SF in HD

Cory Doctorow has a recent article in Locus Magazine on why high definition is bad for science fiction films. Basically, the argument is: in the case of CGI special effects (SF films being the perfect genre for showcasing the next unimaginable spectacle), their quality–or at least definition–exponentially increases each year, as does the amount of money poured into such projects. While a film released five years ago might seem laughably outdated by today’s visual standards, a certain amount of longevity can be ensured by small-screen formats on which it may be harder to see the primitive blemishes of last year’s computer graphics. But with an attendant decline in the cost of bigger, high definition LCD screens, Doctorow says “Whatever longevity can be wrung from a movie by releasing it to smaller, more forgiving screens is cut short by the living-room behemoths that are being pushed on us today,” and the returns that can be anticipated by major studios for investing in $200 million SF blockbusters will be less and less. There is an inverse relationship between Moore’s law and the valuation of filmic SF spectacle.

But I think this argument might not consider the internal mechanics of SF’s reception and the increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia that we seem to be going through in popular culture, which becomes especially pronounced in the case of science fiction films. SF seems to have a different sort of half-life than other fictional modes, it ages much more quickly, in a way that I’m not sure how to talk about. Perhaps SF films draw off of a particular a mode of being in the world that is more easily forgotten, more fragile than the raw materials used in the construction of other types of (realistic) films? A mode of being with technologies that would otherwise be forgotten, but can only be recovered in any sense through some sort of patronizing nostalgia?

objects-on-demand

Cory Doctorow’s introduction to his recent SF short short story “Printcrime” explains that it stems out of a talk attended by a friend at which a British recording industry exec talked of the “industry’s great and hysterical spasm.” It’s assumed by this that he means the gradual chipping away of DRM by consumer dissatisfaction and lagging sales, and the inevitable formation of a new form of intellectual property law/media copyright. The recording exec claimed that this “great and hysterical spasm” of the recording industry would become the template for virtually every other industry that deals in trademarks or patents once the development of rapid prototypers (wanna know how to build one?) and 3D printers becomes viable. For those who don’t want to click through the links, these are machines, in existence now and being developed for personal use, that “print” actual objects. That’s right, just like the replicators on Star Trek.

Doctorow, really one of the most interesting SF authors–among other things–working today, finds the connection between music copyright and 3D printers incredibly strange. In one of his characteristically witty historical analogies, he says that to worry about the future of trademark and patent law in the face of object-on-demand technology is “as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.”

Perhaps this is a problem today with SF and futuristic thought in general. Politicians began using phrases like the “information superhighway” (Al Gore’s pre-global warming pet project/marketing campaign) ten years ago. When SF concepts and the discourse of speculative thought enter the political and popular domain outside of any traditional generic conventions, what is there for SF to do? When advertisements for new technologies have the strange ability to prefigure or even simulate our interaction with these as yet unreleased tools, how can SF react with counter prefigurations of future technologies? And how does any futurist deal with objects whose complexity can only be explained by teams of tech people?

Steampunk, a subgenre of SF that deals with Victorian-era technologies, seems to serve as a valve for some of these frustrations in many interesting ways, especially the challenge of dealing with overdetermined technological complexity. Steampunk Magazine is one online magazine working with this stuff. It looks back to a moment when technological objects were still intelligible as objects, when their development and evolution could be seen as moving in many different directions, when one didn’t have to read through an entire wiki in order to build a tool that made more objects.

(P.S., the lolbladerunner was done by Jamais Cascio)