sci-fi

Yeah, so what's with all the sci-fi ? When I was growing up my mother was (still is) a librarian, and as a method of daycare, I would spend long solitary hours wandering the stacks and poking my nose into the battered collection of each library she worked at. I think something about science-fiction is very male and pre/adolescent..and it's also usually the province of nerds and outcasts. So it's coded heavily with a language of signs and symbols that a very specific audience is fluent with. There is, of course, a repressed type of voyeuristic sexuality that often forms the strange backdrop to a procession of variously imagined Dystopian nightmares. Science fiction is the most existential and mythopoeic of all of the pulp-genres. The idealism of youth is expressed as a precocious deconstruction of the present-as projected into either an idealized and hopeful future, or nightmarish and hellish descent into the Abyss. As a vital movement, it all ended sometime in the early nineties when reality and fiction merged completely and perfectly. Unfortunately the drab and horrific commonplace of the real future did not end up to be so brilliantly cinematic and vivid as the genre's greatest illustrators had proposed on the covers of magazines like Analog or Urania. But it could still be said to be bewildering and surreal in it's own way. Nevertheless, these paintings represent a seminal moment in cultural history. In a stunning fashion, they express a remarkable intersection between the inner and outer worlds of the individual. Looking back to this time of my life, I remember feelings of anxiety and hope, not only for my own future, and my own passage through life to come..but also for the civilization that surrounded me...which I also perceived as being young and in flux. In a way, not much has changed...