***
In 1968, while people chomp their popcorn and gobble their jujubes, a planet earth destroyed by nuclear holocaust and dominated by talking apes will flicker in front of their hippie faces. In one year, man will walk on the moon, but none of that hullabaloo will matter to the motion picture storytellers who will proclaim that in 2,010 years Astronaut Charlton Heston will land on a planet to be caged and prodded and stripped naked in front of a monkey tribunal.

He’ll be captive to a race of apes that has created carbine rifles and the English language, but has yet to develop the internal combustion engine. When the fair-haired cosmonaut discovers the planet he’s landed on is his own, not even the sweet caress of his mute love interest will be able to contain his anger at those bastards who had blown up his beloved New York City.

But five years later those same talkie watchers will take solace in seeing Police Officer Charlton Heston uncover the mysteries of the Soylent Corporation. Sure, the 2022 NYC they will see will be a cesspool of poverty and smog and maybe their green M&Ms will carry a strangely iron taste, but it’ll still be standing. And inhabited by standard squalored men and women. Not criminal masterminds and a one-eyed Kurt Russell that the great John Carpenter will declare had taken over Manhattan 25 years prior.

And therein lies the question. How long until things start shaking? For a 1968 Franklin Schaffner (or Boulle or Serling, but let’s always stick with the directors, it’s easier), the island of Manhattan will take roughly 2,010 years to deteriorate into nothing but a wasteland ruled by apes and a rusting head of Lady Liberty, but the superb John Carpenter will see the island in its pre-Giuliani 1981 urban decay glory, shrug his shoulders, and say “Uhnff, I give it 16 years before it’s a prison.” Certainly we know that the genius John Carpenter was wrong, but Schaffner may still be right with his guess. In 3978. Throw your stone short and you run the danger of seeing your predictions fail. Too far out and men won’t care. The sun will one day burn down, but there is no dramatic tension in a billion years, even if that’s the correct number. Predictions, Doc Hollywood, are a fickle lot.

Take for instance Geoff Murphy’s 1992 Freejack, a film whose most notable prediction is that Mic Jagger will still be alive in 2009, albeit now controlling a corporate police force. Murphy will envision a country where people are plucked from the past so that other people’s consciousnesses can be transferred into their bodies. The year 2009 will come and pass and the world will not deliver on Murphy’s promises. Instead there will be Lady Gaga and iPod Touches and a 3-D movie about a planet ruled by giant blue men — where people’s consciousnesses are transferred into new bodies. But that film’s director will say the idea is still 145 years out.

Perhaps Murphy’s folly is tied to a larger problem for cinematic prognosticators — a physical need to keep things close, but a strong desire to make bold predictions. Murphy’s struggle is simple: How far into the future can he go so that time-travel and mind transfer are possible and yet not too far that Emilio Estevez won’t still want to bang future Renee Russo. Now, certainly anyone who has seen the present day Mrs. Russo realizes the director undershot himself, but one can’t really be blamed for the unpredictability of aging beauty.

Six years after Estevez has escaped the clutches of the evil Anthony Hopkins, the world will be flying cars and hoverboards and Jaws 19 playing at the Holomax Theater in Zemeckis’s Back to the Future 2015. Fusion-powered flying automobiles seem unlikely, but as long as Hollywood cranks out 15 more Jaws films in the next four years that prediction has a shot. He may have rightly predicted the rebirth of 3-D (Avatar, 2009), but he also likely missed its subsequent death (Jaws 3-D: The Remake Nobody Wanted, 2012). Zemeckis was limited in the same way as Murphy though. He could only go so far. Our noble hero Marty McFly had to be alive in the future. Doc Brown might have had more trouble convincing Marty to go back in time to save his great-great-great-grandson. Zemeckis did prophesy the return of the 80s, though hopefully by 2015 they’ll be gone again. Sadly, no hoverboards on the horizon. Not much firing down over fax machines either. Still hope for the double necktie though.

