. Each season could adapt one of the novels and eventually expand beyond the original stories. I would bring back the entire Foundation team and just let them have fun bringing Asimovs sci-fi noir to life. Roxann Dawson is most famous for being a cast member on Star Trek: Voyager but she is an accomplished TV director (including two episodes of Foundation). Give her the pilot and let her set the tone!

Faithful or not? Written in the Fifties, the series could certainly use some updating, but essentially it would be easier to stay faithful to the stories of these novels than with Foundation.

The Pitch: From the writer of The Queens Gambit comes the literary response to Bradburys Fahrenheit 451. Mockingbird is a dystopia that takes place in a future ruled by AI, where the human resistance is fueled by learning the written word. The novel is in conversation with classics like 1984 but is built on a reversal of empowering people through the power of books and literature. The high-concept, post-apocalyptic setting and narrative would make for great set pieces and visuals. Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler has a knack for rich, compelling characters and his work is ripe for adaptation. Given the recent success of Netflixs adaptation of The Queens Gambit and the buzz over Showtimes upcoming The Man Who Fell to Earth series makes this a perfect time to adapt the Nebula-nominated Mockingbird as well.

Dont take my word for it: Society wallows in this unbearable grief by numbing itself with sex, drugs, and electronic amusements. Until the day that literacy reignites a spark of hope and the will to remake a new future in the ruined carcass of the past. Starring a depressed robot that wants to free itself from the centuries of its core programming, a man who rediscovers the lost art of reading, and a woman who is game to imagine the possibility of a future despite the hopelessness of the state of the world, Mockingbirds central love triangle is a bizarre and heartbreaking meditation on what humanity stands to lose as it awkwardly navigates its complex relationship with technology. While perhaps a touch quaint and conservative from todays perspective, Mockingbird has a lot of food for thought that resonates in a 21st century tech-reliant world. It is ripe for an update Cecil Castellucci, author of Tin Star and We Have Always Lived on Mars

Format and Filmmakers: Limited series for Netflix with six or seven episodes to expand the concepts. A good director for the pilot would be The Cabin in the Woods and Bad Times at the El Royale director Drew Goddard. He could give the show a stylized retro-future look and handle the complex characters.

Faithful or not? The series could certainly stay faithful to the structure and themes of the novel, but the human characters and the AIs motivations could be deepened through the expansion of the story.

The Pitch: Jirel of Joiry is the female Conan, blazing a trail through a rich fantasy world created in the 30s and 40s by a woman who was herself a pioneer in the science fiction field, Catherine Lucille Moore. These stories first appeared in the pages of Weird Tales, where Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft had been cutting their professional teeth for several years, two decades before Tolkien would change fantasy forever with the publication of The Lord of the Rings. In the wake of the record amount Amazon studios paid to buy the Lord of The Rings franchise and the long-awaited Wheel of Time adaptation, why not? Unlike, say, Red Sonja, this character was created and crafted by a woman, and a studio empowering women to adapt this classic could honor the legacy of a woman who was a pioneer in the fantasy field.

Dont take my word for it: Making her debut years before Wonder Woman, Arwen, and Eowen, or Xena the Warrior Princess, Jirel is pop cultures original sherobrave, strong, smart, stubborn, and intensely loyal to her people. Indeed, while Jirel can wield a weapon as well as any warlord, she stands out from the men of her medieval fantasy worldand, I would argue, from most action-adventure heroesby winning the day through persistence and emotional fortitude rather than brute violence. Between her fantastic journeys to other lands, dealings with hostile gods, and internal struggles between love and duty, Jirel of Joiry feels like it was made for the screenwhich makes sense, since Moore was both an award-winning genre author and regular scriptwriter for award-winning TV shows including Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip. Lisa Yaszek, Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech and editor of The Future is Female

Format and Filmmakers: This character deserves a tentpole movie. Since Jirels image is tied to her long red hair, the no-brainer first choice for the role would be Jessica Chastain. A good choice to head the film would be Old Guard director Gina Prince-Bythewood who has shown an ability to balance the kinetic action and character beats needed in this kind of smart, blockbuster film.

