One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.
How does he overcome all these challenges?
Science.
The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.
(…or, Everything That’s Wrong with Deadpool & Wolverine)
Well, I finally got around to watching Marvel’s latest blockbuster, Deadpool & Wolverine. This was the first Marvel movie I’d watched in a while, and now I remember why. Holy smoke, what a crappy film! As I watched it—doggedly, hoping it would get better, resisting the urge to switch it off—I began to realize that this film is not only bad, it is profoundly bad. That is, bad in a way that’s worth talking about.
Normally, being a nominal “artist” myself, I don’t lay into other people’s work just because I don’t like it. Why bother? But this movie triggered me in such a way that I have to rant about it for a while. Specifically, it pissed me off because it breaks the single most important rule of genre fiction (which applies equally to genre film): Keep it Real.
Wait a moment, you say. Realistic genre fiction? Realistic fantasy fiction? Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Actually, no. For while every Marvel movie, like every James Bond movie and every action movie and every horror movie and even every science fiction movie, is, in a sense a fantasy, the good ones display a kind of realism that’s critical, and vastly more important than any sense of day-to-day realism in the story itself. This is psychological realism. And psychological realism has its root in physiologicalrealism—the realism of the human body.
If I were to make a list of the most influential science fiction novels of all time, William Gibson’s Neuromancer would surely be on it. How often does a book create a whole genre—almost single-handedly? I say “almost” because there were other cultural touchstones of the cyberpunk genre, primarily Ridley Scott’s landmark film Blade Runner. But Neuromancer was the primary literary component of the movement, with its landscape of towering, high-tech super-cities where the rich live high (in every sense of the word), and the poor live very, very low.
Expanding on his ground-breaking short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” Gibson created a dark near-future in which giant “mega-corporations,” many of them Japanese, have taken control of all aspects of life, and the richest people have almost become a different species. Average people either work as wage-slaves to the corporations, and the closest thing to a counterculture is a teeming underclass of rebel hackers who make their existence by spying on (and stealing from) the corporate oligarchy.
These underground, anti-heroes are the punks of cyberpunk, and they are what made it so compelling as a genre. In a world where technology and corporate greed have dehumanized everyone, the punks beat the system at its own game. They do so by humanizing it, using their courage, individuality, and creativity to win in the one place where everyone is still equal—in the virtual world of cyberspace.
That’s why I like this cover so much. Strangely, though Neuromancer was published forty years ago, there has never been a cover that really captured the vibe and essence of the book. Until this one. It’s a very obscure cover belonging to a Brazilian edition of the novel and created by Spanish artist Josan Gonzalez. I like it because it feels like a 1980s comic strip—specifically, the work of French artist Moebius from the magazine Métal hurlant back in the 1980s (truly, the golden age of cyberpunk). The character portrayed is, presumably, that of Case, the hacker-hero of the novel. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a welter of wires rising from his VR goggles (from his “brain,” essentially), he personifies the spirit of cyberpunk: a rebellious unflappability combined with human creativity and technical skill.
I was going to make a new Christmas Sci-Fi List to go with the first one that I wrote some years ago. But…well…I flaked out. So, here is a belated list of some of my favorite science fiction novels. And why not? New Year’s Day is a time to think about the future, right? RIGHT?
Anyway, here’s the list…
Trouble on Triton
Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton (published as Triton in the U.S.) is one of the finest written, poorly known works of literary sci-fi in publishing history. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it’s a short work—really a novella—with a post-modern, elliptical plot, not to mention some gender-bending content that was way ahead of its time. Set in a dome-style space colony on the farthest moon in the solar system, it tells the story of Bron, an ordinary schlemiel who’s in love with a mysterious, beautiful performance-artist. What really makes this book fascinating is its depiction of a high-tech, post-scarcity society that anticipated Iain Banks’s Culture novels by decades.
