Notes on Caprica

Early reviews of the BSG prequel, Caprica.

Salon doesn't like it:

Unfortunately, "Caprica" doesn't make for tremendously engaging melodrama either, largely because it doesn't have any characters as immediately riveting as Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck or Mary McDonnell's President Roslin. Eric Stoltz brings quiet soulfulness to his grieving father, but Esai Morales feels wooden and stilted as Adama, and the rest of the ensemble (especially, it has to be said, the child actors) aren't a particularly inspiring bunch. As for the show's visuals -- unlike "Battlestar," "Caprica" is filmed largely with fixed shots (no hand-held cameras), which robs it of much of its flair and immediacy. Its clean urban setting feels antiseptic and cold and a bit dull. Judging by the pilot, the planet Caprica is Vancouver with a fancier train system

io9 loves it:

Showrunner [Jane] Espenson has compared Caprica to the series Rome, which focuses on a decadent society right before its fall. Still, the Caprican civilization doesn't feel as if its about to become extinct. Our characters seem as if they're merely trapped in the kinds of compromises we all make in an imperfect world. What makes this series compelling is not a sense of impending doom. Instead it's the fact that the conspiracies and prejudices that hobble our characters are refreshingly unfamiliar, though vividly reflective of ones that we face every day too.

So there you go. I'm less interested in the show itself than in the folly of doing prequels in general. In both the Star Wars and Star Trek universes prequels were hobbled by numerous problems:

• We already know how the story ends so everything feels locked down and predestined. There's no room for real conflict or imaginative exploration.
• Overly cute introductions and origins. It's far too tempting to link together characters we already know in stupidly improbable ways.
• Better special effects lead to the impression that the past was more advanced than the "present" or the "future."

Finally, a lot of critics like to refer to BSG as the smartest or greatest science fiction show of all time. For my money, The Twilight Zone, the original Star Trek, and The Prisoner are still better, smarter, and more entertaining.

Also, given the world we live in, Vancouver with a fancier train system sounds ideal.

The Problem of the Problem of the Future

Or, Science Fiction, What is it Good For?

I don't agree with everything Nick Mamatas has to say about Benjamin Kunkel (I tend to be about 40/60 with regard to his highly enjoyable blog anyway), but this is a pretty interesting line of argument:

SF, or the SF worth writing about anyway, also problematizes politics and love and whatnot. And unlike literary novels, these books often manage to proselytize. Thus, all those ugly people who nonetheless have a dozen lovers at a time thanks to Heinlein, or the Freeze Your Body types, Sea-Steading Libertarians, folks who just don't shower because it's selling out to society's rules not to smell like landfill somehow, or even that wag whose novel for young boys detailed the plans for making an atom bomb out of household goods and mail-order uranium. Everything is historicized in SF: morality, love, what it means to be human (and thus a human character) and often these things are not historicized in a way amenable to the politics of the middle-class social democrat, especially not one terrified of both socialism and democracy.

The Singularity of the novel Kunkel is discussing is an issue primarily for the sort of novel he wrote, and those he mentioned in his essay. The novel, the "literary" novel anyway, is still the venue of choice for the emergent middle class and the thing about middle classes is that they generally have it pretty good until someone rolls out a guillotine. As Thomas Disch pointed out long ago, SF has a different audience and serves a different function. SF appealed to historically (and still does today), the self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer, or more of a meritocracy, or better appreciated the subtleties of the slide-rule and the pun. Now that the present has caught up to the future though, a few of these techno-nuts have managed to become crazy zillionaires, while the Kunkels of the world have been demoted to talking about wine and the semiotics of thongs. SF is still the house organ of Technocracy as Charles Stross has pointed out, and though Technocracy has failed so too has pre-postmodern-double-reverse-Enlightenment thought of the Dissent crowd. But SF people know how to reboot Windows. Kunkel knows how to pitch an essay over drinks.

What I like is the characterization of the ideal Sci Fi reader as that "self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer" which is perhaps the way many genre writers see themselves sometimes, and the majority of their readers as well. But where he sees an emergent Technocracy, I just see the same old tiresome Libertarians, Randian Objectivists, and loosely identifed right-wing para-militarist reactionaries. Moreover, there is no "Dissent" crowd beyond the popular straw man of said Libertarians, Objectivists, and Reactionaries. Either way, not my crowd.

