wisb-Guardian-Express

This week, Tobias S. Buckell joins us on the show to talk about his latest book, Arctic Rising, the environment, technology (green and otherwise), and a load of other fantastic stuff.

You can check out the episode here.

Syrians are still getting screwed, Gingrich writes a wiki, Arizona is rated G for GOP, Trotta expects to get raped, and Santorum smears. Plus: Jen goes on a rant about naughty things and we cover two funny moments in the political landscape.

 You can check out that episode here!

Have you seen Ironclad?  It stars Paul Giamatti as King John of England and James Purefoy as Thomas Marshall, a Templar Knight (Purefoy, by the way, seems to have had a role in at least 3/4ths of the medieval-era-ish film productions released in the last 6 or so years, which is impressive).  If you haven't, you're probably not missing anything you didn't see in Braveheart.

It's not a bad movie by itself, mind you.  A little on the long side at two hours, sure.  But as a film, it has a lot going for it.  Decent acting, a plot that makes internal sense, and a narrative that balances between all out war (there will be blood!) and the rigors of attrition.  If this were set in the mythical kingdom of Genland, with the plot centered on King Hojn's use of Adnish mercenaries to reclaim his throne from the wicked barons who forced him to sign the Namga Artac, then it would be an interesting movie with lots of parallels to England's medieval history.

But that's not what this film is about.  You see, in this version of history, King John doesn't successfully take Rochester Castle from an entrenched baronial force.  Rather, the French
magically show up and he's forced to trudge out into the marshes of England trailing his treasure (which is mysteriously lost), after which he dies of dysentery.  Thus the heroes are saved!  Oh merciful heavens our surviving heroes can go on to live their lives in sin!  Yes, sin.  You know why?  Because Thomas Marshall violates his religious codes of conduct as a Knight Templar by not only sleeping with a woman (abstinence!), but with a woman married to another man.  This results in said woman explaining how important it is for Thomas to live life.  Oh!  He must live it by committing a cardinal sin!

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying sex out of wedlock or adultery is evil or even sinful in my mind.  But we're not talking about the world I live in.  We're talking about 13th century England.  Now, I don't want to suggest here that nobody was breaking religious law back then.  I'm sure the Knights Templar were quite good and putting their willies where they shouldn't (according to their religious rules).  But we're told in this story that these vows are supremely important to Thomas.  Not just important, but so damned important that he spends the entire movie resisting temptation of one form or another, claiming the moral high ground alongside others with less strict religious rules.  And all this is destroyed by a single woman.  If any story could make it more clear to us that the serpent of the Bible lives in the loins of the female human, this is the one.

But I suppose that's me reading a lot into a movie within a film tradition in which religious "rules" really only mean a lot when it comes to who you marry and who you behead.

The real problem with this movie is that it gets its history so terribly wrong as to be dangerous.  Let's toss aside the fact that somehow our hero has resisted wicked temptation his whole life, the criminal use of modern phrases, and the strange logical gap between the importance of Rochester Castle (it controls everything in London and is ever so crucial to King John's campaign -- this is actually true) and the suspicious absence of anything resembling a defensive force in the castle itself (you can count the number of soldiers/archers/defenders on your hands and feet and still have digits left over).  Let's just talk about the utter failure on the part of Jonathan English (ha!), Erick Kastel, and Stephen McDool to write a story that resembles the actual event.

Let's take, for a moment, the glorious inadequacy of these writers, shall we?  The BBC website says the following of the battle Ironclad attempts to depict:

King John lay siege to the castle in 1215 and took it after two long months. He finally undermined the south east tower and burned the props with the "fat of forty pigs" causing the tower to collapse. The city was well placed for raids on London and it also enabled them to devastate the lands of Kent, particularly those belonging to Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had crowned Rufus and was therefore Odo's and the rebels' enemy.

Short, but sweet.  The English Heritage website adds a few more details:

In 1215, garrisoned by rebel barons, the castle endured an epic siege by King John. Having first undermined the outer wall, John used the fat of 40 pigs to fire a mine under the keep, bringing its southern corner crashing down. Even then the defenders held on, until they were eventually starved out after resisting for two months.

