Loosey Goosey - The Poverty Of Our Imaginations, and of Our Ambitions

Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird (Reactor ) hits on some ideas that bothered me in other areas. I see it in politics, other writing genres, and in movies. 

Manifestly, purity is overrated.

The fewer ideas and perceptions and influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population.

For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom.

And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21^st-century S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic, was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely passing.

To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend something as S&S.

And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium, an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness.

What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities.

I saw Supergirl, thought it a good enough movie, and the reviews were generally puzzling. Some wanted a bigger more spectacular follow up to Superman. Some thought it was not clearly enough feminist. The comic book fans decried the divergences from the art. One review in The Guardian is the only one I saw that reviewed it on its own terms. 

Why have we become so needy for purity, for clearly defined content that reassures our prejudices against women, against the oddball? Why do we hug so closely to the past and cliches?

Reactor seems to be on a streak this week, hitting me with articles aggravating the bees in my bonnet: Strange New Worlds, Starfleet Academy, and Nostalgia for the Future.

As a term, nostalgia derives from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning grief or distress. It is a yearning for something which no longer exists or perhaps which has never existed, and, crucially, this desire is less spatial than temporal, often closely linked to childhood memories. It is a feeling which Star Trek has often dramatized (think about Annorax in Voyager’s “Year of Hell” who longs to restore an erased timeline containing his wife and… <dramatic flash> …wait, what do you mean you don’t remember him?!). But understanding nostalgia is not just useful for writers. Knowing more about how it is expressed can also help viewers and critics when contemplating our situationships with popular culture. Indeed, when we analyze what I like to call the flavor profiles of nostalgia we begin to account for why different audiences vibe differently with different incarnations of contemporary Trek. 

 Nostalgia bothers me. I think it is the amber into which our world  and its cultures are being trapped. But I did learn there is more than only one nostalgia.

First, restorative nostalgia. For Boym, this involves a strong emphasis on so-called “truth and tradition,” a stance which Strange New Worlds emphasizes by positioning itself as the heir to classic Star Trek. Such an approach tends to be anchored in a particular historical moment (or, at least, in a recollection of that moment, for as Boym warns, there is always a risk of conflating “the actual home for the imaginary one”). Consider how Strange New Worlds treats the original Trek as a kind of sacred text, with the relationship between the old and new based not on evolution of the material but, instead, on Boym’s “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This is evidenced not just by SNW’s literal recreation of the original Enterprise (albeit much more spacious given Pike’s smaller crew complement) but by the recasting of franchise stalwarts such as Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and Chapel. We further see it in the way the series retells classic stories, for instance how the first season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” offers what is essentially a cover version of the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” by transporting Captain Pike forward in time from 2259 to 2266 while also sending the viewer nostalgically back in time from 2022 to 1966. Even the title Strange New Worlds is itself nostalgically (and restoratively) Trek, drawing as it does from the credits narration of the franchise heyday. 

Which is opposed by:

This kind of layered approach suggests a similar kind of “longing for continuity in a fragmented world” as that exhibited by genuinely reflective nostalgia. It is something that the post-Burn setting of our second example, Starfleet Academy, is designed to take narrative advantage of. Nine hundred years beyond Strange New Worlds, this period is a stage for “unrealized dreams of the past” (dovetailing neatly with the show’s use of hauntology as I have discussed on this site before). Starfleet Academy, so, is as undeniably nostalgic as Strange New Worlds, but while its reflective approach uses similar triggers to the restorative tendency, the series fashions these into very different results. Because reflective nostalgia thrives in the act of “longing itself.” It relishes ambiguities and contradictions (something we will sadly now not see in a mooted third or fourth season installment which would have had the holographic Doctor meet the copy of himself from Voyager’s “Living Witness”). Reflective nostalgia calls “truth” into question as several Academy episodes, notably “Series Acclimation Mil,” pointedly do. Most importantly, it acknowledges that remembrance is an “imperfect process” (which, as much as anything else, is the crux of Academy’s first season finale). Along the way it champions an open approach to history, one in which youth (personified by cadet Caleb) challenges authority while simultaneously being poised to create its own stories. This philosophy celebrates the past of Star Trek but still exhibits a strong longing to forge a new future—via a new ship, a new crew, and a transformed setting—all while honoring what has come before (most obviously in the USS Athena’s commemoration wall, something I hold to be an object lesson in imperfect recollection if only because I refuse to believe that Nog never advanced beyond lieutenant). 

Five Books That Make History Fantastic - Reactor 

The Death of Robin Hood Brings a Legend Low - Reactor I offer as an antidote to my own opinion that the movie works. The points against my opinion are accurate. It is grim, it does hint at other movies, and it does evade what the reviewer wants. The violence is horror level high. I think the changes in Robin Hood are subtle. I think it may be that he had no other means of escaping his past. His world was too circumscribed by place and rank for reinvention.

 sch 6/27