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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
im in between two halfs of a futbol game so just quickly to say i don't think science fiction is any longer some sort of pariah of the narrative arts and hasn't been for a very long time
are there some probably older people who just don't get it? sure. but for the rest of us i think science fiction is often the best way to understand the heavily technological world in which we live, to the point that "science" fiction and just fiction are becoming indistinguishable
don't know about other arts but this desegregation already happened in academia, a long time ago, at least since the publication of "technoculture" back some time in the 90s when the professors publicly and massively acknowledged the importance of the formerly pulpy genre, but since way before then there were people like darko suvin taking a serious look at science fiction
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eta (because now you got me going) things like nuclear war have always been almost exclusively dealt through science fiction-- ever since h.g. wells coined the term "atomic bomb". i think even after hiroshima and nagasaki, which actually happened, the thing was so incomprehensible that instead of looking at it as history we kept grappling with it as science fiction.
nuclear war was the biggest most important question facing humanity in the XX century (don't know why it's not still, maybe we got used to it not happening yet) and i don't believe that the fictions that attempted to deal with it were somehow unserious, even though they were often extremely funny (e.g. strangelove)
btw, speaking of nuclear war, and the neutron bomb, just rewatched repo man this past weekend and it keeps getting better and funnier with every rewatch.
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Ok, well, I concede that culturally, SF is far from the fringes. If anything, it's right smack dab in the center of a lot of social and cultural conversations.
However... SF films represent some of the greatest achievements in cinema, but the closest one has ever come to winning best picture is Return of the King (only SF in the Barnes & Noble category sense, if that... also, not a great film by any stretch of the imagination).
The lines are definitely less present in literature. It's true, you can find plenty of SF in the fiction section. But in my own experiences in academia, even in a field of study that is perhaps more closely linked to the stuff of SF than any other (neuroscience), I can honestly say that the genre was still considered something of an academic curiosity at best even as recently as I was in college and grad school (early 00s). The psychology club would show movies like Blade Runner and Clockwork Orange and as a big topic of conversation in social and personality classes, and I had a cognition and perception prof who name-dropped William Gibson, but still the genre was by no means broadly integrated.
My harder-nosed, old school profs would actually kind of sneer at SF in media. "That's not how it works," and the like. "If you're here because you like the Matrix, you should probably go elsewhere." That kind of stuff.
Anyway, I do feel silly for implying that SF segregated out of arts discussions, because it's not really true at all. But still, 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn't nominated for best picture. Some musical won. Recently, Ex-Machina was compelling and smart as all hell, but it didn't get that kind of attention. Great SF books are usually lucky to get a HUGO nomination, along with a bunch of shitty SF books that cater to cross-media franchises.
Gene Wolfe wrote a great essay about this in the late '70s or early '80s, addressing the need to NOT exclude SF from writing and lit courses in academia. Yeah, a lot has changed, but still... we ain't there yet.
Dennis Villeneuve is an extremely talented director, but now he's doing Blade Runner 2 and being courted for a Batman movie. Watch... his credibility will decrease if he gets sucked into being an "SF filmmaker."
I could be wrong about everything of course, but I really love SF, and Gene Wolfe is one of the greatest authors alive, responsible for at least two of the best epic novels of the 21st century. I'll bet nobody other than myself and Rob (I forced Wolfe on Rob
) even know who he is. NPR listed two of his novels in the top 5 "Best SF/Fantasy books of all time... one was number 1! Above Lewis, Tolkien, Bradbury, etc. But he's never had anything close to a bestseller.
I'm supposed to be working god dammit.