What's that?  The French didn't show up and send King John packing at Rochester Castle?  Really?  You mean our heroes lost by starvation, thus surrendering after an understandably brave months-long fight?  The only thing Ironclad gets correct in the above description is that King John used the fat of forty pigs (sappers!) to cause the tower to collapse.  But most everything else -- the order of events, the players, etc. -- falls apart when under simple scrutiny.  There's no city.  No cathedral.  No indication that anyone actually lives near Rochester Castle, which is unusual when you think about the film's logic:  this is such a strategic point for taking the country, and yet nobody seems to live in the bizarre wasteland around the castle (there's no farmland either).  Not for miles!  And we're given some beautiful shots of England countryside to prove this!

Even Wiki-frakking-pedia points out where Ironclad fails miserably:

William d'Aubigny commanded the garrison but contemporary chroniclers do not agree on how many men that was. Estimates range from 95 to 140 knights supported by crossbowmen, sergeants, and others.[9] John did take the castle, most of the higher nobles being imprisoned or banished; and the French did not arrive in England until some six months after the siege had ended.[10] Characters departing significantly from the historical record include William d'Aubigny who was not an ennobled wool merchant (nor was he tortured and killed in the siege).

You'll notice the citation numbers.  Those two citations happen to come from fairly reputable sources:  Rochester Castle by Reginald Allen Brown (a guidebook from the English Heritage folks) and David Hume's The History of England.  That's right:  David frakking Hume.  But in Ironclad, a ragtag group of six "warriors" show up to "take" Rochester Castle and then defend it with the ragtag group of folks living inside.  And d'Aubigny has his feet and hands cut off and his body chucked from an improvised catapult into the side of the keep.  And John has a happy time with murdering those few nobles he gets his hands on in the film.

Odd how those little details managed to slip the writers' minds.  But why?  Isn't the very idea of defending a castle from a superior force already an exciting and dramatic story?  Couldn't they have told that story?  Did they have to have the French roll in early and save the day?  Deus ex machina!

Maybe I'm asking too much from my medieval movies.  Maybe becoming and academic has soured me to historical fiction.  I don't know.  What I do know is that this kind of crap annoys the hell out of me.  I want my historical fiction to at least get the major facts correct.  Otherwise, you might as well be writing alternate history...

Sadly, Ironclad neither gets the facts right nor does it succeed as an alternate history.  It's a film that historians of the period can watch only if they've had a lobotomy performed by a chimpanzee with a hot poker.  Even then, brain seizures are likely...

Directing: 2.5/5 (there are some weird moments where people seem to be doing something different when there are perspective shifts)
Cast: 3/5 (decent enough)
Writing: 1/5 (I don't reword stupidity)
Visuals: 2.5/5 (CG blood = idiotic)
Adaptation: 0.5/5 (it gets half a point for being correct about the fact that a siege took place)
Overall: 1.9/5


Disclaimer #1:  I do not have a problem with artistic license.  Fiddling with minor details to add a little drama is fine by me, so long as the actual history remains relatively unchanged.

Disclaimer #2:  I am not a medieval history major, but I am one of those silly academics who has some vague idea how to research basic history to figure out whether something is true.

Over at Tor.com, Karl Schroeder, author of the Virga series, has taken a stab at SF's failures to predict or imagine the future.  Specifically, Schroeder takes issue with the genre's penchant for imagining technological and/or sociological change (in isolation), but not for imagining changes in factors like government and/or violence.  He uses as his basis for his argument Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, a book I have not had the pleasure to read, but which I understand to be not only one of the most important non-fiction works of our time, but also an illuminating work.  You can read the full argument here, but I'd like to open this post with this:

I said I was accusing society in the above quote ("...Our technological society’s one big blind spot is that we can imagine everything about ourselves and our world changing except how we make decisions."), but actually the people I was accusing of being most vulnerable to this blind spot were science fiction writers. It’s true there are plenty of Utopian futures in SF, but the vast majority of books within the sub-genres of cyberpunk, space opera and hard SF contain regressive or static visions of human conflict in the future. We’ve given them license to break the barrier of lightspeed, but not to imagine that some other organizing principle could replace bureaucracy or—even worse—to imagine that we could without tyranny reduce human conflict down to a level of ignorable background noise.

