When I was a kid, I liked science fiction without knowing why. I just figured it was cool to have cool stuff that did cool things. Trancers was cool because it had that “long second” watch. Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn was cool because… I don’t know. It was 1983. It’s been a while.
As I gained more breadth of experience, I realized that I didn’t like science fiction because it was science fiction as much as I liked particular kinds of over-the-top plots (that were, granted, catering to teenaged boys). If you wanted a “WOOOOO!!! SCIENCE!!!!” storyline, you’re pretty much stuck with sci-fi films that take science for granted. On the outside, you might find yourself with a “The Right Stuff” kinda movie (and, more recently, Apollo 13). The excitement when it comes to science is the excitement that they had back then and not the excitement that we have now.
When I got even older than that, I realized that, hey, it wasn’t the *PLOTS* that had me going to these movies (though, on occasion, some of the plots were not half bad) but because of the *THEMES*.
For example, most mainstream films have a “there are things that man was not meant to know!” theme when it comes to science rather than a theme that celebrates such things. If any particular genre has an attitude that science is pretty awesome, it’s sci-fi… but then I started to notice some of my other favorite themes were handled with more care by science fiction than by mainstream movies (though this could easily be the tendency of science fiction to pander to its audience while more mainstream movies were happy to be edgy and explore such things as vague nihilism or existential hopelessness). Stuff like the enthusiastic embrace of getting back up after getting knocked down (the good Star Wars movies, The Matrix), the focus on fate vs. free will (The Terminator, Terminator 2), the importance of setting things right (Back to the Future, Eternal Sunshine), and, my favorite, the importance of muddling through (Galaxy Quest).
Ah, Muddling Through. The Galaxy Quest story where everybody has no idea what to do… and so they fall back and act the way that their characters on the show would act is one of the most brilliant treatments of this theme that I’ve seen tackled. Even when forced to address that they’re just actors in a television show, they turn around and come back by faking it (and, of course, relying on the help from the fans who actually understand the science). Just normal folks who are trying to be good without much knowing how.
Since then, I don’t know that I’ve seen this same theme addressed until I started watching Fringe. We’ve got Walter, the “mad scientist” who doesn’t remember much of what he’s done in the past and, the more he finds out, the more appalled he is at his previous behavior. He’s spending his new life trying to make amends for things he doesn’t even remember doing… and, of course, having no real idea how to do it beyond muddling through.
I wish that there were more entertainments that tackled themes like that one.
Anyway, I’m sure that I’m missing out on any number of entertainments that have (and do). What are they?
The muddling through theme is used fairly often in comedies, but it not applied to too many SciFi movies. I can think of a couple of old book series that did it. Phule’s Company being a big one.
My problem with throwing Fringe in with the muddle through theme is that each of these people are quite competent at what they do and can take what is going on in decent stride. We rarely see a lot of flailing around that normally happens in muddling through. There have been a couple episodes though.
Not to side track, but the one theme that I enjoy quite a bit is the Training Film. This is the theme where you main character starts off pretty bad to average at something and learns to become awesome at that something by the end of the story. I see this a lot in martial arts movies, but this is seen in other genres as well (the Matrix had some of this as well and was one of the big reasons I liked it).
Now to tie this together. The training film and the muddling through theme are often intertwined.
Maribou and I talked about the differences between the training film and the muddling through.
It’s awesome to see the hero’s journey and watch a young padewan grow up to take out the evil emperor… but that’s not how most of us live our day to day life. When most of us enter a crazy situation (for our mundane values of “crazy”), the hero’s journey is only tangentially related to how we tend to muddle through. (Maybe we ask “What would Batman do?”, but, for the most part, we’re stuck doing stuff on the fly with people who, we hope, are remembering how they got through this the last time something like this happened.)
Science Fiction has lost its way. It’s neither good science or good fiction, for the most part. This Theme business is all fine and good as far as it goes but it’s lapsed into Symbolising and Sermonising of the worst sorts.
Fundamentally, the sci-fi story was a morality play in the tradition of the Western, with its roots in the tales of discovery. Star Wars was a rehash of half-a-dozen Kurosawa stories with a generous dollop of John Ford tossed in — speeders replaced horses, Luke Skywalker’s clumsy light saber training replaced Errol Flynn’s swordsmanship. Blade Runner retells Philip K Dick’s dark vision of what it means to be truly human in a world where androids and people had become almost indistinguishable.
