By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the THE INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, February 2009
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
When President Barack Obama recently pledged to "renew our Information Superhighway," it struck me that I hadn't heard that phrase in a long time. Indeed, this wording, which was supposed to evoke the futuristic, instead has acquired the exact opposite quality. It's retro, recalling 1990s-era thinking about computing and computers—and among other things, their depictions in pop culture. In particular, I think of the decade's outpouring of computer-themed films.
Of course, Hollywood had sporadically made computer-themed films before, like 1957's Desk Set or 1977's Demon Seed. Quite a few are clustered in the early 1980s, shortly after the introduction of the personal computer, like best screenplay Oscar nominee WarGames (1983), the early cyber-romance Electric Dreams (1984), and the John Hughes comedy Weird Science (1985). The related interest in household robotics in that decade (which proved to be just a flash in the pan) also turned up in the background in quite a few films and shows, like the TV series Silver Spoons (1982-1987) and Rocky IV (1985)—though these generally took a backseat to more dramatic mergers of robotics and AI, as in The Terminator (1984) and Short Circuit (1986).
Nonetheless, the theme would be far more prominent in the films of the 1990s, and this was no accident. It was the falling price of computing power, and the widened availability of Internet access, which turned the personal computer from an expensive toy, status symbol, or at best, occasionally useful luxury, into a consumer essential at that time (at least, for the industrialized world's "middle classes," though access also increased outside this group). And of course, there was the "tech boom" surrounding it, the idea that this was the one sector of the economy that really mattered, and that it was truly exploding. (1)
Put another way, this was a time when computers were both ubiquitous enough for unprecedented numbers of people to be in conscious, direct contact with them—and at the same time, new and novel enough for the fact to be topical. While only a comparative few of them were significant successes, and these outnumbered by mediocre and commercially disappointing films, even the flops make for interesting time capsules, and several of them would go on to be surprisingly influential, both via cult followings, and the inspiration they would provide other, more successful creations.
Hackers as Heroes
Just as computers became more commonplace in the popular consciousness (its cinematic component included), so did the sorts of people associated with them, and in particular, hackers. By the mid-1990s there had already been a handful of films featuring hacker heroes, like the aforementioned WarGames, but they became increasingly common as the 1990s progressed. The caper film Sneakers was slightly ahead of the curve in 1992, the deluge really hitting around the middle of the decade. (2) Sandra Bullock followed up her success in 1994's Speed with The Net the next summer, in which she played a software analyst who finds herself caught up in an elaborate computer infiltration scheme. The film was a middling performer at the box office, but spin-offs followed nonetheless, including a television series that lasted for one season (1998-1999), and more recently, a straight-to-video sequel, 2006's The Net 2.0.
That was more than could be said for Hackers, which centered on a number of young hackers who end up finding out about (and forced to combat) an oil company's cyber-security chief attempting to bilk his employers out of millions (in part, with a plot extorting a ransom in exchange for not staging multiple oil spills using a computer virus). Released the following autumn, it is remembered (by those outside its cult following) more for its cast than anything else, which included a very young Angelina Jolie in her first starring role in a major feature film (she'd already starred in the 1993 cyberpunk B-movie Cyborg 2), Jonny Lee Miller (who would be made famous by Trainspotting the next year), and the ever-obnoxious Matthew Lillard.
This turn naturally presented filmmakers with the challenge of somehow conveying the experience of hacking besides pointing the camera at a sweaty face staring into a screen, a pair of hands pounding away at a keyboard (which manages to both be uninteresting to look at, and explain almost nothing about what they're really doing). (3) Appropriate visual metaphors were hard to come by, however, as the considerable and much-argued-over efforts in Hackers demonstrated. And of course, for sheer spectacle and visceral excitement, computer battles come nowhere close to more traditional hand-to-hand combat, shootouts, car chases and explosions, so that computers were most interesting when creating big effects outside cyberspace. (4)
Not surprisingly, a more successful approach than centering a whole film on hackers and hacking was the inclusion of those elements in a broader plot. In its updating of the Bond series, 1995's Goldeneye, besides offering a host of unmistakably early post-Cold War tropes (Russian mobsters, loose Soviet nukes, leftover Cold War vendettas), prominently featured a pair of dueling computer programmers, Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) and Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco). (5) And in Independence Day the next summer Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson took out the alien mothership with a computer virus in a twist on the denouement of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Of course, this did not prove to be the last time a computer programmer had the fate of the world in their hands.
The Neon-Lit Alley Up Ahead: Cyberpunk on Screen
The future envisioned in cyberpunk was commonly viewed as a reaction to many of the economic and political developments of the 1980s: American industrial decline relative to Europe and Asia, the intensification of global economic integration, the "privatization" of economic life and the unshackling of corporate power that went with it, a greater polarization between the rich and poor. Putting it that way, of course, makes it seem rather dated, but sure enough, these far outlasted the decade. If anything, in the '90s it enjoyed greater force as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc (opening a large part of the world more completely to those same forces), and the economic stagnation of Japan (and the fad for neo-mercantilism that its rise had encouraged). "Globalization," no longer hindered by the division of the world into rival ideological blocs, or petty, predatory economic nationalisms, was now the watchword.
And of course, there was a certain inertia that carried a stereotyped '80s-style "bleak future" through the science fiction films of the early part of the decade, turning up even in some unlikely places, like 1992's Freejack (in which it proved a far less colorful backdrop than the future Robert Sheckley portrayed in the source novel, 1959's Immortality, Inc.) and 1993's adaptation of Nintendo's classic video game, Super Mario Bros. (the directors of which were, notably, the co-creators of the Max Headroom television series).
Still, it became less fashionable to depict urban decay and discuss the darker side of corporate power, and more so to anticipate cheerful consequences to neoliberalism-run-amok, as Nora Ephron did in You've Got Mail.(6) One result is that the 1990s saw no English-language cinematic expressions of that vision on a par with 1980s films like Blade Runner (1982) or Robocop (1987, sequels in 1990 and 1994). However, even as the long-anticipated Neuromancer film continued to languish in "development hell" (as it still does today), there were film versions of two of William Gibson's classic Sprawl stories, Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and New Rose Hotel (1998) (admittedly, not a computer-themed story, biotech being the source of the MacGuffin). (7)
Neither film was a notable commercial or critical success. However, Johnny Mnemonic is noteworthy for being based on a script by Gibson himself. Contrary to what one might guess, he considerably fleshed out the plot of his short story, producing a conventional chase film which we have little difficulty following, and in which we do, ultimately, get to know what is in Johnny's head, and why it matters. The movie, which suffered from, among others things, laughably bad acting from just about all the principals (Dina Meyer, perhaps, excepted), is also worth noting for giving us a visual depiction of Gibson's highly influential vision of the experience of cyberspace. (Some also view the casting of Keanu Reeves as the protagonist as a precursor to his later starring in The Matrix.)
New Rose Hotel stuck surprisingly close to the original story, which was a strength as well as a weakness. The original short story is dazzlingly crafted and quite poignant, but its particular tale of love and betrayal, depicted as a succession of remembered moments in the memory of the nameless narrator, hardly lends itself to cinematic adaptation. The result is stylish and atmospheric, but heavily dependent for its effect on the cast, which included Willem Defoe as the narrator (credited here as "X"), Christopher Walken as his buddy and partner in crime, Fox, and Asia Argento the clear stand-out as Sandii.
Realities, Real and Otherwise
The cyberpunk social vision aside, there was also the matter of the particular technologies on which those stories so often hinged, in particular the mind-machine interfaces that redefined the nature of experience—which, by this point, had far escaped cyberpunk's bounds. Indeed, by the early 1990s stories of people sucked into video games (in the manner of 1982's Tron), and computerized figures which emerge into the real world (as with Kelly LeBrock's Lisa in Weird Science), were already so cliché that I remember science fiction magazine submission guidelines including them in their lists of story topics they did not care to see in their slush piles. (8) Nonetheless, the hype surrounding virtual reality injected new life into the basic concept by making it appear that it would not be long before we could lose ourselves in virtual environments, or see virtual entities so "real" as to be indistinguishable from ourselves.
There was, of course, the Stephen King story "The Lawnmower Man," which hit the big screen in 1992 and spawned a big screen sequel in 1997. Like the Michael Crichton book on which it was based, the 1994 film Disclosure shoehorned the use of the technology into its bigger story about gender politics. So did 1995's Virtuosity which, twelve years before American Gangster, had Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe battling it out (except with the good guy and bad guy roles reversed). VR also figured prominently in Strange Days that October, and 1999 gave us David Cronenburg's Existenz, The Thirteenth Floor, and of course, The Matrix.
As the list indicates, most takes on the subject were epistemological (and other) horror stories, the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy a source of nightmare rather than dream (even in 2000's The Cell, in which a therapeutic use of the technology was explored). In Existenz, the allure of the virtual actually fostered an ideological reaction against it, and the film begins with an attempt by a fanatical anti-VR activist on the life of celebrated game designer Allegra Gellar. Most other films, however, were less ambiguous in their sympathies, their heroes clearly the ones battling the masters of illusion, most dramatically in The Matrix.
The Computer Apocalypse
With so much attention paid to networked computers, and so much anticipation regarding the speed with which the technologies involved would develop, it is hardly surprising that some were anxious; or that villains emerging from these technologies, like malignant artificial intelligences, would again become popular cinematic villains.
They were on the whole less popular during these years than catastrophes of a more natural sort (like the tornadoes, volcanoes and menacing celestial objects of so many big-budget releases), or science fiction tropes with a more "retro" quality (like the aliens of Independence Day, and 1998's Godzilla). Still, they turned up in films like Virtuosity and The Lawnmower Man 2, and of course, The Matrix, the last of which, as the comments in the previous sections indicate, could be seen as cap, summary and synthesis to this whole thrust in filmmaking, drawing together all these previous streams (as well as a great deal of other elements old and new, from the revival of interest in martial arts films to Cornel West, who had bit roles in the sequels) in by far the most successful cyber-film of the decade.
In the future posited by the film, the world has been conquered by artificial intelligences. In need of an energy source after the humans struck back by blotting out the sun (to cut them off from the solar energy on which they relied), they proceeded to enslave humanity as a substitute, sustaining it in a perpetual simulacrum of 1999 in order to harvest electrical current from human bodies (the titular "Matrix").(9) However, a group of humans escaped, and founded the underground fortress-city of Zion, from which they carry on their struggle against the Machines, liberating such humans as they can in the hope of one day freeing the whole species. And in the middle of it all is Keanu Reeves's "Neo," a prophesied newcomer who just may be "The One" to end the war in their favor.
The result was not just a much-quoted, oft-imitated and frequently parodied blockbuster, but a cultural moment that impacted everything from fashion and interior design to philosophy, evident in the vast academic literature to which it gave rise. (10) Its two sequels, while still commercial successes which had their fans, did not have quite the same impact as the original, but it is hard to see how they could have. The unrealistic expectations so often surrounding the later installments of a series, and the practical difficulty of delivering on the first film's promises in a cinematically satisfying way aside, by November 2003, when The Matrix Revolutions hit theaters, the '90s were clearly over.
And Afterward
At the other end of that stream of filmmaking, we have also found ourselves on the other side of a crucial transitional period in regard to information technology, just as we previously had with many of the technologies that came before it, from the airplane, to atomic energy, to the space launch rocket. As in all those other cases, ideas that once seemed radical have become simply a part of the background—while assumptions common among the True Believers were dashed. It has become a banality to say that today's crop of young adults (at least, above a certain minimum of affluence) grew up "online," taking cell phones, e-mail and Internet search engines for granted as ever-available utilities, the alternatives to which they are scarcely aware of. Yet, other, associated ideas have fallen by the wayside, like the prospect of the virtual quickly and conveniently substituting for the physical. (Consider, for instance, how little driving to work telecommuting has actually spared us, as the oil price spike of 2003-2008 painfully reminded us all. (11))
Naturally, film has reflected this. Hacking became a standard action movie trope, sometimes more central to the plot, as in 2001's Swordfish, or 2007's Live Free or Die Hard (a fun film, though to me at least, the idea seemed more dated than its makers must have intended), at other times less so. (12) And tellingly, the requisite skills increasingly became part of the repertoire of more well-rounded protagonists. In 2000's Charlie's Angels, the team hacks an air-launched missile in mid-flight, but we were never really meant to take it seriously, to instead see it as just one more preposterous testament to the titular trio's talents. By 2006's Casino Royale, though, the quiet mention of a rebooted James Bond doing his own hacking was simply a detail.
The same goes for other cinematic uses of the computer, where the novelty faded even faster. The publicity for You've Got Mail highlighted the movie's "introduction" of IT into romantic comedy (essentially, by remaking 1940's The Shop Around The Corner with AOL substituted for old-fashioned letter writing), but this did not stay "innovative" long enough for the list of distinctly computer-themed romances to get much longer. When American Pie hit theaters the following summer, the technological innovation of the sequence in which Jim's clumsy attempt to seduce Nadia ends up being web-cast to their whole school attracted little notice. In short, just as hackers became a standard part of action movies and thrillers, an online component became routine in movie romances and sexual liaisons.
Unlike personal computing and e-mail, virtual reality never became part of our everyday lives with the speed expected (in 1999 Ray Kurzweil predicted that "VR" would be standard stuff in our households by 2009), let alone the means by which we interact with cyberspace as suggested in the Sprawl stories of William Gibson. Accordingly, it retained something of its exoticism even after interest in it waned. (13) Interest in the cyberpunk conception of the future waned, too, with movies set in the near-future less prone to reflect that stream of thinking about how society will develop in the future. (14) Indeed, it is the earlier version of the machine apocalypse presented in The Terminator that continues as a franchise on the big screen, the next film in the series coming out this summer. As that fact demonstrates, computers will go on appearing in movies, prominent in them to varying degrees, but the combination of ubiquity, newness and expectation that existed in the 1990s is now behind us.
Footnotes
1. This of course proved to be nonsense, as many investors realized to their pain back in 2000, but it did affect popular attitudes profoundly.
2. "In Hollywood, where there's around one idea a year, movie concept '95 seems to be 'anything computerized,'" ran a Newsweek article covering a slew of films appearing that year which included Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, The Net, Strange Days and Hackers. "Hollywood's Big Idea: A Hard Disc's Night," Newsweek Jun. 19, 1995.
3. Through it all, however, the viewer got little sense of what hacking actually involved, and came to assume that it was a sort of black nerd magic that could support any plot convenience. Indeed, the viewer got little sense of what computer use in general was like. (Just compare the speed and dazzle of the Internet in The Net with what computer use actually was like at the time, or what it's like now for that matter.)
4. Or at least, in a version of cyberspace that looked much like that outside world. Part of the success of The Matrix, certainly, was its presentation of cyberspace in exactly that way, as a simulacra of 1999, except more exciting from an action movie perspective, because the laws of physics didn't apply there, and the principals could act as if they had superpowers.
5. Rather more low-key, 1994's Clear and Present Danger included a hacker among Jack Ryan's allies, Greg German's "Petey," and an online confrontation between Ryan and his antagonist, Robert Ritter.
6. Perhaps more noteworthy than the film's rather weak serving of romantic comedy was the film's paean to New Economy capitalism (and expression of "postmodern" New Economy conservatism), not only in its celebration of corporate superstores, Starbucks coffee and plain old consumerism-as-self-realization, but its presentation of business mogul Joe Fox as the Nice Guy Everyone Loves (Tom Hanks, just being Tom Hanks), while left-wing intellectual Frank Navasky is a pretentious jerk, played by the Nasty Guy Nobody Loves (Greg Kinnear, in the kind of role he seems to have specialized in ever since).
7. Both stories appeared in the Burning Chrome collection, which I reviewed for Tangent Online back in 2007.
8. The list of such films is lengthened considerably if one counts in stories revolving around the prospects of artificially implanting memories, as in 1983's Brainstorm or 1990's Total Recall (a theme which notably was part of Strange Days).
9. The idea of the human race confined to virtual reality simulations was not quite as novel as it seemed to many then. Olaf Stapledon posited such a scenario in his 1937 classic, Star Maker, over six decades earlier. However, there the technology was used on the "Other Earth" in an attempt by the planet's elites to control a working class that technology had made superfluous. This Marxist speculation, of course, was recast in the films as a question of the balance between human and machine, rather than an extension of social conflicts among humans themselves, though some have read the films human vs. machine conflict as a metaphor for the latter.
10. In particular, the Matrix was widely embraced as a metaphor by all who believe the reality we are conventionally presented with is not representative of how things really are, especially if the veil mistaken for the actuality is a system of control, as with many Marxists.
11. The ubiquity of work-at-home scams (they seem to outnumber real opportunities by a factor of 48 to 1) testifies powerfully not only to the desire of people to be able to work at home, but how rare it is for those who want them to actually find such jobs.
