Of Deliberate And Reactionary Paradises: Outer Space And The Citizen Consumer

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

--Aldous Huxley

                                                                                                                                      

For its themes and dreamy look, Christopher Penfold's "The Guardian Of Piri", one of the more ethereal episodes of Space: 1999 (ITC, 1975-77), fans have long cited influences drawn from Op-Art, Greek mythology and the drug scene of the era. (1)

Oblivious to these observations at the time as a thirteen-year-old, the combination of glowing spheres in a sherbet orange sky and gleaming slabs dotting a pied surface suggested to me nothing so much as the plaza of a typical shopping mall.

Projected And Past Paradises

Only recently did I notice the intriguing similarity in Keith Wilson's set design, down to the the indolent recumbence of its addled characters, to Bruegel the Elder's painting The Land of Cockaigne (1567). (2)

Alternatively known as Luilekkerland (the lazy-lacivious land) in the Netherlands, Cockaigne was a popular European notion of  Paradise in the Middle Ages and Renaissance which mandated of its denizens a hearty dedication to extramarital sex, sloth, gluttony and other indulgences denied under peasant life.

Come to think of it, when considering the various "Consumers' Republics" of the industrialized world, aren't today's malls intended as an earthly equivalent to Paradise?

Suspending Nature...

Certainly Michael Anderson's dystopian Logan's Run (MGM, 1976), from the novel by William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson, logistically shared this association, when it used the Dallas Market Center, an actual mall in Texas, for the interior scenes of great domed cities protecting pampered, youthful inhabitants from a polluted 23rd Century. (3)

The Gerry Anderson TV production in its second season, appeared to reference the novel in the time

travel adventure, "Journey To Where", where the crew of Moonbase Alpha comes into contact with the residents of Texas City, one of numerous domed megalopoli on a similarly-ravaged Earth of 2120. (4)

Freddie Jones' (TV's Emmerdale) delivers a quirky performance as Dr. Logan, while his research associate invokes the creepy rationale for this strange civilization when she opines to the Alphans, "Who needs Nature?" This presages by forty-three years the views of former US Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Itsvan in a 2019 article Environmentalists Are Wrong: Nature Isn’t Sacred and We Should Replace It. (5)

The dramatized theme of a sanitized positivist existence built along technologically panaceic lines goes as far back as William Cameron Menzies' 1936 film version of H.G. Wells' Things To Come. Its penultimate set piece of Everytown, 1970 (sic) is a Lucite-appointed, mall-like subterranian city, where even natural sunlight is traded for an artificial substitute. (6)

Now, anybody who has worked in an indoor shopping complex for any length of time can attest to how easy it is to lose track of time without sunlight. But then, who needs time, either?

... And Time

The android intermediary between humanity and the Guardian (played with silky aloofness by Catherine Schell (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) explains to the lone holdout among the entranced colonists, John Koenig (Martin Landau), that the perfect state of toilless existence once provided by the machine to its extinct creators, the Pirians and now available to the Alphans, rests on the sirenic supercomputer's ability to "suspend time". 

Even as this is in line with the derivation of the planet's name from Miri and Piri, (7) the co-joined Sikh principle behind the temporal and spiritual aspects of life, modern 

mall management policy in its own way also "suspends" time, discouraging the display of distracting clocks in common areas and stores, the better to promote shopping as an immersive recreational pursuit.

What makes the Piri/Cockaine comparison most relevant since Space: 1999 first aired in syndication is how the traditional mission of the mall is showing signs of failing.

Hargobind Singh Ji,, sixth Silh Guru,
creator of the principle of Miri Piri
(1606)

Remember when Wall Street pundits claimed that the fanciful logic behind the burgeoning New Economy dictated it could "go on forever"?

