Sd-Fi Flies High by Charles Nicol
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THE ARTS Sd-Fi Flies High by Charles Nicol The spaceship Cygnus entering the black hole in Disney's journey into SF—Glimpses of heaven and a quite literal hell. CIENCE FICTION has replaced the magazines and drugstore paperbacks. of Battlestar Galactica, an ill-starred ve spy film—which replaced the SF has always been concerned with hicle that fled through the ether in dis Swestern—on the motion picture science in the broadest sense. Current array all last season and this past month screen. The enormous success of Star novels explore not just robots, relativity, finally found Earth. The Black Hole cli Wars signaled a revolution in popular computers, and cloning, but the realms maxes with glimpses of heaven and a taste on which the studios have been of ecology, politics, anthropology, and quite literal hell. quick to capitalize: This past Christmas linguistics. At its best, SF faces a num Favorite campus novels of the last de they gave us, instead of yet another ber of mankind's central concerns; on the cade have included Hermann Hesse's James Bond thriller, Star Trek and The one hand, the fabric of reality and the Magister Ludi (also called The Glass Black Hole. The Christmas offering in mechanics of society; on the other, the Bead Game), in which monastics of the 1978 was Superman (the story of a flying limitations of the rational mind and the future meet to play an enormously com Alien who turns into syrup when confrontation with the Alien, the in plex computer-simulation game for heated), the year before, the well-crafted comprehensible stranger who also glory; Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Chse Encounters of the Third Kind. And dwells within us. With our increasing Strange Land, where the sole survivor of the home screen is not far behind. While estrangement from our own technology, the first Martian expedition returns to this year's late entry in the James Bond science has itself become the Alien for Earth with new-found powers, including sweepstakes, A Man Called Sloane, ran many, and the rising popularity of SF grokking, which he shares with his fol dead last in the ratings, Buck Rogers in testifies to the need it fills. lowers in a religious awakening; Kurt the 25th Century more than held its own; SF fills other needs as well: It is the Vonnegut's Catfs Cradle, where the self- The Martian Chronicles was a mini-se only popular genre to be implicitly or made holy man Bokonon explains that ries; even PBS gambled heavily, trotting explicitly religious. This interest in the only proper response to the end of out Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven transcendence ranges from the sublime the world is "thumbing my nose at You as its "first major" speculative-fiction to the subbasement: from the Know Who"; and J. R. R. Tolkien's The movie. Yet there are peculiar limitations Nietzschean prophecies oi 2001 (begin Lord of the Rings, which is not really SF in all these ventures, reflecting the ning with its first moments, when orbs but shares much common ground, as strange history of SF in the United roll in the heavens to the music of A Zso half-men (hobbits, in other words) battle States, lb understand what is happen Sprach Zarathustra) to the rather en the Dark Powers in a gently religious ing today in the visual media we need to dearing Force of Star Wars, tended by its fantasy. Academic courses in SF (now of look at the idea of science fiction itself Arthurian priesthood of Jedi Knights; fered at more than 200 colleges and uni and its 50-year struggle to escape from from the Aliens bathed in light of Chse versities) frequently include Walter M. the dank American subculture of pulp Encounters to the pretentious biblicality Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, in 24 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG SR 3/15/80 ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED "^1 ilp''""-^ -»-/^ \ VANTAGE I VANTAGE ^'^^!Mentho,l K)Oi FILTER 100's: 10 mg. "tar", 0.8 m nicotine. FILTER, MENTHOL· 11mg."tar",0.8mg. nicotine, av. per cigarette. ^-^3ΚΛ^ 20 Ιί^-^ ^tcw^y Qqawii^ FTC Report MAY 78. PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC^^'Hl. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED BECAUSE the cork is the guardian of the wine, the corksmith judges the quality choosing only the finest straight-grained Portuguese cork to protect our crisp French Colombard. Every step we take, we take with care because'TH E WINE REMEMBERS THE WiNEFY OF ERNEST &JuLD ^^ GALLO French Colombard of Calif. PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG Ernest & Julio Gallo, Modesto, CA ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED which post-holocaust monasteries treat lightful season of half-hour dramas on the surviving scientific artifacts as re- TV. Instead, they have been brutally hgious icons. forced into the epic format of three con This celestial focus has prompted the secutive two-hour programs—some SF writer Joanna Russ to suggest that thing on the order of Roots. Great care science fiction is a unique phenomenon was taken with some of the stories, but to which current literary criticism is in butterflies knotted together on a string applicable, a phenomenon akin not to don't fly well. other contemporary writing but to medi In the 1940s, the newly invented eval literature. She finds it confident of comic books drove most pulp magazines its own values, didactic in nature, and out of business by taking over their concerned with Everyman rather than readership (millions of comics went to the Individual: war with the GIs). But the SF magazines had developed a more sophisticated and Science fiction, like medieval painting, ad specialized audience and consequently dresses itself to the mind, not the eye.... Thus were among the few pulps to survive. the science fiction writer can portray Jupiter They had introduced hard science in as easily as the medieval painter can portray crudely dramatized novels by honest-to- Heaven; neither of them has been there, but god scientists, and republished the sci that doesn't matter. To turn from other mod entific romances of Jules Verne and the em fiction to science fiction is oddly like turn careful speculations of Wells. Their ing from Renaissance painting with all the readership found no satisfaction in the flesh and foreshortening to the clarity and lu- simplicities of the comics. Indeed, the minousness of painters who paint ideas. For rise of more crude forms of popular en this reason, science fiction, like much medi tertainment purged the pulps of their eval art, can deal with transcendental events. own inanities: Readers who craved Hence the tendency of science fiction towards BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) abandoned wonder, awe, and a religious or quasi-re hard science for radio, the comic books, ligious attitude towards the universe. the comic strips of Buck Rogers and ("Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction," Flash Gordon, and the movie serials of Science-Fiction Studies, July 1975) the Saturday matinees where Buster Her argument is well observed and per Crabbe aimed his ray-gun at fat rockets suasive. It explains the unexpected af that swung lazily overhead, emitting finities between American SF readers sparks and the drone of buzz saws. and those fine Oxford medievalists and Much of our supposed SF in the visual Christian apologists, Tolkien and C. S. media today is nostalgia for this silly Lewis. It reminds us of the joyfully inno stuff. Star Wars was less science fiction cent names SF pulp magEizines used to than a loving evocation of old movies, have: Amazing Stories, Astounding Sci and while most of these were Saturday ence Fiction, Marvel Science Stories, serials, the final battle sequence seems Thrilling Wonder Stories. But this un stolen frame by frame from the terrific critical sense of awe was also a severe ending of The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a fly limitation that kept our SF juvenile. ing epic from the Korean War. Appar Tb remind ourselves how bad the old ently to obtain an equivalent for the pulps really were, we need go no further river canyon and its anti-aircraft bat than Mars. At the beginning of our cen teries, director George Lucas gouged a tury it was scientifically respectable to giant groove around the belly of the conjecture that Mars was inhabited, par Death Star Buck Rogers on television is ticularly after the careful observations more deliberate nostalgia, and even has and widely published speculations of the cameo appearances by Buster Crabbe astronomer Percival Lowell. In England himself My children and I eagerly await in 1898, H. G. Wells wrote The War of the next season's continuation, just as we Worlds, a masterpiece that showed the await with impatience this spring's The inadequacy of our proud technology to Empire Strikes Back, but there is a limit deal with the Alien. But in brash Amer to one's appetite for juvenilia, and no fu ica, John Carter easily conquered Mar ture in the past. Man does not live by tians with giant leaps and swordplay in candy alone. The future of visual SF de a series of pulp novels by Edgar Rice pends on the screenwriters adopting the Burroughs. The first and best, A Prin scientific attitude, just as American pulp cess of Mars, appeared in the pulps in magazines once did. But more than this, 1912, in book form five years later. Bur- they must be able to criticize that per roughs's naiveto peopled Mars with four- spective, measuring science against the armed men, six-legged horses, and great rule of our humanity. women who laid eggs, yet this puerile Screenwriters often miss the essence view of the red planet remained locked of SE The first great SF novel, Mary in the popular imagination until finally Shelley's Frankenstein, written 160 offset in 1950 by Ray Bradbury's lovely years ago, has been through countless Martian Chronicles—perhaps the first consciously literary work of American screen adaptations without ever being science fiction.