Saving Tomorrow Land

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I just saw the movie Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney. Wow. I’m glad I saw it on the big screen.

I beheld an image:

A middle-aged man dressed like my dad, in a 1950’s-style plaid shirt and wide slacks, carrying in his arms an injured girl, a girl of innocence and hope, flying high above the ground… flying with a jet pack.

I will never forget.

Who would have guessed, back in the days of wooden guitars and vacuum tubes, that one day you could carry a moon rocket’s worth of onboard computer in your hand—and stuff it in your jeans. But gadgets are easy: humans are complex.

Who would have guessed, while today everybody’s organic Central Processing Unit (CPU) is seemingly pre-programmed to go into shut-down mode during adulthood, that anyone could still dream of a good exciting world—one with jet packs. I know for sure a man can hold on to his youth’s optimism and ideals, timeless, uncoupled from everybody’s conformist CPU timeline: I am that man.

It was over a decade ago when, one evening, my older brother was addressing his wife, another brother and me. He said that back during elementary school I had the courage to get some other kids to play “space,” not sports. And let me add I had us all playing on the same side, no arguing over who was shot. “That was courage,” said my brother. Yes it was, for we all believed in a narrow conformity back in those days. Sports only. No diversity.

We knew what was “normal” and right. Everybody, children and grownups alike, conformed and nobody, let alone government or school boards, had much to say against the bullying of those who were different or smaller or nerdy. “Kids will be kids” is what grownups would say. Not me. Never. When I was big enough to bully smaller kids—while being abused at home—I refused to escape into bullying others. It’s as if, by respecting other children, I have respected my own childhood, across space and time. Surely I’m a product of my social programming, and yet, at the same time, I’ve wiggled free of much of it. There’s a T-shirt out of Japan quoting a schoolgirl saying, “I like what I like, now get off my back!” To this, I’m sure my U.S. cousins would happily say, “You go girl!”

Is a better Tomorrow Land worth pursuing? Dare we believe? Or do we, figuratively or literally, tell ourselves and our child, both the one inside us and the vulnerable real kid standing there looking up to us, “Quit messing with that dam jet pack! It’ll never fly!” I remember.

And I remember we got the dove of peace to fly.  During the cold war most of us hid our heads in the sand, a few of us built bomb shelters to hide in, but some of us believed, and shouldered the “hopeless” burden of walking towards peace… and the radioactive angel of death passed us by.

During my boyhood a grim spy, Matt Helm, admitted to a young lady who hated everything he stood for, “If ever this world is to be saved, it will be by someone too young to know it can’t be done.” I’m still smiling over that one.

Here’s my line: “Act personally, and look around communally.” There is one thing I know for sure: We can inspire each other, as we all advance towards Tomorrow Land.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

August

2015

Footnotes: 
~I wish Tomorrowland were not “just another good movie.” (Three stars out of five) Unfortunately, the professional movie critics and I don’t exactly know what specifically could be done to make the show worth four stars. “Improving this flic” might be a good exercise for film students.

~Speaking of bullying, I just found a 2014 book by Carpenter and D'Antona called Bullying Solutions full of true stories, where, according to the back cover, "the readers" will gain practical user-friendly advice. Unfortunately, "readers" will mean parents, because judging by the more than 40 case studies, teachers are still mostly useless. …I personally knew a teenage girl who, not-so-recently now, was utterly, ferociously savage during girls field hockey—and no teacher ever dared to wonder if she was being sexually abused and bullied at home. (In fact, once she even had a gun held on her) 

I am reminded of a feature-length movie documentary where the teacher confronts a still-bullied student and asks why he didn't tell any teachers, only to have him reply that nothing happened last time when he told her. She hadn't done her job—and didn't know it. Furthermore, not one of the teachers at the school could lead by example through sharing with at least the faculty, if not the students, about having been bullied as a student. To me a lily-white innocent faculty is statistically unlikely.

Plain Sf and Media Sci-Fi

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For this re-run I am putting the Afterword first, because my local convention has risen like a Phoenix and broadened its wings to include writers of romance, mystery and more; and I don't want your eyes to glaze over before you read down to that fact.