And its sort of striking that Mamatas finds fault with Kunkel's argument where they should agree the most. That is, Mamatas sees sci-fi readers as highly individualistic, and Kunkel argues that great literature is about complex highly individualized characters. Kunkel's complaint is that dystopic novels are always about clones, zombies, or characters stripped of their individuality. In his view (and this is problematic in itself) there is no social, moral, or political argument without the fully-formed individual perspective. There can be no future without the idea of the heroic individual to inhabit it. I'm not sure I agree with this either (this argument echoes those over Gladwell's Outliers - do great men make history, or do historic moments make men great?. It seems sort of old-fashioned and overly dependendent on James Wood's ideas regarding the great Tolstoyan Realist Novel. There's no room for postmodernism - and the entire history of literary sci-fi mash-ups - in Kunkel's view, much less post-humanism).

Mamatas's complaint seems to be that Kunkel is an entitled little bitch who should just shut up. EOS:

Literary writers of the sort Kunkel discusses in his essay can't handle the future very well, so they end up falling into the pop culture traps of televised SF. (Thus Kunkel's conflation of the two is correct, but not self-aware.) More interesting SF takes swings at the centrality of the individual subject in a way which smells to Kunkel and his fellow travelers as the liquidation of the middle class. The new world to be born is absolutely terrifying—it's the killing fields, run!— and thus Kunkel did what Kunkels always do—he wrote a long essay in a minor left journal.

The whole thing falls apart with the ax-gridingly annoying reference to "fellow travelers" (whoever they are), but he's right about Science Fiction's capacity for asking the big po-mo questions.

For me, the larger point is that we shouldn't confuse the problem of how we think about the future with arguments over genre fiction vs. literary fiction, or autodicats vs. ivy leaguers, or cyber punks vs. cyper preps, because at this stage of the game we're all on the same side. We're all on the outside looking in. And what's really screwed up is that there is no longer a center. There is no longer a middle class. There is no power structure against which we struggle. Our entire society has been hollowed out and emptied. What we're up against (and boy are we up against it) is not a common enemy or some sort of mystic elite, but mass inertia. Mass incompetence. Mass irresponsibility. We're bogged down by everything that is douchy and infantile in our society. Consumerism. Christianism. Celebritism. It's this whole self-centered soup of entertainment that's keeping us from thinking or writing intelligently about anything, much less the future: the waste and detritus of the never-ending now.

So when we do think of the future it is no real future at all. These dystopic futures are a blending of Horror and Science Fiction. We become steampunks or retro-futurists, because we are haunted by the past, seduced by its glamour, burdened by its nightmarish history. Science Fiction becomes not a literature for technocrats but a system of nostalgic associations, signs and countersigns, to which we always return. In this way Science Fiction cedes its most defining feature, cool logic and reason, to the irrationality of horror fiction, where we are free to revisit that which is repressed and painful or to relieve our broken-hearted selves through the romantically and Romantically doomed. As a result, the future is given over to apocalypse, pestilence, zombies, war, and sometimes, the return of ancient squidlike gods. The future is punk (or punk'd) and there is no future, no future for you.

Horror, as a genre, is the literature of despair. It is the literature of an obsessive engagement with the pain of the past that refuses healing. If the goal of art is transformation, if its purpose is to take the past and make something new, or as David Milch says, to transform the pain of the past, in its pastness, into the future tense of joy, then what horror and dystopic science fiction gives us instead is a frozen vision of postponement, deferral, and refusal. The pain always remains, the future does not arrive. It's Lovecraftian and Beckettian.

What I think is missing from our fictions, or has been lost, or abandoned, or has become unfashionable is this ability to imagine joy. Optimism. Utopia. Tomorrowland. Not technocracy, but faith or something like it. This is perhaps where individuality and character intercede.

Steam-Punked

Regarding the Steampunk Backlash over at io9: I am both a fan and a critic of steam punk. It's fun and it's clever, but it's also sort of endlessly repetitive and pointless. It's a style that can only do one thing, and as a creative anachronism it can't really stretch. As soon as you try to push the envelope a little, they call it something else: diesel punk, sandal punk, elf punk. Is The Willows weird fiction, nostalgia, or tentacle punk? After a while it starts to get a little stupid.

From 60s era Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and T.V.'s Wild Wild West and Doctor Who, to the interactive mysteries and world-building of Myst and Riven, to Alan Moore's all-encompassing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and even Pynchon's epic Western Sci-Fi Historical extravaganza Against the Day, steam punk has been a huge part of everything I like about sci-fi. It's a kitschy blend of the technical and the domestic; gears and steam engines with comfy overstuffed chairs, brandy, and fireside philosophizing. It celebrates both the extraordinary and the quotidian with its eccentric scientists laboring in garage laboratories and boy geniuses inventing things in their rooms. In this regard, it's firmly in the tradition of all boy's fiction from Jules Verne to Sherlock Holmes to Back to the Future to Encyclopedia Brown to Spider-Man. You can run away, have an adventure, and still go to sleep with a full tummy, a soft bed, and a warm dog.

