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I just started watching “Star Trek: Picard” (the jury is still out on it) and there was a joke: Picard finds his friend reading Asimov’s Complete Robot stories and says “I never cared for science fiction; I just didn’t get it.” Ha ha, funny. (It bothered me!)

I have heard this a lot. I’ve never understood the comment. What is there not to get? It’s not our world. It’s a different world. A world of the future, or an alternate past. A world in which possibilities are realized that aren’t in ours. Do lots of people really lack the imagination to understand this? (Positing that Picard is such a person makes no sense at all.)

It has always bothered me that science fiction has never quite been accepted as “literature” or “art.” A great deal has been written about this (some by Asimov!) The science fiction works most likely to be taught or read in school – 1984, Brave New World, A Handmaid’s Tale, Vonnegut – represent a subset of science fiction. These works use sf as a metaphor, or other literary device, to express their views about politics or culture. They aren’t really speculative. (By the way, in case you didn’t already know, readers of sf don’t use the term “sci fi!” I believe this was one of the many examples of wordplay introduced by Forrest J. Ackerman, best known for the long-running magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.) So, what is “real” sf? (“Genre” science fiction.)

Science fiction got its start as we all know in the 19th century with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells (maybe Mary Shelley), but “modern” sf began in 1923 with the beginning of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (mostly fantasy; it includes the wonderful Interstellar Patrol stories by Edmond Hamilton and the story that introduced the term “blaster” – “When The Green Star Waned” by Nictzin Dyalhis.) Or, it REALLY began in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo award is named) started publishing Amazing Stories. This wonderful magazine published “The Metal Man” in 1928 – the first published story by my favorite sf writer, Jack Williamson. (Gernsback had already been publishing sf stories in his nonfiction radio mags.)

But really really real modern sf started in 1938 when John Wood Campbell, the Editor of Editors, took over at Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog) and made it the first magazine to publish really serious sf. Stories that went beyond adventure and girls in space bikinis and BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters.) Campbell inspired and nurtured such amazing talent as Robert Heinlein (the first author to build a carefully-constructed Future History linking his stories), Isaac Asimov (whose Three Laws of Robotics were Campbell’s idea) and Theodore Sturgeon (who, in a different magazine, published “A World Well Lost” – a remarkably sensitive portrayal of homosexual love – in the 1950s!) The Campbell Era is usually referred to as “the Golden Age.”

As usual, I have strayed from my topic. What is the actual value of sf?

First answer: it doesn’t need one! Stories exist to entertain and amuse and explore and make life worth living by TELLING life. Sf is no different. Heinlein said “Butterflies, like little girls, need no excuse.” The same can be said for sf.

Second answer (not a good one) : predicting the future. Science fiction isn’t meant to forecast what will happen – and it has done a remarkably poor job of it. Oh, there are exceptions. Heinlein’s story “Waldo” introduced those glove-in-a-box things for touching radioactive stuff – they are called waldoes to this day. Jack Williamson introduced the term genetic engineering in his novel Dragon’s Island. (And also terraforming.) Asimov introduced the term robotics. But, in general, little of what has happened in our world happened just as sf said it would. Verne launched us to the Moon with a giant gun. Heinlein had us land on the Moon due to a private investor, not the government. Asimov’s robots use positrons (antimatter electrons) – he admitted he just used the term because essentially it sounded cool. Hundreds of sf stories and movies suggested the “visiphone” – a visual telephone locked in place on a desk or wall like old rotary phones; none that I know of predicted the cell phone.

But science fiction isn’t really about predicting the future. If it needs a value beyond beguiling us, I think it’s this: science fiction makes us aware that things needn’t be the way they are. That the world isn’t just what it looks like in our prosaic, limited view. That there are wonders, and possibilities.

Most sf readers are true progressives. We see the world today as a sketch; a possible reality surrounded by hundreds of unseen possible realities. Sf readers opposed racism from the beginning (its history in that regard is far from perfect, but that’s another story.) Why? Because we see intelligence and spirit and dignity in minds, however they are constituted. For the same reason, the gender fluidity that has so many people irrationally scared today is no problem for an sf reader. We’ve been to planets with three sexes, or no sexes, or fallen in love with characters who change their gender.

