Rogue One: Not Your Average Space Opera

     In the various Facebook groups devoted to Space Opera that I belong to, there have been many remarks of late about Rogue One that tend toward the negative.  It is currently fashionable to "call out" any members one disagrees with, but this usually degenerates into the kind of monosyllabic flame war that i detest.  So I choose to examine the question in the form of a little essay that will begin by giving some credit to my potential adversaries: their reaction is not completely unexpected or unnatural.  In fact, they are right in perceiving that Rogue One is not a conventional space opera.  For me, it is instead a combination of medieval Christian epic and heroic tragedy, two historically established genres the American public is almost completely unaware of.

     First, let's examine some of the main expectations of space opera.  There are adventure, one-against-the-universe boldness, reliance on technical mastery or super powers, and of course a successful outcome.  Add to this the tendency to project a hideous evil that is the embodiment of a psychologically concealed nemesis.  Think Spaceman Spiff turning his untouchable teachers into monsters he can disintegrate.  Space opera privileges a high degree of vicarious stimulation and enjoyment.  The reader/viewer expects to confront and overcome the projected monster, gaining a sense of fulfillment, just as in mysteries, he or she accompanies the detective with the virtual certainty of unmasking the criminal and unraveling his plans.  Nothing wrong with what Ronald Reagan, a reader of limited abilities, used to call a "ripping good story."

     The Star Wars universe, though, has never completely subscribed to this formula.  Keep in mind that George Lucas began with a very dystopian future in THX 1138.  A New Hope was a space opera grafted onto a Bildungsroman that featured Luke Skywalker in a scenario that resembled Joseph Campbell's idea of the mythic quest, a type of space-based Perceval more than a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.  It adopted just enough of the Hollywood ritual of obstacles and plot points to fit on the big screen, but its parameters were much wider, leading into the stark dilemma of The Empire Strikes Back, which ends with Luke's ritual mutilation.  

     Rogue One begins in a very un-space-opera fashion, with Jyn being rather unwillingly recruited by Cassian into a mission to recover her father, who has already betrayed the Empire and is in turn the object of a secret assassination plot by the Rebels that Jyn is completely ignorant of.  We are much closer to John Le Carre than Flash Gordon.  As they assemble their unlikely team of paladins (a reverse of the sidekicks in The Song of Roland, complete with a Jedi equivalent of Bishop Turpin), Jyn and Cassian begin to meld together while at the same time delving into their covert selves.  For it is only by coming to grips not only with their past, but also with their individual potential that the couple can assume the sacrificial importance that was the center of seventeenth-century heroic tragedy.  Like The Cid and Chimene, Horatius and Sabine, the reluctant lovers have to realize a blood sacrifice even as they come together.  It is this generic rooting that gives the film the psychological profundity that most viewers have praised.  More than the fact that everyone sympathetic dies, it is the manner and context in which they die that really matters.  Even had Darth Vader been able to seize that memory device at the last moment, dooming the Rebellion, Jyn and Cassian make the rebellion, previously a well-intentioned but morally tainted enterprise, worthy to succeed.  

     As for the reactions of the negative audience, I will note one repeated reaction, "I was not impressed."  This seemingly inarticulate and personal response is actually quite revealing.  Emphasis on impressed.  The space opera viewer typically seeks an impression, an essentially passive response associated with the vicarious thrill of participating with the "hero."  This has always been a feature of Hollywood products and has dictated the almost universal presence of the Hollywood ending.  To have the vicar (in the original sense of the word) die would break the contact with the impression.  In the rare cases of endings where vicars died, there was generally a passing of the vicarious association: McMurphy to Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Spartacus to Varinia and Antoninus, Big X to Cooler King in The Great Escape. Instead of impression, Rogue One requires a process of transformation that shifts the emphasis from the putative heroic fact to the interior heroic assumption of worthiness, as in Pierre Corneille's heroic tragedies or, to come closer to our Anglo-Saxon tradition, in the fifth act of Hamlet ("If it be not now, yet it will be").

    I hope I have shown that, however justified by habit some space opera fans may be in remaining unimpressed by Rogue One, the majority of its worldwide admirers are even more justified by growth in allowing it to transform them.

Sci Fi Comedies -- Why So Few?

