"Science" Is the Operative Word

So a Cracked article I was reading mentioned Luddite ebook-hating pretentious hack Jonathan Franzen, who had the jaw-dropping chutzpah (which, for the Yiddish-impaired, is not a good thing) to say that ebooks are less durable than paperbacks. I looked him up; according to his Wikipedia article, he also told a left-wing British newspaper America is "practically a rogue state", and yet he neither moved away nor took any steps to overthrow its, allegedly, nigh-rogue government. Neither was he disappeared in the dead of night to a hellish secret prison, the likelihood of which is—to a thinking adult—both a major determinant in whether a country counts as a "rogue state", and also in whether saying that to a European audience counts as anything other than contemptible self-hating asskissing.

Also he thinks he gets to write "rules for writers", as if he actually was one. Amongst the obvious remarks ("Write in the third person unless a ­really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly"), Ted Kaczinsky-lite rambling ("It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction"), and kitten-posteresque bromides ("You have to love before you can be relentless"), is this:

When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

Which—let me translate Pretentious Douchebag to English—means "I hate technological innovation that allows the mob(!) to get their grimy, work-callused hands on what was previously the exclusive purview of me and my fellow elites."

It's also bullshit, because Franzen writes artsy-fartsy PoMo literary fiction. "Voluminous research"? Bitch, you wouldn't know voluminous research if it shot out blue Cherenkov radiation and fried your tiny balls clean off. How much research do you even have to do? How many ISO standards did you look up? How many rockets' thrust and delta-V did you compute just to establish the time-frame for one chapter? How many articles on ammunition and body armor, and projected future developments thereof, did you read? How many alternatives to calcium-based apatite, for alien bones, did you try to come up with? How many Japanese websites did you pore over with Google Translate just to find the original text of an 18th-century bunraku play, just so you could do your own translation of one line? How many articles on Transhumanism, Michel Foucault, and John Rawls did you have to choke down, and then try to work into a workable ethos for a fictional villain?

The answer, of course, is none. Mainstream fiction might have its uses—treatment of insomnia, maybe, or if you're in a debating club and need an argument against the concept of human dignity—but it certainly can claim no laurels for the amount of intellectual legwork that goes into producing it. Shit, does anyone who writes it even write about anyone who isn't just like them? Franzen writes about liberal academics from US cities east of the Mississippi. The minstrel-show caricatures these hacks make of anyone who isn't a coastal-elite with literary pretensions is adequately summed up by even a cursory glance at the works of John Updike (who also wrote sex scenes curiously reminiscent of those in "My Immortal", but with more understanding of physiology and less understanding of the principles of literary composition—impossible though the enormity after that "and" may seem).

But it occurred to me: what most people think of as science fiction isn't much better. Fortunately, they're wrong. Since most people's conception of "science fiction" comes from movies, and movies that aren't 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think I can actually say, most people have no contact with actual science fiction.

I mean, let's go down the list. Star Wars is fantasy, and Star Trek (probably, sadly, the closest thing to science fiction in Hollywood) is naval action.

Apart from those, pretty much every "science fiction" title people list simply isn't. Terminator, for instance, relies on a very bizarre conception of causality, not to mention involving freaking vitalism, a theory debunked by the 17th century. Also, aside from sticking its fingers in its ears and singing very loudly when the concept of Lucas-Penrose is mentioned, the movie's whole premise is highly implausible—unless computer scientists and military technicians have the collective intelligence of exactly one developmentally-disabled blowfly. I forget, is "scientists are wrong about every single thing they've ever done" a common theme in science fiction? Because that's the only way Terminator would work.

Or take Planet of the Apes. It's trying to be pro-science, or rather pro-materialist scientism; the whole thing is actually an elaborate allegory against the idea of humans being special. Only, Pierre Boulle appears to be one of those French "rationalists" in the tradition of "Fossil Scoffer" Voltaire, because in order to advance his thesis, he says something patently untrue, namely that apes' vocal anatomy is the same as humans, and nobody's quite sure why they can't talk.

Which brings us to the Alien franchise, which, even if we're charitable and don't count 3 and Resurrection, is probably the single worst thing we as a species have ever done, at least relative to how good most of us think it is—the Holocaust was worse, but the vast majority of the human race doesn't exactly look back on it as a beautiful dream, either. Understand, those two films make Planet of the Apes look like "Apes of the Impenetrable Forest: The Behavioral Ecology of Sympatric Chimpanzees and Gorillas".

Let us enumerate the crimes Alien(s) has committed against its claim to be science fiction.

