Is there nothing new under the sun?

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Are they making a movie of A Scanner Darkly? Need to go check my movie news. I picked this up a few years back and enjoyed it (other than the occasional nosebleeds it caused).

Yep. Great book. Hopefully a great movie as well.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0405296/
http://www.apple.com/trailers/warner_independent_pictures/a_scanner_darkly.html

Richard Linklater is directing, it's animated in the same style as Waking Life. My biggest fear is that Keanu Reeves is playing Fred/Bob.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Just look at Zelazny's Lord of Light: cloning, DNA adjustments, energy beings, thought tranferance, gender changing, men playing gods, religion, all in those pages and published in 1967.

 

[The_Universe]

Isn't there a popular theory that we can't predict what will be
next because of the dum-dum-DUM! Singularity event?

My enworld-fu fails me now, I can't find where I read it but here is where
they discuss that Science fiction is in trouble b/c of the Singularity.

That sounds like something to write a story about. The failure of the human imagination. It's too different, too fast - and so we just quit?

Wouldn't our sudden inability to imagine anything beyond "The Big Change" (or even to properly envision what the big change might be) stop such a big change from happening? Does the Singularity, as its been called, represent the next big step where human life transforms into something that, at the moment, we can barely recognize, or are we looking instead at the edge of a great scientific plateu...?

Interesting stuff.

 

[David Howery]

No. There's nothing new under the sun. It's all been done. You should give up gaming, fantasy, and sci fi, and take up organic gardening....

 

[Psychic Warrior]

I thought Chronicles of Riddick was pretty fresh.

It definately had some good moments but the overall execution was very poor.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

No. There's nothing new under the sun. It's all been done. You should give up gaming, fantasy, and sci fi, and take up organic gardening....

It's been done.

I don't understand the attitude that if there is nothing new that we should all stop and give up what we are doing. That makes less sense than re-doing old things.

 

[The_Universe]

It's been done.

I don't understand the attitude that if there is nothing new that we should all stop and give up what we are doing. That makes less sense than re-doing old things.

Agreed.

 

[devilish]

This thread has reminded me of one of the best science fiction short-story books
I've read in a while -- Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others here. The story "Understanding" is about a person
who becomes hyper-intelligent and THE singularity. The story is well told (won't
ruin it here) and you do get the feeling of being a lowly human compared against this
"singularity" person. All the stories in it are excellent.

That sounds like something to write a story about. The failure of the human imagination. It's too different, too fast - and so we just quit?

Wouldn't our sudden inability to imagine anything beyond "The Big Change" (or even to properly envision what the big change might be) stop such a big change from happening? Does the Singularity, as its been called, represent the next big step where human life transforms into something that, at the moment, we can barely recognize, or are we looking instead at the edge of a great scientific plateu...?

Some excellent ideas in there --- you'd have the pro-S faction, anti-S faction and
neutral faction. The neutrals might even be the ones who accidently create it.
A lot of the talk of the Singularity is that it wouldn't be consciously created -- that
in the advent of nano-technology and AI, that we would "accidentally" create
our successors.

Even better : What if technologies like stem-cell research
and cloning are the way to the singularity and government's are suppressing it, either because they know or because they don't.

New things are on the horizon, I think -- not singularity level -- it just takes
some time for what's cool/fresh/innovative now to sink into author's heads
and let them come up with a new story. Think what MNS and "The Sixth Sense" and
how it was a new way of telling your typical ghost story. Now, it's passe, but then
it was brilliant.

 

[Morrus]

Cloning has been done, as have lasers and masers...I'd say examining the internet (and any future iterations thereof) has been nearly done to death. Space travel has been...well traveled.

I'd say you're getting too specific there. There's no real difference between a cloning plot and an old tale about a witch who creates a magical double of someone. There's no difference, plot-wise, between space travel and sea travel (or any other kind of travel).

The plots are often the same; we just use different methods of telling the same story. A story about ancient greeks who discover a new land is no different to a story about futuristic spacemen who travel to a new planet. You just replace some of the words.

99% of the time, the setting and the mcguffins are irrelevent - just ways of making the same story more appropriate to the audience. The actual story - the important part - is usually about the conflict found between various characters, or the journey/character arc/development of the main character. And when you look at it from that perspective, there are far fewer stories than you might think!

What might be cool is if people tried to think of contemporary tales (whether books, movies, TV shows, whatever) which are retellings of older stories refurbished for a new audience. Is, for example, Spider-Man II the same as, say, one of the tales of one of King Arthur's Knights? (That's a genuine question - the "hero meets bad guy, hero loses faith in himself, hero regains faith, hero beats bad guy" story seems fairly common; most of the Rocky films follow that pattern, as does Spider-Man II, and as do, I'm sure thousands of tales told throughout the ages).

 

[Steverooo]

What do you want to see but haven't? What do you want someone to address, but no one has? What's the next big thing? The next small one?
What hasn't been done?

Explorations of the Vampire legend are always popular, but rarely answer the "Why?"s. One recent one did... Why do Vampires hate silver and holy objects? Because Dracula was Judas Iscariot, after he hung himself. The thirty pieces of silver and holy symbols figured prominently in the movie...

That's basically exploring the Vampire. How it works, what makes it tick. Angel/Buffy did a little bit of this, as well. Some older tales also dipped briefly into the psychology of the people who hunt them... The early Dracula/Van Helsing movies, for instance (the modern versions focus too much on action and special effects).

I'd like to see a good, intelligent, modern-day group of Vampire-hunters, wherein we explore what makes BOTH sides tick, and not focus so much on the fight scenes and SFX. Also, the hunters shouldn't be Vampires, Day-Walkers like Blade, supermen, etc.... I tried doing some of this in this game thread: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=82232, where "Grampa" Jones was my PC.

Stories like this explore the Human (or formerly-human) self, and you can never learn all about yourself, so you can never run out of stories! Notice, in the above thread, how the responce to TR is to call him "crazy". I always thought of him as coldly, calculatingly SANE. It would have been interesting if the game had lasted long enough to find out more about WHY he responded the way that he did, and what made him that way.

This somewhat addresses Nakia's question about security in a world of horror. Most folks chose not to believe Vampires existed. Gramps chose to develop weapons to kill them, and go out - in his wheelchair - and hunt them down. His idea of security involved hunting down the horrors, and putting toothpicks through their tiny little hearts, even if it cost him his arm.

Another genre that occasionally produces new tales are other monster stories... "The Blob" was new, in its day, as was "Frankenstein" and "King Kong", maybe even "The Wolfman". In more recent years, O'Bannon's extreme possibilities spawned the entire "Alien" series, which has proven quite popular.

Elements of these movies are, indeed, old as legend. Others are new. (One of the Blade movies had Whistler asking questions similar to some of the ones that Gramps was asking, revolving around using technology to hunt vamps, for instance, and being afraid of the wolf in the dark is ooooooollld!) But in any case, tales exploring the human psyche will never get old... and there are always fears to be exploited.

So, what are you afraid of?