Top 7 Repeated Science Fiction Phrases or Words That Have Become Annoying
Remember when it used to be relevant to say “repeated like a broken record” or something like that? Yeah, neither do I. But people sure sound like one these days, what with Twitter making it easier and easier to repost every “nifty” thing you’ve ever seen alongside blogs and picture sites used for the same purpose. Some of those “nifty” things have become plain annoying, shoved into the rest of us like smelly hand-me-down socks made by a dead aunt or Santa. Maybe I’m being a little harsh, but I’ve seen the following seven phrases/words peddled around more times than I care to count, and I’m just about sick of them: 7. “May the fourth be with you.” It’s only funny if a child says it. But children aren’t the ones saying it on Twitter. And it’s not cute. It’s not even clever. It’s the kind of thing you laugh at when your kid says it, just like the time they told you that silly knock-knock joke about oranges and apples that you’ve heard a thousand times before. I get it, though. The fourth of May is Star Wars Day, but let’s at least pretend that real clever people run the SF/F world. Hell, you could even say your child said it so you can get away with posting it twelve times on your Twitter account… 6. “All this has happened before. All this will happen again.” It’s an old saying picked up by Ron Moore for his re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. And for a while, it was a creepy way of saying fate was about to screw everyone over in the show. But then people started using it to refer to their day-to-day lives, and mundane things like getting cheap American coffee from a parasitic coffee company…until, finally, people just started saying it for no reason at all, sucking all the life out of a phrase and killing its immense mythology. Good job, newbs. 5. “Reality is for those who can’t handle Science-Fiction.” No, it’s not. Reality is for people who write or read science fiction, because without a sense of reality or an understanding of how the now functions, one can’t actually write science fiction. Sure, you can come up with some kind of bastardized SF/F hybrid, but you’ll never approach the greatness of true geniuses in the field (if we’re going with the pretentious version of things). Still, it’s a nice try at saying something approaching smart. 4. “Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” You know what politicians should read? The frakking U.S. Constitution (or other relevant document if they’re not American politicians). You know what else they should read? Facts. I don’t think science fiction is high on the list of things politicians should be familiar with. Don’t get me wrong; I love SF and think everyone should read it, but our politicians don’t suck because they don’t read my favorite genre. They suck because they’re idiots. 3. “When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.” I thought this was a cute phrase for the first few days. But then everyone and their ancient relatives (the crusty ones with bad manners) started posting it on their Twitter accounts, usually with an exclamation point to drive home their pathetic attempt at a geeky badge of honor. Listen up, folks. You don’t get your geek badge by being annoying. That’s not how it works. First, you have to sell your soul to a Batherian bloodmonk. Second, you have to kill your first dragon while in a spaceship made of solid diamonds. And third, you have to name the primary cast members of at least three different SF/F movie or TV properties. I don’t make the rules. That’s just the way it is… 2. “Science fiction is dead/dying.” You know why science fiction is “dying?” Because every other week some asshole says it’s dying and people start to think it is. It’s called propaganda, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think people who say SF is dying are part of a group of literary elites trying to kill SF from the inside. I wouldn’t put it past them. They’re a vicious bunch… 1. Anything with “punk” attached to it. The “punk” in Cyberpunk used to mean something. It really did. Now people shove it onto every term they want in order to sound hip. The problem? You end up pissing on all those who legitimately engaged with the “punk” dynamic. I don’t care much for pissing on literary geniuses like William Gibson or Bruce Sterling or Jeff Noon or Richard Calder, or even folks who pioneered the Steampunk genre way back before it was Steampunk. But the whole “punk” thing has gotten out of hand. How about we attach “ism” to subgenres instead? Steamism, Dieselism, Undergarmentism… See? That sounds better… That’s my list. What annoying science fiction phrases or words have annoyed you recently or in the past?
The Children of Tomorrow and What They Will See (or, Obama-mania’s Future)
One of my friends on Facebook recently posted this on his profile: the internet scares me. it makes me think people really would vote for trump. it makes me think people really believe obama is part of a conspiracy hatched decades ago to put a racist homosexual kenyan marxist-anarchist-fascist (say what?) in the white house. i’m losing faith in people with each new facebook group dedicated to shit like this. I’m not going to give out his name in case he doesn’t want it to be any more public than his FB account. I initially wanted to respond straight to his post, but then decided I should say the following here (after the fold): Imagine what the world looked like to African Americans pre-1865 or the years surrounding and leading up to the Civil Rights Movement in the south. Maybe it’s because we’re older and more aware of what’s going on around us, but the country is losing its damn mind again, for the second time in the last decade-ish. We went batshit on Muslims and look-alikes, and now we’re seriously entertaining buried racist ideology simply because Obama is one of those brown people, and just can’t possibly be one of us. But that’s not enough. The same people have to other him even more by making him the brown person who is also a socialist commie fascist pigdog, because once we accept that as the truth, we can do anything to him and feel no remorse. The Joker Socialist — a double othering… This is the same rhetorical practice used to justify the Holocaust or the Gulags or slavery or the countless other racist and ideological evils that have been thrust upon humanity like a stain. It’s the same practice used to make it acceptable to murder homosexuals by dragging them by a rope behind a moving car or raping them with broom handles. It’s the same practice which everyday makes people afraid or irreparably damages families all over the country. Because we have a rabid fear of terrorism… And in 20 or 30 years, or maybe 60, or 100, our children will look back, if indeed our children still exist, and they’ll wonder what was wrong with us. What unspeakable mental illness had befallen us as we continued to perpetrate great evil against humanity, against people who aren’t actually different, but are made different by arbitrary social “rules.” And if we’re still around, or more enlightened people are there to say something to those curious children, they might say we were infected with a festering hatred so buried into our blood that we couldn’t contain it…couldn’t hold back the tide of thousands of years of human bloodlust and fear, and in that brief little span of history we were weak, pathetic, and undeserving of the mountains luxuries and freedoms thrown at us like cheap magic tricks in a casino hotel. We were undeserving of the men and women who die on the battlefield at the behest of their country and honor. Because clearly they’ve done so much harm to humanity… Some of us will have to look into our children’s eyes and see that overwhelming childish confusion, much as many children today look at us when they ask us questions about slavery or, sometimes, even racism and sexism (though not so much the last of those great evils, because we still live in a world entwined in the old ideals of male superiority). Personally, I dread that day. I wish I lived in a country where the future of my children would not be so fraught by what will undoubtedly appear to them as utter stupidity. But that’s not the future my children or your children will have. Maybe one day we’ll get it right, and the evils of everyday life will be relatively minor, dealt with on a case by case basis. The history of humanity, however, says otherwise, but I am always hopeful for a better tomorrow…