Well, as one of the once unassailable bulwarks of this absurdity through the 1990s, the indoor shopping mall has been dying in sufficient numbers across the country over the last decade or so to warrant several online pictorials of abandoned complexes, with at least one dedicated website. (8) 

The End Of The Consumers' Republic

In fact, the massive South Norwalk Collection in my area of Connecticut, following five years of stalled funding and two owners ended up the only new indoor shopping center in the entire Northeast upon completion in 2019. (9)

This trend-bucking persists in this year's mayoral race in neighboring Stamford, where both "pro-jobs" candidates made it a point to do what they could to keep the local economy-siphoning leech, the 41-year-old Stamford Town Center, in operation. Up for sale just two years ago before its owner began shifting gears abruptly in service to the lifestyle needs of a higher-end crowd (including a ballet school), post-lockdown saw the STC's launch of a rather grotesque poster campaign raising shopping to a maniacally transcendent experience. (10)

What does this have to do with a British '70s space opera or the dreams of medieval serfs? Though each vision might reflect distinct economic origins, I think they're connected to the consequences of a misplaced idea of how things ought to be, based on a sometimes misplaced idea of how they actually are.

Yesterday's Oppression, Today's "Unfreedom"

Up to now, the difference is that the materialist idyll of industrial society is built generally on the overabundance of contrived appetites (to the numbing point that appetite, itself dies, as on Piri); the imagined Paradise of the 1500s is built on the overabundance of fundamental appetites, in reaction to the extremity of privations on safety, liberty and economic self-determination under serfdom.

Thus far, today's latest vacuous multiplex thriller, that pair of over-marketed sneakers, or gourmet cookies continue to  serve as superficial, compensatory--rather than necessary--benefits meant to offset the imposed insecurities surrounding employment, health care, housing, etc. of the outside society by which the mall and its tenants profit.

In this way, the often unacknowledged contradictions between the wasteful social and globally atomizing effects of modern life (outsourcing, insatiable market expansion, pollution) and the ephemeral excesses it supports philosopher Herbert Marcuse referred to as the "unfreedoms", which help ease the psychic burden of living in "administered" society. (11) 

Human Beings Cannot Exist On Pirian (Nor Schwabian) Terms

In view of the siloing effect of social media, British essayist/novelist E.M Forster's 1909 short story, "The Machine Stops" makes use of prescient features like instant messaging, Zoom conferencing and shallow discourse. This makes the scenario a fitting intermediate step between today and some Piri-esque endpoint, wherein Forster's characters live in individual cubicles, all needs provided through an advanced mechanical god. (12)

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

Depending on how ample the resource base and the economics to exploit it, the main difference between this and Penfold's Piri is which fails first, the people, or the massive instrumentality they 

created that serves them at the ultimate cost of their humanity? 

Incrementally working toward putting all nations under the panoptic thumb of global finance since the end of World War II, policy operations like The Council On Foreign Relations and Zbigniev Brezinski's Trialateral Commission have become overshadowed by Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum as to which way things may go.

Towards A Digital Feudalism

"You must conform."

The latter's "Global Reset" program, (13) promising the imposition of a digital currency, implantable chips, human/machine interfaces and other schemes right off of Isvat's plate are being pushed with every bit the same unyielding conviction as that of Schell's Servant of the Guardian.

How ironic, then, that while the Pirians perished from a wont of spiritual drive after all material needs were fulfilled through fantastic technology that, in today's world, to save capitalism from its excesses, Big Tech's first move is to remove the individual right to material property in a society that has already been long conditioned to neglect the spiritual.

I wonder what would Pieter Bruegel think, following the total economic/social subjection of the masses before the church and state of his day, if he saw its computerized resurrection under a universal corporate state nearly five centuries later?

___

References:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Space-1999-Episode-Petter-Ogland/dp/1312585935

2. https://www.wga.hu/html_m/b/bruegel/pieter_e/10/18cockai.html

3 .https://ascmag.com/articles/logans-run-and-how-it-was-filmed

4. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0706327/

5.https://zoltanistvan.medium.com/environmentalists-are-wrong-nature-isnt-sacred-and-we-should-replace-it-b5a0de6444cb

6. https://www.criterion.com/films/27552-things-to-come

7. https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Miri_and_Piri

8. http://deadmalls.com/

9. https://therealdeal.com/tristate/issues_articles/all-eyes-on-sono/

10.https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/elections/article/Stamford-s-mall-is-struggling-Both-mayoral-16521437.php

11.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-dimensional-man-herbert-marcuse/1122986302?ean=9780807014172

12. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/the%20machine%20stops.pdf

13.https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shaping-the-future-of-the-fourth-industrial-revolution-klaus-schwab/1129040296?ean=9781984822611

Things To Come's 1936 vision of 1970

Stamford Town Center, 2021

Messiahs Or Floor Mops: "Jupiter Ascending" As Populist Alternative To "Dune"

"The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."

