I Gotta Wear Shades

(Almost a month since my last post - clearly I am not blog devoted.)

I found this article at io9 (which you should be reading every day if you're a geek like me) which I enjoyed since it collides things I think about time and again" high/low culture, science/fiction.

The article basically asks why some sci-fi - Trek, Who, Star Wars - is classed as fluffy entertainment and why some sci-fi - BSG - is not. It boils it down to optimisim/pessimisim. Trek looks on the future as something bright and shiny and everyone's happy, so it's not that big a deal and BSG looks on it with dread and fear. I think this is an oversimplification. Trek, in all its incarnations , dealt with serious themes in bold ways. What really got my computer going was that it leads to the real root of the problem: the emphasis of science itself in the writing will lead you inevitably down the road to 'seriousness.'

Star Wars does not obey any science and so - largely - operates in the dude this is so awesome no way arena. Trek swerves in and out of science and in and out of the realms of pop/art. BSG dealt with - until the very end at least - scientific questions. The advancement of artifical intelligence and its impact on our humanity. Hundreds of moral/ethical questions branch off from that, and it followed more or less all of them. Science itself - AI, cloning, the use of nuclear energy, space travel - have always provided us as much in the way of cautionary tales as they do flights of fancy. Science also increasingly casts our future - and our present - in shadow. Science enabled us to impact our environment, and now enables us to understand what is happening to it. We know, from science, that not just our time on earth is temporary, but everything we know is. Science tells us how the universe began, and it also tells us how it will end. Science spells out the finite everywhere we look - Earth will either bake in an expanding sun or be dead anyway by the time it happens, because of tectonic death. The Milky Way will collide with Andromeda and cease to exist. Galaxies and stars as a whole will cease to exist some tens of trillions of years from now as they exhaust all their stellar fuel.

Any fiction that obeys science - or at least holds to its tenents - will have to deal with the shade science casts on our existence at some point. Some criticized the end of BSG because it was a 'happy' ending out of step with its traditional darkness. One thing science also does is enjoy the impossible. Every day we learn something we thought once couldn't be or never was; if we look now and despair on the fate of all things, we also have to realize that what we know amounts to a drop in a bucket that can't possibly be measured. Science is as much discovery as it is elegy, and so is its fiction.