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The Death of Sci-Fi
The other day I wrote about the rumored death of science-fiction. Last night I stumbled over the bloated stinking corpse, and nearly vomited.
I saw Revenge of the Sith. And rather than being the sneaky counter-cultural message I was hoping, it was instead something like a very dull spike driven slowly through my brain.
I mean, I don’t even know how to talk about how bad it sucked. And it’s not that I was surprised. Phantom and Clones also sucked lightsaber dick, but I was just pointlessly holding out hope that it’d turn around. I know it was naive of me, but rest assured I was terribly punished for it. While I was sitting there, I suddenly started feeling like: I don’t ever want to see another movie again.
I really don’t want to get into a big sci-fi nerd discussion here, but really the only word I can think of is betrayal. These movies so stunningly overturned the magic of the original trilogy, upon which I was raised. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not just older and more jaded now. If I was like 11 years old today, would I have been shitting in my pants when Obi Wan chops off Darth Vader’s legs at the end? I like to think that I wouldn’t but who knows.
It just seems like you can’t get good sci-fi anymore. Sure I haven’t been following the genre that much, but it’s because it’s sucked a cold alien cock for so long that there’s been no reason to. I know I come off like a culture-snob sometimes. But I was raised on a steady diet of really crappy pulp sci-fi stuff. It was completely throwaway, but also completely glorious. It may have been formulaic, but it was at least straight-forward, and it delivered some kind of pay-off.
You know the thing I was most annoyed at with this Sith movie? When he goes to the Jedi temple to kill the “younglings.” First of all, that’s gay that they call them that. Second, they didn’t even show him killing the kids! Like I wasn’t look for anything graphic, but it was just such a fucking lame way to treat it. I mean, I see scarier evil things in my toilet bowl. But then they showed him killing those stupid pseudo-Chinese aliens. How annoying.
You know what else annoyed me? When Natalie Portman was delivering the babies, they put this like weird cone thing over her body, from her boobs down to her legs. Sort of like one of those collars that you put on dogs so they don’t lick their balls after they’ve been neutered. I mean, I know this was supposed to be a “family movie” but this whole thing of denying nature, of covering her body during one of the most pivotal parts of the movie was just so typical of the problems with it. I mean, I didn’t need to see the babies squeeze out of her vagina, but hell, this cone-thing was just ridiculous. To me, it’s a symbol of how cut-off sci-fi is nowadays from what’s really important. Rather than being a window to look in on our souls with, it’s just this weird block that keeps us from it.
I guess my question is: if sci-fi has truly died, is the corpse still twitching at all? There any chance of it at least coming back as a zombie? Is there anybody out there doing anything at all worthwhile in this field anymore? I’m starting to lose hope.
PS. Before you go off on a rant about how I should stop watching Hollywood movies expecting good stuff, don’t waste your breath. I already know that, but I like to keep abreast of the important stories in the culture regardless. That doesn’t mean I like to be continually let down…
May 26th, 2005 at 5:27 pm
I feel your pain, padewan. But there is a New Hope: http://www.toonzone.net/shows/clonewars.php
I started watching it last year and it got me back into the whole Star Wars myth. This animated series delivers where the prequels have failed. The animation is top-notch and the characters seem more believable than their real-life actor counterparts. It functions as The Animatrix did with The Matrix– supplementary and entertaining.
May 26th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
man, i LOVE Genndy Tartakovsky. samurai jack was so fucking awesome. but i dont get no cable action here…
May 26th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
I think the reason why sci-fi sucks is that we are living it.
Who needs I-Robot when Toyota is working on them for real?
Who needs squid caps like in Strange Days when Steve Mann is doing all of the work in Toronto?
What I mean to say is that the greatest sci-fi from Dick, Asimov, Huxley & al. is happening before our eyes in the pages of the New Scientist.
What we would need today are sci-fi writers need to look further into the future.
