Lost in Space Gives Us a Great Story Sans "Woke" Cringyness

What I appreciated about the 3 season reboot of Lost In Space, was its handling of male and female characters and their relationships. Maureen Robinson was at once a smart strong woman, but she was also a mother and the wife of a strong man too. With a few hiccups, they became a powerful, mutually supportive team. It also didn't bother trying to make us all accept the idea that the human race would colonize another star system with a bunch of LGBQTLSMFT genetic dead end "self-gendered" colonists. 

 

In this strikingly good series, humans were portrayed as they largely are in nature and didn't focus on the 1 in a hundred sexually befuddled members of our "woke" culture in a ham-handed attempt to educate the rest of us (as so much TV/Movie writing does these days. LIS handled race the way it should have been handled - it ignored racial issues altogether. The writers didn't show us any systemic racism. People were of diverse skin color but all were of one race - the human race as it mostly is these days. Even despite deep misunderstandings with the alien robot race, the people come out triumphant and manage to span the cultural divide between man and AI machines.

John W. Campbell, editor of Analog in the 40s and 50s, used to refuse to publish anything in which the human race came out badly. He shaped science fictions conservative wing for generations to come. Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Orson Scott Card, Jerry Pournelle, Michael Flynn, Michael Crichton, CS Lewis et al. Campbell would have thoroughly approved of Lost in Space.

Lost in Space got it right for serving a large audience. There was little crude language and a whole lot of good stuff in it and not any detectable in-your-face wokeness. If any of the writers were trying to be "woke", they missed the point. They wrote to the values us conservatives believe in. And even some of the bad guys get redeemed.

Hey, it may have been an accident that this series appealed to the conservative in me. It was, after all, a Netflix production, but there it is. I liked it!

© by Tom King

Is " Solo" Maligned by Star Wars Fans Unfairly

I just rewatched "Solo". Star Wars fans set up a howl about that movie. I heard it from the usual prissy Star Wars Fans, It didn't have Harrison Ford in it, but he couldn't have played a young Han Solo anyway. Why is it that movie fans think they should criticize another person's story?

I enjoyed the movie. It was well done. No nudity or strings of f-words. It filled in Solo's backstory and the plot was as intricate as any sci-fi fan could want.I think Ron Howard did a fine job. The folks doing Star Wars these days are taking off in their own directions somewhat, but hey. George wasn't doing anything with it anymore so the story fell to another generation of filmmakers to tell.  Besides, who wants to know how the story ends even before it starts. Sure the feminist and social justice stuff gets sneaked into it - though not as much as with some of the other ones.

What's funny about it all is that so many of these filmmakers are foursquare liberal big government socialists and yet, when they do a film, it's always the big government that is the villain. You'd think they'd notice that, huh?

Only two pineapples though for forgetting to put in something that explains Harrison Ford's chin scar like they did in the Indiana Jones series. Derivative? Maybe. But it would have been fun and I'd always bet on fun!

© 2019 by Tom King

The Dark Tower by CS Lewis

Jack Lewis, Maureen Moore and the infamous Mrs. Janie Moore

Okay, by way of full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of CS Lewis. So when I saw The Dark Tower,  a collection of unpublished short stories of his on Kindle, I snapped the book up. I was all set to enjoy the book. These stories, only a couple of which are complete, were saved from the burn pile by a friend of the family. After Lewis' death, his brother Warnie was cleaning out their home and busily burning papers in the backyard. Fortunately, several friends were helping him and managed to save some of Jack's papers including these stories.

That Jack, himself didn't seek to publish these stories tells you something. In reading these, I found myself looking at the kind of thing a graduate student would dive into while writing a doctoral thesis about some literary figure.

The stories are interesting. They impress me as a kind of personal unburdening by the highly logical and deliberate writer/professor/theologian he was. I understand why he didn't release these stories. I think they reflect a side of Lewis that he wasn't really happy with. Many of them were abandoned after his brief marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham and afterward, I don't think Jack felt quite the same way about women that he did before.

Joy Davidman Lewis and CS Lewis

His female characters in this story do not come out well. Some of them are truly horrific and the males in the stories seem put upon by the females in their lives. Given the situation in most of his home life, the stories seem to be a way for Lewis to valve off his resentment at Mrs. Moore, his housekeeper/dungeon master who made Lewis' life something of a misery by all accounts.

Lewis had promised a friend and fellow soldier that should he not return, Jack would "take care" of his mother. Jack did so until she died in 1951. He refused to talk bad about Mrs. Moore directly, even with his brother Warnie who describes her as a bully and generally unpleasant woman. It appears that the only complaint Lewis ever made about the domineering virago who made his home a kind of torture chamber for him was to cast terrible women as characters in his books and short stories. Mrs. Moore appears vividly in The Screwtape Letters as the woman about whom Screwtape says, “She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”

In almost every one of these unpublished stories, Lewis makes women out to be relatively shallow and unpleasant characters. In one it gets so bad that crew members abandon two of them on Mars to escape their attentions. I suspect Lewis knew he was perhaps being unfair to women in general. Lewis' tendency to self-examination may have prevented him from finishing or publishing these stories. I suspect he'd rather have had them left on the burn pile.

Not everything a writer writes is meant to be published. It's interesting to look at Lewis as he struggles with the concept of time and space, no doubt a subject of much discussion among Lewis and his fellow Inklings - a kind of men's club and refuge from Mrs. Moore that Lewis belonged to with JRR Tolkein and other notable scholars in his circle.

It's interesting to note that while Lewis was always a strong advocate and admirer of a kind of idealized traditional womanhood, he really didn't write much about romantic spousal love relationships in his work until he fell in love with Joy Davidman near the end of his life. The book is a nosey kind of peek into Jack Lewis' maturation as a writer complete with echoes of his personal life throughout. Graduate students desperate for a thesis subject may find this book illuminating. The comments by the books editors will be helpful. One thing, however, can be gained from this volume. If you're a well-known writer, there are some things you should probably go ahead and burn before you die.

I've decided to reread Lewis' other published works and kind of flush out this one. I feel like I've rifled through Lewis' desk drawers and dug around in his private journals. I've always been uncomfortable doing that.

© 2017 by Tom King