BitDepth#1398
MARK LYNDERSAY
THE QUIRKY science fiction epic Everything, Everywhere, All at Once swept the Academy Awards, provoking a bit of a firestorm of confusion and even revulsion at its complete dominance of the awards roster.
Its commanding presence at the Oscars podium bounced Stephen Spielberg's deeply nostalgic biography, The Fablemans, completely out of contention. Something that's almost certain to have startled the Hollywood old guard.
The man who gave us Schindler's List offered up a Cliff's Notes version of his life in cinema, a kind of Spielberg's Shopping List, but its presence on the nominations lists was really more a respectful gesture than earned.
The night's big winner, an Asian-American hybrid written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, is a frenetic mix of modern cinematic tropes vigorously blended with hard, jerking cuts and a torturous narrative line.
As sci-fi cinema, it has a noble forebear in the first Matrix film, which also used whiplash editing, a high concept story and a bold serving of kung-fu wire work to weave a quirky tale of the digital era.
The Matrix is firmly within my times, but it also premiered in shouting distance of a quarter of a century ago.
There comes a time you need to acknowledge when entertainments aren't made for you and belong to a new generation. The only surprise is that the film academy thought so too.
The best cinematic science fiction takes inspiration from the most adventurous novels that bleed alternative storytelling ideas into general contemplation.
Star Wars tapped into space opera world building that was old even in the 1970s and today's trend to explorations of inner-space instead of outer-space began all the way back in 1979 with Octavia Butler's Kindred, a novel that manages to blend blunt rumination on slavery with uncontrollable personal time travel.
I got to that place through an equally odd sideways route of online recommendations which managed to link a casual interest in military sci-fi the sprawling epics of Pierce Brown's Red Rising and David Webber's Honor Harrington series to extended readings on systemic racism to prepare a young black girl for a world that still changes its expectations and perceptions across a few shades of darker skin tone.
That overlap in literary ambitions also brought me to The Wormwood Trilogy, by Nigerian-British writer Tade Thompson, who seamlessly blended his personal experiences with imaginative body terror to create an alien invasion story that began decades before, only to emerge in a Nigerian town.
Thompson's first book in the trilogy, Rosewater, won the 2019 Arthur C Clarke award and is, in its way, very much a spiritual descendant of Butler's Kindred, weaving an alien and pervasive Xenosphere connectivity that's reminiscent of the immersive alternate presence of the modern internet in a genre mash-up that blends zombie horror, virtual romance (yes, let's call it that) and Afropunk.
Thompson's effortless eliding of these apparently disparate forms of
