Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (5 page)

Strike Suit Zero
: Director’s Cut

The Other Mecha Space Combat Simulator on Xbox One

Xbox One owners ought to be able to use their hardware
 for more than just its Blu-ray capabilities and video streaming apps like Twitch and Netflix. It’s been more than seven months since the system’s launch, yet outside of titles like 
Titanfall
 and 
Battlefield 4
—arguably two of the best current-gen multiplayer experiences available, granted—and the near-faultless remake 
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
, the console seems to lack the considerable games catalog that made its predecessor such a success.

Part of that void, made ever larger given the 360’s continued claim to what Microsoft calls its Xbox Live Arcade, can be chalked up to the lack of small, independent games available for the Xbox One (unless you’re a big fan of
 
Peggle
—then rejoice in the coming of
Peggle 2
!).

There is one shining ray of light in all that wasted potential, however, and that is the crowd-funded
 Kickstarter success 
Strike Suit Zero: Director’s Cut
. Having raised over $170,000.00, the developers at Born Ready Games brought aboard a team of artists, designers, musicians, and a composer—most of them from acclaimed projects like
Homeworld
, 
Appleseed: Ex Machina
, and 
Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino
—to bring their vision to life. The marketing folks behind the game inform us, “This Is Space Combat Reborn,” and for the most part they don’t disappoint. 
Strike Suit
 gets off to a slow start with a tutorial mission that features a non-mecha player object, but once the story and transformation game mechanics kick in at the start of the second level everything comes together quite nicely.

The game’s physics feel real even as the graphics and other production values are highly stylized; it takes its inspiration from properties like
 
Robotech: The Macross Saga
 and
Gundam Wing
 unabashedly, and the result is pretty incredible, far as this mecha fanatic is concerned. Most importantly, the game manages to be quite graceful about spaceflight. Because 
up
 and 
down
 are relative in zero-g, you never feel the need to worry about what direction you should be facing, or whether you have to come toward an objective from a particular angle.

Strike Suit
 lets you focus on what matters: taking out enemy ships. And enemies pose a real threat—they’re not the slow-moving slouches common among so many classic arcade shooters and modern FPS titles. If you don’t reach nav points in a timely manner and take out oncoming bogeys, your allies will perish and so will you.

Occasionally, the sound mix makes voiceovers difficult to hear and therefore objectives become unclear, or the story feels a touch rudimentary—but the voiceover
 
performances
, the design work, and soundtrack are endlessly compelling. If the game’s imperfect or lacks innovation, this does nothing to diminish the sheer replayability and “cool factor” that pervade it once you advance past the opening tutorial. In truth, I find it to be nearly as fun as 
Titanfall
. Something both games have in common is a passion for the familiar: Neither game strives to unveil some grandiose piece of worldbuilding that its audience has never seen before—they just try to give the player a fun experience, some interesting if forgettable characters, and the nostalgia that one can’t help but feel in the presence of classic-style “mobile suits.”

A new indie-publishing platform for Xbox One, billed as ID@Xbox,
 
has
 been announced, but at the moment pickings appear rather slim. This particular game is a nice change of pace, for one—and 
Max: The Curse of Brotherhood
 appears to be worth checking out in the near future—but I can’t help but lament the lack of selection. Meantime, it seems we’ll just have to make do with fun but mindless games like 
Titanfall
 and 
Strike Suit Zero: Director’s Cut
 until Bungie’s MMO role-playing shooter 
Destiny
 rolls out in September.

Karmic Demons and the Power of Compassion

Buddhist Philosophy as a Basis for Modern Myth

I would put forward that the next thing is going to be a story, because right now, people really don’t have a big story, a big software. . . . They don’t have a big meta-narrative story; they don’t have a big story like Christianity was a big story. So right now, we need a really big story. And that story doesn’t have to be in conflict or in reaction to the current story, because I would say, right now, you don’t change anything by protesting anything. . . . You give people a more effective way of living their lives, they won’t give a shit about foreign oil, you know? You give them the right story, and you make their cars obsolete, it’s gonna be like, “We are just swimming in oil. What are we going to do with all this oil?” And you can do that within the culture without reacting to the government, the war, whatever. Because in a way, by reacting to it, you’re wasting energy. You are making it stronger by giving it this token little resistance, keeping it in place. So your job, I would say, is to come up with a story like that, that makes all of the things we worry about so much right now completely beside the point. We won’t even think about them, because your story will be so incredible. I don’t know what that story is, but that’s why . . . if I can make my case, somebody’s gonna come up with that story.

—Chuck Palahniuk, 
Postcards from the Future

Palahniuk’s words are inspiring because, as readers and storytellers, we would like to imagine that our most beloved fiction could somehow transcend its obligations to be merely entertaining and truthful; that a story could have such profound ideas, and be told in such a monumental way, that we could feel its impact throughout global society in the form of positive change. Embedded in Palahniuk’s lecture is the notion that whatever the earth-shattering myth of tomorrow proves to be, it will have to resemble in no way the current model for human life. It will have to be recognizable right away as something wholly new, that both challenges the current sociopolitical system and calls readers to action—compels them to live as few or none have lived before.

David R. Loy and Linda Goodhew, authors of 
The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy
, argue that “Traditionally the most important [stories] have been religious. According to the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, religion is the metaphysics of the masses, but it is just as true to label philosophy the religion of intellectuals” (2), and also note that within the context of religious teachings, “it is chiefly the 
stories
 that we find meaningful, because stories speak to us and move us in ways that concepts do not” (2). In other words, Palahniuk’s argument makes sense because for most of us, raw ideas in dogmatic form have little or no appeal, whereas a narrative gives readers a blueprint for living their own lives. Stories give us a means by which to understand ourselves and the world.

One criticism that many have toward a lot of commercially successful fiction being published today is, despite the obvious resonance and rapport between author and reader, far too often the ideas and morality presented by the work are, frankly, too
comfortable
. Too safe. They tend to reinforce, rather than challenge, the status quo.

Books that confront the ills of modern civilization, that expose tyranny and dispel its illusions, have always been the ones to endure through the ages:
 
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, 
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, 
Brave New World
, 
Fahrenheit 451
,
Moby Dick
, 
The Catcher in the Rye
, 
1984
, 
The Diary of Anne Frank
, 
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
Of Mice and Men
. These sorts of books outlive their authors precisely because of the authors’ desire for subversion.

So what would be the most controversial philosophy to put forth in contemporary fiction? What could possibly have the kind of effect on today’s consumer-driven, individualistic world that those novels had in their own time? Well, how about a philosophy that claims the physical, observable world is empty and impermanent; that says we have no essences or souls, and can therefore not be seen as
 
individuals
 in any important sense; and that says our only hope for salvation, for 
enlightenment
, is to free the mind of our worldly desires and attachments—to let go of our possessions and loved ones for the sake of purifying our consciousness?

On the surface, Buddhism sounds more radical than almost any other system of belief, in stark contrast to notions of egoism and the individual put forth by works like Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
 and Cormac McCarthy’s 
The Road
, but within Buddhist thought are some of the most powerful and resonant truths on Earth. Glimpses of ideas like selflessness, compassion, karma, and nonviolence can even be found in countless works of Western literature, in fact. As Loy and Goodhew point out, while Buddhism may not be the primary source of truth in most contemporary English-language novels and short stories, “it makes their Buddhist resonances all the more interesting and important” (7).

One exception would be Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story “Pocketful of Dharma,” a gritty post-cyberpunk work set in Chengdu, China, whose title explicitly denotes the teachings of the Buddha. In this story, a desperate beggar-boy stumbles into possession of a “blue datacube” (6) that is eventually found to contain the computerized consciousness of the Dalai Lama. After witnessing the murder of a foreigner by a Tibetan criminal, the beggar, Wang Jun, is asked to deliver the victim’s datacube to “the Renmin Lu bridge across the Bing Jiang” (6) in exchange for the pair of light amplification glasses the dead man had been wearing.

With money in his pocket for what seems to be the very first time, Jun stops at a street restaurant and orders “
Mapo dofu
, 
yu xiang
 pork, two
liang
 of rice and 
Wu Xing
 beer” (9). Soon after, the cube’s buyer shows up and demands that Jun give it to him. Wang Jun hesitates, and the foreigner threatens to harm him. Jun reaches for something silver he spies in the buyer’s pocket, and pulls out the Tibetan’s severed finger, “its tarnished silver and turquoise ring still on it” (10), and, deciding that the foreigner is likely to make good on his threat, shoves “a handful of scalding 
dofu
 . . . full of hot chilies and peppercorns” (11) into the man’s eyes.

Free to do what he pleases with the cube, Jun takes it to a black-market salesmen called Three-Fingers to find out what it contains. After Three-Fingers attaches the datacube to an appropriate adapter cord, the computer speakers boom with the voice of “Naed Delhi, the nineteenth Dalai Lama” (14). The story then transitions from a primarily socioeconomic journey to an examination of the nature of identity. The Dalai Lama’s voice proclaims, “I am not software. I am the Dalai Lama of the Yellow Hat sect. The nineteenth to be reincarnated as such” (14), adding that he is skeptical of his situation: “How do you know I am in a computer?” (15). He describes this bizarre new existence as “Terrible and still” (15), and explains that “I don’t remember anything until now. But it is very still here. Deathly still. I can hear you, but cannot feel anything. There is nothing here. I fear that I am not here. It is maddening. All of my senses are lost. I want out of this computer. Help me. Take me back to my body” (16).

Wang Jun is then confronted by a woman in white gloves, who he quickly realizes was the intended recipient of the cube—the man at the restaurant had apparently intercepted the information that Jun was to deliver it to “the person who wears white gloves” (6). Her “foreign companion” explains that the Dalai Lama’s body is no longer viable, as “either the Chinese or the Europeans blew his head full of holes” (20). As a hostage, however, he is no longer deemed to have bargaining power, as intended by his enemies. The woman’s companion explains that “The Tibetans want us to destroy him. Keep whining about how his soul won’t be reborn if we don’t destroy it” (20). When she suggests that they map the Dalai Lama’s consciousness—his stolen “identity matrix” (16)—onto a new body, her companion replies that he will no longer be recognizable, and will no longer have a following (20).

The irony here, of course, is that identity is rendered meaningless, or at least trivial, through the theoretical technology of a cerebral-upload procedure. By removing the Dalai Lama’s consciousness from the physical form of the brain, an
 
empty
 and 
transient
organ of the body, the Dalai Lama ceases to exist for those around him, even as he speaks from a place of being, with sound memories and the ability to articulate his experience. In this way, the story confirms the Buddhist belief in “No-Self,” which Mitchell describes as “the Buddha’s view that the belief in a permanent substantial self is not only false, but also leads to selfishness and egoism . . . the absence of [which] leads to selfless loving kindness and compassion for others” (37). So in this story, at least, even the supreme wisdom of the Dalai Lama is corrupted by the human notion of a self-concept.

In another short story, titled “Beyond Lies the Wub,” Philip K. Dick uses parapsychology and metaphysics to describe a very different speculation on the nature of identity and karma. In this work of science fiction, a starship captain named Franco is in the middle of preparing for takeoff when one of his crewmen, Peterson, brings to the gangplank a “wub . . . sagging, its great body settling slowly. It was sitting down, its eyes half shut. A flew flies buzzed about its flank, and it switched its tail” (28).

Captain Franco asks what the creature is, and Peterson replies, “it’s a pig. The natives call it a wub” (28). After their departure from Mars, Franco is discussing how best to cook and prepare the creature; and then the wub speaks: “Really, Captain . . . I suggest we talk of other matters” (29). Astounded, Franco examines the creature, and says, “I wonder if there’s a native inside it . . . Maybe we should open it up and have a look” (29).

After the captain calls the wub into his office for questioning, the creature describes its diet and survival mechanisms: “Plants. Vegetables. We can eat almost anything. We’re very catholic. Tolerant, eclectic, catholic. We live and let live. That’s how we’ve gotten along” (30). Having revealed its seemingly Buddhist inclination toward compassion and nonviolence, the wub goes on to ask “how can any lasting contact be established between your people and mine if you resort to such barbaric attitudes?” (30), perhaps implying that vegetarianism, or even veganism, is the necessary first step for humanity to take if it is to have an ethical, harmonic relationship with animals and the whole of the universe. A more conservative reading, however, might be that the wub’s intellect qualifies it as a sentient being to be privileged above the realm of the animal; but other short fiction of Dick’s, such as the stories “Roog” and “Fair Game,” both of which affirm his regard for humankind as being equal to animals, serves as evidence to the contrary.

Unconvinced of the wub’s relevance to Buddhist thought? This is a question worth asking, but the creature’s intellectual leanings reveal much more of its nature than can be inferred from its grotesque appearance: “Eat me? Rather you should discuss questions with me, philosophy, the arts” (30), it says, before delving into an examination of Jungian archetypes in human myth. It explains, “I find in your Odysseus a figure common to the mythology of most self-conscious races. As I interpret it, Odysseus wanders as an individual aware of himself as such. This is the idea of separation, of separation from family and country. The process of individuation” (31). After much deliberation, the captain eventually decides to kill the creature by shooting it in the head. Later, as the crew is feasting on the wub, Captain Franco—the “only one who appeared to be enjoying himself” (33)—comforts Peterson by saying, “It is only organic matter, now . . . The life essence is gone” (33). Peterson realizes that the wub’s consciousness has seized the captain’s physical body when the man says, “As I was saying before I was interrupted, the role of Odysseus in the myths . . .” (33), and the reader learns that identity in Dick’s universe is like the state of being described by the Buddha himself.

Mitchell writes that “The Buddha always affirmed that persons have an empirical selfhood constituted by a body and a mind” (37)—two entirely separate concepts, then, that intersect in complex ways to comprise a living creature. So whereas Bacigalupi’s story describes consciousness as being a very real existence from the sense-experience perspective of the individual, but rendered irrelevant in the context of a society that cannot be certain of that consciousness’s identity, Dick’s “wub” illustrates the manner in which we experience the state of being. To qualify an individual’s distinct identity, especially in fiction and other types of stories dealing with these kinds of issues, we often use the deductive reasoning of exclusive knowledge. We ask the questions which only a given individual would be able to answer. When the wub speaks of Odysseus, we gain an understanding of the creature’s mind, of its distinctive selfhood; when more discussion of the myth is spoken from the captain’s mouth, we recognize that Captain Franco has ceased to exist, despite that his body endures. We also recognize that the wub yet lives, despite that its brain was destroyed and its physical form is being eaten by the starship’s crew. But because there is no definitive methodology for what constitutes identity, we must conclude that the Buddhist doctrine of “No-Self” is generally truthful; and the wub’s physical destruction for the sake of others’ sustenance proves the Buddha’s assertion that “the belief in a permanent substantial self . . . leads to selfishness and egoism” (37).