When your definition of Science Fiction doesn't include Star Trek or Star Wars, it's probably a stupid one.
It's largely irrelevant anyway. Real science is a harsh unforgiving bitch who has continually, consistently and ruthlessly stomped on the dreams of every sci-fi writer who ever lived.
Most just gave up and accepted it was never gonna happen.
Star Wars is a verbatim rendition of the monomyth that takes place "a long time ago." What does that sound like to you?
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.
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.
Yeah, this basically.
although there's been some awesome tv shows lately. Just not any good sci fi shows.
If you start looking at what SF is, you start getting into the problem of whether SF is a genre or not.
I don't think it is - there are too many SF works that have all the marks of other genres.
All genres have marks of other genres. A genre is always going to be a mostly arbitrary way of dividing works.
There aren't too many genres that regularly feature space ships, time travel, alien life and plenty of AIs. Its enough to warrant a distinction, blurry though it may be.
For quality sci-fi I read books. TV and movies are usually a bit let down, especially given massive budgets and huge potential.
The line between science fiction and fantasy is a blurry one, but you can generally count on science fiction involving a setting or plot element(s) that are not yet possible, where fantasy involves a setting or plot element(s) that will never be possible, and regular old fiction involves a setting or plot element(s) that are (or once were) possible.
The difference between "Death Star" and "dragon" is that, at face value, we might someday be able to construct a Death Star, but dragons do not and will never exist. You can change sci-fi into fantasy or fantasy into sci-fi with explanations ("How could you build a battle-station this large?" "Wizards" or "Where did these dragons come from?" "Centuries of genetic engineering"), and you can also use scientific detail to make sci-fi "harder" (/more plausible) ("This Death Star is constructed according to the principles of Newtonian physics based on an alloy of..."). But those explanations are not required for the work to fall into the sci-fi genre so long as the setting or plot element(s) are at face value things which might one day be possible.
At this point, though, it's looking far more likely that we'll manage to construct a working dragon than a working Death Star. Waving your hands really, really hard doesn't make fantasy into science, and pretty much anything involving faster than light travel falls solidly into fantasy.
If you start looking at what SF is, you start getting into the problem of whether SF is a genre or not.
I don't think it is - there are too many SF works that have all the marks of other genres.
All genres have marks of other genres. A genre is always going to be a mostly arbitrary way of dividing works.
There aren't too many genres that regularly feature space ships, time travel, alien life and plenty of AIs. Its enough to warrant a distinction, blurry though it may be.
For quality sci-fi I read books. TV and movies are usually a bit let down, especially given massive budgets and huge potential.
All those things you mentioned are just trappings though. Setting.
There are a decent number of optimistic/weird settings being explored by scifi writers who have been influenced by transhumanist issues, but as I understand it they're a relatively unknown bunch. Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, Karl Schroeder et al.
Iain M. Banks is probably the biggest of the bunch, with his Culture novels, but the ones I've read have seemed overrated so far. (They do tend to still blow people's minds, though, so I'm not going to judge him too harshly over them. It might just be because I'd read Accelerando and A Fire Upon The Deep before encountering any Banks novels, so my expectations were set ultra-high.)
This discussion makes me wonder how viable a non-human centric science fiction story would be; with minimal to no actual human involvement and a focus on aliens and the universe in general instead. Less imagining human futures or a human centric worldview of the universe and more of an examination of human nature in aliens and how similar and different it might be in them, and how they view things and progress. Would that be too out there and disjointed from human experience to work?
Maybe we are just bored of hearing the same old stuff, utopian or dystopian, with or without anthropomorphized alien species that want to kill us/examine us/be our bestest buds and tell us how special we are. Perhaps the closer our reality meets the standards of science fiction, the less of an impact the genre has on us, and we end up looking at it as quaint and antiquated.
It could easily work. And has been done before several times. (The Pride of Chanur just off the top of my head)
The issues are it's either difficult to relate to or it's just humans with fur or some such.
And on top of that, even if you make it relatable, just the fact that the characters look alien will turn many people off, although that's exclusively a marketing/finding-an-audience thing.
CJ Cherryh as written literally every variation of Dances with Wolves IN SPACE imaginable.
It is broadly true that modern science fiction is more cynical than it was in the days of Asimov. That's not really the same thing as dystopian though. The Commonwealth from The Dreaming Void is as much a utopia as Star Trek, perhaps even more so, with humans who are practically immortal, enjoy a pretty high standard of living, and have social equality no worse than the present, and probably better. But that hasn't ended conflict or made everyone into paragons of virtue.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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?
