The Sci-Fi Movie Stigma 572
An anonymous reader writes "MSN has up an article that explores why Sci-Fi is associated with cheesy Space-Operas and children's movies, and cerebral Sci-Fi films don't make it unless they are adulterated into 'Action' flicks. The piece covers upcoming projects like 'The Last Mizmey' and 'Next', and points the finger at the ultimate culprit: George Lucas. 'When Lucas made Star Wars in 1977, he was paying tribute to a subgenre of science fiction that he loved dearly as a boy: the space opera. But although the breathless serial adventures of Flash Gordon and his ilk had their pleasures, they were often treated with tolerance, at best, by more serious science-fiction writers and readers. Nevertheless, the success of Star Wars changed the movie industry's perception of science fiction forever. As much as we love Star Wars for what it is, it nearly killed Hollywood's willingness to fund science-fiction movies that actually said something about the human condition.'"
'Twas always this way (Score:5, Insightful)
It was always this way even before Lucas, with the possible exceptions of 'Things to Come' and '2001 A Space Odyssey'.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Insightful)
Even 'Deathrace 2000', 'Running Man' and 'Robocop' had socio-politcal statements to make.
Bladerunner (Score:4, Interesting)
And don't just look at Hollywood. There's some great Science Fiction coming out of Japan. Such as Ghost in the Shell.
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It's a a good action movie that uses ideas from the book it's based on as texture. It has some excellent dialog, almost none of which comes from the book.
Oddly enough, Philip K. Dick is pretty much the most filmed SF author, and every one of his books, including Bladerunner, ends up being an action movie, despite the fact that none of his books even remotely resemble something that might be made into an action movie.
Bladerunner is perhaps the most fai
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Re:'Twas always this way (Score:4, Insightful)
Bladerunner is one of those very rare movies that deviates greatly from a great book and still kicks ass.
Can't believe I forgot to list it.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Insightful)
After the serials of the '40s and the atomic monster movies of the '50s, science-fiction cinema seemed to grow up right alongside the literature itself in the '60s, culminating in the ultimate marriage of the two: "2001: A Space Odyssey." Director Stanley Kubrick went right to the source for his visionary classic, enlisting Arthur C. Clarke to write the screenplay with him and presenting perhaps the most serious, adult treatment of science-fiction themes to that date. Other literary adaptations followed. Kubrick did it again in 1971 with "A Clockwork Orange," while "Logan's Run," the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Soylent Green" and the cult favorite, "A Boy and His Dog," all brought real science-fiction novels or novellas to the screen with varying degrees of success. Even nonliterary offerings such as "Silent Running" and Lucas' own "THX 1138" made sobering statements. But "Star Wars" effectively ended all that, substituting space battles, nonstop special effects and simple good-versus-evil archetypes for the more complex shadings and themes that marked science fiction to that point.
Seriously - this would be an interesting article to discuss if people actually read the article instead of treating this as another opportunity to publicly flaunt their indie cred. "Wath me list of sci-fi movies that show I'm so hardcore sci fi."
There goes any hope for an interesting discussion...
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Perhaps you are simply asking to much, this is Slashdot after all, but in response to your selected quote from the article I would offer the explanation that the movie business, like the music business and indeed the rest of popular entertainment, has become increasingly focused on the blockbuster or "hit" concept where an ext
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Funny)
Don't go there....just don't go there.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Funny)
Robot (does something or whatever).
Will Smith: Dayamn! You did NOT just do that! Nuh-uh! You be trippin'!
And no, I'm not kidding. That is exactly what the movie was like.
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Zeroth Law (New):
A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
First Law (Modified):
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to ha
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While the movie was produced in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and released as such on Laserdisc, the DVD release was changed to a 1.33:1 ratio using pan and scan, w
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If one can't figure out why the sci-fi genre isn't taken seriously by the time one gets back home, they'll never get it.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Funny)
Next time say that in Klingon, it gets the point home more forcefully.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, audiences don't clamor for cerebral films of any genre. The Fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our Star Wars, but in ourselves.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry just seems unwilling to depart from established formulas. The result is that everything they do frequently is a beat-down version of something else done before. It's ironic that the industry behaves this way when the rare departure often results in movies that are ridiculously popular... example, Napoleon Dynamite. (Let's face it-- "quirky" would be an understatement to describe the feeling of this movie.) Another example might be clerks... hrm... weren't both of those independant films? I know Clerks was. Perhaps what this shows is that the movie machine is uncreative and cares nothing about the audience save that they surrender their dollars.
