science fiction – Pain In The Bud

The Big Cats Of ‘Exodus’ Are Badass

The new science fiction franchise consists of novels, a short film, a game due out next year, and an encyclopedic art book. It’s got a compelling narrative, deep lore and all the trappings of great SF, and best of all it has awesome big cats.

Exodus is a hugely anticipated upcoming game from the team behind the beloved Mass Effect series, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s also a 900-plus page science fiction novel, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by the outstanding novelist Peter F. Hamilton. A second book, Exodus: The Helium Sea, also authored by Hamilton, is due for release on June 16. A short film in the Amazon Prime Video series Secret Level, titled Exodus: Odyssey, further expands the fictional universe and its lore, as does an “encyclopedia” hardcover about the Exodus universe, its major factions, planets and technology.

Matthew McConaughy is enthusiastically involved, as an actor and producer. (Allright, allright, allright!)

Oh, and it has big cats!

The screenshots in this post are from Exodus: Odyssey, and depict an Awakened Jaguar.

In Exodus, certain animals are “Awakened,” meaning they’ve been genetically modified to give them cognitive and physical gifts.

In the case of big cats, it means they’re smart enough to understand human language, follow complex instructions, interact with technology, and make decisions. Big cats are companions, guards and serve as intimidating special units in the military.

The Awakened Jaguar in this scene is the companion and guardian of a planetary governor. He’s very protective of his human and immediately leaps up to growl in warning when a visitor takes an aggressive step forward.

The Awakened Jaguar leaps up as a conversation becomes intense.

Awakened animals can wear tech peripherals, weapons, armor and tools. Big cats are mostly muscle, guards, soldiers and are used to intimidate enemies, while planetary police forces use Awakened dogs and one prominent character is an Awakened octopus who occupies a tank in his own personal mech, allowing him freedom of movement outside of water.

In Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, there’s a scene depicting Awakened Lions deployed with the military. They’re considerably larger than terrestrial elephants, weighing several tons, standing three times the height of adult men. They’re terrifying to behold, which is precisely why the Celestial military has them accompany their generals as honor guards.

There are also Awakened Tigers who are bigger and much more intelligent than their Earthly counterparts, with fur that can function as active camouflage. The Awakened Tigers are described and illustrated in a companion book, which notes that while the genetically modified big cats are powerful, intimidating and extremely effective, they also have voracious appetites, scarfing down more than a hundred pounds of meat per day.

The Exodus encyclopedia shows an Awakened Tiger standing protectively over a recon soldier:

A two-page illustration of an Awakened Tiger from the Exodus Encyclopedia.

As for the story behind Exodus, I cannot say enough good things about Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.

Hamilton is known for sprawling far-future narratives that combine memorable characters with fabulous technology, vividly imagined societies and awe-inspiring discoveries in the cosmos.

Many of his novels deal with humanity’s encounters with alien civilizations, which range from the serenely benevolent (the Raiel) to the terrifyingly genocidal (MorningLightMountain) and everything in between.

Exodus departs from that template to tell a story about a conflict between regular humans and the Celestials, post-humans who have spent tens of thousands of years on a self-guided evolutionary path that has transformed them into creatures that no longer bear any resemblance to the rest of humanity.

A Celestial queen from the Crown Dominion. The Crown Dominion’s Celestials appear bizarre to us but are actually among the more “normal” looking of the Celestial factions. The most inhuman are said to be the dread Mara Yama and the Talloch-Te.

To say the Celestials consider themselves better than “baseline” humanity is a drastic understatement — Celestial societies have no qualms about breeding humans for specialized labor and roles, emphasizing traits like subservience and loyalty.

In other words, regular humans are treated the same way many in our current society treat animals, as commodities and resources to exploit.

Naturally that does not sit well with people, and the central narrative follows a rebellious group who seek to free every faction from Celestial shackles.

I’m looking forward eagerly to Exodus: The Helium Sea, the second epic novel set for release in six short weeks. I was a bit anxious that a series of novels as a tie-in to a game would be somehow not as great as Hamilton’s usual books, but I should have known the author doesn’t do anything half-assed. The first book introduced compelling mysteries and answered a lot of burning questions, but left plenty to look forward to and resolve.

And as much as I’m hyped for the story, I’m also crossing my fingers for more big cats. Maybe I can convince the creative team that their universe needs an Awakened Buddy…

“No, dude, I get the captain’s quarters! I will generously allow you to use my bed and you will continue to have the honor of being my pillow and stuff.”

Detective Buddy And The Case Of The Vanishing Yums

In the seedy underbelly of Paw City, where niplords run kitty crack empires and feral gangs fight eternal turf wars, one unshakable detective brings the bad cats to justice.

The call came in after midnight.

Shots fired near Burmese Boulevard, with witnesses reporting one party fleeing the scene in a car while another took off on foot.

