The meaning of sci-fi
This was spawned by a discussion I had with maddoggirl in this thread. I'm making a post of it because my comment got too tl;dr for LJ, lol.
I'm not making this post to publicly expose you, MDG. I think this is a very interesting discussion, and the more people get involved, the more interesting it'll get, even if this might be a subject on which a lot of people here have very strong feelings, having been brought up as sci-fi geeks or having found their one true love in that genre. If this gets nasty - I don't think it will because the people on my f-list are all nice and awesome, but if - I'll freeze comments.
A popular opinion among RL people is that while sci-fi might be a more or less entertaining way to pass your time, there's no intellectual merit in it. I've even heard fanfic writers voice the opinion that while fanfic on "deep" literature and tv shows is intellectual challenging, sci-fi is just shallow, bad narrative.
In my opinion, this is as wrong as it gets.
Because that's exactly what fandom is about, isn't it, finding meaning in ostensibly meaningless early evening entertainment shows. Anime, cheap sci-fi shows, silly movies like Hot Fuzz or even groups of barely full age fake-emo hard rock boys writing terrible music and acting as if they were the evilest rock stars ever - all these things inspire people to find meaning and write about it.
Here you'll find an entry by deelaundry in which they quote a statement by hithah about fanfiction. It's rather short, but I'll c&p the most important part.
I think fanfic is more like going to one of those kid-friendly restaurants and seeing that little basket at your table with six crayons in it. And that's all you get. Six colors. And they're weird colors too, like periwinkle and raw umber. And maybe some kid chewed on one of them and it's all messed up. Now try and draw something with only those six weird colors.
That's fanfiction. All you get is a TV show, which is, like any TV show, caught in the restrictions of having to be family-friendly, interesting, entertaining, not too superficial and cheap to produce. Any TV show is like that. Doctor Who, being a different genre than for example House, has different premises, but the goals are the same: raising the figures.
Don't kid yourself, people. House isn't deeper than Doctor Who or sci-fi. What's deep about House? You have the scruffy, highly intelligent genius, an outsider, who doesn't manage to fit into society because of his intelligence and unwillingness to compromise his strong opinions on wrong and right. You have terribly researched med babble, inconsistent, often shallow characterization (just think about Wilson in Half-Wit. What the hell was that? That was so out-of-character, watching it hurt my eyeballs. Or Cuddy's character. How cliché does it get?) and some really bad acting (Omar Epps, whoever told you you could act was clearly mistaken, and RSL, if you're that bored with TV, you should go back to New York). All of season 4 was a disaster as far as consistency and characterization was concerned - seriously, to me it felt as if they were writing those episodes on a caffeine high in the nights before the shooting. And as far as the argument about the general concept of every episode being the same is concerned - I've never seen a show that turns that concept into an art more than House.
There's about as much meaning in House as there is in Doctor Who. The point where the two differ is that while the meaning of House mostly refers to every day issues, Doctor Who - like any sci-fi - deals more with the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything. It's the question of whether or not humanity is essentially good at heart, what it is that we would do if we were put in a position where we could exploit a different culture, whether humanity would be able to survive an apocalypse or not.
It's a postmodern concept, sci-fi in general and Doctor Who in particular. It questions everything, and it challenges the recipient to accept completely new ideas. Take Doctor Who science. The Doctor, being a more or less omniscient being, uses a sonic screwdriver and flies around in something that looks like a police box from the 50ies. He says things like this is my timey-whimey detector and laughs at people who don't know what a happy prime is. Doctor Who science challenges the audience to accept that humanity knows nothing about science, and that we are in no position to seriously talk about things like time travel if we don't even know how to build a pencil-shaped sonic device that opens any lock (except dead locks) and explodes robots, if used correctly and in combination with a sound system.
Have you ever read the Hitchhiker? I didn't particularly like it, because I thought the narrative style was terrible, but the ideas in that book are the exact sort of postmodern out-of-the-box thinking that Doctor Who applies as well. You're given the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything - but you're missing the question. It all boils down to wanting to make people accept that they don't know anything, and that they never will know anything, and that they should stop kidding themselves that this isn't so, but at the same time accept that the only purpose in life that you can have, the only purpose that would ever have the chance to give your life even only the slightest bit of meaning, is trying to find out more about Life, the Universe and Everything.
That's sci-fi. As I said, it's a different sort of meaning than House, but it is not in any way less intellectually stimulating. I can accept if someone says they're not interested in this sort of meaning, but I can't accept them claiming that this meaning either doesn't exist or is worth less than meaning in the classic sort of sense as it is applied in classic literature or ostensibly deep movies and books.
