shanewalker said:
...[Heroes]...and it's a comic book series. Fun, but...As some others have said in previous posts--Mind Control, Battlestar Galactica and Eureka are pretty much the only things worth watching (I've given many other things a shot--and they always slip into campy wastes of time).
It's hard to find any show more campy and comic book than Eureka. Just about every science cliche in existence - starting with long equations, and scientists who only invent huge pieces of hardware that use vast amounts of electricity (never anything like acrylic plastic or aerogel) and are
always circular - did that start with Stargate ?
Sapient said:
Good science fiction always is about how people are in the here and now. The science fiction setting is just a tool to explore the nature of humanity.
If you read any good science fiction, you'll find it to be more like BG. A lot of adult drama and relationships and only a sprinkling of technology and high concept mis-en-scene to ground it in the genre. The core of the good solid sci-fi stuff is always character development, inner turmoil/soulsearching and timeless human conflicts (Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, William Gibson, Frederick Pohl's "Gateway" series, etc.). It's the fantasy/adventure stuff that's made of gadgets and action sequences ad naseum.
I
really disagree with all this. You've left out the core true science fiction which is a third type.
Of course, the adventure SF has always been the big seller - starting with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon back 70 years ago.
But, the fiction that uses a different time-and-place to allow the writer to explore our own society, only arrived in the late 60's, as part of the general questioning of society.
Prior to that, true high-concept science fiction explored
different possibilities. This is admittedly rare in TV and Movies, because it is not very appealing to Average Joe, and so has limited commercial appeal. About the only example I can think of, off-hand, is
Babylon 5 - which explores the possiblity of a galaxy filled with truly different alien species (unlike the aliens in all other TV shows and films, that are merely human characters in the bodies of aliens). To its credit, Star Trek occasionally had episodes of this sort of SF, in fact, the show had every different type of SF.
PS Examples of this sort of SF, in novels, would be Robert Sheckley's "Mindswap", Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination", and especially Brian Aldiss's "Cryptozoic" - that explores the idea that human beings perceive time in the opposite direction from its actual direction of travel...
