Star Wars: A New Hope

Tattoine, the remote desert planet where Luke Skywalker is raised by his Aunt and Uncle, is full of nomads and farmers who scrabble out a life among rocks and dunes. The Jawas roam around in caravans, and the Tusken Raiders are dressed in strips of towel and called only by a name (Sand People) that is probably the space version of a well-known US epithet for Arabs. The only "nice" people on the planet appear to be the transplanted (white) humans like Skywalker and Obi Wan. As usual, George Lucas serves up racial stereotypes, likes white people, and doesn't do much else.

Dune

Arakis, the desert planet whose rolling dunes shelter sandworms and a tribe of polygamous insurrectionaries known as the Fremen, is clearly set up as a Middle Eastern country that has been colonized for centuries. Arakis is the only source of "the spice," a substance that makes interplanetary space travel possible and is mined from the sands by giant spice rigs (that look a lot like oil rigs in the films). Not only is the culture in the Dune universe intended to refer to Muslim culture — for instance, a massive war is referred to as a "Jihad" — but the economy of Arakis is similar to the Saudi, Kuwaiti or Iraqi economies. The planet is full of many oppressed tribes, and ruled by a tiny elite class that trades a single natural energy source for wealth and power. What's interesting is that the books side with the Fremen, who are essentially the insurgents bent on overthrowing the wealthy offworlders who want Arakis' spice.

Stargate (the movie)

While the Stargate television series deal with many different worlds, the original film is focused on only one: Abydos, a land of space Egyptians, ruled by an alien named Ra. According to Stargate lore, Ra came to Earth during the Egyptian era to steal slaves for Abydos. So the culture of the desert planet is a direct descendant of early Middle Eastern culture on Earth. Weirdly, it hasn't developed in the centuries since its transplantation, though of course modern Egypt on Earth is far more technologically advanced than ancient Egypt. It's as if the people on Abydos have just been waiting for some white dude to come and rescue them.

Starship Troopers (the movie)

In the first Starship Troopers film, and the book, our Earth soldiers first attempt to mow down the alien bugs on their home planet of Klendathu. It's a desert planet, much like Planet P where the bugs and humans do most of their fighting in the first movie. While there is no direct connection between the culture of the bugs and Middle Eastern cultures, the desert surroundings definitely suggest it. The bugs are the ultimate, dehumanized "enemy," and therefore it's tempting to say they stand in for Iraqis since the films were all made during a period in history when there was tension between Iraq and the United States. Still, it would be just as easy to say the bugs stand in for other "enemies" in desert regions. So the connection in this franchise between a desert planet and the Middle East is weaker than in the previous three, though it's still there. Especially because so much wartime propaganda is about dehumanizing the enemy.

The Years of Rice and Salt

This novel by Kim Stanley Robinson is not set on another planet — instead, it's set on a very different Earth from our own. It's an Earth where the plagues of the middle ages wiped out nearly all of Christian Europe, and where Islam became the dominant religion in the West. So it's not about the Middle East, but instead a brilliant thought-experiment in which what many people think of as "Middle Eastern culture" has been superimposed on what many think of as "Western culture." The results? Muslim feminism, for one thing. And India colonizes Europe rather than the other way around.

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New York Must Be Destroyed

One of the most obvious ways that scifi echoed the events of 9/11 was to destroy New York, over and over again. The collapse of New York, via time traveling shenanigans or giant sea monsters, continues to obsess scifi creators. In the incredibly terrible A Sound of Thunder (2005), a time traveler who steps on a butterfly during the Jurassic Age changes the present and turns New York into a savage jungle. New York is made into a less-savage jungle by an inexplicable disease in I Am Legend (2007). Aliens with giant world-destroying Tripods smash New York and everywhere else in War of the Worlds (2004). And of course we've already talked a lot about how Cloverfield (2008) is basically a direct allegory of 9/11, with a giant monster standing in for scary terrorists who came out of nowhere and bashed the city.

The Surveillance State is Watching You

Although Minority Report (2002) technically came out after 9/11, and certainly took on new overtones thanks to the passage of the USA-Patriot Act, it was probably conceived and mostly filmed before the attacks took place. Still, another Philip K. Dick-inspired movie, A Scanner Darkly (2006) is clearly an homage to the surveillance state that the current Bush Administration built — and that John Poindexter tried to make even more science fictional with his Total Information Awareness program (now called Terrorist Information Awareness). Fear of computer surveillance — or resigned acceptance of it — permeates countless scifi creations of this era, including Vernor Vinge's superlative near-future novel Rainbows End (2006), which focuses in part on a biotech terrorist attack that's being stopped by intelligence experts who work entirely within vast computer networks.

