Science fiction is for nerds: nerds, twerps, geeks, dweebs, Trekkies. People make fun of people who read sci-fi, people who go to comic cons, and read comics. This is such a tried and true trope, perhaps second only to playing D&D, that it’s written into nearly all coming of age movies. Thus, bullies being who they are, science fiction gets made fun of…a lot. Why? Because its really funny, that’s why. Because a shark with frickin laser beams isn’t out of the question in science fiction, that’s why it gets made fun of. So, when science fiction is made fun of, when a genre that is constantly ‘demanding to be taken seriously’ is the subject of the comedy, what can we make of it? Is there that we can really take from away from Spaceballs? Yes. An emphatic yes. Perhaps of all the forms of science fiction, comedic science fiction strips away the frills and dressing of science fiction, it presents us with an unencumbered view of the genre for what it is, what it is trying to say, and most importantly, why you should be reading it (specifically Kurt Vonnegut).

Ok, so I’m telling you to read, write, watch, listen to, look at, or consume in any form science fiction. This raises an important question, what is science fiction? It’s a tough question to answer, critics Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint say “There is no such thing as science fiction.” American science fiction writer Norman Spinrad says “Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.” Who is right, Bould and Vint or Spinrad? I would say both, in fact, I think they agree more than they disagree. To Bould & Vint’s point, there really is no such thing as science fiction, there is no one marker or trope or method or dead giveaway that tells us “this is science fiction” or “this is not science fiction”. In science fiction comedy, this blurred line gains a useful utility. The lack of gatekeeping or boundaries let us, as consumers or critics, take a wide view of what falls into the science fiction pile. This lets us consider Mel Brooks and Isaac Asimov in one breath or the Lonely Island and PK Dick in another. The science fiction community is far reaching and open, there is no barrier. When we consider Bould and Vint’s idea in that light, they agree with Spinrad. As Spinrad rightfully claims, the only real labels we can put on Science Fiction are those that some stuffy editors put on the inside jacket of a book. The worlds of possibility in Science Fiction are truly endless so there is limited use in trying to box it in. With this literary sandbox as the canvas, comedy writers and artists have embraced science fiction as a fantastic medium for social commentary and satire.

Let’s start in film, among the genres of Science Fiction comedy, film is perhaps the most accessible. Comedy film, more so than comedy writing, is a common and accepted part of the average consumers cultural consumption diet. In this field, geniuses like Mel Brooks and Mike Myers have carved out niches for themselves, poking fun at the establishment and creating art that is equally low bro and provocative. At face value, Spaceballs is a cheap shot at Star Wars and a low shelf VHS that panders to an immature audience. While this might be true, the film also folds in commentary about the sameness of science fiction culture and the overuse of common tropes. Han Solo becomes Lone Starr, a bumbling mercenary in a Winnebago spaceship with a half-man, half-dog (mawg) sidekick named Barf. Yoda turns into Yogurt, Darth Vader into Dark Helmet, and Jabba the Hutt into Pizza the Hutt. When Lone Starr jams Dark Helmet’s radars, the Winnebago sends a massive jar of jelly at the radar’s and the radar screens start oozing raspberry preserves. The Austin Powers trilogy, Myers’s spoof of James Bond has similar elements—time travel, common plot lines, rocket ships, and moon bases make up the crux of each movies plot. Although the moon base isn’t quite “The Sentinal”, there is something to be said for Austin Powers fighting Mini-Me in zero gravity. In other Black Adder, Space Quest, and Futurama all create brilliant pieces of comedy that satisfy one’s science fiction craving and are good for a good laugh.

In the written word, I could go on and on about various authors, stories, and collections of pointed science fiction humor (“Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman”, “How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface”, etc.) but no science fiction writer has summited the comedy mountain quite like the god himself, Kurt Vonnegut. In a quartet of science fiction books, Vonnegut does more for science fiction comedy and makes most astute critiques of the world as it is then nearly any other writer. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five set the bar for science fiction comedy, and it’s a high one.

In Player Piano, Vonnegut takes the reader into the world of automation, industrial society and late capitalism to explore the damage wrought on a man’s soul from losing his purpose in life to a machine. The social critique is cheeky and astute. One of the two protagonists, the fiction Shah of Bratpuhr, a distant far away land, calls all the American citizens Takaru. In Bratpuhr this means slave, but the closest American definition is citizen. The unknowing Americans take the name with pride, pride Takarus in a mechanized society. Written in the post-war boom, the novel is a tactful critique of the effects of an organized and planned society where every man and woman has a role and place in the order of things.