I think the problem with Schroeder's argument is that it relies on a flawed logic about the purpose of SF (or, rather, the function of SF) that I've brought up a number of times before:  namely, that SF is, by its nature, about predicting or imagining fully realized (read:  totalized) potential futures
(read:  prediction).  Unfortunately, futurism tends to get confused with science fiction, and for good reason.  After all, both share the same impulses, the same internal logics, and so on.  But SF is not futurism.  And by extension, it is not about the future.  SF is, by its very design, always already about the author's present.*

We can take as gospel the historical and scientific truth of Pinker's book, but that doesn't change the fact that so much science fiction never has to take it seriously.  True, public policy and social organization will be different in 200 years, but the alienation of that absolute difference limits the generic potential of SF.  What Schroeder seems to call for is a return to the utopian genre -- particularly, totalized works like those of Thomas More (Utopia), B. F. Skinner (Walden Two), William Morris (New From Nowhere), or Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward).  But reading these works now only alienates the ignorant, as many of the "new" social structures found in these works have been tried (most have failed).

But SF isn't technically utopia, or vice versa.**  It isn't meant to be totalized in terms of predictive qualities.  Rather, it is supposed to look at our current world and to do two things (both/either/or):  1) think through "problems," and 2) explore such problems through allegory, metaphor, and estrangement.  That is why SF is about the present, not the future.  That is why SF is set in the future, but is not necessarily about it.  The setting is coincidental for the SF author, whether he or she acknowledges it or not.  What separates the various forms of fantasy from SF isn't the setting, but the method/way/style/approach the author takes to explore his or her present.  Fantasy need not be about a real world problem; it can stand on its own as a journey.  But SF in its pure and actual form is always about the real world transplanted into a different frame, one which relies on the foundations of scientific exploration, even to the limits of the fantastic.  So while SF has done a fabulous job playing out the possibilities of technological advancement, singular social change, and so on, it has and must be, by its nature, utterly terrible at predicting actual worlds.  Another way to think about this might be to say that SF has more in common with the modernist literary movement than with the late 19th and early 20th century realists, though it certainly takes a few pages from the real.

Having said all of this, I should note that I don't disagree with Schroeder about the desire to see SF deal more intelligently with the knowledge found in Pinker's book (or other forms of knowledge, as the case may be).  And there is a certain importance in applying the cognitively estranging effect of SF in its proper "futuristic" form to social organization (government, etc.).  Perhaps we'll see that, but it will be in isolated pockets, not as an SF trend or purpose.

Before ending this post, here's one last complication Schroeder does adds:

In order to write a credible violent future, you’re going to have to show me how these break down. And because the steadiness of the historical trend shows that these reinforcing circles are not vulnerable to the obvious disruptions described above, that’s not going to be an easy task.

He's right, in a way, but I can't help thinking that this won't matter much to the general readership.  Convincing Schroeder only matters if he represents the genre as a whole.  I'm not convinced, however, that this is true, or that enough SF readers are familiar with Pinker's book.  I'm waiting to be proven wrong.

*By "SF" I mean a particular generic form that shares more in common with Darko Suvin's cognitive estrangement than Pulp Era science fantasy.  I make the assumption that Schroeder shares this definition, even if he does not put it in the same terms.

**I like to think that utopia is a subgenre of SF, but this would be historically inaccurate, as the utopian genre existed far before the SF genre (i.e., as generic traditions).

The following video doesn't have anything to do with SF/F or the general concerns of this blog, but I had to share it anyway.  I listened to it on Democracy Now earlier today; it brought me to tears.

A little about StoryCorps first:

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 40,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants.  

They've started animating some of the stories.  This video is one of those animations:

Beautiful, no?  Admit it...

(GS Mumbles -- or Grad School Mumbles -- is the second of my new seasonal columns in which I talk about things I'm working on as a grad student, often in relation to geeky things.)

I suspect this post is going to be an attempt to make a silly connection between a favorite TV show in the geek community and one of the great literary figures of our time.

In his novel, Shame, Salman Rushdie's autobiographical narrator interrupts the narrative to tell us that the novel is quite clearly not about the things we think it's about.  The scene goes as follows:

The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite.  There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space.  My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality.  I have found this off-centering to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate.  My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan. 

