i was thinking maybe we’re more optimistic about how fast society can advance than in the past and thats being reflected in our media. like Asimov stuff vs star trek vs cyberpunk, bladerunner, type stuff being set like 50-100 years from now instead of like, the year 3000+. maybe im wrong
Ghost in the Shell is another fantastic one! There are different versions of it and I’m sure how readily accessible various parts are vs. are not likely varies between them. But anyway that does sound totally consistent with its premise that everything that we have now we would still have but it would be just a tiny bit better integrated in terms of the mind+body connection.
If I spoiled something for LOTR then I apologize - fwiw I think it might not be a true “spoiler” bc what I mentioned about humans going on to the next world may never have been resolved in the books? I never read them though - what I said came from Wikipedia, and I only read the porlogue to The Silmarillion. And the Elven life cycle is just “details”, or at least that’s how I feel but if you feel differently and do get to it later then I hope it won’t ruin your enjoyment of that portion of the book:-).
Starship Troopers was just a stupid sci-fi movie, but I think you got where I was going more with the reference to Star Wars. As in there’s still wars, literal slavery, enormous inequality, bureaucratic wastefulness, and in general the Yin/Yang play between aspects like “good” and “evil” where there is nothing that is wholly one or the other.
Case in point: the Jedi were such massive frauds, claiming to value non-attachment, but then propping up the corrupt establishment that ignored the socially dispossed even on the home planet of Coruscant, leaving orphans to rot in the lower levels of the city-planet while the Jedi live in their fabulous sky palace with all the money they could ever need or want. But rather than get on an elevator and go down to visit those kids that exist 10 minutes travel away, the Jedi instead are sent out to whatever planet has the most valuable commodities and engage in whatever activities work towards increasing the overall wealth of The Republic. The real twist there is: it’s not the ignoring of the needs of the poor that makes the Jedi hypocrites, it’s the FAILURE to ignore the “needs” of the wealthy.
Or at least that’s one way to look at it, but perhaps I’m wrong - in any case that whole universe seems designed to show off those kinds of dynamics, where want and poverty are still very much reality, unlike Star Trek where The Federation at least has moved beyond that.
Sigh… yeah:-(. It’s like people are giving up on the aspirational stuff that seems too unrealistic to even be of interest, hence e.g. Altered Carbon despite the mind drive actually calls out to us as viewers as being something worth thinking about, bc it’s not only likely but inevitable (IF technology could be developed to make that lifestyle a possibility).
Well, the good thing about Ghost in the Shell (I’m a huge fan, but I’m not caught up on the 2 newest series), is its internal canon structure. Because the entire series is originally based on a metaphysical, transhumanist novel, all the adaptions more or less share the same themes. The difference is how each story (the OG manga, anime, movies, OAV, etc.) approaches those themes and reworks the lead cast of characters. Anyway, GiTS: 2nd Gig (S2 of the first anime series) does address class struggles, with a specific focus on immigrants. I don’t think it was handled in a way that was very compelling, but the acknowledgement that the government could be doing far more to help its own citizens regardless of background was very clear.
A little addendum: Another manga/anime series that has similar class struggle metaphors is Battle Angel Alita / Gunnm (pronounced Gahn-moo). Again, getting cybernetic upgrades / prosthetics is not really an issue for poor folks. Many people just go to cyborg doctors or they simply build the parts with scrap metal. The problem in this world is when people are hunted and murdered for their prosthetics. I’m saying it’s roses, except for that. A huge chunk of the OG story happens on a giant scrap heap (where more people live) after all, so Elysium, AC, Gunnm and even Arcane (no spoilers for S2 please lol) have pretty stark parallels.
Ah, I assumed you were a Tolkien super fan with all the explaining. Well, that’s all right. I’m just getting into the original novels and I don’t think you’ve said anything that’s so drastic it makes me not want to continue reading. In fact, I’m actually much more curious now because Sauron has been let go and he’s making moves on the different factions. And a lot of the Elven lore is sprinkled throughout the book, so I think I will continue to be interested in the story. You’re good lol.
I think Starship Troopers was originally based on a novel. I recall some guy reading it in one of my old anime clubs at my university. I like to think the movie is close to the book, regarding warfare and imperialism in the near future as it relates to scientific advancement.
