June 26th 2000

At the end of my last log Is This The End of Short Fiction I said I would explain why I think reading science fiction is better than watching it. A handful of kind, but opinionated souls zapped out emails defending movie SF and other media forms of the genre. So this log will be round one in the battle between The Page vs. The Screen.

For round two, I challenge all you science fiction movie buffs out there to blast me by e-mail. List the films you think reign supreme in science fictional power and explain why. I'll combine the responses to make my next log here at SciFan.

To set up the contest, I'm going to use Round 1 to define the rules and make my initial attack. After reading the replies to the last log, my feelings began to waffle and doubt clouded my thoughts. Then I read a novella in June's Asimov's SF by Greg Egan called "Oracle." and the doubts disappeared! After that I read Gary K. Wolfe's long review of the latest yearly SF&F story anthologies in June's Locus Magazine. I was inspired again.

These two pieces easily convinced me that I was right, and I needed to get back into the fight. Egan's story represents what modern science fiction can do and gives The Page many points because The Screen would never attempt to mine this vein of imagination. Wolfe's overview of last year's stories handily shows the amazing variety of visions that writers can build with just a word processor. The Screen is hamstrung by its own giant production system.

I have always held the opinion that written science fiction was far superior to media science fiction. Media science fiction, as represented on the movie screen, the TV screen and the computer screen, is far more popular than written science fiction, as represented by the printed page. But how do I prove such an assumption? What makes the science fiction viewed on a printed page so much better than science fiction viewed on a screen?

Are there qualities to science fiction that can be measured and judged? Art is not an astronomical object that can be analyzed with a spectrograph. Yet, we do judge art. A comedy is judged by how much it makes us laugh. Of course, one person's big chucks is another person's affront to common decency. So we can't expect to exactly quantify the power of various science fictional presentations.

What are the virtues of science fiction? The key quality that I think most people will agree on is a sense of wonder. Of course the study of history or science or mathematics can have a sense of wonder, so we need to be more specific. Attempts to define science fiction have a long complicated history, and I do not want to get into that here. Sense of wonder is having your mind blown by a new and novel concept.

I want to produce a list of qualities that science fiction possesses which we can then use to rate books, movies, television shows, role playing games or whatever media claims to be science fictional. The individual qualities may not be unique to science fiction, but the sum of these qualities should always produce something that people think of as science fiction. For the purpose of this essay, I'm going to focus on science fiction and ignore fantasy.

In this contest I'm going to invent an imaginary Science Fiction Meter. Think Geiger counter. It has one circular screen with a single needle that swings from left to right along a calibrated semicircle. Those of you who are good with auditory imaginations can hear it click, so as the needle swings right the clicking will get louder. Now this SF Meter will detect the qualities that I will describe below. We need to focus on specific qualities and try to use agreed upon logic. You may think Stars Wars is the most exciting movie of all time. You may call it science fiction. But do not make that leap of false assumption that Star Wars is the greatest science fiction story of all time.

I know we will all disagree, but let's try to focus on the analogy to see if we can make it work.

After a sense of wonder, I think the most important aspect of science fiction is science. Sure, most science fiction isn't very scientific, but there is a relationship to science that is hard to describe. Science fiction is not really fiction about science. Science fantasy might be an apt way of thinking about it. Science fiction writers take concepts they have learned from studying science and extrapolate new exciting ideas. There is a reason why the first two great science fiction magazines were named Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories of Super Science.

At its best, science fiction shows a love or infatuation with science. This is a hard concept to pin down. Time travel and faster than light travel are two common themes of science fiction, but people will probably never travel in time or move faster than light. These are romantic notions of science or wishes we beg from reality by exploring every nook and cranny of theoretical mathematics looking for that cosmic loophole.

The third ingredient is an offshoot of the second. Some people have wanted to use the label 'SF' not for Science Fiction, but for Speculative Fiction. Science fiction doesn't try to describe what is, but what if. At its core science fiction is a literature that speculates about the future. Some science fiction tries to be predictive, but for the most part, science fiction does not seek to be a crystal ball. No, instead science fiction tries to imagine all the possible futures that will ever be or could be or even never will be. A sense of wonder and scientific ideas reinforces this quality. Science and history try to explain where mankind has been and where we came from. At its best, science fiction explores all our other possibilities.

The thing I hate most about dying is not getting to hang around and see how the human race comes out. Just think of what Shakespeare could have done if we could beam 200 channels of satellite TV back to him to watch? That is what science fiction does for us. TV would not show old Billy the reality of the 21st century, and science fiction can not nail down the future for us. It does give our imaginations views of possible futures.