12. Live Free or Die Hard, notably, was based to John Carlin's "A Farewell to Arms," an article he published in the May 1997 issue of Wired magazine.
13. Instead of convincing sensory immersion, what we got was fuller detailing and more intricate interactivity in the worlds we see on our computer screens, as in the Sims series of games, and World of Warcraft (which have yet to be the subject of their own English-language film, despite a few memorable sitcom appearances, included a celebrated South Park episode, "Make Love, Not Warcraft"). Whether that will link up with the promise of photo-realistic video games in the next couple of generations of console remains to be seen.
14. There have been exceptions, of course, including 2002's Minority Report (based on the Philip K. Dick short story by that name), 2003's Paycheck (again, based on the Dick story), 2004's I, Robot (which actually hybridized both Eado Binder and Isaac Asimov), 2006's Children of Men, and 2008's Babylon A.D. (an adaptation of Maurice G. Dantec's novel Babylon Babies). (Stretching the meaning of "near-future," one might also include 2001's A.I..) Nonetheless, that most of these films were based on older science fiction (even when incorporating some more recent concerns and anticipations, as with rising sea levels in A.I.) is noteworthy.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
On Heckler
The documentary Heckler (2007), co-produced by and starring Jamie Kennedy, is about the "heckling" of artists (in the main comedians, but creators of all sorts).
It consist mainly of interviews with celebrities running the gamut from a "Who's Who" of stand-up comedy, to filmmakers both celebrated and reviled, to journalist Christopher Hitchens.
The subject appears a valid one.
There is no denying that critics are often ignorant, narrow-minded, unfair, petty and just plain vicious in their assessments. (Indeed, it is both striking, and sad, how inspired people can get when tearing someone else apart, and especially in the case of "Internet" critics, how much time and effort they're willing to put into their attacks.)
There is no denying that certain prejudices tend to prevail among critics, and that playing the critic too much for too long can produce an undue harshness, and even an obsession with finding fault, in their reviewing.
There are also some grounds for suspicion on the part of working artists toward critics who are not coming from the same place (more commonplace, I suspect, in film than literature, where there are more practitioners, a large portion of which are active reviewers). No one should review a work in a medium or genre they do not like or understand, or without some sense of how artists actually work.
Nonetheless (and this is, admittedly, coming from a critic), to say that there is a lot of bad criticism out there, and that it can be problematic for performers and other creators, is not to say that no one has the right to express an uncomplimentary opinion (or that all such opinions are necessarily "heckling"), which is an absurdity. To suggest that any opinion about a movie, or a comedy routine, proffered by anyone not in the business is baseless and illegitimate is equally absurd.
And those on camera in the documentary seem to say exactly these things, frequently, perhaps unsurprisingly as most of it seems to consist of the interviewees venting about the raw deals they feel they got in the past in an exercise in catharsis and revenge rather than reasoned argument. The result is not only unbalanced, but backfires in making an astonishing number of the interviewees look like raving, hate-filled egomaniacs, at least as bad as the hecklers against which they are lashing out. (Kennedy appears especially clueless in his apparent inability to understand that someone out there might have a valid and honest dislike films he has made.)
Making matters worse, the line-up presented here is likely to make even a broad-minded viewer feel that some of them deserved at least some of what they got (even while they feel sympathetic to those of the interviewees they do admire)-all the more so after seeing them at their nastiest here. (Interestingly, some of those who appear in the film have publicly "heckled" each other, a point not mentioned in the course of the documentary, though the response to that would have been interesting.)
And of course, the fact remains that for all their troubles, the people doing the complaining here are the ones who've won the Dream Jobs. There are far, far worse places to be than theirs--something most of those depicted so unflatteringly in the documentary certainly realize, not that you'd guess it from this doc.
It consist mainly of interviews with celebrities running the gamut from a "Who's Who" of stand-up comedy, to filmmakers both celebrated and reviled, to journalist Christopher Hitchens.
The subject appears a valid one.
There is no denying that critics are often ignorant, narrow-minded, unfair, petty and just plain vicious in their assessments. (Indeed, it is both striking, and sad, how inspired people can get when tearing someone else apart, and especially in the case of "Internet" critics, how much time and effort they're willing to put into their attacks.)
There is no denying that certain prejudices tend to prevail among critics, and that playing the critic too much for too long can produce an undue harshness, and even an obsession with finding fault, in their reviewing.
There are also some grounds for suspicion on the part of working artists toward critics who are not coming from the same place (more commonplace, I suspect, in film than literature, where there are more practitioners, a large portion of which are active reviewers). No one should review a work in a medium or genre they do not like or understand, or without some sense of how artists actually work.
Nonetheless (and this is, admittedly, coming from a critic), to say that there is a lot of bad criticism out there, and that it can be problematic for performers and other creators, is not to say that no one has the right to express an uncomplimentary opinion (or that all such opinions are necessarily "heckling"), which is an absurdity. To suggest that any opinion about a movie, or a comedy routine, proffered by anyone not in the business is baseless and illegitimate is equally absurd.
And those on camera in the documentary seem to say exactly these things, frequently, perhaps unsurprisingly as most of it seems to consist of the interviewees venting about the raw deals they feel they got in the past in an exercise in catharsis and revenge rather than reasoned argument. The result is not only unbalanced, but backfires in making an astonishing number of the interviewees look like raving, hate-filled egomaniacs, at least as bad as the hecklers against which they are lashing out. (Kennedy appears especially clueless in his apparent inability to understand that someone out there might have a valid and honest dislike films he has made.)
Making matters worse, the line-up presented here is likely to make even a broad-minded viewer feel that some of them deserved at least some of what they got (even while they feel sympathetic to those of the interviewees they do admire)-all the more so after seeing them at their nastiest here. (Interestingly, some of those who appear in the film have publicly "heckled" each other, a point not mentioned in the course of the documentary, though the response to that would have been interesting.)
And of course, the fact remains that for all their troubles, the people doing the complaining here are the ones who've won the Dream Jobs. There are far, far worse places to be than theirs--something most of those depicted so unflatteringly in the documentary certainly realize, not that you'd guess it from this doc.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
On Star Trek's Box Office Performance
The widely anticipated success of J.J. Abrams's recent reboot of Star Trek has of course impressed many observers (like the "Box Office Guru"), who have frequently noted that it has left its predecessors in the dust in terms of box office receipts. (Following its $75 million opening weekend, it has enjoyed relatively good legs for a highly publicized, wide-opening summer release to rack up $148 million in just ten days.)
After all, the thinking goes, the series has rarely been in that first rank of blockbusters, only the fourth Star Trek film even breaking the $100 million barrier at the domestic box office.
However, adjusted for inflation (pegged to yesteryear's ticket prices, courtesy of Box Office Mojo), Star Trek IV's $109 million translates to a much more impressive $212 million.
Even so, it is still a lower gross than that of the first Star Trek movie, which pulled in $82 million in 1979, so that after adjustment for inflation, it may be said to have taken in a still heftier $235 million. (Admittedly, this was regarded as a disappointment at the time, but solely because of the giant production budget, and of course, the expectations of studio executives who, displaying their typically poor grip on reality, believed that making a space-themed film automatically entitled their studio to Star Wars-like success.)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn earned $78 million in 1982, or $193 million in today's terms, while Star Trek III: The Search for Spock brought in $76 million, equal to $163 million today, two years after that. Star Trek: First Contact fell just short of the $100 million mark with $92 million in 1996, but this is equal to $150 million now, and even the ninth Star Trek movie, Insurrection, with its comparatively underwhelming performance, is a $100 million grosser in current terms.
In fact, of the first ten movies, after adjustment for inflation, all but Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Nemesis grossed over $100 million-and V actually came close, its $52 million in 1989 equaling $94 million today.
Of course, $100 million just isn't what it used to be-theatrically or otherwise. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that each of the four early, high-grossing films made its respective year's list of top ten earners (with numbers one and four making the top five).
That being the case, the trajectory the current film seems to be tracing (toward the territory of $250 million domestic, according to the Guru) is a return to that earlier form, rather than an unprecedented event in the history of the series-another implausible case of the 1980s all over again, much like the Batman and Indiana Jones franchises (out of which came the two biggest movies of 1989) producing the two biggest movies of 2008.
After all, the thinking goes, the series has rarely been in that first rank of blockbusters, only the fourth Star Trek film even breaking the $100 million barrier at the domestic box office.
However, adjusted for inflation (pegged to yesteryear's ticket prices, courtesy of Box Office Mojo), Star Trek IV's $109 million translates to a much more impressive $212 million.
Even so, it is still a lower gross than that of the first Star Trek movie, which pulled in $82 million in 1979, so that after adjustment for inflation, it may be said to have taken in a still heftier $235 million. (Admittedly, this was regarded as a disappointment at the time, but solely because of the giant production budget, and of course, the expectations of studio executives who, displaying their typically poor grip on reality, believed that making a space-themed film automatically entitled their studio to Star Wars-like success.)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn earned $78 million in 1982, or $193 million in today's terms, while Star Trek III: The Search for Spock brought in $76 million, equal to $163 million today, two years after that. Star Trek: First Contact fell just short of the $100 million mark with $92 million in 1996, but this is equal to $150 million now, and even the ninth Star Trek movie, Insurrection, with its comparatively underwhelming performance, is a $100 million grosser in current terms.
In fact, of the first ten movies, after adjustment for inflation, all but Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Nemesis grossed over $100 million-and V actually came close, its $52 million in 1989 equaling $94 million today.
Of course, $100 million just isn't what it used to be-theatrically or otherwise. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that each of the four early, high-grossing films made its respective year's list of top ten earners (with numbers one and four making the top five).
That being the case, the trajectory the current film seems to be tracing (toward the territory of $250 million domestic, according to the Guru) is a return to that earlier form, rather than an unprecedented event in the history of the series-another implausible case of the 1980s all over again, much like the Batman and Indiana Jones franchises (out of which came the two biggest movies of 1989) producing the two biggest movies of 2008.
Friday, May 15, 2009
In Case You Wondered What Ever Happened to the Seaquest Version of the Future . . . (Ocean Mining)
In case you've ever wondered what ever happened to the Seaquest version of the future (in which the oceans of 2018 were thoroughly colonized), The Economist has just published an article on the state and prospects of ocean mining.
The oil and gas industry, of course, is very active here, but this significant case (and De Beers's scooping up of fairly accessible diamonds off the coast of southwestern Africa) apart, such thinking largely vanished with the '70s.
The article's author isn't predicting a boom right over the horizon, despite interest from companies like Canada's Nautilus Minerals and Australia's Neptune Minerals (and from Russia and China).
Just going by the "big picture" of the world economy, this seems reasonable enough. From the standpoint of the theory of economic "long waves," the slow-growing downward trough in the wave (where we've been since the early '70s) tends to see business favoring "conservative" approaches. Debt-ridden corporations led by "short-termist" management (also the pattern since the '70s) also happen to be an unlikely source of dramatic innovation, especially in a moment like this one, with demand for everything down and the outlook precarious. And the present combination of alternative (e.g. land-based) supplies and the state of the technological art in the field presents little incentive to companies to break with that practice in a rush for the oceans.
Given the complications that might ensue, from international clashes over maritime claims to untoward ecological consequences, it might be just as well that the issue is being deferred to the future. As it is, the path to a viable economic future likely lies more in a more efficient (and sustainable) use of the natural resources already available than a grab for more.
The oil and gas industry, of course, is very active here, but this significant case (and De Beers's scooping up of fairly accessible diamonds off the coast of southwestern Africa) apart, such thinking largely vanished with the '70s.
The article's author isn't predicting a boom right over the horizon, despite interest from companies like Canada's Nautilus Minerals and Australia's Neptune Minerals (and from Russia and China).
Just going by the "big picture" of the world economy, this seems reasonable enough. From the standpoint of the theory of economic "long waves," the slow-growing downward trough in the wave (where we've been since the early '70s) tends to see business favoring "conservative" approaches. Debt-ridden corporations led by "short-termist" management (also the pattern since the '70s) also happen to be an unlikely source of dramatic innovation, especially in a moment like this one, with demand for everything down and the outlook precarious. And the present combination of alternative (e.g. land-based) supplies and the state of the technological art in the field presents little incentive to companies to break with that practice in a rush for the oceans.
Given the complications that might ensue, from international clashes over maritime claims to untoward ecological consequences, it might be just as well that the issue is being deferred to the future. As it is, the path to a viable economic future likely lies more in a more efficient (and sustainable) use of the natural resources already available than a grab for more.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
An Exercise In Near-Instant Nostalgia
In the course of a few recent projects, I found myself wondering "What will the first decade of the twenty-first century be remembered for, pop culture-wise?" Here's an attempt at a list, detailing not what I necessarily thought most memorable about the decade (there's a lot here that I don't like, as well as a fair bit that I do like), but what I think will be part of the broad recollection of it in the coming years. It is also far from complete (and should the reader feel they have something to add, they are invited to do so in the comments section).
In any case, here it goes.
• Cell phone mania.
• Ipods.
• Google.
• MMORPGS, especially World of Warcraft.
• The explosion of blogs.
• TV, DVR and in general, the digitization of the television experience.
• Reality TV (especially American Idol).
• Forensic-themed cop shows (CSI, Crossing Jordan, Bones, etc., with even shows not specializing in this giving more time to the forensics side of things, like NCIS).
• The return of Family Guy.
• Religious-archaeological-Masonic-themed thrillers.
• Zombies, in everything.
• Harry Potter.
• Big-budget fantasy (the aforementioned Potter, the movies based on the writings of Lewis and Tolkien, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, etc.), and superheroes (from X-Men on), at the movies.
• "Frat Pack" and Judd Apatow comedies.
• Michael Moore documentaries.
• Borat.
• The Daily Show.
• Janet Jackson's nipple-and the idiot hysteria over it.
• The term "reboot" (and to some extent, the reboots of old media franchises, particularly James Bond and Star Trek).
• Nostalgia for the 1980s (though on the whole, the 2000s seem less obsessed with the '80s than the '90s were with the '70s, politics apart).
• A preoccupation with the idea of the apocalypse happening in 2012 (since the 2000 date had of course passed, with us still here).
• The entry of the terms "red state" and "blue state" into the cultural lexicon.
• An obsession with real estate speculation (even as the cliché of the IT billionaire continued going strong).
In any case, here it goes.
• Cell phone mania.
• Ipods.
• Google.
• MMORPGS, especially World of Warcraft.
• The explosion of blogs.
• TV, DVR and in general, the digitization of the television experience.
• Reality TV (especially American Idol).
• Forensic-themed cop shows (CSI, Crossing Jordan, Bones, etc., with even shows not specializing in this giving more time to the forensics side of things, like NCIS).
• The return of Family Guy.
• Religious-archaeological-Masonic-themed thrillers.
• Zombies, in everything.
• Harry Potter.
• Big-budget fantasy (the aforementioned Potter, the movies based on the writings of Lewis and Tolkien, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, etc.), and superheroes (from X-Men on), at the movies.
• "Frat Pack" and Judd Apatow comedies.
• Michael Moore documentaries.
• Borat.
• The Daily Show.
• Janet Jackson's nipple-and the idiot hysteria over it.
• The term "reboot" (and to some extent, the reboots of old media franchises, particularly James Bond and Star Trek).
• Nostalgia for the 1980s (though on the whole, the 2000s seem less obsessed with the '80s than the '90s were with the '70s, politics apart).
• A preoccupation with the idea of the apocalypse happening in 2012 (since the 2000 date had of course passed, with us still here).
• The entry of the terms "red state" and "blue state" into the cultural lexicon.
• An obsession with real estate speculation (even as the cliché of the IT billionaire continued going strong).
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The End of Oil and The End
By Nader Elhefnawy
The rise in the price of oil during the past decade, and especially the last five years, sparked a great deal of talk about the world's production and consumption of energy (already on the agenda because of climate change). It has waned a bit in the last few months with the plunge of prices from $150 a barrel to less than a third of that, and our economic worries instead finding their focus in the unprecedented financial disaster sweeping the world (the immediate--but only the immediate--cause of which was the bursting of the American housing bubble), which has actually depressed consumption, even after the fall of the price.
Nonetheless, the basic problem has not gone away for good, just as it didn't go away for good after people turned their attention to other things in the past. It is rarely appreciated that the debate over the imminence of the exhaustion of oil supplies is almost as old as the oil age itself, and has long been conducted along much the same lines as seen today, with liberals and progressives calling for forward thinking and planning, while conservatives place their faith in "innovation," "entrepreneurship" and market forces to deliver the goods. (Indeed, the famously pessimistic Oswald Spengler, in his book The Decline of the West, poo-poohs such fears as they had been expressed in his own day.)
