Kirk Hiner's

"When thinking differently just isn't different enough."

Whither Alex Raymond?
or, How the Computer Killed Science Fiction

By Kirk Hiner

Okay, this one's a bit obtuse, so just hang in there with me. I'll start it off with this premise: The more you know, the less you can make believe.

There was a time, not too far back, when science fiction used to fun. Remember that? Remember those days? Remember when science fiction used to be about alien invasions and giant radiation monsters and voyages to other planets? Remember when the Star Wars movies were entertaining? I do. I remember those days, and I miss them.

Since I was a kid, I was all about science fiction. I never so much liked reruns of Gilligan's Island or Leave It to Beaver. I watched Spectreman and Buck Rogers. I wanted my entertainment to be about things I could absolutely, positively never experience in real life. I wanted it to be good and fake. I wanted it to show me places and people that can't possibly exist, because that which does exist tends to bore me.

I enjoy suspending my disbelief, you see. It's like a badge of honor with me to be able to accept the impossible, the ludicrous, and get wrapped up in it, and I pity those without the ability to do so. If you can't watch a Godzilla movie because, "It's just a guy in a rubber suit," then I feel bad for you and worse for your children.

Another example, Flash Gordon. In the original Flash Gordon comic strip by Alex Raymond, Ming the Merciless is hurling his planet toward the Earth which will, of course, destroy us. Nevermind that it would probably destroy Mongo as well. Nevermind that there's no feasible way to propel and stear a planet. Just accept it and move on, because otherwise we have no story. Even better, the brilliant scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov has alone formulated a plan to save Earth. He's going to crash a spaceship into Mongo to alter its orbit.

One tiny spaceship. One huge planet. Know what? It worked. Hans, Flash and Dale didn't even crash hard enough to kill themselves, but it was apparently hard enough to send Mongo off in some other direction.

Now, every incarnation of Flash Gordon since the initial telling has tried to come up with a more believable method of getting our three heroes onto the planet. We've had wormholes, Imperial Vortexes, and futuristic spaceships. A couple have even started with them already on Mongo, not even bothering to explain how they got there, or why. I suppose any of these explanations may be more believable, but none of them are as much fun.

And that, my friends, is the problem here. For some reason, it appears that today's audiences have lost the ability to suspend their disbelief in order to experience a great adventure. Science fiction these days is littered with films like The Matrix and Minority Report, which are still pretty good movies, I suppose, but they weigh in far too heavily on the science and not nearly enough on the fiction. You can't just have the adventure these days, you have to have an entire explanation for the adventure. You have to have a physics class surrounding it (or, in the case of The Matrix, a philosophy class). If that class doesn't make sense to the audience, then they're going to drop it and take accounting or computer programming or something.

I think I blame the computer for this lack of imagination. See, back in Alex Raymond's day, there was no need to explain how Dr. Zarkov could build himself a spaceship that could alter the course of planets. People just wanted to dream, they didn't want to hear goofy explanations. Whenever Raymond needed a cool new effect or another way to save Flash, Dr. Zarkov could just discover some new "ray" with a power his audience hadn't before seen. Science was wide open back then, and there was so much to be discovered that people believed anything could be discovered.

Not so, anymore. Computers have made us smarter, or at least given us the illusion of being smarter. There's still plenty out there to be discovered, and I always giggle like a schoolgirl when scientists have to admit a previously firmly held "fact" about this or that has now been proven incorrect. Heaven forbid we humans should have to admit we don't know everything or that some of our knowledge may, in fact, be wrong.

But that's a tangent for another time. Sticking with computers, I feel they've become so ingraned into our daily life that they're now ingraned into our dreams as well. Too much can be too easily explained or conquered with computers. Remember Independence Day? I enjoyed that movie...until the ending. If, at the end, the aliens had just taken over the Earth, I would've been happy. But no, once again, man has to show his superiority. So, we kill the aliens. How? With a computer virus.

Are you kidding me? A computer virus? An alien race with their technology wasn't smart enough set up a firewall or pick up a copy of Norton SystemWorks? The writers may as well have used bombs, as it's all technology. It's all man's creation saving us. Boring. Funny how no matter what we create, no matter whether the inventions' original intent is to destroy entire cities, help us do our taxes or get us to work each day, all of them have the blessed side effect of being able to save us from alien invasion. Back when we were a bit more humble and had our writers had a bit more imagination, we had to rely on God/nature to save us. In War of the Worlds, it was the common cold that delivered us from our destruction. In King Kong it was...well, 'twas beauty killed the beast, so we'll call that love. Now, it's always bombs and computers. Where's the message in that? Where's the romance?

Ironically, I loved the movie Tron. But again, that didn't bother to go into too much explanation on just how a human could be transported inside a computer. What little explanation they did give made absolutely no sense, but who cared? Jeff Bridges is in the computer! Cool! And hey, check out those grid bugs! That was back in the early 80s, though, when very few people owned computers. Some people even feared them, opening the door wide for some good science fiction. Now, there as much a part of our lives as our toasters, and only someone like Stephen King would be foolish (or arrogant) enough to write a story about a killer toaster.

See, computers have taken complex technology and dumped it onto our desks. They're with us at work, and they're with us at home. They're even with us in our cars! How can we possibly be imaginative with technology when we see and use something this complex every day? Why would we want to see a movie about renegade planets when a twelve-year-old with a computer and an internet connection can find, in a matter of minutes, dozens of websites explaing how ridiculous that premise is. Does that mean we're smarter as an audience? Yes, but it also means we're not as much fun.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this belief. Looking back at the sci-fi/fantasy adventure films that have done really well over the past few years, few of them have taken place in the present or future. The really enjoyable ones, movies such as The Mummy, Pirates of the Carribean and, of course, The Lord of the Rings, were set either before technology took control, or in a time and place where technology as we know it didn't exist. There were no computers there, nothing to attempt to explain what we were seeing, just a reliance on the imagination and sense of adventure. Even the recent Spider-Man movie did little to tell us how Peter Parker got his powers, thank heavens. He was bitten by a radio active spider. There. Done. Accept it, and watch him go to work.

Of course, this isn't saying that science fiction based on computers or truth as we know it is always bad. Not in the least. William Gibson's books are generally really good, and I've read many other stories by lesser known authors that weave "Startling Stories" with modern technology. What's unfortunate is that, if it's not well done, it's also not any fun. That wasn't always the case, as dumb as that may sound.

What's my point with all of this? Only that I'm going back to the classics. You can keep your Star Trek and your Matrix movies, I'm returning to H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and, of course, Alex Raymond. These were all very smart men, but their time allowed them retain their imagination. So, through them, we get to retain ours. I'm otherwise deep into our computer oriented society, you see, and they offer me that escape in ways that most modern science fiction and adventures cannot. Don't get me wrong, I love my Macintosh, but I'm happy keeping it right there on my desk, outside of my imagination, and far away from the planet Mongo.

.