Science Fiction is not a perfectly defined genre. It is often lumped into Fantasy, so you find space stations and pressure suits next to swords and dragons on the bookshelf of your local bookstore and library. They don't put westerns and horror together or mystery and romance, so this annoys me.
Serious literary critics find it easy to despise scifi, as an allowed form of overt intellectual bigotry. Their contempt for the nature of scifi is probably based on frequently poor quality writing by scifi authors who are selling to teenage boys, but most mystery fiction and horror is crap too. You don't hear them complaining about their poor merits to literature.
Scifi is about ideas, sometimes stupid retreads of space opera, but sometimes very revolutionary ones that matter in the long run, ones that should be taken more seriously. Scifi can afford to be interesting because they will always be despised by the New York Times. And when you're at the bottom, the only way to go is up. Or continue on the bottom, anyway.
There is a downside to scifi, however, when you see scifi stories adapted to a 90 minute movie. Most are terrible. Many producers in Hollywood insist on turning scifi into bible stories. Hollywood is mostly Jewish and bible stories suit their religious purposes, with the excuse of ticket sales and test audiences. Scifi movies are pretty much ruined from the outset. Too many characters rising from the dead. Or building an ark. Or throwing down the temple. Sigh. I am truly sick of how scifi movies are ruined. Some are also quite dumb. The rolling spaceship wheel in Prometheus crushing a villain-character? Really?
Or a giant mechanical steam powered spider? Really? I think too much of Hollywood is made of cocaine fueled insanity. If the war on drugs were really implemented, Hollywood would fall silent. They need their cocaine or they just can't work. If you call that kind of crap work.
Even the Japanese ruin scifi, though they ruin it in different ways, namely insisting on tropist Moe girls or excess violence rather than scientific discovery or actual character development. And then everything explodes because they JUST CAN'T stop moping because we nuked them twice. They had it coming. Ask the Philippinos and Vietnamese and Singaporeans and Indonesians and especially the Chinese how they feel about Japan. If we hadn't, they'd be nuking Japan every xmas in retaliation. They're THAT ANGRY. Most directors can't find anything worthy of ticket buying or advertisement without pantie shots and overly bouncy breasts, powered armor suit battles where a sword trumps all other weapons except maybe an energy sword and the furious hidden inner power. Ugh. Boring. The aliens in Japanese scifi are usually just slightly altered Americans, or half-American half-Japanese thugs with a hairstyle that stopped being popular in the 1950's, a direct reference to the Occupation and reconstruction, something Japan remains amazingly hypocritical for. We dragged them kicking and screaming out of the 14th century and into the 20th, and they complain, still, that we nuked them. Wimps. They had it coming.
It is a shame that movie directors are often massively ignorant people. Real science is interesting to a scientist and public television is full of documentaries about science. I grew up watching Connections and Cosmos and Nova. But I guess its not good TV for people with short attention spans, and they assume it won't sell tickets despite the success of Gravity. I personally liked the move Contact up to the point where they finally decoded the message from space. After that, it was crap. Hollywood ruining something. Raping the source material, generally speaking. Decoding the message was really interesting. It was the high point of the movie. After that it was politics and religion. Again.
If you want to find more serious scifi, you have to stick with the source, the books. This is a great reason to read. You still run into problems, however. Scifi that sells is scifi that meets its audiences expectations. For every masterpiece like Neuromancer and Use of Weapons and The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, there are overly explained piles of crap like Star Trek and the various space fantasies of Star Wars. Stories that are so logical or illogical they make you cringe. Real people, real characters, can't exist in such frameworks. Even the thinly veiled Koran of Dune, with its 15th century Italianate politics and infighting and Moslem Jihaadists, is better scifi than any Star Trek. I think that too much of scifi is written for kids with Asbergers, and thus the excuse it provides for not understanding other people.
In Japan they call the tendency towards overt escapism Chu-ni-byo, aka Middle School Syndrome. Japan also has the full blown regression called Hikki-ko-mori, where the sufferer hides in their apartment until the money runs out and they end up homeless and die of exposure, thanks to full rejection of all people and human society. Very few recover. Japan quietly drives a fair bit of its population to suicide, the highest rate on earth actually. That there's several series written for Aspbergers Kids has a certain sense to its essential market exploitation, but if you don't have it, reading it is really dry. The entire Star Trek Next Generation series explains things too much, and they immediately forget the discoveries of the prior episode. Deep Space 9 was highly unusual for Star Trek because its the only Star Trek where discoveries aren't lost, get built on for the next episode so its more like a Soap Opera and less like Star Trek. Stargate suffered from this too, sadly. They tried to make it comic though, with the dismissive "Magnets?" from the head hero. I always appreciated that.
