To me, the main problem is that lots of current science fiction is rather of the ‘people doing the same stuff they do today, but on spaceships with lasers’-variety. Science fiction is always at its best if it manages to shed some light on the human condition by removing or challenging the assumptions of what it means to be human, to live a human life, and so on. This may be done through some means of ‘exotic’ technology, like sentient AI, or FTL space travel (though of course, both have become stock by now), or migration of human minds into virtual realities, etc., or by exposing humans to the ramifications of discovering life elsewhere, and many other ways. Good science fiction explores the consequences of such a discovery, and how it would change what it means to be human, rather than taking these things in stride, making aliens just oddly-colored people, and sentient AI just a means of comic relief trough failing to understand those quaint things humans do.
Few of the recent science fiction films really did this type of thing; Avatar’s aliens were just big, blue skinned hippies and the mind-transfer technology was just a kind of sophisticated remote control; time travel in Looper is just a convenient way to dump bodies, and so on (not even mentioning the plethora of films that basically just revolve around humans and aliens or humans and robots shooting at each other). These are basically things we have and do in the here and now, just outfitted with a kind of techy gloss. There’s been some (often excellent) breaks with this theme, like Moon, which deals with the value of human life if the individual can be replaced like a broken lightbulb, or this year’s Europa Report, which manages to plausibly capture the excitement, hope, and sacrifice involved in ascertaining whether we are alone in the universe, but on the whole, those have been few and far between.
That’s not to say that the big-robots-shooting-each-other kind of sci-fi can’t be entertaining as such, but in a way, it’s missing most of the important elements that make science fiction interesting to me. They’re a sort of cargo-cult replica: outwardly, everything seems to be right, but it just fails to deliver (anything going beyond what can be delivered by basically just a conventional story being accidentally set in the future—which, again, might be a lot, or might not be).
Oh, and there’s Doctor Who, which is about 1% Sci 99% Fi, where I’m pretty sure every law of the multiverse is literally run by the divine power of Plot. Granted Doctor Who is a bit of a long runner so it may not count even if it did get at least some of a makeover in 2005.
I think some works really do analyze the human condition specifically by making people be basically the same. Take Doctor Who, it runs with the premise that beneath all the superstitions, cultural taboos, and governmental structures people are basically the same. The same tenacity, the same curiosity, the same prejudices, the same fears. Just manifesting in different ways and being more pronounced or subdued based on various factors. It’s wonderful and terrible, scary and beautiful, it leads to the most stunning feats of wonder and triumph and the lowest depths of depravity and horror. Sure, it may not really get at questions like “what does it mean if other beings are more intelligent than us”, or “if a robot acts indistinguishably from a human, is it?” but I think looking at why stupid ordinary brilliant humans do such wonderful and terrible things despite large swaths of physical, temporal, and cultural distance can be just as deep as watching how people react to an intelligent AI thinking its human crew is incompetent.
This isn’t just movies. Hard science fiction is triumphant, and anything less is derided by the readers, who insist it sticks to “reality.”
I’m reminded of an article I read this week that whined over one of the hairstyles in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D being unrealistic (the ultimate put down these days). This on a show that features superhumans and actual gods. People want things to be “realistic,” but their definition is of that “literal.” Years ago, there was as common trope in science fiction about aliens who took everything literally; they were usually the butt of a joke. Now, that’s what people aspire to.
In any case, science fiction used to be the literature of the imagination. Now, it’s literature for the unimaginative.
The purpose of science fiction is the same as the purpose of any other genre of fiction: to tell stories about people. The advantage of SF is that it can tell more interesting stories with fewer mundane restrictions.
To be fair, it’s matched by the current state of science. When was the last time you me a physicist with a vision of the future? All they’re good for these days is telling us how things are impossible.
When I was a little kid, I was always unsatisfied with the cartoon series The Jetsons and The Flintstones. I thought that people should live a lot differently in different times, that they shouldn’t just be stereotypical 50s/60s Generic White People.
Writing about people doing the same stuff that they do today is easier than writing about people who are coping with new technology or new societies.
I love science fiction when it’s done well. But science fiction is about PEOPLE more than it is about technology.
I think what may have happened was that Cyberpunk replaced Space Opera as the “look” of science fiction. The technology underneath is still essentially the same but the surface theme is different.
They got tired of being made the butt of jokes 20 years later when they were shown to be wrong. The internet has sucked out the willingness to take any risk with predictions about the future.
