John Scalzi - Sports of the Future Will Be Much More Violent Than Those at the Olympics
If you're like most Americans (heck, like most humans with the ability to watch television or access the Internet), then at least some part of your time in the last week has been spent obsessively poring over the results from the Olympics, the competition of athletic skill that has its roots in classical Greece and which in its current form has been going on for over a century. (Me, personally? I've been busy with other things. I'm playing catch up at the moment.)
The occasion of the Olympics, however, has put me in a mind to consider the plight of sports in science fiction movies. It's perhaps not entirely surprising that sports do not play a huge role in the history of science fiction film; comedy has quite a passel, like Bull Durham or The Longest Yard, and dramas have everything from Pride of the Yankees to Million Dollar Baby. But in science fiction, once you get past Rollerball, The Running Man and this year's Speed Racer, SF movies with an explicit sport-oriented theme get thin on the ground. You have to look toward B-movies (The Blood of Heroes would be a favorite of mine here), or consider films that have a sports sub-element, like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace or Tron.
Why aren't sports represented in science fiction film? I suspect several reasons. First is simply that real sports are generally not science fictional enough; while one can certainly imagine people playing baseball or basketball a hundred years from now, the sport itself is not likely to be changed in a massively science fictional fashion. Therefore, why bother making a movie about the 2108 World Series, or the 2208 Super Bowl? From a film producer's point of view, all that science fiction will just be a distraction. The second reason (and somewhat more shaky, logically speaking) is that the core audience for science fiction, whether film or otherwise, is not precisely the group most fascinated with athletic events.
Be that as it may, there are enough science fiction films out there with a sports element to make a few general observations about how the subject is treated in the genre. Here's what I've noticed:
1. Science fiction sports films are dystopic: A common theme in science fiction sports films is that the sports are used by the autocratic government to distract the masses from the fact the world stinks and is falling down around them; a sort of "bread and circuses" tactic, without a whole lot of bread. This is most explicit in Rollerball, where the popularity of Rollerball athlete Johnny E threatens the corporations who rule the world, and in The Running Man, where things have gotten so bad that you can see minor characters lusting after the crumbs of food that Running Man emcee Damon Killien leaves behind. The fact that science fiction movies see sports as an opiate of the people -- something to distract them rather than ennoble them, as other genres do -- speaks volumes about the science fiction mindset.
2. Science fiction sports are unspeakably violent and as often as not, end in death: Once again, Rollerball takes the cake here, as the sport starts off incredibly violent, and gets worse as the film goes along; the corporations controlling the game start shaving off rules and limits to get to Johnny E. Death is the least horrible thing that happens to some of the players. In my favorite science fiction sports B-movie The Blood of Heroes, the players go after each other with spears and knives, and if you lose an eye while playing, well, that's quite all right. And Tron (another candidate for dystopia, albeit in your computer) pits computer programs against each other with killer frisbees and the much-lusted-after-by-geeks lightcycles, and to lose results in "derezzing," which in this case is just fake computerese for "death."
Tron's vaguely gladiatorial bent is something a number of other science fiction films share; dystopic films in particular enjoy having two or more players beat the crap out of each other -- see Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for the canonical example of this. The number of geeks who can chant "Two men enter! One man leaves!" without much prompting is truly terrifying to consider.
3. There's usually something significant riding on the outcome: We're not talking about winning the World Series or the World Cup here; we're talking something independent of the game itself. In The Phantom Menace, Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn was betting on Anakin's freedom; in the Running Man, the world was prepped for a proletarian revolution pending the outcome of the game; and in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Max was engaging in a little bit of score-settling between warring powers in exchange for his freedom. To this extent, the sport these folks are engaging in is immaterial; the only thing that matters is simply that there is a winner.
What do we learn from the portrayal of sports in science fiction? Well, that sports are a method of control, that our descendants will love blood as much as the Romans did, and that after every game, something momentous will happen that has nothing to do with what's going on down on the playing field. It's not a particularly encouraging picture, is it? On the whole, I prefer the Olympics.
Have a favorite science fiction sports film or scene? Bring it on in the comments.
Winner of the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John Scalzi is the author of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies as well as the novels Old Man's War and the upcoming Zoe's Tale. His column appears every Thursday.
Two words: Flash Gordon.
John,
I popped over here just to see if you were going to mention The Blood of Heroes, only to find that it's one of your faves.
Mine too.
Since you did mention it, I also wanted to point out that this is one of, if not the only, SF sports movie that has distinguishable, workable rules for its game.
Rollerball (and others) have nifty concepts and some interesting game play, but if put into actual practice (based on what is shown in the films) the game would be unplayable.
welllll....I can't say that I have a favorite, but the deathmaze in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone always stuck with me, for some reason.