Two years later the world will be all about prisons again. This time though our jolly convicts will get the chance to battle their way to freedom on The Running Man, the greatest sporting event in the world. In 1987, Paul Michael Glaser will promise us a 2017 ruled by a totalitarian regime and a TV set dominated by crazed, adrenalin junkies chasing thrills dressed in ridiculous, sparkled outfits. Six years away and what have we got? Patriot act, cough cough, Jersey Shore, cough cough. Moving along, because the run of The Running Man as the world’s favorite sport will see a quick death when the real ultraviolence of Rollerball skates into American hearts a year later. Motorcycles, spiked gloves, and people dying in front of screaming spectators. Jimmy Caan defying the worlds leaders to take a victory lap around the field while you sit silently in your seat, not doing anything. Why is that? They’re just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they’re written down for me. One year later and the replicants have arrived.

Of all the future dystopias, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner will give the populace one of the most gorgeous. The rain-soaked Los Angeles that will flicker on 1982 big-screens will show an Asian-inspired neo-noir 2019 landscape of robots, spinners, and gorgeous architecture. Shame all the animals will be dead. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet, the Japanese will be dealing with their own 2019 dystopia, but instead of out-of-control robots they’ll be fighting clown-themed biker gangs, home-grown terrorism, and teenagers with unchecked mind powers. If you’ve seen Tokyo lately you’ll realize Otomo might be on the right track. Bring on the Capsules.

Three years later and we’ll have made it to Soylent Green. Say what you want about eating processed human remains, it surely beats searching the fallout Arizona desert for canned pears as the mustachioed L.Q. Jones will announce we’ll be doing in the 2024 world of A Boy and His Dog. At least we’ll have psychic talking dogs to aid in our quest to find sweet, non-mutated women to make soft love with. And in 2024 you’d best find sex where you can, and take if often gentleman and gentleladies, for eight years past an innocent Sandra Bullock will delight at our commercial jingles, but sternly rebuff any sexual advances for old Doc Cocteau will have banned all human fluid transfer. Good news on the 2032 food front though — all the restaurants will be Taco Bells. And there’ll be fresh rat burgers available from sewer vendors. Woo-hoo!

Jump three years and the replicants will be back, but now they will look like robots. Humans will have learned the lessons of the uncanny valley, but only Will Smith will seem to have really paid attention during Blade Runner. Universal spoiler: They’re going try to kill us. Chuck Taylors will be old-school. So will motorcycles in I, Robot‘s 2035. Good news for Chicagoans, the EL will look nice. Will Smith will have a robotic arm that will look just like a regular human’s. Thirty-six years later and we’ll be zooming through space, hauling in space bandits, but it seems we’ll have slipped on the robotic prosthetic front. Sorry, Jet, but that thing looks a little clunky. Cowboys will wear nicely tailored suits and cowgirls will wear barely breast-covering short overall outfits. Garbage will orbit the planet and sad decommissioned satellites will score the desert in nuevo figure drawings. Not a bad 2071, Cowboy Bebop.

Thirteen years later and we’ll all be taking vacations to Mars. Or at least we’ll think we’re taking a trip to Mars to fight corporate big-wigs alongside mutant warriors. We might just be plugged into a computer and dreaming all of that. This idea will be pitched to American audiences in 1990. Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall will be an action-flick starring the future Governator, a mutant growing out of Marshall Bell’s stomach, a la Basket Case, and the greatest three-boobed mutant bar scene the cinema will ever see. The movie will become a staple of basic cable and a veritable cult-classic. Yet, after being out for nine years one nerdy hacker named Neo will apparently never have seen it, “Whoa we’re all just living in a computer program.” He’ll find out it’s actually 145 years after Total Recall. The sun is blacked out. The earth is controlled by robots. Giant sperm-shaped robo-killers will hunt him in his hovership. People will really like black leather.

But we’ve skipped a couple. First there will be Danny Cannon’s Judge Dredd. Scorched earth. The start of human cloning. Gianni Versace-designed cop uniforms. Pass. Add 15 years and we’ll have made it to 2154, Avatar. We’ll be mining new planets and everything will be a helicopter. Sigourney will be there. Soldiers will fight aliens in robotic shells that look nearly exactly like the robo-suit she uses to toss the Queen alien out the airhatch in Aliens. James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar will reveal a world of lush vegetation, flying monsters, and Earth’s new colonial domination. Millions of viewers will see it in it’s hyper-real 3-D, look to their friends, and ask, “Well … would you?”

