question about science fiction

[jlh]

So I'm sitting here writing this morning but also distracting myself a little, and came across this list on ew.com of 20 Low-Budget Sci-Fi Classics. Now, this may well be the fault of the list, or EW, or what is usually low-budget, or whatever, but a lot of these films are horror movies, or if not, post-apocalyptic or dystopic-future kinds of

Comments

[jlh]

I do not actually mean the anti-sex people, though they are certainly part of the end-times massive fail of second wave feminism that led to the third wave in the first place.

I more mean the idea that to do things in a specifically male or gender neutral way is more feminist than doing things in a girly way. When I'm not feeling put upon, I can take a step back and understand that this is a defensive posture from people who feel societal pressure to consume in a girly way-like the romance, not like the fighting, etc-and that for them fandom was constructed as a safe space for them to be able to do just that.

But the underlying "ugh, if I wanted to watch stories in the real world I could just look at my life" stuff that dismisses "chick tv" is a constant, and it's not really that interesting. Same with the screaming over wanting female characters that are literally kicking a lot of ass and dismissing the ones that don't (hello, misogyny in slash fandom). Liking boy things in the manner of boys does not make you a feminist.

[ferricent]

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0604_5/littlegoddess.shtml

[ali_wildgoose]

I think the problem is that most scifi you'd enjoy ends up being classified as something else. Because ladies don't like scifi, natch, so it has to be quietly shelved in some other section to fool us into reading it

[amyamy]

What mahoni said; there's quite a bit of non-distopian, non-horror Sci-Fi and a fair whack which is not so heavy on the Chosen One stuff, particularly all the humor and/or "children's" stuff like Hitchhiker's, Back to the Future, Flight of the Navigator and so on. Part of the problem is that it's often hard to remember, when looking at things which cross genres, that, oh, right, time travel is SF! Aliens are SF even when they're cute and fuzzy!

Thinking about it, I think part of the issue you keep running in to is not so much that SF is innately hostile to you and your interests (although, again, mahoni is not wrong re: not a universally open-minded environment) but that people keep recommending to you shows and books and movies which are about events happening to people, rather than things which are about people who happen to be going through events. Star Trek is SF which is ~100% about the people and the futuristic setting is a setting rather than the whole reason for the show, which leads to well developed characters and the possibility to

[lillijulianne]

it may not be your genre, and what;s wrong with that? it's not mine either, across the board. i DO like dystopia/postapocalypse, but i dislike horror, and i do like recognizable daily life.

did we ever talk about john varley? i mentioned him in on of my cakefics. you might like his short stories in particular. he doesn't do horror and i don't remember any chosen-one mythology. some dystopia, but not always. he does a lot of stuff involving memory and identity (to quote wiki, it has been suggested that "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", which was adapted and televised for PBS in 1983, may have inspired some portions of the movie Total Recall (although the primary inspiration was clearly the credited source, the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"). there's a story whose protagomist is an artist working in weather.