Sci-fi Furniture Sale

Have made the point before, not sure I've posted it, so will make it again.

Yesterday's SF becomes today's reality, not just because of the predictive powers of the original SF dream, but because the expression of these ideas plants a seed in someone's head that eventually grows.

If I ever (ha!) get my reference clippings straightened out I could say I know that I know that I know -- but, once again -- Mr. Disorganized will shoot from the hip ...

I'm pretty sure that many of the original pioneers of rocketry (Von Braun, etc.) were fans of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; many of the original Mercury/Apollo NASA engineers were fans of 1930s and '40s hard SF writers -- including Asimov, natch. I recall seeing a thing on the tube as to how plenty of the current NASA engineers were originally inspired by Star Trek -- which is probably a good thing as compared to Star Wars. We don't want any astronauts shutting off the guidance system and "using the force" after all.

Aside from cyberfunk, what the next SF wave will be depends on where technology/society actually goes. This is part of the ongoing feedback loop between predicted change and actual change -- the simplest example being the display systems on Star Trek (which had to change when the PC revolution made the original displays look dorky) or the working-in of movements of social change, like the women's lib movement -- no miniskirts in STTNG -- or technological change, like the PC revolution, which, as far as I know, no hard SF writer quite predicted. There's even shit that nobody would have predicted -- like society's general rejection of smoking in public places. The original Lost in Space pilot had a mission control center (set, I think, in 1997) where almost everybody -- including a TV anchor -- was smoking like fiends.

My hunch (I wrote an essay on this awhile back, this'll be a compressed form of it) is that technological change occurs in waves; the fictional adaptation to that change occurs in concurrent waves, just slightly out of sync and lagging behind. The waves of fiction and reality create interference patterns.

There's a simple reason fiction lags behind reality. Writers are lazy. Almost any genre starts out as the exploration of new territory -- and ends as rearrangements of old furniture. SF is not immune.

What happens with SF is that the furniture of the future becomes too nicely cut and dried. A general consensus congeals about what the future looks like --

As in the flying cars future of the Hugo Gernsback era ...

Or the warp drive/transporter beam/galactic federation conventions of the Star Trek franchise.

Or the teams of big-eyed warriors in anthropomorphic giant robot suits fighting aliens or other weirdos that you'll find in anime.

Or, more recently, the cyberpunk conventions of a consensual hallucination of cyberspace and a sweaty underground cyber economy of outlaws and cowboys swapping spare body and computer parts, dirty deeds and dirty data while jacking themselves up and in.

The consensus congeals; the conventions are worked out. SF writers and/or screenwriters are free to be lazy -- and stop sweating the details of a speculative world (or paying attention to the implications of the present day world). They're free to write soap operas or shoot 'em ups in an agreed-upon fictional reality whose details are as precisely worked out as the town in "Gunsmoke."

While these lazy, established writers are busy doing that, something changes out there in the real world. The writers don't notice it at first. It's off their radar.

This blindness is usually but not always, an age thing. The old guys are stuck in a rut. They're too busy moving futuristic furniture around to notice actual technological and social change.

Then some young Turk comes around -- like William Gibson looks around and notices a few things the established SF writers are ignoring -- things like the embryonic Internet and the PC revolution. He asks himself, "What about this shit? If this goes on ..." Then he thinks. He speculates.

And the young Turk writes something that shakes everything and everybody up. He writes something like Neuromancer. (I think Gibson was still in his early 20s when he wrote it.)

And -- blink, blink -- before you know it, the young Turk's radical new ideas become conventional cliches again. More furniture that other SF writers can move around and, occasionally, reupholster.

So it goes.

Bad President, bad

CJ tells me yet another scandal has bubbled up in the Drudge Report like so much methane farted up in Rush Limbaugh's hot tub. It seems President Clinton did the nasty with one of his aides. Gee, imagine that.

This fart will expand to fill the media universe.

The 60s ... what a movie

So, how come all the movies about the 1960s fall short? Some failures are more interesting than some successes.

Fact is, the 60s have been filmed to death and nobody got the 60s on film -- at least the warm, chewy center of the 60s. It's sorta like the Zapruder clip. You see JFK's head explode, but where's the shootists? The killer concept in Piers Anthony's Macroscope also comes to mind. Once you figure it out it fries your head...

Documentary films are documentary films -- the surveillance camera in the convenience store of life. And we've all seen the goddamn images too many times for them to mean anything...raise your hand if you've just visualized that Vietnamese guy getting his head blown off.

Ken Kesey never got his goddamn Movie together, now did he?

