Surprisingly good. Amateurish acting with moments. Better line readings from the nominally emotionless robots, and especially the emotionally bonded (“en rapport”) robot Pax. Good costume design (though the materials and execution looked cheap.) Nice twist ending that actually worked as a twist ending even for a 2026 audience.
Asimov has treated the same issues in greater depth, but this movie is a very accessible briefer treatment. Essentially a barely-dramatized philosophy 101 discussion: mostly talking heads scenes. Somehow compelling for all that. Quite relevant in our recently post Turing Imitation game era: oh, we’re not really quite past the Turing Imitation game, we can pretty well tell the difference between reading LLM and human writing, but the illusion is so good that we’re past the uncanny valley and into the realms of usefulness and enjoyment.
Everyone grows a bit, even the villains in their villany, the worst of whom ends in exile and I should like more of his story which would be very interesting. The only one who truly suffers and will probably not end well is the ne’er-do-well: to lack ambition and drive seems to be the only flaw Trollope doesn’t forgive.
Everyone gets tweaked a bit, but always with affection. The snobbish petty squire gets saddled with a wife below his ambitions. The rake is rewarded with a wise widow with hands firmly on the purse-strings who will allow him just enough freedom but keep him from ruin. Palliser grows up a little and becomes more human, Grey is induced to serve in public life, which is the obligation of the British aristocracy. The prideful Alice is redeemed.
I’ve been all summer reading this. Perhaps that approximates how it felt to its original readers reading it in serialized form.
So that’s what a pioneering comparative mythologer does all day!
A collection of several essays from the discoverer of the Indo-European tripartite social structure including a massive structural comparison of the cosmic cycles in Vǫluspá and Mahabharata conceived as a transfer of cosmic cycle into human time and terms (this central essay seething with Dumézil’s excitement, which can be shared and savored by anyone with any sort of geeky bent), a most amusing explanation of the odd little pair of gods Byggvir and Beyla in Lokasenna with supporting evidence from Lapp and Germanic folk-customs surviving long into Christian times, and squibs explaining the mysterious Heimdall by relation to the Welsh seal-mermaid and the astral significance of the beasts inhabiting Yggdrasil.
Also a rather neat essay on the uniquely Germanic “downshift” of the Indo-European tripartite social functional structure.
The scholarly footnotes dismissing weak arguments or wishing a source had documented his reports more thoroughly are fun, too. The footnotes were a revelation: he and other scholars often alter their theories and revise books heavily for translation. How is one to keep up!?
I loved this book!
Williams aims to show the human reality of the big moments we know from the primary and ancient secondary sources - the build up to Labienus’ suicide (which he moves in time for dramatic effect), the final transformation of the moribund republic into a principate, the reasons for Ovid’s relegation and for Julia’s exile. The cold, calculating, efficient Octavian is made human and relatable: a young man of great potential and talent given a dangerous start to life during a time of civic upheaval, at first merely reactive, trying to preserve his life from powerful and established enemies, in time ambitiously aiming to subdue the chaos and re-establish order in Rome.
Ovid’s fate and his feelings about it are well-known from the historical record, even if we don’t know the specific grounds for Augustus’ actions. But Julia’s character, deeply interesting as Williams has made her, is elaborated, as is her being swept up into a cult in the islands of Greece that Augustus finds immoral.
I wanted more of a portrait of what the daily life of a man in such power is like, and even more, what made him that. However much time we spend in his 18-20 year old company I still feel I don’t understand what made him. And then we skim over the next thirty years with but brief landings until the episode before Julia’s exile. One touch I buy is that the death of Maecenas, the last of Augustus’ childhood friends, takes the wind quite out of his sails.
I also loved a paragraph about the New Young, contrasting the younger generation that takes the new stability for granted while complaining about the moralizing stodginess of the generation that created that stability: a generation that thought of itself as revolutionary. Something about the self-absorbed crankiness reminded me of a piece I just read in the Guardian about modern cohorts and the mutual despite between millennials in ankle socks and mom-jeans and crew socks and baggy jeans on zoomers.
It is a beautiful book, that treats the people at the center of matters of great import with great sympathy, that acknowledges faults and limitations and mocks gently at foibles, and turns cold white marble portrait busts into warm personal portraits.
Picaresque, happy ending. Marvelous character sketches from main to comprimarios to minors.
The Quy Effect is an anti-gravitic Meissner Effect analogue exhibited by a novel room-temperature organic superconductor developed by a lone maverick inventor. As the novel opens our hero, a ne’er-do-well basement tinkerer in his 70s, has made his discovery blowing up his employer’s factory and has been summarily fired and black-listed.
