Pop SciFi

[TheGreatLordGeorge]

Lately there has been an explosion of Science Fiction shows on network Television. lost, threshhold, heroes, invasion and Battlestar galactica all fit into this trend.

my opinion is that while these shows are fun to watch and surely entertaining they are not true science fiction. They are watered down for the masses and merely use the scifi aspect as a background for the more interpersonal dramas. now some of these shows fit what i described more than others but in some way they all do. Am I the only one who feels this way?

[SaberBlade]

I think it's shows like these which are beneficial to scifi.

I don't believe that Scifi is good in strong doses. Such shows as Star Trek are these very heavy scifi based shows and I think that one of the downsides is that people can see it and not understand (so they feel stupid) and when they see the fandom behind it, like the fans who are obsessed and have devoted their lives to it, they can get freaked out by it and not understand at all.

When you do a scifi story, which isn't heavily involved with scifi then people can get more interested in the show, and perhaps overtime get them more interested in other shows.

Shows like Heroes, 4400, Lost, Eurkea and even BSG to an extent are able to do scifi without having all the technobabel and work on doing interesting stories, even if they are drama, which slowly helping the scifi genre to be more acceptable

[Agent_Dark]

Science Fiction != exclusively space based, aliens, lasers and technical discussion. That is merely one aspect of the genre. It is not 'The True Sci-Fi' by any means.

[maneth]

Humans will be humans everywhere, I for one find that idea very consoling somehow. The technology should IMO only be the background, the enabler of the story. If it's all there is to the story, it's badly written and I wouldn't watch for very long.

[TheGreatLordGeorge]

Okay, i nderstand what you are saying, but lets take BSG for example. Arent you the least bit curious as to how there technology works? They never ever bring it up. I for one enjoy the shows you all mentioned but do feel it is lacking in certain areas. Shows like Stargate and Star Trek are able to include teh technobable but they balance it with interpersonal relationships. I for one thik both elements are needed for it to be considered Sci Fi.

lets look at the words Science Fiction. Science fiction is made up stories explained through science. What Science does heroes, lost or even BSG offer?

[Madeleine]

Okay, i nderstand what you are saying, but lets take BSG for example. Arent you the least bit curious as to how there technology works? They never ever bring it up. I for one enjoy the shows you all mentioned but do feel it is lacking in certain areas. Shows like Stargate and Star Trek are able to include teh technobable but they balance it with interpersonal relationships. I for one thik both elements are needed for it to be considered Sci Fi.

lets look at the words Science Fiction. Science fiction is made up stories explained through science. What Science does heroes, lost or even BSG offer?

Science fiction isn't just about how futuristic technology works. If Technobabble is all that a show needs to be SF, then the lowest common denominator is very low indeed.

Spaceships fly through space, and space is dangerous and uncomfortable to humans on account of its lack of warmth and of oxygen, not to mention the paucity of food, building materials, shampoo etc. That's really all the reader or viewer needs to know about a spaceship, and once we know that, a story involving a spaceship can be told. We don't need to know how the bussard ramjet is attatched to the command deck or what the yield of dilithium is, we just need to know that any hole in the ship's hull is very bad and oh dear there's a hissssss....

To make SF be just about the gizmos and the tech is narrowing it very much indeed. There's always been a strong vein in SF of speculative What If? sort of stuff, and of using currently impossible concepts of science to make us question accepted truths and conventions.

In BSG we are asked: If a non-human entity looks human, acts like a human, and perhaps even believes she is human, what is it that lets us define her as non-human? That's pretty SF to me. In BSG we are asked what constitutes Identity, and the role memory and experience play against the role programming, conditioning and genes play. We are asked this by the portrayal of AIs in the show. AIs are SF, surely!

BSG seems to have totally eschewed spatial anomalies, and holodecks, and transporter beams and all sorts, but it still has the Spaceships. And it's good SF, when they're used. The space battles are good. The privations and neuroses and claustrophobic grimy grind of daily life in a box not much bigger than a small village is pretty convincingly portrayed, and that's as much an aspect of life in space as "let's realign the phase emmission coils and isolate the main deflector" .

The Spatial anomalies and time dilation whatnots so commonly caused by Star Trek tech malfunctions are SF, sure. But they're SF-lite. They're impossible in our world, so they're SF, but that's as far as it goes. The really good ones have something extra, like Yesterday's Enterprise did - a conumdrum, an actual dilemma caused by the tecnobabbly stuff, that makes you actually *think*.

SF-lite, to me, is something that doesn't need to be SF. Where the USS Voyager gets stuck in a nebula and the propulsion system damaged, no matter how much technobabble they use you could see the same story with a wooden sloop caught in a current around an iceberg and the mainmast lost. I prefer the sort of SF story that can *only* be told with the use of technology that is not (yet) available in the real world. (Strictly speaking magic can always be substituted for science without the structure of the story changing, and so my preferred type of SF story isn't plots limited to SF, but to SF&F. I just prefer the SF versions .) Something like Yesterday's Enterprise, or Stargate's WoO, or any BSG story that hinges on one cylon having the memories of another.

As for Lost or Heroes, I'll ceed the argument to you without even a whimper. I don't watch the latter, and the former is the sort of show that doesn't let on if it's plot elements are SF or Fantasy or just random stuff and might one day be explained properly and prove to be SF but equally well might turn out to be a salutory lesson on the dangers of cannabis abuse

[Pitry]

I have to admit I disagree with the space = science fiction equation - frmo both ends.
For example, Stargate in the last couple of years has taken a huge detour towards fantasy elements - Arthurian legends, mediaeval myths, quest 1 spoilers

Spoiler:

hell, they even got a dragon.

