Every story has conflict and speculative fiction; whether
science-fiction, horror or fantasy; often involves conflicts of a
particularly spectacular sort. This isn't always true, but we're
focusing on where it is. The threats, if not the central conflict, of
sci-fi, horror and fantasy usually come from a standard list.
There's
the ancient evil sealed away for who knows how long and now released by
the ignorant and unwise. There's the experiment gone horribly wrong,
or horribly right, that runs amok and goes on a rampage. There's an
attack by outside forces such as aliens or demons, quite often brought
to the setting by the actions of people. There's the progressive change
in society as some advance makes people take things for granted and
results in long-term sociological consequences of a negative sort.
Very, very rarely we have the threat that would have happened with or
without mankind and is brought to an end by the cleverness of the
heroes.
Which is the point I am heading too. Science fiction and
fantasy, where the mad scientists are replaced by power mad warlocks,
has a tendency to confuse sloppy execution and science with things that
should not be researched because the very concept is immoral.
My
favorite example in this vein is Jurassic Park. Both the book and the
movie wax on and on about how terrible an idea it is for people to clone
dinosaurs and uses the scenario as a situational proof for how we
should leave well enough alone. But really, examine the scenario as a
whole. It isn't the concept of cloning prehistoric creatures that is
flawed here. No, rather it is execution of the process.
As soon
as Hammond's employees perfect the process of cloning, he goes right
into production of park and mass production of dinosaurs on one island
to be transported to a second island. He doesn't wait for an analysis
of his newly created dinosaurs. He pretty much jumps out to grab as
many species as he possibly can, oooing and ahhing over the popular
species like a kid at Christmas and jumps right into marketing studies.
Over
and over again, the attacks on the park are not on the idea of cloning
dinosaurs but on Hammond's slipshod carnie approach to it. The
exception to this is the chaos math guy, Malcolm, who is really as
arrogant as Hammond. Malcolm is the only one to attack the idea as
inherently wrong and his is made to be the apparently "right" position.
Drs.
Grant and Statler attack his ignorance about species of plants and
dinosaurs. The hunter attacks his overconfidence as far as security
goes and most of the people attack the rush in which approaches the
project. But most of them aren't attacking the idea.
Then you
have the interference from the hacker idiot. Now, in the movie, if
weren't for the hacker, everything would have been fine and dandy, but
the book makes it clear things were already going out of control well
before he did anything. Among other things, you had raptors already
breeding in the wild and large populations of things like the combies
that weren't being tracked. As well as a sickness in some of the
herbivores on the plant island, not counting for the prion-infected
dinosaurs on Site B (another facet not mentioned in the movies).
Anyway,
back to the hacker. His actions are heavily implied to be part of the
inevitable reason that the entire idea of cloning dinosaurs is a bad
one. But his actions are only indirectly related to the dinosaurs. His
was just basic greed, panic, poor planning and being unaware of the
basic nature of the situation. And while some people will assume that
something like that is inevitable, even if it were (corporate espionage
is likely), that is just one in a long line of bad decisions that had to
combine to make the disaster. If Hammond hadn't been so slipshod, then
they would have been fine even with the crap the hacker loaded on them
with everything else.
There's the storm, which should have been
a non-issue. Especially given the place they set up, there should have
been multiple redundancies even in the face of sabotage and computers
shutting down. The only real impact the storm had was that it made the
hacker's plan go to crap. Given the virus he put in, I doubt that he
planned to go back, so they would have had the shut down problems storm
or no storm.
In any case, I'm going to come back to my original
point, the overall impression of the movie is "cloning dinosaurs is a
bad idea" when, if you really analyze it should be "cloning dinosaurs
and then putting them in a theme park with untested, unfinished
infrastructure and security systems as well as inappropriate weaponry
without even studying one dinosaur first is a bad idea."
The same
problem can be seen with a number of different technologies. Computers
had their alarmist movie in the Terminator. Cloning's alarmists date
back to Frankenstein at least, the author was likely more focusing on
her own recent miscarriage than on science, and probably older if you
look at the number of myths about a created being running amok in
history. Transhumanism was attacked in the most recent Battlestar
Galactica as well as Surrogates. Resident Evil is an attack on
biotechnologies.
Well, not seriously attacks. Most movies are
made to be entertainment, not philosophical discussion and this trend
does make sense because a fiction about an experiment that goes
perfectly right and makes the world a better place is boring. So there
has to be a threat, and even if they want to have the genius scientist
save the day, they still have to have a threat big enough to make an
interesting conflict. Aliens and such are a sometimes used outside
element to provoke a beneficial scientific development, but they've
turned into something of a parody, at least as regards aliens attacking a
modern day Earth. The current atmosphere has the believability of
aliens for a "serious" movie stretched to a point of unpopularity.
Now,
later, the alarmists, at least those prone to talk before they
research, will point to these ill-researched movies as reasons why X
technology is bad. They use the fictional scenario as a sort of pseudo
proof for what would definitely happen.
For example, 1984 is
frequently preached as an example of how bad the world would be if the
Government could watch everything you do. Nevermind the fact that the
Star Trek federation has all the same surveillance capability and
magnitudes more besides. Not that Star Trek is a good proof for how
domestic surveillance is good thing anymore than 1984 is a proof for how
its bad. They're both fictional scenarios. Neither one is a
thoroughly researched study. 1984 is a worst case scenario and in Star
Trek it is background that's barely thought of at all.
And neither is about the good or bad nature of the idea but of the use the idea is put to.
If
we took every one of these sensationalist sci-fi movies (or fantasy
movies with similar themes) as a proof for what science would bring,
then we'd be in a modern day medieval stasis until the oil runs out. In
some ways, we're already there, take a look at the reluctance people
have to turning to nuclear power. We're content to burn up our fossil
fuels in the hopes that somebody will suddenly render solar and wind
power techs up to a level where we could effectively use them instead of
having to cover Texas in windmills to power a major city. (I'm
probably exaggerating there, been a while since I saw the comparisons of
how much energy the windmills produce versus how much is needed)
Sci-fi
shows like Eureka are my favorite, where the overwhelming mood is that
science is a good thing, even with the freaky things that happen every
episode. They make almost every bad thing in the show produce potential
benefits for humanity and map a path of advancement. Though they did
have some trace of "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" in the form of the
artifact.
I also love the Nanoha series of animes because of the
large number of characters who are clones ("Artificial Mages") or
cyborgs or whatever in one form or another and yet the society treats
them as perfectly normal, making it a great transhumanist story.
Babylon
5 is another great one for science given that it is explicitly made
clear to us that humanity will make pretty much all the same advances as
the Vorlons did.
But these "science is good" movies are largely
bogged down in the mountains of "science is bad" movies. Mostly because
it is probably harder to do an entertaining story where the theme is
the benefits of science as compared to the dangers of science.
A blog by Luke Garrison Green of Thrythlind Books and Games. Here he discusses writing skills, reviews books, discusses roleplaying games and refers to Divine Blood, Bystander and his other books.
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