Highway To Mars

Remember when Science Fiction used to be fun?  Those were the days my friend!

I want to be clear, In this episode I am not making any comparisons with state sanctioned segregation practices of the past.  I am however pretty sure that we learned in the past that segregation is a stupid way to solve problems.  So why would businesses in *Current Year* think this is a good idea, no matter how virtuous?

Rejection of a Customers Business based on them not holding the “right ideas” has become quite normal in almost all forms of Science Fiction media.  If there is such a thing as “the right type of customer” then it will be fascinating to see how that plays out.  Are there enough of these virtuous souls to sustain the Industry?  Or will we see IPs start to fail.

Right now, this is the only risk I see to Disney market domination – if having achieved dominance, they start to flex their muscles in the Star Wars way, this could be a very fast rise and fall.  I think Captain Marvel, and the way Disney handles it is going to be a real litmus test on the future of said dominance.

In the meantime, fans who have invested decades and dollars on supporting these brands find themselves on the outer with the new hip crowd coming in and have been villanised by media every time they fight back.  Oh for the days when the biggest controversy was Jadzia or Ezri.

(Contrarian that I am – I am on team Ezri)

In this episode I take a deeper examination of the Women in Fridges trope and how it is a classic example of how we have lost the art of communicating our problems, and solution building in this era of outrage.

Gareth and Stefan restart their series on Douglas Adams at the very end of the Hitchhikers series.  The book stands alone, one way or another all the post douglas materials have attempted to rewrite the end and even douglas himself had his regrets.  However this is a moment where one needs to commit to the bit and take on the book as presented complete with its finality.  In the real world, heroes don’t get a heroic send off.  For his part Arthur takes his moment to shine, displaying his best qualities even in the face of abject certainty that his invincibility has run out.

I have always wanted to approach the Culture War beyond the moral arguments and look more to if there is an effect being felt, if so what is that affect and what does it mean longer term.

In this episode I reflect on the datasets that are out there and how they are used – what they tell us and the limitations on how they can be used.

I also take a look at some harder data that shows that there are other forces beyond the culture war that will impact Science Fiction in the years to come.

So what is the culture war?  Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have noticed that people aren’t very nice to each other any more and even the choice of coffee in the morning can be a polarising act.  In science fiction the battleground seems mostly to have been around the representation of women and minorities.  The battleground has been a combination of the trade media and social media but in recent times creatives more and more are choosing sides.  Representation is a tricky thing, is it presentation, number of people involved, impact or audience.  Should mainstream target the straight white male or be more broad?  As if things were ever that simple.

As I chatted to Gareth this morning, I don’t talk SF in the fishing world it doesn’t work and people tend to think you are wierd.  They are just different worlds, is that right?   I have in recent years found straddling the two worlds a challenge but I am not going to judge many groups of fishers that think I am way too nerdy, at least they understand and respect the fact that nerd or not – I get them.

Science fiction as a culture has over a long time embraced and broadened it’s reach and been the home of dissenting voices on all sides.  That is it’s strength.  That there is a battle to control the narrative is not new.  What is new however is that in the past this was done by regulatory bodies and angry fans.  Creatives did their own thing.  Now that they are in and many are all in, it is impossible to escape the real world as there is almost no SF untouched by politics.

Even the last two popcorn movies I watched – Pacific Rim and Tomb Raider, fun as they were carried constant undercurrents.

Whatever the outcome, it’s hard to see anything other than a victory for the social justice movement.

Will the next underground “edgy” movement in SF be in exploring ideas.  That is where the “edgy” rebel crowd is on Youtube.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe it’s time for SF to think hard about whether we are about reflecting society as it is or imaging society as it could be.

The third radio series was a surprise improvement on the book, can the fourth do the same?

A belated episode (hey it’s only 18 months overdue) we delve into the fourth radio play.  As with the third, I enjoyed most of it even more than the book.

To me this is the ending of the story that Douglas intended, the happy ending that draws upon his dry British humour to make one last poignant statement about us collectively and our relationship with god through gods last message to the universe.

If Douglas made it to heaven, one can only imagine him and god in a pub discussing where it all went wrong.

