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Tuesday, July 05, 2005



Driving A Stake Through the Black Heart of the Age of Peace 'N Love


Today I read a science fiction story published several years ago (by "several" I mean "about five"). I will not identify author or title. To hell with it. Anyhow, the theme and moral of the story was "If we get a chance we should let aliens have the earth and exterminate humans because all humanity is rotten and corrupt and evil Evil EVIL!!"

This kind of crap was beloved in the Seventies, as the Sixties Flower Children started to come down from their decade-long high and realized they didn't change a damn thing, least of all human nature. So to punish that portion of humanity which hadn't been quite so child-like and naive and idealistic and STUPID, they started us down the long road through the Logan's Silent Soylent Running Green Planet of the Death Race 2000 future, from which Star Wars finally rescued us.

(When I complained about the venue in which I saw this story, complained that this sort of thing was old back when I graduated high school, Niles asked whether it was some sort of anti-Star Wars backlash. Dude, I told him, Star Wars was the backlash to exactly this kind of sterile grim vision of the future. He may still be right.)

(When I was in high school we had a "literary" mag. I wrote a couple of stories for it, all science fiction/fantasy, and all rather bad. One of them took place billions of years in the future. The fate of humanity was irrelevant to the story (I told you it was bad), but the editor of the magazine---the creative writing teacher---made me add a sentence noting that the human race had destroyed itself by nuclear war. Else it wasn't science fiction, you know! Feh. That convinced me not to take her creative writing class.)

Frankly, I blame Christianity for this sort of thing. This is post-Christian Christianity: we don't believe in that superstitious old God nonsense, but we still want Him to punish us for our sins. Pretty please?

Folks, the Sixties are over. Accept it. I want to see a story in which the livid, bloated, grinning corpse of the Sixties is burned and the ashes pissed upon before being buried in a landfill which will become a shiny new Starbucks. On the Moon. Thank you.

There. That story had me in a bad mood all day. Better now.