Is Religion Killing Good Sci-Fi Shows? [minimal politics]
- Thread starter jefferiestubes8
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I should have said TOS was "more often" about the tech ... which is true, as your previous post concedes. Fact is, TOS had a greater emphasis on science and tech than nuBSG, which is why comparing the two doesn't make much sense.
My opinion is that every creative act reflects the politics, religion, and general worldview of the creator. There are no exceptions except perhaps for porn. And even then I bet you could name a few.
Roddenberry had a very specific worldview, that some have even taken on as a religion to varying degrees (and let's not forget Dr. McCoy calling the Creation Story a myth in Wrath of Khan). Patrick McGoohan's devout Catholicism drove most aspects of The Prisoner. Doctor Who spent most of its last decade railing against Thatcher at every turn.
The fact is the only people who really care are those who are somehow offended because the finale of XYZ didn't conform with their own beliefs. Lost and BSG are "current" examples, but frankly they're part of a long list.
As long as the story works, the characters work and - most important - the production adheres to its own internal logic and continuity, then as far as I'm concerned the writers/producers/directors can do whatever the hell they want. If I like it, I'll watch it (Doctor Who, Prisoner, nuBSG). If I don't, I won't (Lost). But I'll never make a blanket statement.
Now if the question was "are mainstream commercial networks killing good sci-fi shows" then that would be another matter...
Alex
Roddenberry had a very specific worldview, that some have even taken on as a religion to varying degrees (and let's not forget Dr. McCoy calling the Creation Story a myth in Wrath of Khan). Patrick McGoohan's devout Catholicism drove most aspects of The Prisoner. Doctor Who spent most of its last decade railing against Thatcher at every turn.
The fact is the only people who really care are those who are somehow offended because the finale of XYZ didn't conform with their own beliefs. Lost and BSG are "current" examples, but frankly they're part of a long list.
As long as the story works, the characters work and - most important - the production adheres to its own internal logic and continuity, then as far as I'm concerned the writers/producers/directors can do whatever the hell they want. If I like it, I'll watch it (Doctor Who, Prisoner, nuBSG). If I don't, I won't (Lost). But I'll never make a blanket statement.
Now if the question was "are mainstream commercial networks killing good sci-fi shows" then that would be another matter...
Alex
The amount of technical explanation in a story has nothing to do with whether it's "really" science fiction or not. It's only a matter of stylistic preference, hard SF versus softer SF. And even hard SF doesn't have to explain everything; it just has to be consistent with real science as much as possible, even if it doesn't lecture on the science.
The technical detail is something you work out as part of the background, to make sure you have a consistent stage established for your drama to play out on. You shouldn't put any more exposition on the page than the story actually requires. As long as the readers or viewers can understand what the characters are doing and why, it isn't necessary to spell out how.
And in general, it's not useful to try to build walls between genres, to come up with exclusionistic definitions of what is or isn't science fiction. A genre is a bell curve, and its interface with another genre is a wide area of overlap within both curves, not a sharp dividing line. I said above that I found it more useful in the final analysis to define BSG as magic-realist space opera rather than strict science fiction, but that doesn't mean it doesn't fall under the SF bell curve at all. It clearly has a lot of SF in its makeup; it just isn't solely that.
(After all, let's keep in mind that BSG 2003 was based on BSG 1979, a work which blended space opera, ancient-astronaut lore, Egyptian mythology, and the Book of Mormon, and featured appearances by an entity who was implicitly Satan and a "ship of lights" that was presented in a very angelic way. And BSG '79 was largely an imitation of Star Wars, which was blatantly a sword-and-sorcery fairy tale recast in space-opera semantics. Given that pedigree, it shouldn't really be surprising that BSG '03 is a genre-straddler as well.)
Somewhat, yes, but sometimes that worldview includes the idea that it's worthwhile to portray politics and beliefs that disagree with those of the author. Storytelling is not just polemic. It's bad writing to have your characters be simply mouthpieces for your own point of view. Good characters take on a life of their own and often go in directions that conflict with the author's own beliefs or sensibilities. And a good author lets them.