--Theodor Adorno

Starting in 2000 I spent about a year and a half in Vancouver, B.C. studying computer modeling and animation at what was, at the time, a little school on Beatty Street, which shared space with a barber shop devoted to hip hop culture.

Besides the occasional trim, students would sometimes hang out to graze through CDs or peruse the latest issue of The Source during lunch break.  On one occasion I got to talking with the owner of the business about the school's program, my interest in CG modeling and how my latest project was progressing when the man, taking me in with an assessing twinkle in his eye, remarked, "How can I use you?"

Even if I didn't have to return to class, I still recall after all this time being too stunned by the crude entrepreneurialism underlying this facetious crack to respond.

What's Lost, What's Gained... And What Matters

Bad sign: moviegoers re-
ceived this explanatory sheet
before seeing 1984's Dune

Yet the weight of such bluntness doesn't just define the main distinction between the celebrated 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune (Warner Bros.) and its oft-ridiculed predecessor Jupiter Ascending (Village Roadshow/Warner Bros., 2015), but, as suggested later on, is related to the difference in how the two movies were critically received.

Eric Roth's streamlined script for Denis Villeneuve's take on the intricate space epic--in contrast with the overwhelmed, if stylish David Lynch 1984 Dune--reciprocated the lifting of numerous plot conventions from the novel for use in Star Wars: A New Hope by, in turn, adopting the pacy approach of Lucas' own 1977 saga.

In the process, however, the historical and geopolitical themes driving the plot of a callow nobleman thrust into a destiny-defining struggle between feuding institutions are watered down from the 1965 classic--mainly, how the prospects for the environmental improvement of an entire inhabited world are halted when powerful interests discover the unforgiving demands of its ecosystem inadvertently provide the only means of holding together an interstellar empire.

In the film adaptation (which, so far, covers the first half of the novel) the psychoactive melange, derived from the scat of the planet Dune's gigantic sandworms, alone imparts the ability to navigate hyperspace, making travel between star systems practical. Yet scant acknowledgement that the evolution of the worms, the shai-hulud, in forging an obligatory relationship with the desert world, renders water--the most precious resource to the native Fremen--poisonous to them.

A Planet Of Two Nations

It has been widely observed how the native term for Dune, Arrakis, is a loose anagram of Iraq, but in these later days of global rare earth mineral and petroleum decline, another candidate might be found in the recently-razed Libya.

Before "Operation United Protector", a 2011 U.S.-led NATO bombardment crushed the North African nation back several centuries, Libyans enjoyed equitably-distributed proceeds from the national oil industry, robust public political engagement at all levels of society and the overall highest standard of living in the entire continent. (1)

Of particular note was a program of desert greening in a region bordering Egypt, so expansive it was visible from space in 2004. (2) So threatening to the Western industrialized economy was a nation aspiring to establish Africa's autonomy from centuries of foreign influence through the introduction of a continent-wide currency, in a matter of months, it was reduced to establishing open-air slave markets.

The Radicalism Of Going Bonkers

Though a similar seesaw relation of human dignity and aspiration on one end versus imperial expansion on the other--with a crucial bio/organic resource base as the fulcrum--is in play in Jupiter Ascending, the Lana and Lilly Wachowski production goes one better by subversively expanding the range of  their own sprawling allegory to encompass the populist, as well as the plutocratic, upturning the standard fairytale conceit of opportunity being the sole right of the privileged.

Libyan Al Khufrah Oasis from
Earth orbit (NASA, 2004)

For those who have passed on the 2015 space opera because of the abundance of derisive reviews (interestingly, I read several different ones dismissing  the movie using the same specific, yet murky pejorative, 'bonkers'), it's worth entertaining the possibility that Jupiter strikes perhaps too honest a chord for some regarding how individuals become conditioned in competitive society to inevitably view one another as tappable resources, like the owner of the Canadian barber shop.