Normally I’d tend to other biz and let one of the kids in the detective bureau have their shot, but the commissioner’s on my ass and the mayor is worried about what the headlines will do to the tourism economy.

Leave it to the leaders of a dump like Paw City to care more about the scratch in their pockets than the felines they’re supposed to protect.

But I’m a grizzled detective. I know where the real power naps, and it ain’t city hall.

It’s Scratcher Tower, home of the international consortium that runs Big Yums, controlling the flow of every last morsel of kibble into this forsaken city. The Fat Cats on the top floor, they call the shots, control the mayor and have their paws in every pie. If it’s biz, the Fat Cats get their cut.

The feds? They talked a big game last year when they popped Angelo Felinzino and nailed him on a racketeering charge that earned him 15 to 20 in the slammer. But the Fat Cats are a hydra, and even though Felinzino was rumored to be the consortium’s top earner, the fellas in Scratcher Tower’s penthouse didn’t miss a beat.

It was pouring by the time I pulled up near the corner of Tortoiseshell Street and Burmese Boulevard. I padded out of the warm comfort of my ride, the Budmobile, and told it to watch my back. The Budmobile’s AI chimed in acknowledgement and miniature silos opened on each rear quarter panel, ejecting a pair of drones. One drone circled above me in a defensive posture while the other zoomed ahead, scouting my path.

I tasted wet rain and something else. My nose wrinkled, pulling me toward a funky scent. I crouched, sniffing the sidewalk, and that’s when I saw them: crumbs made soggy by the downpour, their addictive chemicals turning a shade of toxic lime as they interacted with the acid rain.

A Temphead had been here not long ago.

Tempheads are dangerous. They’ll do anything to get their fix, even if it means stealing from littermates or breaking into homes to raid the treat cupboards.

No Temphead was going to catch me off guard, I thought as I placed a paw on my holster and felt the reassuring grip of Thunderclaw. The old revolver was reliable and had legitimate stopping power. The sight of it alone was often enough to get bad guys to back down.

Lightning cracked the sky as I followed the crumbs down Burmese Boulevard, under the old wrought iron bridge and into a back alley.

I paused and sniffed. The Temphead had lingered here at the door to a shady-looking ripperdoc clinic, probably trying to get them to buzz him in. The ripperdoc was smart, didn’t want anyone bringing heat down on his clinic, so he turned the Temphead away.

My keen sense of smell and my detective’s intuition told me the Temphead quickly moved on, and sure enough, there were more crumbs ahead, where the alley made a sharp right turn toward a cross street.

I padded ahead, nose leading the way, and looked up.

The Bradbury Building.

Once a symbol of commerce in the city’s gilded age, now a dilapidated microcosm of Paw City, its former glory obscured beneath decades of grime and decay.

Patting Thunderclaw again for reassurance, I pushed against the heavy bronze doors and into the gloom inside.

My ears prickled in the funereal silence, and my whiskers felt movement in the air currents. There!

A shadowy figure was heading for one of the exits.

Justice is my job, and what kind of cat would I be if I didn’t have the swiftness of a cheetah and the bravery of a tiger?

I leaped the railing, landing gracefully on my feet as I always do, and followed the shadow through the door. The rain was coming down hard, battering my trenchcoat and cap.

Where’d that cat go?

He was clever, I’ll give him that. Lightning lit the alley, and he used the crackle of thunder to mask the sound of his feet splashing through the puddles before he leaped.

I never even saw it coming. It’s been a long time since anyone’s gotten the jump on me. Maybe I was too confident. The attacker barreled into me, knocking me off my feet, and was already propelling himself up a nearby fire escape as I landed in a puddle of rain water.

Thunderclaw was torn from my grip with the impact and went skidding across the concrete.

The Budmobile’s follow drone chose that moment to reappear, making a lazy loop around the alley before stopping to hover in front of me, its ventral nozzles firing whispers of propellant to keep it stabilized.

“Oh dear,” the drone said, “you seem to have fallen, sir. Shall I bring the car around?”

“This,” I told myself, “is undignified.”

The drone chimed.

“Is that a yes, sir?”

I resisted the urge to paw smack the useless machine.

“Yes! Call the Budmobile to the end of the alley.”

I might have been Paw City’s greatest detective, but I wasn’t going to catch criminals with my clothes and fur all wet, smelling like a dirty mutt.

I retrieved Thunderclaw from the ground, slipping the trusty revolver back into its holster.

That’s when I saw it — a scrap of torn clothing on the end of the fire escape, black as night. Black like the absence of light.

I ran a paw pad over the material, feeling its familiar weave and texture. There was only one shop in this section of Paw City that sold zero albedo clothing. Could the Shadow Void be back to stalk the seedy underbelly of Paw City once again? I put him in the slammer once. Now I may have to do it again.