The Peripheral
William Gibson pretty much invented cyberpunk, so it’s fitting that he should write one of the best twists on that genre to come along in years. The Peripheral begins in what appears to be standard Gibson territory. Set in an economically devastated near-future, the story centers on Flynn, a young woman who makes her living as a remote contractor who works in the virtual reality of cyberspace. She thinks she is testing on a prototype for a video game set in a much farther distant, higher-tech future. But when she witnesses a murder in this other, virtual world, she realizes that it’s not virtual at all, but an actual, alternate future earth to which she is connected through a mysterious Chinese server.
The rest of the novel involves her getting to know her future-based boss, Wilf, and helping him solve the murder mystery. Wilf, in return, gives Flynn money and technology to help her and her friends change their timeline, hoping to avoid the environmental catastrophe—a.k.a. “The Jackpot”—that has denuded the planet in Wilf’s. (He explains that their timelines are now independent of each other, so she won’t be messing with his present.) It’s one of Gibson’s best, tightest books with a page-turner plot and some brilliant twists.
The Man in the High Castle
Speaking of alternate timelines, have you ever felt like you were stuck in the wrong one? And it’s not a good one? This is the experience of all the characters in The Man in the High Castle. Set in the 1960s, the book imagines an alternate earth where the Axis powers won World War II. Nazi Germany controls the American east coast, Japan the west coast, and the midwest serves as a vast DMZ between the two. Like most of Dick’s novels, the novel involves several interlocking narratives concerning characters from all classes, high and low, each of whom struggles to be a good person in an insane world.
The Girl with All the Gifts
In the last twenty years, there have been so many zombie apocalypse novels, movies, tv shows, and video games that one would expect it to be completely…well, dead. Played out. Void of new ideas.
That’s what I thought when I picked up The Girl with All the Gifts. You can imagine my surprise when I found it to be one of the best written, engrossing, and often thrilling novels I’ve ever read. Its great strength lies in its central twist on the zombie story: the hero (actually heroine) is, herself, a zombie.Sort of. Ten year-old Melanie is infected with the fungus that turns people into zombies, but despite an almost irresistible hunger for human flesh, she retains her human intellect and sensibility. A prisoner in a military-run research station tasked with studying zombie children, Melanie has super-human strength, a genius I.Q., and a love of Greek mythology. She also loves her “teacher” (actually, a sympathetic scientist), Miss Justineau.
When the research station is overrun by zombies, Melanie becomes the savior of her former captors as they make their way across the English countryside, trying to get back to human-controlled territory. The great irony of the novel is that most of the evil Melanie confronts on her journey comes from humans, not zombies. (Or maybe that’s not so ironic, after all.)
The Wave
Known primarily for his mystery novels, Walter Mosley is just a damned good writer, period. The Wave is a rip-snorting, old-school sci-fi novel with a modern sensibility. It’s about a working-class stiff named Errol who comes home one night to find that his father has paid him a visit. No big deal, except for the fact that his father has been dead for years.
The explanation lies is an sentient extremophile that lives so deep in the earth’s crust it has never been discovered…until now. Intelligent and deadly, it can take the shape of any biological form (including poor Errol’s dead father), accessing the target’s memories and consciousness in the process. Errol soon finds himself on the run from scientists who want to study the entity and military men who want to kill it. Good stuff from one of the best.
The first DVD I bought was Blade Runner. The second was Forbidden Planet. This latter film is a science fiction classic from Hollywood’s second golden age, 1956 (the same year that John Ford’s landmark film The Searchers was released). Perhaps the definitive pulp sci-fi movie, it’s got everything you might expect: stalwart heroes, spaceships, lasers, aliens, a teen-aged hottie, a mad scientist, and even a talking robot.
And monsters, of course. Monsters from the Id.
Ever since I first saw Forbidden Planet on TV when I was kid, I’ve loved it. Here are ten reasons why…
1.) Altair IV
Forbidden Planet is, to my knowledge, the first Hollywood movie to depict human beings landing a spaceship on a planet of another star. This was a fairly landmark achievement in the history of science fiction cinema, made even better by the film’s two art directors, Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan. In their vision, Altair becomes a green- and blue-tinged desert, not unlike that of John Ford’s American Southwest. Considering this was done with matte paintings and other pre-CGI effects, it’s amazing how good the landscapes are, so desolate and full of foreboding. It’s a prefiguration of all the wild worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on, yet to come.
