Torque Control

Humans (C4 2015-2018)

By Tony Jones

Image result for humans season 1

Channel 4’s Humans was one of the big successes of the 2010s. It won many accolades across its three seasons, including a BAFTA. Based on a Swedish drama, Real Humans, it provided a timely reflection on the changes we are actually experiencing due to the rise of AI, but framed as a thriller set in a world of robots. In Humans, the robots look human but are machines with very Asimovian constraints on behaviours, constraints that sentience removes. Enter one group of robots who have moved beyond the programmed and are fully aware.

The essential story of season 1 is where I’d like to focus. The ingredients are a family strained by tensions, husband about to lose his job to a robot, a wife who is a busy, successful lawyer, and their three kids. Into their lives comes a robot with a buried sentience.  

The first series inspires moral and legal questions. How fast does an artificial sentience grow relative to how we think of maturity in humans and when does it become responsible for its actions? Is there an equivalent period of ‘childhood’ for AI that should be reflected in the laws governing sexual consent? Who is developing a legal framework applicable to AI?

If this wasn’t ethically challenging enough, further themes explored in the series include whether it’s possible to love a robot (the conclusion being very much a ‘yes’) and an even deeper one: ‘is there a right to sentience?’.

Humans holds up a mirror to make us aware of how driven we are by appearances. The show is very deliberate with the blurring of boundaries when the robots look and behave as we think people do. While the cast went to synth school to learn how to not move like people, the plot depended on robots being able to pass for humans, sometimes in order to harm them. 

The episode where Niska – one of the sentient robots – is on the run having murdered an abusive human, is a riff on the film Fight Club. She passes for human and is allowed to join in with a group (largely men) whose evening’s pleasure consists of beaten and destroying other robots. The robots look like people and are helpless. To all intents and purposes, the baying crowd were killing people they’d relabelled as objects. Sometimes it’s easy to despair of humanity. 

It’s not clear we are anywhere close to answering any of the ethical questions raised by this show, while the rise of AI in the actual workplaces continues apace. Let’s hope we do a better job than Humans suggests we might.

2019

By Ian R. MacLeod

It was a pleasure and a privilege to attend this year’s Worldcon in Dublin, and find myself surrounded by friendly, intelligent and well-informed people from across the globe, and in a European city which has clearly risen far above the sour heritage of its theocratic and colonial past. It was also great to meet the many Americans wearing I’m From The USA But I Didn’t Vote For Trump ribbons on their lanyards. What a shame so much of the rest of humanity doesn’t seem to be heading along the same path!

SF for me has always had its heart in the liberal values of the enlightenment, but perhaps right now, with truth seemingly regarded as a mere matter of opinion, and science as just another way of looking at the world, and with our planet heading toward ecological catastrophe as us humans stand passively by in a way which would never convince in any self-respecting novel or disaster movie, it’s time to speak to the future and the things that should matter with an even stronger and angrier voice. If this isn’t the signal for a new New Wave or Golden Age in the genre, I don’t know when we’ll ever get one.

Vector 290

Vector 290 is out:

Vector 290 version 8M

The last two issues of Vector had themes — #288’s ‘Future Economics’ and #289’s ‘African and Afrodiasporic SF’ — but this issue is once more a Deck of Many Things. Andrew Wallace reveals all about judging the Clarke Award. Christina Scholz recounts linguistic revolutions in Milton and Miéville. Stephen Baxter reflects on AI and Thunderbirds and Paul Kincaid discusses the late great Iain [M.] Banks. Katie Stone reviews Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, while Vector Recommends brings you Paul Graham Raven on Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon and Nick Hubble on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. We’ve got interviews with Emma Newman and Yoon Ha Lee, and glimpses from SF fandom around the world with reports from WorldCon 2019 and IceCon 2018. We hope you enjoy. 

Cover by Andrea Morreau.

A personal perspective on South African Comics: From Superheroes to Ordinary heroes

By Nick Wood 

The sun darkened and the sky burned. 

Sirens and smoke filled the air. 