But here comes the problem. How can sci-fi look further into the future when the sci-fi timeline (Star Trek could be the best example of our defacto timeline) is already established.
Think of sci-fi as the established probable future (thus sci-fi writers being modern day profits as touched upon here). The problem with sci-fi is that most if not all is established and unless I am unimaginative, (which I doubt) most of the angles are covered.
It comes to the idea that we are presently in a time-frame where we can access past, present and future in the Marshal McLuhan & Will Burroughs style of thinking.
So in a sense I think that you touched a nerve when you noted that conspiracy is the new sci-fi.
Books like the Da Vinci code is attempting to deconscruct the micro realm of human events. People seem to be exploring that angle much more than sci-fi because as mentioned above the marco aspect of sci-fi is established.
The feeling of been there, done that.
To go any further into pushing sci-fi would be stories found today ala Matrix where humans are have transformed or evolved into information or energy. Writing about such things draws the storyline away from the human aspect that we search for in stories.
The need to compare yourself to a character is much easyer than to delve into a story about humans as information or light beings.
I hope that I made sense.
May 26th, 2005 at 6:28 pm
The first volume of Clone Wars is on DVD. Check amazon.com
May The Force Be With You
May 26th, 2005 at 6:35 pm
oh totally. those were great insights. you touched on a major factor of what stories nowadays do. i think it started with feminism, queer theory and other “minority” studies really started - basically the alternate history model. what happens if you change one specific fact or interpretation? certainly sci-fi has done this plenty: what if the nazis won WW2, etc…
i think what you said about looking into the future is good too. like how could we look any farther into the future when sci-fi of the past already has been looking like 10,000 years ahead for years? it sort of seems like mythologizing the past, or transforming the present becomes the much easier more reasonable option after a while.
besides conspiracy theory and cultural studies playing these games, we also have the fields of historical revisionism. you have the whole holocaust denial thing on one hand. on another, you have the annunaki/nephilim people, claiming we’re descended from aliens. and i even saw a book one time that claimed european history never happened, and that the current era was actually something like 1038AD…
i think the matrix does fit into this too, just this whole idea of “everything you know is wrong”… which is pretty much the mantra of conspiracy theory
May 26th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
i spotted that james, thanks!
May 26th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
I couldn’t begin tolist the things that were wrong with that movie. After that first breathtaking scene from above the planet, it was all downhill.
Biggest gripes:
Special effects over story.
Too serious while sumultaneously too comic-booky (one or the other, please!)
We’ve all grown since the pseudo-Taoism of the first- the vaguely buddhist Jedi-speak was pointless (basically, it was too much or too little- they needed to either present a coherent philosophy or leave it up to the imagination).
The Jedi were cool the first time around because they were an anachronism- charmingly chivalric, spiritual, etc. They were space-templars, now they’re a technologically and genetically superior super-army . Instead of engineering nonsense to fill plotholes, they should have left well enough alone. We’re supposed to buy the ‘evil empire’ subverted democracy, but that the universe can be saved by ‘good genes?’
The stupid characters: How can “the chosen one” be so weak? Couldn’t a few minutes of “Yoda with lightsaber” have been cut to lend some development time for the main characters? Could Padme have been just a little less “perils of Penelope?” She’s supposed to be a genius politican, yet she choses to sigh about the tower window and change her clothes ten times a day? Where is the backstory on Palpatine? Why does nobody notice this guy until he turns purple and starts spraying lighning around?
We was robbed.
May 26th, 2005 at 6:56 pm
you know what else pissed me off? the constant wipes in between scenes. why were so many scenes so fucking short? i dont need to be reminded what each character is doing when each of them is doing something so fucking patently boring
May 26th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
I saw it last night too. But you know, instead of being pissed about it, I was glad to see it end. That’s it. Let’s get on with life now. Of course, I’m going with some other friends to see it again tonight.
Some other things: If it wasn’t for John Williams original fanfare, this soudtrack had to be the most dull I’ve ever heard him write.
