Imagine a Western with guns and outlaws and the like, but the world feels like in the times of the Roman Empire, there is magic and technology (fueled by magic) as well as characters that without being exactly the same, are clearly inspired by dwarves and dark elves.

  The Incorruptibles is seen through the eyes of a dwarf. He and his gun slinging human partner partner are caught in the machinations of rich and powerful Ruman nobles while being attacked by dark elf-like creatures. The story is dark and while it provides a kind of happy ending, it's a gritty tale.

  I've previously read a two novellas anthology from John Hornor Jacobs and I felt a similar vibe there: he draws inspiration from history and the worlds and characters of other writers and make them his own, blending them with a lot of creativity. However, the stories are a bit slow and not always enjoyable. They are gripping, though.

  I don't know what to feel about this series. I liked the book and it could be considered stand-alone, but it opened a lot of avenues for new stories and there was a lot of foreshadowing and world building, so it does feel a little incomplete without the rest of the (hi)story. However, I am not sure I want to invest in it, although I am tempted.

  Bottom line: a gritty magical Western hybrid. It was good.

  I am writing this during the second tour of presidential elections, and as the first one has just been annulled. Yes, you read that right, it's a ridiculous situation, but it gets much much worse. After the initial shock of seeing Calin Georgescu clearly winning the first tour of the elections while no one seemed to know who he was, the reaction of people, authorities, media, personalities in culture and science - everyone that supposedly should be steering the country in the right direction - has been a hysterical denial of reality. But in order to understand what the hell is going on, you have to start from the beginning, with the small details that got lost in the media coverage. So bear with me.

  I will be talking about elections, but in the context of this post I focus on presidential elections, not the parliamentary ones, unless specifically mentioned.

  And so it begins

  The first indication that something was amiss was when people started to receive notices and fines from the authorities for posting things on Facebook during the election period, when campaigning is prohibited. This came as a surprise to many people who don't understand how modern social media works, because they had felt their online presence was kind of anonymous, at least protected by that level of unreality that feels natural in the online. How can things happening on the Internet affect your real life? This may seem as a small off topic detail, but it becomes relevant later.

  Then the first tour of the elections came and people were shocked to see that Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate no one seemed to know anything about and who had been predicted to get at most 5% of the votes, got instead close to 25%, giving him a comfortable lead compared to the others. Worse, this guy had clear pro Russian sympathies and maybe even legionary ones (this being a political movement from 70 years ago which was pro Nazi). How can one be for both Russia and Nazism is beyond me, but I digress. And it gets worse, because there were several extremist parties with their own candidates and if you add them all together with Georgescu's votes you get close to 40%. How did this happen?

  The favorite in the presidential race was the current Prime Minister of Romania, leader of the strongest party in the country, Marcel Ciolacu. He got third place, almost tied with the liberal leaning female candidate Elena Lasconi. Another shock, because no one expected one to lose so badly and the other to win so many votes. We are talking about my country, a place that has never had a female president and any woman in power so far has been some guy's puppet. I want to believe Romanians are capable of accepting a female president, but it's unlikely.

   Reaction

  To see the reaction to these events was both entertaining and terrifying. Being politically naive, I was initially happy, because while I hold almost no common views with the extremist discourse of the winner, I wanted to see people shocked out of their complacency, forced to think and consider the implications of their action and inaction. I wanted the arrogant country authorities and people of influence to get jolted into at least pretending to do their job. I wanted the "you have to vote no matter what, even if you're not represented by any candidate" mob to eat their words. Just like the Colectiv situation ten years ago, I was hoping against hope that this will be a drive for positive change. But again, I let hope guide my thoughts, to no positive result. What was awakened was the collective mindless monster of the populace and nothing more.

  In order for a relatively unknown person to win the elections there were several institutions that had to have failed utterly in their work: election officials, security services (which were giving fines for Facebook posts just a few days before), counter candidates (one of which was Prime Minister), their campaign engines and all the government mechanisms they controlled, the media (whether controlled or not), sociologists gauging the people's choices, the statisticians creating the polls and interpreting them (both before elections AND at the exit polls). In other words: politics, authority, media and science failed completely and irrevocably.

