I always imagined it as being possible, just very difficult. I'm currently in the process of nailing down where on a scale of 1 to 10 I want the races in my soft SF to be, 1 being human, anthropomorphized characters and 10 being Cthulhu-esc intangible life that perceives things very differently based on a number of factors, including biology and experience. I want to try finding a middle ground for most, with some extremes both ways.
For humanoid races I don't make them too alien. Their biology is slightly based on specific animals so I incorporate that into their culture so they're not complete humans + a tail. Kinda like Thunderans from Thunder Cats. Though they become more alien when the species has a lesser role in the stories or are from a hostile race.
It's not impossible. Fantasy has the Orcs series. There's Warrors, a novel series up to its forth trilogy about sentient tribal cats. Others include Watership Down and Animal Farm. I'm sure there are many more in fantasy and science fiction novels.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
It's not impossible. Fantasy has the Orcs series. There's Warrors, a novel series up to its forth trilogy about sentient tribal cats. Others include Watership Down and Animal Farm. I'm sure there are many more in fantasy and science fiction novels.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
Agreed. Cartoons, comics and novels have greater freedom with non-human protagonists. TV and films usually can't since they need to appeal to the widest demographic possible & are limited by budget.
Comics and video games have not only seen their mainstream appreciation skyrocket (how long have you been able to walk into a regular bookstore and see an entire Manga section?) but their indie content has exploded, from the vast amounts of casual and innovative games to the ubiquity of webcomics drawn by creators who answer to no one. (What forum are we posting on again?)
Comics may have gotten a bump with bookstores and digital access but the industry itself is shrinking. The direct market is on its last legs (has been for years), only the financial crisis delivered a blow that will speed up its destruction. For all their half-hearted attempts the Big Two are barely bringing many new readers into comics. They have bought back a few former customers with certain titles, though. Women & girls are still either ignored or only given the least to keep them on board professionally and in readership, so manga still maintains their monopoly over them.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
I've thought the next Star Trek should address the different visions of the future. Say, do another big time-skip to the conclusion of some long hard war which the Federation has barely survived, and only so at the cost of becoming a wholly military organization. Then, at the start of the series, you have the Federation going back to its mission of encountering new life and discovering shit and whatnot, doing utopian crap, but with some young officers fresh from the new academy and a hardass wartime hero captain who have to reconcile their shit. Maybe they encounter some gritty hard truths and stuff, but the idea is that they all want to be better, regardless of whether or not they are yet.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
Bradbury has Wizard Did It all over the goddamn place
That's the premise for, like, a third of the Martian Chronicles, probably
It's not like this is actually something that needs a whole lot of cognitive energy to figure out. Sci-fi seems to have "lost its way" for the same reason all entertainment is going to shit - publishing companies, game studios, movie studios, et al are all run by marketing and advertising executives now. There isn't anyone with a creative spirit steering the ship anymore; it just about what does and doesn't sell. Twilight sells. Bayformers sells. Call of Duty sells. There is no motivation to sell thought-provoking stuff when entertainment for idiots makes so much money. Jesus christ, guys.
You do realise that people have been saying similar things for generation after generation, and in 50 years people will be posting how sci-fi is shit and back at the start of the century it hadnt yet gone off the rails?
No they haven't.
The extent to which marketing, shareholders, and executives now control which pieces of entertainment get to market is unprecedented.
This isn't the usual "get off my lawn" or "nostalgia googles" nonsense. Works which we get to read, see, and play - NOT works which are created - lack depth and longevity. The primary purpose of entertainment, now, is to make money. Again, there are no creative persons at the wheel. Lowest common denominator, streamlined, accessibility, franchise. The person who is loyal to their creative work, and believes in it, is no longer a valuable commodity in the entertainment world, and because of shareholder influence it is becoming harder and harder to create something that has depth because depth absolutely does not lead to profits.
Why do you think the only interesting game projects are popping on kick-starter, a platform independent of publisher and shareholder influence?
Again, Twilight, Call of Duty, and Bayformers made, and make, a shit-load of money. They have absolutely no depth. Care to explain to me why anyone, at the wheel at any publishing house, movie studio, or game publisher, would ever want to foster the creation of anything with depth ever again? There's a whole world of morons out there to sell to, why waste time and resources appealing to the intelligent?
Are you arguing that popular things are terrible? Because most popular things are and have always been terrible. (Sure, Twilight is popular. So was "Varney the Vampire".)
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things don't get made? Because there are plenty of works today that have depth and longevity, that appeal to the intelligent, from Universal's "Scott Pilgrim" movie (did it make a ton of money? no. did it get released, can I watch it? yes) to the best-selling novel "House of Leaves" to the broke-all-the-download-records art game "Journey".
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but aren't popular? Because the movie that made the most money in 2010 was the enormously critically acclaimed "Toy Story 3", and you know what's still on the best-seller lists? Catcher in the motherfucking Rye.
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but not by the old studio system? Because even though that's not true, who cares? So long as I can still buy the new Doublefine game on Kickstarter. The internet age has led to an explosion in the availability and creation of art, and complaining that the best stuff doesn't make it to 5,000 screens is a waste of time you could be using to Instant Watch your Humble Bundle from your Project Gutenberg Kindle Library brought to you by Steam.
Define your argument so that I may kick it some more, please.
I'm arguing that in an environment where few entertainment outlets - publishers, studios, etc. - aren't publicly-traded companies, or owned by such companies, little worthwhile entertainment sees the light of day.
Little worthwhile entertainment? Good god, man.
A) Production is way up! More movies are produced now than ever before in the history of movies. As someone who tries to exhaustively cover the good films in a year, by the time I finish getting through my 2011 list I'll probably have seen about 90 new films, almost all of them worthwhile. Television used to be 4 channels, and the proliferation of cable has ushered in a new golden age where at any given time there are a good dozen or two worthwhile shows on the air, a huge improvement over the past. Comics and video games have not only seen their mainstream appreciation skyrocket (how long have you been able to walk into a regular bookstore and see an entire Manga section?) but their indie content has exploded, from the vast amounts of casual and innovative games to the ubiquity of webcomics drawn by creators who answer to no one. (What forum are we posting on again?)
Barriers to entry have vanished. The studio/publishing establishment may have calcified, but who cares? Gabe and Tycho can self-publish over the internet and live off of t-shirts and donations; Cory Doctorow can be an author while giving away his books for free; Jonathan Coulton can be a musician without ever signing to a label; anybody can pick up a Canon 5D and make an independent film or sketch or webseries and distribute it themselves; the Humble Indie group has made over a million dollars with indie games all on their lonesome.
C) The studio/publishing establishment isn't any more hostile to art than it has been in the past. You think you have it bad now? Try the 40s, when the film studios controlled everything, above the line talent (writers, directors, editors) were all on contract and assembled arbitrarily by executives, and if you wanted to make art you had to work around the Hays Code of censorship. But within those constraints we got Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Maltese Falcon, His Girl Friday... and within today's constraints we still get intelligent, challenging movies like The Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Drive.
D) We have unprecedented access to past art. Even discounting piracy, I can put thousands of ebooks on one device, go through Netflix's immense library of streaming and on-disc films and television shows (when as far back as the ancient year of 1975 the only way to see a movie that wasn't brand new was to find a revival house that was playing it), play curated and emulated video games from systems long-dead, and read, say, every Batman comic ever written (*cough*).
Yeah, financial concerns may have a stronger influence on entertainment now than they have before. This is still the best time in the history of culture to be alive, because the sheer amount of worthwhile art and entertainment we have access to, new, old, studio, independent, is simply staggering compared to any time in the past.
So... mentioning the fact that well-known content producers can go direct to market now, because of technology, and that we do get the occasional good movie these days (though most of the movies you listed are adaptations rather than original films) disproves my entire point? Again, my argument is not "hurr durr... man... ain't nothin' no good no mo'" I am arguing that financial forces exert pressure on the content industry and the content industry has responded with less risk-taking; less risk-taking means you guys don't get to see very much new stuff from new authors, which means "SCIENCE FICTION HAS LOST IT'S WAY" to you people.
I will slow it down for you.
Example: The Publishing Industry
1. The publishing industry took a big hit in 2008, just like everyone else.
2. They responded to this by deciding to primarily publish things like ghost written biographies of celebrities, anything that fits into a trend, and other safe bets. They just didn't want to take a risk on new authors. They still don't.
3. The publishing industry, to save money, has offloaded much of it's content filtering - sifting through the slush pile - to agents. Agents make their living from percentages of royalties paid to authors. Agents have no incentive to take a risk on something that, while excellent, may not sell as well as Kim Kardashian's new book about her ass.
Again, my point is that there could be someone out there writing awesome, deep, sci-fi out there and you will never hear of them because market forces are causing publishing companies to take less and less risk.
This is not rocket science. You are being deliberately obtuse for the reasons I listed in a previous post. You want to shout out "NOSTALGIA GOGGLES!" every time someone brings up the fact that maybe we're just not seeing as diverse a field of decent entertainment as we did even ten years ago. You just can't believe that; you have to believe that you love this stuff, man.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
You're right that those properties don't fit into typical sci-fi genres, that's why they belong in a separate genre science fantasy. It's a genre where science fiction and fantasy are blended together.
What exactly do you mean by "fantasy devoid of the supernatural"?
Harry Dresden on
0
Options
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
It's not like this is actually something that needs a whole lot of cognitive energy to figure out. Sci-fi seems to have "lost its way" for the same reason all entertainment is going to shit - publishing companies, game studios, movie studios, et al are all run by marketing and advertising executives now. There isn't anyone with a creative spirit steering the ship anymore; it just about what does and doesn't sell. Twilight sells. Bayformers sells. Call of Duty sells. There is no motivation to sell thought-provoking stuff when entertainment for idiots makes so much money. Jesus christ, guys.
You do realise that people have been saying similar things for generation after generation, and in 50 years people will be posting how sci-fi is shit and back at the start of the century it hadnt yet gone off the rails?
No they haven't.
The extent to which marketing, shareholders, and executives now control which pieces of entertainment get to market is unprecedented.
This isn't the usual "get off my lawn" or "nostalgia googles" nonsense. Works which we get to read, see, and play - NOT works which are created - lack depth and longevity. The primary purpose of entertainment, now, is to make money. Again, there are no creative persons at the wheel. Lowest common denominator, streamlined, accessibility, franchise. The person who is loyal to their creative work, and believes in it, is no longer a valuable commodity in the entertainment world, and because of shareholder influence it is becoming harder and harder to create something that has depth because depth absolutely does not lead to profits.
Why do you think the only interesting game projects are popping on kick-starter, a platform independent of publisher and shareholder influence?
Again, Twilight, Call of Duty, and Bayformers made, and make, a shit-load of money. They have absolutely no depth. Care to explain to me why anyone, at the wheel at any publishing house, movie studio, or game publisher, would ever want to foster the creation of anything with depth ever again? There's a whole world of morons out there to sell to, why waste time and resources appealing to the intelligent?
Are you arguing that popular things are terrible? Because most popular things are and have always been terrible. (Sure, Twilight is popular. So was "Varney the Vampire".)
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things don't get made? Because there are plenty of works today that have depth and longevity, that appeal to the intelligent, from Universal's "Scott Pilgrim" movie (did it make a ton of money? no. did it get released, can I watch it? yes) to the best-selling novel "House of Leaves" to the broke-all-the-download-records art game "Journey".
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but aren't popular? Because the movie that made the most money in 2010 was the enormously critically acclaimed "Toy Story 3", and you know what's still on the best-seller lists? Catcher in the motherfucking Rye.
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but not by the old studio system? Because even though that's not true, who cares? So long as I can still buy the new Doublefine game on Kickstarter. The internet age has led to an explosion in the availability and creation of art, and complaining that the best stuff doesn't make it to 5,000 screens is a waste of time you could be using to Instant Watch your Humble Bundle from your Project Gutenberg Kindle Library brought to you by Steam.
Define your argument so that I may kick it some more, please.
I'm arguing that in an environment where few entertainment outlets - publishers, studios, etc. - aren't publicly-traded companies, or owned by such companies, little worthwhile entertainment sees the light of day.
Little worthwhile entertainment? Good god, man.
A) Production is way up! More movies are produced now than ever before in the history of movies. As someone who tries to exhaustively cover the good films in a year, by the time I finish getting through my 2011 list I'll probably have seen about 90 new films, almost all of them worthwhile. Television used to be 4 channels, and the proliferation of cable has ushered in a new golden age where at any given time there are a good dozen or two worthwhile shows on the air, a huge improvement over the past. Comics and video games have not only seen their mainstream appreciation skyrocket (how long have you been able to walk into a regular bookstore and see an entire Manga section?) but their indie content has exploded, from the vast amounts of casual and innovative games to the ubiquity of webcomics drawn by creators who answer to no one. (What forum are we posting on again?)
Barriers to entry have vanished. The studio/publishing establishment may have calcified, but who cares? Gabe and Tycho can self-publish over the internet and live off of t-shirts and donations; Cory Doctorow can be an author while giving away his books for free; Jonathan Coulton can be a musician without ever signing to a label; anybody can pick up a Canon 5D and make an independent film or sketch or webseries and distribute it themselves; the Humble Indie group has made over a million dollars with indie games all on their lonesome.
C) The studio/publishing establishment isn't any more hostile to art than it has been in the past. You think you have it bad now? Try the 40s, when the film studios controlled everything, above the line talent (writers, directors, editors) were all on contract and assembled arbitrarily by executives, and if you wanted to make art you had to work around the Hays Code of censorship. But within those constraints we got Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Maltese Falcon, His Girl Friday... and within today's constraints we still get intelligent, challenging movies like The Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Drive.
D) We have unprecedented access to past art. Even discounting piracy, I can put thousands of ebooks on one device, go through Netflix's immense library of streaming and on-disc films and television shows (when as far back as the ancient year of 1975 the only way to see a movie that wasn't brand new was to find a revival house that was playing it), play curated and emulated video games from systems long-dead, and read, say, every Batman comic ever written (*cough*).
Yeah, financial concerns may have a stronger influence on entertainment now than they have before. This is still the best time in the history of culture to be alive, because the sheer amount of worthwhile art and entertainment we have access to, new, old, studio, independent, is simply staggering compared to any time in the past.
So... mentioning the fact that well-known content producers can go direct to market now, because of technology, and that we do get the occasional good movie these days (though most of the movies you listed are adaptations rather than original films) disproves my entire point?
"Original movie" and "good movie" have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Unless you're going to tell me that the classic movies I listed from the 40s are bad (Rebecca was a book first, The Maltese Falcon was a remake and a book first, His Girl Friday was a play first). The two trends of "movies these days are more often adaptations" and "movies these days are more often bad" are, even if true, symptoms of a different trend (like "risk-taking has decreased"). There's no causality.
Again, my argument is not "hurr durr... man... ain't nothin' no good no mo'" I am arguing that financial forces exert pressure on the content industry and the content industry has responded with less risk-taking; less risk-taking means you guys don't get to see very much new stuff from new authors, which means "SCIENCE FICTION HAS LOST IT'S WAY" to you people.
This is actually my problem with your argument. I don't fault your logic; I fault you taking the conclusion of that logic in a broader direction than is warranted. I agree that the content industries have responded to financial pressures with less risk-taking, and I'd agree that in theory less risk-taking results in fewer good works. But that does not mean that there are "not very many" good works out there.
Again, my point is that there could be someone out there writing awesome, deep, sci-fi out there and you will never hear of them because market forces are causing publishing companies to take less and less risk.
There could be, yes. But you haven't yet offered evidence that there are enough of these unpublished authors out there to account for an (real or perceived) drop in the quality of science fiction entertainment.
This is not rocket science. You are being deliberately obtuse for the reasons I listed in a previous post. You want to shout out "NOSTALGIA GOGGLES!" every time someone brings up the fact that maybe we're just not seeing as diverse a field of decent entertainment as we did even ten years ago. You just can't believe that; you have to believe that you love this stuff, man.
I've shouted "nostalgia goggles" zero times, you can go read my posts. If anything, I think your problem is that you're too focused on the state of the top of the best-seller charts to notice the vast breadth that has opened up in the past decade or two. Your argument is a little like saying "The number one most eaten food in America is the Big Mac, therefore cooking is DEAD" when we are also in one of the best times historically to be into food (wide varieties are available, cookbooks and cooking programming are ubiquitous, chefs are celebrities, etc).
Astaereth on
0
Options
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
A) Production is way up! More movies are produced now than ever before in the history of movies.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get this? The big studios in the past produced 40+ movies a year, nearly one a week. Production among them today isn't even half as high.
Edit Unless you're referring to foreign films and stuff, but that would impose another barrier against most viewers.
Mad King George on
0
Options
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
A) Production is way up! More movies are produced now than ever before in the history of movies.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get this? The big studios in the past produced 40+ movies a year, nearly one a week. Production among them today isn't even half as high.
Edit Unless you're referring to foreign films and stuff, but that would impose another barrier against most viewers.
I didn't really have a cite for that, it's just some "common knowledge" I picked up at some point in film school. I just tried Googling and it's complicated.