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?
0
Options
Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
The line between science fiction and fantasy is a blurry one, but you can generally count on science fiction involving a setting or plot element(s) that are not yet possible, where fantasy involves a setting or plot element(s) that will never be possible, and regular old fiction involves a setting or plot element(s) that are (or once were) possible.
The difference between "Death Star" and "dragon" is that, at face value, we might someday be able to construct a Death Star, but dragons do not and will never exist. You can change sci-fi into fantasy or fantasy into sci-fi with explanations ("How could you build a battle-station this large?" "Wizards" or "Where did these dragons come from?" "Centuries of genetic engineering"), and you can also use scientific detail to make sci-fi "harder" (/more plausible) ("This Death Star is constructed according to the principles of Newtonian physics based on an alloy of..."). But those explanations are not required for the work to fall into the sci-fi genre so long as the setting or plot element(s) are at face value things which might one day be possible.
And then there are authors like Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, and China Mieville (to a lesser extent) that trample all over the line until it doesn't exist with worlds that are medieval in nature, with lots of magical creatures and things that, oh whoops; turns out those were genetically engineered and scientifically crafted in a forgotten age, also some people still got spaceships, also some people are doing magic but that's also some sort of poorly understood science.
SF doesn't have to be all gritty and edgy and dark, but it needs to be recognisably human.
Why does it need to be? Perhaps this is where the avant garde in science fiction lies, the inhuman.
As Brian Aldiss said after writing the Helliconia books: "who wants a passport to a world of talking slugs?". If SF has nothing to do with being human what can it have to say to anyone reading it?
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.
If you start looking at what SF is, you start getting into the problem of whether SF is a genre or not.
I don't think it is - there are too many SF works that have all the marks of other genres.
All genres have marks of other genres. A genre is always going to be a mostly arbitrary way of dividing works.
There aren't too many genres that regularly feature space ships, time travel, alien life and plenty of AIs. Its enough to warrant a distinction, blurry though it may be.
For quality sci-fi I read books. TV and movies are usually a bit let down, especially given massive budgets and huge potential.
All those things you mentioned are just trappings though. Setting.
They don't actually change the type of story.
So, is sci-fi less worth of its own genre than say fantasy, or romance, or mystery? Using these arguments I think you could boil it all right down to just "fiction".
If you start looking at what SF is, you start getting into the problem of whether SF is a genre or not.
I don't think it is - there are too many SF works that have all the marks of other genres.
All genres have marks of other genres. A genre is always going to be a mostly arbitrary way of dividing works.
There aren't too many genres that regularly feature space ships, time travel, alien life and plenty of AIs. Its enough to warrant a distinction, blurry though it may be.
For quality sci-fi I read books. TV and movies are usually a bit let down, especially given massive budgets and huge potential.
All those things you mentioned are just trappings though. Setting.
They don't actually change the type of story.
So, is sci-fi less worth of its own genre than say fantasy, or romance, or mystery? Using these arguments I think you could boil it all right down to just "fiction".
I think romance and mystery are much closer to genres than fantasy and SF are.
I figure I could take a bear.
0
Options
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
i struggle to care about the definition of the genres
90% of the time you can be like
oh its got space ships and technology and shit, thats what sci fi implies to me so im cool with that categorisation
the edge cases are mostly marginal, and even if you find an edge case you can be like... oh is star wars sci fi or fantasy?
well its because you already know a lot about star wars that you ask this categorisation question... so its not helping you understand anything about star wars... so leave it... dotdotdot...umlaut
There are a decent number of optimistic/weird settings being explored by scifi writers who have been influenced by transhumanist issues, but as I understand it they're a relatively unknown bunch. Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, Karl Schroeder et al.
Iain M. Banks is probably the biggest of the bunch, with his Culture novels, but the ones I've read have seemed overrated so far. (They do tend to still blow people's minds, though, so I'm not going to judge him too harshly over them. It might just be because I'd read Accelerando and A Fire Upon The Deep before encountering any Banks novels, so my expectations were set ultra-high.)
Though they have flaws, Niven's Ring World stuff kinda fits with this as well.
