Megalopolis | review by Rafe McGregor

Self-reflexive or self-indulgent?

Like many Anglophone readers of my generation, I suppose, I first came across ‘megalopolis’ in one of the many Judge Dredd comics published in 2000 AD magazine during the 1980s. The word was used to describe Dredd’s beat, ‘Mega-City One’, a gargantuan city covering the Eastern Seaboard of North America from Miami to Quebec City. I assumed both ‘megalopolis’ and ‘mega-city’ were science fiction inventions, but the Oxford English Dictionary taught me otherwise. ‘Megalopolis’ was used as far back as 1828, as a synonym for ‘metropolis’, and is now more commonly used to describe the contiguous built-up area formed when metropolises expand into one another (beginning with Los Angeles in the 1960s). ‘Megacity’ came much later, in 1967, and identifies a metropolis with more than 5 million residents (beginning with the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation). In case anyone is interested, the biggest megacity in the world is currently Tokyo, with a population of approximately 39 million, and the biggest megacity in the US, New York, with 19 million. The setting of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is ‘New Rome’, an alternative, future New York, and the title also alludes to megalon, a material or mineral with magical properties that can regenerate and restore both cities and the people that live in them. When the narrative opens, protagonist Cesar Catalina (played by Adam Driver) has recently been awarded a Nobel Prize for his creation of megalon.

I first heard about Megalopolis long before it was released in September 2024 – not because of any especially effective marketing strategy, but because of the conditions of its conception and production. Coppola began thinking about it in the late 1970s and began work on it in the early 1980s. The original idea seems to have been something like a cinematic Ulysses (1922), James Joyce’s monumental reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey in 1904 Dublin (which is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever published and ever likely to be published). Joyce’s source material was the most celebrated story ever told in the Western canon (or the second most celebrated, if you prefer the Iliad, which most scholars don’t), but Coppola’s was a curious choice. He had already tried something similar with Apocalypse Now (1979), a magnificent reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s brilliant novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War. Megalopolis would, in contrast to both Apocalypse Now and Ulysses, reimagine a historical event, the Catilinarian conspiracy in the Roman Republic of 63 BCE, in a faintly futuristic New York. The conspiracy was an attempted coup d’état by Catilina, aimed at seizing power from consuls Cicero and Hybrida, and never passed into popular culture. (Though I consider myself an amateur historian, I had to look it up). Perhaps more problematic, where the monstrous complexity of Ulysses is to at least some extent clarified by knowledge of the Odyssey, knowledge of the historical conspiracy actually complicates the film: the fictional Catalina is called ‘Cesar’, but (Julius) Caesar (who is absent from the film) played a historical part; the attempted insurrection is by Clodio Pulcher (played by Shia LaBoeuf) whereas Clodius Pulcher opposed the coup; Hybrida and Cato have no fictional counterparts and there are several major characters without historical counterparts. Notwithstanding, Megalopolis is a reimagining, of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one of the first feature length science fiction films and one of the greatest films ever screened.

By the turn of the century, Coppola had decided he would fund his ‘passion’ (or perhaps ‘vanity’) project himself and began shooting cityscapes of New York. At the turn of the next decade, he started writing the script. Eight years later, on the day before his 80^th birthday, he announced that he’d finished the script, raised $120 million for a budget, and was ready to start interviewing actors. Filming began in 2022 and rumours of Coppola’s erratic behaviour soon spread, followed by allegations that he was under the influence of cannabis for lengthy periods, had sexually assaulted extras, and exceeded the budget by $16 million. It’s difficult to know how much of this to take seriously, but when I read about it, the whole enterprise reminded me of Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to film Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune (1965), in the 1970s. Jodorowsky’s venture was hubristic to the point of insanity, ethically dubious, and doomed to failure, although the documentary acquired both critical acclaim and a cult following. Immediately after watching Megalopolis, I discovered that Coppola commissioned director Mike Figgis to make a documentary of the making of his film, which was released this month as Megadoc (2025). I wonder if Coppola’s motivation for the documentary was vanity or finances? Probably a bit of both.

Megalopolis begins with truly masterful exposition: we are shown almost everything we need to know about what will follow in the first 12 minutes (of 133 from opening to closing credits). One is simultaneously struck by the film’s idiosyncratic yet impressive style, a unique combination of filmed theatre, tasteful CGI, breathtaking cinematography, and beautiful mise-en-scène. Very quickly, we learn that Catalina has a utopian vision for New Rome at odds with Mayor Franklyn Cicero (played by Giancarlo Esposito) and the ability to stop time, which works on everyone except for Cicero’s wayward daughter, Julia (played by Nathalie Emmanuel). The plot is briskly set in motion when Catalina’s ambitious girlfriend, television presenter Wow Platinum (played by Aubrey Plaza), realises he is still in love with his dead wife and seduces his aged uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (played by Jon Voight), the wealthiest man in New Rome. Meanwhile, Crassus’ son, Pulcher, a spoiled wastrel jealous of the success of everyone around him, is desperate to make a name for himself. The ingredients are all simmering in the pot and our appetites whetted for making a meal of what follows. Shortly over half an hour in, the stakes are established as the question of whether or not Catalina will succeed in realising his architectural and humanitarian dream and all of Cicero, Wow, Pulcher, and Catalina’s self-destructive guilt about his wife’s death framed as antagonists or obstacles. Later, Wow Crassus and Pulcher will emerge as the villains of the piece. Later still, they join forces and become an apparently unstoppable dystopian threat that raises the stakes and heightens the tension in an altogether satisfying way. So, what goes wrong?