The problem with it right now is that it is a fad, and as a fad it doesn't really mean anything. It's just a style, once choice among many. It's very flat, and all the rough edges are worn away by the repetition of the same costumes and the same modded out computers. Worse yet, it isn't really fashion. It's dress-up. It's play. And too often this sort of play fails to make the leap from the personal and the fanciful, to the level of pure imagination (in the Coleridgian sense). In other words the meaning of steam punk fails to make the imaginative leap beyond its internet micro-culture to have a larger meaning in society. It's just another weird, creepy, sad hobby like gun collecting, or civil war re-enacting, or fantasy football.

For me, the deeper theme has something to do with the problematic rise and expansion of Capitalism and Imperialism during the Victorian era. Just as British military might was conquering the world, its people, its wealth, and its resources, industrialization was conquering the countryside, restructuring labor, worklife, homelife, and the family. Great advances, built on the backs of human suffering. Great adventures of exploration at the cost of colonial slaughter and subjugation. It's that sense of dislocation, contradiction, revolution, and change that steam punk has the potential to capture. You can see signs of it in the 60s version of steam punk in the way the stories reacted to the cold war, the space race, our friend the atom, and the rapid suburbanization of the cities. What else is Mad Men but a googie-punk version of the same idea and fascination? And today it serves as an outlet for all of our 21st century anxieties over American decline: globalization, the information age, ex-urbanization, systems of surveillance, economic uncertainity, global warming, the energy crisis and world wide terrorism.

It's not all brass goggles and zeppelins, after all. Steam punk is about systems of power and exploitation (steam driven turbines), and the ability of individuals to subvert and undo those systems in the name of the dispossesed (politically subversive punks). In steam punk, the individual is the champion of his preterite community standing against the plutocrats and the elect. Moreover it is where the logic and control of science and commerce meets the non-rational and chaotic forces of life and art. Or, as Henry Adams observed in the "Dynamo and the Virgin,"

This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction -- the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin: --

"Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools: --

"Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."

All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

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At Chartres -- perhaps at Lourdes -- possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles -- but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

What's wanted is not just sci-fi gadgetry, but a deeper understanding of our own natures. The dyanamo is a sexless scientific artifact that hides within it the power and fecundity of chthonic nature. For thousands of years, in religion, in art, in symbol, the virgin as goddess had been the organizing principle for humanity; the driving force behind all human action. What then in the age of the steam engine and all the scientific discoveries to follow. What then is the nature of human existence? How does he organize himself? What of his relationships, society, love, marriage and the rest? How does he interact with his creations, as master or servant? What mysteries does life hold if one has access to infinite power without infinite wisdom?

If steam punk can ever rise to this level of understanding, then it will become something better than a fad.

Gawker goes Sci-Fi

Gossipy haters + nerdy shut-ins = my favorite new blog of 2008.

E.G., reasons Star Trek should stay dead:

3. It's no longer looking ahead. Like Star Wars, Trek is trapped in prequel-land. Enterprise bored us by filling in pointless backstory on the early days of Starfleet, but the J.J. Abrams movie looks to be twice as pointless. We already know everything we need to about young Kirk and the other Trek tots. Mining your own past is a prime symptom of idea bankruptcy.

That last sentence should be carved into a public building or something.

Genre and Book Sales

This is a pretty interesting chart from a study I found here [pdf].




I'm sort of amazed that in spite of the energy and creativity that goes into so much genre fiction (particularly Science Fiction and Horror), that they hold such a small share of the market.

It's no wonder we fall so easily into these religious arguments about what is or is not real sci-fi or real horror. There isn't very much at stake.
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Listening to: The Verve - Come On
via FoxyTunes

Ryan Heshka's Neo Pulp

Via Cool Hunting, an interesting artist with a fun pulp style. More here.

Genre Fiction vs. Genre Tropes

Cory Doctorow discusses the difference between genre stories and genre tropes (the signifiers of a genre) by distinguishing between sci-fi elements that are futuristic and sci-fi stories that are futurismic. He writes:

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III — and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices — but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.

The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.

Of course, the futurismic NCC-1701 was really based on Rodenberry's desire to do Horatio Hornblower stories in space. Not a hardcore attempt to think about the real social and scientific implications of FTL or transporters or replicators. The question is, can you go hardcore non-futurismic (or non-horrorismic, or non-fantasyismic) and still have anything that resembles a story in the mind of the reader. Or do you just get high-modern experimental meta-fiction which we've had for nearly 100 years now?