BIG IDEA: “Happy to Be Hollow” • by Gordon Grice

What I thought I’d like about Godzilla vs. Kong is right there in the title: monsters fighting. I’m a sucker for that—the idea, anyway, if not always the execution. What actually ended up holding most of my attention, though, was its hollow earth gimmick. 

It shouldn’t have. Science debunked that gimmick before it ever got started—a couple of times in the 1700s, with experiments that measured the mean density of the earth. Turns out our planet must be packed with dense matter, like iron and nickel. There’s no room for any significant pocket of air. The entire history of hollow earths in fiction, starting from proto-SF writers like Edgar Allan Poe, happens long after that, and stems not from real science’s brief flirtation with the idea, but from the later, popular notions of crackpots. John Cleves Symmes Jr., for instance, thought openings at the poles led to a world plastered inside the globe. If Symmes were alive today, he’d have a YouTube channel about Stanley Kubrick faking the Apollo landings.

So the science in this kind of fiction has always been pseudo-, yet here’s a Hollow Earth shamelessly showing itself in the 21^st century, unconvincingly explained with science-flavored remarks about “gravity inversion.” When one of our heroes gets described as “a sci-fi quack trading in fringe physics,” it feels like a pre-emptive self-strike. I picture the screenwriters hoping we’ll laugh with them, instead of at.

But I’m not here to laugh (much) at Hollow Earth. I mainly want to figure out why I love it.

Let me parse the gimmick a bit:

One part of it is a land of prehistoric megafauna. That goes back at least to The City of the Beasts (1856) by Hungarian writer Mor Jokai. Jokai’s megatheria and ichthyosaurs dwell not underground, but in and around Atlantis. If you want to visit, sorry; the sinning Atlanteans annoyed God and He flooded the place. It was a popular way to explain extinctions in a period of upsetting, Genesis-busting fossil discoveries. Jokai is one of the few writers I’ve discovered so far to make something like good science fiction out of it, but even he finally collapses into preaching.

Shortly thereafter, Jules Verne tucked his megafauna underground in A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). Sail-backed Dimetrodons stroll an underground beach; a giant Hominid tends a flock of mastodons; marine reptiles battle it out. Reading this novel with post-Kong eyes, its glaring deficiency is heroic adventure. Verne’s humans just sneak away.

For humans bold enough to try capturing the critters, I leap ahead to Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) and its 1925 film adaptation, obvious influences on Kong in plot and gimmick, and packed, at last, with actual dinosaurs. Doyle’s speculative setting is a jungle plateau, though, not an inner earth. A more on-the-nose influence on Godzilla vs. Kong is the Pellucidar novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, starting with At the Earth’s Core (1914). Pellucidar spills over with dinosaurs, ape-men, and man-eating flying reptiles.

A derivative movie with bad science ought to make for lousy viewing, but for this SF fan, it kind of worked. Why?

First, there’s an appeal in scientific near-misses. Or even, honestly, wide misses. When my son and I watched, our heckling included questions like “Where’s the light coming from?” and “What's an anti-gravity drive?” We whipped out our phones to research. And my point is, we enjoyed trying to figure it out. I’d love a novel or movie that got all its science right, but I doubt I’ve ever seen one. We SF fans are all about approaching the asymptote, not attaining it. I’m happy with a good effort that poses intriguing, arguable, amateur-researchable questions.

Next, nostalgia. Both Verne and Burroughs were favorites of my youth. I mentioned that to my son—telling him, for example, how the horizon of Pellucidar also tilts up, just like in the movie. And then I had the urge to tell him a lot more about Pellucidar. Fortunately for him, I noticed that his interest was merely polite.

I’ll tell you, though, because it’s where I found the most powerful source of my enjoyment. Not just nostalgia, but connection. Specifically, I spent most of the movie trying to fit it into fictional universes I’ve encountered. I wanted the flying reptiles to have mesmeric powers, as in Pellucidar. I wanted the Atlantis connection, because I’ve read that was implied in dialog cut from the script of the original Kong. I wanted Tarzan to show up and speak to Kong in Mangani, which actually happens in some crossover novel I’ve mostly forgotten.

I’m talking, partly, about a shared universe. This, I suspect, is part of why Marvel movies remain popular without often being good. It’s not what the filmmakers have done with Spider-Man; it’s what they might do, considering the vast catalog of old stories to pick from. Godzilla vs. Kong is the fourth in a franchise that, up to this point, hadn’t hooked me. What made the difference this time wasn’t what it actually links to—in fact, I wasn’t much interested in the other kaiju that lumbered in for the obligatory CGI wrestling matches. It was the not-there-on-the-screen connections I could, and did, imagine.

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Gordon Grice’s short stories have lately appeared in Shotgun Honey, Night Terrors, and Metaphorosis. He has written about sustainability and the history of science for National Geographic’s Shark Attacks, Discover, and The New Yorker. He occasionally remembers to post at GordonGrice.com. (Photo credit: Mark Brown)

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BIG IDEAS is a new feature we’ll be giving a trial run for the next few Mondays. The concept is that I’m looking for short (1,200 words max.) but fairly serious think pieces examining the conceits and assumptions that underlie our genre, done with an eye towards what still works, what desperately needs to be updated or replaced, and which honored old tropes of our genre should be taken out to the edge of the camp and shot.

