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"We come in peace; shoot to kill"
This is what come of watching too much TV...
Most TV and movie sci-fi is really militaristic, isn't it?
Either it's about scientific exploration conducted by the military (Star Trek and Stargate) or it's about non-military characters getting sucked up into military conflicts (Farscape, Firefly, Babylon 5, etc). They're always having wars, these future people, aren't they?
Not that there isn't, obviously, a lot of historical precedent for this, not just the war thing but also the military being the element of first contact with newly discovered people -- due to governments being the entities primarily with the money to send explorers off to strange lands. But that's not *all* you've got. There are private entrepreneurs and adventure-seekers; there are resource development companies sending out sampling teams to remote places; there are anthropologists and missionaries and, of course, colonists.
This line of thought is kind of making me want to write SF that doesn't involve people shooting at each other as a regular plot point. Of course, Kismet's not really the place to begin, being all about the shooting.
Actually one of the things I like about the Stargate series is the way that the uneasy military/civilian relationship in the exploration teams is handled ... it's especially noticeable in Atlantis where there is distinct tension between the (approximately equally balanced) civilian/scientific and military elements of the expedition.
Still, it's interesting to get to thinking about it and realize that I can think of very few SF shows that don't have that military element at the forefront, either focusing on military characters at its core, or dealing with a large-scale military conflict. Well, there's Red Dwarf ... which is more of a comedy, really. But honestly, that can't be the only one! Can it?
EDIT: Aha, I *did* just think of another one ... Earth2, which was all about human colonists on an alien world. Sort of like Wagon Train in outer space (which I realize is how Battlestar Galactica -- the old one -- is usually described, but it fits Earth2 better).
God, I am such a geek. No wonder I never get anything done.
(Note: the title of this post is from a Weird Al Star Trek parody song, aptly misquoting Kirk.)
Most TV and movie sci-fi is really militaristic, isn't it?
Either it's about scientific exploration conducted by the military (Star Trek and Stargate) or it's about non-military characters getting sucked up into military conflicts (Farscape, Firefly, Babylon 5, etc). They're always having wars, these future people, aren't they?
Not that there isn't, obviously, a lot of historical precedent for this, not just the war thing but also the military being the element of first contact with newly discovered people -- due to governments being the entities primarily with the money to send explorers off to strange lands. But that's not *all* you've got. There are private entrepreneurs and adventure-seekers; there are resource development companies sending out sampling teams to remote places; there are anthropologists and missionaries and, of course, colonists.
This line of thought is kind of making me want to write SF that doesn't involve people shooting at each other as a regular plot point. Of course, Kismet's not really the place to begin, being all about the shooting.
Actually one of the things I like about the Stargate series is the way that the uneasy military/civilian relationship in the exploration teams is handled ... it's especially noticeable in Atlantis where there is distinct tension between the (approximately equally balanced) civilian/scientific and military elements of the expedition.
Still, it's interesting to get to thinking about it and realize that I can think of very few SF shows that don't have that military element at the forefront, either focusing on military characters at its core, or dealing with a large-scale military conflict. Well, there's Red Dwarf ... which is more of a comedy, really. But honestly, that can't be the only one! Can it?
EDIT: Aha, I *did* just think of another one ... Earth2, which was all about human colonists on an alien world. Sort of like Wagon Train in outer space (which I realize is how Battlestar Galactica -- the old one -- is usually described, but it fits Earth2 better).
God, I am such a geek. No wonder I never get anything done.
(Note: the title of this post is from a Weird Al Star Trek parody song, aptly misquoting Kirk.)
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Uhmm...Ever read Sheri S. Tepper? Not "slice of life" stuff...but refreshingly free of gratuitous gun-play.
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Books ... yeah ... it's not nearly so noticeable in sci-fi books. You're a lot more likely to get books that span the full range of human experience. And really, it's not as if I MIND the "explodey" factor ... it's just kind of startling when you think about it and realize that that's really all you see on TV. It's actually more dramatic when you contrast the TV situation against what you see in books, because there are a lot of good SF books that deal with subjects other than war and the military.
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I think it also comes from the fact that most SF involves interstellar travel, involving ships, and most people tend to think of the Navy when it comes to organized ships. Not that interstellar cruises and the like wouldn't happen, but if ever there's trouble - and most TV is going to be about Trouble on a big scale - the military would be called in, so...
Quantum Leap was SF TV of a sort, and no significant military presence to speak of (Al was an admiral but I believe the project was gov't-but-not-military funded?) And Alien Nation - no military there to speak of, and while it was a cop show it was as much social drama. In anime, Trigun has a lot of guns, but not much with the military...
(I also feel obliged to point out that Star Trekkin' isn't Weird Al's, I believe the group is called "The Firm"? but don't quote me on that ^^;)
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It may just be that *I* watch the wrong shows. :D Heh ... and yeah, Quantum Leap's a counter-example, and I've also thought of a few more -- maybe a lot more depending on how far you're willing to stretch the definition of science fiction. (Does one SF element make a sci-fi show? Is "Dead Like Me" sci-fi? "Invisible Man"? "Buffy"?)
Still, see my other answer below -- I think it's not that I mind what they have (I actually quite like most of the SF on TV), I just wonder why they don't have a slightly wider range. I agree with what you say about most people using the military/Navy metaphor for space travel. It's just a trifle frustrating that they don't think outside the box a little more. You could easily do an SF series about, say, life on a frontier planet, or a futuristic bounty hunter, or a team of resource developers exploring alien star systems.