The Terrorists Are Everywhere!

Australian Max Barry published Jennifer Government in 2003, a novel where corporations stage fake terrorist attacks to get publicity for their new shoes. But other tales were less satirical. Mark Millar's Civil War comic book series (2006-7) dealt with what happens to the superheroes of the Marvel universe when Congress passes the "superhero registration act" and forces all heroes to be tracked in the name of fighting terror. Hero fights hero in this response to the Bush Administration's efforts to track Muslims and other "undesirables." Battlestar Galactica dug deep into politically incendiary terroritory in 2006 when some of the humans become suicide bombers in order to fight the Cylon in occupied New Caprica. Even Star Trek: Enterprise had a terrorist plot arc with the Xindi in 2003. In books, Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel (2007) dealt with high-tech terrorists in a surveillance state.

Department of Homeland Security is Plotting to End the World

One of the conceits of post-nuke apocalypse series Jericho (2006-2008) is that the Department of Homeland security may have been behind the attacks that flattened most major U.S. cities with nukes. 28 Weeks Later (2007) has U.S. security forces ordered into London to "protect" citizens being repatriated after a plague has wiped out most of England. Turns out of their orders is just to shoot everybody — innocents and monsters alike — if the situation gets out of control. In The Mist (2007), a secret military experiment unleashes extra-dimensional killer beasts on a small town. And in Serenity (2005), Joss Whedon's film spinoff from the Firefly series, a government obsessed with quelling uprisings in its satellite colonies is hunting one of the main characters, River, an escaped experiment who would have become a mind-reading weapon under government control.

Desert Planets are the Source of All Unrest

Two new Dune miniserieses hit the bigtime on the SciFi Channel: Dune: The Miniseries (2001) and Children of Dune (2003). Both are true to Frank Herbert's novels, which are thinly-veiled allegories of Middle Eastern politics — complete with Jihads and desert planets which produce a chemical that enables rapid transportation. ("The spice must flow" = "The oil must flow".) New Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert's son, came out in 2002, 2003, and 2004 and dealt directly with Butlerian Jihad that created the world of the first novels. Clearly, Jihad was on SF writers' minds. People who tuned into the Stargate TV series throughout the last ten years were treated to another desert planet full of nasties and insurrectionaries: Abydos, whose inhabitants are basically space Arabs.

They Live revealed the psychological effects of late-80s Reaganism gone wild. Even Iraq War zombies have shown up on the big screen - and Cloverfield? It's the return of the repressed, the environmental effects of offshore dumping come back to tear us apart. Or something like that.

Women aren't meant to ask for divorces and move out - bad things will happen. Anthropologists should be wary of what they bring home with them; maybe they should never have left the country in the first place. After all, there are Communists everywhere. And everyone's off having a good time, doing something else, without you.

And what about The Stuff? That weird and strangely forgotten horror classic from 1985 about some sort of brain-rotting, highly addictive frozen yogurt... that turns out really to be an organism mined from the surface of the Earth by sinister retail dessert conglomerates? Edible geology. Timed perfectly for the advent of artificial sweeteners and for the arrival of frozen yogurt at your local mall, who wasn't afraid? "Are you eating it?" the film's absurd poster asked, addressing an American audience terrified less by the Cold War than by the FDA's recent approval of Aspartame. "Or is it eating you?"

More than a year ago, meanwhile, The New Yorker ran a short article about Halloween-themed haunted houses in Queens - or Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or Atlanta, I don't remember - that had been designed to provoke real fears. Not chainsaw-wielding maniacs, in other words, but tax auditors and bedroom spiders and muggers with hoods. The experience of falling from great heights. Having your in-laws round for a surprise breakfast while you're sitting on the toilet, late for work. And so on. Are you more scared of being eaten by zombies or of becoming homeless? I'm reminded of Nick Flynn's book, the unfortunately titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, in which Flynn, a volunteer at the local homeless shelter, finds, horrifically, that his own father has just checked in for the night.

In other words, what are we really afraid of?

The idea here is that maybe contemporary horror films only cater to one side of our world's ever-widening political divide. We've got the horrors of ecocide, of nuclear radiation, of Orwellian Christian hordes taking over the country, and robot Presidents - but what if a different sort of horror film were to come out someday in a theater near you? You're browsing Netflix in the summer of 2009 and you see Blood Rite recommended for whatever algorithmic reason. You rented something once with "blood" in the title. You have no idea, actually. But you're bored - so you click on it.

It's about gangs of AIDS-infected homosexuals kidnapping Cincinnati businessmen and forcing them to drink blood. It's directed by Jim McGreevey.

