Every little thing that is discovered. Name's Morbid, 37NB || The Antihero. Currently boiling in the Blood Ocean. I write sometimes and I'm mediocre at it.
Please read classic science-fiction. Like, I am begging you on my hands and knees to read classic science-fiction. There is so much literary value in books that ask “what if?”
Here’s a curated list (according to me):
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969. Genly Ai is a human diplomat sent to Gethen to convince them to join an alliance. He has to navigate the “foreignness” of the planet’s inhabitants being genderless and getting caught up in their own political turmoil. 10/10 no notes. Won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Preserved in The Library of Congress. An exploration of gender, identity, society, politics, and most importantly, empathy for other. Genuinely think this book would go crazy on tumblr, please read it.
“Tell them at Shath that I take back my name and my shadow.”
Dune - Frank Herbert, 1965. Paul Atreides can see the future and carries the extreme burden of his ancestry. He finds himself in a position in which he can manufacture an ideal future for the greater good, but he will have to commit to huge sacrifices to achieve it. Also won both the Hugo and the Nebula. If you saw the movies, you have maybe grasped half of what makes Dune ideal science fiction. There’s six official novels in the series, but you literally only have to read the first one to experience the full onslaught of Herbert’s ideas. He combines religion, philosophy, universal consciousness, humanism, politics, and ecology all together into something entirely unique.
“Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Hyperion - Dan Simmons, 1989. Seven pilgrims share their stories with each other as they travel to the planet Hyperion, to look for answers to the heavy and terrible riddles they bring with them. A mysterious being on the planet is rumored to be able to grant wishes. Won the Hugo Award. What if the Canterbury Tales were set in distant space? There are four novels and several short stories in The Hyperion Cantos, but I recommend sticking to the first two. Simmons tackles heavy topics like the passage of time, the loss of memory, and mortality.
“….loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave.”
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler, 1993. Lauren Olamina can literally feel the pain of others. As she travels through the post-apocalyptic US, she develops a new religion that preaches change and spreading the seeds of the Earth by traveling to and inhabiting other planets. Butler’s original novel was a finalist for the Nebula Award, but the graphic novel version (2020) did win the Hugo. This book can often be found on Banned Books lists due to the way it tackles racism, social inequality, political extremism, and environmentalism.
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.”
Foundation - Isaac Asimov, 1951. The Foundation is an organization established to preserve knowledge through a foreseen Dark Age predicted to occur when the Galactic Empire collapses. The members of the association use ‘psychohistory’, the science of predicting future historical developments to make decisions through centuries of political and social turmoil. Asimov is one of the Big Three of Science Fiction for a reason. The Foundation novels span thousands of years and cover the efforts of the organization to survive societal collapse, pass down knowledge, and bridge the gap between individual actions and pre-determined results. There’s also a pretty decent adaptation on Apple TV too!
“I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.”
Other, worthy classic sci-fi novels:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick, 1968. The inspiration behind Blade Runner, but also majorly influential to the Matrix and Ghost in the Shell.
Neuromancer - William Gibson, 1984. The father of the cyberpunk genre.
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury, 1950. A collection of short stories that popularized the ‘human colonies on other planets’ trope.
One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.
there is just. so much that i absolutely ADORE about this specific sequence in iron lung. we literally watch simon’s survival instincts happen in real time while he navigates himself out of the cave. something about him being able to get out entirely on his own by using this hand-made map and the camera to capture key areas in the cave that give him geographical clues as to where he’s going, what direction he’s facing, and where exactly he is within the cave, is SO COOL. not only is it REALLY sick to watch the gears turn in his head but we also gain an insane amount of respect for him because what he’s doing is incredibly impressive and admirable. it proves that he is anything but incompetent. he uses the scarcity of his resources for his own benefit, purely out of the desire to survive. we learn so much about him from just that alone. hes self-sufficient. he learns by doing. hes not stupid.