What got me to thinking about it originally is noticing how much of a sense of wonder there tends to be in the Stargate series(es) -- the "Oh cool, we're on an alien world!" effect. And I got to wondering why you really *have* to have the grand space-alien war going on in the same series -- why you can't have a series that's just about a privately funded, non-military group of explorers, and why no one ever seems to do that on TV.
This is making me want to write such a series. :D
Maybe it's just 'cuz with something like Stargate, you get both -- the sense of wonder and character interaction for people who like that, and the big space battles and explosions for people who like that sort of thing (or people like me, who enjoy both). One series, double the fun!
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Yes, shows like Buffy or X-files or Lost, not sure what to classify them as, SF or fantasy or horror or something in between...especially given that while literary SF is traditionally grounded in science (sort of), screen SF often takes the inspiration for its fiction as much from fantasy as from science. Even putting aside the deliberate swords & sorcery of Star Wars, a warp engine might as well be magic. (And what category do superheros fall under?)
The wonder of exploring new worlds - that was one of the big draws of SG1 for me as well (...copious amounts of h/c in the series aside. heh.) It really reminded me of original Star Trek - and TNG to a lesser extent, but TOS especially was all about the "new life & new civilizations". Whether Starfleet was actually a military operation changed from episode to episode - there were times (at least in TNG, that I recall) that they pretty much flatly denied it was, despite all evidence to the contrary; it was supposed to be an exploratory organization first and foremost. And unlike TNG, TOS didn't have any major wars going on during the course of the series; they were in occasional conflict with Klingons and Romulans and such, but no ongoing threat like the Borg. (For that matter, I've never seen Lost in Space, but that wasn't a military ship, was it?)
But I understand what you're saying about thinking outside the box, how screen SF seems so limited in scope especially compared to the literary - the problem's probably compounded by the Buffy-type shows, too, in that people are inclined to think of those as a genre other than SF, and "science fiction" as strictly spaceships battling aliens & robots. Such that you sometimes hear things like BSG called "science fiction, with a human element" while that "human element" is in fact an integral part of science fiction to begin with, as far as I'm concerned.
Though I think the chances of non-military, non-action oriented SF shows are getting more likely. One, because I think it's becoming clearer that women are into SF, and everyone knows that we chicks only dig the touchy-feely non-exploding stuff :P So a female-aimed SF series (probably on WB. Or rather Wupn, or whatever they're going by ^^) would be more likely to be drama than action. There's also the matter of budget - with CGI, it's easier to set something on a convincing alien world at a cost low enough that the budget doesn't have to be justified by huge ratings-grabbing battles and explosions.
(And then there's the genre-jumping girl-show my sister's been plotting, with the gay space pirates...)
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SG1 always did remind me of TOS (my favorite of the various Treks, incidentally -- mostly because I liked the characters better, and the occasional h/c didn't hurt at all ^_^). There was a similar vibe to the two series, allowing of course for the fact that 40 years had passed between them and that audiences, including me, expect a little more realism from SF now.
Sometimes I do think that network execs are catching on to the female SF audience, with character-oriented (if still essentially action-based) shows like Stargate and Buffy. But those sorts of shows are still rare, and not really getting any more common -- it's like every once in a while, they'll hit the magic formula by accident and it'll develop a huge cult following, but they STILL don't know what they did to tap into that SF-starved female market, and ten or twenty years later, character-centric SF is still as rare as it ever was.
Not that I think men can't enjoy character interaction or need an explosion every ten minutes to keep them interested, of course. But I do suspect (based on my highly unbiased sample of the people I know ^_^) that women seek the character-centric stuff a lot more than men do. For me, at least, it's like the character interaction moments are the meat of the show and the explosions are just a nice bonus -- or, more accurately, an excuse for more character moments. :) And most shows are weighted too strongly towards the explosion end. All too often the characters seem to be merely reacting to a long string of external events without nearly enough of their internal life being shown ... if that makes any sense.
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I'm all for that - you write it, and I'll draw it... :)
Actually, it would be nice to see a comic series that played up to the sense of wonder of the best hard SF of the likes of Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter, without the military stuff that's usually put into space opera to charge things up. Rendezvous With Rama would make a fabulous comic (or film for that matter).
"Wagon Train to the Stars..." was how Gene Roddenberry originally sold Star Trek to the network.
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It's not that I have a problem with the media, say, glorifying violence (which I honest-to-God don't really think they do) or playing up the role of the military. I don't require my entertainment to be healthy for my brain -- I greatly enjoy action/adventure SF ... the TV/book/comic equivalent of popcorn and chocolate. For that matter, it's not as if you can't explore deep human truths or tell an engaging story set against the backdrop of war -- quite the opposite, actually. ... I'm just intrigued by the overall narrow scope of most television and movie sci-fi, and I wish they'd draw upon a wider range of human experience. As a writer, it makes me interested in casting my net a little wider -- seeking ground to explore that hasn't already been thoroughly mined by other writers, or new ways to tell old stories.
I thought the "Wagon Train to the stars" comment was for Battlestar Galactica. Stupid brain...
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There was also a brief, 6-episode, BBC series in 1973 called Moonbase 3 that dealt with, you guessed it, day to day life in a multi-cultural moonbase. The best episode was the final one, where contact was lost with Earth and, in the general paranoia that ensued, everyone came to believe that all life on Earth had been destroyed in some catastrophe. Much angst and scenes of suicide-contemplation followed...