John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> The movie industry's attitude towards the genre indicates that they have 
> absolutely no appreciation of its potential, but merely use it to entice 
> money out of people who will pay to watch anything that features a 
> technological future.

  It all comes down to one's *definition* of "sci-fi". Basically sci-fi
has a wide scale of "hardness", and where people put the line between
"real" sci-fi depends on personal opinion.

  On the "softest" end of sci-fi we have products which take immense amount
of liberties and go absolutely to extremes with everything. We may have
spaceships routinely traveling between *galaxies* in short periods of time,
thousands of alien species (all of which inexplicably speak English as a
common lingua franca), time travel (with or without any regard to any kind
of consistency) and often a varied amount of supernatural phenomena, such
as telepathy. Don't expect even regular physics to be very accurate in these
products.

  On the "hardest" end we have products which take place just a few decades
in the future, and where there's very little, if anything, that current
science wouldn't take for granted or at least very possible. For example
no faster-than-light travel (which means the story is located entirely
inside the Solar system), no aliens, no artificial gravity (unless you
count centrifugal gravity, which of course is completely ok), realistic
spaceships, realistic traveling times, and not even exotic modes of
propulsion (unless it has been seriously proposed by scientists).

  Of course we have all kinds of nuances in-between those two extremes.

  So where is the line between "real" sci-fi and "a bad joke"?

  For example, some people consider the Terminator series to be sci-fi,
even if slightly on the softer half of the scale. Others don't.

  Maybe the definition of "sci-fi" is not so much about the science part,
but about the fiction part, in other words, the storytelling. But that
becomes even harder to define accurately.

  Sometimes I get the feeling that "sci-fi purists" consider "true sci-fi"
only those stories which are really obscure and next to incomprehensible,
a bit like an artist who thinks that "true art" is something that a regular
person cannot understand. Of course the problem with this that this kind of
abstract storytelling doesn't sell, so why would movie companies even bother
to try making them?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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