As one might expect, it is also not new to fiction. In 1914's The World Set Free, the granddaddy of all nuclear apocalypse stories, H.G. Wells expresses concern for the dwindling of the world's fossil fuel supplies.
In 1930's Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon depicts the end for modern civilization coming about as a result of exactly this problem. In his Americanized future, the descendants of his generation burn the last of the oil in mindless movement in their personal vehicles as a matter of religious duty. (And to think that so many writers have scoffed at his vision of the future!)
Such fears seem to have been less conspicuous in later decades, but they did not totally go away. In Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1953 The Space Merchants, for instance, the exhaustion of the world's oil left those of us who could afford it riding about in "pedi-cabs."
Still, it was the 1970s which would see a deluge of fiction of this type. The most famous expression was perhaps the Mad Max films. It was not simply a repetition of the earlier stories, however. Rather, it reflected a fear of imminent catastrophe, and the scenarios, naturally, were not just limited to far-future scenarios like Stapledon's. Indeed, we see the anxiety about oil's scarcity, and the preoccupation with shady oil politics, in thrillers from the period not usually classed as genre books (and which remind me how much better the period's "airport" novels were than the current run of stuff), like Paul Erdman's Crash of '79 (1976), Steve Shagan's The Formula (1979), Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) (a brilliant and grossly underappreciated mix of over-the-top parody and biting satire) and Clive Cussler's Night Probe (1981) (not as flashy as later books he would write, but a much better read than the last few Dirk Pitt novels).
As oil prices fell again in the 1980s and 1990s, and as the political tenor of the times changed (making an anti-establishment suspicion of the security state and big business less "acceptable," and militarism more so, as recounted by William James Gibson, Andrew Bacevich and others), the nightmares centered less on scarcity as such, fears of immediate exhaustion or even the ambitions of established local potentates like the Iranian Shah or the Saudi royals than their vulnerability to Soviet takeover. In the techno-thrillers that were coming to overshadow the spy novel, like Tom Clancy's 1986 Red Storm Rising, a superpower clash in the Persian Gulf was a standard scenario, and after the Soviet Union's fall, Iraq and fundamentalist Iran were the favorite bogeymen, filling its old place (though never very convincingly, given their smallness).
However, as oil prices rebounded after the turn of the century, so did the 1970s-style fears (validated to the extent that they recognized the failure of governments to act seriously in a timely fashion, as James McCausland, who cowrote the script for Mad Max with George Miller, noted in a recent article), which certainly have their place in Geoff Ryman's "mundane" science fiction movement.
I've certainly found myself paying more attention to the issue, publishing articles in Parameters and Survival on the matter, and for those wondering, here's the current big picture:
• The world's "proven" oil reserves run to about a trillion barrels. At current rates of usage, and with recently observed rates of growth, we could easily burn through a trillion barrels by the 2030s.
• Assuming those numbers, we will not actually succeed in extracting that much oil. All other things being equal, production from a given deposit rises steadily until half of it has been extracted, after which the rate of production begins to fall. This is what is called the "peaking" of oil production. Given the amount of oil already extracted, we may be near, or even at, a global peak.
• Our estimates of the world's proven oil reserves may be exaggerated (estimating supplies is a tricky thing, and the industry is known less for transparency than for dishonesty), so that the crunch may hit us sooner and harder than the numbers above suggest.
• Even assuming the global numbers to be accurate, it may be that a worldwide average makes the situation look better than it really is. The world's production is concentrated in a comparative handful of supergiant oil fields, a notable example of which is Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, which by itself produces over six percent of the world's oil. These fields are generally old ones, peaking, plateauing and declining, as seems to be the case with Ghawar, so that a field-by-field analysis produces a much more worrisome picture.
• Undiscovered oil supplies may be out there, but we are now using up oil four times as fast as we are finding it. The new deposits tend to be smaller, and increasingly in hard-to-get, expensive-to-work places, like offshore fields. (In other words, don't count on finding a new Ghawar anytime soon.) And even if we do find a really big new field that can help us through the squeeze, actually getting production going there is a decade long process. Put simply, it can be ten years before you get so much as a drop.
• There is plenty of unconventional oil, but it is very hard to exploit, and even in a relatively optimistic assessment-in which it quadruples to about 10 million barrels a day by 2030 or so-it seems unlikely to compensate for the shortfall in conventional supplies.
All of this looks pretty bad, and in ways that were not really the case back in the 1970s. It looks even worse when one sees the essential lameness of the arguments against this picture. (For instance, we are told by oil boosters that the Saudis, far from exaggerating their reserves, secretly know they have three times as much as reported.) They say that the constraints are not geological but "political" (political always referring not to the Suits over here, but the nasty foreigners over there), the Russians and the Persian Gulf countries throwing up obstacles in the way of exploration and development, or the environmentalists opposed to drilling in Alaska (this last claim in particular showing the lack of basic math skills on the part of this group, given the paltriness of even the biggest estimates of what that area might yield). And let's not forget all that abiogenic oil (allegedly) to be found deep inside the Earth's crust.
At the same time, oil boosters are quick to remind us that despite worries in the past, the apocalypse has not happened yet, making those worries "wrong." And there are those who can profit from the doom and gloom. The energy industry can certainly benefit from exaggerating the argument, using it as an excuse for high prices, government subsidies and the exertion of political pressure on oil producers to provide more generous terms, consumers to put up with their profit-mongering in times of general hardship. Fear that the end of the world is about to happen if they do not get every dollar they want can also be used to ward off demands for more socially and ecologically responsible policies.
Indeed, this is more or less what journalist Greg Palast argues in his book Armed Madhouse. Much as I respect Palast (and recommend his book), I find the evidence for a peak by the 2020s (and possibly earlier) persuasive, and said so in the journal Survival back in April 2008. In the issue released the following August, one critic disparagingly described my article as a "doomsday scenario" for that reason, but the truth is that the longer I study the issue, the worse the situation looks to me, and to a great many others. The International Energy Agency, certainly no alarmist, recently put out a worst case scenario in which world oil production falls from today's 86 million barrels a day to a mere 9 million-roughly ten percent of today's levels-circa 2030. Matthew Simmons, addressing the World Affairs Council of Houston in December, declared those numbers optimistic (in part because of the depreciation of the infrastructure for producing and transporting all that oil, which he thinks it may cost $100 trillion-equal to a year and a half of the globe's total economic output-to keep in working order, provided this can be done at all).
A ninety percent cut in planetary oil production over twenty years might well tax modern civilization's capacities for adaptation beyond the breaking point. Electricity and heating would not be the main problem; just a tenth or so of the world's electricity comes from oil burning plants down from 25 percent in 1973, and that mainly because oil-rich Middle Eastern countries have found it convenient to continue along that path. (More recently, however, they seem to be joining the rest of the world in turning to other sources.)
The production of chemicals, plastics, asphalt or fertilizer in which oil is a key component is actually a larger concern, given that in many cases no obvious substitutes are readily available.
The biggest worry, however, is transport, which uses a full two-thirds of our petroleum.
Of course, there is no shortage of ways of economizing or substituting the use of fossil fuels, far too many for me to even make a go of a proper list here. None of them looks like a quick and easy technical fix to the entire problem, but they do offer plenty of ways of chipping at it until it gets down to a manageable size. And of course, there are plenty of revolutionary concepts which can vastly reduce our use of transport in ways that may actually raise the quality of life rather than diminishing it, from treating telecommuting as more than a slogan, to "urban agriculture."
Even so, serious bottlenecks along that developmental path are nearly certain should oil production start to contract sharply in the near term, as in the direst scenarios. Still, it is very likely that early, far-sighted action on a meaningful scale can cushion the blow, at least enough to keep the modern world a going concern. The question that remains, then, is whether or not the potential solutions will actually find speedy, comprehensive, practical application to the problem. The record to date has not been promising, and while the likes of Denmark and Sweden, with their energy-efficient economies and massive exploitation of renewable energy hold out reasons to be hopeful, cases like mainland China (with its vast and growing appetite for energy, to date met mainly with fossil fuels) seem to weigh much more heavily at the opposite end of the balance.
Nonetheless, the current financial crisis is already forcing a great deal of rethinking of the policies and attitudes that led to this point. That has yet to lead to really meaningful progressive action, but an ecologically sounder developmental path may yet be a surprising consequence of our current troubles.
Whatever comes of it, I suspect some places will do better than others. I expect that the developed nations will, on the whole, do better than the developing ones due to their better access to technology and capital (though the smaller needs and innovation of some developing nations may surprise us). I would also guess that Western Europe and East Asia will do better than North America due to differences in infrastructure and politics. (Simply put, the economies of industrialized Europe and Asia are already much more energy-efficient, and in particular oil efficient, than the U.S.'s; and there seems to be less serious domestic opposition to meaningful action in their cases. Already it is Sweden which has unveiled the most ambitious plans for phasing out fossil fuel use and developing renewable energy resources.)
Yet, it is very much an open question whether even the best will do better by a large enough margin to avoid really rocky times ahead. No one is quite where they should be, or even where potentially they could have been had they made a proper start back in the previous energy crisis of the 1970s, but even if a great deal of time has been lost, enough remains in which a serious attempt to think big and think ahead can matter.
The rise in the price of oil during the past decade, and especially the last five years, sparked a great deal of talk about the world's production and consumption of energy (already on the agenda because of climate change). It has waned a bit in the last few months with the plunge of prices from $150 a barrel to less than a third of that, and our economic worries instead finding their focus in the unprecedented financial disaster sweeping the world (the immediate--but only the immediate--cause of which was the bursting of the American housing bubble), which has actually depressed consumption, even after the fall of the price.
Nonetheless, the basic problem has not gone away for good, just as it didn't go away for good after people turned their attention to other things in the past. It is rarely appreciated that the debate over the imminence of the exhaustion of oil supplies is almost as old as the oil age itself, and has long been conducted along much the same lines as seen today, with liberals and progressives calling for forward thinking and planning, while conservatives place their faith in "innovation," "entrepreneurship" and market forces to deliver the goods. (Indeed, the famously pessimistic Oswald Spengler, in his book The Decline of the West, poo-poohs such fears as they had been expressed in his own day.)
As one might expect, it is also not new to fiction. In 1914's The World Set Free, the granddaddy of all nuclear apocalypse stories, H.G. Wells expresses concern for the dwindling of the world's fossil fuel supplies.
In 1930's Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon depicts the end for modern civilization coming about as a result of exactly this problem. In his Americanized future, the descendants of his generation burn the last of the oil in mindless movement in their personal vehicles as a matter of religious duty. (And to think that so many writers have scoffed at his vision of the future!)
Such fears seem to have been less conspicuous in later decades, but they did not totally go away. In Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1953 The Space Merchants, for instance, the exhaustion of the world's oil left those of us who could afford it riding about in "pedi-cabs."
Still, it was the 1970s which would see a deluge of fiction of this type. The most famous expression was perhaps the Mad Max films. It was not simply a repetition of the earlier stories, however. Rather, it reflected a fear of imminent catastrophe, and the scenarios, naturally, were not just limited to far-future scenarios like Stapledon's. Indeed, we see the anxiety about oil's scarcity, and the preoccupation with shady oil politics, in thrillers from the period not usually classed as genre books (and which remind me how much better the period's "airport" novels were than the current run of stuff), like Paul Erdman's Crash of '79 (1976), Steve Shagan's The Formula (1979), Trevanian's Shibumi (1979) (a brilliant and grossly underappreciated mix of over-the-top parody and biting satire) and Clive Cussler's Night Probe (1981) (not as flashy as later books he would write, but a much better read than the last few Dirk Pitt novels).
As oil prices fell again in the 1980s and 1990s, and as the political tenor of the times changed (making an anti-establishment suspicion of the security state and big business less "acceptable," and militarism more so, as recounted by William James Gibson, Andrew Bacevich and others), the nightmares centered less on scarcity as such, fears of immediate exhaustion or even the ambitions of established local potentates like the Iranian Shah or the Saudi royals than their vulnerability to Soviet takeover. In the techno-thrillers that were coming to overshadow the spy novel, like Tom Clancy's 1986 Red Storm Rising, a superpower clash in the Persian Gulf was a standard scenario, and after the Soviet Union's fall, Iraq and fundamentalist Iran were the favorite bogeymen, filling its old place (though never very convincingly, given their smallness).
However, as oil prices rebounded after the turn of the century, so did the 1970s-style fears (validated to the extent that they recognized the failure of governments to act seriously in a timely fashion, as James McCausland, who cowrote the script for Mad Max with George Miller, noted in a recent article), which certainly have their place in Geoff Ryman's "mundane" science fiction movement.
I've certainly found myself paying more attention to the issue, publishing articles in Parameters and Survival on the matter, and for those wondering, here's the current big picture:
• The world's "proven" oil reserves run to about a trillion barrels. At current rates of usage, and with recently observed rates of growth, we could easily burn through a trillion barrels by the 2030s.
• Assuming those numbers, we will not actually succeed in extracting that much oil. All other things being equal, production from a given deposit rises steadily until half of it has been extracted, after which the rate of production begins to fall. This is what is called the "peaking" of oil production. Given the amount of oil already extracted, we may be near, or even at, a global peak.
• Our estimates of the world's proven oil reserves may be exaggerated (estimating supplies is a tricky thing, and the industry is known less for transparency than for dishonesty), so that the crunch may hit us sooner and harder than the numbers above suggest.
• Even assuming the global numbers to be accurate, it may be that a worldwide average makes the situation look better than it really is. The world's production is concentrated in a comparative handful of supergiant oil fields, a notable example of which is Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field, which by itself produces over six percent of the world's oil. These fields are generally old ones, peaking, plateauing and declining, as seems to be the case with Ghawar, so that a field-by-field analysis produces a much more worrisome picture.
• Undiscovered oil supplies may be out there, but we are now using up oil four times as fast as we are finding it. The new deposits tend to be smaller, and increasingly in hard-to-get, expensive-to-work places, like offshore fields. (In other words, don't count on finding a new Ghawar anytime soon.) And even if we do find a really big new field that can help us through the squeeze, actually getting production going there is a decade long process. Put simply, it can be ten years before you get so much as a drop.
• There is plenty of unconventional oil, but it is very hard to exploit, and even in a relatively optimistic assessment-in which it quadruples to about 10 million barrels a day by 2030 or so-it seems unlikely to compensate for the shortfall in conventional supplies.
All of this looks pretty bad, and in ways that were not really the case back in the 1970s. It looks even worse when one sees the essential lameness of the arguments against this picture. (For instance, we are told by oil boosters that the Saudis, far from exaggerating their reserves, secretly know they have three times as much as reported.) They say that the constraints are not geological but "political" (political always referring not to the Suits over here, but the nasty foreigners over there), the Russians and the Persian Gulf countries throwing up obstacles in the way of exploration and development, or the environmentalists opposed to drilling in Alaska (this last claim in particular showing the lack of basic math skills on the part of this group, given the paltriness of even the biggest estimates of what that area might yield). And let's not forget all that abiogenic oil (allegedly) to be found deep inside the Earth's crust.
At the same time, oil boosters are quick to remind us that despite worries in the past, the apocalypse has not happened yet, making those worries "wrong." And there are those who can profit from the doom and gloom. The energy industry can certainly benefit from exaggerating the argument, using it as an excuse for high prices, government subsidies and the exertion of political pressure on oil producers to provide more generous terms, consumers to put up with their profit-mongering in times of general hardship. Fear that the end of the world is about to happen if they do not get every dollar they want can also be used to ward off demands for more socially and ecologically responsible policies.
Indeed, this is more or less what journalist Greg Palast argues in his book Armed Madhouse. Much as I respect Palast (and recommend his book), I find the evidence for a peak by the 2020s (and possibly earlier) persuasive, and said so in the journal Survival back in April 2008. In the issue released the following August, one critic disparagingly described my article as a "doomsday scenario" for that reason, but the truth is that the longer I study the issue, the worse the situation looks to me, and to a great many others. The International Energy Agency, certainly no alarmist, recently put out a worst case scenario in which world oil production falls from today's 86 million barrels a day to a mere 9 million-roughly ten percent of today's levels-circa 2030. Matthew Simmons, addressing the World Affairs Council of Houston in December, declared those numbers optimistic (in part because of the depreciation of the infrastructure for producing and transporting all that oil, which he thinks it may cost $100 trillion-equal to a year and a half of the globe's total economic output-to keep in working order, provided this can be done at all).
A ninety percent cut in planetary oil production over twenty years might well tax modern civilization's capacities for adaptation beyond the breaking point. Electricity and heating would not be the main problem; just a tenth or so of the world's electricity comes from oil burning plants down from 25 percent in 1973, and that mainly because oil-rich Middle Eastern countries have found it convenient to continue along that path. (More recently, however, they seem to be joining the rest of the world in turning to other sources.)