Faithful or not? Jirel started life as a series of short stories. The film certainly could start with two or three stories and remain faithful. The best option is to choose one story to expand while staying true to Moores character and worldbuilding.

The Pitch: The Dispossessed is a science fiction utopia about political divisions by one of the great pioneers of the genre. You couldnt ask for a timelier novel as one of the major themes highlights the rigid political distrust that keeps our society fractured. It appears that Le Guins son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, is currently working with two production companies1212 Entertainment and Anonymous Contentto develop the novel into a TV show. Attracting a mass audience may be a challenge due to the political nature of the story; however, the success of a deeply politically charged show like The Expanse may help pave the way. As much as this will sting for fans of the novel, this series should be sold to studios as House of Cards in spaceI know, I know. Its reductive, and I am a fan of the book, but while Sheveks great discovery as the catalyst for societal change should still be the heart of the story, I think the show must develop a clear antagonist.

Dont take my word for it: In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin presents a fully imagined and worked-through anarchist utopia. Her world of Anarres shows how liberty and mutuality are not in opposition, and the continuing participatory work that is needed to keep utopia alive. Una McCormack, academic and New York Times Bestselling novelist.

Format and filmmakers: This heady project will need a little bit of room to breathe. It makes sense to do a limited series format for a streamer like Amazon or Apple TV. I would hire Hanelle Culpepper as a director who has been doing great work at Star Trek: Discovery combining effects and great, memorable moments of performance.

Faithful or not? This one will be challenging; how do you adapt a utopian work inspired by Dostoyevskys novel about anarchists and Murray Bookchins ideas on radical ecology? You cant simply add armies and space battles to spice things upinstead, the focus on drama and political mechanics of Anarres and Urras is the key. One worlds capitalist society versus the others anarchist and independent society might be a tougher sell than action and explosions, but there is a way to remain faithful to Le Guins themes while adding more character-driven drama and friction. Thus, House of Cards in space with a clearer villain might be the way to go.

The Pitch: A genre-defining classic of Golden Age dark fantasy directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Guillermo del Toro has almost happened multiple times. The movie has been designed, and even cast before. In some alternate universe, it was released and Tom Cruise starred in one of the most successful R-rated opening weekends ever. People would talk about it as del Toros scariest film. The problem (in our world) has always been the cost of making it. It would require a massive budget, but maybe Amazon could do one less Lord of the Rings episode and cover the costs that way Lovecraft was, of course, a problematic figure, but he has no estate and is long dead. Lets see what a Mexican master of film can do with this material. The pitch should be that this adaptation would do for horror what Dune did for sci-fi, and allow people to have the full theatrical, immersive cinematic experience of this world unfolding around them (assuminghopefullythat its safe to do so when the movie premieres).

Dont take my word for it: At age 54 Ive lived long enough to see humanity land robots on Mars, clone a sheep, and map the human genomeyet del Toros adaptation of H.P. Lovecrafts At the Mountains of Madness still eludes us. And while Im dreaming of the future, Id also like to see Rob Zombie tackle J.F. Gonzalezs Survivor. Horror Grandmaster Brian Keene, author of The Rising.

Format and filmmakers: Hollywood killed 3D by overusing it. This movie could give audiences a reason to not miss the experience. Biggest screen possible IMAX 3D.

Faithful or not? Del Toro is the right filmmaker to do the first faithful-but-updated H.P. Lovecraft movie. His screenplay has been written for years, though according to this recent interview, hes still very interested in revising it, making it weirder, and finally bringing the story to the screen.

The Pitch: How does one get away with murder in a future where telepathy is commonplace? The Demolished Man is a perfect paranoid sci-fi thriller. The first novel to win the Hugo award, back in 1953, it is strange that no one has made this movie yet. It could be done creatively for a medium-sized budget (think a Looper-sized scale), heavy on ideas and characters that looks like more was spent. I would love to see a gritty noir take on this story that is as much an exploration of megalomania as it is a thriller.