also, from a filmmaking perspective, the scene plays out so smoothly and its so terrifying and cool as FUCK and i LOVE IT. were watching him do this repetitive task of going back and forth from the camera, to the map, to the driving console (?). it ushers us into this false sense of security, and we as the audience go, “oh, wow, he’s got this.” watching simon put the pen in his mouth tells us that he’s in deep focus, that he’s concentrated, and therefore we put our faith in the thought of him escaping, since he seems to actually be succeeding for the first time in the story. then, we see the shot from the ground, while the flashing of the camera occurs just out of frame, and the dropping of the pen (pastel, crayon, charcoal, idk) immediately serves as a threatening image. right away, without even seeing simon or the camera, we know that simon has witnessed something so clearly bizarre that it broke him out of his focused mindset, and his jaw has dropped. it makes the from-afar reveal of both simon and the image of the eel all the more frightening and effective, because we’re right there with simon the whole time. we don’t see it coming, just like he doesn’t see it coming. it is so sudden, and the tension has racked up all over again, almost effortlessly, in just a few seconds. this is our first official time seeing the eel face-to-face, and its just such a masterfully done and eerie reveal. we get no time to prepare for it and it really solidifies that he isn’t alone down here. he never was.
If I had a nickel for every fandom I'm in that uses lungs emoji as a legitimate react, I'd have two nickels - which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
It just dawned upon me... [Ava/Fish Iron Lung Spoilers]
Major plot spoilers and theory below, thread with caution.
= = =
In the beginning of the movie when Simon encounters a "skeleton" that's not marked on the map - he notifies the tow ship right away, and Ava confirms several times if that was _definitely a skeleton_ he saw. Since he's unaware he's using an x-ray camera he just retorts and then immediately gets yoinked back to the hangar and gets an grabby-stabby upgrade. We can hear Ava talking to David how they don't have time to top up his oxygen because the circumstances might change (= the "skeleton" might move away).
With Elli the Eel Fish Monster pictures out, we now know she's made out of human body parts, presumably the SM-8 crew among then. From Simon's first encounter with Elli, the monster assumes the SM-13 carries Ava. I also noticed how the monster is literally begging, pleading "to be rescued", promising "to work together this time" but the moment Simon says "oh, you're also stuck down there", it takes a second to re-calibrate and adjust it's emotional assault tailored to Simon instead, manipulating him into helping her to get to the coordinates - Elli can't get there on her own, but Simon can. I'm also willing to bet my money the monster does not differentiate between Simon's and Ava's thoughts/voices, they're all just 'humans' to her.
Conversation between Elli and Simon implies Ava would have been accompanying the SM-8 on a different hemorover (might as well have been the SM-13 as per my previous theory) when something bad happens and Ava escapes with a gnarly scar (presumably), leaving the SM-8 behind to meet its grim fate and maybe become (part of) the Monster after encountering the Indifferent God.
So what Ava truly wants from Simon, is a tissue sample, not a bone, to see if the monster is really made of human flesh. And I guess she gets this confirmation while Simon is briefly offline, as when he comes back within the radio reach she refuses to pick him up at the cost of "we have orders" and "there is nothing we haven't already seen with our own eyes", but he manages to bargain for his life with a promise of recovering the SM-8 data. Which suddenly Ava is willing to sacrifice her life for. COI no longer have the means to make another high-tech sub such as the SM-8 was, and securing that black box means the research and the lives it cost didn't go to waste.
This is so important and even miraculous to Ava that she makes a very uncharacteristically reckless decision that costs the captain her life, but the reward makes it all worth it. She jumps into the SM-14 ("get 14 prepped, get Jack for one last weld, hold him if he can't stand").
Except Elli the Fish is so so so vengeful. The moment she realizes that Ava is within her reach, she crushes the SM-14 right in front of Simon, taunting him into destroying the data. The moment Ava understands the trap she got herself in, she uses her last seconds to beg Simon to see how this is bigger than both of them (and Simon just proceeds to cry how miserable he felt, the difference in their dispositions was just pure comedy). I was wondering why blood tendrils kept the camera button jammed - now I understand, it wanted Simon to _see_, see how truly powerless humans are in the blood.