When I was a public school kid back in the 1980s, I used to spend hours at the bookstore, mostly looking at science fiction books. It wasn’t just the stories themselves that interested me, but the cover art. Back then, before the internet gave one an endless supply of great sci-fi concept art of any kind, the only way to get one’s imagination going was to head to the bookstore.
So, it’s probably inevitable that I would regard that time as a golden age of sci-fi cover art. And I do. When I look at sci-fi books today, there is usually no cover art to speak of, but just an exercise in graphic design. The title goes in this font 38 point; the author’s name goes in this font at 28 point; etc.; with some blurry, abstract notion of an alien planet or a futuristic city. Back in the pre-digital days, sci-fi cover art consisted mainly of actual paintings, made by actual painters.
One of the best actual painters was (and is) Michael Whelan. His work has that perfect blend of realism, action, and whimsy that I always looked for in a good sci-fi cover. For five decades, he created some of the best covers ever made, and they earned him a place in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
One of my favorites is the one above, his cover for the 1990 Bantam/Spectra edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. If you haven’t read it (and you should), it’s an allegory about the loss of ancient wisdom, the horrors of capitalism, and even the conquest of the American West. Haunting the work are the ghosts of the Martians themselves, who once-great civilization is helpless in the face of the invading Earth-men, with their guns and disease and endless greed. I love this cover because it gives you a sense of that lost majesty, but it also makes you curious about the story.
In one of those strange, synchronicity moments that sometimes happen, I recently stumbled upon an article in Collider about how the classic John Carpenter film Escape from New York is getting a new 4K release from Shout Factory. This was a heart-warming bit of information, for me, since the film has been one of my favorites since I saw it in the theaters in 1982. It’s nice to think that new generations of film lovers might be given a chance to appreciate its many charms.
The news was also timely, for me, because I had been contemplating writing a post about the things I love most about movies like Escape from New York. That is, B-Movie Action Flicks. As anyone who reads this blog or my old one will realize, I am somewhat obsessed with B-Movie Action Flicks, especially from their golden age back in the 1970s-80s. Part of my obsession is mere nostalgia, of course. I spent many a late Saturday watching such movies on HBO with my equally nerdy, reprobate friends, and they (the films and the friends) helped me get through the agonies of growing up. But the other part of my obsession has to do with the nature of B-Movie Action Flicks. Why are they so much fun?
Ursula K. Le Guin was one of our finest science fiction writers, and The Left Hand of Darkness is probably her best book. Not only did it anticipate by half-a-century the seismic cultural shifts that are currently roiling Western society regarding issues of gender-identity and sexual orientation, it’s also just a damned good sci-fi story.
Set in the far future, it takes place on Gethen, a wintery planet with a post-industrial civilization. Genly Ai is an Earth-man who is sent to Gethen on a diplomatic mission, hoping to convince the locals to join the Ekumen (basically, Le Guin’s version of the United Federation of Planets). Genly’s efforts are frustrated by long-standing, internecine conflicts between the Gethenians themselves, and also by his own difficulty in relating to the local people. People on Gethen are, it seems, are androgenous—serially androgenous, actually, existing as one sex for a part of the month and as females for the other. (As Le Guin beautifully describes, they subtly change their outer physiognomy, depending on which gender they are currently occupying, appearing to be “men” some of the time and “women” at others.)
Even now, it’s a pretty far-out concept, but it was totally mind-blowing in 1969 when the novel came out. Trust me, though—it’s a very exciting book. Genly soon finds himself caught between warring nations and is arrested as a potential spy. He is rescued by Estraven, the former prime minister of one of the countries, who helps Genly escape. They set off on a life-and-death adventure, sledding across the frozen wilderness of Gethen and trying to get to safety. In the process, Genly is forced to come to terms with his own deep-rooted conceptions of sexuality, while Estraven faces the prospect of Gethen being just one small planet in a vast, strange galaxy.
