Steve’s take on Sci-Fi

What is all this? Why?

It’s another avoidance mechanism, I guess!

That’s the quick answer. How this project started was this.

During a period of blissful unemployment, I wandered into a video store (at the time, they had shelves of DVD movies and they still had lots of VHS tape movies, too). I happened into the science fiction section, where, lo and behold, they had old movies such as The Angry Red Planet, and Them! I hadn’t seen since childhood, as well as some old science fiction films I had never seen, such as First Spaceship on Venus.

I had to watch them. As a youth, I had loved reading science fiction literature, and was very affected by the the better sci-fi films of the time. The videos brought those high feelings back. But I was seeing them now as an adult, with different eyes.

At the same time, I had a web site, and had been wondering what to do with it.

It was a splendid project for my idle mind. I started writing little summaries of the movies, from my new point of view.

The first idea was to revisit sci-fi movies I saw as a kid, to see if they still please me or scare me as they did then. I can report that I’m still rather thrilled by any of those. The scariest things are still pretty scary. I maintain that original list in the page Favorite Old Sci-Fi Films.

Over the years, I would see another old film and write it up. And then… I started writing up a newer film. Now what was I doing?

Decisions and discernment

I’m particularly interested in the ideas about science and space, about how people might be in the future, in other places, in strange situations. I write about the ideas these movies show: scientific, social, and stylistic.

There are plenty of movie critics. There are plenty of web pages poking fun at scripts and plots of old sci-fi films, and how silly the special effects are. So there isn’t much point in me simply indulging in film criticism or mockery. What am I doing with this?

Eventually I formulated a policy: to focus on how these movies portray the scientific and social ideas, how those related to the ideas of the times, and how they affected later ideas both in movies and in society generally.

However, the cinematic qualities of a movie are not independent of the movie’s success, either financial or social. And I want to make it clear which movies I think are really worth watching, and which might be best to avoid, so I made a simple rating system.

Concerning what to review: a weak re-make of an old movie isn’t worth it. Similarly, spin-offs and sequels that add nothing to the sci-fi don’t belong. But what about independent adaptations of the same book to film? It seems wrong to ignore a later effort just because it wasn’t the first. I’m shooting for ideas here, but if two movies tell the same story, and a later one is well made, it deserves some mention, provided it tells the story differently.

I’ve drawn a line with sequels and re-makes. Since my primary interest is with ideas, a sequel or re-make will only qualify if it provides substantially different ideas to the story. This very rarely happens. There are a few space sci-fi franchises that have remained popular, although they’ve given up on imagination altogether.

New adaptations of an original story are worth considering, though.

I leave out films for which a future or extraterrestrial world is a mere backdrop for a mundane story, and films for which some science idea is a mere excuse for a monster. The science needs to work into the fiction.

But I don’t exclude films that are merely poorly executed… ideas are of primary importance. The ’50s were replete with very bad science fiction films, though. Many are unwatchable and contain no new ideas whatever. At some point, I had to give up.

Another fictional form popular especially in the 1950s and ’60s appeared in educational movies, depicting space flight that was yet to happen, and scenes in space that were basically speculative. I prefer to reserve the term “science fiction” for works with some dramatic content — as opposed to a simple scene of astronauts working on a space station, or standing on Mars.

I haven’t decided what to do with made-for-TV-movies — I harbor a low view of the medium. Mostly I haven’t bothered reviewing them. Many were not shot on film, but videotaped, thus locking them into the low resolution of TV. (Early ones were preserved only by filming a TV screen!) There were a very few such movies based on the works of good science-fiction writers, which came out well. So those I reviewed. But there are terrible examples of mangling by inept TV movie makers. (I don’t know why, but Bradbury was especially prone to dismally bad TV adaptations.) Maybe it’s worth a separate list.

I’m not a professional movie reviewer, and I don’t want to be. I don’t have time in my life to even look at most of these movies. I simply can’t review every movie where something sciency flits by in the dialog, or every re-hash of a tired old sci-fi theme. Instead, I’m sifting through the ones that show any promise.

I just have to be more discerning: I won’t automatically review movies with little to recommend them, or sequels and direct derivatives. Fortunately, there’s plenty of new stuff to choose from.

As the ideas are in focus, I do point out where each movie portrays developing social ideas, or possible technologies, and I also point out how miserably wrong they get the science, and, once in a while, that they get something right that most movies overlook. This is, after all, supposed to be science fiction.

To keep this on track, I have to draw a line, make an executive distinction. The thinking is this: typically, a story has an explanation. If the explanation is an attempt at a natural one, as opposed to a supernatural one, and the explanation has something to do with learning about the physical world, then I might call it sci-fi.

What is sci-fi?

A question recurring in these reviews has been: “is this science fiction?” The term is often used very loosely — any “weird” story is often categorized as sci-fi. For practical purposes, and for some aesthetic reason (whose form I continue to revise), I developed a working definition. So here it is:

Science fiction is fantasy about things that could be, where the action is subject to naturalistic constraints. It explores imaginary physical worlds, and how life might be there.

In contrast, general fantasy, in whole or in part, may dispense with naturalistic explanation, or even plausibility.

To classify a story as sci-fi, I look for naturalistic explanations: for instance, alien technology, alien biology, as opposed to magic and ghosts on an alien world. (That said, Ray Bradbury, who is commonly regarded as a sci-fi author, wrote many stories about Mars, wherein the Martians are simply ghosts. Well — in his stories, people got to Mars by naturalistic means. But see his remarks on his status as a science fiction writer, below.)