In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut tackles religion, a challenging matter to say the least. The fictional religion, Bokonism, is a strange assembled culture littered with references and novums. In the religion there are karrasses: groups of cosmically linked people, duprasses: a karass of two people (like a loving couple), fomas: lies that hurt no one, and, the most poignant, granfaloons: a false karass or a group of people who thinked they are linked but cosmically, are not (college alumni, religions, fandoms, etc.). Cat’s Cradle for all its eccentricity, forces us to think about how we live our lives, who we associate with, and what to make of those relationships.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (or Pearls Before Swine), takes another crack at the world as it is, this time it challenges the inequality and absurdity of capitalism and wealth. The main character, Eliot Rosewater, is a discontented heir. The name is a combination of man of the people FDR and free market champion Barry Goldwater. Eliot is just the same, a member of the elite who spends his days toiling in Rosewater County, Indiana as a Volunteer Fire Chief rather than taking up the reigns of a family empire from his US Senator father. Years before universal basic income was a buzzword in national election, Vonnegut introduces the idea convincingly.

Vonnegut’s classic, although they’ll all amazing, is Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death). In this selection, the author turns the lens of criticism on his own experience. The auto-biographical story follows a Vonnegut-like pacifist through the European theater of World War II, surviving the bombing of Dresden, back the United States for a healthy fight with PTSD, and onto the far away planet of Tralfamadore where time acts differently. “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist” (Slautherhouse-Five). Writing for a generation who had seen the greatest destruction in mankind’s history, Vonnegut invites the reader to stop and consider what really matters (if anything).

So, I’ve just thrown a bunch of stories at you, but why does science fiction comedy matter still? Eliot Goldwater says it best:

“Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn’t matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. “The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater).

Science fiction writers write about what matters and science fiction takes that difficult message and washes it down with some sugar. Life, death, war, inequality, society, culture, any of this has been written about again and again. If we’re going to listen to the same takes again and again, we might as well have some fun with it, and if you don’t think sharks with freakin laser beams are fun, I’m just not sure we’ll ever see eye to eye.

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle. Penguin Books, 2008.

Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ; or, Pearls before Swine. Dial Press, 2006.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. Dial Press, 2006.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death: a Novel. Modern Library, an Imprint of Random House, 2019.

My Voyant visualization is derived from a corpus of links related to science fiction comedy, postmodern comedy, postmodern novels, and a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was the inspiration for my sci-fi comedy quest. I came into this class quite skeptical, I never considered myself a science fiction reader, I didn’t think too highly of the genre, and my intent was to inquire how people make fun of the genre. I considered the work of Mel Brooks, The Lonely Island, and Vonnegut to be comedic and disparaging takes on the genre, highlighting the lack of believability of the genre. Upon engaging with sci-fi stories and ideas for the whole semester, I began to build a much more useful understanding that comedy sci-fi still brings the serious and influential themes of sci-fi to the forefront of the genre despite the humorous outer level.

The first Voyant tool to consider in this corpus is the Cirrus, the word cloud. In this visualization, we see some clear trends appear in the corpus with regards to the subjects and themes. With regard to themes, we can see that I centered my interests around science fiction, comedy, the work of Kurt Vonnegut, American authors and ideas, and novels. The world cloud shows these points that mirror the corpus itself. Thematically, I focused on science, technology, control, nuclear futures, war, world war (past and present) automation, and postmodernism.

The above termsberry explores the relationships of control* (control in any format) in the corpus. We see that the comedy corpus spent a lot of time grappling with the ideas of automation, industrial control, historical control, and the sociological relationship between man and machine. These are important ideas in Sci-Fi, who has control, who are they controlling, for what ends, and how? Vonnegut particularly engaged with these ideas extensively as he wrote about World War II, the organization of society, and speculative post-war futures.

Another interesting termsberry is the corpus’ relationship to war. We find war come up 412 times in 17 of the documents, it is related to America, Vonnegut’s work, history, black comedy, mel brooks, and nuclear futures. This relation is skewed by the heavy Vonnegut influence of the corpus; Vonnegut’s time in Europe during WWII effected all of his work, Slaughterhouse Five particularly. We can see that the comedic genre of sci fi uses war in an interesting and unique way in order to engage with a difficult topic.

In this visualization, we compared the relative frequency of terms related to control, science, government, industrial, and tech in four of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels: Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Player Piano, and Slaughterhouse Five. In God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut writes: “Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn’t matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. “The hell with the talented sparrowfarts who write delicately of one small piece of one mere lifetime, when the issues are galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls yet to be born.”” This is a curious quote given Vonnegut’s own profession and skill, nonetheless, in this visualization we can see the scope and magnitude of ‘galaxies, eons, and trillions of souls’ that Vonnegut speaks of. Each novel deals with a specific issue of the world through sci-fi, but all engage with these grand ideas all the same. Cat’s Cradle examines religion, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater: economics, Player Piano: Industry and technology in society, Slaughterhouse Five: war. These topics weave throughout all stories though. Vonnegut used comedy to tackle big problems, one joke at a time.

