Category: Science Fiction

Avatar

First off, let me say I loved seeing Avatar, and want to go see it again.  Second, this is not a review, but a dissection of the movie and it has spoilers, so don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.  Avatar represents state of the art movie making and proves computer technology can turn any imagined story into a film.  I agree with the majority of reviewers that have said “Wow” to the special effects and then mumbled some grumbles.  The story retraces Dancing with Wolves, but the filmmaking blazes new territory.

However much I loved watching Avatar, I have one really big gripe:  I hate that humans are presented as stupid, cruel and blood-thirsty.  Why does Avatar portray future homo sapiens as 19th century colonial ravagers? Star Trek came up with the Prime Directive back in 1966, so why does this futuristic flick predict mankind as idiot imperialists?  I asked my friends about this and they defend the movie by saying “Oh, the film is just a liberal metaphor for how corporations and people treat the environment.”  But I can’t imagine James Cameron ruining the most expensive piece of art in history with such a crude message.  I can’t but wonder if Cameron thought the “kill them all and let God sort them out” mentality is how the majority of moviegoers want the majority of men and women characterized.  Why aren’t viewers insulted by seeing ourselves shown in such a nasty light?  Or are people sitting in their chairs thinking, that’s not how I am, I’d be one of the good scientists, but all the people around me must be like those blood-thirsty killers of the poor Na’vi. 

The film imagines technology evolving, but shows men and women devolving from our present knowledge.   Cameron presents the military as disciples of General George Armstrong Custer.  I’m surprised Colonel Miles Quaritch didn’t go around saying “The only good Na’vi is a dead Na’vi.”  Sure the solders in Avatar are passed off as private security, so as not to insult the U.S. military, but they think of themselves as Marines – thus it still attacks a stereotype.  And I worry that international film goers will naturally accept the bad humans, and especially the military in this film, as representing typical Americans and typical American thinking and philosophy.  If the Na’vi had been the bugs of Starship Troopers, I would have been pumped up by the military might of the story too.  We are a violent nation, but it’s important to know when violence isn’t the solution.  Strangely I think our real military knows that better than we do, or movie makers.

Why did Cameron spend so much money making such a cliché story?  It’s Starship Troopers at the Little Big Horn.  Sure, I can picture the story as a metaphor for how we’re destroying the Earth and its indigenous people and life forms, but that analogy is too crude to work.  How many filmgoers leave the theater thinking about how we’re destroying the rain forest?  Or does Cameron think we’re all spectators at the Coliseum, just sitting in front of his spectacle to get pumped up over a simple action picture show – hey the white hats win in the end, but we’re not wearing them.

Also, it’s time for film makes to stop relying on cliché science fiction.  The humans and the military in Avatar could have come from the same generic Sci-Fi reality as Starship Troopers, Aliens, and countless other SF movies and TV shows.  When are science fiction movie makers going to evolve and create more realistic science fiction? 

I would have been more impressed if Cameron had made almost the same movie but with a different opening premise.  Start with a generation ship that has traveled for three hundred years, finally reaching its destination, Pandora, with interstellar colonists.  The human space travelers must colonize or die.  They must find acceptance in a harsh new world, so instead of Custer’s Last Stand, they must be Jamestown and struggle to share a new world with equally intelligent creatures, and this time not follow the same path as we did with the Native Americans.  The colonists could use the same avatar technology to communicate with the Na’vi – what a fantastic first contact way to communicate.

I’m tired of science fiction films having comic book level violence.  The world is not Tom and Jerry, or Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.  Also unbelievably silly, is to think that anything in existence would be valuable to mine at interstellar distances.  This is pretty much basing a plot on the Santa Claus principle.  Why aren’t science fiction fans enraged at this kind of Easter Bunny thinking about the future?  If Avatar had been made in 1955 I could forgive the story, but the world has gone through a lot of enlightenment since then.

I’m sure James Cameron assumed we’d go through some catharsis of guilt and hate ourselves for being so evil.  I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being the bad guy.  I know humanity has been evil in its treatment of the Earth.  It’s time to go past that and change.  Science fiction needs to show us evolving, and becoming wiser in the future.  Science fiction needs to show who we should aspire to be, rather than make us hate who we are.