Even Bradbury, about as good as it gets in the sci-fi genre, frankly admits his sci-fi was just so much retelling of Greek myths and he’s abandoned the genre, becoming an unpleasant Luddite in his old age, snarling and whimpering about the Internets, cell phones etc. He’s gone to detective stories now, though Agatha Christie summed up that genre succinctly enough, saying all she did was paint a picture of a placid pond into which she could throw a stone. Aesop’s Fable about the Jove and the Frogs comes to mind. You can amaze the frogs once by throwing a log into a pond. When the frogs realized Jove had played a little joke on them and stupidly asked for a king they could respect, Jove sent them the stork who would periodically eat a frog. Would that someone would eat a few of Science Fiction’s venerable worthies.
Sci-fi’s villains and heroes are just literary nonsense. Bad storytelling is not redeemed by much chrome plating and winking LED lights and tales of space ships. Speculative fiction has a problem: we see the future through the lenses of the present: we now live in a world predicted by Asimov and H.G. Wells. But we also live in a world predicted by Orwell: our vastly more intrusive Big Brother puts his to shame.
There is a bit in the Dune series which I’ve often thought a very fine backstory, the Butlerian Jihad, an anti-technology revolt against AI. The Butlerian Jihad made the entire Dune universe possible. Granted, the series declined precipitiously with each new volume but the ghola replicant made for an interesting concept, one nobody’s properly explored. We’ve only got that prim android preacher, Data from Star Trek, to make stunningly banal statements about what it might be like to be an android. If we lived in a world where Data was trusted as far as being an officer aboard a starship, it would be humanity, not the Borg, who would have joined to the machines. Just more simplistic storytelling. Themes only make for a good story when they’re remotely congruent with human nature, which changeth not.
When did this start to fail? You mention Phillip K. Dick and I was actually beginning to wonder about whether he represented a tipping point.
We moved from dystopian futurism as political criticism (1984) to cautionary fable (Fahrenheit 451) to dystopian futurism as entertainment (pick any one of Dick’s books).
There was a point at which the future stopped being awesome.
Then again, it’s not like Roman children pretended to be Roman Gladiators IN THE FUTURE!!! (That we know of, anyway) with handheld trebuchets and chariots that have bronze so strong that even a real trebuchet can’t dent it.
They just pretended to be gladiators. Maybe “THE FUTURE IS AWESOME!” is a blip and the exception rather than the baseline.
I think you’re comparing a pre- and post- thing.
My father told me once that when he was a kid (born in ’46), the smart people believed that they could possibly prove something that wasn’t proven before, invent something that was a world-changer, and write the Great American Novel. That is, people who were the nerd teens between 1920 and 1965 still thought it was possible to be a Renaissance Man, of one sort or another.
Prior to 1900, not so much. Post-1985, certainly, people starting thinking that you could never be that good at three things at once.
I think there’s a number of things going on in that window, that aren’t like any other time in history; a confluence of technology improvements opening up large vistas without yet revealing what it would take to get past the low-hanging fruit stage of exploring those large vistas.
> There was a point at which the future stopped being awesome.
You should read Neal Stephenson’s Innovation Starvation. Article’s all about how current SF is about life sucking and it’s only going to get worse. He posits this is stifling innovation and progress since SF is a primer for young people who are interested in developing inventions and ideas for the greater good of the human race.
Jeez, I hardly know where to start. Hope is what you have when nothing’s happened yet. All those visions of bright shiny starships…. notice how Captain Kirk’s communicator doesn’t have Caller ID? I’m told the idea of the cell phone got its start with the Star Trek communicator by some people who worked on the early prototypes at Bell Labs.
When we got to the moon, something sorta snapped. The Apollo 13 astronauts were allowed to think they were on nationwide TV but they’ve been preempted for something else. But when they got in trouble, everyone paid attention all right. Personally I blame NASA for what went wrong with our vision for space. Werner von Braun was a great leader but the NASA bureaucracy grew bloated and its vision dimmed. If anyone, JPL kept the vision alive. Hubble produced some totemic images.
