Seconding this. I give some SF a pass - Jurassic Park, for example. But if I have to start learning new names for guns or horses forget it.
Nor do I.
Fantasy no way, no how. Ever. Period.
I’m interested in very little of it - I’m a big Futurama fan, but other than that I’m not much interested in general. I used to watch Star Trek pretty regularly when I was younger, but when I’ve seen it lately it seems really sterile and formulaic and preachy as all get out. Wil Wheaton’s occasional blogs about individual episodes crack me up, however, because when you look back on those episodes (even if you just know the style and not the specific episodes), they’re definitely risible. I was a big X Files fan for a few years, but most of the time I find I’d rather read about sci-fi TV shows than actually watch the shows. I do live in fear that I’ll get hooked on Dr. Who, but I’m not looking for any new shows to get addicted to.
I can’t even say much about typical fantasy stuff, because I did read Lord of the Rings but I got over it and have avoided the rest of the kinda-medieval magic genre, so I can’t say anything good or bad about it.
I never became a regular Buffy or Angel viewer. I do enjoy them when I see them and I like Whedon’s dialogue, but for whatever reason I don’t seek out those shows.
I have to admit I don’t understand this attitude at all, though. A story is a story, good or bad. Does it matter if it’s made up or not, or made up 100 percent instead of 50 percent? This is just kind of missing the point, to me. It’s a story, and if it’s good, it sheds light on the world we live in whether it’s set there or not.
phouka writes:
I’d suggest starting a different thread for that, since it will tend to derail this one completely. In fact, I’ll do so now.
Here it is:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=10199842#post10199842
Generally speaking, it’s not my first choice for books or movies/TV. But every once in a while there’s an exception (Ray Bradbury short stories are amazing) so I can’t completely rule it out.
The referenced thread was a rather extreme example of this; apparently, EVERY awesome moment that has ever happened in the history of the visual arts happened in a science fiction TV series since 1990. (And to be perfectly frank, a lot of the links suggested the moments were really not that awesome at all.) We do get discussions of other stuff, though. That thread was THE most extreme case I’ve ever seen on the SDMB; I think we had ten references to “Babylon 5” before we had five references to all forms of media that aren’t science fiction.
I actually do like some science fiction, and urge you to consider that the very best of the genre might be worth a look even when most of it is crap (most of all genres are crap.) In general, though, my interest level in it is about a tenth of what seems to be the median level here, so I feel your pain, especially with regards to the tiresome Mr. Whedon’s endless parade of karate girls and ironic dialogue.
Having said that, you’re always going to get this sort of thing on the Internet. It’s just a natural meeting of the sets of frequent Internet users and science fiction and fantasy fans; they correlate to a greater degree than random chance would dictate.
This I don’t necessarily buy, though. The big recent thread on a video game was on Spore, which is certainly not a fantasy RPG.
In fact, I’m often surprised (when it happens to cross my mind) that we don’t have more threads about World of Warcraft than we do. It’s the most financially successful video game ever made, if I am not mistaken - it isn’t quite the top seller in software units sold but games like “The Sims” don’t have their customers all anteing up $15 a month - and has more users than pretty much all the other online RPGs combined. I’d have thought we’d have nonstop World of Warcraft chatter here, but we don’t.
I think the point that was being made was not that the stories lack something but that fantasy and sci-fi can sometimes become astoundingly dense with their own genre markers to the point that it takes away from the story. That sort of thing can be invisible to the regular fantasy reader, for instance; they become accustomed to a thick patois of pseudo-medieval dragon-fiction, but to a novice reader it’s just a barrier to getting into the story. This is excacerbated by the fact that such a large portion of the body of fantasy literature. for instance, is serialized; it seems 85% of the books my wife reads (See below) are part of a three, five, seven or MORE book series, and enjoyment of each subsequent book is dependent upon familiarity with the previous installments.
My wife loves fantasy literature and I’ve tried my best to get into it but
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Sturgeon is right, and
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The thickness of the fantasy-brogue is just incredibly offputting.