  The general reaction to this was panic. Not "well, I messed up, let's fix this", which I had hoped, but "I couldn't have messed up this much, something else is to blame". In a matter of days everyone rallied to... save their asses. Election authorities approved recounting of votes based on a complaint raised by a less than 1% candidate, after 30 years of refusing such things with a lot more evidence of fraud. Media was flooded with exposés of the evil candidate Georgescu, somehow overly religious, misogynist, pro Russian, Nazi and legionary at the same time, financed by shadowy forces connected to Russia and maybe China, supported by priests in the backward churches outside the cities and TikTok influencers, a true Rasputin. Talking heads switched their discourse from who should have seen this coming to how defenseless Romanian people have been manipulated by the unstoppable forces of doom scrolling on social media. Authorities got into action to determine the outside influences that had caused this, against their best efforts. The highest Romanian court started deliberating based on all of this new information. People got into the street spontaneously and peacefully demonstrating for democracy and European identity. Just today police started to raid "extremists" that posted images of weaponry on social media - for the first time I've seen this.

  I call bullshit!

  Just days before the annulment of the election tour, the head of the same institution that did it said he sees no significant changes in the count of the votes. In fact, this is not even the reason of the annulment, but the "declassified" documents coming from the security services who now, suddenly, had evidence of external influence of the elections and "continuing cybernetic attacks". Well, duh! Cybernetic attacks, by their nature, never end.

  But while declaring no campaign finances and clearly having someone with a lot of money support his campaigning, while publishing ultra professional high res videos on media platforms, some mimicking the ones Putin did, but tailored towards Romanian traditional sensibilities, while showing a public presence that people just don't have without a lot of preparing and training, Georgescu did nothing provenly illegal, so all the votes coming his way were sincere, regardless of how misguided. To protect democracy, government institutions just decided, together with the media, young people in the streets chanting for democracy and European freedom and old people talking in scared high pitched voices in the park, that elections just didn't yield the correct result, so we must redo them.

  I can't imagine better results for shadowy anti-democratic forces than this! On one side, a complete failure of democratic institutions, both before and after the fact, as well as the kneejerk reaction of people who should have known better. On the other side, a large disillusioned portion of the populace just having their choice forcefully eliminated, like they don't exist. Not only they, but also the pro liberal Lasconi supporters, who will now lose any chance of winning the presidency. In the end, the worst result for most of the electorate, a terrible long lasting blow to democracy and trust in authorities in general and a higher polarization between "city people" and "countryside people".

  Ignoring 40% of the population won't make them go away, you know. And they won't just die off and leave their smarter and more educated children behind, instead just younger, even less educated by experience, copies of themselves, fighting for whatever random cause or belief they're manipulated into.

  Witch hunt

  There is a term called Witch hunt which applies to what is happening here. I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, because it's very revealing.

  Societies function on a very simple contract: a relatively common narrative must be maintained and some institutions are created to curate and enforce it. When that narrative is contradicted by reality, society unravels, so there are only two choices for stability: craft the narrative to be a balance between reality and the people's needs or eliminate the source of contradiction. It's that simple. The spirit of democracy is closely linked to this, as it attempts to provide the mechanisms to keep that delicate balance and stave off as much as possible the necessity for "eliminating contradiction". But when that fails, the only solution is blunt force, mob fear, fanatical clinging to the narrative, which most of the time leads to tyranny and/or atrocity. Why is it so hard to realize that the narrative has to change a little?

  In our case, the narrative is the naive and stupid comfort of authority functioning regardless of what we do, that so many communities tend to fall into. It's already a first step to autocracy, the same narrative applies there as well, in the beginning. But when it fails, people have to find a culprit and ritualistically sacrifice them. I don't know what will happen with poor Georgescu, but as I see it he will either become the dictator of Romania or be burned at the stake.

  And a lot of other things are going to fall with him: online privacy, as little as it is nowadays, honest public discourse, as little as it is allowed now - even in countries which are paragons of democracy, opportunity to choose anything unexpected. We may see even more fanatical adherence to the mythical concept of a united Europe, regardless of its state, while becoming even more afraid of technology. And this just because we obstinately refuse any opportunity to open our eyes and think for ourselves. We have people to do that for us! If he somehow wins, which I find unlikely, things would be even worse.