Is a monster movie sci-fi? Some people would call any monster movie a sci-fi movie. On the other hand, many sci-fi stories feature some alien being, playing the role of a monster, and sometimes the two genres are simply mixed. Clearly, vampires and ghosts are not science fiction characters: these are by definition supernatural entities, and science fiction should concern itself with what could physically be.

Is a dinosaur movie science fiction? My argument is that it is the involvement of science that distinguishes science-fiction from a pure fantasy. In the case of dinosaurs, what we know of them comes from science, therefore, a fantasy about their lives may qualify as science fiction. In contrast, a movie about dragons set in the middle ages might not involve any science whatever.

Gray areas

The superhuman abilities essential to the super-hero genre presents a problem. Most of the abilities are simple fantasy: scientific-sounding words don’t suffice as a reason for a person having supernatural abilities, and many of the abilities go beyond super-human, into the physically impossible. But there is a big gray area in the genre, where the abilities presented are marginally physically possible, and their scientific explanation isn’t complete blither. The purpose of the super-hero genre is to excite the egos of those who are unsatisfied with their personal limitations. My policy will be to avoid super-heroes.

The wider genre of “fantasy” story is often intermixed with sci-fi. Usually a fantasy is set in some fantastic place, with some characters who have some fantastic abilities. Many of these have nothing to do with science as such, and I won’t call it sci-fi.

Is it enough for a fantasy to be set on a planet other than Earth, to qualify it as sci-fi? What’s the essential difference between a kingdom in a place that never was, and a kingdom that never was on a planet we never heard of?

Often, mega-disaster stories are classified as sci-fi. But I make a distinction between a disaster that has something to do with scientific understanding (e.g. comet strike,) and a common natural disaster (e.g. earthquake). The former might be sci-fi, while, unless the latter has some other science content, it isn’t.

Likewise with the “post-apocalypse” genre, which is commonly lumped in with sci-fi. Many of these have nothing whatever to do with science, except possibly that present-day weapons were made using science (e.g., nuclear apocalypse), or that scientific facts might suggest some catastrophe (e.g. meteor or comet strike).

Not all movies about an imagined future are science fiction, in my view, any more than a movie about an imaginary land or an imaginary past or an imaginary person. A possible future world is no different from any other imaginary story, unless it has elements that require scientific or naturalistic explanation.

Stories about multiple parallel (or possible) worlds have become popular. Many of these are purely fantastic in nature, and their plots involve no science. So again, they’re not sci-fi.

What to do with a science-fiction premise that turns out to be just a dream? What is the purpose of this device? To resolve the tension brought on by the mere presence of fantasy? Or is it to assuage moral fanatics? It often strikes me as a cowardly act.

In the 2000s, whole new kinds of franchises appeared: most commonly based on ultra-violent shoot-em-up video games (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Doom, Final Fantasy, Halo, Assassin’s Creed). Most of these have sci-fi elements. Some of them did fairly well commercially, but none of these is good sci-fi. They are essentially super-hero shoot-em-up’s and gore-fests.

Even dumber were movie series based on children’s animated TV: for instance, Transformers. These things shouldn’t be for kids — they’re really for grown-ups who watched these brain-dead cartoons as children. They most certainly aren’t sci-fi — they’re super-hero fantasies.

Nowadays, there are fantasy movies that feature some sci-fi, a flood of comic-book superhero franchises that invoke sciency whatnots, a barrage of monster movies with sci-fi excuses, including various vampire-ish themes such as human abduction, probing and harvesting, a new genre of social movies about immigration of space aliens.

But often, it’s just hard to say if a movie is sci-fi or not.

Ultimately: it’s my list. I’ll call it sci-fi when I feel like it — although it might sometimes make me apologize.

Other definitions of sci-fi

The origin of the term

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary,

1929 (first attested in advertisements for "Air Wonder Stories" magazine), though there is an isolated use from 1851; abbreviated form sci-fi is from 1955. Earlier in same sense was scientifiction (1916).

According to the Science Fiction & Fiction StackExchange

The Oxford English Dictionary notes usage of “Science-Fiction” going back to 1851 in William Wilson’s “A Little Earnest Book Upon A Great Old Subject”.

Isaac Asimov

“Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”

(That is consistent with his science fiction writing: his characters are invariably human beings. But I would object that many science fiction stories do not mention human beings.)

Robert A. Heinlein

“A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.”

(That’s pretty long, legalistic and rigid. I object to the limitation to future events — but he does say “possible”, and he emphasizes nature and science, which I agree are essential.)

Arthur C. Clarke

“Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography… In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line.”

But consider his remark on the possible, his “second law”:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.”

Ray Bradbury

“It’s the art of the possible.”

Bradbury’s stories often mixed science-fiction themes such as space colonization with supernatural ones such as ghosts and magic. He gets credit for understanding the distinction between his stories and science fiction. He said:

“I am not a science fiction writer. I am a fantasy writer. But the label got put on me and stuck.”

Lester del Rey

“Science fiction is an attempt to deal rationally with alternate possibilities in a manner which will be entertaining.”

— in: The World of Science Fiction, the history of a subculture (Ballantine, 1979)

Well, that’s pretty broad: I don’t think “alternate possibilities” is specific to sci-fi. He goes on to explain that, outside of science fiction, “fantasy” literature deals with impossibilities. But there are plenty of dramas that nobody would call science fiction, but are in fact about fictional, but possible, people, in a fictional, but possible, world.