I have not given the country a name.  And Q. is not really Quetta at all.  But I don't want to be precious about this:  when I arrive at he big city, I shall call it Karachi.  And it will contain a "Defense."  (23-24)

In discussing this passage in class, I was consumed by the image provided by the following scene from "The Stolen Earth" (Doctor Who):


I wouldn't say that being "one second out of sync with the rest of the universe" is an adequate explanation for the Rushdie passage, but it does provide a way of thinking about this line:  "The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite."  Shame is, perhaps, about an out of sync representation of a place, one which at once seems like the proper thing, but is also something else entirely by the nature of representation itself.  To write fictionally about a country as Rushdie does in Shame, you also take away the possibility of writing about that country.



Of course, Rushdie might be up to something a little more clever, which is perhaps why I didn't bring up the "out of sync" comment in class.  If I had been smart enough to think of it then, I might have brought up China Mieville's The City and the City, which more accurately captures this idea of a representation which is two places compacted (almost) into the same place in the form of a literary reference.  But even that comparison is an unfair one.
I think the crucial part of the scene is where Rushdie says, "My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan."  It similarly connects to J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, though in less abstract or dislocated terms.  Coetzee's novel could very well be about any number of different former colonies, as all the references are ambiguous enough to point in multiple directions.  Shame is not necessarily so ambiguous, though the antihistoricity of the text suggests that the fictional Pakistan and the real Pakistan are, if not separate in concrete terms, then certainly held apart by a blurred boundary -- the boundary that normally is embodied by the fictional allegory in the strictest of separations.  You'd have to think of Shame as an anti-historical novel -- that is, a novel which actively fights the idea of the empirical truth of a real place in a narrative which challenges, at every step, the nature of reality and truth itself.In other words, there is no Pakistan, only the imaginary shared "idea" of "nation" the people who call themselves "Pakistanis" have bought into, just as those who call themselves "Americans" have bought into the idea of a stable thing called "The United States of America."  There's no point pretending something is when the conditions of its existence are always already compromised by the near-fictionality of the imagined community (this is Benedict Anderson's concept, which, if reduced, reads something like:  the nation is neither real nor fake, but the imagined or dream-like entity people accept as a nation -- i.e., we make the nation by believing it exists).
Does anyone have any thoughts here?  Whether about Rushdie, Mieville, Coetzee, or nationalism?  The comments are yours...

This is the first in my weekly roundups of stuff I'm doing elsewhere.  Here goes:

In last week's episode, Jen and I interviewed Michael Sullivan, author of The Riyria Revelations series.  The conversation wandered from publishing to reviews to fantasy to anti-heroes to the wickedness of dwarves (and, of course, the novels).  You can check out the episode here.
This week's episode is a long discussion with Liz Bourke about LGBT discrimination in publishing, SF/F books for the ladyfolk (whatever that means), history from the classical period (with a little medieval history for good measure), and SF/F in the global sphere (and the women on the margins therein).  You can check out that episode here.

And:
The first Duke and Zink Do America column is a dialogue between Jen and I on the subject of the U.N. security council and the recent veto by China and Russia of its proposed public condemnation of Syria.  Feel free to head over, read what we have to say, and offer your two cents!

(This is the first in what I'm calling "Teaching Rambles," which have more to do with random ideas, concerns, and problems I've experience in teaching non-Western or non-traditional literatures in class than actual teaching experiences.  Hopefully that makes sense.)

I should start by saying that there is no such thing as "African Literature."  There is only literature which happens to be written by people who live in countries that reside in the continent of Africa.  I've never bought into the idea that Africa can act as a homogenous identity for the variety of peoples, histories, mythologies, and religions that make up the would-be-nations of that continent (would-be because the national boundaries we know today never existed prior to colonialism).  Yet even when I say "I don't buy into this," I still use phrases like "World literature" or "African literature," despite the implicit othering embodied by them.

Others have said similar things elsewhere (I don't know where, but I'm sure it's happened).  To describe something as "World literature" is to exoticize all things non-Western (even where Western literature happens to exist in the "World" category, such as for those works not written in
English -- France, etc.).  Really, the opposition is lingual.  Since the publishing world is centered in the Anglophone world, and more specifically in the U.S. and U.K., all things not-English and not-Western is "other."  A double othering.