  Can't wait for mandatory identity checks everywhere online and a global ban on social media for under 16 and of TikTok in general, as a means to protect democracy and free speech. What a joke!

  My thoughts

  Well, obviously all of these are my thoughts, but as a conclusion, I am terrified. Not by Russia, Europe, China or the United States, but by the people of my own country. We have lived in fear for so much time that it has become part of our DNA. We are controlled by it. Make Romanians afraid and you can make them do anything, say anything, think anything. Maybe that's true for everybody.

  I was disgusted to see how the Russian boogie man was resurrected once more to justify unilateral reactions by clueless authorities. What are you going to do? Fight Russia? Send security to arrest the priests who campaigned in churches before and during the election in the countryside, probably for heavy fees? How ironic is that Romanians are crying to the skies for security forces to validate and protect democracy. I guess in 30 years one forgets everything.

  I was happy to think the veil of illusion will be lifted from the eyes of Romanians, but what happened instead is that some of my own illusions have been blown away. Of course, I don't like it and I feel fear. That's natural. What we do with it is what counts. I wrote a blog post. Yay, me!

  To people who think leaving Romania will somehow solve the problem, it does not. But when freezing and fighting seems to not do anything, what is left but to flee? I get it.

  Personally, I want my country to get through this and become stronger for it, but the idea of Romania is just as much an illusion as anything else. And we've already proven that we can ignore every reality and forget any past, unless it suits us otherwise. This is not the country of my childhood or of my youth and it will continue to change in the future. But the attachment is still there and I wish it well.

  David Brin was 30 when he published Sundiver in 1980, but the book, his first, feels much older, almost van Vogtian. The writing style and subject matter further strengthen the feeling. Imagine a bunch of humans and aliens in the future, diving into the Sun to communicate with a newly discovered race of intelligent beings there. A tree alien, an uplifted chimp and others are part of the expedition.

  All the tropes of sci-fi pulp are there: a youngish protagonist of the same age as the author, romance, mystery and its deductive solving as well as its revealing in elaborate group discussions, the belief in the power of meditation and trance to improve the mind, people having Erich von Däniken as the prophet of the origin of the human race, lasers, fist fights, hints of colonialism, and so on and so on. The book is very entertaining, but it's spectacularly outdated. I guess the lasers and the Däniken references place it after 1960, but ignoring that, one could believe it was written in the '40s.

  There are some ingenious ideas in the book, though. In this universe, intelligence is believed to never have been evolved by itself, instead "patron races" uplift existing native animals to intelligence, generating a complex web of patrons and clients. Not humans, though. They have been partially uplifted then left to their own devices, thus placing them in a dubious middle of the hierarchy, while kept away from the somewhat monolithic culture of the galaxy. Humans are both exotic and quaint, ignorant and arrogant, daring to know things they figured out for themselves rather than spoon fed by "the Library".

   I don't think I will read more of this series, but I might read more from Brin, whenever I feel the need to go classical without diving into a time compression bubble.

  Unique visuals, inspired by Japanese theater, tell the story of a hunter of demons, or mononoke. It's not action as it is basically a procedural, where the hunter needs to determine the root cause of the appearance of the demons. A bit too drawn out, but very nice otherwise. The weird graphics, the sounds, the weird symbolism all work together to build an unsettling feeling that evokes the supernatural without ever trying to fully explain it.

  Mononoke has twelve 20 minute episodes, where a story is told in two or three episodes at a time. It is a spinoff of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, by the same studio, that I have not watched. I just rewatched the Mononoke series - of which I remembered nothing - because Netflix just released a film called Mononoke - Phantom in the Rain (or Paper Umbrella?) and I wanted to know the context.

  The plot is as follows: an elfish looking person carrying a mysterious sword and advertising himself as a Medicine Seller is always in situations were mononoke appear. These are like ghosts "supernatural disease" created by the intertwining of the fates of people or whatever. There is a catch, though. The sword can only be drawn when the Form, Truth and Regret are known: the true shape of the demon, its physical manifestation and its spiritual manifestation. In other words, one cannot vanquish a demon without understanding it completely. Pretty therapeutic.

