Is SciFi ABOUT SciFi, or should it be?
POSTED BY: jewelstaitefan
UPDATED: Thursday, May 1, 2008 19:58
VIEWED: 2998
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Another part of this question, and the reason I placed it in Other Science Fiction Forum.
How much do you think Other SciFi should progress? Not written form, but visual medium.
Will Firefly/Serenity be a warning/caution agauinst intelligent scripts without aliens, monsters, fantasy technobabble?
I do not like SciFi which completely ingores basic scientific laws, just as I fault Titanic for being the first film about that disaster which had the opportunity to tell the truth about the cause, had the cause fully known from the work of Ballard (who was really the Paxton role), and yet refused to be historically accurate.
When stories focus on why the latex forehead piece causes abnormal activity, then the story is ABOUT the fantasy fictional science the writer created of whole cloth, I'm ready to move on. I know many fans, even a pop singing duo named T'Pau, eat this stuff up, but not me.
I liked Waterworld. The SciFi portion was easy to understand, and the rest was the normal trials and tribulations of humanity.
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Sci-Fi (like all Storytelling) needs to be about the story first. I almost said "characters," but I know some people write more for plot; more power to 'em, I just tend toward characters; point is that the Sci-Fi aspects can never be more important than the drama.
In writerly terms, there's something called a "conceit," the conceit is the element (or elements) that defines the story and sets it apart from reality. In the Buffyverse, the conceit is the Hellmouth (and the linked concepts of vampires, demons, and the Slayer). Everything else is based on the real world --except where the conceit directly changes it (take the real world, factor in the existence of demons, and Wolfram & Hart and the Council of Watchers become kinda inevitable).
In CSI (as a counterexample), the conceit is simply that these particular characters (as opposed to "actual persons living or dead") work in the CSI department of a particular city (and that the CSI dept actually has access to good equipment that always works, but that's a whole other type of fiction 
).
For me, Storytelling is based around finding the most interesting characters I can, then finding the worst possible thing to happen to them (knowing that death isn't necessarily the worst thing that could happen). For me, SF just opens up new possibilities of interesting characters and horrible things.
As for the relative importance of tech, that depends on the circumstance. Hell, I could have jagon-filled conversations with fellow film/TV students that'd probably leave Kaylee's head spinning (about synching a Timecode Gen to a Avid capture base just to avoid the extra work of having to re-synch AV files because the clock speed has slipped, or about having to neutral gel on top of hard spun, all via gobos, because the only lights we have are 5Ks and we don't have a neutral wall to bounce from).
For instance, My current favourite Star Trek is the Starfleet Corps of Engineers eBook series. It's heavily character-driven, but with wall-to-wall technobabble, which fits since all the characters are engineers --it's not random crewpeople spouting off about the warp field manifolds being misaligned across the coils' field vectors (meanwhile, Tev is an asshat, Pattie and Soloman are developing a friendship [both outcasts from their people], Abramowitz and Hawkins are suddenly an item, Corsi and Fabian are doing their Zoe & Wash impressions, Gomez has to regain Gold's trust, etc)
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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I have to say that story is paramount. Without a good story or plot all the technobabble in the world or CGI will not save your movie/TV show. I've sat through many a high grossing movie that was absolutly horrible. It was just CGI for CGI's sake.
It's not exactly Sci fi but the latest incarnation of "King Kong" was awful. No plot or characterization. It was "Look what we can do with our computers and a piece of film." I wish I had my money back from that movie and "Pirates of the Caribbean 2". "I Am Legend" approached these two in CGI with the zombies masses horribly rendered but was saved by the beautiful damage to NYC.
"Children of Men" was fantastic, good story and characters and there was little or no technobabble, the differences in the society were conveyed by the news on TV, ads etc. All very subtle and in the background. There wasn't any CGI that shouted "CGI HERE". It was all about the story.
That's why I love Firefly and Serenity. It could have taken place out west, on a tramp steamer in the South Pacific etc
And BTW Joss makes liberal use of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" via "Forbidden Planet".
I also love trying to find all the references to classic movies, Shakespeare, Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology, pop culture and everything else he throws in his blender.
http://fireflyfaninnc.livejournal.com/
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Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
A. SciFi should be a good story, with the Sci Fi only being the setting or circumstances surrounding the story.
That's one of those them there false dichotomy things! Other forms of SciFi can have good stories too...
Quote:
B. SciFi should be ABOUT the SciFi, and the story should be ABOUT the SciFi.
There's two ways of interpreting that - do you mean "Hard SF" - i.e:
"Fiction in which the exploration of a real scientific concept; logical speculation about fringe or fictitious science or speculation about the effects of new or imagined technology play a central role in the plot."
