Seeing this recently caused me to mull over the differences.




Is "sci-fi" a slur on the genre?

Is there too much pew-pew and not enough thinking/exploration of concept in Books, TV, and movies (and now video games)?

What say you to claims like: "it doesn't have to make sense -- it's fiction!"?

Chainsaw?


Let the wanking begin!

It's an interesting thought. I'm a little inclined to agree with Ellison about this, if only for the fact that it could potentially be a useful method of quickly differentiating between I, Robot and I, Robot.

I already gave my snap snarky response on Skype, but then I watched the interview and thought a little more about it.

TL;DR - To have a truly literate society, the consumer and the producer must have a conversation through their media, and that takes energy from both sides. If either side is lax - by being too lazy or by being too strict in their interpretations - then the conversation breaks down.

I think the phrase taken out of context "It's science fiction, it doesn't need to make sense" isn't exactly what they mean (unless the people talking are truly illiterate, which could also be the case). Science fiction isn't strictly rooted in our current milieu - it may be speaking to a problem of the milieu, or using ideals and understanding of the milieu, but science fiction is intrinsically about branching from the real into the imaginary in ways that other kinds of fiction do not. In that vein, no, science fiction doesn't need to 'make sense' by way of being restricted purely to the science of the current day.

However, Mark Twain said it best: "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." Writers have finer control over their settings and their characters, and as such must exercise that control to the best of their ability. This is different than making your writing too highly tuned to the point of telegraphing every aspect of the work - part of the joy of consuming creative media is study and analysis. If there's nothing to spark the imagination, no questions left unanswered, then it's too easy to consume and discard.

Which leads me to my next point, regarding 'thinking and exploration' in media. Those activities are on the consumer first and foremost. If you read a story - any story, not just a science fiction story - and it doesn't spark any sort of questions in your head, you're probably not reading it with any energy. It takes effort to ask questions of stories, and not a lot of people are willing to put forth that effort. So, the point about having 'boring', nonsensical scripts and such leading to an illiterate society is only part of the equation. The reader has the responsibility to use energy to ask questions that spark the literacy these guys are talking about, as much as the writer has the responsibility to bake some questions into their work.

Either way, I think this interview was a bit on the side of hysterical - not as in funny, as in doom-saying.

It's a conceit of television that the worlds biggest dilemmas can be hashed out in only 6 minutes.

Somehow I think the conversation would have only gotten more hysterical from there, had it been allowed to continue But yeah, these conversations are relevant, even though the specific content isn't 100% accurate.

Scifi is just a shorter way to say science fiction, and all their complaining is really about good scifi versus bad scifi.

It's the worst form of pedantry, the type that takes itself seriously. And is wrong. If they want to say there is a difference between speculative fiction and sci-fi sure I'll buy that. Not all speculative fiction is sci-fi and not all sci-fi is speculative fiction, though they do often cross. Other than that, they are just being self congratulating assholes.

That pretty much sounds like Harlan Elison's mission statement.

This wasn't a debate to me because it seemed like all sides were really agreeing with each other. But who cares really Genre does not dictate story. As I've said before it is a marketing tool and a way to group similar things. You like science fiction books, your favorite book store has a section for that. You like comedies oh look Netflix has a section for that. Hey what's this in my comedy section, Red Dwarf, a sci-fi comedy interesting.

You're all being thrown off because you're hearing the words spoken with nothing indicating their spelling.

They're talking about the differences between Science Fiction (the genre) and SyFy (the network that used to feature Science Fiction exclusively, but now has it in as a quickly fading afterthought).

Clearly, Science Fiction is far superior to SyFy. Once Eureka finishes out and Warehouse 13 is also cancelled, I most likely won't be tuning into them at all any longer.

Snark aside: this is the kind of wank that is classic among talking heads in the literary world, and it's all ridiculous because given any genre, there's a great big pile of steaming crap within it, and a small percentage that's really good, and within that small percentage somewhere is the stuff that's not only good but really literary too. You can have a well crafted story with multiple large explosions (Ender's Game, anyone? They took out more planets than Star Wars did.), you can have a story that's trying so hard to be literary and say something allegorically that it's unreadable and bores you to tears (Pilgrim's Regress, the one C.S. Lewis book I've been unable to finish).

TL;DR version: Literariness is a sliding scale. Good storytelling is another one. Explosions is a separate one from the previous two. A good creator (or lucky one) can hit as many of them right where they want to. Trying to discern between the good and bad in a genre is just a way of picking a fight about something that doesn't fucking matter.