Good thread. the fact is, Sci Fi has to become Sci fantasy-because science is increasingly showing that interstellar travel, colonizing new planets, is probably impossible. We don’t know if FTL travel is possible-Einstein says it isn’t.
that is why I like the SciFi of the 1950’s-when these limitations were not as well known.
But what about the theme of advanced civilizations looking like 12th century Europe? "Starwars"started it-with people who could travel around the galaxies-dressed like medieval peasants!
I agree with your point that a critique based on some work of fiction being ‘unrealistic’ is more often than not misplaced, at least when it refers to ‘realism’ in the sense of ‘conforming to everyday reality’, rather than internal consistency (you may for instance consider a character doing something wildly against their established nature as ‘unrealistic’ in a sense, and such criticism tends to have a better standing). I think people need to realize, especially when it comes to movies, that what they’re seeing is not necessarily intended to be a depiction of events as they actually transpired, but rather, that the pictures they’re shown aim to get across the flavor, and not just the mere content of a scene. The car blowing up in that way may not be realistic, since real cars don’t blow up that easily and spectacularly, but it’s also not necessarily meant to be; rather, the adrenaline rush produced by the depiction is intended to transport the intensity with which the characters subjectively perceived it. (Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, as it’s a pet peeve of mine.)
However, I don’t think that hard science fiction in any way puts constraints on the imaginativeness of the genre; and if so, then only in ways that I would consider beneficial, since it’s less easy to just plop down some great big technobabble deus ex machina to save the day if you have to come up with some plausible mechanism for it. Another benefit is that in creating a bridge from presently existing technologies, it’s more easily possible to take the reader along; otherwise, you just end up with the ‘indistinguishable from magic’-type of technology, and the people using it might just as well be wizards. The key word in science fiction is always ‘if’, but if you essentially allow magic, then everything that follows from this ‘if’ is kind of trivial. (I recently read Greg Egan’s Diaspora, which I think is a good example of science fiction that is both hard and wildly imaginative.)
If you mean by that taking essentially everyday people and putting them into conditions in stark contrast to their usual environments, then I don’t think this is really different from what I had in mind—after all, our living situations define who we are to a large extent, so changing these can be just as stark a change as introducing the possibility to inhabit robot bodies, or things of this sort. And I agree that Doctor Who is particularly good at that; however, there’s always also a good chunk of this theme’s opposite, that what looks and feels human may be something else altogether (the best example of this being the Doctor himself, and it’s actually perhaps what I admire most about the series that they always had the good sense of not making him too human; it’s always made clear that what’s behind the zany hijinks (or whatever the traits of the current incarnation may be—this inconstancy itself being a distinctly non-human element) is fundamentally and irreducible alien).
I think there has been a general trend in films to use more “realistic” styles of late, perhaps partly driven by nerdy types who will scoff at completely unrealistic ideas in films.
What you describe is mostly quite James Cameron, but surely Ridley Scott deserves some of the credit/blame? The style of Aliens was obviously based on Alien (although expanded) and I like to think the Earth depicted in Blade Runner is not too different from the world Eleanor Ripley left behind.
I thought the name “Unobtanium” existed long before Avatar and using that name was much like using the name “mithril”, or perhaps even better, because mithril has a clear association with Tolkien, whereas Unobtanium is a little more generic and doesn’t “belong” to anyone in the same way.
While I’m not sure I agree with your interpretation of that, its mostly just because thats what the means and technology available allowed them to do and the expectations of the audience, I have noticed that explosions and crashes in films etc are becoming a lot more realistic, to the extent that the old fashioned ‘balls of flame’ explosions that were depicted in the fairly recent movies Windtalkers and Predators destroyed my suspension of disbelief in a way they don’t when watching older and lower-budget movies.
Eg: throw a grenade in a movie, there is a huge explosion and a massive ball of flame, through a grenade in real life and there’s a loud but rather unimpressive crack and thump with little pyrotechnics, movies are moving much more to the latter rather than the former.
I disagree. Jules Verne paid very close attention to then-current technology, and didn’t extrapolate far from the curve. His Robur the Conqueror, as I’ve observed before, built his heavier-than-air aeronef from COMPOSITES, something which still astonishes me (He used them because they were tough yet extremely light). It took about a century before aeronautical engineering caught up with this, but composites, surprisingly, were used in his day – for railroad engineering. In Tribulations of a Chinaman his (Chinese!) hero is saved despite being swept overboard by his rubber Survival Suit – which seems futuristic, but had been demonstrated in Verne’s day.