If you’ve been paying attention you know 45 years down the line, it will all turn out to be a computer program. That world will be permanently stuck in the 90s. Luckily a 64-year shuffle from there will unveil the greatest site the future could ever hold — Milla Jovovich wearing only white straps. The men in 1997 theaters won’t have to confer about human-alien intercourse watching The Fifth Element. There will also be tiny apartments where the shower hides under the bed, a system of quitting smoking that uses shorter and shorter cigarettes, and a bombastic Chris Tucker that screams into a microphone and whispers sexy words to airline stewardesses. Luc Besson can probably sit back and rest assured these inventions will be come to fruition by 2263. And in the end one religious order will lead a successful rebellion against a destructive alien force by showing us love is a really, really big deal.

Eleven years into the future and religion will have us all chanting and hollering while our friends float up into a bright light and explode like sparkly human firecrackers. Yay, Carrousel. Everyone will have a 70s haircut. And the uncanny valley will have now kicked into the point where our robots will look like children’s homemade box costumes wrapped in tin foil. And when this robot confronts us with the knowledge that he’s been freezing people to turn into food and tries to kill us we’ll run away scared and surprised because apparently we won’t have seen Blade Runner, I, Robot, or Soylent Green. Typical future generations. No respect for the classics. That’s OK because the top of that bubble society everyone lives in will be blown to smithereens in a noble effort to show people a man who has a beard and a bunch of cats. Now the logical among you probably realizes that people who have no survival skills and are stupid enough to routinely blow themselves up will not survive long in the wild. And for that I present to you The Goodchilds.

Or at least I present you the Goodchilds 141 years after the fall of Logan’s domed city. Same idea though. One city remains surrounded by untamed wilderness. If you’re the counting kind, you’ll notice this is at least the fourth time in our future history where we will live in a utopia, surrounded by a terrible wasteland dystopia, only to find out our utopia is actually a terrible dystopia. Twistopia. Aeon Flux‘s city of Bregna will be ruled by a family known as the Goodchilds who have saved humanity from the brink. The government is corrupt, but so are the rebels who fight the government. The weather seems nice. People will have finally crammed their cellphones into their heads so they can send each other telepathic messages. Some people will have hands for feet. Oh, and everyone will be a clone because a virus will have killed most of the world’s population. That will have happened 404 years ago. Checks watch. Which would be present day for you, kind reader. Which means for a 37-year-old Karyn Kusama who made her big budget film debut with 2005′s Aeon Flux, 2011 will seem like just the right year for a virus to wipe out 99 percent of the movie going public. Which begs the question, “If Charlize Theron won’t be fighting corruption for another 400 odd years, why kill most everyone in six?” Trigger happy.

But the most premature death in the future known Verse will surely come 103 years later. It will be a death sentence handed down to theatergoers in 2002, but it will be shown in the world of 2518. There will be epic space battles, rousing speeches, and mindless space monsters hellbent on destruction. The Wild West will be reborn on fresh planets. There will be a war against an oppressive regime destined to make everyone fit into the same mold, led by one Firefly-class spaceship captained by the most badass man since Snake Plisskin. He’ll win his fight against the government, but still his ship will fade out with the rolling credits of Serenity.

And now our longest jump yet. 1461 years after Serenity and we’ll be back on the beach with angry Charlton Heston on the good old planet of the apes. But perk up Heston, be a man. What did you expect? You launched your Planet of the Apes career in 1968 and now it’s been 2010 years. Maybe the world didn’t get blown up. Maybe everyone got plugged in. Maybe they’re living in their domed cities watching Running Man reruns. Maybe they’ve gone out to explore. New worlds. New galaxies. New species. Any second now a ship could rip through a time portal and land behind you and Captain Mal Reynolds could step off and ask you to come help fight the good fight.

Get on the ship. There’s a future out there waiting to be told. Remade. Sequelled. Revised and retconned. That future might be two decades out and it might be two millenia. It doesn’t matter. It’s about the story. And if you get on that ship and you ride into the future you can be guaranteed it will be a hell of a story. Plus, Jayne Cobb is on that ship. You’re going to like him.

