J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek: An Addendum (to my review)
Some time ago I posted a scathing review of the new Star Trek movie. That post has since become one of biggest traffic and comment drivers on this blog. Thinking back, I do have some additional thoughts on the movie, and one thought in particular that I think may explain more about why I really dislike the newest film. I am fully aware that time travel has been a staple within the Star Trek universe, what with the fifth movie having a plot centered entirely around that subject (the one with the whales is the fifth, right?). But what concerns me most about the newest Star Trek movie is that its use of time travel is essentially a non-starter. What do I mean by that? The problem with the newest movie is precisely that its time travel narrative essentially makes the entire movie pointless. If it is that easy to manipulate the course of time, then what is the point of telling a story in this universe? Some new writer could come along and rewrite the entire universe again just so we have something “fresh” and “new” to work with. And in another ten, the same thing (or maybe forty would be the more appropriate number, since that’s sort of how long it took to get this reboot). What about the characters? They become meaningless too, because nothing they do actually matters. It can simply be rewritten. Some characters might not exist at all and some will be replaced. This is the problem with time travel narratives as a whole. Back to the Future only works because it makes fun of itself; the series is centered around a purely comical farce and doesn’t take itself too seriously because of that. But Star Trek is not a comedy, nor based in a universe centered on a farce (at least, it’s not supposed to be). Star Trek takes itself fairly serious, because it should be a serious endeavor; the shows and movies try to address a possible future, not a farcical one (can you really take seriously a time machine built into a DeLorean or, dare I say, a hot tub?). This fact is what bothers me the most about the newest Star Trek. It is too easy and simple to rewrite the course of history, to rewrite characters and plots and entire populations of people (you can now destroy planets, never mind that the very concept of one ship taking out an entire advanced civilization is so mind-bogglingly idiotic it hurts to think about). If Abrams wanted to rewrite Star Trek, he should have ignored time altogether. Just rewrite it. Take the old, update it, make it flashier, stronger, more character driven, and so on. Don’t establish a precedent for the pointless. Or, perhaps the better idea would be to ignore the standard cast of characters and start something completely new. It’s yet to be done. Nobody has started a Star Trek movie with an unknown group of characters (or at least a group that hasn’t been talked much about within the various series) and spawned a series of films about them. What a better way to reboot a franchise than to start clean! But maybe that’s why I don’t make movies. Originality and logic seem to have fallen to the wayside in Hollywood. Thoughts? Opinions?
The West, Science Fiction, and No Future
Over at Genreville (on the Publisher Weekly’s blog), Josh Jasper asks a very intriguing question: Perhaps the future really belongs to people who’re hungry for it, not the ones who take it for granted. Does western culture take the future for granted these days, whereas rising cultures don’t? I think this really depends on who you talk to. Scientists, by and large, would likely take the future very seriously, and many geeks and technology-oriented individuals consistently display their love of the present and the future of the industry (in technology, of course, thinking about the future in logical terms is quite impossible, since the industry is shifting so rapidly that one can’t be expected to keep up). But scientists, geeks, and technology-oriented people are not the majority of the population in the West. They’re a minority; a fairly vocal minority (at least it seems so in the 21st century), but a minority nonetheless. Most of America (and other Western countries, I would assume) is fairly introverted, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. Most of us have to be, particularly now in this difficult recession. The future of things like space travel (kind of a thing of the past, really) holds no weight in a culture struggling to keep jobs, find jobs, pay bills, survive, and be happy (whatever that might entail). I think the issue here isn’t that we take the future for granted, but that most of us (obviously not myself) see no value in much of what Jasper is talking about. Yes, it has value. Absolutely. I would be a lying scumbag if I said that the future of space travel (near future) has no value, or that people aren’t excited about the futures of medical technology. The problem seems to be that, in the west, so much of our daily lives don’t feel as though they are influenced by the things that used to be the future or by what will