Review – The Implausi.blog

New on the Bookshelf – April 2025

A number of titles have come in, from the usual used and remaindered sources. Let’s have a look, and capture the theme and reasons why I got them.

24/7, Jonathan Crary (2013)

We’ve mentioned this a few times before, most notably in the “Cult of No-Sleep” in Issue 7 of the Implausibility Newsletter back in February, but I didn’t have a hardcopy in hand. So when this showed up as a deal, I had to grab a copy. It’s an insightful book; we’ll do a few review here soon.

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson, (2003)

A historical non-fiction look at the Chicago World’s Fair, intertwined with the account of a serial killer during the Gilded Age. I grabbed this due to a recent mention of it somewhere (I’ll blame BlueSky), and I’m curious to how it reads, even though I’m not really enthused to read serial killer fiction. To be honest, this might site on the TBR pile for a while…

It’s Complicated, danah boyd (2014)

boyd’s work looks at the intersection of youth and online spaces, and this work is a more recent summary of the some of her earlier work, arguing that youth actually do find meaningful interactions online (contra to a lot of the doomer narratives that are presented in mass media), and are using the tools in ways that suit their needs. As the title suggests though, there’s a lot more nuance to the topic than is largely thought. Looking forward to reading this.

American Cosmic, D.W. Pasulka, (2019)

This remaindered title looked interesting, an ethnographic study with those who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, and how it is more mainstream of a belief that commonly suspected, and how media like the X-Files drives the spread and normalizes the assumptions. This ticks a lot of boxes for me, so I’m interested in checking it out.

Robot Proof, Joseph Aoun, (2018)

Written prior to the explosion in AI-related work in academia since the public introduction of ChatGPT and other LLMs, this book anticipates the coming changes to academia with the automation of education, and proposes where educators can focus their time and energy to ensure the students are prepared for what that future world looks like. I’m curious how much this overlaps with the elements of echanger we’ve already discussed.

Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, Steiff and Tamplin, eds., (2008)

A rather lengthy anthology of articles on the theme of BSG and Philosophy. (There was a bunch of [Blank] and Phil books in the early 2000s, as I guess it sold books.) With the renewed focus on agentive robots and the push towards AGI by a number of companies, this showing up in the pile for $5 had a bit of serendipity to it, and I think it’s well worth another look.

Computing and Technology Ethics, Swiatek, Burton, Goldsmith, Mattei, Siler, eds., (2023)

Created as a textbook for a college class, this looks at key questions in ethics for a computer science class, and uses excerpts from several sci-fi stories to unpack them. I got it mostly for this last reason, as we’ve done similar things with the podcast and in our academic career, though not on this specific subject. Looking forward to a full read of this.

and Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams, (2025).

When I heard that promotion of this book was being suppressed by Meta, I figured it was worth grabbing a copy in case it eventually became harder to get. A memoir about the behind-the-scenes operations of Facebook in the pre-Meta era, this ended up being a collection of anecdotes and scenes that covered the authors time at the company. I was somewhat disappointed in it, as much I didn’t find anything really “new” or revealing, and spending that much time with the background of awful people wasn’t necessarily endearing either.

As always, as we get through them we’ll share the full review or notes about them in future posts.

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-Ho, 2025)

There will be some spoilers in this review and commentary about the recent film.

Do you ever go to a theatre and see a movie with incredible potential but it doesn’t quite reach it, it doesn’t take that next step to get where it needs to be to reach that level of greatness?

That was my experience with Mickey 17 (2025), a movie I enjoyed, with a great concept and cast, and had so many things go for it, but it felt like it was holding back, and this made it a “smaller” film than it could have been, if it really wanted to take some of the ideas that it was exploring up to the next level.

The political commentary in the film was on the nose, which is remarkable given how long ago this would have likely been in pre-production* and development to nail that, but it seems almost restrained compared to current events that we’re dealing with right now (in April of 2025).

We also see continuing elements of class and social commentary that Bong Joon Ho has had in his other films like Parasite (2019) and Snowpiercer (2013), and there’s a lot of similarities with Snowpiercer in this film. They’re both deeply chilling movie in the same way, and this only is in part due to the winter environment that’s an existential threat that forces humanity in on itself. Hmmm. Probably a paper there needed to unpack all that.

However, the part where the movie hit a wall for me is with the implications of the 3D printing tech and the memory storage: it didn’t take it far enough and explore what it could actually do – it took it to a certain point and just stopped, which is unfortunate, as other movies with similar themes like Edge of Tomorrow (2014) or Westworld (1973) and Futureworld (1976) (or the 2016 HBO series) where we have that printing technology going on explored it better, and I think that speaks to some of the films limitations.