Easy Rider, strangely, seems like a premonition -- as if somebody in the old South had written Gone with the Wind before the South had even lost the war...

Somehow, it just doesn't feel like a movie made in the 60s. It's more like a movie somebody made in the 80s or 90s as a painstakingly accurate historical recreation of the period to see what went wrong. But it's all looking back at what's not there anymore. The commune ain't it. The road ain't it. America ain't it. What they're looking for is gone...

Medium Cool is a film about how it's impossible to get the truth on film -- even when you're there when it's happening...

Joe was excellent -- but, like a lot of 60's films, it's a chalk outline of a dead body on the sidewalk...

Movies like Little Murders, The Graduate, Getting Straight, the Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, etc. are less about the 60s and more about the death of attitudes and power structures left over from the 50s -- either in the sense of a world going to hell (as in Little Murders) or raising hell (as in most of the rest of 'em). These were sometimes (but not always) an excuse for middle-aged male fantasies about groping young chicks and taking drugs...

Just like the kids.

Paul Mazursky's stuff (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice...I Love You Alice B. Toklas, etc.) has flashes of insight and intelligence -- but is too obviously about something ripped out of the newspaper to be real. What real experience he shows is more beat than anything else. A beat in freak's clothing...

Much of the people making experimental movies were too ripped to make good movies...sorta like an acidhead putting his thumb on the camera. Hold your eyes open, kids! It's the Magical Mystery Tour!

Roger Corman's the exception here.

God bless Roger Corman, all praise to his name.

You got a few flashes. The Trip comes to mind. Supposedly supportive but just the least little bit hostile acid guide Bruce Dern holding out a chair in front of acid-bummed Peter Fonda. It's just a chair. What're you scared of the chair for?

Gahhhhhhhh.....

But Roger Corman movies are Roger Corman movies period.

Forget every earnest political tract -- like the Billy Jack movies, which are sorta like the leftwing antimatter equivalent of The Green Beret -- hold a reel of Green Beret in one hand, Billy Jack in the other, put them together and the universe explodes.

Ohmygod, they killed the rabbit! Ohmygod, they killed the kid!

Now I must kill for peace!

What's left is one-size-fits-all Hollywood bullshit and the cynical reality of various independent visions...

The bullshit: exploitation flicks for the youth market.

The individual reality...

Lots of films about squarepegroundhole loners like Five Easy Pieces. Lots of films made by smart aliened individuals about smart alienated individuals...

And Altman films. These are more (in an almost wierdly Japanese way) about individuals as they function in groups. Self and false self, status games, man/woman sex power games, the universal field theory of lying, the pecking order and pecking parties, insiders, outsiders, crossed messages and the shifting goalposts of us and them...

Altman knew how to present the fractured, surrealistic bullshit of American life -- smart, hip, cynical people walking through the broken glass doing their best not to stand on anything like the doctors in M*A*S*H. The people who do stand on anything get cut to pieces: like Shelley Duvall in Three Women or Brewster McCloud in the same-named film. Enthusiasm and commitment ends badly -- always. Detachment is a survival trait.

Believe the wrong speech and you'll bleed to death in the snow like McCabe...

Animal House is strangely accurate. But it's about the attitude before the storm hit...

Vietnam being, pretty much, the storm -- or the outward and visible sign of the storm. Every movie I've ever seen about it seems fake...movies that scream "I'm a movie."

Except for Full Metal Jacket. There's a cold, real ugliness about it...

But we're talking the woodsman who takes his kid out in the woods and leaves him there. It's not about the kid -- it's about the death-system Daddy throws the kid into...

What the storm wrecked was the center of it all -- the communal peace/love thing of the counterculture. Yes, I know it seems like bullshit now. But, apparently, at a specific place and time -- say Haight Ashbury in '67 -- there was something like a spontaneous youth movement...

If you believe the urban legends, those who weren't cynical, independent, grounded, and skeptical got sucked into a rush of tribal enthusiasm -- and got deeply fucked over. Nobody's ever captured what that felt like on film. Woodstock is on the outside looking in (and feels like a fucking commercial) -- but nobody's ever convincingly filmed what it's like on the inside being caught up in it all...and what it was like when it all went wrong.

Say a decent treatment of We're the People Your Parents Warned You Against...

Nobody convincingly caught the left-wing anger either -- as, in print, Turgenev and Dostoevsky once got inside the heads of their country's revolutionaries -- because, in this country, the non leftists didn't get it or want to and the leftists were so goddamn serious all they could do was make documentaries (or films that wanted to be documentaries -- or PRC type revolutionary opera). What they couldn't do is see themselves objectively as characters...their own contradictions, weakness and bullshit...