The monster keeps manipulating Simon into destroying the black box and surrendering, and I just couldn't help but notice how the moment the Monster rags on Simon's mom for raising a killer and teaching him nothing but death, it's like a switch drops in him and he puts everything he has left into securing the black box, even using the knife sheath (I'm still not 100% what it is, but that's the consensus) strap to secure it to the life jacket and succeeds to get it out to the surface against all odds.
I love this movie so much, I am very normal about it and everything that went into making it.
I've now seen enough people versed in radiation discuss how everyone Simon flash-banged with the industrial-grade x-ray gun are likely to die a slow terrible death. Which means Ava is aware of it, too.
Being the captain, she would have read the manual, she knows how it works. She tells Simon he "can apologise to her tumors", that brooding over it won't help the cause. Her fate is sealed, the damage is done.
Which means the last meaningful thing Ava can do, is to get the data herself or die trying. So she goes in the blood to make her untimely death mean something, she goes out fighting.
(and on a darker note) Yet she dies without ever learning that convict succeeds to salvage the black box. Ava dies facing the vengeful ghost of SM-8, alone in the dark.
While I’m endlessly excited to watch iron lung a million times once it’s in dvd and streaming, a part of me feels like I’m going to miss this period of the “in between” of the movie being only out in theaters. Cause there is a very unique situation right now where there are thousands, if not millions of people who went to watch this movie and not only loved it, but went to watch it again. And because lots of this fandom online and in person is so focused on the details (because the movie begs its audience to do so), we kept coming back for more.
I’ve seen so many people talk about bringing notes or drawing fanart in the theater just to try and get certain aspects right on costuming or certain lore details and like THATS SO COOL. We care collectively SO much that we tried our hardest to scavenge what we could and share our knowledge to the masses online. Together we pooled so much information that most people wouldn’t have been able to connect pieces for, let alone on a single watch. Sharing stories and going to the theater multiple times and the community around that is so cool in a world losing its connection with physical media. I guess what I’m saying is I’m going to miss how we banned together to figure it out, by going out and watching it over and over again in person and bringing more to the table each time, cause I’ve never seen anything like that for anything else quite in this way
Ava died not knowing if she got through to Simon, if he listened to her
She died afraid, just hoping that he would do what she asked, hoping that her life, the lives of others sent down, and Simon's life, wasn't going to be lost in vain
She spent her last breaths fighting for what she viewed as something incredibly important to humanity
And Simon DID listen, he got that box. He saved it. He kept it safe at all costs.
so i already figured that the calm voice that tells simon when he's at the sm-8 to watch out was his mother, but what i didn't catch was the "you'll love it there dialogue" as pointed out by this tweet:
i initially heard it as "here" as i thought simon and his mother moved to eden for whatever reason and she died of unspecified/unimportant causes, maybe illness or smth. but this is so much worse. and brings up so many questions? why was simon sent away? was eden already worshipping the tree or did they start worshipping it after the rapture? if they were already worshipping the tree, did she send him there with the goal of getting him indoctrinated into the cult? was it the only way for survival? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
the whole transcript of the voice, at least what i can make out currently:
they have a tree up there,
it'll feel just like home,
*sigh* simon don't be like that.
you'll love it there
and then comes the warning
simon...
its a trap
its right behind you
its still there
on your left
they're watching you
in general this whole scene has so much to unpack because of the MANY many voices going on and sound effects, trying to decipher whats a flashback and whats a hallucination, but keeping focus on his mother's dialogue
this stood out to me because i think if simon was the only one that was sent to eden, and if we are to believe the theory that the blood of at-5 is specifically the blood of the humans that got raptured.... then that means his mother has been right there with him that whole time. and maybe that's why he stays alive so much longer than he was supposed to.
