Native Language

SF has given us greater access to interior information, to understanding ourselves, our world around us, and our role in our culture. First published in 1959, Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" begins with the lines:

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But Mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

On watching this recent Hot Chip video (a collaboration with the hilarious Reggie Watts) I began to count the SF tropes as they appeared. It made me consider how SF has created a language (and even created the ability to craft new language) to express and explore thoughts, feelings, emotions. This video offers a little taste how that language is so deeply entrenched in American culture that we use it as lucidly an perhaps even unconsciously as our spoken native language.
This video was surely made to set off SF nostalgia bells, filled as it is with winks and inside jokes. I thought I might take a stab at connecting some of the references to classic SF.

1.Hoods and religious order harken to the post-apocalyptic monastic order in Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz."

2.The egg recalls aliens seen in Frank Herbert's "The Mating Call" where human explorers inadvertently become pregnant after watching a field of egg shaped aliens dance to beautiful music. Also, this might connect with "Alien" in a more sinister vein.

3.The English style mansion not to far from an upscale urban city (not to mention the school-like atmosphere) show more than traces of the X-Men's X-Mansion.

4.The lady pilot's flashing costume is a small shout out to cyberpunk, sparked by William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy.

There may be other places where these ideas first began, and I include these books above only to point back towards high water examples. Every SF book has many references and connections of its own and today, as genres specialize further, many books even connect to ideas established other places in the genre. SF itself is an aggregator of ideas, laying its roots in the fifties and sixties SF that amalgamated the detective, fantasy, erotica, and action stories of the time into a brewing cauldron of ideas. SF generating a cultural language seems like a natural process of the creative, explorational style of the genre itself.
Since the fifties, SF stories have aggregated and curated science, speculation, politics, and emotional realities. In this TED talk, Larry Lessig discusses copyright law and explains that for more recent generations of artists, aggregation and curation are art forms to themselves.

Steps into Space

Lunopolis is a documentary style paranoia-toggling sf movie that relies on creative scripting, candid acting and gritty shooting to propel a heady, visceral path of discovery deep into the "truth" about our timeline and human cities on the moon. Highly recommended, watch with the lights off in a smoke-filled room, free on Netflix.

Also, in the spirit of Zero History (sci-fi conspiracy/the future is now) I came across this story of a paralyzed woman who was given a robotic arm that is controlled by her mind. Scientists mapped the neurons that fire when she thinks of moving her physical arm to the mechanism that controls the robotic arm.

The possibilities here are very exciting! If someone can control a device with her mind, where would the limitations end? One trick with this robotic arm is that imagining moving your arm fires the same centers in your brain as if you actually were moving your arm. (Interesting too when you think about doing something in a dream, is the sensation of the experience registered on our subconscious as truly as physically doing it?) Could we link ourselves to super-robots and interface with astonishingly powerful machines? Could we explore deep outer space in first-person? On a darker twist, could this the first step to a surrogates future? The singularity must be drooling. By the way, you've got to love that the main difference between Bruce Willis and his surrogate is hair.