On sci-fi and grittiness

[eye_of_a_cat]

(Note - for the purposes of this, I'll be sticking to science fiction in film and TV, rather than books. That's a slightly different conversation.)

I love the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, up to and including the finale. It has its flaws - lagging sense of direction from time to time, weirdly forgetful writing, and a bit too much focus on the furrowed and angst-filled brow of Lee Adama, to name a few - but it's really, really good. And most of that goodness, without a doubt, comes from how beautifully dark and gritty and postapocalyptic it is. Main characters die, horribly and often. Humanity is nearly extinct. The ship that holds the last remnants of the population together is falling apart. This is the future, red in tooth and claw.

Most of the critics, obviously and justifiably, welcomed BSG with open arms. It's science fiction, but it's serious! It's dark! It makes disturbing points about contemporary American foreign policy! (Of course, some critics took all this to mean that it's not 'really' science fiction at all, merely a drama series set in space and therefore it's okay to like it, non-geeks!, but seriously - it's about killer robots who live in space, so give up.) I don't disagree with any of this as well-deserved praise, but I do take objection to the argument which quite often follows: that what's so good about BSG isn't that it does gritty realism very well, but that it does gritty realism at all, and that sci-fi which goes down this route is inherently better than sci-fi which doesn't.

To put it another way, I don't think BSG is superior to Firefly or Wall-E by virtue of being bleaker.

And yet there's a growing tendency, among sci-fi dabblers who don't want to be associated with all that silly stuff and among sci-fi fans who don't want people thinking their hobby is childish, to start thinking along just those lines. Good sci-fi is dark. Good sci-fi isn't suitable for children. Good sci-fi uses futuristic settings as allegories for contemporary issues. Good sci-fi certainly doesn't feature any cute robots, or aliens in ridiculous make-up, prosthetics, and costumes.

Make no mistake, I'm not disputing that Ron Moore did a great job of rebooting BSG. At the same time, I'm really glad that Russell T. Davies didn't go down that route with a dark, gritty, unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who, because that would have sucked. I'm glad J. Michael Straczynski was unapologetic about including weird-looking aliens as main characters. I'm glad Pixar created a cute, huggable robot. I'm glad George Lucas didn't design Star Wars as a thinly-disguised commentary on American politics of the 1970s, and I'm really, really glad he had absolutely no problem at all with escapism, because sci-fi would be a poorer place without someone to decide it needed Wookies, alien jazz bands, and Boba Fett.

Sci-fi is a big, broad genre. It's always had room for all of this, and it would be a shame if we ended up shrinking it out of a desire to make it 'better'.

Comments

[marymac.livejournal.com]

My mother falls into that trap frequently. I think my genre-jumbled bookcases hurt her soul, and I haven't even broken it to her about Amitav Gosh yet.

Farscape So many colours. Okay, not Chiana, but everyone else, colours. I watched the first series in a haze of 'ooo shiny.'

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

And the ship is beautiful too! (And thankfully eventually stopped being frightened at everything, they must have had trouble thinking "what other responses can a living ship have to this situation?") I am trying to persuade ghost_of_a_flea to watch it with me, but he has an unreasonable prejudice against muppets/TV series he saw bits of as a teenager or something, and is holding out.

While I'm bitching about grey sci-fi, the other trend that annoys me is dark Macbeths. Yes, we know that it's a dark play, that there's a lot of darkness in the language. Now could you give us something interesting to look at, please, or at the very least, something we can actually see in the murk.

[marymac.livejournal.com]

I love it when Pilot and Moya start biting back. They are awesome. Just auch a gorgeously designed show. I can't get my young man to watch it though, he can't get past the Muppets. I suppose if its the least of his faults...

Ooooh, yes. Trevor Nunn, I am looking at you. We watched the McKellan & Dench production for GCSE and Duncan should not be memorable for being the only visible object in the scene, really! It can't be that hard to find someone in the RSC who knows how to operate lights.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Do you know, I acquired the DVD of that production years ago, and still haven't watched it because I remember having seen the odd scene and it was ALL SO DAMN DARK. And that's despite having McKellan and Dench in the leads.

I spent the first episode or two going, MUPPETS? Not to mention the strange waily noise at the end of the credits music. Then I fell for the show, despite its having such strange attributes as a bloke with a thong on his face. It was very odd seeing Browder and Black in Stargate without the sexual chemistry between them!

[marymac.livejournal.com]

It was allegedly not that bad seen live, so I give a certain amount of leeway for the difficulties of restaging for film, but whoever decided to shoot it in black and white without any concept of lighting for monochrome deserves to be shot.
If you treat it as a radio play you at least get the benefit of the awesome cast, though. Except Duncan. Duncan remains pretty awful.

I was warned for Muppets, but the musc threw me a loop too. And it does make Stargate very odd! Especially the promo shots. I'm programed to expect them draped round each other now.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

It's more that I'm programmed to expect SIZZLING HOT SEXUAL TENSION if they're in the same room as each other, and it just wasn't there. I suppose that's why it's called acting, but it was still odd!