Back Again

I'm back again after several weeks with my family. My uncle died while I was away. He had lived a long life and was a veteran of the Korean War and a teacher in the Indianapolis Public Schools for thirty years. He specialized in American history but claimed to have known more about its Irish counterpart. He was also a devoted Catholic.

I don't think my uncle was especially interested in science fiction and fantasy, but he was a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. It's no coincidence as far as my uncle went that Arthur Conan Doyle was of Irish-Catholic descent and that G.K. Chesterton, though falling short of Irishness, became, nevertheless, a Catholic. While Conan Doyle went in for nonsense in the Cottingley Fairies affair, Chesterton was, by virtue of his faith, more well grounded. We have him to thank for an idea that has been paraphrased thusly: "When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." The American Chesterton Society traces that paraphrased idea to the research and conclusions of Chestertonian Robin Rader of  Zambia, who believes it came from two quotes found in the Father Brown stories:

"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." (From "The Oracle of the Dog," 1923.)

and

"You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief--of belief in almost anything." (From "The Miracle of Moon Crescent," 1924.)

I have written before about weird fiction against materialism. I think you could make an argument that weird fiction is against other kinds of belief as well, those that have displaced a belief in God, or at least in the supernatural. Many of these beliefs are based, I think, in Scientism, that bastard-child of science and religion. In my view, Scientism is not about science but of the perceived supremacy and worship of what some people call science, or what has lately sometimes been called "settled science," that is, an unquestioned and unquestionable dogma more characteristic of religion. One bit of "settled science" is that the world is overpopulated, in other words, that there are too many of us and that it would be better off with some us--meaning you--gone. (Have you ever noticed how people who believe in overpopulation never talk about getting rid of themselves?)

As a supposedly scientific idea, overpopulation would have entered science fiction at some point, perhaps not long after it had become a concern in the real world. I'm not sure when that was. The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggests that the starting point was in the 1950s, but that overpopulation as a theme in science fiction really took off in the 1960s. That's my sense, too. Here's a quote from the Encyclopedia:

The most powerful attempt to confront the issue squarely and in some detail was Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966), a novel whose thrust was entirely lost when it was filmed as Soylent Green (1973). 

I don't agree so much with the comment about Soylent Green, but it's clear to me that overpopulation as a theme was pretty well established in science fiction by the end of the 1960s. Witness "The Mark of Gideon," an episode from the final season of Star Trek, broadcast on January 17, 1969. Witness also the publication in 1970 of The World Outside by Robert Silverberg.

Overpopulation was big in the 1970s. Even otherwise sensible people believed that the world was or soon would be crawling with humanity and that, as a result, there would be disaster, or, alternatively, dystopia (as in Soylent Green [1973] or Logan's Run [1976]), which is only another kind of disaster. If anyone foresaw that we would actually face in the twenty-first century a different kind of disaster, that of demographic collapse, I don't know who that would have been.

Implicit in all of the talk of overpopulation is an anti-human sentiment. But in giving up on a belief in God, and in transferring our most fervent religious beliefs to materialism, atheism, Darwinism, socialism, and so on, many in the world today have become so thoroughly anti-human that they despise humanity and wish for us to be extinguished. My sense is that they despise themselves, but that, because self-hatred is a psychically unbearable condition, they transfer their hatred to the rest of the world. They also, I think, transfer it to God. (My question is, why are they so angry at somebody they don't even believe in?)

Another variation on this anti-human attitude is expressed by people who have elevated animals to the level of people (or have demoted people to the level of animals), in the process casting their pets into the roles of surrogate children and lovers. How long will it be before we can mate with genetically modified pets to produce hybrid dog-people who love us as dogs love us, without reserve, unconditionally, and beyond the imperfect love of our fellow human beings? I suspect it will happen, sooner rather than later. Who in science fiction, as unquestioning of the dogma of overpopulation as the writers of the genre have been, foresaw that we would do these things? Who, in or out of science fiction, envisioned that we would face not overpopulation but demographic collapse partly because we love only our animals and no longer our fellow human beings? 

