I’ve written before about Beasts of the Southern Wild, the apocalyptic fairy tale about people living outside of the levees in Louisiana, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, remains one of my favorite movies of the year, and stars the most original superhero of the summer in six-year-old Hushpuppy. It’s a deeply, intensely political movie, though not along conventional lines: director Benh Zeitlin told writer Jeremy Butman of his characters, who live through a hurricane and resist efforts to relocate them behind the levees, that “It’s not like the movie is advocating that people not be rescued from disastrous situations. But it’s that condescending notion of, ‘We know better, you should live somewhere safer,’ which definitely infuriated me after the storm and that was a big entryway into the movie.”

I was also intrigued by what Zeitlin said in response to what I think is the most substantive critique of the movie, that it can seem to glorify extreme poverty, an answer that also clarifies the ideas behind his world-building:

The Bathtub is not a place where money exists. The whole idea of the Bathtub is that it’s a society where all the things that divide people have been removed. So there’s no religion, no politics, no money, no one sees race, there’s no rich and poor because there is no currency. So, I never thought about that because to me the Bathtub is this utopian place. And the poverty thing, to me it’s much more like it’s been cut off from the world, and it’s a survivalist place where they have to build everything by hand, they have to live off the earth. You don’t have any commodities to sustain yourself, but to me there’s no poverty there. There’s this ultimate freedom that exists there. But part of it is that when people see a trailer it’s like, “Oh, it’s a trailer. Poor people live in trailers.” That’s how I know it has been looked at, but I think that people are bringing certain preconceptions. When you see a trailer there’s a certain association. When you see black people in dirty clothes there’s an association. Those are things that people are bringing in because they’re used to those aesthetic elements communicating a very specific narrative about misery and poverty. So, it’s not that I don’t understand the reaction, but I don’t know that it’s in there.

Science fiction and fantasy can create new things, of course. But I think it’s easy to forget that they can also help us question the associations we have with images and signifiers, and pose challenges to our visions of what counts as affluence, or comfort, or an aspirational lifestyle. Respecting Hushpuppy means, at least for the duration of the movie, accepting her worldview. As she puts it, “Daddy says on the other side of the levee, on the dry side, they afraid of the water like a bunch of babies…The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world…Daddy’s always saying that up in the dry world, they ain’t got none of what we got. They only have holidays once a year. They got fish stuck in wrappers and babies stuck in carriages…Me and my daddy, we stay right here…We’s who the earth is for.”

I’m quite looking forward to Robot & Frank, a story about an aging jewel thief and the robot he’s given to keep him company, not just because of the absurdly terrific cast, or the fact that it’s near-future science fiction, which tends to employ small changes rather than broad metaphors, to sharp effect:

Robot & Frank is a case where the scenario in which the technology’s being employed—to resume Frank’s heist career, and get revenge on the tech nerds who are taking over the local library—is actually more baroque than the technology itself. Japanese companies have long been at work developing robots to assist in many aspects of elder care. Technology companies depend on our ability to develop low-level emotional bonds with technology ranging from Roombas, which act as surrogate pets, to Apple’s Siri voice technology. And the continued work and social lives of aging people, as well as elder care, are major issues that Hollywood almost never has the courage to touch, much less approach from the perspective of people who are aging rather than the younger people who will take lessons from them. I’m almost as excited for a thoughtful, funny, fully human story about retirees as I am to see a movie about robots.

In the years I’ve been working as a professional critic, I’ve never been as excited for a follow-up to a directorial debut as I have been for whatever Niell Blomkamp decided to do after District 9, his story of a South Africa in which white and black citizens have united to enforce apartheid on a group of stranded aliens they’ve herded into townships, which for my money was both the smartest alien invasion movie and one of the most shattering love stories in years. I’d heard rumbles that his subsequent feature, Elysium, would follow up on some of the same themes, and according to the first reported plot summary, it sounds like that’s the case:

In the year 2159 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard the government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

In between this and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim (In Time did this too, but less well) I’m very, very excited for the fact that a new crop of sci-fi movies that recognize that mobility is something that gets more valuable as society gets more stratified. Immigration reform gets treated like a poor people’s cause, in some limited cases, like it’s a gay cause—lack of mobility from one country to the next becomes a magnifying factor of the joblesseness and violence people face in Mexico, or the second-class treatment by the federal government of marriages between same-sex couples. But the ability to move across borders, and to do so free from harassment isn’t something we should take for granted. I’ve always loved fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which recognizes that restricting mobility and immigration is a way of reinforcing inequality. I’m choosing to believe that two big-budget science fiction movies on one of my favorite themes is my reward for fighting sexism.