It only makes sense. To Balem Abrasax (played with patrician menace by  Eddie Redmayne), oldest of the three heirs to the House of Abrasax, one of several elite blocs maneuvering for dominance in the galactic order, "Life is an act of consumption" justifies his family's preying upon the collective living wealth of the populaces of hundreds of planets--including Earth--in order to maintain their longevity.

Far from the majesty of liberating prophecy haunting the trials of Dune's Paul Atreides (AKA Muad'ib), Jupiter Jones, a frustrated cleaning woman played by Mila Kunis, finds herself caught in the rivalry between the siblings when it is discovered her genome is an exact copy of that of their recently passed mother, meaning she could contest their claim to the throne.

From Cleaning Houses To Court Nobility

As an illegal Russian immigrant, Jupiter is used by her enterprising uncle in Chicago to work in the homes of the affluent when she is thrust into a realm of satirically arcane bureaucracy, Borgian intrigues and assassination attempts stretching from a secret fortress hidden in the eye of Jupiter to numerous worlds elsewhere in the Milky Way.

Grooming whole planetary populaces over the course of millennia so they can unknowingly be reduced to a glistening, life-extending distillate (comparable in political value to melange), may gloss over the fact that the nobility in this setting are, in an inverted nod to Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) (3), cannibals, it also goes far to demonstrate the self-consuming social character of the prevailing economic arrangement, in our world.

With the exception of the Shadout Mapes, there is next to no day-to-day interaction between any of the powerful occupiers of Dune and the rank-and-file Arrikians. The cruelty of the prior Harkonnen rule to the Fremen is only alluded to in Dune, though we see it well enough when administered laterally against their peers of House Atreides.

By comparison, Jupiter ties the actions of the grasping Abrasax clan with those of Jupiter's own family, not just when an impatient Balem resorts to sending dragon-like Sargorn enforcers to abduct the Bolotnikovs but, in a more prosaic bit of foreshadowing, when Vladie, her scheming second cousin, anticipates Balem's defense of the status quo using less elegant language. When she wants to know why Vladie's entitled to the majority of the proceeds from the impending sale he arranged of her eggs to a fertility clinic, he quips, "That's capitalism, babe. Shit rolls downhill, profits flow up."

Just as Uncle Vassily unscrupulously takes advantage of his undocumented kin to operate his cleaning business (while indirectly being exploited, presumably, by those above him), Jupiter is forced to, after a fashion, cannibalize the wealth of her own body to get by.

Reaching For The Stars... Or A Remote

Though she wants the money to buy a telescope identical to that of her late astrophysicist father (killed by Russian mobsters), her cousin's comparatively shallow goals are dramatized to comically pathetic effect. Vladie panics when he realizes the big-screen TV he just bought with money that wasn't there might have to be repossessed when he learns Jupiter's eggs were not harvested, after all.

McTeague, filmed as Erich
von Stroheim's Greed (1924)

In fact, the fervor of this character for the extravagant bauble is comparable to the titular dentist's near-obsession with acquiring an expensive oversized gold tooth to ornament his office shingle in Frank Norris' naturalistic novel McTeague (1899), where a group of neighborhood characters in 19th century San Francisco are slowly torn apart by the brutally dehumanizing preoccupations with acquisitiveness, class envy and other factors propelled by the unrelenting pressures of the late Gilded Age. (4)

Of course, for followers of the timeline spanning the Dune universe (by now encompassing some 20 novels), this decay is evident with the once-upstanding Harkonnens before their debased appearance in Dune. Yet Jupiter's cross-class focus demonstrates how the avaricious priorities of a financialized economy reproduces itself as it goes down the line.

Licking The Hand That Slaps Us

Ironically, dedication to this abusive social relation is upheld in Dune at the cost of worthier ones. When the Saurdakar warriors of the deceitful Emperor Shaddam IV (whose career is related in the novel by Princess Irulan after Anna Kommene's 12th century account of her father, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I [5]) bring down the loyal Atreides and their entourage, the latter also sacrifice their lives to protect Paul and his mother near the end of the film. 

The Wachowski production calls this time-honored convention into question: what value is allegiance to a system by those living under it if its foundation is built on their own mutual exploitation for the benefit of the few who impose it on everyone else?

Jupiter Ascening transcends this contradiction by having the heroine emerge from a hard-earned education in the thrust-and-parry of the political/legal machinations leading into her post-Cinderella station by not automatically jumping to embrace all its benefits, but, instead, pausing to question if she is entitled to them if it means no one else is.

Princess Anna Kommene,

 author of The Alexiad

Conclusion

Despite its rich blend of dynastic history, ecology, resource politics, religion and Lawrencian messianism, the new theatrical Dune never demands of its powerful characters why they are entitled to their authority, consequently, neglecting the bulk of humanity by rendering it the object of the plot, rather than a subject in its own right.

Maybe my response to that barber's question, "How can I use you?" should have been, "How do we help one another?"

____

References:

1) https://www.mideastdiscourse.com/2021/04/13/why-nato-destroyed-libya-ten-years-ago/

2) https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/4998/green-circlesal-khufrah-oasis-libya

3) https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/872/modest.pdf

4) https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/mcteague

5) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/485025.The_Alexiad

Buck Rogers, Joe Biden And the Indispensability Of The American Race

"Lucky Buck is back!"

--Gil Gerard,

“Buck Rogers

 In the 25 Century”

(NBC, 1979-1981)

"America is back--we are

the head of the table, once

again."

--Joe Biden, "With Biden

America is Back, But Not

At the Head of the Table",

NPR, 12/2/20

It was hard to suppress a chuckle when Joe Biden's 2020 presidential win came on the heels of Legendary Pictures' announced television/cinematic revival of the 88-year-old American space hero, Buck Rogers (1).

The timing couldn't have been more darkly appropriate as the forgotten origins of the pulp-era character makes for an uncomfortable reminder of how, across so many decades, the celebrated benignity of U.S. global primacy and its concomitant racism, embraced by the incoming president, continues to shape domestic consciousness.

The World As a Jumbled Filing Cabinet

Employing a smug potpourri of select historical oversights, vague euphemisms for state aggression/criminality and oxymoronic expressions like "tactical cooperation" (not to mention the occasional outright lie) in its advocacy of continued dominance of the geopolitical scene against China, Russia, among other nations, Biden's Foreign Affairs essay (September/October, 2016) "Building On Success: Opportunities For the Next Administration" is a strong indicator of what we can expect post-Trump--and as political commentator/cartoonist Ted Rall warns, it will likely be even worse (2).

Since then, Biden's claim "the world needs steady American leadership more than ever" being complemented by "The world does not organize itself" (3), among other self-important zingers, is not simply insufferable, but mundicidal, given that the Union Of Concerned Scientists' Doomsday Clock, which tracks the likelihood of nuclear war, is currently little over one minute from midnight (4).

From Anthony To Buck

This messianic strain of national exceptionalism found expression in the original role of Rogers, as conceived by William Francis Nowlan in his novellas, "Armageddon 2419 A.D." and "The Airlords of Han" (which formed the basis for the more widely-known comic strip and movie serial version of "Buck Rogers" in the 1930s). The first adventure running in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories introduced Anthony Rogers, whom, like Richard Seaton, the inventor/hero of E.E. Smith's equally influential Skylark of Space of the same issue, projected a self-assured, technically enterprising determination when confronting profound challenges in a quintessentially American mode.

"Armageddon" and the sequel from the March 1929 Amazing detailed a 20th century engineer who falls victim to mysterious gases in a mine to awaken in a 25th century U.S. overrun by Chinese invaders. Once getting the lay of this new land, he quickly recharges the East coast descendants of "Bos-Tan" and "Nu-Yok" with the lost can-do spirit and know-how that turns the tide against the occupiers with an aplomb that brooks no doubt that under his guidance, not only will Wilma Deering and his other new friends defeat the enemy of the "American race" (sic) at home, but across the globe--indeed, they are fated to do so.

Sir Boss' Ignored Legacy

Despite the contrasting satirical foresight of his controversial A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, where Hank Morgan, a disentimed Hartford arms factory manager, who naively sows socio/political chaos when he introduces what he considers panaceic technology to the ignorant denizens of 13th century England, Mark Twain (an avow-ed anti-imperialist) would probably have been less than amused to consider his 1889 novel as immediate forebear to the many techno-evangelistic speculative adventures to come.

Probably starting with Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars novels featuring

John Carter, such a cosmic savior complex permeated the genre across a variety of tropes (from interplanetary and microscopic, to cybernetic settings) into the 1940s, like The Prisoner of Mars by the prolific Edmond Hamilton, whose novel from the May 1939 Startling Stories combined elements of Welles' recent panic broadcast with Twain's "Prince and the Pauper" in a tale of Martian tyranny, overcome by an heir to the throne raised on Earth as human.

The Spring issue of Planet Stories the following year featured two novelettes of similarly super-competent contemporary outlander heroes, one miniaturized to defeat a subatomic-scale despot in Ray Cummings' "The Girl From Infinite Smallness", the other, thawed out from a 20th century climbing accident in Carl Selwyn's proto-Terminator "Revolt On the Earth-Star", to end the mass brain-harvesting by robots of his oddly complacent descendants.

 

Back in the pages of the first issue of Startling (January 1939), apparently even felony could not stain the nobility of such scientific Prometheans: the subject of Stanley Weinbaum's The Blake Flame was preserved for a distant future in need via electric chair execution for murdering his wife in the present.

Regardless of how exotic the situations the protagonists might face, the through-line of these adventures upheld a disturbing insistence that, as the ideal of Western civilization, the American character and priorities could not help be of universal value because of the presumption that, to elaborate on Dick Cheney's quote from 2000, "The American way of life is not (only) non-negotiable"(5), but also the apex of everyone else's aspirations, for all time an space.

Master Races & Imperial Stars

In his author biography E.E. "Doc" Smith (Starmont House, 1986), Joseph Sanders views the space opera hero as a logical heir to the romanticized explorers and conquerors of the country's Western expansion, transposed to the anticipated frontier of the heavens.

As with the eliminationist ravages visited upon native nations standing in the way of white settlers, railroad barons and mining magnates, the Blavatskyesque racial overtones of Smith's point-based ranking system for the various alien species of the Lensman saga,  based on how much they diverge from a human "standard", cannot be denied.

Nowlan's contributions are more blunt, as Rogers' foes, the Han, are revealed to be the progeny of centuries-past forced extraterrestrial/human interbreeding, relegating the majority of Earth's population to non-human status--hardly a welcome foundation for a character that is to be the centerpiece of a renewed multi-media franchise simultaneous with the long standing bigotry of the new president (all multicultural pretensions aside). As a "trans-Atlanticist", Biden functions as point-man for a new wave of U.S-led global imperialism, according to Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace (click on his name to listen to interview) (6).

2016 Green VP candidate Ajamu Baraka

In the wake of his notorious predecessor, Biden's own racism seems to have evaporated from memory even faster than that of Nowlan's novellas, which were penned against the intellectualized xenophobia of the 1920s, significantly fomented by eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. whose writings were skewered by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. From his early opposition to school integration (7), support for the unconscionable destruction of Iraq and Libya (among innumerable other invasions/coups) (8), to his helping to draft the 1994 racially-targeting Federal Crime Bill (9), not to mention his bizarre praise of presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean..." (10)--a comment in keeping with Rogers' own backhanded admiration for the "simple, spiritual Blacks of Africa"* in "Airlords", cultural zeitgeist offers Joe Biden little defense.

Conclusion

Happily, while the last televised version of Buck Rogers In the 25th Century, starring the amiable Gil Gerard, was influenced more by the giddiness of the Disco era than the "Yellow Peril" of both the fiction and the early comic strips, it makes sense, when responding to what domestic and foreign policies to emerge from the Oval Office, to not lose sight of what convictions the new president will be drawing from in formulating them. 

*The text of Armageddon 2419 A.D--The Seminal "Buck Rogers" Novel, a 1978 Ace unitary edition of both stories, re-edited by Spider Robinson, reads the "wise, spiritual Blacks..."

____

References:

1. www.cbr.com/buck-rogers-legendary-pictures-film-franchise/

2. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_ted_rall/on_foreign_policy_biden_is_worse_than_trump

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/biden-knows-that-the-world-wont-organize-itself/616953/

4. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

5. https://www.mail-archive.com/usma@colostate.edu/msg21850.html

6. https://blackagendareport.com/black-agenda-radio-week-february-15-2021

7.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/joe-biden-didn-t-just-compromise-segregationists-he-fought-their-n1021626

8.https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/bidens--shameful-foreign-policy-record-extends-well-beyond-iraq/

9. https://www.theroot.com/biden-to-sign-executive-orders-for-his-racial-equity-ag-1846133093

10. https://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama

The original texts of "Armageddon: 2419 A.D." and "The Airlords of Han" can be found on Project Gutenberg at:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32530; http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25438

Varieties Of Evolutionary Experience In Sci-Fi Media

I admit, right off, much of my affection for Del Tenney's deliriously hokey The Horror Of Party Beach (20^th Century Fox, 1964) stems from delight in the novelty of it having been shot in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut.

Watching it recently for the first time on DVD (after years of childhood screenings at the local library), brought home anew just how much its curious take on mutation and the evolutionary process contributed to its charms, not to mention to that of other fantastic films and video of the last century.

Instant Monstrosities

Like the giant bug films of the prior, post-Hiroshima decade, such as the ants-take-LA spectacle Them! (Warner Bros., 1954) and Universal's response, Tarantula, the following year, with occasional exceptions, radiation provided the most common explanation for spectacular and rapid changes in otherwise mundane fauna and flora.

Just as improbable as such developments remain from the perspective of real-world considerations, like the Square-Cube Law (which, in assuming a giant creature's volume to expand unavoidably faster than its surface area, would render its body too heavy to move), the monsters of Horror are just as improbable for their character and genesis.

In the opening credits we see at the bottom of Long Island Sound dumped nuclear waste accreting onto human skeletons, whom, courtesy of a little time-elapsed animation, turn into googley-eyed scaly bipeds who bear what resemble dozens of closely-packed hot dogs protruding from where their mouths should be.

In short order, they make their way to the surface and begin marauding the town, along the way, disrupting a beach party performance by the Del-Aires, business at a local deli (still in operation, I might add) and even a slumber party before dispatched to rubber suit oblivion by a scientist hero and his girlfriend.

In contrast to their great numbers (one or two monsters become a horde courtesy of trick photography), they have an unlikely uniformity of appearance one would normally associate with organisms developed from progenitors of the same species, rather than the unwieldy impact of ionizing radiation. But then, the idea that toxic waste can inspire tissue growth and novel, complex life starting with nothing more than a collection of pirate bones is even more outlandish than giant spiders—even as a similar idea held sway for centuries prior to Pasteur.

Abiogenesis, allowing for the origination of fully-formed organisms from inanimate matter, like fossils, was, itself, a form of spontaneous generation, a belief which maintained that living things could appear from circumstantial associations--a favorite example being the rural notion that field mice were somehow spawned from grain, since they were so frequently sighted around barns filled with it.

Evolutionary Overdrive

Though these and other pre-scientific notions have long-since been dispelled, they hold a superficial logic that finds more intricate expression in other atom-inspired fare, like Day the World Ended (ARC/AIP, 1955), directed by low-budget maven Roger Corman.

Seven diverse survivors of nuclear war, including a gangster, his moll, a prospector and a geologist take refuge with a prepper and his daughter in their home, cradled in a valley whose generous lead deposits protect it from the worst of the catastrophe.

With the grim threat of impending fallout, rations must be spread thinner than expected, reducing the chances for everyone's survival... except for Radek, one refugee who seems to be adapting readily to the altered world beyond their haven, dramatized by such disturbing habits as venturing out at night to mingle among the encroaching mutant beastiary of the surrounding forest and even noshing with gusto on radiation-tainted meat.

The dialogue between Richard Denning's geologist hero and Paul Birch, assaying an ex-Navy man with a Pacific bomb test background, demonstrates scriptwriter Lou Rusoff's earnest appreciation of how a given habitat selects certain species to thrive and others to die off based on which do or don't develop useful characteristics in response to its various pressures. The story's brazen departure, however, that dramatic changes to denizens of an entire ecosystem (forget a disaster so lethal as to warrant thousands, millions of years for recovery) can foster the development of adaptations in weeks, versus the conventional crapshoot impact of random chemical, electromagnetic or other influences, expressed over countless generations, is what makes Day almost creepily poetic.

As a contemporary aside, Alex Garland's Annihilation (Paramount, 2017) from Jeff VanderMeer's celebrated Southern Reach Trilogy (FSG Adult, 2014), while applying a less aggressive wave of extraterrestrial transformation, rather than the messy Cold War variety, in its own fashion, still supports the flattering misconception that emerged not long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace's articulation of modern evolutionary theory in the 19^th century: that it embodies a direction and purpose.

Evolution's Darlings

Contrary to the dominant focus regarding the former's 1859 publication of On the Origin Of Species and its subsequent impact on the religious sphere well into the following century (the Scopes Monkey Trial, Creationism/Intelligent Design), productions like Joseph Stephano's eerie ABC program The Outer Limits (1963-65) reflect an equally enduring reactionary defense of species chauvinism in the secular world.

The episode "Sixth Finger", starring David McCallum of Man From UNCLE fame, depicts the metamorphosis of a lowly, resentful Welsh miner into a macrocephalic superman of the future, after he submits to an inventor's evolutionary-accelerating cabinet. The more he uses it, the more powerful the abilities his changing form exhibits as he hurtles toward human 

biological destiny.

While the results are as reliably pitiable and frightening as most of the entries in a science fiction anthology from the screenwriter of Psycho, the premise slavishly hews to the conviction that because homo sapiens sapiens has the power of reason, our debut on the planet is, logically, the goal of Nature—or at least puts us on the right path toward whatever that may be.

The dreadful socio/political fallout from such movements as the eugenics policies of the 1920s (not to mention the more recent fascination with genetic determinism) to serve this teleological fixation makes little difference, as adaptive evolution has no direction.

Familiar expressions like "next step in evolution" are as meaningless as "devolution", because, far from being antiseptically removed from the surrounding environment, like the miner in the cabinet, life's success lies in how effectively its multifarious expressions fill various ecological niches via incremental, sometimes beneficial, mutations in response to what different settings throw its way—not on how clever one facet of it might be.

Some shark species have remained virtually the same for millions of years as robust predators of the deep because they have become adapted to an environment that has been 

more consistent in its challenges than others. And before we prize ourselves for our unique ability as accomplished toolmakers to adjust to a vast range of climes (including outer space), it's worth noting that, to date, as a species, we have only been on the Earth about one fifth of the time of our first upright ancestors, homo erectus, who thrived for two million years.

Looking Backwards

Going in the other direction, the Jekyll-and-Hyde update behind Jack Arnold's Monster On the Campus (Universal, 1958) yields its own equally whimsical take on the pageant of life, courtesy of a prized extant ceolacanth preserved against bacterial decay with a dose of gamma rays by the ever-professorial Arthur Franz. Unfortunately, the irradiated blood of this "living fossil" (once thought to have been extinct for 70 million years), has acquired the ability to revert whatever animal ingesting it into its ancient counterpart.

Much of the plot revolves around a series of contrived episodes wherein, alternatively, a German Shepard, a mosquito and—via his ubiquitous pipe—Franz's paleontologist character, turn, respectively, into a proto-wolf predator, a giant insect and a murderous ape man, following contact with the blood.

Though it makes for maddening viewing waiting for anyone to put two-and-two together as the academic death toll mounts, the idea that the embryological phenomenon (at least in vertebrates) of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny could be jammed into reverse is, in its way, an intriguing maguffin and presages Ken Russell's Altered States (Warner Bros.) by twenty-two years--not to mention the wilder speculations surrounding the origins of intronic, or so-called "junk" DNA.

Conclusion

Coming full-circle to the monster bash of Stamford's Cummings Beach, the true value of this representative sampling of modest (and occasionally bizarre) productions lies less in any consistent quality of acting, writing or direction, but in what their themes reflect about our collective sense of our place in Nature... with exalting and unsettling results, alike.