A perfect and indestructible love--where have we found that before? We seem to remember something like it in the far-distant past, before Scientism became the faith of choice. What was its Source? Who offered it? The difference is that the love offered by a hybrid dog-child is perfectly manipulable. We are its masters. We need not be humble or submit to Anyone's will, because it is our will that is being expressed. Our dog-children will come from our own image of ourselves--those will be our genes in there after all. In other words, our dog-children will be perfect, three-dimensional, organic, hybrid-human-canine selfies.

My uncle understood the anti-human attitude of the believers in overpopulation, and he understood it decades ago, shortly after the theme had entered science fiction but before it had taken off in the 1960s. I doubt that he was aware of these developments, but he knew of parallel developments in the real world, for in a long letter to the Indianapolis Star, published on August 26, 1961 (p. 10) and in response to a previous newspaper item, he wrote:

The problem [of population] is not to be solved by impoverishing the earth of the greatest of its riches, "the life and intelligence of man."

I don't know the origin of the quoted phrase. Nonetheless, he saw that the implicitly anti-human policies of the believers in overpopulation were (and are) likely to prove disastrous. And he didn't just dream that up. His faith and his love for his fellow man were behind it. He lived that faith, and he acted out that love, perhaps nowhere so much as in the classroom, in front of the students who attended Harry E. Wood High School in downtown Indianapolis, with its broken windows, darkened brick walls, and run-down facilities. This was an inner city school of the 1970s, when inner cities were polluted, abandoned, and falling apart, like in a scene from Soylent Green. But my uncle, a scholar like Sol, kept faith and served his students. He was pro-human. He chose love over hate, peace over war, freedom over slavery. And because of the things he valued, thus lived, he was remembered by his students, one of whom graduated in the year that letter was published in the Indianapolis Star and who came to the funeral home fifty-seven years later to see him and honor him one last time.

Copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Movie Miscelleny

I have been away and will be away again soon. My writing has suffered for it, but it seems to me that we all have two choices in life: there is either family or there is everything else. I will choose family for as long as it's needed. In the meantime, I hope you will continue to read Tellers of Weird Tales. There is still plenty to be found here, especially way back in the vault, if you haven't already been following this blog since its beginnings. I hope to devote more time to it before too much longer.

* * *

Last month we were able to take time away from our work to see two movies. Solo: A Star Wars Story came first. We saw it in an old movie theater in Shelbyville, Indiana, and in that, I felt like we had stepped back in time. That's a nice feeling to have when you're seeing a movie that is essentially a return to the past and a work of nostalgia. Unfortunately we came too late in the run of Solo to have had much of a crowd. In fact there were only two other people in the theater, and they seemed to be either all dead or mostly dead. I wondered why they were even there.

I was a little apprehensive about Solo. I hadn't heard a lot of good things about it, and I was especially skeptical of the young actor chosen to play the title character. Now, after having seen it, I can say that there wasn't so much to worry about after all. I liked and enjoyed it, but that's not to say that it's a great movie. I'll tell you why I think that.

First, the whole Star Wars franchise is, in my opinion, pretty well exhausted. There is energy and inventiveness in Solo--having a young cast helps in that way--but it's hard to get excited anymore about a Star Wars movie. Solo is an example of why that is, for there is very little at stake in this film. We know that certain characters will live--there is little suspense as to their fate. As for the other characters--well, they're not very interesting or well developed. I didn't care very much whether they lived or died. They didn't seem to care either. Woody Harrelson's character loses the woman he loves (or at least who loves him) early in Solo. What is his response? Not much of anything. And what kind of lines are these people given to speak? Little that is either expressive or memorable. If anything is going on inside them, we don't know what it might be. They don't seem to have much in the way of feelings, desires, or personalities. Again and again in Solo, someone or something is lost, gained, or striven for, and yet its characters--and we because of it--feel almost nothing. This goes back to my complaint about the whole Star Wars universe, that it's pretty much devoid of love and human emotion. Put another way, the Star Wars universe is stoic. The characters we love the most--Han Solo for example--seem to be interlopers. Perhaps that explains his jadedness and cynicism in the original Star Wars (1977).

