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Why is there no pure Sci-Fi on TV today? Part Deux

Trying to define science fiction as a set of sub-genres and themes is impossible. That's because "science fiction" is a term like "prose" or "realistic." These terms tell us how the story is written, not what kind of story, i.e., genre.
It doesn't tell us in any way how the story is written. Science fiction has been written in comic form, for the screen, in prose, even in poetry.

Science fiction is and always has been a real genre. It doesn't tell us anything about the form of the story, only of the content.

As to the notion that science fiction is a genre in the literature of ideas, specifically, the kind that examines the effect of scientific change on humanity, well, that seems to be a definition inspired by the thought there must be 1.)some weighty reason for the story, namely examining change and 2.) some unique purpose for the science, giving science fiction a justification for its existence. I don't agree with either proposition.
I don't agree either, and never said any such thing. Nice straw man argument, though.

Entertainment is a valid purpose for fiction and drama.
Of course. Many science fiction stories were written purely for entertainment. The genre title "science fiction" says nothing whatsoever about whether or not a story is written to entertain or enlighten of whatever.

Criticism is concerned with why some things are regarded as entertaining, and may reject some forms of entertainment as inferior.
Not sure what your point is. No one in this thread has rejected any genre as inferior. Even the thread title, which asks the question "why is there no pure sci-fi (which I take to mean science fiction) on TV today?" has nothing to say about the overall quality of one genre over the other, it only implies that one genre isn't being well represented on television.

This is not always very comfortable for us, which is why many people oppose criticism.
1) Who's "us?"

2) Where's the criticism in this thread? I don't see it anywhere, other than in the link I posted which i've already said I don't agree with.

Science is about reality, which is interesting in itself. This is reason enough to include science in science fiction, or in principle, any fiction. The objection to labeling science fiction as just more fantasy is that this false distinction relieves the science fiction writer of the obligation to write good science fiction, where the science isn't (for my taste, boring) BS. Fantasy writers not only don't have to worry about reality posing any strictures as to what's good or bad fantasy, they get brownie points for ignoring it.
I would say writing fantasy is at least just as difficult as writing science fiction. Fantasy writers may get to make up their own worlds, but they have to establish the rules early in the story and stick with those rules. It's not like anything at all can happen in the story. It's rules may be different from the rules of our world, but those rules need to be followed just as well as the rules that govern our known universe. Not only that, but the author has to be able to explain those rules in the natural course of the story, whereas in a science fiction story, unless a difference between the science fiction story and the real world is specifically highlighted, the reader is going assume there is no difference. A fantasy reader is going to automatically assume our world and the world of the story are different, and are going to expect the author to show those differences right away.

In short, a fantasy story isn't any easier, it's just a different beast.

The wikipedia definition is useless in practice. The vast majority of science ficiton, good or bad, is in no way any part of a literature of ideas. It is also a bad definition in principle, because the part about "pure imaginative speculation" directly contradicts the part about scientific possibility.
Not at all. If you are competent in chemistry, you can use your imagination to speculate about the future of chemistry. The writers of Analog and Asimov's do it all the time, and do it very well.

There is plenty of scientific speculation but if it's pure imagination, it's not scientific speculation. A theoretical definition that would exclude not just H.G. Wells but most of Jules Verne is useless.
Wells wrote pure fantasy as well as science fiction. Certainly, mainy of his stories qualified as science fiction in the day. He used what we knew of the practice of vivi-section to write a story about what could have been the next nightmarish step. If he were alive today, the story would have probably had to do with genetics.

Wells wrote a short story called "The Plattner Story" that was about a guy who accidentally ends up in a higher dimension, a dimesion one step higher than the three we are able to perceive. When he returns, he's been "flipped" around in this other dimension and his heart is now on the opposite side of his body, he's now left-handed where he was once right-handed, etc. The story is every bit as relevent (and entertaining) today as it was over a hundred years ago.

(You can read the story online here. It's one of my favorites.)

The other way of reading the question, why is there so little scifi that tries to be well written scifi in which the "science" isn't just gibberish? There's very little of that because science fiction isn't very popular, fantasy is popular. Television is a very mass oriented medium and it will aim for the fantasy audience first.
This we can agree on.
 
A question, wasn't the term Sci-Fi created as a shorthand term for Science Fiction, just as San Fran is a shorthand term for San Francisco? ( just don't use it front of a resident ;) )
 
The death of Sci-Fi on TV was the rise in power, size and importance of the female demographic!
Sci fi has never appealled particularly well to the female demographic, yet shows with spaceships and aliens used to survive just fine with mostly male audiences. So what's changed?