But nobody convincingly caught that sense of "Fuck! Daddy's going to take us out in the woods and leave us there!"

Nobody made a good movie about the demonstrations in Chicago in '68. What it was like to go there. What it was like to be there. (Medium Cool being about what it was like to be there and not be there...)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is more like the comedown after the high -- that bad, bad burned out feeling. Thompson's book was enough, of course. The film is as ugly and unneccesary as the vomit splattered all around your toilet from whatever it was you don't remember doing the night before...

That vomit is now the only record you've got that anything happened at all. And by the looks of it...

It must've really been something.

Days of Future Past

Yesterday's SF becomes today's reality, not just because of the predictive powers of the original SF dream, but because the expression of these ideas plants a seed in someone's head that eventually gets built...

If I ever (ha!) get my reference clippings straightened out I could say I know that I know that I know -- but, once again -- Mr. Disorganized will shoot from the hip...

I'm pretty sure that many of the original pioneers of rocketry (Van Braun, etc.) were fans of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; many of the original Mercury/Apollo NASA engineers were fans of 30s 40s hard SF writers -- including Asimov, natch -- I recall seeing a thing on the tube as to how plenty of the current NASA engineers were originally inspired by Star Trek -- which is probably a good thing as compared to Star Wars. We don't want any astronauts shutting off the guidance system and "using the force" after all...

Aside from cyberfunk, what the next wave will be depends on where technology/society goes. This is part of the ongoing feedback loop between predicted change and actual change -- the simplest example being the display systems on Star Trek (which had to change as the PC revolution made the original displays look dorky) or the working-in of movements of social change -- like the women's movement, or technological change -- like the PC revolution, which, as far as I know, no hard SF writer quite predicted. There's even shit that nobody would have predicted -- like society's general rejection of smoking in public places. The original "Lost in Space" pilot had a mission control center (set, I think, in 1998) where almost everybody -- including a TV anchor -- was smoking like fiends...

My hunch (I wrote an essay on this awhile back, this'll be a compressed for of that essay) is that technological change occurs in waves, the fictional adaptation to that change occuring in concurrent waves, just slightly out of sync and lagging behind.

One reason is writers are lazy. Almost any genre starts out as the exploration of new territory -- and ends as the rearrangement of old furniture. 

What happens with SF is that the furniture of the future gets too nicely cut and dried -- even if we're not talking about a show with its own "future history" like Star Trek, a general consensus congeals about what the future looks like -- as in the warp drive, galactic federation, flying cars future of the Gernsback era -- or the consensual hallucination of cyberspace and a sweaty underground cyber economy of outlaws and cowboys swapping spare parts, dirty deeds and dirty data while jacking themselves up and in -- or, for that matter, the teams of big-eyed warriors in anthropomorphic robot suits fighting aliens or other weirdos that you'll find in anime...

The consensus congeals. The writers and/or screenwriters are free to be lazy -- and move away from working out the details of a speculative world (or speculating in the first place about the present day world). They're free to write soap operas or shoot 'em ups in an agreed upon fictional reality with details as worked out as the town in "Gunsmoke"...

While they're busy doing that something changes out there in the real world. Something that they don't notice. Something that they can get away with not noticing for awhile...

Like, say, the PC revolution.

Or the possibilities inherent in the internet...

This blindness is very often, but not always, an age thing. The old guys get stuck in a rut.

Some young turk comes around -- like William Gibson who, I think, was still in his early 20s when he wrote Neuromancer -- and says "What about this stuff? Hell, all you zombies seem to be unaware -- so I might as well write about it."

The young turk writes something that shakes everything and everybody up...

And -- blink, blink -- before you know it, the young turk's radical new ideas become a cliche convention again. And so it was that Neuromancer begat Tek Wars. And it was bad.

So...

Unfortunately....

I guess it's a question of some radical change happening out there in the big bad world first. SF, as much as it deals with imagination ain't pure imagination, which is why it ain't fantasy. Even if the writer isn't interested in being predictive per se, there has to be some tether to the real world. A new speculation implies a new reality to speculate about...

For a new SF direction to happen, there has to be a zig or zag in society or technology that nobody quite predicted. Something that a writer with eyes to see will notice when it's just starting out.

So, before Frankenstein you have to have Galvin's experiments with electricity...

Before Neuromancer there has to be at least the beginnings of a global computer network. 

Mary Shelley noticed. William Gibson noticed. But life kept going on.

What the hell am I missing?