Second, and more to the point, Solo is the fifth out of ten Star Wars movies that exist solely to explain the original Star Wars (1977). (1) The problem is that Star Wars doesn't need any explaining. It's a whole story. It stands alone. (It's the only film in the saga to do so.) We all saw, loved, and thoroughly enjoyed it without knowing what came before. (We didn't really need to know what came after it, either. [2]) Yes, Obi-Wan Kenobi mentions the Clone Wars and explains that Darth Vader killed Annikin Skywalker, but that's all we really needed in 1977. We didn't need five more movies--five whole movies running to nearly eleven and a half hours--to tell us what was neatly, economically, and satisfactorily disposed of with a few minutes of dialogue in the original and in its opening scroll.

* * *

The exhaustion we see now in the Star Wars saga is emblematic of our larger popular culture. As I've said before, we are like people picking among the ruins of a once great civilization. There shouldn't be any need to point out that it will never again be 1977. There will never again be a phenomenon like Star Wars. As much fun as it was, we will never have that back, and we should quit trying to get it back. Likewise, we should quit trying to remake the creation. We don't need any more explanations of what went before. The scroll tells us. We don't need any new secret origin stories, nor any reboots. We don't need to know how Han Solo came by his surname or the details of his winning of the Millennium Falcon or how he found out about Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine. These things are minutiae. We all have better versions of how they happened inside our own imaginations. To commit them to film only heads off all other possibilities, which are, truth be told, infinite in number.

* * *

The George Lucas version of the Star Wars saga--what fans call "the canon"--is only one of that infinite number of possibilities. For example, the second trilogy is not really the story of how Annikin Skywalker became Darth Vader. It's only Mr. Lucas' version of that story, just as in his revised version of Star Wars, Greedo shoots first. In our version of that scene, Han Solo shoots first. Is not our version equally as valid as the revised version? Isn't it actually more valid, considering that it's based on the original creation rather than on a revision? In an alternate version of the Star Wars universe (the version shown in the original movie), Darth Vader and Annikin Skywalker are not the same person. Vader is not Luke's father. With that being the case, the events of the second trilogy are rendered invalid. Even if we accept George Lucas' revision and Darth Vader is Luke's father, the events of a second trilogy could have happened in a different way. In my imagination they did. You may have a version sprung from your own imagination. I count your version as valid, too. As for how the Rebels came by the plans for the Death Star: the events shown in Rogue One are only one version of that story. You can see another version in Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars (2014). One, the "canonical" version, concludes with a creepy CGI Princess Leia, in other words an attempt to bring back something from the irretrievable past. The other is extremely funny and in the end perhaps more entertaining. So which version is the "right" one?

* * *

What we're seeing in all of this is a kind of obsessiveness in explaining what came before. By returning again and again to the past, moviemakers (and fans) are merely regurgitating and chewing their cud. I've never chewed it before, but I know enough to say that cud is not fresh.

* * *

I have other complaints about Solo. Again, as in other Star Wars movies, music (and by extension joy and pleasure) is here associated with decadence or evil. Witness the scene of the cocktail party on board the bad guy's spaceship. Also, early on, there is an extended chase scene that--though exciting and well-staged--amounts to a preview and source material for a video game. (Most action movies have these scenes now.) I for one don't want to see a video game while going to the movies.

More seriously: I had read about the supposed "social justice" content of Solo before going to the theater. If there is that kind of thing in Solo, it seems to be toned down. However, it's interesting that there seems to be in this film a kind of turning in the Star Wars universe in that the bad guys are now not strictly governmental (i.e., working for the Empire, in other words for a totalitarian State) but also include criminal syndicates allied with the Empire. In other words, in Solo is introduced an entirely new concept, that of what you might call a quasi-fascistic alliance between an overarching State and nefarious business interests working hand in glove with the State to bring about its ends. In other words, the makers of Solo are saying that Star Wars (1977) had it all wrong: the Empire as a State is not the main villain in the galaxy, for it is aided by and allied with businessmen, and so the bugaboo of the real-world Leftist rears its ugly head here. Never mind that Disney is a multi-gazillion dollar corporation like the mysterious Crimson Dawn. Businessmen--in other words, the middle class, aka Marx's bourgeoisie--are now seemingly the ultimate bad guys in the Star Wars universe.