1. A human is more likely to be impregnated by daffodil pollen than to be subject to infection by a facehugger. This gets orders of magnitude more ridiculous when it's determined xenomorphs take on portions of their hosts' genetic material—because apparently aliens use the same kind.


2. The crew of the Nostromo would have a better chance of nourishing themselves by eating their ship's (probably synthetic) upholstery than the xenomorph would of nourishing itself by eating them.


3. No lifeform that size would evolve anything like that life cycle or social structure. There are fairly hard and fast mass limits on animal life, and a single eusocial insect colony still masses toward the low end of that scale, except in a few species. For xenomorphs to use the same evolutionary strategy as ants or bees—which relies on each individual of the species being "cheap" from a reproductive and calorie-intake standpoint—their ecosystem's biomass would have to be as much larger than them as ours is than ants or bees. That is, their homeworld's equivalent of say, rats, would have to be as common as rats, but as much larger than the man-sized xenomorphs as rats are larger than ants. And so on, all the way up to blue whales and sauropod dinosaurs.


4. Molecular acid is not reversibly oxidizable, nor does it reversibly bond with most other volatile gases a life-form is likely to breathe. Plus, every chemical reaction in a lifeform's metabolism has to balance being useful for its process with being deadly to the organism using it, and there are lots of strategies far cheaper than acid blood—like, say, regular blood. Things don't evolve based on what's scariest, they evolve based on what actually works. Maybe if the Alien movies hadn't been written by a seventh-grader who only asked "what would be badass-scary?" rather than "What isn't laughable nonsense?"

And even if Alien isn't science fiction, it's a good movie, right? Nope. The first one is a horror movie: which means it has an idiot-plot, they all do. That's why, if an otherwise intelligent person likes horror movies, it's for the same reason my dad likes Eureka: it gives his brain a rest after a hard day in the intellectual acid-mines teaching high school math. Not only that, but there's that bullshit "the military-industrial complex would actually try to market xenomorphs" thing, for which the writers should've been convicted of sedition and then traded to the Soviets, so they could see how they like the alternative to a market economy.

The second one is worse, because it's James Cameron; not only does it crank that "corporations are so evil, even though this movie wouldn't have been possible without about a dozen of them" up to eleven, the xenomorphs' being those periodically-devouring-everything South American ants In Space was, canonically, a metaphor for capitalism. Only, remember how I said the xenomorphs would never evolve? Yeah, there are no life-forms that can devour their entire ecosystem like that, because they'd go extinct. Similarly, corporate exploitation actually does have natural limits, because "glut ourselves, then starve" doesn't really have much return on investment.

As if his "brain-damaged fourth-grader raised by Communists" understanding of economics wasn't bad enough, Cameron also, just like in Avatar, is incapable of portraying a military as anything other than stupid 'roid-raging children playing with guns. And, even if they actually behaved like trained soldiers (or Marines, who are more disciplined than regular soldiers), nobody would send those guys in, against that known threat, with that equipment, unless the point of the whole exercise was to get them killed—for instance, no space-faring civilization is going to have much trouble designing armor that protects against biologically impossible acid-blood. Just like with Terminator and Avatar, Cameron is too stupid to understand that "what lets the movie I want to make happen" and "what is not implausible contemptible crap" are two very, very different questions.

Now, what's interesting is, Alien(s) can be forgiven—though you still shouldn't like it, because it is shit—solely because it inspired something else, namely, the Flood. And the Flood is an example of how to do that idea right, because unlike Hollywood, Halo is science fiction. The Flood reproduces from, and eats, humans, Brutes, and Elites, because it is a bio-weapon engineered by a species that had a hand in all three of those races' evolution. Aside from the fact that it's not actually an animal—it's something like a cross between a lichen and the colony-jellyfish called a Man o' War or bluebottle—the Flood produces huge biomass to sustain itself, essentially converting entire ecosystems into Flood, which xenomorphs don't do (their hives are not living things). And the UNSC never sends guys in to fight it without protection against its infection-forms; every time UNSC soldiers have to fight the things, it's because it showed up unexpectedly. As for Elites and Brutes, well, they're both partly based (especially the former), on the Yautja, AKA Predators (look at Elites' mouths), and they actually are crazy enough to go after xenomorph-type things without protective suits.

My younger sister was saying this the other day, when my brother and I were raving about how good Skyrim is: video games appear to be fixin' to save civilization. Between Zelda, Skyrim, and Halo, among others, actually decent SF and fantasy are actually available in a visual medium.