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Sci-Fi Ghetto
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Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_1'); })The Sci-Fi Ghetto reflects a long-lasting stigma which has been applied towards the science fiction genre, which frequently leads creators and marketers to shun "Sci-Fi", "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy" labels as much as possible, even on shows that have clear science fiction or fantastical elements. It also reflects the tendency for critics, academics and other creators to near-automatically dismiss or disdain works which cannot escape this label being applied, regardless of relative quality or merit. Conversely, if these critics, creators and academics do feel that the work possesses merit by their standards, expect them to strenuously insist that the work is not science fiction or fantasy (How could it be? It's good), regardless of how many torturous hoops they might have to jump through in order to do so. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_2'); })A lot of this has to do with snobbery. A (somewhat contradictory) perception about science fiction in general is that it is somehow both too complex for mainstream audiences with "simple" tastes and yet simultaneously not literary and sophisticated enough for critics and academics. This perception tends to be drawn from two extremes. In the first place, science fiction is often dismissed as lightweight, formulaic and poorly-written rubbish churned out by talentless hacks who never met a cliche they didn't enthusiastically regurgitate. On the other end of the spectrum, science fiction is often seen as aloof, dreary Doorstoppers, with impenetrable jargon, and use of a number of tropes that cater only to those who are familiar with the genre, rarely attracting casual readers. In either case, the result is considered the same; material which is poorly written with lame plots and characterization, almost entirely lacking in literary merit. This, of course, unfairly prejudges a massive and wide-spanning genre by its worst extremes, and ultimately takes a fairly narrow and limited view. While plenty of examples from the genre that reflect these criticisms do of course exist, to dismiss the entire genre based on them ignores the fact that Sturgeon's Law applies to science-fiction no less than any other genre. While it's true that even accepted classics of the genre can take time getting used to read, owing to its arcane content, the same is true for classical literature and poetry, which is impenetrable without some basic knowledge of Greek and Roman myth. Like any work that is ghettoized, its initial admirers form a subculture, who in many cases do in fact live up to the unfortunate stereotypes of science fiction fans as a bunch of weird dorky obsessives with no social skills. These fans, and especially fans who become writers, don't do favors when a work manages to successful by appealing to a broader audience, who can often be painted as Category Traitor. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_3'); })Fantasy fiction suffers from this as well to a similar extent due to the difficulty of defining the line between science fiction and fantasy. In fact, fantasy fiction often has it even worse, as it is speculative in a completely implausible way (science fiction is just mostly implausible). This happens to horror as well, especially when it overlaps with Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It's been a little more accepted than those two genres, at least on the literary front (and, lately, television as well), but you'll rarely see awards given to horror works. With cinematic horror in particular, with the exception of Hays Code-era classics (like Universal's monster movies or the works of Alfred Hitchcock) and a selection of other indisputably great films (most of them dating to no later than the '70s), you'd be hard-pressed to find professional film critics who don't view horror as a land where gorn and exploitation stand in for plot and characters. Then there's the romance genre. In general, many critics view romance novels as nothing but the Extruded Book Product of companies like Harlequin and the worst depths of YA fiction, pandering to a Lowest Common Denominator of housewives and teenage girls who want to dream of an exciting new man. Romantic films get treated with a bit more respect, especially older ones (see: Casablanca, Annie Hall, much of Audrey Hepburn's filmography), but the very existence of the term Chick Flick shows that the stereotype exists there, too. In this case, it typically overlaps heavily with the Girl-Show Ghetto, the implication being that no self-respecting man would ever read a romance novel. In the case of movies, the ghetto especially affects actors in genre movies. The perception in cinema is that science-fiction, horror, and fantasy, depend far more on special effects, costumes, writing, and direction than acting. Actors who appear in these works rarely get notice for their good performances, being rarely nominated, and almost never winning. Boris Karloff for instance was considered by his peers, by directors, and critics, as an excellent actor but since he often appeared in parts where he had to wear heavy makeup, and often played monsters, his work never really won the acknowledgement it deserved. The situation is inverted in recent years, especially in the superhero genre, where directors and producers cast critically-acclaimed actors