Avatar is too beautiful to hate.  It is stunning to see.  It immerses us into an alien world better than any other science fiction film.  I just wished it didn’t have such a cliché plot.  Avatar proves that just about any science fiction or fantasy novel could be made into a film.  I’m tired of movie makers thinking the only science fictional conflict worth filming is human versus alien death matches.  What great science fiction book would you love to see filmed with the same technology as Avatar?  The first one that comes to mind for me is Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

JWH – 1/4/10

My Science Fiction Thrill is Gone

Anyone who reads my blog knows I’m very into science fiction, but I have to admit that I’m having a devil of a time finding new science fiction stories to love.  For the past decade I’ve been getting most of my sense of wonder thrills from rereading science fiction books I first discovered in the 1960s.  I occasionally stumble across a new SF novel that rekindles the old thrill, somewhat, like Hyperion (1989), Snowcrash (1992), Red Mars (1993), Old Man’s War (2005) and Spin (2005), but life wasn’t like it was in my teens when I read several mind blowing SF books a week. 

Has my sense of wonder fuse blown out? 

Have I discovered all the great science fictional concepts?

I was page turning thrilled by The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) but it was written by a literary writer, Audrey Niffenegger, and its appeal did not deal with time traveling, but a very fascinating romantic relationship.  I’ve read many books and watched many movies about time travel and that far out idea is really tired.

And I’m burned out on alien invasions too. (I mean, be honest aren’t you too?)  Ditto for Star Trek save-the-world space opera.  And just how boring have all those after-the-collapse stories gotten?  I’ve been in the mood for a great robot yarn, but the film I, Robot, although fun, wasn’t sense of wonder thrilling, and neither was WALL-E, but I loved it.

Thinking about it, the most exciting SF I’ve enjoyed in recent years has been the film Gattaca (1997) and the recent version of Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), and neither of these sense of wonder thrillers were for traditional reasons.  Vincent Freeman’s epic struggle to compete with genetically selected super humans was emotionally uplifting.  And even though I’m an atheist, the idea of a race of robots, the Cylons, trying to exterminate the polytheistic human race because of the Cylon’s belief in monotheism was just too delicious not to love.  However, as much as I enjoyed the series, it had little traditional sense of wonder.  I was very disappointed it did so little with the psychology of the Cylons.

Am I jaded over science fiction, or have science fiction writers lost their mojo?  The last science fiction novel that came up with a fantastic new H. G. Wells level concept was The Life of Pi by Yann Martel in 2001. 

Now most people are going to scream at me, “WTF!” 

I know, I know, most of you ladies and gents think The Life of Pi is a literary fantasy.  That’s because you want to believe in Pi’s tale, which is a fantasy.  We all want to believe in his fantasy, the fantasy of God, and all the other fantasies we love.  When you accept the realistic ending, you accept science, and The Life of Pi becomes science fiction.  A science fiction novel that kills science fiction.

And that might be why my thrill is gone.  I want a new science fiction fantasy to believe in, like space travel, time travel, mind downloading, meeting far out aliens, mind travel, teleportation, immortality, and so on. 

I can’t help but believe I’ve written this blog post before. 

My mind is going, but the desires stay the same.

JWH – 12/16/9

Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Orphans of the Sky is one of Robert Heinlein lesser known novels, even though it’s one of his best.  It’s hard to talk about the novel without giving away its big idea, but it’s not likely I’ll convince you to read it without telling.  This short novel is made up from two novelettes first published in 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction, and it might be the first fictional account of a generation ship, that is a starship that travels so slowly, that it takes generations to reach its destination. 

In Orphans of the Sky, the characters do not know they are in a starship, but think of the ship as all of reality.  They can’t see outside.  They have forgotten most of what civilization gave them, so they are primitive, superstitious people.  Heinlein uses this as a beautiful setup to attack our own superstitions.  I don’t want to spoil the joys of the story by giving away the plot, but if you need to know more, read the first link to Wikipedia above.  The important thing to know is Orphans of the Sky makes major contributions to the genre science fiction.  It’s central speculation, made in 1941, is probably the most creative since H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, 1895.

