Just one more reason why San Junipero is the best episode of Black Mirror.
San Junipero is the best episode because it does portray future technology as deeply unsettling, because new tech is ALWAYS deeply unsettling. But in the end, it produces a strange new kind of beauty we never even knew could exist before.
That's what tech really does. It doesn't just make things better. It doesn't just make things worse. It makes things DIFFERENT. Itbends the contours of human life, and changes what it means to be human. By giving humans more power, it unleashes the bizarreness of our imagination.
Sci-fi that merely trumpets progress is as boring as sci-fi that issues proclamations of doom. The best sci-fi is about otherness.
The highest purpose of sci-fi is summed up in the last line of "The Left Hand of Darkness":
"Will you tell us about the other world out among the stars - the other kinds of men, the other lives?"
"Will you tell us about the other world out among the stars - the other kinds of men, the other lives?"
Or from the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation:
"That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence."
"That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence."
Sometimes that stuff is bad, sometimes it's good, but it's always DIFFERENT. And that's why sci-fi -- good sci-fi -- will always be my favorite form of fiction.
The only thing weirder and more fun than good sci-fi is history itself, unfolding in real time.
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The only thing weirder and more fun than good sci-fi is history itself, unfolding in real time.
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