The term "media" includes movies, TV and comic books: Everything except the printed page. Meaning: If you have seen every single Star Trek episode, you still know diddly squat (nothing) about science fiction. The printed page is not moving pictures, not chewing gum for the eyes.  (as Harlan Ellison said of TV)


Afterword

Update: A man I regard as an "insider" later told me that people "in the know" during the last convention were not buying the discounted tickets for next year, because they were afraid they would lose their money, that there would be no next year. They were right. Partly because media guests are too expensive, partly because... (My contact gave me a laundry list of what was wrong)

Happily, those of us with library cards, we real nerds, who don't even wear costumes, had our own 2011 convention for readers, writers and publishers... a con with librarians on the panels. The con name is a pun on the old Philip Wylie novel, (made into a movie) When Words Collide. It was a success, and my contact expects tickets to be all sold out before the next one, in August of 2012. I've bought mine already!

Update 2015:

Speaking of media autographs, today at the convention we learned from a credible source, a writer, that the actor who played the fellow on Star Trek in the wheelchair, the guy who was cast only because he looked vaguely like Captain Pike of the Enterprise, the guy that did nothing but sit totally motionless, and beep once for yes and twice for no, recently signed an autograph for fifty dollars. We all laughed.

Down the years the convention has truly spread out to include other genres, not just sf. In fact, this weekend I attended poetry seminars (plural) and a talk, with slides, about Sherlock Holmes. And from the president of the Alberta Romance Writers Association I heard a fascinating lecture on theme…

I've just come home from the Mid-August 2015 When Words Collide, and found that someone has been on this post in the last 24 hours. Nice.

The Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Hugo awards is the Aurora awards. We have won the Aurora  for our well organized convention, and next year we will host the Canadian awarding of the Auroras. I've already bought my membership. This year the tickets sold out in early June, so don't delay.


Plain Sf and Media Sci-fi

It was Prometheus who, after bringing the gift of fire to Earth, said it would be a good servant or a bad master. It was the Federation who, to prevent such “gifts” in the future, came out with the Prime Directive. Now the longest running “f and sf” convention in Calgary, “CON-Version,” is poised to become good or bad. We have gifted ourselves, this year, with not one, not two, but five media guests from Star Trek television. Namely, the holo doctor, Neelix, Counselor Troi, Q, and a lady who had several guest spots with the Ferengi. …Quite impressive.

Judging by a few conversations I had in the "con (vention) suite" over chips, coffee and beer, the people were pleased. Nevertheless the Prime Directive, for CON-Version, is being bent.

Back in the 1980’s, after the CON had been running for a few years, I interviewed the founders. They told me that all over North America fans put on “f and sf” CONs, and that there would always be CON as part of the title. They told me that some of these were relax-a-cons. In contrast, CON-Version was intended to have substance. Namely, science and the written stuff.

From day one the CON has featured big name authors while having several programming rooms going at once. Sometimes there was enough fan interest to have one “stream” of writing related things all weekend. Sometimes a guest would do a slide presentation on ancient archeology or his paleontology trip to Mongolia. Mostly there would be panel-and-audience discussions on everything under any sun. Once an old guest writer, L. Sprague de Camp, commented “I can’t imagine fans of nurse stories (pre-TV) having a CON: What would they talk about?” And of course these lively one-hour panel topics included Star Trek and other media shows.

One year Robert Silverberg told us, “Don’t lose your innocence. Down in the States the CONs have become a media three ring circus.” At the time I thought he meant bringing in outside TV news crews to see the costumes. As years went by I came to sense how the opposite of CON-Version is not a relax-a-con: it’s a “media” con, replacing writer guests with media guests. The media being Hollywood and comic books.

I clued in when a short lived glossy magazine, Science Fiction Age, referred to bad blood or a feud or something between media (sci-fi) and the written stuff. (sf) Apparently, extremists for sci-fi claim that an sf fan would rather read a mediocre book than see an excellent TV show or movie, while extremists for sf claim that media fans would rather see a mediocre movie or show than read an excellent sf book. Maybe this feud is merely confined to an earlier decade and, furthermore, to just the New York City ward where Science Fiction Age is published. No one I’ve met ever talks like that. In fact, in the magazine Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, also published it New York, the gentle old Asimov has nothing but good to say about media. Asimov may have been a very prolific writer of nonfiction and fiction but he still found the time to enjoy Star Wars.

