Edmond O'Brien and Donald Pleasence speak in 1984, from 1956

Two of the great literary dystopian novels rework the language itself to accomplish a keen disconnect with the contemporary reader’s known world. This high neologisticism (Itself a neologism. Neologed by me, just now.) has an effect that also serves to make the works timeless. It’s something that takes a deft touch and could easily be schlocked up if overdone. Many a sci-fi story has failed for misuse of this technique and become unpleasantly impenetrable or worse,  cutesy.

One that does well with it, of course,  is George Orwell in 1984. Here’s a link to The Newspeak Dictionary.

Most know of the 1984 film version famously released in the titular year of 1984. There is a lesser known, and now more rarely viewed, film version of 1984 released in the year 1956, with Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith.

Where the early version failed with a love story that ” makes the unforgivable mistake of providing an ending that cuts clean across Orwell’s savage purpose”, the 1984 version may have failed partly for the opposite reason, for bludgeoning the romance up-frontally, so to speak, with distracting nudity, as well as its overextended torture scene. In many ways  the 1984 1984 appeared to have been an intentional refutation of the 1956 1984. Where O’Brien may have been a little bit on the fleshy side, John Hurt as Smith may be a little too gaunt, even for a dystopia. Both are talents worthy of the role, however.

Anthony Burgess put his own lexicon right in the back pages of the acutely prescient A Clockwork Orange, seeing the devolution of the language as a parallel to the devolution of Western civilization. Here’s the Nadsat Dictionary. You can draw you own conclusions as to why Burgess predicted a heavily Russian influence on the language of his ultra-violent UK teens of the near future.

On the slightly lighter side, a literary entity in itself, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary illustrates that the maddening ironies and nearly intolerable absurdities of a dystopia may be just what we’ve been  moving through since his own time. An example:

SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere “survivals” — things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we have inherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of the dead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

American stern-wheeler floating aircraft carriers in Tim Olive's 1884: Yesterday's Future.

Here’s the very rough four-minute teaser:

Hat tip: Quiet Earth

Hm. What to watch while in a dystopia phase, on Vincent Price Day.  How about The Last Man on Earth. Yeah. That’ll do.  Here’s a review.

Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price in TALES OF TERROR

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Sounds like a story in there somewhere.

And we’ve recently been brushing up on our dystopia recently as well (again, for reasons  etc etc ….stay tuned)

The other night we screened Children of Men, which was better than not,  and we’ll give it a mini- review next. Film reviews are much less time-consuming than game reviews, so hopefully it will mean more posts . Two hours letting the subject  wash over  you and then write. Game reviews, well the way we like to do them anyway, can take over your life for weeks. Soon as we get our A-game technology back in gear we’ll do more.

But for now, back to science fiction.

The Oscar nominations were announced today and somehow or other District 9 is among the Best Picture nominees. Now I enjoyed the movie but let me go out on a limb and predict that it will not win the Best Picture Oscar. You might say, well, this is the first years of the expanded 10-nominee, watered- down category…but wait. It’s one of two science fiction flicks in the running. So, pro-rating back to the smaller list and, well…Avatar would still be there.

But what about Dune? Does the Earthling guy become a messiah type? A god? Or just a leader of the opposition. If a god then was there a legend that an avatar would come and save the Na’avi? Dune splices that with Dune’s Bene Gesserit millenia-in-the-making genetic manipulation plans. A bit more meat there.

It may bear some similarities to the Dune movie and the miniseries, in that they were fairly simplied tick-tock interpretations, but those books were probably not destined to be good movies. I had excessively high, it turns out, hopes for the David Lynch attempt but was deeply disappointed. Besides phoning it in, with a production scale far beyond his ken, Lynch was lashed to a couple-three fatal casting choices: his own (Kyle McLachan?!) and the studio’s (Sting!?)

Scarce resource? Spice vs….whatever it is the evil humans want in Avatar? Yes, but House Atreides was given Dune to manage the spice in a diplomatic deal that turned out to be a trap. The Fremen indigenes may not have been happy about it but armed resistance didn’t start until the Harkonnens took over. So right there you have a more sophisticated set-up than just evil Americans swooping in to grab Na’avi land.

Also, from what I’ve heard, Cameron’s planet is elaborately imagined but maybe a bit OVERimagined. Whereas the environment of Dune was simpler and more integrated with the characters and the political motivations of the story. Why were the worms feared, yet worshiped? I’m sure you’re aware of the actual source of the spice. There again, a point probably intentionally not clearly laid out in the books, untouched in the movies, and pretty much out of Avatar’s league.

And oh yes, another point in common: Na’avi skin, blue. The Fremen whites-of-their-eyes? Blue.

Hadn’t thought of that Dune comparison though. Interesting, and worth considering.

You also left the theater that day with no desire to see it again, and yet you have seen “Empire Strikes Back” nearly annually since your first screening. The gentleman in these clips explains why that might be, and in the process of deconstructing dismantling the Episode I, also conveys a good basic lesson in storytelling/scriptwriting.

Personally my own Star Wars orbit began to decay with Return of the Jedi. Besides the accursed Ewoks, I came away with the distinct impression that Lucas didn’t actually re-screen or review his own previous films for any “the-story-up-to-now” before scribbling the script for the next one. At the End of Empires Yoda states: “There is another.” Leia, I’d guessed. Made sense. But I never found out.

HARD SF. Written SF that adheres, or tries to adhere, to plausible science and technology. Therefore it generally implies a fairly modest TECHLEVEL; the most anal Hard SF may even preclude FTL. For obvious reasons, plausible is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. It is also a moving target. In fact, you can usually date Hard SF particularly well by its technology, which will lean heavily on whatever technical or scientific speculation was fashionable about five years before a book’s publication date. If this did not pan out (and mostly it hasn’t), the resulting Hard SF will sound very dated within a decade or so.

I would adopt this whole but for some quibbles: one, about the five-years-ahead tech level requirement, and two, especially, about the anality of precluding FTL (faster-than-light travel.) Some futurism can lean toward the hard, and assumption of non-proven concepts like FTL might be acceptable, just as the assumption of meeting non-terran-originating life forms (aliens!) may be as well, as long as they are treated in an internally consistent manner, and are subject to some “hard” limitations and constraints.

For instance, (and to put it into terms with which a non-sci-fi fan who has gotten this far may be familiar) why is the Transporter of the original Star Trek series generally fan-respected, while the Holodeck of the Next Generation the object of derision in some quarters? Well, first off the Transporter has a built-in limitation. It’s in the Transporter Room. Just a room, not a whole deck. Along with other mentioned limitations (atmospheric, electromagnetic) there are multiple episodes where the Transporter has trouble, and indeed breaks down, Although there was a Next Generation episode where the captain was trapped in the Holodeck, in general the tech served much more often as a go-anywhere, we’re-out-of-plots-crutch. This type of cop-out in the original series required that the Enterprise, the whole damned star-cruiser, find itself orbiting a planet where the population was in an Earth-like phase in its history: Chicago gangsters, Nazis, Planet of the Apes- ripped-off post-apocalyptic US Constitution-worshipping barbarians, etc.

Holodeck is internally implausible on its face. Was it all an elaborate hologram generated by computer? If so how could you touch things? How could things touch you? Was it generating matter on the fly? Where would this matter go when the fake images instantly vanished? It’s more than just Trek-geek nitpicking. At times you find yourself thinking these questions while watching (Well, I do anyway. Maybe that’s because I’m not a true Trekkie. I’m not. I swear.)

So in comparing these two fantastic technologies, the original series is harder than its sequel. “Proof” of relative hardness might also lie in the multiple recent breakthroughs that bring transporter tech closer to reality than holograms that can touch you.

Hardness is a scale in sci-fi, with a big H for hard on one end and a big F on the other, marking the border with the fantasy genre of magic and wizards. Every work has a place on this scale. Vampires and zombies are off-scale, beyond the F. At that far end there are paralleling and branching-off scales for most of what fits in the horror genre but that’s a whole other discussion. Frankenstein is sci-fi, and pretty hard at that, considering the time it was written. Dracula is fantasy. Alien is both sci-fi and horror; it’s a sci-fi work well down on the hard end of the scale near the Big H. The journeys take a loooong time, requiring suspended animation. The alien biology is elaborately outlined. The androids have “blood,” and “veins” to carry it. So even though the film is jump-out scary monster-in-the-house story, it’s superimposed on a hard sci-fi world.

Many works labeled sci-fi these days are on that Big F side. Thank George Lucas for that, since he misdefined his magnus opus for the hordes of non-sci-fi fans—and publishers and producers. Space ships, whether they make noise in a vacuum or not, does not a sci-fi story make, whether you’ve accumulated more money than God or not. Stars Wars is fantasy. The Jedi ability to render blasters useless with their fancy flashlight sabers alone puts the saga solidly over the border. Lucas’ attempt to harden it all in the fourth movie (I’ll never think of it as “Episode One”) with this whole ” high midi-clorian count” business in young the Darth’s bloodstream did not pan out, and he either abandoned it or forgot about it in the subsequent two highly forgettable movies. This is more evidence that George may not have watched his old movies from one project to the next. Another instance of this is the strong hint of Leia’s force abilities at the end of The Empire Strike Back. What the heck happened, George? I think he forgot. Or he decided to bag it and hoped no one would notice. An interesting hard sci-fi story might take place in the Empire’s R&D department: about a technician who’s given an assignment: figure out how to make a better Jedi-killing blaster. (But this treads into the scary “fan fiction” realm, a psychosis-induced danger zone in which you will never find this writer. Hopefully. And yea, I fear already having ventured too far into the Star Wars morass, but then, in for a penny in for a credit…)

Lucas was also much over-credited by dazzled non-sci-fi critics for adding all those easy details, like the trash compactor and how the fleet treated its trash… well, now that you mention it, a lot of it had to do with trash. Might be a topic for Lucas’s analyst. Somewhere a masters candidate fan-boy has probably written a thesis on it. (But we all have about 8 trillion things that take priority over tracking that down, don’t we?) This addition of the mundane aspect of his long-ago-far away land did much to create an illusion of hard in this really really expensive swords-and-sorcery serial, but we’re not fooled.

Simply put, hard sci-fi may include technology that could be more than five years away, but it must behave like technology as we know it. Making the one FTL concession is enough to get you out there. what happens once you’re out there is the question. The drawback to this is that if your scientists have made FTL safe, what the hell all else have they improved? FTL is the entry drug. Once you taste it you’re drawn tractor-beam-like ever more toward the non-hard, and the Big F.

For all of the knocking about of definitions, though, wherever you place your story in these genres and on the scale within them, your story will still have to be about people, or else, phhht, you can shoot all your technology out the airlock.

Why does it matter? Because hard is much more interesting, and fantasy magic is easy, not only for the writer, but for the reader as well.

What say you?