One of the ways Mickey 17 falls short is in the portrayal of the 3D-printing technology and the way it is integrated within society. The tech itself comes across as both silly and kinda dorky in the way it’s implemented, with the slow emergence like from a dot matrix printer in the 1990s to the fully-completed form. This is where Leeloo’s build in The Fifth Element (1997) or the hosts emerging from the vat in Westworld (2016) feel more fully realized. The silliness of the process works, in so far that it also highlight the somewhat bizarre way that this future society treats the implications of this tech. So many questions remain poorly answered by the film: why only one person per ship as an Expendable? Why not multiples for each role on the ship (or at least for the combat, exploration, and scout crews?) Why limit what is essentially nigh-immortality to a very limited underclass? Why would the ultra-wealthy not jump on this very tech? (Though this last point is kinda hinted at in the dream sequence in the epilogue). This silliness brings Mickey 17 more in line with other films like Prometheus (2012), and to be honest, I’ve never really enjoyed movies that kick around the idiot ball.

Some of this is answered, though not to my satisfaction, in the presentation of the Expendables and Multiples in the film. The religious proscription against having more than one, and the way they are treated. And of course, the use of the gun as the final commitment to the process (similar to dog in Kingsman (2015)) may be a bridge too far, though one that the crews of Starfleet have long since overcome. (The argument about whether the transporter kills the user or not having gone on for ages.) If one is already on the upper tier of society, would one be willing to risk it all to achieve this pseudo-immortality?

It might be too much to give up, as the process isn’t exactly perfect. We learn in the second act that there are variations in various duplicates, as they emerge from the printer. Whether this is due to the somewhat less that rigorous process of printing and downloading that occurs by the medical team – who remind one of a collection of grad students in a lab, rather than the most top-notch team out there – or due to some natural variations in the printing process is unexplained. There is a lot of difference in the repetition, and this variance might not be appealing to the ultra-wealthy that would be demanding a greater degree to fidelity in the transfers, much as was seen in the aforementioned Westworld in its later seasons.

Ultimately Mickey 17 is a love story. Despite the difference in each iteration of the various Mickeys, each one of them is loved by Nasha, who he loves in turn. Their meet cute happens early in the movie, and it’s love at first site, a love that endures through each reprinting of Mickey. His love for her is constant (and she does change and grow through the movie too – the role she plays at the end of the film is not who we see at the beginning – as is her love for him, throughout all the different foibles and flaws of the many personalities that are printed.

Though there some throughlines, some continuity in the bedrock personality, which is why Mickey 18 makes the sacrifice play late in the film, despite the wildly different personality from 17. Props to Robert Pattinson for pulling off making the same character feel different in Mickey’s varied iterations.

Final thoughts: Mickey 17 is well crafted, there isn’t any misses in the production aspects of it, though some of the satire misses due to the low-key nature of it. I want to see the Luc Besson version of Mickey 17, that takes the premise and goes all out.

*: apparently this is an adaptation**, which I had heard about going in but hadn’t checked the book out. Also, the book was published in 2022, and adapted shortly after, and was originally delayed in release from it’s original set date in 2024. So the political stuff is even more poignant, or perhaps sadly, more eternal.

**: also, in looking at the wiki after writing the above, the short story was also an exploration of the Star Trek teleporter paradox, so… hmm, yeah.

Dredge (2023)

In a rare turn of events, I recently completed a video game. This happens much less often than one would think (and not counting the recent Half-Life playthroughs I mentioned a little while ago). This is partly due to time, and perhaps partly due to engagement, as the pacing of many games, once the “gameplay loop” is firmly established is some combination of slow, boring, or frustrating.

But there’s something zen-like about a good fishing game. Enter Dredge (2023):

This is a boat-based fishing game with a dark plot, where you start off with a simple boat, not a lot of memories, and a fishing village with more going on behind the scenes. The gameplay is relatively simple: sail boat, spot fish, get fish, sail back, sell fish, try not to lose your mind.

This is the dark twist behind the game: a lot of the fish are Weird, and the locals too, and the various setting elements would seem right at home in an expansion for the Arkham Horror board game. As you continue fishing to fill your hold with the various species for cash money, more and more of them start turning up wrong.

And as they get weirder and weirder, and you progress through more of the zones of the game, the story builds up as well. I really liked the different places to fish, the relative ease of following along the main storyline, and how I was able to complete the main arc of the story at about the same time as I had gotten (most) of the unlocks. It never felt too grindy, and if there was a grind, well, I was just doing some more fishing.

I guess the lesson here might be that it’s not a grind if it’s a grind that you like.

Anyhoo, the game never outstayed it’s welcome, and progress was enough to make me feel like I was moving forward, even when I was a little bit stuck. I finished it, and went back for the alternate endings, and enjoyed how they got to the finish. Bravo!

Recommended to check out if you see it on a sale. I got it off Epic, and enjoyed it a lot.