My Kind of Science Fiction

Or "Why I watch TV shows."

I watch a lot of TV shows on Netflix. I argue that reading is better than movies, that Television is the biggest time waster ever, and that I have better things to do besides play computer games, and yet I go through a new show about every month. Today I am here to defend this practice to the world.

I don't just watch TV shows, I watch scifi TV shows. Star Trek, Stargate, Firefly, Dollhouse, Doctor Who, and Sherlock, to name just a few. My favorite movies are scifi: I, Robot, Tron, Tron: Legacy, Antitrust, etc. I have never seen the Lord of the Rings movies. My fantasy TV picks are limited to Robin Hood and Once Upon A Time. I enjoy very few fantasy films.

I am a writer of both fantasy and science fiction. So how come I prefer to partake of fantasy in written form, but science fiction visually? The first question needs to wait for a future post, the second question is coming up now.

 The grand masters of fantasy are Tolkien and Lewis, but also Rowling and Paolini, and dozens of demi-master, and writers of smaller fame but equal quality. The acknowledged grand masters of science fiction are Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. I, Robot and 2001: A Space Odyssey are possibly the most well known works of science fiction, with the possible exception of the works of Jules Verne. These writers are fifty years out of date. No one has risen to challenge them. No author has achieved their status, or equaled their work. How hard can it be to trump science fiction so old that we laugh at their future predictions? And yet, when you think of science fiction, what comes to mind? Star Wars. Star Trek. Stargate.

Oh, there's Ender's Game, perhaps, or the works of Jerri Prunelli, but they're still small players compared to the grand scale of the fantasy genre. Face it, in written fiction the science fiction genre nearly doesn't exist. When you do read a science fiction novel you can't expect a fun adventure story of life on a space ship. Science fiction writers wrestle with deep questions like atheism, and life after death. Many science fiction is more fantastical then the highest of high fantasy. Many of them read like a doctorate thesis disguised in a plot.

If an aspiring SF writer wants to learn about things like warp drive, hyperspace, spacial distortions, and other fictional science, where is she to go? To novels like "Revelation Space" where the plot centers around the idea that stars are sentient? To "A Pebble in the Sky" that simply tries to prove that environmentalists are right about radiation from the sun? What if you don't care about the politics of today in relation to what you're writing? What if you want character driven stories with SF elements?

Television doesn't have an agenda. Television can only be profound for a few moments, because then the episode is over and the characters go on. Television has the chance to put a lot of truth into just a few minutes, because they're on a time schedule. Sometimes they skip the meaningful content altogether and just get back to shooting aliens.

From "Firefly" I learned how realistic science fiction can be.
From "Dollhouse" I learned how quickly technology can change.
From "Star Trek" I learned how alien characters can affect the plot.
From "Stargate" I learned a whole lot about physics, and the lack thereof.
From "Star Wars" I learned that a fantasy plot can become scifi with just a few twists.
From "Antitrust" I learned that science fiction doesn't have to be futuristic.
From "Tron" I learned how extraordinary ordinary modern technology can be.
From "Doctor Who" I learned that there's an explanation for everything.

From the written world of science fiction I learned that for a good writer, the sky is the limit. 

Review: Tron

 Greetings, Programs.

Let's see, where do I start? Tron... I saw Tron:Legacy for the first time on vacation, actually, at a friend's house. I also saw it for the second and third time. The family I was staying with watched it in groups. The parents one night to approve it, the boy the next afternoon because he thought we wouldn't like it, us girls that evening when we insisted we would, and again the next night because the little boys had to go to bed the previous evening. Told from the start it was boring and pointless I and my friends were, of course, determined that it wasn't.

I didn't fall in love with it, to start. I was intrigued, definitely. It wasn't boring, but it was confusing. I theorized that it was heavily based on the original Tron, and that the filmmakers mistake was that the people who'd seen original Tron had forgotten it, and the people watching Tron: Legacy had never seen the original. Ultimately it was the discussion, the confusion and the warnings of boringness that made me really fascinated.

I came home with this otherwise pointless movie on my list to see again after I saw the original. I hunted down the original, and suddenly was converted. Legacy has little to do with the original Tron, although there is tribute after tribute nestled into the cinematography. Somehow, though, I liked both. Tron is old, the graphics are old, and the plot is a little flat. But I loved it. I loved the characters. I loved how noble the character Tron was, I loved how potentially dangerous theology was easily dispensed with.

From left to right: Tron, Ram, and Kevin Flynn

Tron: Legacy did not deserve it's name. Tron isn't even in it. Well, he is but... [spoilers.] I've heard it said that it should have been called Flynn's Legacy, but the how would we have connected it to the original, eh? Anyway, titles aside, Legacy is of interest as a film student, if nothing else. It's as much on the cutting edge of what's possible in film as its predecessor was in its day. The cinematography is startling, as it centers heavily around light. Everything seems made of light and glass, and is blue or orange on black. While this is very unique, it personally gets tiring on your eyes after two hours. A lot of people probably will find Legacy boring. It has a lot of rather long lightcycle chases, and it successfully put my dad to sleep. But the real reason this is one of my favorite movies is the music.

When my friends younger brothers were watching it the next night I originally started out in the kitchen playing go fish. We could just make out some of the sounds from the movie through the wall and on occasion I would life my head and listen thinking "That's really cool music." It's more than cool music, it's brilliant music. It's become one of my favorite soundtracks. You can read more about the music in a review by Aubrey Hansen.

In summary, my favorite character is Tron which makes me very excited for Tron: Uprising next summer.  I think that both movies have equal merits and were brilliantly done. They may not have the most original plot on the block, but they've certainly got a unique premise. And just to prove how much I loved them I made this nice mashup with my favorite (and only) computer game, Myst.