This is what's changed: the balkanization of entertainment into smaller and smaller audiences. A small audiences may be really interested in, say, a sci fi show about the origins of the Cylons, but their increased interest doesn't make their eyeballs worth any more than the eyeballs of a bored channel-flipper.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people who don't give a flying frak about the origins of the Cylons, assuming they've ever heard of them, aren't interested, so you have a tiny audience and a business model based on advertising, which is only really suited to the mass audience that TV used to have. Appealing strongly to a niche audience instead of sort of appealing to a large audience, isn't something anyone's figured out how to monetize well. How do you translate interest into dollars? DVD sales won't take up the slack and if the network isn't producing the show, they don't see the revenue anyway.

But the reverse strategy - make your sci fi as broad and bland as possible - also usually fails because the audience that is interested in sci fi of any kind wants their specific type of sci fi. You can see this phenomenon right here, where any new show is rejected by most of the people who try it. Caprica is boring. Lost is confusing. V is bland. FlashForward is dumb. Persons Unknown is even dumber. Everyone hates everything. No wonder the networks just churn out reality TV for the sheep who are too dumb to complain. We deserve to have nothing! :rommie:

There's also the issue of budget vs return, which ties into your "balkanization" arguement. Back "in the day", you had 3 choices in any given hour of what to watch. Therefore each program would carry a number of viewers who weren't necessarily fans of that particular program, but didn't find the other two options appealing either for some reason. I guess you could call them "casual viewers". Nontheless, they counted for ratings points and paid for that show. The modern, balkanized audience is not going to choose "least of the bad". There's just too much out there to pick from if you have a good cable package. That means that if they aren't REALLY interested in your show, they're gonna go somewhere else. WHich means you lose their viewership, lower ratings and poor ad sales.

How does that tie into budget? The more "science" in your sci-fi, the bigger your FX needs to be a good chunk of the time. FX are expensive. (Same for sets, costumes, etc). If you're not getting the numbers, or more accurately, if there are other shows that can give you the same numbers for LESS money, then they're gonna get picked up first, and more likely to be retained.

It's the difference between, say, Star Trek and Stargate SG-1. The former had to build virtually from nothing. The latter (being a military/sf hybrid) had the advantage of being able to use a great deal of "off the shelf" props, costumes, set decorations, etc. That's one reason why Enterprise, for example, only got 4 seasons while SG-1 got 10.
 
I didn't mean a show with the same premise as the X-Files. I mean a scifi show that is as widely popular as the X-Files was back in its day.
 
I didn't mean a show with the same premise as the X-Files. I mean a scifi show that is as widely popular as the X-Files was back in its day.


Alas, it hasn't been for lack of trying. INVASION. THRESHOLD. SURFACE. FRINGE. THE 4400. HEROES. FLASH-FORWARD. V. THE NIGHT STALKER. THE SARA CONNOR CHRONICLES. Umpteen other failed FOX shows.

Arguably, LOST achieved the same level of recognition, although much of the audience didn't realize it was sf at first . . . ..
 
Science fiction is basically fantasy with science trappings. So, instead of flying through space on swans, you use spaceships, 'cause those are sciency-looking (regardless of how plausible the spaceship looks and the various basic laws of physics its operation may entail).

It can be basically speculative fiction solidly grounded in real science, but that's a possibility, not a guarantee. What you're left with there is a more plausible fantasy.

The problem with Hober Mallow's more rigorous definition (aside from ignoring how we actually use language)* really is it doesn't leave a whole hell of a lot left over. The majority science fiction is quite arguably not strictly and exclusively grounded in real science; and it's practically nonexistent in visual media.

2001: A Space Odyssey? The aliens get off on Clarke's 'advanced tech = magic' equation, which can call its 'true' sci-fi credentials into question. And so on.

By this logic, Caprica is as 'pure' sci-fi as you could define the concept on TV. It's set in a speculative sci-fi environment and has a number of science and fantasy concepts embedded into the series premise. I'd probably define a non-pure sci-fi series as one where the sci-fi concepts are more peripheral or it's more grounded in the real world; both of which are common and popular enough.

But yeah - it's expensive and risky and you could probably get the same or better ratings with a show set in the real world, so why bother? I doubt I'll see another space opera quite as outre as Farscape anytime in my lifetime.

*Which is very important. When we define a word, we need to define what we mean when we use the word. Defining the word so it no longer means what it does isn't an answer to the question, it's evading it. Now we're talking about what we want the word to mean, which isn't the same thing.
 
I didn't mean a show with the same premise as the X-Files. I mean a scifi show that is as widely popular as the X-Files was back in its day.


Alas, it hasn't been for lack of trying. INVASION. THRESHOLD. SURFACE. FRINGE. THE 4400. HEROES. FLASH-FORWARD. V. THE NIGHT STALKER. THE SARA CONNOR CHRONICLES. Umpteen other failed FOX shows.

Arguably, LOST achieved the same level of recognition, although much of the audience didn't realize it was sf at first . . . ..
Yeah, I would agree about LOST, but it's one of those shows that a lot of people didn't discover until much later into its run. It was just way too hard to jump into if you hadn't seen it from the beginning. While The X-Files had a running arc, it was mostly standalone, so it was fairly easy to start watching whenever.
 
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