Given the relative success of the recent War of the Worlds movie, based on H. G. Wells' 1897 novel, I wonder if anyone will make a movie version of the book's sequel from the next year, Edison's Conquest of Mars.
You probably haven't heard of Edison's Conquest of Mars,
(A book version of Edison's Conquest can be purchased here, but scans of the original serial, and its art, can be found here -- warning, the images are large, and download very slowly.)
Bruce Franklin, in War Stars, cites Edison's Conquest as a pro-Imperialism story meant to generate support for the Spanish-American War, and to counter the anti-Imperialism of Wells' War of the Worlds, and it's easy to see why. As the story's title suggests, the lead character taking the fight back to Mars was none other than Thomas Alva Edison, who invents most of the devices used by Earth to defeat the Martians. He's accompanied by Lord Kelvin, who plays Spock to Edison's Kirk, giving scientific explanations but steering clear of combat. Unsurprisingly, the story includes stoic soldiers (fresh from wars of conquest on Earth) and women in distress, held hostage by the savage Martians. And, of course, the Earthlings win, killing off the Martians in an act of genocide and annexing Mars for colonization.
Although the commonplace concept of sci-fi is more about blasters and rocketships than about politics, speculative fiction has a long history of tackling sticky political issues. It's an ideal venue for political stories, in many ways. Authors are not bound by conventional effects of political decisions, nor by commonplace articulations of political motives and ideals. Moreover, science fiction authors can explore the more extreme results of choices now being debated.
Like Wells' anti-imperialism vs. Serviss' gung-ho adventure, current political science fiction stories often embrace completely antagonistic viewpoints. Michael Crichton's State of Fear tells us that global warming is a big hoax, while Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (and its imminent sequel, Fifty Degrees Below) explores some of the harsher possible results of climate disruption. John C. Wright's The Golden Age
But while political science fiction is still quite common, stories involving living real-world characters in a fictional setting are much less so. Stories that "borrow" the intellectual property of other works without permission (I find no indication that Wells knew of, let alone agreed to, the publication of the sequel) are even harder to find. A movie sequel to the 1996 "Independence Day," for example, with (say) Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Craig Ventner leading the return invasion of the alien homeworld would be shut down by an army of lawyers before it even made it past a producer's desk, especially if the underlying story was an attempt to highlight the folly of invasions and nationalistic pride.
It is kind of fun to imagine, though.
(Via MetaFilter)
