I Am Geek

Okay, I admit it...I am a geek - and this is the post that is going to totally expose me.

I really like good speculative fiction. There. I said it.

"Huh?," you say.

Speculative fiction is a snob's way of saying science fiction. For most people science fiction as a genre evokes images of bad robots from 1950s B-movies or legions of geeked-out Star Trek/Star Wars fans living in their parents' basements in some kind of alternate fanboy universe. For sure those images and people exist. And I am not better or all that different really. Or, perhaps I am - not in kind but in degree. I like hard science fiction. I like science fiction that engages the science of quantum realities, that explores the limits of what it means to be a human, a species, a society, etc. I like science fiction that is about big ideas that conventional literary forms, grounded as they are in the world as it is, cannot begin to engage. I like to engage my imagination with the world as it might be. Science fiction allows one to position a narrative in a possible future, even if it is only a minute further into that future, and posit, "What if?"

This is why I like the term "speculative" as a modifier for fiction. It speculates about another world, either a little beyond our own or so far removed as to be nearly unrecognizable. Often such a world forces its protagonists to wrestle with significant moral/ethical issues that might not be as accessible or as interesting in a standard format. Writers like Orson Scott Card (in his early writing especially) and William Gibson (who continues to amaze) create worlds of possibility and invite you to engage there deeply. If you are interested in engaging speculative fiction on a more philosophical level, you might read the articles connected to the following links.

Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

William Gibson Explains Why Science Fiction is About the Present

But back to the ultimate purpose of this post...You know where 99% of the bad rap science/speculative fiction originates from? Poor film adaptions of what is usually incredible source material.

Last Christmas season Will Smith starred in a movie that got a lot of advertising attention, moderate critical reception, and a decent box office: I Am Legend. Go ahead, hit the link, watch the trailer, then come back. I'll wait...This movie is based off a "legend"-ary work of what I would consider fantastic speculative fiction that dates to the 1950s. Written by Richard Matheson in 1954, this book tells the story of the last surviving human, Robert Neville. It's not that everyone else is dead; it's that everyone else has been transformed into some variation of a vampire. Sounds cheesy, I know. Except that Matheson wraps the vampire convention in a plausible life-science scenario of genetic mutation and species evolution. It's a big idea kind of book. And it builds and it builds and it builds and you have no idea where it is going until wham! You are on the last page and there is the big reveal and it is over and there you sit - astounded by what Matheson has pulled off. Something you never see coming. Just like the ending of The Sixth Sense.

Back to the film. Imagine if the movie studio heads determined in the end that audiences weren't smart enough to understand what M. Night Shamalayan was doing in The Sixth Sense and told him to erase the part about Bruce Willis's character being dead - scratch that part. Let him solve the murder mystery conventionally and become a fond uncle to Haley Joe Osment's character. I can hear them: "Let's let him watch the young man mature, reunited and living happily with his wife, far into the future. Much brighter that way. Audiences like bright." Except that didn't happen to The Sixth Sense and that is essentially what happened to I Am Legend. Some studio head at Warner Bros. decided that people were incapable of handling a big idea movie and instead settled for science fiction movie conventional ending #435. I was fuming when I left the theatre. They took an amazing plot and eviscerated it. And that happens all the time.

Now - why the aneurysm today? I found a blogpost about I Am Legend. It is about to be released on DVD. And guess what? They filmed an ending much closer to Matheson's original. The fact that they understood and filmed something in the spirit of the original and then butchered it? Unconscionable. But through the wonderful opportunities that DVDs and director's cuts create, we speculative fiction geeks have the opportunity to see a more faithful (but still not perfect) rendition of Matheson's classic.

I don't want to blow the ending for anyone whose curiosity is stoked, but if you go to FirstShowing.net, you can read that blogger's take on this, with a little more detail on the plot itself and what makes the ending so good - and see the five-minute long alternate ending!

Okay. That is all.

I Am Geek.

Comments

[Adam]

Isaac Asimov!!!!

[Tim]

No, just Tim. : )

You're right - Asimov is a giant in this genre, among others, too.

[Timothy Johnson]

Yeah, they actually had to go back very late in the process and refilm it weeks before release. I wish people would just tell their stories they way they think they should be. As you said in the book, it worked for Peter Jackson.

[Matt Fillilngham]

Sci-Fi (or Sci-Spec) Geeks of the world unite! My wife and I are really into Sci-Fi serial television. There are a few absolutely great ones out there. We've just about emptied out Netflix of their Sci-Fi shows. The best sci-fi show ever is one that is about to start it's final season on Scifi network: "Battlestar Galactica" We've seen a lot of TV, but nothing, in any genre, comes close to this. You're right, Sci-Fi, speaks to our humanity in a way that no other genre can.

[Tim]

You are right, Matt. Battlestar Galactica is without peer in terms of writing and production. No other show takes on the breadth of ideas that it does, especially during a time of war like we are currently in. Terrorism, torture, theology, personhood, AI - all of these subjects are introduced and handled deftly. But the part that really makes it so great is that it doesn't get bogged down under the weight of the topics it engages. Instead it uses fantastic characters to bring you more organically into these ideas as an integral part of the narrative. Amazing. Thanks for sharing.