Doing work on myself leads me to thinking about others. Why did I pick telling science fiction stories as a means of making myself better? Why is scifi my ‘gateway to good?’ I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about those questions. Along the way, I’ve come to some conclusions and it’s time to talk about one of them: kids need ‘thoughtful scifi’ right now.
What does that mean? As I mentioned earlier, I saw Tenet as ‘James Bond Meets Primer.’ Not only were the action sequences astounding, the movie and story were a legitimate head-bender. After a dearth of cerebral science fiction, Nolan’s thoughtful scifi felt like a breath of fresh air. All well and good, right? It hit me this weekend, re-watching Disney’s classic ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,’ and ‘The Black Hole.’ Where’s the thoughtful scifi for kids in 2021?
Why do kids need thoughtful scifi? Remember when you were younger, growing up on movies like 2001, the Andromeda Strain, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind? We were blessed with that catalog of formative scifi stories, movies that asked big questions in a format that even children could understand.
Those kinds of stories benefitted us in other ways. We used thoughtful scifi as a window on the world we were entering: the issues, problems, and potential solutions. Are we doing that for kids in 2021?