So it depends on what numbers you want to use and what you count as a movie. Today's big studios in Hollywood make about 600 movies a year; several articles I've found estimate the number of total films that make it film festivals at 50,000 (which I think is a global figure) (and naturally almost none of them find real distribution). Studio-released movies worldwide are around 6,000 or so (did you know Nigeria makes like 900 movies a year? crazy!).
Since I'm really, really bored (and curious!), I went through a bunch of IMDB data, searching for all Feature Films and Documentaries produced in the United States from 1897 to 2012, and then (since this is the crux of the argument) how many of those for each year were science-fiction.
The results: the last decade really has been on a big upswing, ranging from 1,923 movies in the year 2000 to 7,354 movies in 2011. In comparison, no year before 1996 had more than 1500 movies produced. The average in the '40s under the studio system was 544.6 movies produced per year.
The weird bit is that science-fiction has always been a very, very small percentage of films (at least determined by IMDB tags), ranging from almost 10% in 1958 and 1959 to an average of 4.5% between 1977 and 1997. And although overall film production is, as I said, way up since 1997, the ratio of sci-fi films to the total has dropped to an average of 2.4%. My guess is, independent productions make up the bulk of the increase in production, and science-fiction often requires budgets that independents can't match.
Whether this accounts for the perception that sci-fi has "lost its way" is questionable, however--for that you'd have to look at major releases.
It's not impossible. Fantasy has the Orcs series. There's Warrors, a novel series up to its forth trilogy about sentient tribal cats. Others include Watership Down and Animal Farm. I'm sure there are many more in fantasy and science fiction novels.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
All of these characters are pretty recognisably human in their cognition, cultures and attitudes. And bodies too - anthropomorphic robots and animals. They're all humans with a reskin. When we were talking about non-human characters earlier, I assumed we weren't talking about that kind of thing.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
You're right that those properties don't fit into typical sci-fi genres, that's why they belong in a separate genre science fantasy. It's a genre where science fiction and fantasy are blended together.
What exactly do you mean by "fantasy devoid of the supernatural"?
I hesitate to put words in his mouth, but I imagine he is referring to fantasy in which magic is so systematised and explained that is natural rather than supernatural. Contrast Elrond Halfeven's longevity, barely explained and bound to his own internal choices, with a post-D&D conveyor-belt fantasy elf who lives around 700 years, maturing at around 180, marrying around 200-300, and becoming 'old' at around 500. Or the difference between Gandalf's magic and Harry Dresden's.
And I'm still not sure why we should worry about genres particularly.
I figure I could take a bear.
0
Options
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
It's not impossible. Fantasy has the Orcs series. There's Warrors, a novel series up to its forth trilogy about sentient tribal cats. Others include Watership Down and Animal Farm. I'm sure there are many more in fantasy and science fiction novels.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
All of these characters are pretty recognisably human in their cognition, cultures and attitudes. And bodies too - anthropomorphic robots and animals. They're all humans with a reskin. When we were talking about non-human characters earlier, I assumed we weren't talking about that kind of thing.
That's about as good as you're going to get, though. Turns out, as humans, we really don't give a shit about things that aren't human. No one is going to read a book that isn't at least about weird shit that thinks human and I doubt very much anyone would be able to write it.
It's not impossible. Fantasy has the Orcs series. There's Warrors, a novel series up to its forth trilogy about sentient tribal cats. Others include Watership Down and Animal Farm. I'm sure there are many more in fantasy and science fiction novels.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
All of these characters are pretty recognisably human in their cognition, cultures and attitudes. And bodies too - anthropomorphic robots and animals. They're all humans with a reskin. When we were talking about non-human characters earlier, I assumed we weren't talking about that kind of thing.
That's about as good as you're going to get, though. Turns out, as humans, we really don't give a shit about things that aren't human. No one is going to read a book that isn't at least about weird shit that thinks human and I doubt very much anyone would be able to write it.
My guess is, independent productions make up the bulk of the increase in production, and science-fiction often requires budgets that independents can't match.
Whether this accounts for the perception that sci-fi has "lost its way" is questionable, however--for that you'd have to look at major releases.
That's what I meant. Those movies made nearly one a week were all major releases. Major studio releases today are far fewer while "independents" are way up.
As far as for scifi in general (this part isn't directed toward you specifically, but the thread) we've got to not limit it to "spaceships and stuff." There's a reason that Frankenstein is considered the first scifi story and it's most definitely not about spaceships.
It's not impossible. Fantasy has the Orcs series. There's Warrors, a novel series up to its forth trilogy about sentient tribal cats. Others include Watership Down and Animal Farm. I'm sure there are many more in fantasy and science fiction novels.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
All of these characters are pretty recognisably human in their cognition, cultures and attitudes. And bodies too - anthropomorphic robots and animals. They're all humans with a reskin. When we were talking about non-human characters earlier, I assumed we weren't talking about that kind of thing.
That's about as good as you're going to get, though. Turns out, as humans, we really don't give a shit about things that aren't human. No one is going to read a book that isn't at least about weird shit that thinks human and I doubt very much anyone would be able to write it.
Sure, that's what Bogart etc were saying before.
Disagree. I think we care greatly about things which aren't human - but we don't trust other humans to imagine how or why they think the way they do. Which I think is a perfectly reasonable position, since it's essentially no different to other human produced literature.
If we ever do discover intelligent aliens, I suspect there'll be enormous interest in reading their literature.
Any legitimately non-human characters - the ones that are not just re-skins - are most often used as foils for humanity. They define what it is to be human by being everything a human is not. One could get into a philosophical discussion about whether or not a human sci-fi writer could even perceive of a consciousness that is truly alien.
The re-skinned humans (rubber forehead aliens), when in a setting with actual humans, are often allegory for racism/classism/etc. Essentially human concepts.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
Bradbury has Wizard Did It all over the goddamn place
That's the premise for, like, a third of the Martian Chronicles, probably
First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.
The Battlestar Galactica remake count as a sci fi? It had some excellent moments (though the overall story arc became kinda eh) and the new 'realism' thing allowed for some awesome spectacles that wouldn't have felt like big events on an older sci fi where stuff like big space battles didn't have any repurcussions. The Galactica takes a nuke to it's hull, that damage stays. Nothing gets magically fixed between episodes, and by Season 4 the thing was a wreck, the list of redshirt pilots was thin, and getting into big battles was a whole lot more tense because of it.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Or with how stupid BSG got. The supernatural is anathema to the core idea of science fiction. If your plot comes down to A Wizard Did It than no amount of IN SPACE is going to make it real science fiction. The Caves of Steel and BSG are not in the same genre, even though they may share some trappings of setting.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars,Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
You're right that those properties don't fit into typical sci-fi genres, that's why they belong in a separate genre science fantasy. It's a genre where science fiction and fantasy are blended together.
Yes.
What exactly do you mean by "fantasy devoid of the supernatural"?
In something like Mistborn, magic is bound be definite rules and logic, which makes it a natural rather than supernatural force. Even it's semi-anthropomorphic deities are rational forces.
Whereas in, say, LotR, magic is not only unexplained, it is inexplicable. Why can't The Witch King be killed by any man? Because he said so. It's more than just a boast, because it has the power of prophecy (whatever that means), but it's not exactly a logically defined power or ability, and can apparently be beaten by linguistic nit-picking. Good thing whatever language they speak in Middle Earth was gendered pronouns.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
One of the places my mind usually goes when reading things like LotR is what I expect to happen in like, 300 years after the main plot when the renaissance happens and people start exploring the magics in a rational fashion, and they find out the simple underlying principles governing all those things.
Whereas in, say, LotR, magic is not only unexplained, it is inexplicable. Why can't The Witch King be killed by any man? Because he said so. It's more than just a boast, because it has the power of prophecy (whatever that means), but it's not exactly a logically defined power or ability, and can apparently be beaten by linguistic nit-picking. Good thing whatever language they speak in Middle Earth was gendered pronouns.
To be fair to Tolkien, he's drawing on a well of story and this is less egregious in its lawyering than the prophecies in MacBeth.
One of the places my mind usually goes when reading things like LotR is what I expect to happen in like, 300 years after the main plot when the renaissance happens and people start exploring the magics in a rational fashion, and they find out the simple underlying principles governing all those things.
I think the new Mistborn novel is this. I haven't yet read it however.