eventually be our future. We don’t make an A to B connection between, say, the guy who predicted the cell phone in a science fiction novel or movie to the product itself. We benefit, most certainly, but the connection is not made explicit in our daily lives. This is a particular problem with space travel, as mentioned earlier, because as much as space travel is wonderful and has taught us so much about the universe, our planet, and even ourselves and our fellow critters, most people down on the ground and outside of the scientific and technology-oriented communities don’t see the benefit. And, countries that are now getting into the technology world seem more excited because, in that initial boom, it is exciting. When the Internet first started exploding in households, that was a big deal in the United States. Same with the car, the cell phone, and so on. But normality eventually reduces that to, well, normality. We take for granted such things because the value decreases with the increase of acceptance in culture. How does this translate into written science fiction (something Jasper brings up as clear separation between the West–who seems more focused on near future dystopia and far future impossibilities–and the non-West–with a focus on the excitement of the technological revolution)? Well, you could argue that all the problems I’ve discussed above have led to a public disinterest in that excitement. Space travel isn’t exciting to most. It’s mundane at best, and worthless at the worst (I disagree, but that’s me, and I’m not in that community of naysayers and for-granted-takers). The technological revolution is, in a way, over for us, and thinking about a future where we’re doing basically what has already been done, just on a grander scale, isn’t necessarily appealing or exciting. The future is, perhaps, mundane in the West for those who fail to see its value in their daily lives (not because they’re stupid, but because we have done a piss poor job of instilling that love and excitement one needs to make light of the present). So, certainly we take the future for granted (I’m intentionally conflating the future and the present here). In some ways, that’s a bad thing. How do we get that back into our culture and our science fiction (it’s there, just marginalized)? I don’t know. I’m not sure we can, at least not on the scale that would make for meaningful change. The inevitable future of cultural consciousness, at least as I see it, is that every country eventually reaches the point of mundanity about the future. For now, the non-West is booming with excitement because, well, to finally get your own space ship in space or to do all these new, futuristic technological wonders that you’ve yet to do (even though others have) is exciting. Wouldn’t it be exciting if tomorrow was the first time the United States put a man into space, or that someone had thought of the idea in a book and it was the first time for us, ever? Of course! But that’s not us. We’ve done it already, and the future/present isn’t offering something tangible for the masses to demonstrate that there’s still something to be that excited about. But, enough about what I think. What about you?
How (Really) Thinking About Star Wars Can Make You Feel Uncomfortable (i.e. Terrorists!)
How do you feel about terrorism? You don’t like it very much, do you? Most of us don’t, and for good reason. It’s bad, right? No matter what! Damn those evil terrorists! On the opposite end of things, there’s Star Wars. Most of us like that, right? Well, at least the originals. The prequels have really divided us Star Wars geeks… Now, what if I was to tell you that your hatred of terrorists is directly contradicted by your love of Star Wars? Stay with me. You see, Star Wars (the movies only) is basically a giant high five to domestic terrorism. You’d never know it if you didn’t dig in and think deep (the show, after all, does such a fine job painting the Rebels as the good guys). Think of Star Wars in terms of its internal biases: The Rebels are the focus characters. With the exception of Darth Vader, there are few, if any, Imperial focal points throughout the series. Figures like Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, etc. are our heroes, and unabashedly so — watch the first movie again and tell me they’re not unreserved heroes. The Light Side of the Force is pitted against the Dark Side, and, thus, the good side is pitted against the evil side. We’re told that the Empire is evil. Sometimes we see it commit evil, but the assumption left to be made by us is that they are only capable of evil. What isn’t shown is actually quite shocking: infrastructure, culture, etc. The Imperial culture is militaristic, with an Emperor at the head giving all the major orders. But what about the normal folks living in the Empire? Again, we’re left with a biased view, because those planets we are shown tend to be outer world, low-resource, or near-inhospitable places where outlaws have lived pre- and post-Empire, and where we see the failures of colonialism most