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

Lucky you

It seems to be coming back to ethics, some scientists don't bother with could or should they just want to do (and then worry about the after effects).Even if told not to, some one always will just to be the first

Some times watching sci fi you can get a feel as to what the future may be and sort if see the effect it will have. If it makes people think and talk isn't that a good thing

(just a little blue)

Helelou

Which I think is what is good about science fiction, it gives us some time to think about solutions to problems that might arise. We could have had cloning laws 50 years ago if politicians read science fiction. Instead of trying to implement them at the last possible moment.

absolutely!!!!!

I would just like to link to www.badastronomy.com which is a site that talks about the movies which have a wrong use of astronomy. Like Armageddon.

"Which I think is what is good about science fiction, it gives us some time to think about solutions to problems that might arise. We could have had cloning laws 50 years ago if politicians read science fiction. Instead of trying to implement them at the last possible moment."

that is so true!

i don't understand why scifi, esp print scifi has such a bad reputation. but then i've been pretty selective in what i have read. is there a lot of cr*p scifi around as well? (novels i mean, i know about the films already)

There is a difference between Sci-Fi and Space Opera, undoubtably. Star Wars is a pinnacle example of Space Opera, 2001 arguably the same for Sci-fi.

One thing I have a problem with is those who demand that a film accurately fit current scientific thinking. As in real life, I prefer the science to sit in the background, without needing to be explained too much. I know how to operate this PC but I have no idea what is going on inside to make it work. As long as the "science setting" is crucial to the plot, it's Sci-Fi whether the science is explained fully or not. If it's a standard (for example) revenge plot that happens to be set on a space ship then it's Space Opera.

"i don't understand why scifi, esp print scifi has such a bad reputation"

Snobbery. Sci-Fi is considered a "juvenile" form of writing, and so is not taken seriously. Sci-Fi novels with a good reputation (Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", Orwell's "1984", Huxley's "Brave New World", Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano") are usually given "alternative" genres so that critics don't have to handle the fact they are sci-fi. For example "1984" can become "a political novel of the future".

Actually, we were better off when sciffy was in the pulps and paperback originals and your folks were just glad you were reading a book rather than a comic book.

I read on another site yesterday, Strange Horizons, I believe it was, that there are courses that college literature instructors take to learn how to 'teach' science fiction.

Pleh!

Some books are good for their generation. Some transcend time and place and circumstances. Good writing is subjective.

I've never read what I was supposed to. I'll take suggestions, but no one can make me finish a book I can't stand.
I refused to read 'The Martian Chronicles' in High School. The teacher was confused, but he let me hang around the reading lab for a week or two while the class went through it.
I don't like Bradbury's books. Some of his short stories are interesting.
In the end, I had to take a test on the book, for a grade.
I got a C.
Bradbury can be so predictable.

The bad reputation kept the sociologists away.
Vonnegut to this day is confused about why the hippies and then the college professors took to him.
Once the academics and Hollywood have you by the short hairs, then "you've lost that loving feeling".

I recently got my mitts back on my copy of Philip K Dick's (I share a birthday with him, fact fans!) "Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said" and started reading it again on the train home.

Dick was an example of a cross-genre writer. He's pidgeonholed as sci-fi, but he is also a spiritual and surrealist writer to a great extent. I last read the book when I was 22 and "mentally disordered" to some degree. I'd forgotten how good it is.

And my friend never read it, and is a pudding for doing so. Yes, fords, this means you

I've never been able to read Dick for long.
I keep sensing this aura around his words and I get the feeling that when I look into his pages, he is looking back at me.

Then I close the book and hide it where it can't see me!

Bladerunners 'funky' voiceover is, of course, a harking back to the hard boiled fiction of the forties and fifties. The film, as made by Ridley Scott is a masterpiece. The Director's Cut should be required viewing for anybody who thinks they understand SF cinema.

As mangled by the studio and released into cinmea's, it's still pretty good buthas a tendency to treat the audience like idiots and has that silly tacked on happy ending.

