Comments on: Four Reasons I Love Science Fiction (as Experienced Through Prometheus)

By: jaromir

jaromir — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 05:29:03 +0000

IMO the secrete to making Sci-fi successful to the average viewer is to tricking them into not knowing that they are watching sci-fi. As the poster above me mentioned, Groundhog Day is a perfect example of this method.

I find that even the television show “community” is sci-fi at it’s core.

I’m sure there is more examples of this, just not in the mood to find them.

cheers

By: Dolaction

Dolaction — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 20:07:45 +0000

Groundhog Day and Source Code are not conventional time travel, but they deal with reliving a strand of time over and over, which I find fascinating. I strive for a perfect day, just like the ones in those movies, and the message in groundhog day has stuck with me my entire life. Source Code added more of a scifi twist, but i argue that fantasy movies, while not considered scifi, effectively teach the same lessons.

By: RBourn

RBourn — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:06:23 +0000

I think the thing that keeps me coming back to SF is the level of pure creation involved in every piece. I have read some really bad SF before (some of the Star Wars books are terrible). But for me, the better ones allow a freedom of creation and a level of artificial construction of imaginary worlds, places, people and peoples that make SF very different from other genres.

For example, in general, most stories based in real life/modern day settings are relatively the same situations and people recombined in a different arrangement. To some extent this can be wildly different, like a kaliedoscope, but ultimately within limitations.

SF, by comparison, is like shattering that restriction and adding new, purely imaginary elements to traditional humans, and normal stuff. It allows us to ask questions that cannot be asked in other genres, and I’m drawn to that because it offers something that cannot really be acheived in most other styles of writing/film.

I just finished reading War of the Worlds, and I can really recommend the book H G Wells wrote, as it is one of the most interesting pieces of SF I have even encountered. His version of a “heat ray” is apparantly the first evident example in literature of energy weapons (it said it in the introduction of the book, feel free to disprove me). I find that fascinating.