Go cinema. Go.

***

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The title settlement was ostensibly established for the twin goals of communicating with a strange race of Exoterres known as “Hosts” and obtaining biorigged technology, such as the oxygen-emitting “aeoli” and the flesh-created airships called corvids. But because Hosts evolved with two mouths and their minds directly communicate without the signification indemic to Terre (human) language, the Hosts can only communicate with “Ambassadors,” human twins as close to one person with two voices as people can be, with names to match—CalVin, MagDa, JoaQuin.

With the scenario established, Embassytown attempts to wrestle with the problem of communication. The novel comments on the difficulties of storytelling itself; it is filled with small instances of people mishearing each other, from an adult who remembers a children’s rhyme poorly to the narrator’s failure to realize the true purpose of a communication automaton.

It touches on the brutalities occasioned by the attempt to combine two estranged minds into one—the Ambassador training doesn’t always take, and what to do with those people whose ability to speak with the Hosts is sup-optimal presents the settlement with a problem.

Along the way, Embassytown comments on colonialism as well; an Embassytown functionary mentions to the narrator that behind every story of crazy natives misinterpreting an explorer’s gesture lies an empire trying to steal the silver.

In a way, Embassytown is more optimistic than other works in the Miéville canon. The attempt to communicate bears fruit; the conflict is resolved largely due to the efforts of an intrepid band of semiotic innovators. The way is not without suffering—hordes of Hosts mutilate themselves to escape the noxious effects of certain kinds of language on their biology—and the action does not close on a world where “everything is all right.” But while work remains, the primary conflict of the plot is resolved satisfactorily; there are some happy endings.

But for all this optimism, Embassytown is not a simple paean on better communication. Indeed, many problems come from attempts at communication, most notably from the fact that those who can communicate, the Ambassadors, are able to build their power on the assumption that the Hosts cannot communicate with anyone else.

Instead, Miéville suggests that the task is harder than simply speaking: It requires recognizing in the other a mind equally capable of interpreting the world. Miéville’s argument is not in favor of language itself, but mutual recognition. It is about seeing each other as people with voices as valuable as our own. In a world full of estrangements and miscommunication, Embassytown presents a reflection worth pursuing.

But you can’t find any of this information on his Tumblr. There Miéville only posts artworks/found items he appreciates, terse observations about British politics and artistic (either drawn or written) renderings of his thoughts.

In my interview with Miéville, I attempted to explore the motivations behind his world-building and RPG influences that go into his works. Here is the result:


Handshake: Yesterday, during your spotlight, you talked about the careful planning that goes behind the setting of your works and how you consider your writing to have roots in Dungeons and Dragons. How do you think table-top RPGs such as DnD have informed the world-building in your fiction?

Miéville: Table-top RPGs were a really big part of my cultural growing. I got into DnD Basic when I was 11, I think. And then over the years I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, a lot of Call of Cthulhu and Rune Quest. Chaosium was sort of my main engine for role playing.

I remember two particular things about them impacting me: One is a fascination with the systematization of a world, that everything can be defined in terms of logical rules and statistics. But I think that conceiving a world that way comes at a cost. The thing that we like about the fantastic is the awe, the unknowability. And that drive to systematize is opposite to the unknowability, so there’s a kind of creative tension there that can be productive.

The second thing came from my mania for the bestiaries, the collection of monsters. I share the voracious desire that RPG creators and gamers have to steal fantastic creature from all of the world’s mythologies and to invent their own. It’s an endless, accelerated cycle of monstrous creation. This drive is sort of philistine, and I know because I’m one of them, since it doesn’t care about the folkloric context for a creation. We just want to steal it and systematize it in a game. There’s something refreshingly piratical about that collecting mentality of the unreal.


Handshake: In most RPGs, elements such as religion are an avid gamer’s approach to flavor the experience. How does that translate into how you use religion, for example, to texture the characters and civilizations in your novels?

