Game of Thrones vs. People Who Only Threw a Fit After-the-fact
George Bush is in the HBO production of Game of Thrones (season one). Not really. A replica of his head was dressed up in a manky wig and put on a spike to represent one of the heads King Joffrey lobbed off towards the end of the first season. Said replica was on the screen for such a short amount of time that nobody figured it out until someone made a passing comment in the commentary on the DVD suggesting as much. Oh. My. God. The world has just ended. It’s over. Hollywood wants to kill George Bush. It’s finally true! The liberals have come to kill our babies and eat our brains using parasitic tube monkeys. And then they’re going to cut off George Bush’s head and put it up on a spike with a nasty black wig! None of that is true. Well, except everything before “Oh. My. God.” In truth, this is one of the stupidest things people have gotten upset about in Hollywood this year, let alone this decade (and the one before it). There are a lot of more important things to get pissed about. Such as how women are portrayed in films and TV. Or representations of people of color. Or the fact that most of the crap they put on TV looks like it was written by a 5-year-old missing half a brain. But this? Please. Grow up. And, yes, contrary to what some of a different political persuasion than myself might say, I would not have cared either if the bust was Barack Obama, except for the fact that there are almost no black people in Game of Thrones (season one) to begin with. Putting him up on a spike wouldn’t make any sense, and I might get a little annoyed at that if I actually noticed it. But would I have? No. I didn’t notice George Bush either, and I don’t even like him as a President. That said, I don’t really know where I stand with the producers’ rational for why they used a replica of his head. Is it possible they couldn’t afford to rent or make a whole bunch more body parts and heads? Maybe. Could it also be a veiled political statement? I guess. But that would assume David Benioff and D. B. Weiss are stupid enough to a) put it in their movie knowing some place like Big Hollywood will scrutinize everything they do, and b) mention doing so in the commentary. If you wanted to make a political point, I’d think you’d take the moment to say something in the commentary. Maybe they’re that dumb, but I find that hard to believe, and I don’t feel like making that judgment right now. So I will officially file this in my “stupid crap that the world got upset about” bin. Do with it what you will.
Question: Is “Solar System SF” the future of Space Opera?
Paul Weimer (who podcasted a review of Prometheus with me about a week ago) was kind enough to ask the question in the title, perhaps in some vain hope that I actually know what I’m talking about. I’ll start by first saying much of what follows is uneducated speculation, in part because predicting trends in SF is a crapshoot (remember when Mundane SF was the “next big thing”?) and in part because I am not familiar with all the SF novels being published (traditionally or otherwise) simply because it is not my job to be familiar, and I’ve got 20 other things going on — some of them actual jobs or job-related. That said, one of the curious things about this question is that it wasn’t immediately clear to me what Paul meant by “Space Opera.” As a narrative tradition, Space Opera has been identified as the “high adventure” genre, often coupled, in some ways, to Planetary Romance (Burroughs, for example), but with greater reach, greater inherent optimism, and an extraordinary love affair with the infamous “sensawunda” (also: colonialism, but you can read John Rieder’s book for that). It’s a genre that reminds us at once of the great history of SF and all that is wrong with it. But Space Opera does have a newer face. Some call it New Space Opera — a crummy term, to say the least, but effective enough. I see this new type of Space Opera as a more serious version than its predecessor, not in the sense that old form SO lacks seriousness, per se, but more in the sense that New Space Opera, insofar as it exists, seems to be constructed on a frame of complexity and rigor. You might also say that NSO has a serious tone that seems absent from SO, though I am not altogether convinced that this is necessarily true, particularly since some authors identified with NSO, such as Tobias S. Buckell, seem to draw heavily from old SO. In other words: NSO may or may not exist, though there is probably something going on in SO that is distinct from the older form. The community should probably discuss this trend at length (maybe it has). I say all this as a way to attempt to explore Paul’s question, which seems to hinge on a concern with definitions. Since SF based in the solar system (that is, SF in which humanity moves about the solar system instead of remaining stuck on Earth or going elsewhere) has usually remained the domain of hard SF (not exclusively — Burroughs again), I suspect that SO which takes on the traditional narrative forms are unlikely to sustain a movement in solar system SF (these titles are getting ridiculous, I know). It’s not that there can’t be sensawunda and adventure in our solar system; quite the contrary. Rather, it seems to me that SO has a tendency to look to far off, practically unattainable futures in which interstellar travel is a given, aliens (or human factions) are plentiful, and the wonder of exploration to alien (not extraterrestrial, per say) worlds is practically a necessity to narrative. That’s what the community has made SO into for so long, to greater and lesser degrees (for taste, of course). My gut tells me that SO which clutches to local concerns will invariably collapse back into hard SF, though I cannot as yet explain why in any intelligent manner. That doesn’t mean SO in the SS won’t exist — a stupid position to take. It means that such writing won’t take over the traditional form. There’s something else in store for SO. Something that NSO, existing or otherwise, must be leading to. But I have no idea what that will look like in the end. Do you?