I liked that the orginal (looking) set of the corridor in the Rebel Blockade Runner which set the tone for episode IV was used a couple of times. And it was also kind of neat I suppose to see a recreation of the scene in which Vader strolls down the bridge while the officers were busy below. Spittin’ image of the same scene in Empire. Hayden Christensen does not have nearly the same build as David Prowse. Vader looked kind of frumpy.
You’re right it blew. But at least it is finished. Well, not for me. Let’s see how it comes off a second time.
May 26th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
To conclude myself on what was noted above…
Yes there is a lot of history revisionism and what if stories nowadays.
On a micro level again (our inner selves), the Paranormal, is now slowly being merged with science with the advent of Quantum Physics and Bio-Physical advances connected with the advent of nanotechnology. Obviously the conclusion of hologram theory is one that is comming up more often these days.
Thus I guess that sci-fi is not looking for the future anymore, but within ourselves to explain the unexplainable and tapping into the sub and or mass conciousness.
But I am seeing too many paralells here, like crazy Bob Dobbs as an example.
Sci-Fi as we know it from Verne upto Roddenbury , is definatley past its`Golden Age.
May 26th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
Didn’t it also seem like Samuel L. Jackson told Lucas he could pencil him in for a three hour hour shoot?
I think the CGI is killing the genre. What sci-fi cinema needs is a return to the real sets, matte paintings, miniatures, stop motion etc. Organic special FX baby! The time it took for the sets and scenes to be crafted in the olden days probably lent itself to a much superior screenplay and dialogue as well. Plus having Harrison Ford didn’t hurt the first three either.
May 26th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
you just sparked another thought for me, NM. like what if the purpose of sci-fi was actually to create all these advances in our minds and hearts, so that we’d then be able to get over the “hump” and create them into real reality.
maybe too its almost like a back-up fail-safe against scientists who push forward with no regard for consequences. like these scientists just want “progress” but sci-fi asks “at what cost”? and it gives us the stories to understand and utilize all these new developments before they even happen.
if we jump back to the analogy between sci-fi and conspiracy theory, does that mean that conspiracy theory basically is prepping us for the birthing of something new into reality? maybe what conspiracy theory does is recognize multiplicity and somehow explicitly prepare us for the conflict between multiple viewpoints on reality…
May 26th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
one other thing while im on the topic: did anybody else see the preview for the lion the witch and the wardrobe? at first, i was like, oh god, another one of these movies about stupid kids in a creepy house, and then i suddenly realized what it was and was totally stoked. it actually looks kind of awesome, i think
May 26th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
I think your exactly on point there my friend.
Case closed, I would say…
Chalk another one up for the Occult Investigator!
May 26th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
and they would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for us meddling kids!
actually, scooby-doo is another good reference point for having been indoctrinated in conspiracy theory ethics at a young age. except, at the end, the gang always hands the villain over to the police. it would be awesome to see an episode of that where they actually investigate the police themselves. possibly uncovering a ritual abuse scandal or something similar. man, that would be so nuts to see shaggy and scooby running around all goofy and fake scared in some kind of room with slave-kids in cages…
May 26th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
“I guess my question is: if sci-fi has truly died, is the corpse still twitching at all? There any chance of it at least coming back as a zombie? Is there anybody out there doing anything at all worthwhile in this field anymore?”
Firefly!
