Science fiction

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.
Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

Thanks and plot bunnies (MWAHAHA!) to GlimmerGirl, Angel and ‘The Girls’ for betas, comments, and laffs.

this is an odd thread.

And for what it's worth: the vast majority of 90's tv sci-fi* was shit. SOOOO much horribleness came about when people realized that you could make money with a weekly syndicated program shot on the cheap in vancouver that they just all dove in, and the programming line-up of the Sci-Fi Channel was born. Shit was so bad I stayed away from checking out the updated Battlestar due to memories of all those crap shows that my roommate would watch at like 2 in the morning on a saturday night on some UHF station. Hell, even the Doctor Who tv movie was infected with this, and shot in vancouver!

*at some point, should the discussion ever drunkenly wander back into that area again, it would be worth considering Harlan Ellison's distinction between "science Fiction" and "S.F./Sci-fi"

And for what it's worth: the vast majority of 90's tv sci-fi* was shit

http://home.comcast.net/~pccranford/sliders.jpg

hated that show so much

Neat idea, tho. First season or so was fun.

modern Western culture is so lacking in universally accepted rites of passage that large swaths of society don't really ever leave adolescence.

let's all gather to celebrate this fact with a conference on '"quantum leap" traversing the end of history'.

here is a blog post, by an academic, about the wire:

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/you-know-i-blame-the-system-the-wire-barrack-obama-and-omar-for-president/

thats all folx

http://www.unmotivating.com/gallery2/d/4549-1/nerd_chicks.jpg

OTM

would

underneath the clothing and glasses is a cripplingly insecure virgin with attachment problems and an inability to understand normal human interaction

give me a curvy colombian wife any day of the week

hips don't lie

give me a curvy colombian wife any day of the week

-- max, Saturday, 23 August 2008 22:03 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

http://www.marca.com/primeras/06/12/g1204.jpg

(real talk)

Those footie references baffle me every time.

But then, I'm a SF fan.

pisode 1: The sliders travel to a world where Stephen Fry is a cockney. Mallory blows him up

Episode 2: The sliders discover an Earth where everyone is gay. Mallory blows it up

Episode 3: The sliders arrive on a world that has been inverted. Guest Starring Corey Haim

Episode 4: The sliders arrive on a world where a black man is president. The black man president is astonishingly heroic, like the one in 24

Episode 5: The sliders arrive on a world with a woman as president. She is awful. Just before they slide to safety, Mallory blows her up

Episode 6: The sliders land on a world where New York and Los Angeles have exchanged position. Mallory blows it up

Episode 7: The sliders land on a world where KROOOMAGS

Episode 8: The Kromaggs slide directly into the sun

Episode 9: The sliders land on a world where televisions are upside down

Episode 10: The sliders land on a world where David Bowie never existed. Mallory blows it up

Episode 11: The sliders land on a world where onions are the size of pumpkins

Episode 12: The sliders go down the toilet but then they can't get out again

Episode 13: The sliders land on a world where Mallory falls over

Episode 14: The sliders land on a world where stairs are replaced with slides

Episode 15: The sliders land on a world where houses are upside down. Mallory blows it up

Episode 16: The sliders land on a world. Before they can look around, Mallory blows it up

Episode 17: On a world where Sliders had been cancelled, the sliders begin to cry

Episode 18: The sliders land on a world where television controls people's miiiiiiiiiiiiinds

Episode 19: The sliders land on a world where grass is blue and the sky is green. Mallory begins to shriek

Episode 20: The sliders land on a world where emotion has been surpressed by a drug known as Prozium

Episode 21: The sliders land on a world where Will and Grace had gay kissing. Mallory runs down the street and shoots a policeman, before they slide to the next world.