who normally appear in independent and offbeat films to play major blockbuster roles, precisely to give them additional depth, but these are treated as "paycheck films" i.e. roles that give them financial security to later do films they really care about, and few consider their performances in these films as excellent in their own right. There's also the Comedy Ghetto which has the same issues but is something entirely separate, since even in the science fiction genre, a comic take on the genre rarely gets respect. Keep in mind the ghetto may actually be American-centric. In Europe and Japan, talented authors in a variety of genres are critically respected and acclaimed. Most known is H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, who is to this day the second most translated author in the world behind Agatha Christie. Yet given how America dominates the global market in culture and influence, it's still widely known and enforced. A Sub-Trope of Public Medium Ignorance. Can overlap with Animation Age Ghetto, as animated works have a strong tendency to be genre fiction. See also Not Wearing Tights, Not Using the "Z" Word, and Dead Horse Genre. Not to be confused with Industrial Ghetto or Fantastic Ghetto. Examples: |
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For some reason, action movies seem particularly prone to ignoring the ghetto. The Matrix, above, is a partial example, but a more illustrative one would be Terminator, which is referred to as action far more often than sci-fi or horror, and certainly more than action sci-fi. Then again, which is more important to the series: the fact that it has time-travelling robots, the fact that those robots are ruthlessly stalking a helpless protagonist (in the first movie, at least) like something out of her worst nightmaresnote Or, more specifically, James Cameron's nightmares — he got the idea for the film from a dream about a robot skeleton rising from flames., or the coolness of the fights those robots get into? Take it or leave it, but the filmmakers said that the "Tech Noir" club was named as such because they thought that they were more or less creating a new genre (sci-fi fused with noir) and were hoping the term would catch on. Which was strange, because Film Noir used to be pretty disreputable in and of itself. Unfortunately there already is an established name for that genre: Cyberpunk. A term Newer Than They Think: Bruce Bethke coined the name in a short story from 1980, but it wouldn't be published in 1983 and not receive widespread use until the release of Neuromancer that came out in the same year as The Terminator. |
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Charley's War: It's probably the most underestimated British graphic novel/magazine comic series sold in the States, made worse by bookstores stacking them along with Judge Dredd and other 2000 AD titles — because Pat Mills wrote it. It's an extremely realistic series of WWI war stories. | |
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Prior to the 1930s, almost all American horror films were careful to provide plausible explanations for any seemingly supernatural story elements, as seen in London After Midnight, The Phantom of the Opera, The Cat and the Canary, etc. It was generally believed that audiences considered the supernatural silly and wouldn't take such a film seriously. Tod Browning's Dracula was considered a major risk for Universal specifically because it contained no cop-outs: the vampire really was a vampire, and the film's (now lost) coda went out of its way to make absolutely certain audiences knew it. | |
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Might and Magic offers a strange example. Although the CRPG series were heavily into sci-fi (hand to hand with heroic fantasy), this was not obvious for the turn-based strategy titles, Heroes of Might and Magic. Thus, when the third installment of the series attempted to insert a faction called "Forge", containing sci-fi elements of the interconnected RPG series, the fans were so displeased that the developers even received death threats (!) which resulted in the faction being scrapped. | |
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Better Off Ted is an interesting example of a show that from an objective perspective is probably sci-fi, but that is almost never considered as such, and so escapes this problem entirely. | |
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It's worth mentioning, too, that two of Vonnegut's earliest novels are quite clearly science fiction: Player Piano (about a mechanized future society) and The Sirens of Titan (about, among other things, an interplanetary war). Cat's Cradle, Galápagos, and Slapstick also contain genre elements. | |
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The Western also long suffered from this kind of effect, even during its heyday in the '40s and '50s. This is demonstrated by the way many critics wrote that High Noon was "more than a Western" or movie histories that proceeded from the belief that the Spaghetti Westerns of the mid-1960 were the first ones to revise and deconstruct the genre, apparently unaware that e.g. The Searchers (1956) even existed, quite possibly because it was directed by genre veteran John Ford. It's notable too that only three Westerns have ever won the Oscar for Best Picture.note Cimarron, Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, for the record. Note the sixty-year gap between the first two. Even Spaghetti Westerns were Vindicated by History, both for their enduring popularity and influence on pop culture. Roger Ebert reviewed The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as one of his first films and gave it three stars and admitted when he put it on his Great Movies list that the movie was a four-star film and that the only reason he had given it 3 stars back in his original review was that a four-star review would have been too unexpected at the time. Westerns made outside of the United States Of America and Italy still get this a lot though. One of the previews of the Franco-Belgian film "Les Cowboys" notes that it is thankfully not a French Western. As it is a place where people such as Mœbius came from, you would expect more respect from critics. |