     It came up in a conversation today that it is odd that comedic treatments of sci fi on film and television are so rare.  Successful ones, that is.  Movies like Pluto Nash managed some good moments, but so often ran into problems of pacing, perhaps because as the great comic author Moliere said, "Timing makes the whole show."  Amid the special effects, costumes, and star blather, it is hard to focus on the magical timing that characterizes both visual and dialogue comedy.  This is even evident in what may be the cult favorite of the sub-genre, Spaceballs.   The incomparable Mel Brooks, John Candy, Rick Moranis and some of the Brooks crew regulars hit their lines with effect, but the male and female leads always seem so bedazzled by the context that they wind up being very unfunny.  One could conclude that the trappings make space comedy impossible.

     But if that were true, we would never have Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (esp. the original television version) or Red Dwarf.  What were the Brits doing so well?  For one thing -- economy of comic effects.  Red Dwarf thrived with a small cast of well-differentiated characters: one very streetwise Earthling, a hologram, an overly-evolved feline, a wise-cracking software personality, and eventually that superb automaton Kryten.  Each one of these figures could serve as a pharmakos, or comic butt, because of their inherent failings. Dave's slovenly habits and his lower class lack of taste, Rimmer's insufferable false pride, the Cat's clothes-horse vanity, Holly's lack of a real body, and Kryten's mechanoid Felix-Unger-fussiness could play off each other continually through any episode.  The series' writers excelled at "ringing the changes" out of every permutation of contrasting traits.

     And though it adhered to a classic episodic paradigm, Red Dwarf joined this to a narrative framework that was as old as literature, the odyssey quest. A double irony generated a lot of comedy in itself, for on the one hand, the odyssey quest had already been established by space operas like Battlestar Galactica as a perfectly serious standard, and on the other, this particular quest was inverted, since there was no home in the story line to return to, at least until the last seasons restored one through a trick of time travel.

     Any comedy also needs some kind of comic nemesis to generate plot, and here Red Dwarf again scored a perfect ten by providing creepy aliens that were outlandishly overdone (for example, the Despair Squid), while at the same time introducing some intriguing scientific possibilities far beyond the standard sci fi fare.  The fact that the crew invariably triumphs over or at least escapes from the nemesis (in Dave's case, running away from the altar of a presumptive troglodyte bride) does not pose too much of a problem in verisimilitude.  It merely underlines the principle of Murphy's Law that permeates the whole show.  In fact, it also cleaves to the ancient odyssey quest form, leaving its equivalents of Polyphemus, the Lotus Eaters, Circe et al on their own scattered planets.  In the long run, this is a far more manageable formula for nemesis than continually reviving Cylons, Romulans, Ming the Merciless, or other long-running villains.  

     Hitchhiker's Guide relied on its own system for generating comedy that was at least as sophisticated as that of Red Dwarf and also quite different.  It deserves a post of its own in the future. This little analysis limits itself to openings a few lines of inquiry that can start a dialogue on sci fi comedy.   

Future War

No, this post is not about the (awful?) sci fi film by this name, although that venerable classic does impinge somewhat on the content I am about to discuss.

Specifically, I am interested in the Mad Scientist Science Fiction Contest sponsored by the US Army TRADOC Command.  This contest was recently announced, offering the winner rather obscure financial inducements ("most travel expenses paid") as well as a chance to speak at the Army's annual Mad Scientist Conference (I kid you NOT!) and publication in an Army journal.  TRADOC's mission is to plan the army of the future, and one is tempted to believe that includes the military occupation of outer space, as well as this planet.  Never mind that we have signed treaties to the contrary -- the military doesn't each time it launches another secret military mission into and beyond the Earth's atmosphere.  Now, on the positive side of the ledger, one has to admit that there is and must be a certain rationale for defining the presence of some kind of human military and its weapons in outer space, so let's look at the possibilities.

In the classic Western film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the bandit Tuco (played by Eli Wallach in what is arguably the best performance in a Western by any actor in history) is fond of the catch phrase: "There are two kinds of people..."  Of course, Clint Eastwood's Blondie character eventually teaches him that there are really three kinds of people, even if one of them is "a dirty son of a bitch."  Let's say there are three kinds of truly military eventualities in outer space.  The first is that we encounter aliens more technologically advanced than ourselves, the second that we encounter aliens less technologically advanced than ourselves, and the third that we encounter aliens equally technologically advanced as ourselves.  Of course, it is possible that we might encounter no aliens at all, which just leaves us ourselves to fight each other, that is, no different from what we face right now.