For instance, my favorite character to write in Star Trek: Ex Machina was a religious leader whose beliefs differed from mine in many ways. Annd not just in terms of her spiritual beliefs; at one point I had her express skepticism toward the value of literacy, a sentiment that made me uneasy to write but that was right for the character. Similarly, in the original spec novel I've been struggling with for a while, the character I'm finding it most fascinating to write is one I disagree with, one who came down on what I consider the wrong side of a key issue but who did so for pretty valid and principled reasons. It can be fascinating and fun to put yourself in the head of characters who disagree with you. Heck, it would be boring not to.
Well, that's a non sequitur, since Roddenberry had virtually nothing to do with TWOK.
Also because the vast majority of Christians understand that the Book of Genesis is a myth. Also because the word "myth" doesn't really mean "an untrue story" -- strictly speaking, it means a tale that codifies the fundamental identity or guiding principles of a culture. So calling something a myth shouldn't be taken as a dismissal of its worth. On the contrary, it's an acknowledgment that it's something genuinely meaningful on a societal or spiritual level, regardless of whether it's true on a mere factual level.
The technical detail is something you work out as part of the background, to make sure you have a consistent stage established for your drama to play out on. You shouldn't put any more exposition on the page than the story actually requires. As long as the readers or viewers can understand what the characters are doing and why, it isn't necessary to spell out how.
And in general, it's not useful to try to build walls between genres, to come up with exclusionistic definitions of what is or isn't science fiction. A genre is a bell curve, and its interface with another genre is a wide area of overlap within both curves, not a sharp dividing line. I said above that I found it more useful in the final analysis to define BSG as magic-realist space opera rather than strict science fiction, but that doesn't mean it doesn't fall under the SF bell curve at all. It clearly has a lot of SF in its makeup; it just isn't solely that.
(After all, let's keep in mind that BSG 2003 was based on BSG 1979, a work which blended space opera, ancient-astronaut lore, Egyptian mythology, and the Book of Mormon, and featured appearances by an entity who was implicitly Satan and a "ship of lights" that was presented in a very angelic way. And BSG '79 was largely an imitation of Star Wars, which was blatantly a sword-and-sorcery fairy tale recast in space-opera semantics. Given that pedigree, it shouldn't really be surprising that BSG '03 is a genre-straddler as well.)
Somewhat, yes, but sometimes that worldview includes the idea that it's worthwhile to portray politics and beliefs that disagree with those of the author. Storytelling is not just polemic. It's bad writing to have your characters be simply mouthpieces for your own point of view. Good characters take on a life of their own and often go in directions that conflict with the author's own beliefs or sensibilities. And a good author lets them.
For instance, my favorite character to write in Star Trek: Ex Machina was a religious leader whose beliefs differed from mine in many ways. Annd not just in terms of her spiritual beliefs; at one point I had her express skepticism toward the value of literacy, a sentiment that made me uneasy to write but that was right for the character. Similarly, in the original spec novel I've been struggling with for a while, the character I'm finding it most fascinating to write is one I disagree with, one who came down on what I consider the wrong side of a key issue but who did so for pretty valid and principled reasons. It can be fascinating and fun to put yourself in the head of characters who disagree with you. Heck, it would be boring not to.
Well, that's a non sequitur, since Roddenberry had virtually nothing to do with TWOK.
Also because the vast majority of Christians understand that the Book of Genesis is a myth. Also because the word "myth" doesn't really mean "an untrue story" -- strictly speaking, it means a tale that codifies the fundamental identity or guiding principles of a culture. So calling something a myth shouldn't be taken as a dismissal of its worth. On the contrary, it's an acknowledgment that it's something genuinely meaningful on a societal or spiritual level, regardless of whether it's true on a mere factual level.
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I would still disagree. In TOS the "tech" might set a story in motion, but the story wasn't really about the tech. An episode like Balance of Terror wasn't about the cloak or the plasma weapon but about predjudice and unswerving national loyalty. Spock can rattle on about bending light waves, but that was never the point of the story.