0
Options
lu tzeSweeping the monestary steps.Registered Userregular
It's not like this is actually something that needs a whole lot of cognitive energy to figure out. Sci-fi seems to have "lost its way" for the same reason all entertainment is going to shit - publishing companies, game studios, movie studios, et al are all run by marketing and advertising executives now. There isn't anyone with a creative spirit steering the ship anymore; it just about what does and doesn't sell. Twilight sells. Bayformers sells. Call of Duty sells. There is no motivation to sell thought-provoking stuff when entertainment for idiots makes so much money. Jesus christ, guys.
You do realise that people have been saying similar things for generation after generation, and in 50 years people will be posting how sci-fi is shit and back at the start of the century it hadnt yet gone off the rails?
No they haven't.
The extent to which marketing, shareholders, and executives now control which pieces of entertainment get to market is unprecedented.
This isn't the usual "get off my lawn" or "nostalgia googles" nonsense. Works which we get to read, see, and play - NOT works which are created - lack depth and longevity. The primary purpose of entertainment, now, is to make money. Again, there are no creative persons at the wheel. Lowest common denominator, streamlined, accessibility, franchise. The person who is loyal to their creative work, and believes in it, is no longer a valuable commodity in the entertainment world, and because of shareholder influence it is becoming harder and harder to create something that has depth because depth absolutely does not lead to profits.
Why do you think the only interesting game projects are popping on kick-starter, a platform independent of publisher and shareholder influence?
Again, Twilight, Call of Duty, and Bayformers made, and make, a shit-load of money. They have absolutely no depth. Care to explain to me why anyone, at the wheel at any publishing house, movie studio, or game publisher, would ever want to foster the creation of anything with depth ever again? There's a whole world of morons out there to sell to, why waste time and resources appealing to the intelligent?
Are you arguing that popular things are terrible? Because most popular things are and have always been terrible. (Sure, Twilight is popular. So was "Varney the Vampire".)
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things don't get made? Because there are plenty of works today that have depth and longevity, that appeal to the intelligent, from Universal's "Scott Pilgrim" movie (did it make a ton of money? no. did it get released, can I watch it? yes) to the best-selling novel "House of Leaves" to the broke-all-the-download-records art game "Journey".
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but aren't popular? Because the movie that made the most money in 2010 was the enormously critically acclaimed "Toy Story 3", and you know what's still on the best-seller lists? Catcher in the motherfucking Rye.
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but not by the old studio system? Because even though that's not true, who cares? So long as I can still buy the new Doublefine game on Kickstarter. The internet age has led to an explosion in the availability and creation of art, and complaining that the best stuff doesn't make it to 5,000 screens is a waste of time you could be using to Instant Watch your Humble Bundle from your Project Gutenberg Kindle Library brought to you by Steam.
Define your argument so that I may kick it some more, please.
I'm arguing that in an environment where few entertainment outlets - publishers, studios, etc. - aren't publicly-traded companies, or owned by such companies, little worthwhile entertainment sees the light of day.
Little worthwhile entertainment? Good god, man.
A) Production is way up! More movies are produced now than ever before in the history of movies. As someone who tries to exhaustively cover the good films in a year, by the time I finish getting through my 2011 list I'll probably have seen about 90 new films, almost all of them worthwhile. Television used to be 4 channels, and the proliferation of cable has ushered in a new golden age where at any given time there are a good dozen or two worthwhile shows on the air, a huge improvement over the past. Comics and video games have not only seen their mainstream appreciation skyrocket (how long have you been able to walk into a regular bookstore and see an entire Manga section?) but their indie content has exploded, from the vast amounts of casual and innovative games to the ubiquity of webcomics drawn by creators who answer to no one. (What forum are we posting on again?)
Barriers to entry have vanished. The studio/publishing establishment may have calcified, but who cares? Gabe and Tycho can self-publish over the internet and live off of t-shirts and donations; Cory Doctorow can be an author while giving away his books for free; Jonathan Coulton can be a musician without ever signing to a label; anybody can pick up a Canon 5D and make an independent film or sketch or webseries and distribute it themselves; the Humble Indie group has made over a million dollars with indie games all on their lonesome.
C) The studio/publishing establishment isn't any more hostile to art than it has been in the past. You think you have it bad now? Try the 40s, when the film studios controlled everything, above the line talent (writers, directors, editors) were all on contract and assembled arbitrarily by executives, and if you wanted to make art you had to work around the Hays Code of censorship. But within those constraints we got Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Maltese Falcon, His Girl Friday... and within today's constraints we still get intelligent, challenging movies like The Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Drive.
D) We have unprecedented access to past art. Even discounting piracy, I can put thousands of ebooks on one device, go through Netflix's immense library of streaming and on-disc films and television shows (when as far back as the ancient year of 1975 the only way to see a movie that wasn't brand new was to find a revival house that was playing it), play curated and emulated video games from systems long-dead, and read, say, every Batman comic ever written (*cough*).
Yeah, financial concerns may have a stronger influence on entertainment now than they have before. This is still the best time in the history of culture to be alive, because the sheer amount of worthwhile art and entertainment we have access to, new, old, studio, independent, is simply staggering compared to any time in the past.
Yes, we are on the cusp of a new age of creativity.
But don't blow the trumpet too loudly, because there are people actively trying to stop it happening. Powerful people are trying to funnel and shape this wonderful technology into something they can control.
One of the places my mind usually goes when reading things like LotR is what I expect to happen in like, 300 years after the main plot when the renaissance happens and people start exploring the magics in a rational fashion, and they find out the simple underlying principles governing all those things.
Any sufficiently advance magic seems like technology.
One of the places my mind usually goes when reading things like LotR is what I expect to happen in like, 300 years after the main plot when the renaissance happens and people start exploring the magics in a rational fashion, and they find out the simple underlying principles governing all those things.
Any sufficiently advance magic seems like technology.
0
Options
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Any legitimately non-human characters - the ones that are not just re-skins - are most often used as foils for humanity. They define what it is to be human by being everything a human is not. One could get into a philosophical discussion about whether or not a human sci-fi writer could even perceive of a consciousness that is truly alien.
The re-skinned humans (rubber forehead aliens), when in a setting with actual humans, are often allegory for racism/classism/etc. Essentially human concepts.
Aliens inhabit the same universe as we do. If, as our science assumes, the universe follows the same natural laws all throughout, then wherever sentient life arises after millions of years of evolution and natural selection, that alien life will develop along similar lines to us. Why? Because they will almost certainly possess a desire to understand their environment and themselves. More then likely, they'll need to eat, sleep, mate, find shelter, survive, and find answers for their existence. They'll look at the sky and dream much as we do.
The difference extends from their relationship with their environment and with each other, as well as their biology and the speed with which they advance technologically and their desire to advance and eventually reach the stars. They might live in symbiotic peace with their homeworld and have no desire to advance or leave. They might be telekinetic and share emotions and thoughts more directly between individuals. They might be in a much more brutal competition with themselves and their environment because their planet is sparse in resources and habitable land and has more hostile conditions. They might dwell underwater or in another kind of liquid or physical state. They might even be minerals who spend their entire time on a wall in some cave or underground, weaved into the heart of the planet and becoming one with it in an almost spiritual union.
Ultimately, they'll come up with vastly different cultures and beliefs and understandings of the universe and the many questions that we too face. But the key similarity, the thing that makes it possible to conceive of them, at least nominally, is the fact that we live in the same basic condition of ignorance. Any life capable of self awareness and thought would grow curious, to some degree at least, of why they exist and what the state of that existence is. So if we ever went out and met those minerals on the wall and found a way to communicate, they would probably ask us things like what it's like to walk and look at the stars as we do, and maybe what we think of them.
Aliens are very different then us, but not completely, and we can conceive of them. The only alien life that would perhaps be truly incomprehensible to us and other alien life from our universe would be life from other universes or dimensions, that grew up and exist in vastly different places with different physical laws, assuming that natural laws do not extend beyond our own universe.
0
Options
JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
One of the places my mind usually goes when reading things like LotR is what I expect to happen in like, 300 years after the main plot when the renaissance happens and people start exploring the magics in a rational fashion, and they find out the simple underlying principles governing all those things.
Well, yes, that's a scientific approach to take.
But I think it's good to realise, when considering fantasy magic, that there are lots of different traditions/conceptions of magic, and only really neo-platonistic magic is rationally explicable.
Neo-platonist magic is a magic system, basically. in fiction it is magic as science, such as D&D magic. It's also a kind of actual magic people believed in historically, but when analysing magic it is used more broadly. Rules, laws, equations, etc etc. Note that this has nothing to do with real science - geomancy/feng shui is a type of neoplatonistic magic.
Then there is transactional magic such as religious magic, shamanism and demonology, where magic is a favour granted by a supernatural entity, usually in return for sacrifice. Innate magic, where the practitioner has special natural abilities. Trancendental magic, where the inner spiritual or mental state of the practitioner gives them special abilities. And maybe more, though you can usually reduce others to combinations of these: Gandalf's magic is a mix of religious and innate, for example.
