Elysium’s Director Thinks His Hellish Paradise Is Our Future

Way back in 1984 (starting with <i>Neuromancer</i>), William Gibson wrote about an orbiting space station owned by the super-rich.[1]<p>(WARNING: Spoilers below)<p><i>&quot;Tessier-Ashpool is a fictional family appearing in William Gibson&#x27;s Sprawl trilogy novels. The family owns Freeside, a space station shaped like a spindle Bernal sphere constructed in high orbit. The family resides in the Villa Straylight, which occupies one end of the spindle.</i><p><i>The family is organized and run as a corporation, Tessier-Ashpool S.A.. Family members are kept under cryogenic stasis and thawed out periodically so that governance of the family is cycled between members. According to &quot;orbital law&quot; they are legally dead while cryogenically preserved.</i><p>...<p><i>The Tessier-Ashpools were founded with the marriage of scions of two powerful families: Marie-France Tessier, who was Swiss and John Harness Ashpool, an Australian who inherited a Melbourne engineering company. After the two were married, Ashpool began construction of Freeside in high orbit due to the relatively relaxed laws governing construction.</i><p><i>The family became extremely successful financially, developing the attached space station, sponsoring human colonization of space, and acquiring a number of other firms which subsequently flourished.</i><p>...<p><i>However, following the death of Marie-France, the family became extremely reclusive. Family members, including Ashpool, tended to place themselves in cryogenic sleep. At any one given time, only one or two of the children would be awake. They are also known for cloning their own assassins, &quot;vat-grown&quot; ninja who follow their orders without question.</i><p>...<p><i>By the time of Neuromancer the family has become extremely degenerate and dysfunctional. The patriarch Ashpool spends almost all of his time in cryogenic stasis. A dissolute alcoholic and heavy drug user, when he is awakened for the final time he has sex with and subsequently murders a clone of his daughter prior to committing suicide.&quot;</i><p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessier_Ashpool" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tessier_Ashpool</a>

The future as described in 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson I think is more likely, perhaps scarier even, and taken to levels beyond Elysium (though don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m very excited for Elysium).<p>2312 is a future where many generations of people have lived on colonies on Mercury, Venus, Mars, hollowed-out asteroids (&quot;terraria&quot;), the outer moons. The spacers live in a new paradigm, not a rich paradise like Elysium, but a very pleasant, long and happy life, while those who inhabit the Earth live in a warring, diseased, overpopulated and climate-change-disaster struck Earth.<p>I think the crowd here would like this book. You should read it.

In case you missed it, like I almost did: there is a little &quot;Page 2&quot; link way at the bottom. <a href="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/07/blomkamp-elysium/2/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;underwire&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;blomkamp-elysium&#x2F;2&#x2F;</a>

a) District 9 was a great movie both as entertainment and as something to think about<p>b) having grown up in South Africa, Blomkamp may have some unique insights about human nature.<p>it&#x27;s certainly interesting to contemplate what&#x27;s going to happen.

I don&#x27;t really care for the story line, but <i>finally</i> somebody worked a high-quality render of a full-scale rotating habitat into a movie! Always wanted to see how that might look since <i>Rendezvous with Rama</i> and Hamilton&#x27;s books.

In a parallel, HG Wells too imagined a society with two diverged class of human species. One serves as the prey and other as predator.

I highly recomend <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Beggars_in_Spain</a><p>You can find there rich and poor, genetic modifications only rich can afford, one (lack of the need to sleep) so special that it reshapes world. You can find there universal income as payment for voting. You can find philosophy of exchange through voluntary mutually beneficial contracts promoted by such influential inventor that it raises to the same eminence buddism has. Awesome read.

If current systems and economics stayed the way they are, then I imagine that it has a higher probability of being true. I foresee those economic structures shifting &#x2F; changing though.

Elysium doesn&#x27;t sound too different from the book Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. They both do sound like very possible futures for the human race.

The picture in the article is confusing me. What&#x27;s going on with his hand?

Please, NO SPOILERS! A lot of people haven&#x27;t seen it yet :)

Still looking forward to the movie.

how long until science fiction set in the slums of south africa gets recognized for being formulaic?

The trailer looks like an OWS supporter took every 1 percenter and anti-immigration trope in the book, added a bunch of explosions and called it a &quot;film&quot;.<p>I really hope the actual movie is more nuanced in the politics it looks like it&#x27;s trying to shove down our throats.