This has been bugging me for the last couple months so I thought I ‘d whine about it to get it out of my system.
SciFi seems to be on the beginnings of an upswing these days now. There’s even been a resurgence of some spaceship based tv series (probably thanks at least in part to BSG), however questionable their quality might be. So, I dunno, as an SF fan who grew up in the 90s (the ‘golden era’ for TV SF if you ask me), I’m getting hopeful.
But then I keep seeing/hearing marketing and/or interviews with creators to the effect of “It’s technically science fiction, but we think we’re better than that, so don’t think of it as science fiction, we’re tackling serious issues/normal people can enjoy it/etc.” The fuck is up with that? On the SRSBSNS side of things we have Battlestar Galactica. I’ve seen a number of little specials talking to the cast and crew about the series and they almost always make a point to belittle science fiction as a genre–because Battlestar Galactica is tackling real, serious issues and SF has never done that before! Aside from obnoxious continuity issues and spotty characterization it’s this sort of thing more than anything else that fuels my dislike of BSG. Since when has SF not tackled “serious issues”? Hasn’t that been a staple of the genre from, really, pretty early on? Sure there’s plenty of pulp and cheap thrills in there too, but that doesn’t mean it’s incapable of being taken seriously. It’s a popular genre for tackling touchy issues because it’s easy to use an SF context to remove the issue a bit from the real world so it can be approached from another perspective. Even TOS, as campy and ridiculous as it was at times did all sorts of “serious” and groundbreaking things, but I guess the BSG crew is too good to associate with the likes of Star Trek.
Speaking of Star Trek, that brings me to the other side of the coin: the attempt to rebrand SF as something “not just for nerds, but normal people too.” On some level, I can appreciate wanting to get more people to see a SF film from both an economic and I-like-SF-and-you-should-try-it-too perspective. But why do they have to stigmatize nerds? I don’t recall any comic book movies launching ad campaigns to say, “comics: not just for nerds anymore.” I dunno, I think comic books are less accessible to the general populace than SF just from an availability perspective (there’s probably a better chance that, assuming you’re old enough, you’ve seen an episode of Star Trek or one or more of the Star Wars movies, etc than you’ve read an issue of Batman–I dunno, maybe I just don’t know the right people but I can’t remember anyone in my schools, boys or girls, who read comics, but we all watched Star Trek at least occasionally). So what is it that made SF into a nerds-only thing? I mean, I really don’t know what it was in particular. I guess the media stigmatized it or something, maybe? Because for the life of me I can’t think of how exactly we got to this point. Again, in my elementary school at least (isn’t this usually where this sort of thing happens?), everyone watched/knew about Star Trek and it wasn’t especially nerdy. TNG/DS9/VOY were popular primetime series at the time.
Anyway–I’m starting to lose my train of thought–what the hell is wrong with people these days? And I wish it was just BSG and the new Trek movie in this ‘trend’, there’s all sorts of other shit like Lost and it’s “it’s scifi but we’re pretending it’s not because sf is for nerds and noone would watch it” thing, Stephanie Meyer’s garbage like Twilight, “vampires for people who don’t like vampires,” and The Host “scifi for people who don’t like scifi” (why would you want to read sf if you don’t like it?), shows like Defying Gravity–it’s not scifi, it’s a soap opera in spaaaaace, because girls don’t like scifi, so let’s take a nifty SF premise and gut it so we can have a new gimick for cheap who’s-sleeping-with-whom drama and now certain acclaimed authors denying that their work is SF because SF isn’t taken seriously/being stigmatized seriously right now for whatever reason.
I dunno. It just makes me sad and angry that it has to be like this. I want my 90s SF baacckkk :{
To be honest, I’m just as perplexed about the whole “sci-fi doesn’t tackle real issues” thing, considering all the general ’sci-fi B-movies as metaphors for the Cold War’ and the general Star Trek social dilemas that were always present. I guess current Sci-fi is trying to seperate it from tacky, old-school Doctor Who/Star Trek sets, with tinfoiled up wacky gadgets and bad special effects that the average joe would prefer not to look past. I guess in order to be taken ’seriously’, it needs to say that it isn’t that, but it shouldn’t completely deny what it essentially is.
Maybe the difference between comic movies and sci-fi shows, is that the general populace assume that comic books take itself less seriously than sci-fi shows, so it’s that bit more ‘fun’ and accessible, what with the sci-fi fans general enjoyment in getting caught up in the techy side, which so called ‘normal’ folk may not care for.
I guess BSG was trying to separate itself from that idea, as it was much more of a character driven show than a techy one and tried not to get too bogged down with pseudo science, which I know puts a lot of people off of Star Trek and the like. I mean, a lot of ‘non-nerds’ love Star Wars and it too wasn’t incredibly techy and mostly a character driven romp of adventures and so forth.
By: Trinfortune on 2009/08/31
at 18:23
Yeah. I think part of it might be that SF as a genre is becoming increasingly impossible to define adequately so it’s causing some problems. Like, honestly I’d argue that BSG wasn’t really SF most of the time because, like you said, it was more of a character driven show. But the SF elements were more of a backdrop/setting than anything most of the time (I still feel like they totally threw away all sorts of potential future ethical/social issues with the Cylons — the Cylons could have easily just been another ethnic group of human rather than robots…. I guess they sort of were in the end too which didn’t really make much sense, but anyway!).
I honestly wouldn’t have minded if the BSG crew had said something more like “we’re not really a scifi show, we’re a character-driven drama” as opposed to their whole “we’re not scifi, we’re better than scifi” attitude.
Maybe the genre just needs to be redefined? Though it’s still bugging me that I can’t really think of what caused the huge blight on the term “scifi” (it seems similar in a way to how “otaku” became associated with that homicide case in Japan and turned into a ‘bad word’ as a result, but I can’t think of an equivalent incident). Hm, maybe it’s SyFy’s fault for pushing all those shitty B-movies instead of good stuff.
By: citrinitas668 on 2009/08/31
at 23:26
Ha, speaking of defining Sci-fi, my friend of mine was writing an editorial in a zine about what Sci-fi is and he concluded that everyone just needed to point at things and proclaim them to be sci-fi.
That dog on the street. There. That is Sci-fi.
By: Trinfortune on 2009/09/01
at 14:03
i agree!
By: ptolemy21 on 2009/08/31
at 22:28
I’m a college student who has off and on been working on a science fiction book for 5 years. I guess I was just wasting time trying to find out what people were looking for in science fiction these days. Of course, this article makes me realize that for the most part, I dont like what most would suggest as being good “science fiction” material. In my science fiction I had hoped to incorporate more “realistic” dialogue in my characters, and to save my story from idiotic scenarios brought about for the sake of carrying on the plot. However, I would also like to keep true to old school science fiction, where the science isn’t just a backdrop, but a crucial factor in the story. If anybody has suggestions for thing’s to look out for in writing a science fiction I’d really appreciate it.
By: Ethan on 2009/11/17
at 17:38