Oh speculative fiction, how you are mistreated. Or at least, mistreated by me. I’ve read very very little, all of which was out of date. This despite the fact that my head tells me that the page is the natural arena for the stuff, the best place to really explore those ideas. Instead, most of the visions of the future I come across are novelty “science” stories in the papers and vaguely speculative films (also, all too often, outdated).
The TV series seems like a reasonable way around some of the problems raised by speculation on film. They have less of a time constraint, more of an ability to build an impression of normal life. They also deliver that same audio-visual element which can’t quite be found on the page.
The future should never be pictured as life with flashy add-ons. There’s a need for a holistic view, for us to ask how people can and will change. When people say “actually this sci-fi is about the present day” I get suspicious. It’s like the stuff can’t be worthwhile unless it’s a metaphor. They should mean, “this tells us about the human condition and our fate”, not “this presents a clear parallel with the events of 9/11″. Evidently this is a challenge for writers, and most “literary” writers ignore it, contributing to the poor reputation of the genre, and the fact that I don’t read much of it. Frankly, we need to capture the flavour of imagined futures, to really feel their textures.
Ghost in the Shell is all texture. When I saw it I was rather disappointed. Expecting an examination of the future, what I got was a gorgeous treat for the eyes, with strangely little substance. It gave the future a flavour, but never convinced me that this was the future. It was elegant and fantastic, but unreal. It was a bit like Blade Runner, except for the fact that I adore Blade Runner to the point where I can’t even communicate how amazing I think it is.
I’ve just started GITS: Stand Alone Complex. As I was lead to believe, this one’s a bit different. It’s thorough, convincing. Its future is less tied to android aesthetics than to the political, it’s life as data labyrinth - the slow invasion of the computerised, not the flashy intrusion of cyborgs. As speculation the series suits me better than the film, but it did raise another question. There’s apparently a live action film coming. The series already feels close to live action.
In my last post I suggested that animation needs to stake its claim at the cinemas, demonstrate its virtues on the biggest screens. When anime isn’t showy, when a massive element of the aesthetic it works with is a feeling of the real, I kind of wonder what the point is. Is Stand Alone Complex just a way round live-action TV budgets? That’s not a criticism of the show really, because it doesn’t lose anything from being animated, art and design is impeccably arranged.
It does, however, make me wonder about the projection of alternative societies that we get from sci-fi. How much is that feel, that flavour, governed by the medium? The engagement is with (if you’ll excuse the pretension) art. It’s not just an idea of the shape of the future, it’s an attempt to create it as human experience. Which is something art does for the present too, in all its permutations.
So when I watch Ghost in the Shell it’s not just saying what the future feels like, it’s hitting a particular area of the future. It’s the future for a cop, for justice enforcement. And in presenting the image of life for the Major and co. it’s establishing a critical criteria, deciding which bit of the future really matters, where the story is in this different human society, which bit gives me the real flavour of the place. Which is a bloody overextended way of saying: the show has my full attention. With any luck I’ll eventually crank out a detailed post about what it says, for now I’m just glad that I’m watching some good speculative fiction, for once.
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