Science Fiction Frames
Insights and analysis jumping off from a single frame of a film, TV show, or video game.
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Strange Days (1995)
Kathryn Bigelow’s cyberpunk noir thriller, twenty-five years old this October, is a complex, provocative vision of voyeurism as a narcotic amid escalating racial tensions on the eve of the millennium. Flaming cars, militarized police tanks, and helicopter searchlights comprise the visual backdrop; the soundscape consists of profanity, emergency sirens, pulsing 90s electronica, and a grunge overdose. But it’s not all brash posturing. One hour and twenty-four minutes in, a Black mother watches her young son mingle with friends at a party, light a pair of sparklers, and wave them in tune to the music. She smiles for a moment, and then turns around.
The mother, Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett), is sheltering her friend Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes). Nero is a peddler of illegal “clips”: human experiences recorded from the cerebral cortex of one person and relived, “pure and uncut,” via the cerebral cortex of another. A former cop, Nero once protected Mace’s son, Zander, during a domestic violence situation. As Mace has watched Nero lose his way, her gratitude, combined with a protective instinct, has matured into something more. Even while chiding him, she calls him a “goofball romantic.” Nero, however, is consumed by unrequited feelings towards his former girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis).
Before Mace’s moment of stillness at the millennium party, much loudness and violence has unfolded, and more will ensue. Nero has been receiving anonymous “black-jack” clips—snuff recordings—from a killer who equips his victims with headgear, so that they experience their own torture and death through the killer’s eyes in real time. Nero and Mace have retrieved a clip that shows the brutal killing of Jeriko One, a Black rapper and activist, by white LAPD officers. The murder, if released to the media, is sure to spark riots in the massive downtown “2K” party. Because the clip came from one of Faith’s now-deceased friends, Nero believes that she is next on the killer’s list.
But before “history ends and begins again,” as the film puts it, we glimpse a possibility of hope in Mace’s mid-movie scene. “There’s something very beautiful or serene at the heart of the film,” Bigelow noted in an interview, “that’s antithetical to the environment, which is grim, brutal, disturbing….”
When Mace slowly eases into that wide, heartwarming smile, it’s the first time that one of our protagonists expresses uncomplicated joy while fully in the here-and-now. In Mace’s words, this is “not playback.”
It’s a fragile juncture. Mace bridges the promise of the future, reflected in her son’s spontaneous happiness, and the past that is eating Nero alive. At the same instant that her son is delighting in a carefree reality, Nero is “wire-tripping” the clip of Jeriko One’s murder. Mace is stuck in the middle, bound by her affection towards her friend, but uncompromising in her parental responsibilities. The scene’s orchestration is splendid: Nero, deep in the house, is trapped in his own virtual world; Zander, outside, is free; and Mace, standing right by the window, halfway between the two, is on the cusp of liberty, but still constrained.
Her act of gazing is worth noting in its own right. Mace remains an observer rather than a participant. “You wanna watch, or you gonna do?” Faith teases Nero in a clip of happier days. The question ends up haunting Strange Days' characters—and its viewers. Just as the movie’s imagined technology superposes victim and perpetrator, Bigelow’s narrative makes us accomplices to the voyeurism it denounces.
Mace’s quiet moment proves transitional, as did Strange Days itself. The film, which Roger Ebert described as “a technical tour de force,” represents a shift in Bigelow’s filmography. Here, the director interrogates the seduction of violence in her previous work. The fetishizing close-ups and smooth, glamorizing pans in Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990), and Point Break (1991) are replaced by jerky POV sequences, which give way to the hyper-realist, quasi-documentarian aesthetics of The Hurt Locker (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Detroit (2017).
Observing our social media–saturated world, it’s clear that we’ve failed to heed the film’s warning about our predilection for watching others as a way of avoiding being present with ourselves. In hindsight, we can see that with this thoughtful, socially engaged film—“America’s been my boogeyman for four hundred years,” Jeriko One raps early on—Bigelow was affirming that for her, reflexivity had become as important as reflection.
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Forgotten Futures
Visions of the future that deserve more attention.
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SimEarth (1990)
I like to say that my favorite video game is SimEarth (1990). But this is a joke: as far as I know, SimEarth has never been anyone’s favorite. Attempting to embody the paradox of “fun climate model,” it’s borderline unplayable: it’s baffling, slow, and lacking in what McKenzie Wark calls “satisfying win conditions.” It was created by Will Wright in consultation with James Lovelock as a software implementation of the Gaia Hypothesis, a theory of life at the planetary scale which Lovelock began to develop while working at NASA on astrobiology.
SimEarth isn’t really my favorite, but I am stunned by its ambition. The best part of the game doesn’t even take place on-screen. Rather, it’s SimEarth’s chunky, wire-bound game manual, which, at a whopping 250 pages, includes an introductory earth sciences textbook and a preface by Lovelock himself. Though it was probably made to help market the game as educational software, the manual is a marvel. There are detailed sections on topics like glaciers, atmospheric chemistry, and convection. Not, that is, on how to address these issues in the game—just explanations of the processes themselves. The reader/player is left to wonder how much of what they’ve just learned is actually simulated in SimEarth: are tidal forces operating, due to unseen simulations of other heavenly bodies? The number of interconnections explained in the manual cannot possibly be at work in the game itself: SimEarth was made to run on a 1990s personal computer, while the manual describes a real-time representation of a planet that could outstrip any contemporaneous, supercomputed Earth System Model.
