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coalescentThere is an article by Bryan Appleyard in today's Sunday Times about the remake of Solaris. It moves on to the place of SF in general:
"But the real reason Hollywood finds adult sci-fi unfilmable is not aesthetic, it is financial. The mass audience isn’t interested. It wants recognisable conflicts, made cosmetically into sci-fi by light sabres, baby aliens and warp drives. [...] This is serious, because, as I say, sci-fi is a serious artistic matter. It is the form that most precisely questions and generates fables about the present human condition, by dramatising the possibility of an encounter with otherness. [...] Sci-fi, therefore, should be a primary artistic form of modernism. In writers of the stature of Lem, JG Ballard and the late Philip K Dick, that is what it has become. They are the giants of the genre, who can toss off more ideas about the future and technology in a short story than Hollywood has managed in dozens of films."
I am torn between:
(a) Applauding a mainstream journalist - a mainstream arts critic, no less - who apparently recognises the value of SF as a literary genre.
(b) Denouncing him as a snob for his restriction of said value to Lem, Ballard and Dick.
(c) Denouncing his taste in proclaiming the original film of Solaris to be a masterpiece. And for apparently failing to understand that aliens-as-representation-of-human is not always a failing, it can be a powerful device.
:-)
"But the real reason Hollywood finds adult sci-fi unfilmable is not aesthetic, it is financial. The mass audience isn’t interested. It wants recognisable conflicts, made cosmetically into sci-fi by light sabres, baby aliens and warp drives. [...] This is serious, because, as I say, sci-fi is a serious artistic matter. It is the form that most precisely questions and generates fables about the present human condition, by dramatising the possibility of an encounter with otherness. [...] Sci-fi, therefore, should be a primary artistic form of modernism. In writers of the stature of Lem, JG Ballard and the late Philip K Dick, that is what it has become. They are the giants of the genre, who can toss off more ideas about the future and technology in a short story than Hollywood has managed in dozens of films."
I am torn between:
(a) Applauding a mainstream journalist - a mainstream arts critic, no less - who apparently recognises the value of SF as a literary genre.
(b) Denouncing him as a snob for his restriction of said value to Lem, Ballard and Dick.
(c) Denouncing his taste in proclaiming the original film of Solaris to be a masterpiece. And for apparently failing to understand that aliens-as-representation-of-human is not always a failing, it can be a powerful device.
:-)
