Let’s Get Happy

Michael Solana thinks science fiction is doing us a disservice. Nighmarish predictions of the future aren’t new, but Solana thinks that they’ve become pervasive. A sub-sub-genre has taken over the field, and occupied our imagination.

Solana writes, “dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made viruses in the pages of what was once our true north; we have plague and we have zombies and we have zombie plague.”

Ever more disturbing than the critique of technology in these stories is the casual assault on the nature of Man himself. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was people walking through a black and white hellscape eating each other for 287 pages and it won the Pulitzer. Oprah loved it. Where the ethos of punk is rooted in its subversion of the mainstream, famed cyberpunk William Gibson’s Neuromancer is no longer the flagbearer of gritty, edgy, counter-cultural fiction; ‘life will suck and then we’ll die’ is now a truism, and we have thousands of authors prophesying our doom with attitude, as if they’re all alone out there in tinfoil hats shouting at the top of their lungs what nobody else will. Yet they are legion.”

Happiness has become edgy and counter-cultural: “In the Twenty-first Century, the most punk rock thing that you can be is happy, or—and this is really crazy—’happy ever after.’”

One might observe that “happy ever after” hasn’t quite yet been deleted from our vocabulary or psyche. Disney – nuff said.

But Solana is right, and that dark dreams haunt us. Insofar as this is the case, it reveals something deeper than Solana taps into, something deeper than can be touched by an exhortation to “Be happy.” Do we see out of the corner of our eye the abyss of nothing that is the only alternative to Jesus?