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That's it, you hit the head right on the nail. Whatever puts the butts in the seats and the $$$ in the coffers.
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The industry just seems unwilling to depart from established formulas.
There is inertia to be sure, but unwilling?! Hardly. I watch creative and innovative films all the time. The fact of the matter is that most people WILL NOT go to see a creative and innovative film unless a) it has something they already like (e.g. The Matrix, for all its SF plot was largely seen for its huge explosions and bullet-time fight scenes) or b) peer pressure is involved. What this means is that creative films that don't toe the line and add bombs, blood, breasts and beasts will remain relegated
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There should be some kind of law about abusing licenses...*cough**shadowrun**cough
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After "Bicentennial Man" (*shudder*), I had hoped that the Good Doctor's work would not be further reduced to trash by Hollywood... but I was wrong. I'll have no part of "I, Robot", the Holly-weird version. I was sad that Harlan Ellison's version didn't get made; although still not as close to the original book as i would have liked, it would have been a thousand times better.
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1. Will Smith vs. killer robots. Explosions and stuff! Ooh, and product placement. He can do a rap number - perfect! Ha ha, look at the funny rapping black man.
vs.
2. People thinking out their problems and using their brains. Oh, and the lead character is a woman... and she's the world's smartest person and leading expert on robotics...
But it wasn't just "I, Robot."
Look at The Postman or Starship Troopers. (These three are the best (worst?) examples of butchery I can think of r
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Re:'Twas always this way (Score:4, Insightful)
The movie was entertaining, the book, which was a completely different story, was excellent.
Re:'Twas always this way (Score:5, Interesting)
It may have also been his way of getting out of a contract for writing so called 'juveniles' since it was the last he wrote for that genre. (I seem to recall reading somewhere that he intentionally wrote a book that was good fiction and technically fit the genre, but was too controversial for them to publish.)
Now when you get down to it, the current administration's off and on proposal for mandatory 'civil service', which can include military service, is a trend toward what Heinlein brought up in Starship Troopers.
As a long time Heinlein fan, I watched the movie and listened to the commentary, wondering if the director did much more than skim the book. I also had my doubts that he had read very much Heinlein, especially the stuff after 1959, when Starship Troopers was published.
As with many Hollywood productions of SF classics, I would have to give Starship Troopers a D minus with regards to how well the movie matched the book. While it did cover the suffrage through military service concept, with an iron hand, it missed a lot of the interesting things like the fighting suits. (Budget restrictions, according to the director.)
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What a lot of people don't realize is that Starship Troopers (the movie) was made by someone who didn't understand the book in the same way that you don't. Most importantly, like most of the wide varieties of societies in Heinlein's fiction, the main society at the center of
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And for the really geeky... The announcements in the background are in Esperanto.
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ANY thing cererbral is going to be shunned by Hollywood. That's the way it's always
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(1) It had a different title
(2) It didn't have a character named Susan Calvin
or
(1) Susan Calvin was the main hero and actually solved the problems
(2) The solution was through thought and insight, not action and computer virii
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly right (Score:2)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also true that Star Wars was more responsible for a mental-block on the part of those looking back at film history than it was for a change in later films.
Some films that came before Star Wars:
Some films that came after Star Wars:
You will notice that when you search for movies from these different periods, the primary thing that leaps out at you is that movies that treated science fiction as a serious genre (Pi, Gattaca, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain) are about evenly spaced. There aren't a lot of them, but they get neither more nor less frequent over the decades... We just have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to history.
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As fun as it might be -- George Lucas is not the ultimate reason for this. The ultimate reason is that the major film studios are afraid to innovate and want every film to be a sure thing. He didn't make hollywood that way.
Definatly. The author really needs to go watch Logan's Run if he wants to see what Hollywood sci-fi was like before Star Wars (it's a laughably bad movie with an interresting story and it got two Oscar nominations).
The sci-fi genre was dead in hollywood before Star Wars made a gazillion bucks and motivated producers to fund some. The fact that intelligent sci-fi is hard to find is not Lucas' fault, it's because all Hollywood movies are dummed down to please the lowest common denominator of movie goers.
Don'
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Actually, GP's analogy doesn't suck.
The analogy points out that American movie audiences would probably lack a proper appreciation for a critical piece of classical history and legend encapsulated in the set phrase "philosopher's stone": that the philosopher's stone [wikipedia.org] was the holy grail of alchemy, the key to transmutation of the elements and the source of an elixir of immortality.