Like in BSG the tech might support, inform or frame the story but its not about the tech. So, I think both used the tech aspects in similar fashion. That TOS might "name drop" tech and science terms more often is a different matter.
In daily life there is religion where people get married in a church; socialize in a church on Sundays; then get buried after a church service. Along the way, they may pray a few times to let off steam. They have a vague notion they'll somehow live forever, somewhere and at some indefinite time they'll have a party of some sort with nearest and dearest relatives who predeceased them. Religion for them is more a social custom like the other holiday observances, like Fourth of July or Halloween. (Probably not as intensely felt as Mother's Day, though.)
Lots of scifi throws in some sort of fantasy element to pander to this kind, but it doesn't substantially change the sfness of the story. Star Wars may have referred to the "ancient religion" but it was a religion without any rituals and no one had the slightest interest in propagating its moral teachings. If it had any. The Force was a stand-in for God, depersonalized and naturalized, so to speak, as part of everyday reality.
Then there's the people who send most of their money to a TV preacher; who get sick and pray and go to the doctor and then give the credit to (you guessed it
) God; who tell their friends their prophetic dreams to help them make life decisions, and so on and so forth. And, despite the pious wish for minimal politics, there are the ones who applaud murder (or commit it themselves) for religious reasons.
The thing about Lost and BSG is that the religion in those stories is like the second sort. This kind of thing is phony and stupid and meanspirited. There can't be any internal consistency because it's all blatant nonsense, like God being on both sides of a war because the believers on both side each pray to him.
The necessary inconsistency applies to style and narrative structure as well. Science fiction's pseudorealism aims at an impression of lawfulness while the religious story gets its kicks from God breaking bad with Nature. Science fiction stories are about the characters or possibly ideas about our world but religious stories are about wish fulfilment via God or about some other world (no, not another planet.) It's bait and switch. It really is irritating when somebody tries to pretend that it was our fault for not reading the fine print closely enough. Bait and switch is still fraud.
Lots of scifi throws in some sort of fantasy element to pander to this kind, but it doesn't substantially change the sfness of the story. Star Wars may have referred to the "ancient religion" but it was a religion without any rituals and no one had the slightest interest in propagating its moral teachings. If it had any. The Force was a stand-in for God, depersonalized and naturalized, so to speak, as part of everyday reality.
Then there's the people who send most of their money to a TV preacher; who get sick and pray and go to the doctor and then give the credit to (you guessed it
) God; who tell their friends their prophetic dreams to help them make life decisions, and so on and so forth. And, despite the pious wish for minimal politics, there are the ones who applaud murder (or commit it themselves) for religious reasons. The thing about Lost and BSG is that the religion in those stories is like the second sort. This kind of thing is phony and stupid and meanspirited. There can't be any internal consistency because it's all blatant nonsense, like God being on both sides of a war because the believers on both side each pray to him.
The necessary inconsistency applies to style and narrative structure as well. Science fiction's pseudorealism aims at an impression of lawfulness while the religious story gets its kicks from God breaking bad with Nature. Science fiction stories are about the characters or possibly ideas about our world but religious stories are about wish fulfilment via God or about some other world (no, not another planet.) It's bait and switch. It really is irritating when somebody tries to pretend that it was our fault for not reading the fine print closely enough. Bait and switch is still fraud.
Ah, but in a show that explicitly has memory downloads, virtual realities, and mind surgeries--all based on science or what passed for science in-universe--those "mystical" visions were anything but.
Plot and theme, but not genre. I'm trying to think of any work that hid its genre leanings till the end. Knowing, maybe? (Science fiction-lite, ala The Core, perhaps, but actually a Rapture movie.) But okay, I can give you one where it worked: Abre Los Ojos and also Vanilla Sky. It was not at all apparent from the beginning that it was a science fiction film; but the foreign elements were introduced with the greatest of care.