We’re futurists, by and large. Anyone who has read Foundation knows that the future, like the past, is determined by statistics. Who can take seriously the idea that the world will be saved if only “our” party is in office, who has read Foundation? We’ve also walked amid the rubble of shattered worlds and know that ours is precious and needs protecting. Sf readers knew the dread power and wonderful potential of the energy locked in the atom long before the rest of the world.

In “A World Well Lost,” the people of earth call two aliens “Loverbirds” because of their routine displays of affection for each other – not realizing that both are male.

On an even deeper level, science fiction, even bad science fiction, makes us think about the inner nature of things, not just their outer appearances. What is awareness? What is meaning? What might the future hold? How can we find truly new solutions to age-old problems?

How sad to consider these questions and say “I just don’t get it.”

“Survival” comes from the French “sur vie” – literally “on life” but actually more like “more life.” (Prepositions don’t always translate smoothly.) Many people feel that a fear of death, and a longing to believe that death is not the end, is the primary motivator of religious belief. I think that’s too narrow a view of what religious belief offers people. But it certainly is a powerful motivator.

In one of my favorite pieces of fiction, the Twilight Zone episode “Long Live Walter Jameson,” the title character (a man who has been alive long enough to know Plato) says that he came to believe that if a man couldn’t live forever, there was no point in living at all.

Most stories about long-lived people try to teach us that the desire for immortality is vain and foolish. In Natalie Babbit’s “Tuck Everlasting”, Winnie is told by an immortal, “Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever. You just have to live.” Who can forget the horrible struldbrugs from Gulliver’s Travels – they can’t die, but they lose all their physical and mental powers. Lonely immortals are everywhere in science fiction – I highly recommend Grotto of the Dancing Deer by Clifford Simak, The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson, “Requiem for Methuselah” (an episode of Star Trek) by Jerome Bixby, and the movie The Man From Earth, also by Bixby. “The Coming of the Ice” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker appeared in Amazing Stories in 1926; it features a man who gave up procreation to achieve immortality and ends up cold and heartless (get the double meaning of the title?)

Why do we long to live forever? Not everyone does. Read Silverberg’s brilliant novella, “Going.” But, most of us have felt like Walter Jameson. What’s the point of collecting experiences, growing, changing, if it all ends up fading into eternal nothingness?

I have a counterpoint to this. Suppose there is an afterlife. There are two possibilities. Either this life is our only opportunity to learn, grow, and change, and in the next part we are “locked in” forever – never changing, learning nothing new, always just as we are now. Or, we continue to grow and experience and those experiences add, and subtract, from the total of what we are.

I think only the second possibility holds any appeal. Who wants to be a statue in a museum forever, or to repeat the same experiences over and over, or to learn nothing from any new ones we might have? I’m already tired of the stories I tell on first dates.

But if the second possibility is true, and we keep changing – what would we become in a thousand years? A million? A hundred billion? I can barely relate to the person I was thirty years ago. Sometimes, he seems like me, and there is a sense of continuity. Sometimes, he seems like a stranger, and his motivations and feelings and hopes are a mystery to me. In any case, he’s gone. I’m here now.

How much more would this be so in a hundred years? And….how much of your past could you even really remember? In Jeffrey Sackett’s odd novel, Mark of the Werewolf, immortals forget literally everything; their brains can only hold about an ordinary lifetime’s worth of information. They don’t even know their own birth names.

Without a sense of continuity, in what real sense would I remain I?

Suppose someone showed you what you would be like in a thousand years, and you saw someone who had long ago grown bored with everything that gives your life meaning now. Perhaps your future self has outgrown all the people you fear to die and leave, so he never talks to them. Perhaps the changes in your circumstances have altered your sympathies; perhaps in the next world, you relish watching acts of cannibalism in arenas with crowds of other thousand year old beings who hiss oddly to show their satisfaction and have replaced body parts with animal limbs.

