Everything changes but awareness of a change is, in effect, after the ‘fact’…change is opinion, has to be (fairly) widely recognized before it is official and to quote William Gibson, “While science fiction is sometimes good at predicting things, its seldom good at predicting wha these things might actually do to us.”
I might be author of more doom-and-gloom-from-beneath-the-weight-of-the-oppressiony than anything else; drama over comedy. My classic toppings are science fiction (which I thoroughly research before really writing the script. It took me two years to write the original draft of Blackline, almost eleven months to do the research and reading alone. Which is how I began getting invited to attend Nanotechnology conferences. It was my relentless curiosity and extreme adoration for social trends (and innovations) as well as ethics that found me speaking to a room full of professors at George Mason University in 2011.
Back to my original idea, so yeah, my stuff you can expect the setting to be a near-future where control of the world is in the hands of people with highly questionable ethics. Beneath, the same old issues are right there. Conflicting, arising from different world views and biologies – and war is always ‘on the verge’ of happening (unless it’s on) but the story always with the ‘better’ people fighting to take the world back.
My scripts and films might kick, blast and crush hope but I don’t take it away; I have a soft spot for it in my grey old heart. “Apocrypha” is my latest film trilogy and its the closest to fantasy I’ve ever written but it also involves time travelers, dragons, vampires, ninjas and elements of our present-day world like narcotics, skyscrapers and even a form of MP3 players – music is always a key factor in the stuff I write.
The world today is as dangerous as it is inspiring…the examination of how far we’ve come; Atari to X-Box 360, landlines to blue-tooth ear-pieces so that we can have both hands free while talking with others on cell phones (see: Moore’s Law) … and the reconstructed documentary, formerly about the ethical implications of nanotechnology is more counterpart to Apocrypha than “The Posthuman Condition” was to “Blackline.”
Technology is arguably the primary ingredients to society’s progress but it’s what we do with it that initiates the next Change. For better worse, the world is approaching another change. We can’t prepare for it in any traditional sense but we can keep an eye out: the first signs will be in the media that has become such a part of everyday life: I consider “Game of Thrones” to be one of the most promising as far as morals, ethics, etc go…it’s about struggle, it’s about sacrifice, it’s about love and hate and all that plus it has dragons but it’s underlying themes about the choices we make are one of my favorite things to sniff out.
It’s four days to the 3rd to final episode of Season Four and anyone who’s read the books has a pretty good idea of what’s gonna happen but we don’t know precisely how it will happen – the show has cut the right parts and characters to leave out, in my opinion. Life is like that show; like any show – we’re always waiting to see what happens next.
And now I’m tired so I would just like to say, I’ve been so very wrong about so many things – some weird bits of architecture in Arlington, Virginia are a good example but that’s another story – but right now, today, at this point, two women that I have never met face to face or spoken with over the phone have given me a kind of hope that could not have existed before the internet as we know it today. Jimena Paris, from Santiago and Ella Valentine, from London.
Some things you never can predict. And it’s always amazing to see how these surprises alter our lives…changing them.
Apocrypha, Shadow and Cold Light 