And, yeah, while it is a little unfair to compare a monolithic work like a film to a disjointed piece like a four-season television series, it's very clear that part of the problem with introducing these foreign elements is that there was no overarching Plan (ha ha) to fit them seamlessly against what had come before. The sureness of hand necessary to pull off the conceptual fusion might be impossible in the context of a television series, particularly one that struggled with ratings and (to a degree) network overseers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for a general conservatism, but a recognition of how elements fit (or don't) into any specific story.
"Is Religion Killing Good Sci-Fi Shows?"
Not if your an atheist.
Which btw doesn't excuse the fact that the finale of Lost threw away an entire season of plot development and didnt bother to show what happened when the Ajira flight made it's way back to civilization. Plus it had crap action in it.
BSG on the other hand I adored.
Not if your an atheist.
Which btw doesn't excuse the fact that the finale of Lost threw away an entire season of plot development and didnt bother to show what happened when the Ajira flight made it's way back to civilization. Plus it had crap action in it.
BSG on the other hand I adored.
or Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
Yes, yes, yes! I couldn't stand that movie for this very reason. And it wasn't just that they made Alice the chosen one with a destiny. It's that they had her destiny written down on a piece of paper and told us the plot to entire rest of the movie!
Shows like "Angel" got the prophecy angle right. "The vampire with a soul will play a major role in the apocalypse." They didn't tell us what his role would be, and for a time we weren't even sure if Angel was the vampire in question! Prophecies should be mysterious and vague.
There was that one time that they were serious about the speed of light, in "33."
That being the one where the Cylons attacked every 33 minutes, and it is strongly implied that the reason was the output a radioactive marker aboard the Olympic which (naturally) required 33 minutes for a signal to reach the Cylon fleet, at which point they would jump again and threaten the Colonials--until such time as Olympic was destroyed.
But maybe the Cylons just should've used whatever FTL comm bullshit their uploading used. Under the ground? No problem? In a dying solar system? No problem. Fifteen light years away? No problem! Your memories are transmitted instantaneously on the sub-etha network into your new "robot" bodies, courtesy of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Anyway, BSG's science or lack thereof isn't important. If it were, even vaunted "hard" SF would be disqualified--if nothing else, in hindsight with the advance of real science. Is anyone prepared to make the claim that Imperial Earth is not science fiction because it does not accurately portray the evaporation of small black holes--primarily because Clarke wrote it prior to Hawking's work on black hole evaporation?
What matters is its literalism. Defining science fiction versus fantasy might be done like so:
1)Does it have elements (technologies, planets, species)?
2)Are those elements explicable in-universe through that universe's science? That is, are in-universe phenomena treated as objective phenomena which are subject to scientific investigation?
If yes to both, you have SF. That's why Sandman is not science fiction (despite its emphasis on rules) but Star Wars is (despite its emphasis on mysticism). BSG treated its fake technologies and phenomena as scientifically investigable in-universe.
All the way until Zombie Starbuck. And yet even she was literalistic in execution--Zombie Starbuck interacted with the physical world in a logical and consistent manner. Even the BSGod is, at bottom, an objective phenomenon.
What, really? The BSGod isn't particularly worse, from a real-world scientific standpoint, than human ESPers and giant space amoebae.
See, that's where you're imposing your own assumptions on the text. The visions were deliberately ambiguous -- we were supposed to be uncertain whether they had a technological explanation or a mystical one. For instance, at first we were led to believe that the visions of Six in Baltar's head resulted from a computer chip the Cylons had implanted in him. But then, in episode 7 of season 2, he had his head examined (literally) and discovered there was no chip. So from that point on, the Six in Baltar's head had no scientific explanation. She wasn't a technological projection, but she couldn't be a delusion either because she knew things Baltar couldn't know. So there was no single rational explanation that could make sense of her. It was at that same point that she began claiming to be an angel, a messenger from God. And as we ultimately discovered, she was essentially telling the truth.
So they told us outright that we were watching a show about mysticism and divine intervention. It's just that they had deviously set things up so that we weren't sure whether to believe them when they told us that.
What about Lost? It took a while to work in the genre aspects, and -- much like BSG -- stayed deliberately vague about whether its weirdness had a scientific explanation or a supernatural one, only clarifying it at the end.