The production of chemicals, plastics, asphalt or fertilizer in which oil is a key component is actually a larger concern, given that in many cases no obvious substitutes are readily available.
The biggest worry, however, is transport, which uses a full two-thirds of our petroleum.
Of course, there is no shortage of ways of economizing or substituting the use of fossil fuels, far too many for me to even make a go of a proper list here. None of them looks like a quick and easy technical fix to the entire problem, but they do offer plenty of ways of chipping at it until it gets down to a manageable size. And of course, there are plenty of revolutionary concepts which can vastly reduce our use of transport in ways that may actually raise the quality of life rather than diminishing it, from treating telecommuting as more than a slogan, to "urban agriculture."
Even so, serious bottlenecks along that developmental path are nearly certain should oil production start to contract sharply in the near term, as in the direst scenarios. Still, it is very likely that early, far-sighted action on a meaningful scale can cushion the blow, at least enough to keep the modern world a going concern. The question that remains, then, is whether or not the potential solutions will actually find speedy, comprehensive, practical application to the problem. The record to date has not been promising, and while the likes of Denmark and Sweden, with their energy-efficient economies and massive exploitation of renewable energy hold out reasons to be hopeful, cases like mainland China (with its vast and growing appetite for energy, to date met mainly with fossil fuels) seem to weigh much more heavily at the opposite end of the balance.
Nonetheless, the current financial crisis is already forcing a great deal of rethinking of the policies and attitudes that led to this point. That has yet to lead to really meaningful progressive action, but an ecologically sounder developmental path may yet be a surprising consequence of our current troubles.
Whatever comes of it, I suspect some places will do better than others. I expect that the developed nations will, on the whole, do better than the developing ones due to their better access to technology and capital (though the smaller needs and innovation of some developing nations may surprise us). I would also guess that Western Europe and East Asia will do better than North America due to differences in infrastructure and politics. (Simply put, the economies of industrialized Europe and Asia are already much more energy-efficient, and in particular oil efficient, than the U.S.'s; and there seems to be less serious domestic opposition to meaningful action in their cases. Already it is Sweden which has unveiled the most ambitious plans for phasing out fossil fuel use and developing renewable energy resources.)
Yet, it is very much an open question whether even the best will do better by a large enough margin to avoid really rocky times ahead. No one is quite where they should be, or even where potentially they could have been had they made a proper start back in the previous energy crisis of the 1970s, but even if a great deal of time has been lost, enough remains in which a serious attempt to think big and think ahead can matter.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
New Lexx Cast Interviews
The Lexxverse web site (a place well worth checking out if you're a fan of the show) has recently performed Internet interviews with members of the cast of-you guessed it-Lexx. The most recent, which you can read here, is with Michael McManus, who played Kai on the show.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Melrose Space to Marauder: The Starship Troopers Film Trilogy
By Nader Elhefnawy
First published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, DECEMBER 2008
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
In the classic Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, Juan "Johnny" Rico, the son of a wealthy Filipino businessman living in Buenos Aires, enlists in the Terran Mobile Infantry after high school, against his father's wishes. Through his training, and his service in the war that subsequently begins (when the alien arachnids attack his hometown of B.A.), Johnny goes from being a callow child of privilege to a responsible leader of men as an Infantry officer, and citizen of the Federation.
The famous 1997 film retains the basic outline of the book, as well as many of the characters and incidents, but as one might expect from a movie designed as a Hollywood summer blockbuster, there are some significant changes.1 Not the least of these is the shift in emphasis from Johnny's development in Heinlein's futuristic bildungsroman, to action-adventure and spectacle. (It has to be admitted that the novel is a bit of a disappointment for readers looking for a thrill ride. After the adrenaline rush of the opening raid against the Skinnies, the book offers very little action, and that written more with an eye to realistically providing a sense of the confusion of battle rather than visceral excitement.)
The film also has a broader scope than the novel, which is narrated by Johnny in the first person. It gives rather more time to other characters, particularly those who came with Johnny (played by Casper Van Dien) from school, like Carmen Benes (a pre-Wild Things Denise Richards), and in this case, Dizzy Flores, who in the film is a young woman (Dina Meyer) serving with Johnny in the Infantry. (In the book there were women starship pilots, like Carmen, but in the film the Infantry is fully coed.) They brought their emotional baggage from high school with them, the new circumstances facilitating the carrying over of two interconnected love triangles, one between Johnny, Carmen (now Johnny's high school girlfriend, whom he basically followed into the service) and Dizzy (who followed Johnny in her turn, even requesting and getting a transfer to his platoon); and another between Johnny, Carmen and her fellow starship pilot, Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon).
Of course, viewers had plenty to say about those changes, not all of it positive (apart from the Oscar-nominated special effects, which drew almost universal acclaim, and still hold up very well a decade later). The casting dismayed some, who felt that the principal characters were insufficiently diverse in a story where racial harmony and gender equality were supposed to have been perfectly realized (in particular displeased by the decision to cast Van Dien as Rico).
Along with the romantic entanglements, and the other trappings of American high school life (a slice of Americana, down to the high school football game and the prom), that aspect of it led some to derisively joke about the film being "Beverly Hills 90210 in space" (Van Dien and Meyer having both appeared on that show prior to this movie), or "Melrose Space." Other fans of the book were dismayed at not seeing the powered armor widely remembered as a hallmark of the story, an absence justified by producer Jon Davison on budgetary grounds (in particular the cost and time wire-work on that scale would have absorbed) and dramatic ones (as the sight of the soldiers "bouncing" about the field would easily have looked very silly).2
The big controversy, however, really centered on the portrayal of the social order in the film, which is not surprising given that it had been controversial among the novel's readers from the time of the book's first appearance. In Heinlein's future, the Federation is run solely by military veterans, who alone enjoy the full rights of citizenship--the franchise, and candidacy for high office.3 This, and other aspects of the future in the book, led some to see Heinlein's story as fascistic. Indeed, the book became so closely identified with such tendencies in the genre that Michael Moorcock titled his famous 1978 essay about the subject "Starship Stormtroopers."4
Of Starship Stormtroopers
Of course, many of Heinlein's fans have flatly rejected such a reading of the story.5They can and do legitimately point out that the Federation was not established in the name of traditional values or institutions (like the family, organized religion, the martial spirit, or anything else), and nor does it seem to take much interest in upholding their status. The military may enjoy a privileged place in the political system as the sole gateway to full political rights (the franchise, and public office), but serving soldiers are subordinate to those who have returned to civilian life, not a word is breathed about military rule per se, and criticism of the military is freely expressed by civilians, including the very physician examining Johnny when he applies.6
Additionally, Heinlein repeatedly stresses that the Federation represents a historical maximum in the personal freedom its citizens enjoy. (Indeed, even those serving in the military enjoy far more freedom in some ways than those serving in any existing military today, free to put in their resignation at any time outside of actual combat.) There is no mention of corporatist economics, which the Heinlein of the 1950s (any interest in alternatives to the free market by this point long behind him) would in any case be expected to strongly disapprove of. And of course, this society boasted perfect, matter-of-fact racial and national equality.7
Consequently, the Federation is very far from fitting the description of any fascist state in history, or any other kind of "totalitarian" state for that matter, and Heinlein's defenders are absolutely right to point this out. And yet—-it is not so simple a matter as that to dismiss the claims, especially when one distinguishes between the culture of the Federation as a whole, and the book actually depicting this world. The story's marginalization of social and economic questions in this "society that works"; the emphasis on punitive discipline, corporal punishment, and the echo of 1950s-era hysteria about "kids out of control"; the gleeful contempt for liberal sensibilities expressed by Johnny's educators--all of these at the very least identify the story with a fairly harsh brand of conservatism, while offering abundant material to those looking to identify the film with fascist ideas, to see in the vigilante vets who founded the Federation, and their political heirs, something of the post-World War I Freikorps.8
The conception of the enemy as mindless, sub-human, literally insectoid (and the not unreasonable tendency of some readers to see them as stand-ins for human opponents) also echoes the crudest sorts of nationalist and racialist propaganda, and Johnny himself embraces the rooting of morality in a harshly socio-biological view of life, reminiscent of nineteenth century Social Darwinism and rhetoric about a growing nation's need for "breathing room." While it is difficult to pin any particular political label on Heinlein, many aspects of Heinlein's politics as the author himself openly expressed them at the time (his defense of McCarthyism, his hard line in the Cold War), do not exactly discourage such perceptions.
In short, while the Federation is quite different from fascist states like Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, one can see something of fascism's spirit in it. And to the chagrin of quite a few fans of the book, it is this view of the book that the film's creators embraced, using the material furnished by Heinlein's novel as a launch pad for a satire of fascism and militarism, a decision perhaps not all that surprising given the creative team in charge: director Paul Verhoeven, working with screenwriter Ed Neumeier, the duo who gave the world the original Robocop (certainly one of the sharpest satires to come out of Hollywood in the 1980s).
Their touch is evident throughout, in the small details (like the zany commercials and news programs), and the large. In this vision of a futuristic "good society," society's less seemly aspects (and one must assume they still exist, given the lack of evidence to the contrary) are tucked out of sight, unmentioned--or normalized, like the live, televised executions that air on every channel. The same goes for the complexities of political history. (There is a quick reference to "Mormon extremists" who have intruded into Bug territory, which Verhoeven has pointed out is a reminder that, contrary to how the Federation would have it, the conflict with the Bugs did not precisely begin with the attack on B.A..9)
Instead, the sanitized, carefully controlled media speaks in a single voice reminiscent of '40s-era newsreels in its complacent authority, simplicity of outlook and uncomplicated aggressiveness, no trace of skepticism, cynicism, doubt, difference or dissent ever intruding. No one on screen dares (or at least, thinks) to utter the kind of anti-military sentiment that was unsurprising in the book, any more than these things would have turned up in the World War II films that inspired the product.10 Johnny and friends are as vacuous as they are eager, earnest and enthusiastic, a "right-wing group of beautiful, empty-headed people doing exactly what they're told to do" as science fiction historian Paul Sammon puts it.11 From beginning to end they never do a double-take at the state worship and state violence drenching their culture, and increasingly their lives--even after Johnny (barely) gets through the bloody, bungled mess that is the Battle of Klendathu (which evokes argument only over tactics, not strategy, policy or general goals in the press). Their recruiting poster looks and recruiting poster flatness makes them come across as idealized, mindless figures out of propaganda--and indeed, the film closes with a recruiting commercial featuring Johnny and Carmen.
Given this vision of the nation-in-arms at its most ridiculous, the acting and casting are actually perfect, especially when one considers that the aesthetic is not solely derived from that of Anglo-American wartime film.12 Indeed, it fits in neatly with the considerable borrowing from Nazi aesthetic expressions, ranging from the uniforms (particularly the one worn by Neil Patrick Harris in the role of Colonel Carl Jenkins) and other regalia, to the staging and cinematography of the crowd scenes, reminiscent of Nazi rallies.
The Sequels: Starship Troopers 2 and 3
Predictably, much of the audience didn't get the joke, the critical elite included. Being a satirist always means running the risk of being misunderstood, and especially being thought to promote what you are actually criticizing.13 However, the controversy did not result in a blockbuster. When all was said and done Starship Troopers took in about $55 million in the U.S., and another $66 million overseas, making for a global total of $121 million. Given that it cost $105 million to make, these earnings had to be considered a significant disappointment.14
Nonetheless, box office failure has never stopped Hollywood from trying to milk a potentially profitable franchise, and in 1999 a spin-off television series hit the airwaves (executive produced by Verhoeven himself), Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, but it proved short-lived. There were distribution problems, of course, not least of them the destruction of the story arcs when they were aired out of order, but there was a more fundamental issue; the show was clearly an uneasy cross of kid's weekday morning cartoon with the very adult vision of the film. While more successful on that level than one might expect, the result was a military procedural somewhat more mature than what one expected in that time slot, but much tamer in its depiction of the still-abundant action (and other things), the social comment toned down, the plot considerably simplified.
Instead the series continued in live-action format, specifically the straight-to-video sequel format, with the first of these appearing in 2004, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. Once again Ed Neumeier penned the script, with acclaimed special effects artist Phil Tippett (who supervised the creature effects in the original) helming.
The movie was, of course, shot on only a fraction of the first film's budget (perhaps less than ten percent of it), and it shows. Hero of the Federation is shot on video, with low light levels, to make it look like film, and perhaps also to compensate for the limited F/X resources. The recycled image of the air strike from the original film apart, in the battles we typically get a few, usually close-in shots of bugs interspersed among a lot more shots of harried humans shouting and shooting their guns at targets off screen, all in the dark and during a storm. Following that the soldiers whose story we follow are trapped by the Bug assault in an abandoned outpost on a forbidding planet, where they stumble upon a fallen war hero (Richard Burgi's Captain Dax).
Additionally, none of the characters from the original return, and only one of the cast members does so, Brenda Strong, who had a minor supporting role as Carmen and Zander's commanding officer, Captain Deladier. Deladier having died in the original, she appears as a totally new character, "Sergeant Dede Rake," a larger but less glamorous part consistent with the film's new tone.
The satirical parody that characterized the first movie is confined to brief bits at the beginning and end. In between, we get a straight war drama which after the first half hour or so starts to shade over into horror movie territory as all the characters begin to act very strangely. During it we get the darker, grimmer, more ambivalent look and feel of cinematic recollections of the Korean conflict, and to the credit of the film's makers, this is not just an excuse for the lower production values.15 The grizzled, tired quality of the Troopers we see this time around (so different in that from the fresh-faced and gung-ho Rico, Flores and Benes), and especially Dax's cynicism, are strikingly juxtaposed with the government's upbeat official line, the comic bits about them played rather more broadly than in the original film to heighten the contrast with what is really happening "over there" (and perhaps because the writer wanted to make sure the audience "got it" this time around). The unseen menace that drives our heroes to turn on each other, while admittedly cliché today, is appropriate in its evocativeness of Heinlein's work (not least, his 1951 classic The Puppet Masters), the fears in the background to this chapter of film history, and the insanity swallowing everyone up by this point.
The response to the movie was on the whole unfavorable, and I have to admit that I shared that opinion when I first saw it. However, my opinion of it improved when I recently watched it again for this review. As one might expect given Tippett's storied technical career, the filmmakers' get the most out of their resources, certainly not matching the spectacle of the first movie, but nonetheless doing better than might be expected (the action scenes have punch, and all things considered the Bugs look as good this time as in the last), and certainly well enough to tell this particular story. While presenting Rico, Benes and company seeming worn-out and war-weary might have made the film more effective, as well as giving the series greater continuity, the casting works here, not just Burgi (and more surprisingly, Strong), but also Ed Lauter as Jack Shepherd, Colleen Porch as Lei Sahara and Kelly Carlson as Charlie Soda. The result is on the whole more watchable than most straight-to-video genre film, even if lacking in many of the things (the epic battles, the humor and parody throughout) that fans liked about the original.
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, which came out last September (and also marks screenwriter Neumeier's directorial debut), is something of a return to the roots of the series. Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico, who is a colonel now, and in the first few minutes of the film ends up on death row when he strikes a superior officer, his old friend General Dix Hauser (Boris Kodjoe), who had been about to shoot a farmer in a bar fight that got out of hand.
However, his neck is saved by Dix at the last second (literally) so that they can send him on a secret mission--to rescue Sky Marshal Omar Anoke (Stephen Hogan). Stranded on planet OM-1 after a visit to the front lines with only a handful of troopers and crew, he is in danger of being captured and compromising crucial military secrets, in particular the location of the planet Sanctuary, site of an important fleet base. Compounding the problem, the Sky Marshal (a flamboyant figure to begin with, with a successful second career as a singer that has increased his popularity) has been acting erratically for some time now, a fact that his second-in-command, Admiral Enolo Phid (Amanda Donohoe), has been keeping quiet.
As the premise implies, Marauder has a brighter, flashier look and feel, and a broader scope, which serve it well in its return to the propaganda movie parody approach of the original. Fans who wondered where the powered armor was during the first film will be happy to see that, as the title hints, it is featured prominently here.16 The satire also touches on some issues the previous two films did not explore, like the attitude of wartime states toward dissent (visible and growing at this point in the conflict, despite the execution of protestors); the games that go along with state secrecy, covert military and intelligence operations, and the management of the media; and the Federation's treatment of religion, which it goes from suppressing to mobilizing as a resource in the war--much of it with an eye to the conflict the U.S. is currently embroiled in.
The film suffers somewhat from its slender budget (the constraints of which are more obvious here than in the second film, on account of the bigger scale of the story), and the less polished feel of the production. However, viewers who liked the first film are likely to find it more satisfying than the 2004 sequel, and perhaps even look forward to a fourth installment.
