Intellectual Segregation is fun kids...Nov 25 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Science fiction? It's a setting, not a style.
"The best Science Fiction series" You know what? It's titles like this that demonstrate just how far science fiction has to go to achieve widespread 'acceptance' of what it is. Like it or not, Sci-Fi is regarded as something that nerdy boys (and men) watch and obsess over in place of a social life. And, to and extent, that's true. Particularly in the case of Star Wars/Trek which are both as bad as each other and tend to attract truly disturbing individuals to their fold. The problem is, that's not science fiction. Science fiction is a setting, a place a story can happen. It's not a type of story any more than 'stories set in middle America' are a type of story, and that's what people don't get. Now this is partially down simply to the fact that Sci-Fi has become synonymous with a certain type of story - Alien invasions or spaceship travel - where there are good guys, bad guys and lots of big pretty special effects or dramatically written moments (depending on your medium). The truth of the matter is rather that these types of story have more in common with the traditional form of a Western than they do Science fiction per say - although that's because westerns came to be synonymous with that type of story. See, my problem with this category is that it's rather like the newly invented category in the Oscars for best Animated film. Because while on one hand animation will now get a modicum of the respect it's entitled to, more to the point it¡¦s essentially ensured that an animated film will now never win the best Oscar statuette. They've segregated the type of storytelling in an attempt to placate and contain it, and that's what this kind of category does for science fiction. Of course I've got more than a few things I could name as my favourite "Sci-Fi" series. The "Night's Dawn" trilogy by Peter F Hamilton for it's sweeping space-opera plot and vast vision of the future, "Transmetropolitan" by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson for it's bitingly sharp political and cultural satire, "Dark City" for it's subversive examination of the nature of both reality and the human condition. But to choose any of these in a category such as this would lump it in with Science fiction as the overriding category, whereas in reality any of them deserved to be considered as great writing, cinema or sequential art they represent for their medium. It's topics and categories like these that, more than anything remind me just how blind our society can be to great works of fiction simply because they take place in a place expected to be reserved for little characterisation and simple plots. Let's try to look beyond the categories for once shall we?  |
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