Oh and I mentioned Star Trek TOS that way because I still believe that it was a show unbelievably ahead of its time, but at the same time, extremely relevant for its own time (and unfortunately, still relevant today). Like, somehow Trek came out in 1966 not long after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed and passed. I was thinking how that show was envisioning a world that seemed almost scary to imagine because the reality of so many BIPOCs reflected the exact opposite aspirational goals that the team was trying to convey. That’s why I think Trek is more like a world to look forward to. Not just people like myself, but all manner of minorities. It might seem hokey what Roddenberry was trying to convey, but I do like the narrative concept of having a sci-fi that is explicitly anti-war and anti-colonialist. At least to a degree.
As much I love Star Wars, its universe, with all the rampant oppression (and unfortunately, the meta racist tropes and cultural appropriation that the entire franchise uses to deliver its messages; more of genre problem, but I digress) in various forms, I do believe you’re right. That world reflects way better on the world we live in now.
I catch your point about the moral bankruptcy and spiritual corruption of the Jedi Order. It is a sad, but necessary reflection of real life religious institutions that essentially do as you described. Use religious texts, deliver spiritual teachings only to exploit these moral values for the sake of profiteering off of working class people. I’m not a-religious just to be clear, but I always feel a sense of great embarrassment when I see how spot on the “Jedi are hypocrites” argument can be to RL places of worship.
It is, at the end of the day, one perspective to view the Jedi. Unfortunately, other writers have taken suit to writing Jedi in a very similar manner as Lucas did in the prequels. Like, I totally get the critique because it’s well deserved. One has to still remember that the SW universe is enormous and not all Force-believing factions and beings function in the same corrupted manner as the late Republic Jedi.
That brings me to the your last comment. Again, I was gushing over Star Trek because even though there was noteworthy backstage drama and certain problematic aspects to it, it still kinda made me think of a world beyond our own. It still makes me think of sci-fi stories beyond what we are often given. Like, why does sci-fi as a genre always have to look like Star Wars or Starship Troopers. Or, hell, Terminator? Can we as a species not imagine ourselves in a world beyond all these self-destructive forms of oppression?
What I find super interesting about Ghost in the Shell (in comparison to Altered Carbon) is how they depict cyber brains. Basically, two or more (or even an entire small community) of people can connect to each other on a kind of neural network. Like a mind hub. Don’t know if they have that in AC, but basically you have USBs in the back of your neck and you can easily share information. Obviously, you’re at risk of being brain hacked, (like in the Cyberpunk game) but that seems both scary and kind of interesting because you might more easily be able to share information in way that you might not even be able to do over the web if you’re in a country that has a lot of government censorship of websites. Ghost in the Shell depicts this in a very normalized way. S1 of the first anime, Stand Alone Complex, shows the extreme danger of sharing information this way and how it can be used to manipulate people to commit copycat crimes.
Unfortunately, as you said, so much of this genre’s focus (with good reason) is on cautionary tales and warnings about technology. It would be truly lovely to see something that isn’t so far a utopia (to the point of alienating the audience), but also isn’t a straight up planet-rotting dystopia that literally is just an upsetting reflection of my own working class neighborhood. It would be nice to have an acknowledgment of the bad, but still something else. You know? I understand your exasperation.
Sorry for the long rambly replies. Your responses are thought provoking.
I very much enjoyed reading the OLD scifi works, like HG Wells “Time Machine”, and anything by Isaac Asimov. These present quite a different world-view - including much more realistic, and dare I say pessimistic outlooks on how the future would look (hint: virtually identical to today, just with a higher level of technical sophistication).
These are more rare to see in movie form, b/c people don’t want to pay money to see such - unless that adversity only exists in the start of the movie, but is then overcome through hard work & ingenuity - although a fantastic exeption exists in Wall-E. There, the people basically simply sat down and never bothered to ever stand up again, not seeing any point to need to do so? OF COURSE that is more realistic than e.g. Star Trek where people all work together, following military levels of precision and discipline, for the nebulous goal of “the common good”.