Looking Back
The trio of Starship Troopers movies made to date certainly do not comprise the most successful trilogy in science fiction history. Nonetheless, the first film, and to a lesser extent, the whole set, are something unique in genre cinema. Despite George Lucas, big-budget space opera (indeed, even just space opera-ish material) has been a screen rarity, the few examples outside his six famous films rarely getting made, and even more rarely capturing much audience interest, even when done well. In recent years the highly praised Firefly spin-off Serenity flopped, while The Chronicles of Riddick failed to get the reception that would have warranted the big-budget trilogy originally anticipated (though apparently there is still buzz about more modestly budgeted, independently produced sequels).
In retrospect a big-budget satirical space war movie is even less likely than any of those other concepts was, but Starship Troopers delivered exactly that, and the result actually seems to have become more relevant with time. Ironically, just after the film satirized World War II-vintage militarism, the United States descended into a manic celebration of exactly that, Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan hitting theaters and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation hitting shelves the year after.17 After the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was to the memory of World War II to which pundits and politicians turned for precedents, for analogies, for inspiration.18 Verhoeven himself drew parallels between the film and the War on Terror in the interviews since that time, like this one with Ain't It Cool News:
The war remains a problematic subject for Hollywood, as the troubled release of Uwe Boll's Postal (about which I interviewed the director of that film for Strange Horizons earlier this year) demonstrated.19 Nonetheless, in the most recent twist to that particular story, Hollywood recently announced plans to film Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, a book often seen as a foil to Heinlein's novel. I won't hazard a guess as to what will actually come of the project, science fiction movies based on well-known books all too often ending up in production hell. Yet, assuming the film based on Haldeman's book actually gets made and proves to be a success, it's easy to picture viewers looking back at Verhoeven's movie as an important precursor.
Footnotes
1 Readers should note that this was not the first screen version of Heinlein's book, that distinction going to a short-run animated Japanese series in 1989. Incidentally, I have been unable to find it on DVD, at least in North America.
2 "Death From Above: The Making of Starship Troopers," in Starship Troopers (Special Edition), dir. Jeffrey Schwarz, writ. Tyler Hubby, DVD, Sony, 2002. This DVD extra is far better than the usual expressions of mutual admiration and shots of actors in front of green screens that tend to accompany films like this one. The writer, director and producer discuss the film's writing, casting, theme and overall aesthetic, and it is strongly recommended to readers interested in those aspects of the film.
3 Heinlein famously responded to his attackers by saying that the word "veteran" in the book only meant something analogous to "civil servant," but the text offers little evidence for this reading. (This was in the afterword to his 1958 "Who Are The Heirs of Patrick Henry?" which readers can find reprinted in Expanded Universe (Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 2003). Those looking for a close reading of the book with attention to that question can check out James Gifford's essay on the subject, "The Nature of 'Federal Service' in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers," Site:RAH: The Robert Heinlein Homepage. Accessed at http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf.
4 Michael Moorcock, "Starship Stormtroopers," Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 4, pp. 42-4. Accessed at http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/Moorcock.htm.
5 It is worth noting that Heinlein's fans can be astonishingly combative, even against each other, as I learned the hard way after penning a small article commemorating the "Heinlein Centennial" for Tangent Online last summer.
6 These sentiments, also expressed by Johnny's father, make clear that, at least in peacetime, the culture of the Federation is not militaristic. However, as Heinlein acknowledged himself, the book was intended to glorify the "poor, bloody infantry." Such glorification of the military, especially in a story where military service is seen as proof of civic fitness, may reasonably be considered to qualify the book as militaristic.
7 Even as his economics shifted rightward, Heinlein remained a progressive on race and gender (though his image in this regard has been tarnished by changing expectations, and of course, his publication of Farnham's Freehold), a resolute atheist, an opponent of government regulation of the moral sphere, and not least of all, a writer willing to experiment with unconventional ideas--enough so that he could produce Strangers in a Strange Land, a book near and dear to many in the counterculture of the 1960s.
8 From that standpoint, it may also be relevant that the Federation originated in a revolt of disgruntled veterans whose goal is "law and order," pure and simple. Indeed, in this regard the Federation's founding (and possibly aspects of its governance) come quite close to the understanding of fascism Wilhelm Reich offered as "a mixture of rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas." See Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), p. 7. Accessed at http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf. However, I should make clear that I believe any such resemblance to be unintentional on Heinlein's part.
9 Schwarz, 2002.
10 The citizens also tolerate a great deal more control over their personal lives, as with the requirement that they get a government license before they can have children--and the favoritism the government shows to fully franchised citizens, which has the effect of compelling some would-be mothers to perform military service. (In the third film in the series, viewers also learn that the Federation has long suppressed religious freedom as well.) The film also offers a number of subtle reminders that the Federation is not an egalitarian place. While socially and economically privileged Johnny can take his place at Harvard for granted, Shujimi (Anthony Ruivivar), who earned his way in, had to enlist in the military to pay for it. Additionally, in a deleted scene included on the Special Edition of the DVD, Carmen tells Johnny's parents, unlike hers, "have money, so they don't need to be citizens," raising the relationship between economic and political power that Heinlein's book glossed over.
11 Screenwriter Ed Neumeier mentions in the documentary "Death From Above: The Making of Starship Troopers" that the image in his head when he was developing the screenplay was "Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue go to outer space and fight giant bugs and become Nazis." Schwarz, 2002.
12 The replacement of the drop capsules with the drop ships, which look like World War II landing craft, is one example of this. Schwarz, 2002.
13 There were many accusations that the film was fascistic, the most famous of them an editorial that ran in the Washington Post shortly after the movie's release. Stephen Hunter, "Goosestepping at the Movies: Starship Troopers and the Nazi Aesthetic," Washington Post, 11 Nov. 1997.
14 One should keep in mind that of a film's total gross, usually just 40-50 percent goes to the studio, so that to make back its budget at the box office, a $100 million movie would need to earn $200 million or more. Of course, no film depends on ticket sales for its entire income, video, television rights, merchandising and the complexities of subsidies playing very large roles, but this nonetheless goes a long way to defining expectations, and the revenue from those other income streams.
15 In the "Inside the Federation" extra on the special edition DVD, screenwriter Neumeier acknowledges the influence of Sam Fuller, the director of films like The Steel Helmet.
16 The "Marauder" powered armor is not the only new reference to the book. This film also marks the first reference to the planet Sanctuary (prominently featured in the book) in the series.
17 Interestingly enough, another, major space war film appearing at this time, 1999's Wing Commander, drew heavily on the imagery and history of the Second World War, the basic plot a refight of the Battle of Midway.
18 Watching the film since then, one can be struck by how easily one can turn the film's script into the rhetoric of FOX News and company simply by scratching out the word "Bug" and replacing it with one referring to the ethno-religious bogeymen of our time.
19 It may also be telling that the third installment was a German-South African co-production, rather than one financed by an American company.
First published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, DECEMBER 2008
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
In the classic Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, Juan "Johnny" Rico, the son of a wealthy Filipino businessman living in Buenos Aires, enlists in the Terran Mobile Infantry after high school, against his father's wishes. Through his training, and his service in the war that subsequently begins (when the alien arachnids attack his hometown of B.A.), Johnny goes from being a callow child of privilege to a responsible leader of men as an Infantry officer, and citizen of the Federation.
The famous 1997 film retains the basic outline of the book, as well as many of the characters and incidents, but as one might expect from a movie designed as a Hollywood summer blockbuster, there are some significant changes.1 Not the least of these is the shift in emphasis from Johnny's development in Heinlein's futuristic bildungsroman, to action-adventure and spectacle. (It has to be admitted that the novel is a bit of a disappointment for readers looking for a thrill ride. After the adrenaline rush of the opening raid against the Skinnies, the book offers very little action, and that written more with an eye to realistically providing a sense of the confusion of battle rather than visceral excitement.)
The film also has a broader scope than the novel, which is narrated by Johnny in the first person. It gives rather more time to other characters, particularly those who came with Johnny (played by Casper Van Dien) from school, like Carmen Benes (a pre-Wild Things Denise Richards), and in this case, Dizzy Flores, who in the film is a young woman (Dina Meyer) serving with Johnny in the Infantry. (In the book there were women starship pilots, like Carmen, but in the film the Infantry is fully coed.) They brought their emotional baggage from high school with them, the new circumstances facilitating the carrying over of two interconnected love triangles, one between Johnny, Carmen (now Johnny's high school girlfriend, whom he basically followed into the service) and Dizzy (who followed Johnny in her turn, even requesting and getting a transfer to his platoon); and another between Johnny, Carmen and her fellow starship pilot, Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon).
Of course, viewers had plenty to say about those changes, not all of it positive (apart from the Oscar-nominated special effects, which drew almost universal acclaim, and still hold up very well a decade later). The casting dismayed some, who felt that the principal characters were insufficiently diverse in a story where racial harmony and gender equality were supposed to have been perfectly realized (in particular displeased by the decision to cast Van Dien as Rico).
Along with the romantic entanglements, and the other trappings of American high school life (a slice of Americana, down to the high school football game and the prom), that aspect of it led some to derisively joke about the film being "Beverly Hills 90210 in space" (Van Dien and Meyer having both appeared on that show prior to this movie), or "Melrose Space." Other fans of the book were dismayed at not seeing the powered armor widely remembered as a hallmark of the story, an absence justified by producer Jon Davison on budgetary grounds (in particular the cost and time wire-work on that scale would have absorbed) and dramatic ones (as the sight of the soldiers "bouncing" about the field would easily have looked very silly).2
The big controversy, however, really centered on the portrayal of the social order in the film, which is not surprising given that it had been controversial among the novel's readers from the time of the book's first appearance. In Heinlein's future, the Federation is run solely by military veterans, who alone enjoy the full rights of citizenship--the franchise, and candidacy for high office.3 This, and other aspects of the future in the book, led some to see Heinlein's story as fascistic. Indeed, the book became so closely identified with such tendencies in the genre that Michael Moorcock titled his famous 1978 essay about the subject "Starship Stormtroopers."4
Of Starship Stormtroopers
Of course, many of Heinlein's fans have flatly rejected such a reading of the story.5They can and do legitimately point out that the Federation was not established in the name of traditional values or institutions (like the family, organized religion, the martial spirit, or anything else), and nor does it seem to take much interest in upholding their status. The military may enjoy a privileged place in the political system as the sole gateway to full political rights (the franchise, and public office), but serving soldiers are subordinate to those who have returned to civilian life, not a word is breathed about military rule per se, and criticism of the military is freely expressed by civilians, including the very physician examining Johnny when he applies.6
Additionally, Heinlein repeatedly stresses that the Federation represents a historical maximum in the personal freedom its citizens enjoy. (Indeed, even those serving in the military enjoy far more freedom in some ways than those serving in any existing military today, free to put in their resignation at any time outside of actual combat.) There is no mention of corporatist economics, which the Heinlein of the 1950s (any interest in alternatives to the free market by this point long behind him) would in any case be expected to strongly disapprove of. And of course, this society boasted perfect, matter-of-fact racial and national equality.7
Consequently, the Federation is very far from fitting the description of any fascist state in history, or any other kind of "totalitarian" state for that matter, and Heinlein's defenders are absolutely right to point this out. And yet—-it is not so simple a matter as that to dismiss the claims, especially when one distinguishes between the culture of the Federation as a whole, and the book actually depicting this world. The story's marginalization of social and economic questions in this "society that works"; the emphasis on punitive discipline, corporal punishment, and the echo of 1950s-era hysteria about "kids out of control"; the gleeful contempt for liberal sensibilities expressed by Johnny's educators--all of these at the very least identify the story with a fairly harsh brand of conservatism, while offering abundant material to those looking to identify the film with fascist ideas, to see in the vigilante vets who founded the Federation, and their political heirs, something of the post-World War I Freikorps.8
The conception of the enemy as mindless, sub-human, literally insectoid (and the not unreasonable tendency of some readers to see them as stand-ins for human opponents) also echoes the crudest sorts of nationalist and racialist propaganda, and Johnny himself embraces the rooting of morality in a harshly socio-biological view of life, reminiscent of nineteenth century Social Darwinism and rhetoric about a growing nation's need for "breathing room." While it is difficult to pin any particular political label on Heinlein, many aspects of Heinlein's politics as the author himself openly expressed them at the time (his defense of McCarthyism, his hard line in the Cold War), do not exactly discourage such perceptions.
In short, while the Federation is quite different from fascist states like Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, one can see something of fascism's spirit in it. And to the chagrin of quite a few fans of the book, it is this view of the book that the film's creators embraced, using the material furnished by Heinlein's novel as a launch pad for a satire of fascism and militarism, a decision perhaps not all that surprising given the creative team in charge: director Paul Verhoeven, working with screenwriter Ed Neumeier, the duo who gave the world the original Robocop (certainly one of the sharpest satires to come out of Hollywood in the 1980s).
Their touch is evident throughout, in the small details (like the zany commercials and news programs), and the large. In this vision of a futuristic "good society," society's less seemly aspects (and one must assume they still exist, given the lack of evidence to the contrary) are tucked out of sight, unmentioned--or normalized, like the live, televised executions that air on every channel. The same goes for the complexities of political history. (There is a quick reference to "Mormon extremists" who have intruded into Bug territory, which Verhoeven has pointed out is a reminder that, contrary to how the Federation would have it, the conflict with the Bugs did not precisely begin with the attack on B.A..9)
Instead, the sanitized, carefully controlled media speaks in a single voice reminiscent of '40s-era newsreels in its complacent authority, simplicity of outlook and uncomplicated aggressiveness, no trace of skepticism, cynicism, doubt, difference or dissent ever intruding. No one on screen dares (or at least, thinks) to utter the kind of anti-military sentiment that was unsurprising in the book, any more than these things would have turned up in the World War II films that inspired the product.10 Johnny and friends are as vacuous as they are eager, earnest and enthusiastic, a "right-wing group of beautiful, empty-headed people doing exactly what they're told to do" as science fiction historian Paul Sammon puts it.11 From beginning to end they never do a double-take at the state worship and state violence drenching their culture, and increasingly their lives--even after Johnny (barely) gets through the bloody, bungled mess that is the Battle of Klendathu (which evokes argument only over tactics, not strategy, policy or general goals in the press). Their recruiting poster looks and recruiting poster flatness makes them come across as idealized, mindless figures out of propaganda--and indeed, the film closes with a recruiting commercial featuring Johnny and Carmen.
Given this vision of the nation-in-arms at its most ridiculous, the acting and casting are actually perfect, especially when one considers that the aesthetic is not solely derived from that of Anglo-American wartime film.12 Indeed, it fits in neatly with the considerable borrowing from Nazi aesthetic expressions, ranging from the uniforms (particularly the one worn by Neil Patrick Harris in the role of Colonel Carl Jenkins) and other regalia, to the staging and cinematography of the crowd scenes, reminiscent of Nazi rallies.
The Sequels: Starship Troopers 2 and 3
Predictably, much of the audience didn't get the joke, the critical elite included. Being a satirist always means running the risk of being misunderstood, and especially being thought to promote what you are actually criticizing.13 However, the controversy did not result in a blockbuster. When all was said and done Starship Troopers took in about $55 million in the U.S., and another $66 million overseas, making for a global total of $121 million. Given that it cost $105 million to make, these earnings had to be considered a significant disappointment.14
Nonetheless, box office failure has never stopped Hollywood from trying to milk a potentially profitable franchise, and in 1999 a spin-off television series hit the airwaves (executive produced by Verhoeven himself), Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, but it proved short-lived. There were distribution problems, of course, not least of them the destruction of the story arcs when they were aired out of order, but there was a more fundamental issue; the show was clearly an uneasy cross of kid's weekday morning cartoon with the very adult vision of the film. While more successful on that level than one might expect, the result was a military procedural somewhat more mature than what one expected in that time slot, but much tamer in its depiction of the still-abundant action (and other things), the social comment toned down, the plot considerably simplified.
Instead the series continued in live-action format, specifically the straight-to-video sequel format, with the first of these appearing in 2004, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation. Once again Ed Neumeier penned the script, with acclaimed special effects artist Phil Tippett (who supervised the creature effects in the original) helming.
The movie was, of course, shot on only a fraction of the first film's budget (perhaps less than ten percent of it), and it shows. Hero of the Federation is shot on video, with low light levels, to make it look like film, and perhaps also to compensate for the limited F/X resources. The recycled image of the air strike from the original film apart, in the battles we typically get a few, usually close-in shots of bugs interspersed among a lot more shots of harried humans shouting and shooting their guns at targets off screen, all in the dark and during a storm. Following that the soldiers whose story we follow are trapped by the Bug assault in an abandoned outpost on a forbidding planet, where they stumble upon a fallen war hero (Richard Burgi's Captain Dax).