Sadly, only foreigners get to see Blood of Heroes as it was meant to be seen - the cut with the badass ending and the badass title: Salute of the Jugger! Now that's a movie that puts the skull on the stake!
Vernor Vinge touches on an evolution of soccer in "Rainbows End". But that's written SF, of course. And the scene is not really about sport.
However, SF-dom seems to have some liking for sports, as being shown opposite the Superbowl is thought to have been what meant that JMS' Babylon 5-spin-off "Legends of the rangers" never got beyond pilot.
When you wrote the "Blood of Heroes" is a favorit of yours I immediately thought of "Salute of the Juggers" which is a favorit of mine and - as I soon found out - the same film ;)
I got it from my parents when is was a teenager. It was one of those cheap video releases where they only have a cardboard sleave instead of a real case. That may account for my knowing it by its Austrailian title... I have loved that movie ever since - and when I was younger I wanted to be a Jugger :P
Opposite the Super Bowl has complications far larger than whether or not it's target audience likes sports.
Anyhow... Robot Jox was a terrible movie, gladitorial, with hyper-inflated results. Just to say, that it fits the mold described.
I wonder if Logan's Run's Carousel counts as a sport. Like Golf, but... you know... no caddies.
No 'Deathrace 2000'? Fits the Scalzi analysis perfectly on all three counts.
So does 'Deathsport' (I see a pattern...), maybe David Carradines darkest moment, badly pimped motorbikes that sound like TIE fighters... astonishingly bad.
I would add Spy Kids 3D to your list, although the blood/mail dial is turned way down. Gladiator is a non-SFF flim that otherwise fits the pattern, but Ridley Scott was the director.
In TV, there was an episode of Babylon 5 ("Geometry of Shadows") that had a death game between two teams of Drazi to see who would pwn for the next few years. And who can forget drill thralls?
Just remember that we are the people who got bullied by the athletes in school and saw them get all the full scholarships. The contest there was for the favor of the administrators and who got to pwn for the next few years of your life. A lot of them would have been derezzed if we could have gotten them into our computers.
Preview and STILL miss a typo: "blood/maiM"
All three points are true enough, given the apparent assumption common to most comments thus far: namely, that the topic is limited to the subset "Competitive Sports of the Future" -- a constraint which narrows the range rather drastically, and all too frequently focuses on the stereotypes you mentioned. The "something riding on the game" may be a useful element of story, but often is little more than a device which justifies throwing out real plot or character development to allow the producers to concentrate on thrill-a-minute action sequences ... rather like passing up a four-star banquet in order to ride the roller coasters and gorge on cotton candy and popcorn.
Absent this restriction, one finds that sports are (will be) alive and well in the future. Some will be familiar activities taken to new levels, e.g: mountain climbing on Olympus Mons, surfing the monster waves of Dis at its tri-lunar conjunction [1], or a friendly game of WallBall™ -- b-ball with power-assisted footwear and the hoop mounted eight-plus meters above the floor [2]. Some future sports will be recognizable to us ancients, despite our having lacked the means or environment to implement them (human-powered winged flight [3] or solar-sail yachting [4]), while others will be too far beyond our imagination for any movie to present.
Darn, now there's sports all over the floor. Speaking of which, did anyone catch the mercuryball championship game? [5] :-)
________
1. Surfeit, Alan Dean Foster.
2. The Android's Dream by our host, John Scalzi. Pity that the game got cancelled...
3. The Menace from Earth, R. A. Heinlein.
4. The Wind from the Sun, Arthur C. Clarke.
5. *mumble* Tom Corbett *blush*
Thank Ghod I've forgotten the title: $noun $preposition $adjective $noun.
CJH / esper: Scalzi's observations are about SF movies, though, not written. Can you think of warmfuzzy non-competitive examples from film?
Though competitive, Triad/Pyramid is not played for such competitive stakes in the two incarnations of Battlestar Galactica. However, the game has been central to an episode or two in each series.
The Prisoner had Kosho.
Dune, in each of its three incarnations so far, had gladiatorial knife-fighting.
Part of the difficulty in including a sport in sf film is that such inclusion needs to be justified in terms of the plot, which means that the Stakes Must Be High. It's something that is much more likely to come up in sf television or written forms, which have more leeway to explore side elements of the background.
Michael Chabon's Summerland is a good example of sports-centered, well, I guess it's more fantasy than sci-fi, plus it's written, but it's a damn good book!
I don't think Quidditch is quite the bloodbath, but does it count as competition for world domination?
Not a movie, but Futurama has Blernsball. Not particularly violent. One of the lamer episodes, true.
Still waiting with bated breath for Ender's Game, where the Battle Room should be a lot of fun on screen.
Hmmm, back to violence: Monday Night Rehab in Idiocracy.