Episode 22: The sliders land on a world where bees are replaced with wasps, and vice-versa

Episode 23: The sliders land on a world where they discover that George Lucas is a Kromagg

Episode 24: The sliders land on a world shaped like a giant ubb

Episode 25: The sliders land on a world where all the atoms are in a line

Episode 26: The sliders starve to death because they land on a planet where everyone eats aeroplanes

Episode 27: The sliders land on a world where black people are allowed to vote

Episode 28: The sliders land on a world where there are only five eggs

Episode 29: The sliders land on a world where eveyone is discussing tax

Episode 30: The sliders land on a world where there is no Christianity. Mallory blows it up

Episode 31: The sliders land on a world where Mallory is not allowed to blow anything up

Episode 32: The sliders land on a world where people don't speak English they speak Kromagg, which sounds exactly like English except for its name, which is Kromagg

Episode 33: The sliders land on a world where women can only live by constantly kissing

Episode 34: The sliders land on a world ruled by a giant fat Mallory

Episode 35: The sliders land on a world where fat bearded men are hunted as big game

Episode 36: The sliders land on a world which is Wales

Episode 37: The sliders land on a world where pornography consists of a rotating triangle, emitting a humming sound

Episode 38: The sliders land on a world where everyone is dead

Episode 39: The sliders land on a world where Naked Lunch is the only program ever shown on TV, and also where everyone is constantly terrified

Episode 40: The sliders land on a world where Julian Sands is the only actor

Episode 41: The Sliders land on a world made entirely from tears

Episode 42: The sliders land on a world. It blows up

+1, Insightful.

space is boring

― MPx4A, Tuesday, 3 June 2008 13:20 (7 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol this thread

ilx needs some sort of ferg repository

Some thoughts:

1. Essentially I love science-fiction because it deals with and explores the need for humans to both come to terms with and improve the conditions of their existence at the highest level (obviously also how they fuck that up).

2. Am curious about those who do not take any interest in science-fiction at all. I can see trivial reasons for their dislike, but taking my brother as an example there was a point where he stopped being a kid and i think that was the point where he also stopped being remotely interested in sci-fi. i'm suggesting that, practically or typically, all boys like it (having been more encouraged than girls to do so, generally and traditionally) until a certain dividing incident (being mocked for it by an older boy? wanting to distance yourself from it due to some acquired insecurity e.g. becoming more disturbed by aspects of it, or because you start associating it too much with people you don't like (this could happen with many other things e.g. sports). could be bollocks but based on personal childhood experience it rings true. i guess there i'm saying 'why wouldn't you love it, at least as a child?' because the visual qualities of the concept are so rich and do touch on my first point

3. I do not like that many sci-fi TV shows or even films but I wouldn't blame "Americanisation" for this - at least that is a hugely problematic term and the wrong word. But most of our influences come, directly or not, from there and through that filter and this also feels problematic and limiting. I suspect when most people say they hate sci-fi they are really talking about the way it's presented as entertainment in the mainstream market and obv. it's the most difficult area to tell convincing or believable stories which many adults have issues with.

4. But I think the biggest problem with sci-fi is how often it jars with human interest on a wide scale, as if they are in unresolvable opposition. Often what you end up with is just stories that don't have any real connection to the technology, environs and conditions the characters are operating in and could be set on historical Earth, because of the idea that as many as possible must be able to relate. Perhaps the best sci-fi accommodates this but transcends it without compromising on challenging, exotic and interesting events and objects (the design of sci-fi things generally being a big factor in the love - visualising things which don't actually exist being empowering). People like Star Wars because of how relatively well it did this.

i think the main prob with a lot of scifi is that it requires such a feat of world-building and few people can do that well enough to compete with, you know, the real world.

That's why most of best sci-fi tend to exagerrate the real world rather than recreate a new world.

that says more about the viewer perhaps. you are a certain age before you start going 'nyarrrgh looks so fake' plus you can get great entertainment out of people's attempts to realise the fantastic even whey fail (as they so often do). sci-fi can still be great even if it 'fails' to look as believable as real life. xp

That's why most of best sci-fi tend to exagerrate the real world rather than recreate a new world.

do you mean when people try to come up with how aliens and other planets might look?

