Word: fi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...about what's inside. Aliens. Abductees. Elvis. "I think what's hidden in Area 51 is Kyle MacLachlan's career, particularly after Showgirls," suggests comedian Kevin Murphy, the voice of the robot Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks to get a genetic encoding. It then puts it into a huge...
Paranoia could be the only sane strategy for getting through the '90s. When sci-fi solon William Gibson is asked if his fiction is an optimistic or pessimistic view of the future, he replies, "A realistic view of the present. I don't think of myself as a futurist. I think of myself as someone who inhabits a baffling and in many ways terrifying present in 1996. Science fiction is always about the year in which it is written. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a McCarthyite fantasy. Today, I think, the alien is inside, a virus of one kind...
...idea that sci-fi is not so much a window to the stars as a mirror of our dark selves is supported by David Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books. "The alien represents metaphorically what's in the real world. The aliens in '50s films often represented communists--faceless invaders who were going to take over our country. The mysterious beings of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 represent our transcendent future. Independence Day sounds like the old form of sci-fi: the foreign invaders intend to wipe out our cultural heritage--ethnic cleansing. They don't want to come...
...about belief. It is certainly about box office. Peter Chernin, the 20th Century Fox chairman, didn't see a holy white light when he gave the green light to ID4; he was thinking grosses. Michael Sullivan of UPN didn't have religion in mind when he put four sci-fi shows on his network; he was thinking demographics. "Sci-fi has traditionally been a cult item, and 20 years ago, networks had to draw a mass audience. Now with the networks' share of audience diminishing, that core audience becomes more significant," he says. And NBC's Warren Littlefield...
...admits, "Our goal, first and foremost, is to scare people." It's the modern movie director's job to package an old idea with zippy effects so that the audience will think it's seeing something new--and be blown away. During the cold war, even the cheesiest sci-fi filmmaker, like the legendarily dyscompetent Ed Wood, had some moral admonition in mind ("He tampered in God's domain"). Now it's size that counts; sense and scruples don't. As Spielberg says, "If the '70s and '80s were the era of the What if? movie, then...