As for RotSith…I saw it last night and was pretty disappointed. The special effects didn’t Wow me like I expected…instead it just seemed like a barrier between the story and the characters. All the droids except C-3P0 looked like cartoons. I think what upset me the most was how Padme had no real character arc, and seemed to spend the movie staring out a window. Leia went around the galaxy kicking ass; why was her mom so passive? When Chewbacca had his gratuitous and pointless appearance, all I could say was “Thank you, George Lucas, for raping yet another childhood memory.” There’s this weird jump in technology on the last reel, like Lucas was forcing a bridge between the two trilogies in a way that doesn’t make sense chronologically. Then again, the whole series had major timing issues, like Luke becoming a master Jedi in the same time Leia and Han hide out in the asteroid field. But it was worse with this one. Padme’s pregnancy seemed to happen overnight. Like far too many movies these days, it seemed like a good half of the battles (like the Yoda/Palpatine bout) happened solely to provide more big bosses for the video game version. Speaking of the combat scenes, they had none of the lyrical flow the Clone Wars cartoon shorts exude. The writing was stilted. The acting was wooden: I literally laughed out loud a number of times (example: Anakin thrusting his head towards the heavens and shouting “Noooooooooo!”). I’m very disappointed with Lucas for bringing in all that religious nonsense in Phantom Menace without ever explaining it. Why didn’t Anakin have a father? What was the goddamned prophecy? At least there was a pitiful attempt to clear up the whole Obi-becoming-more-powerful-than-you-can-imagine dealie. Where was Bail Organa for the first 2/3rds of the movie? Another thing I noticed was that they totally skipped over the most important parts of Anakin’s character development. It’s like there’s this gap between where he finds out that Palpatine=Sidious and when he informs Samuel L. Jackson about it, and then another gap between then and when he shows up in Palpatine’s office. 6 movies, ostensibly about Darth Vader’s fall and redemption, and the key moments get glossed right over. Him and Natalie Portman making eyes at the camera does not count.
But what you really nailed, Tim, was the “younglings.” WTF?! I could understand Obi-Wan calling them “younglings”…maybe it’s some weird Jedi thing and it sort of fits with the Brit accent…but then to have Padme repeat it instead of saying “children” just seemed weird. With a PG-13 rating, and dismemberments and decapitations galore, I really do not comprehend what possessed them to not show Darth Vader’s most evil act. When he walked into that room and drew his lightsaber, I readied myself to see horrors. Instead, I got another one of those annoying ass overused transitions. And then they show the holo-footage and you expect, okay, now we’ll see. And again, nothing.
May 26th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
yeah i laughed out loud a bunch of times too. the worst was when obi wan appeared at the top of the stairs in padme’s ship, and he had his hands on his hips. it was fucking RETARDED
May 26th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
I remember a key point James Campbell made about the starwars trilogy is the battle between the more humanistic/intuitonal/inner voice of us and the mechanistic/bureaucratic side of us. Darth Vadar representing someone who has gone over to the “dark” side, being more machine then human, and Luke representing someone in the end who ends up choosing the more human side; forgiveness, not relying on the radar thing to destroy the deathstar, etc.
So..the argument can be made that George Lucas has gone over to the dark side, his original movies although having special effects never used them to the detriment of the human story and some of his more endearing robots are more humanistic while the ewoks and wookies I think help represent more natural men.
His new movies though almost completely choose flash, technology, the allure of the machine over anything for the lack of a better word “organic”, half the backgrounds are so busy and out of human scale one just shuts down, like at an airport. I found myself like most people just withdrawing my involvement when I saw a bunch of digital actors interacting with digital extras against a digital background.
Yes the “younglings”, I winced every time they said that, but I think that is one of the strongest scenes in the whole movie. I work part time at a theatre so I’ve seen the movie twice, once on opening night with the hardest of the hardcore and a Saturday matinee with kids and their moms. The base was either overjoyed at the scene, a guy two rows up actually said “Cool!”, or defiant at the people who said cool “Shut up man!”
The kids though and their moms, most of them it hit them totally raw, they really didn’t see it coming, they actually fucking gasped! then the whole theatre was silent except for some Marge type concerned murmuring. I think alot of us are so dull to violence, (I know people who think Kill Bill is not a violent movie), that when we are confronted with something like that, unless it is filmed just right, it doesn’t register.
