Spoiler Alert: the following podcast contains spoilers for the film being reviewed; enjoy at your own risk (or something like that). Paul Weimer was kind enough to spend a little time with me talking about the release of Ridley Scott’s long-anticipated Alien prequel, Prometheus. If you’ve seen the film and want to offer your two cents, feel free to do so in the comments. You can download or stream the mp3 from this link.
I’ve decided that I’m going to start hosting a regular Google+ Hangout for the purposes of stimulating writing — technology permitting, of course. How regular these will be depends on a lot of factors, such as who is interested, schedules, and so on. These hangouts will be done alongside my live writing feature, both of which I’ll announce on Twitter when it goes live. For those that don’t know anything about the writing hangouts, they are pretty simple: for about 15 minutes, everyone talks about whatever floats their boat, giving people time to get into the room and settle into their writing mode; after that, everyone writes, usually for 15 to 30 minutes, sometimes more. The hope is that these little hangouts will progress into cyclical writing binges for an hour or so, but we’ll see. If you’re interested in participating, leave a comment with your weekly schedule!
In a recent episode of Read It and Weep, one of the hosts criticized urban fantasy’s strange habit of ignoring what I call “the big question.” The criticism was fairly light — being a humorous podcast and all — but it convinced me to blog about it here. First, the big question: Why do so few urban fantasy novels explore the spiritual, religious, and historical impacts inherent in discovering the existence of the supernatural? This is a huge question for me, in part because it is also a little pet peeve of mine. Some of the least interesting UF novels avoid the question altogether. And they do it at the expense of the smidgen of realism necessary to make such a work, well, work. If your characters go through life believing dragons and fairies and what not don’t exist, why would they suddenly buy into some relatively mundane hints to the contrary? Even big, in-your-face hints (i.e., seemingly irrefutable evidence) would be taken by a lot of us with a grain of salt; many would assume they’ve gone completely mad. But most UF novels don’t bother addressing this problem. Something weird happens; someone waltzes up and says “dragons be real”; and the disbelievers respond with “Okie dokie.” In the real world, this would not happen, unless you magically stumbled upon the very tiny minority of folks who believe such things in our present world. Human beings are naturally skeptical of a lot of long-since-debunked nonsense, with rare exception. Similarly, a lot of UF novels fail to address the religious or historical aspect of the question. A lot of UF novels are set in America with American protagonists and antagonists. This means that it is statistically likely that the majority of these characters are believes in some version of the Christian God. How would Christians respond to the existence of vampires? How would that response vary depending on the denomination or the religious dedication of an individual? One great example is Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey and its sequel, And Blue Skies From Pain, which imagines that the Fae and the fallen angels from the heavens actually exist (the novels are set in 70s Ireland). Leicht actually explores the big question in a unique way: making the Catholic Church part of a war with the Fae (basically); the Church responds by creating a division specifically trained to deal with the Fae, assuming they are all part of the Fallen (angels who led the rebellion against God and were cast out of heaven), thereby keeping the gears of their religion intact and providing the Church a rationale for its power structures. It’s a clever bit of worldbuilding. For me, the failure to address this problem from both sides (the impact of knowledge and the natural inclination for calling B.S. on stuff that lies outside contemporary belief systems) creates a shitty book. You’re already asking me to suspend my disbelief to buy into a world where dragons and vampires and werewolves actually exist, a leap that requires me to shut off parts of my brain to enjoy the ride. But when your characters can’t be bothered to question, as most of us would question in the real world, the events around them, you’re basically saying “Eh, whatever.” It’s lazy and it makes for bad characterization. There are probably a lot of exceptions, though. Great UF books. Great UF writers. And so I’d like to ask everyone this: Which urban fantasy novels actually take the “big question” head on? Suggestions welcome in the comments.
I’ve argued before that science fiction is a naturally optimistic genre. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that SF almost always imagines a future in which we still exist. While watching Sunshine, however, my position became more nuanced. It’s not that we are still alive; it’s that we’ve survived. Sunshine is one such movie. Set in a future in which the Sun has prematurely begun to die out, humanity has been given the seemingly impossible task of jump-starting the gas furnace of the Sun and save Earth. Impossible is an understatement, really. It’s pretty clear from the start of the film that humanity has not progressed all that far from our present in terms of technology. We’ve mastered a few more stages of spaceflight, put bases and communication arrays on the moon, managed to solve gravity issues on long-range spaceships, figured out how to maximize oxygen production, plant growth, etc., and built ships large enough to house multiple humans and to protect them from radiation, the Sun’s heat, and so on. None of that should inspire confidence in our ability to control stars. And as the opening moments remind us, this is more true than we can possibly know. The first jump-start spaceship, Icarus, disappeared on its way to deliver its payload, leaving us with the Icarus 2, which, we’re reminded, is the product of Earth’s now limited resources. All of these facts are given to us in the earliest moments to remind us how dire the situation really is. But they also tell us something else: we’re survivors who can somehow manage amazing things in the darkest of times. After all, we’ve survived plagues, viruses, weather, and all manner of obstacles thrown at us by our ecosystem. And we’ve survived ourselves for centuries. Sunshine is yet another reminder of this: we are not dead from a nuclear war — as the Cold War Era thought we would be — or biological agents — human made or otherwise. Rather, our obstacle is a seemingly natural one. The Sun is dying and we’ve got to do something to fix that. But the kicker is the solution: impossible technology. The energy needed to successfully jump-start the Sun should be beyond us — should be unattainable. A science fiction trope if there ever was one. But somehow we’ve managed it in Sunshine. For me, the ability to imagine humanity beating the worst odds imaginable is a kind of optimism that cannot be outmatched. It is only in darkness that we can see the light, as they say, and so it is with Sunshine, wherein humanity bands together to defeat the greatest of foes: nature. It doesn’t seem terribly important to me that the technology in this movie is largely imaginary — after all, how exactly are you supposed to restart a star with little more than what can be found on Earth and some almost-magical-hand-waving? But that, to me, is a kind of optimistic notion, too — when handled correctly. That humanity can, in a science fiction universe, discover the means to solve a seemingly impossible problem reminds us how remarkable humans can be. Do any of you have the same feeling?
One of the interesting things I did with my friend Adam last year was a collaboration in which we more or less wrote a story live. While that story didn’t pan out (still have it and think it’s a wicked piece of work that we should one day finish — Andy Remic would love it), it made me think about how I might use Google Docs to let people sneak a peak at my writing process. Google lets you share a document with anyone, and it shows updates more or less as they are happening. Since I’m working on WISB-related stuff, I thought some of you might like to see me at work (and to see the rough drafts as they come into being). I could select a time (maybe a daily time or something) and give the link out on my blog. Even if you couldn’t make it to the live event, you could still check in on the progress. Would any of you be interested in this? Let me know by clicking on the little poll.
I recently re-watched the 1998 film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Sphere (starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson, among others). What fascinated me about the film was that despite all its flaws, it is still an example of science fiction doing what it does best: explore the big ideas (Wikipedia tells me this is also true of the book, but since I haven’t read it, I can only comment on what is in the film). For those that have not seen Sphere, I suggest you watch it before reading beyond this point, because I’m going to ruin the ending. Starting now… The big idea in Sphere is a twist on the traditional “first contact” story. A ragtag bunch of scientists (and a psychologist played by Hoffman) are brought in secret to an underwater facility by the U.S. military. There they learn that the military has discovered a 300-year-old spacecraft, which they suspect to be alien. It turns out, however, that the craft is neither 300-years-old nor alien; rather, it is of American origin and from the future, having crashlanded in Earth’s past after a brush with a black hole. To add to the mystery, the characters discover a strange sphere inside the ship (nobody knows if it’s alien or not, and no answers are ever actually given). Eventually we discover that all those who go inside the sphere gain the ability to bring their thoughts to life. In the concluding scenes (inside a decompression chamber), the surviving members of the team consider the implications of what they’ve learned. Hoffman’s character rightly concludes that humanity is too primitive for the kind of power granted by the sphere, as their nightmarish foray in the underwater facility shows (they all more or less bring their nightmares to life). And so all three characters decide they will use the power to forget what happened, thereby denying humanity access to the information. What I find compelling about this ending is how it fulfills its own prophecy. Because the ship is from the future, we’re drawn to the realization that the choice of the characters to forget means that the mistakes which led them to this realization must always happen. It also means that humanity never actually learns the lesson that these individuals do, making it impossible for any kind of species-centered growth — there will be no forewarning of the dangers, no future-reversion, in which technology from the future influences the technology of the past, leading us to that future point (yay, a paradox!). But the paradox lies in that problem: if the spacecraft has no record of what the scientists discovered in the past, then something must have happened to prevent that information from reaching the authorities. We’re led to believe that this means nobody is meant to survive, but the truth is that the information is destroyed, making certain that nobody knows and that everything proceeds in blindness. Anyone thinking about this problem knows that something must happen or the whole world collapses (which is a problem for Sphere, a serious film, but not really one for Back to the Future, a humorous film). That idea — of meeting our future head-on and grappling with its implications, both technologically, socially, and psychologically — is what SF does best. It doesn’t really matter if Sphere is a great movie on its own; what matters is if its ending compels one to think — and ask the big questions. How do we grapple with technology that makes the “dreams come true” idea a reality? What do we do when we know our own future, and it’s immediate ramifications? And is it really possible to forget such power and history? And if you don’t forget, does that mean your future changes? Do we fall into one of those weird Back to the Future paradoxes? Would you know if things changed? And, of course, there’s this one: What is the sphere? Where did it come from? Will we ever know? I’ll leave it there for now, because I want to see what others thought about the conclusion of Sphere. How did you interpret the paradoxes and ideas presented in those final moments?