But the Quy Effect is not only the scientific discovery, it is Quy’s effect on his family, his friends, and the world. It is the effect that a maverick lone dreamer can still have in a world of science that has become bureaucracy and teams. It is Caractacus Pott - Crackpot - contra the mundane.
Unlike Fleming’s charming fable, there is no Evil in this story. There is opposition, and threat and danger, but it is all from simple human conflicts of interest, from pettiness, selfishness, short-sightedness, lack of vision and imagination, fear, self-doubt, self-absorption; and not from the opposition only: our hero creates his own problems by his own stubbornness, self-absorption, and selfish focus on what is essentially an artistic drive, tho’ his field is industrial and scientific. Against these are arrayed good-nature, kindness, and caring.
It is a book about fathers and sons: the relationships among Quy, his son Preston who worshipped him and whom he rejected to keep him from following in his maverick footsteps, and his grandson Alan, who also worships him, and from whose influence his father wishes to protect him are briefly but beautifully presented.
And there are redemption, and reconciliation, and understanding, and self-understanding.
The finale is an acknowledgement that teams are necessary for large projects and a plea for human-scale committees, small and unencumbered by self-protective procedures, energized by pride and commitment. (And I believe that NASA achieved that, with a third of a million participants; as great a feat as the engineering and scientific achievements.)
Disturbing follow-up to Many Dimensions. The English genius for intensity through a glass.
By itself, the story of a man nearing the end of his life, afforded a glimpse of hell and an opportunity to experience self-sacrifice and service.
As a sequel to Many Dimensions, Lord Arglay has a limited experience of the submission and self-sacrifice that Chloe fulfilled in the earlier novel.
Arglay, tempted to anger and rage and vengeance - the last most anathema to one who had devoted his life and shaped himself to the service of Justice - offers us his formula “there is entire clarity in the Omnipotence” for recalling oneself into peace from tumultuous and negative emotions. “It operated; the temptation passed into the benediction of the Omnipotence and disappeared.”
But for the Personalization this could as well be a Taoist or Buddhist approach, perhaps. But Williams is a Christian, and I think he wants us, through Arglay, to come to something closer to Christian faith. Arglay came late in life to belief: he chose belief in the novel as a carefully reasoned response to his enemy’s actions, chose it as an intellectual posture, chose to give himself over to acting out of belief, without, I think ever understanding what it means to believe. Chloe demonstrated that submission to the will of God is belief, that sacrifice is belief. Lord Arglay understood what she had done; I think in this short story he is given the opportunity to do so himself.
The second half of the piece is a ghost story, a very disturbing ghost story, largely atmospheric tho’ with one intensely unforgettable image (borrowed I think, like the last line of the story, from Dante.)
The best part of the story are Lord Arglay’s observations on aging and the acceptance of aging in the first half.
This is trickier than I thought. Here is a fragment of StarLogo code:
to patch-setup
activate-demon [evaporation-demon diffusion-demon]
end
to evaporation-demon
set-pheromone pheromone * 0.9
end
to diffusion-demon
diffuse pheromone
end
StarLogo specifies simulations in terms of turtles - mobile agents - and patches - fixed pieces of ground. Turtles and patches can have properties and can execute code. Demons are procedures that, once activated, execute repeatedly and concurrently for each patch (or turtle, but in the example above, only two patch demons have been activated.)
So the intent of the code above is that a patch of ground may have had some pheromone deposited on it, and that the pheromone both evaporates and diffuses to neighboring patches (‘diffuse’ is a StarLogo primitive.)
StarLogo simulations should be thought of as massively parallel: each demon runs on each of their subjects simultaneously and in lock-step. All the patches are subject to evaporation and diffusion at the same time. That is woefully underspecified: in this simulation, does evaporation happen first, and some of the remaining pheromone diffuses? Or vice versa? Or do evaporation and diffusion occur in chance order for different patches? And does the amount diffusing in participate in the evaporation and diffusion in the current step?
For that last question, I decided on the classic Conway Game of Life solution: the current step changes a new copy of the world. The amount diffusing in doesn’t affect the current step. That leaves the question of the order of diffusion and evaporation. Since the simulation is intended to be qualitative and exploratory, I decided it doesn’t matter.
For simplicity, the demons will be executed in the order in which they were activated; each demon will run on each of its subjects before the next demon is run. Demons will operate on a copy of the world, and the final results will be copied back. That means that diffusion, for example, is calculated on the current stock of pheromone, and the results of all diffusing out and diffusing in are summed into a ’next’ array and then copied back.
It might be interesting to experiment with different implementation choices (for example, always work on the current world, so that the order in which patches are processed impacts the final result, or allow the demons to interleave) and see if there is much difference in the progression of the simulation. I wish I knew the mathematics needed to make predictions about the effects of these choices. There must be “process models” or reasoning techniques for such things?