Jargogled Impressions.

I have never been a comic book fan, even of the graphic novel kind. I have tried my hand with a few authors like Eisner, Moore, Gaiman, etc. but the over-reliance on visual layout does not seem to satisfy me. I have a hunger for words on paper that can let my imagination run wild. A brilliantly designed comic book steals away that pleasure as it makes the subject and the surroundings much more explicit. I have read Scott McCloud’s brilliant work at dissecting the comic book art medium “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” and was surprised at the levels of abstraction and visual formats that comic designers choose to convey their imaginations. But sadly, I was never able to pick up this medium of reading seriously.

Even so, a few years back I was perusing through a few graphical novels at the Seattle Central Library and I happened to chance upon a short story format comic panel that really gripped me. While I have now forgotten the author and the comic book, the subject of time and its relativity stuck with me. The panel depicted two different species observing and feeling time in their own frame of reference, with one species – a couple of giants seemingly interpreted as statues by the other species because time moves faster for them versus the other. In a sense, like the trees around us for whom time may as well be a different concept altogether.

Comic books are mostly geared around science fiction and therein lies the link to my second tertiary interest. I end up going back to science fiction a lot of times even though my relationship with this genre of writing is patchy at best. While I have read through the masters in this space (Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adam, Aldous Huxley, etc.) and have been fascinated by their leaps of imagination and creativity, somehow the chord hasn’t struck with me the way literary fiction does to me. It’s not an indictment to the medium though, and I don’t subscribe to the view that science fiction is more escapism than literature. It’s also not always a dystopic vision of the future too though many novels do end up taking a rather bleak view of the future. But the effort involved in making sense of a new world and then observing human nature through that new reality does seem sometimes to be too wasteful and effort.

Science fiction is analogous to traveling to distant and exotic places to discover something new and interesting. Literary fiction is traveling to the innermost minds and feelings of us humans regardless of nations and geographies to unearth commonalities and the universalism of the human condition. Both aim to address our innermost curiosities to step away from our internal lives and our own narrow worlds, and step into a strange, alien world.

Living in the time of COVID-19, these two worlds seem to inch closer together to morph as a medium to understand the human predicament. As the world around us grows stranger and a new mindset is thrusted upon us, science fiction does not look so strange anymore. Science fiction is meant to serve this purpose – to make sense of a world by reframing the situation through eyes not our own but those of intergalactic species and aliens. Through this lens, asking questions of our existence and our purpose on this world here becomes possible, so does an extrapolation of the nature of reality and of the human consciousness. And in cases like the one we are living in today, by thinking ahead and informing us of the art of the possible, speculative fiction takes away the shock factor that could commonly afflict people not primed before an event of such large magnitude happens. Science fiction could really become required reading for kids. And not just because it’s a healthy and exciting tool to prepare us for calamities and catastrophes, but also because through its prophetic visions and imaginative leaps in the concepts of human progress, it can inspire people to scientific pursuits in order to realize their wildest of imaginations.

The visions and peregrinations inherent in science fiction becomes more potent the closer it is to reality. When the stories tease the thin line dividing the present and the future, and in so doing, help the reader easily take the leap along with the author, the fiction becomes real and possible. What could soon very well be, becomes instant fodder to people to latch on to and work towards. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

In many cases, as in the series Black Mirror, when a logical extrapolation of existing technologies (like social media, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, immersive games, etc.) brings out the societal implications of technology and that skirts the boundaries of ethical and philosophical quandaries, the mind is unsettled and provoked. It strikes more as a fight or flight stimuli versus a figment of someone’s imagination and we become intrigued to the point of becoming afraid. Something like this can happen, and may happen soon, we wonder.

The purpose of art is to shine the light of truth to our understanding of the world. Science fiction, when coupled with an artistic sense of depicting human condition, becomes a vital tool to instigate and investigate what could possibly be. The platform that speculative fiction provides to authors enables a radical inquiry into the prevalent culture of the times. Through the reactions of the vox populi, one can gauge the mores of social life and of the contemporary thoughts and ideologies. Today, we are vexed by the idea of traveling to Mars one day, by what AI will do to our mundane jobs, by what would a brain-machine interface enable, by what immersive life would be in VR, by what bio-engineering would mean for us humans in terms of our longevity, by what the advancements in hyperloop would mean for our travels within and outside this world. Tomorrow, we may take these things for granted. But what would vex the generation of people 100 years in the future. The limits to which our imaginations can wonder is itself limited. What lies outside of our imaginations is a mystery. But the steps, each on its own a leap of our own understanding and dreams, added together, can help us peek into the future like nothing else can.