pronounced. What of the inner planets like Coruscant, etc.? In the prequels we have a good idea that these places are technologically advanced, culturally driven, and prosperous. If you really think about what is shown to us, you have to wonder how much of that is truly the mark of an evil “nation” or “empire,” and how much of it is simply an “empire” gone somewhat awry, but still a few shades short of the extreme evil that we are told it represents. Inevitably, as I briefly touched on above, there is a lot left out of Star Wars in terms of what it doesn’t tell us or intentional leads us to avoid thinking about. Such as: The Rebels are terrorists. They periodically infiltrate the Empire with spies, attack convoys, invade Imperial prisons to liberate criminals against the Empire (yes, Princess Leia is a criminal), etc. The fact that the Rebels almost immediately resort to violence (albeit in a seemingly toxic political environment) is rather telling here. Am I suggesting that violence against the Empire is inherently bad? No, but the problem is that the visual given to us doesn’t provide context to understand the motivations, at least not on a comprehensive level (superficially we are conditioned to hate the Empire). As I mentioned above, and what is relevant to the point preceded this one, the complete lack of Imperial culture within the films essentially leaves an entire side of the coin unseen. This leads us to the following point. Because we only see the militaristic sides of both the Rebels and the Empire (the prequels only show us a pre-Empire galaxy), we have no idea how these two groups are seen in the context of society. Are the Rebels viewed as a good thing, even secretly, among the citizens of the Empire? What about the Empire? While it is certainly relevant to recognize the impetus behind the Rebels’ actions, it doesn’t hide the fact that whatever good intentions there may be, they are still engaging in what we would call terrorism today. Think of it this way: to the people who support Al Qaeda, they are doing a good thing; likewise, to the people who support the Rebels, they are also doing a good thing. It comes down to perspective, and when you are on the outside, as we are, you can think objectively about the reality that Star Wars proposes. That reality is one where terrorism is something to root for, where good and evil are clearly defined, and where, inevitably, the folks we think are the good guys always win. While the Al Qaeda analogy might not hold up for most, it functions well enough to demonstrate how good and evil are defined by both context and perspective, both of which we cannot ignore here, even if the movies want us to for the sake of its internal logic. But ask yourself this the next time you watch the original Star Wars movies: are the militaristic and “evil” elements of the Empire the only things severely damaged by the end of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi? Or is it possible that the collateral damage from everything the Rebels have done is in fact far more devastating than leaving the Empire in control in the first place?
Scifi Squad’s Top Scifi Rapist
Last month, Scifi Squad posted a top ten list of scifi couples. The usual suspects show up there (Han and Leia from Star Wars), with a few modern additions (Zoe and Wash from Firefly and WALL-E and Eve from WALL-E). But then there’s #3: Rick and Rachael from Blade Runner. I wasn’t aware that being a rapist made you one half of an awesome scifi couple. But maybe the Scifi Squad folks don’t remember the scene where Rick Deckard throws Rachael against the wall after she tries to leave, and then forces himself upon her (she cries in that scene, by the way) while terrifying her into telling him “she wants it.” It wasn’t hidden. The scene is pretty damned clear: at best, Deckard is an abusive son of a bitch; at worst, he’s the worst kind of rapist you’d expect to see in a Lifetime movie. They’re reasoning? Between filming two parts of his memorable Star Wars romance, Harrison Ford fell in love with a replicant. That’s the last thing you’d expect from the world-weary Rick Deckard, who specializes in terminating “skin jobs,” but the heart wants what the heart wants, and the cool, classic beauty of Rachael (Sean Young) sneaks through his defenses, until he’s doing everything within his power to keep her alive. Did they see the same movie I did? He hardly does anything for Rachael. Yes, at the end of the movie he takes her away, but that’s the only moment where Deckard really does anything for her (rather than for himself). Throughout most of the movie he is either screwing with her mind (i.e. telling her she’s a replicant and that all her memories, which she thinks, at that point, are hers, are in fact fabrications), killing her kind, or forcing himself upon her. One shouldn’t forget that the world Deckard has come to know pretty much allows him to get away with doing whatever he wants to the so called “skin jobs.” I wonder if a little of that has rubbed off into the real world… Two thumbs up for rapists, I suppose.
