Has anybody else noticed how it has suddenly become terribly unfashionable to have an imagination?

It used to be a real point of pride among the terminally smug that they never enjoyed movies nearly as much as the books they were based on -

“because the books allow you to use your own imagination.”

If you were to read books like “To Kill a Mockingbird”, you’d discover the subtle joys of learning to walk a little in someone else’s shoes. You’d see how much both you and that other person might grow as a result, and how much richer the world might appear - not necessarily nicer, or easier, but undoubtedly a richer place for hearts and imaginations to roam.

The sequence at the end, where Scout discovers the strange, lost soul of Boo Radley, remains one of my favourite pieces of understated storytelling.

Where did that all go?

Sure, there are zombie-wasters and vampire-slayers aplenty in fiction. There are girls who can leap across tall buildings and scour the cosmic wastes for new worlds, pilot starfighters and face off alien invaders. Heck, we even have heroines who can mend themselves after being burned to a crisp. That kind of imagination is cool, and we get oodles of extra portions with each new movie, each new TV series - but remember that these are just stories. Watch them, enjoy them, but try to remember your place in the Universe when the real world floods back in.

Just lately, it seems to have become almost offensive to suggest we might be able to imagine ourselves in any clothes but the ones we were wearing… in any skin other than the one we were born with.

How dare we assume we could walk in another person’s shoes, or see through any eyes other than the ones our limited little life-experience would allow us?

I always used to baulk slightly when people described something as being “beyond imagination”. It always seemed, at least to me, to miss the point of actually having an imagination.

But just lately, such phrases appear to have become somewhat ubiquitous. We are told on a fairly regular basis about situations which most of us, apparently, “cannot even begin to imagine.” We are reminded that certain attitudes have been “hard wired” into us, and we are lectured about the fragility of our world view.

To lose all sense of meaning, we need simply to step beyond the comfort zone of our dominant cultural ideology - yes, that’s right, we don’t even have to leave the planet, let alone the star system.

Maybe it really is arrogant of us to defy the prevailing wisdom, to take the Atticus Finch route and show some faith in our ability to empathise with those souls who walk the other side of the street.

But what else is there?

Our world only becomes precious when we see beyond it, when we take it out of the test tube and spend some time with its textures - the way Jane Eyre would have done, when a woman’s heroism was defined by her ability to reach beyond herself, and the walls that others built around her.

Perhaps there’s a panel of experts disproving this even as I speak, calibrating the limits of our imagination to the nearest decimal point so that we can slip back safely into mediocrity, secure in the knowledge that those pesky spiritual aspirations were wrong all along, and our souls really are this small.

Resist them. The moment you let anybody other than yourself define the limits of your imagination, you will have lost the world in the test tube. You will have let small voices into your soul, where they have no right to be.

John is the writer behind Matterings where he writes about stuff.

Pretty much every time I see a new heroine emerge on a movie or TV series these days, I notice the same kind of buzzwords creeping in - she’s feisty, she’s independent, she does thing on her own terms…

I read interviews with the actress, all of which confirm that her character is indeed feisty, independent and likes to do things on her own terms. It’s a good thing, we’re all reminded, to be your own person (honestly, there’s a certificate you can get and everything), to take no crap from anybody and not to be afraid of getting in people’s faces. The last one is particularly perplexing - why exactly do I need or want this person in my face again? Last time I checked, my face needed space.

I’m over-egging it here, I know, but there is a definite cultural phenomenon here - and one that sometimes overwhelms subtler stuff that might actually do the same job better.

I guess it’s like the big speech bit in a blockbuster movie, when the hero or heroine rallies a stout-hearted bunch of followers with some rousing words about freedom and honour and the spirit of whatever… Often, these are the bits that feel a little forced, or even a little annoying. They only work when you really believe the truth behind them, rather than feeling it’s just a handy way of getting people stirred up for a big fight with lots of swordplay and explosions.

Often enough, you find the truth of the heroic cause through fairly small things - a sudden moment of understanding or empathy between two characters, perhaps, or the heroine’s dawning realisation that every damn thing she does is going to have consequences… and that some of them are going to hurt much more than she realised. They’re moments of guilt and uncertainty, doubt and fear…

Whatever it is that sets our heroine on her cause, however brash of vibrant her style, it is often something far more fragile that draws us into her story.

