I'm a little disturbed these days, not about the future of the Middle East or the coming global crisis in wheat, but about the state of science fiction. Science fiction, for those of you who scorn the style, is a respectable subgenre of fiction. What it is, exactly, has been the subject of many debates. I vote for Isaac Asimov's point of view, that science fiction stories are "extraordinary voyages into any of the infinite supply of conceivable futures."
So why are so many of those conceivable futures portrayed in film and print these days so grim? Dystopian movies, such as "Blade Runner," "Gattaca," "AI," "12 Monkeys," all the "Mad Max" movies and the recent "Book of Eli," generally show the world in shambles, civilization mauled and mutilated, and Darwinian theory operating to the extreme. Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, although a beautiful exploration of the father-son bond, gave me nightmares for weeks.
I grew up on the science fiction of a different age. Through it, writers and filmmakers took the fledgling breakthroughs of their time and extrapolated a future world. Some, like Isaac Asimov, extrapolated entire universes; others, like Arthur C. Clarke, used a touch of science and their own imaginations to create a future populated with items we find commonplace today, such as satellites and video conferencing. Of course, much of the science fiction written after World War II involved military might, macho figures and bad guys. But the overarching element for much of the science fiction I devoured as a youngster was curiosity - what's out there? What does it mean?
Which is why I was delighted to see that the mighty search engine Google had deigned to commemorate the author Jules Verne last week. The French author was born 183 years ago on February 8. In his life he wrote unceasingly, publishing such famous titles as Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Center of the Earth. In these and other works, Verne portrays a world informed by science and populated by the curious. The future appears marvelous and generally pretty tidy. If there is trauma in these fictional worlds, it comes from other people or from forces of nature not controllable by mankind.
I was introduced to Jules Verne via the popular movie version of his novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. With Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre, and James Mason as the tortured Captain Nemo, the movie was featured on Sunday night's "Wonderful World of Disney" show one evening when I was 11. A giant octopus, a baroque submarine complete with spooky organ, guys walking around on the sea floor, Kirk Douglas playing a ukulele? I was hooked.
But there have been very few science fiction writers who chose the sea as their focus. Ursula Le Guin, another of my favorites, spun a fantasy world called Earthsea in her trilogy published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She created a sea populated with thousands of islands, conflicting countries and religions, and a few wizards and dragons. Her three short books had all the drama and conflict of a good Russian novel. What I liked the most, however, were her inventive details. In the final book, The Farthest Shore, she created a tribe of people who lived their entire lives on rafts far out at sea, coming to shore only once each year. With great detail she described what they ate, how they played, and how they managed to keep a fire burning on their giant rafts. She gave them music, annual rituals and a religion linked to whales. Because she is a good writer, she created a fantastic world in which I could possibly envision myself.
Even Kevin Costner's magnificent wreck of a movie Waterworld had its admirable aspects. Global warming had caused the world to flood, civilization had degraded into survival of the fittest, and a maniacal Dennis Hopper was in charge of an ill-named oil tanker. Still, there was imagination at work in the script. Costner's character wants a drink of water but has no money to pay for it. He trades dirt at a bar for a glass of potable water. It is that translation of the routine into something slightly fantastic but believable that is the hallmark of good science fiction. Of course, the scenes of Costner ripping across the endless ocean against a picturesque sunrise in his giant catamaran are alone worth a Netflix request.
To enjoy science fiction, one must harbor the notion that the future is going to be better, not worse, than the present. Perhaps the cavalcade of environmental woes we seem to have prescribed for ourselves mitigates that ability. Perhaps the rapidity of new tools and pleasures has worn out our curiosity about the future. But the ocean as a canvas for speculative thought remains remarkably untouched. Because the world's oceans have been so lightly explored to date, I remain hopeful that there will be a new science fiction writer or movie maker who can portray the possibilities inherent in the sea with verve and optimism, not dystopian gloom.
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