The big stories

Literary fiction has become overloaded with irrelevant minutiae; television's plotting is now hopelessly complex; regular movies are just too expensive these days to take any risks. And so, the only stories left that can make any large statements about the world are in speculative fiction - in science fiction and fantasy, and in the movies and television shows they spawn.

And those stories are always of two types. There is the lone hero story and the unlikely alliance story. In one, the hero is distinct and identifiable, and somehow better or more honourable or more admirable than the rest of the characters; the parables are stark, the morality black and white. In the other, an apparently disparate cast of characters must work together, bound by some sort of nebulous code or end that they're struggling to understand.

In the theatres this week is Man of Steel, which remakes, for the third time in movie history, the 80-year-old Superman legend - the archetypal lone hero story in science fiction. Unlike the other two attempts, however, this one is awful. Partly because of the overt Christian mythos that've been grafted on: this Clark Kent is first seen wearing a Christ-like beard, has a tendency to hold his arms out as if crucified when about to do something noble and sacrificial, and actually has an epiphany sitting in a church with a stained-glass Jesus blazing in the background. Oh, and he's been sent by his father far, far away to save Earth and make us all better people. The movie makers' attempts were still considered insufficient, however, by Warner Brothers' marketing people, who have set up a special website that highlights a nine-page booklet titled "Jesus: the First Superhero", published by the studio, which is trying to sell it to Christian pastors.

Man of Steel also sets a new high for science fiction awfulness thanks to its cartoonish digitised violence, which ends with Superman actually killing somebody in cold blood - something inconceivable with earlier incarnations of the character. This is, in fact, the moral heart of the movie. Oddly, it isn't thanks to producer Christopher Nolan, fresh out of directing a morally ambiguous Batman series in which the eponymous cape wearer was given extra dollops of darkness and reinvented as a War-on-Terror-era good-bad guy who does things that the forces of law and order can't. It's because of the film's director, a disaster named Zachary Snyder, who made his name directing a Western supremacist "historical" movie called 300 about macho white men defending civilisation from a multicultural horde of monsters. Mr Snyder has always believed in violence; his lone hero leads not by example but through the brute application of power.

The greatest difference between the lone hero stories and the ensemble stories is how they treat the application of power. This is the old Star Trek versus Star Wars divide all over again. In the TV series and films of Star Trek, including the one just released, Star Trek: Into Darkness, individuals from a near-pacifist, rule-bound society that puts a premium on respect for difference try to deal, repeatedly, with existential threats without losing their essential soul. In Into Darkness, one protagonist begins by breaking a basic directive that is a marker of respect for indigenous societies - and it is shown as a sign of his immaturity. The Star Wars movies, in spite of the large cast of characters, always show victories as coming from the special powers and abilities of lone heroes, who break rules on the way.

In fact, that's why the best commentary on the US' recent foreign policy misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan has come from science fiction books, movies and TV, and not from novels - novelists have little to do with fighting these days - or from the regular Hollywood that produced military-loving movies like The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty. One excellent recent example was Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that specifically showed the impossibility of ending threats to a society through trying to rule your enemies through a pseudo-colonialism. And the big hit of recent television has been Game of Thrones on HBO, based on a brilliant series of books written by George R R Martin. The third season of Game of Thrones just ended, with what looked like a triumphant scene in which a single white redeemer saved an entire nation of adulatory brown people. But, as future seasons will show, George R R Martin doesn't believe that such heroes will be "greeted as liberators". An apparently straightforward action turns instead into a bloody quagmire - in his stories, individuals beyond the lone heroes have projects and an integrity of their own, and the consequences of the exercise of power are never what you'd expect.

The reason why science fiction is mainstreaming itself after decades of marginalisation is that other genres just aren't willing to tackle these bigger questions. Even the Harry Potter novels deal with the problem of evil and the possibility of redemption in a grander manner than most other fiction. In science fiction, the unreality of the background allows creators to smuggle political and ethical content into their stories that would never be allowed in any other form of pop culture. Science fiction's empire will only continue to expand unless "the mainstream" realises what it's missing.

The writer is a Mumbai-based consultant