The planetary probes were marvels of engineering: strange, to think of how tech had improved over the years of travel time between the final tightening of the bolts of Mercury Messenger in December of 2003, its launch in August of 2004 and its eventual arrival in orbit March of 2011. Messenger runs on a 25 megahertz processor with a 10 megahertz fault protection processor.
The final hurrah for science fiction was probably Stanislaw Lem. Suspenders are Intelligent, Too. I’ll translate a chunk for you:
Hier hinter Ihnen steht ein Perpetuum mobile. Was hat es damit auf sich?
Lem: Das Perpetuum mobile bekam ich von meinem Sekretär geschenkt. Es besitzt eine kleine Trockenzelle und von Zeit zu Zeit muss man diese Trockenzelle erneuern. Ich bin sehr abergläubisch. Solange das Perpetuum mobile sich bewegt, werde ich leben. So einfach ist das. Mein Sekretär wird also nachts heimlich die Zellen austauschen. Ich habe noch einen riesigen Vorrat an Trockenzellen im Schrank, also machen Sie sich um mich bitte keine Sorgen.
There seems to be a perpetual motion machine behind you. What does it mean?
Lem: I got this perpetual motion machine from my secretary. It has a small battery and every so often you have to charge the battery. I’m very superstitious. So long as the perpetual motion machine keeps moving, I’m going to live. My secretary secretly replaces the cells at night. I still have a huge supply of batteries in the closet, so don’t worry about me.
Panels 1-5 pretty much say it all better than I could when it comes to speculatory/optimistic science fiction.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=299
As the lights on our society have darkened and, on an individual level, our attention span has waned, the obstacles to a brighter future just seemed to get more and more insurmountable.
TV and film science fiction is nice.
Written science fiction is better.
Nobody has time to read.
Name some titles.
Alastair Reynolds is the best SF writer of the early 21st century. Greg Egan and Robert Reed are also contenders. His Revelation Space series is good, he has a short story called “Signal to Noise” which is also quite good. Robert Reed wrote “Truth” which is also a good short story and he’s best known for his novel Marrow. Greg Egan has a bunch of good short stories. I haven’t really gotten into his novels. Reasons to be Cheerful is a good short story and there’s another decent story he did but I don’t recall the title. An astronaut goes to investigate what aliens are doing to Venus and ends up pulling off an incredible stunt which gets the aliens’s attention who have largely ignored humanity.
What was that short you threw my way a couple of weeks ago? It was fantastic, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the title.
Was it email, Facebook or here?
IIRC Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven.
Yes! That was it!
Lois Bujold’s Vorkisigan books, though they’re more 90s than 21stC.
Farscape, while I tend to think of it more as “multiple fish out of water” also has a lot of Muddling Through going on. “Well, this is completely fucking WRONG and not how the universe works, but since we’re here, let’s go ahead and try to survive it anyway.”
Ah, I loved that show. I have started to watch it a again and I am in season 2. There is definite muddling through.
On a related note about themes, I found myself thinking about themes in zombie games/movies this weekend. This was nothing that hasn’t been said but it got me to thinking about disaster movies. I think one of the reasons that disaster movies are popular is that we get to see humanity at it’s best. Instead of the usual backstabbing, villification, and other stuff that serves to separate us from each other, the disaster always unites all of humanity (except for maybe one or two backstabbing pricks who “get it” in the end). Whether we’re all united in fighting the aliens, evacuating the wounded and helpless from a volcano, or just praying for Bruce Willis to blow up a giant rock, disaster movies show a humanity that unites in the face of disaster. They portray a humanity where we are all brothers and sisters.
If you want to read “muddling through” then you should pick up Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. You get a story in the first and last ten pages but inbetween the author and characters go off on adventures which barely tangent the plot.
I always enjoy those.
For example, most mainstream films have a “there are things that man was not meant to know!” theme when it comes to science rather than a theme that celebrates such things
This is the oldest divide in ‘modern’ speculative fiction; the ur-texts for each branch being Bellamy’s and Shelly’s Frankenstein.
sb “Bellamy’s Looking Backward” (which is where the link was supposed to go, of course)
See, I didn’t have Bellamy’s Looking Backward categorized as “Science Fiction” in my head. It was under “Socialism”. You’re absolutely right, though… it’s damn near Star Trekkian.