Digger - failure or great climate movie?

Everyone seems to be talking about Digger, the latest Tom Cruise film, about Digger Rockwell, the oil tycoon. Most reviews are bad and it's doing really badly at the box office, but I saw it yesterday and it's well worth seeing. 

It's a very difficult film to review without giving away the surprise twists (of which there are several, slowly revealed through the length of the film). However, without giving too much away, I'll say that it's a film that delivers uncomfortable truths about the world we live in and leaves the viewer questioning whether art can ever really make a difference to important issues. It's a well-made, thought provoking satire. Being satire, many of its fans find it very funny, though I always find satire less funny than it's supposed to be. I think I laughed three times in Digger, the rest of the time the satire was just too close to grim truth to be funny. 

So, don't believe the negative reviews, go and see the film. There are a couple of good reviews on Wired (both of which contain 'spoilers' so read them after seeing the film):

Everyone Hates Digger - It's the Perfect Climate Movie. 

Digger is a Box Office Flop. It might be the most Relevant Film of the Year.  

An Immense World by Ed Yong

An Immense World explores the many ways that animals perceive the world. It looks at how the senses that we share with other animals can differ between species, some species can only see in black and white, while others can perceive colours beyond the spectrum that humans can see. The human sense of smell is notoriously poor compared to that of many other species, such as dogs or elephants.

However, where this book probably becomes most interesting is in looking at the senses that other species have that humans entirely lack. For example, seals can follow the hydrodynamic wake (the swirling water currents created by the movement) of a fish from up to 200 metres away. Spiders' webs are effectively a clever extension of their senses, being sensitive to the movements of trapped prey. Bats and dolphins can navigate using echolocation, enabling them to avoid obstacles in dimly lit environments. The most powerful electric eel can incapacitate a horse.

As humans we experience the world in a uniquely human way and we cannot begin to imagine what it would really be like to experience the world in entirely different ways. Reading this book helps us to understand some aspects of what it would be like to perceive life differently. 

The book also looks at some of the ways in which human activities make life harder for many species - excess lighting at night fatally attracts insects and disorientates bats and migrating birds; noise pollution changes the way that birds communicate with each other and underwater noise affects how creatures such as dolphins can navigate. 

 

An Immense World by Ed Yong, published (2023) by Vintage 

How Deep is Your Love?

How Deep Is Your Love, written, directed and narrated by Eleanor Mortimer, follows a group of marine biologists trying to understand life in the deepest part of the ocean, before an international vote on deep sea mining. 

 

We're shown amazing footage of beautifully weird deep sea creatures and learn about the long process of naming and classifying the many species that are new to science. We meet the marine scientists, who each have their particular areas of expertise in the taxonomy and ecology of deep sea life. We are also allowed to eavesdrop on the international conference, being held in Jamaica to decide whether to lift the moratorium on deep sea mining. The tiny island of Nauru is the loudest voice calling for deep sea mining to be allowed (large parts of Nauru have been entirely destroyed by mining for potash). 

 

The moratorium still holds on deep sea mining (for now) and this film really brings home how much the world stands to lose if it is allowed to go ahead. There is so much we don't know about the deep sea environment, so many amazing creatures with such different ways of living on this planet. 

 

This is a beautifully made, thought provoking and fascinating look at the deep sea world. Scroll down on the How Deep is Your Love homepage to find screenings near you. 

 

 

 

Autumn Colours in the Dells

The weather is beautiful today. Here are some photos from this morning's patrol of Edinburgh's Water of Leith, an activity I do most weeks, recording wildlife and often picking litter (I pick litter every week in Summer, once a fortnight in Spring and Autumn and once a month in Winter). 

The Grey Heron in the photo below was very patient, but still my photo isn't great!

 

Shared for Nature Notes. 

Falling Leaves haiku

all the things
I meant to do -
falling leaves 

 

originally published in Issue 3:4 of Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society. 

Water of Leith - Roseburn to Stockbridge

 We enjoyed walking this stretch of Edinburgh's Water of Leith yesterday. There are several sculptures by Anthony Gormley in the river, the one below is near to the stairs that lead up to the Gallery of Modern Art. 