The best I can think of from written SF is a story whose title or author I can't recall, but involved going out for a night of "thorming" -- a rehabbed bowling alley where you dive 100 feet into a low-grav field to try to get through rings. Just a slice-of-life story, but it's stuck with me. I read it in a Best Of collection from the 70s many years back, the same volume had a story with a slightly more violent tone called "Moopsball" which had aspects of bicycle polo and SCA.
And, if we stray to fantasy, how can we forget Quidditch?
But even the wikipedia (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_sports) can't yield much more.
Oddly, this reminded me of an audiobook class I'm taking on Baroque and Classical music. Bear with me for just a minute.
The instructor -- the incomparable Robert Greenberg -- makes an analogy between understanding forms in concert music and understanding the structure of a baseball game. The large scale structure is defined by the innings, with each inning split into the top and bottom halves. Within an inning, the at-bats and out define the moment to moment structure. There's even a substructure to an at-bat: the pitches.
If you were at a baseball game, but came from a culture that didn't play the game, you'd probably be lost. The significance of any individual event -- a great double-play for example -- would be lost.
Lacking knowledge of the structure, you would lack context. Without context, you wouldn't feel the drama of the moment.
Back to movies.
Sports movies never stop to explain how the sport is played. They rely on our shared understanding of the structure of the sport. Nobody has to tell you why the last-second touchdown in a football movie (and there's always a last-second touchdown) is so important. Nobody has to explain that last fast ball in "Major League".
This is also why the science fiction movies do so badly with sports, and why they have to embed the sport in some larger dynamic. Drama cannot come from the action itself, because the context of the action is essentially meaningless to us. Nobody knows what the structure of Rollerball really is. It has no intrinsic drama.
Ah, but when you put lives, governments, or planets at stake, then you have instant, if somewhat cheap, drama.
This also explains the violence. We don't need a scorecard to understand the significance of a vicious gut shot, a broken femur, or a pod-racer splitting into four diverging constituents. Explosions tell us, "That's one less racer in the game," in a way that two minutes in the penalty box wouldn't.
Unfortunately, most of the science fiction "sports" are so contrived that there's no way to engage us in their structure and internal context. Even Quidditch is so fundamentally silly that the rules themselves don't give us any structural context. (By that I mean, the whole game can be decided by force majeur at almost any time, rendering the rest of the hoops and balls into nonsense.)
A movie would have to teach us to play the sport, before we'd appreciate it for it's own drama. Until then, made up sports will continue to fit the Scalzi Pattern.
Also, and at the risk of seriously droning on about this, I think this is why we hear so much ridiculous commentary during the Olympics themselves.
Most of us are blithely unaware of the nice distinctions in gymnastic performances. A single dive happens so fast, one quarter to one half of a second, that we don't see the angle of the diver's toes. We're not expert enough to fully appreciate the subtleties of the athletes' performances.
So, to keep our interest, the commentators provide external dramatic context by telling us about the athlete's personal challenges, bitter rivalries, waning career, and so on.
on the small screen - 80's version of Buck Rodgers had something like bobsledding in space. A Star Trek NG episode centered on team precision piloting of small craft. in written SF, Jack Vance invented the sport of Hussade - described in great detail in one of the Alistor books
Nygard:
That's not the Olympic coverage I get here in Japan. Here, they spend a couple weeks before-hand running special programs about the contenders with high-hopes & chances. But during the games, they have announcers who simply explain things that aren't obvious... when they can.
Some things still don't need explanations, or heightened drama. Watching Michael Phelps with a green-line through his mid-section marking where the world-record-holder was at that particular moment of the race... pretty easy to understand.
And the Japanese announcers have NO IDEA what Fencing Silver Medalist Ota was doing, nor do most of the fans... so they only show 90 seconds of it, and say, "Wow, that looked like something! Ota-san, how do you feel?" "Umm... Good? I won an Olympic Medal you nutter!"
The personal drama is really much less dramatic than the athletic drama. The American Olympic broadcasts just got worse and worse, as they showed less and less of the competition...
As for sports you've never heard of before, invented for a movie... they COULD have that sort of play-by-play help-the-viewer sort of announcing, but it wouldn't be very realistic! (They don't do that sort of thing in daily broadcasts of sports that the viewers usually know).
At any rate, a friend of mine reported that they did studies on the psychological response to watching sports, and found that people who used to or still play the sport are half way between watching and playing, whereas people who never played are just watching. So, putting baseball on a movie screen in the U.S.A. you involve the people who played baseball. How many people in the audience played "mugderidnfmdiaa"? So, it sort of needs to be a stand-alone visual spectacle. Blood works!