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Some fans of The Matrix refused to call it sci-fi, as apparently "It's not sci-fi unless it's in space/the future".note Not only is this a belief not generally held among SF fans, but alternate history is considered a sub-genre of SF. Those stories don't really correspond to our time stream at all but are often roughly in our past. Also time travel stories are frequently set in the past and may begin in the present day. Even though it was explicitly set in the aftermath of a Robot War. Not to mention that it was set in the future; the sequences apparently taking place in The Present Day are illusionary, a virtual reality transmitted directly to the brains of artificially-grown humans. | |
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King himself once had a conversation with a woman who said she didn't read horror fiction, she liked heartfelt stories like The Shawshank Redemption. When King told her he had written that story, she simply said "No you didn't.'" | |
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The Innocents was met with scratched heads when it was first released. Ghost stories at the time were seen as pulpy B-movies, so the film's aversion of those tropes turned off a lot of horror fans (some Hammer Horror buffs complained that it wasn't gory enough). On the flipside, critics didn't know how to take a horror film that in their mind had "too much thunder and lightning" to appeal to the art crowd. However it has since been Vindicated by History and is considered one of the best horror films ever made. Even at the time, its star Deborah Kerr - who had five Oscar nominations and starred in the likes of From Here to Eternity, The King and I and An Affair to Remember - called this her best performance. | |
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John Wyndham's The Chrysalids has a Penguin edition with an editor's note, to paraphrase — sadly this was released into the genre known as science fiction, which isn't the case here. | |
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Discussed in Clouds of Sils Maria, where Maria and her assistant Valentine go out to see Jo-Ann's latest film, an incredibly campy mess of superhero, sci-fi, and YA dystopian cliches. While having dinner afterwards, Maria tells Valentine that she could literally feel her brain cells dying as she watched it, while Valentine tries to defend its merits and those of Jo-Ann as an actress, arguing that Maria probably would've loved the film if it'd been set in a factory or on a farm — which Maria happily admits to, saying that she can't take a film set on a spaceship seriously and frequently bursting into laughter as Valentine lists off numerous fantastical plot elements in the course of defending the film. | |
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A variant of this happened with Titanfall, a Mech Ghetto if you will. In a magazine interview◊, the staff infamously renounced the "mech" label for their Titans, insisting they were more like nimble mechanical soldiers and an extension of the pilot rather than clunky and slow machines, apparently unaware that there exists an entire genre with this sort of thing, not just Battletech. | |
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Donnie Darko is almost always interpreted as an allegorical Mind Screw rather than a fantasy film about an unstable time loop that Donnie has to fix. Richard Kelly has repeatedly said it is a comic book movie, and Donnie is a superhero, and the Director's Cut drives this home. | |
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Genres themselves can be quite subjective — for example, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is normally placed around "Literature", but it's a simultaneous Pastoral Fantasy and Cyberpunk. | |
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When Digital Extremes were looking around for a publisher to support their new online looter-shooter action game in 2012, every single publisher they approached took one look at their proof-of-concept demo and immediately dismissed it, mostly because it was a sci-fi game, and sci-fi wasn't "in" at the moment. Even those who thought that it otherwise looked really good still told DE directly to their faces that the game would fail, and in the end they were forced to go ahead without a publisher, putting their entire studio on the line. That game was Warframe and today it's one of the most successful, most-played, most respected and most critically-acclaimed F2P games in the entire world. | |