There is other "social justice" content in Solo, for it turns out that the Cloud Riders are not marauders but warriors against the Empire and its businessmen partners. I guess we're supposed to sympathize with them because they have been exploited and abused. They are the underdogs, and we all love underdogs. The class warfare aspect of this part of the story is hard to ignore, though. And if there is any doubt that membership in the underclass intersects with the other sympathies of the real-world Leftist, the leader of the Cloud Riders turns out to be not just a woman but a bi-racial woman. Grrl Power, yeah! The only way it could have been better is if she were a transgender Muslim. (3) And in case you missed it, she seems to be a kind of Founding Mother of the Rebellion, for it is she who provides the Rebels with what they will need to power their fleet. (If only she had known that that same fleet would be wiped out by the end of The Last Jedi, she might have let Han Solo have it for the Millennium Falcon, which survives.)

One more bit before I move on the second movie we have seen recently. There was talk that Lando Calrissian would turn out to be "pansexual" in Solo. Yeah, whatever, Disney. But he does seem to have a thing for his robot, although their relationship, whatever it might be, seems to be one in which the distaff side--the robot--bullies and abuses her opposite--Lando himself. Anyway, I'm not sure what objection people might have to this relationship when right now (or at least very soon) real people are having (or will soon have) "sex" with robots. If it isn't wrong in real life, how can it be wrong in a movie? Beyond that, millions if not billions of people, instead of living their lives in the real world and in relationship with real human beings, are now living, mostly or exclusively, by vicarious means, that is, through machines. (And if they're not, they aspire to live that way.) The most obvious example of this way of "life" is the obsessive playing of computer games and video games. So are the same people who are having these digital or virtual "experiences" or "relationships"--the same people who report having digital "friends"--really complaining about a character in the movies having a "sexual" relationship with a robot? Isn't that a case of the pot calling the kettle black? (No pun intended.) Isn't there really only one kind of experience, one that takes place in the real world, without a digital intermediary? And isn't there really only one kind of relationship, one in which a real person relates only to another real person and not to a machine or through a machine? Why should anyone who lives his life through a machine complain about another person doing the very same thing? (4, 5)

* * *

So a few days after we saw Solo, we went to see Avengers: Infinity War in a different movie theater. There were more people this time and we had more fun. It struck me that here are two movies, each made by a separate division of Disney, and yet one--Avengers: Infinity War--is so vastly superior to the other. It's much more entertaining and exciting in my opinion, but there is obviously so much more at stake in this film than in Solo. The characters are human and likable. They have feelings and desires and personalities. There is also a great deal of humor and some very funny dialogue. There is even music. (Wherever Star-Lord goes, there is music.) I guess my question is, how did it come to be that the Marvel movies are so much better than the Star Wars movies? And how has Marvel so successfully mined the past for material while the makers of the Star Wars movies have so often failed in that task?

One last thing. In Avengers: Infinity War, the villain is Thanos and he has, of course, his world-destroying scheme. This is to wipe out half of the life in the universe because he thinks the place is overpopulated. In a movie, that's a perfectly fine goal for a villain. We easily find ourselves rooting against the villain and for the men and women who oppose him. But do the people watching this film realize that Thanos' goal is one shared by millions of their fellows, some of whom are probably sitting right next to them in the theater? What I mean is this: If you believe in zero-population growth--if you believe that our planet is overpopulated and that our numbers should be controlled--that there should be only two billion people or five hundred million people or whatever arbitrary number of people you have come up with--that we are destroying our planet and should be reduced, or, in the words of a prominent writer and editor of fantasy, lessened or diminished--if you believe any of these things, then you are Thanos. You are not one of us. You are not one of the Avengers or the Guardians of the Galaxy or the Wakandans or the people of Earth or of any other planet in the universe. You are a villain and a monster. Just admit that to yourself. You are a monster. And you should begin as soon as possible to cease being a monster and to come over to the side of humanity. Take this message to heart: Don't be Thanos. Be a human being. Be one of us instead of against us.

