| | "What kinds of fantasies are not justified? Those with no intellectual or moral application to human life—for instance, the movies about man-sized ants from another planet invading the earth. "Wouldn't it be horrible if ants suddenly conquered the earth?" Well, what if they did? If those ants at least symbolized some special evil—if, like animals in a fable, they represented dictators or humanitarians or other human monsters—such a story would be valid. But fantasy for the sake of fantasy is neither valid nor interesting."
She did not "get" it, did she?
Of course, by this standard, Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons would be all right because they do represent our own evils. (Of course, so does Homer, but that is another subject entirely.) I like their appearence in the Halloween "Monkey's Paw" story where Lisa wishes for total world disarmament, and Kang and Kodos come down from orbit brandishing slingshots, but we chase them away -- "Look out! The human has a board with a nail in it!"
And, painfully, there were no movies (plural) "about man-sized ants from another planet invading the earth" but only Them. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/) The ants were of our own making, coming from the New Mexico desert where we exploded atomic bombs. So, this is a morality play, right? Also, once they are out, chasing them down requires some thinking and doing by scientists -- and a little love interest because the one scientist is a nubile female. We, the viewers, have to piece the clues together -- though the theater posters told us what to expect. All in all, I liked Them then and I like Them now. Ants are so trivially harmless -- well, fire ants are not -- that the scariest part of a story like this is "the world turned upside down." What if everything you thought you knew was suddenly proved false?? What if sharing was evil? What if taxation was theft? What if capitalists were heroes? We called them "atoms" because they were uncuttable. Then we split them...
These monster movies follow certain formulas and one of the continuing elements is that all of the guns and bombs and things are useless and we have to think our way out of this. The heroes -- and villains -- are scientists, which is why this is all (loosely, perhaps) "science fiction." Atlas Shrugged fits into the genre. Does the new mode of electrical power generation "represent" something (like a new philosophy) or is it just what it is, an unreal, anti-reality fantasy element? Or is it an exciting new idea, not allowed by present knowledge, but what if... Would the man who invented it be hailed as a hero or condemned as a destroyer?
Robots can have attributes that humans cannot, such as altruism according to Asimov's Three Laws. We have computers now, we have machines. We wear contact lenses, hearing aids and cardiac pacemakers. Given the existence of an android -- a biomechanical "man" what then is the definition of "man"? This has been attacked many times from many angles in science fiction, but my favorite is the Star Trek: Next Generation episode Measure of a Man.
This is a recurrent theme for STNG. The episode Tinman is about a sentient lifeform that is a spaceship. Silicon Avatar deals with a lifeform that actually scours planet surfaces clean of all life -- including the humans -- and yet, Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew attempt to defend it. Perhaps some people might not be able to tolerate ten minutes of this unless you told them that the Avatar was a quasi-free semi-socialist society or something... To me, it was just a lifeform, much like the wasps in my attic whom I can kill or for whom I can open the window...
All art comes down to who you are inside.
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