Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number six: Theme #6 Risk Averse Society versus the Thrill of the Frontier Of course, being too safe is a little scary in itself. Part of the reason people want to go is because it’s exciting. But the mores of Earth-bound society make it a sin to take too large a risk. How will that morality conflict with the ambitions of our settlers? Will they be blocked “for their own good”?
Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number five: Theme #5 Failsafes and Adaptation Space is a dangerous place, don’t get me wrong. But then again, so is Siberia or Alaska. Or the Sahara. There are dangers all over the world that are quite sufficient to kill an exposed human without important life-support or supplies. We don’t worry about that most of the time, because we’ve adapted to these dangers. We do that through the equipment we carry (starting with clothes), through the behaviors we learn, and through the environments we create for ourselves.
If you’re an anti-spoiler purist, you might not want to read this one, but… Implicit in some of my posts about “No Children in Space”, is a story choice some American space fans probably find a little questionable, which is my decision to have Hiromi and Georgiana go up on a Soyuz launch vehicle which is (at least superficially) very much the same as today’s Soyuz launch system and Soyuz-TMA orbiter. Why not an American spacecraft? Are we (as Americans) being unpatriotic? Is this some liberal PC “world peace” thing? Photo Credit: Isaac Mao @ Flickr / CC By
Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number four: Theme #4 People Who Don’t Want to Be There Won’t Be Close on the heels of my previous complaint comes this one: In an effort to drum up sympathy from audiences, some writers have portrayed characters who are constantly whining about their “plight” on the frontier. This is totally ridiculous.
Continuing with themes in the stories for Lunatics… Here’s number three: Theme #3 Fatalism versus Can-Do on the Frontier One of the unfortunate memes in movie science fiction — especially European SF for some reason — is the recurrence of the “nobel sacrifice of life” or of the triumph of hopelessness and fatalism. Some character inevitably concludes that it’s all pointless and takes their helmet off to die in the “cold hard vacuum of space”. I guess this is supposed to be symbolic of something or other, but I find it incredibly annoying. Real space pioneers just won’t act like that. Being on a frontier really focuses you on basic survival needs.
Themes in Lunatics Although Rosalyn Hunter is credited as the “writer” on Lunatics and I am credited as the “director”, the reality is a bit more muddled than that. We are highly collaborative in our creative process, as you might expect from a married team. I thought it might be interesting to introduce some of the themes we’re working into the series. Here’s the first: Theme #1 “Bridging from Here to There”
This is getting a little ahead of ourselves, but we thought it would be a fun extra to share with you all. This is a bit of dialog that Rosalyn wrote for the 2nd episode of Lunatics, to be called “Earth”. This is our own performance of the dialog, although we’ll probably have real voice actors re-record the scene for the final episode. This gave us a chance to test out our recording equipment and technique. We have a little bit of a room acoustics problem, but otherwise it worked out quite well. I have an idea for an acoustic panel made from cardboard that may improve the ambiance considerably.
