Potential

At this point in Science-Fiction Week it occurs to me that I’m doing a lot of bitching. On the one hand this may not seem remarkable because providing a venue for rantings, expressions of entitlement, snark and general douchebaggery seems to be the primary purpose of the interwebs in general and blogs in particular. But as I take a deep breath after reiterating how much I disliked the 2003 Hulk movie and ragging on the Avatar trailer and dismissing Tales of the Dying Earth as a poorly-written footnote to a different interest of mine entirely, I’m capable of the modicum of self-awareness necessary to realize that the whole reason I have so much to say about sci-fi, due to so much exposure to it in general, is because I am ostensibly a fan of the genre. But I hate the thought of embodying fandom as “someone who can pick apart and denigrate things with excessive specificity.” Begging the question: when’s the last time I consumed any sci-fi pop culture which I actually liked?

I am alarmed at how difficult this is proving to answer.

It’s not surprising to run into bad sci-fi after bad sci-fi because the genre is so fraught with pitfalls, all of which are really just the dark sides of its strengths. It’s something people willingly come to with a higher threshold for the suspension of disbelief, but that is often used as an excuse to incorporate magical plot developments and resolutions that don’t make any sense by draping them with non-explanations like “aliens” or “future technology”. It can make the familiar unfamiliar and let the audience take a fresh look at something (like yet another high school drama but in a school staffed by ROBOTS!) but often times it gets caught up in the flashy new idea and loses the connection to real life that would have made it meaningful. In a similar vein, it’s a near-perfect setting for allegory, but ham-fisted moralizing sometimes gets the better of it.

And there’s some kind of primal allure the genre has for me, something to do with the inherent promise and potential of starting with our real world and pushing at the edges of it a bit, reshaping it in a plausible way, with unlimited possibilities, which means I return to it again and again no matter how many times I get burned. Somehow that deep belief in what sci-fi can be keeps me coming back despite every new piece of evidence that it rarely reaches its own capacity for greatness.

I guess it’s symptomatic of my general decline in pop culture consumption in general that I’m hard-pressed to rattle off sci-fi I’ve loved lately. I liked the Watchmen movie (even though I thought it had some pretty serious flaws), so much so that I’m eagerly looking forward to picking up the ultimate edition on DVD and sharing the viewing experience with my wife, who missed out on the late-night boys’ trip to see it in the theater. I am enjoying the Blackest Night storyline in the Green Lantern comics, although I’m still reserving judgment until it finishes up. I was grooving on Firefly for a while there but I don’t think I’ve popped one of those DVDs in since early spring (before baseball season, of course). The last sci-fi that wasn’t based on a known commodity I enjoy (i.e. comics or Joss Whedon) that I was thrilled to discover was the Hyperion Cantos novels by Dan Simmons. And I read the fourth and final installment of that series a year ago.

It’s hard to shake off associations of identity, though. Even if I can’t point to a single great new sci-fi find of 2009, even if I spend more time apologizing for Star Wars than enjoying it, I still consider myself someone who’s always on the lookout for the next big futuristic jetpack thing and optimistic about 2010. (And I still have Serenity, Torchwood: Children of Earth and the Star Trek reboot to get around to as soon as I have time …)


(Seriously, you guys, if at some point in the rebooted franchise they do a feature-length Mirror, Mirror I would pay $100 to be at the midnight showing.)

Just to wind up this post with some unbridled enthusiasm: a bit of sci-fi for which I have undiluted nostalgic goodwill (probably because I have yet to revisit it as a harsh and jaded adult) is a Japanese cartoon called Star Blazers (in America, at least; the Japanese title translates roughly to Space Battleship Yamato) and a disproportionately huge amount of that warm regard comes from the cartoon themesong. It’s a fantastic composition that lays out the backstory (warship confronts enemy aliens to save the Earth) of the cartoon against a stirring, stridently martial composition, so it sounds like a song soldiers would sing while marching off to war … in the future!!! If there is the slightest appeal in boys’ adventures somewhere in your soul, to hear this song is to love it. So I was reading another blog yesterday evening while my son little Wildstar played nearby and I was made aware of the existence of a speed-metal cover of the Space Battleship Yamato theme song (by a band called Animetal) and I had to track down the MP3 and unmute the computer speakers so I could blast it. It was, I am happy to report, a clear-cut case of awesome + awesome = even more awesome. I am even more happy to report that little Wildstar concurred. He is just starting to make the tentative connections between music, rhythm, and dancing, which means when he hears something musical he will rock his tiny torso back and forth to the beat, or sometimes clap his hands. When the air was filled with shredding guitar underlining Japanese lyrics about war with aliens, he did both. He stopped what he was doing, clapped along and rocked out. I hesitate to project to much on my progeny, but I’m sure I recognized the spark in his eyes.