Miéville: That RPG desire to map everything, to map all the deities of the pantheon and to know all the timelines of events is too complete. There are not enough gray areas in it to comprehend the world. I share this slightly desperate desire, but I think it comes with a cost. My own feeling about its role in cultural creations, such as books and games, is that it gives a very interesting effect, if you come out of that tradition, you can do really interesting things with it, but without its opposite it has a cost. For example, the Cthulhu mythos is all about the unknowable, but to have Azatoth’s stats in front you make you look at it in a completely different way. I love that tension, but I think that surrendering to one side or the other is a bad idea, so I try to oscillate on that tension.


Handshake: Would you still call yourself a gamer?

I haven’t actually gamed in 20 years or something, although I do keep up with their developments. The itch that playing scratched I now do through world creation. I was more interested in creation than moment-to-moment playing, but I would never disavow that part of my past. Any geek who is about my age can say it was an immensely formative part of our lives. Anyone can criticize some aspects of gaming, but it would be pointless and ungrateful to say it wasn’t a very important part of my psyche.

Which is why when someone wanted to make an RPG adaptation of Bas-Lag, I was very flattered and delighted. It’s an incredible honor to think that people would want to play in that world, doing what I did when I was a kid.


Handshake: Going off that idea of people creating within your world, what your opinion of people writing fiction within Bas-Lag or another universe.

Miéville: It’s fine. Making fiction or home-brew games purely for enjoyment doesn’t matter and can only bring people closer to each other and the original work, so I don’t have a problem with it. Now, what I think is true is that there’s an issue of courtesy. I think for somebody to make money off of an author’s work without permission is, aside from being illegal, discourteous.

Fanfic is very interesting, but I do worry a little bit about it keeping those people from creating their own original works. There is not a lot of fanfiction of my stuff, but I’m fine with people entertaining themselves and each other with fanfiction of my work. But I’m much more interested to see them invent something, because I’m much more interested in your worlds. It’s not a judgment, but I hope that fanfiction of my works is not stopping you from doing your own stuff.


Handshake: What if your work inspires someone to create their own worlds?

Miéville: Now that is much more exciting to me. That’s an immense honor. I’m much much more moved by the idea that what I write is part of you writing something unrelated. If someone’s pirating ideas, well that’s what we all do all the time. It’s just not a big deal to me.

–

Stay tuned for Handshake‘s review of Embassytown, which will come out this May through Del Rey Books.

Here are the gems we saw as we winded through the hazy blur of storm troopers, fandom personalities, as well as the endless lines of shops with collectible games, comics, and T-shirts on the con’s most action-packed day—Saturday:

10 a.m. – Doors open and every exhibitor is already set up. It’s a slow trickle at first. A well-costumed Harley Quinn fan pretends to hit another fan a with a huge mallet for passing photos. Within the hour, the exhibitors’ floor is mobbed with so many fans, that not much time seems to pass through this entrancing journey until the first notable panel of the day.

11:30 a.m. – Author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar China Miéville gives a reading of his new book Embassytown, which comes out this May. According to his critics, the book is Miéville’s most straightforwardly sci-fi work.

Most questions in the half-filled conference theater revolved around how Miéville comes up with the weird stuff he writes, and how he nestles otherworldly characters and places within tight and enrapturing narratives. Miéville said how Alice in Wonderland informed the fantastical characters in his YA novel Un Lun Dun, and how for him, The Scar‘s protagonist Bellis is a “thinly veiled” Jane Eyre.

The settings, on the other hand—which are often the root of his inspiration—come from a different place. “The world-building in my works comes very much from a Dungeons and Dragons tradition,” Mieville says, “[creating worlds with] maps, timelines, and stacks of guidebooks.”

Check back soon, and we’ll have an exclusive interview with Miéville where we’ll explore how gaming and world-building has affected his writing.

4:30 p.m. – Nerdcore Hip-Hop Panel

From the awesome song sampling Capcom that opened the panel to the straightforward love for the history of video game and hip-hop music and culture, this panel was far and beyond the con’s best. Kyle Murdock (K-Murdock), Raheem Jarbo (MegaRan), and Matt Weiss paralleled the histories of hip-hop and video game music, as well as the declining sales of the urban genre and the almost matching rise of video games.

