Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Odd-fi


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, overall, seems to be a bit of an underrated story, or, if not underrated, a story that a lot of people enjoyed but seem to have forgotten about. It deals with concepts of reality and what it means to not only be a human being, but a being at all. It blends cynicism and optimism in a palatable and engaging way. It has a diverse set of characters with motives (or lack thereof) that you don't normally see in scifi. It's consistently funny in a way that's bleak or "dark" but overall innocuous. And most importantly - it's downright odd.

My first exposure to it was the movie, a long time ago. While the movie most certainly stands up today, it was more the "long time ago" part for me that had me a little perplexed by it. I didn't understand a lot of the concepts, like the Earth being destroyed for such a menial thing as a galactic highway, I couldn't get into that perspective and didn't like that idea.

A few years later I saw another scifi movie that upset me even more - Melancholia, a movie about our planet's annihilation. Only, that movie is much more of a bleak character drama leading to Earth's demise. I hated the idea but it later made me think of Hitchhiker's Guide again. It's not the end of the world, and if it is, it doesn't mean we never existed, that our lives meant nothing. They do to us, and in the end that's what matters the most.

And so I came around to "odd-fi", and I further left the concept that scifi can only be about ships and lasers. It didn't affect me in the way Blade Runner had, which opened my eyes to the overall genre being much more than the sum of its parts, but it showed me that scifi can be funny without being hokey, or cynical without being depressing. It gave me a great perspective on a widened galaxy of storytelling in the scifi genre as a whole.



Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Noir-fi and the Power of Great Fiction



I think Blade Runner may have changed my life, or at least, changed how I thought about fiction. The first time I saw it was not really anything special. I wasn't at a theater on a rainy evening, and it would be physically impossible for me to be there opening night. I just saw it on the computer one day, back when I was around 13 or 14.

A lot of people talk about how Star War changed their view on everything, and while that may have very well been the case with me, I had seen and absorbed Star Wars all my life, all the episodes, action figures, games, everything. But when I saw Blade Runner, I felt like I saw something I never had before. The kinds of stories I knew I could now tell, or even absorb, had changed.

I thought it was just about the ships, the blasters, the lasers and droids. But after seeing Blade Runner I knew fiction could be more than the sum of its parts. It wasn't just the universe, it could be a specific story in that universe, and it could be gut-wrenching and terrifying and moving.

I was taught for a very long time that science fiction and fantasy were never ever to be taken as seriously as period pieces or modern dramas or classic fiction.

Blade runner taught me how wrong that idea was.

I had found the holy grail and I didn't even know I was looking for it at the time. Blade Runner taught me that you don't need to hold the laser pistol up to the screen so the audience can see it's a blaster pistol, you don't need a wide shot of the ship landing because wow look at that it's a space ship. You can certainly do all these things, but you can also have a story about mortality, more poignant than any modern drama you'd seen in the subject. To see characters stepping outside of the confines my mind was putting them in, the moral boxes I had been taught everything was about. It wasn't good vs evil, it wasn't science fiction for science fiction's sake, it wasn't Star Wars, it wasn't Star Trek.

It was Roy Batty, an android moments from his own death by expiration date, saving a man who was trying to kill him.

Blade Runner was a very real, gritty universe, both in the book and on the screen, but it was more than that for both, it told me that creative fiction outside of our reality could tell stories that weren't just about themselves, not just about the morality of the characters we see, not just about good vs evil, but about our mortality itself.

Classic Scifi and You!

It would seem that a lot of classic scifi, at least in America, was born out of this idea of the "space race" we had with against Russia following World War II.

Much of the technology represented in classic scifi seems to be built around the stories themselves, and never really the other way around. Because of that, I feel as though the public was more accepting of scifi in that form, being more about space drama with a bit of action, a ray gun that looked especially art deco, a sleek and clean presentation of the universe that's being built around the story.

Cars, even, reflected this whole idea of the space age:


The rocket ship-like tails fins and chassis lends to this national idea of reaching the stars in a subconscious way, mirroring Japan's adoption of their own mechanical icon after WWII: the robot/android/mecha, which informed its national identity for decades to come as well.

So it would appear scifi had gotten a lift, pun intended, in America directly due to the fact that were were trying to get a rocket in orbit, and then put a man on the moon. The very gradual introduction of less fit and trim elements of scifi into popular culture speaks to that. After all, putting a man on the moon, or even up into space had seemed like science fiction enough to most people for a very long time, much like the fantasy of human flight before it.