That's the way the phrase "philosopher's stone" is meant in the book. But the benighted masses of 'merka wouldn't recognize the ph
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I think what is in common is that fans tend to be those that feel as if they don't fit in with the wo
Didn't stop Alien, Blade Runner, et. al. (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't seem to stop Ridley Scott from making Alien and Blade Runner right after Star Wars. There is and will always be smart sci-fi out there. And there is and will always be pulp. I would actually argue that Star Wars is more than just pulp, especially in Empire Strikes Back, but nonetheless smart sci-fi continues to be made.
In fact, I can think of
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Dude. This is Slashdot, okay? People don't always read the article. You haven't figured out yet that basically how it works it, the title and summary set the tone for the conversation, and the article is only involved in a tenth of the posts? It works like this:
FLASHY TITLE TO GRAB ATTENTION.
Summary of article.
(HUNDREDS OF POSTS of us talking to each other, bitching about the summary, TFA, the title
Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Solaris (Score:5, Informative)
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Brainwave, The Caves of Steel, Blood Music, Queen of Angels, The Demolished Man, Fahrenheit 451, Childhood's End, Camp Concentration, Permutation City, Beggars in Spain, and a thousand other novels. There are some relatively legitimate reasons why you would want to set it in space, though: you want to depict a possible future, and you believe that having people in space will be an important part of that future, or you belie
Damn you Lucas!!! (Score:5, Funny)
wtf is this guy talking about ? (Score:4, Insightful)
"human condition" what is that ?
what "human condition" does Flash Gordon series contain ? or early superman series ? they are run-off-the-mill american dream robotized characters that are fighting absurd evil characters that contain no humane feelings - just evil, for evil's sake.
im not a star wars fan, but boy, star wars contain heaploads of stuff for "human condition" than any of the sci-fi stuff this guy is talking about - its about humane fears, good and evil, greed, comradeship, high ideals and lowly cravings.
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None, and that's the point. Flash and early superman were cheap junk. Star Wars is expensive junk.
Of course, Joseph Campbell would have disagreed.
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There have been plenty of thought-provoking SF movies before and after Star Wars. If anything has been harmed by his success with that franchise, it's been artistic side of his own career.
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Even Disney films contain elements of "good" and "bad", but having such things does not make them classics for descriping the human condition.
Disclaimer: I love B-, C-, and D-grade science fiction. I can appreciate the cheesiest movies with awful special effects and no redeeming plot lines. That doesn't mean I can't distinguish story-telling art fro
Might this yet change (Re: Ender's Game)? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Might this yet change (Re: Ender's Game)? (Score:5, Insightful)
I partially blame... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just Sci-Fi channel; it's the market, too (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago, some friends of mine and I pitched the Sci-Fi channel, and I heard directly from a very highly-placed executive that the network was actually making a conscious effort to move away from SF programming and do more "Scare Tactics" style programming in an effort to capture portions of the SpikeTV market.
I foolishly (for the goal of selling a show to them) observed that running away from the very thing that made the network popular -- and was in the damn name, by the way -- probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but the geek in me overpowered the hopeful businessman. Oh well.
Those craptacular movies you're referring to (I did two of them: Python and Deep Core) used to go directly to video in the USA, while also being sold to foreign markets to make back money for their investors. However, with the advent of basic cable and channels like Sci-Fi, they usually are produced by, and air on one of those stations (think Lifetime, TNT, etc.) before heading off to the bargain rack at the car wash.
One of the points made in TFA is that intelligent movies have been replaced with action movies, and thoughtful plots have been replaced with explosions and spectacle. One of the reasons I tend to agree with the parent on Sci-Fi being part of the problem here is that they still translate these movies into several different languages, and distribute them all over the world; an explosion and a scantily-clad starlet are essentially the same in any language or culture, so it's easier to sell those films (to Sci-Fi and to the foreign markets) when they're simplistic, "four-color" 90-minute packages, instead of complex 2001-esque masterpieces.
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It couldn't have been that hard t
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I honestly am starting to feel that the problem is cyclic; that the "d
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This is something I could never get about network executives... They treat humans like a homogeneous blob which can be attracted, and never like the subgroups with diverse interests that humans actually are. SpikeTV has the SpikeTV market because it's aiming for that subgroup. If the Sci-Fi channel desires it, it can have an almost exclusive stranglehold on the sci-fi market by making more good shows like Battlestar Galactica or the Stargate franchise.