Along the way K-Murdock then highlighted the video game music that incorporated hip-hop styles and culture, such as Streets of Rage and Jet Grind Radio. The middle school teacher and now official Capcom artist MegaRun talked about and his own project, where he raps over sampled songs from MegaMan.

We will air out this topic in much more detail. Look for a post about Nerdcore on Handshakemag.com soon.

Using a piano, a bell set, an accordion, and his own hands, Blake takes the majors and minors at 157 beats per minute to further demonstrate the correlation between math and music. And for those of you who hated math as much as I did, 157 beats per minutes is coincidently 314 divided by two.

1. Incubus
I couldn’t care less if his pronunciation is roundly critiqued by academia—Shatner undertook a role in Esperanto. (His English pronunciation has always been a bit suspect anyway.) The film Incubus has the distinction of being the second of two feature-length Esperanto films shot in the 1960s.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2.   The (Various Dollar Amount) Pyramid
Shatner was notoriously horrible at this popular game show. So horrible that at one point, for a laugh, he was given the chance to play against himself (knowing the answers for which he was to supply the clues) and he still can’t quite pull it off. (Apologies for the quality, if a madman one day digitally restores the $20,000 Pyramid, I will update with a better clip.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. The Commodore VIC-20
I am of the opinion that former starship captains should always be the face of future technology.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. At 116 MPH
In 2006 William Shatner took place in the 10-lap Pro/Celebrity race at the Long Beach Grand Prix, evidently a popular Long Beach tradition. Fortunately for the universe, there is was dash camera to capture the old man in action.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As you might imagine, this video has been remixed to death and now contributes to the world of amazing and delightful Shatner videos left for you to explore.

YouTube user cofauver’s documentary of a man who refuses to shave for an entire year is a brief glimpse into a person’s life. The changing scenery, the passing seasons, the questionable wardrobe choices: everything building until the viewers feel as if they’ve lived the year in three minutes. The idea isn’t unique. There is Noah Kalina’s Everyday project. In Almost Every Picture #7. Even Homer Simpson got in on the action.

Others might have done it before and with better execution, but this video must be commended for the dedication and persistence it takes to pull off such a project. Plus, it has Yeasayer.

She made the announcement today by tweeting the name of her “mystery project” and linking to USA Today’s article on the upcoming series. Day had been hinting at her project via Twitter, finally telling her followers last night that she’d spill the beans today.

Been teasing #mysteryproject but it will be announced tomorrow, promise. Can only hint that it’s based in a world you may know, gamers…

Day also named crew members last night: “@peterwinther was our director,” “@gregaronowitz did production design MAGIC, and John Bartley, DP on 6 seasons of Lost, was our DP!” and “@actordougjones from Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, Silver Surfer, is part of our cast!”

She told followers today that a teaser trailer will run on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday night and that she spent two months doing research, did two play-throughs, and spent the summer writing for the new Web series.

Day will play an Elven assassin named Tallis. “Day’s six-episode run, due to hit the Web this year, is set in Ferelden, the same fantasy land in which 2009′s Dragon Age: Origins and the upcoming sequel Dragon Age II play out. In the Tolkienesque sword-and-sorcery adventure game, several races join forces to combat a scourge called the Darkspawn (think of them as cousins to the orcs in The Lord of the Rings),” according to USA Today.

“I am an organic gamer and I love games, and I particularly love this franchise,” Day told USA Today. “I put every single effort into making this something that gamers will be proud of. Even though we were constrained a lot as a Web series, none of the people who were involved took that as a constraint. They took that as a challenge.”

Fans can find Day in upcoming episodes of Syfy show Eureka and expect a fifth season of The Guild on Microsoft’s Xbox Live. A Syfy original movie featuring Day, Red: Werewolf Hunter, had premiered at the end of October.  She previously played in two episodes of Joss Whedon’s Fox show Dollhouse and had a leading role in Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, also starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. According to reports in April 2010, Dr. Horrible might return for a sequel.

If you’re wondering about Dragon Age II, which comes out March 8, Felicia Day tweeted at a fan: “The new game is totally dope, I got to play DA2 for ‘research’ last week.”

Also, remember Day’s music video for The Guild?

Click here to view the embedded video.