Hard Science Fiction: Toward a Definition

Embarking on initial research for an essay entitled “The Hard Science Fiction Manifesto” of course I immediately found a web site that covered it well enough to save me the work. The quote below is from Rocket Punk’s fine sci-fi glossary. The original page has anchorlinks to other terms in the glossary (”TECHLEVEL”) which I won’t reproduce here:

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?

Disney Acquires Marvel

Disney Acquires Marvel

That’s big news. Two giant names. Four billion-with-a-B dollars! Powered by the recent strength of the Marvel movie efforts no-doubt. Much will be made of the mix of characters: Mickey and Spidey, Donald and Hulk, etc. But hopefully no corporate genius will get the idea of actually meshing the Marvel and Disney fictional universes. “Think of the synergy! The Fantastic Four teams up with Goofy!” Actually judging by the so-so Fantastic Four movies, they might benefit some by teaming up with Goofy.
 

Fantastic Four & Goofy

“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din”

Gunga Din

Bolstering Big Hollywood as the go-to online spot for real writing about movies, Schizoid Mann’s manly and surprisingly “otherly” (no spoilers please) piece on Gunga Din is one of the best posts in the site’s short life. Very little of value about movies has been written or presented in the mass print or electronic dinosaur media for decades, decades i tell you, and that includes the Oscar broadcasts. (and excepting Robert Osborne on Turner Classics.) So if you’re interested in film and all manner of topics surrounding the art and the business of it you’ll want to give it a look.

“Kali!”

We watched Gunga Din here at the Shears Compound just a few months ago as a matter of fact; exposed Lance, Leo and Escella to it, or tried to anyway, and Mrs. Shears enjoyed it as well. This continued a family tradition of appreciation for the work. I remember my Ma and old late Paw loved the film, and the reason I remember is I have a clear echo of them in the 1960s pointing out that Sam Jaffe, who play Gunga played Dr. Zorba, hospital boss of neurotic TV neurosurgeon Ben Casey.

So hopefully they’ll pass it on to their offspring, to watch in whatever format story-telling will take further down the century. Maybe they’ll absorb it through their skin. The Movie Patch. Whatever. Gunga Din will be there because it’s just good storytelling.

Some people can’t watch those old films. They mock the stagey speech and sneer at the image quality. They’ve been raised, and conditioned, on color and the (supposed) naturalistic speech patterns of modern film/TV. But one of the facets I like best about films from before the 70s is that they speak the lines clearly, so that you can understand what the hell they are saying. This must have lent discipline to the writing, since the writer knows in the back of his mind that the lines he transfers to the actors mouths will be heard. Write lines for modern hacktors like Sean Penn and you know he will not only change them, but you might not even be able to decipher what he changed them to, since mumbling is what passes for acting now. When screening modern film/TV, on average once per viewing, and often more often,  we have to pause and go back to see what was said. Sometimes we even have to turn on the subtitles, for an American film!

Maybe improved sound is the reason. The audio technology from the infancy and adolescence of the talkies may have required more enunciation; and so the actors didn’t have to worry about modulation or their vocal instrument, they just spoke the lines, had some personality and looked great, something everyone in this film managed — even poor, brave Gunga.

The Blue Max and Barry Lyndon. Same movie, different heart throbs?

George Peppard and Ursula Andress

Two of our rewatchable faves are the WW I aerial drama, The Blue Max, and the painting that moves, Barry Lyndon. We watched the former on Netflix Watch Instantly over the last two days and noticed striking similarities between the two.

It goes beyond the severe market-directed miscasting of American pretty boys in European settings. In Max, dreamy, at-the-time, box office name George Peppard is a German WWI pilot, speaking plain-spoken American English, surrounded by actual Europeans — one of which is, James Mason. In spike od Paerppars presence and clear acting abilities, it makes you wonder, what are all those foreigners doing there?

Similarly In Lyndon almost ten years later, Ryan O’Neal is almost laughable trying to pull off that accent as he makes his way across 18th century Europe, completely outclassed by everyone on screen, even the beautiful lightweight Marisa Berenson. But the movie wouldn’t have been made without him, and he is a bit on the photogenic side.

No. That’s not all. The macro-story thrusts in both are also exactly the same. Both feature upstart social climbing, not-so-loveable rogues who value the trappings of wealth and fame but never get the hang of what having class is all about. The Blue Max is tragedy because  does redeem, slightly, then gets his anyway. B. Lyndon never does redeem and gets rewarded with a fate worst than death, for him. Obscurity. 

Still. Some movies rise above poor casting. Besides all the well-done flying and dogfights, the final dramatic airfield sequence in The Blue Max makes the picture. Thank director John Guillermin and James Mason for that. And the final image stuck with me a long time after I first saw it in the theater. I was ten and believe you me the Ursula Andress topless-with-towel-yoke scene had some staying power as well.

Barry Lyndon is Kubrick making art, and it has some enjoyable and authentic battle scenes as well. Visually impeccable, the long sequence of Redmond Barry’s dissolution set to the Schubert Trio Op. 100 will never be matched. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

“Big hitter, the Lama.”