Here's the thing though -- crappy "reality" programs li
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Lynch's film, while being an abomination in almost every sense of the word, did have the atmosphere right, and the acting was much better. If they could have put the actors and director from the movie into the miniseries, I think we would have had a spot-on Dune, but as it
Battlestar Galactica has turned into DS9. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now BSG definitely IS a soap opera. We've got custody battles, affairs, elections, trials, family squabbles...
I liked it better when it was a Sci-Fi show about ships in space, not a daytime soap opera that just happens to take place on ships in space
oh dear lord (Score:4, Insightful)
With only a few exceptions, it was all cheesy, and almost all action based. Lucas just made the action part look damn good for the time.
1970 Science fiction movies:
"The Andromeda Strain" (1971)
"Silent Running" (1972)
"Soylent Green" (1973)
"West World" (1973)
"Futureworld" (1976)
"Rollerball" (1975)
"Omega Man" (?)
"Planet of the Apes"
Some thinkers, mostly action based.
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Zardoz!
You forgot Zardoz!
You did it on purpose, didn't you?
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It.
Them.
Return to the Planet of the Apes.
Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Yet another Planet of the Apes movie.
The recent "Planet of the Apes" remake.
Star Trek the Movie (#1,2,3,4,5,6,....)
Star Trek the Next Generation (#1,2,3,....)
Flintstones, the movie.
An Inconvenient Truth.
Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Earth Girls are Easy.
Human condition? (Score:2, Interesting)
There's plenty of SF movies (Score:5, Insightful)
The Truman Show
Being John Malcovich
Manchurian Candidate
Movie makers and marketing companies want their films to attract as broad an audience as possible. To call something "science fiction" automatically creates expectations in people's heads.
It happens in publishing as well. Margaret Atwood is a very famous example of someone that has intentionally distanced themselves from the label.
To name me is to limit me.
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I was coming into this discussion with my own opinion about the subject, and I didn't even think about the movies the parent mentioned. I think the issue is that some really really good sci-fi movies don't immediately jump to mind when you think about sci-fi because you're looking for things like Star Wars o
Re:There's plenty of SF movies (Score:5, Informative)
Movies like Star Wars may be entertaining in their own right, but they have little to do with science. That stuff has more in common with Lord of the Rings: Fastasy-Fiction, except with spaceships and lasers. Star Wars is basic Swords and Sorcery... err, light sabers and The Force.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
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But... (Score:3)
But what about Blade Runner [imdb.com]? That's about as serious as Sci-Fi gets and was made later than Star Wars.
I believe the problem is more with Hollywood studios not wanting to take any risks, always sticking to the same formula. The genre is irrelevant.
Well what else is there? (Score:2)
Who is to say how Sci-fi should be presented since it's bullshit from the get go.
Some people may get a chubby over the more recent Star Trek shows because they throw in some actual scientific lingo but it's just buzz words that make the eyes of the masses glaze over. Anyone with a decent IQ knows they are just spitting out buzz words and on a very rare occassion they throw out an actual working theory.
Hell, it's entertainment. Leave it alone. If it's space opera
Three things (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Related to #1, thoughtful drama is the province of television now. Movies (and this is where Lucas and Spielberg are responsible) are about explosions.
3) Realistically, how good, or how thoughtful, a movie was 2001, anyway? It's as overblown and boring as Heinlein novels that the sci-fi fanboys also insist are Really Important.
Or there's compromise... (Score:2)
right (Score:3, Insightful)
Sci-fi ranking by the imdb... (Score:2)
TFA seems to be right, as most of the top ranked Sci-fi flicks at the imdb are just future-based action movies:
1. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2. Star Wars
3. The Matrix
4. Metropolis
5. Alien
6. Aliens
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
9. Blade Runner
10. Donnie Darko
Rest of the list, here [imdb.com].
--
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Star wars is not... (Score:4, Funny)
2010, Contact, there are others (Score:2)
There are many good sci-fi films.
Just apparently they don't fit the need of the writer?
Science Fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are still good films and good books made, but greed has pushed the idea of being "good" rather far from the central idea of the major production houses, to the point where "good" and "bad" become conflated with "popular" and "unpopular." It's all about the money. The most popular actors are generally good, but there are countless incredible actors who never attain that sort of popularity, including some who are far better than some among the popular... because the popular people are part of the formula, and tend to bring in more money, even if their acting is worse than the acting of an unknown. The same applies to writers, and to almost all art where it's a producer/distributor generating the money, and more in it for the money than for the quality of the product. If art and culture really are the metrics we ought to use to measure the output of our civilization--if it wasn't just the Industrial Revolution that mattered, but also the Renaissance--then greed can be a terrible enemy to the quality of our productions.
