And Five Coltrane Biographies Sunday, November 02, 2003

I have been asked to write a hard-core sci-fi post. I've been trying for some minutes now but I realize that I'm not sure how I feel about sci-fi anymore.

As a kid, I was mad for space. I tore through Time/Life books on the subject and big NASA photobooks about the Apollo program. At the same time, I was hot for mythology, everything from Edith Hamilton to Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion skeletons. All of that came together as a love of superhuman characters who had galaxy-spanning adventures. (A great band name waiting to happen: Tom Swift and His Electric Ladyland.)

I spent my free time drawing spaceships shooting each other, racing around the neighborhood on my bike pretending I was a scout ship for Terra Prime and smashing around the house making laser-gun noises. At the same time, I went to great lengths to reconcile the space mishegais with my unreconstructed Catholic consciousness. My mother relates that as a boy I had two goals: I wanted to be an astronaut, and the first American pope. (The third goal, which I never related, was to get through one goddamn schoolday without an unprovoked priapism.)

Come high school, I discovered that I wanted to chart the vast reaches of my navel even more than deep space. In that light sci-fi stories where things "happened" and people "did stuff" seemed hopelessly childish. Didn't the world realize that all action was futile in the face of overwhelming cosmic nullity etc. etc. I read boring books, watched ridiculous movies and wrote unreadable stories. The common denominators: Depth and Message. If I'm yawning, I must be missing something important.

These days, after a bunch of psychic reversals, pretense in sci-fi drives me up a wall. Anyone who says they want to "reinvent" the genre by making it more character-driven or naturalistic is, on the whole, fooling himself. Sci-fi is crap art, as PKD put it: You've got to respect the inherent ridiculousness of it. Part of what made the original "Star Trek" gorgeous, for example, was the sheer goofiness of the accoutrements, the lingo, the mood. Green slave girls? Nazi planets? Ludicrous, all of it, but it touches something primal--the same way that the Greek gods are obviously absurd, obviously phony, but their stories ring true thousands of years later. Seriousness can be the enemy of truth.

PKD, who was working with some of the most serious ideas in sci-fi history, understood this. All of his stories had some element of the ridiculous in them, parodies of sci-fi conventions. The genre likes jargon? He had cars called flobbles and quibbles, alien money called crumbles. Or talking robots? He made refrigerators and toasters into characters. Psychic aliens? I give you the Wub.

Is that possible anymore? I look at the modern sci-fi landscape and it just all seems so goddamn serious. I'm so starved for goofiness that I nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw a preview for the movie "Supernova," which used the song "Mama Told Me Not to Come" as background music. (It turned out to be mostly shitty, leavened with a few nifty action-hero moments from James Spader (!).)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the overseriousness comes from focusing on science too hard. Which is to say: William Gibson is a great writer with a light touch. David Brin has moments of tremendous pathos and humor and irony. But both of them, ultimately, are coming from the Reason magazine/Wired school of thought that science is a be-all and end-all in human affairs. Their characters are defined by how they process data and react to the environment--not what they believe. They write about the end of the world, but as environmental catastrophe (Brin) or Grand Historical Process (Gibson).

I'm reminded of a line from "Childhood's End," in retrospect one of the most humorless sci-fi books ever. You know the story: The aliens show up and drag us into the future. At one point, they "prove" that religions are phony by using their Histor-O-Vision time machine to show people what various iconic figures "actually" did and said. Whereupon everybody gives up their beliefs and gets with the program. It's one of the most breathtakingly smug scenes in sci-fi; but even the subtler writers who followed Clarke drink from the same cup. If everybody just knew enough about string theory, and the environment, and artificial intelligence, and "bots"--and gave up on the God stuff already--we'd be able to leap to the next step of evolution. (Involving either vigorous group sex or brains in vats, depending on your kicks.)

PKD, I think, could laugh at that stuff because he believed in God--or at least a beer can that told him the future. Science is not an end. It is a way of understanding and mastering the world, but it's not the ultimate explanation for life. Too many sci-fi writers, I think, ignore that fact--they think that they're writing in the one genre that CAN explain life because it's all about science and technology. With that attitude, you lose satiric perspective. Believing in God, or at least a beer can that tells you the future, is one way of keeping things in proper focus.

In short, if you can't laugh at sci-fi, you shouldn't be writing it.

There's my hard-core post. LLPJ, the ball's in your court.

@ 4:52:00 PM,

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