So, anyway, LOTR magic isn't really that kind of magic. No-one's going to be able to analyse the rules governing the Valar or the Maiar.
I figure I could take a bear.
0
Options
Andy JoeWe claim the land for the highlord!The AdirondacksRegistered Userregular
The ratio of bad to good, in science fiction or any other genre or media category, is roughly the same today as it has always been. The past only seems superior because mediocrity leads inevitably to obscurity.
Any legitimately non-human characters - the ones that are not just re-skins - are most often used as foils for humanity. They define what it is to be human by being everything a human is not. One could get into a philosophical discussion about whether or not a human sci-fi writer could even perceive of a consciousness that is truly alien.
The re-skinned humans (rubber forehead aliens), when in a setting with actual humans, are often allegory for racism/classism/etc. Essentially human concepts.
Aliens inhabit the same universe as we do. If, as our science assumes, the universe follows the same natural laws all throughout, then wherever sentient life arises after millions of years of evolution and natural selection, that alien life will develop along similar lines to us. Why? Because they will almost certainly possess a desire to understand their environment and themselves. More then likely, they'll need to eat, sleep, mate, find shelter, survive, and find answers for their existence. They'll look at the sky and dream much as we do.
The difference extends from their relationship with their environment and with each other, as well as their biology and the speed with which they advance technologically and their desire to advance and eventually reach the stars. They might live in symbiotic peace with their homeworld and have no desire to advance or leave. They might be telekinetic and share emotions and thoughts more directly between individuals. They might be in a much more brutal competition with themselves and their environment because their planet is sparse in resources and habitable land and has more hostile conditions. They might dwell underwater or in another kind of liquid or physical state. They might even be minerals who spend their entire time on a wall in some cave or underground, weaved into the heart of the planet and becoming one with it in an almost spiritual union.
Ultimately, they'll come up with vastly different cultures and beliefs and understandings of the universe and the many questions that we too face. But the key similarity, the thing that makes it possible to conceive of them, at least nominally, is the fact that we live in the same basic condition of ignorance. Any life capable of self awareness and thought would grow curious, to some degree at least, of why they exist and what the state of that existence is. So if we ever went out and met those minerals on the wall and found a way to communicate, they would probably ask us things like what it's like to walk and look at the stars as we do, and maybe what we think of them.
Aliens are very different then us, but not completely, and we can conceive of them. The only alien life that would perhaps be truly incomprehensible to us and other alien life from our universe would be life from other universes or dimensions, that grew up and exist in vastly different places with different physical laws, assuming that natural laws do not extend beyond our own universe.
Excellent. One will get into a philosophical discussion about alien consciousness. I should say I find everything you wrote reasonable and agree with much of it. I'm going to try to argue the other side because 1) that's what I asked for, and 2) I find discussions like this fascinating and the crux of some of my favorite science fiction. On a side note: I assume you've read Neal Stephenson's Anathem, as much of what you've said and what I'll say takes up a good deal of space in that book, but if you haven't: FUCKING READ IT. That goes for the rest of you too.
While our understanding of the Universe is expanding exponentially, it is by no means complete. As far as we can tell, the majority of the cosmos is composed of matter so arcane we call it "dark". True, given the same conditions we experience on Earth, it is reasonable to assume life could develop in a similar fashion. And even on a world unlike Earth, given the same governing physical principles, perhaps molten lead based proteins behave similarly to water based proteins for purposes of evolution. But perhaps not. Perhaps there is a principle of natural inclusion that would take precedence over natural selection in such a scenario. We can make assumptions that life develops the same way, but they are just that: assumptions. Reasonable assumptions, sure, but assumptions based on our current understanding of the Universe. Which is inherently and irrevocably based on our humanity.
Furthermore, any alien life we may encounter will have to be viewed by humans through a human lens. We could ask a sentient quartz crystal how he feels about his relevant hardness, but perhaps hardness isn't a concept Rocky has any concept of, as it literally means nothing to him. Also, I used the pronoun 'his' there. Gender is meaningless to Rocky. Even had I used 'it's', that doesn't guarantee that individuality is even conceptual. It's reasonable to me that such an existence would have a vastly different understanding of the Universe than you or I. Our minds may not have the capacity to relate.
I am arguing that financial forces exert pressure on the content industry and the content industry has responded with less risk-taking;
Whereas in the old days publishers loved to publish shit that didn't make any money.
Not necessarily. I think the logical extension of that argument is that in the old days it was cheaper to publish and market, and thus content creators were more amenable to risk, whereas now your average publisher is looking for blockbusters and nothing else.
It's not like this is actually something that needs a whole lot of cognitive energy to figure out. Sci-fi seems to have "lost its way" for the same reason all entertainment is going to shit - publishing companies, game studios, movie studios, et al are all run by marketing and advertising executives now. There isn't anyone with a creative spirit steering the ship anymore; it just about what does and doesn't sell. Twilight sells. Bayformers sells. Call of Duty sells. There is no motivation to sell thought-provoking stuff when entertainment for idiots makes so much money. Jesus christ, guys.
You do realise that people have been saying similar things for generation after generation, and in 50 years people will be posting how sci-fi is shit and back at the start of the century it hadnt yet gone off the rails?
No they haven't.
The extent to which marketing, shareholders, and executives now control which pieces of entertainment get to market is unprecedented.
This isn't the usual "get off my lawn" or "nostalgia googles" nonsense. Works which we get to read, see, and play - NOT works which are created - lack depth and longevity. The primary purpose of entertainment, now, is to make money. Again, there are no creative persons at the wheel. Lowest common denominator, streamlined, accessibility, franchise. The person who is loyal to their creative work, and believes in it, is no longer a valuable commodity in the entertainment world, and because of shareholder influence it is becoming harder and harder to create something that has depth because depth absolutely does not lead to profits.
Why do you think the only interesting game projects are popping on kick-starter, a platform independent of publisher and shareholder influence?
Again, Twilight, Call of Duty, and Bayformers made, and make, a shit-load of money. They have absolutely no depth. Care to explain to me why anyone, at the wheel at any publishing house, movie studio, or game publisher, would ever want to foster the creation of anything with depth ever again? There's a whole world of morons out there to sell to, why waste time and resources appealing to the intelligent?
Are you arguing that popular things are terrible? Because most popular things are and have always been terrible. (Sure, Twilight is popular. So was "Varney the Vampire".)
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things don't get made? Because there are plenty of works today that have depth and longevity, that appeal to the intelligent, from Universal's "Scott Pilgrim" movie (did it make a ton of money? no. did it get released, can I watch it? yes) to the best-selling novel "House of Leaves" to the broke-all-the-download-records art game "Journey".
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but aren't popular? Because the movie that made the most money in 2010 was the enormously critically acclaimed "Toy Story 3", and you know what's still on the best-seller lists? Catcher in the motherfucking Rye.
Or are you arguing that non-terrible things get made but not by the old studio system? Because even though that's not true, who cares? So long as I can still buy the new Doublefine game on Kickstarter. The internet age has led to an explosion in the availability and creation of art, and complaining that the best stuff doesn't make it to 5,000 screens is a waste of time you could be using to Instant Watch your Humble Bundle from your Project Gutenberg Kindle Library brought to you by Steam.
Define your argument so that I may kick it some more, please.
I'm arguing that in an environment where few entertainment outlets - publishers, studios, etc. - aren't publicly-traded companies, or owned by such companies, little worthwhile entertainment sees the light of day.
Little worthwhile entertainment? Good god, man.
A) Production is way up! More movies are produced now than ever before in the history of movies. As someone who tries to exhaustively cover the good films in a year, by the time I finish getting through my 2011 list I'll probably have seen about 90 new films, almost all of them worthwhile. Television used to be 4 channels, and the proliferation of cable has ushered in a new golden age where at any given time there are a good dozen or two worthwhile shows on the air, a huge improvement over the past. Comics and video games have not only seen their mainstream appreciation skyrocket (how long have you been able to walk into a regular bookstore and see an entire Manga section?) but their indie content has exploded, from the vast amounts of casual and innovative games to the ubiquity of webcomics drawn by creators who answer to no one. (What forum are we posting on again?)
Barriers to entry have vanished. The studio/publishing establishment may have calcified, but who cares? Gabe and Tycho can self-publish over the internet and live off of t-shirts and donations; Cory Doctorow can be an author while giving away his books for free; Jonathan Coulton can be a musician without ever signing to a label; anybody can pick up a Canon 5D and make an independent film or sketch or webseries and distribute it themselves; the Humble Indie group has made over a million dollars with indie games all on their lonesome.
