Ruminations On Science Fiction, by David King

 On Science Fiction 

by David King. 

Peter's recent ruminations on science fiction got me thinking about my own attitude towards the genre and what it means to me. 

Much of my creative work has been in science fiction - from the very first national short story award I won in 1971 at the age of 16, the Young Australian Short Story Award for a yarn called Aeons After which, in just under 1,000-words, spanned several hundred thousand millennia from somewhere around the beginning of the Universe until just after the first Moon landing and left the judges gob-smacked by its stylistic ingenuity (their words and the reason it won) - to The Last Agent, a twisted riff on Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville with echoes of Terry Gilliam's Brazil cocooned in Burroughsian literary style and published on the now sadly-defunct original Scum Gentry website as well as on Armchair Traveller during Peter's brief flirtation with Facebook. 

Then there are my films which often seem to riff off science fiction themes. I mention these because it always surprises me when I look back and see how much of my work has been influenced by science fiction. It's not like I sit down and say, “I'm going to write a science fiction story” or “I'm going to make a science fiction film”. It always seems that I look back and see that's what I appear to have done almost without being aware of it. 

In fact, I often look at science fiction with a kind of leery scepticism. Too much of it over the ages has been of the cheesy pulp variety which may be superficially entertaining but isn't something that inspires or attracts me. 

Buck Rogers-style sagas of rockets, robots and ray guns never did it for me. Monster fests such as Godzilla or King Kong left me cold. Star Wars had me running for the exit. 

Independence Day had me reaching for the remote, as did many other space operas where the United States military, headed by some lantern-jawed hero or heroes and occasionally a heroine, save the Earth from an extraterrestrial menace which always seems to have motivations more in common with the human race than anything that might genuinely be called 'alien'.

Going further back, The Day The Earth Stood Still may be a wonderful morality play but laughable in terms of believable human interaction with an alien species.

Of course, the alien looks human, the robot also has humanoid form, and they both speak English - one of the least likely possibilities if we were ever to encounter an alien species. But I can't remember - was that 'alien' actually a human from the future? 

On the other hand, a film like Godard's Alphaville remains one of my all-time favorite works. Ditto for George Lucas's THX-1138. And, of course, I'm a fan of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and the original Alien. Not to mention Terry Gilliam's Brazil and 12 Monkeys which was based on Chris Marker's La Jetée (another favorite), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker, and more recently, Alex Garland's Annihilation which has parallels with Stalker. 

These films had one thing in common - they were basically believable and plausible. Alphaville is essentially a Godardian take on the B-Grade spy thriller set in 'a distant galaxy' with absolutely no attempt to disguise 1960's Paris. The sheer chutzpah of doing this was in itself breath-taking and a kind of sci-fi. 

Where this film successfully traded in the deliberate suspension of disbelief and even thumbing its nose at sci-fi convention, films set in outer space required (and still do require) a level of believability based on science. It is no accident that Godard skipped any kind of space voyage in Alphaville, preferring to use a voice over to reveal his hero's journey across the galaxy. 

As a teenager, I used to laugh out loud at those cheesy science fiction films on television which showed astronauts in rockets which would tilt back as they went 'up' and forward as they went 'down' and show them being pressed back into their seats as they accelerated. For I knew very well that there could be no up or down nor sense of speed in space. 

2001: A Space Odyssey gained my admiration for showing that simple reality. The scenes where one astronaut was standing at a 90 degree angle to another in the same shot, where Bowman jogged around the giant centrifuge, and where he chased the body of Frank Poole in the extravehicular pod with the only concept of movement coming from the lights that flashed over his face from the instrument panel (the computerized 'instrument panels' themselves being something to behold in the late 1960's) and the increasingly rapid beeping of the tracking system all made 2001: A Space Odyssey entirely believable.

As for the controlling computer. HAL 2000, that brilliantly cold invention gave me nightmares and for a long time afterwards I could write about nothing but computers going haywire and destroying the humans that depend on them. 

Moving on, we come to THX-1138. Is there any real difference between the life of THX-1138 and the average factory worker of the 60's or 70's? 

He and his fellow workers are being encouraged to self-medicate so they can keep doing their jobs which are both boring and dangerous. What does this remind us of? Laborers on an oil refinery? An oil drilling rig in the ocean? A coal mine? 

Apart from the THX-1138's escape attempt, there are even parallels with David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner which is about factory workers on a Sydney oil refinery. Not only do they self-medicate at a makeshift pub on the banks of the river across from their refinery, but even their experience of sex is on par with that of the society in which THX-1138 lives. And this was Sydney in the 1960's. 

So THX-1138 was really not about some distant future. It was about the present projected into the future.  That is where the best sci-fi happens and why it works. It's about the here and now. It's about us. Our problems, the issues we need to solve now. It's believable. 