Additionally, none of the characters from the original return, and only one of the cast members does so, Brenda Strong, who had a minor supporting role as Carmen and Zander's commanding officer, Captain Deladier. Deladier having died in the original, she appears as a totally new character, "Sergeant Dede Rake," a larger but less glamorous part consistent with the film's new tone.
The satirical parody that characterized the first movie is confined to brief bits at the beginning and end. In between, we get a straight war drama which after the first half hour or so starts to shade over into horror movie territory as all the characters begin to act very strangely. During it we get the darker, grimmer, more ambivalent look and feel of cinematic recollections of the Korean conflict, and to the credit of the film's makers, this is not just an excuse for the lower production values.15 The grizzled, tired quality of the Troopers we see this time around (so different in that from the fresh-faced and gung-ho Rico, Flores and Benes), and especially Dax's cynicism, are strikingly juxtaposed with the government's upbeat official line, the comic bits about them played rather more broadly than in the original film to heighten the contrast with what is really happening "over there" (and perhaps because the writer wanted to make sure the audience "got it" this time around). The unseen menace that drives our heroes to turn on each other, while admittedly cliché today, is appropriate in its evocativeness of Heinlein's work (not least, his 1951 classic The Puppet Masters), the fears in the background to this chapter of film history, and the insanity swallowing everyone up by this point.
The response to the movie was on the whole unfavorable, and I have to admit that I shared that opinion when I first saw it. However, my opinion of it improved when I recently watched it again for this review. As one might expect given Tippett's storied technical career, the filmmakers' get the most out of their resources, certainly not matching the spectacle of the first movie, but nonetheless doing better than might be expected (the action scenes have punch, and all things considered the Bugs look as good this time as in the last), and certainly well enough to tell this particular story. While presenting Rico, Benes and company seeming worn-out and war-weary might have made the film more effective, as well as giving the series greater continuity, the casting works here, not just Burgi (and more surprisingly, Strong), but also Ed Lauter as Jack Shepherd, Colleen Porch as Lei Sahara and Kelly Carlson as Charlie Soda. The result is on the whole more watchable than most straight-to-video genre film, even if lacking in many of the things (the epic battles, the humor and parody throughout) that fans liked about the original.
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, which came out last September (and also marks screenwriter Neumeier's directorial debut), is something of a return to the roots of the series. Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico, who is a colonel now, and in the first few minutes of the film ends up on death row when he strikes a superior officer, his old friend General Dix Hauser (Boris Kodjoe), who had been about to shoot a farmer in a bar fight that got out of hand.
However, his neck is saved by Dix at the last second (literally) so that they can send him on a secret mission--to rescue Sky Marshal Omar Anoke (Stephen Hogan). Stranded on planet OM-1 after a visit to the front lines with only a handful of troopers and crew, he is in danger of being captured and compromising crucial military secrets, in particular the location of the planet Sanctuary, site of an important fleet base. Compounding the problem, the Sky Marshal (a flamboyant figure to begin with, with a successful second career as a singer that has increased his popularity) has been acting erratically for some time now, a fact that his second-in-command, Admiral Enolo Phid (Amanda Donohoe), has been keeping quiet.
As the premise implies, Marauder has a brighter, flashier look and feel, and a broader scope, which serve it well in its return to the propaganda movie parody approach of the original. Fans who wondered where the powered armor was during the first film will be happy to see that, as the title hints, it is featured prominently here.16 The satire also touches on some issues the previous two films did not explore, like the attitude of wartime states toward dissent (visible and growing at this point in the conflict, despite the execution of protestors); the games that go along with state secrecy, covert military and intelligence operations, and the management of the media; and the Federation's treatment of religion, which it goes from suppressing to mobilizing as a resource in the war--much of it with an eye to the conflict the U.S. is currently embroiled in.
The film suffers somewhat from its slender budget (the constraints of which are more obvious here than in the second film, on account of the bigger scale of the story), and the less polished feel of the production. However, viewers who liked the first film are likely to find it more satisfying than the 2004 sequel, and perhaps even look forward to a fourth installment.
Looking Back
The trio of Starship Troopers movies made to date certainly do not comprise the most successful trilogy in science fiction history. Nonetheless, the first film, and to a lesser extent, the whole set, are something unique in genre cinema. Despite George Lucas, big-budget space opera (indeed, even just space opera-ish material) has been a screen rarity, the few examples outside his six famous films rarely getting made, and even more rarely capturing much audience interest, even when done well. In recent years the highly praised Firefly spin-off Serenity flopped, while The Chronicles of Riddick failed to get the reception that would have warranted the big-budget trilogy originally anticipated (though apparently there is still buzz about more modestly budgeted, independently produced sequels).
In retrospect a big-budget satirical space war movie is even less likely than any of those other concepts was, but Starship Troopers delivered exactly that, and the result actually seems to have become more relevant with time. Ironically, just after the film satirized World War II-vintage militarism, the United States descended into a manic celebration of exactly that, Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan hitting theaters and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation hitting shelves the year after.17 After the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was to the memory of World War II to which pundits and politicians turned for precedents, for analogies, for inspiration.18 Verhoeven himself drew parallels between the film and the War on Terror in the interviews since that time, like this one with Ain't It Cool News:
The whole situation in Afghanistan is almost an exact copy of STARSHIP TROOPERS; the whole gung ho-mentality of bombing everything, blasting the Taliban-forces out of the caves. I put all that in STARSHIP TROOPERS! The corrupted atmosphere of propaganda, once invented by Goebbels, has now taken over the United States as well. It's extremely interesting to see how the media can besiege an entire nation with propaganda.Verhoeven's unabashed expression of such views likely did not help his Hollywood career in that rally-round-the-flag moment, and neither did the projects he had planned. (Discussed here in another interview with the British newspaper, The Independent , they included a film about the Medieval crusades.).
The war remains a problematic subject for Hollywood, as the troubled release of Uwe Boll's Postal (about which I interviewed the director of that film for Strange Horizons earlier this year) demonstrated.19 Nonetheless, in the most recent twist to that particular story, Hollywood recently announced plans to film Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, a book often seen as a foil to Heinlein's novel. I won't hazard a guess as to what will actually come of the project, science fiction movies based on well-known books all too often ending up in production hell. Yet, assuming the film based on Haldeman's book actually gets made and proves to be a success, it's easy to picture viewers looking back at Verhoeven's movie as an important precursor.
Footnotes
1 Readers should note that this was not the first screen version of Heinlein's book, that distinction going to a short-run animated Japanese series in 1989. Incidentally, I have been unable to find it on DVD, at least in North America.
2 "Death From Above: The Making of Starship Troopers," in Starship Troopers (Special Edition), dir. Jeffrey Schwarz, writ. Tyler Hubby, DVD, Sony, 2002. This DVD extra is far better than the usual expressions of mutual admiration and shots of actors in front of green screens that tend to accompany films like this one. The writer, director and producer discuss the film's writing, casting, theme and overall aesthetic, and it is strongly recommended to readers interested in those aspects of the film.
3 Heinlein famously responded to his attackers by saying that the word "veteran" in the book only meant something analogous to "civil servant," but the text offers little evidence for this reading. (This was in the afterword to his 1958 "Who Are The Heirs of Patrick Henry?" which readers can find reprinted in Expanded Universe (Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 2003). Those looking for a close reading of the book with attention to that question can check out James Gifford's essay on the subject, "The Nature of 'Federal Service' in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers," Site:RAH: The Robert Heinlein Homepage. Accessed at http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf.
4 Michael Moorcock, "Starship Stormtroopers," Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 4, pp. 42-4. Accessed at http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/Moorcock.htm.
5 It is worth noting that Heinlein's fans can be astonishingly combative, even against each other, as I learned the hard way after penning a small article commemorating the "Heinlein Centennial" for Tangent Online last summer.
6 These sentiments, also expressed by Johnny's father, make clear that, at least in peacetime, the culture of the Federation is not militaristic. However, as Heinlein acknowledged himself, the book was intended to glorify the "poor, bloody infantry." Such glorification of the military, especially in a story where military service is seen as proof of civic fitness, may reasonably be considered to qualify the book as militaristic.
7 Even as his economics shifted rightward, Heinlein remained a progressive on race and gender (though his image in this regard has been tarnished by changing expectations, and of course, his publication of Farnham's Freehold), a resolute atheist, an opponent of government regulation of the moral sphere, and not least of all, a writer willing to experiment with unconventional ideas--enough so that he could produce Strangers in a Strange Land, a book near and dear to many in the counterculture of the 1960s.
8 From that standpoint, it may also be relevant that the Federation originated in a revolt of disgruntled veterans whose goal is "law and order," pure and simple. Indeed, in this regard the Federation's founding (and possibly aspects of its governance) come quite close to the understanding of fascism Wilhelm Reich offered as "a mixture of rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas." See Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), p. 7. Accessed at http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf. However, I should make clear that I believe any such resemblance to be unintentional on Heinlein's part.
9 Schwarz, 2002.
10 The citizens also tolerate a great deal more control over their personal lives, as with the requirement that they get a government license before they can have children--and the favoritism the government shows to fully franchised citizens, which has the effect of compelling some would-be mothers to perform military service. (In the third film in the series, viewers also learn that the Federation has long suppressed religious freedom as well.) The film also offers a number of subtle reminders that the Federation is not an egalitarian place. While socially and economically privileged Johnny can take his place at Harvard for granted, Shujimi (Anthony Ruivivar), who earned his way in, had to enlist in the military to pay for it. Additionally, in a deleted scene included on the Special Edition of the DVD, Carmen tells Johnny's parents, unlike hers, "have money, so they don't need to be citizens," raising the relationship between economic and political power that Heinlein's book glossed over.
11 Screenwriter Ed Neumeier mentions in the documentary "Death From Above: The Making of Starship Troopers" that the image in his head when he was developing the screenplay was "Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue go to outer space and fight giant bugs and become Nazis." Schwarz, 2002.
12 The replacement of the drop capsules with the drop ships, which look like World War II landing craft, is one example of this. Schwarz, 2002.
13 There were many accusations that the film was fascistic, the most famous of them an editorial that ran in the Washington Post shortly after the movie's release. Stephen Hunter, "Goosestepping at the Movies: Starship Troopers and the Nazi Aesthetic," Washington Post, 11 Nov. 1997.
14 One should keep in mind that of a film's total gross, usually just 40-50 percent goes to the studio, so that to make back its budget at the box office, a $100 million movie would need to earn $200 million or more. Of course, no film depends on ticket sales for its entire income, video, television rights, merchandising and the complexities of subsidies playing very large roles, but this nonetheless goes a long way to defining expectations, and the revenue from those other income streams.
15 In the "Inside the Federation" extra on the special edition DVD, screenwriter Neumeier acknowledges the influence of Sam Fuller, the director of films like The Steel Helmet.
16 The "Marauder" powered armor is not the only new reference to the book. This film also marks the first reference to the planet Sanctuary (prominently featured in the book) in the series.
17 Interestingly enough, another, major space war film appearing at this time, 1999's Wing Commander, drew heavily on the imagery and history of the Second World War, the basic plot a refight of the Battle of Midway.
18 Watching the film since then, one can be struck by how easily one can turn the film's script into the rhetoric of FOX News and company simply by scratching out the word "Bug" and replacing it with one referring to the ethno-religious bogeymen of our time.
19 It may also be telling that the third installment was a German-South African co-production, rather than one financed by an American company.
Friday, October 31, 2008
"Two Dooms" and the Memory of World War II in Alternate History
By Nader Elhefnawy
First published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, AUGUST 2008
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
Cyril Kornbluth's novella "Two Dooms" begins with Edward Royland, a theoretical physicist pondering his situation at Los Alamos in May 1945. His dissatisfaction with it is tied to his feeling that the Manhattan Project in which he personally has been involved these last few years was all a colossal waste of time. However, a late development (the completion of "Phase 56c") changes that feeling into a profound anxiety that
Fifty years old now (it first appeared in Venture Science Fiction Magazine in July 1958), "Two Dooms" preceded Philip K. Dick's more famous World War II allohistory, The Man in the High Castle, by three years. Dick's novel is the cleverer and subtler of the two stories, but Kornbluth's earlier novella was the one that truly marked out the trail so many others would follow in the years since. As Gavriel D. Rosenfeld notes in his landmark 2005 study of World War II-themed alternate history, The World Hitler Never Made, "Two Dooms" was the story that "inaugurated the...allohistorical attention towards Nazism" of the post-war period; and in that early Cold War atmosphere, also "the first work to revive the demonic wartime image of the Germans" that had softened with the focus of those years on the Soviet Union and Communism.(2)
One can go even further than Rosenfeld in identifying the elements of this story that would later become standard, if not cliché. As is typical in many later World War II allohistories (Dick's novel included), the defeat of the U.S. in World War II in Kornbluth's novella left the United States occuped by the Axis. The world that results is not only nightmarish in its horror, but nightmarish also in a literal sense—its quality of unreality, highlighted by the witness given to them by a traveler from another time who struggles to return to their saner world. And of course, Kornbluth's comment about World War II is meant to also say something about a more contemporary issue (in the case of "Two Dooms," the invention of the nuclear bomb).
Of course, what is true of the World War II allohistory has a way of being true about allohistorical writing generally. As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young put it in his article "The Third Reich in Alternate History" in the October 2006 issue of the Journal of Popular Culture:
Indeed, this vein has been mined so often that Sidewise Award founder Steven H. Silver wrote in the speculative fiction quarterly Helix that
Far from anomalous, the popularity of the idea seems to me to be over-determined by a multiplicity of factors. First and foremost among them is a major limitation writers of alternate history labor under, namely that a story of this kind only works (at least, as a piece of alternate history) if the audience knows how things really went in our timeline, and so can spot the twist and appreciate the difference when they do see it. This limits the range of potential subjects to what a large readership can be expected to know something about—and care about. Unfortunately that list is a short one, and gets shorter when considered internationally, leaving not very much besides World War II. (The U.S. Civil War, the second most popular genre theme—and which Silver also says he is tired of reading about—is primarily an American preoccupation.)
For the British, and increasingly for Americans as well, it is the war with Germany that dominates popular memory of World War II, and in some sense, history more broadly. Indeed, the fact has long been the butt of jokes. On the G4TV video game review show X-Play hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb routinely joke about the sheer ubiquity of World War II-themed video games, and no doubt many viewers were able to relate when Tripping the Rift's Chode said in the show's pilot episode that "Just once, I'd like to time travel and not see Nazis!" Nonetheless, the Second World War (especially as retold by Stephen Ambrose, Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg) retains its hold on the popular mind.
A related limitation is that the event being tweaked in the story must be large enough to plausibly and recognizably skew the timeline. A fiction writer's alternate history and the "counterfactuals" that historians use to pursue scholarly inquiries are two different things, and it must be admitted that many brilliant alternate histories are utterly unconvincing as historical analysis, Kornbluth's novella included. (For a thorough discussion of what does make for a good counterfactual, see the first chapter of Unmaking the West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World History, by volume editors Philip E. Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker.)
Nonetheless, there is a limit to how far away a writer can move from the actual record and still claim to be writing even an "alternate" history, and World War II happens to be comparatively rich in options for such significant tweaking. Most of those possibilities, at least where an Axis victory is concerned, happen to lie in the fight between the Allies and Germany. After all, Germany was by far the most powerful member of the Axis, with four times the national income and industrial capacity of Japan. Additionally, in a world dominated by European colonial empires, Germany was a lot closer to the centers of gravity of the major players. Japan occupied French and British colonies in East Asia—but Germany conquered France outright, and may have had a real shot at doing the same to Britain itself.
Even a casual reader of history, consequently, finds it easy to come up with world-changing possibilities there. For instance, what if the British frittered away their fighter squadrons trying to defend France in the spring of 1940? What if Lord Halifax succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister instead of Winston Churchill, and opted to make peace with Hitler? What if Germany determinedly pursued the "Mediterranean" strategy, capturing Gibraltar, locking up North Africa and rolling east? And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
By contrast, it is much harder to pick out really war-deciding moments centering on Japanese action. The Battle of Midway is routinely described as a decisive battle, and it did in fact mark the end of Japan's run of victories against the Allies in the Pacific theater in World War II. However, the most likely consequence of even a crushing Japanese victory there would have been to delay an Allied victory by months, the disparity between Japanese and Allied resources simply too large for it to be otherwise. Indeed, the difficulty of imagining Japan coming out of its war victorious is amply demonstrated by editor Peter Tsouras's essay collection Rising Sun Victorious where, despite the title, Japan wins a battle only to lose the war in most of the pieces. (I have yet to see any historian or group of historians even attempt a similar project centering on Italy.)
