h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

er, my previous post was in response to KerrAvon.




"Cyberpunk was never supposed to be about reality shift. Cyberpunk was about the way in which technology affects the lives of those that use it, particularly the 'underclasses'
I wouldn't ever think of The Matrix as CyberPunk in the same way as do Gibson Stirling, Greenwood and the rest..."

i was talking about the reality shift idea in the Matrix. also the concept of martial arts training in biocyberspace is pretty similar to what humans have been doing for millenia in working with altered states of consciousness.

but good point... a number of themes in the Matrix then - would the class uprising idea in the Matrix have been informed by cyberpunk?

It could have been, but CyberPunk is actually pretty much like hard boiled fiction in that ithas the little man against the odds, not necessarily doing the right thing, put pursueing their own peculiar code of ethics...

The best most of Gibson's characters achieve is not getting killed and maybe getting the girl (always a dubious honour in a cyberpunk novel )...life in cyberpunk (or the best cyberpunk, anyway) is a series of compromises with the forces of government/commerce. Revolution is beyond the scope of your average cyberpunk hero.

Best illustration- Jack Womack's excellent and under-rated 'Random Acts Of Senseless Violence'

"I often use teletext subtitles for *English* language films I see on TV, but that's somewhat different."

i saw a Glaswegian film a while ago that had subtitles for the first 20 mins. it was hilarious....something like "shut the F**k up you gobsh*te" (in a very thick Glaswegian accent) was subtitled as "be quiet".

It's also true that a novel idea is only novel once.

The small studios/independents have to push the boundaries in what they produce to attract ANY interest from the public. When they do it well, they get a hefty reward (in relative terms).

Whereas the big studios can't afford a failure, they have to pay Arnie or Bruce's wages, so they will go with the flow, the latest fad, or re-use an idea.

That said, every now and then you do get someone in charge at a big studio who can push the limit and do it well.

Personally I like things like Bladerunner, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes - all dealt with tricky issues in a novel way, i.e. pushing a single scientific concept past a limit. There's no real suspension of belief in those films.

Whereas Independence Day, Armageddon, et al while enjoyable to watch are just candyfloss - tasty, but insubstantial.

Are we talking about the new Planet of the Apes here? Where ordinary champanzees evolve into every kind of ape, even the ones they're not at all related to?

"It could have been, but CyberPunk is actually pretty much like hard boiled fiction in that ithas the little man against the odds, not necessarily doing the right thing, put pursueing their own peculiar code of ethics...
The best most of Gibson's characters achieve is not getting killed and maybe getting the girl (always a dubious honour in a cyberpunk novel )...life in cyberpunk (or the best cyberpunk, anyway) is a series of compromises with the forces of government/commerce. Revolution is beyond the scope of your average cyberpunk hero."

ok. sounds something like 'Slow River' by Nicola Griffith. (so long as the girls are allowed in the subgenre too ). it does have happy ending though.

The orginal Planet of the Apes, I hope

Ahhh...
where should I start?

One of our family's favorite sic-fic is "The Fifth Element".

It is fast, fantastic, varied in it's locations and level of special effects, it has sight gags and bad puns and actors of varying ability, it explains almost nothing and it has an ending that pretty much closes the whole thing down.

An inspired movie that knows it is a movie and really, even though it approaches art at times, and we really love the soundtrack, doesn't take itself too seriously.

It is when a movie attempts to explain something that science fiction becomes fictional science, i.e., a lie.

Gene Roddenberry wrote "Wagon Train to the Stars" on his original proposal to CBS. He meant it. When you are shooting a show of any kind on the Desilu lot, using the same sets (apparently) that the Wild Wild West and a half a dozen other shows are using, you have to use your head. You have to keep the characters busy and you have to write in some guest shots every show. Star Dreck didn't get truly goofy until the Paramount movies, which, with the exception of "Khan", were worse than the Saturday Morning cartoon version.
At it's best "The Next Regurgitation" was some of the best TV to be found in it's early years. The Ferengi were an inspired idea.

The worst part about Star Bores and Star Dreck are the novelizations.
But my kid plowed through them in a summer and a half and I was happy to have her reading anything above her fifth and sixth grade reading levels, if only just barely.

I watched "Dune" (the first one) and "Buckaroo Banzai" on the same evening, in the same theatre. I watched "Buckaroo" first, then I went and tried to watch "Dune". Then I went back and watched "Buckaroo" again!

It was like the time "Heavy Metal" came out in the theatres. I watched it and then I went and got some friends and paid for them to see it so that we could talk about it.

I like movies that do their job. If a so-called sic-fic movie is more movie than science, so be it. If it is a good movie, it doesn't make any difference to me. If it is a bad movie and the science is good, , I could have been watching a documentary on PBS and had more fun. If it is a bad movie and the science is bad, it better be very bad and funny bad, otherwise, a waste of potential guitar picks.

My main bitch about the Matrix is that the makers didn't learn anything from MIB.
A page a minute, boys.
And don't make the watchers sit through any exposition that runs longer than it takes an illiterate to scan an 8 1/2 by 11 comic book page.

I also couldn't figure out why the Matrix would let them see a hardwired rotary dial phone in a digitally camouflaged world. Since all the prettiness was wrapped around ugliness and ruins, why, during the final fight scene, were the tenement walls streaming data?
You can't stand on the second floor of nothing.

cf. Marvin and the Tank...

