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Tag Archive for Science Fiction

Poking Holes in Time

September 2, 2013 Uncategorized, Writing Comments Off on Poking Holes in Time

If you scratch a bit, like you do with a penny on a Lotto ticket, you can see something else.  Not winning numbers, but an underlying corruption.  A sense that the rebooted Starfleet is, in essence, a reflection of our own, modern-day society.  Sure the spaceships are bigger, the architecture more daring.  But the same essential flaws are there.  People and governments willing to do Bad Things for what they perceive is the Greater Good.  And, as much as I enjoyed the reboots, I think that something has been lost, or perhaps is simply getting subsumed in all the lens flare and flashy explosions.

Roddenbery’s Star Trek was about the best in us.  Not just that humanity evolved and matured between now and the shining future, but that we were *still* able to continue to overcome our internal and external conflicts.  Granted, Roddenbery’s future without pockets has been bagged on over the years, it still remains the only shining, hopeful future out there.  When StarWars hit the screens, then Blade Runner, the future got grittier.  Every film or show had rust under the paint and clouds in the sky.  Stories focused on doing “the best we can” as opposed to becoming the “best we can be”.  They tried a bit of that in Star:Trek, the Next Generation, and threw a bit more in during DS9 and Voyager, but it never quite stuck.  You didn’t watch Star Trek for the gritty “realism” or the dystopic adventure.  You watched it because it showed the potential.  It gave us a version of the future where we didn’t irrevocably f*ck everything up.

I worry a bit that the new generation of Star Trek writers is more interested in showing us the flaws, in exposing the impossibility of a Utopian society, than they are in building new stories in a world where it is not only possible, but that it is *probable* that people will do the Right Thing.

Wait, what did we just DO?

January 27, 2011 Uncategorized Comments Off on Wait, what did we just DO?

I was trolling through the “Juvie” books the other day, looking for something new for my 9yo son (Thing01).  I do this reasonably regularly, and I will freely admit, about half the juvie books I bring home get read by me first, or sometimes me only, since I occasionally pick out something that sounds really interesting to me, but for whatever reason, Thing01 doesn’t take a shine to it.  Really, its a win-win because otherwise I’d never get the chance to read books at all.

I ran across “Enders Game” by Orson Scott Card and I stopped.  My first throught was that someone had left it on the shelf when they changed their mind (which probably happens a lot) but on closer examination I found that it was, in fact, classified as juvenile fiction.

Excuse my French, but WTF?

This was one of my favorite books when I was a tween, but back then it was categorized simply as “science fiction”.  The breakdown of books at my local B.Dalton was much more straightforward, you had books with pictures, you have a small group of “half and half” juvie books (like The Three Investigators or Encyclopedia Brown) and anything “good” without pictures was found by genre.  You didn’t go for the “Fiction” shelves because there you would invariably run into Wuthering Heights and books about relationships.

But now, when I wander through the “juvenile section” I keep seeing these classics from my childhood recategorized, taken out of the “science fiction and fantasy” shelves and plugged in amongst the Hardy Boys and Artemis Fowl.  It feels like a lost opportunity there.  I keep hearing about how people want more “good” science fiction on the shelves, but I have to wonder if it’s just slipped sidways from the genre.  I never would have found Handmaid’s Tale by looking in the genre section, or even the Hunger Games. 

Since I hate presenting a problem without at least looking for a solution, I have to admit, I’m stumped.  Shelf space is a valuable commodity, so having a book placed in multiple categories simply isn’t going to happen.  How then do we cross-promote titles to where fans of different genres can find what they are looking for, regardless of age or labeling?

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