Ursula K. le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is kinda in the same vein.
i struggle to care about the definition of the genres
90% of the time you can be like
oh its got space ships and technology and shit, thats what sci fi implies to me so im cool with that categorisation
the edge cases are mostly marginal, and even if you find an edge case you can be like... oh is star wars sci fi or fantasy?
well its because you already know a lot about star wars that you ask this categorisation question... so its not helping you understand anything about star wars... so leave it... dotdotdot...umlaut
Genres are like cladistics: they are very useful and function 90% of the time at the least, but every once in a while you get a ring species or a mammal that flies and people start insisting that it invalidates the whole concept.
0
Options
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
at what exact point does plesippus become the horse?
no i mean what exact point
at one point they were plesippus and now theyre horse, either youre a horse or youre not oh em gee
oh i see you cant identify an exact point where it became a horse
The line between science fiction and fantasy is a blurry one, but you can generally count on science fiction involving a setting or plot element(s) that are not yet possible, where fantasy involves a setting or plot element(s) that will never be possible, and regular old fiction involves a setting or plot element(s) that are (or once were) possible.
The difference between "Death Star" and "dragon" is that, at face value, we might someday be able to construct a Death Star, but dragons do not and will never exist. You can change sci-fi into fantasy or fantasy into sci-fi with explanations ("How could you build a battle-station this large?" "Wizards" or "Where did these dragons come from?" "Centuries of genetic engineering"), and you can also use scientific detail to make sci-fi "harder" (/more plausible) ("This Death Star is constructed according to the principles of Newtonian physics based on an alloy of..."). But those explanations are not required for the work to fall into the sci-fi genre so long as the setting or plot element(s) are at face value things which might one day be possible.
Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series poses a plausible way to gain dragons.
0
Options
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Dragons aren't that hard.
Flying lizards with a gas problem and some way to cause a spark. Problem solved.
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.
I'm arguing that when cost, risk, and profit are the driving forces behind publication and production, then you are just not going to see decent works being produced or published.
I think there is a lot of great stuff that we're not even seeing in the market because the decision makers at those entities which publish and produce books, games, movies, etc. don't see the ROI in producing anything with depth. If you work for a publishing house, a game publisher, or a movie studio, you want people to like Twilight. you want people to like Bayformers, you want people to buy a copy of CoD every year. You want people to only believe that all they can ever have is a burger and fries, so that you never have to worry about them asking for a steak.
I see this discussion crop up time and time again on these forums and some of you just don't want to get it. It's like you can't believe that economics, marketing, demographics, and all that have an effect on your hobbies and interest. You absolutely do not want to believe that people who have no interest in your passions have complete and total control over them. You also do not want to understand the stock market, shareholders, IPOs, and any other attributes of the modern corporate environment which play a massive role in what you get to read, see, hear, and play. You just don't want to believe it.
There used to be a lot of publishing houses, movie studios, networks, game studios. They weren't all owned by the same four companies. There was a time when everything wasn't a subsidiary of something else. They've all been gobbled up by bigger entities; that is not a favorable climate for creative persons. It's all about ROI. It's all about quarterly returns. It's all about shareholders.
"The extent to which marketing, shareholders, and executives [control] which pieces of entertainment get to market" has been unprecedented in every era. Presumably the attendant men-of-letters of the 16th century tut-tutted about how terrible it was that Michelangelo had to be commissioned to paint the last judgment.
when cost, risk, and profit are the driving forces behind publication and production, then you are just not going to see decent works being produced or published
are you really prepared to argue that no decent art has come out of a major studio or publisher in the last (say) 20 years? This strikes me as an incredibly stupid contention (even if we restrict the conversation to sci-fi media)
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
0
Options
lu tzeSweeping the monestary steps.Registered Userregular
"The extent to which marketing, shareholders, and executives [control] which pieces of entertainment get to market" has been unprecedented in every era. Presumably the attendant men-of-letters of the 16th century tut-tutted about how terrible it was that Michelangelo had to be commissioned to paint the last judgment.
In the 16th century "attendant men of letters" were being burned at the stake for translating books into English.
So, no. Probably not.
lu tze on
World's best janitor
0
Options
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
edited April 2012
Art has never been totally concerned with making money; it's basic human expression independent of any conception of success. If I get paid for a painting I make or a book I write and it becomes successful, that's great, and maybe I do that for a living, but the main reason I made it was for myself, to express myself and share what I see the world to be with others. It becomes genuine in a way I hope appeals to others. Real artists and authors write from the heart and from experience, and plenty of them do that for a living without compromising their inherent desire to express themselves.
