A conversation on the future
Oct. 15th, 2004 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
burntcopperWhich happens at the bar in sci-fi conventions. I don't remember who first came up with it, but it was inspired by Star Wars. Where we were shown what the future would look like in tv shows and films. Everyone had it so shiny, before Star Wars. Star Wars was the first we remembered where things were worn down and faded and dust encrusted, and the hyperdrive didn't work because it was old and hadn't been maintained. And it looked so much realer than things like Star Trek, where it was clean and shiny and things worked. So we came up with a list.
Before alien contact, the different sectors of the universe will look like this :
UK : Red Dwarf.
US : Firefly.
Alien contact will be like Alien. Some poor sods attacked out of the blue.
Post-alien contact, when things have settled down, there will be Babylon 5. Bureaucracy and psi-cops, with military problems.
And the far corners will be Farscape. Mad and lawless equally.
Because we just couldn't believe in something shiny and smooth-running. Chaos and bureaucracy and red tape and the engineer's curry ending up in the most vital part of the engine, we can believe in. Nobility is no longer something we believe in, as we move farther into a future of weather problems and pollution, with constant little wars on the sides.
In the fifties they told us everyone would have a car; they just didn't tell us that a generation would grow up with asthma as a commonplace thing, in the time between everyone getting cars and pollution laws coming in. Or that having everything done by machine, with shiny plastic-wrapped convenience food would give children the diabetes of obesity. And the practices that gave us cheap and endless food led to poisoning of the very food itself, diseases of the brain. We made everything clean, because we were supposed to want it that way, and everything looked neater and shinier. Everything so neat and shiny that our immune systems couldn't handle everyday things, so fruit and nuts and milk could so shock our systems that it could kill people.
We couldn't believe in Star Trek anymore; the human race didn't work well enough for that.
Before alien contact, the different sectors of the universe will look like this :
UK : Red Dwarf.
US : Firefly.
Alien contact will be like Alien. Some poor sods attacked out of the blue.
Post-alien contact, when things have settled down, there will be Babylon 5. Bureaucracy and psi-cops, with military problems.
And the far corners will be Farscape. Mad and lawless equally.
Because we just couldn't believe in something shiny and smooth-running. Chaos and bureaucracy and red tape and the engineer's curry ending up in the most vital part of the engine, we can believe in. Nobility is no longer something we believe in, as we move farther into a future of weather problems and pollution, with constant little wars on the sides.
In the fifties they told us everyone would have a car; they just didn't tell us that a generation would grow up with asthma as a commonplace thing, in the time between everyone getting cars and pollution laws coming in. Or that having everything done by machine, with shiny plastic-wrapped convenience food would give children the diabetes of obesity. And the practices that gave us cheap and endless food led to poisoning of the very food itself, diseases of the brain. We made everything clean, because we were supposed to want it that way, and everything looked neater and shinier. Everything so neat and shiny that our immune systems couldn't handle everyday things, so fruit and nuts and milk could so shock our systems that it could kill people.
We couldn't believe in Star Trek anymore; the human race didn't work well enough for that.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-15 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-15 05:28 pm (UTC)