A New SF Manifesto of Bologna: Jetse de Vries and the Literature of Change (Part Three)
Now for the final post in my response to Jetse de Vries’ post. You can read the previous two parts by clicking the following links: part one; part two. Here goes: Point Five – SF dismisses actual science This one is easy to deal with: what consumers want is what they get. You want more SF that deals realistically with all aspects of science (even the aspects that most readers don’t know about anyway)? Well, then you have to change the public. Good luck with that. If scientists knew how to change the public’s view of science enough to make them want to change how we teach science in school (and thus affect change on science literacy), then they’d probably have done it already. Consumers don’t know the vast majority of the actual rules of science; SF writers tend to know this. Some of them want accurate science; some of them don’t. You tell me which way works best. Now, we can moan and groan about how this is terrible and oh so sad, but that’s not something consumers give a flying fig about. Why? Because they don’t read SF to be educated about physics or chemistry or what have you. They read SF to be entertained. The ones who read SF for accuracy are a minority. That’s not to say that accurate SF can’t work, just that consumers generally can’t tell the difference between what is right and what is not. Don’t believe me? Take a camera and a microphone to the streets of any major city and start asking people either whether they care if the science is accurate or whether or not they know the basics of science. I guarantee you that most people (i.e. most consumers) will not have a clue. It is not SF’s job to educate people. Point Six – SF isn’t relevant (enough) Never mind that de Vries contradicts himself on this point (earlier he says that SF doesn’t really deal with present worldly concerns, but then here he says that it does; maybe he should make up his mind). What is important here is the whole point of the optimistic anthology he’s been working on: SF is so depressing and doom and gloom and sad and boohoo. SF has no solutions. It’s just about how things go from bad to worse. My question is: does de Vries actually read books, or does he just make this stuff up as he goes? Of course things go from bad to worse. That’s what makes a novel tick. You can’t have a story that goes from good to gooderer and expect anyone to pay attention. That’s the kind of crap that keeps five-year-olds entertained during the day while their parents are cleaning the house. That’s what makes Barney, the Teletubbies, and Blue’s Clues work for kids and not for adults. The only way literature for older kids and adults works is if it goes from good to bad to worse to better. That’s how it works. The whole doom and gloom proclamation, however, is remarkably narrow-minded. Maybe if all you ever read are SF novels about doomsday futures you’d get a bit bothered, but this all reads to me as a desperate need on the part of de Vries to actually get out there and do some more reading. Either he has been incredibly isolated where he lives or he’s just never picked up the right books, because all this talk about how most SF is about how the future is all bad (and not good) is like saying that all football games are about hitting other people for the fun of it. Hardly. There are plenty of science fiction writers who are imagining futures that have problems that get resolved. They don’t always get fully resolved (after all, a lot of SF deals with planet- or multisystem-wide problems), but there is usually a significant leap in the happy direction at the end (the world is saved, the characters we’ve rooted for finish a mission, or bring down and evil dictator, or whatever—the examples are endless). The doom and gloom stuff is a particular brand. We call them dystopias, and they’ve been around for quite a long time. And it is here again that de Vries demonstrates his complete ignorance of the real world. SF is supposed to “get off its arse” and “be totally open to outside influences and other cultures, and get involved with proactive thinking, proudly using science, about the near future.” Just before that little quote, however, de Vries points to something said by Athena Andreadis about the fall of science within the mainstream (political and social) in the U.S. Somewhere in there de Vries has a little disconnect. This is what he is saying: SF should further ostracize itself by becoming more and more about real world science, despite the fact that the general public (i.e. consumers) is scientifically illiterate and that such illiteracy is unlikely to change any time soon. Yeah. Smart. Let’s make SF more and more about stuff that the general public clearly doesn’t give a crap about. Don’t get me wrong; I agree. I’d like my SF to be more accurate at times, but to assume that this is going to help SF in any way is absurd. People do not give a shit. If they did, scientists would be revered for being totally awesome and we’d all be living in a world that reminds us, surprisingly, of an episode of Sliders (you know, the one where Quinn’s twin in another dimension is both a science wiz and on a Wheaties box, and everyone seems to get off on the whole science thing, with Einstein being the equivalent of Elvis). Boy would that be one heck of a fantasy world. That’s all I have to say on that. As much as I’d like to get on board with all this, I feel like it’s doing nothing but proposing a lot of ideas that sound good,
A New SF Manifesto of Bologna: Jetse de Vries and the Literature of Change (Part Two)