I climbed back into the Budmobile, grateful for the blast of heat from its dash. It was time to pay Tommy the Tailor a visit…

Check back for the next episode of Detective Buddy: Feline Noir!

UK Man Pays $22k To Have Cat Cryogenically Frozen, Hoping To Revive Her In The Future

Using a technology most commonly associated with science fiction, the UK man is banking on a technologically gleaming future where he and his cat can be revived and meet again.

A man in the UK has spent a small fortune on the possibility of reviving his dead cat.

Mark McAuliffe says he was so upset when his 23-year-old cat’s health began to fail that he made arrangements with a Swiss firm to preserve her body when she passed away.

The 38-year-old adopted Bonny, a domestic shorthair, while he was a teenager, and she’s been with him for more than half his life, including his entire adulthood.

Usually when stories like this make the news, they’re about people who preserve their cat or dog’s DNA for cloning.

That’s not what’s happening here.

Bonny has been placed in a cryopreservation unit, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her entire body. Freezing a body essentially suspends it in time. Extremely cold temperatures — as close to absolute zero as possible — suspend cellular activity, including decay.

It’s called cryopreservation, and while the concept is most frequently invoked in science fiction, putting a body into cryostasis is real and within the technological capabilities of modern science.

The company McAuliffe paid to preserve his cat is Switzerland-based Tomorrow Bio, which is affiliated with the European Biostasis Foundation. The technology is used for several other purposes in the medical field, the food industry and in certain engineering applications.

McAuliffe is gambling on the future, or a version of it in which people and animals can be revived and repaired, like Lazarus in a lab. But it wouldn’t be much of a future for Bonny if her human wasn’t with her, so McAuliffe has reserved a spot for himself as well, hoping to meet her in better times.

“This cushioned the blow about Bonny’s death,” he said, “because I have got it in the back of my mind that it is not going to be the final goodbye.”

Employees of Tomorrow Bio inspect a liquid nitrogen pod. Credit: Tomorrow Bio

The European Biostasis Foundation runs the cryovaults where clients are kept. The organization told the Daily Mail that it has five “full body patients,” 15 preserved brains, two dogs and eight cats. In addition, more than 700 people have made arrangements to have their own bodies frozen upon death.

There is, of course, a hiccup.

While freezing a body is possible, thawing is not — not without destroying the body.

That’s because ice crystals form and rupture cell walls when the body is brought out of cryopreservation, no matter how slow the process.

The workaround involves using cryoprotectants, essentially a form of anti-freeze that would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals despite the temperature.

That, however, introduces an entirely new set of problems, including the fact that cryoprotectant is toxic at the levels required for preservation.

Preserving the brain presents an entirely different set of problems, as our neurons and neural pathways begin to decay immediately after death. Our brain topology and neural connections are part of who we are, part of what makes our minds uniquely our own. Neuroscience and cryostasis technology each have a long way to go before scientists can even attempt to thaw a brain.

So by spending almost $22,000 to preserve Bony, and buying a plan to preserve himself (at a cost of $230,000), McAuliffe is banking on major breakthroughs in biology, as well as the ability to precisely control temperatures. To successfully thaw a body without destroying it, the entire body must be warmed at the same time, including all internal organs. That’s a significant technical challenge.

It’s also a gamble on the general shape of the future, placing hope that progress will continue. It assumes we won’t lapse into another dark age, that we won’t lose technology and expertise to devastating wars, plagues or other disasters that could set humanity back decades or centuries.

Finally, there’s a major hurdle that has little to do with science behind cryopreservation. It’s the simple fact that human lives are short, companies that promise centuries of operation can’t guarantee that outcome, and a lot can happen while a person sleeps away those years.

There’s a great short story by the Welsh science fiction novelist Alastair Reynolds about a wealthy man who wakes after centuries of cryosleep to find that the company who managed his crypt went bankrupt. From there it changed hands several times until it ended up in the portfolio of a corporate raider.

So the narrator, expecting to be woken to fanfare, deferential treatment and a bright technological future instead finds himself indebted and facing a reality much different and more depressing than he ever imagined.

I sympathize with McAuliffe, who obviously loves Bonny a great deal, and I see the appeal of becoming a refugee from the past, entering into a cryovault in the hope of emerging into a better future. But man, that’s a huge gamble.

In the meantime, there are plenty of cats who need homes and have a lot of love to give. Every shelter cat is a potential Buddy!

Predator: Badlands Is An Epic, Surprisingly Funny Adventure, And Even Has A Breakout Character Named Bud

Badlands is a romp through a vividly realized alien world filled with danger. It’s also a film with heart.

Hollywood pumps out so much disappointing content, especially in the age of streaming, that it’s easy to become disillusioned with movies altogether.

But every once in a while there’s a film that reminds you how much fun movies can be, hitting all the right emotional notes while taking you completely out of this world for two blissful hours.