I stood in my family’s garden in Pinelands, Cape Town, watching the red horizon blaze and shift, as the neighbouring black townships of Athlone, Langa, and Nyanga were consumed by bullets, tear-gas, and flames. The Soweto Uprising had swept down from Jo’burg in 1976, from a nationwide youth protest opposing the teaching of Afrikaans in schools – which had been met with brutal police killings.

To me, then, as a young white teenage male, facing military conscription, it was as if the whole world could go up in flames.

Not known to me at the time, though, was that the destruction in Soweto included the burning down of the publishing house Africomic. Africomic was the home of South Africa’s first black comics superhero, Mighty Man. 

The Mighty Man stories unravelled over seventeen issues, featuring the exploits of a policeman called Danny Ndhlomo, who was injected with a secret alien serum. The serum gave him superhuman strength and speed … and he became Mighty Man. 

Superheroes often have secret identities. In the case of Mighty Man, there was a lot more than met the eye. Mighty Man was funded by the Apartheid government, with money shifted from the Defence budget [1].

Continue reading “A personal perspective on South African Comics: From Superheroes to Ordinary heroes” →

Vector #290

vector-290Download
Vector 290 version 8M
Cover art by Andrea Morreau

 The last two issues of Vector had themes — #288’s ‘Future Economics’ and #289’s ‘African and Afrodiasporic SF’ — but this issue is once more a Deck of Many Things. Andrew Wallace reveals all about judging the Clarke Award. Christina Scholz recounts linguistic revolutions in Milton and Miéville. Stephen Baxter reflects on AI and Thunderbirds and Paul Kincaid discusses the late great Iain [M.] Banks. Katie Stone reviews Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, while Vector Recommends brings you Paul Graham Raven on Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon and Nick Hubble on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. We’ve got interviews with Emma Newman and Yoon Ha Lee, and glimpses from SF fandom around the world with reports from WorldCon 2019 and IceCon 2018. We hope you enjoy. 

Cover by Andrea Morreau.

Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor & Misery

By Jonathan Hay10-Splendor Misery-and-Clipping

This academic article examines the manner by which clipping.’s 2016 album Splendor & Misery—a conceptual hip-hop space opera—freely enlists and reclaims texts from the African cultural tradition in order to manifest its Afrofuturist agenda. A countercultural movement characterised by a dynamic understanding of the narrative authority held by texts, Afrofuturism rewrites African culture in a speculative vein, granting African and Afrodiasporic peoples a culturally empowered means of writing their own future. The process by which Afrofuturism reclaims and rewrites culture is paralleled within Splendor & Misery through the literary device of mise en abyme; just as the album itself does, its central protagonist rewrites narratives of African cultures and traditions in an act of counterculture.

Introduction

In the sixty-five years since the Hugo Award was established, only two albums have been nominated to receive the prestigious science fiction accolade, and neither has won (Heller, 2018). One of the albums to have been nominated is clipping.’s Splendor & Misery (2016), an Afrofuturist concept album. It is especially fitting that this particular album was considered for an award traditionally dominated by literature and film, because, as an Afrofuturist text, Splendor & Misery problematises conventional conceptions of narrative authority. Through its Afrofuturist mode, the album can even be seen to transcend conventional Western considerations of medium altogether.

As John Cline concludes in a discussion of music and science fiction, aside from the soundtracks of films in the genre, Afrofuturist music is intriguingly the only facet of science fiction music ‘that has shown sustained critical investigation’ (Cline 261). Although the term Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s, artists such as Sun Ra, Janelle Monáe, George Clinton, and Parliament-Funkadelic, have used music as an Afrofuturist medium for decades. Like many of these earlier Afrofuturist albums, Splendor & Misery extends and reimagines traditions of African and Afrodiasporic oral culture. At less than forty minutes in length, the album is crammed with language and narrative. Paul Gilroy suggests that the ‘power and significance of music’ in attempting to confront the terror and trauma of slavery has grown in ‘inverse proportion to the limited expressive powers of language’ (Gilroy 74). The rapid, semantically dense delivery on tracks such as ‘The Breach’ complicates this suggestion. Rather, Splendor & Misery fuses the powers of language with the powers of music, creating a new form of virtuoso, technologically-enabled storytelling, which employs a variety of flows and vocal performative techniques, and augments the human voice with a vast range of instrumental elements and production techniques. Its status as both a hip-hop album and a speculative narrative is further enriched by a cinematic element, both through immaculately sculpted soundscapes, and its frequent invocation of a visual imagination shaped by science fiction cinema.

Continue reading “Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor & Misery” →

‘We have come to refuel your future’: Asphalt Afrofuturism and African Futurities

By Gemma Field

This article takes as its starting point the wildly popular and commercially successful African science-fiction novel Lagoon, written by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor. Lagoon is an ideal site in which to explore the environmental and political concerns that are common themes in the fantastical literature of West Africa, and to demonstrate the efficacy of broadly Afrofuturist aesthetics, both in problematising and reimagining environmental politics in modern Nigeria. Utilising traditional African iconography and mythology in concert with radical futurity, Lagoon challenges many of the assumptions and tropes of mainstream sf, while also drawing attention to political, social, and environmental conditions in Nigeria. Dramatically re-envisioning the conditions of Nigeria’s social, political, and economic present, the novel makes connections between environmental devastation enabled by global capital in concert with state power, and the violence and trauma visited disproportionately upon the populations of the Global South.

This article takes as its starting point the wildly popular and commercially successful African science-fiction novel Lagoon, written by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor. Lagoon is an ideal site in which to explore the environmental and political concerns that are common themes in the fantastical literature of West Africa, and to demonstrate the efficacy of broadly Afrofuturist aesthetics, both in problematising and reimagining environmental politics in modern Nigeria.

Lagoon tells the story of an alien invasion that unfolds on the shores of Lagos, Nigeria. The novel playfully subverts the structures of alien invasion science fiction, revitalising tired tropes by synthesising them with West African mythology and fantastic futurism. Against the backdrop of the ultra-urban, somewhat dysfunctional metropolis of her native Lagos, Okorafor draws attention to the consequences of neocolonial developmentalism in Nigeria. Lagoon examines in particular the toxic politics surrounding the country’s oil industry, politics that are bound up with what Rob Nixon refers to as “slow violence” (3). In these respects, Okorafor’s novel draws from a rich tradition of non-realist Anglophone African engagement with the consequences of neocolonial developmentalism: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), in which spirit-human interplay is complicated by the socially and environmentally disruptive imposition of a road that takes on a dangerous life of its own, is perhaps Lagoon’s closest antecedent; works such as Pepetela’s The Return of the Water Spirit (1995) and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) are also worth noting.

Lagoon follows the alien ambassador Ayodele as she establishes contact with an assortment of aquatic and terrestrial Earthlings. Ayodele promises that her people have no malevolent designs for Earth, asking only to assimilate while offering miraculous technology. Intersecting plotlines follow various characters (human, animal, and supernatural) who undergo fundamental changes because of the “radical new possibilities” (Okorafor, 269) that Ayodele and her people bring.

The aliens are a catalyst for change in the city of Lagos and its waters, plunging both into chaos while also bringing forth new forms of life and possibilities. Folkloric forces emerge in brief narrative interludes throughout the novel: the spider-trickster Udide and the mythical living masque Ijele are the most prominent. These ‘super-humans’ apparently discover Ayodele’s nature, and overcome a variety of fantastic and institutional obstacles in their attempts to resolve the crisis, eventually recruiting the President of Nigeria to their cause.

We also meet other non-human characters with their own rich histories, quirks, and agendas, including a “monstrous” (Okorafor, 21) swordfish, determined to destroy an offshore oil rig and given the power to do so by the aliens, and a sentient, predatory highway that calls itself the “Bone Collector.” It is these two characters I will focus on in this article. But before I turn to them, I first want to offer a very brief overview of Afrofuturism. Although Okorafor herself has rejected the label, certain aspects of Afrofuturist theory nevertheless remain a useful lens on her work. [See endnote.]

Continue reading “‘We have come to refuel your future’: Asphalt Afrofuturism and African Futurities” →