Things That Came A While Ago
| Warren Ellis posted this, and I thought it was worth reposting. It's written by H.G. Wells, and like a lot of things during the 30s, it predicts a major war coming shortly. From there, it gets weird. Take some time, enjoy it. When I first saw this, it was a very long time ago and I was a young, impressionable geek. Now I'm a less-young geek, and I find it immensely revealing. Basically, seeing this movie as an adult has helped me understand why geek culture is lousy with semi-autistic personalities who call themselves libertarians. Since its accidental creation in the 20s, geek culture has always had more than its share of undersocialized freaks who can't comprehend how another human being could be more interesting than a shiny new gadget. The question that always bothered me is why that lack of empathy, less common as fandom's become less of an all-male enclave over the decades, so often took the poisonous form of pseudo-libertarianism. Why did we suffer so many years of "Oh, if only they'd stop feeding poor people and minorities we could mine the asteroid fields! 'Cause I'm sure that's an energy-efficient way to get iron... somehow..."? The blame for this is often laid at the feet of Heinlein, and sure, some of it's his to bear. He certainly helped with the bizarre military fetishism one sees in lots of fandom, along with the aforementioned gadget thing. (The military tends to have, or at least to want, some really awesome gadgets.) In the main, though, I'm gonna go ahead and blame Ayn Rand. I know, it's easy to blame Rand. Her books are simultaneously so laughably awful and so batshit insane that you just want to lock them in a room with the Left Behind series and let them fight it out. But in this case, we should set aside snark and think about how her books would have impacted the nerds of the time, raised on stuff like this. Sure, there's the fact that in Randworld, people who can do math but have no social skills are virtual deities, sexual superheroes who rape the future with their mighty wills, but that's just gravy. The key thing was just that she wrote some stuff set in "the future" and worshipped an abstract Science as an all-powerful, all-giving god. That was all it took, the shibboleth that let her into "the literature of ideas", thereby ensuring her ideas would be accepted without being examined. For the hardcore SF fan, particularly back in the day, books were a binary thing. There was fantasy/sci-fi, and then there was (shudder when you say it) mainstream fiction, generally agreed to be "all about adultery in Westchester County," as I heard quoted more than once. Once you were in, though, you were in. Ray Bradbury's still in, and if you can call most of his output over the last 50 years science fiction, I'd like some of what you're smoking. Thus, while the "mainstream" world was off debating whether Rand's philosophy made a lick of sense, the geeks could discuss ideas the way they were comfortable with: by figuring out how the machines worked and ignoring the humans. Rand's lunacy fell on fertile soil, and was fertilized with ample Heinleinian bullshit (Heinlein also drew a direct connection between agreeing with his views and getting tons of sex), and poof, we got a couple generations of Larry Nivens telling us that pure capitalism was going to conquer space and save the future... any, uh, minute now... okay, wait, now. No, now... hang on, there's still some poor people and minorities stuck to it... So yeah, I watch this gorgeous, crazy 1930s film, and I love the miniatures shots, and God help me, I'm such a sucker for that old futurist design, but I also can't help wincing every five minutes. Too many pasty con-goers over the years, all trying to persuade me that they're high-functioning sociopaths because they believe that's a good thing, all sure that science is a big stick that you hit things with until they're fixed, all certain in their hearts that they're the heroes of that movie. | |
Funnily enough, Heinlein's Military Fetishism could stem from the fact that he was actually an officer in the US Navy. However, he never saw action as acute tuberculosis earned him a medical discharge before WWII broke out.
I'm sure you know all of this, I'm just spitballing.
Posted by
the.exile |
8:53 PM