also. can you imagine the survivor's guilt? of watching your mother die so far away on another planet. getting to see her final moments yet also not? only knowing that she's gone and not even knowing why or how.. and you, the butcher, survived.
and maybe that's why the creature also brought up simon's mother to him. do you think it knew she was there?
how many more bodies would you climb over to save yourself?
always thinking of the life you'll never get back,
thinking of a mother, who wouldn't even recognise the killer she spawned
or maybe she'd be proud.
is death, the only thing she taught you?
half-measures. half-committed. NEVER enough
there is nothing else for us now.
it seems to know of her existence, yet nothing about her. WOULD she be proud of the killer he'd become? she gave him the knife holster afterall. was this blood on his hands before or after moving to eden? was the holster before or after the blood on his hands? was it a means to survival which led to all this bloodshed, or was it a reward for all the killings?
also, i think it's clear that whatever she did, for whatever reason, must have been done with love in her heart, because otherwise i don't think simon woul have been that attached to her. he is a man riddled with guilt over all the lives hes taken(?), yet his biggest comfort is a weapon holster given to him by his dead mother.
this movie is driving me insane i need to gnaw on something with my bare teeth
So to my understanding, Simon was supposed to earn his freedom and place in the COI with the sub mission
Ok, so, say we're talking about "Simon lived" AUs and he completed his mission and more (black box at a heavy fucking price assuming he still sustains the serious injuries). Say the deal is honored and he's made into a member of the COI
It would not be an easy transition, not just because of Eden propaganda and the whole thing with being sent down to die in the ocean, but also i just KNOW there'd be some high school ass gossip, depite all the shit Simon's already been through.
Whispers of:
"are they really letting The Butcher join us? Can he be trusted?"
"So what? He got some data out of the ocean. Thats what he was SUPPOSED to do. He's still Eden scum. Still a murderer."
"The captain should've just let him die down there"
And so on
Some people would be openly weary of him and others outright hostile towards him. I'm sure there'd be some people who'd try to be neutral also but like
His hardship is NOT ending with the "get out of jail" card. That's just how humans are.
And I just know Simon would not be doing himself too many favors with that temper of his.
One reason I really love Iron Lung is because of how Absurdist it is without meaning to be: Searching for meaning in a world that is actively hostile to such an endeavor. The very real possibility that there is no meaning to find after all. The inherent rebellion in the act of choosing to keep pushing forward despite the fact that it would be so much easier to just succumb and give up. Deciding that, if there is no meaning to be found, then you will create your own meaning if need be. Being fundamentally changed by the horrors you have witnessed in the world. Choosing to scream in the face of oblivion. Fighting for a future you may never get to see. Not even knowing whether or not your actions had any lasting consequence of worth. Feeling trapped within the confines of your surroundings. Trying to escape that confinement over and over again despite each failure. Seeing your fellow human and noticing the robotic monotony of their actions. Do they view you the same way? Are they even human? Are all humans this alien to you now? What even is humanity? YOU CAN'T GIVE UP ON HUMANITY. Finding a seedling of hope in all the darkness and clutching onto it with everything you have for as long as you can. The cyclical nature of repeated actions and mistakes. The breakdown of communication and comprehension. The apparent "emptiness" of the narrative. The audience struggling to comprehend what they are witnessing. No easy answers. Only hard decisions. The illusion of choice. The decision to keep deciding anyway. Being trapped with someone you struggle to understand/empathize with. The suspicion of violent evolution turning into tyranny itself. The threat of something unseen being always just out of reach/sight. Never achieving your goal, but never giving up even at the end of it all. The resilience of the mind despite the collapse of the body. The breakdown of time and space. What is real and what is not? The hidden complexity within a seemingly simple concept. Choosing to believe that it's bigger than you even though you were never truly able to figure out what IT is. Fighting back against the narrative that has doomed you. You're still doomed, but you don't stop fighting. Revolt. Revolt. REVOLT.
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