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Helene Wecker admits that she fell into the ghetto herself before eventually defying it with her historical fantasy The Golem and the Jinni. She originally started off writing a straightforward story of immigrants in the early 20th century that was pretty bad. She had no idea what was wrong until a friend asked her why she was writing that way when she was a dyed-in-the-wool nerd who cut her teeth writing Doctor Who fanfiction. Wecker agreed and changed the story to be a fantasy about supernatural beings, and the book was much better for it. | |
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Discussed in the bonus cast interviews on the Big Finish Doctor Who audio story Son of the Dragon. Guest actor Douglas Hodge, whose best-known work has been on the stage, notes that science fiction is a genre virtually untouched by theatre aside from the odd musical or comedy, even though the medium is often receptive to challenging intellectual/political material otherwise. He agrees with the interviewer that "snobbery" towards the genre is likely the issue, and that while readers and movie/TV viewers are willing to take sci-fi stories seriously, theatre audiences would be likely to snicker instead. (Hodge also ponders whether something like 1984 should be counted as science fiction — see Literature above.) | |
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When learning the writing skill in The Sims 3, the Sim in question will learn a different genre at each skill level (at level 0, they can only write fiction and non-fiction). At level 1, the Sims learns to write science fiction. At level 2, they learn the "trashy" genre. That's right, according to The Sims 3, trashy novels are harder to write than science fiction. | |
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Sucker Punch is often dismissed as a mindless action movie that makes no sense due to having several fantasy sequences involving Action Girls doing battle with zombies, dragons, orcs and robots. This is despite Cinema Wins and Better With Bob pointing out that the film discusses the topic of sexual assault and mental illness, as well as other feminist issues. The marketing is partly to blame - which focused on the action sequences and girls in Fanservice costumes. | |
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A variation of this is discussed in the second episode of the Lucky Star anime, when the main character and Otaku Surrogate Konata brings up a poll to determine how many books the average Japanese citizen reads in a year - the poll specifically excludes manga, though no such restriction is placed on the comparable media of light novels and children's picture books. She goes on to wonder how people can say that illiteracy is increasingly common among young people, pointing out that blogs and web pages in general take up a major part of the average teen's free time, and they are as wordy, if not more. | |
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The Dune series is sci-fi, of the best kind, but you'll still find people complaining about it being shelved in the sci-fi/fantasy section. | |
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Critical darling prestige television program Twin Peaks is also described as Magic Realism despite its heavy supernatural elements. | |
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An early Soviet edition of the The Lord of the Rings which was heavily revamped to look like Sci-Fi (obvious cause: publication of some "suspicious" "fantasy" was unthinkable, whereas Sci-Fi had some respect). Just one quote: "It's not a Ring, it's some kind of gadget". | |
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Star Trek gets this particularly badly, with its reputation for Rubber-Forehead Aliens and the most obsessive of geek fans. Patrick Stewart, for instance, one of the best actors working, has gotten several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for his TV work... but only for "respectable" fare like Hamlet and Moby-Dick, never for his seven years on The Next Generation. Stewart himself defies the ghetto, stating that his years of classical training were "practice" for the role of Captain Picard. | |
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If you would like to see desperate literary snobbery coupled with hilarious pretentiousness, why not ask a professor of Shakespeare why the ghosts and witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, or the fairies and angels in A Midsummer Night's Dream don't qualify the plays as fantasy? A Midsummer Night's Dream is notable, because Puck gives a monologue at the end of the play 'apologising' to anyone who didn't like the subject matter — and there was minor outrage at the time for depicting fairies on the stage since they were fantasy creatures. People tried to 'justify' the depiction by saying it only depicted fantasy creatures that stemmed from popular belief. Your results may vary — there are some professors who do believe that Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream are in fact fantasy and do hold them up as an example as to how fantasy can be literature as well. | |
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This is before we get into Timequake, which admits freely in the prologue and throughout the text that it's the remains of a novel ("Timequake One") he couldn't make work mixed in with his thoughts, experiences and recollections of the previous months, and a large dose of metafiction. "Timequake One" is as SF, or slightly less, than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His genre situation is possibly best summed up by the fact that in Foyle's, the famous bookshop in London, about half of his books are filed under Science Fiction and half under Fiction. | |