Idris Elba talked to Vulture about Pacific Rim, the monster movie by Guillermo Del Toro he’s starring in, and wow does it sound incredible:

He’s yet another man of authority, but this time much higher up. He’s the head of the army and the army is the essential fighting force against these monsters. The world is crumbled and this alien lived underneath the surface of the Earth for a long time. Our only defense has been these massive robots that fight back — they’re basically tanks that are put together to look like men and can walk. I play the leader of that sort of movement. Then we lose our funding, basically, and the world decides to build walls around countries, which basically means the rich can get in and the poor can’t. So our characters go, “No. We’re going to fight this our way.” It could be a box-standard, fight-against-the-aliens sort of film, but not with Guillermo.

It sounds like it’s almost a commentary on class and immigration.

Well, it’s certainly a commentary on if the world were under attack who would survive and who wouldn’t. Interestingly enough, the poor would probably more survive than the rich.

Why is that?

Because they have less and are used to less; therefore, more resilient and more tough. If an alien attacks a big skyscraper, people in the skyscraper are going to die. The people on the floor may not.

It’s often splashier and scarier to pit humans against aliens in science fiction, and to portray alien invasion as an engineer of a new, happy, human solidarity. But we’re a lot likely to get fierce international and inter-class struggle and competition before we end up in a fight with spacemen. That Del Toro is acknowledging that and giving us his signature awesome monster design has me very, very excited indeed.

As should be obvious, there are massive spoilers for Prometheus in this post.

I’ve been thinking about many aspects of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien movies, but the one that’s stuck with me most is the clearest continuation of the Alien franchise’s themes: the movie’s exploration of bodily invasion and specifically women’s bodily autonomy. In New York Magazine, David Edelstein describes one of the movie‘s most harrowing and original sequences “a bit of grisly self-surgery that should inspire the pro-choice movement for millennia to come.” Livejournal user cavalorn, in a long and much-circulated analysis of the movie that’s the closest I’ve seen for a compelling argument for the coherence of some, but not all, of its ideas, writes: “I’m not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don’t think they’re clear, and I’m not entirely comfortable doing so.” I’m still considering this element of the movie, and suspect I will be for some time to come. But for the moment, I feel like Prometheus is a movie that attempts to describe the quest for bodily autonomy as a sign of extreme toughness that ends up reaffirming the persistence of patriarchy and rape culture, even in the future, even as we travel beyond all we know.

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about the android David’s (Michael Fassbender) motivations for dosing Holloway, the colleague and lover of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the movie’s main character: does he know that it will result in her pregnancy? Is he experimenting for his own purposes or at the behest of Peter Weyland, the father he also wants dead? To a certain extent, his motivations and reasoning are irrelevant. The end result of David’s actions is that Shaw ends up with a metaphorical pregnancy against her plans and will, and when she expresses a wish to end the invasion of her body, David forcibly prevents her from doing so.

The scene of Shaw’s—abortion isn’t really the right word for it, because she isn’t pregnant, but rather infected, and the result of the surgery isn’t the termination of her pregnancy but a premature birth—seizing control of her body is undeniably, viscerally powerful, even as it’s sacrificed in small ways to the movie’s other needs. The surgery would have been urgent enough even without the medpod’s initial warning that it isn’t programmed to treat women, a nonsensical restriction on its programming that causes a slight delay in the midst of great urgency but really exists as another clue that Peter Weyland is still alive. Similarly, the revelation that Shaw has been unable to conceive a child with Holloway ends up functioning as foreshadowing, rather than as nuance. Her instant reaction to David’s diagnosis of her pregnancy is to want to terminate it. The movie isn’t interested in the possibility that, given her profound upset over her inability to have a child with Holloway, she might have some sort of connection to the thing growing rapidly inside her. Those emotions might have been uncomfortable given how that creature came to be inside her, but it would have been a fascinating, uncomfortable conversation for the movie to engage in.
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Note: it’s impossible to discuss Prometheus in the depth it demands without massive spoilers, so I’ll revisit the movie on Monday. This review contains some basic plot details, most of which can be gleaned from the movie’s promotional materials, but if you want to go in blind, please defer your reading.

