Tuesday, August 24, 2010

In the beginning…

Alright everyone, I’m going to go a bit old school-nostalgic on this one. I can trace my loving relationship with the world of science fiction back to one place. Well, actually it was five people…

The Mighty Morphing Power Rangers.

That’s the one. That show started it all for me. It was just the right thing to turn my 4 or 5 year old mind on to the concept of science fiction and all the aliens, lasers, and giant robots that came along (especially in Power Rangers). I say this with all due respect paid to Star Wars (the shining jewel that it is), but Power Rangers came to me first. After that, I really fell down the giant space rabbit hole that was science fiction television in the early ‘90s. I fell in love with shows like the remake of Gigantor, Thunder Cats, Transformers, Voltron, Robotech, and all sorts of others (and as you can see, giant robots were kind of my thing). Elementary school saw my introduction to sci-fi videogames like Starcraft and Mechwarrior 2 (more giant robots, but now they were MY giant robots), and I started watching some pretty good movies. I saw Star Wars and finally started to actually grasp it, but it was Stargate that really blew my mind. Then I finally was old enough to start reading some real novels, and I fell head-first into things like the BattleTech universe, Tom Clancy novels, and a book called the Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen (which remains one of my favorite books). And all of this just scratches the surface. We’ll just say that I’ve had a long, fruitful relationship with science fiction in its many forms.


As far as defining it... Well, that's a little harder. It is pretty difficult to beat “the genre of ‘what if.’” I mean, for a long time this was a genre defined by space ships and giant robots, but I understand that is not, and never was, the case (although both of those things are still awesome). I mean, sci-fi certainly is about the “what if,” but couldn’t traditional fantasy play that role as well? I’ve spent the last week trying to pin down the crucial elements of science fiction, and I’ve come away pretty empty-handed. I have had one thought though: science fiction exists through the power of explanation. I think this is what sets it apart from fantasy when it comes to telling the story of “what if.” When fantastical things happen in a science fiction world, there always seems to be an explanation. In fantasy, it is most often written off as magic, but sci-fi always seems to rationalize events with things like “ancient alien technology” or midi-chlorians in your cells giving you control of the Force. Anyone have other thoughts on this?

4 comments:

Elizabeth said...

It's amazing how many different cartoons from our childhood count as science fiction. The Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Drew said...

I just want to say that Power Rangers were like my favorite thing when I was little and the fact that they fall under sci fi had not even occurred to me. Great stuff.

Jordan said...

Ninja Turtles!!! haha love me some TMNT. Also I really like what you said at the end about the difference between sci-fi and fantasy. It does seem like in science fiction the power of the "magic" or technology or whatever it is rests in the audience's ability to understand it. For example, I DID NOT understand much of the technology or what exactly they were doing with it while reading "The Island" for class. Yeah, they were building wormholes and something got in the way. I got that part but the rest was confusing. In fantasy, we just take things as they come and accept them, because hey, it's not real. It needs no further explanation other that "this exists in this world." In sci-fi we want to know why, how it works, how it got there, what it's doing for/to people... So much more complex!

Andy Duncan said...

A lot of Star Wars fans, John, were dissatisfied by the midi-chlorian explanation for the Force in The Phantom Menace. Why do you think that was, and what do you think about it?