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Like most sci-fi movies, ID4 is a sensation machine. You leave saying "Wow!" instead of a speculative "Hmmm." These days the real head scratchers are on TV; there you'll find the genre's cool, metallic intellect touched by the fever of despair. The X-Files' twin mantras--"The truth is out there" and "Trust no one"--are the ideal ingredients for a sci-fi cocktail with a '90s twist. The paranormal and the paranoiac have joined hands through a pop-cultural wormhole; they meet and multiply. It's not so much science as psychic or psychoanalytic fiction...
...next year or so. Besides Mars Attacks! (a gleefully nihilistic vaudeville that promises to play Dr. Strangelove to ID4's relatively docudramatic Fail-Safe) and the inevitable sequels and remakes of Alien, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Lost in Space, you'll see big-budget versions of thoughtful sci-fi novels: Carl Sagan's Contact (directed by Robert Zemeckis), Michael Crichton's Sphere (Barry Levinson) and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven...
...theory 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...
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...