  In the entire series we don't learn who the mysterious hunter is. The stories, though, happen in different historical eras, thus implying he is not human.

  I can't say the anime is perfect, though. Scenes seem to be drawn out, kind of like Japanese theater itself where they move, say something very slowly, then everything stops, then they do it again. Maybe that would have been fine if not for unexplainable moments of verbosity when, after an episode and a half of saying a few words syllable by syllable, the hunter was suddenly dumping pages of wiki lore before doing anything. But I liked it and maybe the film will be more refined. Just have to see.

  It's not that Titanium Noir is a bad book, but it's the same tired cliché of the cynical private investigator trying to unravel a simple murder that turns out to be a global conspiracy that makes the reader think of social issues. The sci-fi is almost incidental, so I kind of listened to a third of the book, then fell asleep and woke up close to the end and I didn't find anything exciting in it. A disappointment from something that has such a cool title and intriguing cover.

  Nick Harkaway is the son of John le Carré and he mostly writes fantasy, apparently, but in this he went a bit, just a tiny bit, towards science fiction. Not enough to induce me to finish the book, unfortunately.

  Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a book worth of a political thriller miniseries, only too real. It shows the 10+ years history of Theranos, a "unicorn company" formed only on personal charisma and lies and which reached a top valuation of ten billion American dollars at its peak. Billions, with a B! It also shows how that can happen within the American economic, political and social system, which - if you ask me - is much more damning and interesting than the exposure of Elisabeth Holmes and her cronies.

  John Carreyrou also had the faith, training and backing of a powerful journalistic entity just to be able to bring this to public attention, something to be considered in this climate of journalistic consolidation into partisan corporations that care nothing for the truth. It would have been so easy for this to have continued for years, unchecked and uncheckable, if it weren't for this tiny detail.

  To boot, this book will be extremely triggering to anyone working in a corporate environment, especially Americans. Let's play some corporate bingo: sociopath CEO claiming their vision is paramount to anything and anyone, older generation Indian management that feels the lives of employees belong to the company, paranoid NDA backed culture where people just disappear without any mention to the remaining employees, totalitarian control of data, communication and the general narrative, backed by law firms hired on millions of dollars to intimidate anyone who might challenge it, inner-circle privileges given to loyal individuals, university dropout visionaries that consider any technical hurdle something to be solved by lowly multiple PhD holding peons and not something that can hold them back, even if they themselves are technical imbeciles, yes-men culture where dissent or even mere criticism is considered treason, to be punished by immediate termination, public humiliation and legal action. The list can go on...

  I can't recommend this book enough. It's not entertaining in any meaningful way, instead it's terrifying. Imagine being in a situation where you have the knowledge, the certainty, the moral high ground, the awareness of your absolute right in a matter, only to give it all away because someone with a lot of money sics a law firm on you. Imagine bullying at every level once you have haphazardly signed some documents that you assumed were standard corporate operating practice, but instead signed your soul to the company. Imagine trying to tell people that something is terribly wrong, only to be met with dismissive comments on your character and expertise, just because someone believes in a PowerPoint presentation more than in any deity and because you are not part of the in-group.

  But one thing that the book did not discuss, although it implied heavily through out its length, is how can something like this happen. How is it possible that somehow law can be corrupted to stop people from reporting unlawful acts? How can a company be created and thrive and be financed by people on promises alone, while heavily educated and well informed naysayers can be summarily dismissed at any moment and their input suppressed? In fact, this is a direct and informed criticism of the way American society works at the higher levels. Theranos was a symptom that, unchecked, led to Trumpism. There are direct parallels between the mindset of the management in this 2010 company and the political system taking over in the 2020s, with mindless loyal cronies being hired for all of the critical jobs on a wave of populist faith.