Viewed from the perspective of its manual, we can glimpse SimEarth as it was meant to be: not a bewildering jumble of square icons and unfathomable causality, but a testament to our own alien planet, upon which life and natural systems could have developed in a multitude of strange and unforeseen ways. A visualization—at a time when climate change was new to the public—of what a changing world (“The Living Planet,” as the game’s tagline has it) might look like. This gap between SimEarth’s cryptic simulation and its ambitions as a worldbuilding platform illustrates why it’s so difficult to tell history alongside and through planetary models.
In the version of SimEarth I’m emulating in my browser as I write this, I’m gazing down in deific benevolence upon my continent. It’s finally evolved a sentient species: not humans but “avians,” this time—wonderous! But this is where the simulation’s depth ends. Though I’m told they are birds, you wouldn’t know it. My avians are in “the Bronze Age,” and are sailing boats and riding horses as they spread across the land and seas, fight wars, and suffer plagues. The simulation doesn’t care that a bird person could presumably fly to the next island over. The technology tree is fixed, its lack of flexibility a surreal contrast to the endless permutations of planetary dynamics imagined in the manual. If it never changes the course of “sentient” history, how could any planetary change be meaningful?
“Aquarium,” the first scenario outlined in the manual, “is a world that will never develop sentient life. Sentience can only be reached in SimEarth by land animals. We hope we're not offending any intelligent, purely aquatic aliens anywhere in the universe, but as far as we can tell, civilization requires the use of fire and the burning of fossil fuels to develop.” The game considers fossil fuels so essential to the development of civilization that it’s important not to use a “monolith” to artificially induce sentience until enough evolutionary time has elapsed. A civilization will collapse if its world lacks the fossil fuels to sustain it. “ALERT,” a notification in my playthrough blares, “Advancement Slow. Science needs Energy.”
This is no worse than the kinds of reductive causality you’ll encounter in simulation games like Civilization or SimCity. But when the manual dedicates 50 pages to laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, such claims read differently. We can point to long-lasting human civilizations that used next to no fossil fuels. Can we really not imagine a world where tools and societies are developed by underwater creatures? (I know I can.) What’s troubling is that SimEarth’s easy equation between sentience, civilization, science, and progress is not as quaintly outdated as one might hope. The Fermi paradox and the Kardashev scale, influential concepts used to guide the search for intelligent life in the cosmos, imagine sentient alien neighbors that are just as expansionist as settler-colonial cultures on Earth, and never capable of being satisfied with any amount of energy. History limited to what we can see from low Earth orbit, and classified according to the amount of energy we marshal as a species? Gaia help us. These are the simulations we really need as part of our next planetary god game: not the otherness of other planets with radically different continents, flora and fauna, but the otherness of other timelines, other historical causalities, other ways of organizing the world. Before we can decarbonize the atmosphere, we’ll need to decarbonize the mind.
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Imagination Elsewhere
Celebrating the work of our fellow travelers.
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Strangest of All (2020)
It’s delightful to see Strangest of All, a free digital anthology of science fiction about astrobiology, published by the European Astrobiology Institute and edited by Julie Nováková, an award-winning Czech science fiction author and evolutionary biologist. It feels like a fellow traveler of our own efforts to use science fiction as a vehicle to explore complex and occasionally intimidating scientific and technological fields, from space-exploration economies and clean-energy transitions to artificial intelligence. It also features stories by several of the Center for Science and the Imagination’s collaborators, along with some incredible writers whose work is new to us.
The book contains eight reprinted short stories, each paired with a chatty, brainy commentary by Nováková and a set of ideas for how to use the story in classrooms. Most of the stories are written by authors who are also card-carrying scientists and technologists in a range of fields: marine biology, electrical engineering, physics, astronautical engineering. The stories range from close to home—Uranus, Mars—to the Kuiper Belt, out past the reaches of our solar system, and beyond, to far-flung exoplanets.
I was most taken by “But, Still, I Smile,” by D. A. Xiaolin Spires, one of the volume’s few nonscientist authors, who presents a beautifully literary take on the Fermi paradox (“But where is everybody?”) through the eyes of a data analyst struggling with multiple pregnancy losses, slowly losing her fight against despair in a climate-stressed near future. Its reveal is existentially spooky but also strangely sweet, and the images Spires conjures really pay off the story’s careful, character-driven buildup.
Overall, Strangest of All emphasizes the social and philosophical challenges at the heart of astrobiology: that we don’t know precisely what it is we’re looking for. Much of our popular culture prepares us for extraterrestrials in advanced industrial societies, humanoid in form and stature, sharing our basic biochemical makeup and perhaps even some of our thought processes, desires, fears, and values. Astrobiology requires an imaginative leap, an act of ontological broadening that science fiction might be uniquely apt to help us make: to consider modes of embodiment, cognition, and habitation—orientations to the cosmos—that are utterly unexpected.
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Defining Imagination
Perspectives on imagination and what makes it (and us) tick.
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I think there's been a failure of imagination. Everywhere around the world, people are having difficulty imagining a future.
People are going to move. Things are going to change. And yet all of our leaders seem to be telling us to go back to a previous time when things were better. You know, in Britain, it's go back before the E.U. In America, it's make America great again. In much of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, it's, you know, go back to the caliphate of 1,000 years ago.
The danger is that we're not imagining futures, not imagining something where we can go to that's different and progressive. And that's, I think, part of the job of a novelist, is to start imagining those futures [...] to make people comfortable with what I think is the inevitable reality of a world where billions of people are going to move in the next couple of hundred years. You know, climate will change, sea levels will rise, people will move.
And if we can't find a way to be hopeful and optimistic and find beauty in that, we're in real trouble.
☉
Mohsin Hamid
In a 2017 interview with PBS NewsHour, about his novel Exit West
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