And so when I talk to my students about "African literature," I'm always careful to remind them that there is no such thing as "Africa" the country.  We have to talk about actual countries, and not within the context of their value to the West, but their value to their specific geographic, social, and political "climate."

That's not something Westerners find easy to do.  When talking about Amos Tutuola's The Palm-wine Drinkard, for example, many of us automatically make connections with literary works from the Western literary tradition.  One of my students likened certain scenes in Tutuola's novella to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," which is an interesting connection indeed, but one which privileges the Western tradition over the native one.*  But there's something unfair about expecting students, or anyone, to be able to connect with a text from a culture they don't know anything about.  There are, of course, other problems here.

Simon Gikandi, if I recall correctly, had enormous difficulties pulling Westerners out of this worldview, in part because so much of the Western tradition is moralistic, leading us to make moral connections over explicitly literary ones.  Gikandi argued this by way of his own teaching experiences as an "African scholar" in a "Western world."  In reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, an enormously important literary work from a Nigerian writer (he has yet to win a Nobel for his work, though Wole Soyinka, another important Nigerian writer, has), Gikandi's students often focused their attentions on moral questions about the indigenous characters of the novel.  Gikandi was concerned with this moralistic approach because students seemed unable to detach themselves from the legacies of colonialism, showing, in my opinion, that those legacies had rooted themselves in the Western psyche.  The question is not "what is Chinua Achebe up to," but "why is Okonkwo so violent against his wives and why does his culture condone infanticide."
These two problematics bring me back to the start of this post.  While we can expect students (and readers) to disentangle the othering discourse of "African" and "World literature," it is much more difficult to have the same expectations about the moral or literary questions/connections made by Western readers.  Westerners are as human as any other "people," and that means that we will make connections between things in any way we can.  That's how we make sense of the world.  As such, I'm not sure where to put the line between "appropriating connectivity" and "appropriation and devaluation."  Perhaps someone else has some thoughts on that.

I do agree with Gikandi, however, that focusing on moral questions is a kind of infantilization of non-Western traditions.  Why is it that we can read a novel by an American author writing about strangely mundane things (everyday morality on the ground) and miss the moral problematics there, and yet cannot do the same with a Nigerian novel?  Is it because Americas are so utterly removed from the world of colonialism -- the colonial world as it appears to those most recently affected by it -- that everything appears sensationalist in Things Fall Apart?  But then what do we do about The Palm-wine Drinkard, which at no point pretends to be a story about "the world as it is," opting instead for the world of myth, folktale, and, in a certain sense, traditionalism?  Surrealism?  So few of my students are widely read in genre fiction of any stripe, which means their experiences with the unusual (by Western standards) are severely limited.  Tolkien is hardly the "great wonder of fantasy literature" that he once was.  He's become mundane in the Western tradition.

Then again, the same could be said of Tutuola  He's telling us tales relatively familiar to Nigerians.  He simply put his own spin on it.

I think I've rambled enough on this.  The last thing I'll say is that I hope someone challenges me on the use of "Western" and "Non-western" in the comments.  Those terms deserve criticism, because they are wholly inadequate.

What do you think about all of this?  The comments section is all yours.

----------------------------------------------

*I say this knowing that native literary traditions have been irreparably influenced and changed by contact with the West.

Starting today, I'm going to do a kind of "weekly roundup" of things I'm doing elsewhere.  Why?  Because with The Skiffy and Fanty Show and Duke and Zink Do America in my pocket, there'll be far too much going on every week to justify posting new things for each of them.  50% of my posts shouldn't be "hey, here's a new episode."

So you can expect a roundup of my stuff, with exception here or there to major news (you know, like a publication).

And you can also expect me to contribute different stuff here in the future.  No idea what that will be, but so be it...

If you've been a reader of this blog for at least a year, you'll have noticed that I'm rather political.  I'm also hesitant to post about politics on this blog, in part because this is supposed to be a space about genre fiction, writing, and so on.  That doesn't mean I don't talk about things that are political, but it does mean that I try not to talk about things to do with actual politics (Presidential races, etc.).