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Inversion: The science-fiction trappings of I Am Legend often get exaggerated to the point of drowning out its horror nature — two out of three movie adaptations calling the monsters mutants instead of vampires, and some copies of the book list it as science fiction rather than horror. | |
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It has been claimed that the reason the first Star Wars movie didn't win the Oscar for Best Picture is that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences are a bunch of artsy snobs who would never give such a high award to a [turns up nose haughtily] science fiction film. The fact that Star Wars lost out to Annie Hall may be evidence of thatnote (Or it may be evidence that the Academy is absolutely in love with Woody Allen and gave the award to Annie Hall because they wanted Woody Allen to win Best Picture for something) For the sake of balance, Annie Hall is an excellent film in its own right, though it does not have the popular appeal of Star Wars. Another example was at the 53rd Academy Awards in '81, where The Empire Strikes Back wasn't even nominated for Best Picture, which was won by Ordinary People.note Which also beat out Raging Bull and The Elephant Man, a fact that totally had nothing to do with the Academy's love of Robert Redford. Interestingly, some have actually accused the Academy of dumbing down for daring to award Best Picture to films such as Braveheart and Forrest Gump, which, whilst not fantasy, were considered too "moneymaking" "crowd-pleasing" (read: "plebeian") for the Oscars. | |
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Ditto with Lost, which is still more explicit in its combination of bizarre sci-fi elements (the present) with "realistic" drama (the "past" and "future"). Lost fits pretty much all the requirements for Magical Realism. After its time-travel-heavy Seasons 4 and 5, the creators were more vocal about categorizing Lost as sci-fi, saying: "You can go, "Oh, it's not a genre show, because I don't like genre shows, but I like Lost. Therefore, Lost is not a genre show." That's the logic they apply. Well, we've been writing a genre show from the word go. We're sorry that it's getting more genre." Note though that this didn't always square with what they'd said before or with the show's marketing (where it was usually described as a straightforward drama). |
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However, the spaceship simulation genre has suffered since the 90s, with barely a new release per year. More recently, with the advent of Kickstarter, the genre is trying to have its revival with campaigns such as a new project by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame, a new Elite game, a Transforming Mecha space combat game and the already-released FTL. Steam's friendliness to indie developers has proven a boon to the genre. | |
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Get Shorty: In-Universe, as Karen regards doing genre movies as being beneath her talents, which Chili argues against. | |
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Several reviews for The Host on Amazon have described the novel as sci-fi for people who don't like sci-fi. | |
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Sci-fi comedies have their own ghetto-within-a-ghetto: despite the success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, The BBC remain very cagey about sci-fi comedy — taking years to commission a new one in Hyperdrive, which then failed to draw in enough viewers, giving them an excuse to stop doing sci-fi comedies at all. Another interpretation is that Red Dwarf is an inversion. During the 1990s, the BBC made hardly any SF or fantasy due to executive hostility to the genre, and there's some reason to suspect that Red Dwarf got made because the executives thought that it was laughing at the genre and its pathetic fans, none of whom could possibly have a sense of humour. And this show was expected to only attract male nerds. It's not as if about half the fans are female, is it? |
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How to Survive a Horror Movie lampoons the horror ghetto. If you find yourself in a big-budget, respectable-looking horror movie (really?), then odds are good that you're not actually in a horror movie, but rather, in a Psychological Thriller. In which case, the only advice the book can offer is that your missing child probably never existed, and that your husband is the bad guy. | |
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Pandorum was hardly a critical success at the box office. It was marketed as a horror film, but in the end explained everything, probably annoying the hell out of people who like their horror left mysterious and unexplained. However as a sci-fi film, it's pretty good. | |
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The Craft was considered a very risky gamble in the mid-90s - because it was a teen film that dealt with witchcraft in a fantastical way. The filmmakers have stressed that it was even before the Young Adult demographic was a thing (its release pre-dated Harry Potter by two years) - so they had no clue who they were even marketing the film to. They realised who their audience was when hundreds of goths and punks showed up to the trailer release party. It became a Sleeper Hit that grossed $55 million. | |
