How can I describe it?

My family didn't have much money when I was a kid, and as a result we didn't do a lot of the things that most families did. We never went anywhere on vacation (in fact, I don't recall my father ever taking a week off), I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothing from my three older brothers, and so forth. We lived about 23 miles from the nearest real town, and that, combined with our lack of spare cash, meant that going to the movies certainly wasn't on the list of family activities. 

However, time went on, and as I got older, went into high school and got a part time job, the combination of a little extra money and the guaranteed ride into town on the school bus meant that a slightly larger world opened up to me. However, not having had access to a lot of the finer things in life as a child left me a little cautious, if not nervous, about taking advantage of some of the new options available to me. 

When I was 15, I decided that I would take the proverbial bull by the horns and go to a movie, the very first movie that I would ever see on a big screen. We did have a battered old TV at home, and our makeshift antenna allowed us to get two TV stations, so I had seen movies, albeit marred by poor reception and static, but never at the theatre. As luck would have it, that summer there was a lot of buzz about this new science fiction film that was being released - unhampered by worries of spoilers I had already purchased the novelization and was eager to see the real thing. 

Because it was the summer, the option of using the school bus to cover that 23 mile gap wasn't available, but even at the age of fifteen I was a fairly accomplished hitchhiker. (I figured out once that I hitchhiked something over 20,000 miles altogether before I gave it up, including a trip from Ontario to British Columbia.) So I hitched into town, had a banquet burger at Rombo's, and made my way to the theatre. Paid my money (I have no memory of what the movie cost) but didn't get popcorn, you have to go into these things one step at a time. Found a seat, and waited. 

The lights went down... ...and another new world opened up, as a desperate little spacecraft fled across the screen in a hail of laser bolts, followed by a gigantic pursuer - what seemed like miles of its underside ponderously filling the view. 

It is impossible to describe what it was like to see Star Wars that very first time. I have no idea what other people thought of it, people who had the experience cushioned by years of moviegoing - for me, it was as if the entire movie had been made expressly for my 15-year old science-fiction fan wishes, like some benevolent genie had chosen that moment to fulfill a need that I didn't even know existed. It was an epiphany of teenage experience, and I left that theatre feeling like a different person. 

In the thirty years since, a lot has changed: my view of the world is a little less limited, and to a certain extent I've become jaded by repeated exposure to the media's visions of the future. My honest opinion is that as George Lucas has made his way through the series, each movie has been a little worse than the one before. 

I stand in awe of the breadth of the vision behind the entire story, but it's not a perfect vision - much has been written about the flaws in the various Star Wars movies that I won't bother repeating here.  Star Wars is now an entire industry of action figures, toys, movies, games, TV shows, comics, novels and web sites, far removed from the beginnings of the phenomenon. 

And all that means nothing to that memory from thirty years ago. Nothing will ever change the magic of that first viewing in the dark of the Parkview Cinema, that first view of a galaxy far, far away. Thank you, Mr. Lucas - nothing else has ever been better.

- Sid

Since when?

I was just reading Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather and near the end there's a little expository section when a woman running a net-based correlation service/Delphic oracle asks the stormchasers for their opinions:

"My question is: When do you think the human race conclusively lost control over its own destiny?"

Answers range from Columbus to the French Revolution, and from 1914 to 1968. MY first thought was "Around the point where we started using sharp sticks to dig out grubs, probably." My second thought was, "Wait, when did we have control?" Looking at the great waves of change in our development as a species, the great events of history, NONE of them have been changes that we have decided upon as a species. It's always been my contention that when the aliens finally get here (my apologies to the flying saucer crowd, but I don't think that they've been here yet), they're going to look around and say, "What, could you people not agree on anything?"

It's a very science fiction concept to think in terms of humanity as a species, as a group which might actually have some kind of unified goal. Right now we show perilously little sign of anything close to that, and I have to wonder if we will manage to stumble through all of the problems that we've created for ourselves until we get to a point where we're all working together. (Apparently one of the attractions of Star Trek in its various incarnations is that it suggests a future in which we act as a species, ignoring the minor divisions of race, creed and nation.)

And even then, who knows? One envisions the dinosaurs complacently affixing their claw prints to some kind of planetary accord for lizards, right before the comet comes screaming into the atmosphere...

- Sid

The Good, The Bad, and the Tardis

 

In short, the straw of a manufactured realism with which the sf writer makes his particular literary bricks must be entirely convincing to the reader in its own right, or the whole story will lose its power to convince.

- Gordon R. Dickson

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible.

- Frederik Pohl

A lot of the definitions of science fiction that I've read tend to deal with what makes for good science fiction - not a bad thing to have definitions that concentrate on quality, although I think that some of the motivation for that sort of definition comes from a kind of defensiveness about the genre, as per Sturgeon's Law. 

For a perfect example of the line that divides good SF from bad SF, let us turn to the popular media - okay, the BBC, but still - and take a look at the reborn Doctor Who. 

In the first season, with the excellent Christopher Eccleston capably filling the Doctor's shoes, there was a two-part episode: The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. Set in WWII London, the Doctor is presented with the odd phenomenon of an inhumanly powerful child, wandering the streets in a gas mask while looking for his mother. Even odder, the child's condition appears to be contagious - people are mysteriously changing into gas-mask faced entities requesting their mummy. 

This is explained as being the work of military medical nanobots from a crashed spaceship, nanobots that have no idea that the model they are using to rebuild the population of London is in fact a flawed one (people not normally having gas masks for faces, even in London) and the boy's powers being the result of being brought up to alien military spec. 

This would qualify as "good" SF by my standards: an apparently inexplicable situation which is logically explained within the context established by the plot. 

Sadly, David Tennant, Mr. Eccleston's equally gifted replacement, is not always as ably supported by plotline. In The Idiot's Lantern, once again people are falling prey to a mysterious ailment, this time in 1953 London: after watching television, their faces vanish. (I've often thought that might happen.) 

After seeing a sort of corral full of faceless victims, the Doctor finds a room full of TVs, each one containing a missing face. Apparently this is because an alien entity known as the Wire is stealing energy from people. 

What? Why in the world would that cause their faces to vanish? How do these faceless, mouthless, noseless remnants breathe? Shouldn't they all be dead in about four minutes? Sadly, this episode rings the bell for bad SF, where the science fiction element is really just for show, intended to create an interesting visual effect but with nothing in the plot to explain why and how such a thing would happen. 

And, as a postscript to the whole thing, it really does make me wonder if I'd feel safe living in London.

- Sid