Notes

(1) Those movies are: The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), Revenge of the Sith (2005), Rogue One (2016), and now Solo (2018).

(2) Just as five of the Star Wars movies explain what came before the original, four, soon to be five, explain what came after. You could make an argument that they are also unnecessary. In the end, don't we really just need the original Star Wars? (Or maybe Star Wars and a little of The Empire Strikes Back?)
(3) We are led to believe at first that her character is male and are allowed to see only near the end that she is actually female. Is that a figurative transition from one sex to the other? Is she then figuratively "transgender"? Maybe. It's more likely that this is just a continuation of the trend in our popular culture to remake traditionally male roles or characters (Mad Max, Dr. Who, Colonel Sanders, Luke Skywalker) into female roles or characters (with Imperator Furiosa being the female Mad Max and Rey being the female Luke).
(4) "Sexual" relationships between human beings and robots go way back in science fiction. I'm not sure how far back, but they're at least as old as the Barbarella comic strip of the 1960s. See also the movie Westworld, from 1973. And if you look at the robot in Metropolis as sexual in some way (I think we're supposed to), then sex and robots have been a thing since 1927.
(5) By the way, Avengers: Infinity War also depicts a relationship between a human being and a robot. I think there's a big difference here, though. In Solo, the human-robot relationship is overtly sexualized. I guess we're supposed to think that it's cute and funny. (Maybe we're being softened up--no pun intended--for further moves planned by the social justice warriors behind the Star Wars movies.) In Avengers: Infinity War, however, the human-robot relationship is not overtly sexualized. In fact, the relationship between Scarlet Witch and the Vision seems to be one of love. The Vision aspires to be human. Scarlet Witch loves him and tries to save his life. Meanwhile Lando Calrissian is dragged down into mechanized sex with a robot that isn't and can never be human. Maybe that as much as anything explains why the Marvel movies are better than the Star Wars movies.
In any case, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Disney would create a "pansexual" character for one of its movies, for there has been sexual perversion in Disney movies at least since the 1960s. If you doubt that, watch the scene in The Parent Trap (1961), an otherwise enjoyable movie in which Disney's dirty old men had Hayley Mills suck on a pale, plastic popsicle for endless minutes. Worse yet is The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964), in which there isn't anything that is not weird, creepy, perverted, or disturbing except for Annette Funicello. 

Revised on July 11, 2018.
Copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Pavane pour une infante défunte

Before I let go of 2016, I have to remember a princess. Carrie Fisher died on December 27, bringing to an end a dream of life. I first saw her in Star Wars in 1977. Like boys everywhere, I fell in love with her. She was very beautiful, and though she was young, she was also tough. She could handle her words and, when needed, a blaster. She was a princess but you could also very easily imagine her as a senator and someone high up in an organization devoted to freedom in the galaxy. Girls loved her, too, my youngest sister among them. I drew a picture of Princess Leia for her on her school folder. There were two more movies in the series. There should have been more and they should have come earlier. Too many years passed before Carrie Fisher was once again in Star Wars, and by then there was a new cast and a new spirit. She will be in Star Wars again but I can't help but think she will haunt the movie rather than star in it. There have been and will be attempts to digitize her, but you can't digitize life, or beauty, or romance, or dreams.

I saw Carrie Fisher in life, once, in 2015 at a comic book convention in Indianapolis. I saw her from a distance, but I can say at least that I saw her. On the night before she died, we went to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story at the theater. If you don't want to know something about the movie, stop reading now, but her likeness is in it, a likeness lacking in life and spirit to be sure. Hers is the last character to appear on screen. The next morning, Carrie Fisher, the real person, was gone. A strange valediction.

