sf, page 33 of 33

Zathura is, essentially, a space version of Jumanji. Both films are about a magical game whose every turn throws its players into a series of fantastical events or challenges based around a certain theme. (With Jumanji it was jungles. Both films are adaptations of books by US childrens’ author Chris Van Allsburg.) In Zathura, once young Danny has wound up the clockwork game and pressed the battered “GO” button, their father’s house is transported into space and subjected to, amongst other things, a robot rampage, attack by Zorgons, and a visit from a passing astronaut.

It’s plenty of fun. I liked the banter between bickering brothers Danny and Walter (“That’s your robot?” “At least I’ve got a robot”), and the whole thing came close to conjuring that special excitement you feel at a certain age when you see films and totally get lost in some zany little world of pure adventure. (Which happened for me with The Goonies in 1985.)

But it doesn’t really have much substance. Once the game gets going, for a while it just feels like a bunch of disconnected episodes. It only starts to develop a more emotionally meaningful strand with the appearance of the astronaut, whose identity eventually provides a somewhat mind-boggling twist. Also, despite being set in space, the film has a more closed-in feel than Jumanji, because although you get the occasional awe-inspiring shot of an enormous planet or sun, the action is basically limited to the house. There’s quite a funny suspense moment when the older brother, Walter, gets a wish, just after arguing with his brother for the n-th time, but aside from that, once its hour and a half is over — and unless you’re a kid — Zathura doesn’t really linger, aside from a distinct feeling of having just had some fun.

The narrator of William Gibson’s story “The Gernsback Continuum” is a photographer who, commissioned to snap examples of the sort of futuristic architecture America produced in the thirties and forties, finds himself slipping into a reality where that future actually happened, as he sees an enormous propeller-driven, boomerang-shaped aircraft gliding impossibly against a cityscape of “zeppelin docks and mad neon spires” (something similar to the one brought to life in 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, perhaps).

It’s fitting Gibson should touch on that thirties/forties dream, because it was the only even vaguely optimistic future the 20th Century produced — till Gibson’s came along in the eighties, that is. By that time we’d long since ceased to believe in the sort of technological utopia promised by those hover-cars and jetpacks of the early SF pulps, but Gibson’s future had the advantage of not being limited by the possibilities of the real world. His idea, cyberspace (which he also referred to as the Matrix), was another reality altogether, a world we could jack ourselves directly into, a landscape of computer data turned into geometric shapes in “Bright primaries, impossibly bright in that transparent void”. A world curiously reminiscent of Disney’s wonderful 1982 film Tron, in fact.

It’s now more than twenty years since Gibson’s cyberspace made its first appearance (in “Burning Chrome”, 1982), and we don’t look much closer to achieving it. Excel might be able to produce nice looking pie-charts of your expense accounts, but it comes nowhere near the “electronic consensus hallucination” of Gibson’s computer reality where we’d exist as bodiless intelligences in a world of pure data.

Gibson’s fiction still feels relevant, though. Not because cyberspace is a possible future (I’m sure jacking your brain directly into a computer is as far off today as it was when Neuromancer first came out). Cyberspace wasn’t really a re-imagining of the future, it was a re-imagining of the imagination itself. It is once-upon-a-time land updated in neon colours, with data instead of gold and computer programs instead of magic spells. It’s just as full of angels, demons, ghosts, animal helpers and monsters as the world of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.

One image that has really stuck in my head from my (very) early reading was a double-page spread in The Usborne Book of the Future. It had two views presenting two possible futures. One was all dark skies and people in gas-masks, the other was bright sunshine and people with wristwatch TVs. I remember staring at those two images for hours, hoping with all my might that the future I’d live in would be, if not the wristwatch TV one, at least not the dark skies and gas-masks one. Outside of cyberspace, Gibson’s rundown, citified future is much more reminiscent of the darker of those two alternatives, though in this he’s generally acknowledged to have borrowed from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, another powerful exploration of how the future might be, partly inspired by Philip K Dick, but more derived from Scott’s encounters with massive industrial processing plants in contemporary England.

I know this seems to be reducing Gibson’s future to the influence of two films — Blade Runner and Tron — but I love his work too much to leave it at that. His real strength lies not in prediction, but in writing about how people deal with a changing technological culture. In a potentially de-personalising world of mega-corporations (a dystopian nightmare prevalent in late seventies and early-eighties SF films like Rollerball, Alien and Blade Runner), Gibson’s characters use technology to emphasise, not erode, their individuality. He’s often at his best when writing about people whose (usually artistic) talents are only really released by technology, as in, from his story “The Winter Market”: “…you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in…” His future is a digital bohemia our iPod-equipped world is coming more and more to resemble, even if we don’t get to actually jack into it via cyberspace. (Do white earplugs count?)

I don’t want to, but I have to admit it: I hate the new series of Doctor Who. I tried not to, because that’s exactly what a betrayed fanboy would feel, and though I was a real fan of the series, I don’t like thinking of myself as a fanboy.

But I do have reasons — one all-pervading reason, in fact. There’s a quality the show has that it didn’t have before, a quality not just evident in the content and style, but in the very way it’s marketed. That quality is smugness. The new series of Doctor Who is smug.

The show’s acting (from the lead actors, anyway) is smug. It’s probably very good acting, but it doesn’t serve the drama. Rather, it seems to be trying to prove what good acting it is. The two lead actors seem so pleased with the way they can add little interpretative frills to each line, the way they can spin the dialogue to make it sound throwaway and casual and humorous (or, too often for my liking, self-righteous, which is the dominant tone of the likes of Eastenders), but the result, for me, is most definitely not a sustained narrative trying to create an overall effect (horror, or wonder, or the thrill of adventure), but merely a series of affective soundbites — emotibites, you could call them — no doubt intended to keep a jaded, emotionally sluggish audience engaged.

