"What happened to "Why is the SciFi Channel what it is?"" Topic

The entire topic titled "Why is the SciFi Channel what it is?" (id=155746) just disappeared seconds after I read it. It was active and had new 20 posts in the last 12 hours.

I'm just wondering whether it disappeared due to a bug in the system or because an admin censored it.

thanks

Abducted by aliens?

"I'm just wondering whether it disappeared due to a bug in the system or because an admin censored it."

There is only one admin – Bill. I had not read the thread, but it is possible Bill nuked it because it was about a subject that is outside the scope of these fora.

I would imagine Bill nuked it.

From space, as it is the only way to be sure.

If it was on the regular boards rather than the Plus area then it didn't belong there and Bill probably got rid of it. I just checked and it wasn't moved to TMP Plus, although I seem to recall that Bill said that was impossible to do at present.

It seems like there have been more news/entertainment posts on the minatures/gaming boards of late.

I started that topic, and the editor sent me a message saying he got rid of it because it wasn't in tmp plus.

Oh well. I put it on the SF discussion board, and thought it was a perfectly legitimate sf topic, because it was about the philiosophy of the network it general, rather than any specific show, but, I am not running this McDonalds, so it isn't up to me.

It wasn't an SF topic as such, since you could say the same thing about MTV. It was, however, a topic about something which is covered by the Broadcast Entertainment forum, which lurks in the Plus boards. You could always start it again, I suppose.

I feel sorry for whoever was posting at the moment the thread was nuked. They're now in front of their computer in a room with no doors, trapped on their own private internet, forever.

Andrew

Shouldn't the Devil's Whore topic, interesting though it is, go the same way?

Doug

Hey! I think we need a new board to discuss which topics go on which boards!

Not having read it, I will attempt an answer anyway.
It is owned by NBC. The name "Sci-fi Channel" is just a handy thing to use when convenient.
(Here I am assumng that there was a complaint about ECW.) NBC and WWE have always had a cosy relationship. USA is owned by NBC. If NBC would make more money running "House" reruns on USA then two wrestling shows, then a handy spot for ECW is the Sci-Fi channel.

By the way, I can remember when "true" science fiction fans LOATHED the term "Sci-Fi". It reeked of low brow fantasy disguising itself as science fiction. In other words, Star Trek and Star Wars. As usual, Gresham's Law applies. As it was explained in a Dortmunder novel, "The bad driives out the good ."

All the Good Stuff™ on the Sci-Fi channel isn't really science fiction anyway. It's space opera. Even (and especially) the stuff I like, like Stargate and Battlestar Galactica.

John the OFM "By the way, I can remember when "true" science fiction fans LOATHED the term "Sci-Fi". It reeked of low brow fantasy disguising itself as science fiction."

John, here's the thing man, in two parts:

1. If its got muscular guys with wind blown hair (wind blown even on board a spaceship) shooting brightly colored beams of light out of their guns at other guys who are dressed up like giant insects, its science fiction.

2. Harlan Ellison can go pound salt.

Hope that clears it up.

BTW: How anybody who wrote "A Boy and His Dog" can consider anybody else' work to be "lowbrow" is beyond me.

Who brought up Harlan Elison?
Back in the Day, that was EVERYBODY's opinion. Not mine, though, as I considered EVERYBODY to be pompous blowhards. FIAWOL and all that.

Your #1 is not science fiction, but space opera. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Star Wars is NOT science fiction. It's space opera, and I love it. At least I love the first movie.

By the way, I also love "A Boy and His Dog". I HATE Dangerous Visions.

John the OFM "Your #1 is not science fiction, but space opera."

Nope. Hard science fiction.

Blowing hair on space ships is the result of a nanite infused hair gel and thus hard sc-fi.

coryfromMissoula "Blowing hair on space ships is the result of a nanite infused hair gel and thus hard sc-fi."

See? Here, have a cold one.

American Heritage Dictionary says:

science fiction
n. A literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background.

Note the background reference. It seems, IMHO, like those folks who allegedly once said space opera != scifi have at least som epassing commonality with the people who today like to claim that Warhammer 40,000 is not a real wargame…

BTW: Blowing hair on spaceships is really the result of the life support blowers being set to "HI" – being that this a drain on ship's power, it should be discouraged, lest it interfere with operation of the shields or energy weapons arrays.

Z

"Nope. Hard science fiction."

