A Most Powerful Medium

Science Fiction has a bad rap. I bet your English teacher turned their nose up at it. I know mine did. I remember for an 8th grade reading assignment we had to bring in a book that was over 200 pages. I brought in 'BOLO' by Keith Laumer, a sci-fi book about a futuristic tank with AI.

I enthusiastically showed it to to my teacher and she mockingly exclaimed, "BOLO?! Ugh, one of them."And then she gave the book back and dismissed me. And so the first of many dreams of fantasy, adventure and imagination were squashed by someone in educational authority.

But the science fiction genre, and fantasy for that matter, has always been in the unique position to make the most powerful of statements on society without being overtly preachy, which is, quite frankly, boring. No one wants to be a captive audience to blatant political commentary.

But wrap that comment in a fun, exciting and imaginative story, and now you have engaging entertainment with allegorical overtones that may or may not be subtle. Will the audience get the allegory? Who cares! Either way, they are entertained and you get to use your novel, screenplay, or painting as a mouthpiece of what you want to express about life on this spinning ball of mud.

For example, Godzilla was intended to be the personification of Japan's utter horror and helplessness in regards to nuclear annihilation. But they were banned to express how they felt about 'the bomb' that fell some 15-odd years earlier. So they created an allegorical horror in the form of a 200 foot tall monster that destroys a city (well, the model of one, anyway), and now you have an amazing film.

Ironically, J. R. R. Tolkien was quoted as saying he despised allegory, and he never used it in his books. It's funny, because it doesn't take much thought to compare the battle of the Shire vs. the invading Orcs as the struggle our rural facet of society faces against an expanding industrial one.

In short, the purpose of this blog will be to pick a movie or an episode that is taken from the science fiction genre and just say what I feel it is really about. I'm sure it will evolve from there.