Stories about interstellar travel in science fiction have mostly taken the fantasy route of faster-than-light (FTL) travel.  Whereas, Orphans of the Sky dwells well within humanity’s technical ability to get people to the stars.  It will still be an amazing engineering challenge to build a starship miles long, that rotates to create artificial gravity, and is design to function for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  A trip might have to last as long as from now back to Shakespeare, or Christ, or Aristotle.  If worldly societies can change so much in those time periods, imagine what life in a starship might be like and how it could change.  This is a brilliant idea, and Heinlein imagines his characters in a post-apocalyptical world inside the ship.   It’s strange that Orphans of the Sky wasn’t printed in book form until 1964 since it is so innovative in a genre that loves far out ideas.

Although, the novel is only about 150 pages, Heinlein does an amazing amount of speculation.  Besides the big new science fictional ideas, Heinlein imagines how society would change if it evolved backwards, for example he has women treated like they were in the Old Testament.  There are scientists but no science.  One of the most enchanting aspects of the story is how concepts we take for grant in our world are turned into strange superstitions in the world of Heinlein’s forgotten starship crew.  Heinlein knew how thin the veneer of civilization is that covers our nations.  He also plays with what we know now could be completely wrong.

Orphans of the Sky is not a literary masterpiece, but heavy duty pulp fiction from the golden age of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction.  It’s all action, with little characterization, but what characterization there is is very vivid and sharp, especially the mutants.  For my third reading of this story I listened to the Audible Frontiers audiobook edition that is beautifully read by Eric Michael Summerer.  Audible Frontiers goal is to put great SF and fantasy into audiobook editions.  If you love classic science fiction and hanker to experience it again through a dramatic reading, it’s worth joining Audible to get these audiobooks.  They are also available through iTunes.

Orphans of the Sky would make a wonderful sense of wonder film, and I’m surprised it’s cinematic potential has been ignored.  Movie producers often strike pay dirt with SF, but they seldom select innovate classics to explore new science fictional themes.  They beat the dead horse of alien invasion over and over again.  There’s so much more to science than strange invaders.

JWH – 12/13/9

Ringworld in Oz

When I was a dumbass kid of 10 I acquired a reading addiction by discovering the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.  When I was a dumbass kid of nineteen, I dropped out of college for the first time and bought the fourteen Oz books and reread them.  At nineteen I felt like a grownup and wondered if rereading my favorite kid’s books would tell me something about how I was programmed.  Between 10 and 19 I read whole libraries of science fiction books, and rereading the Oz books taught me that science fiction was often just Oz books for adults. 

It was around this time, 1970, that I read Ringworld by Larry Niven for the first time.  Now, almost forty years later, I’ve come back to Ringworld again, like my return to Oz.  The whole time while listening to Ringworld on my Zune I kept thinking that Larry Niven had practically copied the structure and sense of wonder of an Oz book.  Now, this can be seen as both praise or a curse.  Oz books are like giving rug rats wordy psychedelics – the stories are so goddamn vivid that they put their tiny tyke imaginations into an overdrive that no Ritalin could ever break.  I also think these books produce unrealistic expectations about reality.  Yeah, I know, I sound a Puritan.

Our society underestimates the power of children’s minds.  From an early age we have a desperate need to make sense of reality, and almost any input can be shaped into a belief system.  I loved being a kid shooting up stories, but now that I’m older and examining some of my most ancient subroutines from my mental programming code, I have to wonder about the dangers of children’s books.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to campaign against giving kids fantastic fiction, but I want to explore the idea of fantastic fiction on evolving minds.  

I once read a shocking article in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction about how libraries banned the Oz books.  I’d love to find that article again, because librarians believed the Oz books gave children unrealistic ideas about life.  At that time, I felt their protests were complete bullshit.  Banning the Oz books didn’t work, because writers like Robert A. Heinlein, who also grew up reading Oz books, went on to write even more books that gave kids unrealistic expectations about life.  Fantasy and science fiction have become universal fictional addictions in our modern society.  Does anyone worry about that?