C) The studio/publishing establishment isn't any more hostile to art than it has been in the past. You think you have it bad now? Try the 40s, when the film studios controlled everything, above the line talent (writers, directors, editors) were all on contract and assembled arbitrarily by executives, and if you wanted to make art you had to work around the Hays Code of censorship. But within those constraints we got Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Maltese Falcon, His Girl Friday... and within today's constraints we still get intelligent, challenging movies like The Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Drive.
D) We have unprecedented access to past art. Even discounting piracy, I can put thousands of ebooks on one device, go through Netflix's immense library of streaming and on-disc films and television shows (when as far back as the ancient year of 1975 the only way to see a movie that wasn't brand new was to find a revival house that was playing it), play curated and emulated video games from systems long-dead, and read, say, every Batman comic ever written (*cough*).
Yeah, financial concerns may have a stronger influence on entertainment now than they have before. This is still the best time in the history of culture to be alive, because the sheer amount of worthwhile art and entertainment we have access to, new, old, studio, independent, is simply staggering compared to any time in the past.
So... mentioning the fact that well-known content producers can go direct to market now, because of technology, and that we do get the occasional good movie these days (though most of the movies you listed are adaptations rather than original films) disproves my entire point?
"Original movie" and "good movie" have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Unless you're going to tell me that the classic movies I listed from the 40s are bad (Rebecca was a book first, The Maltese Falcon was a remake and a book first, His Girl Friday was a play first). The two trends of "movies these days are more often adaptations" and "movies these days are more often bad" are, even if true, symptoms of a different trend (like "risk-taking has decreased"). There's no causality.
Again, my argument is not "hurr durr... man... ain't nothin' no good no mo'" I am arguing that financial forces exert pressure on the content industry and the content industry has responded with less risk-taking; less risk-taking means you guys don't get to see very much new stuff from new authors, which means "SCIENCE FICTION HAS LOST IT'S WAY" to you people.
This is actually my problem with your argument. I don't fault your logic; I fault you taking the conclusion of that logic in a broader direction than is warranted. I agree that the content industries have responded to financial pressures with less risk-taking, and I'd agree that in theory less risk-taking results in fewer good works. But that does not mean that there are "not very many" good works out there.
Again, my point is that there could be someone out there writing awesome, deep, sci-fi out there and you will never hear of them because market forces are causing publishing companies to take less and less risk.
There could be, yes. But you haven't yet offered evidence that there are enough of these unpublished authors out there to account for an (real or perceived) drop in the quality of science fiction entertainment.
This is not rocket science. You are being deliberately obtuse for the reasons I listed in a previous post. You want to shout out "NOSTALGIA GOGGLES!" every time someone brings up the fact that maybe we're just not seeing as diverse a field of decent entertainment as we did even ten years ago. You just can't believe that; you have to believe that you love this stuff, man.
I've shouted "nostalgia goggles" zero times, you can go read my posts. If anything, I think your problem is that you're too focused on the state of the top of the best-seller charts to notice the vast breadth that has opened up in the past decade or two. Your argument is a little like saying "The number one most eaten food in America is the Big Mac, therefore cooking is DEAD" when we are also in one of the best times historically to be into food (wide varieties are available, cookbooks and cooking programming are ubiquitous, chefs are celebrities, etc).
I think we're both arguing based on separate issues which are often conflated.
I don't mean to say that current fictional works - adaptations or otherwise - are not "good." What I am trying to say is that the content industry is less inclined to produce things which have depth, attention to detail, nuance, etc. because those are often attributes ignored by the majority of consumers. I also don't mean to say that things which lack these attributes are not "good." A piece of entertainment can completely lack nuance, depth, and detail and still be "good" if it is "fun."
I just think economic factors are pressuring the content industry into taking less risk. Less risk inevitably means less stuff that can be mentioned in threads like these. After all, they Bladerunner would have never been made if they would've known how little money it would make in theaters. However, it's considered a classic now. So, I'm saying that short-term profit shouldn't be such a large deciding factor in the content industry, and because it is such a huge factor, and because they have even better means of market testing and risk assessment now, you're going to see less deep, meaty, detailed, and nuanced fiction.
I will admit that much of what I've been posting about pertains more to the publishing industry and he game industry than the movie industry which has been churning out more decent stuff than the others.
Any legitimately non-human characters - the ones that are not just re-skins - are most often used as foils for humanity. They define what it is to be human by being everything a human is not. One could get into a philosophical discussion about whether or not a human sci-fi writer could even perceive of a consciousness that is truly alien.
The re-skinned humans (rubber forehead aliens), when in a setting with actual humans, are often allegory for racism/classism/etc. Essentially human concepts.
Aliens inhabit the same universe as we do. If, as our science assumes, the universe follows the same natural laws all throughout, then wherever sentient life arises after millions of years of evolution and natural selection, that alien life will develop along similar lines to us. Why? Because they will almost certainly possess a desire to understand their environment and themselves. More then likely, they'll need to eat, sleep, mate, find shelter, survive, and find answers for their existence. They'll look at the sky and dream much as we do.
The difference extends from their relationship with their environment and with each other, as well as their biology and the speed with which they advance technologically and their desire to advance and eventually reach the stars. They might live in symbiotic peace with their homeworld and have no desire to advance or leave. They might be telekinetic and share emotions and thoughts more directly between individuals. They might be in a much more brutal competition with themselves and their environment because their planet is sparse in resources and habitable land and has more hostile conditions. They might dwell underwater or in another kind of liquid or physical state. They might even be minerals who spend their entire time on a wall in some cave or underground, weaved into the heart of the planet and becoming one with it in an almost spiritual union.
Ultimately, they'll come up with vastly different cultures and beliefs and understandings of the universe and the many questions that we too face. But the key similarity, the thing that makes it possible to conceive of them, at least nominally, is the fact that we live in the same basic condition of ignorance. Any life capable of self awareness and thought would grow curious, to some degree at least, of why they exist and what the state of that existence is. So if we ever went out and met those minerals on the wall and found a way to communicate, they would probably ask us things like what it's like to walk and look at the stars as we do, and maybe what we think of them.
Aliens are very different then us, but not completely, and we can conceive of them. The only alien life that would perhaps be truly incomprehensible to us and other alien life from our universe would be life from other universes or dimensions, that grew up and exist in vastly different places with different physical laws, assuming that natural laws do not extend beyond our own universe.
Excellent. One will get into a philosophical discussion about alien consciousness. I should say I find everything you wrote reasonable and agree with much of it. I'm going to try to argue the other side because 1) that's what I asked for, and 2) I find discussions like this fascinating and the crux of some of my favorite science fiction. On a side note: I assume you've read Neal Stephenson's Anathem, as much of what you've said and what I'll say takes up a good deal of space in that book, but if you haven't: FUCKING READ IT. That goes for the rest of you too.
While our understanding of the Universe is expanding exponentially, it is by no means complete. As far as we can tell, the majority of the cosmos is composed of matter so arcane we call it "dark". True, given the same conditions we experience on Earth, it is reasonable to assume life could develop in a similar fashion. And even on a world unlike Earth, given the same governing physical principles, perhaps molten lead based proteins behave similarly to water based proteins for purposes of evolution. But perhaps not. Perhaps there is a principle of natural inclusion that would take precedence over natural selection in such a scenario. We can make assumptions that life develops the same way, but they are just that: assumptions. Reasonable assumptions, sure, but assumptions based on our current understanding of the Universe. Which is inherently and irrevocably based on our humanity.
Furthermore, any alien life we may encounter will have to be viewed by humans through a human lens. We could ask a sentient quartz crystal how he feels about his relevant hardness, but perhaps hardness isn't a concept Rocky has any concept of, as it literally means nothing to him. Also, I used the pronoun 'his' there. Gender is meaningless to Rocky. Even had I used 'it's', that doesn't guarantee that individuality is even conceptual. It's reasonable to me that such an existence would have a vastly different understanding of the Universe than you or I. Our minds may not have the capacity to relate.
This is what was interesting about the book Solaris.
One of the places my mind usually goes when reading things like LotR is what I expect to happen in like, 300 years after the main plot when the renaissance happens and people start exploring the magics in a rational fashion, and they find out the simple underlying principles governing all those things.
Well, yes, that's a scientific approach to take.
But I think it's good to realise, when considering fantasy magic, that there are lots of different traditions/conceptions of magic, and only really neo-platonistic magic is rationally explicable.
