We did it! Despite some of the darker predictions that took place this year, we managed to last through the demonic wasteland that was 2018 in America. Please take a moment to congratulate yourself. In the last few hours of the year, I was thinking about what I hoped for in 2019. It came down to three wishes for scifi, or you might call them fervent prayers. Pour yourself a glass of whatever you’re drinking, and let’s dream together:
Adults Being Adults
In 2019, we come to the end of adults acting like poop-flinging gibbons. Maybe not for the whole world, but just for us. More stories, fewer hot buttons. Fewer ‘wedge issues’ that mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. We’re here to take a chunk out of the universe. We can’t get to the stars until we climb out of the gutter. No more toxicity, no more trolling. Let’s be the adults we’re capable of being.
Make Room, Make Room!
This year, we widen out instead of closing in. There’s room for everyone in the metaverse of science fiction. If you check out my Instagram, I’ve been highlighting some artists that make truly evocative and unique science fiction. I’ve been making some, myself! Make room for everyone. Give everyone their fie seconds in the spotlight. You never know where the next J.R.R. Tolkien or Ralph McQuarrie is coming from.
View this post on Instagram
Less Machinery, More Humanity
This comes from one of my favorite movies, The Great Dictator. Charlie Chaplin makes an impassioned speech at the end that’s still relevant eighty years later. More than machinery, Chaplin pleaded, we need humanity. He’s absolutely right.
Corporate entertainment has a stranglehold on science fiction, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I still love Star Wars, and I still love Marvel, but they have enough of our attention. Escape the Disney-Marvel-Lucasfilm Industrial Complex and get back to the real science fiction. The ideas, the stories, the characters that shaped us. We’ll get there when we champion the makers instead of the takers.
So there you have it, my three scifi wishes for 2019. May you live long and prosper, may your dreams be bigger on the inside, and may your journey toward success happen in less than twelve parsecs. I’m working on some new scifi art and I can’t wait to see what the new year brings.