Rereading Ringworld, I noticed it had the same structure as an Oz book.  Oz books would introduce a handful of weird characters, quickly get them on a quest, and along their journey these characters would experience mind-blowing sights and meet far-out magical creatures.  Then when enough pages were filled to equal a book, the story would be wrapped up.  Oz books had little character development, and practically no rising plot action, definitely no climax or falling action, and very minimal resolution. 

The Ringworld of Niven’s novel is his Oz, a magical place equal in scope to the Land of Oz.  Like Oz, Niven barely scratched the surface of the Ringworld, leaving room for endless sequels.  Nessus, the Pierson’s Puppeteer and the Kzinti, Speaker to Animals, are as colorful as any magical Oz character created by L. Frank Baum.  Children reading the Oz books starting with the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in the year 1900, through Glinda of Oz in 1920, wanted to believe that Oz existed.  I know in 1962 when I discovered the books I somehow wanted Oz to exist.  I knew it didn’t, but wished it did.  If I had found these books sooner, when I was seven or eight, I might not have been able to tell Oz from reality.

By age eleven I switched from fantasy books to science fiction, and even though I knew science fiction was also make-believe, I developed a life-long belief system based on science fictional ideas.  Rereading Ringworld only reminded me that believing in science fiction is no different from a kid of ten believing in the Land of Oz.  All fiction is fantasy.  Even realistic books like those by Edith Wharton or James Joyce, still only produce fantasies of life in 19th century New York, or early 20th century Ireland, no more real than Oz or Ringworld.

Like I said, I have no intention of giving up fiction, it’s the vice that defines me, and an army of deprogrammers could never make a dent in my delusional addiction.  When I’m alert and concentrating, I can face reality directly.  I know my life would be more real if I spent my time hiking in the mountains, woodworking, or studying astronomy – or just washing dishes and changing the cat box.  I’ve always felt sorry for Christians who hated this world and dreamed of Heaven, but is dreaming of Paradise any different from dreaming of Oz or Ringworld? 

I guess those librarians who wanted to ban Oz books were right.  I can see I used fiction as a drug to avoid life and living in reality.  I understand that, and accept it, but it doesn’t invalidate that I love fiction more than reality.

If I had never gotten hooked on fiction would I have been a better person?  Would I have been disciplined and realistic?  Would I have been hard working and productive?  Gee, I don’t know, maybe if I was lucky.  There are billions of people living with their faces shoved into reality that have no happiness or escape, so I can’t complain about my fiction habit, because my life could suck and I might never have discovered the magic of make believe.

All I know at the moment, is tonight I want to read my paperback copy of Cosmic Engineers by Clifford Simak or go watch Heroes or Firefly on DVD and eat Phish Food ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s and Fresh Market chocolate chip cookies.  I could do something real, I just choose not to.

JWH – 10/27/09

This essay was written fueled by playing “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show thirty or forty times.  Music, the other addiction.  Be sure and read “The Man Who Made Oz” over at Slate.

The Purpose of Science Fiction

Why do you read science fiction?  Do you read science fiction purely for entertainment, or do you want something more from science fiction? I’ve always expected a lot more from science fiction then maybe I should have, and that might be unfair to the genre. I never wanted SF to be merely escapism, although I’m afraid that I spent most of my adolescence avoiding reality by reading science fiction. I always told people I thought science fiction’s #1 purpose was to promote manned space exploration. I thought it’s #2 purpose was to inspire the creation of AI robots. It’s #3 job was to warn us of dangerous futures. In other words I thought science fiction should be a kind of cheerleading to build new technologies and an oracle to warn society about paths we shouldn’t take.

Reading science fiction did inspire me as a kid to think scientifically and made me want to be a scientist, but I didn’t have the academic discipline to succeed with that dream. The failure to become a scientist has always been a major regret of mine. I often wonder if I’m wrong about science fiction and that it’s nothing more than good clean reading fun. Because if that’s not true I might have to grade science fiction rather harshly.