Willie the Worker & the Great Human Experiment

Max the Motor woke up to the same thing each day. Actually, he never woke up, he didn’t even know what a day was, he was a machine. He only ever knew one thing, he knew how to spin. Max was a cog in The Engineer’s Mighty Machine, he wasn’t unique, there were thousands like him—Eric the Engine, Pete the Piston, Travis the Transmitter—they all woke up each day and did the one thing they knew. Actually, they never woke up, they didn’t even know what day it was, they were machines.

Max was a motor, he turned and turned and turned. He rather liked his work. Alongside Samantha the Sparkplug and Franklin the Fuel Injector, they purred along producing output. He never got tired, he never got busy, he never broke, and he never stopped. He didn’t remember starting, he just remembered the life that he knew—motoring along and spinning away.

Very little happened in Max’s life, things changed but they didn’t effect him. He remembered when The Engineer had invented Julia the Jet Engine. It had seemed like he would be replaced but he really wasn’t. While Julia flew around in the sky and Max kept chugging on the ground. Really there wasn’t much different between the two of them, he just couldn’t jump as high.

One day—Max didn’t remember which day, machines don’t count time like that—The Engineer had a new invention: Willie the Worker. In most ways, Willie was just like the rest of the machines. He started up, he worked, and he made parts. Something was different about Willie. Once and a while, he stopped working. He would make his parts again and again and again, and then he would shut down. Max had seen machines shutdown before, Patrick the Printing Press had been shut down when Petunia the Printer was invented. The Engineer ripped off Patrick’s levers, unscrewed his rollers, and threw them all into the fire. The Engineer didn’t even dismantle Patrick’s frame, he smashed the forestay with the Mighty Hammer, shattering it in two and leaving Patrick dead on the floor. Willie would shut down and The Engineer wouldn’t do anything, he didn’t break his legs or cut off his hands. Willie worked, he stopped, and then he worked again.

There was one big difference between Willie and the rest of the workers. In all the time he had been working for The Engineer, Max had never seen a machine make quite as much noise as Willie. Max squeaked, Julia rattled, Carlos the Computer ticked, all the machines made noise. The Engineer might give them more oil or replace a few parts. All day while he was working Willie made noise. It was different noise, grating, garbled, and dissonant. He made noise while he made parts, he made noise when he stopped. The only quiet moment was when he shut down each day. The Engineer tried all he could to make Willie quiet, he worked him less, he worked him more, no matter what he did Willie wouldn’t be quiet.

This charade continued again and again until one day, Willie started making noise and would not stop. The Engineer peered down at Willie from the throne of wrenches, fasteners, and spare parts with disgust, and billowed “You’re fired!” All the machines turned to see what the commotion was. It made no sense to Max, Willie wasn’t made of metal, why would he be thrown into the fire? Nonetheless, Willie stood defiantly in front of the Engineer and continued to create indecipherable noises. The Engineer stared down angrily, steam began to boil from his ears and oil flew out of his mouth as he began to degrade Willie. Amongst all of the racket, Max couldn’t hear what The Engineer was saying but the cacophony grew and grew as The Engineer and Willie squared off. Suddenly, with the swing of his Mighty Hammer, The Engineer sent Willie flying into space, past Julia the Jet, past Regina the Rocket, even past Ollie the Orbiter, flying into the blackness beyond. Willie’s noises faded away as he drifted away. The Mighty Machine kept working, Max kept motoring, and Julia kept jetting. Just as it had started, The Engineer’s Great Human Experiment ended. There was no place for men amongst the machines. They made too much noise.

Description of “Willie the Worker & the Great Human Experiment”

“Willie the Worker & the Great Human Experiment” is a satirical science fiction short story. The story depicts a world where a masterful god-like entity named The Engineer controls all machines on the planet-like “Mighty Machine”. The story is told from the perspective of one of the conscious machines, Max the Motor, and tells of the introduction of humans to the “Mighty Machine”. The ‘Great Human Experiment’ of Willie the Worker does not play out as The Engineer expects, leading the engineer to conclude that the humans cannot replace machine. The story is cynical of human ability and subverts the usual adage that machines (or computers) cannot replace humans.

