… is out now, with my review of Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus, Second Edition
Category Archives: reviews
The Future’s So Bright
A couple of nights ago, I watched Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World for the first time in many years. I first saw this film back in, I think, late 1993 or early 1994. I thought then its depiction of 1999 was one of the most realistic and plausible depictions of the near-future I had ever seen.
But that was before the year in which film is set. I’ve now watched it again almost a decade after the year in which it is set…
Wenders apparently wrote Until the End of the World to be the “ultimate road movie”. It’s set in the months leading up to the start of the new millennium. An Indian nuclear-powered satellite is out of control, and could fall from orbit, causing widespread contamination. Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) is returning to Paris from Venice when a traffic jam prompted by the impending crash of the satellite forces her off the beaten track. As a result, she is involved in an accident with a pair of friendly bank robbers. After giving them a lift to the nearest town – her car survived the crash, theirs didn’t – they ask her to take their ill-gotten gains to Paris for a 30% cut. En route, Claire then meets Trevor (William Hurt) and gives him a lift to Paris… but he steals some of the money.
The film then develops into a chase, with Claire and her boyfriend Gene (Sam Neill) following Trevor to retrieve the stolen, er, stolen money. Trevor is also being chased by bounty hunters, since he apparently stole an expensive prototype camera from a US lab. This camera records the brainwaves associated with seeing. Trevor is using the camera to record his relatives for his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau). The film finishes up in the Australian Outback, where Trevor’s father (Max von Sydow), the inventor of the camera, has a secret lab.
Then the Indian nuclear-powered satellite explodes, causing an electro-magnetic pulse which wipes out all unshielded electronic equipment…
When I first saw Until the End of the World, I was very taken at the way in which it showed technology integrated into everyday life. Cars had electronic maps on their dashboards, computers were small and portable, videophones were the norm, software programs had animated avatars as user interfaces and could search global data… And yet other aspects remained unchanged. Cars looked a sleeker but a lot of old models were still being driven. Cities appeared to have changed very little – more neon and glass, perhaps, but no real substantial changes. And the way in which people lived their lives had not altered…
Science fiction has never been about predicting the future – that’s futurism. But watching Until the End of the World now, eight years after it was set, seventeen years after it was made… it’s interesting seeing just how close Wenders was.
Cars do indeed have electronic maps on their dashboards – GPS. Desktop computers have not changed greatly in appearance in ten years (unless you include the introduction of TFTs), but laptops certainly have. They are a great deal smaller and more powerful than they were in 1991 – the Asus EEE, for example, is 22.5 x 16.5 cm. Admittedly, the animated GUI for the search programs shown in the film are crude; modern CGI is far more sophisticated and realistic. But the search through global data itself is not so far from Google and the like – don’t forget that when Until the End of the World was released, the WWW did not exist. And while videophones have yet to really catch on, mobile phones with cameras are common, as are webcams.
Despite this, the film still doesn’t feel like it was actually made in 1999. There are enough near-misses to indicate its true age. And, of course, the central conceit, the camera which records brainwaves, is pure science fiction.
It’s still a damn good film, however. I’m not sure I’d call it a favourite – the plot feels a little like two stories badly-welded together, and both William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin seem curiously blank throughout. And the edition released in the UK has no subtitles, despite there being a lot of French dialogue (which is a little too fast and fluent for me). But I’ll certainly watch it again.
100 Must-Argue Science Fiction Novels
100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels by Stephen E Andrews and Nick Rennison is a new reading guide to the genre. It is not, the authors write, a list of the best of science fiction. Their intent was to provide “100 books to read in order to gain an overview of the rich and diverse writing to be found in SF”.
By its very nature, the contents of such a book are going to be contentious. Why that book, and not that one? Christopher Priest says as much in his foreword, and even names some of the novels he would himself have included. Likewise, I could argue the inclusion or exclusion of many of the titles given in the guide. But what’s the point?
However, what is interesting is that of 100 books named, more than half are from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (and near half of those are from the Sixties). There are two novels from the 21st Century. It is the least-represented decade since the 1930s – and while the decade is not yet over, it has surely seen more sf novels published than the first three decades of the 20th Century. But then that’s science fiction’s single biggest problem – for a genre that frequently uses the future as its setting, it spends an inordinate amount of time looking backwards. I have seen people recommend fifty-year-old novels to readers new to the genre. Fifty years old. Why? Would they recommend Dennis Wheatley to someone looking for an introduction to contemporary fiction?
It could be argued that the language of sf requires readers to work their way through its history in order to gain fluency. But that’s complete rubbish. Current day narrative techniques and styles of story-telling – not to mention the attitudes and sensibilites embedded in the text – bear little resemblance to those of, say, the 1950s. Modern readers expect modern texts. So why foist old ones on them?
An example: last year, nostalgia drove me to re-read EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Masters of Space. Unusually, I remember exactly when and where I originally purchased and read the book: it was Easter 1978. My father had picked me up from school, and we spent a couple of days in London before flying out to the Middle East. I’m not sure in which book shop I bought Masters of Space – probably Foyles. But I remember the occasion, because it was the first time I saw Star Wars. So. Almost thirty years ago. The book itself was first published in 1961, although in style and content it harkens back to Smith’s works of the 1930s. When I read it in 1978, I remember enjoying it. When I read it in 2006… oh dear. I don’t know which was worse: the rampant wish-fulfillment, the cheesy 1930s dialogue, the neanderthal sexual stereotypes… Halfway though Masters of Space, the characters are given the opportunity of replacing their bodies with ageless, super-strong android bodies. The women are all for it – because it means their tits will never sag. While spung! may not have actually appeared in the pages of Masters of Space, it was very much there in spirit.
I would never willingly force someone new to sf to undergo the same experience. Not if I want them to continue to read science fiction. There is an unrealistic expectation among fans of science fiction that non-sf readers will appreciate classic works as much as they themselves do. Not as classics of the genre, but as straight genre works. No one reads Jane Austen without recognising that she lived 200 years ago. You, a science fiction fan since the age of eleven, may have fond memories of Asimov’s Foundation – but does that really make it an appropriate example of science fiction to give to someone new to the genre?
I argued a couple of posts ago that science fiction stories should contain a science-fictional conceit. As fans of the genre, have we become so hung up on the “idea” that it has become the only criteria by which we can judge genre works? Is that why we think of a fifty-year-old novel on the same terms as we think of one from last year? Is that why the genre won’t recognise that it has an historical dimension, and insists on categorising all its works as if it belonged to an eternal present?
They say the Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen. It’s certainly true that sf fans grow older. Perhaps it’s time they grew up too.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 