2001: A Human Catastrophe
October 1st 2007 07:36
I must say, I have been sorely disappointed with the 21st Century so far. Perhaps it was because I spent my youth watching Back to The Future, and thinking in the year 2000, we’d have hoverboards and flying cars. It is 2007, right? You’d think we’d be more technologically advanced than we actually are, in that year. There’s no way 2015 will look like the way it did in Back To the Future Part II (only 8 years to go, and that film will look extremely outdated. You know, we’re actually closer to 2015 than 1985? Scary)
The year 2001 was nothing like the movie of the same name, by the way. Where was the manned Jupiter mission? Where was the HAL-9000 supercomputer (Daisy…Daisy…), might I ask? Instead, 2001 will forever be remembered as the year when 9/11 happened. And that’s just sad. We used to look forward to the year 2001. It was a brave new world. An exciting future. Now, it’s a reminder of how little Humanity has actually progressed since we were apes living in caves. The world is now a frightening, depressing, paranoid place, in which terrorists are not a random baddie in a Die Hard film, but a very tangible threat to society.
It’s not just our lack of technological advancement that has failed to impress me in the 21st Century so far. Where is all the science fiction this decade? I remember as a kid growing up in the mid-90s, it was everywhere. Independence Day, Men In Black, Star Trek: First Contact, The Fifth Element. I couldn’t get enough of it in my teens. I remember always going to the bookstore and immersing myself in the latest stuff in the sci-fi section. They don’t bankroll many sci-fi movies or TV shows anymore. And that sucks, frankly. People don’t seem to want escapism anymore. The television stations are full to the brim with lame, cheap-to-produce reality TV trash (which I abhor, and always boycott); or dark, depressing drama serials like CSI and 24. Post 9/11, our world is a self-conscious, untrusting place. The optimism, the hope that humanity will somehow overcome its violent past and emerge into a new evolutionary stage, a view popularised by the Star Trek franchise, doesn’t sit too well with the pessimistic Noughties outlook. Even when a sci-fi show is miraculously produced these days, it is often just as gritty and ‘dark’ as every other drama (see the new Battlestar Galactica, or Torchwood). I mean, the new BSG is quite good, but there’s only so much I can take of Battlefrown Depressica, if you catch my drift.
Fantasy (in the swords and sorcery sense) seems to have made a big comeback this decade (blame Peter Jackson’s LOTR and Harry Potter for that one). But hard SF seems to have fallen by the wayside. It’s lamentably gone the way of the Western genre (the Western is all but dead in the contemporary context. A shame, because I enjoy a good western). Instead of focusing on the petty problems of this miserable planet, I believe we should occasionally cast our eyes upward. To the stars. Perhaps we’d finally see how insignificant our little blue rock is in the scheme of the universe.
The year 2001 was nothing like the movie of the same name, by the way. Where was the manned Jupiter mission? Where was the HAL-9000 supercomputer (Daisy…Daisy…), might I ask? Instead, 2001 will forever be remembered as the year when 9/11 happened. And that’s just sad. We used to look forward to the year 2001. It was a brave new world. An exciting future. Now, it’s a reminder of how little Humanity has actually progressed since we were apes living in caves. The world is now a frightening, depressing, paranoid place, in which terrorists are not a random baddie in a Die Hard film, but a very tangible threat to society.
It’s not just our lack of technological advancement that has failed to impress me in the 21st Century so far. Where is all the science fiction this decade? I remember as a kid growing up in the mid-90s, it was everywhere. Independence Day, Men In Black, Star Trek: First Contact, The Fifth Element. I couldn’t get enough of it in my teens. I remember always going to the bookstore and immersing myself in the latest stuff in the sci-fi section. They don’t bankroll many sci-fi movies or TV shows anymore. And that sucks, frankly. People don’t seem to want escapism anymore. The television stations are full to the brim with lame, cheap-to-produce reality TV trash (which I abhor, and always boycott); or dark, depressing drama serials like CSI and 24. Post 9/11, our world is a self-conscious, untrusting place. The optimism, the hope that humanity will somehow overcome its violent past and emerge into a new evolutionary stage, a view popularised by the Star Trek franchise, doesn’t sit too well with the pessimistic Noughties outlook. Even when a sci-fi show is miraculously produced these days, it is often just as gritty and ‘dark’ as every other drama (see the new Battlestar Galactica, or Torchwood). I mean, the new BSG is quite good, but there’s only so much I can take of Battlefrown Depressica, if you catch my drift.
Fantasy (in the swords and sorcery sense) seems to have made a big comeback this decade (blame Peter Jackson’s LOTR and Harry Potter for that one). But hard SF seems to have fallen by the wayside. It’s lamentably gone the way of the Western genre (the Western is all but dead in the contemporary context. A shame, because I enjoy a good western). Instead of focusing on the petty problems of this miserable planet, I believe we should occasionally cast our eyes upward. To the stars. Perhaps we’d finally see how insignificant our little blue rock is in the scheme of the universe.
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