This gets to another weakness of Scifi which annoys scientists. Space Opera takes advantage of some irritating tropes for pure storytelling convenience.
- Artificial Gravity
- Antigravity
- Flying Cars
- Faster Than Light Travel
- Bendy Lasers
- Techno-Gibberish
- Force Fields and Force Field Space Suits
- Everybody the Same DNA-type across space
- Unlimited Power Cells so Nanotech works
- Unobtanium Materials for Construction of things like ships and space elevators
- Claiming ethical superiority despite ridiculous levels of violence in your society
Seriously, the moment you allow religious extremists into space with a craft, they're going to use it to bomb the Earth with asteroids because they're relentlessly violent. You can't export crazy people off planet, can't risk it or we'll all die. And our civilization just isn't interested in denying evil people access to weapons. Psychopaths Among Us is a very important article to read. You really must read it. This will give you proper perspective on a core problem in our species, and how we allow hyperviolent individuals to rule us and prey upon us. Sadly, this is NOT science fiction. But it should be accounted for in any setting.
I'm a firm believer in "If it can go wrong, it will go wrong". I am a professional Pessimist. I got paid to find problems and fix them before they broke or killed everyone nearby. I'm not a Luddite, but I do look for potential points of failure, highlight them for the Engineer and followup so they don't handwave till they get their check and run away, which happens a lot with the Engineers I've run into. They aren't all like that, but ironclad contracts aren't just a good idea, they can save your company from criminal and civil responsibility for shoddy work. This is a good topic for scifi, called Social Commentary. This is also a kind of idea, but its important too, just like Space Opera provides a framework for metaphor. Jurrassic Park wasn't just a convenient slasher film with social commentary about irresponsible engineering and biological exploitation.
As goofy as the mad math man was, he had a point about life finding a way. Life on earth Evolved. And life itself is unique for at least 60 light years in every direction. And probably the universe. Stable life bearing planets are incredibly rare, despite lots of other planets being discovered. It's easier to build a space habitat than it is to terraform a planet, especially if that planet has too weak a magnetic field, the wrong mix of gases for heat retention and UV filtering (too little and no mutation/evolution, too much and organisms die), wrong temperature range for liquid water, lack of volcanoes so no nutrients in soil... a lot has to go right for life to get a chance. If anything goes wrong, no life. The first 3 billion years there was no life on Earth. Only in the last billion has there been any life detected on Earth, and only the last half billion has there been stuff able to leave fossils.
Planetary terraforming is easy in scifi novels, but its really quite ridiculous. Very few authors even consider the potential of engineering people able to live in hard vacuum or copying human intelligence into robots for exploration which sidesteps the requirement for terraforming in the first place. It rarely makes a good story. Its a little too alien for readers conventional tastes. The handwaving that Earth becomes uninhabitable is just pandering to an audience that's never liked science in the first place. They're after religion. This is why I prefer to read stories about the next ice age, rather than magical warming fairies and sea level rise when if you melted Antarctica (all at once, which is specifically impossible and would take decades, and evidence shows we're at the highest levels of sea ice recorded there) levels would barely rise 5 centimeters. Do the math. As for melting the north pole.... its already at sea level, and the water volume would shrink because ice expands when water freezes. That's why it floats. Duh! Religious zealots are misusing taxes, and their acolytes are writing BS novels about 20 foot higher sea levels and apocalyptic hurricanes ravaging the coastlines. I wish they would. I'd have a good laugh, but there isn't that much water on earth, sorry. In the real world, the ice age is coming again. I want to read novels about that. And I will probably write them, too. After all, the audience will be interested. We're expecting more Polar Vortexes this winter. So much for WARMING. Funny thing is, in the 1980's we just called those "winter storms" or "blizzards" and they're standard weather for the Northeast and Midwest. Duh.
I expect when authors of warming scifi see their book sales crash, they'll go for the ice age angle. Audiences of buyers have to have money to buy books, and authors write for those who spend. Tracking and predicting market trends is part of an authors job, and researching market trends will help an author of fiction to stay ahead and not fall into disregard and publishing failure. So many books on Amazon are ranked low, for good reason, because the book just wasn't interesting enough to sell to enough people to justify its publication. That's life.
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