And there are countless examples of mainstream media that is still worthy of intelligent consumption, just as there has always been throughout history. Mass Effect comes to mind as an example that recently sparked a huge debate among gamers about the nature of how much control an author has over the narrative arc of an interactive story, or any story for that matter. Intelligent people who loved the games from start to finish, and were genuinely invested in the story, to the point of protest and (mostly) intelligent discourse over the ending. And shareholders, though perhaps worried about the controversy, still made money back on their investment.
Of course there is plenty of stupid shit for stupid people on TV and the Internet. Of course that kind of media is easier to make and can even pull a CoD and make $Texas$ from people that are interested in candy or a quick fix of entertainment. And even smart people play CoD sometimes. And that kind of art and expression, though shallow, is still as valid in a free society as anything a DaVinci can cook up. Because it's still someone creating something for someone else, even if the focus is more on money.
I don't have to watch something or play something if I don't want to and I'm not going to get worked up if others like something I perceive as stupid or shallow, even if I disagree with it and occasionally point out reasons they shouldn't and provide alternatives. For us to get anything good, we must accept human nature as flawed and some people as genuinely concerned more with money then art and create for ourselves and others anyway. Otherwise, we can't really create anything (because why bother, I'm not making $Texas$) or make the argument that others creations are hogging all the good spots on TV and it makes us sad pandas.
I'm not saying, as well, that Capitalism is without it's flaws in relation to media and art, or that shareholders interests are infallible in that regard, only that blaming them for all the lost greatness we don't get to see in our entertainment anymore is patently silly. Frankly, it should be obvious. That's why we have stuff like Kickstarter.
Corehealer on
0
Options
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
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.
Oh brilliant
0
Options
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
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.
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.
I'm arguing that when cost, risk, and profit are the driving forces behind publication and production, then you are just not going to see decent works being produced or published.
I think there is a lot of great stuff that we're not even seeing in the market because the decision makers at those entities which publish and produce books, games, movies, etc. don't see the ROI in producing anything with depth. If you work for a publishing house, a game publisher, or a movie studio, you want people to like Twilight. you want people to like Bayformers, you want people to buy a copy of CoD every year. You want people to only believe that all they can ever have is a burger and fries, so that you never have to worry about them asking for a steak.
I see this discussion crop up time and time again on these forums and some of you just don't want to get it. It's like you can't believe that economics, marketing, demographics, and all that have an effect on your hobbies and interest. You absolutely do not want to believe that people who have no interest in your passions have complete and total control over them. You also do not want to understand the stock market, shareholders, IPOs, and any other attributes of the modern corporate environment which play a massive role in what you get to read, see, hear, and play. You just don't want to believe it.
There used to be a lot of publishing houses, movie studios, networks, game studios. They weren't all owned by the same four companies. There was a time when everything wasn't a subsidiary of something else. They've all been gobbled up by bigger entities; that is not a favorable climate for creative persons. It's all about ROI. It's all about quarterly returns. It's all about shareholders.
Burgers and fries take skill to make, while steak is simply expensive, so I'd say that the reverse would be a better analogy.
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?
entertainment has always been hand in hand with money. I'm not sure what golden age you're talking about when entertainers lost money to make artistically daring things, or when people consumed literate and smart culture. Never happened.
We're currently in an age when the best, most daring, well made, and interesting television is being created. By far. If you think all the movies made in the past decade are michael bay films then you're part of the problem.
0
Options
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I don't understand what so hard to grasp about the fact that people can both try to make something great and make money while doing it.
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.
Has anyone mentioned yet that when looking back at sci-fi of the past, we have the benefit of decades of selection to find the "best" works available? And that of recent works we're more likely to be limited by the relative effort that has gone to promote works, rather than their availability?
Like a lot of people, I didn't know that Firefly existed until years after it was cancelled. That can be blamed, mostly fairly, on the Fox network's lack of interest in making that series succeed, but at the same time there's room for criticism of my own breadth of attention at the time. I wasn't exactly paying attention to television sci-fi at the time or since. But it was inevitable that I would eventually cotton to the existence of an excellent space cowboy show. Of course Firefly is no counter-example to those with thematic concerns since it's very soft SF in a somewhat dystopian future (more mythic than speculative) but as an example of the way the passage of time can warp our perception of the availability of quality work it seems relevant.
