What Is Science Fiction? : Is it really SF?

» dougwood - Is it really SF?

"There is a common tendency to think that SF must be filled with spaceships, exotic aliens, and far away worlds."

Conversely, just because a story has "spaceships, exotic aliens, and far away worlds" doesn't necessarily mean that it's SF. This is especially true on the big screen.

Alien was a horror/monster movie that just happened to take place on a spaceship. It has all of the classic elements of the horror-thriller-suspence story.

Starship Troopers was basically a war movie. You could probably say the same about the book, but the movie left out so much of the philosophy (it did try to include it, but there wasn't enough time) and sacrificed military accuracy for the sake of action.

The Star Wars movies are about myth. George Lucas studied Joseph Campbell's book The Hero With a Thousand Faces and (again IMO) also was trying to recapture the flavor of the Saturday matinee movie serials of his youth. A lot of the science was done poorly. The attack on the Death Star resembles every bad fighter pilot movie I've ever seen.

Almost everything else is just bad SF (or a memory lapse on my part). Of course, I still think that the last good SF movie made was 2001: A Space Odyssey (hmm, sounds like a personal problem to me).

-- posted by dougwood