Predator: Badlands is that kind of movie. Unexpectedly funny and poignant, it also delivers the kind of action audiences have come to expect from the Predator franchise — and then some.

The biggest change here is that, for the first time, a Yautja (the alien species we call the Predators) is the protagonist.

Njohrr is a Yautja clan leader who believes Dek is not strong enough to earn his place in the clan.

Dek isn’t just any Yautja. He’s a youngster who is horribly wronged in the opening minutes of the film and sent to Genna, a place his species calls the “death planet” because virtually every form of life there is monstrous and spectacularly lethal.

His own death is a foregone conclusion on the brutal world until he meets two unlikely allies: Thia, a damaged synthetic (android) built by the notorious Weyland-Yutani corporation, and Bud.

Bud steals the show, but I wouldn’t dream of robbing anyone of the pleasure of experiencing Bud the way writer/director Dan Trachtenberg intended, so I will say no more.

Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi play Thia and Dek, respectively. Fanning adds a human element as she and Dek team up initially for survival, then out of loyalty to each other.

Badlands has a lot of heart and a script that knows just when to slice the tension. In one quiet scene after surviving an encounter with a particularly nasty creature, Thia (an energetic Elle Fanning) raves about the experience and the excitement of accompanying Dek and Bud on a hunt.

“The Dynamic Trio! Remember when we went down the tree? That monster’s mouth? I mean… Uggh. Didn’t smell great, didn’t smell great, but we got him. We got him! Thank you, seriously, for that experience. Truly amazing. Thrilling! Truly thrilling.

“What was your favorite part?” she asks the young Yautja.

“When my sword pierced the creature’s skull and its blood ran down my face,” Dek deadpans.

Dek is not invincible, and he’s without the vast majority of his arsenal, with only his trusty heat sword to defend against the hyper-aggressive fauna of Genna.

This is Trachtenberg’s second Predator film, and Badlands exists because he proved there was life still left in the franchise with 2022’s Prey.

That movie was unfortunately streamed direct to Hulu without a theatrical release, as were several big time films that year, because of a resurgent COVID wave. (Remember the Delta variant?)

But critics and audiences, including your humble Buddesian correspondents, found a lot to like in the story of Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman living on the Great Plains in 1719. After encountering a Yautja, Naru warns her tribe that a mysterious and dangerous creature is stalking their lands, but they laugh at her and accuse her of telling tall tales — until they see the Yautja for themselves, at which point they don’t find it amusing anymore.

Midthunder was fantastic, and Prey balanced its historical setting with stunning action sequences and quiet character moments.

Amber Midthunder as Naru in 2022’s Prey.

In earlier installments, including Prey, the Yautja were always the antagonists. We knew they were a warrior culture, that they followed an honor code and possessed fantastically advanced technology, but for the most part the Yautja remained a blank slate aside from some non-canonical media (mostly novelizations, comics and games) that attempted to expand the universe.

Badlands demystifies the Yautja somewhat out of necessity, which is always a dangerous gamble (just ask the xenomorph of Alien fame, which lost its mystique half a dozen sequels ago), but significantly raises the emotional stakes.

Dek isn’t invincible. Circumstances have robbed him of most of his arsenal, he’s thrown into a perilous and unfamiliar world, and he’s haunted by the fresh memories of the tragedy that sets off the events of the film.

That makes it easy for the audience to identify with and root for Dek, despite the difficulty of conveying emotions with alien facial features. Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi deserves credit not only for imbuing Dek with physicality, but also for getting the most he can out of the Yautja youngster’s brooding body language, howls of frustration and slowly dawning realization that he can choose his own path in life.

It may take a planet teeming with horrors to make an underdog of a Yautja, but Badlands succeeds on that count.

Predator: Badlands set a record for the franchise with a $40 million opening weekend, and pulled in $184 million total at the box office. It was made available for streaming this week. With the financial success, and the positive reviews from critics and fans alike, it’s possible we’ll see Dek, Thia and Bud continue their adventures in a sequel.

Wordless Wednesday: The Retrofuturistic Rocket Cars Of Rural New York

They appear out of nowhere on a scenic route in New York’s Catskill mountains, beckoning drivers to stop and check out the rest of the wonders inside the nearby shop.

A few years ago on the way back from the Catskills, a scenic mountain belt in low-central New York, I spotted this beauty from the road and had to stop:

It’s a heavily modified, custom Dodge Magnum crafted by artist Steve Heller. The parcel of land I’d almost passed houses his shop, Fabulous Furniture On 28, one of the most unique spots you can find in the state, if not the country.

Here are a few other photos of the Cro Magnum I took that day:

Heller’s property is adorned with all sorts of retrofuturistic metallic sculptures that evoke the science fiction films and comic books of yesteryear: