io9: Ask the Readers

What Do You Think About the New Afrofuturism?

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:25:13 PDT

Everybody is YouTubing Barack Obama's March 18 speech about racial politics partly because it was one of the most nuanced political speeches in recent memory, but also because he played the futurist card. He talked about his own racially-mixed family, and speculated about how mixed-race community and people represent the future of the United States. He described several ways that racial reconciliation of the future could begin on a foundation of mixed-race identity. What do you think of this style of futurism? By answering, you can help an undergrad at the University of Arkansas, who wrote in to pose a question about Afrofuturism.

Obama's rhetoric calls to mind the tradition of Afrofuturism, in which writers, artists, and creators mingle traditional African culture with futuristic imagery and ideas. We've written about Afrofuturism at io9 before, in our interview with Junie from P-Funk. And Octavia Butler, whose book Kindred we recommended as one of twenty that could change your life, has written a series of books that deal with Afrofuturist themes (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, and Patternmaster).

io9 reader Dolly Hayde recently wrote in to ask us whether we could bring up the topic of Afro-Futurism on the blog. She's taking a class at the University of Arkansas on folk and pop music, and writes:

My project centers around African-American musicians who claim space traveler and/or extraterrestrial personas. This work has been primarily informed by music biographies, a whole lot of bizarre rap and jazz tracks, and anthropological texts on science fiction and racial identity. I'm also currently reading Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and researching Afrofuturism online wherever I can find it . . . I'm curious as to what [io9] commenters have to say about this specific phenomenon within the greater context of science fiction and pop culture in general.

So what do you think? Is Obama an Afrofuturist? Are there other examples of Afrofuturism in pop culture that Dolly needs to look at?

Image via Time.

Should Movies Update Classic Scifi, Or Go Retro?

Charlie Jane Anders — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:30:23 PDT

There are two ways of taking a science fiction classic and bringing it to the screen: You can bring it up to date, setting it in the present day and revamping the characters accordingly, like Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds. Or you can set it in the era when it was written, and painstakingly recreate the time and place that gave birth to it, like Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie. Which route do you think works better for movies of classic novels?

Really, it's impossible to recapture the era when something originated completely. The past is a foreign country, and all that. And the older the work in question, the more stuff there's likely to be that a 21st century audience would find bizarre or offensive. The best you can hope for is a kind of retro-futurist look back at the golden age.

(I was inspired to think about this by yesterday's discussion of the rumored John Carter movie, and how many people were violently opposed to a WotW-style update.)

How likely is it that film-makers will be able to reconstruct the look of a bygone era and make us understand the real-world issues that the old stories were dealing with metaphorically? (Even Watchmen, which only takes place 23 years ago, is going to have a hard time hauling our asses back into a Cold War mindset.)

And there's another dimension to the issue of filming Golden Age science fiction: stories set in the future, like the Lensmen saga or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, both in development right now. Should movies of those books try to recapture a 1930s or 1960s vision of the future? How far should film-makers go in trying to pay a retro-futurist tribute to these classic works, maybe in a sort of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow style?

Instead of doing a poll, I'm just throwing the question out there. On one level, it's just a yes-or-no question: should film-makers try to be faithful to the eras when classic SF texts were written? On another level, it's a much more complex issue. What do you think?

Movies That Take Place Just Barely In The Future

charliejane — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:30:00 PST

What do you call it when a filmmaker takes the present day and makes it futuristic? Andrew Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show and directed Gattaca, says his movies take place "five minutes into the future." But that's kind of a mouthful. We need a term that you can ask for at your indy video store.

You could always borrow "mundane science fiction," a term that's sweeping the literary SF world. But the word "mundane" doesn't conjure up images of a taut thriller, does it? There's also "near future," but that could encompass films set in 2027. The Village Voice has used the five-minutes-into-the-future tag to describe films as diverse as Fight Clubhttp://www.villagevoice.com/livoice/9942,movies,9396,0.html and Demonlover. So what do you think? What's a snappy term for a movie that takes place in a few minutes?