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| Escapism could be
the reason behind the revival of SFF, or it could be something
else. Only good can come from the redux, and that doesn't mean
the many millions authors, actors and studios will make. |
Soon,
minority report will complete what blade Runner began-the legitimisation
of Philip K. Dick as a true master. There'll always be those who
rate Ursula K Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Samuel Delany, Isaac Asimov,
or Arthur C. Clarke better science fiction writers, but to my mind,
that's a bit like trying to convince people that L Sprague de Camp-no
mean practitioner of the genre-wrote better fantasies than J.R.R.
Tolkein. To backtrack to the beginning of that tortuous first sentence,
Minority Report will complete what Blade Runner began- both are
based on Dick's works-and the credit should probably go, an equal
measure of it, to Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg.
The motion pic also makes the past seven months the best period
in the history of SFF since.... Never mind the since; it's probably
the best ever. A little memory-aid: The Lord Of The Rings, Harry
Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, The Scorpion King (fine, that's
camp, not fantasy, but it still counts), The Attack of The Clones,
and now, Minority Report. It's not just movies; look at books. All
of Tolkien's works have been reissued and are doing well; the market
is waiting for Joanne K. Rowling's next Potter book; the biggest
literary success of last year was, arguably, The Amber Spyglass,
the last instalment of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy, His Dark
Materials, and book stores-the good ones at least-are literally
bursting at the seams with copies of sci-fi classics like Dick's
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Vonnegut's The Sirens of
Titan.
The pocket-psychoanalyst theory doing the rounds
is about how 9-11 and the events that followed increased the receptivity
of people to science fiction and fantasy. "Reality has been
so horrible," the analysis goes, "that people have been
forced to take refuge in fantasy." There could be some substance
in this 9-11 hypothesis: I don't have any book trade statistics
to prove this, but it looks to me that the number of books on food
coming out of the US has increased since 9-11. And we all know the
healing power of food, don't we?
Escapism could be the reason behind the revival
of SFF, or it could be something else. Only good can come from the
redux, though, and I am not speaking about the many millions authors,
estates (Dick, alas, died in the early eighties, just before Blade
Runner's release), actors, and studios will make. Fantasy and science
fiction are keepers of balance. All of us need to spice our quotidian
diet with a dash of SFF. At another level, we need to be familiar
with the genre to recognise it when we encounter it. If we don't,
things could go horribly wrong. Starved of its required share of
fantasy, an executive's subconscious could instill it into a business
plan she's crafting. Worse, a SFF-ignorant accountant may, on encountering
a fantastic leap of mathematical logic in a company's financial
statement, simply overlook it. No examples are needed for the second-the
papers are full of them. As for the first, ever wonder how seemingly
rational people believed a dotcom that allowed surfers to append
virtual post-its to a website could make money?
Minority Report then, isn't just important
to Cruise and Spielberg-the last named takes an unusual-for-him
detour into the dark side with the pic and the best SFF is always
dark; even TLTR has its moments. The motion pic is important to
the sense of balance that keeps life, and business on the straight
and narrow. Besides, SFF rocks.
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