Neo-platonist magic is a magic system, basically. in fiction it is magic as science, such as D&D magic. It's also a kind of actual magic people believed in historically, but when analysing magic it is used more broadly. Rules, laws, equations, etc etc. Note that this has nothing to do with real science - geomancy/feng shui is a type of neoplatonistic magic.
Then there is transactional magic such as religious magic, shamanism and demonology, where magic is a favour granted by a supernatural entity, usually in return for sacrifice. Innate magic, where the practitioner has special natural abilities. Trancendental magic, where the inner spiritual or mental state of the practitioner gives them special abilities. And maybe more, though you can usually reduce others to combinations of these: Gandalf's magic is a mix of religious and innate, for example.
So, anyway, LOTR magic isn't really that kind of magic. No-one's going to be able to analyse the rules governing the Valar or the Maiar.
Magic systems like you've described are what I like in my fantasy. Having rules, even crazy ones like on Supernatural, makes it more consistent. They can be very creative & unique, as well.
While our understanding of the Universe is expanding exponentially, it is by no means complete. As far as we can tell, the majority of the cosmos is composed of matter so arcane we call it "dark".
Well, that's not really accurate: what we have observed is that there is more gravitational force than we can account for given the amount of matter we've seen/measured in the universe. One hypothetical explanation for this extra gravity is the existence of 'dark matter'.
But the best answer, at the moment, is to say that we don't yet know what is causing the extra gravity.
While our understanding of the Universe is expanding exponentially, it is by no means complete. As far as we can tell, the majority of the cosmos is composed of matter so arcane we call it "dark".
Well, that's not really accurate: what we have observed is that there is more gravitational force than we can account for given the amount of matter we've seen/measured in the universe. One hypothetical explanation for this extra gravity is the existence of 'dark matter'.
But the best answer, at the moment, is to say that we don't yet know what is causing the extra gravity.
Fair enough. Doesn't really change my point. But you knew that.
0
Options
lu tzeSweeping the monestary steps.Registered Userregular
Well, you do insert far more mysticism into that sentence than is strictly required (arcane, really?).
It's not dark in the metaphysical sense, it's dark because... we can't see it.
Posts
For humanoid races I don't make them too alien. Their biology is slightly based on specific animals so I incorporate that into their culture so they're not complete humans + a tail. Kinda like Thunderans from Thunder Cats. Though they become more alien when the species has a lesser role in the stories or are from a hostile race.
There are the bazillion anthropomorphic animal franchises (Mouse Guard, Rats of NIMH, etc.)
There's also Raptor Red, a book from the perspective of a dinosaur. Transformers comics without stupid human sidekicks.
I think we'd see a lot more if there wasn't a constant chorus demanding that a random human element be inserted into everything.
Agreed. Cartoons, comics and novels have greater freedom with non-human protagonists. TV and films usually can't since they need to appeal to the widest demographic possible & are limited by budget.
Comics may have gotten a bump with bookstores and digital access but the industry itself is shrinking. The direct market is on its last legs (has been for years), only the financial crisis delivered a blow that will speed up its destruction. For all their half-hearted attempts the Big Two are barely bringing many new readers into comics. They have bought back a few former customers with certain titles, though. Women & girls are still either ignored or only given the least to keep them on board professionally and in readership, so manga still maintains their monopoly over them.
Blending the supernatural with science fiction can work, but it needs to be done well. nBSG just confused everyone to much so no-one was happy. Other properties in the science fantasy genre which handled it better are Star Wars, Warhammer 40k & Thundercats.
That doesn't make any of those things Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction/whatever we want to call it. Regardless of what labels you use, it's obvious that these do not belong in the same genre as Asimov or Bradbury.
On a side note, the trend toward logical magic systems recently (caused perhaps by a generation of authors raised on DnD?) has resulted in quite a bit fantasy devoid of the supernatural.
Bradbury has Wizard Did It all over the goddamn place
That's the premise for, like, a third of the Martian Chronicles, probably
So... mentioning the fact that well-known content producers can go direct to market now, because of technology, and that we do get the occasional good movie these days (though most of the movies you listed are adaptations rather than original films) disproves my entire point? Again, my argument is not "hurr durr... man... ain't nothin' no good no mo'" I am arguing that financial forces exert pressure on the content industry and the content industry has responded with less risk-taking; less risk-taking means you guys don't get to see very much new stuff from new authors, which means "SCIENCE FICTION HAS LOST IT'S WAY" to you people.
I will slow it down for you.
Example: The Publishing Industry
1. The publishing industry took a big hit in 2008, just like everyone else.
2. They responded to this by deciding to primarily publish things like ghost written biographies of celebrities, anything that fits into a trend, and other safe bets. They just didn't want to take a risk on new authors. They still don't.
3. The publishing industry, to save money, has offloaded much of it's content filtering - sifting through the slush pile - to agents. Agents make their living from percentages of royalties paid to authors. Agents have no incentive to take a risk on something that, while excellent, may not sell as well as Kim Kardashian's new book about her ass.
Again, my point is that there could be someone out there writing awesome, deep, sci-fi out there and you will never hear of them because market forces are causing publishing companies to take less and less risk.
This is not rocket science. You are being deliberately obtuse for the reasons I listed in a previous post. You want to shout out "NOSTALGIA GOGGLES!" every time someone brings up the fact that maybe we're just not seeing as diverse a field of decent entertainment as we did even ten years ago. You just can't believe that; you have to believe that you love this stuff, man.
You're right that those properties don't fit into typical sci-fi genres, that's why they belong in a separate genre science fantasy. It's a genre where science fiction and fantasy are blended together.
What exactly do you mean by "fantasy devoid of the supernatural"?
"Original movie" and "good movie" have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Unless you're going to tell me that the classic movies I listed from the 40s are bad (Rebecca was a book first, The Maltese Falcon was a remake and a book first, His Girl Friday was a play first). The two trends of "movies these days are more often adaptations" and "movies these days are more often bad" are, even if true, symptoms of a different trend (like "risk-taking has decreased"). There's no causality.
This is actually my problem with your argument. I don't fault your logic; I fault you taking the conclusion of that logic in a broader direction than is warranted. I agree that the content industries have responded to financial pressures with less risk-taking, and I'd agree that in theory less risk-taking results in fewer good works. But that does not mean that there are "not very many" good works out there.
There could be, yes. But you haven't yet offered evidence that there are enough of these unpublished authors out there to account for an (real or perceived) drop in the quality of science fiction entertainment.
I've shouted "nostalgia goggles" zero times, you can go read my posts. If anything, I think your problem is that you're too focused on the state of the top of the best-seller charts to notice the vast breadth that has opened up in the past decade or two. Your argument is a little like saying "The number one most eaten food in America is the Big Mac, therefore cooking is DEAD" when we are also in one of the best times historically to be into food (wide varieties are available, cookbooks and cooking programming are ubiquitous, chefs are celebrities, etc).
Just out of curiosity, where did you get this? The big studios in the past produced 40+ movies a year, nearly one a week. Production among them today isn't even half as high.
Edit Unless you're referring to foreign films and stuff, but that would impose another barrier against most viewers.
I didn't really have a cite for that, it's just some "common knowledge" I picked up at some point in film school. I just tried Googling and it's complicated.
So it depends on what numbers you want to use and what you count as a movie. Today's big studios in Hollywood make about 600 movies a year; several articles I've found estimate the number of total films that make it film festivals at 50,000 (which I think is a global figure) (and naturally almost none of them find real distribution). Studio-released movies worldwide are around 6,000 or so (did you know Nigeria makes like 900 movies a year? crazy!).
Since I'm really, really bored (and curious!), I went through a bunch of IMDB data, searching for all Feature Films and Documentaries produced in the United States from 1897 to 2012, and then (since this is the crux of the argument) how many of those for each year were science-fiction.
The results: the last decade really has been on a big upswing, ranging from 1,923 movies in the year 2000 to 7,354 movies in 2011. In comparison, no year before 1996 had more than 1500 movies produced. The average in the '40s under the studio system was 544.6 movies produced per year.
The weird bit is that science-fiction has always been a very, very small percentage of films (at least determined by IMDB tags), ranging from almost 10% in 1958 and 1959 to an average of 4.5% between 1977 and 1997. And although overall film production is, as I said, way up since 1997, the ratio of sci-fi films to the total has dropped to an average of 2.4%. My guess is, independent productions make up the bulk of the increase in production, and science-fiction often requires budgets that independents can't match.
Whether this accounts for the perception that sci-fi has "lost its way" is questionable, however--for that you'd have to look at major releases.
All of these characters are pretty recognisably human in their cognition, cultures and attitudes. And bodies too - anthropomorphic robots and animals. They're all humans with a reskin. When we were talking about non-human characters earlier, I assumed we weren't talking about that kind of thing.
