Posthuman Blues

Whitley Strieber's "Lilith's Dream" is unfolding nicely. Strieber is a very skilled suspense writer, and his vampire mythos is agreeably creepy.

Reactions to the first-draft book cover have been mixed. The common denominator among those who don't unconditionally love it seems to be that it's too stark. I tend to think that minimalism is a virtue in graphic design, but I agree that the current design could be spiced up.

"Matrix Revolutions" was thoroughly trashed by the Kansas City Star. To be sure, it was a flawed movie. One mistake was to package it as a single movie. "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" should have been shown as the single long movie that they really are, perhaps with a 20-minute intermission. This wouldn't have masked all of its shortcomings, but at least it would have made the Wachowksi brothers look pioneering and denied the critics some of their ammunition.

What annoys me (even more than the underdeveloped plotlines in the last two movies) is the fact that much of the trilogy's back-story -- an imaginative and plausible war between humans and robots -- is apparently available only in the form of supplementary media like the "Animatrix" DVD, which I have no desire to see. No wonder theater audiences were scratching their heads.

That's it from me on the topic of "The Matrix." Ominously, I don't see any remotely promising new science fiction on the movie horizon.