at the science fiction double threesome

[kleenexwoman]

Wow, that was a pretty productive night. Er, morning, mostly.

I was kind of unsure about the way I was handling Douglas's and Professor White's reactions while I was writing it; it seemed to me that George would have been more likely to be scared and paranoid about a monster from space, from watching too many movies where the alien invades and eats people, while Doc would have been more enthusiastic about meeting a member of a more enlightened civilization...but then I remembered that this is not Doc and George, this is Douglas the secret alien and Professor White the Good Scientist.
We've been talking about Good Scientists versus Bad Scientists in SF class. The distinction is quite clear. Bad Scientists invent things that are an affront to nature and then refuse to take care of the consequences. Herbert West, Victor Frankenstein, and Adrian Mayhew are all Bad Scientists. Good Scientists are socially conscious; they are usually the ones who look at their charts and go, "Great Scott, the Earth will be devoured by a supernova in three days so we had better evacuate all the Aryans." Nobody ever listens to them until it's too late, and I don't even remember any of their names. Clearly, the only way to get respect as a fictional scientist is to be a megalomaniac obsessed with creating autoerotic abominations. (Why is it that Bad Scientists are so often biologists? You never see a Good Scientist doing experiments with dead tissue unless he is an unwilling and very squeamish sex slave assistant of a Bad Scientist.)
Anyway, the other thing we've been talking about in SF class is postmodernism, which means something very different to Prof. Snow than it does to me. Her definition is that it's a story which demonstrates the meaninglessness of existence and the awareness of the possibility that the human race could be destroyed at any moment, the isolation of modern humans from each other, etc. etc. I always thought it denoted an ironic, self-aware type of art in which the absurd and surreal was taken as concrete.
Where was I going with this? Ah, yes. The reasons why Douglas and Prof. White are not George and Doc Brown. Douglas is symbolic of a New Age, the teenagers who have seen the horror of war and the paranoia of the Cold War and rejected it in favor of a more meaningful, cooperative, peaceful existence. You know, the hippies. Prof. White is symbolic of the old, imperialistic, paranoid Cold War mentality--kill or be killed, convert or be converted, bomb or be bombed. There's a very good reason I put in that line about the Manhattan Project.
"A Match Made In Space" as compared to "Back to the Future" is, so far, very much like comparing historical sociology with Freudian psychology, a story of the beginnings of a whole society growing to maturity versus one individual person's journey to maturity. George is a gay/asexual/sexually immature boy who needs to be turned into a heterosexually mature man by conquering his father figure--Darth Vader, the "dark father," who is in reality a product of George's latent heterosexuality and conformity to societal values of masculinity.
In contrast, Douglas is an entire generation who rejects the competitive values of his father's generation (Prof. White is clearly the father figure here) in favor of a more egalitarian set of ideals. Spoiler for those who aren't ghostgecko or diraskyria, both of whom know what's going to happen with the Volkon: The Volkon turns out to be that type of father figure too, but a much more deceptive one, kind of like your old dad who talks about how great it was when he was a kid and he skipped school to march in the streets and stood up to the pigs to protest the Vietnam War and really made a difference in the world, man, not like these lazy kids who won't go to school and study and just want to laze around all day running wild in the streets and shooting their mouths off to their elders and won't do something productive like getting a job or joining the Army.
It's rather ironic, then, that these maturations both have diametrically different directions. George's maturation is hellion in nature: the world is tough, you must stand up for yourself, you must take what is yours and protect it from all competitors. Douglas's is kindred in nature: the world can be a good and peaceful place, free from hurt and injury, if only we all join together to make it so.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing you get out of me when you put me in a class dedicated to dissecting the cultural context of old science fiction movies, then give me a hippie professor for Soc class and a Bad Scientist for Psych class. (But more on my professors later. They are cool.)

But anyway, I think I'm really getting into the groove of this story. Gone is the purple prose and awkward thought telegraphing--I have to remember that most of my readers actually might be able to tell what a character is feeling through the way I make them act. Important, that.

Comments

[diraskyria.livejournal.com]

What is purple prose?

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Really super-flowery, uberdescriptive prose which overwhelms you with imagery instead of imparting information.

[diraskyria.livejournal.com]

Okay. I figured that's what it might be. ^_^

[bestfiend.livejournal.com]

You've put some impressive work into your novel. Your approach to writing is more complex and sophisticated that I imagined. Cool beans. I respect your ability to analyze your own writing, because if I used this approach, I'd never write at all.

[the-quarantine.livejournal.com]

I was kind of unsure about the way I was handling Douglas's and Professor White's reactions while I was writing it

So was I, actually.

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Uhm. You were unsure about your characters, or about mine?