Things ain't what they used to be

[undyingking]

Interesting story from Peter Watts, looking at an SF classic (short story and film) from an alternative perspective. It's not really very good writing (he said politely), but it's good SF in the sense of making you think about things slightly differently.

"That was how these empty skins moved of their own volition, why I'd found no other network to integrate. There it was: not distributed throughout the body but balled up into itself, dark and dense and encysted.  I had found the ghost in these machines."

[Poll #1507038]

Comments

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I agree, the writing's not the best - kind of purple and murky. But I love alien-perspective stories, and villain-perspective stories, and SF about consciousness, so generally WIN.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

It's pretty good, though over-wordy.

I suspect it works best if you're familiar with the original story (which I'm not)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

You can find the text here (in breach of copyright, although as the author has been dead for nearly 40 years you may consider that morally OK). Or a summary here. It's generally reckoned to be one of the greatest early-C20 SF stories, so probably to be found in a bunch of anthologies as well.

The second film sticks pretty closely to the story, if you've seen that.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The summary does help make more sense of it. I'm too bleary to do it, but you might want to add a link from Wikipedia to the alternative version story.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

No poll option suitable.

It was better than "Meh!", but nowhere near "Excellent!". Competently executed, but longer than it needed to be and repeated itself too much. Text quality didn't bother me particularly, but then I've read enough SF to have low expectations in that department!