How do you find the strength to carry on when you’ve just had to send the tortured vampire-boy of your dreams into hell, just at the moment he gets his soul back? How do you carry on working for an organisation that you know is evil, knowing that the man you work with thinks he’s one of the good guys?

I love the fun of a good bit of kick-ass vampire slaying as much as the next person. I think daring escapes and leap-of-faith stunts across flaming gorges are really cool, and I love it when the heroine decides it’s time to ditch the touchy-feely nonsense and kick some alien butt.

“Get away from her, you bitch!” - damn right, Ripley.

But I care more about that stuff when I know what it means to the heroine, when I feel what she’s been through to get there.

In the final season of Buffy, there’s a lovely exchange between Xander and Dawn, who’s just discovered that she’s not potential slayer material after all. It’s a quiet moment for all the non-heroes out there who find themselves having to get on with stuff anyway, without any special powers to help bolster their resolve.

This is us, the audience, the people in scaredy-cat land, where a lonesome ride home in a train carriage can be far more terrifying, dispiriting or even soul-destroying than any vampire monster.

This is us, finding our way through a world that all-too-often conspires to make us vulnerable.

This is us, wondering from each day to the next just how much of a distance we should keep to protect ourselves from the unspoken terror around us.

In this world, vulnerability is not really a sign of weakness at all. To allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to risk empathy with others, to reveal some part of ourselves and share what we have learned with those we care about - these are the qualities that pass for courage in the world that most of us live in.

This is for all the heroines I have known, real and imaginary, who have conquered such fears.

John is the writer behind Matterings where he writes about stuff.

I thought whilst we wait on some more articles I would celebrate a particularly important date that is often overlooked:

On this day in 1978 “NASA introduced its first female astronauts when it named the eighth class of astronaut candidates. This class of 35 included six women: Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judith Resnik, Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon and Kathryn Sullivan. All six eventually flew on the space shuttle. And Shannon Lucid set an endurance record for American astronauts with a six-month stay on Russia’s Mir space station.” (source)

Lee is a a huge popular culture freak, loves comic books, science fiction, soundtracks and writes for Quit Your Day Job.

There is a moment in my life that I will always remember even though I was only a witness to the event, it wasn’t happening directly to me. I was walking to work one mid morning and along the way a bird jumped out in front of me and started squawking. It was kind of like a seagull and I gave it a wide birth as I headed on down the street. It was only when past the bird that I noticed the cause for its concern. In the middle of the road a chick had been hit by a car. To this day I tell myself that the baby was already dead and there was nothing I could do for it. In all honesty I don’t know. I do know that I wouldn’t have been able to render any more aid than putting the baby bird out of it’s pain.

That is at least if I could have gotten past it’s mother. What made the event really cement itself into my memory was what I saw next though. I watched a bird about the size of a seagull with wings outstretched standing down a car.

It was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve seen, the mother literally blocking her chick’s body by standing in between an oncoming car. The bird screeched at the approaching car, demanding it stay away from her fallen child.

Here was a creature defending it’s young against a tremendous foe with no chance of winning. I hope that she survived and that wasn’t her only baby. The realist in me sadly believes that she also gave her life that day protecting her child but like I said, I hope not.

In Aliens Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is faced with a similar situation and to a degree reacts in the same way. After surviving the first Alien film Ripley is picked up in her escape pod and awoken from hypersleep after 57 years. Her own daughter who was only young when she left has passed away having lived out her own life assuming her mother was killed in a deep space accident.

Events are put in motion that see Ripley returning to the planet where she first encountered the Alien with the space marine corps. It is here that she encounters ‘Newt’ a young girl around the age of Ripley’s daughter and the only survivor of the doomed settlement.

In the climax of the film Newt and Ripley find themselves in the Alien Queen chamber. It is here facing off against the giant Alien Queen that we see the culmination of Ripley’s protective or motherly feelings for Newt as she stands in between the Alien Queen and Newt.

The line I believe is ‘get away from her you bitch’.

Matt Murray puts it best when he wrote:

Protecting a lonely, traumatized child hardly needs any explanation; it’s hard-wired into our species to care about such things.

And so there you have it, something that links humans with the animal kingdom. A primal urge to protect our young no matter what odds that we face. Female elephants will form a circle around their young to protect them from danger. It’s only natural that Ellen Ripley would face down an Alien Queen to protect her surrogate young.

Lee is a a huge popular culture freak, loves comic books, science fiction, soundtracks and writes for Quit Your Day Job.