You might be saying, “I would never change that much!” But, look how much you have changed in the few short years you’ve lived.

That person a thousand years from now would not be me. I have little interest in his continuance. But the me I create in this short life can go on, in the affect I have on this world and in the unchanging scroll of life that I am making my marks upon right now. I don’t want the memory of the me I am to be reduced by the shadow of some future being who claims a connection to me through sheer continuity.

As Walter Jameson said, “We love a rose because we know it will die. Who ever loved a stone?”

We all know that Hollywood is sequel-happy. One reason often given is that movies are so amazingly expensive to produce, so studios aren’t willing to take a risk on something that isn’t almost guaranteed. Not that sequels never disappoint at the box office, but they rarely bomb completely. I have an idea about the psychology behind the success of the phenomenon of the sequel. But first, I’ll say other things.

It’s very disappointing, especially (for me) with science fiction films. So much Asimov, Heinlein, Williamson, Simak, Leinster, Silverberg, Moore, Kuttner, Sturgeon, and so many more, is out there, unfilmed, while we get Terminator 20: He’s Baaaack and This Time, He Does the Macarena!

Sometimes we do get something brand new. Like the stunningly bad Jupiter Ascending. Though, I have to be honest: I really like that movie. It puts most of its feet wrong, and since it’s hard to even tell what species the film is, who knows how many feet it really has. But no film featuring Mila Kunis as a space goddess who somehow rules bees for no reason can be said to completely lack charm.

Before I get to my little theory, which explains both why we like sequels and why we are doomed to be disappointed by them, I’ll say that I think there are two kinds of sequels. Type 1 sequels are sequels that were meant to be. Either a film was based on a series of novels like Lord of the Rings or James Bond, or the film’s story was deliberately spread over multiple films like Kill Bill, or a series was always intended (or at least hoped for) like Star Wars. Such sequels can still be bad, but they don’t really fit my theory.

Type 2 sequels are the ones to watch out for. These are sequels to stories that were completely told already. The story is over; let’s have more! Like children around a campfire, we hear that the boy is found dead at the grave because he put his own dagger through his shirt, and we yell “More!”, leaving the camp counselor befuddled.

A perfect example is Die Hard. (Ever notice that the expression is pronounced with the emphasis on hard, but everyone says the movie title with the emphasis on die?) Here was a great movie. The greatness lies in the fact that John McClane had no business being where he was. He stumbled into the adventure of his life. In Die Hard 2: Is That A Gun In Your Pocket Or Are You Thinking About Die Hard 1, he…stumbles into the adventure of his life….again. It just doesn’t work.

One reason it doesn’t work is because writing a sequel inverts the natural order of things. A storyteller comes up with an idea first, then robes it in the flesh of characters and world-building. For the sequel, the characters and world are already in place, and the story is fitted to them. An idea has to be come up with to fit a situation, when it should be the other way around.

So why do we love them so much? Even after we’ve been burned? And why are we always so disappointed?

We have to admit, we’re really unfair in judging sequels. It’s not like we don’t know what we’re walking into. There are only two complaints about sequels: “the original was better, this was unnecessary,” or “that was nothing like the original.” And that just about covers the spread. Or, as my Dad said on our way out of Star Trek 5: Shatner IS a Director, Dammit!, “they’ve squeezed just about all the blood out of this turnip.”

Okay, so here is my long awaited theory. We want a sequel because we want to see the original again. But we also want something new. We’re like Homer Simpson: “Put all my groceries into one bag – but don’t make the bag heavy!” (When the bag boy said, “That’s not possible, sir,” Homer responded, “What are you, the Possible Police?”)

We want the original again because we had a good time and we remember how great it felt when Indy just shot the guy with the sword. We don’t want to risk our evening out on an untested quantity. “Pitch Black? I don’t already know that one! I’m scared!”

So, we should see the original again. But, we don’t want to! Or, we don’t think we want to. We think we want something new, that’s old, that’s new! Something fresh that has been sitting there for years. Something unexpected that won’t startle us. Something different that is familiar.

We want to leave our beautiful wife and flee to Europe, and take up with a dancing girl, and have her shed the seventh veil, and it’s our wife, but better somehow.

So, what is the inevitable result? If the film breaks no new ground (what we ostensibly want), we conclude it’s not as good as the first one. (Of course it isn’t! I’m on my fourth midlife crisis and it really lacks the zing of the first one. ) We decide that there was no reason to make it. (Again…of course there wasn’t.) But, if it breaks new ground, a part of us senses that this could have been a really good story about a Satanic cult on motorcycles – but what the heck is Dracula doing there! (Christopher Lee, Count Dooku for all you fellow prequel lovers out there, or Saruman for you Tallfellows) essentially said as much about The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Hammer films 1973. He also recorded his own heavy metal music in his 90s. There was a man who knew how to move on! As I was saying, if it breaks new ground, then it isn’t really the same – and we feel cheated.

Sequels just can’t please us. We should grow up and spend our money on original works.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If so, let me know and I’ll rewrite it slightly and offer it up as something new. Hey….I need something to do to distract me from how the Apocalypse we’re oozing through has delayed Wonder Woman 1984 once too often and I’m getting twitchy.

Do you recognize the quote? Poor Admiral Stockdale. But what a thought-provoking quote. I think, once we had that answer, we’d know just about everything worth knowing.

I am Paul Bedard, and I am here right now to write a blog post. I’ll tell you why I chose my title. It’s a quote from Nicholas Boileau. Like me, he’s French. Unlike me, he’s dead. Like me, he was a critic. Unlike me, he got paid for it. Presumably. The quote, which I have always loved, is “Anyone can be original, and absurd.”

I think what he must have meant by it, is that we prize originality in art, but maybe we prize it overmuch. After all, have you ever seen a TV show that “broke all the rules,” and had the spontaneous thought – oh! now I finally know why they made those rules!

Let me explain it a little more carefully. If you set out to write a story about a dragon, it might occur to you that everything has been said. The wings, the fire, the wisdom older than time, the iridescent scales and the defiance of gravity, not to mention the square-cube law. So, if it’s all been said and done, how can you be – – -original?

Well, it’s easy! As Nick says, anyone can do it. Just write a story about a dragon that lost his quilt and decided to travel back in time to ask Thomas Jefferson to make him a new one but slipped on a time-banana and ended up on the set of Beverly Hills 90210 just in time to talk Shannen Doherty out of *****ing her way off the show.

I guarantee you, you’ve succeeded. Your dragon story is absolutely original. No one has ever written that story. But – and here is the second half – it’s absurd.

Now, something that just anyone can do, doesn’t seem worth doing. Or…does it?

Here’s where I go off the rails a bit. Sorry, Boileau (pronounced “Bwa” as in “bwahaha!” and “LO” as if you’re a little angry but no one knows why. Most French is pronounced with subliminal emotions. It’s the only language that actually has a verb tense called “the passive aggressive.”) Anyway, here’s the thing – I would absolutely read that story. And demand a sequel. I enjoy the absurd.

But not Rise of Skywalker absurd. Because I don’t like my intelligence insulted.

Anyway, that’s why I chose that name. Because I wasn’t sure if anyone would want to read anything I’d ever write, and I felt more than a little pompous presuming that they might. So I asked myself, what can I offer? Well, originality, for one. But perhaps absurd originality. But that’s okay. (Unless it’s not. In which case, my humblest apologies. And farewell.)

I think it’s a perfect name. And I don’t even have to worry about living up to it, because it’s not like I quoted Mark Twain or even Shania Twain. I quoted Nicholas Boileau. Whom I guarantee you’ve never heard of.

So, I can promise you, if you read my future posts, you can be guaranteed to read things you’ve never read before. That’s about all I can guarantee. If you attempt to find any other motive in my narrative, you will be….oops! Better keep my promise and not quote Twain.

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