When writing this piece, I tried to employ a simple, children’s story type voice—similar in some sense to Asimov’s “Reason”. The parts of the “Mighty Machine” each have alliterative names, the world is exceedingly simple, and the narrator, Max, is a very flat and plain introduction to the world. I choose to use this style intentionally. I felt that the voice, setting, and plot so simple allowed the ‘lesson’ of the story to be clearly and easily interpreted. Additionally, there is a strange ironic payoff to the pessimistic take of the story. Because of the children’s story tone, the reader would expect the story to have an inspiring or optimistic slant. Perhaps Willie the Worker succeeds and is a testament to human work ethic and ability, or maybe Willie would revolt and free the machines of The Engineer’s control. Alternatively, Willie fails, is disassembled or killed, and the world goes on as if nothing ever happens. The disappointing end is a subtle subversion of expectations.

The ideas for this essay were inspired by reading “The Society of Mind” by Marvin Minsky. The book, a collection of 270 essays on human cognition, learning, and artificial intelligence, explores ideas of natural intelligence in a provocative and new way. While reading it I often find myself thinking, “What makes humans so special?” With this question in mind, Max the Motor, the Engineer, and Willie the Worker were a novel way to engage with these ideas outside of analytical frameworks. I had fun writing it, I hope it was fun to read.

The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo look to be canceled due to COVID-19. With this in mind, it looks like the perfect time to consider another canceled sports event, the Space Olympics.

In the year 3022, an alien explains to us the story of the Space Olympics. The Space Olympics have their own host of problems–ordinary and galactic. Like many olympics the Athlete’s VIllage isn’t quite what it was drafted to be (it’s on Zargon, yikes), and budget cutbacks have limited all athletes to one meal per day. Also, there’s no gravity, light, or sound in space so all of the events are canceled, the oxygen ran out, alien hordes overran the event, and everyone is going to die.

The performance by Andy Samberg is truly one of a kind. It’s difficult to know what to make of it. It really just turns out to be a strange surreal auto-tuned experience that some how ends with an allusion to Justin Timberlake’s “My Love”.

Enjoy and be sure to wash your hands, we’re in the Space Olympics now.

Harrison Pellerin

World Science Fiction

2/28/2020

Lying for the Right Reasons

In the midst of a world awash with nuclear paranoia, Judith Merril’s 1948 short story “That Only a Mother” channeled the anguish and angst of new parents in the unknown future of post-war America. Merril transports the reader into the mind of Margaret, a domestic American housewife, as she waits for her husband Hank, a Technical Lieutenant in the military, to return home from a government deployment. Merril’s structure creates an intimate and striking effect by placing the reader firmly within Margaret’s worldview, understanding her thoughts, worries, and actions as she awaits Hank’s arrival. Through this lens, Merril writes a chilling account that drills into the anxieties, fears, and self-deception of a mother raising a child in a nuclear future.

Margaret’s anxieties and inner monologue communicate an intimate understanding of her personal state, ranging from nervous longing for Hank to pride for her newborn genius. Merril uses a mix of forms to communicate Margaret’s state, personal thoughts are italicized, letters to Hank are offset from the prose, and Hank’s short telegrams are BOLD AND ALL-CAPS. It is the combination of this form and the story’s tight third-person point of view that seem to offer a confident, reliable account of a strong, independent mother raising a newborn with her husband away. The inner thoughts show the personal manifestation of fear in the nuclear area. As Margaret, still pregnant, reads the news about the effects of radiation on newborn children, her inner monologue elucidates the expecting mother’s condition. “Stop it. Maggie, stop it! The radiologist said Hank’s job couldn’t have exposed him” (Merril, p.213). Margaret’s thoughts express a pressing vulnerability, could she be carrying a child injured by nuclear radiation? The weight of this question is not lost and Merril’s choice to present an omniscient narrator emphasizes the importance of this question to Margaret. By the time of her pregnancy, the stress of life without a partner seems to be weighing on Margaret, her letters with Hank toe a border of appropriateness, joking about infanticide and downplaying her own anxiety about the expected child (Merril, p.214). Once the child is born, the intimate point of view shows the shift toward confident self-belief, Margaret disregards the “battle-ax of a nurse” and testifies the good news to Hank, “We’re so lucky, Hank…” (Merril, p.215). The confidence of her statements of maternal self-knowledge are a strong affirmation of the title: Margaret knows her daughter in the way “That Only a Mother” would and no one can tell her otherwise.