I noted that the reimagined history was confusing. The pseudo-Roman setting constitutes part of Coppola’s distinctive style, which is pleasing on both the eye and the ear, but otherwise pointless. The same is true of the very limited advanced technology that seems to have been responsible for the film being classed as science fiction. While megalon is the means by which Catalina intends to realise his vision, that means could just as easily have been an imagined but mundane mineral or a fictional but plausible construction method. Similarly, the sole purpose of Catalina’s ability to stop time as far as the plot is concerned is to show that there is a genuine connection between him and Julia once they fall in love. If I appear overly critical of the film’s retrofuturism, the categorisation as science fiction in particular brings with it certain expectations, for example that the film will to at least some extent be about advanced technology or about the psychological or political impact (or both) of that technology. Futuristic megalon is as incidental as Catalina’s superpower and, like the Roman retrospection, serves a stylistic function, providing Coppola with the opportunity to present some (once again) aesthetically pleasing CGI. To remain with the plot a little longer, the story is very much that of Catalina’s ambition and the film a vehicle for Driver as Catalina. In that part, he either lacks the charisma or does not bring enough of it to this performance to engage and enthral the audience for the quantity and quality of his screen time. I found myself much more interested in Julia and Wow, watching the narrative as a tug of war between two powerful women with Catalina relegated to the role of the rope. As a final criticism of the plot, once all is lost for Catalina and Julia, the tables are turned by Crassus in a scene that is absolutely ridiculous. I think it’s meant to be amusing rather than dramatic, a deliberate parody of itself, but it’s neither tense nor funny and falls flat.

If Megalopolis is not about the Catilinarian conspiracy and/or its contemporary counterparts or the impact of advanced technology such as megalon, then what is it about? I mentioned Metropolis earlier and while there are several references to Lang’s masterpiece (and no doubt some that I missed), Megalopolis does not share its themes. Aside from a few superficial mentions of immigrants being unwelcome and some gratuitous police brutality, Coppola fails to offer a perspective on social justice and does not represent class conflict or even class consciousness. With politics, technology, and justice stripped away, there isn’t very much left. A theme that emerges with admirable speed in the expert exposition is some elaboration of the relationship between time and creation, the latter in the sense of artistic creativity. As the narrative progresses, a link is established with first utopian desire and then romantic love, all bound up within a temporal horizon. Early in the second half of the film, Catalina tells Julia, ‘I can’t create anything without you next to me’ and one is inevitably reminded of Coppola’s wife of six decades, Eleanor, to whom the film is dedicated and who died shortly before its release. The tyranny of time, the inspiration and perspiration of creation, dreams of a better way of life, loving as a way of living…Megalopolis is a film about itself, about the trials and tribulations of its own creation. Coppola has fictionalised his creative process from conception to production, creating an almost entirely self-reflexive epic. And while that doesn’t make it a poor film, it does mean that it doesn’t have very much to say to its audience, not much more than we could find in Megadoc anyway.

The critical response was initially described as ‘polarised’, but reviews have been largely negative, the only notable exception being Sight and Sound magazine, who placed Megalopolis 17^th on their list of the best 50 films of 2024. To me, ‘polarised’ suggests something broad in scope and rich in depth, a work of boldness and ambition that will either flop or be recognised as a work of genius but could never be mediocre. I just don’t see this kind of greatness in it. There are plenty of highlights – Coppola’s style, the slick start, Emmanuel and Plaza’s performances – but more lowlights and Megalopolis is neither a magnum opus nor a nadir. The film has 45% on the Tomatometer, which is not unfair, though I do wonder if critics would have been more generous if they didn’t know that it was the product of 50 years of work. Unfortunately for Coppola, it was also a major commercial failure, only recouping £14.3 million at the box office and costing him $75.5 million by May 2025. At the time of writing, Coppola is 86, which suggests that this is his last film. While it’s a shame to see a career end this way, we should not forget that he is the genius who brought us all three Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders (1983), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), among many others. I hope he doesn’t forget either.**

Jurassic World: Rebirth | review by Rafe McGregor

Jurassic World: Rebirth, by Gareth Edwards (Universal Pictures)

Three times three?

Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh instalment in the Jurassic Park/World franchise that was launched by Steven Spielberg twenty-two years ago (excluding animated and short films). The previous instalments can be divided into two trilogies, with the second being a continuation of the first and the fictional chronology following the years in which each film was released (as far as I can tell). I shall recap the events of the franchise so far as Jurassic World: Rebirth plunges us directly into them and may well be the first of a third trilogy that is a further continuation (rather than remake, reboot, or retcon), though it is (of course) advertised as a “standalone” story.

The premise of Jurassic Park (1993) is that dinosaurs have been de-extincted by means of cloning and a theme park (“safari park” would be more accurate for UK readers) established on a fictional island called Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica. What could possibly go wrong? Lots… and everything that could go wrong does, in consequence of which the island is abandoned by its human visitors. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) dinosaurs are discovered on the neighbouring island of Isla Sorna, which was where the original cloning was done before it was abandoned following a hurricane. (We now have two abandoned islands full of dinosaurs.) An ill-considered plan to transport a Tyrannosaurus rex to a zoo in San Diego goes wrong (who would’ve guessed) and after rampaging around the city it is returned to the island, which is declared a protected nature reserve. Jurassic Park III (2001) is essentially a rescue mission: ignoring national and international law (as they do), some rich folk undertake an illegal air safari of Isla Sorna, crash, and get bailed out by mum, dad, and some hired hands.

Jurassic World (2015) has exactly the same plot as Jurassic Park: a new multinational corporation acquires the rights to build a safari park on Isla Nublar, but have “improved” on the original by creating a new and very nasty dinosaur called an Indominus rex by means of transgenesis. What could possibly go wrong? Everything that did in the first film and this one ends in the same way, with humanity abandoning the same island for the second time. In between Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), a mercenary unit arrives on the island and succeeds in collecting an Indominus rex DNA sample (I wonder where this is going). The fifth film begins with the island about to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption and the protagonists are hired by the antagonist to launch a private rescue attempt, not realising that the relocated dinosaurs are going to be sold at an auction (those rich folk don’t get that rich by being nice). The rescued dinosaurs escape from their cages, enter the Northern California wilderness, and usher in a new era in which humans, animals, and dinosaurs are all going to have to coexist. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) has a broadly similar plot to Jurassic Park III, being in essence a rescue mission, this time rescuing the first and only cloned human child from another multinational corporation and the dinosaurs it keeps in the Dolomite Mountains. As far as the fictional world of the franchise goes, little has changed as dinosaurs are still roaming, swimming and flying around the place like any other animal, fish, or bird.

I didn’t come to Jurassic World Rebirth with any great expectations. As I mentioned in my birthday wishes to Jaws’ (1975) Bruce, the sheer number of animals slaughtered onscreen in my lifetime is wearing me down and Scarlett Johanssen’s offscreen persona hasn’t exactly endeared itself to me (as Hollywood’s highest-grossing star my news feed is unfortunately full of her). I was also surprised to see that none of the previous casts were reappearing. The protagonists of the first trilogy were palaeontologist Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) and mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum), who appeared in five of the first six films between them. The second trilogy introduced the on-and-off couple Owen Grady (played by Chris Pratt), an ethologist (aka Velociraptor-wrangler), and Claire Dearing (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a corporate slavedriver turned dinosaur activist. The protagonists of Jurassic World Rebirth are Zora Bennett (played by Johansson), a mercenary action hero, and… well, just Zora Bennett (because you don’t get to be Hollywood’s best-paid star by sharing the limelight).

Following a prelude where another mutated dinosaur (Distortus rex) wreaks havoc on another fictional island (Île Saint-Hubert, in the Atlantic Ocean) that (also) has to be abandoned, the narrative opens with the Earth’s climate threatening to return the dinosaurs to extinction, in consequence of which they have all migrated to the equatorial regions of the globe. For once, somebody has done something sensible and designated these no-travel areas. The antagonist, Martin Krebs (played by Rupert Friend) hires Bennett and her team to take DNA samples from the three largest living dinosaurs – Mosasaurus (sea), Titanosaurus (land) and Quetzalcoatlus (air) – for the purposes of making trillions of dollars from a cure for heart disease. The first indication that the film might be a pleasant surprise was that the DNA has to be retrieved from live dinosaurs and, indeed, the mercenary team very quickly loses all of its weapons, making most of the blood spilled in the story human. At the same time as Bennett, Krebs and their entourage begin their mission, an idiotic father of two, Reuben Delgado (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Netflix’s Lincoln Lawyer), is sailing his daughters and one of their boyfriends across the Atlantic in his yacht (an Atlantic swarming with literal sea monsters, I should add)… and everyone ends up on Île Saint-Hubert.

In addition to limiting the lizard slaughter, the three-part mission to acquire DNA over sea, land and air works very well, providing the narrative with a neat structure, broad scope, and organic signposting. The story also pays homage to the original Jurassic Park in at least two scenes, a Tyrannosaurus rex river chase and the final climatic battle at the abandoned laboratory complex, one of which works well and the other of which doesn’t. Segue to my only two criticisms, the opening and that climactic battle. In the former, the entire complex’s security system is destroyed by an empty Snickers wrapper. A complex that is not only containing dinosaurs, but creating nastier ones for human entertainment… I hope somebody somewhere got sued. The other let down is the Distortus rex itself. It inspires pity rather than fear and is so stupid and so slow that its survival on the island before the arrival of Bennett, Delgado and the rest seems highly unlikely. Having said that, while Jurassic Park: Rebirth may not reach the heights of the original film – perhaps even the first two films – it’s definitely as good or better than the rest. It’s also already well on the way to grossing a billion dollars so I guess we might just see Bennett back for two more instalments. ***

Borderlands and Otherworlds & Sphinxes and Obelisks | review by Rafe McGregor

Borderlands and Otherworlds by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, limited edition hardback, £45.00, 17 June 2025, ISBN 9781912586684

Sphinxes and Obelisks by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, paperback, £17.95, 12 November 2021, ISBN 9798764096322

I’ve been meaning to write a review of one of Mark Valentine’s collections of essays for some time now, but when the previous one was released, I was right in the middle of my own six-part essay, “Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between” (which you can find here, if you’re interested). That was less than a year ago and the next one is already available so I decided I’d better get on with it before I have to admit that he can write essay collections faster than I can read and review them. While ordering the recently released Borderlands and Otherworlds, I realised I’d somehow managed to miss Sphinxes and Obelisks and ordered it in paperback at the same time. This is review of both volumes.

Valentine is best known as a short story author, an editor and an essayist, but is also a biographer and poet. He has been publishing short stories and essays for more than four decades, although these have only relatively recently been collected in book form (In Violet Veils, in 1999, is – I think – the first) and more recently still (with – again, I think – The Collected Connoisseur, in 2010) made more widely available in paperback. Much, perhaps even most, of Valentine’s output has been published by Tartarus Press, a highly successful independent publisher famous for their limited edition sewn hardbacks (usually 350 and signed, if publication is not posthumous) with distinctive yellow dust wrappers and silk ribbon markers. If you are a collector as well as a reader, these are well worth the price at £45, with free postage and packaging in the UK. While I’m on the subject, Tartarus paperbacks have similar production values, but are probably overpriced at £17.95 (their Kindle editions appear to go for between £7 and £9; I prefer paper or audio books so I have no idea whether this is reasonable). Although I enjoyed Valentine’s The Collected Connoisseur, co-authored with his long term collaborator John Howard, a great deal, I have always preferred his work as an essayist and editor to his short fiction (my review of The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths, which he edited in 2008, was published in TQF24).

As an essayist, most websites list Valentine as specialising in book collecting, but his scope is much wider than that and includes undistinguished, forgotten and obscure authors from the first half of the twentieth century and before, many of whom were writers of speculative fiction. Borderlands and Otherworlds is his sixth collection of essays published by Tartarus, the first five of which are all available in paperback: Haunted By Books (2015), A Country Still All Mystery (2017), A Wild Tumultory Library (2019), Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and The Thunderstorm Collectors (2024). I’d be exaggerating if I said every essay in every collection is worth reading or that one or more of the collections shouldn’t be missed by speculative fiction fans, but I don’t regret the time or money spent on any of them. Rather than browsing their often diverse and always idiosyncratic tables of contents, I recommend watching this interview with Valentine, which gives a very good sense of the man, his interests, and even his prose style.

Sphinxes and Obelisks consists of 32 essays, 10 of which have been previously published, and a substantive introduction. It is worth noting, for both volumes, that the periodicals in which the essays previously appeared have often either ceased publishing or were privately issued, meaning that many readers are, like me, unlikely to have encountered them before and that they are simply no longer available anywhere else (both of which makes these collections all the more valuable). A summary of each essay would not only be tedious to compile, but almost certainly fail to do the collection justice and my intention is to expand Valentine’s readership, not reduce it, so I shall restrict commentary to those I enjoyed the most. The one on my shortlist that will probably appeal the most widely is “‘The Wonder Unlimited’: Hope Hodgson’s Tales of Captain Gault” (9 pages). William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) is now recognised as one of the original pioneers of the weird as a distinct genre within speculative fiction more generally and is possibly best known for his serial occult detective, Thomas Carnacki (first collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder in 1913), though he was also the author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Night Land (1912), and various tales of the sea. Valentine discusses a group of the latter, which featured the serial character Captain Gault and were some of Hodgson’s most commercially successful work, while reflecting on the curious decline of the nautical tale as a genre of its own. For me, the other highlights of the collection are: “‘Change Here for the Dark Age’: Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins” (12 pages), about a precursor to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973); “Sombre Gloom: The Macabre Thrillers of Riccardo Stephens” (8 pages), about an early mummy novel; “Cricket in Babylon”, about the (surprisingly many) varieties of what I’m going to call armchair cricket (6 pages); “Three Literary Mysteries of the 1930s” (6 pages), about three talented authors – Robert Stuart Christie, Petronella Elphinstone, and Seton Peacey – for whom almost no biographical information exists; and “Passages in the West” (8 pages), an autobiographical account of a book hunting expedition in the West Country.

Borderlands and Otherworlds also consists of 32 essays, 8 of which have been previously published. My favourites are the first and last. In the former, “Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s” (17 pages), from which the collection takes its title, Valentine discusses the uncanny fiction of Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson (1867–1940), Mary Amelia St Clair (May Sinclair, 1863-1946), Forrest Reid (1875–1947), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), Lesley Garth (who was probably Lesley West Garth: born in 1900, married to William Ball in 1927, died in 1988), and George Oliver Onions (1873–1961). This is Valentine at his most typical and at his best, unearthing hidden – or, more accurately, forgotten – treasures. I am assuming, of course, that, like me, most TQF readers will be familiar with no more than half of these authors (Benson, De la Mare, and Onions in my case, although I have yet to read Benson). The last essay, “In the Attic” (5 pages) is, as the title suggests, an (all-too-brief) rummage through Valentine’s attic, which is full of all the forgotten treasures his regular readers will expect. My other highlights are: “At the House of Magic: Mary Butts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult” (6 pages), about Mary Franeis Butts (1890–1937), a collaborator of Aleister Crowley who was praised by T.S. Eliot; “Priestess of the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune” (11 pages), about Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946), founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light; “The Last, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul” (4 pages), about a novelist who retains a cult following in spite of next to nothing being known about her life (1903–1973); and “The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell” (3 pages), about a mystery encountered during a book hunting expedition in the Welsh Marches.

So far, The Thunderstorm Collectors is my first choice of the six – I don’t recall a single essay where my attention drifted for even a moment – but Borderlands and Otherworlds is a close second. Regardless of precise preference, the same can be said of all the volumes: Valentine’s essays are simultaneously fun and fascinating, clever and chimerical, enlightening and exquisite.

Rollerball | review by Rafe McGregor

Rollerball, by Norman Jewison (20^th Century Fox) 

Another Golden Anniversary.

While Jaws turned fifty with much hype and fanfare last week, including here at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, it’s Rollerball’s turn today, albeit without the bells and whistles. I’m not sure how, but in spite of being both a science fiction and James Caan fan and familiarity with the premise, I’d never seen the film. I’ve always had a soft spot for Caan’s onscreen persona, an underrated, understated, effortless tough guy tough guy with a very distinctive style (he reminds me of John Wayne, though where Wayne is always in the Old West no matter what part he’s playing, Caan is in a big city somewhen in the nineteen seventies). Caan’s performances in all of The Godfather (1972), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Thief (1981), and Misery (1990) are inspired and Rollerball revolves entirely around him as Jonathan E(vans), the first and only superstar of the world’s most dangerous and popular game in 2018 (forty-three years in the future).

Rollerball’s screenplay was written by novelist William Harrison, who developed it from a short story called ‘Roller Ball Murder’, which was first published in Esquire in 1973. The world of 2018 is a utopia rather than dystopia, a planet of plenty where everyone literally has everything they want and nation states have been replaced by multi-national corporations that coexist in a state of avaricious harmony following a little-talked about and possibly even erased event known as the Corporate Wars. The competitiveness essential to unrestrained capitalism is, it seems, channelled into rollerball in an international tournament in which teams from various cities clash in a spectacle of bloody and vicarious violence for the players and audiences respectively. The actual game is a combination of inline speed skating and Basque pelota with a couple of motorbikes thrown in and the rules are changed regularly to make it more brutal. The top-ranked team is Houston, courtesy of Jonathan’s skill and resilience, and the inciting incident occurs when he is told to retire by the chief executive officer of the corporation running the game (if not the world), Mr Bartholomew (played by John Houseman), who is revealed as the narrative’s antagonist.

There are a couple of things that strike one immediately watching Rollerball fifty years later. First, the extent of the explicit critique of global capitalism with the gloves off. The capacity of the Hollywood film industry to make money from apparently resisting a system of which it is such an integral part never ceases to amaze me…and has been at work for a lot longer than I thought. Second, the science fiction trope of a utopia that turns out to be a dystopia as soon as the surface is scraped is becoming rather dated. It is much easier, for example, to imagine the worlds of Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Strange Days (1995), and Children of Men (2006) as or in our future than a land of plenty where we all keep ourselves busy with shopping, pill-popping, and rollerball.

Jonathan doesn’t want to retire and one is never sure why. His lavish lifestyle would not change at all, his existential exploration of the conflict between comfort and freedom is somewhat limited, and he must be nearing the end of his shelf-life anyway. The only plausible explanation is an obsession with the adoration of the bloodthirsty crowds, but even this isn’t entirely convincing. The conundrum exposes one of the two flaws in the film, which may have accounted for a critical reception that did not match its commercial success and has left it with a fair 57% on Rotten Tomatoes: Jonathan is simply not a particularly sympathetic character. (This is not one of Caan’s best performances.) The second is just as damaging. Given that the genre of the film is some mix of action, thriller, sports, etc., the representation of rollerball is really poor. The cinematography and stunts fail to convey the speed and danger of the game, which ends up looking quite camp with its players modelling their rollerskates, leather pants, and almost invisible cosmetic scars. I’ve watched ice hockey games on television that look more dangerous and there isn’t a single missing tooth in Rollerball. The film isn’t terrible, but it’s not great entertainment either.

Talking of ‘terrible’… Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan and released in 2002. Coming from the director of Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and Basic (2003), I was surprised to see the film’s impressive 3% on the Tomatometer. As if that isn’t bad enough, the Los Angeles Times also claimed it was one of the biggest commercial failures of all time. The remake starred Chris Klein, LL Cool Jay, and Jean Reno, all of whose performances I usually enjoy, but Klein was fresh from his role as a lacrosse player in American Pie (1999) and American Pie 2 (2001) so that might be the first clue to avoid it. I’m glad I watched the first Rollerball, but I won’t be wasting seventy-eight minutes of my life on the second.**

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Trickster – Rafe McGregor

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was intended to be part of a series of six novels, which was planned as Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay, but only the first two were ever published, in 1993 and 1998 respectively. The first three Parables take their titles from the three biblical parables of the same names, in the Books of Luke and Matthew, and each of the published novels concludes with a quote from the relevant Book. In The Parable of the Sower, the sower is symbolic of God and the seed of God’s message. Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of the first two Parables, creates a new religion called Earthseed and founds the first Earthseed community in Humboldt County, California. Following the discovery of extrasolar planets that sustain life in 2025, the ultimate aim of Earthseed is to ‘take root among the stars’. The Parables are referred to as Butler’s Earthseed books in order to distinguish them from her other two series and her standalone novels. In The Parable of the Talents, the monetary talents (a unit of weight used as currency) are symbolic of personal talents (God-given abilities and aptitudes), both of which are granted for the purpose of serving their respective masters. Olamina dedicates her life to the service of Earthseed, which becomes one of the most popular religions in the Americas, and launches the first starship in 2090, the final year of her life. In The Parable of the Trickster, which is better known as The Parable of the Dishonest Steward (or the Shrewd Manager), the steward’s alternating incompetence and prowess is symbolic of the inability of human beings to serve both God and money. The Earthseed settlers on the planet Bow (an abbreviation of 'Rainbow') cannot both cling to the form of life they had on Earth and thrive in the extrasolar colony.

Butler began work on Parable of the Trickster in 1989, made numerous false starts from 1999 to 2004, and continued compiling notes and drafts until her death, early in 2006. The premises, outlines, and fragments have been available in The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive since 2013 and I was lucky enough to gain access to these while researching Literary Theory and Criminology in 2022. There are several aspects of Butler’s premises, outlines, and fragments that remain fairly consistent, most of which concern the protagonist and setting of the novel. There is less consistently about the structure of the narrative, but two plotlines can be discerned as well as a third that is only sketched. Butler seemed certain that Trickster would be written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, who would be named either Imara Hope Lucas, Imara Wright Drew, or Imara Dove Holly. Imara is an African American woman who was adopted by Olamina during her teens (between 13 and 17) and is aged between 35 and 45 when the story begins. Imara is an Earthseed therapist in some versions and a sharer (suffering from the organic delusional disorder called hyper-empathy, like Olamina) in others. Some time between 2090 and 2095 she leaves Earth in an Earthseed Instar with between 4700 and 5339 colonists to realise the Earthseed destiny. Given the dates this appears to be the starship fleet led by the Christopher Columbus described at the end of Talents.

After a flight of between 107 and 137 years, during which Imara is placed in DiaPause, a method of suspended animation, she arrives on Bow, which is 11.8 light years away from Earth. Bow can support human life, with plenty of oxygen and water. The planet has no moon, is cooler than Earth, and has days that are just under 20 hours long. The ships have arrived near the equator, where it is warm, wet, and windy and the plan is to build the colony in a river valley. In most versions, Bow has no fauna beyond earthworms and microorganisms and flora that is limited to a slimy moss-like substance. The settlers immediately miss the beauty of Earth, a feeling that is exacerbated by the fact that the colours on Bow are all muted and the atmosphere smelly, varying from being merely unpleasant to smelling like vomit. Two of the three plotlines begin five years after the arrival of the humans, by which time there is a fully functioning settlement and society. The colony is divided into 50 to 60 housing groups of 30 to 100 people each, built in a protective semicircle around their crops and water supply. Each housing group has a communal gathering house at its centre, but the individual houses are inhabited by nuclear families. The aim is to develop the colony by having a new housing group split off from the parental house once a group reaches 100 inhabitants. The minimal governmental functions, including leadership by an Earthseed shaper (clergyperson) and record-keeping by an archivist, are based in a gathering hall, which serves as the community centre. The colony is multinational and multi-ethnic, with each of the colonists being selected for their skill set. By the fifth year, the colony is fully established, with the colonists living off the land. At some time in the future, after Trickster, it will break up, with some housing groups choosing to merge into a town, others developing around industrialised farms, and others adopting pre-industrial gatherer or monastic lifestyles. Once one moves beyond the protagonist and the setting, there is little consistency in the Trickster archive. Three plotlines nonetheless emerge from the notes and fragments, two of which are fairly substantial. I shall consolidate the notes and fragments to produce an account that sacrifices accuracy for coherence.

In the first, which includes a fragment of 47 pages, Imara Lucas Hope is the expedition’s archivist. She was raped by her mother’s partner at the age of 13, became pregnant with his child, was abandoned by the couple, and tried to commit suicide in an orphanage. The unborn baby died, but she survived to be adopted by Olamina. Imara and Olamina became very close as the years progressed and she was appointed ‘Guardian of the Ashes of Lauren Oya Olamina’, which are to be scattered on Bow in an Earthseed funeral on Day 2000 of the arrival of humanity. The narrative begins on that day, in medias res as the community leader, shaper Eric Parnell, appears to lose his mind when he starts shouting nonsense in his opening speech. Imara, waiting to play her part in the ceremony, has a hallucination of the thousands of colonists in the hall panicking, stampeding, and injuring one another in a race to exit. Eric is taken to the clinic and Imara realises that he, she, and the community’s dentist, Luis Huerta, have all had hallucinations. They all seek physical explanations, but none can be found and they have concerns about their sanity, worrying that they may not be able to cope with prolonged exposure to the conditions on Bow (which can support them physically, but perhaps not psychologically). Claire Lawless, Eric’s deputy, and Muir Parnell, Eric’s wife, have also been hallucinating and there is some tension between Claire and Imara. In the following chapter, Imara wakes up the next morning feeling fine, but immediately hallucinates a conversation with Olamina. Seven more people are admitted to the clinic with hallucinations during the day and Imara realises that the community’s psychiatrist, Ross Kuusi, is trying to conceal the fact that he is also hallucinating. Concerns about prolonged exposure to the planet are exacerbated when Imara works out that everyone who has been hallucinating is either part of the last transit crew or the first ground crew, the only people who were awake in the first 100 days of arrival.

In the second plotline, which has more dedicated fragments but of shorter lengths than the first, Imara Wright Drew is the expedition’s psychiatrist. The narrative opens with her awakening from her ‘coffin-sized DiaPause tank’ and gradually recovering her senses and motor control. Imara is part of the first ground crew and the reports from those who have explored Bow are negative: while it can clearly sustain human life everyone has found being on it either disconcerting, unpleasant, or both. Imara finds out that after she was put in her DiaPause tank, her husband, Powell Davidson, changed his mind and decided not to join the Earthseed expedition. She is given a letter from him apologising for his decision and realises that he is now long dead. In the following chapter, Imara begins to regain her strength and other colonists are introduced: Aaron Wen, a shaper; Nissa Swan, an anthropologist; Julian Gamero, a farmer; and others. Imara begins helping other people wake from DiaPause. Three days later, Nissa goes missing. She had previously explored Bow and claimed to have seen an indigenous species. A search party is sent out for her. They find her trail, track her, and quickly locate her corpse at the bottom of a canyon. Imara is asked to attend the scene. As soon as she goes outside she has an hallucination and it will subsequently be suggested that the hallucinations were responsible for both Nissa’s sighting of an indigenous species and her death by falling. Imara starts thinking about adapting to rather than curing the hallucinations, at least in the short term, and this is both the resolution to the plot and the core theme of the narrative.

In the third plotline, which is sketched in the barest detail, Imara Dove Holly is the expedition’s law enforcement agent, the Sheriff of Bow, selected personally by Olamina before the expedition departed. Imara is married to a farmer, Aurio Cruz. When she does not have law enforcement duties to fulfil, she assists both her husband and the colony’s archivist. Five years after the colonist’s arrival someone sets a fire outside the largest greenhouse of the Rose Housing Group, causing considerable damage. When Imara begins her investigation, she has her first hallucination and subsequently learns that many people are hallucinating frequently. There is a second fire, in consequence of which one of the colonists is killed. The ubiquity of the hallucinations make the case almost impossible to solve, but Imara eventually finds a way to make use of the hallucinations to detect the arsonist while the medical professions continue to seek a cure. Strangely, given the amount of relative detail provided, there is no suggestion of a central theme in the archivist’s plot. The strongest suggestion is in the psychiatrist plot, in which the solution to the problem of the hallucinations is not to ‘cure’ or overcome them, but to accept them as one of the features of life on Bow in order to minimise their impact on everyday life. The sheriff’s plot goes even further, suggesting that the hallucinations are not just a phenomenon that human beings can live with, but a phenomenon that can actually be exploited for gains of some sort. There is an allusion to this idea in the archivist’s plot, in which the narrator reflects that ‘two of the most important tenets of Earthseed were foresight and adaptability’ before Parnell addresses the community about their adaptation to life on Bow. In the context of the other plotlines and extracts, the double emphasis on adaptation immediately prior to Parnell’s very public hallucination may well be an instance of foreshadowing the resolution to come: adaptation rather than cure.

The theme of adaptation is developed in Butler’s notes by means of two concepts or metaphors, the xenograft and the trickster. A xenograft is an interspecies transplant and she described the story as one in which people xenograft humanity onto a new world whose immune system tries to expel them. The resistance of Bow to humanity is the sense in which the planet itself is the trickster of the title and parable and the hallucinations suffered by those with prolonged exposure to the planet are the most dangerous means by which it tries to expel them. Butler was explicit as to the planet’s trickery, ‘a world that seems to be one thing (dull, drab, and harmless) and is something else entirely.’ Her planned conclusion to the novel was that the colonists would be forced to make a choice, ‘to try to hold on to what they were as normal human beings on Earth or to allow the change they have both fought and adapted to for years to continue.’ She also wrote that in the end Bow ‘will adopt them and they will be of it.’ As a sequel to both Sower and Talents, this theme is completely consistent consistent with the Earthseed principle of ‘God is change’ and Olamina’s insistence on employing it as a guide to one’s life. To return to the biblical parable, the human beings on Bow cannot retain their human form of life on Bow, but must develop and establish a new form of life that is adapted to the planet on which they have chosen to live. This also provides a neat juxtaposition to the dark note at the end of Talents, in which the starship is revealed to have been named the Christopher Columbus, predicting that the form of life in the extraterrestrial colony will be as unjust and unsustainable as it was in terrestrial colonies. As such, it seems as if Trickster was intended to proceed through conflict and tragedy to a conclusion with life-affirming meaning. As Butler writes: ‘The community will suffer greatly at the hands of the hallucinations, but eventually pull through.’

Butler had little more than premises for the second half of the series. The colony would divide into two in Parable of the Teacher, with one group determined to adapt to the planet and the other determined to conquer it. Parable of Chaos would see the rise of ‘an absolute Stalinesque figure’ whose every word and whim is passed into law by his sycophantic followers. Finally, in Parable of Clay, humanity would not only have adapted to life on the new planet, but actually evolved into a new species or subspecies. The themes the four novels set on Bow would explore would be the roles of creativity and repression in adaptation to the environment and new ways of being human that revealed marginalised aspects of humanity. Butler suffered from high blood pressure in her final years and died following a fall while walking in Lake Forest Park, in Seattle, at the age of 58. She became the first Black woman to be a published science fiction writer when Doubleday released her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976. Along with Samuel R. Delany, she is recognised as inaugurating Afrofuturism as a literary movement. As far as the continued relevance of her work, Butler’s Earthseed novels are only matched by Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 feature film, Children of Men, and the eight seasons of HBO’s Game of Thrones, released from 2011 to 2019.