(Though I'll admit it can also help, at times--the rich artist can grow soft, with no need to change and grow. Look at how comedians change as their success does.)
catering to the audience (Score:4, Interesting)
The only reason the studioes release anything else is because they make money on DVD sales and rentals downstream. You want more sci-fi? Buy every battlestar galacta, star trek, star wars, dr. who, dune, LoTR, etc DVD. Individually they are about the same as a movie ticket + some popcorn; it will look awesome on your widescreen LCD; and it sends the message that sci-fi will be supported by the audience. (Star Wars actually went against this model because it took so long to get ep 1-3 onto DVD)
Not confined to movies (Score:5, Interesting)
Mrs. Carroll, my English teacher in high school, was unconvinced that science fiction was on a par with classic literature, even though I trotted out examples like "Farenheit 451", "Foundation", and "Childhood's End". I got very sick of Shakespeare, Henry James, and that lot as they were continuously pounded into my head as "great writing." And now that I am partner in a company that releases a science fiction journal, I can look back and laugh. If there's any problem with science fiction right now it's the scarcity of good writers; I have to say I don't read as much current work as I did when I was kid, when I absorbed Clarke, Asimov, Heilein, Niven, Pournelle, etc.
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But I agree that the problem now is that SciFi just doesn't have any superstars left. Asimov was, at his best, one of the best writers out there (though ironically he could also be one of the worst), and the Foundation series could make some pretty good movie
Dune (Score:5, Insightful)
Lynch's movie captured the "ambiance" that many people associated with Dune, but slaughtered the story. The SciFi channel series, with more time on their hands, did more justice to the story, but completely slaughtered the ambiance.
Battlefield Earth for example, once you take out the scientology crap out of the ecuation, is a eminently fun and well done sci-fi novel. Yet the movie was a fucking disaster.
What's the difference between the success of say, the Harry Potter and LOTR movies and the failures that are Dune and all the other crappy film treatments of fantasy/sci-fi books? I'm not sure, but hopefully someone will figure it out soon. There are a lot of excellent books out there - who wouldn't want to see a movie based on Niven's Ringworld series? Or Saberhagen's Berserker opera? - that would make fantastic movies.
they're not alone... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, regular folks like you and me would call the one variety of books "science fiction," or maybe "space opera" (or, if you've read them, "bad"), and the other books "hard sci-fi." But if you're inherently ashamed of the genre you're exploring, I suppose such a distinction isn't sufficient.
Bah, I say.
Obligatory Star Trek Troll (Trowl?) (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I am also a fan of Frank Herbert, Isaac Asmiov, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson, and Phillip K. Dick.
With all that said I'm going to reiterate something I said in college.
Star Trek killed science fiction. With a phaser. Star Wars helped, but Gene Rodenberry has a lot to answer for.
See, what they both did was take the science out of the fiction. Dune too, to a great extent. More and more often these stories are less about how science changes the human condition and instead are about how science simply enables a new setting for the same old story. The fiction goes from involving the scientific aspect to working around it.
For instance if anyone ever tells Oedipus Rex as a science fiction story you will know it's horseshit. In any scientific culture Oedipus would have had his DNA tested to reveal his ancestry.
IEEE Spectrum had an article on this many years ago where they pointed out that for all the SCIENCE in TOS it was always the captain and rarely the science officer or engineer who finally saved the day.
In all fairness maybe we shouldnt blame the writers but the publishers. Whose idea is it to put Sci-fi and fantasy in the same section of the bookstore. There's nothing more iritating than browsing in a bookstore for a good scifi book and finding something with sword laden dragon hunters or somesuch. What I'm saying is that Tolkein, Leguinn, and Pratchett should go find their own damn shelves.
TNG was all about science changing the hc (Score:5, Insightful)
Where to start from...let's see...
artificial forms' rights? the whole story of Data was about that.
AI? Data, again. He even created a child.
3d hologram technology and consequences? lt Barcley's holodeck excursions, LaForge's love with a virtual character.
The consequences of very advanced weaponry? lots of stories here about balance of war.
Racism? Federation values and mistreatment of alien races.