Posted the text of this previously as a Money Quote. Here’s the clip. From Caddyshack, Carl Spackler’s famous speech about caddying for the Dalai Lama.

Nay: Synedoche, New York

Hate to start this out on the negative note but we had high hopes for an interesting cinematic experience when we self-programmed this via Netflix. So whose fault is it? With Synedoche, New York we got an incomprehensible, self-reflexive scatological mess, and so ended up with a quite negative evening of self-programming ourselves, Mrs. Shears and I. Charles Kaufman is not a genius. Let’s go out on a limb. He’s the Hollywood Approved genius, an American who makes self-focused films. They are not self-indulgent, like Woody Allen or Oliver Stone because the self-reflexivity is what he does. He’s the apex of that trend, started by, who else, the Beatles, when they began to mention their own songs in their songs. He’s is the acknowledged “art” writer in Hollywood today so that there is at least one Amarican whose name the film snobs can point to and then have everyone nod at each other is mutual self-gratification. Yes. He’s a genius. 

But he’s also not a genius.

Because geniuses would have a large body of work besides what would be considered their masterwork. Kaufman may not ever come up to the level of Adaptation again, but he wouldn’t have to. He’d just have to make something that doesn’t concentrate so much on his or someone else’s digestive tracts. And since he also directed the mess, he’s running neck and neck with M. Knight (”Shamalama Ding Dong”) Shyamalan — who has never, and likely will never, match the competent storytelling he exhibited in The Sixth Sense – for the title of One-Hit Hollywood wonder.

See, too long already for  a short post.

By the way. Speaking of the film snobs, They’re the ones who have destroyed the presentation of foreign films on DVD. Was I the only one in who preferred the dubbing of voices to subtitles? I’d gladly give up the authenic voice and lips synching in exchange for the ability to watch the movie. Instead we are forced to read the screenplay on-screen. I haven’tseen one foreign film on DVD where dubbing in English is a choice. Most of these film will already have an Englihs tracks. Just slap it on the disc.

Tha Agony and the Ecstasy: One great man to another

Big Hollywood’s TCM Pick of the Day for Sunday is The Agony and the Ecstasy, just more Charlton Heston being great playing a great man. Heston had such a body of work that it’s difficult to cover it all.

But you do what you can. We have a Heston tribute page with clips of some of his later sci-fi work, movies that would have been far far less worthy without him. Would anyone remember The Omega Man for Anthony Zerbe’s scenery-chewing smorgasbord as the hippie-zombie leader alone? Would Zerbe, a craftsman in his own right, have taken on the project if Heston wasn’t on board?

Something happened in the film business soon after the mid-60’s, and we sense that it only had a little to do with cultural or political revolution, or color television. Why was it films like The Agony and the Ecstasy could no longer be made? Why was it that Hitchcock, after practically inventing a genre, and making classic upon classic, had to resort to Bruce Dern in Family Plot, which is a fun watch but no classic, and Frenzy, which is not nearly either? Was there no room in the market for a Hitchcock?

We’ll come up with the answer. Someday.

One last note about The Agony and the Ecstasy (Amazon link below.) The movie, as movies must be, is a well-executed abridgement of only the one section of the book involving the confrontations with the Pope and Michelanelo’a most famous non-sculpture. Irving Stone’s book is well worth the read for that and for other details, such as Michelangelo’s attachment to the land, his related approach to his favored medium, marble, and his spirituality.

A Cat in the Temple of Bast

I come to bury 2008, not to praise it…

Although, we must say, friends, web surfers and Infinity-ites, that the famous and famously ironic funeral speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar may not quite fit, we are reminded of it for the reason outlined below.

Having recently acquired two kittens, Achilles and Odysseus – names that will probably continue to translate around here to “the black one” and “the gray one,” respectively - we got a cat movie from Netflix, a movie both Mrs. Shears and I remember seeing in our long-lost youths, The Three Lives of Thomasina. 

The image that stuck with me all these years was the near-death experience where the cat heroine dreams of falling into the afterlife in the Egyptian Temple of Bast…

Thomasina enters the Temple of Bast

Cooincidentally we called Mother Shears for New Years and asked if she remembered where we first saw the movie as a child. Of course she immediately remembered making the birthday trip to New York and seeing it at Radio City. I also have a vivid memory from that trip of the famous Camel smoke ring billboard out a restaurant window.  The trip would have been January 1965 and the billboard would be gone sometime the next year.

Anyway, this memorable scene in the film rang familiar…when the boy conducting the funeral paraphrases Shakespeare’s speech from Marc Antony. “We have come to bury Thomasina, and to praise her…”

Here’s the whole scene from youtube, including both the near-death dream and, Mrs. Shears’ favorite scene, the funeral and its beautiful setting (overlooking Loch Fyne in Inverary, Scotland):

Mrs. Shears has her own fashion-oriented post about Thomasina over at allchic.com.