American filmakers seem to require a happy ending, they seem to think that viewers who don't go away happy aren't satisfied no matter how improbable. AI is a case in point, it should have ended about twenty minutes before it did.
( My hubbys fine-I'm not blue anymore)

Helelou

Film makers aren't the problem, it's the studio's and their assumptions about audience expectations and requirements...

Yes...they think we'er all idiots!!

Twelve Monkeys seemed to have survived the studios pretty much intact though.

What I like about that film is that it never really reaches an answer, it just changes the nature of the question.


Geggs

Gilliam is left alone by the studios because they don't understand him, but he gets rave reviews (studios like to back at least one 'arty film per season, just to keep their hands in), and he wins awards, which they like as well.

They learnt the lesson the hard way with brazil, which was set to be butchered until it won the oscarfor best original screenplay...

I'm afraid Gilliam is the token none-lowest common denominator film maker, just there to be pointed at when Hollywood is accused of never stretching formula. Which is a shame, as he could be so much more, and if the studoes didn't just rely on semi-tame types, there might be more space for new off-the-wall talent.

Actually, Blues Shark,
I've never seen a copy of the unadulterated Brazil.

Apparently, in the US, the real version is hard to come by.

Test audiences can make one's life interesting, too.
Some film makers and distributors go to the trouble of running test showings at conventions or inviting folks that they know are knowledgeable about the genre.
An unreceptive audience can make a good movie look bad.

We avoided AI.
We avoided "The Bicentennial Man".
We've avoided "Gattaca" and I wish we'd avoided "Johnny Mnemonic".
The "Thirteenth Floor" would have been a good one to skip, also.

"Twelve Monkeys" seemed too much like "The Fisher King" part two.

"Brazil" worked because it had that kind of "Max Headroom" vibe that was possible then, going forward while going retro while parodying the whole "Odessa Steps" self-referencing of the film auteurs while still managing to tell a simple and direct story of sincere confusion in the middle of clear choices.

There is horror in certainty.

I have read with interest recently about a documentary that was made of Gilliam's failed attempt to film "Don Quixote".

That's just a little too close to "Baron Munchausen" for comfort.

What's he going to do next, "Napoleon, the Early Years"?

I just want to defend The Core. I haven't seen the movie, but someone on here claimed it wasn't true that the Earth's EM-field shields us from solar radiation. All the ozone layer does is keep the UV-light at bay. But other radiation from the sun, such as high energy electrons, is kept back by our EM-field. And if that was to disappear, mutation rates would go up quite a bit I think.

Actually the EM-field sort of guides the electrons around, untill they reach the spot where the field comes out. IE, the poles. And when the electrons go speeding into the atmosphere, they create some nice lights, which we call aurora.

I haven´t read all the backlog, so I don´t really know if anyone has already made this point:

People ranting about scifi movies being merely fiction, always reminds me of the simpsons-episode where Homer gives those three nerds a place to sleep in his garage. The three become very rich and start to do what they always wanted to do. One of them makes a sci-fi movie, complete with no sound and explosions in space, without any means of fast-transportation so that the spaceships just sits in the middle of the screen for ages and so on.

The only guy who stays in the cinema is the comic-book-guy.

I am not caling all of you nerds, geeks or what ever. But, hey, they are movies and they are fiction, so loosen up a bit. I´d rather be concerned with holes in the plot than in the science.

There are (were) several directors in hollywood, who could get away with an artsy movie. Kubrick for instance. I know that the last 20 minutes of AI are cr*p, but apparently they were directed by Spielberg. But at least Kubrick got away with 2001 and Clockwork Orange.

I don´t know why hollywood is so much into happy endings. Of course I do expect them sometimes, especially when watching a Disney-movie, but in a really dark sci-fi-flick? No, not really. I wouldn´t go that far and say the studios regard us as idiots. But I´d say that they try to get as many as possible to go and see the movie. And a sweet happy end might appeal to more people...

Chili