 I can’t see a feud-ish anger serving any purpose besides ego, except, maybe, to provide energy for arguing about steering a convention. I don't like conflict. Maybe for CON-Version, as the “con chair” wrote in his first-page message in the program, we can provide a balance of both.

The scientist in me proposes a thought experiment: If having a media-only CON is bad, then how might that be so? Harlan Ellison, who’s old Outer Limits scripts inspired the Terminator movie, once wrote an angry essay about the behavior of fans, behavior so bad that I just can’t bring myself to repeat it. Ellison wrote that he believed there must be a conspiracy of silence among writers about those awful fans. I am in no position to know, since the only CON down in the States I have ever been to, just once, was here on the Great Plains where people on both sides of the border tend to be friendly and sane. At the CON in Missoula, Montana (MisCon) they had one media guest, the roommate on the TV show Dark Angel, and two big name novelists: Samuel Delaney, whose thick book Dahlgren inspired a choreographed dance I once attended, and David Gerrold who scripted The Trouble With Tribbles.

It was at CON-Version, few years before the Montana CON, that I asked Gerrold about Ellison’s conspiracy of silence scenario. Gerrold was alone at a six-foot table waiting to sign more books; at the next table was one of the old “Pauls:” either Paul Anderson or Frederick Pohl; I’ve been getting those two writers mixed up since elementary school. 

I said “Hi.” Until that day I had never heard of Gerrold’s series of novels, the Chtorr Wars. Now I regard that series as a modern “masterpiece,” complete with recurring themes and symbols. But on that day I pointed to the word “chtorr” and asked, “How do you pronounce this?” 

For a second he looked very tired and said, “Tor.” We talked and I asked about Ellison’s views. 

“I read the same essay,” he said. He mostly disagreed with Ellison. Then he gestured to the nice old man at the next table and said, “Such behavior would happen only at CONs where they don’t know his name.”

I thought: Whoa! Who wouldn’t know his name? And then I realized: The defining factor of many media fans is: they don’t read. After a few years I’ve finally become used to that idea. And I’ve had a thought: If a CON is overbalanced towards media then you might not only have some bad fans, but from the media guests you might have some bad karma.

So far in Calgary we’ve had good karma. I remember when Gerrold sat on a panel, in a big room, on Women in Science Fiction. That was the day I first learned that a lot of males wouldn’t read a novel where the hero is a woman, or maybe not even read any novel written by a woman. Whoa! Incidentally, in Gerrold’s Chtorr War series the viewpoint hero is a male, who gets promotions in the army, but his wife is always two or three ranks higher. 

I made the room roar with laughter when I raised my hand to say, “Oh, I don’t know about that; If the hero is female and the writer is female then I might buy it… because I’m still trying to understand women!” Gerrold really grinned to say how very long term my goal was.

Writers like Gerrold and the “Pauls” attend CONs for the fun of being with like-minded people. Another sf writer, Kurt Vonnegut, once pointed out there are fewer full time writers than admirals in the U.S. navy. (I think society is has become more affluent since he said that) He has also pointed out that sf writers go to CONs to escape their cheap lonely desks for the warmth of the sf and f community. 

The writer guests are volunteers: The CON will pay for their expenses, travel and hotel, but not for their time. It is very common to see writers roped into sitting on panels, common to see them chatting in the lounge. When they autograph your books they do it for free. Meanwhile volunteers on the “concom” (convention committee) will have picked them up from the airport and taken them on trips to things like the Royal Tyrrell (dinosaur) Museum. They will go back and tell their peers how they had a good time. Fun. Warmth. A good time.

And then there are the media guests. They charge you to enter the autograph room, and charge you again for the actual autograph. The prices are not token but steep, very steep. At CON-Version this year if you paid the price of an autograph,  $25.00, for a dinner, then you could watch the stars singing for their supper, putting on a dog and pony show. Incidentally, a gourmet told me the food was mediocre.

My favorite drinking buddy for the CON, Rob, was at the dinner. Rob told me enthusiastically how for him this was the best CON he had ever been to.

For me the question around karma is: if you are a star who is here making money then are you really a “volunteer?” I feel doubtful about the whole thing. I don’t suppose the media guys see themselves as fellow nerds, so no panels, or even as fellow fans, so no lounging in the halls to chat. 