The show is smug in relation to its audience in other ways. It tells its audience what to feel, moment by moment. For instance, in an episode from the first series where Rose is taken out onto the top of Captain Jack’s spacecraft hovering above a blitzed-out London, she says something like: “I’m standing on a spaceship hovering above London!” The subtext of this statement of the obvious is: “Look, you stupid audience, this is a wonder moment — feel the wonder, feel it!” Not only is this treating the audience like a bunch of idiots who can’t feel anything unless it’s spelled out for them, it’s doing an injury to the deeper psychological function of the show’s drama. The great thing about any sort of drama is that it allows a viewer to interpret it in a way that’s personal to them. It’s only by doing this, by allowing the viewer to impose their own emotional concerns, that it’ll be able to have its effect — cathartic, uplifting, whatever. The difference between that and what the new series of Doctor Who is doing is the same as the difference between a laugh generated by a funny joke and a laugh that comes from someone holding up a card that says LAUGH. If you constrict a viewer’s emotional responses by telling them what to feel, you cut them off from their genuine emotional concerns and do them no benefit at all. (And I thought the above example of Rose’s spelling-out-the-wonder was bad till David Tennant came along and over-egged the wonder at almost every opportunity. He’s always saying something like, “Aren’t humans brilliant?” like that kid from The Fast Show. Who was brilliant.)

The show also has what I call the smugness of the present. This is a special sort of smugness you feel if you think the age you’re living in is so much better than every other age simply because it’s the age you live in. It’s the smugness of people who think history is over now we’ve got everything right. It’s the smugness that leads to remakes of classic movies, a smugness that says: “Of course we’ll make Psycho better this time round, because we’ll be doing it with modern technology,” or, “Of course we’ll make Dracula better this time round, we’ll be doing it with a modern sensibility,” or whatever. But here’s an example from the show. It’s the episode from the first season that had Charles Dickens in. Rose meets a Victorian-age serving maid. Almost straightaway, Rose asks something like, “Where did you go to school?” A pretty unlikely question to ask someone you’ve just met, unless you feel they might have gone to a school known to you. (Which in this is quite unlikely, as Rose is talking to a woman born a century before her, and half a country away.) The only reason she asks the question, then, is so viewers in the 21st century can feel self-satisfied at how much more enlightened they are when the serving maid answers, “I didn’t go to no school.” Oh how misguided those Victorians were! Oh how much more enlightened we are in our wonderful age of school and… school and… Oh, all those other wonderful things we have in our wonderful age! We treat our poor so much better! (We still have poor, though, so let the smugness end there.) The thing that’s wrong with this is that the whole point of science fiction taking us to other worlds is not to make us feel how much we, in our current age, have got it right, but how much we’ve got it wrong, how much further we’ve still got to go.

Another smugness that gets to me is how the show is being marketed. The Christopher Eccleston season of Doctor Who was released on DVD as “Season One”. Why? Because this new series of Doctor Who is obviously so much better than those others, it requires a whole new chronology. Those last thirty years of the show, they were B.C. This new series is A.D. We’re out of the dark ages and into the light! The messiah has come!

If only the new series was worth being smug about. It gets so much wrong. The format is too short to build up both an entirely new fantasy world and a drama set inside it, so as a result we get what I call tokenised fantasy, where you end up in situations like the end of that recent two-parter with the Beast living on a planet near a black hole, where the Doctor had to smash some vases or whatever in order to defeat it. Smash vases? It’s meaningless. It was simply a way of resolving the drama by inserting a “this story ends here” token. Tokenised fantasy. The Doctor and Rose’s are they/aren’t they relationship (modelled on a far more believable sexual tension between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files) just doesn’t work because we know it won’t ever happen, so it comes across as audience manipulation on one level and confusion as to what the characters’ real feelings are on another. The show’s style is comedic. This isn’t to say the old show didn’t have its comic moments, but when they worked it was because it was the characters who were being funny, while the world they were in remained serious, meaning the darkness they were facing within that world remained potent. (I of course exclude the Sylvester McCoy, or “pantomime”, era from this statement.) The new series can’t take itself seriously, almost like it’s embarrassed to be dealing with the vivid emanations of its writers’ imaginations. You can joke about fantasy, but if you don’t at the same time allow yourself to value what the fantasy’s about, to take the underlying drama seriously, you’ll gain nothing from it. It’s like all those awful stories that end with it “just being a dream”. If it’s “just” a dream, you don’t have to take it seriously, and all that darkness within you, well, you don’t have to take that seriously, either, you don’t have to face it, you can just let it boil away and devour you from the inside, nice and slowly. The new series of Doctor Who wants to come across as non-threatening; as a result it comes across as fluff.

I know the old series of Doctor Who wasn’t perfect. It’s almost a rule that even the best stories were flawed by at least one really awful moment (the giant clams in Genesis of the Daleks, the fluffy rat in The Talons of Weng Chiang), but this was because of their tight budget. Knowing they weren’t able to produce something to rival Hollywood’s Most Expensive, they were forced to make sure they got the tone right. They quite literally couldn’t afford to be smug.

I could go on and on, but I’m sure I’ve embarrassed myself enough for the moment, betrayed fanboy that I am. I’ll go away now and mumble to myself in the corner.

But — alright one more thing — the music. The music. The old Doctor Who theme tune was an invitation to another world. It was weird, frightening, mysterious. It was numinous. The new music is an invitation to curl up with a cushion. It’s multi-layered, beautifully produced, ever so correct. It’s technologically smug. And sterile.

Alright, I really will shut up now.