Anno Stella Bella

Blessed be Lucas, who taught the bean counters there's gold in them there SF hills.

As long as I've been picking my own reading material, the bulk of it has science fiction. I've been doing that picking since at least 1964, so call it three score years. Until around the mid 1990s, it would have been hard to name a science fiction book or movie I didn't know (and in many cases, own).

I saw the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV: A New Hope) the night it opened. That opening bit, the long, long spaceship… and everything else, an indelible memory. Driving home after, my Volkswagen Bug was a Tie Fighter (pew, pew).

But somewhere near the end of the last century visual science fiction (TV, movies, games) became a full-fledged mass-produced commodity that through sheer over-exposure started to become dull and uninteresting to me.

I praise/blame George Lucas and his Star Wars and split SF into two eras:

• Before Lucas (B.L.)

• Anno Stella Bella (ASB)

It's a riff on Before Christ (B.C.) and Anno Domini (AD) that tries to follow the pattern in as many ways as possible. The key one being that both are about how an individual and his work divides things into two eras.¹

Over the years, I've found an apparent difference between B.L. fans and those who came along only in the ASB era. The rolls of fans greatly expanded in the new era as SF became mainstream. That is really the first point here:

Lucas brought science fiction from niche into the mainstream. He showed the bean counters that it could be (massively) popular not just at the box office, but in merchandising.

A great deal of SF since then seeks to recapitulate that success. But Star Wars isn't really science fiction; it's a fairy tale for children and the inner child in us all. It merely wears science fiction trappings (like robots and spaceships and blasters, oh my).²

The greatest science fiction is the fiction of human and social ideas (with a science-y flavor), so to the extent one is "a science fiction fan" only because of Star Wars, one is still sitting at the children's table — which includes most television SF along with a great deal of movie SF. There have been some wonderful exceptions, though, and I’ll talk about them in future posts.

Today I write neither to praise nor to bury Lucas or his Stella Bella. While I was always more a Star Trek fan than a Star Wars fan, as a life-long (and hard-core) science fiction fan, I appreciate the riches Lucas bestowed upon us. Hell of a legacy!

This post has a more general point:

Thesis: Science fiction has declined in the ASB era.

This turns out to be a difficult thesis to prove or disprove. Crucially, one needs objective criteria for quality, and therein is a possibly insurmountable challenge.

Among science fiction fans, Sturgeon's Law (originally: Sturgeon's Revelation because there was a different Sturgeon’s Law) says that 90% of everything is crap. Everything obviously includes science fiction.

But calling it “crap” seems pejorative and likely plain wrong (in most cases). Rather than “crap”, call it “commodity” — at its worst, akin to “motel art”. Domino’s pizzas aren’t “crap”, they’re commodity. They won’t win prizes for knocking your socks off, but that isn’t a sustainable level for anyone. Commodities are important to our lives, but almost invisible.

If we accept the basic premise of Sturgeon's Revelation, 90% of SF was always crap, but there's so much more SF now it seems like science fiction has gone downhill from all the crap. But that could just be an effect of there being so much commodity SF. “Strength in numbers” is not usually a characteristic of good art. Quite the opposite, I’d think.

I’ve considered the possibility of trying to analyze word vocabulary. Break it out by decade to see if modern SF has a smaller vocabulary. My wild ass suspicion is that it does. (Does Google have tools to make this analysis possible?)

More challenging would be attempting to codify and compare the concept vocabulary used by decade. Is there less complexity in modern SF compared to that from the B.L. era? Are writers trying to be more mainstream, more appealing to larger audiences?

One big question I have in the B.L. era is whether there a significant difference in the quality of television and movie science fiction compared to the written form. Is the perception of low-quality — if it's a valid perception at all — due, in part, to media forms playing such a big role in the modern era?

I think most would agree books are "better" than movies or television if the nuances of storytelling matter. It is usually true that any movie of a book leaves out much of what is in the book.³ On the other hand, movies and television are a different experience.

Which is both good and bad. Visual stories “collapse the wavefunction” of your imagination. After seeing Lord of the Rings, whatever my fuzzy conception of Frodo may have been, he is forever after Elijah Wood.⁴

It's possible the low bar of movies, and the sometimes even lower bar of television, combined with all the science fiction done in those mediums, is what makes SF seem "gone to the dogs" to us old fans. (I'm by no means the only one who thinks this.) The written form does seem capable of still delivering the goods.⁵

Even so, my perception remains, and I finally figured out why.

