At the movies, as in fiction, I am, like most people, a willing believer in happy endings. But that willingness to believe must begin to fade for those with minimally discriminating taste, along with the plausibility of the ending in question. In other words, the feel-good dénouement has got to look pretty real, or it won’t feel real good at all. If the happy ending hasn’t been earned, as we might say, it will look like sentimental claptrap by an author who couldn’t be bothered to make his invented world look like anything approximating the world that is, in the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, “everything that is the case.”
This means that science fiction always starts out with what seems to me to be an almost insuperable disadvantage, since the stuff it works in looks unreal even before the story begins. In fact, its unreality is the very basis of its appeal to the mostly undiscriminating audiences of today. Yet, like any other novelist or filmmaker, the creators of science fiction and fantasy must feel, however faintly, reality’s gravitational pull, drawing them down to earth—at least they must if they and their audience are not to be content with producing an animated comic book.
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