I'm not making this post to publicly expose you, MDG. I think this is a very interesting discussion, and the more people get involved, the more interesting it'll get, even if this might be a subject on which a lot of people here have very strong feelings, having been brought up as sci-fi geeks or having found their one true love in that genre. If this gets nasty - I don't think it will because the people on my f-list are all nice and awesome, but if - I'll freeze comments.
A popular opinion among RL people is that while sci-fi might be a more or less entertaining way to pass your time, there's no intellectual merit in it. I've even heard fanfic writers voice the opinion that while fanfic on "deep" literature and tv shows is intellectual challenging, sci-fi is just shallow, bad narrative.
In my opinion, this is as wrong as it gets.
Because that's exactly what fandom is about, isn't it, finding meaning in ostensibly meaningless early evening entertainment shows. Anime, cheap sci-fi shows, silly movies like Hot Fuzz or even groups of barely full age fake-emo hard rock boys writing terrible music and acting as if they were the evilest rock stars ever - all these things inspire people to find meaning and write about it.
Here you'll find an entry by deelaundry in which they quote a statement by hithah about fanfiction. It's rather short, but I'll c&p the most important part.
I think fanfic is more like going to one of those kid-friendly restaurants and seeing that little basket at your table with six crayons in it. And that's all you get. Six colors. And they're weird colors too, like periwinkle and raw umber. And maybe some kid chewed on one of them and it's all messed up. Now try and draw something with only those six weird colors.
That's fanfiction. All you get is a TV show, which is, like any TV show, caught in the restrictions of having to be family-friendly, interesting, entertaining, not too superficial and cheap to produce. Any TV show is like that. Doctor Who, being a different genre than for example House, has different premises, but the goals are the same: raising the figures.
Don't kid yourself, people. House isn't deeper than Doctor Who or sci-fi. What's deep about House? You have the scruffy, highly intelligent genius, an outsider, who doesn't manage to fit into society because of his intelligence and unwillingness to compromise his strong opinions on wrong and right. You have terribly researched med babble, inconsistent, often shallow characterization (just think about Wilson in Half-Wit. What the hell was that? That was so out-of-character, watching it hurt my eyeballs. Or Cuddy's character. How cliché does it get?) and some really bad acting (Omar Epps, whoever told you you could act was clearly mistaken, and RSL, if you're that bored with TV, you should go back to New York). All of season 4 was a disaster as far as consistency and characterization was concerned - seriously, to me it felt as if they were writing those episodes on a caffeine high in the nights before the shooting. And as far as the argument about the general concept of every episode being the same is concerned - I've never seen a show that turns that concept into an art more than House.
There's about as much meaning in House as there is in Doctor Who. The point where the two differ is that while the meaning of House mostly refers to every day issues, Doctor Who - like any sci-fi - deals more with the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything. It's the question of whether or not humanity is essentially good at heart, what it is that we would do if we were put in a position where we could exploit a different culture, whether humanity would be able to survive an apocalypse or not.
It's a postmodern concept, sci-fi in general and Doctor Who in particular. It questions everything, and it challenges the recipient to accept completely new ideas. Take Doctor Who science. The Doctor, being a more or less omniscient being, uses a sonic screwdriver and flies around in something that looks like a police box from the 50ies. He says things like this is my timey-whimey detector and laughs at people who don't know what a happy prime is. Doctor Who science challenges the audience to accept that humanity knows nothing about science, and that we are in no position to seriously talk about things like time travel if we don't even know how to build a pencil-shaped sonic device that opens any lock (except dead locks) and explodes robots, if used correctly and in combination with a sound system.
Have you ever read the Hitchhiker? I didn't particularly like it, because I thought the narrative style was terrible, but the ideas in that book are the exact sort of postmodern out-of-the-box thinking that Doctor Who applies as well. You're given the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything - but you're missing the question. It all boils down to wanting to make people accept that they don't know anything, and that they never will know anything, and that they should stop kidding themselves that this isn't so, but at the same time accept that the only purpose in life that you can have, the only purpose that would ever have the chance to give your life even only the slightest bit of meaning, is trying to find out more about Life, the Universe and Everything.
That's sci-fi. As I said, it's a different sort of meaning than House, but it is not in any way less intellectually stimulating. I can accept if someone says they're not interested in this sort of meaning, but I can't accept them claiming that this meaning either doesn't exist or is worth less than meaning in the classic sort of sense as it is applied in classic literature or ostensibly deep movies and books.