Entry #18, Day 27

From the new one.

Jeannette’s returned. She staggered out of the forest this afternoon, her clothes all torn. She’d suffered some lacerations from foliage, apparently, and was bleeding. After we fixed her up she told me about where she’d been. She said she went out alone into the jungle, and about a kilometer deep she found a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a pattern of concentric circles cut into the grass, and in the center of the circles was a large stone. She said it was like a lectern, so she stood at it, and when she did the circles in the grass began to glow yellow. Then they began contracting, closing in on her and she realised that it wasn’t just the dirt beneath the grass that was glowing, it was the slugs that had emerged from the ground. They were bioluminescing this radioactive yellow, and surrounding her, coming closer. She panicked and ran, stepping over some and crushing others, running without looking back towards the treeline, to safety, only before she could leave the clearing she felt a sudden impact all over her body, and fell to the ground. When she woke up, the glowing slugs had completely covered the stone lectern, their light uniformly pulsing. She felt that they weren’t dangerous, and even approached for a better look. When she tried to leave the area, to tell the rest of us, she couldn’t. She said there was a wall, the same thing that knocked her out. Some kind of invisible wall surrounding the perimeter of the clearing. It felt smooth and cold to the touch, and give a soft vibratory ringing sound when she put her ear up close. But there was no visual evidence of it existing at all. She rammed her shoulder up against it to no effect. She threw rocks but they went straight through, disappearing into the forest behind. She was stuck. As an experiment, she used a stick to pick up one of the glowing slugs off of the stone to see if it would pass through the wall, which it did. She was there for hours, she said, and over the time she noticed the mass of slugs covering the stone gradually shrinking, as if the stone itself was shrinking. And at one point, when it was about 20% its original size, she said she saw someone walk out from within the jungle and directly up to her. A man in a green suit. Green tie. He walked straight up to her and stood on the other side of the invisible wall, facing her.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, frightened. He reached out his arm toward her forehead, right through the invisible wall as if there was nothing there. Before he could touch her she stepped back, stumbled and tripped. She was lying on her back, looking up and he stood over her, blocking the sun behind him, silhouetted. He knelt down, and gently put his hand over her face, covering her eyes.

That’s the last she remembers. She said when he touched her she must have blacked out. She’s vomiting now, but besides that seems okay.

A short review of Elysium, the nature of Sci-Fi

I just saw Elysium, the new one by Neil Blomkamp of District 9 fame. It was pretty much what you'd expect for the big budget successor to D9. The same blending of CG robotics with live action footage, awesome visual design, and a thinly veiled commentary on how unfair the world is. Where District 9 was about racism, Elysium is about both immigration and the rich 1%, who are universally depicted as evil. Seriously, William Fitchner and Jodie Foster are bad, the President turns out to not be reasonable, the civilians are prejudiced against Earthlings. Even Matt Damon's supervisor, a non-Elysium citizen, was a bad guy with no regard for human life. In fact everyone on earth seemed to be either an evil minion of the Elysium regime or a criminal, and this was arguably supposed to reflect how the poor conditions of Earth drive people to monstrous extremes. The only really good people seemed to be the love interest and her sick daughter, and of course, the hero at the end after undergoing his personal transformation. The juxtaposition between shitty Earth and fantastic Elysium was so stark it was silly. The conditions on Earth were so totally comically bad, and Elysium was so ridiculously utopic, both environments appeared more or less unsustainable. There seemed to be no sign of government on Earth except for police robots controlled by Elysium. Nothing was clean, the only jobs I saw were in some robot-disposal factory and a hospital. Everybody else seemed to live in squalor. There was apparently money on Earth, but it was unclear whether there was money on Elysium. The only jobs up there seemed to be governmental. Could this have been suggesting that a strong public sector leads to a utopia while a sort of anarcho-capitalism leads to slums and crime? Who knows.

A guy once told me that all science fiction invariably involves some metaphorical subtext about society. I think that's bull. Or, I've misunderstood the entire science-fiction genre. In fact, I don't even actually think of science-fiction as a genre, to me it's a setting. Western is also a setting but there are particular plot tropes that characterise westerns. You can have a western set in the modern day, or in Japan - remember that Tarantino described Inglorious Basterds as a western. However you cannot take away the fictional science of a sci-fi film and have it still be sci-fi. If you take away the robots and futuristic setting of Elysium, it would be an action/drama. My point is that you can still tell a story about society without using science fiction, which is only necessary to mask the social commentary in metaphors so that the superficial story is free to be an action film (or comedy, or romance, or whatever). Science fiction is a tool to change one genre into another. Similarly, I reject that guy's statement also because I don't believe that a story with science fiction elements necessarily has metaphors. Consider Transformers. Here I'll also obviously point to my own work as an example, in that I write stories to be fun tales, ripping yarns, not to make a point. Sometimes points about society arise organically, sure, but they're never the driving force of my stories. I leave that to people who care more about issues than I do.

So if the definition of science-fiction is, "using fictional science to create metaphors for real world issues" then I don't write sci-fi, I write horror or action or something else, and a lot of movies and books in the sci-fi shelf don't belong there either. If the definition is, "containing scientific elements which aren't real," then I reject that as a genre, as it does not say anything about what happens in the story. Action movies are characterised by action. Comedies have jokes. Romances have love. Horrors are scary. Sci-fis have science fiction, yes, but that's not a plot or even an event, merely an enabler for events.

Elysium was a pretty good movie. There were a couple of laughs. My main disappointment was the childhood bits near the beginning, and the drilling in how unfair life was, how everyone deserves a shot at the good life even when it's literally very out of reach.

I give it five out of seven.