I hesitate to put words in his mouth, but I imagine he is referring to fantasy in which magic is so systematised and explained that is natural rather than supernatural. Contrast Elrond Halfeven's longevity, barely explained and bound to his own internal choices, with a post-D&D conveyor-belt fantasy elf who lives around 700 years, maturing at around 180, marrying around 200-300, and becoming 'old' at around 500. Or the difference between Gandalf's magic and Harry Dresden's.
And I'm still not sure why we should worry about genres particularly.
That's about as good as you're going to get, though. Turns out, as humans, we really don't give a shit about things that aren't human. No one is going to read a book that isn't at least about weird shit that thinks human and I doubt very much anyone would be able to write it.
Sure, that's what Bogart etc were saying before.
That's what I meant. Those movies made nearly one a week were all major releases. Major studio releases today are far fewer while "independents" are way up.
As far as for scifi in general (this part isn't directed toward you specifically, but the thread) we've got to not limit it to "spaceships and stuff." There's a reason that Frankenstein is considered the first scifi story and it's most definitely not about spaceships.
Disagree. I think we care greatly about things which aren't human - but we don't trust other humans to imagine how or why they think the way they do. Which I think is a perfectly reasonable position, since it's essentially no different to other human produced literature.
If we ever do discover intelligent aliens, I suspect there'll be enormous interest in reading their literature.
The re-skinned humans (rubber forehead aliens), when in a setting with actual humans, are often allegory for racism/classism/etc. Essentially human concepts.
I was thinking of Fahrenheit 451 mostly.
Yes.
In something like Mistborn, magic is bound be definite rules and logic, which makes it a natural rather than supernatural force. Even it's semi-anthropomorphic deities are rational forces.
Whereas in, say, LotR, magic is not only unexplained, it is inexplicable. Why can't The Witch King be killed by any man? Because he said so. It's more than just a boast, because it has the power of prophecy (whatever that means), but it's not exactly a logically defined power or ability, and can apparently be beaten by linguistic nit-picking. Good thing whatever language they speak in Middle Earth was gendered pronouns.
To be fair to Tolkien, he's drawing on a well of story and this is less egregious in its lawyering than the prophecies in MacBeth.
But don't blow the trumpet too loudly, because there are people actively trying to stop it happening. Powerful people are trying to funnel and shape this wonderful technology into something they can control.
What I'm saying is, don't take it for granted.
Any sufficiently advance magic seems like technology.
Aliens inhabit the same universe as we do. If, as our science assumes, the universe follows the same natural laws all throughout, then wherever sentient life arises after millions of years of evolution and natural selection, that alien life will develop along similar lines to us. Why? Because they will almost certainly possess a desire to understand their environment and themselves. More then likely, they'll need to eat, sleep, mate, find shelter, survive, and find answers for their existence. They'll look at the sky and dream much as we do.
The difference extends from their relationship with their environment and with each other, as well as their biology and the speed with which they advance technologically and their desire to advance and eventually reach the stars. They might live in symbiotic peace with their homeworld and have no desire to advance or leave. They might be telekinetic and share emotions and thoughts more directly between individuals. They might be in a much more brutal competition with themselves and their environment because their planet is sparse in resources and habitable land and has more hostile conditions. They might dwell underwater or in another kind of liquid or physical state. They might even be minerals who spend their entire time on a wall in some cave or underground, weaved into the heart of the planet and becoming one with it in an almost spiritual union.
Ultimately, they'll come up with vastly different cultures and beliefs and understandings of the universe and the many questions that we too face. But the key similarity, the thing that makes it possible to conceive of them, at least nominally, is the fact that we live in the same basic condition of ignorance. Any life capable of self awareness and thought would grow curious, to some degree at least, of why they exist and what the state of that existence is. So if we ever went out and met those minerals on the wall and found a way to communicate, they would probably ask us things like what it's like to walk and look at the stars as we do, and maybe what we think of them.
Aliens are very different then us, but not completely, and we can conceive of them. The only alien life that would perhaps be truly incomprehensible to us and other alien life from our universe would be life from other universes or dimensions, that grew up and exist in vastly different places with different physical laws, assuming that natural laws do not extend beyond our own universe.
Whereas in the old days publishers loved to publish shit that didn't make any money.
Well, yes, that's a scientific approach to take.
But I think it's good to realise, when considering fantasy magic, that there are lots of different traditions/conceptions of magic, and only really neo-platonistic magic is rationally explicable.
Neo-platonist magic is a magic system, basically. in fiction it is magic as science, such as D&D magic. It's also a kind of actual magic people believed in historically, but when analysing magic it is used more broadly. Rules, laws, equations, etc etc. Note that this has nothing to do with real science - geomancy/feng shui is a type of neoplatonistic magic.
Then there is transactional magic such as religious magic, shamanism and demonology, where magic is a favour granted by a supernatural entity, usually in return for sacrifice. Innate magic, where the practitioner has special natural abilities. Trancendental magic, where the inner spiritual or mental state of the practitioner gives them special abilities. And maybe more, though you can usually reduce others to combinations of these: Gandalf's magic is a mix of religious and innate, for example.
So, anyway, LOTR magic isn't really that kind of magic. No-one's going to be able to analyse the rules governing the Valar or the Maiar.
Excellent. One will get into a philosophical discussion about alien consciousness. I should say I find everything you wrote reasonable and agree with much of it. I'm going to try to argue the other side because 1) that's what I asked for, and 2) I find discussions like this fascinating and the crux of some of my favorite science fiction. On a side note: I assume you've read Neal Stephenson's Anathem, as much of what you've said and what I'll say takes up a good deal of space in that book, but if you haven't: FUCKING READ IT. That goes for the rest of you too.
While our understanding of the Universe is expanding exponentially, it is by no means complete. As far as we can tell, the majority of the cosmos is composed of matter so arcane we call it "dark". True, given the same conditions we experience on Earth, it is reasonable to assume life could develop in a similar fashion. And even on a world unlike Earth, given the same governing physical principles, perhaps molten lead based proteins behave similarly to water based proteins for purposes of evolution. But perhaps not. Perhaps there is a principle of natural inclusion that would take precedence over natural selection in such a scenario. We can make assumptions that life develops the same way, but they are just that: assumptions. Reasonable assumptions, sure, but assumptions based on our current understanding of the Universe. Which is inherently and irrevocably based on our humanity.
Furthermore, any alien life we may encounter will have to be viewed by humans through a human lens. We could ask a sentient quartz crystal how he feels about his relevant hardness, but perhaps hardness isn't a concept Rocky has any concept of, as it literally means nothing to him. Also, I used the pronoun 'his' there. Gender is meaningless to Rocky. Even had I used 'it's', that doesn't guarantee that individuality is even conceptual. It's reasonable to me that such an existence would have a vastly different understanding of the Universe than you or I. Our minds may not have the capacity to relate.
Not necessarily. I think the logical extension of that argument is that in the old days it was cheaper to publish and market, and thus content creators were more amenable to risk, whereas now your average publisher is looking for blockbusters and nothing else.
I think we're both arguing based on separate issues which are often conflated.
I don't mean to say that current fictional works - adaptations or otherwise - are not "good." What I am trying to say is that the content industry is less inclined to produce things which have depth, attention to detail, nuance, etc. because those are often attributes ignored by the majority of consumers. I also don't mean to say that things which lack these attributes are not "good." A piece of entertainment can completely lack nuance, depth, and detail and still be "good" if it is "fun."
I just think economic factors are pressuring the content industry into taking less risk. Less risk inevitably means less stuff that can be mentioned in threads like these. After all, they Bladerunner would have never been made if they would've known how little money it would make in theaters. However, it's considered a classic now. So, I'm saying that short-term profit shouldn't be such a large deciding factor in the content industry, and because it is such a huge factor, and because they have even better means of market testing and risk assessment now, you're going to see less deep, meaty, detailed, and nuanced fiction.
I will admit that much of what I've been posting about pertains more to the publishing industry and he game industry than the movie industry which has been churning out more decent stuff than the others.
This is what was interesting about the book Solaris.
Magic systems like you've described are what I like in my fantasy. Having rules, even crazy ones like on Supernatural, makes it more consistent. They can be very creative & unique, as well.
Well, that's not really accurate: what we have observed is that there is more gravitational force than we can account for given the amount of matter we've seen/measured in the universe. One hypothetical explanation for this extra gravity is the existence of 'dark matter'.
But the best answer, at the moment, is to say that we don't yet know what is causing the extra gravity.
Fair enough. Doesn't really change my point. But you knew that.
It's not dark in the metaphysical sense, it's dark because... we can't see it.