I mean most of the best sci-fi uses the possibilities of our world's future state as a template rather than trying to create a whole new worlds from scratch. There are exceptions though (I love plenty of space operas.)

i read a quote when i was a kid that stuck with me, something about the difference between sci-fi and fantasy being that sci-fi takes the real world, changes one thing and asks "what if?", whereas fantasy changes, um, a whole bunch of things.

(no idea who said it but i'm guessing harlan ellison, maybe)

I mean most of the best sci-fi uses the possibilities of our world's future state as a template rather than trying to create a whole new worlds from scratch. There are exceptions though (I love plenty of space operas.)

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, January 27, 2009 5:41 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya but i find a lot of the time it becomes this narcissism of small differences thing where it's like... almost but not QUITE believable and thus just totally fails

reading that scifi hall of fame book i love the datedness of some of the future technology--like people can travel faster than light but still watch "phono-tubes" and "electro-tapes" and stuff like that

I think the reasons people actively dislike/ignore SF relate mainly to a distaste for fandom, which isn't unique to SF as a genre but is obviously a very visible aspect of it. The idea that this stuff is a genre at all is problematic I think. I definitely went thru a phase in late teens/early 20s of distaste for any kind of genre fiction - defined as whatever I decided it was. Also even now I'm over that there's still a lingering - contempt is too strong a word but small guilty inner sneer is fair - for adults who primarily enjoy films/books/TV shows/etc as escapist fantasy.

None of that is reasonable or fair, or accurate. They are bad reasons for disliking a huge mass of literature etc. I'm just saying I guess they partly answer one of blueski's questions: a lot of people feel like that at some time in their lives, maybe some people feel like that for most of their adult lives.

I still don't like a lot - maybe the bulk - of "Science Fiction". I don't really like fandom either. But it'll take a while to think about why.

this reminds me of previous discussion where someone (n/a?) said CGI errors would never become charming and quaint in that way. xp

"ya but i find a lot of the time it becomes this narcissism of small differences thing where it's like... almost but not QUITE believable and thus just totally fails"

I'm not reading sci-fi for believeability.

ya i know dude but you get what i mean. replace "unbelievable" with "distractingly contrived" then

"The idea that this stuff is a genre at all is problematic I think."

Not really. The fact that it was a separate genre was for a long time its greatest asset.

another thing is that characters are usually really, really, shittily written in scifi, especially women, and a lot of ppl can't get over that.

Yeah one of the things that put me off when I was in high aesthete mode was I thought a lot of the writing was terrible, but I was kinda wrong and misjudging on that score, sometimes.

you guys dont have to defend scifi from this, im just saying that's WHY a lot of ppl dont like it

I don't agree about the genre thing Alex, it lumps together really disparate works in ways that I don't find helpful, and sometimes it acts as a barrier to keep people inside it as well as outside it?

Walters fidgeted with his lapel and poured himself another bourbon. His visitor sat across the desk, waiting for an answer with almost inhuman patience. Finally Walters looked up and scowled - "What, you think you're the only one on Terra with problems?"

the female characters complaint relates to girls generally being discouraged from sci-fi i guess. but there aren't enough female characters for good and bad to be defined v well. what about all the terrible male characters etc.

Also this ^ is true for every genre besides sci fi as well.

that doesnt mean it's not true of scifi

but the argument that there's not enough female characters in scifi for us to determine whether they really are written poorly is, uh, revealing.

"I don't agree about the genre thing Alex, it lumps together really disparate works in ways that I don't find helpful, and sometimes it acts as a barrier to keep people inside it as well as outside it?"

The barriers that kept people in it allowed for a degree of creativity that wouldn't have occured if they were writing short fiction for the Atlantic or the Saturday Evening Post of whatever.

Ray Bradbury used to write for Collier's!

yeah it's MORE the case with sci-fi, just as there are more women in rock n' roll or R&B than in electronic/dance

"but the argument that there's not enough female characters in scifi for us to determine whether they really are written poorly is, uh, revealing."

Except it's basically nonsense.

I'd argue that SF writing has become wayyyyyy more nichified these days

xpost

But I won't, I'll just say it and you'll have to accept it