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Recycled: Fiddler On the Roof is Science Fiction

Filed Under: SF Films, Speculative Fiction, Uncategorized

I didn’t have a chance to write a good post today, so here’s some recycled content from last year:

Nobody believes me when I tell them that I think Fiddler on the Roof is the best science fiction musical tragicomedy ever.

Fiddler on the Roof, at its core, is about a slightly old-fashioned man experiencing future shock. In a time of great cultural change, Tevye’s ways, the old ways, are repeatedly assaulted. First, his daughter Tzeitel refuses her arranged marriage and begs to be allowed to marry the poor tailor that she loves. And Tevye relents! He overcomes his culture shock, his fear of the new, and realizes that things won’t be so bad this way. Then, his second daughter rebels, asking for only his blessing for her wedding, not his permission, and again, he relents! One again, he overcomes the cultural bonds of tradition, moving forward with the times. As a modern viewer, I felt such pride for the human race, that he could see through the old things and allow passion to bloom.

Then, the tragic turn. Tevye’s third daughter has fallen in love with a non-Jewish Russian, and asks to marry him, but Tevye cannot allow this. He has found the line that he cannot cross. He becomes a victim of future shock and it destroys him. He cannot speak with this daughter again, and you can see that the man is absolutely devastated by his decision, and yet still he remains firm. This moment… “on the other hand… on the other hand…” there is no other hand! It was one of the most moving scenes of any musical for me. Rationality loses in the end, but I think the moral, from this perspective, is just that, perhaps we cannot force change too quickly without breaking the things that we wish to preserve through societal upheaval.

It’s not that long ago that marrying for love seemed like an outlandish concept, even a speculative one. Fiddler on the Roof may not have been written as a SF story, but it does what a great science fiction story does; it deals with the intersection of people and ideas; in this case, the traditional man of Tevye, and the idea that tradition not need hold in opposition of love. It needs no robots or rocket ships. The future does not always come in the form of technological advancements.

Fermi’s Paradox and the Great Filter

Filed Under: Science, Speculative Fiction

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The interesting astro-related blog Centauri Dreams had a post the other day discussing one of my pet topics, Fermi’s Paradox. The latest discussion and solution to be offered comes from Robin Hanson by way of Nick Bostrom, and the idea is being referred to as the “Great Filter.” This is kind of a meta concept, an idea concerning probability: we see no advanced life in the universe, so there must be some filter event that destroys/eliminates intelligent life. Here is Bostrom’s explanation:

The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems.

So is this filter event in our relative past, or our relative future? Have we already passed through it, or is it yet to come? Bostrom believes that the Great Silence is a good thing, and means that we’re past the filter event. If we find complex life, then we should be concerned that the event is yet to come.

As a SF writer, this stuff is a gold mine. I’ve read quite a few novels and short stories that dance with the Paradox. It’s a very important question, and it really lights a match in the boiler beneath my imagination.

For instance, I was wondering this morning, while thinking about the Great Filter, if the reason behind the silence out there might somehow be a result of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, of which I have very little understanding of, so you’ll have to forgive me if I mangle something.

It’s observational bias that I keep turning over in my mind. The idea that we change the results of an experiment just by observing them. Is it possible that once one “observer” species evolves, it’s very existence is the filter that prevents other life from evolving? Our observation changes the universe? I don’t feel like I can explain this idea. I need to read up on quantum mechanics and its implications to develop this line of thought further.