We Need a Better Class of Sci-Fi Racists\Racial Dialogue

In recent years, mainstream filmmaking has made tentative but sure steps to portraying racists with greater complexity. Three films have been particularly emblematic of this: American History X, This is England, and The Believer. American History X is well known, but the Believer is an obscure film that shows how a self-hatred for one's own racial\religious group (here Judaism) can lead to the very bigotry that victimizes you. What makes The Believer such a great movie is that its protagonist, Danny Balint, is a three dimensional racist, not someone who is just solely committed to ruining every minority person's day. I believe that American racial dialogue really needs this kind of honesty, because the mainstreaming of simplistic binaries between good anti-racists and bad racists simply does not work. People know real life is not that simple, and they also are aware of the class advantages that many proponents of anti-racism have had. I think science fiction badly needs some honest racial dialogue. The last time we had an honest movie about race was probably Brother from Another Planet, and that is almost three decades old. Series like Alien Nation tried to say something about race, but they were simply too embarrassingly simplistic to do any good. Star Trek, the most race-obsessed series on television, usually settled for simplistic racial signifers: mean Klingons, cunning Romulans, good humans, mercantile Feringi. If we're going to get somewhere with the genre, sci-fi authors and television producers need to take a good hard look at real racial anxieties in America. I think the ideal place to start is with Octavia Butler's excellent and complex meditations on race, such as Lillith's Brood and Kindred (especially the latter; the former occasionally becomes a feminist jeremiad). Only by doing so will the genre really become the racially sensitive genre it's ostensibly supposed to be.

RPGS and Fundamentalists

I am writing a play called "Fundamentalists in search of an RPG", about a young man trying to leave his culture and using RPGs as the method. The whole fundamentalist objection to RPGs has always interested me. I nearly wasn't able to play RPGs as a kid because of anti-RPG prejudice on the part of one of my grandmothers. Later on, my school banned a kid from bringing an early version of WOW to school, while simultaneously letting my brother and I enchant our classmates with Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. Evangelical reactions to RPGS can often take on rather extreme overtones, with some players even being physically threatened during the height of the RPG scares of the early eighties. In case you guys are interested in this topic, I urge you to check out this article.

Equlibrium and Hate Crimes Laws

Equilibrium is only an average sci-fi movie, but it does have one exceptional element, which is that it realizes the potential dangers of hate crimes legislation. Dystopianism in Equilibrium is brought about by "the revolutionary precept of the hate crime" (in the nation state of Libria). I fully understand why so many minority groups do want there to be hate crime legislation and I do sympathize. My problem with such legislation is that ultimately it criminalizes thought as well as action, and therefore could eventually lead to the criminalization of hate speech as well. I would vigorously oppose that, since criminalizing hate speech would likely turn the U.S. in an even more totalitarian direction than we are already going. What if "Christophobia" was labeled hate speech, or anti-corporate rhetoric? No, Equilibrium got it right, in spite of its occasionally insipid plot and lame shots at psychiatric drugs. And it's an enjoyable movie to boot!

Teaching Queer-friendly Sci-fi and Literature

This semester I have incorporated two quite LGBT-friendly texts, Corpus Christi and Wicked. Both of them are going to be a challenge to teach. Corpus Christi is a play that transposes Christ's passion to a bunch of gay men living in 1950's Texas. I'm not claiming it's great art (it's also not bad art either), but it is the only prominent work of literature that has addressed Christ's life from a queer perspective. I'm interested in seeing how my students respond to it. I'm not trying to brainwash them into blindly accepting a pro-LGBT position, but I do want them to think about the potential consequences of some of the rhetoric currently directed towards the gay community.
Wicked, I've already posted on. But it's one of a series of texts that I would like to incorporate into a course called "The Wizard of Queer," about LGBT-oriented sci-fi and fantasy. Wicked and at least one work by Samuel Delany, would be my first choices. Do you guys have any other suggestions?

A Boy and His Dog

I'm almost through watching this classic 70's nihlist sci-fi film (it's taken me almost a semester to watch it). I think there's a lot to commend in this picture, particularly the lack of sentimentality about the lead Vic and his dog Blood. Vic is basically a trigger-happy rapist in waiting, while Blood undercuts everything you've ever believed about what dogs think of humanity. I think the film's cult status stems in large part from the director's refusal to bow to pressure and turn this film into safe family fluff, a la Buck Rogers and The Black Hole. A Boy and His Dog is probably the last great classic of 70's sci-fi film, before Star Wars and Alien came around and ruined everything.

What is your favorite Earthside sci-fi program?

Normally, I am more a fan of space opera than earthbound science fiction. My favorite space operas are Farscape, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Blake's 7, and to a lesser extent, the new Battlestar Galacatica. But I was wondering what your guys favorite Earthbound series are. To me, the top two Earthbound series are The Prisoner and Max Headroom. I think the Prisoner set the surrealist tone for so much of the Earth-centered sci-fi that came after it, only it did it much better. Max Headroom, meanwhile, was the definitive cyberpunk show. Politically, Earthbound series tend to emphasize paranoia and distrust of the government, healthy attributes in a state-controlled era of media-spinned, entertainment-saturated American citizens. Many of the top earthbound series have leaned heavily left, particularly Max Headroom and The X-Files. My fear with earthbound sci-fi is not that it will supplant space operas (though it is doing that), but that it will no longer be creative. I just can't get that interested in what's going on in Lost's island or in the parallel universes of Fringe. Neither series, right now at least, appeals to me. I want some real sci-fi ideas, and some new ones, not recycled and inferior copies of great Prisoner and X-Files episodes. The age of remakes and quasi-sci fi should be over. A return to cyberpunk, to thoughful space opera, to outlandish science fiction ideas, should begin.