Simply put:

Science Fiction has become well-plowed ground.

For instance, it's pretty hard to write a time-travel story that hasn't been done.⁶

All the old themes have been well-explored: time travel, space travel, spaceships, space battle (time battle), space politics, space corporations, space aliens (and planets), space robots, space vampires (and ghosts), space doctors, space construction workers (space bars!), space police and private eyes, space diplomats and politicians, space spies, and even space burglars.⁷

Robots and AI are a common theme these days, yet these stories (certainly the robot ones) have roots in ancient golem mythology. Isaac Asimov (one of "The Big Three" of science fiction) wrote robotics AI stories back in the 1950s.⁸ From my chair, I can look up and see at least four Big Bad AI stories.

As an aside, one I remember fondly is The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979), by James P. Hogan. Humanity is smart enough to build the super-AI on an isolated space station. It still nearly wipes us out and only stops when it realizes it’s dealing with other intelligent beings, not abstract obstacles to its resource acquisition. Even earlier is Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), a film adaptation of a 1966 novel by D.F. Jones.

Genetics is a theme that offers some new ground for science fiction. That's a fairly new technology that we can tell new tales about (although the science does go back a ways). Nano-machines also offer some possibilities, but ultimately those are just (tiny) robot stories.⁹ I have seen some good stories based on quantum mechanics (one I especially liked is Quantum Night (2016), by

Robert J. Sawyer

— a contemporary author I highly recommend). For more lyrical, almost poetic, quantum SF, check out the stories of Hannu Rajaniemi.

Perhaps the bottom line is that, after 60 years of SF, it's hard for me to see new science fiction that doesn't borrow from science fiction’s rich past. They might be new to those without a long history, but all I see is old hats.

Yet all art is reuse, all stories borrow from the past. Science fiction adds new ways to tell those stories, and can even open doors regular fiction can’t, but any new landscape can become familiar territory.

And if, as ever, only 10% is truly worthwhile but struggles to find new and interesting ground, then it's easy to see how it can feel as if the genre has gone downhill. (I find I have a similar view of music. How can there be anything new in rock music? Yet it seems to matter less there. Music is more like poetry in its ability to enjoy repeatedly.)

There are (at least) two key aspects of "good" (i.e. "quality") art for me. One of them involves the skill of execution, and that can sometimes be sacrificed when the creativity is extraordinary. But originality is required and seems increasingly challenging as writers explore a genre over time.

Which means that all genres and mediums can "tap out" over time.

I'll leave it there for now but will return to it down the road.

Until next time…

1. I like the terms, but let's not get too carried away comparing Lucas to Jesus. Certainly, the eras ushered in by both have endured and changed the world, but the parallels of a metaphor don't make the map anything like the territory.

2. "Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away," is the dead equivalent of "Once upon a time." The story is about a Princess and a lost Prince (who thinks he's a commoner), and they oppose an evil emperor and his evil wizard (and all the king's troopers). There is also a white knight and his faithful squire. And a reclusive powerful white wizard who lives in the woods.

3. It bugs me even more when they add new things that change the book.

4. I think one thing that made Lord of the Rings so wonderful for fans of the book is how well Peter Jackson brought the Middle Earth of most fans’ imagination to accurate life. Much of what he presented was almost exactly how we’d envisioned it all those years before.

5. And there have been some excellent SF television shows and movies. Most recently, The Expanse (2019-2022; six seasons) or Edge of Tomorrow (2014), for examples. Both of which, incidentally, are based on written stories.

6. Time travel is tough because it’s inherently contradictory, but I have seen it done well. Primer (2004) is the canonical example, and Looper (2012) is excellent, but I give first prize to a quirky low-budget Japanese gem, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020). Best time-travel story ever.

7. It's even harder to be original in the fantasy realm. Tolkien and a few other early writers plowed that ground very well (our mythology and parables had already begun to explore it). Once you've done dragons and wizards and monsters and swordsmen a few times, there isn't much more to be said.

8. Asimov and I go back to the very beginning of it all for me. His Lucky Starr series is among the first SF books I can recall reading.

9. Tiny and giant stuff go way back in storytelling. Gulliver's Travels, for instance. Early SF movies carried on the theme. A personal favorite of mine is Fantastic Voyage!