Science Friction : Fullerton Show Explores How Space Age Rubbed Off on Pop Culture and Sparked New Life Forms

We’re all living in the future

Tell you how I know

I read it in the paper

15 years ago

--”Living in the Future,” John Prine

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Stardate 9704.12: You live in a master-planned community of immaculate, landscaped housing complexes and manicured parks. Your living quarters are climate controlled, with fully integrated life-support, entertainment and food-synthesis systems.

You work from home at a computer console that can send information to any point on the globe in the blink of an eye. Your favorite diversions include surfing cyberspace and playing virtual-reality games.

And everywhere you go, you carry a palm-sized communications device that allows you to speak with anyone, any time, anywhere.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. You’re living it now, but you’ve also been seeing it for years in the movies and on television.

It was the beginning of manned space flight almost 40 years ago that kicked interest in science fiction into high gear, according to Jennifer Schamberger, who, with co-curator Anna Sanchez, has created “Empires, Aliens, Warp Drives and Conspiracies: Science Fiction in the Space Age.” The exhibition of film and television memorabilia opens Sunday at Cal State Fullerton’s art gallery.

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“We’re examining the impact of science fiction on culture since manned space flight became a reality,” Schamberger said Wednesday by phone from the gallery.

“Science fiction as a part of mass culture has really only developed over the last 30 years or so,” Schamberger said.

TV programs including “Star Trek” owe much of their popularity to the development of the United States’ space program in the early 1960s, say Schamberger and Sanchez.

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Science fiction’s impact on our attitudes about the future has been strongest since then, they say, with filmmakers and producers stepped into the Space Age with utopian visions as well as dark predictions about what society could become.

“A lot of the technology that’s being developed today was seen in the science-fiction universe of about 30 years ago,” she said.

“Take something as common as a flip phone. It’s something that so many people take for granted, but the truth is, its development can be linked directly to the cordless communication that was shown on ‘Star Trek’ 30 years ago.”

The exhibition has several treats for Trekkers. Among the items on view are Capt. Kirk’s command chair from the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise.

Fans also will recognize the blue science officer’s uniform, similar to that worn by Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, and the sexy, bright red engineering uniform worn by Nichelle Nichols in her role as the ship’s communications officer, Lt. Uhura.

Other Trek memorabilia includes a Klingon Bat’let sword from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” two wall panels from the Borg ship in “Star Trek: First Contact” and original Tribbles from “The Trouble With Tribbles,” one of the most popular episodes of the original series.

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Also on view, from the 1982 futuristic thriller “Blade Runner,” is a matte painting used during the filming of the movie’s final battle scene between Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.

The work, on loan from a private collector, is the only remaining painting from that scene, said Schamberger, who finds the film interesting in light of the cloning experiments that recently made worldwide headlines.

“It’s ironic that the first successful cloning was a sheep,” she said, noting that “ ‘Blade Runner’s’ story of cloning humans was based on the novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.’ And in the book, animals--including sheep--are cloned as pets.”

The exhibition also deals with conspiracy theories and the growing popularity of such shows as the “X-Files” that have made shadow government and sinister alien plots a central part of the science-fiction mythology.

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“Science fiction lends itself particularly well to that kind of plot line. And it makes for a chilling scenario,” she explained.

“We’ve included enlargements made from ‘X-Files’ trading cards and stills from the [1971] movie ‘The Andromeda Strain,’ that make a point about the government and how we don’t really know a lot of what’s going on.”

The exhibition also features a photographic timeline pointing out the relationship between the development of the space program and the evolution of science-fiction films and television.

Pictures of real astronauts and spacecraft from the Johnson Space Center in Houston are juxtaposed with texts pointing out important concurrent moments in science-fiction history.

Among other items in the show are a mask of Han Solo’s hairy sidekick Chewbacca from the 1977 movie “Star Wars” and an alien head from Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (also 1977), both on loan from collector Forest Ackerman, whose 1960s fanzine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, introduced a generation of kids to many elements of the science-fiction genre. Ackerman also contributed an essay to the show’s catalog.

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Schamberger insists that both she and Sanchez have always been fans of the science-fiction genre. But as work progressed on the exhibit--which took nearly a year to complete--they began to consider themselves “rank amateurs” compared with some of the most dedicated fans.

Working with fans and collectors also dispelled some of their preconceived notions about the science-fiction crowd.

“We found that there are a lot of fans out there, but very few of them fall into that geek stereotype that is a common image of hard-core science-fiction fans,” she said. “We found that that kind of person just doesn’t exist.”

* “Empires, Aliens, Warp Drives and Conspiracies: Science Fiction in the Space Age” opens with a reception Sunday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Cal State Fullerton Art Gallery, 800 N. State College Blvd. The exhibition continues through May 15. Noon-4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; 3-7 p.m. Wednesday; 2-5 p.m. Sunday. Free. (714) 773-3262.