The Deconstructionist: The Space Vampire
Like Nerds Need Something Else To Worry About.
This week I’ve finally decided to weigh in on the rampant speculation that science fiction is a dying if not dead form of expression, as explained by Bruno Maddox up in the most recent issue off Discover magazine. This is complete hooey of course, (and terrific irony because I subscribe to Discover as a source of inspiration for my own science fiction stories) and it’s likely the only reason the idea was brought is that Bruno Maddox needed to write 1,300 words for an essay to round out the issue. Well, I also need a 1,000 word essay and an easy target to go about so here we go!
Now pay attention to the title of this essay because I am going to get so much out of what is a crummy metaphor that is essentially an excuse to link to this:
Damn that messed me up when I was a kid! That episode was on when, 81? I was eleven? To me, the crappy make-up was so crappy that it passed right through ridiculous and into terrifying, breaking down my childish defenses on two fronts. First, to look that absurd and yet survive in a hostile universe, a creature (called a Vorvon) would have to be BAD ASS, but also, if adults were putting something so incredibly, obviously, stupefying fake on a prime-time television program, (his ears are on backwards! BACKWARDS!!) doesn’t it mean that the competence I assumed was guaranteed with the arrival of maturity was, in fact, a myth? Both my own world and the fantastic world of Buck Rogers were shaken to the core by the arrival of The Space Vampire.
Now I look back at the Space Vampire and see it for what it is: desperate writing. That is, a hope that some fantasy in sci-fi drag would spice up a sci-fi show that was limping back through the stargate on impulse power.
But that didn’t mean sci-fi was dead or in trouble, just that the folks who wrote Buck Rogers didn’t know what they were doing. Check that- they were looking for ways to make Erin Gray even sexier, and making her a space vampire did that, so I take back some of the accusation. I mean to say, they don’t know how to write science fiction.
And that’s no crime. Sci-fi is hard, and hard sci-fi is freakin’ impossible, but only because it requires the mind of an engineer and the discipline of a polished author. But there are people who posses those gifts and they manage to fill up Asimov’s and dozens of other ‘hard’ sci-fi publications every month, to the degree that these publications have no need for my own somewhat tenuous expeditions into the field.
I relate sci-fi to the Space Vampire not only because most of it sucks but because it cannot die. Think about it: science fiction works on exactly the same principals as the technology and society it seeks to explore or explain. The day we can no longer imagine new technologies and how they will change our lives is the day we no longer have a future as a species. So if that impulse dies, losing Asimov’s will be the least of our worries.
The key argument to the idea that the age of meaningful sci-fi has passed is grounded in the idea that technology progresses so quickly that speculation of what it might bring is impractical. What 21st century are people who believe this living in, anyway? I don’t have to go far to find examples of how progress is woefully lagging behind my expectations. For one, my freaking television sucks! That’s right, I could go one and on (and I have) about how my television is like some hand-crank powered model T from 1927, and it’s a good one- flat screen (still a tube), hi-def, etc, but I have NO CONTROL over what happens on it! Episode 1 will always end the same, no matter what I do, and sure, I could maybe download an alternative mix from the internet and play it back, but that’s not flying, that’s some guy carrying me and running in a circle while making airplane noises. I pick on Episode 1 because it kind of sucks but also because it’s mostly CGI, and since only a small percentage of it exists, I should be able to freely manipulate the rest of it, but hell, I can’t even make entirely CGI ‘movies’ like ‘The Spirits Within’ interesting by interaction, so what hope is there?
And yes, you can get a wonderful story about the future of television technology. Nineteen-eighty-four has some bad-ass televisions in it, but the worst is Bradbury’s The Veldt. Hell, David Bowie got a song out of imagining what will happen with our televisions, and that song became a Cronenberg movie. So replace televisions with anything else mechanical and get writing.
The Discover article mentioned as a second cause of death of Sci-fi the idea that fiction is no longer the chosen method of delivering Big Ideas. Blogs are. As a blogger myself, I can wholeheartedly say that I have never delivered a big idea via an blog. Secondly, no one has ever read this far into one of my blogs, where I can say with some confidence that many folks have finished my fiction pieces (I know this because they complain about typos late in the stories). So should I ever have a Big Idea, I’ll be certain to put it in some fiction, where someone will see it, even if I have to surround it with sex and car chases.
And fiction is still delivering the Big Ideas. Look at The Prestige, which may even be science fiction (it has science in it, and is fiction), which is a rip-roaring yarn that says more about human nature than magic-but also makes the point that any technology significantly advanced is indistinguishable from magic. This is so literal in The Prestige that the entire story could have sprung from that one Clarke quote.
In the end, I know that Sci-fi isn’t dead the same way I know that the editors of Discover (if not Maddox himself) don’t believe it. In the same issue there is an interview with William Gibson, who states yet again that his understanding of science and technology is weak. Yet he keeps getting those awards fro his Sci-fi. Gibson is the prime example of a writer he uses fiction to present Big Ideas, and because those ideas are about the future -usually a future shaped by technology - he is writing science fiction. Not the same as Asimov or Clarke or even Bradbury but still science fiction. And we can add the new Galactica, which is all big ideas, to the pile and oh, does anyone remember a thing called The Matrix? And yes, an argument could be made to exclude these efforts as not Sci-fi enough (exclude Gibson?) but in making it you become Steve Martin in The Jerk where he’s explaining what prizes you can win if he fails to guess your weight. Martin excludes shelf after shelf, narrowing the potential awards until all that is left is a tin can filled with pencils.
The last code blue on Sci-fi is the worry that Fantasy will devour Science Fiction much as Country Music devoured Country and Western. I’m not so worried about that. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings films have inspired many authors and publishers in the same way Star Wars did back in the seventies. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been talking about Buck Rogers and Galactica because we wouldn’t have had them if not for Star Wars. Now it’s all witches, dragons, fairies, and elves, and it will be for a while, until we get another Neuromancer, Star Wars, or The Matrix.
So one of you guys, go write one.