Two weeks later you see a preview for Sovereign Terrain: a lone man stands out in the desert somewhere, surrounded by undead Mexicans. There are more and more of them. He doesn't understand where they're coming from. Are they magic? They walk right through fences - and they double in number every 36 hours. What's worse, he once employed them...

Then there's the gay black couple that only adopts white boys. They watch ballet during the Super Bowl and hug quite frequently, even by normal standards. That's a lot of hugging, people mutter to themselves. That's an awful lot of hugging. Grown men shift uncomfortably in their seats. I don't like this film, they think. It's scarier than Jaws. They have their hands in front of their eyes. Women are screaming.

It gets worse.

The blacks are actually Jewish.

What's happening to this country? People literally throw popcorn at the screen. It's outrageous. We are losing control. Mexicans illegally crossing the border are just a front for an invasion by Satan - wait a minute, that was Constantine.

So what about horror for the Red States?

Sinister black athletes invade from space. Women are drawn to them.

Perhaps we've seen enough Blue State horror. Perhaps we've seen too many military coups and Fascist dystopias and suburban conformist nightmares. Perhaps we don't even know what we're afraid of anymore. Maybe we'll all live in cages, whilst endangered tree frogs rule the world. Down with these goddamn tree frogs! people scream. Humans unite!

Virus Freakouts
The US was just coming out of the 1980s AIDS horrors, and a big theme of Clinton's first term was the need for universal health care. Science fiction of the era responded with countless tales of viral decimation and health care run amok. In 12 Monkeys, a Terry Gilliam film, a guy who has become unstuck in time is trying to stop a deadly virus from wiping out most of homo sapiens. In Greg Bear's novel Slant, everyone has gotten high-tech brain implants to prevent them from falling prey to crippling depression and other health problems — a virus destroys the implants and people go nuts. And in Gattaca, the health care system goes wild, producing a completely genetically-engineered human race where disease is bred into non-existence. Except our hero is a wild type, born without any genetic engineering. Can he fight the medico-industrial state?

The Liberal Happy Place
Clinton's theme song was Fleetwood Mac's groovy "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," and his presidency ushered in an era of unprecedented economic growth during peacetime (well, if you forget about a little bombing in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia). Several popular works of science fiction celebrated the idea happy liberal tomorrows, such as Contact, based on Carl Sagan's novel about first contact between humans and nice, glowy aliens who just want to help us. Liberal icon Jody Foster stars as the atheist astronaut who meets the friendly alien. Star Wars I was also notably warm and fuzzy, focusing on the out-in-the-country boyhood of Annakin. And in bookstores Ursula LeGuin's Four Ways to Forgiveness focused on characters who have left war behind and are adapting to peacetime.

Dude, It's the Interwebs!
The World Wide Web was still young (people still called it "the information superhighway"!), and the Clinton White House was the first to have a Web site. Plus, as libertarian cyber-journalist Declan McCullagh never stopped reminding us, Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. Two of the greatest SF books of the era, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, managed to present us with plausible and brilliant visions of a future where the internet is thousands of years old — and in the second book, humans are given brain tweaks to turn them into human extensions of the Web (essentially, for you nerds, they become the top layer on the OSI model). In cinema, however, movies about cyber-serial killers such as Virtuosity, and cyber-what-the-hells in Lawnmower Man, did not get it right. It wasn't until Clinton was nearly out of office that The Matrix came along and finally gave us the internet-influenced science fiction we deserved.

Conservative Paranoia
All that crazy liberal "atheists bond with aliens" crap got the neoconservatives completely freaked out, and a counter-trend of Contract with America-influenced science fiction came into being. Though Clinton loved the X-Files, it was actually the perfect right-wing paranoia show, all about how a soft-hearted girly man is trying to bring down the government by discovering its secrets, cavorting with Native Americans, and loving the alien. Books from the Left Behind series, about the Christian apocalypse, gave evangelical scifi fans their fix. As for Independence Day, I'm guessing the cheers weren't about being glad the real-life president was safe. Keeping the Aliens in Line
Clinton may have kept the U.S. (mostly) at peace, but the strongly conservative Congress was making other plans. Those plans eventually bore fruit during the Bush Administration, but you could still see them reflected in scifi fantasies of the Clintonian variety. Stargate was the ultimate "let's shut our borders to the Middle East" movie, with a portal that opens to a world ruled by space Egyptians who would love to destroy our precious Western way of life. Men in Black outlined a new border policy with alien life — keep them monitored and tagged, and if they get out of line bring in the big guns. And although Armageddon wasn't about aliens, its muscular men with their big nukes and giant drills fighting a nasty asteroid certainly presaged the Bush Era to come. Plus, in Armageddon, all the nasty liberal cities in the world like Paris are destroyed.