...and which I happen to quite like... or do you mean Star Trek on a lazy plotting day where they allow major plot points to be resolved by Geordi/Scotty/Torres/O'Brien re-directing the starboard EPS conduit through the ventral sensor array and generating an inverse tetrion pulse to restabilise the space-time anomaly?
(Sadly, Doctor Who - inventor of the phrase "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" gets a dishonoruably mention here, although I offer "this is my timey-wimey detector - it goes bing when there's stuff" in mitigation!)
Now I think there's room for both in the world. I also think its very, very difficult to do "hard SF" on the screen because it does tend to rely on big slabs of exposition which you can get away with in books but not so much on screen.
"Hard-SF-ness" also tends to get stripped out when books are adapted. 2010 the novel, for instance, was principally concerned with exploring Jupiter and its moons - combining information from the Voyager probes with speculation about possible life forms while Russian and American astronauts all got along swimmingly: in the film, most of the exploration was gone and they dropped in a cold war crisis to generate conflict between the crew.
Dune, the novel, had a hard-SF "worldbuilding" strand, plus a "how would a future society which rejected computers develop?" theme. It also had a non-hard "Macbeth in spaaaaaaccceee!" strand which is what the screen adaptations have concentrated on (you might just catch references to the others if you've read the book first!)
However, I suspect that the natural medium for Hard SF is the novel - or even the short story. The "hardest" SF show on TV is, I suspect, Futurama with its quite highbrow scientific in-jokes.
Quote:
C. SciFi is merely a showcase for Special Effects. The story is unimportant in real SciFi, and the setting and use of SciFi is only an excuse to show new SFX.
I think that makes it a false trichotomy! Providing a visual spectacle seems like perfectly reasonable entertainment to me. Jurassic Park was really about "look - we can do convincing dinosaurs now" and thoroughly entertaining (although, again, lots of the science and tech stuff from the book got cut).
Plus, at least 2 of the 6 Star Wars films did pretty well on a fairly innane story plus spectacular effects (lets just pretend we all agree on which two
).(Ugh, need sleep. That wasn't very eloquent - sorry folks).
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I think 2 examples of good SFX I like are Braveheart and Gladiator. Except for the glitches in the Oliver-Reed-after-he-died parts, you hardly notice the CGI, and I don't think the CGI should be obvious.
i do like "hard SF" as you described - in books, and even contemporary pop works. But the translation to screen seems to lose much of the audience, and even tho I might like it, does it do the medium more harm by disenfranchising these viewers?
Your description of Star Trek lazy plotting days is exactly what I was talking about - those, plus the details of Spock's puberty - are also what seems to repell many potential fans, largely because they have a phobia about science (and even math, gasp).
My biggest gripe with the lack of "hard SF" is merely the flimsy excuse for the basic princiles of physics that many projects build their SciFi upon.
I did like StarGate the movie because of how well much of the known history of humankind was covered and connected, which is normally hidden and disguised. But the TV show seems to have just made it a dumbed down vehicle for commercials.
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Quote:
Originally posted by jewelstaitefan:
i do like "hard SF" as you described - in books, and even contemporary pop works. But the translation to screen seems to lose much of the audience, and even tho I might like it, does it do the medium more harm by disenfranchising these viewers
Well, I think hard SF books have always tended to be a bit of a minority taste - most of what you'll find in bookshops is either fantasy or tends towards the "space opera" genre (which has been made respectable by the likes of Iain Banks but is still, basically, stories about the himan condition, love, war etc. on a space ship). There's not a lot of really "hard" hard SF about (e.g. Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter)...
One problem is that science is inconvenient - especially on the screen: the problems of zero gravity, the unlikelihood of aliens conveniently speaking English and the sheer times and distances involved in space travel and the annoyingly strong possibility that FTL travel really is impossible. You'll notice that a lot of written SF is now not only avoiding FTL but acknowledging that even sub-light interstellar travel in non-geological time will require something a bit more than a fusion drive.
Firefly is unusual in TV space opera in that they don't have FTL - but even flitting around a super-sized solar system within days or weeks without turning the crew into a rather fetching pink glaze on the rear bulkhead implies some unobtanium-fueled WeHaventThoughtOfItYet drive. Yet (e.g.) in the pilot, when they cross the path of the Reaver ship they seem to have a relative velocity of about 20 knots...
More worrying than bad TV SF, though, are "realistic" shows like CSI - in which I doubt the science is much better, but which people are liable to expect to be true.
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