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney | review by Rafe McGregor

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney, Soho Press, paperback, £13.79, 15 July 2021, ISBN 9781641293686

Chris McKinney’s career as an author began with The Tattoo in 2000 and Midnight, Water City is his seventh novel. The science fiction mystery is his first work of genre fiction, the first not set in his home state of Hawaii, and the first instalment of the Water City Trilogy, which continues with Eventide, Water City and concludes with Sunset, Water City, both published in 2023. Midnight, Water City is narrated in the first person by an anonymous narrator and in the present tense. It took me some time to realise both, which is a mark of the author’s literary skill. While use of the present tense can make for a more immediate, engrossing reading experience, it is difficult to do well and can have the opposite effect when it fails, undermining the suspension of disbelief. The narrative opens in 2142, with the murder of Akira Kimura, forty years after she saved the planet from an extinction event. Kimura was initially despised for being the bearer of bad news when she identified Sessho-seki (Japanese for “The Killing Rock”), the asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and then because of her undisguised misanthropy when interviewed about it. Although she thought that only a tiny proportion of humanity was worth saving, she turned her genius to the creation of Ascalon, a cosmic ray powerful enough to alter the path of the asteroid before it destroyed Earth. The weapon worked and Kimura was propelled to unprecedented celebrity status, revered as a saint for the next four decades.

The narrator was recruited as Kimura’s head of security when she was receiving death threats and has been her right-hand man ever since, switching between the roles of bodyguard and assassin as required. Once protecting her was no longer a full-time job, he returned to his police duties, but received a call asking for his services again immediately before the novel begins. The narrator arrives too late, discovering Kimura dead in her home, literally cut to pieces in a hibernation chamber that extends the lifespans of “The Money” (the socioeconomic elite) in the 22^nd century. (It is not difficult to imagine Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg working on something like this in the near future, if they aren’t already.) Later, he receives a posthumous message from Kimura, asking him to find her daughter, also named Ascalon, in order to apologise to her on Kimura’s behalf. He is shocked at the revelation as he has no knowledge of the child and realises that he did not know Kimura nearly as well as he thought. The story is set in motion very quickly, in the first four pages, and by the end of the first third of the narrative the narrator has resigned from the police and accepted his twofold mission, to detect Kimura’s killer and to find her daughter. Despite being advertised as a “neo-noir procedural” – an appeal to the many fans of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel – the novel is very much in the hardboiled detective genre, with the protagonist driven by both rather than just one of the two standard plot devices, the murder mystery and the missing person, reminding me of both Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987). In keeping with the finest traditions of hardboiled detective fiction, the narrator is a complex character with a tainted past and hidden depths, in addition to an idiosyncratic type of synaesthesia that gives him a head start against other detectives.

McKinney not only sets the plot in motion with ease and expertise, but handles the exposition effectively and economically. By the seventh page one already has a good grasp of his 22^nd century, including Kimura’s unique status, the preference for living in submarine high rises, the existence of suits that control one’s environment completely, the ability to prolong the human lifespan artificially, and much more. Again, it is a testament to McKinney’s literary skill that he is able to communicate so much so quickly without committing the creative writing sin of “information dumping”. My sole criticism of the novel is that while the worldbuilding is for the most part conducted with a light touch, it never stops (chapter 21 of 27 is, for example, mostly exposition) and the cumulative effect is a little like wading through water: unusual and pleasing at first, but becoming gradually more exhausting as one continues. Notwithstanding, Midnight, Water City is a seamless blend of crime, science fiction and social commentary that can be read as either the first in the trilogy or as a standalone mystery. The novel has been widely and generously reviewed since publication and received as much – if not more – praise from crime fiction critics as science fiction critics.

Children of Men | review by Rafe McGregor

Climate change allegory.

Children of Men is Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of P.D. James’s dystopian novel, The Children of Men. Cuarón was initially uninterested in the project, which he described as “a science-fiction thing about upper classes in a fascist country”, and his adaptation replaces James’s Christian themes with a rich and rewarding exploration of the compatibility of the free market and authoritarian nationalism. The novel was published in 1992 and set in 2021, the film released in 2006 and set in 2027, and both narratives take place in England during an extended global pandemic of human infertility. The film was a critical success and commercial failure (the latter relatively minor, recouping 93% of its budget at the box office). Its critical and cult following rose steadily over the next decade and a half, reaching a wider audience with the coincidence of the novel’s setting and the COVID-19 pandemic. The late music critic Mark Fisher opened his 2009 bestseller, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, with a discussion of the film’s representation of a dystopia unique to late capitalism, in which “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist” without contradiction. As we approach 2027, the UK is increasingly resembling Cuarón’s depiction, led by a self-selected elite that seems to delight in cruel and unusual punishments of the poor and displaced as much as it delights in exploiting its public service for financial reward. Praiseworthy though this prescience is, the film’s contemporary value lies elsewhere.

As Fisher notes, Children of Men is not simply what Amitav Ghosh would later call disaster fiction set in the future in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The film is neither about adapting to post-apocalyptic conditions nor about anticipating the apocalypse to come. The apocalypse is, rather, already in progress, ‘being lived through’. Creating a compelling and convincing narrative that is neither pre- nor post-apocalyptic is notoriously difficult, challenging enough in a novel or television series but even less likely to be achieved in a two-hour feature film (Children of Men is only 100 minutes from opening to closing credits). Octavia Butler is one of the few narrative artists to succeed, with her peerless 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower. For all Butler’s literal genius (she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995), she was unable to continue as successfully in the sequel, Parable of the Talents, and unable to complete the trilogy with Parable of the Trickster, which was unfinished at the time of her death in 2006. Parable of the Talents relies on a conspicuously artificial compression of several decades for credible closure and Butler’s multiple attempts at writing Parable of the Trickster never reached more than fifty pages. Cuarón’s success is akin to Parable of the Sower and his mastery of the multiple temporalities of cinema is exemplary, perhaps even unique.