Should we have a hostile encounter with aliens more advanced than us, it is likely to be a short war.  This time, the shock and awe would be completely on the other side, assuming that we stay around long enough to even feel shock or awe.  If humankind manages to survive a hostile encounter with a more advanced life form, we would not be in a situation to wage the type of war so far contemplated by the military, based on Robert Heinlein's work and especially on Starship Troopers.  Our only hope for survival would be to carry on a struggle on a completely assymetrical basis against great odds.  So I would humbly suggest to TRADOC that they might talk with someone in the People's Army of Vietnam or maybe even (dare I say?) El Qaida or ISIL, who have experience with that sort of thing.  Unthinkable, you say?  Maybe not, since some of our proxy soldiers are Chechens very friendly with those boys.  But let's leave the specific problematics of that weird combination for other times and go on to the other possibilities.

The second eventuality, that we might encounter alien life forms less advanced than ourselves, leads directly to James Cameron's Avatar.  I concede that we have yet to find evidence of big blue low-tech natives who ride dragons and talk with trees, but from a human angle that film touches on many contemporary values as we begin to contemplate deep space mineral exploitation in our immediate cosmic neighborhood.  How would our real starship troopers deal with the indigenous species?  The way North Dakota is dealing with the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies?  For that confrontation in the depths of North American Outer Space is certainly being viewed by military theorists as a training mission for future corporate vs. "native" standoffs.  And when I say military in this instance, I mean private as well as public, since Blackwater and other corporate entities are trying out new weapons and strategies on what's left of our own Na'vi.  Anyone who takes a look at our novel Life Sentence will realize that we have a highly skeptical attitude towards the ability of corporations to attenuate the chance for violence.  So we're not well placed to win a TRADOC prize for helping the military figure out how to colonize other species and their territories.

Even more potentially damaging is the possibility that we will face a hostile encounter with a species of equal technological advancement.  I state this because, as we see in places like Somalia, Syria, and Libya, equally pitched sides tend to create the most thorough and interminable suffering for everyone concerned.  Humans' time-proven inability to abide by their own promises or to foster compassionate understanding might easily yield to the (natural) military impulse to exploit any tactical advantage in order to unbalance the playing field.  Only a bilateral recognition of mutually assured desstruction might avert a conflict between equals, but even that would depend in some measure on non-military negociation.  Which brings us back to an important issue: to whom would a human space military answer?  To POTUS?  To the CIA, The UN?  Amazon?  Elon Musk? All of the above?  Even a half-century after the fact, we're still not completely sure whom the military was answering to in Vietnam, since the rat's nest of strategic, commercial, and political motives in that (relatively simple) human-on-human fiasco has never been completely unraveled.

So, Tuco, there are not just two kinds of people (friend or foe) or three (good, bad, and ugly), but a potentially infinite number of kinds of people out there, and no one prospect of war to deal with them.  Even worse, at this stage, is the face that there is not even one single type of peace that is receiving any planning.  If it is a question of peace or war, and war is the one with all the plans, chances are it will be war, indeed!  We probably shouldn't count on TRADOC to plan  interstellar peace, since that's not its mission, but maybe someone should take up the call.  If technology seems inextricably tied to war, maybe we need to take the cue from another sci fi classic, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and lay a footing for some kind of Second Foundation that would work on solutions other than the Starship Trooper style.

OK, I admit, this is not going to win me a TRADOC prize or even their attention.  There are hundreds of military sci fi authors out there who are laboring each day to come up with the kind of scenarios TRADOC wants and expects to see.  To come back to Future War's premise, I suppose I am suggesting that humanity should consider ways of being more than a TOOL.  As we inevitably move toward space, I assert that it is implausible that we will have to use martial arts against Robert Z'Dar, Kasja, and a bevy of tyrannosaur puppets, so we have to develop more options for analysis and organization, to be dissatisfied with the inevitability of armed conflict, better prepared for exchange (and its downsides), surer of what we want as a species besides minimal survival, if we are to take advantage of any encounters that may occur.

Roman en vente chez Amazon.fr

     Salut, les amis francais!  Nous sommes ravis d'annoncer que notre roman Life Sentence est disponible, a la fois en formats imprime et electronique, chez Amazon.fr.  Et cela pour la somme raisonnable de 2,99 euros pour le Kindle.  Nous serons tres heureux de recevoir vos reactions sur ce site et particulierement en forme d'etoiles (beaucoup, on espere!) sur le site meme d'Amazon.fr.  Nous avons deja  commence la recherche d'une traduction francaise, mais beaucoup d'entre vous sont certainement en mesure d'apprecier le texte americain.  

     

A Taste of Life Sentence

by J. M. R. Gaines Copyright@2016

Our new novel available now on Amazon Kindle

     The judge wriggled uncomfortably in his robes as he read the scrap of paper, then passed it back to the bailiff and said, “Foreman of the jury, in the case of the state against Wilhelm Klein for first degree murder of Feldwebel Schmidt, Kommissar Lebov, and Inspector Ciccolini, how find you the defendant?”

     “Guilty!”

     “Defendant, have you anything to say before sentence is pronounced?”

     “I was framed,” answered Klein in a deadpan delivery.

     “Mr. Klein, really! We have satellite photos of 1 to 35 resolution showing you pulling the trigger on two of these three auxiliary security personnel who periodically served as loyal contractors to the government. If you hadn’t decided to murder the third one in a lavatory, we’d have a photo of that, too. In that, DNA proves your presence. It’s true all three were off duty, but their contracts afford them the same protection as full-time servants of the state. How can you possibly say with a straight face that you were framed?”

     “What can I say? Do you always trust a camera a hundred miles up in the sky to give you the full story? You asked me if I had anything to say, and I say I was framed.”

     “Since there are no mitigating circumstances, I shall pass directly on to sentencing,” said the judge, smoothing his moustache and ignoring the argumentative prisoner. “The court of the United Nations, District 12, Circuit C, Region 35, sitting in the city of Athens has found you guilty of murder. This is a capital crime and calls in principle for the death penalty.”

     Suddenly the walls of the courtroom erupted with protestors waving signs and chanting “Save a life! Save a life!” and “No more Justice with bloody hands!” The contrast between the projected images and the relative tranquillity of the little court chambers was acute. Inside the room sat only the judge, the bailiff, and the robotically restrained prisoner. Even the foreman of the jury was only holographic, attending the trial from his home hundreds of miles away in Bulgaria. But the streets around the Palace of Justice were filled with angry activists.

     “This is Kent Phillips reporting from Athens where yet another death penalty has set off demonstrations around the Acropolis in protest to capital punishment. As might be expected, the majority of the protestors are Greeks and Turks who have been here all week for this session of the assizes. But there is also a sprinkling of Brits, Poles, Germans, and French, since this batch of hearings includes an overflow from the courts all over Circuit C. Our psychometric reaction scale shows a reading of 67, which makes this one of the livelier responses of the week and may portend the outbreak of some minor looting and the torching of automobiles in the nearby neighborhoods. Now over to our on-site analyst Demetrios Palamenides!” The screens shifted from the blond, Californian traits of the announcer in the streets to the darker, more elegant face of a man clad in a designer suit.

     “Kent, we see this as a very controversial verdict. Before we cut away to commercials, I can tell you that our viewer audience rates confidence in the judge at only 22.7%, lowest of the past three weeks. And now a word from Muellerwurst, the fine old-world sausage founded in 2075.” Dancers in lederhosen filled the screens, weaving their way through the happy chaos of Oktoberfest, while in a little corner window, the producer counted down to cue in the magistrate.

     Judge Brock whispered “Shit!” away from the microphone and then turned back to his most dignified courtroom manner. “As I was saying, the death penalty is mandatory IN PRINCIPLE in these cases, but I am willing to indulge the public abhorrence for further violence and commute the prisoner’s sentence to life if any authorized body will claim him for a prisoner. Is any authorized agent in the audience willing to make a clemency bid?” There was suspense on the view screens and the digital display of Judge Brock’s approval rating shot up 10% on the courtroom master console. The public loved this moment almost as much as the crowds in the Coliseum must have loved waiting to see what the emperor’s thumb would do. But none of the incoming data sources lit up. The bailiff, who was off camera and off audio, sneered in Klein’s face and said, “Nobody wants to take a chance on a con with your rap sheet!” Watching the approval points erode from his digital display, Judge Brock suddenly added, “Since we are too close to dinnertime to evaluate all the offers coming into our studios, I have to say tune in tomorrow to find out the results of this sentencing, followed by the fantastic details of the LoBello rape case. This is John Gabriel Brock saying that’s all for this issue of Criminal Court Drama!”

     Klein slouched against the wall of his cell. He would not turn on the view screens, and he was tired of reading. He set his antique first edition of As I Lay Dying on the table next to the bunk. He had stolen it from a merchant in Colonial Williamsburg several years ago and never had a chance to really get into it before he was incarcerated. Rossellini the trustee rolled up the prison library cart outside the bars. “That’s pretty depressing crap to be reading in your cell,” he remarked. “How about this to cheer you up? Two Tibetan girls and an orangutan?” He held up one of the generic black holodisks that were loaded with prison porno.

     “Unlike you, I don’t fancy sex with animals.”

     “Huh, you’ll be lucky to get an animal where you are going” pouted Rossellini. “You’ll be happy to get an orangutan. Or even a mangy monkey!”

     “What do you mean where I’m going?” Klein knew that the trustees were often privy to all sorts of news that the cons could not normally get.

     “I mean you have been claimed!”

     “No shit! Where?” Klein’s mind raced. Maybe one of the platforms in the Arctic or Antarctic. He could face that. They said Kerguelen Island wasn’t so bad if you had warm clothes. Even the moon. That would take some adjustment, but he could take the moon. Just no asteroid duty. An endless spinning of stars in the black void would get to him in a matter of weeks. Anything but asteroid duty.

     “Domremy”

     “What?”

     “I said Domremy. You are about to become a proud citizen of the colony of Domremy.”

     “Where the hell is that?”

     Rossellini started to chuckle. “Wellll, they say you tie your ass to an ion accelerator, take a deep breath, fly out to Way, Way the Hell Out There, then turn left and go as far as you can till you run out of fuel!”

     “Funny man. I’m going to recommend you for a merit badge in geography.”

     “No kidding Klein,” said the trustee, turning serious for a minute, “You have any final desires, you better try to hook up now. They gonna ice you down for a good many months to send you out to Domremy. I know because I seen the requisitions for the suit. You’re facing one hell of a long nap, man.”

      “Nuts,” said Klein, looking at the floor. “In that case, give me the damn holodisk.”

     It was worse than Rossellini had predicted. The next day they put him on the Jet-Cat for the trip across to Alexandria. Klein had hoped they would launch him up from the platforms from Woomera so that he could experience the exhilaration of lifting off from Earth. But it was not to be. They were treating him strictly as cargo. He would be iced down on Earth and launched in a container with a hundred other stiffs from the big mass driver that Olivetti had just built in the desert down near Mogadishu, almost exactly on the Equator for minimum orbital thrust. He would have liked to look out on the Mediterranean whisking by at 80 knots, but he was to be locked in a windowless biologicals hold with an armed robotic guard and case after case of the latest Ebola mutation serum. He shuffled down the gangplank at Alexandria, right onto a bus for Port Said. There, in a ratty little lab, they handed him over to a pair of sadistic technicians who didn’t give him enough tranquilizer to put him to sleep. They laughed and laughed as his panic grew. Few people who have not been iced can imagine the feelings that go through you as your body systems shut down one by one and paralysis creeps up from your toes to your head in an almost discernible line until it reaches the face. The mouth shuts down first, as you gag on your last attempts to articulate a word, any word, before you can speak no longer, then your nose, as you frantically dilate, gulping for a last breath of air, then, last of all, the organs of sight, slowly numbing and dying while you strain until it feels like your eyeballs are going to pop out of your head as you grasp at the last few twinkles of light.

     He became vaguely conscious of still being alive when he was somewhere out in space, cramped onto a shelf in a transport compartment, still in his clammy shipping suit. After a while he began to panic again, as it seemed that he would soon exhaust whatever air was slowly pumped into the suit, asphyxiating before he could move his arms and legs. Shouting did no good, but just as he thought he would go mad, a crew member came into the room, turned on the light, and nonchalantly went down the shelf unzipping suits, quickly passing on from Klein without comment to finish the row. The man had already opened the hatch to head for other chores when Klein was able go croak out, “Is this, is this Domremy?”

     “Where?” said the puzzled mate. “I got no idea where you carcasses are going, but this is the spaceport at Tau Ceti. You’ll be reprocessed and sent out again from here.”

Klein felt a wave of nausea sweep over him as he realized he would have to go through the icing process all over again, maybe more than once, before he got to wherever Domremy was. He must have fainted after that.

               To all our readers around the world, thank you for staying with us for this journey!  Our novel Life Sentence is now available on Amazon Kindle for purchase!  We appreciate all those who have followed us so far in realizing the journey of Klein and Entara, and hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it! Continue to follow us as we create the sequels in the Forlani Saga, and stay tuned for our new webpage!

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