I’m glad they didn’t show the actual killing. In the clone one they underplayed Anakins little genocidal field trip with the sand people, but it was pretty clear in this one what he was going to do, and I for one am with Obi One, “I have to turn it off, it’s to painful” again a natural human reponse to disturbing visuals, before of course you’ve started to be tempted by the dark side.
May 26th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
I’m both worried and looking forward to it. It could be very good done well, but some aspects of the stories could be seen as anti-Islam, and given the right wing backing of this film I am a little worried about how they’ll do it.
May 26th, 2005 at 11:38 pm
which film, narnia?
May 27th, 2005 at 1:51 am
Interesting this talk of George Lucas is…
Have you seen last month’s cover of Wired?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iggy/10974704/
It features Lucas in the Darth Vader mask with it half cut away…
A very interesting image in terms of an earlier chat on this website about Lucas as a failed “gray-robed christian”…
May 27th, 2005 at 5:49 am
Just another point about Natalie Portman’s delivery room scene - has anyone here been at the birth of a child? Has George Lucas? For the mother the midwife is THE most important person in the room - much more than just ‘medical staff’ which seems to be the angle that GL took, making easy for him to make the ’staff’ a robot
If they were really advanced they would have know important HUMAN support is at that time
Cold, cold, cold, like much of the rest of the movie
No wonder she kicked the bucket!!
May 27th, 2005 at 1:54 pm
There is a new (relatively) hope.
Gregory benford writes way far off sci fi.
Robert Charles Wilson writes some of the weirdest stuff this side of PKD, and it’s set only 20 years out or so.
John Ringo writes throwaway stuff with great mythic characters and battles with the kind of stakes you saw in SW: IV, V, VI: the fate of the galaxy lies in the hands of a few crazy folks.
For every action (Crapification, in this case) there is an equal and opposite reaction (quality sci-fi).
May 27th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
I can’t recommend Iain M. Banks enough. Consider Phlebas was his first Culture novel and it can be sort of annoying sometimes…like he was finding his voice, but it is sort of necessary for an introduction. After that, they get much better. Excession kinda blew my mind. I don’t know if you’re into the space opera shit, but I love it. I would never want to see a movie made of them though. Funny talking about time and shit with sci-fi, cause with Banks he sets his timelines in like 1000 AD and so on, but the technology is wildly imaginative it fits nowhere. I mean really…what does time mean when it comes to space travel?
I can’t stand seeing those wipes either…as if including them somehow makes them more like the first chapters. Not to mention he never used them inhis other movies and ripped them from Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress.
May 29th, 2005 at 12:04 am
Fin de siecle eras like that explored in AOTC and ROTS are ruled by hyper-intellectual critics who have no belief of their own. They merely seek to destroy what has already died within them. Anankin is destroying what can no longer defend itself. This outlook sows the seed of destruction. Twilight of the Idols, hammer of the Gods. In a nod to reality, this is the critical problem with the left in America and it’s response to the fascist tendencies of Bush. In an age of unbelief, raw power comes to rule.
In a related note…see the above “Last night I stumbled over the bloated stinking corpse, and nearly vomited….I saw Revenge of the Sith. It was… something like a very dull spike driven slowly through my brain.”
IMHO, every scrap of sci-fi/fantasy literature, comic books and movies are dog shit compared to historical artistic expression. Thinking here of Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart etc. Like any pulp garbage, if you don’t get “into” it, you will hate it. It requires the suspension of critical faculties, otherwise it just doesn’t hold interest. The more you know about the genre the more likely this outcome. And once someone goes down that road, they can find tons of stuff to support their reasoning. I know people who hate the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy movie. They didn’t get “into” it, and tore the movies to shreds. On the internet movie database website, the highest ratings of Revenge of the Sith are coming from teenage girls, the least likely to know anything about sci-fi in general or Star Wars. The worst ratings come from men over age 45.
