2021: A SPACE ODYSSEY

The New Face of Sci-Fi

A New Way to Trace the History of Sci-Fi’s Made-Up Words

OCTOBER 6, 2020 | AUTHOR: KATE KNIBBSKATE KNIBBS

ONE THING NERDS like to argue about is what nerds are allowed to argue about. If you agree to stipulate that science fiction is often one of those things—and, hey, we could argue about that—then a problem to solve is the boundaries of that genre, the what-it-is and what-it-isn’t.
That’s not straightforward. Finding the edges of science fiction is like taking a walk around a hypercube in zero-gee; you keep bumping into walls and falling into other dimensions. Reasonable people don’t even agree on when it started— Frankenstein? The Time Machine? Gilgamesh? A story where a ghost kills people is horror; what if a robot did it? What if the universe has robots and spaceships but also magic and destiny?
It does seem all but inarguably true about science fiction, though, that the genre radiates neologisms (new words) and neosemes (new concepts made of old words) like an overloading warp core emits plasma and neutrinos. Just to be clear, that’s a lot.
Don’t get mad, romance and mystery fans; you are great. But the point is, if you’re doing it right, science fiction packs in new concepts, even entirely new languages—Klingon, for example, and that inkblot thing the heptapods squirted in Arrival. (What's that you say? Fantasy has Elvish and Dothraki, why am I leaving those out? Let’s take that to the comments.) It’s where writers need words—or, if need is too strong, maybe want—for rockets propelled by impossible technology, people who are also machines, guns that shoot light instead of bullets, and all sorts of other things that don’t exist and therefore don’t (yet) have names.
“Naming things well—and I’m not purporting to be someone who does that—but as a reader it’s so satisfying, because it can be exposition without being expository,” says Charles Yu, occasional WIRED contributor and author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and the National Book Award–winning Interior Chinatown. “And it’s so much fun too.”

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KEANU REEVES HAS never been worse—which, in his special case, is understood to mean better—than he was in Johnny Mnemonic. The 1995 cyberpunk almost-classic captures a pre-Matrix, pre-Cyberpunk 2077 Reeves at his most cartoonishly buttoned-up, all hunk and monosyllabic monomindedness. His first line of dialog, “Yeah,” pretty much says it all: I am here, in bed with a hooker, so yeah, let’s do this. The movie has never been considered classy cinema, but thanks to the interoperability of stay-at-home orders, streaming, and the Keanaissance, nerd-dom revived it in 2020, and not a moment too soon. Because 2021—welcome!—is the year in which Johnny Mnemonic, the story of a mysterious epidemic and the one man who might put an end to it, is set.
Does science fiction predict the future? The question, particularly that verb, predict, irritates all the greats. The genre ain’t predictive, huffed Le Guin, it’s descriptive. I’m a preventer of futures, claimed Bradbury, not a predictor of them. (Let’s see about that next year, if/when the 2022 of his Fahrenheit 451 comes to pass.) In 1981, a then-unknown William Gibson, raised on writers like Bradbury, published a hot little neon-noir in Omni called “Johnny Mnemonic.” Many years later, enthroned as the father of cyberpunk, he’d say of his work that “it’s not prescient.” Look around, though. Prediction might not be the intent of science fiction, but humanity seems to suffer a desperate, ever-darkening desire to see as much of it as possible come true.
JOHNNY IS A digital-era delivery guy. If you need some data transported hypersecurely, simply load it into his head and off he goes: your very own walking—more often running, from bad guys—USB air-gapped meatstick. So what if the gig comes with memory lacunae and the risk, in the event of information overload, of brain-burst, to say nothing of the Yakuza at your back, who are more than happy to carry out a file transfer by way of decapitation? It pays well, and you look cyber-cool doing it.
Of course, the Yakuza aren’t the real villains. Neither is the random psychotic bionic street preacher played by Dolph Lundgren, whom Gibson and first-time/last-time director Robert Longo, when they went to turn the short story into a movie, had to make room for. (Blame the studio.) Turns out there’s an evil shadow corporation behind it all, Pharmakom. They’re the ones who sic the Yakuza on Johnny, because they know what’s inside Johnny’s computerbrain: the cure to a mass plague called NAS. That’s nerve attenuation syndrome, aka the black shakes. If it stays incurable, Pharmakom can keep treating it half-assedly. They don’t want Johnny spoiling their profits.

Besson’s origin story doesn’t start with film. He grew up with a weekly habit familiar to nerds worldwide: On Wednesdays, he went to buy comics. French bandes dessinées, though, weren’t like US comics. They eschewed primary-colored spandex-clad do-gooders in favor of science fiction, weirdness, and sex.
He didn’t go to film school. Besson talked himself into apprentice-level gigs on-set, carrying cables and guarding cameras. His second film, Subway, was an homage to musicals and gangster movies and also to 1980s Paris, and it elevated Besson into an emerging cohort of young French directors. Unlike New Wave avant-­guardians like Godard and Truffaut, with their broody, art-house mannerisms, Besson and his contemporaries valued things like “plot” and “action.” American stuff.
When Besson was developing The Fifth Element, he turned to bandes dessinées creators for production-design help. Jean Giraud, who under the pen name Moebius had ruled ’70s sci-fi comics in Europe, illustrated characters. And for Bruce Willis’ flying taxicab—a full-size version of which sits in Cité du Cinéma’s cathedral-like lobby—Besson turned to Jean-Claude Mézières, cocreator of Valérian et Laureline. According to Besson, adapting Valerian was Mézières’ idea. “I said, ‘We cannot do Valerian,’” Besson says. “‘There’s too many aliens and robots and spaceships. It’s impossible.’”
Besson had a point. The series follows the titular characters, far-future space cops who get around in a time-­traveling flying saucer. The first issue sends them back in time to fight a mad scientist under a flooded, post­apocalyptic Manhattan. Before long it’s off to a hollow planet, where men wage war against women in galleon-like airships. (Laureline spends a lot of time in a metal bikini in this one.) So yeah, good luck filming all that.
Besson and his longtime producer (and wife) Virginie Besson-Silla bought the rights anyway, thinking conditions might change. And they did: Avatar came out. Big enough computers fueled by large enough bank accounts could make anything look real. “Suddenly, only imagination became the limit,” Besson says.
Imagination wasn’t a scarce resource for Besson. In a binder that grew to hundreds of pages, he wrote biographies for Valerian and Laureline and dozens of secondary characters. He described the centuries-long history of Alpha, a 12-mile-wide space station that’s home to 17 million, most of them aliens. He put out a call to designers all over the world, seeking ideas for creatures and ultimately ended up with 3,500 submissions. “So when the actors arrived, they had a package with all that. That’s their homework,” Besson says. “Honestly, none of this information will ever be used in the film. But when you tell them, ‘You’re in headquarters on Alpha,’ they know exactly what it means.”

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LINKS TO THE ORIGINAL ARTICLES: https://www.wired.com/story/historical-dictionary-of-science-fiction/ https://www.wired.com/story/2021-conspiracies-johnny-mnemonic/ https://www.wired.com/2017/07/luc-besson-valerian/