Verne son Michel and many other writers of the time strayed further from reality than Jules Verne did, but still tried to keep close to reality and current engineering. The thing is that when they extrapolated far from existing technology, there weren’t many examples close at hand to crib from. So Verne’s aeronef, with its forestr of propellors, sems ludicrous today.
It’s true that some writers got extremely exotic and weird – Edmond Hamilton and Doc Smith with their enormous devices. But the ideas are still present. What do you build a Dyson Sphere or a Ringworld out of? Nowadays writers will say that their space elevators are made of nanotubes or defect-free silicon or suchlike in a bid for verisimiltude, but these devices are still far from reality enngineering. The very existence of FTL travel represents an exotic leap of faith.
I still see things like exotic states of matter or unusual elements or particles showing up in literary fiction. Not as much of this is ending up in movies or TV shows, so I think you need to blame directors and screenwriters. You can’t build everything out of Unobtainium.
I like the way Schlock Mercenary handles the unobtainium problem: Their ultra-strong metals are post-trans-uranics, meaning elements well above uranium, from an “island of stability” that really is stable. They require enormous amounts of energy to produce, but the best energy sources, matter annihilation power plants (or “annie plants”) themselves require PTUs in their construction, presenting a chicken-and-egg problem for any civilization trying to produce them without outside help. It both explains how such things are possible, and why we don’t have them yet, nor will we any time soon.
To give Hanna-Barbera credit, they did step out of that box (at least a little) with The Pirates of Dark Water. The people weren’t white, the problem (dark water) was profound and actually scary, and (yes, yes, with the exception of the ubiquitous H-B cute whiny annoying mascot) the people were somewhat more sophisticated in their depiction. H-B tried to present a serious science-fantasy story, and somewhat succeeded.
But, yes, modern science fiction is falling down, a bit, on the “sense of wonder” aspect that was so vital to it in the days of Doc Smith and Bob Heinlein. The recent remakes of War of the Worlds and Day The Earth Stood Still made a valiant stab at it, but fell short. The recent John Carter movie was actually better than both of those…and died like a frog. Alas!
Its not the movies but the best sci-fi experience I have had in many years and in any media is playing the Mass Effect trilogy, it didn’t grab me at the start and I nearly gave up on it but I’m so glad I didn’t.
Good storyline, interesting characters, believable story-world, emotional cues that hit right on the mark, thought-provoking concepts and moral choices, jaw-dropping set-piece action scenes, I loved it.
I also thought it had a nice balance been neat ‘gee-whiz’ gadgets and grimy and gritty real life, it felt like real people (aliens and humans) in a real world.
Now I’m gushing again…
btw I really liked the Tom Cruise ‘War of the Worlds’ and I don’t think it deserves all the hate directed at it, though I really disliked the new The Day The Earth Stood Still and thought Moon was slow, ponderous and uninteresting though thats maybe because I’ve seen the concepts introduced done earlier and better elsewhere.
And if your SF (or any kind of fiction for that matter) has these, then maybe you need not worry so much about whether real-world science will obsolesce your novel/film, or whether changing tastes in style or social attitudes will lead people to say your work looks or sounds “dated” (And really, I don’t expect someone writing in 1962 to sound like someone writing in 2012). As was mentioned, often the screenwriters/directors will be looking over their shoulder at that possibility.
For all we know in another X number of years the pendulum will swing back so that in visual style sleek and slick “looks right” again. And maybe at some point the number of audience members concerned with nitpicky demands for “canonical” explanations of how the frammizdat engages the potrzebie fluxor, will diminish so more of them can focus more on how well are these characters portrayed dealing with a world where [whatever that thing does] happens, while remaining understandably human to us.
I think Scott may actually deserve all of the blame. I read he specifically set out to create the future worlds of Blade Runner and Alien as a dark, gritty, industrial contrast to the gleaming, “welcome to the world of tomorrow! Today!” worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars. For the past 30 years, Blade Runner, all the Alien films, Babylon 5 (at least the human stuff), Red Dwarf, Starship Troopers, Battlestar Galactica, games like Halo or Homeworld, Avatar, Elysium all might take place on the same fictional Earth.