The subtitle of the movie is accurate, I think: it is a Star Wars story, told in the same universe of course but also in the same spirit, though somewhat darker in tone than the original. There are problems with it. Most can be overlooked. An obvious one that can't be is this: if you can cast a shield around a planet, why can't you cast a shield around your shield generator? A more subtle problem: More and more movies are being made by people who seem to have grown up playing computer games rather than reading literature or watching movies. The computer game aesthetic is more and more in film. There are contrived complications, objects to procure, puzzles to solve, obstacles to jump over or through, mazes to traverse. (One of the obstacles in Rogue One reminds me of the "choppy, crushy things" in Galaxy Quest. When your movie evokes memories of a science fiction parody, you could have a problem with your screenplay.) In Rogue One, there are even digitized human characters, just as in a computer game. They are creepy and lifeless and distracting. I stopped listening to the dialogue when they were on screen. There is also a problem that has plagued science fiction since its beginnings, namely, the use of characters as mere plot devices rather than as representations of genuine human personalities. There is no one in the movie with the personality or allure of Carrie Fisher or Harrison Ford or even Billy Dee Williams or puppet master Frank Oz as Yoda. The exception might be the robot K-2SO, a kind of cross between Mr. Spock, R2-D2, and Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally, as in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the lead character--in fact the strongest character and the driver of the action--is a woman. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It only shows what has happened in our culture since 1977 (forty years ago!). Then it was a boy who lived on a backwater planet, worked as a farmer, drank blue milk, watched his parental units die at the hands of the empire, and set off on a quest to avenge them, learn about the force, have a great adventure, and destroy the Death Star. Times change.

* * *

On New Year's Eve, we saw Passengers, starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. From watching the preview, I thought it would be some kind of conspiracy movie. It's not. (I told you to stop reading if you don't want to know about the movie.) Instead it relies on two science fiction tropes: flight from an overpopulated planet and a meteor strike in deep space. The first is ridiculous. Unless something really changes, we're going to be rushing towards each other on an underpopulated planet rather than rushing away from each other on an overpopulated one. The second one is ridiculous, too. Both tropes, however, are used to set up a situation of "what if?", which is what science fiction is about, and in that, and in the intriguing situation, the gorgeous design, the fine special effects, and the perfectly fine performances by the four main actors, Passengers is worth a couple of hours of your life.

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Faith in the Infinite Future

I have been writing about the question Is science fiction dying? Here is Donald A. Wollheim on the subject:

The essence of science fiction is that this is a changing world. . . .

If we are to survive into that Infinite Future that science fiction writers of previous decades have managed to insinuate into the mental background of the world's dreams, then we are going to have to pay close political attention to what we have done with the products of science and their undesirable biproducts [sic]: pollution, overpopulation, and atomic warfare.

Of course science fiction does not play solely the role of Cassandra. It cannot afford to. It must, in occasional stories, point to these evils, but to rely on its enlarging audience, to keep the contentment of its constant readers, it must continue in the main to maintain a belief in human infinity. . . . To do otherwise would very soon cause science fiction itself--as a marketable category--to disappear. A steady diet of foreboding and horrifics would be palatable only to the misanthrope.

Wollheim wrote those words more than forty years ago in his introduction to The 1972 Annual World's Best SF. Did he sense then that science fiction was in trouble? Maybe not. Nonetheless, he diagnosed a problem and predicted a course for science fiction, perhaps without knowing it.

I don't know whether science fiction is dying or not. If it is, it could be because we have given up on what Wollheim called "that Infinite Future" and "a belief in human infinity." There is reason to believe that science fiction has in fact become "[a] steady diet of foreboding and horrifics." Does that satisfy the current science fiction readership? If so, does that mean the science fiction readership has turned into one of misanthropes? My contention is that you can't be against something and succeed. You have to be for something. If science fiction is not for something, it can't survive, let alone succeed. If it isn't hopeful, if it doesn't have faith, if it doesn't look to the future with excitement and enthusiasm, it can't very well carry on.