  Even more spooky is the strong desire people felt for this book be a hit-job, to have the young female charismatic Elisabeth entrepreneur somehow be the victim of the male dominated system, the disgruntled employees, the Svengali 20 years older lover and irate Indian bully, the vengeful journalist, all working together to stop her from playing her fantasy of becoming the next Steve Jobs. You can imagine a Scooby Doo moment where she could have just made everything work out if it weren't for the pesky kids. But the truth documented in this book shows that, while certainly some sort of victim, Holmes was a mentally deranged individual who still managed to play the entire world and reach wealth and prestige even some nations in the world only dream of.

  Bottom line: you have to read this book, even if it's very long, terrifying, frustrating and its "happy ending" only demonstrates that you have to make a LOT of mistakes for justice to happen when you have enough money and political backing.

  Jesus Christ, this book has 100000 chapters! And that's because there are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

  Anyway, Sea of Rust starts off as yet another western with robots, set in a post apocalyptic desert, where machines with guns act and feel like people in a lawless land. But as the book progressed, it became more of an exploration of what means to be alive, what meaning we derive from life and what means to actually live as opposed to just survive. It wasn't a literary or philosophical masterpiece or anything, but it did carry a nice punch to the gut in some scenes. The book became better as it got close to the end, to the point that I could have considered reading the next book in the story, if there was one.

  In fact, there is another book in the series, but it's a prequel. Film writer types, right?

  There are about three major twists, one that you kind of guess from the beginning, one that I should have seen, but never thought about and another that is more or less a hope to get into another genre later on. There are also some major plot holes, but just a few and they underpin the story, so you just have to ignore those if you want to enjoy the book.

  Robert C. Cargill is a film writer as well as books, he did the Sinister films and Doctor Strange and The Black Phone, the last two having seen and enjoyed. His writing is good, although you feel the cinematic nature of it. Writing from the perspective of robots did help with limiting things to just sound and visuals anyway.

  I liked the book, although I didn't feel it spent enough time creating the world or its characters. A world of machines should have been orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting than what's in this. It's one of those stories that need to be told in a certain way, and the world around is just a prop for it. It feels linear and without breadth. If I were to compare it with anything, it would be the Fallout TV series, but seen only from the perspective of the ghoul.

  The anime Dan Da Dan has a funny and endearing first episode where two awkward high school students dare each other to test each other's paranormal/alien beliefs. And what do you know? Both find stuff! But then it gets into the same terrible Japanese clichés of monster of the week and new nakamas and high school dramas.

   The start music is fun, too, which probably hits hard when you first watch the series, but then, together with the content, it fades into the background.

   But the first episode is worth it.

  I tried reading some Philip K. Dick in my early years and didn't like it. But not I am older and wiser, ready to process the brilliant ideas in PKD's books. No longer will I feel that a paranoid stoner on a bad trip in the '60s is writing random stories about how reality is not real and consciousness creates new ones again and again and again, just to spite me personally. That's just the hubris and ecocentrism of youth. Right? Right?!

  No. Ubik took me forever to finish because I didn't like it. The writing was good, but inconsistent, moving from philosophical to direct, just like a stoner would when writing about unravelling reality. The characters were there just to push the plot, however flimsy, forward, while the scathing satire of the capitalist system was just caricaturesque and lacking any depth.

  Worst, this is one of those story types that I personally despise. You will understand when you get to the end, if you get to the end, what I mean, because I don't want to spoil the book. It was short and still I dragged myself to finish it. I am sure it was brilliant in 1969, but 55 years later it's just quirky. 

  To be fair, this is not supposed to be one of this best books, so maybe there are some that I will just love if I try hard enough. But I prefer other authors.

  I picked up the book and I went "Oh, no! the writer of this book is called qntm. He must be one of those YA Twitter writers!". No he isn't! Actually, after reading this book, I am determined to read more from Sam Hughes. There is No Antimemetics Division is a wonderful book, blending non Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the spirit of something like The Andromeda Strain in a sort of Fringe-like story, but much better.

  A collection of chapters that contain almost separate short stories, the book slowly constructs this amazing world in which "antimemetic" entities exist. Don't worry about it, a few minutes after you're read my review you will have forgotten about them. The idea is cool and fresh enough, but the amount of attention to detail that the author poured into it raises it to a different level. And then more ideas keep piling up.

