The Spaced-out Library
Reviews by Elmwood Kraemer |
We know that books and movies carry over into life quite a bit. You find most of the chain stores distributing survival kits and uniforms representing one TV series or another and we find mail-order memberships in the Jedi Knights, as well as a lot of wargaming equipment among the games stock. It's all part of the culture. The mass-media are supposed to be part of American life and not just be something to look at. What's odd about all this is how much of it is fantasy or sf. Sure, there's mundane things like THE SURVIVOR, about which earlier sf may have commented in a predictive fictional form, but not identified with. However, a lot of sf fandom now is taking an active part in one reality setup or another based on televised or motion-picture fantasy and science fiction. There used to be a certain aloofness about the sf attitude that has vanished in the onrush of gaming possibilities. So an interpretive approach has to be taken by the reviewer in looking over the materials of this gaming culture. What are some of the original choices for interactive activity? You find a show like ANDROMEDA, which features a bunch of people living a beatnik lifestyle in a bohemian environment with an ET invasion from outside space and time going on around it. They apparently know what's going on and what they're doing, but if the audience does they're using guidelines. They can, of course, reason from their own lifestyles, which are apt to be post-hippie and New Wave, but even if they get the show figured out they're faced with a plot that just cycles around inconclusively, much worse than the soap operas. TREMORS shows people beset by one calamity after another, with a sort of survival motif that could help viewers face the reality of their own modern-day disasters if the script did not add so many unknown menaces to these disasters. More far-out is BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, although it does have STAR TREK as a precedent. This shows how rough it is to be part of a crew in a war; how they get along with one another is studied, suggesting that people don't get along too well together under stress. This is a Space Opera, if anyone is wanting to know what one of those is. Its mood is similar to that of the old horror fantasy soap, DARK SHADOWS. There's always the menace of the unknown threatening people whose lives are not very orderly to begin with. That's some of the SF; the fantasies like to take you back to an age preceding the Grecian times when unknown empires conflicted, as in the CONAN movies. Note that these were accepted enough for a person who would become the Governor of California to have been one of the stars in them. Conan's views are more fundamental than the modern ones, but he seems to represent a form of impulse toward democracy that the literate reader can compare to those expressed by the Greeks. These shows are not devoid of philosophy, but it is expressed in a rather guttural manner. The civilized viewer will note that the characters in these movies are more athletic than he is himself, but they don't seem to think as well. Nevertheless, a whole lot of people are identifying with them in Dungeons and Dragons games. I recently acquired a sixteen hour movie in episode form called CONAN THE ADVENTURER which shows a rather dissolute Conan who lacks the glorious “mane” described by Howard; instead he has the kind of hair style exhibited in the musical of that name, HAIR—it's hennaed. But he's big—casting didn't shuck anybody there. He has a rather doofus attitude, though, and one of the complaints I have about the picture is that all of the women he romances die. It's as if the script-writers didn't like women. His “band” is a sort of gestalt which he acquires while adventuring. I'd say that on the whole I'd rather not identify with the characters or their adventures, myself. Did anyone else pick up the VCRs of THE NECRONOMICON and NAKED LUNCH? There's no gaming about them, anyway. They're more abominable than horror comics used to be and I would say that they attack reality rather than attempting to determine or participate in it. Say, the sf magazines are starting to acknowledge the Forums in a big way—computer sf is becoming a realized thing. Probably the same principle of audience participation is involved. And net writers are indeed moving up into the magazines. Lou Antonelli, who has had a story in Surprising as well as other net magazines, will be coming up in the next issue of Asimov's, which will be out by the time this column goes up. Check it out—you'll find other writers familiar on the net in the Big 3 magazines, too. Eyal Teler is another example of this movement upward. Speaking as we were above, how many books are there in which computers are gateways to other dimensions or alternate realities? I would recommend Tad Williams' OTHERLAND as an outstanding example of this trend or viewpoint, and perhaps a good introductory work to consideration of the concept. Books aren't life? In modern times, it's getting pretty difficult to tell the difference.
|
