Miron Liu: "To Caroline Yoachim: Subtlety of SF"

Subtlety of SF

by Miron Liu

As a genre, speculative fiction has a special talent of subtlety when it comes to breaking down and reconstructing paradigms. SF consistently provides literary environments that are ill-suited for totting along preconceived expectations. The unfamiliarity of the settings and plots are just too difficult to navigate with close-minded inflexibility towards new ideas. This is the perfect genre for the facade of entertainment to lower the defensive mechanisms of the naturally egocentric and opinion-biased humans just enough for an underlying idea to casually stroll into their minds unopposed. Admittedly, I am one of these humans who happens to be very very susceptible to this sort of literary finagling. In the words of Dominick Cobb (played by Leo DiCaprio) from Inception:

In a world of confirmation bias and political polarization, it’s a huge disadvantage for an idea to be presented, butt-naked. However, with the confluence of speculative fiction and pop-culture, ideas can hide themselves among an overabundance of eye-candy.

 For example, the entire plot of Iron Man can arguably be simplified down to one big pacifist agenda for demilitarization disguised under the unrevealing entertainment of Tony Stark’s tendency to, rather, pass-a-fist through someone instead. Additionally, The Matrix may just be one big pro-libertarian work of propaganda, or, with its emphasis on military action, maybe even a pro -“Neo”- libertarianism propaganda (I’ll see myself out). Furthermore, even behind the space-wizards and exceptionally horrible aim in the plot of one of the most iconic works of science fiction, Star Wars, lies an unremarkable agenda against fascism. After all, Star Wars was modeled after the events of WWII, and what better way to denounce fascism than to beat up space-Nazis with laser swords?

The examples of political ideas embedded in speculative fiction are practically endless, and they have evaded confirmation bias quite well. After all, no one walks into a Star Wars movie making a conscious effort to think about fascism. Unfortunately, confirmation bias plagues modern media and often stalls solutions to the many critical issues of today. Pressing issues like climate change, gun control, and immigrant deportation are just some of the few examples that have been victimized by political gridlock. Much like the opposite of pro is con, the opposite of progress is congress due to political polarization. Technology has further exacerbated the issue of confirmation bias with Google’s user diagnostics contributing to certain articles being pushed into users’ feed that are reflective of the users’ political agenda in order to generate ad revenue once the user clicks on the article because, well, confirmation bias.

The pressing political issues are more than deserving of some SF intervention. Creating plot for an SF story should be relatively easy. Let’s start with the agenda that we are trying to push.

(Disclaimer, the political agenda of this SF plot may or may not have been influenced by the confirmation bias of its writer.)

Agenda that we want to push

Climate Change: Bad

Gun Control: Good

Immigrant Deportation: Bad

Now that we’ve established the agenda, the next step is the setting. Since creating a secondary world provides a further precaution against viewers bringing along the biases associated with their own world, lets make the setting an alien planet. The name of this planet needs to be multi-syllabic and sound relatively alien. How about “Hoomanbe.” The inhabitants of said planet will, by suffix rules, be called “Hoomanbeians.” Ok, now that we’ve created the agenda and setting, we need a villain to drive the plot and represent the antithesis of our agenda. People tend to like villains with long names, so let’s name this villain, say, Pronraantiepa. For pronunciation sake, it’s pronounced Pro-nra-anti-epa. Now that we have a villain, all we need now is a hero to save the world by adhering to our agenda. Let’s go with someone with flashy powers, say, a superhero with heat-vision named “Burny.” Let’s give this hero a sidekick with a little a less flashy name and powers. How about a sidekick named “Sandas” with the ability to control sand? Now that we have our duo, Burny and Sandas, all we need is a plot.

Plot:

The evil villain of the Hoomanbian galaxy, Pronraantiepa has chosen to enslave the galaxy’s capital planet, Humanbe itself. Pronraantiepa feeds off of the energy of the planets pollution and climate change, but the Hoomanbians are incapacitated with domestic issues like the distinction between a blaster and a phaser. The Leftt organization of Humanbe claims that phasers should be banned for their multi-shot capabilities while the Wright organization of Humanbe claims that both blaster and phaser are both equally deadly.

Here we provide the audience with some irony. The Humanbeians are too concerned with disputing the dangers of their weapons that they fail to realize the biggest danger, Pronraantiepa.

The Humanbeians also are too busy bickering among themselves of which race of Hoomanbeian belong on which piece of dirt that they fail to realize that they are, at the end of the day, all Hoomanbeians, so it doesn’t matter.

Here is more irony. The Humanbeians are too concerned with “alien” (foreign) threats that they ignore the real alien threat.

Fortunately for Humanbeians, Burny and Sandas come to the rescue. They get the Humanbeians to band together, set aside their differences, and point both their phasers and blasters at Pronraantiepa. With the world saved, the Humanbeians phase out their phasers after seeing the destruction that it can unleash, they dissolve the borders of their continents as they recognize that they are all Humanbeians, and they promise to never pollute the air with greenhouse gasses to stave off creatures like Pronraantiepa. With the world saved, Burny and Sandas return to their vigilante lives, fighting crimes across the galaxy.

Having the good guys win makes the agenda seem more appealing to the general audience. The audience is always susceptible to happy endings. So there we have it, we have now very subtly conveyed our agenda using the mechanisms of SF!