The Three Lives of Thomasina, though promoted as a movie for and about little girls (human and feline) – is, if you stick with it longer than the 15 minutes, which son Leo apparently could not manage -  well worth a more mature look. Patrick McGoohan gives a strong performance as the single father, a reluctant veterinarian - he wanted to be a doctor – who is forced to make primal choices dealing with grief at his own loss and the seemingly willful loss he imposes on his headstrong daughter.

The film’s outer story of a little girl’s love for a cat rides thinly over a much more interesting theme that mixes multiple religion types and points them at the question of what constitutes helping, what is the moral basis for Earthly charity…and who exactly is being helped. The old-religion is represented by a Celtic “witch” – and note that the kids mark the grave with a cairn not a cross; there’s the formalized pagan Egyptian imagery in the near-death dream;  and the modern, establishment Christianity, personified by the stolid and wise town vicar, who stands at one point before his Earthly edifice with a “Church of Scotland’ sign rooted prominently behind him.

All of these theologies get equal and even-handed treatment up to a point. The witch has an empathy with the animals, the image of Thomasina rising to merge with the golden idol of Bast is hard to shake for the rest of the film after the dream sequence, and the vicar dispenses his brand of standardized wisdom and heartfelt kindness freely. But in a surprising reversal we get Lori the witch woven in with a plot turn that brings on the expected Disney ending. What we learn about what Lori actually believes is quite obviously intentionally emphasized by the makers. See it for yourself and you’ll know what we mean.

Last Train from Gun Hill: The Money Quote

An overlooked western Last Train from Gun Hill pits Marshall Matt Morgan, played by Kirk Douglas, against rancher and town-owner Craig Belden, played by Anthony Quinn. Written by James Poe, who also scripted Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Bedford Incident, you may see mention of a famous hanging speech. I couldn’t find it anywhere and so transcribed it from Netflix Watch Instantly.

As with nearly all westerns, sort through the horses and the shoot-outs and the unavoidable genre cheesiness you’ll find some tense drama and some fine writing. This one was somewhat ahead of its time in 1959, with a racial edge. Marshall Morgan’s Indian wife is raped and killed by two men on a lonely road. Their son witnesses and rides home on one of the horses, which has a distinctive saddle. Morgan knows who the saddle belongs to, his old friend Belden, who he hasn’t seen in years. He goes to Gun Hill and finds out one of the killers is Belden’s son. He’s wants to bring him in but the father will not allow it. Morgan manages to subdue Rick, the son, and is “holed up” with him handcuffed to a bed in the local hotel, which is surrounded by the elder Belden’s hired men. The younger Belden sneers at Morgan, tells him he’ll never get out alive and then claims he had no way to know it was his wife he’d killed, that she was just a “damn squaw.” An enraged Morgan chokes him near to death, then stops himself.

Belden mocks him again: “Don’t take no guts to kill a man when he’s cuffed.”

And Morgan replies:

“Takes guts not to. Be too easy on ya. You die too quick. I know an old man who’d like to kill you, Belden. The Indian way. Slow. That’s how I’m going to do it. Slow. The white man’s way. First you stand trial. That takes a fair amount of time and you’ll do a lot of sweatin’. Then they’ll sentence ya. I never seen a man who didn’t get sick to his stomach when he heard the kind of sentence you’ll draw. After that you’ll sit in a cell and wait. Maybe for months, thinking how that rope’ll feel around your neck. Then they’ll come around some cold morning, just before sun-up. They’ll tie your arms behind you. You’ll start blubbering, kicking, yelling for help. Won’t do you any good. And then drag y’out in the yard, heave y’up on that platform, fix that rope around your neck and leave y’out there all alone with a big black hood over your eyes. You know the last sound you hear? Kind of a thump when they kick the trapdoor catch and down you go. You’ll hit the end of that rope like a sack o’ potatoes, all dead weight. It’ll be white hot around your neck and your Adam’s Apple will turn to mush. You’ll fight for your breath, but you haven’t got any breath. Your brain will begin to boil. You’ll scream and holler. But nobody’ll hear you. You’ll hear it. But nobody else. Finally you’re just swingin there’. All alone and dead.”

Phantom Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still

We haven’t seen it and don’t intend to. Why? Because you could tell from the trailer you were going to be lectured at. Message delivered. Ho hum. Special effects will be more of the same and Keanu Reeves ditto. Double-triple ho hum. Sitting through the TV ads during football games was plenty enough.

Here’s a link to the Rotten Tomatoes page on it for more actual reviews.

While the original, thoughtful and thoughtfully paced, The Day the Earth Stood Still carried a warning about a real threat – the potential for nuclear self-destruction – that the between-the-lines sci-fi of its day was reticent  to utter, this update would obviously hammer us into our multp[lex seats with a loud Earth-revenge effects based on the purely speculative voodoo science that is incessantly amplified by the cultural frenzy over climate change (nee global warming.) 

So, basically the original retains more relevance than the update.  Fancy that.

It underscores the ongoing trend of atrocious updates to classic sci-fi movies, more a sign of Hollywood’s aversion to risk than it’s desire to make good or original stories into films. (Take it from a struggling writer.) They’ll make them but that doesn’t we mean we have to go see them.

And Reeves, you are no Rennie.