I recall the Black Fleet Crisis series of Star Wars books where Luke chases down a non-Jedi order of force users (“White Current”) that chooses not to get involved in galactic politics, and therefore managed to avoid the purge that took the Jedi down along with the rest of the Old Republic as it converted into the Empire. Though the vast majority of the Star Wars universe seemed to revolve around the Jedi v. Sith dynamic, with all the mere “plebes” being relatively unimportant - much like today where the “real” people (Bezos, Musk, Trump) fly high above us in their sky castles, untouched by “laws” of society or to a large degree even physics (decay, death, disorder - all are muted at least some amount due to the influx of resources to overcome their effects, e.g. those who have health care are effected less by diseases than those who do not). And the rest of us just suffer from their fights, as shit rolls downhill. THAT may be the biggest distinction between Star Wars vs. Trek then: in the latter, everyone mattered purely based on their ability, usually more so rather than some accident of their birth (Wesley Crusher was a somewhat unusual situation, being on a starship due to his mother’s assignment there, but most children did not have access to such opportunities).
In a word: “no”. Entropy exists, as too does inertia, and we cannot simply turn aside as if it were literally nothing the collective force that propelled us towards this point. If you are at least familiar with the religious language: to dust we came, and to dust we shall return - it is an error in philosophy to think that we can rise above it all without any difficulties as those forces work to claw and cling and force us back down into the us-vs-them, eat-or-be-eaten set of dynamics that govern the basic principles of our world, even below the subatomic level. It was naive of us (imho) to think, not that it could not be done, but that it would be so easy. Like a doctor, if we want to cure a disease, we first have to diagnose it, which means opening our eyes to see clearly the road ahead of us. That is why works such as Rules for Rulers are so upsetting to us: b/c it exposes our own hypocrisy and wishful thinking that the world could magically become like how we wish it, without any investment of effort on our part. So: are you sure that you want to have what you asked for?
Farscape and Firefly are neat shows that are a bit like you asked though:-), and within the realm of scifi. Those type of space operas though get expensive to try to produce on a TV or movie budget, so there aren’t that many to begin with - that’s why anime is so awesome, allowing a deeper and wider exploration of possibilities (just by virtue of making numerically more of them, the chances of one rising up that will be truly great rise, plus an author can gain experience and thereby create better and better ones over time). Like Sword Art Online: is it “pure fantasy”, or is it “scifi”, or both, or neither, or… something else altogether? Whatever the case, it’s a great one if you haven’t consumed it yet:-).
Though as CGI costs continue to lower, I wager that we’ll see more of the traditional “space opera” types of ye olden times resume once again. Although… is there a difference then really, b/t “real life” people in costumes (like Worf or Data in ST:TNG), “actual puppets” like Farscape, and “full CGI” like anime? Check out a trailer for “Exception” (https://www.netflix.com/title/81002444), a sci-fi fantasy where people travel to the stars and then 3d print their bodies rather than preserve the originals in cryo-sleep, leading to an issue that forms dramatic tension as they try to resolve it. People are people, regardless of what technology they have access to. That’s why I think Star Trek was “wrong” - or not wrong per se but yeah, highly stilted and unrealistic, though useful all the more deeply for serving as an aspirational goal, yet completely neglecting to touch base with the part of about to actually ARRIVE at such a far-different utopian society? I mean, we ALREADY, RIGHT NOW have the ability to feed the entire world - we could do the Star Trek stuff RIGHT NOW, even without “antimatter reactors” or “replicators” or “energy to matter converters”. Instead, we choose not to. Hence why we’ve collectively (societally I mean) lost interest in watching the show: we’ve already chosen not to walk that path, so we’re all just wondering which one we’ll end up moving towards instead… Altered Carbon it is then, it would seem:-(.
Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with many of the classic sci-fi novels of old. I did read Fahrenheit 451 back in HS, though. Besides a few concepts that probably couldn’t readily exist in our real world, such as a literal giant robot dog, I think that universe reflects our current real world pretty accurately. Like, literal mass book burnings might not be a thing, but with all the mass book bannings and censorship in schools, I think this prediction was eerily spot on. Just accomplished in a different way. To be fair, I think there actually might be places that simply throw away or incinerate books, just not on a massive, government-sanctioned way. Parts of the US seem like it’s inching closer to that, though 😞
The state of the world in the Wall-E universe didn’t feel too far off from many places in the world (entire communities, really), that are essentially left to rot.
Ah, I should read the Black Fleet books then because that sounds very interesting. Do they play a prominent role in the story, or are they only written in passing to demonstrate different factions of Force users in the galaxy?
Speaking of which, it would be nice if more writers and SW creators tapped into this more and shifted focus to non-traditional Force Users. Especially considering that you have entire species that are naturally attuned to The Force.
I always thought it was really interesting that Luke had a sort of disconnect with formal, traditional Jedi culture. I thought that would’ve been a way for him to develop an entirely new, less conservative way of understanding The Force. But considering he was trained by Obi Wan, it makes sense that he still has a more hardline understanding of it. I have not reached the Jedi Academy or New Jedi Order books, yet, but I know things don’t end well.
Thanks for mentioning Farscape and Firefly because I have both on my watch list lol. Also, the thing about anime is that one of the unfortunate reasons why they’re produced so quickly is because the animators are always working overtime and are essentially exploited. Manga publishing sadly works the same way. That’s why Akira Toriyama had to walk away from DBZ after a time, then come back. That man LITERALLY had no regular breaks over the course of him writing and drawing the Dragonball Z manga. RIP 😞
I do get worried about the health of certain artists from various industries. A friend of mine told me about an animators strike that was going on about a month or two ago. I don’t recall if that strike was in the Japanese anime industry (wouldn’t be surprised; good for them) or if it was in the US (again, totally rooting for them).
But I do agree that with anime, there is a bit more freedom and fluidity to tell very different stories outside of what is often the norm in Western (I’m mostly referring to American) storytelling. Just like Sword Art. Which I guess isn’t too unique in, with the virtual reality game concept. I have watched it a few times, but never got into it.
I used to really be into a much older anime (back in middle school) that has a similar idea :Hack//Sign I’m not sure if you heard about that one. The thing I don’t remember is that really eerie, existential question of ‘if you die in the simulated game world, do you die in the real world?’ I can’t recall because so much of the series only focused on the virtual story.
Oh yeah, when you mention going back to old school space operas (because of lower CGI costs) that made me think of BattleStar Galactica for some reason. That one feels very “distant future”-ish but still deals with things that I think would be relevant if humans moved beyond Earth. I just started the series (mostly out of sheer curiosity, than genuine interest). I kept thinking about the sci-fi trope of “colonizing distant planets” / terraforming the environment despite potential indigenous beings and native flora/fauna being present.
I’ve always been worried about this concept, but I think more modern writers are aware of what colonizing other planets might imply and are more willing to explore what that really means. I know Dune addresses this, but there is the issue of the Savior trope which has always been pretty insensitive. Heck, even modern fantasy fiction is tackling this problem too. I know both the Greedfall and Pillars of Eternity games directly explore the myth (ideology) that America is basically based off.
I will check out “Exception”. I couldn’t get a grasp on what was going on in the trailer because there were no subtitles, but the plot you mentioned is very fascinating.
And I agree too that it is probably very unhelpful to display a future like in Star Trek, but then not to demonstrate the steps needed for a society to take in order to reach that egalitarianism. Many other fans have critiqued the series for this same reason, especially considering that Roddenberry himself had an odd rule of not showing any dramatic conflict in the first 2 seasons of Next Gen.
The last point you make about feeding the entire world (most probably because there is greater profit to be made from people’s deaths and their medical suffering) makes me think about how much times I’ve heard medical professionals complaining about the cost of vaccines and brand name medicine. Basically, a lot of pills can help many people if only the rights to the brand name version was released and manufacturers can mass produce generic versions. They’re still just as effective.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a sci-fi series where in a very near future, you have teams of people trying to use slightly more advanced tech to make food and meds more accessible to the poor, but then are met with backlash from giant insurance and pill companies whose profit margins are being challenged. I feel like some of these stories already exist in cyberpunk fiction, but I just haven’t been exposed to this exact story yet.
iirc the actual amount of time dedicated to the intersection between those alternative Force-users and the rest of the Galaxy is quite small, and yet the impact of that completely changed the direction of the trilogy, literally saving the day due to their having taught Luke Skywalker a new set of powers - well, at least just one or two:-). Most of the books are dedicated to setting up this totalitarian regime that was going to overwhelm and conquor the galaxy, and on the Jedi side the search for these alternate users.