The next quality is rather generic sounding, and that is imagination. If you have ever seen the film of a Saturn 5 rocket taking off, with the tremendous fire of thrust flowing out those five rocket nozzles lifting the giant assembly into the sky, you have a true sense of man's technological power. It takes a lot of power to launch a rocket, and it takes a lot of imagination to create awe inspiring science fiction. Imagination is what launches a science fiction story into orbit. Yet, imagination by itself is not science fictional. Shakespeare was the most imaginative writer of all time. Science fiction requires a specific kind of imagination. The best science fiction imagines something new. When H. G. Wells conceived the time machine his mind created something new that had an astonishing sense of wonder.

For many years science fiction readers talk about the years 1939-1949 as being the Golden Age of SF, until some very perceptive person said that age 13 is the real Golden Age of SF. So the mind of the audience is very important. The Matrix probably pegged the SF Meter for teenagers last year, while my SF Meter screamed when I saw Gattaca. Some people lack a sense of humor, so it is to be expected that some people will not be moved by science fiction. In other words the power of science fiction can not really be measured in absolute terms.

So what do we have so far?

• Sense of Wonder
• Science
• Speculation
• Imagination

Of course, the same kind of snobbery has always supported the idea that books are better than movies, and suggested that having read the book provides greater intellectual standing than having seen the movie. Your coolness rating is higher if you've read Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's rather than seen the film with George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn, as proved in an episode of Seinfeld.

I have always been the snob who believed the experience gained from reading Flowers For Algernon was far more powerful than watching Charly, the movie based on the book. I might just be an old fogey that is attached to the old medium of words. And when a movie fails to compare well against a book, it might really be due to the fact that the movie director just envisioned the book different than the way my mind filmed the book in my head.

In comparing written science fiction against movie science fiction we need to be fair and compare the four qualities I've covered above. I'd like to think the four elements that go into producing the concept we call science fiction should be measurable so we can think of some books as having a lot of science fiction power and others as having little. Think of amps or horsepower. We know the Star Wars movies have a lot of power because they made a lot of money and influenced a lot of people. But does Star Wars have science fiction power?

Star Wars has faster than light space travel, galactic empires, far out weapons, robots, alien creatures and many other elements that have been in science fiction movies and books for generations. Yet, I believe that Star Wars isn't science fiction at all and would not make a click on the SF meter. Robots by themselves are not science fiction. Inventing the three laws of robotics and building a story that speculates about them are SF. Star Wars is set in a science fiction background, but the characters and plot are about politics and intrigue and mysticism and love and war. The setting could have been ancient Rome, the wild west, medieval Europe, ancient China, or whenever because it wouldn't have mattered to the heart of the story.

E.T. is immensely entertaining and has a good deal of sense of wonder. But it lacks science and speculation, and its imagination is just great Hollywood movie making imagination and not inventive science fictional imagination. Close Encounters of the Third Kind had all four elements that go into making science fiction. My point I keep trying to make is just because something looks like science fiction does not means it is science fiction. There is a difference. Reading a lot of great SF books and stories will help you spot the difference.

Gattaca is science fiction because it speculates about the future of genetics and makes it integral to the plot. Yet, what makes Gattaca great is that it takes the science fiction concept and asks a philosophical question: what inspires us to go beyond our genes? Is the competition to survive enough for make a normal man compete with supermen? What makes Vincent give everything and never hold back? It's because he wants to go out into space. Thus a sense of wonder, the essence of science fiction, drives Vincent to overcome the reality of his genetic makeup. Gattaca is a science fiction movie about science fiction.

Gattaca KOed the competition in the first seconds of the first round. It is my favorite all time science fiction movie. Yet, it was not popular with general film goers or with science fiction fans. That goes to show that everything is relative. Plug Gattaca into my brain and the SF meter needle slams off the register. Plug it into someone else and it barely registers at all. Go figure.

For a future log I'm going to compare Gattaca with Samuel R. Delany's "The Star Pit" a novella with similar themes. These two stories represent the best of both forms and make a excellent way to compare the two media.

When you get down to it, there is not that many true science fictional stories. Most stuff called science fiction just looks like science fiction on the outside, but lacks the heart of science fiction on the inside. This is equally true of movies or books. So when we are lining up movies to compete with books, we need to find the real thing.