Does this sound like something you’d like to be a part of? If so, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com to tell me what you might like to write about. If I like your pitch and don’t have one like it already in the works, we can talk terms and schedules. For the full call for submissions, follow this link: https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2023/02/rfp-big-ideas-in-science-fiction.html

Go ahead, pitch an idea! The worst I can do is say no.

~brb

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RFP: Big Ideas in Science Fiction

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS.

There, that ought to get your attention. Actually, this is a Request For Proposals, or if you prefer, Pitches. As we work to reanimate Stupefying Stories, one thing I’ve been pleased with and would like to develop further has been Guy Stewart’s series of non-fiction posts on topics like Creating Alien Aliens and Mining the Asteroids and the like. For as long as I’ve been in this business—and that’s been nearly 50 years now—science fiction has always claimed to be “the literature of ideas.” It purports to be the one field of literary endeavor that is unafraid to examine the big ideas about science and the future of humanity, to ask the questions no one else dares to ask, to present the most dangerous visions, to boldly go—

When I look at what’s being published, though, the genre as a whole seems to come up way short of its stated ambition. (And don’t even get me started on the evident paucity of imagination in video-media SF.) Considered more dispassionately, print-media science fiction might more honestly be described as “the literature of tropes,” stuck in a ±40-year time loop between the Astounding of the late 1930s and the Asimov’s of the early 1980s, churning back and forth through the same old ideas with only very slight variations with each new iteration. Robots, aliens, space ships, utopia, dystopia, more robots, weirder aliens, better spaceships, lather, rinse, repeat… Except for steampunk, which began as a Great Leap Backward to reboot the genre all over again with Jules Verne but ended up producing only another tired and clichéd fashion motif for cosplayers.

As it happens, in addition to science fiction, I also read Science News. And the further we progress into the real future while simultaneously retrogressing back to John Campbell in our entertainment, the more it bothers me that the gap between science fiction writers and real science is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.

Perhaps this is a stupid idea. Perhaps the denizens of SF fandom will be happier, and thus we will be better paid for our work, if we stick to recapitulating ideas that were already old when they were adapted to become Star Trek scripts in the 1960s. Another dispassionate look at the realities of the current SF marketplace would seem to support that assertion. But seriously, is this all modern science fiction has to offer? Remakes of what was successful in the past, only with slight variations to suit the conceits of the contemporary audience?

Hence this RFP. I would like to start running a weekly series of short* but fairly serious think pieces examining the conceits and assumptions that underlie our genre, with an eye towards what still works, what desperately needs to be updated or replaced, and which honored old tropes of the genre should be taken out to the edge of the camp, shot, beheaded, their corpses burned, and the ashes buried in unmarked graves, to ensure that they never rise to trouble the living again.

Does this sound like something you’d like to be a part of? I’m not looking for finished articles now, just pitches for what you might like to write about. If you have an idea, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com. Target length and payment rates are TBD at present, as I’m still trying to gauge the level of interest in this concept. 

Introspection is a scary thing, I know, but I sure hope there is more to this genre than the same old $#!+. I don’t want to be publishing stories about @#*($&*ing crashed flying saucers forever. Even if the USAF is shooting down UFOs over Lake Huron right now.

 

 

* Target length is a real issue. While I’m inclined to equate serious thinking with longer articles, here in ADHD World, anything over 250 words long seems to seriously tax the readers’ attention span. Is that also part of the problem? Modern readers can’t stay focused long enough for the writer to develop a new idea and a coherent argument, so we skip to recycling old tropes and writing in cinematic shorthand? E.g.,

[EXTERIOR, DAYLIGHT, BLUE SKY, SCATTERED CLOUDS: An F-22 Raptor sweeps into view. Zoom in on the pilot, USAF Captain Melissa Strongwill (she/her), who is intently staring ahead. Cut to 3/4 view from behind her, showing what she's seeing.]

STRONGWILL: I have a solid radar lock.

CONTROL: (crackly voice over radio) Weapons free. You are cleared to engage.

STRONGWILL: Fox One!

[Missile streaks out from F-22, impacts briefly glimpsed octagonal UFO, big explosion, UFO veers down and right, trailing smoke and obviously out of control.]

STRONGWILL: Got it! The target is going down! Repeat, the target is going down!

CONTROL: That’s confirmed. We’re tracking it. It’s going to splash about ten miles offshore. The Coast Guard has been alerted.

[etc., etc., proceed with Standard Plot #7. UFO crashes, sole occupant is rescued and imprisoned in secure facility, STRONGWILL is brought in to meet and interview alien, comes to realize that this was all a terrible mistake, the alien is humanoid, intelligent, peaceful, ambiguously gendered but very beautiful in an exotic way, STRONGWILL helps alien escape, engages in a mix of fish-out-of-water comedy, rom-com misunderstandings, chase scenes with menacing men-in-black type agents, in thrilling final reel chase scene helps alien make rendezvous with rescue craft and escape in the nick of time, and is left standing in a wheat field, pining for the hermaphroditic pansexual alien who has won her heart and opened her mind, while the MIB agents watch helplessly as the craft soars away.]

AGENT: (talking into radio) The alien got away. (radio garble) Captain Strongwill? Yes, we caught her.

STRONGWILL: (turns around to face agent) (in voice that's almost a growl) My pronouns... are they and them.

[MUSIC UP: David Bowie, "Starman"]

[ROLL CREDITS]

C’mon, admit it. Haven’t you already paid to see this movie at least three times? Wouldn’t you pay to see it again, if this time the script played up the alien’s gender fluidity and wry amusement at “primitive” human sexual morality?

 

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