I have recently found myself filling my sci-fi fix through television and not movies. The problem I have with sci-fi movies lately is that there is just not enough time to go in depth on a complicated storyline, with real character drama. Where Movies fail is where TV can move forward. Telling a story over a season of episodes instead of over 2 hours of movie time, allows the view to establish more of a relationship with the characters than a movie will allow. 

Much more like books to be honest. And with the quality of shows like Heroes (which I would consider sci-fi) and the new Battlestar Galactica, it is almost like a mini movie every week. Focus more on the characters than the effects, focus more on the story than the fight, focus more on the way characters evolve over time rather than cut and dry 1 person from begining to end....

I don't rememeber the exact quote or who said it, but a director commented recently that the future of epic science fiction entertainment was in serial episode format, and not in movies and thier sequels. I tend to believe that just in the way tv has now been allowed to push boundries on the stories they can tell in that genre.

And because of the success of those shows, it says that viewers themselves have evolved enough to want more out of sci fi than just space battles and cool gadgets. 

just my thoughts.

Children of Men was good and I liked The Island. Serinity wasn't bad either although the captian was a lot like a Star Wars character. The strange girl everyone was after was cool.

*NB: I see the source for "futuristic." In the context, I should have said "speculative."

*Read (your own), before you rant.

Kalon:  you quote one definition of "Science fiction" with approval and then blithely assure us that "the War of the Worlds" is "science fiction", too, even though it fails to satisfy the definition you have just so airily endorsed.   Nothing in "The War of the Worlds" has anything to do with science, beyond the final scene, which I shan't reveal, because there may be people viewing this forum who don't know the ending, just as i am pretty confident that a certain individual never got past page four of "Gulliver's Travels".

Quote - *NB: I see the source for "futuristic." In the context, I should have said "speculative."

*Read (your own), before you rant.

Kalon:  you quote one definition of "Science fiction" with approval and then blithely assure us that "the War of the Worlds" is "science fiction", too, even though it fails to satisfy the definition you have just so airily endorsed.   Nothing in "The War of the Worlds" has anything to do with science, beyond the final scene, which I shan't reveal, because there may be people viewing this forum who don't know the ending, just as i am pretty confident that a certain individual never got past page four of "Gulliver's Travels".

God I love these PMS moments. I have a PhD in Eighteenth Century English literature, with a focus on the novel, and I have taught Gullivers Travels in addition to reading it a dozen times or so in my life. And if "I don't know where you got 'futuristic'" is your idea of a rant, you must be fun when you are upset. I didn't go back and read my first post because if I had, I'd have lost my reply window. When I did go back, I conceded the point immediately.

Sheesh. Why bother?
M

Well then let me blithely and airily rejoin....

First, your interpretations of others statements tend to be extremely rigid, but you seem to wish your own statements to be graced by a certain lenient interpretation.

At it's heart, The War of the Worlds, is about the relationship between technology and man. From man's unthinking atrocities against all other life, to the eye-opening realization that we are not the final culmination of the evolutionary track... And then what happens when the tables turn and man is on the wrong side of the telescope... the wrong end of the food chain.

And yes, that ending that has to do with science, you know, the one you don't want to give away--is set up on the very first page, bringing the entire science fiction novella full circle.

BTW Did you figure out who determines which practioners can define the craft... or are we going to blithely and airly let that go?

I like how Battlestar Galactica tends to be just drama that takes place in space.  I like Firefly's characters and its frontier roughness look with some space stuff thrown in.  Heroes is so dragged out in its story telling, but fun to see new characters getting introduced along the way.  All three shows keep my disbelief suspended.  Which is what Star Wars and AI and Minority Report (Lucas/Spielberg movies cannot suspend any disbelief I have it seems) have trouble doing.  I did like THX-1138 though.

i think (hope) that in the very near future, DVD movies and eBooks are going to offer multiple story paths allowing the viewer/reader to choose how the story will progress. and i would certainly give the movie Sniper a different ending :p

Sadly all film genres are 99% crap and 1% gold, SciFi or not has nothing to do with it.

I can find one or two scenes in just about any movie that I  think was cool, but that doesn't mean I would watch the whole thing again. I don't trust trailers or the critics who seemingly only attack low budget unknowns. If a big name made it they'll find something great about it so they can keep their worthless high paying jobs. Grammy's are no better. Hollywood praising themselves with artificial hype. Wasn't he or she just fabulous in this or that. Makes me want to barf. What happened to the days when they thanked the audiences for being so generous. Most the movies they said was great I personally though were garbage. Maybe we should all go around acting like we're royalty and everything we do is glorious so we can build up artificial hype and attract weak minded zombies to follow us around and snap pictures of us because it's a blessing just to catch a chance glimpse of our marvelous selves. BARF!  

Kalon, you really weren't paying attention at school, when they went through that whole "apostrophe" thing, were you?   Clue:  when you think you should, don't - and vice versa.

No, "The War of the Worlds" is not about the relationship between man and technology.   It's about the relationship between technologically advanced men and less technologically advanced men.   Wells was opposed to the many colonial wars that occurred in the latter stages of the nineteenth century.   The Martians landing in Surrey are a metaphor for British troops rampaging through Ashanti, or Matabeleland.   Read it again.

