Pat Kane: Beam us Scotties up, Alex

Published on 15/06/2012 00:00

IT’S about time someone put the country on the science fiction movie map – after all, there’s already a good relationship between SF and our politics, writes Pat Kane

He canna Scotland see wha yet/canna see the infinite/and Scotland in true scale to it. As far back as Hugh Macdiarmid (and maybe even as far back as the Brahan Seer), Scotland has had a complex relationship with the future both the future you want to bring about, and the future you want to prevent happening.

Whether its Star Treks Scotty chirpily tweaking his dilithium crystals to full capacity, or Robert Louis Stevenson predicting that medical science could let us unleash our inner monster, we do the future in Scotland like we do most things: to aye be where extremes meet.

The unofficial slogan of the new Scotland work as if you were in the early days of a better nation, quoted from the top politicians downwards comes from Alasdair Grays 1981 dystopian novel Lanark. This portrays a totalitarian future Glasgow as Unthank, its ruling classes involved in grisly genetic experiments and mind-control. Grays hopeful, optimistic slogan defies the darkness of his own book.

There seems to be a fruitful (if not exclusive) relationship between science fiction and independence politics at the moment. Pre-eminently, Alex Salmond is the first politician to be honoured as a Starfleet Officer in the worlds largest Star Trek fan organisation. Salmond is a self-confessed Trekkie, revealing in 2010 that he would pretend to be the hyper-rationalist Vulcan Spock in his schoolboy bedroom mirror, making and hoarding audio recordings of the original 1960s TV series.

Fellow SNP leading light Rosanna Cunningham is also a Trekkie. Its the ultimate what-if?, she once said a understandable passion for a progressive Nationalist to adopt. Noted SF authors like Mark Millar and Iain Banks have firmly nailed their colours to the independence mast. Our first Makar, Edwin Morgan, is famous both for integrating SF into his poetry his poem The First Men on Mercury is a staple in Scottish schools and also for magicking up a million pounds to fund the Yes campaign.

Theres no automatic SF-independence link, though. That refined-looking ex-Doctor Who, David Tennant, is a staunch Labourite. And in these very pages, ex-Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray, not previously known for his matter-transporting tendencies, displayed an intimate understanding of the Culture framework that lies behind Iain M Banks science-fiction novels. Who would have guessed that behind Grays thrawn exterior, his imagination thrilled to the prospect of a hedonistic, body-morphing galactic civilization?

But its worth dwelling a little on how science fiction sits with the imagination of policy in general. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, scourge of austerity and inflexible economic management across the globe, is the fanboy of a Edinburgh SF author called Charles Stross.

Theyve debated and discussed in science fiction conventions, with the Nobellist thrilling to Strosss careering tales of abundant technology causing crime, carnival and perversion. An economist who urges us to be creative with our collective indebtedness but who also loves SF visions of scarcity being abolished, in the era of robots, nano-tech and synthetic biology surely some connection there.

The relationship between science fiction and politics/policy cannot, by definition, be predictable. Arthur C Clarke may have strongly advised that politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories, because one of the biggest roles of SF is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Yet that flexibility can go into very extreme areas.

America is key here, whether its Kennedys space-race conducted in the era of Star Trek, through Reagans Star Wars missile shield shaped by SF author Jerry Pournelle, to the connections between games designers, movie scriptwriters and defence research departments in the current era (not to mention Obamas love of robot drone killings as a way to fight al-Qaeda). There has always been a live dynamic between American expansionism and science-fiction dreaming.

The USs Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency or Darpa seems unashamedly targeted at bringing about visions of SF into reality. Robot soldiers, digital telepathy, invisibility cloaks, brain implants all in the service of full spectrum dominance.

Look at the coming slate of Hollywoods SF blockbuster movies for 2013, and most of them are about future war of one kind or another, featuring characters that are poster-boys (and sometimes girls) for the kind of cyborg futures and human enhancements that many forecasters think will be the big commercial industries of the next 50 years.

Who could soften us up for a certain kind of post-human future better than the effortlessly cool Robert Downey Jnr in Iron Man the guy who made his fortune from military research yet still wears a Black Sabbath T-shirt over his nuclear-powered heart?

Does it matter that our science-fiction imaginations are over-conditioned by America? SF advocates often proclaim loudly about not being interested in such puny limits as national boundaries, while peddling US values in almost every other mainstream production. Surely one of the attractions of the revived Doctor Who franchise, and its Torchwood spin-off, is that this is a defiantly British (though recently largely English) take on the vistas of the future. Agatha Christie battling giant alien wasps in her refectory. Latexed baddies with impeccable RP accents launching galactic domination from, er, Cardiff. Gentle explorations of bashful sexuality between time lords and their assistants.

ITVS Primeval treads the same ground, with its downbeat heroes dodging velociraptors in the aisles of your local Lidl. The soon-to-be-revived BBC space comedy series Red Dwarf is even more explicitly counter-American, where Scousers and Estuary Men deflate their cartoon Yank associates inside wobbly Airfix-style space crates.

Yet its hard to think of an SF future on the screen which has anything like a strong Scottish derivation or locus. More often than not, were set dressing: whether its Bertrand Taverniers Death Watch, 1970s Glasgow as gloomy backdrop to the ultimate surveillance society; or next years World War Z with Brad Pitt, where the same city stands in for Philadelphia as the battleground for a future zombie war.

However, if the budgets are much, much lower basically, ink on a paper page Scotland does make it into the SF imaginary. Ken McLeods left-libertarian alternative futures often use the locales of his background Plockton, Lochcarron and Miavaig as theatres for his space opera.

Ive made them the battlefields of wars both guerilla and global, McLeod wrote recently. Crashed flying saucers and tactical nukes into them. Crushed them under the mechanical sprawl of runaway artificial intelligences. Choked them with mutant jungles. Made their sea-lochs ring with the din of spaceship yards. Settled their villages with ageless retirees scoffing illegal life-extension drugs.

Millar and Grant Morrison are well-known for interpolating random Scots into their futurescapes. Both are graduates of the comic 2000 AD, whose spokesman Michael Molcher recently said that our success rests on a whole coterie of Scottish writing talent that has joined us over the years. Our Scottish writers like John Wagner and Alan Grant, creators of Judge Dredd lend a specific voice to the publication, which is cynical, satirical, sarcastic and darkly humorous. 2000 AD really does excel at the subversive, anti-establishment, Scottish voice and that voice is the comics success.

Well get by selling cars, sings Michael Marra in his song Australia Instead of the Stars, wryly lamenting the failure of Dundee inventor Sandy Kidds anti-gravity gyroscope. We know what we are. But what do we want to be? Perhaps alongside the grim urban murrdurrs of our crime factories, and the tourist-friendly Celtic sentimentalities of Pixars Brave, we could ask our image-merchants (TV, film and games) to raise themselves to the challenge of creating some audio-visual Scottish science fiction worthy of the name.

Who will rise to the challenge of producing Grays Lanark, or Bankss Culture, or Morgans interplanetary meditations, or McLeods techno-highlands for our screens? More than another retread of the William Wallace story, Id like to see the national imagination boldly going where no Jock Tamson has gone before. At the very least, youll get support for that from quite a few space cadets in Holyrood on both sides of the aisle.

Pat Kane blogs on Scottish current affairs at Thoughtland.info