Dont take my word for it: Alfred Besters work still feels modern and daringhe was doing cyberpunk-adjacent stories before cyberpunk was even a thingand hes long overdue for the grand Hollywood treatment. Great imagery, intriguing anti-heroes, manically dystopian worldshis work has it all. Carrie Vaughn, Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of Questland and Bannerless.

Format and filmmakers: After seeing Boss Level, I am ready to give this to director Joe Carnahan. He can handle the action and effects, and his work in movies like Narc and The Grey shows that he can get strong performances out of his cast.

Faithful or not? Sure, it would need some updating, but generally it is amazing how well the book holds up.

The Pitch: An epic mosaic-style look at the human impact on global ecologyalthough it won the Hugo in 1969, it is very much about the world of today. SoZ takes place in a future where the population and tensions are as high as resources are low. Using multiple points of view, this novel gives a varied and frightening look at the many different ways humans risk the sustainability of life on our planet. Eventually, the story comes together in a novel that predicted climate change, mass shootings, and media manipulation of the public. This is not one of the more commercial projects on the list but could be an important work. Brunners novel is my personal pick for the best science fiction novel of the 20th century.

Dont take my word for it: Groundbreaking SF using a breathtaking array of narrative techniques to paint a vividly detailed dystopian future. The fact that the population bomb never exploded as Brunner expected doesnt diminish the power of this novel. F. Paul Wilson, bestselling author of The Repairman Jack series.

Format and filmmakers: This 700-page novel would need a full season to play out; I would love to see it on HBO Max. This would be excellent in the hands of the Westworld team, Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, or Damon Lindelof with Nicole Kassell, who directed the pilot for Watchmen.

Faithful or not? First the environmental science and technology would need to be updated. It might also help to deepen the characters a bit. The episode structure would actually feel like the Lindelof show The Leftovers, with the mosaic approach to storytelling.

The Pitch: This is the fantasy seriesone that features battles between warriors riding winged creatures, dragons, wizards, and swordplay in a far future masterpiecethat the New Wave authors grew up reading. There is a reason many old-school fans pointed to this 1950s series when they saw the flying creatures in James Camerons Avatar. These stories have the epic scope of Tolkiens fantasy without the bloat.

Dont take my word for it: Vance cunningly blended science fiction, fantasy, and horror with this landmark collection. The Dying Earth tales possess images of darkest horror, yet his touch is so light, his cuts so deft, you wont notice the bleeding until its too late. Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase

Format and filmmakers: I could see a smaller streamer like Peacock picking up a project like this, in order to have their own fantasy series.

Faithful or not? Vance was a powerful storyteller. I think a showrunner would have to do some heavy lifting to get the format right, but the stories are right there for the taking.

The Pitch: A beloved post-apocalyptic tale that takes place over a dozen centuries and does so while delivering a powerful message about the nature of humanity and civilization. Broken up into three acts that take place hundreds of years apart, this novel, while universally praised, has long been considered unfilmable. If each act of the movie spends 30 to 40 minutes covering each of the three parts, I think it is possible. The novel starts in the aftermath of a nuclear war and follows a sect of monks who protect the books that explain our technological society well enough that, in time, they can help to rebuild civilization. The only problem iswill we as a species make the same mistakes again?

Dont take my word for it: I came across it by accident, it was a book my parents were reading and talking about. I was fourteen or fifteen. I loved it then and recently re-read it, and it holds up really well. It is funny that it took the literary establishment ten years or so to catch-up to the genius the genre community saw right away. It is remarkable as a novel. Brian Evenson, author of Immobility

Format and filmmakers: I think this needs to be an arthouse sci-fi movie in the vein of a 2001 or Interstellar. How about getting three different A-list filmmakers for each section? Imagine part one directed by del Toro, Part 2 by Katherine Bigelow, and part 3 by Christopher Nolanor some other great combination of filmmakers.

Faithful or not? Yes. One hundred percent yes. It is amazing how well this novel, which won the Hugo award in 1960, holds up today.

The Pitch: This novel is basically the anti-war response to Starship Troopers, written by a Vietnam war vet. Ridley Scott owned the rights to this novel and came very close to getting a greenlight several times, including one attempt that gave way to Prometheus. The novel uses the expanse of space to tell a vivid tale of endless war and the feeling of dislocation that most returning vets feel. A limited series might be in a better position to tell the story; we saw Ridley Scott do this with Raised by Wolves, so how about that? Be bold. Or how about releasing the first two hours with an exclusive theatrical window and ending on a trailer for the HBO Max series?

Dont take my word for it: Forever War on the big screen should be like All Quiet on the Western Front, but on other worlds, to show that humanity not only takes its best intentions to the stars, but also its greatest shortcoming: our failure to communicate with what we dont understand. Tony Peak, author of Eden Descending.

Format and filmmakers: Film or limited series. Or both!

Faithful or not? My concern with a movie as opposed to a series is that a big budget affair would be too focused on the spectacle and not the emotional core.

The Pitch: From the co-writer of The Crow comes a gritty novel that is part urban fantasy and part cyberpunk, written before the name of either genre was officially coined. This novel takes place in the slums of high-tech San Francisco, where the underground punk rock scene is run by hackers and gangsters. Stu Cole, the main character, is recruited by an online persona to fight these criminals, only to discover the avatar is the city itself, brought to life. (I know I am pushing it here by including a late 70s novel, but it is great.)

Dont take my word for it: If John Shirley is patient zero when it comes to the cyberpunk genre (as William Gibson famously stated), then his titular character in City Come a-Walkin, the very embodiment of all the glitz and technological shadiness of the city itself, comes to life like a renegade post-modern Prometheus. Shaun Lawton, editor of The Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Format and filmmakers: Imagine a punk rock Dark City, gritty neo-punk noir with a few action scenes; this is arthouse indie sci-fi destined to be a cult film. Think festivals and arthouse theaterssomething on the scale of Benson and Mooreheads Synchronic. Are they available after Moon Knight? Or how about giving it to Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. He is the Spanish director behind 2019s inventive and disturbing cult hit The Platform.

Faithful or not? Update the music and technology, but the structure and themes are solid.

The Pitch: It has been too long since we had a truly bonkers Philip K. Dick adaption, so how about one we could pitch as The Running Man meets The American President? This was Dicks debut novel and its the paranoid dystopian action thriller about our broken political system we need. In this future, the president is chosen at random by a lottery, and then once that choice is made, the candidate must prove their toughness by fending off assassins, as viewers watch all of this unfold on television. Normally this process is rigged, but not for Cartwright, our new President-elect, who quickly figures out the killers know how to get around his psychic bodyguards.

Dont take my word for it: Given how many film adaptations or homages of Dicks work lean heavily into sci-fi action, its shocking that Solar Lottery hasnt already been put to celluloid. Fast-paced, heavy on the weird, and intensely critical of our desire to be a passive audience to the misery of others, Solar Lottery is as relevant now as it was in 1955. And besides, we all want a movie that features a simulacrum controlled by multiple telepaths! Anthony Trevino, author of King Space Void and co-host of the Dickheads podcast.

Format and filmmakers: Movie! The next Total Recall! Directed by Gareth Evans of the Raid movies. Lets see what he could do with science fiction.

Faithful or not? It needs some updating, as the novel is 70 years old, but the basic story is perfect.

The Pitch: The Expanse and Firefly meet Flash Gordon, from the woman who worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. Eric John Stark was born on Mercury in a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth; the solar system is populated by warring factions of space-faring Martians. Bracketts high adventure novels were often called planetary romances, but they are pure, sugary-sweet space operas. The Secret of Sinharat could appeal to sci-fi fans looking for something Western-ish like Firefly, but with healthy doses of sword-wielding action. Dinosaurs, spaceships, and swordplay. Sign me up!

Dont take my word for it: A science fantasy set on the wild frontier of Mars, featuring Eric John Stark, science fictions original space rogue and the inspiration for later swashbuckling science fiction icons such as James T. Kirk and Han Solo. After spending some time with Stark, youll understand why author Leigh Brackettknown as the Queen of the Pulps in her daywas invited by George Lucas to write the original script for The Empire Strikes Back. Lisa Yasek, Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech and editor of The Future is Female

Format and filmmakers: A TV Series for Syfy, or somewhere else that will let the creative team fly the campy flag high.

