Dreamers: Disenchanted with dystopia...

Last week, I discovered that Brad Bird and Damon Lindelhof made a movie just for me. It was an old-fashioned sort of movie, with an old-fashioned message of hope. Yes, it was a little preachy, but it's a sermon worth hearing and I loved it unabashedly from its goofy vacuum cleaner jet pack to its steampunk rocket to another dimension.

It wasn't just optimistic, it was anti-cynical. As we've come to expect from Brad Bird, it was practically utopian, but in a practical way.

I must be honest with you: as a general rule, dystopia bores the snot out of me.

It's not that dystopian stories should not be told, but by dwelling solely on the inevitability of decline, we've shot ourselves in the collective foot as a literary movement and as a society.

There are dystopian stories that need to be told and certainly valid uses of the milieu. I haven't had a chance to see Fury Road yet, but the cultural conversation it spawned is evidence that dystopian futures still have the power to make us think about the dystopian now. And science fiction does and should have a role to play in warning us of the future consequences of current trends. All the same, I feel deeply and personally that we took a wrong turn somewhere.

I really want to blame the "Same but different" approach that publishing and Hollywood takes whenever something is successful. Katniss's adventures in the Land Beyond Running Man means that we're going to spend awhile feeding fictional kids into a futuristic meat grinder whether we like it or not. Just as the success of the first Avengers has doomed us to a hundred 'shared world' movie franchises and team-ups, we're also staying far too long at the dystopian dinner party, wringing the last marketing dollar out of the genre until there's nothing left of it but a husk of post-apocalyptic cliches.

Lest you think I watched Tomorrowland and had an epiphany, I said almost those exact words in November 2011 shortly after finishing Howard Carter. Howard is aggressively anti-dystopian without ever venturing into utopian. Its story rests on the refutation that cycles are unbreakable. Its stance is pointedly and fearlessly anti-fatalist.

I tried very hard to walk the line between the two without betraying my central idea that the thing I miss most in modern science fiction is the sense of hope. Hope that children can make better choices than their parents. Hope that humanity can improve and change. Hope that the ingenuity of humanity can eventually triumph over the inhumanity of humanity.

Zombies are so over-done there's nothing left on the bone. The Dystopia became just another setting and more often than not these days, it seems to be another setting: Do I set this novel in post-apocalyptic wasteland or Belgium? Attacking the underlying set of assumptions that make these apocalypses feel inevitable is the bravest thing Bird and Lindelhof have done, and should garner them a much larger audience than the latest disaster flick, no matter how charming Dwayne Johnson might be.

I used to like dystopian stories for the same reason I used to be more enthusiastic about zombie movies: they meant something. These two semi-connected constructs were our muse for decades, an airing of inchoate fears about the state of the world and stark, if at times hyperbolic, warnings about our inevitable fate should we continue on our current path. Regional and economic inequities are given a harsh and satirical spotlight among the adventure elements of The Hunger Games. I haven't seen the movie yet, but the evocation of a feminine warrior element at the center of Mad Max: Fury Road has given rise to a valuable and ongoing societal debate around the gender assumptions that it leaves shattered in its wake.

But will its message of equality give rise to more? Or will its success give rise to a storytelling wasteland of tropes and cliches written on the back of a napkin by movie execs who cannot see past the dollar signs to the message that filled those bags with cash?

I fear the latter.

If you're with me and you too miss the idea that we should and can dream, and that positing futures should be at least as much about hoping for better tomorrows as it is foretelling doom, go see Tomorrowland.

The Future in Spite of Ourselves :: How we're accidentally creating the World of Tomorrow

While I was never going to vote for him, there is an aspect to Newt Gingrich's faded political fortunes that has troubled me for awhile now. I'm not talking about any of the real 'hot button' political issues of our time, but the Big Dream that seemed tailor-made to create laugh-track fodder for late night comedians. Most pundits agree that vowing to put a colony on the moon was a ridiculous hail Mary from a dying campaign.

Maybe so, but should it have been?

I'm currently running a bit of a fever, so it's possible I will wake up tomorrow and wonder what I was doing, bringing this up, but we're going to go with it for now.

Why?

Because this goes back to my central thesis that Science and Science Fiction should be fun again. That even though I enjoy a good post-apocalyptic yarn, I think we would benefit from more dreams and fewer nightmares. And anytime the political theater in this country shifts for a moment from doomsaying to dreaming, I think we should pause and wonder why it doesn't happen more often.

This is why I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World.

There's also the fact that anytime I hear or type the phrase "Most pundits agree" my hackles rise and I find myself taking a harder look at whatever it was they allegedly agree upon.

Why do I care about Newt's moon colony? Possibly because America's premier astrophysicist made the case that Gingrich wasn't as far off-base as you might think: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's a good idea.

I don't bring up the politician to make fun of him, nor the eminent astrophysicist because, well, if Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's good, we all should. Not at all. Even though -- as Tyson notes -- "the naysayers aren't the engineers." NASA said it was feasible as early as the 1970's. I only bring up Gingrich and Mr Tyson because I agree with the latter when he says it's high time America started dreaming big again. And I think it's worth considering why and when we started punishing our leaders (or those who want to be our leaders) for setting lofty goals for us to strive toward.

Tyson's support for the Gingrich's idea isn't surprising. He had written a book about this, in fact, that makes that case for the starry-eyed dreamer, looking back at the space age and pondering what happened to our dreams of jetpacks and flying cars, zipping around a domed city on the Sea of Serenity?

(Spoiler: We won the cold war and lost a rival to vie against.)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Not to quibble with Dr Tyson, but that claim has many problems. While the highest areas of government and industry certainly stopped being a haven of starry-eyed dreamers, and turned their eyes toward terrestrial concerns instead of heading out to explore the stars, that's not to say that the people stopped dreaming.  I would posit that we just stopped expecting our government to do it for us.

You've heard of Maker Fair, right?

Did we really stop dreaming? Did we really stop taking action to make those dreams real? Have we turned inward in an endless and pointless spiral of internet navel-gazing to the point where we forgot that space can be amazing and engineering can perform marvels outside of the gardens of cyberspace? Or did the future envisioned simply turn out to be too big, too impractical and/or impossible for us to achieve it all at once?

Perhaps to achieve such a large scale dream, it was necessary at some point that we break it up into manageable bits and allow those whose dearest dream was to put the Library of Congress in our pockets or fly a jetpack or make a flying car, or mine the asteroid belt to go it on their own.



Because all of those ultra-futuristic things are coming to pass. The Maker Movement, that mad assortment of civilians who took to their garages and sheds to create something that they'd dreamt of has  -- in a way -- democratized the development process.


Without much in the way of direct government assistance and with the help of new ideas like Kickstarter, we've taken what started out as a government initiative like the internet or space travel and moved it into the civilian realm.  We've actually achieved commercially-viable jetpacks, and asteroid mining is on the horizon entirely financed by private money.

Air cars are still quite a ways away, but considering I can't feel entirely comfortable with the way people drive on Interstate 5, what makes anyone think it's a good idea to put everyone a thousand feet in the air?

It's a terrible idea... until we figure out a way to take human error and inattention out of the equation, that is.
(Via NPR: Flying cars (and why we still don't have them).

Not to count NASA completely out of the game. They've recently revealed medical advances that beggar the imagination and leave science fiction racing to catch up.

The NASA Biocapsule—made of carbon nanotubes—will be able to "diagnose" and instantly treat an astronaut without him or her even knowing there's something amiss. It would be like having your own personal Dr. McCoy—implanted under your skin. It represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of medicine, and yes, it'll work on Earth, too.  ~ Via Gizmodo

It's to a point that presidential pandering about moon colonies sound positively sane by comparison. The future we keep waiting for has already happened. The future... or rather The World of Tomorrow is just soooo yesterday.