“I wear my sunglasses at night…”

I saw Oblivion over the weekend. The special effects were great, and the story was fun, but for me it really drove home what I enjoy about science fiction. Some people get into the ideas and technology, others love the predictive futurism aspect, still others just love the settings. But the science fiction that really speaks to me – whether in a short story, novel, television show or movie – demonstrates one concept: human beings are stronger than anything that is done to us.

I’m not going to talk about how Oblivion handled that, because the movie is still in theaters and I don’t want to spoil it. So I will pull in examples from elsewhere.

(Holy crap. I just realized it’s been so long since I’ve watched the original Star Trek series that I can’t discuss the episodes in detail, only generalities. I better see about that.)

Consider the movie They Live. Silly fun? Absolutely. Sunglasses revealing alien subliminal mind control. Rowdy Roddy Piper delivering the classic line, “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” But what’s the core of the story? Aliens have taken over and entrenched themselves so thoroughly in positions of power that they control us from behind the scenes. And still humans find a way to fight back and stand up for who and what we are.

Consider Babylon 5. Humans are one of the last of the known races into space but it was humans who stopped the Dilgar and became a force to be reckoned with. The Minbari almost wiped us out, but we came back stronger. But that’s all window dressing. Let’s dig into the core of the story. The Shadows and Vorlons have been “guiding” the development of every major species for thousands of years. But who figured out the game? Who faced both these ancient powers down and said, “Enough! We will stand on our own”? John Sheridan, a human. Last to develop spacefaring technology, less than two decades removed from near eradication, humans stood for the right to find our own destiny, to be who we are.

But let’s bring this down to the personal level. I could pull another example from B5, but there are so many great examples that I want to look elsewhere. So let’s turn now to Firefly.

No aliens in Firefly. Just humans. But still the theme remains, embodied in the character of River Tamm. Poor River: kidnapped, abused, trained, and surgically altered to become the ultimate killing machine, complete with “trigger” mechanisms that would “activate” her. But the unselfish devotion of her brother, and the acceptance of the crew of Serenity help her recover her humanity, her sanity, herself.

When I think about these things in the real world, I always come back to Holocaust survivors who managed to overcome the horrors they had endured to find lives of their own, even families.

It’s not a sign of weakness that some of us break when we go through hell. But I think it’s a sign of greatness that some of us don’t. And I love that science fiction can remind me of that.

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