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The VVitch experienced similar treatment, with some people claiming it doesn't 'count' as a horror movie due to its lack of Jump Scares, Gorn or gratuitous nudity. | |
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In the introduction to Tales of the Black Widowers, Dr Asimov talks about readers who write him questions about why a Science Fiction writer thinks he can write about Shakespeare, why a chemist thinks he can write about history, why a Shakespeare scholar would bother with Science Fiction, why a historian would bother writing chemistry essays, and so on, ad nauseum it would seem. | |
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Avengers: Endgame is the epic Grand Finale of the first 22-movie Myth Arc of the largest and most successful film franchise of all time, and by itself outgrossed Avatar to become the highest-grossing film ever. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from both critics and fans and is considered to be one of the finest Summer Blockbuster movies ever. So naturally, people assumed that it at least had a shot at some of the big awards that year, especially considering fellow MCU entry Black Panther's many nominations the previous year, and many having complared the film favorably to previous Best Picture winner The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whose award wins are generally considered to be for The Lord of the Rings as a whole, so people felt that maybe history would repeat itself with Endgame getting some big nominations that could be seen as being for the MCU as a whole. Unfortunately, due to being a superhero film that is built upon audience familiarity with an established franchise, it only received one technical award nomination for Best Visual Effects... which it lost to realistic war drama 1917. note Another factor could likely be the abundance of critically-acclaimed films released near the end of the calendar year that ended up hindering its chances of dominating major award ceremonies. | |
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Atlanta Nights itself is not a work of science fiction (ostensibly, it is a murder mystery), but it merits special mention as its creation lies in the invocation of the Sci-Fi Ghetto. Publish America is a vanity press whose website claims that it only accepts high-quality manuscripts from authors, but in actual fact, they will publish anything at the cost of the author. It owns a website called Authors Market, where it stated in two separate articles that science fiction and fantasy, by their very nature, are bad and do not meet the standards of credible literature. A set of sci-fi and fantasy authors retaliated and produced a stupendously rubbish manuscript that was accepted by Publish America. Here's a quote from one of the articles, Only trust your eyes, which inspired this retaliation: | |
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Orphan Black received stellar reviews (with much of the praise going to the acting) during its first season, but was ignored by the Emmy Awards for major award consideration. It finally managed to escape this somewhat with a nomination for Tatiana Maslany in its third season, and more officially escaped it when Maslany won an Emmy for the fourth season. | |
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One of the multiple showrunners of FlashForward (2009) described it as "not being science fiction" but instead just being a "drama". Not only does the show have a clear sci-fi premise, the entire first half of season 1 (likely the only season) focused on the investigation into the sci-fi event. Not to mention it's based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer, whose website is called sfwriter.com. |
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The Force Awakens grossed over $1.5 billion at the Box Office and earned a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But when the awards came around, it fell into the ghetto and only received nominations in the technical categories. | |
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Some early reviews of Game of Thrones placed it squarely in the ghetto, with critics (the New York Times review in particular) comparing it with The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons (naturally), with some doomsayers even going so far as to claim HBO was heading straight for Network Decay because, as the NY Times author put it, HBO is "a corporate auteur committed, when it is at its most intelligent and dazzling, to examining the way that institutions are made and how they are upheld or fall apart" and cited The Sopranos, The Wire and Rome as examples of this. Leaving aside the fact that 'corporate auteur' is a fundamentally nonsensical contradiction-in-terms, the kicker is that except for the fact that it's set in a fantasy world instead of the real one, "the way institutions are made and how they are upheld or fall apart" is exactly what the show is about. Ultimately, Game of Thrones would get the last laugh on every single one of them. Depending on who you ask, it's either broken Out of the Ghetto, or invited the casual viewer in. It's seen as a fantasy series, no mistake, but it has been generally accepted into mainstream pop culture and a number of of fantasy geeks have pointed to the series' reception as a sign of changing attitudes about the genre. On the other hand, particularly towards the later seasons, the showrunners are on record for purposefully downplaying fantastical elements, and even removing characters and plotlines that feature them heavily. They may have been able to take the series out of the ghetto, but not the ghetto out of the series. |
