Pursuits: Science lets you down but magic is forever

If you are over 40, then you probably remember a cartoon called the Flintstones.

The story was about a family of primitive cave-dwellers (Stone Age probably) who managed to mimic the average American family of that era in every respect except that they did it all in caveman fashion. (I am telling it badly.)

 

The comic was a lot of fun, though I never liked the movies they made later.) But no matter how old you are, I imagine you have only the vaguest recollection of the cartoon that was the modern counterpart of the Flintstones. It was called the Jetsons and it was about a space-age family that managed to mimic the average American family of that era…

 

   Why do we remember the Flintstones while the Jetsons have faded from memory? When they first came out, both cartoons were equally popular. But the Jetsons are hardly ever mentioned now. And there is certainly no talk of reviving them whereas the Flintstones are still a part of American popular culture.

 

   If you watch the cartoons or read the comic strips now the answer becomes painfully obvious. The Jetsons strip was set in a future that never arrived: flying cars, etc. Like all bad science fiction, it took bets on what the future would be like. And it lost.

 

   That’s the problem with science fiction. I speak as someone who loathes the genre so you must forgive me my prejudices. But I reckon that the Golden Age of science fiction has long past. The genre exerted a certain fascination in an era when science and space travel held out the hope of an exciting future. These days we take science for granted and nobody is very excited by space travel. Hollywood may want to revive such pre-Second World War characters as Batman and may even celebrate the adventures of Second World War hero, Captain America. But nobody remembers their contemporary Buck Rogers. And Flash Gordon is largely forgotten. When a big budget movie based on the old John Carter of Mars stories was released a couple of years ago, it was the season’s biggest flop.

 

   What we want now is a different kind of fantasy, not one that derives its excitement from the space age. Can it be a coincidence that the biggest cult TV show of the last few years is Game of Thrones? Who would have thought that a series of movies based on J.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings books would be among Hollywood’s biggest grossers many decades after the novels were published? And now, there are the sequels to Lord Of The Rings featuring the hobbits.

 

"Denied the naivety that allowed science fiction writers to imagine a glorious future in the Fifties, the world has now begun to think backwards to an age where there was no science and magic was everything."

   I draw a distinction between popular historical hokum on TV – The Tudors, The Borgias, Rome, etc. – and stuff like Game of Thrones. Even though the show (based on the books by George RR Martin) derives its inspiration from a real-life historical event, the War of the Roses, it makes no claim to any historical origins. Instead, it is a work of fantasy filled with magic, zombies, a summer that stretches on for many decades, fire-breathing dragons and strange animals called direwolves. In that sense, it is not unlike The Lord of the Rings trilogy which uses the legends of ancient England to create a world of fantasy.

 

   There are other examples. Consider the legend of King Arthur. We know now that he never existed, that there was no Camelot, no Round Table, and no infidelity by Sir Lancelot Du Lac. These are just legends. And the legend of Merlin is based on an even older myth that found its way into the King Arthur stories. Yet, even though most of us grew up on tales of Excalibur and the sword in the stone, we still find a freshness in the modern retelling of the Arthurian legends. One version or the other of the Arthur stories is nearly always on TV or in the cinema halls. And Merlin has distanced himself enough from the Round Table to deserve his own TV show.

 

   The case for the popularity of science fiction in our era is based largely on two phenomena. The first is Star Wars. If science fiction is dead, you may well ask, then why has Disney paid a bomb for the rights to Star Wars? Well, the answer is quite simple. Star Wars is not science fiction. George Lucas stole much of the inspiration from Lord of the Rings and he was careful to place the stories in the past rather than the future. (“A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”) The second great science fiction phenomena is Star Trek, which has been successfully rebooted. But I would argue that the new Star Trek consists of simple people-in-conflict-stories. The original conceit of Gene Rodenberry’s show where space was the final frontier and the Enterprise was full of explorers going boldly forth has now been buried. It cannot be a coincidence that Star Trek was rebooted by J.J. Abrams, best-known for idiotic stories about worm holes, changing dimensions and ghosts or that Abrams is also in charge of the Star Wars revival. Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury, he is not.

 

   So what appeals to us so much about fantasies full of knights, wizards and dragons? My theory is that we have had an overdose of science. In an era when all of us can Facetime each other instantly and where the wisdom of the ages is accessible to anybody with a hand-held mobile device, science has lost its power to excite or captivate. Even space is a bore. As Sandra Bullock keeps telling us in Gravity, “I hate space.”

 

   Denied the naivety that allowed science fiction writers to imagine a glorious future in the Fifties, the world has now begun to think backwards to an age where there was no science and magic was everything. That’s why they keep making new movies based on the Tolkien stories. And that’s why Game of Thrones is Barack Obama’s favourite TV show.

 

   Science lets you down. Magic is forever.