Black Sci-Fi | movie | 1992 | Official Clip | dG1fX2xBWEpRbG1GVVU
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00It's a wonderful way to think about possibilities.
00:05It's a wonderful way to explore exotic politics.
00:09It's a wonderful way, it's a freedom.
00:11It's a way of doing anything you want.
00:14There are all sorts of walls around other genres.
00:18Romances, mysteries, westerns.
00:21There are no real walls around science fiction.
00:24We can build them, but they're not their natural life.
00:28Hustle on over here.
00:30When I was 12, I saw a terrible movie called Devil Girl from Mars.
00:35One of those sad 1950s movies.
00:39The Martians had for some reason lost all their men,
00:42so they'd come to Earth to get some more.
00:45And for some reason, in spite of the fact that the Martian women were beautiful,
00:48the Earth men didn't want to go.
00:50And I turned off the television and said to myself,
00:54I can write a better story than that.
00:57And from what I've heard, that's the way a great many people start writing.
01:00Just the idea that what they're seeing is so awful, they can do better.
01:04I sat down and began writing my first science fiction story,
01:08which also turned out to be my first patternist story.
01:16My patternists are people, a gathering of mutants, really.
01:22They're not extraterrestrial or anything.
01:24They're not gathered for any particularly good purpose.
01:26They're gathered because a rather odious character is lonely and very long-lived.
01:33So he breeds them.
01:35He also eats them, in a sense.
01:39I think, really, a lot of my early writing had to do with my own feelings of powerlessness.
01:45So I dealt often with power, with what it did to people,
01:50what they did with it when they got it.
01:52And what I do in the xenogenesis books is explain what that is.
01:56I have aliens who arrive and who are interested in us
02:01because they are natural genetic engineers.
02:04They are gene traders, as a matter of fact,
02:06but who tell us that we have this conflict within ourselves.
02:10All too often, our intelligence serves our hierarchical tendencies,
02:15so that we tend to one-up ourselves to death.
02:19And I have all this going on after a nuclear war,
02:22when we really have one-upped ourselves to death.
02:41Most of the world, from what little we know of it today,
02:44is scarred with strips of impassable land.
02:47The sea is run through with deadly currents.
02:50Toramon may be the only fragment that can hold life, for all we are sure of.
02:57Once man flew to the moon, even to the moving lights in the sky.
03:01There were many empires.
03:03Often they fought with one another, and that was called a war.
03:08This notion that war is something that makes the whole society pull together,
03:12war is something that turns boys into men,
03:15and that was a view of war that science fiction writers,
03:19such as Heinlein and Poole Anderson, were very much enamored of.
03:24And when I looked around at what was happening to the people
03:28that you saw coming back from Vietnam, or going off to fight in Vietnam,
03:32this isn't what I saw.
03:34A small bead of light dropped from one of the airships.
03:38For five seconds, a sound came on, a concussive rumbling.
03:42The broken stud of burning masonry, the remains of the tower,
03:45flickered above the hem of buildings.
03:47Chaos roiled on the concourse.
03:49The newsspeaker grill began humming.
03:51Remain calm, citizens, remain calm.
03:53It behooves the writer to realize that certain kinds of questions
03:57are going to be asked, like who wins?