Like it or not the Culture War has seeped into pretty much every part of Science Fiction.  In truth I don’t have an ideological dog in the fight beyond the fact that there is no real world evidence that much of the remedies the SJW side will work and I dislike the fact that they have essentially given the far right something  to gain traction over.

Having spent much of the past 4 years looking at human performance, and good creatives are very much the product of human performance at it’s finest my fear is not so much the culture war but the loss of talent that comes with it.  History tells us that is a short term problem but none the less the greater the drain, the greater the risks that one of the big franchises will implode.

Star Wars and Doctor Who are showing dangerous signs and Star Trek is probably DOA.

In this episode I lay down some of the keys to individual performance, in the second episode I look specifically at the culture war and the last I look at the brain drain.

It’s diversity of storytelling, not immutable characteristics that drive the industry.  If every story becomes the same ideologically, the crash will not be far behind.

 

Cheers

It’s been a strange old year in Science Fiction where content creators decided to take on fans in different ways and virtue trumped storytelling too many times.  That said there was still a lot to enjoy, if not a lot to jog the brain cells.  With that in mind, I have been spending the year delving into that grey zone between science fiction and science and making science fiction come to life…  Way better than bitching about the latest twitter drama in my books but that’s just me.  Twitter drama definitely gets more clicks, but I know which one is more fulfilling to my soul.

Here is to a 2018 where peace is declared and we all get back to enjoying science (fiction) over the drama.

Or not.  Either way I aim to misbehave.

Collectivism is a funny thing.  We have given it a go in various forms with varying degrees of harm to those involved.  Generally collectivism is implemented by force because while Objectivism is arrogant when it comes to the ability for society to operate without rules, Collectivism mostly seeks to override the other truth, that we rarely will act completely for the collective good and not ourselves.

My only (small) beef with Bioshock 2 is that it chooses a relatively narrow form of collectivism, the religious cult.  I guess like Ayn Rand, the cult is a collectivist format that belongs on the fringes.  Maybe that is the point, it’s the deliberate choice of ideologies that belong at the fringes that defines parts 1 & 2 of bioshock.

Faith in a divine being that will save us all is such a rational position and all.

The problem I have in pitting Sophia Lamb against Andrew Ryan is simply the fact that Ryan achieves something of Substance, Sophia Lamb really doesn’t get close.  She is, like many cult leaders a total nutter.

Ryan is not exactly all there but his failing is his blind belief that what he built and his ideology will always win out.  Lamb on the other hand just wants to use the bones his failures to unleash a psychological experiment on the world.

God knows, that is what we need, more people fucking with our heads.

Ayn Rand isn’t everybodies cup of tea and I see it as somewhat ironic that before a movie was made about her book Atlas Shrugged there was the Bioshock series.

Objectivism as a philosophy has some good points, that we should deal with (objective) reality, that the world can be objectively defined and we should make living a happy life our primary goal.  Where it falls down is that it offers one way to get there – free market capitalism (without government).  Call me crazy but if that was a model destined to be a winner we would already have trialled it already.  The fact that such as system really hasn’t gotten off the ground anywhere (or at least not without massive exploitation) says maybe putting the capitalists in charge of their own destiny is probably not going to work.

The limit of any belief is the point at which idealism is overwhelmed by reality.  The fact that Andrew Ryan (like so many before him) doubles down on his ideology in the face of clear evidence that his ideology was failing is pretty much the ultimate in human responses.  When reality fails to meet your expectation, adjust reality, not your expectation.

Personally I think Bioshock give Objectivism a pretty good hearing highlighting both it’s potential (Rapture) and it’s serious flaws (letting the inmates run the asylum).

Bioshock proves that Games are a legitimate art form and can be an active part of science fictions engagement with the audience, to have a bigger conversation.  Is it perfect, no, but then what is.  Does it succeed in giving a vibrant window into a philosophy many will not have heard of?  Yes.

In truth I can’t really find great fault with Andrew Ryan other than he like so many others before him was blind to what was right in front of him until it was too late.  As a cypher for a particular ideology, a man whose sole reason for existence was to be the mouthpiece of Ayn Rand, he falls to his own hubris, rather than the specific failings of his ideology.

Would you kindly forgive his failings and give the game a go.