Tristesse by Jonatan Anjos
What the fuck
This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:
- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)
- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.
- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)
- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture
- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.
- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)
- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.
What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.
But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?
Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi
tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example “science matches on” which I think is a pretty fair shake
This. This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors. There’s a certain danger, here. A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.
What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises. “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.” I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks. It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.
“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.” Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.
The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle. Shake of the head. What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse. What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?
Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times. Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed. Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks. So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.
These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level. Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado. It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.
And they can paralyze the sci-fi
writer, if you think too much about them.
Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next. “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,”
the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply
known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view
of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty. “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No
explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.” Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside
of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’
gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would
implode in its own gravity field. And
now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers. Self-satisfied, smug in superiority. As if we did the work to find out ourselves,
instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.
I’m reminded of the preface to Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men, published in 1930
If ever this book should happen to be discovered by some future individual, for instance by a member of the next generation sorting out the rubbish of his predecessors, it will certainly raise a smile; for very much is bound to happen of which no hint is yet discoverable. And indeed even in our own generation circumstances may well change so unexpectedly and so radically that this book may very soon look ridiculous. But no matter. We of today must conceive our relation to the rest of the universe as best we can; and even if our images must seem fantastic to future men, they may none the less serve their purpose today
And this is very true. Writers write for their own time, within the conventions that exist at the time of their writing, and within the understanding of the world that exists in their time (especially relevant for science fiction, where seemingly plausible ideas can turn out to be complete nonsense). And if a book is well-written, it can still have meaning for future generations, even if parts of it appear hopelessly dated












































