The futurism Bee > The post-apocalyptic future wont beso eek Greg Waldock Staff Writer ne of the best sleeper video game hits of 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn is a post-apocalyptic dream. Societal collapse, the dangers of technological advancement, robot dinosaurs—this game has something for everyone. Its depiction of the future is at once bleak and hopeful, brutally nihilistic and oddly comforting. To fully explore its themes would mean completely spoiling the intricately-constructed story, so we're going to avoid that. Instead, we'll look at the concept, the music, and what it says about how we view the future. Two things are immediately noticeable when you start playing Horizon Zero Dawn: One, the massive robot dinosaurs, and two, the dense and sprawling environments. The core concept of the game can be summed up with a giant metal Tyrannosaurus rex walking in a quiet wintery forest. Horizon blurs the line between natural and unnatural; in fact, many in-game legends have the robots as part of the natural world, along the same line as humans and animals; robots are viewed as being simply another aspect of life on Earth. This is pure futurism—a distant future where technology is seamlessly woven into the world, and advanced mechanical constructs are as ordinary as the trees. The environments are the basis of the sometimes-jarring juxtaposition of Have an idea for a story? M arts@theotherpress.ca a robot in a forest. Lush jungles, wide woods, massive deserts, and frozen tundra feel untouched by civilization, with most traces of mankind having been wiped away centuries before the story starts. This is also pure futurism, with the return to nature after we collapse, and the idea that humanity is very temporary. While the plot does go on to argue against this point of humanity’s transience, the imagery is undeniably impacting as once-massive cities completely vanish underneath dirt and new growth. The music continues this theme of technological juxtaposition, fusing smooth synth riffs with violins and gentle, wordless singing. The result is something special: A video game soundtrack that reinforces both the atmosphere and the At war with the Earth itself > N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Broken Earth’ breaks expectations of science fantasy Caroline Ho Arts Editor T* Broken Earth is a brilliantly innovative and socially relevant recent fantasy/science fiction trilogy taking place in a world where the very Earth seems the ultimate enemy, wreaking havoc on the humans who tamper with its balance. Ina literary environment littered with countless pseudo-Medieval-Europe parallels, this series shatters conventions of the genre to grapple directly with issues of societal discrimination and indominable climate change. The first two books of the trilogy, The Fifth Season (2015) and The Obelisk Gate (2016), have won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016 and 2017 respectively— making N.K. Jemisin the first black author to win a Hugo in this category. It remains to be seen if book three, The Stone Sky, published last August, will take home the 2018 award. Although I haven't yet had the chance to read the third book myself, I’m sure it is just as captivating and chillingly pertinent to contemporary challenges as the first two. The world itself consists of a single continent called the Stillness, which is wracked once every few centuries by a catastrophic “Fifth Season,” usually spanning several years. These Fifth Seasons experience extreme climatic conditions such as incessant ashfall and acid rain that render the planet nearly uninhabitable. As the series progresses and the struggle between humanity and Father Earth becomes clearer, the parallels to our own planet’s tumultuous relationship with our environment resonates more and more deeply. The trilogy’s relevance to real-world problems goes far beyond its ecological scope. The Broken Earth also unabashedly confronts and challenges preconceptions of racism. Skin colour is not the nucleus of prejudice in this world, as the Stillness is populated by people with a diverse range of physical appearances. Instead, discrimination is levelled predominantly against people with orogeny—the power to move and manipulate the earth. Orogenes, or “roggas” as they are derisively known, are ostracized, feared, and despised for being dangerous merely as circumstances of birth, a bias that is almost uncomfortably familiar. Society in The Broken Earth also stands out from the usual fantasy fare in that the series contains characters and relationships across a range of sexualities, including a polyamorous relationship that works perfectly for the characters and the context. In addition, the trilogy includes a character who happens to be transgender, which everyone simply accepts. Yet the world also has a clear hereditary caste system, with categories such as Leadership, Strongback, and Breeder, so civilization overall contains an ingenious, thought-provoking blend of progressive and regressive. The Fifth Season follows three storylines. Essun is an orogene who has spent the last few years hiding her powers and living an ordinary village life until the day her husband kills their son and kidnaps their daughter. Syenite, an ambitious young orogene, is sent (¥ Reception for ‘past present future’ takes place this Thursday (¥ The future of television changes again (¥ Indigenous futurism And more! Promotional image for ‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’ plot with each new encounter. Just like the robots in the game world, the synth sounds exactly as natural as the singing, incorporated perfectly to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For Horizon, humans are not the greedy, destructive monsters that so much media makes us out to be. Instead, it portrays us as smart, tenacious, adaptable, and, more than anything else, a part of nature. Ultimately, Horizon works to show how distinctions between artificial and natural exist only in the imagination, and that humans, our creations, and the natural world can and do co-exist if we put a little work into it. Despite being post-apocalyptic, Horizon is optimistic about humanity and the future of the planet. with a mysterious mentor on a mission by the Fulcrum, the organization for training and regulating orogeny. Damaya is a child brought to the Fulcrum when her orogenic powers are discovered. All three stories and their powerful characters are utterly compelling, and the moment when their plotlines connect is masterfully breathtaking. The Obelisk Gate builds on the characters and the world as the season of devastation continues. The novel delves more deeply into the nature of orogeny and of the truth behind the world’s climatic instability—which, again, is poignant, cleverly constructed, and unmistakably relevant in the best, though most haunting, fashion. In basically every aspect, The Broken Earth trilogy completely crushes every trope of fantasy and questions so many of our comfortable assumptions about the world. Most powerfully, it offers a mesmerizing, terrifying vision of a world perhaps not unimaginable for our own future.