Faithful or not? I admit I read these books decades ago, and my recollection of them is a little faded, but the framework is there. My memory of them is pure pulp joy.

The Pitch: Dark and haunting science fiction that could be done on a reasonably inexpensive budget but filled with grand ideas. 10,000 years after the ancestral home of the human species was left lifeless, it has become the final resting place for the human diasporas rich and famous. That all might change when a group of colonists wants to take humanitys home back. This novel was written by a man that received fan letters from the teenaged Isaac Asimov. Before The Batman got delayed by COVID, Matt Reeves was rumored to be adapting the Simak classic Way Station for NetflixI am excited about that, but I would love to see Cemetery World.

Dont take my word for it: Mind-blowing as they are, with time travel, interstellar adventure, intelligent androids, mutant dogs and more, Clifford D. Simaks stories are rooted in the rural Wisconsin of his youth, directly or by deep-space proxy, and wary of urban life. His galaxy-spanning yet folksy sensibility would be a particularly interesting perspective to revive in todays genre conversation. Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, author of Strength of Water and Come Tomorrow

Format and filmmakers: Movie for Amazon or Netflix. Brad Anderson (Session 9) could directyeah, I know, he is a horror and thriller guy but I would love to see him tackle a gritty sci-fi movie.

Faithful or not? One of the reasons I would like to see this particular novel adapted is that the ideas were there, but it is not one of Simaks best. It was written very late in his life. The themes and setting are near perfect, but the story and the characters could be improved in translating it to the screen.

The Pitch: A massive structure is found in spacea massive artificial world shaped like a ring, which must have been built by a superior intelligence. In this imaginative science fiction classic, we follow the first human explorers to this vastly alien world. CGI would make this adaptation possible, and could deliver a mind-bending experience.

Dont take my word for it: A paradigm-shifting leap of imagination. Consider the mind that was able to conceive this mind-blowing feat of engineering, and then had the cojones and scientific knowledge to make readers believe such a thing possible. An instant classic. F. Paul Wilson the bestselling author of the Repairman Jack series.

Format and filmmakers: This should be a movie, and would require a visual stylist who would take the design very seriously. Joseph Kosinski, who made Oblivion and Tron: Legacy, would be a great choice.

Faithful or not? Despite winning the Hugo, Ringworld is socially outdated, with terrible and insulting depictions of the women, and the characters in general lack realistic motivations. Ringworld is a powerful concept with weakly executed characters, and one of the primary reasons to adapt it would be to fix that aspect. Destined for the list of rare movies better than the source material.

The Pitch: The simple pitch is: Its the space opera version of Arrival. Babel-17 takes place in the middle of an interstellar war. Ryda Wong is a linguist, telepath, and starship captain sent on an important mission to locate a spy. The enemy has developed a new weapon, a language that spreads like a virus and changes your perceptions and motivations. Eventually, Ryda has to wonder if she herself is the spy after all

Dont take my word for it: In a future where humanity finds itself enmeshed in an interstellar war, one starship captain sets out to stop the enemy from using a new linguistic superweapon called Babel-17 to turn people into unwilling traitorsonly to realize that her exposure to it is leading her to betray her own crew. From award-winning science fiction luminary Samuel Delany, this story has it allgalaxy-spanning adventure, thought-provoking meditations on relations of language and reality, and a cast of unforgettable characters. Its a breathtaking vision of a future that could be and a timely mirror of our own cultural moment, as social media increasingly enables bad actors to mobilize words as weapons in our own world. Lisa Yaszek, Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech and editor of The Future is Female

Format and filmmakers: This short novel could be a great movie. You would need to find the right director who could play with the language and would be willing to slowly build the storyDuncan Jones, director of Moon and Mute, would be my choice for this one.

Go here to read the rest:

Beyond Dune and Foundation: Golden Age and New Wave SF Classics That Should Be Adapted Right Now - tor.com