If they are of heroic visage, chest hair blowing in the breezes found upon the high, uh, seas, sword (on a starship) visible at their side, then it is probably not the science that is hard. Welcome to poorly disguised romance, soapy space opera, etc.

"Hard SF" doesn't split infinitives on every page.

Almost nothing being published right now is "Hard SF". Most of it is gun porn, which is not the same thing. The closest to Hard SF the theaters have seen this decade was probably "A.I."

Harlan Ellison may be a caustic old retrobate, but he's also one of the last of that breed of SF writer. He has every right to be annoyed at the current state of "science fiction". Campbellian SF is all but dead.

I've yet to figure out how they work. They must be some of the most stupid and vacuous humans on the planet. Let's see: cancel Dresden Files -- green light Cha$e. Yeah.

Harlan is brought up because he invented the term "skiffy" I believe. He was contemptuous of the phrase "Sci-Fi" and used skiffy to lampoon those who would equate 'low brow' SF stuff with 'true' SF.

(See how I use SF instead of Sci-fi? Nuff said).

Walt

Farstar, off the top of my head, Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter both write pretty hard SF. OK, so it's only three authors. There are more, I'm sure, in Waterstones.

Mind you, scientific plausibility doesn't necessarily equal good writing, as Frank herbert or Iain M. Banks can tell you. :)

Actually, Reynolds has proven, repeatedly, that it's possible to write hard SF, space opera and horror, all in the one book.

Back when, people called the stuff with rayguns and diesel-powered starships "Science Fiction". Then other people decided to co-opt this term to just mean "hard" science fiction. Those sorts of people still try as hard as they can to redefine the term, while the rest of the world says "whatever".

Those sorts of people still try as hard as they can to redefine the term, while the rest of the world says "whatever".

Standard specialization of language within a profession or area of interest.

Hmmm, all this explains Gundam 00 starting on the Sci-fi Channel next week.

Giant human piloted robots used in a war is still considered sci-fi right?

It is below Sci-Fi, and well below SF.

Not only is the character's hair windblown and voluminous, it is spiky and long and of various colours. It stays that way even after they take off their helmets.

It is anime. But it is cool.

"Giant human piloted robots used in a war is still considered sci-fi right?"

Sci-fi? Yes.

SF? Not so much. There are hints of it through the Gundam setting, but mostly the many and various Gundam shows are space opera.

Giant robots are not automatically Sci-fi. There are a couple well known shows that are clearly more Fantasy, and a few borderline cases. What draws them into "SF" is not that there are giant robots vs not, but rather what the stories are like. In Gundam, the stories are mostly straight up war stories. There is more "SF" going on around the advancing presence of the Newtypes and how they are dealing with (and being dealt with) in the context of war. The Mobile Suits are just window dressing.

Hard SF (or Campbell's "Speculative Fiction" for that matter) in anime is rare, just as it is rare in American movies, because flashy tales with big heroes and explosions sell ad space. Some of Masamune Shiro's works (Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell) are on that short list, as well as Akira, Planetes, and a scattering of others.

So the original post was deleted for not belonging here but now this topic has made it most of the day. Why?

Tony G.

So, space opera is not science fiction..? Even given that I've often found science fiction to apparently be the genre ghetto with the most subghettoes (after metal music, of course), this is a new one…

Depends on who you talk to.

I tend to use "Science Fiction" as the general label.

Within that general category (that excludes those settings traditionally called "Fantasy" but little else) I consider the following labels. Most of these have fuzzy boundaries, or are not mutually exclusive.

"Hard SF"
"SF"
"Speculative Fiction" (aka "Campbellian SF")
"Military SF"
"Sci-Fi"
"Space Opera"
"Science Fantasy"

Some of these follow their own particular set of "rules", such as the Hard SF tendency to stretch the Laws of Physics as little as possible, and often clearly define where that boundary has been crossed.

Others set their Physics breaks out, but feel free to have as many as they need. Still others wear the trappings of technology, but don't bother to explain it or attempt to keep it within known bounds, and may not really need it in the first place.

Speculative Fiction is that which uses technology as a backdrop (at least) but seeks to extrapolate what effects the technology will have on the people and cultures that possess and use it. "Technology" in this case can also mean any of the usual SF tropes that are considered physics breakers, such as psionic powers. The very nature of the story being told depends on the presence of this trope or technology, making the story itself very difficult to tell in other genres or circumstances. That is what defines Campbellian Speculative Fiction as separate from Space Opera (though ironically the two can be mixed, such as in MS Gundam or, apropos to this forum, in most gaming).