The Fifth Element would set off the SF Meter, but I think The Twelve Monkeys would push the needle further right. Yet the SF radiation from Greg Bear's novel Darwin's Radio would fry either of those movies. Why, you ask? Both of the movies had many tried and true SF elements that have almost become cliché. Younger viewers would still find them fresh and exciting and increase the reading on the SF Meter. Both movies had lots of style which accent the science fictional elements, but ultimately neither gave off a lot of power. Greg Bear comes up with a mind blowing new concept by speculating and philosophizing on current scientific ideas.

This is essentially why I think The Screen looses to The Page, although not due to any inherent nature of screen presentations. People who make movies seem to be way behind the curve in presenting far out science fictional ideas. The Time Machines was made sixty something years after the book. Why? Starship Troopers was forty years after the fact. Was the reason why The Day the Earth Stood Still so good because it was made just thirteen years after the original story?

Real science fiction isn't very common, and great original science fiction is exceedingly rare. Very few SF movies exist at the cutting edge. I can only think of two at the moment: Gattaca and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe Destination Moon. When H. G. Wells Time Machine came out just before the start of the 20th century the pointer of the science fiction power meter was pegged all the way to the right. Sixty plus years later when it was filmed as a movie, the power meter registered a lot of science fiction, but it wasn't in the same league as the book in generating science fiction power. This presents a fundamental problem in measuring science fiction. Science fiction is at its most powerful when it is new. The impact of the concept of time travel is much less today than it was in Victorian times. In fact, the power of science fiction may be on the wane simply because it has been around so long that few new science fiction ideas are being created.

However, it you are thirteen, then everything is new.

Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky was mind blowing in 1941 when it was first published as two separate novellas in Astrounding Science Fiction. Even when published in book form in 1963 it was still quite powerful. The idea of a generation space ship has been written about many times since Heinlein came up with the concept. Even today his story is very impressive because he added the extra touch of having the inhabitants of the space ship forgot they were travelers through space and portrayed them as beings living in an isolated universe. Heinlein invented a major theme and no movie has yet to try and exploit the idea.

To answer the central question of this essay I am going to make a suggestion. Review two examples from each medium and then decide. The Star Wars movies are the most popular SF movies ever, so use them if you want. For the second SF movie I suggest Gattaca. For the two books I recommend Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. I personally think Star Wars is weak science fiction, so you can substitute The Matrix if you want. Read the books and watch the movies, and then try and decide which generates the highest rating on the SF Meter.

The movies will dazzle your brain visually, and I believe the visual process of the mind tends to overshadow the conceptual visualization that books simulate in the mind. All four have varying degrees of the elements I mentioned needed to make a great science fiction experience. I contend the books win. The devil is in the details. Hyperion and The Sparrow takes days or weeks to read. They are relentless in throwing out one science fictional idea after another. If you have the imagination, just a few sentences from either books can generate powerful science fictional visions. If you lack the ability to turn words into mental landscapes, the books will be hobbled, and thus the movies will appeal to you more. The Matrix is dazzling visually, as is Star Wars. The science fiction ideas of Star Wars were already old in the thirties, and reminds me of the writing of Edmond Hamilton. Gattaca and The Matrix are both more modern, although I'd tie Gattaca to the new wave movement of the 60's of the post humanist movement of the 80's and compare it to writers like Samuel R. Delany. The Matrix is like 80's cyberpunk, a descendant of William Gibson.

If movies could be faithfully made based on books like Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion and The Sparrow there would be no measuring their power. Think of Shakespeare. His stories were meant to be acted, and movies only enhance the power of the plays. Shakespeare is so powerful no one can possible comprehend him just by watching a play or movie. Reading Shakespeare line by line with reference works only begin to show his true genius. Shakespeare writes each line with an amazing amount of information and with some lines serving four or five purposes. The visual qualities of the actors and sets are just icing on the cake and even a distraction.

The quality of movies always comes down to the quality of writing. Writers should be the stars and the highest paid of the people involved with the making of movies. People are too influenced by their eyes. To prove this, I'll leave you with a final test.

Get a copy of Star Wars and play it through your TV, but don't look at the picture. Just lay back in your chair and listen to the words with your eyes closed. There is a reason why the bible says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Without language we have no consciousness. Self awareness is language. Animals can survive in the world through visual analysis, but we are masters of reality because we have the word. Star Wars does not have the words to create the vivid worlds its special effects trick you into seeing. Read Hyperion and see what your mind creates for you.

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