Smile for Big Brother
Our lives are science fiction -- cool, isn't it?
      by Rachel Hyland

Star Trek inspired technological leaps aplently -- like this garage door opener.

Things really started happening in the genre in what is known as the Golden Age of American Science Fiction (1938-1950). As with the Golden Age of comic books, the Golden Age of cinema, and the Golden Age of just about anything else, really (except, perhaps, gold), this was a time when it all, finally, came together. Ideologies of equality and tolerance and, geez, big scary bug-eyed Martians found their feet and something of an audience; world-saving, evil-beating, ass-kicking protagonists of the old school began saying stuff like: "Take that, you Venusian scoundrel! Hands off my scantily-clad, ever-screaming woman!" But there was far more to the field than the at-times hackneyed dialogue and disturbing conviction that all we chicks could look forward to was a life of perpetual damsel-in-distress-ness. It was the technology science fiction invented, and developed -- and, eventually, inspired -- that really changed the world, and took us forward at the speed of thought into an entirely new age (no capitals needed): the computer age. Its hard to remember that a mere ten years ago, not everyone you knew had an e-mail address and a dotcom of their very own. But, surprising as it is to me too, there was a time when I wrote actual letters on actual paper, and had no idea that a semi-colon and a right parentheses could equate to a wink.

And though radio, film and television, all advocates of this Science Fiction revolution that made heroes out of geeks and geeks out of everyone, popularized the ideas so much that a space shuttle could be named Enterprise (sorry, you knew I had to mention Star Trek again at least once), it is that gift of the Internet from our friends in the Sci-Fi community that set us all on the road to the true Golden Age of Science Fiction: today. A time when every formerly less-traveled road now has pot holes, when modern female heroes like Honor Harrington and Esmay Suiza, Trinity, Ripley and even post-Adam Buffy all take their place. But more than that, it's been the venue for a wild trip through the astounding that has broadened minds, hearts and souls the world over.

Honor Harrington's technology allows her to be fifty years old and look nineteen. Cool.

A revolution that I fear is over. Today's Sci-Fi equivalent: Survivor.

Where once we had fiction exploring the outer limits of the unreal, we now have non-fiction exploring the very tangible limits of reality. We have ordinary people put into extraordinary situations, manipulated and frustrated and bribed into being the very worst human beings they can possibly be. Whereas science fiction always strove to show people at their best.

Sci fi, that creator of satellites and faxes and the holy mother Internet, made the impossible imaginable, the unbelievable unavoidable, and the improbable impressively real. Science Fiction really does create the future, but it also serves as a warning for what that future could -- nay, may very well -- hold. How many far-flung future tales of human expansion into space talk of the over-population and extensive pollution of Earth that precipitated it? How many near-future stories of the cyber-punk school talk of the disassociation of society, the displacement of the individual, and -- even more direfully -- the disrespect for the most rudimentary rules of fashion?

And how many of them show a desolate picture of a world drugged by spectacular media events, despotism masquerading as entertainment? Is this the society we are creating; not from the best and brightest of science fiction, but from the best and most terrifying?

'Cause Big Brother is watching, two plus two sometimes does seem to equal five, and the worst excesses of Temptation Island hearken back to a time when the most challenging aspect of life Sci-Fi explored was the sexual liberation of various limpid blondes, and not their ability to be sexually liberated and save a world or two in between romantic conquests.

But it seems the tribe has spoken. We don't want the fantastic anymore, we don't want the unreal. We want the unreal to seem real -- and for there to be a million dollars up for grabs. But the worst thing about this whole real-TV thing? All it does is remind me of the Schwarzenegger extravaganza that was The Running Man. And when the real world resembles bad science fiction, you gotta know we're in trouble.

If anyone finds a Stargate, I'm out of here.

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