And no, BSG didn't "hide" any of its genre leanings. All along, they showed us characters having visions, prophecies coming true, signs of divine intervention. They didn't hide them. They just put them in a context that left us unsure whether those mystical things had a rational explanation or not (although really the mystical explanations were the only ones that were consistent and non-contradictory, as with Angel Six above).
To this day I remain impressed at the determination some folks have to read BSG as Christian allegory because, in-universe, one character at the end challenged the others to accept that there was proof they'd all been manipulated by an unseen power; something that some would call God, but whatever it was, it /was/ doing something to them.
Then at the very end, another character *explicitly* provides an out for the viewer to decide that whatever "that force" is, it's not a supernatural god - "you know it doesn't like it when you call it God."
And even there, I think all this betrays just how much of a burning stick up the arse some people have about religion. Because when it comes to general topics such as "metaphysics" or the so-called supernatural, science fiction is a venue where those things have been touched upon countless times. In the hypothetical frameworks of science fiction stories, many authors have directly grappled with questions such as "if a being becomes sufficiently advanced, let's say, why wouldn't it really be "god"? What is "magic"? What happens when "science" becomes "magic"? What is nature? What could be beyond nature?"
Sometimes, I feel that the mentality of people who call themselves science fiction fans has become very poor in the last couple of decades, and it may be as a direct result of those people having developed a subtle - or not so subtle - vendetta against "irrationalism" because of the ideological wars going on in western civilization today. So for them, "science fiction" is really "reassuring atheist fiction that disproves God, the Supernatural, and elevates what I define as Scientific Fact to defacto deification." Too many "fans" are not interested in ideas. They just want fanfic that panders to their personal pet peeves.
Then at the very end, another character *explicitly* provides an out for the viewer to decide that whatever "that force" is, it's not a supernatural god - "you know it doesn't like it when you call it God."
And even there, I think all this betrays just how much of a burning stick up the arse some people have about religion. Because when it comes to general topics such as "metaphysics" or the so-called supernatural, science fiction is a venue where those things have been touched upon countless times. In the hypothetical frameworks of science fiction stories, many authors have directly grappled with questions such as "if a being becomes sufficiently advanced, let's say, why wouldn't it really be "god"? What is "magic"? What happens when "science" becomes "magic"? What is nature? What could be beyond nature?"
Sometimes, I feel that the mentality of people who call themselves science fiction fans has become very poor in the last couple of decades, and it may be as a direct result of those people having developed a subtle - or not so subtle - vendetta against "irrationalism" because of the ideological wars going on in western civilization today. So for them, "science fiction" is really "reassuring atheist fiction that disproves God, the Supernatural, and elevates what I define as Scientific Fact to defacto deification." Too many "fans" are not interested in ideas. They just want fanfic that panders to their personal pet peeves.
In daily life there is religion where people get married in a church; socialize in a church on Sundays; then get buried after a church service. Along the way, they may pray a few times to let off steam. They have a vague notion they'll somehow live forever, somewhere and at some indefinite time they'll have a party of some sort with nearest and dearest relatives who predeceased them. Religion for them is more a social custom like the other holiday observances, like Fourth of July or Halloween. (Probably not as intensely felt as Mother's Day, though.)
Lots of scifi throws in some sort of fantasy element to pander to this kind, but it doesn't substantially change the sfness of the story. Star Wars may have referred to the "ancient religion" but it was a religion without any rituals and no one had the slightest interest in propagating its moral teachings. If it had any. The Force was a stand-in for God, depersonalized and naturalized, so to speak, as part of everyday reality.
Then there's the people who send most of their money to a TV preacher; who get sick and pray and go to the doctor and then give the credit to (you guessed it
Be very careful, here.
Keep the discussion focused on the topic about the effect of religion on SF shows and not on your personal views about religion or God. If you want to go that rout, take it to TNZ.
That's just part of the show's consistent practice of keeping it deliberately ambiguous. There was definitely some higher power at work, but its true nature was left open to interpretation.