  The book starts from quite frightening situations that boggle the mind and challenge the way we see reality, then continues to consistently up the ante to ridiculous scales. Yes, some things are slightly contradictory and hard to accept, but image this is happening in a world that your brain screams it couldn't possible exist, while the clinical scientific and technical viewpoint of the main characters convince you it just as well might.

  I've already put another book from this author on my to read list. I loved this book and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

  I like Sam Neill. He is a good actor and he played in some movies I really like. Funny enough, he doesn't mention those! Instead he focuses in ones that meant more to him and that I mostly haven't watched.

  Did I Ever Tell You This? is a large collection of small anecdotes from the author's life that he decided he needed to write down when he was diagnosed with cancer. They are funny, heartwarming, but strangely impersonal, like stories one tells at a wine table, meant to entertain, not share, offend or expose. For that reason alone it was hard for me to finish the book.

  Imagine being at a party with friends, having fun, Sam bloody Neill being there telling everyone how he most certainly did NOT fuck every woman in London. It would be great, right? Only he keeps talking and talking and talking. Very little about the dramas in his life, the marriages, the children, he just goes on and on about funny things that happened to him, when he was working with people that he thinks are all great, women, and people of color and Aboriginals and all wonderful actors and human beings. It gets old fast! That's this book.

  Now, I like the guy and he came off well out of the book. The problem is that I don't feel like I know him more now than before. He's an average Kiwi, happy to have been chosen to join a great cast of film people and trying to make good with what he got. Humble like. Kind. Funny. Doesn't feel like a real person at all!

  Anyway, the book was fine. It was just overly long and not hitting hard enough.

  Nick Cutter went to the store, bought the largest bag of horror tropes and then poured them all into The Deep. Imagine a cross between Event Horizon, It and The Thing, with every other horror cliché you could think of sprinkled in and you get this book. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Do you feel the horror? YEAH! But does it actually have any impact? No. It gets so horrid so fast that your mind just goes numb and asks itself why is it reading the story at all.

  The Deep has it all: horrible parents, child abuse, loving couple torn apart by child abduction, child fears, parental murder, psychopathy, body horror, supernatural horror, cosmic horror, claustrophobic horror, animal cruelty, interdimensional evil, gore, hopelessness, losing your mind, nightmares, global pandemic and, king of them all, "let's separate!" horror. Well, I am being a bit mean, because by that point nothing really mattered, but you get my drift.

  I guess there are two types of horror as far as I am concerned: intriguing and numbing. The first one is always built on hope, hope that the some character has a chance, if only they would make the best choices and would have a bit of luck, they could pull through. Maybe add some irony, something ridiculous that gives that person an edge when it matters most. The second one is just pointless witnessing of the suffering of another when they have no chance in hell they could pull through. The Deep veers really fast and really soon towards the second category. The horror is strong, but without a reason to exist. And boy does the guy fail to make the right choices!

  Yet, if you watched Event Horizon and thought it was great, like I did, maybe you will love this book, too. Personally I think this felt more experimental than, err... deep.

  Yes, I confess, I only expedited the reading of Mickey 7 because there is a Mickey 17 movie adaption with a pretty big budget and cool cast. I already see your eye roll for yet another review about an unreleased movie and not the actual book, but I promise I am writing about what I've read, so stick around :)

  This is a book akin to The Martian or maybe more the Bobiverse books, with which it also shares some plot elements: first person, light action, reasonable and emotionally stable protagonist and capable of being replicated after he dies or, as is the case of this story, when people thought he died. I had fun with it, read it really fast and served as a great palate cleanser after a really annoying book I slogged through before.

  It's not a masterpiece of literature, but it's good and fun. Edward Ashton is a decent writer and if I had an issue with his craft is with people being too consistent in their behavior. They all are neatly placed into their nice little boxes and they never get out of them, even in the face of traumatic deaths (of others or their own). The book also kind of drags, focusing too much on trivialities and less on the interesting aspects of the characters. However, this is the setup book, a first in a series as is tradition, so maybe the next volume, Antimatter Blues, will be better. I intend to read it, too. Maybe not immediately, though. Let's see how I feel about the movie.

