Lions And Tigers And Mobile Phones, Oh My!

Well, this morning came and went. I had a bit of a lie in to recover from working late nights all weekend (and I'm working one tonight to - I'm at present skiving off the back pretending to do paperwork). But, in order to keep up with the 12 Blogs theme, I need to blog something today. Hence why I'm writing this on my BlackBerry and pondering why sf authors never postulated the internet and whether or not Captain Kirk can browse Facebook on his communicator.

It's often said that sf is the only contemporary fiction and there may be a valid point. Most mainstream authors, myself included, tend to stumble along a few years behind everyone else. It was 2003 before I even wrote a mobile phone into a story so convinced was I that they just weren't going to catch on. Today's mainstream novels (a few writers like Iain Banks aside) are just beginning to look at the impact of 9/11 on the world. Sf on the other hand, doesn't need to witness the history firsthand to postulate what the world might come to be.

But still, the power of sf as prophecy is vastly overstated as it is more a comment on the current times (cf. Star Trek's status as the American Metaphor) than a statement of "this is how it will be". So Neuromancer becomes a comment on the eighties rather than a proscribed future. Gene Roddenberry understood this, and he realised that he could use it to his advantage. Thusly, Star Trek's 'A Private Little War' is a balanced argument about Vietnam (and it's a measure of just how balanced in that you can watch the episode and come away thinking it has a pro-Nam outlook, while the person sitting next to you can take an anti-Nam message away from it. Joe Haldeman's masterwork, "The Forever War", published in 1974 when US troops were still in VietNam does much the same thing. It would take him twenty years to deal with Nam in a non-allegorical context with his novel "1968" and it was five years after the withdrawal that Hollywood was brave enough to deal with it in "The Deer Hunter". There's a line in "Watchmen" where the Comedian, played in the movie by Jeffery Dean Morgan in a fearless performance comments that if the US hadn't been victorious in Nam (the story is set in an alternate 1985, remember, where the first superhero, Dr Manhattan, helped to win the war) they would have gone a little crazy as a country. Which obviously a comment on what did happen. But is the present (at the time) offered up by "Watchmen" any better? That's what sf is good for.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device