Which is why something like Independence Day doesn't work for me. Because you have this supposedly technologically advanced alien species attacking the Earth in huge space craft when one of the major questions is, if these aliens were so fantastically advanced, why would they need space craft to travel in?

Why would they need to conquer us by force? Surely, they could simply enter our minds and rearrange them in such a way that we would regard their control of our planet as perfectly normal? This was a theme successfully played on by Alex Proyas in Dark City. 

So we see Independence Day is really about something like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It's about the past and the USA's insecurity in the present. And as sci-fi, it doesn't work for me because I find myself asking questions which make a mockery of the whole concept. 

This goes for just about every film or novel in which some alien species comes to Earth to 'conquer' the human race. Except maybe for the likes of The Day of the Triffids or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers which are closer to the idea of viral invasions (which we're undergoing now) than to the idea of some alien species intentionally invading and trying to conquer us. 

In both of these films, the 'aliens' seem to do what they do because it's their nature, much like what a virus does. They don't have 'evil intentions'. They just happen to have the effect they have and Man has to figure out some way of defending himself from this 'blind attack'. This is much more realistic and believable. 

So why do I include Ridley Scott's Alien in the pantheon of sci-fi films I admire? Partly because the technology was believable. The concept of 'space truckers', bored with their lot in life and looking forward to getting home and spending the money, is entirely plausible. The one thing the technological realism of Alien didn't touch on was the reality of everyone they knew back on Earth being most likely dead of old age by the time they returned, so what would they be returning to? 

From discussions I’ve had with Peter, I know he would also argue against the probability of interstellar travel and man's ability to survive it. But since more scientifically-knowledgeable people than either of us are actually working on these problems at various levels, the jury is still out on that issue . 

The alien itself - a species which lives to kill and kills to live - was easy to imagine existing somewhere in the galaxy. Such things already exist on Earth. What other purpose does a Great White shark or salt water crocodile have but to kill to live and live to kill? They are apex predators whose purpose is to clean the biosphere they exist in. They have no interest in the human race. But if the human race enters their environment... 

Note that the alien in Alien did not come in a space craft to Earth to conquer us. It was inert and harmless until the spacefarers found it, similar to a virus being uncovered in a forest being deforested for grazing land. 

It was carried by the spacefarers the same as a virus or bacteria. Had the crew of the Nostromo not heeded that call, the alien would have remained on that dead planet, ostensibly harmless for the rest of time, and, of course, no movie called Alien would have been made. Something had to activate it. So again, we're reminded of our own behaviour on Earth - what we do to activate those things that jeopardise our lives here - Ebola and COVID-19 being good examples. 

But this type of alien can also be too plausible and too close to Nature as we know it to be really alien. A favorite question of mine is: if something was genuinely alien, would we even know what it was or what it was doing? Why should it live to kill and kill to live? Why should it 'blindly' try to destroy us the way a virus does? Why, for that matter, should it have any effect on us at all? 

Supposing we were to learn that we have been living with several different species of alien intelligence for the last 500 years without any of us even being aware of it. That we walk past them every day without even regarding them as 'alien' much less as any kind of threat. 

I even have one hiding in the bottom right corner of my garden. Peter has suggested it might be one of the last of the Triffids - once prolific invaders, now almost on the verge of extinction.

What if you were to learn that the funny-looking rock or plant at the end of your back yard is actually an alien intelligence? That there are billions of them all over the planet and they could well be sending whatever they regard as information back to their home planet? And that apparently hasn't done us any harm and is unlikely to ever do us any harm. A geological life form? A silicone-based life form? A two-dimensional life form? Why not? Would they even recognize us as life forms? Seek to interact with us? Conquer us? Probably not. Interacting with and attempting to conquer are distinctly human, not alien, traits

Of course, when it comes to a film or a work of literature, there has to be some kind of conflict to keep us involved and wanting to know the outcome. If an alien does nothing and has no effect on anyone, if it's completely harmless and of no consequence, why should we write or make films about it? Sure, it can also be a 'friendly' alien, a la E.T but again, that makes it too human-like to be genuinely alien. 

Which brings me to the kind of God-like alien concepts contained in the monolithic slab of Kubrick's 2001, 

the planet around which the space station orbits in Tarkovsky's Solaris,

and the inscrutable orb in Michael Crichton's Sphere.

These alien entities do not acknowledge or attempt to do anything to the humans which encounter them. They simply have an effect on their minds which causes humans to do things to themselves.


Apart from something that has no effect on us whatsoever, this is much closer to what I believe a genuine alien being could be like - a 'being' which we would not even recognize as a life form or an intelligence but would see more as an object. 


So please, no more Hollywood heroes saving us from 'evil' aliens. Instead, let's remember that the single most dangerous and evil 'alien' we know of (so far) is the one that looks back at us from the mirror every morning. And that 'alien' doesn't even want to know about it.

ENDS

Copyright, David King, 2021

Portarlington, Victoria, 3223

AUSTRALIA.