Posted on 07/18/2009 6:56:06 AM PDT by jalisco555
Michael Crichton’s book SPHERE was cr@p! So was the movie.
Sci Fi Literature Ping
>>>>> Contemporary Science Fiction is the most anti-American of genres for the lion’s share of this material is about how hellish the future will be. <<<
If by “contemporary” you mean “since about 1966,” you’d be correct. The feminist faction was especially annoying — Russ, Triptree, Leguin.
<<
Actually I was refering more to the entertainment, not the literature.
And my context is more from 1979 to the present.
Cyberpunk(William Gibson) is unAmerican!
Most sci-fi movies and TV in the last 20 yrs are increasingly made in a very unAmerican country that does not respect us- - I am talking about Canada.
Science Fiction movies and especially TV all seem to have a leftwing bent to me.
Science Fiction TV has always existed to shove some liberal messages down our throats.
I still have a few of those -- although when I try to read them today, the abysmal quality of the writing is embarrassing. Especially the hero's knack for inventing new laws of nature when the plot demands it. Still, "Victor Appleton II" mentored my attitude towards science and technology. As a technical writer, my ability to venerate (suck up to?) engineers has been a career-maker.
This article suggests that Sci-Fi is a branch of children's literature, the coming-of-age adolescent novel. What can be more alien to a boy who's just hit puberty than -- a girl?
Speaking as a Christian, I also blame dispensational premilennialism for its willingness to hand over the future to the devil. Our decision to become unpaid cheerleaders for the other team meant that we were AWOL when it came time to colonize the future with works of imaginative literature.
The first meal taken on the moon was the Lord's Supper. I pray for the day to come when I can step out under the night sky and invoke God's favor on descendants glorifying Him in their vocations on the moon, and/or Mars.
We actually had a speaker come to our school to speak about how he thought that people were falling more into fantasy now because they didn’t have the technical knowledge to understand SciFi, since technology has become so complicated. It was an interesting theory, but I don’t know if I buy it.
Well, magical thinking is closely linked to paganism. The Christian mandate to understand and develop creation leads to technology.
The Ra Cra channel?
Just think what “Star Wars” would’ve looked like were it released in 1967 instead of 1977.
Yeah, a lot fewer spfx and rocketships that look right out of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.
Probably would have used more American actors too.
On that last point, Star Wars was made in Shepperton Studios and ‘2001’ was made in Borehamwood.
I think Space:1999 was also made in the latter.
That is the beginning of Cyberpunk right there, along with the Virtual Reality Thriller- - both of whom I ascribe as separate but related sub-genres of sci-fi.
The material is unAmerican anyway for they always postulate a dystopian vision of Americas future.
I believe in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick predicted the end of popular sci-fi stories once humans went out into space although there is a black market for pre-colonial ficton on Mars.
I remember being interested in science fiction in middle school but had no interest in things like R is for Rocket and Farmer in the Sky. I discovered PKD about 1981, a few months before he died, I think the first story I read was Father Thing and the first novel was ‘Flow My Tears,’ the Policeman Said which was a terribly interesting novel to me at the time I read it.
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