“How do you know it’s beautiful?” one character asks another at the beginning of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his science fiction landmark Alien, about futuristic truckers who find themselves burdened with a uniquely lethal cargo. “It’s what I choose to believe,” she responds. So have we, lured into theaters by the astonishingly gorgeous marketing campaign for the dark, futuristic blockbuster about religious scientists hoping to reconcile science and faith in one daring exploratory mission. But like those scientists, who followed a recurring set of pictographs across the galaxy only to find their expectations grievously disappointed, Prometheus is not the miracle we’ve been lead—or lead ourselves—to expect.

In place of the Alien movie’s scathing portrait of a corporation that’s willing to see a crew of humans butchered to capture the potential basis for a weapon, to talk a woman traumatized in its employ into facing the same thing that nearly killed her, to abandon a colony to its death, Prometheus has a nearly-bloodness corporate dynastic struggle. David (a terrific Michael Fassbender), the android who is maintaining the crew of the spaceship Prometheus while they are in hypersleep on their voyage to a distant star cluster, turns out to have been a surrogate son to industrialist Peter Weyland. Weyland’s affection for him is limited, though, shot through with a kind of species superiority complex. In a hologram recorded before his death and played for the crew upon their arrival, he explains that “He is unable to appreciate his remarkable gifts because that would require the one thing David lacks: a soul.” But whatever Weyland believes about David’s capacity for wonder, his casual contempt appears to have registered with the android. “I was designed like this because you people are more comfortable interacting with your own kind,” he informs the crew, a slight edge emerging from bland, uptipped lips. Later, he asks with that same lack of affect, “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?”

Weyland-Yutani’s willingness to betray its human employees to keep the Alien alive and exploitable set the company terrifyingly apart from the human race—in this universe, corporations aren’t people, they’re a predator species of their own. But in Prometheus, Weyland’s toxic relationship with his children is both more personal and more antiseptic than the grime of the Alien movies. The venom is contained to their cursed circle, the mission a pet project of Weyland’s rather than a corporate priority. Prometheus is willing to judge Weyland’s character, but not his company.

The movie doesn’t do justice to most of its other, more high-flying ideas, either. There are monsters and body-horror-inducing substances a-plenty, but for a movie that’s meant to answer an awfully specific biological question—Damon Lindelof told io9 he wanted to know “Where did that thing come from? It’s not really a practical organism if it needs a human to gestate. Was it invented by someone?”—Prometheus‘s science is designed more to provide a steady stream of horrific images than a satisfying evolutionary or bioengineering narrative.

Similarly, the characters make decisions so stupidly self-destructive and draw conclusions so counterintuitive that it becomes difficult to root for them. The more logical and plausible horror is, the more effective it is because it suggests that the monstrous could grown organically from the everyday. By contrast, I’m not particularly concerned about a pot-smoking geologist making spectacularly poor decisions that lead to the death of half of my colleagues. Prometheus‘s shocks may be sharp, but they generally fade quickly.

The exception is a sequence that transmute normal anxieties about rape, unwanted pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and birth into a powerful and lingering nightmare, and an opportunity for Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) to demonstrate her unstoppability: sucker punches have nothing on a blow to the cesarean section incision. If Ridley Scott can be said to be a feminist, it’s less for his advocacy of a world beyond patriarchy, and more for his conviction that women have the will to survive the unimaginable. Ellen Ripley was a response to the horror trope of the Final Girl long before Buffy Summers’ arrival in Sunnydale, and here, Idris Elba’s ship’s captain defies the death order preordained for horror-movie black men.

“Big things have small beginnings,” David assesses coldly midway through Prometheus. But for all its visual splendor and strong performances, Prometheus is a reminder that brilliant, low-budget beginnings can be more compelling than their monstrous offspring.

I am so sorry to hear of the loss of Ray Bradbury, who as well as writing some of the first, most influential science fiction I ever read, but who helped teach me how to write. Zen and the Art of Writing, his book about how he became a writer and came to understand creativity is a book I constantly go back to when I’m stuck, especially for Bradbury’s poetry. Here’s one to start with:

Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth
So in your wake a weltering of welath
Springs up unseen, ignored and left behind
As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.
On your return along the jungle path you’ve made
Find all the littered stuffs where you have strayed;
The small truths and the large have surfaced there
Where you stealth-blundered wildly unaware
Or seeming so. And so these mines were mined
In easy game of pace and pounce and find;
But mostly fluid pace, not too much pounce.
Attention must be paid, but by the ounce.
Mock caring, seem aloof, ignore each mile
And metaphors like cats behind your smile
Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you’ve hid inside,
Now summoned forth in harvests from the brake
Turned anteloping elephants that shake
And drum and crack the mind to awe,
To behold beauty yet perceive its flaw.
Then, flaw discovered, like fair beauty’s mole,
Haste back to reckon all entire, the Whole.
This done, pretend these wits you do not keep,
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep.

I was reading through Annalee Newitz’s piece in last month’s Smithsonian about Neal Stephenson’s efforts to create a more optimistic science fiction in the wake after reading Emily Nussbaum’s piece on Community and Doctor Who in the New Yorker, and the combination struck me. The thing that I’m most interested in seeing in my science fiction right now is not solely new technology, and not solely explorations of what relationships might look like in the future: I’m interested in explorations of what our relationships to our new technology are going to be like.

One of the things Emily praised about Doctor Who in its latest incarnation was its exploration of how a specific technology—time travel—affects characters’ relationships to each other, and enhances fears of abandonment, missed chances, and the need for profound patience with the people you love. Stephenson, Annalee writes, has a more concrete set of motivations:

“We have one rule: no hackers, no hyperspace and no holocaust,” Stephenson says. He and his collaborators want to avoid pessimistic thinking and magical technologies like the “hyperspace” engines common in movies like Star Wars. And, he adds, they’re “trying to get away from the hackerly mentality of playing around with existing systems, versus trying to create new things.”Stephenson’s greatest hope is that young engineers and scientists will absorb ideas from the stories and think, “If I start working on this right now, by the time I retire it might exist.”

I think what I’m curious about is a fusion of the two. Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel 2312 is about precisely that dilemma: what happens when humans who are interconnected to their personal computing devices to the point of having them embedded in their bodies, discover that computing’s evolved to a higher level such that they aren’t sure they trust something they’re intimately connected to? What happens when they date someone or get involved in professional relationships where someone wants them to detach? These aren’t exactly new questions—Orson Scott Card posed a lot of them with his character Jane, a sentient expression of the internet, in Speaker for the Dead—but Robinson feels like he’s riffing off Siri, the Apple personal assistant that doesn’t work as well as we’re told it will, but that we’re supposed to want to like quite a bit.

And these aren’t the only technologies that pose those kinds of questions. Watching Star Trek a couple of years ago, I was struck watching Bones repeatedly stab Kirk with injections. I have a nut allergy, and my Epi-Pens are a source of both great comfort and anxiety to me. I’m glad they exist, but I’m terrified of actually having to jab myself with one, and I was both uncomfortable and fascinated to see Bones doing that repeatedly as if it was no big thing. I’d be curious to hear from long-time Trekkies in the audiences whether there are episodes of the show or movies I might have missed that address what it’s like to have medical technology that good. Do people take more risks? Do doctors overmedicate patients? Does it lead them into error? I feel like we have a lot of science fiction, whether it’s John Scalzi’s work or The Forever War that discusses how medical technology changes decision-making by soldiers. But from a doctor’s perspective, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a tool that powerful at your disposal, and I’d love to see a futuristic medical show that explores some of those questions. I’d totally watch a show about a futuristic Atul Gwande (or, who am I kidding, Shonda Rhimes 2032 show Space Mistresses).

Good gadget design or carefully thought-out rules are a first step towards good science fiction. But just putting those tools or those rules into action without meditating on them aren’t the only way to tell stories with them.

One of the things that irritates me most is people — progressives in particular, because conservatives tend to be more vigilant on this score — who dismiss culture as if it’s unimportant, or as if people aren’t influenced by it. And my favorite counterargument of the moment comes from Paul Krugman, who went into economics because he wanted to be Hari Seldon when he grew up:

The background story is, I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity…, we don’t exactly have the laws of psychohistory, but we do have some pretty good guidelines. The other thing, of course, is in Foundation, Hari Seldon is able to put together his long term plan and actually nudge history in the direction he wants it to go, and so far I’m feeling not like Hari Seldon but like Cassandra. I keep on predicting bad things, no one will believe me, and then they happen…Not everyone, obviously, but social scientists in general … I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction. It’s speculative, we’re thinking about what society could be like. Never mind the gadgets, although they create the alternative worlds, but a lot of it is thinking about society.

Fiction is about defining the outer limits of possibility: you show a kid a world where economists can shape the fate of humanity, and he’ll embrace realistic possibilities for social science he might never have been attracted to in the first place. Show girls superheroines and master archers as well as princesses and maybe some activity will catch a spark. I sometimes write that a movie or television show feels surprising because I didn’t think it was something that could exist. What really ends excites me about those pieces of art is that they’re times when popular entertainment is matching what’s truly possible in the world, and occasionally exceeding it. It’s artistically and societally depressing when media rooted in imagination turns out images and societies that are vastly more crabbed than our world actually is.

By that I don’t mean that we can’t explore oppression, or myopic people. But when books, or music, or movies fall into replicating the same old character tropes, or means of interactions between people, or possibilities for science and technology without acknowledging that society’s moved on around them, there’s something sad about that, both as a failure of art, and of excitement for the future. Or, as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a marvelous line cited by Austin Allen in an essay on the power of literature, fiction “Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.”

When the first teaser for The Host, the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction novel starring Saorsie Ronan as an alien lifeform implanted in the body of a young human woman, came out, I decided to give Meyer the benefit of the doubt and give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised, and it made me wonder how Meyer’s career might have gone if The Host had been published before Twilight and Meyer had been embraced as a science fiction novelist, rather than primarily as a romantic one. But we live in the world that Twilight built, and so The Host looks like it’s going to be marketed as an intense young adult love story:

This is too bad, because to my mind, the most interesting thing about The Host as its status as a kind of peaceful Old Man’s War from the aliens’ perspective. Ronan’s character is an extremely fragile alien who goes by Wanderer. Her species is a colonizing—and as they see it—civilizing one that travels to new planets, removes the consciousness from the sentient species who live there, and insert themselves. The worlds they run are free of conflict, poverty, disease, and ecological devastation. In Wanderer’s opinion, this is a significant improvement, and lets her species, known as Souls, gather the stories, traditions, and wisdom of the species whose bodies they occupy. Where in Old Man’s War, John Scalzi’s characters drop in on species and civilizations as they fight their way through the galaxy, Wanderer gives us fleeting but powerful glimpses of life in all its possibilities.

That’s not to say there isn’t a YA-level love triangle in the novel, but rather than being defined by Who Loves Bella Swan more, the people who end up competing both for Wanderer’s love and the affection of the body she inhabits offer differing models of human independence in the face of alien invasion. The man who loved the body Wanderer occupies before it was hijacked stands for resistance to the invasion, to an inflexible vision of humanity as pure and independent, while the man who comes to love Wanderer for herself is one of the first humans she meets who is intrigued by the possibility of expanding his knowledge of the universe and his understanding of the kind of people who are worthy of sympathy and empathy. It’s a triangle with intellectual purpose beyond emotional frisson.

The book isn’t perfect, far from it. But it’s going to make me sad if The Host gets sold as another romance in the vein of Twilight and not as anything more. I’d like to think that a sense of wonder is still something that can get pricked by exposure to the potential size of the universe, not just by the sensation of being desperately wanted. Maybe The Hunger Games will convince folks that if you heighten romance with a postapocalypse, girls won’t be deterred, and boys will feel there’s something there for them, too, and we’ll all get a better movie as a result.