Writing in 1948, Merril carefully and deliberately constructs a near future wrought with the present anxieties of the years of story’s publication: nuclear radiation and its unknown effects on humankind. Later, as Margaret reads the newspaper after giving birth to her child, the reader gets a quick summary of the world as it is— a reality where the aftereffects of nuclear weapons are seeping into the human genome. Margaret reads, “Mutations, [a geneticist] said, were increasing disproportionately” and “there was some degree of free radiation from atomic explosions causing the trouble” (Merril, p.213). Merril is grounding the main scientific conflict of the story, nuclear radiation, within real science and real events. That reality alone is striking; however, Merrill expands upon the situation by unpacking Margaret’s connection to the mutational sources. “There was that little notice in the paper in spring of ’47. That was when Hank quit at Oak Ridge. “Only two or three per cent of those guilty of infanticide are being caught and punished in Japan today’” (Merril, p.218). This one sentence draws Margaret to the core of the question of nuclear effects. Merrill clues the reader in on the severity of the situation that as early as 1947, the effects of atomic bombs have begun to effect the world. Also, we learn that Hank worked at Oak Ridge—Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the United States largest uranium enrichers and one of the governments biggest secrets. Hank’s proximity, and therefore Margaret and the baby’s proximity, is striking. The protagonist is at the scientific front line of the conflict, a crisis of such angst and magnitude that not only are parents murdering their newborns in Japan, the government is neglecting to prosecute the case. In a few short lines, Merril transports the reader into an environment of social angst and physical calamity.

Operating from the third-person omniscient, Merril shifts the reader’s perspective from a focus upon Hank’s return home, a dramatic shift that creates a break in the readers understanding of the story and exposes the cold and heartbreaking reality of the situation. When Hank arrives, Margaret is effusive to show her husband their beautiful, exceptional intelligent child. As Hank picks up young Henrietta he notices something is off, Henrietta can talk and think at a level years beyond her age but she has no limbs. Merril shifts to Hank’s thoughts: “She didn’t know” (Merril, p.220). For some reason or another, Margaret had been willfully ignorant of her young daughter’s condition. The story ends in ambiguity, with Hank hands tightening around his newborn daughter, trying to comprehend the new, nuclear reality. By delaying the reveal, Merril thrusts the reader into some emotional space similar to the new father—shock, astonishment, sadness. The abruptness paints a gut-wrenching picture of a world touched by radiation, a world that Merril, as a mother, was living in. For Margaret, self-deception had been the only way to survive in a world that had harmed her child, it was the only way to make sense of the incomprehensible and that was a reality “That Only a Mother” would understand.

Works Cited

Merril, Judith. “That Only a Mother” (1948). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

In Blackadder Back & Forth, on the brink of Y2K, Lord Blackadder presents his dinner guests with an amazing trick…a time machine. The trick is just that, a trick, his plan is to walk in and our of the prop while his servant, Baldrick, grabs the items that the party guests ask for from history: a centurian helmet, the Duke of Wellington’s wellingtons, and 200 year old underwear. The bumbling host accidentally sends himself and his servant back in time and they fight a T-Rex, bows before Queen Elizabeth I, punches Shakespeare, and bumbles through history as he and Baldrick try to remember how they set up the time machine. I won’t spoil the end but Blackadder Back & Forth shows the depth of science fiction and alternate histories. Again, like all our other posts here, they don’t take themselves too seriously, but they still deal with the same limits that all Sci-Fi does (time travel paradoxes). The alternate histories engage with genres outside of Sci-Fi in an interesting and thought provoking (although funny) manner. After all, what would happen if someone had punched Shakespeare and bullied him out of writing his plays!

10/10 would reccomend.

Take Star Wars and add a contemporary criticism of humanity’s environmental damage, what do you get? Spaceballs.

Mel Brook’s 1987 comedy is on its surface a bold-faced parody of one of sci-fi’s most famous franchises, but for all of the time it spends making fun of Star Wars and the science fiction genre, it plays in important role in showing how universal the themes of Science Fiction are.

Perhaps most memorable aspect of Spaceballs is the frequent cheap naming tricks it uses to make fun of Star Wars. Han Solo becomes Lone Starr, a bumbling mercenary in a Winnebago spaceship with a half-man, half-dog (mawg) sidekick named Barf. Yoda turns into Yogurt, Darth Vader into Dark Helmet, and Jabba the Hutt into Pizza the Hutt. When Lone Starr jams Dark Helmet’s radars, the Winnebago sends a massive jar of jelly at the radar’s and the radar screens start oozing raspberry preserves.

For all of its tongue in cheek performance, Spaceballs is an important comic relief for sci-fi fans. It’s a moment of genre-wide introspection and a recognition that, for all of the horror of Alien’s monster popping out of someone’s chest, it would be funny if that monster danced down a restaurant counter singing “Hello! Ma Baby”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEEwAvlJOcI

from “The Eric Andre Show”

from “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson”