Science Fiction Fans

I've been thinking about this a lot recently and I've got to get some of it off my chest.

I don't dislike them as people, I dislike what they do to culture, and I really dislike their inauthenticity. Some of them anyway. Some sci-fi fans don't know what they like. Science-fiction, a bit like art-history, is a label given to a class of imagery. I often describe art history as a "made up" subject because it's so open-ended- it includes the future as much as the past- and crawls other disciplines for the word "art" without having any procedure in place to deal with the word when it finds it.

The sci-fi class comes with a collection of imagery/concepts in the box, and trawls culture for things that seem to vaguely match up. Once they match, they are appropriated, and science fiction, like the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, assembles a massive collection of disparate forms with its imprint, its label, on.

I'm not saying nothing was ever made specifically for science fiction fans. Just that the things sci-fi fans think they like about their favourite TV shows aren't the things they really like. They're drawn to anything by the label sci-fi, and when they run out of things that are obviously intended for them, they move onto things that never were. The differences between Dr Who and Red Dwarf was almost absolute...but because they both featured alien imagery (or whatever) they both had an appeal to the the same fan-set. The hook, surely, must then have (initially at least) been the word "alien" or the space ships, or whatever. Star Trek, on the other hand, is superficially entirely imagery, but people stay with it for the opera part of the space opera. People, ultimately, like stories more than they like bazookoids.

So why don't sci-fi fans like regular drama? Well, they need to be in a 'l33t club, to feel they're not like everyone else, when everyone else seems to like good drama set on earth with no aliens. When things like Star Trek reward obsessiveness with consistency they can share the delight that someone is responding to them, but most of all they can revel in the illusion that what they are enjoying is spotting continuity errors and performing some kind of perpetual continuity maintenance for the greater good of Science Fiction. When they run out of things created for them (or by them) they start appropriating from other genres, seeing the "sci fi" in things that were never primarily about sci-fi imagery, and effectively ostracising these things from the mainstream. The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy was never meant for fan-dissection, it was meant to be fun and funny and wry and satirical. Its sci-fi elements were always principally satirical. I don't understand why it should have any appeal at all to people who like, say, Babylon 5.



Yikes. I really have to go to work. I'm not done with you yet though!


Continued

> On 5/25/05, Alistair Johnston wrote:
> > I think what you're describing happens a lot. "I
> > like things with the label x. This has been labeled x therefore I will
> > like it." Is there more to science fiction than space/the future?
> > Could science fiction be about thought experiments? What would it be
> > like if... Would that be a useful definition? Better than Star Wars,
> > which is just a Western with robots.
> >

I want to nip these debates in the bud. It doesn't matter what sci-fi is about, it jsut seems to be about almost whatever it decides it is about. It is a vehicle to allow people who want to be percieved as having eccentric tastes to access things that are universally appealling. Star Wars is sci-fi because someone once said it was.

I believe sci-fi is different to other genres in this respect, and appeals to a different kind of person. A comedy fan wouldn't indiscriminately assume an interest in everything which had an element of humour in, e.g. All Creatures Great and Small, or the X Files, or label it a "comedy", but a sci fi fan is so desperate to have their natural human needs sated through surprising means they'll force their label on anything with a hint of time travel /aliens/ weirdness. Sci-fi fans think they like Dr Who because they're collecting associations with (first) sci fi, and (second) Dr Who as a sub-label. Just as Billie Piper fans preoccupied with an imaginary fantasy image of Billie Piper might like Dr Who because they're collecting Billie Pipers, and their interest in the show is no less valid than the "hardcore" science fiction fans for that.

Most of these things don't belong to sci-fi, they are hijacked by the labelling force that calls itself sci-fi. I don't want to argue about what programmes could "really" be called sci-fi, that's exactly the kind of sentiment I object to. Nothing should "really" be called "science fiction," it's the most unhelpful term in the world, and all it does is alienate books, films, media of every kind, from the public domain. The science fiction label turns most people off so it can go on virally replicating itself among a minority who want to believe they are minorities, special, or chosen, for whatever crazy reason. It's the crazy reasons I think we should be addressing.