The Prisoner and the Arizona Shooting

I've been depressed while watching the news on Jared Loughner. As an advocate for the mentally ill, and as a mentally ill person myself, the demonization of the mentally ill occurring in the media is truly astounding. Every news station, from Fox to MSNBC, is using this issue as a political football, a chance to gain ratings. The pictures of Loughner are accompanied by scary music and orchestral accompaniment, the media completely oblivious to the fact that this may prevent a fair trial of this young man. People keep calling Jared's actions "heinous". I definitely think they are "tragic", but the term heinous implies that Jared knew what he was doing was wrong and no one has proven that as of yet.

No one is putting the blame on state health care programs that are cutting millions from mental health treatment in favor of more expensive prisons. Even supposedly responsible newspeople are using antiquated terms for Jared, like "madman", "psycho", etc. And of course, our beloved psychiatric community, as is typical, is, if anything, contributing to the media feeding frenzy. And people wonder why the mentally ill don't seek help.

If that wasn't bad enough, there are now calls to clamp down on free speech and hate speech, particularly the Tea Party movement. Readers of this blog will know I am no friend of the Tea Party, but I think these calls are asinine. And that brings me to Patrick Mcgoohan's The Prisoner. Mcgoohan, living in a pre-Cable age, was a fierce individualist, and also a fierce opponent of "individualism" as a political philosophy, rather than a personal outlook on life (in other words, he saw that individualism itself could be corrupted). The last episode of The Prisoner, "Fallout", truly exposed the moral bankruptcy of our media-created Villages, with their manufactured heroes and manufactured villains. Number 6 knew better, or at least I hope he would have. So, I for one, will not join the lynching party aimed at a (probably) schizophrenic young man. I'll leave that for our media intelligentsia. I'm sure they'll do a great job.

Buck Rogers and A.I.

Buck Rogers approach to A.I. is somewhat different from that of the original Battlestar Galactica. The original Battlestar took a very negative view of A.I., seeing it as uncreative and unimaginative. To a certain extent, Buck Rogers shares that predilection, as Buck is always warning Wilma about not relying on computer technology, as it is too "predictable". There is also a good deal of senseless android killing in the series. But the higher forms of A.I., like doctor Theopolis, rule Earth benevolently, where human beings can't. Twiki, like C-3P0, shows human emotions. While he is a silly robot, at least he doesn't follow in the killer robot tradition of Terminator. To me, anti-A.I. prejudice is not necessarily a laughing matter. Series like the old BSG have molded public perceptions of A.I., telling us that such creatures will always be somehow "less than" human. But how will we really know? Who's to say that if we create A.I., it won't be more than us, something deeper, with sensitivity to art, love, compassion. Twiki, whatever his limitations, is in some ways infinitely preferable than the Terminator\Agent Smith\Skinjob stereotype of A.I. that now dominates contemporary society.

Buck Rogers and Genetic Perfection

As a series, Buck Rogers frequently plays with the idea of women and men looking for the "genetically perfect mate". Princess Ardala has the genetic hots for Buck and Buck himself is deeply attracted to "Miss Cosmos". The theory in the series goes, in so much as it is a theory and not an excuse for incredibly skimpy outfits, that the bodies of beautiful men and women will be highly sought out genetic commodities in the future. As much as I hate to admit it, the series actually has a fairly interesting point in this regard, though it would have been more interesting if they had just used the traditional genetic collection techniques of a sperm bank. Then again, seeing Gil Gerard pouring his seed into a cup would probably traumatize me for life. On the other hand, many men would love to know more about the lovely Erin Gray, but I digress. Seriously, though, it's interesting to speculate on what the "beauty market" of the future will be like, when that market is genetically, rather than randomly controlled. It may likely produce a new form of racial hygienics based on beauty rather than the fitness of the German or American volk.

Buck Rogers, or Stupidity Made Manifest

So, I'm watching Buck Rogers for my sci-fi Encylopedia. It's truly abysmal. The series has some of the worst acting ever, even if it is meant to be camp. Politically, it says absolutely nothing, except that the capital of the new world order will naturally be in Chicago (because Mayor Daley did such a good job there in the 1960's, the 25th century naturally had to follow suit). The sexual politics of the series are deeply repulsive. I mean all the eye candy is gorgeous, but I don't like seeing women being objectified the way Buck Rogers so clearly does. Even when compared to series like the old Battlestar Galactica, Buck looks weak. At least the old BSG had some heart, and even one or two characters you could care about. And the dumb android in this series, Twiki, is even worse than Boxey's daggit. All I want to do is put a gun to Twiki's head and pull the trigger. God, what a series.