SF AND ROCK VIDEOS

While other media have made fantastic leaps in power and distribution, publishing remains a smokestack industry. Now word processors and videotex media have arrived: rude intrusions into the ivied halls of literary culture.

These new technologies are pantingly ready to lay rude hands on the lilied flesh of literature, and the resulting indecencies are extremely promising opportunities for SF. Straight literature has never taken technology seriously, and as a result it has lobotomized itself. As it flounders in an increasingly senile search for its audience, its vigorous bastard child, science fiction, might conceivably lead this technological revolution and make itself the dominant mode of literary expression in the 21st century. We owe it to ourselves to try.

We can learn from another successful synthesis of art and technology: 20th century pop music.

There has been a long alliance between SF and pop music, from the jazz of the '40's and '50's through to today's hi-tech rock. These despised genres have fermented happily together over several decades, borrowing one another's audiences and terminologies. ("New Wave" for one: a term drawn from SF and applied to rock through the mutual tradition of fanzines.)

Now, through the new art form of rock videos, we are confronted with a blazingly vigorous new medium that exploits a host of new technologies to dazzling effect. Consider the list: electric guitars, synthesizers, recording technology, video cameras, satellite transmission, cable, and television, all dedicated to the noble effort to blow the minds of today's youth. Is it any wonder that parents clamor for grotesque "lock-boxes" to keep their kids from mainlining MTV twelve hours a day? These are the same archetypal parents who have been tossing out boxes of comics and rocket-ship books for the past 50 years, for identical motives.

Recently we have been treated to the appalling spectacle of SF figures allying themselves with the forces of reaction. "Kids don't read any more," they whine. The kids are down the street popping quarters into video games instead of publishers' pockets; they're home watching MTV. What should writers and publishers learn from this?

A sense of shame. Why aren't kids lined up eight deep for the latest issue of ISAAC ASIMOV'S? Why isn't ANALOG doled out from locked crates by frowning members of the PTA? Because they are DULL. Worse than dull; they're reactionary, clinging to literary-culture values while a cybernetic tsunami converts our times into a post-industrial Information Age.

It is little wonder that rock videos, like Napoleon, have pulled SF's crown from the gutter and placed it on their own heads. Movement, excitement, color, reckless visionary drive: you will find these in abundance in the work of video directors raised from birth on SF. Consequently they are producing not only excellent SF but SF often better than that in the written media.

Consider a work like Culture Club's KARMA CHAMELEON, an irresistable alternate history where 19th century blacks and whites frolic together under the benevolent aegis of transvestite Rastafarianism. As social statement, this blows away the pallid efforts of modern SF's white-bread legions of feminists and libertarians.

Has there ever been an adolescent power fantasy to compare with Billy Idol's DANCING WITH MYSELF, where the apotheosis of vicious teenage angst capers under the flaming eyes of Oktobriana, lust-goddess of the Soviet pornographic underground? Or a fantasy pastorale with the vividness of SAFETY DANCE by Men Without Hats, with its subtly monstrous combination of 18th century gypsy merriment and the ominous whine of banks of synthesisers?

Already rock videos have seized the imagination of SF's golden-age audience of 14-year-olds. SF is missing out on this action for very real and cogent reasons. The problem is not the purported illiteracy of today's decadent youth, but their sheer lack of interest in a genre sleepwalking its way into the middle-aged pipe-and-slippers comfort of the NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller List.

The graying of SF has left it with a cadre of established writers who are rightfully reaping the harvest of years of dedication. But we must not be misled into thinking this a sign of robust health. It is to a great extent the result of a cultural power vacuum created by the abject collapse of straight literature. Unless SF acts now to recapture its sparkle, we may expect a crippling long-term drain of future writers. Today's young visionaries will ignore SF's inbred tail-chasing for the wide-open spaces of video.

This is a challenge akin to those of other smokestack industries: a crying need to re-think, re-tool, and adapt to the modern era. SF has one critical advantage: it is still a pop industry which is close to its audience. It is not yet wheezing in the iron lung of English departments or begging for government Medicare through arts grants.

SF has always preached the inevitability of change. Physician, heal thyself.