 

We were delighted to get good views of two Dippers, this one was in a very busy section of the river, quite close to Dean Village, which yesterday was more crowded with tourists and others than I've ever seen it. The Dipper didn't seem to mind the crowds

We also had a decent view of a Kingfisher, but it didn't stop for long enough for us to get a photo! 
 

For Nature Notes.  

 

China + 100 edited by Xueting C Ni

China + 100 is part of the Futures Past series from Comma Press. This series of science fiction anthologies set their stories exactly a century after a specific event in a country’s recent past, in this case stories from a China 100 years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This concept really appeals to me, so I was delighted to be asked to review this book. I was interested to find out from the book's introduction that China has a strong tradition of science fiction, stretching back over 100 years, a brand of science fiction that uses lessons from history and mythology to inform possible futures. Editor, Xueting C. Ni, writes about how difficult it was to overcome some writers' political and cultural misgivings about writing about the pandemic, which makes it amazing that this anthology exists at all. 

These stories vividly imagine futures that include a wide range of novel elements including: thermal imaging to reveal the past movements of people; quantum consciousness; eternal youth; smart clothing; payment in shops using traces of DNA; the expansion of human settlements across the universe;  and the recurring tropes of nutrition using food capsules or similar replacing real food; people having AI chips implanted in their brains; and of course lots of helper robots. 

All the stories refer back to the COVID-19 pandemic in some way and several of them include future pathogens.  Zhao Haihong's The Moon Returns (translated by Andrew Rule) sees a resident of the moon struggle to cope with the pathogens when he travels to take up a job on earth. In Ling Chen's Miracle Grass (translated by Xueting C. Ni), a pandemic has broken out among the residents of a space craft exploring the distant Kuiper Belt, while Anna Wu's Archaic Dust (translated by Christopher MacDonald) features a coronavirus that can be passed from computers to humans, which can be made visible using the Archaic Dust of the title. Cryogenic freezing means that characters in this story meet again well into the future. Meanwhile, the characters in Zhou Dedong's I Want a Different World (translated by Jack Hargreaves) actually time travel in this entertaining missing person case. It's a twisting, turning mystery and ultimately a beautifully tragic love story. 

Many of these imagined futures are, unsurprisingly, depressing to contemplate. Tang Fei's This is a Good Path (translated by Judith Huang) explores the downsides of immortality. A film-maker and his acquaintance find out that they're too selfish to take on looking after a house plant in this future where no-one wants to care for anything other than themselves. The main character in Yimei Tangguo's Dust Rose (translated by Mel ‘Etvolare’ Lee) is threatened with eviction for not being a productive member of society. I found it heartening though, that, in this horribly believable dystopian future overseen by AI police officers and state control of everyone's personal finances, the main character is an author, giving us hope that perhaps the arts will survive the AI takeover. Qiufan Chen's Glaze (translated by Xueting C. Ni) is a compulsively readable but highly disturbing story, which I'm tempted to describe as body horror (though I'm not really familiar with that genre). A stage performer who remodels part of her body during shows, is haunted by nightmares of being taken over by a monster and eventually finds that the nanobot system that she relied on to repair her body after every show is no longer working and her body starts to disintegrate. 

He Xi & He Zun's  The Wasteland Courier (translated by Gigi Chang) didn't really work for me, with it's overwrought descriptions. When I started reading Dan Shi's Fire (translated by Yahia Zhengtang Ma) I thought this was going to be another story that wouldn't work for me. However, I ended up loving its thought provoking approach to exploring history, censorship, gender identity and equality. I also was fascinated by the idea of  historical hubs attached to historical buildings and locations so you can explore the history of the site through a virtual reality set up. 

Lu Hang's The Concrete Farm (translated by Xueting C. Ni) follows a young woman, who teams up with a former student of her late horticulturalist grandfather to convert a failing housing development into a horticultural hub. This is a fine example of a thrutopian tale, a genre we need more of. There are problems all the way along to hold the reader's attention (alien fungi!), but it's a story with a satisfying, optimistic ending that gives us hope for the future.  

Overall this is a fascinating look into possible futures for China 100 years beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 China + 100 edited by Xueting C Ni, to be published 8 October 2026 by Comma Press. 

Disclaimer: I was sent a free pdf of this book in return for an honest review.