I started this series of posts the other day and will now continue. You can read part one here and part three here. Point Three – SF is WASP-ish By that, de Vries means that SF allows for the perpetuation of white-privilege, which is true on some level, but also somewhat ignorant of what WASP actually stands for (historically speaking). He uses this to point at the problem of international SF to get any play in the Western market, which is also true on a lot of levels, but once again misses a very important problem: translations. First off, the Western world speaks English (mostly), and, thus, only reads in that language. You can’t expect writers from China to have much hold on the Western market without their work being in English. What’s wrong with that? There isn’t much of a market for translations in most of the literary markets to begin with. While there are translations that do quite well, there are also lots of translations that don’t, and expecting publishers to take on the burden of translating work that will likely lose them income is like expecting football players to try to be as graceful as ballerinas on the field while simultaneously making big plays. You find a way to make the market (i.e. the consumers) interested in translated fiction, and you’ll have solved this problem entirely. Right now, that hasn’t happened. However, de Vries is correct that SF probably should be more inclusive of non-standard (i.e. white) characters and themes, but that is also true of a lot of genres (most literary forms should be multicultural, not necessarily universally, but certainly more frequently). For the record: I actually wish more works were translated into English, particularly from China, because I’m curious about what is being written out there, but I also understand that I am a minority in the market. The people who control what gets produced by publishers are the people who put books on the bestseller’s list, generally speaking (yes, I know this is not true of everything). Point Four – SF is commercially dead This is where I think the most tired arguments are being presented. Perhaps the funniest part of de Vries’ discussion of the commercial death of SF is that he uses as an example a book written over twenty years ago and associated (or started, rather) with a genre that has, for the most part, actually experienced commercial death (it didn’t truly die, but it certainly ceased to be a major player and has since been consumed by other forms of SF). So, his example of “risk-taking SF” is a book that represents a genre that is already dead, and this is what SF should become? (He’s talking about Neuromancer, in case you didn’t read his post.) Let me rephrase: de Vries thinks that SF doesn’t take enough risks (it does, but nobody buys the books that take a risk, apparently, and consumers seem far more interested in re-hashes of the stuff that sells in the theaters, which is true), and so his solution is to follow the lead of other seemingly dead-end subgenres in order to make SF wonderful and vibrant again. Brilliant idea. Let’s kill SF while its still standing and feign shock when it stops breathing. For the record, William Gibson actually thought taking on the label “cyberpunk” was a horrible idea. He said as much in an book signing in Santa Cruz some time back. See, Gibson is not a moron; he knew that cyberpunk would be short-lived, and it was. The result? Gibson survived because he refused to take on the title and continued writing in and outside of that genre, and the vast majority of the other “cyberpunks” disappeared entirely (with the exception to a handful of authors who managed to get a hold in other subgenres). The thing is, SF is taking risks. Many writers of non-tie-in SF are doing exactly what de Vries wants the genre to do and they either sell very well (Robert J. Sawyer) or not. Some have tried to revitalize some of the old gosh-wow elements of golden age SF (John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell) and a lot are simply going with what works: tie-in fiction and space opera. SF, contrary to what de Vries seems to think, is also tackling the modern world in a future context. Kim Stanley Robinson and many others have written on climate change and there are authors today tackling everything from the potential ramifications of a Chinese superpower to the rise of a radical religious movement here in the States and elsewhere. I don’t know where de Vries has been living, but he’s certainly not on the up-and-up in the SF genre (I’m not even on the up-and-up and I seem to have a clearer picture of what is going on). The problem? He expects the genre to tackle real-world dystopic situations with puppies and flowers. Screw realism. Screw what might actually happen to a world struck by rapid, unstoppable climate change. No, we should paint it all pretty and make it a giant masturbatory scientific orgy in which the conflict is little more than “how do we fix it / oh, let’s do that / but it’s hard / it’s okay, we’ll manage / yippee.” Well, if that’s the kind of SF de Vries wants, you can count me out. In fact, what SF should probably be doing is splitting in two, with the “serious” side pulling out all the stops and coming up with the nifty ideas, the harsh realities, and the hardcore SF we’ve come to love, and the more flashy side exploding Star Wars style with as much escapist fantasy as humanly possible. He (de Vries) thinks the second part is a bad thing, and you have to wonder why. What could possibly be bad about SF doing exactly what all literature should: entertain. Consumers want this; publishers are giving it to them (kind of). Get over it.