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

[kittiethedragon.livejournal.com]

I like stacking Frankenstein with my Sci-fi, not classics. Just to confound people. None of my "classics" are stacked as such. i put them into their respective genres and called it good. And friends are constantly surprised when they scan my stacks XD

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I have all my fiction sorted into period, then alphabetically, so Frankenstein is in the 19th c section. There are a few alarming titles in the early modern section, though I can't remember them off the top of my head. Le Guin was at head height until the latest re-arranging, and one of them is bright yellow, so I think it was that they were spotting.

When people notice my edition of Gone with the Wind, one of those books so thick that they got an entire (and lurid) film poster on the spine, I cheerfully shock them by telling them all about the mad lesbian subtext.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Mine's sorted by size (to best fit the bookshelves) and... that's it, pretty much. Work-related stuff tends to be on one side of the fishtank and science fiction is the other, but only in a vague sense. It doesn't help that my mental picture of which book is where fits the layout about three flats ago, either!