#169 Hollywood necromancy: Remake (1995) by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is known for her stocked awards cabinet and for her lengthy novels in the "Oxford Time Travel" series. But this major figure of US SF has not always been concerned with exploring the past, or with doorstop-sized tomes. Remake (1995) is one of her less discussed novels, short enough to sometimes be categorised instead as a novella.

This is story set in what was then the near future, and is now the recent past - potentially the year 2018. This is a story about the movie business, about a Hollywood system completely devoid of creativity and trapped in a grim cycle of reinventing and remixing old successes instead of doing anything new. It is also a story about computer-generated slop, made up of ground-up fragments of older works, and passed off as something new. It's fair to say that Remake has some eerie connections with the way the 21st century is actually going.

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