Space Opera is simply one of the many classic tales set in space. In other settings it could be told as a horse opera, soap opera, war diary, etc. In space opera we find the truth of the line "SF isn't a type of story, but is just another setting".

Military SF is generally a subset of Space Opera, in that it is a set of familiar tales set amongst higher technology than we now employ. It also seems to be the majority of what is being published in the US these days. Some of it is even good reading.

Hmm. The terminology seems to be pretty different hereabouts.

For starters, "speculative fiction" is generally used as an umbrella term or a superset including what is traditionally considered "fantasy", what is traditionally considered "science fiction" and the more vague and less easy to categorize works (such as "magic realism") wich involve significant departures from "consensus reality". It's pretty much everything that is not considered "realistic fiction" (an oxymoron in itself), in other words.

Also, I don't think the Ellisonian demarcation line between "real" science fiction and "watered down populistic" scifi has never really managed to work itself into the local dicourse, to some dismay from hard line science fiction afficionadoes.

Owned by NBC…..

That explains a lot.

To "physically paraphrase/quote" my 15 year old daughter's most derisive gesture:

"W"

Gracias,

Glenn

For starters, "speculative fiction" is generally used as an umbrella term or a superset including what is traditionally considered "fantasy", what is traditionally considered "science fiction" and the more vague and less easy to categorize works (such as "magic realism") wich involve significant departures from "consensus reality". It's pretty much everything that is not considered "realistic fiction" (an oxymoron in itself), in other words.

While I could see Campbell's Speculative Fiction (he coined and defined the term, as I understand it) being applied to fantasy settings, its origins are in SF.

I don't know that the US market uses a blanket term, aside from lumping both in with the overall label of "Fiction". Book stores and libraries (on the Dewey system) both tend to separate fiction into four or five groupings aside from "Young Adult". You'll see General Fiction, Romance, and "Science Fiction and Fantasy". Some will separate the Science Fiction and Fantasy, others will pull the "Literature & Classics" out of General Fiction. Horror also makes a common appearance as a separate category. Twenty years ago, book stores also tended to separate the "gun porn serials" (Mack Bolan, The Destroyer, etc) out on their own regardless of other genre, but this has apparently gotten less common.

We need more gun porn, now more than ever.

"W"=whatever=kids still using this? Old skool Chicago 1993….

GypsyComet 21 Nov 2008 8:36 a.m. PST:
"While I could see Campbell's Speculative Fiction (he coined and defined the term, as I understand it) being applied to fantasy settings, its origins are in SF"

Historically, the Finnish genre literature of the last 25 years or so tends towards stuff that's a bit hard to categorize easily. I suppose Campbell might've approved some of it under his original definition, much of it probably not. Many were "new weird" or perhaps even "slipstream" before the terms were coined.

I think the term speculative fiction was lifted up to the status it looks to enjoy when genre authors began to gain mainstream recognition and wanted to shed the labels of fantasy (largely seen as subset of "young adult" literature at the time) and science fiction (the "geeky" stuff no "normal" person would touch), but were not able pass their stuff off as pure mainstream. So some term to describe these was required, at least by us who still dwell in the genre ghetto (-;)

I think the term speculative fiction was lifted up to the status it looks to enjoy when genre authors began to gain mainstream recognition and wanted to shed the labels of fantasy (largely seen as subset of "young adult" literature at the time) and science fiction (the "geeky" stuff no "normal" person would touch), but were not able pass their stuff off as pure mainstream.

With a good enough agent, just about anything can be classified as just "Fiction". See it in the US all the time, as two of the most productive perpetrators are well known horror writers. A fair bit of soft-core porn gets elevated to just "Fiction" as well.

Well, they have sort of managed that by two means: leaving off the most obvious scifi and fantasy tropes, and by simply getting published by the big (locally, that is) publishing houses in the first place.

These publishers certainly seem to bend rather over backwards to avoid using terms "science fiction" or "fantasy" with the likes of Johanna Sinisalo (whose Finlandia award winning novel "Troll" incidentally was fairly recently published in USA AFAIK) so that the sales won't get hurt by the "genre stigma".

The literature critics tend to let the cat out of the bag tho, especially if they happen to find some other fault with the books…

But, like I alluded, speculative fiction (in the sense of being a local umbrella term) is mostly used by fandom and the few critics who have sneaked into mainstream media while retaining their love for speculative fiction.