This discussion makes me wonder how viable a non-human centric science fiction story would be; with minimal to no actual human involvement and a focus on aliens and the universe in general instead. Less imagining human futures or a human centric worldview of the universe and more of an examination of human nature in aliens and how similar and different it might be in them, and how they view things and progress. Would that be too out there and disjointed from human experience to work?
Maybe we are just bored of hearing the same old stuff, utopian or dystopian, with or without anthropomorphized alien species that want to kill us/examine us/be our bestest buds and tell us how special we are. Perhaps the closer our reality meets the standards of science fiction, the less of an impact the genre has on us, and we end up looking at it as quaint and antiquated.
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.
0
Options
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
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.
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.
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.
I think there's two ways of defining Sci-fi. As a setting, it basically means anything in space or with something described as "advanced technology". Star wars is a classic pulp-fantasy adventure story with a science fiction setting. As a genre, though, sci fi is a lot more specific.
Posts
A fun story.
Yeah, this basically.
although there's been some awesome tv shows lately. Just not any good sci fi shows.
I don't think it is - there are too many SF works that have all the marks of other genres.
And I think you're just massively cherry-picking which parts of my post you want to read.
And then making broad statements that add absolutely nothing.
All genres have marks of other genres. A genre is always going to be a mostly arbitrary way of dividing works.
There aren't too many genres that regularly feature space ships, time travel, alien life and plenty of AIs. Its enough to warrant a distinction, blurry though it may be.
For quality sci-fi I read books. TV and movies are usually a bit let down, especially given massive budgets and huge potential.
At this point, though, it's looking far more likely that we'll manage to construct a working dragon than a working Death Star. Waving your hands really, really hard doesn't make fantasy into science, and pretty much anything involving faster than light travel falls solidly into fantasy.
All those things you mentioned are just trappings though. Setting.
They don't actually change the type of story.
Iain M. Banks is probably the biggest of the bunch, with his Culture novels, but the ones I've read have seemed overrated so far. (They do tend to still blow people's minds, though, so I'm not going to judge him too harshly over them. It might just be because I'd read Accelerando and A Fire Upon The Deep before encountering any Banks novels, so my expectations were set ultra-high.)
CJ Cherryh as written literally every variation of Dances with Wolves IN SPACE imaginable.
It is broadly true that modern science fiction is more cynical than it was in the days of Asimov. That's not really the same thing as dystopian though. The Commonwealth from The Dreaming Void is as much a utopia as Star Trek, perhaps even more so, with humans who are practically immortal, enjoy a pretty high standard of living, and have social equality no worse than the present, and probably better. But that hasn't ended conflict or made everyone into paragons of virtue.
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?
And then there are authors like Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, and China Mieville (to a lesser extent) that trample all over the line until it doesn't exist with worlds that are medieval in nature, with lots of magical creatures and things that, oh whoops; turns out those were genetically engineered and scientifically crafted in a forgotten age, also some people still got spaceships, also some people are doing magic but that's also some sort of poorly understood science.
As Brian Aldiss said after writing the Helliconia books: "who wants a passport to a world of talking slugs?". If SF has nothing to do with being human what can it have to say to anyone reading it?
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
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.
So, is sci-fi less worth of its own genre than say fantasy, or romance, or mystery? Using these arguments I think you could boil it all right down to just "fiction".
I think romance and mystery are much closer to genres than fantasy and SF are.
90% of the time you can be like
oh its got space ships and technology and shit, thats what sci fi implies to me so im cool with that categorisation
the edge cases are mostly marginal, and even if you find an edge case you can be like... oh is star wars sci fi or fantasy?
well its because you already know a lot about star wars that you ask this categorisation question... so its not helping you understand anything about star wars... so leave it... dotdotdot...umlaut
Though they have flaws, Niven's Ring World stuff kinda fits with this as well.
Ursula K. le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is kinda in the same vein.
Genres are like cladistics: they are very useful and function 90% of the time at the least, but every once in a while you get a ring species or a mammal that flies and people start insisting that it invalidates the whole concept.
no i mean what exact point
at one point they were plesippus and now theyre horse, either youre a horse or youre not oh em gee
oh i see you cant identify an exact point where it became a horse
GUESS YOUR CATEGORIES ARE USELESS BRO
Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series disagrees
Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series poses a plausible way to gain dragons.
Flying lizards with a gas problem and some way to cause a spark. Problem solved.
You mean genetically engineer them from smaller telepathic dragons that can already fly, breath fire and teleport?
That's hugely plausible.
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.