Starship Troopers featured that acrobatic-football-like thing and was fodder for the love triangle without being overly gladiatorial (at least, any more than modern football, though we see the moves later on during combat); Solarbabies was all about future roller hockey and fits more with the dystopian/significant outcome theme. And a few different sci-fi TV shows have featured spaceship enduro-races (Stargate SG-1 and Voyager), with varying degrees of purely for sport vs. advancing a larger plot point.
I know it's not a movie yet, but I'm really interested to see how the battles in Enders Game are handled.
Logan's Run carousel wasn't a sport, but a means to cut down on the population of over 30 year olds. It was advertised as a chance for renewal, but no one ever renewed.
I too came over just to see if you mentioned Blood of Heroes.
Now I wanna see this uncut version somebody mentioned.
Nobody carries the Dog Boy!
Dune, in each of its three incarnations so far, had gladiatorial knife-fighting.
Corrida (bull fighting) was oft mentioned in the novels as well.
There's an episode of News Radio where the leads are awoken from cryogenic suspension in a future ruled by robots. Someone asks who has won the World Series while he's been asleep and the answer is (akin to) "2008, Yankees; 2009, Braves; 2010, Robots; 2011, Robots; 2012, Robots..."
And I know I've seen some sports and pseudo sports in my MST3k watching; There's a robot that helps a guy play tennis in Cherez Ternii K Zvyozdam (Humanoid Woman) and there's motorcycle jousting in City Limits.
As for the Olympics, I have got to recommend NBC's online feeds. I just watched the women's archery finals for 3 hours with no commercials and only the loudspeaker announcements. Last night I watched four fencing feeds with nothing but the judge's "En guard", "prêt" and "allez!" to be heard other than crowd noises and swordplay.
I don't miss the announcers at all. Granted, it took me a few minutes to hunt down how Judo is scored when I was watching some, but I'd rather do that than listen to blathering idiots talk about personal stories.
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is supposed to be filmed/produced/released or whatever soon. That's a sci-fi story centered around a game, or a series of games.
I'd put Quidditch in as well . . . Fantasy? Sure. But it's a game for the sake of having a cool game at school where subplots can be developed. I like it.
Here's a freaky coincidence: Blood of Heroes is on tonight at 9 (in fifteen minutes) on the Action channel.. I don't know if maybe that's a Canadian channel?
Hey AMC, pretty clear that you have to put The Blood of Heroes on heavy rotation. Maybe once a week. Also like to see a Rutger Hauer / Joan Chen / V.P. D'Onofrio reunion introducing segments, live modern-day Jugger tournaments, and pretty much just nothing but Blood of Heroes-related content all the time. Except maybe when Mad Men is on.
I have two possible reasons for the scarcity of sports in science fiction.
First, and a point previously alluded to, recognizable sports don't have a SF aspect, and rules-based future sports (perhaps based upon zero-G environments or alien morphologies) are complex and thus lack easily recognized conflict (excluding fight-to-the-finish "sports").
My second point is one which John also raises: science fiction is largely a literature of the nerds, and writers in general are not as sports oriented as John Q. Public. We nerds would rather write than watch sports. (And I'll exercise tomorrow. I'm writing, not procrastinating.)
You could make similar observations for other genres such as fantasy, mystery, and romance. They are largely written by women and for women, and women aren't typically as sports and competition oriented as the male of the species.
I would like to point out that I am a card-carrying nerd, as are a number of my friends, both male and female. And I, like some of my friends, do enjoy sports. I'm watching the Olympics now, and I'm a football fan. I'm talking about generalities here.
Some of my best friends are sports fanatics. I just don't talk to them much. And they don't have time to read.
I'd like to hear ideas for zero-G sports, appropriate for the Asteroid Olympics. All I can think of is a version of racketball or handball. Most sports have a strong dependence upon gravity.
I think the reasoning is simple: not too many of us scifi nerds care all that much about sports!!!
Manny:
Free-climbing, beginning of ST V: TFF.
In response to Stephen Covey:
Without doing any exhaustive research, I can immediately point out a number of Olympic sports which would translate well (or at least, interestingly) to microgravity...
Archery
Cycling (watch out for Coriolis forces!)
Handball/racquetball/etc as mentioned
Judo (which would become the martial-arts equivalent of 3-D chess)
Pistol/Rifle
Rhythmic Gymnastics
I think Judo is particularly intriguing because it would be scored based on throws and locks which only get *more* interesting in microgravity,
Likewise the shooting sports -- you subtract out gravity and (presumably) crosswinds, but add in action/reaction effects and possibly Coriolis forces depending on the venue.
The story collection Future Sports has a great filmable selection. I'm almost clinically unable to watch sports in any form (I don't mind participating, but watching...eek!) but Jonathan Lethem's story Vanilla Dunk offers something interesting.
http://www.sfsite.com/10b/up138.htm
It actually strikes me that some of this collection could be filmed as a sports-show, perhaps cutting between different stories.