I don't see why any practitioners should get to define the craft, as you put it.   I think that that was my point:  it is dangerous to let a subset of practitioners set "acceptable" limits to what they and their fellow-practitioners do.   Look in any university music department today and you can see the consequences.   There are people who can compose by the mile in the style of the "Second Viennese School" (i.e. Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), because that requires no inspiration, only a formula.   How many university lecturers can tell you how to write music worthy of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, or Bruckner?   Funnily enough, those are a bit thinner on the ground.   This isn't a coincidence.   Schoenberg succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in re-defining the academic approach to music, because he enabled talentless pseuds to claim to be "in the mainstream".   The problem is not merely that these academics can't emulate Brahms, but that they spurn Brahms altogether.   Similar things have happened in architecture, where the Classical style is mechanically derided, and in painting, where the basic skill of draughtsmanship is no longer valued by many so-called "schools" of art.  

Jeez, the petty fights breaking out here remind me of why I don't hang out on actual SF forums. :rolleyes:

It's coming to something when I can mentally hear everyone's posts in the voice of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

Morgano--

Whatever. You're right. I'm wrong. You have taken the field. Congratulations.

Quote - Jeez, the petty fights breaking out here remind me of why I don't hang out on actual SF forums. :rolleyes: It's coming to something when I can mentally hear everyone's posts in the voice of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

Sam "SF" Moskowitz wrote "The Immortal Storm," a history of SF fandom in the 1930s.

"a historical review of internecine strife within fandom."  
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Moskowitz
"The only history of the 1930s where World War II comes as an anti-climax"
[www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Hyperion/Moskowitz-3.htm

](http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Hyperion/Moskowitz-3.htm) "it was always burning since the world's been turning."
 

Where is Kilgore Trout when you need him?

I still stand by a Quote by the brillant Harlan Ellison ;

Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to purée of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!"

Harlan Ellison, date uncertain.*

SciFi?  It's as dead as H.G. Wells is.  And BTW - men from Mars aren't interesting anymore.

I'd postulate that the average SciFi reader / movie watcher / channel surfer / whatever is seeking pure escapism.  Not Deep Thought.  The Real World is such a mundane place: so who wants to live in it?  Space is much nicer.

Which is an example of the very old-fashioned "grass is greener" syndrome.  Things looking glum?  Then escape off to Proxima Centauri.  And if you discover that your problems follow you there: then go further -- to Andromeda and beyond.............

But consider: if you really were in space, then you'd probably end up chasing down a perceived rival for a perceived lover -- while wearing diapers, of course.  And in the aftermath you'd hold a press conference to complain about the discomfort & inconvenience of having to wear an electronic monitoring device around your ankle.  Changing out the batteries is such a pain........

No fiction can be as good as that.  Not even science fiction.

The truly definitive SciFi movie -- as everyone knows -- is Plan 9 From Outer Space.  There have been no others to equal it: nor will there ever be.  P9FOS is THE definitive SciFi movie.  Kubrick never did anything to match it.

Quote - Everyone has communicators now (see cell phones).

That's the greatest danger to the entire SciFi genre.  It's at risk of becoming Mundane: and thus offering no escape.

Oh, yeah --  I should add that the definitive SciFi TV series was My Favorite Martian.  This is another self-evident fact.

well thats this thread over with. the cats have arrived, all serious discussion leaves.

Hey -- my cats know when there's Serious Business to be attended to.  And they attend to it.  So I say welcome to the cats -- because they know that there's Serious Business being accomplished here.

Don't misread my earlier posts -- there's not a thing wrong with pure escapism (unless if it becomes an obsessive addiction).  However: we need to identify the thing for what it is, and not mis-label it as being something else.  Cotton candy is fine, but not when people insist that it's nutritious food: and then eat an exclusive diet of it all of the time.

The true danger of SciFi is when people start to take Star Trek seriously.  Sure, it can be entertaining: so long as one remembers that's all that it is.

Taken literally, the Matrix is nonsensical philosophical gobbledygook.  But there's a problem: gobbledygook can be so much more diverting than paying the rent.  Edward Lear did Nonsense a lot better.

I never could stand preachy SciFi.  Even in my teenage years, if a SciFi author started to tell me that I needed to Save the Whales, or else a super-normal alien intelligence would someday come to destroy the earth in retaliation for my greedy capitalistic sins against the Sacred Environment: then I'd throw the book away.  I hear enough of that kind of silly newspeak pseudo-religion coming from Al Gore and others.

Lt. Uhura's......I mean Nichelle Nichols'......brother took this stuff seriously.  He commited suicide together with the rest of the Heaven's Gate cult.

I like & enjoy SciFi, although I tend to prefer Fantasy.  I'll indulge in it, too.  Hey -- I might even write some.  But I won't look to it for lessons about real life -- any more than I would seriously consider an afternoon soap opera.

Maybe science fiction movies, as they've been made for the past couple of decades, have reached some sort of dead end.  Dead?  No.  People have been saying comic book superheroes were "dead" since Alan Moore's Watchmen in the eighties, but superhero comics are still there, and sometimes they may even be decent.  Hollywood seems to conflate science fiction with special effects action movies too much of the time, leaving little room for the science fictionry, except as gimmicks.  Hollywood overall seems to favor vapidity and flashiness rather than storytelling and good content - which could be said of comics, too, as far as I can tell.  That approach is a dead end almost as soon as it starts, IMO.  The whole point of films and comics is storytelling.  They're trying to make music videos and video games.  

I'm probably repeating others' opinions or OT at this point in the thread.  I respond to the OP, without having read any more, or having read the linked article. 

I think the serious discussion was over when we reached the point of insulting each other's education :rolleyes:

r s who ... Sci Fi dead ,LOL.

RorrKonn
http://www.Atomic-3D.com

Khai:  "well thats this thread over with. the cats have arrived, all serious discussion leaves."

Well, I for one welcome our extraterrestrial feline overlords...especially when they look like this!

Sincerely,

Bill