Way to rock the shit out of those mutton chops!
In honor of the coolest Isaac of all time (with Newton and Hayes coming in second and third respectively), today is National Science Fiction Day. A celebration of all things geektastic. Contrary to the extremely vocal and persistent wishes of close friends of ours, we have not yet popped my Star Wars cherry.
Instead, we celebrated by watching an absolutely terrible B-movie on the SyFy, discussing science fiction, reading a short story and then sort of writing a short story with my delightful cousin Sydney.
I had work today so there wasn't much we could do during business hours. We decided we should put on SyFy and just take our chances with what we got. It did not disappoint.
Oh yes. This happened.
It reminded us how much range there is in the SciFi genre. Creature features? Check. Fantasy stories about far off worlds? Obvs. Futuristic worlds filled with fantastic technology? Super duh. So how do you pin it down? To be honest... where we settled is that you kind of can't. As we watched a poorly acted debacle about a mythical creature, loose aboard a cruise ship, it became clear that SciFi is where real imagination lives. No... definitely not in Chupacabra Terror (or Ogre: the delightful bullshit that was on immediately after)... but in the other major areas of the genre.
Think about fantasy stories - worlds, languages, new sets of rules and universal laws are all created by the author and the story is woven into that fabric. Then look at true science fiction - beautiful, fantastical futurism at its finest. Perhaps the best example of it is the birthday boy himself: Asimov. Back in 1964, he predicted where technology and the world would be in 2014. It is pretty spot on.
We talked a lot about what scifi represents to our society. I was particularly fascinated by how stories have shifted. Thousands of years ago, stories about giant creatures and Gods were our explanation for our world. Now we have a real understanding of much of the world around us and we know it isn't the wrath of Poseidon that causes tsunamis, for example.
Well don't pout about it.
So we look to things we either want to know or still don't understand and those become our science fiction. Would we have cell phones if Star Trek didn't have communicators? What about 3D printers without replicators? Right now, scientists are studying how to instantly transport matter and perfecting an invisibility cloak, but the first step in both of those processes was coming up with the idea. With that in mind, we got curious about what the next generation of scientists and inventors would think of... so we asked my 10-yr-old cousin Sydney to tell us a short story.
She came up with a story about future earth where people tried to invent robots, but instead they released a chemical that made all the animals on the planet go crazy and get aggressive. So our future selves had to escape to the sky to hide from the crazy animals. Until, one day, the birds got infected too and we had to flee back down to the ground, but by then all the crazy animals were dead or the bad stuff wore off... so... that was good.
Seems more creature feature than science, but who's to say we won't decide to live in the sky one day? The views would, by definition, be killer.
After chatting with Syd, we found a neat site that publishes submissions of short stories of all genres called East of the Web. In their scifi section was a delightful story, called Paris at Night, about technology that captures and removes memories that you can then sell to other people. Very interesting. I think I found my recreational reading for a while.
Finally, we're capping off the evening with Elysium -- a somewhat bleak future predictive movie, but very interesting. And much of the technology I could see existing at some point. Matt Damon's character dons an exo-skeleton that, in non-criminal/freedom fighter applications, could be a major medical breakthrough.
Mostly, today was about musing on the future and all it has to offer us. I remember when I could sing the AOL dial-up sounds because they were so familiar to me. No longer. Sydney has never known a world without highspeed internet. I can't wait to see the things our children see as daily realities that were once the fevered dreams of madmen.
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