  Talking about the movie, I think it's clear they are going to change the plot significantly, therefore the different title. And I get it. The story is about colonizing an alien planet after years of relativistic travel, a lot of internal monologues, flashbacks, and shortened stories of other colonies from books that he reads, but also gruesome deaths and insectile alien life. Hard to cram that into a movie and keep within the budget.

  A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers is one of those books. 25 different short stories about how liberals, gays, women, non neuro-normative people and people of color are abused or openly hunted by possible future American systems. And the regimes described are quite awful indeed, yet the overall feeling one gets from reading the book is just eye rolling disbelief. I only read it because I like how Victor LaValle writes, problem is he just edited this collection and wrote none of the stories inside and it was a grind to get this read.

  I blame the first story. It was so beautiful and reasonable, where a librarian shelters people from both sides of a divided America and they come together in discussing a single book they had all read. It set a tone that I couldn't wait to get more of. And the second story was the most strident, hysterical, yet at the same time bland piece of literature I've ever read! And it was followed by a lot of similar stories, where everybody who was gay, of color, autistic, female and sometimes all of the above was openly and legally terrorized by a system run by the evil conservative Whites. The tonal shift was so brusque I felt literary whiplash!

  Maybe when your subject is systematic abuse of minorities and you're also part of one or multiple of these minorities, it's pretty hard to get openly rejected. That's the only reasonable explanation I could find for the wide variety of quality in these stories. There were some that were really good. Unfortunately, only a few of them and most of the others could only kindly be called mediocre.

  I just couldn't believe it! The same people who were afraid of an ever more improbable future (The Handmaid's Tale feeling heavenly in comparison) in which non-normalcy is illegal, were describing with glee how the wheel was turning. For example, there was one where a genetic time travelling bomb backfired and all of America was now diverse. That kind of laughable diversity, with no national identity, just a bunch of people all being different from each other, looking different, yet having a united community and all of the American problems magically gone.

  I couldn't shake a quote from my head: slaves don't dream of freedom, but of becoming masters. The same people that were afraid of intolerance wrote short stories about us vs them, where "them" were caricaturesque inhuman villains and deserved everything coming to them.

  For sure there is some emotional catharsis to imagine a terrible future in which everything you hate is openly evil, thus giving you permission for all the fear and hate and extreme fantasies. Imagine Death Wish, but now the hero is a gay woman in a wheelchair killing fraternity bros. How is that not a movie already? Barf!

  What do you remember from the Terminator movies? It's the Skynet killer robot, obviously, the people who seem to always be related somehow, and a hero that needs saving for the sake of their work in the future, but running for their lives in the present. In Terminator Zero you get all of these, to the point that they feel a little overdone. But the animation is good and the story is interesting, adding some logical elements that I've only seen in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I liked a lot and wanted more of. I loved that they set the action in a clearly different timeline than our own and also tried to make it clear the ridiculous cycle of trying to fix the past from the future.

  Unfortunately, they've decided to add children to the mix. And I mean children that need a nanny, not 24 year old Claire Danes. Most of the time it's the children and their very Japanese emotions filling the screen, while their father, a mysterious tech mogul, keeps saying cryptic things almost until the end of the movie for no good reason. The Terminator is thankfully not in the shape of Arnie and the human fighter from the future is a woman. It also is set in Japan. The series ends with a promise rather than with closure, although I doubt they will make a second season.

  It's eight episodes of 20 minutes each, but I think the story was a little too simple for 160 minutes and it could have easily been a more concise two hour animation film. What's the difference, really, between a series you release all at once and a feature film anyway?

  While I applaud stories said in animation - readers of this blog may already know that I believe that's how you do and say brave things today, especially in sci-fi and horror - being a Terminator story meant it was locked in some preestablished framework and couldn't be too creative. Just consider taking some pages out of Screamers, for example, and you understand what I mean. I would watch seasons and seasons of Terminator anime than hope for something decent in live action anymore. The thing is that they already are very far advanced in special effects, but those also cost a lot of money, meaning that you either underdeliver on viewer expectations or have to make a whole bunch of money to break even. Animation is not like that and it's also a lot more flexible.

  All in all I liked the show and I recommend it, but don't expect too much.