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

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

released an OFFICIAL Beretta CX4 flash hider identical to the one on the show. Oh Noes Time Paradox!

Ha! (Speaking of which, one of the few things that did annoy me about BSG was how they introduced the really cool idea about having to use much older technology because the Cylons could interfere with all the new shiny stuff, and then... forgot about it after thirty minutes into the pilot episode of the miniseries. Sigh.)

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Ach, I think I stopped expecting consistency from BSG not too far in, although it's a pity as it did raise your hopes fairly high. It's like people who complain about Supernatural mispronouncing Samhain. That boat sailed when they said, "Say God's name in Latin! That's 'Christo', remember!" four episodes into Season 1. After that I settled comfortably into not expecting them to get anything at all right, and therefore could not be disappointed. (Yes, I have succumbed. And it's not so much the mutilated women which are getting to me, although that could be because I'm still on Season 1. It's that practically every episode ends with a beautiful, usually blonde, young women thanking the boys profusely.)