A few weeks ago when we were mvoing I picked up one of Anne McCaffrey’s “Pern” books. The first section of the book was just awe-inspiring in its tedium and awfulness; rather than getting in to the story, McCaffrey chose (or was made to) provide an exhaustive history of the planet Pern and the problem of Thread and the dragon riders and the social organization of Pern with guilds and guild halls and blah blah blah; it just went on and on, with a lot of funny compound words. It certainly did not compel me to continue reading.
There is terrific sci-fi and fantasy work out there, of course. I have written much of my admiration for the sublime genius of “Battlestar Galactica.”
Of course, nobody has to change their preferred fiction to suit my tastes. If you like it, more power to you.
And that’s a good point.
I will risk exposing the depth of my nerditude by asking what the Alabama football thing means.
Seconded. I’m not that into fantasy but do play a sci-fi RPG and a cyberpunk RPG, and I:
- Find most Star Trek series boring and don’t seek any of it out, although TNG can be interesting sometimes
- Despise Joss Whedon’s work–it’s not anything about gender, and I don’t think you have to be a “sub” to find it interesting to turn the tables on conventional gender roles–it’s just that he tries so damn hard to be excruciatingly clever in every single bit of dialogue and, even worse, his fans talk like that too, now
- Could go the rest of my life without hearing another word about Star Wars or Babylon 5
- Sigh and turn away when an otherwise promising CS thread is hijacked by the Star Trek and Babylon 5 crowd
- Feel a little worse about the average IQ of this message board when I open a book thread and it’s all fantasy novellas
I think you’re painting with a pretty broad brush, and I also think a Doper doesn’t have to be completely turned off by sci-fi and fantasy to agree with your main point here.
Count me in. I like some things, like Aliens and The Princess Bride, and I loved Quantum Leap, but most of it? Meh.
Just not my cup of tea.
I don’t even know what cyperpunk and steampunk are…
The Matrix is cyberpunk, as is the “mirrorshades” genre of books and movies that it ripped off mercilessly, pioneered by William Gibson. Basically, the 1980s-era concept of the late 21st century, something of a neo-libertarian nightmare world of crime, information piracy, overdevelopment and exploitation of people and natural resources. Common themes include cool sunglasses, hackers, corruption, technological augmentation of the human body, and total interconnectedness. The original “matrix” was a full virtual-reality digital world, described by William Gibson as a mass consensual hallucination of the entire human race. Cyberpunk heavily influenced the direction of the development of the Internet at the time, with the Gibson concept of the matrix serving as a model for the early World Wide Web. (Remember VRML?) Anyway, cyberpunk has become somewhat passe since everyone realized how overrated the Matrix movies were, especially the sequels.
I don’t know much of anything about steampunk, but AIUI it’s pretty much any gritty fiction set in the Victorian era.
I was only trying to say that I understand being overexposed to something that everyone else seems to enjoy, or even obsess over, but that you find tedious or silly. I’m a science fiction fan, but I can see where it wouldn’t appeal to everyone.
I wonder what makes a person disposed to enjoy or dislike speculative fiction? I was brought up in a house full of sci-fi books, so I never had a chance, but my husband was raised by parents who were suspicious and contemptuous of the genre, yet he also turned out to be a fan. I work with a bunch of engineers, who you would expect to be pretty geeky, but I’d say only about half of them are into science fiction, and only a few of those are readers.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Actually I meant why football is particularly important than Alabama. (Told you I was a nerd.) However, my coworkers have since lectured me on the terms “Crimson Tide” and Bear Bryant.
I wouldn’t really lump SF in with fantasy.
Fantasy, to me, is dragons and orcs and books with badly drawn pictures of pneumatic warrior women in red leather on the cover. It interests me not one bit.
Sci-fi, though, can be believable “what-if?” stories, set in space or on other planets, perhaps, but in a recognisably plausible future, and if it’s down well I like it.
I’ve heard that the difference is that, in fantasy, dragons can hover, while in science fiction they have to fly.