Additionally, for dramatic and entertainment purposes (and perhaps reflecting a broader conservatism), there is a tendency to alter the timeline in a way that leaves us breathing a sigh of relief that our own twentieth century, horrible as it was, was not worse still. This translates into setbacks, frustrations, disappointments, and horror stories being far more commonplace than wish-fulfilling speculations about what might have been (as we see in many of Michael Moorcock's Seaton Begg stories, for instance). There is also a preference for clearly delineated, recognizable heroes and villains permitting a reading of the events as a historically simplistic but dramatically compelling narrative of good versus evil.
Once again, World War II fits the bill, and especially the Third Reich. It is with the Nazis, rather than the leaders of Japan or Italy, that the idea of the Second World War as a contest between good and evil is so closely associated, so much so that a display of Nazi props has become a cheap way of getting attention. As Winthrop-Young puts it in his article,
The tendency of observers from different points on the ideological spectrum to look at Nazism and see two opposite things is also well established in the historiography. Leftists often view fascism as capitalism's defensive reaction against socialism, while rightists emphasize the socialism in "National Socialism," and the questions get only more complicated from there. Was Nazism a monstrous reassertion of traditional values, or an off-the-wall flight from them to some imagined pagan past? Were its most horrible acts a result of the technological mentality run amok, or a reversion to primitivism, so appalling because the most modern tools are used to achieve the most retrograde ends? In short, writers have successfully used Nazism to represent not only capital "E" evil, but many particular kinds of Evil—something for everybody.
However, none of this is to say that every possibility these parameters offer has been exhausted, and it is equally worthwhile to look at the possibilities writers have tended to ignore. None of these omissions is more glaring than the history of the war on Germany's Eastern Front. While there is at least a vague awareness among most that a great deal of importance happened there (indeed, by any conceivable yardstick, the European war was overwhelmingly a fight between Germany and the Soviet Union), English-language writers focus on the involvement and experiences of the Western allies, particularly Britain and the U.S. Obviously familiarity and national particularism have something to do with this. So does the problem that Norman Davies points out in his recent study, No Simple Victory—that thinking of the war as a struggle primarily between Hitler and Stalin makes it much harder for mainstream opinion to characterize World War Two as a simple contest of good and evil.
Nonetheless, this has entailed a neglect of plenty of interesting ideas. One is a situation in which the Western allies find themselves fighting both Hitler and Stalin at once in 1940. (The League of Nations, after all, came quite close to intervening on Finland's side against the Soviets in the Winter War, which would have exactly this result.) Another is the consequences of a limited German victory against the Allies in the west for the post-war settlement, a German victory against the Allies on D-Day, or at the Battle of the Bulge, easily leaving the Soviet army in control of a larger part of Europe when V-E Day finally arrived.
Of course, it can be pointed out that this kind of World War II counterfactual quickly turns into a Cold War counterfactual, and so far few writers have been willing to try their hand at one (except in the very loose sense of substituting a continent dominated by Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union, as Brad Linaweaver does in "Moon of Ice"). The few exceptions to the rule, like Brendan DuBois' 1999 Resurrection Day, tend to simply confirm the idea that barring a misstep leading to a nuclear war, things would have turned out pretty much as they have.
This may be because, by comparison with World War II allohistory, really interesting Cold War allohistory is inherently difficult to write. The nuclear arms build-up relegated the use of force by both superpowers to the edges of the global chessboard, making it hard to pick out decisive moments on the battlefield (at least, after V-E Day).
The wide gap in material resources between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which is even wider when the Western alliance is compared to the Soviet bloc as a whole, is another constraint. The Soviet Union managed to narrow the gap in the 1950s and 1960s, but despite widespread expectations that the Soviets would eventually catch up, never managed to close it. If anything, the facts have been exaggerated by the attitude of contempt which has replaced the earlier paranoia about Soviet capabilities. The intellectual dominance of a simplistic version of neoliberal economic theory only reinforces the tendency to view the Soviets as hopeless blunderers who could not possibly have done better. (There was never such an attitude toward the Nazis, who are generally held to have been competent industrialists, technical wizards and capable warriors, whatever one makes of them morally.)
The result is that, especially after V-E Day and Hiroshima, plausible, significant alterations to the Cold War's timeline dwindle quickly in number, and tend to be a little too obscure for popular taste. For instance, what if rather than leading to a nuclear war as in DuBois' novel, the Cuban Missile Crisis was avoided altogether, denying Stalinist hard-liners the chance to retake power in the Kremlin, permitting the continuation of liberalizing reforms in the Soviet Union after the early 1960s? This line of reasoning would probably go right over the average reader's head, and also have a much more ambiguous outcome than the occupation of the U.S. by Soviet troops (as happened in jingoistic Cold War-era fantasies like the film Red Dawn and the mini-series Amerika, or the pilot episode of Sliders, a rare television foray into this territory).
It may also be that the Cold War's conclusion is still too near a thing. Rosenfeld notes in his book that the early World War II alternate histories were triumphalistic and moralistic in tone, prone to view history in black and white terms, treating the Nazis as a unique evil and flatly validating the Allied conduct of the war (a tendency "Two Dooms" certainly reflected). As writers and readers gained greater distance on the event, they displayed an increasing tendency to relativize, aestheticize and universalize the conflict, whether in taking a more critical approach to the received version of events; seeing it in shades of gray; regarding it as analogous to other events; or treating it as easy material for entertainment.
The present ubiquity of World War-II themed allohistorical fiction is inconceivable without that greater variety of perspective. It may well be the case that we remain too firmly in the post-Cold War's triumphalistic, moralistic phase to do very much with the idea, especially in the United States, where the outcome of the conflict is widely regarded as not only an American victory, but as fully validating the American way of life. However, the recent success of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may suggest that Americans, too, are starting to find the Cold War a quaint enough thing to enjoy stories of the type. The Cold War may never become as popular a genre topic as World War II, but we could still see a lot more stories of alternate Cold Wars in the years ahead, and many of them are likely to be rooted in the events of alternate World War IIs too long ignored.
Footnotes
1. Cyril Kornbluth, "Two Dooms." In Gordon Van Gelder, One Lamp (New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2003), p. 8.
2. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 100-102.
3. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, "The Third Reich in Alternate History," Journal of Popular Culture 39.5 (2006), p. 879.
4. Ibid., p. 878.
5. Ibid., p. 879.
First published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, AUGUST 2008
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
Cyril Kornbluth's novella "Two Dooms" begins with Edward Royland, a theoretical physicist pondering his situation at Los Alamos in May 1945. His dissatisfaction with it is tied to his feeling that the Manhattan Project in which he personally has been involved these last few years was all a colossal waste of time. However, a late development (the completion of "Phase 56c") changes that feeling into a profound anxiety that
Oppie [Robert Oppenheimer] and the rest of them were going to break the sky, kick humanity right in the crotch, and unleash a prowling monster that would go up and down by night and day peering in all the windows of the world, leaving no sane man unterrified for his life and the lives of his kin.(1)Not sure what to do about it, Royland hopes to clear his mind by going to the nearby Hopi reservation and seeing his old friend the medicine man, Charles Miller Nahataspe. Hearing about his problem, Nahataspe suggests he try "God Food," dried black mushrooms far stronger than peyote, and finds himself transported a hundred and fifty years into an alternate future—the early 22nd century in a timeline where the atomic bomb that has instilled such dread in Royland never materialized, resulting in the conquest of the world by the Axis.
Fifty years old now (it first appeared in Venture Science Fiction Magazine in July 1958), "Two Dooms" preceded Philip K. Dick's more famous World War II allohistory, The Man in the High Castle, by three years. Dick's novel is the cleverer and subtler of the two stories, but Kornbluth's earlier novella was the one that truly marked out the trail so many others would follow in the years since. As Gavriel D. Rosenfeld notes in his landmark 2005 study of World War II-themed alternate history, The World Hitler Never Made, "Two Dooms" was the story that "inaugurated the...allohistorical attention towards Nazism" of the post-war period; and in that early Cold War atmosphere, also "the first work to revive the demonic wartime image of the Germans" that had softened with the focus of those years on the Soviet Union and Communism.(2)
One can go even further than Rosenfeld in identifying the elements of this story that would later become standard, if not cliché. As is typical in many later World War II allohistories (Dick's novel included), the defeat of the U.S. in World War II in Kornbluth's novella left the United States occuped by the Axis. The world that results is not only nightmarish in its horror, but nightmarish also in a literal sense—its quality of unreality, highlighted by the witness given to them by a traveler from another time who struggles to return to their saner world. And of course, Kornbluth's comment about World War II is meant to also say something about a more contemporary issue (in the case of "Two Dooms," the invention of the nuclear bomb).
Of course, what is true of the World War II allohistory has a way of being true about allohistorical writing generally. As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young put it in his article "The Third Reich in Alternate History" in the October 2006 issue of the Journal of Popular Culture:
no matter how loosely or tightly alternate history is defined, there is unanimous agreement that no scenario is treated more often than an altered outcome of the Second World War.(3)This is not only the case where sheer mass is concerned, but also with the most popular, most visible and most acclaimed efforts as well. Dick's High Castle aside, the alternate history novel which achieved the genre's greatest mainstream success in recent memory is surely Robert Harris's Fatherland. The prolific Harry Turtledove, widely hailed as the grand master of the genre, has written not one, but several series exploring different versions of that conflict (the Worldwar, Infamy and "Timeline-191" sequences), as well as numerous additional one-shot novels and shorter works like In The Presence of Mine Enemies. Of the last six winners of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (long form), four are World War II-related (namely J.N. Stroyar's The Children's War, Murray Davies' Collaborator, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Ian R. MacLeod's The Summer Isles), and the same theme turned up yet again last year in another book that grabbed a great deal of mainstream attention (and a place on the New York Times bestseller list)—Michael Chabon's much-discussed The Yiddish Policemen's Union. (Among these, Winthrop-Young observes, "Hitler's victory remains the most popular scenario," as the above list indicates.(4))
Indeed, this vein has been mined so often that Sidewise Award founder Steven H. Silver wrote in the speculative fiction quarterly Helix that
If I've gotten one thing out of reading alternate history for the Sidewise Awards for the past eleven years, it is the strong desire not to have to read any more stories which deal with...World War II.Nonetheless, Silver acknowledges in the piece that writers will surely go on writing them, and he will surely go on reading them. That being the case, it seems only reasonable to ask: why has the alternate history genre come back to these themes, these tropes, time and time again? Why is it that writers keep returning not only to World War II, but to the same might-have-beens, in particular, a crushing Axis-and especially, Nazi-victory with horrific consequences?
Far from anomalous, the popularity of the idea seems to me to be over-determined by a multiplicity of factors. First and foremost among them is a major limitation writers of alternate history labor under, namely that a story of this kind only works (at least, as a piece of alternate history) if the audience knows how things really went in our timeline, and so can spot the twist and appreciate the difference when they do see it. This limits the range of potential subjects to what a large readership can be expected to know something about—and care about. Unfortunately that list is a short one, and gets shorter when considered internationally, leaving not very much besides World War II. (The U.S. Civil War, the second most popular genre theme—and which Silver also says he is tired of reading about—is primarily an American preoccupation.)
For the British, and increasingly for Americans as well, it is the war with Germany that dominates popular memory of World War II, and in some sense, history more broadly. Indeed, the fact has long been the butt of jokes. On the G4TV video game review show X-Play hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb routinely joke about the sheer ubiquity of World War II-themed video games, and no doubt many viewers were able to relate when Tripping the Rift's Chode said in the show's pilot episode that "Just once, I'd like to time travel and not see Nazis!" Nonetheless, the Second World War (especially as retold by Stephen Ambrose, Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg) retains its hold on the popular mind.
A related limitation is that the event being tweaked in the story must be large enough to plausibly and recognizably skew the timeline. A fiction writer's alternate history and the "counterfactuals" that historians use to pursue scholarly inquiries are two different things, and it must be admitted that many brilliant alternate histories are utterly unconvincing as historical analysis, Kornbluth's novella included. (For a thorough discussion of what does make for a good counterfactual, see the first chapter of Unmaking the West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World History, by volume editors Philip E. Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker.)
Nonetheless, there is a limit to how far away a writer can move from the actual record and still claim to be writing even an "alternate" history, and World War II happens to be comparatively rich in options for such significant tweaking. Most of those possibilities, at least where an Axis victory is concerned, happen to lie in the fight between the Allies and Germany. After all, Germany was by far the most powerful member of the Axis, with four times the national income and industrial capacity of Japan. Additionally, in a world dominated by European colonial empires, Germany was a lot closer to the centers of gravity of the major players. Japan occupied French and British colonies in East Asia—but Germany conquered France outright, and may have had a real shot at doing the same to Britain itself.
Even a casual reader of history, consequently, finds it easy to come up with world-changing possibilities there. For instance, what if the British frittered away their fighter squadrons trying to defend France in the spring of 1940? What if Lord Halifax succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister instead of Winston Churchill, and opted to make peace with Hitler? What if Germany determinedly pursued the "Mediterranean" strategy, capturing Gibraltar, locking up North Africa and rolling east? And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
By contrast, it is much harder to pick out really war-deciding moments centering on Japanese action. The Battle of Midway is routinely described as a decisive battle, and it did in fact mark the end of Japan's run of victories against the Allies in the Pacific theater in World War II. However, the most likely consequence of even a crushing Japanese victory there would have been to delay an Allied victory by months, the disparity between Japanese and Allied resources simply too large for it to be otherwise. Indeed, the difficulty of imagining Japan coming out of its war victorious is amply demonstrated by editor Peter Tsouras's essay collection Rising Sun Victorious where, despite the title, Japan wins a battle only to lose the war in most of the pieces. (I have yet to see any historian or group of historians even attempt a similar project centering on Italy.)
Additionally, for dramatic and entertainment purposes (and perhaps reflecting a broader conservatism), there is a tendency to alter the timeline in a way that leaves us breathing a sigh of relief that our own twentieth century, horrible as it was, was not worse still. This translates into setbacks, frustrations, disappointments, and horror stories being far more commonplace than wish-fulfilling speculations about what might have been (as we see in many of Michael Moorcock's Seaton Begg stories, for instance). There is also a preference for clearly delineated, recognizable heroes and villains permitting a reading of the events as a historically simplistic but dramatically compelling narrative of good versus evil.
Once again, World War II fits the bill, and especially the Third Reich. It is with the Nazis, rather than the leaders of Japan or Italy, that the idea of the Second World War as a contest between good and evil is so closely associated, so much so that a display of Nazi props has become a cheap way of getting attention. As Winthrop-Young puts it in his article,
Almost any combination of swastikas, black uniforms, and German accents will ensure instant drama by providing an immediately accessible good-versus-bad set up with little need for further elaboration.(5)It helps that the Nazi regime offers potential material for a wide range of comments and analogies. It can be used to represent perceived foreign menaces, even quite different ones (as with those who read Harris's Fatherland as being not about Nazi Germany, but the Germany of the 1990s); to say something about racism, religious persecution, the destruction of democracy, and the rise of totalitarianism.
The tendency of observers from different points on the ideological spectrum to look at Nazism and see two opposite things is also well established in the historiography. Leftists often view fascism as capitalism's defensive reaction against socialism, while rightists emphasize the socialism in "National Socialism," and the questions get only more complicated from there. Was Nazism a monstrous reassertion of traditional values, or an off-the-wall flight from them to some imagined pagan past? Were its most horrible acts a result of the technological mentality run amok, or a reversion to primitivism, so appalling because the most modern tools are used to achieve the most retrograde ends? In short, writers have successfully used Nazism to represent not only capital "E" evil, but many particular kinds of Evil—something for everybody.
However, none of this is to say that every possibility these parameters offer has been exhausted, and it is equally worthwhile to look at the possibilities writers have tended to ignore. None of these omissions is more glaring than the history of the war on Germany's Eastern Front. While there is at least a vague awareness among most that a great deal of importance happened there (indeed, by any conceivable yardstick, the European war was overwhelmingly a fight between Germany and the Soviet Union), English-language writers focus on the involvement and experiences of the Western allies, particularly Britain and the U.S. Obviously familiarity and national particularism have something to do with this. So does the problem that Norman Davies points out in his recent study, No Simple Victory—that thinking of the war as a struggle primarily between Hitler and Stalin makes it much harder for mainstream opinion to characterize World War Two as a simple contest of good and evil.
