Why Is Science Fiction So, Well, Violent?

I love to read. I was late to the party but have since caught up. You see by the third grade, despite good grades, my mother discovered I couldn't read. Oregon public schools in the 1950's taught us to read by sight! Despite being a visual learner letters arranged in patterns taught me nothing. 

So my parents bought phonics cards and night after night in what seemed like forever I learned the sound of each letter and pairs such as th, sh, wh and such. They then took me to the library and I can vividly remember spending the summer between third and fourth grades devouring every book I could get. Years later I did the same thing with my students as a Peace Corps teacher in Liberia. It pleases me that AFTER all these years LA Public schools are finally changing to phonics! Reading scores will jump at long last.

Because I loved comics, Superman, Batman and quite a few sci-fi comics I graduated to Bradbury, Heinlein, Clark, Asimov's Foundation series that stretched to 12 or so books and many, many more.

One book was quite upsetting: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. I could never get past the chapter where humans land on Mars, are greeted by Martians, wined and dined then killed in their sleep. I abhor violence and that upset me greatly. I finally, on my third try, just skipped that chapter and read on. Bradbury remains one of my favorites today.

However, that didn't stop me from seeing THE BLOB or THE FLY, MONSTER FROM THE BLACK LAGOON even PSYCHO that I couldn't watch again for 60 years. It seemed at least some of those books offered possibilities for a better future even if the movies couldn't.

I've seen 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY at least 40 times, even the anniversary edition a few years ago. As everyone agrees, Kubrick changed the face of sci-fi forever. No more Buck
Rogers with wispy smoke coming out of his rocket and a cheesy control deck. Every time I hear The Beautiful Blue Danube I conjure up the Pan Am shuttle rotating with the space station as it docks and/or the moon rocket landing on the moon! There was ultimately hope and a warning of the AI we are grappling with today. Remember the HAL 9000? "Open the pod bay doors HAL" as it kills all the slumbering crew.

Before we finally launched a satellite after Russia's Sputnik, we would stay up all night waiting for NASA's Vanguard rocket to launch only to see it blow up time and again. Finally a military Redstone rocket got us into space. And the race was on!

Those were both tense yet heady years.

HAL 9000

STAR WARS, Episode 4, first of a nine part series came out in September 1977. We went to see it in Westwood near UCLA when that was the place to go. Clearly it built on Kubrick's 2001 creating a world as real as ours. However, it was replaced by the drama and strife we see on earth magnified by a thousand different planets and species. The barroom scene in many ways says it all. And this strife was carried on in just about every sci-fi series from then on.

I picked up one of the myriad STAR TREK series at the Palm Springs Library, a series  that seems never-ending. STAR TREK: DISCOVERY started almost out the gate with that old adversary, the Klingons attacking a Star Fleet starship of the Federation. And that's when I asked myself the question, will space

STAR WARS Bar scene

exploration always be violent? Should we meet an alien and will they be our enemy? In Asimov's FOUNDATIONS END humans meet Daniel, the only surviving robot from our era and ask, "Is this the end of space? He answers yes. He has protected the human race the best he could asking, "Didn't you ever wonder why you never saw an alien race? We picked the dimension that was safest for you." They had nothing to say.

A few months ago I saw MICKEY 17, a sci-fi creation of the Korean director who created and directed, the grim movie PARASITE. Since the killer was holed up in the basement of the man he's murdered home, everyone was expecting a sequel. It wasn't.

MICKEY 17 was a name for an "expendable," a man who felt he was of little worth and agreed to have his DNA copied as well as his memories and was given jobs everyone knew would kill him. We meet Mickey in his 17th iteration as he's about to freeze to death in a crevice on a planet his and many others have gone to with a Jim Jones like leader who couldn't get his way on earth. As they wish him well and will see him as Mickey 18 he is resigned to his death. However, he didn't die. 

Creatures on this barren planet no one knew about save him by dragging him to the surface. He makes it back to the base and meets Mickey 18, something that is forbidden to happen. There are issues and violence leading to the leader and his McBethian wife dying and they then face a standoff of the native creatures who arrive to the base by the thousands. The two Mickey's go out to face them and in a twist I haven't seen, in like forever, they agree to live side by side and the colony can move on. Wouldn't that have been nice here in 1620?

Boon Joon Ho took an almost warn out genre giving us hope that "contact" doesn't necessarily have to be violent. Jodie Foster's CONTACT spread a similar message as aliens asked for help that would be repaid.

One of the sweetest sci-fi films I seen in a long time is JULES starring Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin and Harriet Sansom Harris. Milton (Kingsley) has an alien space craft crash in his back yard. Soon an alien emerges and he takes him in and feeds him. For some reason the alien keeps drawing stick figure cats. The three try to help and keep him from the government that wants alien and machine. Geared for seniors it's a wonderful family movie and again no real violence with a touching, NON-violent ending. 

Do we really know what would happen? It would be nice to consider what the future could bring us benficially without the violence we see around us as each and every day. We hardly need our entertainment making it worse. And yet it does. 

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