Le Guin is often described as a literary science fiction writer, and it’s true. Her prose and descriptive eye were top-notch, and she was able to weave Big Ideas (Feminism, Taoism, etc.) into her fiction without it feeling like a Humanities 101 lecture. The edition I read had this great cover by veteran illustrator Alex Ebel, which might seem a bit cheesy today but was striking and evocative at the time. I love the way it captures one of the major visual motifs of the novel, that of linked-opposites (light and dark, male and female, good and evil, progressive and reactionary). It’s a great, surreal representation of a great novel.
Well, I finally watched Dune: Part Two (henceforth known as Dune 2) last night. I’m a big fan of the first film (part 1), and I was very eager to see this one (although not eager enough, apparently, to shell-out for theater tickets; oh, well).
Dune 2 is, obviously, an amazing film, even when viewed on a TV screen. A lot of people have commented on how much the movie reminds them of Lawrence of Arabia, and it’s true. Why not? Frank Herbert was, himself, influenced by Lawrence when he wrote the book. But as I watched Dune 2, I kept thinking of another classic film, The Godfather. They’re practically the same movie, when you think about it. Duke Leto is the Godfather, the noble monarch of a great and honorable kingdom. Arrakis is New York City, full of violence, corruption, and sadistic evil. Paul is Michael, the exiled prince, who is at first reluctant to take up his old man’s role but later succumbs to the circumstances that surround him, and to his own desire for revenge. Chani is Kay. Gurney is Clemenza. And on and on.
I mean this comparison, of course, as a compliment. Dune 2 is an archetypal film, as is The Godfather. And, like The Godfather, it’s got some electrifying scenes of action, woven inside a theme of how good can survive in an evil universe without becoming evil itself. (Dune 2, like The Godfather, leaves the question unresolved.)
I did have some pretty major complaints about the movie, especially in the way it handles time. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the entire story takes place during Lady Jessica’s pregnancy with the unborn Alia. Right? So, unless babies in the Dune universe take a lot longer to gestate, that’s less than nine months—which makes no logical sense. (In the book, it’s more like four years.) Even more problematic, for me, is the film’s unrelenting depictions of sadism. The Harkonnens—the greatest lovers of BDSM fashion in the galaxy—are always stabbing or crushing or slicing somebody up, usually someone helpless and innocent. Yeah, I get it; evil is the major theme of the movie. But I couldn’t help but think that director Denis Villeneuve (who is, I believe, a genius) takes it just a little…bit…too…far. I mean, we get four or maybe five scenes that are essentially remakes of The Empire Strikes Back with Darth Vader killing some dim-witted subordinate.
Still, it’s a great movie, exciting and fluid and beautifully acted. I’ll watch it again. If you haven’t seen it (which I seriously doubt), check it out…
Back in the early 1990s when I was a poor graduate student, I used to stay home on Saturday nights and watch my little black-and-white TV. I couldn’t afford cable, of course, but thankfully there was always PBS, so I watched a lot of documentaries and episodes of Great Performances. On one such night, I saw a filmed performance of Peter Brook’s stage play The Mahabharata. The play is, of course, a dramatic adaptation of the great Hindu epic, the tale of a feud between two groups of royal cousins, the Pāṇḍava princes and their arch-nemeses, the Kauravas. As epic tales are wont to do, the feud escalates into a civil war so catastrophic that even the gods are pulled into the conflict (in the same way that the Greek gods Mars, Apollo, and Venus involve themselves in the The Illiad).
Being a filmed staged play, Brook’s TV version is low on special effects (this was before CGI) but packed with minimalistic, highly-stylized interpretations of sweeping battles, multi-armed demons, and flying chariots. Somehow, it all works, and I found myself obsessed with both the film and the story. A few years later I would finally read a popular translation of The Bhagavad Gita, which is really just one portion of the much larger Mahabharata.
Ash Clifton, Writer 