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We live in a society that fetishizes military hardware. It’s on movie posters, in our games, our bestselling books. There are discussion forums full of people arguing whether this plane could outfight that one. And I totally understand this: I think it’s the same psychological engine that brings people into Pokémon, or bird watching, or sports.
Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to difficult films. From his hallucinatory feature debut PI to his metaphysical triptych fantasy THE FOUNTAIN, his cinematic worlds are often a hopeless personal struggle against overwhelming, even cosmic odds. The other theme to which he most often returns is that of all-consuming passion (be it ballet or wrestling, or—if you want to give in and get really dark—addiction).
As a lover of horror fiction, I’ve always said that fear is the strongest human emotion, but it’s not. Grief is. If you ever felt lovesick, you know what I mean. When it happened to me, I curled up on the couch literally for weeks.
What we’re looking at here is the power of the neutral position: the right to stand in for all people, to be “everyman.” From the neutral position, you can experience the whole range of human emotion and possibility, and you can communicate your experience to others. You’re the myth-maker; you create the story of the world. In implying that only white actors can do this, Handel’s saying the opposite of what he thinks he’s saying. He’s saying that the race of the individuals does matter. It matters enormously. It matters so much that Noah wound up with an all-white cast.
The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older than the word “robot”; Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of emotion. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with emotional coldness; I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to life didn’t portray them as being unemotional. I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic manner.
Scott Sigler was the first author to start podcasting novels, and built up a huge online following that led to a five-book deal with Crown Random House. Two of his books are currently in development as TV shows. His new novel, PANDEMIC, the third book in the Infected trilogy, is out now.
I began doing a series of stories set at the end of planet Earth, a kind of a slow decline, for a book called Sunfall. And the story of Paris, which is one of Europe’s oldest cities, dating back to old Lutetia, and its relationship to the Seine, and the melancholy of a lot of French literature, conjured a city enclosed, many-tiered, in which the Seine cascades as a waterfall. I then saw one lone figure standing poised for self-destruction on that brink.
My friend Pancha loves to read about plagues, natural disasters, and historical events like the Donner Party—basically, anything about extreme survival situations. We always joke that she’d be the best person to have on hand in a global-scale disaster, because she knows all the ways people can die. But she also has severe fibromyalgia. I wanted to write about a character like that surviving in a post-apocalyptic world through knowledge.
Rémi Le Capon was born in 1973 in Grenoble, France. He attended drawing school in Lyon. He works as a freelance illustrator for role playing games, other games projects, and private illustration commissions. He also works as a colorist for comics. Despite his training in classical drawing, he mostly works in digital media.
Alsiso may be out there waiting to get his/her revenge on me. Maybe I’ll be turned into a toaster oven or something. I’m fascinated by the rise and fall of mythic figures—ancestors and heroes becoming gods, gods becoming another culture’s demons, the modern mythologies around products. I don’t think our belief in magic has died…
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