“What do you love about short
science fiction & fantasy? What will keep you reading it once you're out of
this class?”
Finally
Freed from Romance!
By
Arianna Osar
Science
fiction and fantasy are great because the content is engaging and
unpredictable, unlike many works of today’s popular culture. The market is too
risky for original ideas to be exposed, so most movies that come out these days
are poorly-made sequels or remakes of once-good movies, and popular books come
from whichever author gets lucky.
One of
my biggest pet peeves about pop culture is the amount of unnecessary romance
present in everything. For example,
the movie Blackhat (which is unsurprisingly ranked 1.5 stars on rotten tomatoes) is about a hacker who is freed from
prison on the condition that he would help the government catch whoever was
infiltrating their systems. Although some of the technical content regarding
computer security is inaccurate and oversimplified, it seems to be a fairly
good movie. That is, until the only female protagonist (who, mind you, has
absolutely no chemistry with him and is only present because she is the sister
of an investigative whitehat hacker) is shoved in his face, completely
derailing the plotline and sending it in a downward spiral into the pits of
hell.
Being
force-fed romance in popular movies and books
Although many SF works have some sort of romance
present, it doesn’t devour the plot. In George R.R. Martin’s The Hedge Knight, protagonist Dunkin sees a pretty puppeteer girl on his way to
register for jousting. After being distracted, he thinks “It was jousting he
should be thinking about, not kissing,” and he goes on to fight instead of
spending the rest of the story trying to get with her. He does talk to her a
couple of times, but he doesn’t make it obvious that he likes her. The romance
in this story is more subtle and natural as opposed to popular, non-SF stories
in the media today. I enjoyed The Hedge Knight because of its
immersive world. From the clothes on peoples’ backs to the background stories,
the world is well-developed and clear enough for someone to believe it could
exist somewhere.
Short stories themselves aren’t necessarily popular,
but the ones that exist in literature textbooks—those which I presume to be
popular—have fairly predictable endings. Say there’s a poor Hispanic girl in
New York City and her mom is sick. She finds a way to make money and cure her
mother and they live happily.
SF is a bit more unpredictable—not just in its
ending, but in events that occur along the way. In The Martian
Chronicles, the
second expedition of men that arrive on Mars are ignored by the Martians. We
don’t know why that is until, unknowingly, they end up at a psychologist’s
house where they are locked with insane Martians that claim to be from Earth
and other various planets. They also discover that Martians can project
hallucinations and others can see them, so that pulls everything together about
the way they’ve been treated the entire time on the planet. They wind up being
killed by the psychologist, and the psychologist kills himself.
I find
this content engaging since it touches on the “what if”s which are of course a
central component of SF. The ideas that
derive from the “what if”s intrigue me, and I like these ideas because they provoke thought outside of reading
the book. When my mind wanders, it often winds up thinking about a story
and I even think of how different my world would be in this very moment if, for
example, we could read other people’s minds and project hallucinations. Or if I
was in that situation. When I read books, I think of how I would react
differently, and I find it interesting to be in the shoes of another person.
Overall,
I think SF is a wonderful thought-provoking genre filled with creative ideas.
It isn’t as dull as other popular content, and doesn’t use romance as a filler
for lack of creativity. I would recommend reading SF since it gives you a break
from your everyday world and introduces new concepts to ponder.
Arianna,
ReplyDeleteI think you must be reading the right sff if you haven't been seeing a lot of romantic filler! I think sff can fall prey to that formula as much as a lot of other genres and storytelling media. The key is, I hope, creators showing respect to their characters and their readers both, not assuming that either "needs" a certain kind of relationship for a narrative to truly be complete.
Best,
TT