Again, if science fiction is dying, the dying seems to have begun during or after the 1970s. So maybe we have narrowed the timing of the onset of disease. But what of the cause? Did Donald A. Wollheim make the diagnosis forty-two years ago?

The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and with cover art by Frank Frazetta. The imagery comes from fantasy rather than from science fiction. The mood however, is hopeful, confident, forward-looking, and triumphant, all hallmarks of classic science fiction.

Text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fire and Rain

I have been keeping track of weird news stories. My contention is that life is essentially weird. And the weird stuff that actually happens is sometimes weirder than what you would read in a story. I also wrote the other day about this question: Is science fiction dying? One possible answer: How can science fiction be dying when we quite obviously live in a science fiction world? (I know I answered a question with a question, but that comes naturally to the Irish.) Unfortunately, the science fiction world in which we live is too often a dystopia. A case in point: this week, a news story came out reporting that British hospitals have incinerated aborted and miscarried fetuses, in part to help heat their buildings. We all knew we were headed in this direction, but I didn't think it would happen so soon. Writers of science fiction and fantasy have anticipated developments like this, of course. It's equal parts "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift and Soylent Green, based on Harry Harrison's novel. It reminds me also of a cartoon by Andy Singer from his syndicated comic panel, No Exit, in which a man dashes through the background at a filling station shouting, "Soylent gas is made of people," while in the foreground, a man, who is gassing up his car, says, without even turning around, "Yeah, so what."

So the story comes out about human fetuses being burned for heat, and the world says, "So what." I suppose such a thing is acceptable, even desirable, in our science fiction world. You might think at first that it would be unacceptable inasmuch as it contributes to global warming. We should all realize however that it is acceptable to burn human fetuses for heat because they have not yet reached the threshold of carbon neutrality. In other words, they are carbon negative, so burn, baby, burn. Disposing of them in any way is also acceptable because then we can help head off the sin of overpopulation, or in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge, "decrease the surplus population." Great! A twofer!

There was record flooding in Great Britain this winter. That story came out first, so we can't place the two in a relationship of cause and effect. In any case, the last time we did stuff like this, the rains came and washed everything away--except Noah and the animals. So the British who endured inundation this winter get to relive it in a new science fiction movie called Noah. I know that the story of Noah and the flood comes from the Bible, but the movie bears little resemblance to that book. It is in no way biblical. Yeah, there is Noah and his family and a big boat full of animals and a worldwide flood, but otherwise Noah is on its own--pure Hollywood, if not Wormwood. Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly reprise their roles from A Beautiful Mind, only, instead of seeing mathematical equations in the sky, Noah sees visions of doom (some of which are drug-induced). She's still the devoted wife of a man who's trying to discover the meaning of existence. (She did the same thing as Charles Darwin's wife in Creation.) Anthony Hopkins plays Gandalf/Hannibal Lecter/Timothy Leary, but in this movie, he trades a taste for entrails for an obsession with red berries (no doubt slang for his favorite recreational drug). Oh, and there are Transformers, too.

I can only assume that Noah is set in a dystopian future with some elements of an imagined past, a sort of Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max. Humanity once again gets wiped out for its wickedness, but there doesn't seem to be much wickedness going on except for eating of cute little animals. And for being a bunch of hungry people, they sure look well fed. Maybe they have been drinking too many Big Gulp sodas. In any case, the suggestion seems to be that it has all come about because of that pesky global warming and overpopulation, you know, the only two sins left in the world. (I guess you can add a third when Tubal-Cain, the Bob Hoskins character, partakes of some salamander sushi, thereby rendering a species extinct.) In the end, everybody learns a lesson, Noah puts his drunkenness behind him through a twelve-step program, and the world goes on. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over Noah. But before you turn in, make sure you turn off your carbon-neutral, fetus-powered, non-incandescent electric light, and if necessary, take a red berry for a nice, dreamless sleep.

Copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley