Before starting let me tell you that I'm an avid science fiction afficionado. Books, movies, tv series, comics, I like them all. Coming to Bucharest when I started studying at the university was like entering a candy store as a kid: all these antique bookshops with cheap, old and good books I finally was able to get my hands on. Because you see, in Onesti, my hometown, getting science fiction books was kind of impossible. The local library carried a couple of old books from Nemira and from time to time you were able to find one or two from in the book stores. You had to resort to 'aunt Ioana's son who comes from Bucharest for Easter' or to other science fiction fans. And they weren't that many.
Now, onto my gripe. Let's face it: we, the science fiction fans, don't get too much love from the networks. We're probably too few to generate the desired ratings and generally we're smart, which means that we're not going to watch everything which has a spaceship in it.
With the big screen, we're better. We get our share of science fiction movies. They don't come in big numbers, like the usual retarded teen comedies or the cheap horror flicks. But they come. Are they any good? Well, most of them aren't. But this is not about the big screen.
You see, I have a problem. I don't have a lot of new stuff to watch. The usual suspects, I've seen them and nowdays I'm searching for old science fiction flicks which I saw when I was a kid and which I can look at today without saying to myself: "Oh yes, now he sees the awful truth and next the monster comes out and he shoots it 4 times and... Wait, why am I watching this movie?". My problems would be solved if I was a trekkie since there's soooo much stuff to see, so many series and spinoffs.
But alas, I am not.
Now imagine my happiness when I stumbled upon Masters of SciFi, an ABC series hosted by Stephen Hawking. It's produced by the same guys who did Masters of Horror. I was thrilled. Each episode is standalone, based on a story by a notable sf author. I guess that we all have our list of small novellas which we would like to be transposed to the screen, but we know it'll never happen or, if it will, it will be streched and bloated to fit the required lenght. And butchered in most cases. But this has potential because it's directed by guys who directed Star Trek for example, has Oscar nominated actors in it, screenplays are written by guys who wrote for Outer Limits.
How about a screenplay written by Harlam Ellison based on one of his books? An episode based on a story by Robert Heinlein? Sounds good? Well, you know what they say about things which are too good to be true, don't you?
Remember what happened to good shows like Carnivale or Firefly? They got cancelled. And this is what is going to happen to this series. Because, as the idiot who runs ABC puts it, it was "very uneven" and "a little bit problematic". No shit, Sherlock. Of course it is for the brain dead people who watch Wife swap, National Bingo Night or Shaq's Big Challenge, truely remarcable and intelligent achievements in tv entertainment.
It was delayed for an year. There are six episodes, but only four will air. It started a couple of days ago and it airs in one of the worst time slots available: Saturday from 10 PM. That's like saying to the producers: very nice show you guys did, we're sure your friends and relatives will enjoy it since they're the only ones who'll watch it. With enough ratings we might see the other two, but it's not probably going to happen. Originally it was supposed to have thirteen episodes.
Oh well, at least Futurama is coming. :)
ABC and Fox, please die. And now, back to the classics.
P.S. Here's a small treat: the pilot for Galaxy Beat, a space opera comedy which didn't get picked up. Very funny stuff.
Comments
It's often said that Science Fiction is the literature of change. When a culture is undergoing a lot of changes due to scientific advances and technological developments, and expects to undergo more, it's hardly surprising if stories about these changes become popular as a way of expressing people's feelings (optimistic or otherwise) about change. Note that the changes may be in our ability to control the world, or just in our understanding of it. For example, some "post-holocaust" stories, such as Wyndham's The Chrysalids (also known as Rebirth), portray cultures that understand and control less of the world than we do; the scientific element consists of our understanding of their world, and of how it arose out of our world. Other stories offer future technologies that we can hope for based on present-day science, but haven't developed yet, such as fusion-powered spaceships. Yet others go beyond this to dazzle us with future science that differs from what is now believed, but they retain some recognisable elements of the world we live in, so we can at least believe that the world depicted in the story might some day come to be.
This leads up to my loose definition of ScF as fiction set in a world that differs from our everyday world in a way that importantly involves science or technology. Some people add that ScF should make you think about possible future worlds and alternatives thereto, but I'm quite glad to have some fiction that's purely entertainment. If history is any guide, there will always be plenty of ScF that asks questions (and usually supplies ready-made answers) about changes in the world and the futures to which they may lead.
About a year after inscribing the above onto my hard disk, I was reading an introduction by Isaac Asimov to a novel by a younger author and found this:
A science fiction story must be set against a society significantly diferent from our own -- usually, but not necessarily, bcause of some change in the level of science and technology -- or it is not a science fiction story.
He was contrasting ScF with detective stories, where criminals are caught and order is restored:
... the science fiction story destroys our own comfortable society. The science fiction story does not deal with the restoration of order, but with change and, ideally, with continuing change ... we leave our society and never return to it
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For your information, AXN is airing this series mondays, at 9 PM.
And it's very good...
Is this series still on the air?
Justin
I dont think it is still airing in AXN anymore. Ive been looking. Great post by the way!
Gud work dear!..but i missed so many shows meanwhile,cld make it with my busy schedule.Can any one tell me on what days AXN airs this show?
True sci-fi should be set in the future in a world different to our own, but what is fiction now could well be fact in a few years time, our technologies are changing at an incredible rate and things which may seem fiction now will surly become fact over time.
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