I'm arguing that when cost, risk, and profit are the driving forces behind publication and production, then you are just not going to see decent works being produced or published.
I think there is a lot of great stuff that we're not even seeing in the market because the decision makers at those entities which publish and produce books, games, movies, etc. don't see the ROI in producing anything with depth. If you work for a publishing house, a game publisher, or a movie studio, you want people to like Twilight. you want people to like Bayformers, you want people to buy a copy of CoD every year. You want people to only believe that all they can ever have is a burger and fries, so that you never have to worry about them asking for a steak.
I see this discussion crop up time and time again on these forums and some of you just don't want to get it. It's like you can't believe that economics, marketing, demographics, and all that have an effect on your hobbies and interest. You absolutely do not want to believe that people who have no interest in your passions have complete and total control over them. You also do not want to understand the stock market, shareholders, IPOs, and any other attributes of the modern corporate environment which play a massive role in what you get to read, see, hear, and play. You just don't want to believe it.
There used to be a lot of publishing houses, movie studios, networks, game studios. They weren't all owned by the same four companies. There was a time when everything wasn't a subsidiary of something else. They've all been gobbled up by bigger entities; that is not a favorable climate for creative persons. It's all about ROI. It's all about quarterly returns. It's all about shareholders.
are you really prepared to argue that no decent art has come out of a major studio or publisher in the last (say) 20 years? This strikes me as an incredibly stupid contention (even if we restrict the conversation to sci-fi media)
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
So, no. Probably not.
And there are countless examples of mainstream media that is still worthy of intelligent consumption, just as there has always been throughout history. Mass Effect comes to mind as an example that recently sparked a huge debate among gamers about the nature of how much control an author has over the narrative arc of an interactive story, or any story for that matter. Intelligent people who loved the games from start to finish, and were genuinely invested in the story, to the point of protest and (mostly) intelligent discourse over the ending. And shareholders, though perhaps worried about the controversy, still made money back on their investment.
Of course there is plenty of stupid shit for stupid people on TV and the Internet. Of course that kind of media is easier to make and can even pull a CoD and make $Texas$ from people that are interested in candy or a quick fix of entertainment. And even smart people play CoD sometimes. And that kind of art and expression, though shallow, is still as valid in a free society as anything a DaVinci can cook up. Because it's still someone creating something for someone else, even if the focus is more on money.
I don't have to watch something or play something if I don't want to and I'm not going to get worked up if others like something I perceive as stupid or shallow, even if I disagree with it and occasionally point out reasons they shouldn't and provide alternatives. For us to get anything good, we must accept human nature as flawed and some people as genuinely concerned more with money then art and create for ourselves and others anyway. Otherwise, we can't really create anything (because why bother, I'm not making $Texas$) or make the argument that others creations are hogging all the good spots on TV and it makes us sad pandas.
I'm not saying, as well, that Capitalism is without it's flaws in relation to media and art, or that shareholders interests are infallible in that regard, only that blaming them for all the lost greatness we don't get to see in our entertainment anymore is patently silly. Frankly, it should be obvious. That's why we have stuff like Kickstarter.
The fact that this is a question says there's something really wrong with how we're defining things.
Burgers and fries take skill to make, while steak is simply expensive, so I'd say that the reverse would be a better analogy.
entertainment has always been hand in hand with money. I'm not sure what golden age you're talking about when entertainers lost money to make artistically daring things, or when people consumed literate and smart culture. Never happened.
We're currently in an age when the best, most daring, well made, and interesting television is being created. By far. If you think all the movies made in the past decade are michael bay films then you're part of the problem.
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?)
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.
Like a lot of people, I didn't know that Firefly existed until years after it was cancelled. That can be blamed, mostly fairly, on the Fox network's lack of interest in making that series succeed, but at the same time there's room for criticism of my own breadth of attention at the time. I wasn't exactly paying attention to television sci-fi at the time or since. But it was inevitable that I would eventually cotton to the existence of an excellent space cowboy show. Of course Firefly is no counter-example to those with thematic concerns since it's very soft SF in a somewhat dystopian future (more mythic than speculative) but as an example of the way the passage of time can warp our perception of the availability of quality work it seems relevant.
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.
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.
I think there's two ways of defining Sci-fi. As a setting, it basically means anything in space or with something described as "advanced technology". Star wars is a classic pulp-fantasy adventure story with a science fiction setting. As a genre, though, sci fi is a lot more specific.