Bladerunner was a great movie, almost science fact now though!!

and I think thats what makes really good sci-fi for me anyway... the possibility that it is all just around the corner..

what about Silent Running.. surely a great bit of Sci-fi, War of the Worlds, The time machine....

as an aside , where is the boundary between science fiction and fantasy??

In one magic is called magic and you really don't have to explain how it works, while in the other magic is called science and you have to have some excuse for it.

"Silent Running" was a good movie. The fact that it involved science fiction was secondary.

I always thought "Apocalypse Now" was a bad sic-fic movie.
It has a lot in common with the first LOTR movie and that Sean Connery vehicle "Outland".

Bladerunner was confusing to me then. I had never seen anything like it in the theatre. It was dark and mean and it had that goofy voice-over like "Magnum, P.I."
My Grandmother went to see it with us and she had no idea what was going on. Like Master Chiun, she thought soap operas were poetry.

I haven't even seen the new Planet of the Apes. A trailer was enough to put me off.

Silent Running with Bruce Dern is possibly one of the greatest sf movies ever produced. I first saw it when I was about 10 and I cried for the little robot on his own in the greenhouse at the end.

Logan's Run? (though the book was better)

The Navigator?

Being John Malkovich??

Worst:
Starship Trooper

Best:
The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Man Who Fell to Earth

Book I would love to see as a film but it won't ever happen:
Stranger in a Strange Land

The day the earth stood still... great movie,

but i think the thread on re reading the beginning, was having a go at modern film makers, and I have to say on the whole I agree that modern directors are mostly vapid wannabes who do sci-fi in the hope of making a cult film and thereby enhancing themselves to godlike status, or aam I just taking this all too seriously.

Probably.

A moving picture is a moving picture, series of still images (well, not shot on video, but...) that are not real.

Even so-called investigative reportage on film, or documentaries, are not all real. The ability to edit and to reduce time to a few seconds allows even on-the-spot reportage to have an unreal quality.

Directors who make good sic-fic films consistently are in the minority precisely because it requires a level of education and thought that they can then skillfully transmit to the audience.

Unfortunately, Wood Allen's "Sleeper" displayed much more thought than many of the movies in the past few decades.

New directors have to make crap. That's how they learn their trade.
"THX-1138" and "Dark Star" were crap, but the directors didn't try to rise too much above it. They did the best they could with what they had.
Unfortunately, that doesn't explain "Alien" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or the recent spate of meteor and comet films.

I like the Trancers films. Jack Deth is cool.
I think of the Bond films as slick sic-fic.
Which means the Flint films are a better version, as well as "Casino Royale" and "The President's Analyst".

The sic-fic films of the seventies mostly had a leaden quality. "Look, we're serious!"
Which is why "Futureworld" and "Westworld" stank when they could have been fun. But I still think Yul Brynner was inspired casting and he got a check for doing nothing much but walking around looking mean.

I've always liked "Damnation Alley". It's slick, it's cheap, it's stupid and it's icky!

I didn't critizise Star Wars just to be cool. I am just annoyed at how many people seem to think that is the movie that defines the genre of science fiction. Without being science fiction.

Here is my definition of sci-fi:
A story where the plot is dependent on future technology, extrapolations of present technology or scientific principles.

For example showing what kind of implications a future technology could have on society. (Like Gattaca)It is not about trying to predict the future. (So Jules Verne is NOT the best sci-fi writer) And putting ray guns into a western doesn't make it sci-fi. Or light sabers into a fairytale.

And I do like AI, except for the ending. Whatever went wrong there? Was that where Spielberg took over from Kubrick?

I thought the Matrix was a cool movie. I guess there might have been other writers that have done similar things, but none has illustrated it in quite that way. And I don't think Ghost in the Shell or Dark City could be considered similar. But I've never really read any cyberpunk, so I can't say anything about that. And besides, Descartes beat the Matrix with about 300 years didn't he?

But Xanatic, your definition of skiffy excludes that old standby - the alternative history story.

Take Philip K Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle' for example. The story is set at the same time as it was written, but in a different reality where the Germans won the Second World War. So Dick extrapolated a new present based on an alternative past.

And Gattaca isn't really about future technology, it's about eugenics - which as a theory is alive and well today, and has been attempted by crude methods in the past (and probably is at the present too). Give us five years and we will have the tools to start a eugenics progam in the same way as described in Gattaca, but the point is not the ability, but the intent. The question Gattaca is supposed to leave you with is not 'could we?', but rather 'should we?'. Is it possible for a person to be greater than what their DNA says they will be? And if it is, is it therefore right to discriminate on the basis of their DNA?

John Brunner's book 'Stand on Zanzibar', which explores these ideas more deeply, with the added point that once the world starts to become overcrowded only the genetically 'good' will be allowed to reproduce, is my favourite skiffy book. Though I would hate for it to be made into a film. It's far too complicated a book for that - it just wouldn't work on screen.


Geggs

Well, I also think alternative history doesn't really fit into any catgories. Except perhaps Fantasy.

It is true that we have had eugenics before. But that was in a sort of active way. Everybody lived, unles we decided to kill off the weaker ones. While with gene technology creating superhumans could become a standard part of pregnancy. Gene technology could have some consequences, that would make eugenics very rampant. Here in Malaysia every commercial block has something about a food additive that will make your kid smarter/stronger/more musical. Imagine what will happen when they get to sit and fiddle around with the genes of their children.

As for the "could we?" and "should we?". As mentioned in the Jules Verne part, sci-fi is not about saying "could we?". It is exactly about saying, "if we could, should we do it and what consequences could it have?"

Look, I got post 100