One scene that stuck in my mind was when these two people attacked Luke and his companion, and how she did not condone his having struck them down - despite it having been done entirely in self-defense, they were pacifists to such a large degree that even then they did not condone the killing. This ofc reveals them to be VERY different than the Jedi, most of whom kill without a second thought about the matter, despite how their claim is to revere “life” (their justification ofc being that they mean it on the larger scale, but the “life” of an individual or two or twenty thousand doesn’t matter all that much).
I’ll give you the tiniest of (really non-) spoiler for the Jedi Academy: yeah it doesn’t turn out well:-). Though that’s okay, b/c there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and it was what he (Luke) needed to have done to get from there to where he arrived later. Perhaps the larger part of his failures there is not due to how he was trained, but that he never finished - remember when he abandonded Yoda to go rescue his friends? Yoda kindly said that he knew enough… but he could have been taught so much more. So like, enough… “for what”? Enough to destroy the Emperor’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Enough to resurrect the Jedi order? Enough to train new members in the ways of using the Force? And what about when the Yuuzhan Vong show up later in the New Jedi Order to conquer everything - the Emperor had a whole society geared around defeating them, with fearsome technology like planet killers and star killers and rigidly disciplined clone armies and the ability to make as many more of them as needed, but did Luke have “enough” training to handle all that was to come?
Or perhaps things like survival of a species or even a galactic empire don’t really matter, in the long run, when the entire universe will fade into dust and cease to fight against entropic forces anymore, some day. Maybe all that matters at the end of the day is how we face our ending, like did we remain true to ourselves? (and perhaps that in turn depends on how “inspiring” such scifi stories were, which correlates with how profitable they were to sell in the past and thus in turn make more of in the future…:-P)
I never consumed DBZ, in any form - it seems too old to be worthwhile, but do you think there is merit in it still? Sadly, there seems nothing at all that escapes enshittification as a result of capitalism. Doctors are overworked, as are scientists, engineers, teachers - and that is even just merely STEM, but then we can start going through the list of non-STEM too: lawyers, accountants, architects, … and you mentioned the entire set of “creative” fields such as actors, artists, designers, etc. - yeesh!:-( But are there perhaps better publishers, which we can support and thereby encourage better practices?
Watching SWO a couple times is totally “enough” - not everything needs to be all-consuming, and while I think the story was well-implemented (as you say, it is nowhere close to being unique: I never got into :Hack//Sign but there are even more ancient series like Tron that also played up that same concept, and I am sure many fantasy concepts that pre-date modern technology like if you die in a dream then you die irl), there is a ton of irl stuff to read and learn and do about as well. e.g. when I watched Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, it totally fucked me up for years afterwards, trying to re-think my entire worldview of how I thought the world worked - and more importantly, should work. Trigger warning: that philosophy might be too heavy to get into and so you may want to avoid it if you aren’t ready to know.
I am going to specifically avoid commenting on BattleStar Galactica b/c… well, you’ll see. I’ll just say that it is very “interesting” how the whole series evolves - and as it does, reiterates tropes that occur irl too. But I can leave it behind and switch to StarGate instead: especially with those nanobot beings - why terraform a planet when you can just flip a switch and planetform yourself into something that can breathe that atmosphere and otherwise adapt to those conditions? As the 2001 A Space Odyssey and more pertinently its sequels show, terraforming is something that a society may do only briefly along the development of its technical capabilities - b/c it’s an enormously expensive undertaking, and it’s far easier to simply… not do that, and adapt ourselves instead (genetically I mean, as in not merely DNA but the “stuff” that makes us up). Those are kinds of FASCINATING thoughts that I LIVE to see/hear/read/imagine in scifi & fantasy settings!:-P
Btw zombies are an example of where that kind of thinking goes wrong, but with just a bit of tweaking… what if we had something like a T-virus that actually worked as intended, and basically gave the people that took it superpowers? Obviously, some evil mastermind would have to kill all the researchers that made any contributions to it at all, thereby preventing anyone else from having access to such, and preserving their immortality (not quite the same as total invulnerability, though getting closer to that as well) for millenia?
I think “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” is a little bit like you are saying where people basically have to try to save the planet, or even better (so long as we aren’t being picky about it being “Earth” that is attempting to be saved:-), “Avatar”:-).