I have been watching the growing media activity around Gavin Hood’s film version of Ender’s Game, and re-experiencing a niggling unease about the original story. I enjoyed it immensely when I first read it, I’ll freely admit, but subsequent understanding of the author’s political stance has brought something questionable to the narrative. It’s familiar territory, well-trodden by the combat boot of male-dominated, hard SF. Not exactly clean cut, not exactly simplistic but definitely part of a pervasive argument that technological ferociousness will always have a place in our interaction with alien races. A ‘distinguished’ military line within the genre then, from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers right up to Halo 4’s recent mini-series prequel, Forward Unto Dawn.

However, there’s also the sometimes quieter, more complex voice of dissent; the alienation of the returning soldier trying to make sense of the conflict that he or she has been through. With this in mind it’s encouraging to find Joe Haldeman’s Forever War being refreshed as a film project by Ridley Scott – the man who brought corporate complexity to the future battlefield (or maybe that was John Wagner). Although the project is still languishing in development hell, it would be fantastic to see a more pluralistic view of future war and its effects on indigenous life forms and the soldiers sent to kill them.

War. Maybe that never does change but, thankfully, the perspectives on it do.

No, not the 2005 Doctor Who novel, rather the virtual capture of an actor’s performance for digital reproduction. It’s a topic that Hollywood has already had a pass at with S1m0ne, which – despite a ‘powerful on paper’ union of Andrew Niccol (Truman Show/Gattaca) and Al Pacino – received a limp critical reception.

Now, in the hands of Ari Folman – director of Waltz with Bashir – the topic resurfaces with a tale of an aging, out-of-work actress accepting one fateful farewell gig. The film’s an interesting merge of live action and animation – much in the style of Richard Linklater’s excellent ‘A Scanner Darkly’ – but it does delve, once again, into the muddy waters of ‘selfhood’ as opposed to ‘reproduction’ within an increasingly omnipresent and avaricious mediascape. Twelve years ago discussion centred on the femininity of virtual character Aki Ross in the technically brilliant ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’. Now we’re already beyond the Rubicon of post mortem digital reproduction – Oliver Reed in Gladiator/Tupac hologram at Coachella 2012. Perhaps – to bastardise a line from Proximo’s character in Ridley Scott’s swords and sandals epic – future legal agents will have to consider that movie stars can, potentially, be more than just “shadows and dust”.

A look at retro video phones over at io9 sparked some thought about future communications. While, in the real world, we’re bouncing through innovation after innovation via voice over internet protocols (VoIP), it’s still wonderful to see how ideas about visual communication have evolved.

One thing missing from this retrospective, however, are David Wallace Foster’s simulacra from the novel Infinite Jest. In a very PKDickian twist, the use of ‘Teleputers’ within the book results in people purchasing prosthetic representations of themselves to answer the phone – ultimately, the stigma of looking naturally flawed drives this completely self-serving and superficial industry. It’s obviously an idea heavy with Foster’s characteristic irony, but when you look at contemporary actors’ concern about the emergence of HD TV, alongside Skype providing guidelines about whether your home office is “ready for broadcast”… Well, maybe this premise – mirrored at a less developed level in the film Surrogates – isn’t so far-fetched.

Within science fiction there are, of course, several other cautionary tales about revolutions in communication. Most poignantly Ursula K Le Guin’s Ansible – a faster than light system explored fully in The Dispossessed – and Douglas Adam’s universal translator, the Bable Fish, which, “… by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

The complexities, then, of messages and machines… Oh, and fish.

Oddities in time travel have popped up in a series of locations since the last post here on Drozbot. First, 2004 Nobel Prize winner for physics, Frank Wilczek, has proposed some weird properties that may well be attributed to what he terms Time Crystals. These, still hypothetical, products of ‘asymmetric time’ could well allow the psudo-science holy grail of perpetual motion to become a reality. The notion has received a muted reception from the physics community, but it does highlight some ongoing, fundamental issues with time’s function in wider physical theories – something echoed in a recent New Scientist opinion piece here.

Closer to home, and on a more prosaic – albeit fictional – basis, there’s the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who to ponder. Unfortunately, the celebration of TV’s longest running science fiction series, has been marred on several fronts. The rekindling of William Hartnell’s xenophobic private life was first out of the TARDIS door as a result of Mark Gatiss penning the script for upcoming bio pic An Adventure in Space and Time. Worse press then followed bad with the sexual revelations of Richard Marson’s JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner. Add in the general lacklustre of the current series and everything turns decidedly Sylvester McCoy as opposed to Russell T Davies’ recent tour de force. Perhaps it’s time to let The Doctor sit fallow once again.

Max Reinhardt, over on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, recently brought shortwave number stations to my attention. Apparently, these encoded communications have their origin in World War II but still permeate contemporary airwaves. It’s great to think, in these days of data encryption, cyber terrorism and governmental control of the internet, that something so anachronistic can still be effective. The Conet Project has a plenty of bandwidth when it comes to information about these stations, but if they don’t satisfy your elicit audiophile needs, just check out the trailer for Swedish film LFO above. Meanwhile, at a more nuts and bolts level, Germany has finally out metalled its metal with the creation of a robotic four piece called Compressor Head. Personally, my future sounds are all about Dan Friel and his personal soundscape of recycled glitch punk.

