I was looking for a Ghost Transmissions reference the other day and ended up redirected to a sci-fi message board; had a quick browse, like you do (becomes aware that this is sounding awfully like the sort of thing people say when they want to explain why they were coming out of a sex shop). Constant Readers, please beware should you venture this way, for Lo! They have fora for politics and current affairs. And the politics of such places veer dramatically from the radically progressive to the frankly terrifying, with very little moderation or common ground. There's people on there who use the words "Ayn Rand" without the associated phrases "psychotic misanthropy" or "bullshit".
Anyway, the bit that caught my attention was a spectacular moment when someone (discussing, I think, the NHS) used the phrase "do-gooder", which I thought had vanished with the 1980s. A translation for our American Ghosts: "bleeding heart" should cover it.
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| My entire fashion sense; Toulouse Lautrec not shown. |
Yeah, someone used that phrase. On a Doctor Who forum. You know. All about heroics and non-conformity and protecting people. It's an especially annoying comment, because from about 1990 until 1996, the show only existed as a series of novels, which contained some of the most subversive political ideas that ever sneaked into the halfway popular imagination.
For anyone familiar with the contemporary TV version, this might come as quite a shock. I'm not talking a little mild liberalism here. Openly queer, non-monogamous characters abounded and the politics were extreme. Russell T Davis wrote his magnificent Damaged Goods for the range, a savage story about class conflict and outsider status so moving that at least one publisher begged him to lose the science-fiction and publish it 'straight', which misses the point on SO many levels. Ben Aaronovitch wrote The Also People, positing a completely fluid society, culturally, politically, sexually; absolute polymorphism in all senses, made to sound like a utopia that could actually work if only we had the technology. Paul Cornell's Human Nature was later adapted for television, without the savage humour or the optimistic anti-war slant of the original.
My point being, these worlds that Ghost Transmissions is trying to explore are not especially conservative or middle of the road (notice that I never talk about Star Trek. Sorry folks). They are radical universes. How many times do we have to see the rebels vs. Evil Empire That Never Ended before we get the point? Frankly, the audience is a victimised and increasingly angry one; we don't want to see more than one Starship Troopers (and even that universe is a surprisingly subversive one). We want the heroes who are born to lose.
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| I was 13 and this was a defining moment. Reject the binary opposition! Also, fashion icon 2. |
To that end, I'd like to take a few moments to study the rebels, the outsiders and the born losers who populate the Ghost universes. I'll level with you: there's an agenda here.
I can't help but keep noticing that what might once have been science fiction excesses are creeping into day-to-day life. Age specific ultrasound weaponry used only to exist in Michael Moorcock. The BBC news looks like The Day Today and there are plans to scan license plates on garage forecourts, to take DNA samples from teenagers caught truanting. Sometimes it feels like the only thing that can save us is the incompetence of underpaid private security contractors, and yet -
There's a power in fiction. A strength which can sometimes empower and sometimes transform our very nature. Re-write the fictions of our own worlds. It's the power of these fictions that I want to explore now. Which Ghost Transmissions changed the world? Which ones could?
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| I defy anyone, regardless of gender, not to want to be a bit like Emma Peel. |
The power of the story. That's what we're going to go looking for.
Still coming with me?
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