Nonetheless, this has entailed a neglect of plenty of interesting ideas. One is a situation in which the Western allies find themselves fighting both Hitler and Stalin at once in 1940. (The League of Nations, after all, came quite close to intervening on Finland's side against the Soviets in the Winter War, which would have exactly this result.) Another is the consequences of a limited German victory against the Allies in the west for the post-war settlement, a German victory against the Allies on D-Day, or at the Battle of the Bulge, easily leaving the Soviet army in control of a larger part of Europe when V-E Day finally arrived.
Of course, it can be pointed out that this kind of World War II counterfactual quickly turns into a Cold War counterfactual, and so far few writers have been willing to try their hand at one (except in the very loose sense of substituting a continent dominated by Nazi Germany for the Soviet Union, as Brad Linaweaver does in "Moon of Ice"). The few exceptions to the rule, like Brendan DuBois' 1999 Resurrection Day, tend to simply confirm the idea that barring a misstep leading to a nuclear war, things would have turned out pretty much as they have.
This may be because, by comparison with World War II allohistory, really interesting Cold War allohistory is inherently difficult to write. The nuclear arms build-up relegated the use of force by both superpowers to the edges of the global chessboard, making it hard to pick out decisive moments on the battlefield (at least, after V-E Day).
The wide gap in material resources between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which is even wider when the Western alliance is compared to the Soviet bloc as a whole, is another constraint. The Soviet Union managed to narrow the gap in the 1950s and 1960s, but despite widespread expectations that the Soviets would eventually catch up, never managed to close it. If anything, the facts have been exaggerated by the attitude of contempt which has replaced the earlier paranoia about Soviet capabilities. The intellectual dominance of a simplistic version of neoliberal economic theory only reinforces the tendency to view the Soviets as hopeless blunderers who could not possibly have done better. (There was never such an attitude toward the Nazis, who are generally held to have been competent industrialists, technical wizards and capable warriors, whatever one makes of them morally.)
The result is that, especially after V-E Day and Hiroshima, plausible, significant alterations to the Cold War's timeline dwindle quickly in number, and tend to be a little too obscure for popular taste. For instance, what if rather than leading to a nuclear war as in DuBois' novel, the Cuban Missile Crisis was avoided altogether, denying Stalinist hard-liners the chance to retake power in the Kremlin, permitting the continuation of liberalizing reforms in the Soviet Union after the early 1960s? This line of reasoning would probably go right over the average reader's head, and also have a much more ambiguous outcome than the occupation of the U.S. by Soviet troops (as happened in jingoistic Cold War-era fantasies like the film Red Dawn and the mini-series Amerika, or the pilot episode of Sliders, a rare television foray into this territory).
It may also be that the Cold War's conclusion is still too near a thing. Rosenfeld notes in his book that the early World War II alternate histories were triumphalistic and moralistic in tone, prone to view history in black and white terms, treating the Nazis as a unique evil and flatly validating the Allied conduct of the war (a tendency "Two Dooms" certainly reflected). As writers and readers gained greater distance on the event, they displayed an increasing tendency to relativize, aestheticize and universalize the conflict, whether in taking a more critical approach to the received version of events; seeing it in shades of gray; regarding it as analogous to other events; or treating it as easy material for entertainment.
The present ubiquity of World War-II themed allohistorical fiction is inconceivable without that greater variety of perspective. It may well be the case that we remain too firmly in the post-Cold War's triumphalistic, moralistic phase to do very much with the idea, especially in the United States, where the outcome of the conflict is widely regarded as not only an American victory, but as fully validating the American way of life. However, the recent success of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may suggest that Americans, too, are starting to find the Cold War a quaint enough thing to enjoy stories of the type. The Cold War may never become as popular a genre topic as World War II, but we could still see a lot more stories of alternate Cold Wars in the years ahead, and many of them are likely to be rooted in the events of alternate World War IIs too long ignored.
Footnotes
1. Cyril Kornbluth, "Two Dooms." In Gordon Van Gelder, One Lamp (New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2003), p. 8.
2. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 100-102.
3. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, "The Third Reich in Alternate History," Journal of Popular Culture 39.5 (2006), p. 879.
4. Ibid., p. 878.
5. Ibid., p. 879.
Monday, October 27, 2008
The Lies and Times of Colonel Pyat: Looking Back on Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the New York Review of Science Fiction 19.4 (December 2006), p. 22.
Over the last quarter century Michael Moorcock has related the life story of Colonel Maxim "Pyat" Pyatnitski, a minor character from the multiverse of his secret agent Jerry Cornelius. By the time Pyat is "dictating" his tale to Moorcock, shortly before his death in 1977, the colonel is keeping a secondhand clothing shop in Notting Hill, clutching scraps of a nonexistent former glory as he reminisces about Jerry's mother Honoria and bemoans the state of the world.
The Pyat Quartet, which began with Byzantium Endures in 1981, and continued with The Laughter Of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992), was finally completed earlier this year with The Vengeance Of Rome, the appearance of which was barely noticed in the United States. While Random House published the first two books in the quartet-the first only after censoring it-it was unwilling to release the last two volumes of the tetralogy in the U.S.. Moorcock commented in an interview that Random House, and Alfred A. Knopf (to whom Random House offered the rights), feared a backlash from readers who wouldn't recognize the irony in Pyat's anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic rhetoric.1 Random House, however, declined to comment, and Knopf simply said it was not "appropriate for their list," the kind of uninformative banality usually reserved for form rejection letters to unpublished writers. (My own editions of the last two Pyat books came from Random House's British imprint, Jonathan Cape.)
Pyat's ranting aside, it probably didn't help Moorcock's case that his protagonist is a coke-snorting, anti-Semitic Jewish ex-Klansman and Fascist with a taste for eleven year old girls and Nazi stormtroopers. This is not, however, a simple work of politically incorrect shock. Moorcock's stated goal in writing the Pyat cycle was to "examine how the Holocaust could have been permitted by Western culture." It can of course be argued that no work of art can truly explain the Holocaust or any of the other great calamities of the twentieth century. One can also point out that some of this has been done before, particularly his indictment of technological utopianism, which has Pyat constantly identifying himself with H.G. Wells and American pulp science fiction, terming them sources of inspiration or fellow travelers. In particular there is something of Thomas Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow here, in Moorcock's protagonist "born coeval with the century" (Pyat was born on January 1, 1900), preoccupied with entropy and flying machines. As in Pynchon the dream of flight is here intertwined with the nightmare of the Holocaust, the tale all but starting with Pyat's childhood flight in a machine of his own making over the gorge of Babi Yar, scene of the infamous massacres in 1941.
Nonetheless, if Pynchon anticipated some of the story elements (just as Philip K. Dick often anticipated Pynchon) this tale is unquestionably Moorcock's own, and certainly the more eloquent. He succeeds in making the life story of an utterly incoherent man supremely readable and the device of the unreliable narrator, which so easily becomes little more than fodder for dry graduate seminar papers, actually the source of much of the fun. This has led to the inevitable comparisons with Harry Flashman and Baron Munchausen - though the deceits here are far more serious stuff. Pyat's strange odyssey across Europe, the Middle East and the United States, by turns harrowing and hilarious as Candide-like he and his friends stumble from horror to horror, is the story of the twentieth century, not just because of its considerable scope, but his particular way of telling the tale. Pyat's moralizing soars highest when his actions are their lowest, his protestations of purity and goodness most insistent when he is at his most repulsive. His endless professions of idealism and sensitivity are impossibly entangled with greedy, egomaniac self-seeking, convoluted bigotry, perversion, and a boundless capacity for hysterical denial, desperate rationalization and pathological lying.
Through the telling and retelling of his story Pyat, the son of a kosher butcher who abandoned his wife and child in the slums of Kiev, becomes a Romanov prince. The civilian huckster who wandered haplessly across the Ukraine and once rode in the back seat of a plane over embattled Odessa becomes a Cossack cavalryman, a World War I flying hero, a colonel in the White Army. The drop-out from the St. Petersburg Polytechnic becomes the youngest professor in its history, and an engineering genius who created every notable invention of the twentieth century, from the jet engine to the microwave oven.
As his friend Kolya tells him in the Gestapo headquarters in Munich, the evidence weighs very heavily against his version of events, but there is always an explanation, his triumphs always snatched away from him at the last moment. The "Violet Ray" that would have saved Kiev from the Bolsheviks and turned the tide of the Russian Civil War is disrupted when the city's power supply gives out. The multitude of flying machines he builds all crash right after take-off, if they get off the ground at all, and the schemes surrounding them always "inexplicably" turn out to be a con on someone else's part, forcing poor Max to run screaming that he is scapegoat and victim. Even the films which testify to his stardom in Hollywood's silent era as the "White Ace" and the "Masked Buckaroo" have all crumbled to dust.
Bad luck, base treachery, and above all, "Carthage" is always to blame-Carthage, the old adversary of Rome and "New Rome," Holy Byzantium. African, Semitic, Oriental Carthage is for Pyat the embodiment of all that's evil in the world, a fantastic, conspiratorial projection of all he imagines stands against his utopia of a triumphant, Christian Russia, liberated Constantinople and flying cities which civilize the world and explore the cosmos. The Jews, the Muslims, the Catholics, the socialists and whoever else Pyat does not like at a given moment are all identified with it, and its presence is felt everywhere as cunning, evil Carthage tugs on the invisible strings controlling the world.
"My past is reinvented for me by liars," Pyat laments when facing an SS interrogator in Dachau who presents him with a less seemly and more plausible version of his personal history, but, especially since the interrogator may well be just in his head, which liars? Whose lies? To what end? Even inside Pyat's telling of the tale he seems to lose his grip, things he had recognized as lies in the second book (like his record of combat against the Reds in the Civil War) appearing even to him to be indisputably true by the fourth.
The denials, rationalizations and delusions add up to a whole history, not just of Pyat but of the world in which he lived, and the lies long survive the reasons for them, the longevity and durability they achieve taken to its logical end in the book's final chapter. After five decades of separation, he meets his mother in London and learns the truth of his heritage, sees that the name on his birth certificate is not Maxim but Moishe-and he automatically concludes that this is all a mistake, that this woman is not his mother, he is not her son, and he walks right out on her, never to see her again. The happy ending that reconciliation could have allowed is defeated by the lies that had built up, making the truth inaccessible, turning the historical record into a self-serving, neurotic obfuscation. It may be as much a comment on the price paid for surviving the century, as the perfidity and delusion of those who made that century.
1. "Moorcock Blasts U.S. Publisher," Scifi Wire, 2 Mar. 2006.
Accessed at http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=34814,
Oct. 27, 2006.
Originally published in the New York Review of Science Fiction 19.4 (December 2006), p. 22.
Over the last quarter century Michael Moorcock has related the life story of Colonel Maxim "Pyat" Pyatnitski, a minor character from the multiverse of his secret agent Jerry Cornelius. By the time Pyat is "dictating" his tale to Moorcock, shortly before his death in 1977, the colonel is keeping a secondhand clothing shop in Notting Hill, clutching scraps of a nonexistent former glory as he reminisces about Jerry's mother Honoria and bemoans the state of the world.
The Pyat Quartet, which began with Byzantium Endures in 1981, and continued with The Laughter Of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992), was finally completed earlier this year with The Vengeance Of Rome, the appearance of which was barely noticed in the United States. While Random House published the first two books in the quartet-the first only after censoring it-it was unwilling to release the last two volumes of the tetralogy in the U.S.. Moorcock commented in an interview that Random House, and Alfred A. Knopf (to whom Random House offered the rights), feared a backlash from readers who wouldn't recognize the irony in Pyat's anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic rhetoric.1 Random House, however, declined to comment, and Knopf simply said it was not "appropriate for their list," the kind of uninformative banality usually reserved for form rejection letters to unpublished writers. (My own editions of the last two Pyat books came from Random House's British imprint, Jonathan Cape.)
Pyat's ranting aside, it probably didn't help Moorcock's case that his protagonist is a coke-snorting, anti-Semitic Jewish ex-Klansman and Fascist with a taste for eleven year old girls and Nazi stormtroopers. This is not, however, a simple work of politically incorrect shock. Moorcock's stated goal in writing the Pyat cycle was to "examine how the Holocaust could have been permitted by Western culture." It can of course be argued that no work of art can truly explain the Holocaust or any of the other great calamities of the twentieth century. One can also point out that some of this has been done before, particularly his indictment of technological utopianism, which has Pyat constantly identifying himself with H.G. Wells and American pulp science fiction, terming them sources of inspiration or fellow travelers. In particular there is something of Thomas Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow here, in Moorcock's protagonist "born coeval with the century" (Pyat was born on January 1, 1900), preoccupied with entropy and flying machines. As in Pynchon the dream of flight is here intertwined with the nightmare of the Holocaust, the tale all but starting with Pyat's childhood flight in a machine of his own making over the gorge of Babi Yar, scene of the infamous massacres in 1941.
Nonetheless, if Pynchon anticipated some of the story elements (just as Philip K. Dick often anticipated Pynchon) this tale is unquestionably Moorcock's own, and certainly the more eloquent. He succeeds in making the life story of an utterly incoherent man supremely readable and the device of the unreliable narrator, which so easily becomes little more than fodder for dry graduate seminar papers, actually the source of much of the fun. This has led to the inevitable comparisons with Harry Flashman and Baron Munchausen - though the deceits here are far more serious stuff. Pyat's strange odyssey across Europe, the Middle East and the United States, by turns harrowing and hilarious as Candide-like he and his friends stumble from horror to horror, is the story of the twentieth century, not just because of its considerable scope, but his particular way of telling the tale. Pyat's moralizing soars highest when his actions are their lowest, his protestations of purity and goodness most insistent when he is at his most repulsive. His endless professions of idealism and sensitivity are impossibly entangled with greedy, egomaniac self-seeking, convoluted bigotry, perversion, and a boundless capacity for hysterical denial, desperate rationalization and pathological lying.
Through the telling and retelling of his story Pyat, the son of a kosher butcher who abandoned his wife and child in the slums of Kiev, becomes a Romanov prince. The civilian huckster who wandered haplessly across the Ukraine and once rode in the back seat of a plane over embattled Odessa becomes a Cossack cavalryman, a World War I flying hero, a colonel in the White Army. The drop-out from the St. Petersburg Polytechnic becomes the youngest professor in its history, and an engineering genius who created every notable invention of the twentieth century, from the jet engine to the microwave oven.
As his friend Kolya tells him in the Gestapo headquarters in Munich, the evidence weighs very heavily against his version of events, but there is always an explanation, his triumphs always snatched away from him at the last moment. The "Violet Ray" that would have saved Kiev from the Bolsheviks and turned the tide of the Russian Civil War is disrupted when the city's power supply gives out. The multitude of flying machines he builds all crash right after take-off, if they get off the ground at all, and the schemes surrounding them always "inexplicably" turn out to be a con on someone else's part, forcing poor Max to run screaming that he is scapegoat and victim. Even the films which testify to his stardom in Hollywood's silent era as the "White Ace" and the "Masked Buckaroo" have all crumbled to dust.
Bad luck, base treachery, and above all, "Carthage" is always to blame-Carthage, the old adversary of Rome and "New Rome," Holy Byzantium. African, Semitic, Oriental Carthage is for Pyat the embodiment of all that's evil in the world, a fantastic, conspiratorial projection of all he imagines stands against his utopia of a triumphant, Christian Russia, liberated Constantinople and flying cities which civilize the world and explore the cosmos. The Jews, the Muslims, the Catholics, the socialists and whoever else Pyat does not like at a given moment are all identified with it, and its presence is felt everywhere as cunning, evil Carthage tugs on the invisible strings controlling the world.
"My past is reinvented for me by liars," Pyat laments when facing an SS interrogator in Dachau who presents him with a less seemly and more plausible version of his personal history, but, especially since the interrogator may well be just in his head, which liars? Whose lies? To what end? Even inside Pyat's telling of the tale he seems to lose his grip, things he had recognized as lies in the second book (like his record of combat against the Reds in the Civil War) appearing even to him to be indisputably true by the fourth.
The denials, rationalizations and delusions add up to a whole history, not just of Pyat but of the world in which he lived, and the lies long survive the reasons for them, the longevity and durability they achieve taken to its logical end in the book's final chapter. After five decades of separation, he meets his mother in London and learns the truth of his heritage, sees that the name on his birth certificate is not Maxim but Moishe-and he automatically concludes that this is all a mistake, that this woman is not his mother, he is not her son, and he walks right out on her, never to see her again. The happy ending that reconciliation could have allowed is defeated by the lies that had built up, making the truth inaccessible, turning the historical record into a self-serving, neurotic obfuscation. It may be as much a comment on the price paid for surviving the century, as the perfidity and delusion of those who made that century.
1. "Moorcock Blasts U.S. Publisher," Scifi Wire, 2 Mar. 2006.
Accessed at http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=34814,
Oct. 27, 2006.
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