Nineteen Ninety Never

I haven’t seen it, but I’m pretty sure 1980’s GALAXINA is probably the most perfect movie in the world. Produced by Playboy, it stars the 1980 Playmate of the year Dorothy Stratten as a “voluptuous android who finds herself alone for many years, developing emotions and falling in love with the ship’s pilot as he and the other crew sleep the years away” after they’ve been placed in suspended animation (Parts of this actually sound suspiciously similar to Alastair Reynolds epic book House of Suns).

The tag line on the movie poster (via) is “IN THE 31st CENTURY MAN FINALLY CREATED A MACHINE…With Feelings” and its going on my must-watch list.

Speaking of machines with feelings, you can’t go wrong with remixes of Florence + the Machine’s You’ve Got The Love. I wrote about the XX remix of that track a little while ago (damn, I love golden robots), and I was glad to hear Adam Smith’s take on it.

The Secret Galaxies remix comes courtesy of T-dot ballers Borracho, who were kind enough to post it on their Myspace page. Its a little more mellow than some of their other stuff, and I definitely like it.

You can’t go wrong with a little Ellie Goulding, and when the theme of the day seems to be galaxies and robots what better than a space-disco track about getting starry-eyed (I’m just going to assume she’s singing about looking at the stars and dreaming about space). These Monarchy cats have done some other mixes, and I dig that they called this one the Horses Head Nebular remix.

Anyways, if you’re in a galactic mood, give ‘em a listen:

Florence + The Machine - You’ve Got The Love (Adam Smith Remix)

Cavaliers of Fun - Secret Galaxies (Borracho! Remix) (via Borracho!’s MysSpace)

Ellie Goulding - Starry Eyed (Monarchy “Horse Head Nebular” Remix) (via DiscoDust)

I’m about 500 pages into the first book, The Reality Dysfunction, of Peter F. Hamilton’s “The Night’s Dawn Trilogy” and so far I’m loving it.

Part of the reason I like it is because some of the main characters, the “Edenists” are similar to the post-human Culture of Iain Banks’ books. One of the key differences is that instead of having their main technologies be based on computers, the Edenists grow their sentient starships and habitats out of a substance called “bitek” (that I can only assume is short for “bio-technology”). This gives both their habitats and ships personality and sentience, with the Edenists connected to them via a telepathic affinity bond.

Like a lot of the sci-fi I’ve been reading lately, its full of huge ideas and takes place on an epic scale. Reading it, I feel the same way that I do when I look at that picture of the astronaut floating above the earth.

I added the tracks from the XX below because they definitely have a spacey-feel. If you listen closely to the lyrics of “Shelter,” it almost sounds like they were written about the Edenists and their living technology. The original version of this track is pretty good, but I really like the the rework that Death to the Throne gives it.

The XX - Shelter (Death to the Throne Remix)

The XX - Basic Space (The Astronomer Remix)

Joachim Garraud - Back From Space (Frederico Fanchi Remix) (via the always-classy Palms Out)

I just finished reading House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. In the book, two shatterlings named Campion and Purslane (the galaxy-wandering, six-million year old clones of a woman named Abigail Gentian) fall in love with each other, befriend a golden robot (Hesperus, of the Machine People) and arrive decades late for the gathering of shatterlings that happens approximately once every 32,000 years.

I absolutely loved the book, and the fact that parts of it span tens of thousands of years. Reynolds writes sci-fi on an enormous time scale. As Charlie Jane Anders writes:

“House Of Suns is one of those novels that assumes a shape after you’re done reading it. All of the elements that seemed purely random fall into place, and you realize quite what an intricate design you’ve been looking at all this time….This novel has everything: artificial intelligences that become sentient, post-humans, questions of faster-than-light travel and causality, cloning, virtual worlds, a murder mystery and a group of nigh-immortal people dealing with the burden of history in a more personal way than most of us ever do.”

Anyways, that’s not a picture of Hesperus, but of my Halo 3 armor. I was inspired by the book to make him golden and to give him the House of Suns insignia.

Anyways, here are some tracks that I’ve also been coincidentally listening to these days. I really feel like they flow with the book. The Empire of the Sun track makes me think of the love between Campion and Purslane, and the name of the original band and remixers just works with the book as well.

We Are The People (Golden Filter Remix) - Empire of the Sun

Why this Girl and the Robot? Because at one point in the book, the female shatterling (Purslane) spends a great deal of time with Hesperus (don’t worry, nothing weird happens).

Girl and the Robot - Royksopp

Girl and the Robot (Joakim Remix) Royksopp

Girl and the Robot (Ocelot Remix) Royksopp

You should buy House of Suns on Amazon, then check out Alastair Reynold’s blog.

You can also buy Royksopp tracks on Itunes.

One of the most hilarious blogs that I’ve been following lately is definitely Erotrash. I’m pretty sure it is entirely in Italian, but you don’t need to understand the language to know that all they do is post scans from vintage European science-fiction sex comics. Needless to say, it isn’t exactly safe for work.

The title of of the blog reminds me of one of my favorite Chicks On Speed songs, Eurotrash Girl. I also think that when I saw Chicks on Speed in Montreal about 6 or 7 years ago it was one of the first electronic music concerts that I’d ever been to. My friend Lachy and I were also some of the only guys there, so the whole thing seemed pretty awesome at the time.

Chicks on Speed - Eurotrash Girl

The Erotrash blog also has an album of songs available for download entitled Music For Strange Situations. I’m guessing that the strange situations they are referring to are the ones that the girls in the comics they post frequently find themselves in. Maybe just looking at the blog is considered a strange situation. Either way, it must be the music you should listen to.

Alessandro Alessandroni - Spiagge Azzurre

This is pretty much what I wish my life was like. I have a feeling I’ll have to travel farther than the closest star to Earth to find anything as cool as six-limbed gorillas and space babes.

Roman Salzger - Alpha Centauri

(via Le Touch)

More awesome art from Boris and Julie (including a flying wolf!) can be found here.

More Roman Salzger here.

If you’ve been reading Nineteen Ninety Never for a while, you’ll know that I totally dig zombies and sci-fi. These two tracks remind me of both, and that’s why they’re bang-on.

Hot Chip - Touch Too Much (Fake Blood Remix)

Tits and Clits - Attack of the Living Dead

Props to Oh Crapp! for the Hot Chip remix and to the Data Sapiens for the other track.

For more Zombie related tracks, check out the post I wrote a few months ago about World War Z.

This sounds so unbelievably sci-fi fucked-up that I just had to post something about it. I just hope these tracks do it justice. They were the ones I thought of when I saw the picture, and thought about space babes and mechs possibly preventing the end of the world at the hands of interdimensional beings.

Miss Kittin - Rippin Kittin

Princess Superstar - Do It Like A Robot (Jon Spencer Remix) (thanks for that one, schlampe!)

The Kills - No Wow (MSTRKRFT Remix)