Seriously, the same srtatements apply to fantasy as to science fiction. It’s not all Tolkien retreads and Conan wannabes. Besides modern urban fantasy (and not-so-modern. It’s not as if contemporary settings for fantasy are a new thing. Read Thorne Smith, fer cryin’ out loud. Or plenty of others I could name) Fantasy can exist in any setting, any historical epoch, or any cultural melieu.
Think of the awful position that I’m in.
I’ve been a professional sf writer for 30 years. I got into fandom in 1969, I started reading sf many years before that. I’ve read most of classic sf and thousands of books and stories from the New Wave on. I’m fascinated by sf history and I’ve read dozens of nonfiction works on the field.
And yet I feel the same way about much of the field of f&sf as the haters in this thread do.
I watch very little media sf. What I have seen is mostly awful, so I don’t have any incentive to watch more.
I dislike elves and gnomes fantasy, and found Tolkien to be something that needed to be read for critical reasons but had little to nothing to recommend it farther than that.
I think military sf is an oxymoron (you can’t have space wars with our physics) and who cares about made-up battles? Or real ones. Even so, that’s what the bulk of the field is today.
I love characterization and fine writing but the classic writers that most people love totally fail at both and most of the popular writers of today are little better.
But as Theodore Sturgeon once said, science fiction is the only field that people judge exclusively by its worst examples. (This is a slight exaggeration, but gets the point across wonderfully. Here’s a page of Sturgeon quotes, each of them brilliant. One of our best writers, though hardly anybody outside the core fans recognize his name.)
The vast majority of people who comment on f&sf know nothing about the field except for the media junk. (You can tell who they are, because they always talk about sci fi.) That’s a shame, because they’re missing so much.
One of the Sturgeon quotes on that page reads: “Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”
The best writers in the field test this proposition daily, with some of the best writing in fiction. J. G. Ballard was a science fiction writer. He started as one, was accepted as one, wrote for the magazines and sf publishers, and never left. Kelly Link is one of the most brilliant short story writers working today and everything she does is in the genre, though it can’t be pigeonholed as genre sf or fantasy.
To me, that’s f&sf. Not this stuff that you’re complaining about. To me, it’s like complaining about mainstream fiction by using the Da Vinci Code as your example. I can’t get interested in most of the threads here about “science fiction” or “fantasy” either. But they have little or nothing to do with the field I love.
I’m an engineer in the aerospace industry. Aerospace engineers are either really into science fiction or not into it at all. I am in the latter camp. In fact, I don’t really care for any kind of fiction. The real world is hard enough to understand; I don’t have time to ponder hypothetical situations.
What Dangerosa said. Cafe Society definitely is not as well rounded as it could be, and many threads that do not have to be SF&F dominated do frequently become dominated by them. It’s not the end of the world or anything, but it is unfortunate.
I liked it okay when I was a kid, and even have been known to read some old favorites as an adult, but I do wish there was less of it in Cafe Society. It does tend to overwhelm that forum.
Funnily enough, if asked I’d say without hesitation that I am interested in science fiction and fantasy, but I’m not interested in any of the above. I didn’t even know until I Googled it just now that there was a science fiction series called “Torchwood”, and was wondering why you’d included an HBO Western series on your list!
You may not have been online this long ago, but trust me, things used to be a LOT worse in this regard. My recollection is that a WebCrawler search for anything used to turn up maybe a couple of relevant hits along with a bunch of Star Trek fansites and the like. I’d be looking for Pearl Jam fansites (this being the early '90s), and I’d wind up with a bunch of “About Me: I like playing AD&D, listening to Pearl Jam, and playing Frisbee with my dog Chewbacca. I hope you enjoy this Star Trek episode guide…” Either that or “I hope you enjoy this collection of my favorite Monty Python quotes…”
But I digress. As others have said, there’s more to science fiction and fantasy than Star Trek and Buffy. Of that “more” there’s still quite a lot that I wouldn’t bother with, and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to bother with even what I consider the “good stuff”. But enough people like some type of science fiction or fantasy that you have to expect that examples of those two broad genres are going to come up in book/TV/movie/game discussions.
That said, I personally would be happy never to hear anything about “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer” ever again. I’ve probably got better odds of winning the lottery, though.