And really, who's to say that an actual, honest-to-self god would want to be called God? That's a human-created term for such an entity, and it might not even come close to embodying what it truly is.
At the very least, it's kind of generic. I mean, it's like calling a person "Person." "God" isn't really a name, it's a euphemism people employ to avoid using the Lord's name in vain.
or Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
Yes, yes, yes! I couldn't stand that movie for this very reason. And it wasn't just that they made Alice the chosen one with a destiny. It's that they had her destiny written down on a piece of paper and told us the plot to entire rest of the movie!
Shows like "Angel" got the prophecy angle right. "The vampire with a soul will play a major role in the apocalypse." They didn't tell us what his role would be, and for a time we weren't even sure if Angel was the vampire in question! Prophecies should be mysterious and vague.
Also, the prophecy was never used as a lazy way to identify Angel as "the hero" without actually showing him being heroic. Angel would have been a hero without the prophecy. In fact, "Judgment" demonstrated that the prophecy interfered with Angel being a hero because it distracted him. He became more concerned with fulfilling the prophecy than with his mission.
The Matrix made the "chosen one" angle work because so much of the story was about Neo struggling with his destiny or with his perceived status as something beyond human when he didn't feel that way. Or it was about Neo believing that Morpheus' faith in him was misplaced.
"Chosen one" stories don't work when they seem to be used because it's the only way the writer can think of to make some idiot teenager into a believable hero.
Exactly. One of the things I love about BSG is a thing I love about LOST, the nerve to leave some things unanswered, some thing ambiguous, to leave room for multiple interpretations.
BSG rationalized the immortality of the Cylons with doubletalk about downloading memories. Since the Cylon bodies were indistinguishable from human bodies, this meant they were able to transmit extraordinary amounts of data, apparently at faster than light speeds, without a transmitter. This was nonetheless supposed to be a perfectly natural phenomenon. When Roslin had prophetic visions of murdering a prisoner, she was supposed to be taking drugs, a pitiful attempt at a scientific rationalization, but there it is. The claim that BSG played fair with its supernatural predilections is bullshit. Lost took considerably longer to go completely stupid.
Given the absolutely shocking contempt for reality displayed by so many writers and dramatists, the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy is only the way the fiction or drama treats its fantastic elements. If kamala root is somehow supposed to treat cancer, cause prophetic visions and be so addictive that withdrawal mimics psychosis, it may be silly but it's still supposed to be natural, not supernatural.
The mention above of Knowing is interesting. Very few people would acknowledge Knowing or a similar film, Signs, as artistically successful films. The final vision of aliens playing angel by depositing helpless children on an alien planet standing in for heaven was hopelessly anti-climactic. Partly because it seemed likely they'd just end up dying. Signs of course ended up with the question of why aliens who died from water would come to Earth. I suppose human fields are the alien equivalent of Carrara marble.
It strikes me that anyone getting a favorable impression of religion from such films is an idiot. In one, only children are worthy of life (because they're uncontaminated by sexuality?) In the other, the world gets invaded so one man can regain his faith. Religious scifi is typically loony tunes in a way even most believers would recoil at.
Given the absolutely shocking contempt for reality displayed by so many writers and dramatists, the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy is only the way the fiction or drama treats its fantastic elements. If kamala root is somehow supposed to treat cancer, cause prophetic visions and be so addictive that withdrawal mimics psychosis, it may be silly but it's still supposed to be natural, not supernatural.
The mention above of Knowing is interesting. Very few people would acknowledge Knowing or a similar film, Signs, as artistically successful films. The final vision of aliens playing angel by depositing helpless children on an alien planet standing in for heaven was hopelessly anti-climactic. Partly because it seemed likely they'd just end up dying. Signs of course ended up with the question of why aliens who died from water would come to Earth. I suppose human fields are the alien equivalent of Carrara marble.
It strikes me that anyone getting a favorable impression of religion from such films is an idiot. In one, only children are worthy of life (because they're uncontaminated by sexuality?) In the other, the world gets invaded so one man can regain his faith. Religious scifi is typically loony tunes in a way even most believers would recoil at.
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