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Thursday, January 19, 2006

Neo-SciFi

Star Wars is over. Did you notice? This leaves a big hole in the universe of new SciFi content. I don't have TV, so I'm certainly not up on all the latest offerings but I do see a glimmer of a trend. I'll call it Neo-SciFi. Why? well because I want to coin a popular term (though it already seems in danger of being shortened to Neo-Fi). But I digress.

What is this Neo-SciFi you speak of? Its SciFi but with a new direction. Old SciFi is often typified by bad cliches:

  • False Drama - "Gads the Robo-Mutant-Aliens are attacking, again!".
  • One Dimensional Characters - the Dashing Idealistic Captain, the Buxom Nurse/Doctor/Psychic, or the Brash Loner Rebel
  • The Magic Episode Reset Button - "Last week I got my stomach blown out, but this week I'm great!".
  • Idiotic and Impotent Bad Guys - Week after week supposedly dangerous bad guys unload massive stock piles of ammunition and take heavy casualties; all while not putting a scratch in the good guys.
  • Next Time on a Special Blossom - Uh oh, all the episodes are mostly the same! Better throw in a moral lesson episode. It's wrong to borrow without asking. "Glue, I need Glue!".
  • Laser Pellets - Space fighters fly like jets, there is lots of sound in space, everyone and everything has a laser/photon/blaster on it. Lasers shoot pellets instead of beams, All planets are just like earth, all aliens are just people with bad acne.
  • Uh, Its The Radiation - All this crazy technology, but because the gewiz-a-ma-hicky could solve everything and leave you with no episode; either we have to conveniently forget we have it or its magically disabled by an ion storm.

It's no wonder that female readers (and a good fraction of the males) probably stopped reading as soon as I said Star Wars. Further, its no wonder I don't have a date tonight.

Neo-SciFi is more drama and less SciFi. Like a good drama its motivated by characters, the interplay between them, the choices they make, the consequences of those choices, and how that forms a feed-back loop to the characters themselves. Further, in a good drama this is largely grounded by some gist of reality. This new trend is typified by Serenity/Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and to a lesser extent Enterprise.

My blurb Here is unlikely to convert anyone. But If your on the edge about sci-fi you might want to add the first season of Battlestar Galactica and the Serenity movie to your Netflix cue.

Oh, and when the first Oscar for "Best Neo-SciFi" is given out you'll remember that you read it here first.

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# posted by Max : 1/19/2006 06:17:00 PM  
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