I wish the actors well. I like Hollywood; I buy entire seasons of television DVDs. But here’s the thing: For watching an episode for the second time, using the commentary voice over, I’ve given up on actors. There is a reason why these people are called, in the industry, the “talent.” I have enjoyed listening to directors, scriptwriters and even producers. I learn things. But as for the talent, it’s as if they know little of society or industry, let alone the film industry, and little of history, let alone film history. What grates on me is how more often than not I hear the actors giggling. I don’t mean sharing laughter for the sake of encouraging and sharing with the DVD audience. Rather, the commentary somehow feels forced. If they know they have little to offer then it's no wonder they giggle. 

I was once very pleasantly surprised to hear actor Peter Weller holding his own with the director as they shared the commentary for an episode of Odyssey-5. (A short-lived series I liked) And I shared this with Sheldon, a fan who sells old books at CON-Version. He then told me Weller is a university teacher. It figures. As for the rest of the talent—giggles.

At CON-Version there was a half hour “Q and A” where the five Star Trek guys sat facing a room of starry-eyed fans. A young man stood up to ask one of them, “What was your favorite episode?” For a brief moment the actor might have looked pained or tired before answering, “78. Episode #78.”

The fan persisted. “I mean, any anecdotes, practical jokes or something that stood out: Your favorite episode.”

“78.”

The fan then asked, “How about your favorite on (a different Star Trek series)?” 

So an actor at the far end leaned forward to look down the table and say to his buddy, “That was #78 too, wasn’t it?”

“Yep. 78”

It’s important to realize that, in context, “you had to be there,” not one of us scorned that young fan, nor did we scorn the actors for—get this—occasionally making farting noises. There was warmth in the room. Nor were we judgmental about an actor’s rude line that made us really roar. At the end of the show an actor stood up and planted his feet. “Don’t tweet that line, since it would not be read in context. Seriously, no tweets.”

Knowing my fellow nerds, I know that no one tweeted. I’m glad we could accept what the talent could offer; I’m sorry we were asking them for something they could not give us. Let me put it this way: In the years to come at the CON, while I am a fan of Odyssy-5, I don’t expect to ever see Professor Weller as a media guest. 

Now, like Sarah Connor at the end of T2, we are going down a dark road to an unknown future. I hope we at CON-Version keep our balance.

Sean Crawford
on the lone prairie
August 2015
and October 2010
Stardate 2015point48

Footnote: Someone has just clicked on my old essay Jetpacks and TV News archived June 2012. Oops! I guess I should have footnoted that piece when I posted. It offers another look at sf and sci-fi, as an entry into looking at the effect of print news being replaced by moving pictures, a new thing that affects our body politic. 

Free Falling in Old Small Towns

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We at Free Fall Fridays are amazed at how the same prompt will result in many different pieces. Most of us hand-write, but since I came to writing through practical journalism I bring my MacBook Air.

Today’s pieces are all from my September 2014 file, with a theme:

Old small towns

prompt- He’s a legend in his own mind.

Every town has one, or should. I mean the man with the vintage, not old, 1950’s car all set for cruising; the man with the leather jacket, blue jeans while the other old codgers were wearing slacks, and, heaven help us, brylcream in his hair. I had Jake in my hair too, as he was my brother. Thank God nobody knew he used to be called Biff. Jake often parked his car at the bar on the street side where he could easily cross over to the gas station to supposedly get cigarettes, or cross down to see if anyone was smoking in the front of the bowling ally, looking to see “if anybody is there that owes me money.” Actually, he just liked to hang out.

I didn’t mind, because I liked fresh air more than I liked that bar, the Moosehead, because the bar still seemed smoke filled to me, although the pesky government had outlawed indoor smoking. It never fails: “they” up on capital hill, never ask us real smokers what we think. My god, it’s like bicyclists being asked to plan the next superhighway. I said to Jake, “Jake, the snobs on the hill just ain’t fair.” We were standing just outside the gas station.

“Tell me about it. I think I’ll mosey over and—

“—see if anyone owes you any money.”

“Are you coming?” Jake asked.

“Oh yeah, ” I said. As we walked, me in my slacks and Jake in his jeans, I said, “If you’re so good at walking, maybe you could walk Sandra down the aisle.” It was the first time I had ever seen anybody stop in mid stride before.

“Now, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean she doesn’t have a father and you are closer to her than I am.”

Jake was a legend in his own mind, doing a church walk would do him good.