. I still don't think there's a question about whether they're science fiction or fantasy.
In contrast, Farscape had aliens and spaceships, and most people do indeed look at it as science fiction, but if you look more closely, there's no inner sense in the world, there's technology but there're also things you can explain as nothing but magic. For me, that woudl disqualify the show from being science fiction. You don't have to explain the science. Technobabble isn't always necessary - and sometimes it hurts. But if the world isn't consistent, then the rules of your science, whatever science it may be, aren't consistent, and therefore it can't be described as science.

As for the shows in question, I don't know any of them enough in order to comment specifically or not, but if BSG for example has its inner mechanism consistent, then it's science fictino in my eeys, and if not, than it's fantasy with spaceships, like Farscape or Doctor Who.

[Acolyte Of Bli'l'ab]

I do agree, pop-sci-fi is watered down on the sci-fi elements and replaced by relationships/drama, not really anything wrong with that, cos shows like BSG show you can do that style and still keep depth and intelligence. It would be nice to have more "out there" and weird sci-fi shows, especially if didnt even have humans in them, but I doubt stuffl ike that would last long even if it did happen. People want humans and relationships ect..

[Trek_Girl42]

Okay, i nderstand what you are saying, but lets take BSG for example. Arent you the least bit curious as to how there technology works? They never ever bring it up. I for one enjoy the shows you all mentioned but do feel it is lacking in certain areas. Shows like Stargate and Star Trek are able to include teh technobable but they balance it with interpersonal relationships. I for one thik both elements are needed for it to be considered Sci Fi.

lets look at the words Science Fiction. Science fiction is made up stories explained through science. What Science does heroes, lost or even BSG offer?

I agree with Madeline W- Science Fiction is about What If? through whatever futureistic/alien/space/technology/etc situations. Sci-fi being about technobabble is one very narrow tip of a much larger iceburg- technobabble is a convention of sci-fi, not a necessity, and it's really hard for show creaters to move past that one because it has been so deeply engrained in the genre.

I think that science-fiction inhearantly boils down to the human condition: who are we, where are we going, what might happen when we get there? The technical details aren't necessary, because the stories are bigger then that.

As for BSG- I don't give a frak how things work. The show is very believable and enagaging as it is, and RDM was right to break away from the technobabble shows that sci-fi has become known almost exclusively for. Take a look at Star Trek Voyager, if they hadn't wasted all that time on technobabble, maybe we would have actually gotten to see some of the characters as more then pieces of cardboard!

[Pitry]

I'm having a [problem with the strict "what if" definition because not all "what ifs" are science fiction.
Historic novels, for once. They're the work of fictions, based on reality. "What if Napoleon would have died young?" "What if the Hitler would haev been assassinated in 42?" etc etc. They're not sciecne fiction, however... - but I agree that technobabble doesn't determine the science fiction nature, too.

[ShadowMaat]

There's more to scifi than flying around in space ships and firing your laser-guns at bug-eyed monsters. Especially if you expect there to be how lectures on the physics of space flight, the mechanics of the laser-guns and the biology of BEMs. If I didn't know better I'd say that someone was attempting to find a definition of scifi that specifically excludes BSG.

Lost might lean more towards speculative fiction than science fiction, but the line between those two categories can be very vague.

There's is a lot of "watered down" scifi-type shows around, but most of them don't last- partly because mainstream audiences have never been fully onboard with the genre and partly because, well, it IS watered down. But you could almost say that watered down "pop" scifi is a sub-category of its own because it's been around for as long as the genre itself. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians...

I think the "What if..." definition works as well as anything and certainly better than judging a show's "worth" based on something like the amount of technobabble it has.

As for the "What if... Napoleon died young?" type stories, that isn't historical fiction, it's alternate history. Most of the alt.history books I know are written by icons of the scifi genre and are housed in the scifi section. And a lot of scifi IS based on reality.

[lord-anubis]

As for the "What if... Napoleon died young?" type stories, that isn't historical fiction, it's alternate history. Most of the alt.history books I know are written by icons of the scifi genre and are housed in the scifi section. And a lot of scifi IS based on reality.

i like the what if stuff in scifi all thou the what if nazi won ww2 gets kind of boreing. i just saw some thing on the history channel about napoleon he wasten even frech i think. i think a better what if would be what if napoleon had won the battle of waterloo

[MB.Eddie]

BSG is certainly Sci-fi. Actually its hard to find anything that is more sci-fi imo. Sure it lacks some of the techno talk, but it makes up for it in questions that challenge our own views, and focus's more on the human 'science' in drama. For me it shows how things might be like in space. Not flying around in fancy spaceships like some of the Trek's that dont worry about fuel, people, food, constant threat of attack, etc.

As for the other shows, they are light sci-fi, but still good for the genre. The best thing is that we have such a wide choice to choose from

[Trek_Girl42]

As for the other shows, they are light sci-fi, but still good for the genre. The best thing is that we have such a wide choice to choose from

Exactly. It would be a stale and dull genre if there were only one "correct" type of Sci-fi. One of the things that I love about this genre is that it has wide boundries that lie much in obscurity.

[Pitry]

As for the "What if... Napoleon died young?" type stories, that isn't historical fiction, it's alternate history. Most of the alt.history books I know are written by icons of the scifi genre and are housed in the scifi section. And a lot of scifi IS based on reality.

Really? Here they're more often than not tagged under regular lit., rather than science fiction. It depends ont he type I| guess - there is the kind that tends more to teh alternate history, but there is the kind that is a historical "what if" novel.
I'm just saying that just like technobabble, "what if?" isn't a good enough definition, IMO. It usual has this "extra dimension". What if... Napoleon would haev died because of intervention from time travellers. What if... our society in this day and age would have been compeltely and utterly differnet had Napoleon died young. What if... the ancient Egyptian gods would haev been aliens () - there's usually an extra element when it's rendered science fiction.