And that's how it's going to be from now on, because I just started a political podcast/blog with my co-host at The Skiffy and Fanty Show.  What is this new show called?

We describe it as follows:

Duke and Zink Do America is a 3/5ths serious political commentary podcast from a progressive perspective. We cover news, relevant events, and whatever else comes our way, always on the lookout for the stupid arguments and the stupid people who make them. 

If you need a fix of progressive politics with a moderate dose of humor, then this is the show for you.

Our first episode recently went live.  The show will be bimonthly, but we expect to post a few columns a month alongside.  Essentially, this is where my political rants and nonsense will go to live, fulfilling my desire to keep my writing and political worlds separate.

Feel free to head on over there and subscribe if you are politically inclined.  There will be a post over there soon enough explaining our mission, history, and so on.  For now, you've got over an hour of political deliciousness to enjoy.  Go listen and leave a comment!

Anywho!

The following video might be of interest to anyone who read my previous post.  It's also a video I'm teaching my students this semester in my "Writing About Postcolonialism and Genre Fiction" class.

Anywho!

The latest shitstorm in the SF/F community comes in response to acrackedmoon's criticism of Pat's (of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist) controversial perspectives on Thailand and travel (acrackedmoon offers a counter here).  The short version:

If anyone wonders if my creative juices are still flowing, you'd only need to sneak in on some of the conversations I have with my girlfriend.  I say "conversations," but really these are long, surreal rambles I launch at her, which she finds amusing.

This is one such conversation:

Me: Would you prefer I court you in the old English way? I need to get a cool steampunk pocketwatch... That way, while we're on a strolle, I could pull it out and say, "Hmm. My dear, it is half past seven. It's mighty late and it will be quite chill soon. Shall I escort you home?" 

And you'll say, "Why Reginald, that's a capital idea!" 

And we'll walk home and I'll bid you good night and bow and gently kiss your hand, and you'll scurry up to your room and I'll look up to your window and you'll flick on the light and lean out and blow me a kiss. And then I'll walk with my cane and top hat down the snowy street whistling.

Her: *laughs* 

Me: Good. It's settled. 

I have this fear that you've copied every single bizarre fit of imagination I've had with you in the chat or on Skype or whatever and that you'll one day publish them as part of your memoirs. 

The book will be called: In the Shadow of Greatness -- Life as the Wife of a Mad Literary Genius. 

Her: Ha, that's a good idea! 

Me: Or perhaps the title would be: The Anti-Teakettle Diaries: How One Woman Survived an Eccentric Writer for 75 Years. It'd be an instant hit. 

But you’re the reclusive type, so you'd refuse the call from Oprah to be on her show. And reporters from The Guardian and some new paper called The Flickerfist Quarterly will pile outside our door hoping to catch a glimpse of you on your way to work, perhaps for a quote. 

But you'll be old, so they'll look at you with respect and fear, because nobody knows what an old person will do. And you'll scurry off to your little shop, called Tinkers and Pages Magical Emporium of Tinker Toys and Books. 

Her: *laughs* 

Me: You won't make any money at the shop. Mostly, you just sit around winding up the little toys and giggling. And once in a while, a kid will come up with his parent and buy some cool thing, like a wind-up pheasant pirate or a rotating fobblefig. And then you'll go home, walking as you usually do with your little cane, and the reporters will be there, as if they've never left, waiting to take more pictures. 

And you'll never say a word. Only walk inside, put on the kettle for your hot cocoa, and read a book, which you'll forget about when you fall asleep in your chair with old BBC re-runs on the tele. Somewhere in the basement is me. Trapped in a giant typewriter. 

The End. 

*long pause* 

I should put all that in a blog post...  

Her: You should.

And here we are.  With a blog post...

Thoughts?

The folks behind Portal 2 (and the fans who love it) are a weird bunch. Clever. But weird. Take this, for example:

Brilliant? You betcha. But damned creepy. I'd even go so far as to say the Portal 2 version of "This is Halloween" (changed to "This is Aperture") is infinitely creepier and more relevant than ever. After all: what's more terrifying than a collective of singing evil robots trying to convince you that you're both safe and unsafe at the same time? Then again...there's cake...