Another group dislikes ROTS immensely and that is the neo-cons.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/...lic/Articles/000/000/005/611ajqxt.asp
I wouldn’t like it either if I was a Sith Lord and trying to keep my plans under wraps.
Lastly, Lucas explores how fighting with violence against the “tyrannical order” of things plants the seed for future tyranny. After Return of the Jedi, and after killing untold thousands in their Rebellion, the restored Republic fails rather quickly. The medal ceremony at the end of Episode 4 looks like a Nazi ceremony and lo and behold a few years later Luke goes over to the dark side in the outline of the third trilogy. While not a new idea, this is the true tragic dimension of the Star wars universe.
Apparently six movies over 30 years hasn’t driven this point home. Does someone need to make the third trilogy?
May 29th, 2005 at 12:38 am
Lastly. Tim, you can recreate the excitement of your sci-fi youth if you just kill a lot of brain cells with hard drugs (might take a few years and expensive) or blunt force trauma with a heavy object. My personal method is to sit and stare at a wall for days at a time. But then we couldn’t enjoy your excellent writing.
May 29th, 2005 at 3:46 am
Sometimes I think it is important to go back to the classics, contextualize them, and see how they feel now. The Day the Earth Stood Still came out on DVD so I bought that sucker. Nice, deeper than the iconic scenes that I thought of (robot zaps people, big lecture at the end). It was really about dealing with fear and paranoia and a tendency to go off half-cocked when the hanging rope is in your hand. Babylon 5 is out on DVD and should be pondered frequently as the brilliant, classic tale it is. Twin Peaks is in that grey area-a soap opera with sci fi implications (UFOs, ritual sacrifice, serial killers, possession, the White and Black lodges), as well as being the precursor to endless X files episodes (in which some folks picture Duchovny as DEA Agent gender changed again). The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Cute but peculiarly British. Dark Angel was not bad, Harsh Realm was too challenging for a television (sheep) audience, Lone Gunmen was eerily prophetic and ran counter to America’s CanDo optimism (skewering the can do/ should do judgement). Verhoeven’s films stand up well and are sharp satire of Western Civilization (I’ll buy that for a dollar!). Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha was brilliant time travel story. GATTACA? Sky Captain (I didn’t see it). The French have done some great work-Alien Resurrection, City of Lost Children, LeeLoo! Resident Evil, the first film, and 28 days later have quasi science themes in that genetic manipulation makes monsters-self replicating Frankenstein’s monsters. Stargate is going gangbusters, as is Battlestar Galactica and the other SciFi channel specials, series, and mini-series.
Coming from a different angle, look at the interactive fiction elements of two computer game series: Half Life and Deus Ex. The latter especially has tapped into the subsurface layer of suspicion, paranoia, and angst about what is in store for the next generations. Your avatar’s actions have determinative effects on your character’s existence in the games. Half Life takes parts of the Area 51 mythos and constructs a narrative wherein the avatar makes choices which affect the outcome of the game, including some relative humdingers. Both series are incredibly immersive compared to some others.
Finally, if you have some hot ideas go write them down and make your own stories! The worst that can happen, well, okay, you will get a perspective on the writing process. You may find out where hacks come from. Or you may be a genius in waiting. Star wars, Star Trek-really were kind of hack work in a lot of ways. But more people watched those than ever stayed awake through Kubrick’s 2001. Today’s kids will remember Anime and Manga as their golden sci fi. Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, Space Cruiser Yamato, Akira, Macross, and Gundam are happening now. The search for depth is where the excitement is-a PK Dick makes it somewhat easy to look for the structure beneath the narrative(s) by publicizing his process, while others never get that scrutiny. How many of your friends have a Lord of the Rings manuscript they’ve written, some Dungeons and Dragons kid who went a few steps further? All I can say is GO!
May 29th, 2005 at 12:33 pm
yeah thats great advice! write write WRITE! i plan to go back and write some more SF stuff once i finish this project im working on…
June 1st, 2005 at 11:55 pm
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