I suppose in these days of the socio-facebo-tumblo-tweet-sphere, keeping a blog is some lost archaic art, like curating and maintaining linotype machines, but all the better, then, for fitting in with the theme of today's ruminations.
(My old blogs, until livejournal deletes them, can still be found here)
I'm at a Star Trek convention, the first I've attended in...geez...well, I think since 1996. It can't help but feel to me like the twilight of the Phenomenon that once provided both backdrop and horizon for so much of my adolescence and early college years. In that very (post?)modern way in which the halflife of a given anything is now measured in months if not weeks, and the comparatively recent gets relegated as ancient, it's now hard to recall a time when any science fiction could possibly present a believable, much less wildly popular, vision of the future as one where humanity's better instincts rule them and the thirst for adventure and discovery steers the characters.
The sum of our fears has weighed too heavily on pop-culture since: ecological devastation, social ad political division, fear of terrorism and war and our own government...contemporary scifi now only presents us with worlds where these fears are not only present, but greatly magnified. No one, myself included, would find a future that looked any different to be believable.
It's so ironic - Star Trek, with its episodic, "everything returns to homeostasis after each show" format, where almost no one who didn't wear a red shirt ever died, and its platitude-spouting, square jawed heroes, now seems so "simple" and "naive" compared to the enormously tangled plot-threads and tortured, complex antiheroes of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica or the sheer bizarrity of Farscape. Deep Space Nine's Dominion War arc or Enterprise's Xindii saga, and of course JJ Abrams' reboots, were hailed as Trek "coming of age" and finally being unafraid to make its heroes do shady things, to explore the dark side of the shiny Trekverse....
...but in fact, you could make the argument that traditional Star Trek and TNG were in fact MORE transgressive, MORE deviant, in that they dared to present a vision of the future where humanity rose above the seemingly intractable crises that we were facing back when those shows were on the air (the Cold War, Segregation, denial of gay rights, dictatorships, etc). While admittedly never telling us precisely HOW, it just said, "we fixed that, and now we act as if it was inevitable this stuff got fixed," and, maybe, just maybe, that served an important role in INSPIRING people to, well, actually make strides in those issues.
Today? We look to scifi and see an argument that the agonies of our times are intractable, and we praise it as "realistic," and look for heroism in the struggles of characters to eke out some small victories despite that.
I don't know.
On the plus side, wow, the attendees are so much better looking nowadays than in times of old. :)
- DTW
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