I was late coming to Iain M Banks – waiting until my 21^st year before devouring both The Wasp Factory and Consider Phlebas in quick succession, and then being delighted to find Feersum Endjin on my university reading list. From that point the majority of his works have repeatedly fed into elements of my life at each publication. Friendships were instantly forged by the complimentary mention of his name in passing. The idea of a messy, pluralistic utopia (The Culture) inspired a few of these friends to find ways to demand national/global change, whereas – on a more mundane level – each new book was still received with complicit excitement and fevered discussion.

So it was with an omnipresent sense of gloom that news of the author’s inoperable gall bladder cancer finally reached me. It’s a bleak statement, but one approached with typical Banksian fearlessness and humour. As fellow Sci Fi writer, Ken MacLeod, comments here, “The way Iain has reacted to his situation is not really with a sense of unfairness but more that it’s just the way the universe works, the way matter works, that there’s nobody out to get us, nobody to blame for it all.”

That said, insult to injury still comes with the demise of Margret Thatcher and the knowledge that Banks is having to witness the current pageant of, what my mother would term, “chinless wonders” as they mourn the passing of their queen.  Hopefully Iain will don his infamous FTT (Fuck the Tories) T-Shirt for the occasion of her ‘not exactly state funeral’? There’s no doubting he remains politically active regardless of the doctor’s prognosis, as this recent article in The Guardian attests.

Down, but definitely not out. Raw spirit, indeed.

So there I was floating around aimlessly, wondering what would coalesce into the next post on Drozbot, when I finally ran aground on the shores of coincidence. Maybe it was Lemuel Gulliver leaving Laputa in my reading of the third of his voyages? Perhaps it was J B Ballard’s Concrete Island – a current companion book to Swift’s excellent satire and, interestingly, in movie production with Brad Anderson and Christian Bale at the helm (see above)? Or maybe it was battling sea monsters in Ni No Kuni that brought all these things together for an eventual landfall here.

It seems that Tor.com must have been thinking along the same lines, if this latest post on their site is anything to go by. While the list seems comically brief, it does highlight a few engaging elements despite some obvious omissions. Meanwhile, over on SciFi Now, there’s an uncomplimentary DVD review of Oblivion Island that finds something lacking in the film’s execution despite its remarkable theme.

Islands then, and the tempestuous influence they have on creators of the fantastic. Now if only I could crowbar in a reference to the atolls of the Pacific, I might just be able to get away with a closing image of a giant robot on a tropical beach.

A cluster of intriguing science fiction games have recently come to the fore. Not the big, brash, blockbusters that resemble action movies in all but setting. Rather something more focused and more, well, knockabout in their presentation. The only table-top game in the collection is Space Cadets but, in a moment of timely synchronicity, its premise is weirdly reflected in that of Spaceteam for the iPad. Both deal with individual players taking charge of different stations on the bridge of a star ship, and both present a craft that can only be piloted successfully if everyone works together as a team. Space Station 13 is also a multiplayer, albeit one that substitutes the command of a single vessel for the much more expansive operations of an entire space station. Finally, sporting a red shirt and bringing up the rear guard, is Star Command (trailer above). More solo-player sim than collaboration, it still targets the fictional interpersonal skills of some very Star Trek-styled space travelers.

While listening to Open Book on BBC Radio 4, I stumbled upon mention of Life After Life – a novel by author Kate Atkinson. The premise within this is a central character who gets to repeat existence over and over again in an attempt to reach some kind of understanding. Nothing new for science fiction fans accustomed to films like The Butterfly Effect or Ground Hog Day and TV shows like Battlestar Galactica. At best Life After Life is simply a re-visitation of an old, well established, trope that – in my opinion – had its strongest outings to date with Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon (1960) and Ken Grimwood’s Replay (1987). That said, perhaps Atkinson’s new book can oust one of these two from my personal pantheon – despite courting the kind of mainstream attention that genre author’s rarely have access to. However, with the upcoming collection of Burdry’s critical writings, published via Ansible Editions, I already know what I’m probably going to spend more of my precious time reading. Now if only I had access to a resurrection ship…

Architecture has been an evolving piece of SF synchronicity, building around the peripheries at the tail end of 2012 and the start of 2013. First the death of Oscar Niemeyer in December – a designer who brought the aspirations of science fiction artists to life in concrete and glass. Next the Mega City One vistas created by Neil Miller resurfaced in a feature over at Sci Fi Now, closely followed by a much deeper analysis in 3D World’s architecture special. These both predated the Oscars and the revelation that Buckminster Fuller was involved in Science Fiction Land – the true back story behind Ben Affleck’s award winning Argo. It all makes for a nicely constructed subtext that contrasts the glib view, currently circulating within the blogosphere, that science fiction is caught within an irrevocable erosion  Instead of collapse, I believe these imaginary foundations will last a lot longer than any of us can anticipate.