The fertility crisis in the film is approaching its second decade and the global response has been economic and political collapse, which have only been averted in the UK by the election of an authoritarian government and the establishment of a police state. Refugees are detained on site in streetside cages and transported to sprawling concentration camps like Bexhill-on-Sea, where they are largely left to their own devices. The police have been militarised, a new paramilitary force created, and the Armed Forces placed on internal security duties, providing three overlapping levels of counter-terror and social control. The narrative initially seems to deploy the mythic mode of storytelling characteristic of Hollywood, proceeding from an inciting incident through an initial objective, watershed, and nadir to an unpredictable but inevitable zenith. In retrospect, Cuarón both deploys and subverts the archetype of the hero’s journey, exploiting it to prioritise a specific engagement with the apocalypse that I cannot reveal without spoiling the film’s final few minutes. That hero is Theo (played by Clive Owen), a former activist who is called to action when his estranged wife, Julian (played by Julianne Moore), recruits him to the Fishes, a resistance movement led by Luke (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor). Theo’s mission is to escort a young refugee, Kee (played by Clare-Hope Ashitey), to the south coast, where she will be picked up by a mysterious international organisation known only as the Human Project. Theo has become a cynical alcoholic since his split from Julian, but remains useful to the Fishes because his family connections are sufficient to secure transit papers for himself and Kee. Theo acquires the papers, meets Kee, and then discovers that she is pregnant, about to give birth to the first human baby in eighteen years. The watershed is his decision to complete the mission, in spite of the exponentially increased risk, Julian’s death, and betrayal by Luke.

Children of Men’s style is as nuanced as its form and its cinematography and mise-en-scène are routinely praised by critics and theorists. With respect to the former, philosopher Slavoj Zižek has analysed the film’s apparently inexhaustible visual density, the totality of a world represented with meticulous attention to detail in every aspect, which is both a reflection and critique of the post-9/11 culture of control. With the respect to the former, the narrative is threaded between two magnificent long takes, one of 247 seconds and the other of 379 seconds. The first, which takes place approximately a quarter of the way through, depicts a car chase in which Luke tries to save Theo and Julian from homicidal bikers. The second, which takes place approximately three-quarters of the way through, depicts Theo’s attempt to rescue Kee when Bexhill-on-Sea erupts into a tripartite battle among Islamist revolutionaries, a Romani militia, and the British Army. Together, the two takes constitute a seamless combination of film style and film form, which are deliberately and brilliantly understated to produce a very familiar – and very British – dystopia. The understatement also facilitates the integration of the mythic with the everyday (to which I shall return below): Children of Men is about both ordinary people and the end of the world.

Cuarón’s reproduction of the lived experience of an apocalypse-in-progress is the film’s greatest achievement. But if it is to be anything other than a purely aesthetic accomplishment, then it must matter in some way and Children of Men’s extra-aesthetic values are not immediately obvious. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, which was published in 1999, literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues for the ethical and political value of what she refers to as the literary imagination. She focuses on language, reading and literature, but her thesis can be extrapolated from the literary mode of representation to hybrid modes of representation that combine the linguistic with the pictorial, such as cinema. The literary imagination frees the reader from the constraints of truth without severing the text from the world, which is why one is moved by a literary text without believing in it. As such, the literary imagination is a paradigm for value without a commitment to truth and trains one to reconsider, reappraise, and reconceptualise social reality as socially constructed rather than naturally extant. Drawing on a tradition that began in the Romantic era, Spivak calls this training aesthetic education, demonstrates how it transforms the individual by indirect, implicit and figurative means, and concludes that it is “an excellent instrument for a slow transformation of the mind”. The transformation is achieved by a detranscendentalisation of elitism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression that exposes them as political and plastic and thus susceptible to being dismantled as part of the reconstruction of a more just and sustainable social reality.

The experience of watching Children of Men is the experience of living through the late capitalist apocalypse with Theo, Julian and Kee and recognising that the sequence of events narrated are both fictional and relevant to our own lives. Returning to Fisher (not to be confused with the fictional Fishes), the particular and peculiar relation between the reality of the film and the reality of the world in which we watch the film is the shared experience of what sociologist Jason Moore refers to as the Capitalocene in Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. The Capitalocene is the geological epoch during which capitalism has had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and climate. Capitalist world-ecology began in 1450, drove climate change for over five centuries, and is currently self-destructing in consequence of the copious amounts of waste it generates. Children of Men detranscendentalises the Capitalocene in the way Fisher suggests, by dramatising, exaggerating and anticipating the epoch’s final decades. The relevance of the film’s reality to our own is all too easy to identify – it is what lies ahead in a few decades or in a few years, during another global pandemic, one far more destructive than COVID-19. Sadly, this world is much easier to identify in 2023 than it was in 2006, which was after 9/11 but before the Great Recession. The crucial point, however, is that we are already living in and through this more destructive pandemic and the relations among our reality, the film’s reality, and the Capitalocene are articulated by the figurative element in Spivak’s aesthetic education.

The setting of Children of Men is an extended fertility crisis at the literal level of narrative meaning and a foreclosure of human futures that represents climate change at the symbolic level of narrative meaning. The fictional fertility crisis is the real climate crisis: both will destroy the human species if they are not averted or ameliorated; both occur across rather than within generations; and both create contemporaneous economic, social, and political crises. They are also both turning points in the web of life, the response of an overpopulated and exhausted planet to the numbers of people it is required to sustain and – much more importantly – the concurrent and exponential increase in resource consumption. In the fiction, this response is human infertility, which will reduce consumption by reducing the population. In reality, this response is climate change, which Moore describes as capital being forced to internalise the cost of its own waste, which is in turn the beginning of the end of the Capitalocene. The significance of this symbolism to the narrative’s thematic content means that Children of Men is best understood as an allegory. Traditionally, allegories took religion as their subject, integrating the real, material, and everyday with the figural, spiritual, and divine, which recalls the centrality of Christianity to James’s original novel and the way in which Cuarón combines formal and stylistic devices to portray the everyday experience of the apocalypse-in-progress. Allegories do not impose a single or even twofold meaning on a narrative, but function so as to reveal a structure of multiple and intersecting representational and extra-representational levels of meaning. They are, in consequence, ideal vehicles for the detranscendentalisation of the complexities of the late Capitalocene, in which multiple crises combine to exacerbate multiple inequalities and multiple injustices. All of which is to say, I cannot recommend this film enough. If nothing else, it helps us make sense of the complicated, confusing, and contradictory world in which we find ourselves in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. As such, Children of Men exemplifies the great writer Samuel Johnson’s criterion for poetry, that its purpose is ‘to instruct by pleasing’: Cuarón has provided us with one of the most pleasurable lessons we are ever likely to receive on one of the most unpleasant subjects possible. *****