Prompt- letter to grandchild

When I grew up children could play outside, and no one wore a pack to school. I could carry my food in a bag, fold it into my pocket, and then walk home with my hands free. I walked a mile and a quarter, about six kilometers today. It took me an hour. I would part with my friend Howard at the half mile point, and then walk on alone.

I guess that’s why I can be my own company today—we didn’t need any music or tablets. Do you know what the guy who wrote Treasure Island said? A man should be able to spend three hours waiting at a little train station, with no books or electronic devices, and not be bored. You need a well-stocked mind in order to do that; it’s something for you to work on.

We used to eat all sorts of berries on the way home. Now I see berries going uneaten—what’s this world coming to? We had television, in black and white, and we could get three to five channels, depending on the weather. When you turned the set on, you had to keep the sound off so it could warm up, and only turn up the volume after the picture suddenly started. From the back you could see little glowing vacuum tubes, and the picture screen itself was part of a really huge vacuum tube. Radios had tubes too. In the kitchen our radio had no box around it, it had been broken years before, and the antenna was a wire that went along the cupboard and then up the wall.

And each house had only one TV.

Prompt- (a picture from Swerve magazine)

When I was a boy we lived in neighborhoods, walkable neighborhoods. The streets were built by the government, in traditional Roman town fashion: a grid. Whoever thought that real estate developers could do it better? For them, any plot set aside for a shack for preventative medicine, or a library or fire hall, is one less shack to bring in the shekels for them.

No one walks because, when you get down to it, the developers don’t put in any focus: there is no “there” when you get there. The kids try to use the all-night convenience store, but that is a very poor substitute for grass and a park bench, a ceremonial slab to climb up on, a promenade for people watching, tables for chess and checkers, and an old civil war statue for the gamblers to make book on where the pigeons would strike next. No drinking fountain for today’s kids, just a sterile 7-11 out for your money, in a community that lets developers take everyone’s money.

When I was a boy you put down roots. If you wanted to paint your house fuchsia, who cared? A giant chalkboard on your garage? Great, keep the kids off the street. And a park swing set: No one cared that kids might not hold on tight—they always held on, same as when they climbed trees. But trust a developer to say that climbable trees, or swing sets, cut into the real estate gravy.

In my day you didn’t need community gardens, because everybody planted gardens. The old folks had their flowers; the young families had their vegetables. In my family I was always in charge of the pumpkin patch.

Oh, and in my day the kids could trick-or-treat. A stupid sterile mall is no substitute for gnarly apple trees and giant rustling sunflowers.

Fear is the problem: rumors of poisoned apples, poisoned candy. I have to wonder why people always found the razor blades before they bit in, and it was never the choir kids who got their pictures in the papers. A guy testified on Oprah that there had been only two poisonings in America, and in both cases it was the relatives of the kids, not strangers. But people with no roots, I think, are especially prone to wild fears. It’s too bad. We need nice rooted human neighborhoods, not prissy sterile ones.

Prompt- time keeps flying

Whoosh! Wisssh! Swoosh! That’s the sound of time flying. Now, I know what you’ll say, that time can’t fly because it’s not in the air, it’s on the ground doing a crawl, a slow slither, a stagger and a roll, no, a slow caterpillar hump, a snail ooze. Yes, that’s time, an oooooze.

Nope. Time is in the air, and it flies. OK, it floats, drifts, eases along, wafts… No, it helicopters like a maple seed of our childhood—there goes summer! There goes the leaves, the snows, the puffy parachutes of dandelions. Oh, ain’t life grand?

If we don’t want a frozen tableau and frozen smiles in a rictus world, well, we have to embrace time. And it flies. And if time didn’t fly, we’d have to adjust our clocks so that it did fly. How else to be reminded of the preciousness of each long day? Can you store time? No and yes. If I store stuff I can create a time sink, a joy well, a pit of despair. Forget stuff, live now.

Sean Crawford

August

Calgary

2015 

Footnote: 

We have a Free Fall Fridays blog that some of us occasionally post on. While it is OK to fix our spelling and punctuation, it is just not done to edit for publication, neither on our blog nor here on my own site. To be authentic, a Free Fall should be posted just as it is. Otherwise, prospective visitors to our meetings might get a false sense of how unpolished free-fall writing truly is. 

Those of us who normally edit as we go, which includes me, may really benefit from free-falling.