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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.)
no subject
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...)
no subject
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.