Sexuality? Riker's affairs with asexual races, the trill woman and the doctor.
Cloning? Riker's brother, Lore.
What reality means in the presence of technology? Riker's episode in the hands of alien mind benders.
The consequences of nanotechnology? the episode with the nano-machines.
History and archeology? the episode where Picard finds out the common ancestor race for most races of the A and B quadrants.
Sociology and biology? unification.
Cyborg technology? the whole Borg story was about that.
Religion? many episodes where Picard was treated as god.
Politics? quite many episodes.
Money? the structure of the Federation as an advanced form of society that does not need money.
Evolution of civilization? Federation citizens evolved into people that aim to better themselves and not simply consume resources.
Strange stellar and time-space continuum phenomena? plenty of episodes as well.
Time travel and consquences? yet again, many episodes.
Terrorism and 'cause justifies the means'? season 3, episode with terrorists possessing a super-transporter device. Maquis.
Anti-gravity? Star Trek's home.
Psionics and telepathy? besides Deanna Troi, there were lots of episodes where telepathic races did various things with various consequences.
Espionage? plenty of Romulan-related episodes.
Tortures and human rights? 'I see 4 lights'.
Parenthood and what it means to raise children? lt Worf, his wife, his child Alexander.
Actually, La Forge and Data saved the day in quite a lot of episodes...in fact, in more episodes than Picard did.
See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek:_T
TNG is above and beyond all other sci-fi shows.
Odyssey 2001? was HAL science? it was more magic than science. Artificial gravity in Odyssey 2001? yeah, it could work, but man will not go to the Stars in rotating cylinders. The monolith? increbible black magic box.
Blade Runner? yeah, cloning. Big deal. Seen and discussed a thousand times in TNG.
Doctor Who? let me laugh. The doctor, travelling in time, battling injustice? with a ship bigger from the inside? what kind of science is this? where is the science, actually?
Farscape? nothing that Star Trek has not shown before.
Galactica 2003? firearms instead of lazer guns, Christian God preaching instead of ancient Gods? no thank you sir. It is ridiculus. Galactica 1978 was much better.
So...Star Trek did not kill Sci-fi. TNG was the most popular show, because of its tremendous diversity in topics.
Sci-fi was killed by the mindless stupid and silly shows that followed.
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Logistical Hurdles (Score:3, Insightful)
I think SciFi lends itself more readily to taking the easy way out. Throw in some lasers, a sweeping scene of an alien world, and you're good. But if you look at the LoTR, you can also see how well a movie of this type can be made. (I realize that Fantasy is different from SciFi, but from a Hollywood perspective they are essentially the same.) But doing so requires enormous effort and great risk- the two things for which Hollywood is least known.
There's no real -stigma-, It's just expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Both were really good mysteries, both did 'meh' business. Guess which one cost more to make and therefore, made the studios more dough?
The only real 'stigma' against SciFi/Fantasy is that it's expensive. As a general rule, the bigger your budget, the more the studios insist on playing it safe. They aim at the big audiences more likely to earn back the investment and dial down anything challenging/quirky/contentious/etc.
The natural target? The 18-25 action/adventure crowd.
Why should a studio spend the extra money doing a SciFi mystery, if they cost more and gross about as much as a contemporary mystery? Similarly for a drama, comedy, horror, etc.
Prejudice (Score:4, Insightful)
Many science fiction movies do a similar thing with theme. In a conventional movie it's desirable for the theme to be hidden. Apocalypse Now is only a war movie on the surface; same with Platoon or Saving Private Ryan. But with science fiction it's quite different. It's expected that the theme *is* the story. What are the consequences of genetic manipulation? What are the consequences of atomic power? If machines could think, should we give them the same rights as humans?
But critics have been trained since high school to look for the subtext, the hidden theme. Confronted with something new, they fall into their learned prejudices. Maybe they should red more literature from non-European, non-dead authors instead of being so closed-minded.
Primer (Score:3, Interesting)
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Firefly, may she rest in peace, BSG, the new Dr. Who and Torchwood are "grown up" Sci Fi with a wider appeal. This is evident by the ratings they're getting. Either that, or there are many more nerds now than there ever were.
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So, really, it's about a possible movement shift in the public perception of the term Science Fiction into being something that exclusively refers to a certain comfortable old shoe called Space Opera. The irony here being that Star Wars isn't science fiction really (it
Re:Deep impact, The Day After Tomorrow (Score:4, Interesting)