Thinking of the past or future causes us to sway backward or forward. “University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.”
Spike Lee is set to direct a biopic on Ron Mallett, the African American UConn physics professor, who in his spare time conducted basement experiments hoping to eventually develop a time machine. Mallett, by the way, is completely aware his interest seems crazy to an outsider. I had tears in my eyes when he appeared on This American Life last year. Mallett’s motivation was to see his father again, (who died when he was ten — around the time he was getting into sci-fi comic books.) His autobiography is Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.
The Weirdest Sci-Fi Kids Movies
Pretty much the only bad thing I can say about Wall-E is that I’m not 10 years old so I can’t enjoy it as much as I would were that the case. It even asks the question I find most fascinating in SF: how much of the natural world is an innate human need?
But the film is just another example of great science fiction aimed at young people. Generally kids have an appetite for the non-real and are willing to suspend belief rather than leave a theater arguing whether something is fantasy, regular sci-fi, hard sci-fi, or not genre at all. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if City of Ember is just as great. The Jeanne Duprau young adult novel was adapted for the screen by the very talented Caroline Thompson (who wrote Edward Scissorhands.)
Here some other great children’s sci-fi movies (and if this list seems 80s-centric, that is likely because of my age):
Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang, 1978
It is the darkest children’s story I can think of, outside of Daniel Handler and the Brothers Grimm, and this is its darkest adaptation. Jacob is sent to the “child prison” Slimer’s Island for insulting a candy store clerk. He says “Thank you very much, thank you very much!” The shopkeeeper thinks he’s insincere, but really Jacob has a bizarre stutter where he repeats himself. So for the crime of insincerity, Jacob is sentenced to “Two Years, Two months, two weeks, two minutes and two seconds”
Hooded Fang, a former wrestler, is the prison warden, and with a job like that is it redundant to say he hates kids? Hooded Flang’s two flunkies are Mr.Fish, a fish/human hybrid and Ms. Fowl, a bird-lady — all metallic makeup and theater whisper overacting. But never fear, child superheros Intrepid Shapiro and Fearless O’Toole are on the case.
I spent sometime in 2003 hunting the film down on VHS. Thankfully it’s now all on YouTube. Start from the beginning.
The Peanut Butter Solution, 1985
This is sci-fi mad science at its finest. Michael is spooked by something he finds exploring a haunted house. Soon afterward his hair falls out due to a condition the doctor calls, “Hairrem Scarrem.” No ten year old can wear a wig for long, so relief comes in the form of a ghost offering him peanut butter to rub on his head. Michael mistakenly uses too much and soon the hair growth is out of control. (A lot of you right now are laughing in anticipation of me mentioning that one mildly raunchy scene. Well, I’m not going to talk about it. This is a family website okay? Oh…alright.) Later, Michael’s art teacher gets the wacky idea to use his hair to build paint brushes. Soon they realize using these brushes allows an artist to instantly paint whatever he or she imagines.
The Peanut Butter Solution is the best known in a series of supernatural children’s movies, “Tales for All.”
Konrad, 1985
The most obscure film on the list. I’m tempted to purchase one of the VHS cassettes on Amazon as there is so little information out there on this one. This film is about a boy robot that arrives at their door totally naked inside a metal vat. From the All Movie Guide:
Directed by Nell Cox, Konrad centers around a strange, technology dominated method of placing children in appropriate foster homes. When a computer error sends Konrad (Huckleberry Fox), a seemingly ideal child, to an eccentric woman whose many quirks qualify her as a definite reject by the mysterious “birth factory’s” standards, no one is prepared for the resulting chaos. The film also features Ned Beatty, Polly Holliday, and Max Wright.
The Amazon reviews are all enthusiastic and not in the somewhat apologetic nostalgic way you typically find with someone remarking on a film once loved in childhood.
Small Wonder, 1985 and Out of This World, 1987 (TV)
Two is a trend! OK, this is TV and I already posted about it, but in cased you missed it, here are my two favorite TV shows from childhood.
The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, 1964
This innocuous seeming Disney film starring gay icon and “Scrabbled Egghead” Tommy Kirk (and Annette Funichello) is actually a subversive argument against the covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, MKULTRA. After investigating hypnosis, Merlin discovers the secret to mind reading. The resulting internal dialogue he intercepts is just barely as scandalous as what Mel Gibson hears in What Women Want. In my favorite scene he tells everyone in the college library to “SHUT UP!”
The Flight of the Navigator, 1986
A film about aliens and time travel with one of the coolest looking spacecrafts I’ve ever seen. David is abducted by an alien ship. Because of time dilation he thinks he’s only been gone a few hours, but he actually returns to earth eight years later. Wikipedia has a long plot summary. This is a science fiction classic that’s yet to get its due.
Others I missed:
A lot of great science fiction children’s movies came out of the 80s like The Explorers, Baby, and The Electric Grandmother, (unfortunately I don’t remember these ones very well.) There’s ET of course, and Pinocchio probably counts as sci-fi too. I remember The Boy Who Could Fly, but not too fondly. I also remember being a kid and thinking Honey, I Shrunk the Kids seemed pretty dumb. And don’t forget, two of the best fantasy films of all time — Neverending Story and Return to Oz — also came out of that era. Earlier Fred MacMurray made a career out of weird kids sci-fi, with Flubber and the Absent Minded Professor.
Update: Somehow when I wrote this I blanked out about one of my childhood favorites The Brave Little Toaster, written by the same person responsible for most of my favorite books 20 years later: Thomas M Disch. (Although, I guess it just bridges the fantasy/sci-fi line.)
Science Fiction: Women Do It Better
In a cafe in New Orleans a couple years ago, I overheard a couple in conversation. The girl was explaining the book she planned to write. For about thirty minutes I listened to this extraordinary idea for a narrative, a Jekyll and Hyde-inspired story dealing with female body insecurities that I’m not going to further explain because I really hope she’s still working on it, if not near publication.
“So that’s almost like science fiction,” her boyfriend said. “Not really,” she replied
No, it’s not just “like” it, her idea is science fiction. But for some reason the classification is avoided when the work is written by a woman. It’s speculative fiction, fantasy, or quirky McSweeny’s-style stories, but if a woman wrote it, it’s certainly not sci-fi.
Just look at the brilliant book Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall. I haven’t read anything better in years. The science fiction community has all but ignored it, giving only passing mention of its James Tiptree Jr award win.
This may seem like a superficial concern. Why should it matter whether something is part of a genre or not? But “science fiction” is known as the literature of ideas, intellectual rigor, and philosophic arguments. Science fiction indicates an imaginative literature: analytic, scientific — a creative work of scholarship rather than banal solipsism.
Even if a female author is labeled science fiction, another distinction is made: that she isn’t “hard science fiction.” The “hard science fiction” bar is raised when women want to write or film science fiction. Women tend to write a lot about biology, and more women study biology than other sciences. As Peggy at Biology and Science Fiction points out, “there aren’t that many gadgets that have come out of the biological sciences, at least as compared to the physical sciences” — and gadgety is representative of “hard science fiction.”
There was a panel about this at the WISCON, the women in science fiction con:
JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term is problematic is it’s used as a norm for “real science fiction” and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there’s other terms they call it when they don’t want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it’s soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists… I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reivews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.
Margaret: Just like what has been called “art”. At various times pottery, woven stuff, wasn’t art, because it was women and people of color who were doing that. And very similar things done with gender and hard sf. As you’ve suggested, when men were doing very similar things with social issues, that was still “hard”.
There’s pressure on a woman to write “hard science fiction,” even if she doesn’t really want to — just to prove that she can.
People gave Sleater Kinney a lot of guff because they didn’t have a bass player; but no one ever said that meant they weren’t a rock band! Classification is always arbitrary. Had Joanna Russ befriended Donald Bartheleme in the 70s, instead of editors of Amazing, her work would be called metafiction, (or whatever.)
Going back to the idea that every subject can be science fiction, those of the gender that breed and bleed, have plenty of interesting science fiction concepts to bring to the table.
And they are definitely consuming science fiction. At least as many young girls have read the Handmaid’s Tale as young boys have read Ender’s Game — perhaps an equal number of boys and girls have read Ender’s Game. Females tend to read more fiction, after all.
Another two reasons I just don’t buy the idea that men are inherently more interested in science fiction than women: Small Wonder and Out of this World, about a girl-robot and time-shifter whose dad is an alien, respectively. Those two shows (and Punky Brewster about an orphan who was obsessed with astronauts) were my favorites and yours if happened to be a girl growing up in the 80s.
What makes these two television shows unique from other widely enjoyed tv sci-fi like Lost in Space or even BSG today, is both of the lead characters were girls. It might be the first time science fiction was made just for a mass young female audience. Silly as it seems now, the shows were no better or worse than any other 80s sitcoms.
Children watching these programs were engaged with philosophy of science fiction: what would it be like to stop time just by touching your fingertips together? (I’m sure I’m not the only one who practiced this in my bedroom when no one was looking.) Or if your friend is made of metal and wires, do you treat her just like everyone else?
Women love science fiction! We do! Probably more than you dudes! Nearly every art school girl has Ursula Le Guin’s books on her shelf. Women actually write most of the fanfic. Even at the basest, lowest low culture it is in there: a number of romantic comedies, (many starring Mel Gibson for some reason,) use science fiction furniture. And I learned, during a period of unemployment, that nearly every soap opera has a supernatural gimmick — clones, witches, even aliens. Instead of mocking it, we should embrace it, as the feminine counterpart to the shlocky science fiction made by the likes of The Rock and Sylvester Stallone in the 90s.
Some work by women that should be welcomed into the Science Fiction cannon: the writers Anna Kavan, Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Katharine Burdekin. In film: Lynne Littman, Kay Linaker, Caroline Thompson, and so many others. The music of Anne Clark. Art by Sara Sze and Patricia Piccinini. These are all just off the top of my head. I should probably make another post on this.
And let me praise Daughters of the North yet again. It’s magnificent. The Handmaid’s Tale comparisons were inevitable, but Atwood’s dystopia, while bleak and repressive, isn’t nearly as horrific as Hall’s vision. Hers is a world of hunger, suffering, torture, shit. It’s even better than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Sarah Hall is a genius.
Images of sculptures by Sarah Sze
Previously:
- Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
- Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films
Related links:
- Bat Segundo interviews Sarah Hall
- When Harry Met Sexism, Bidisha, The Guardian
- Science Fiction Fandom Has No Sex, This Recording
- What Chicks Don’t Like About Science Fiction, io9
- Gender and Fan Studies, CCC
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