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Gone Home has the trope briefly touched upon In-Universe, when Terry Greenbriar, the main character's father, receives a letter from his father Richard about Terry's new time travel novel. In the letter, Richard writes that "readers of (Terry's) chosen genre will lap up copies hungrily," implying that sci-fi fans do not have discerning tastes. | |
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Roadside Picnic languished in a neighborhood of the Ghetto for years. In the afterword of the 2012 translation, Boris Strugatsky explains that for eight years he and his brother battled the Soviet censorship bureau denying the novel publication. They Bowdlerised the text quickly enough and the only political concern was that the Russian character be identified as a Soviet. What held the novel up was the censor's refusal to accept a sci fi story that was gritty and realistic; the protagonist is a real man struggling with himself, civilization's ugliness, and sneaking into the weird landfill-like Zone as a literal thief. The censors expected a square-jawed hero boldly exploring the great unknown for the benefit of humanity, nothing but pure escapist fantasy. | |
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Northern Exposure is a fantasy. It has precognitive dreams, ghosts, aliens, a man who can fly under his own power, and a large number of single-episode supernatural events that aren't so easy to categorise. People tend to look at you funny if you actually point out that it was one of the most successful fantasy programs in network television history. Lacking elves and whatnot, it gets pigeonholed as Magic Realism. | |
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This sad fate was part of what befell The 10th Kingdom. There were people who turned it on, spotted fairy tale elements (never mind the Deconstructor Fleet) and immediately turned it off, thinking it was for kids. | |
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The makers of Space: Above and Beyond insisted it wasn't science fiction, it was a war series. Which just happened to take place in the future and involve humans fighting aliens. In spaceships. | |
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In the US, Doctor Who is still in the Sci-Fi Ghetto due to its checkered broadcast history. During the show's original run, PBS was its US distributor, which immediately meant that it was never going to attain a wide audience like shows on the Big Three networks. Worse, PBS stations generally aired it only at Otaku O'Clock. Getting Screwed by the Network had nothing to do with the show's content, and everything to do with the fact that it was a British show; on most PBS stations it was shown in blocks with things like Monty Python's Flying Circus and Are You Being Served?, which always had comparatively smaller audiences in the States. The 2005 revival was even worse off in this regard, because until Sci Fi Channel actually decided to run the show they had the US rights to, it was only broadcast in repeats on BBC America, a network that, until quite recently, huge chunks of the country didn't even get unless they had digital cable or satellite. In a business decision that can only be regarded as insane, Syfy gave up the first run rights on Doctor Who to BBC America. BBC America, who unlike Syfy seem to genuinely love the show, have promoted it to death and the 2008-2010 specials (which Syfy refused to air) and the first Eleventh Doctor season gave BBC America its best ratings ever. Even though it's easily among the highest rated non-American shows on American television, it still isn't as ingrained in mainstream pop culture in the US as it is in Britain. The fact that it's not only British, but a science fiction show, probably has something to do with it. The Sci-Fi Ghetto is part of why Doctor Who got cancelled in the first place back in the 80's: BBC controller Michael Grade not only loathed the science fiction genre but also its fans, and did everything in his power to get Doctor Who cancelled so the BBC could focus more on dramas. This included slashing the budget and episode count, putting the show on hiatus for 18 months, firing Colin Baker, and scheduling Doctor Who against Coronation Street so it would get crushed in the ratings. Unfortunately for him, the Queen is a massive Doctor Who fan, so he remains the only BBC controller who's never been knighted. |
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Despite Jurassic Park and The Lost World (1995) featuring dinosaurs being brought back from extinction with advanced genetics, they are often listed as "techno-thrillers," a super-genre term typically reserved for hyper-realistic stories such as those of Tom Clancy featuring only the most plausibly realistic technology possible. | |
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Most collegiate creative fiction classes expressly deny the option to write anything other than "literary" fiction. You might hear a variety of reasons for this, ranging from the idea that "genre" fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, thriller) cares more about setting and mood than plot and characterization, or simply that the class is designed specifically to focus on literary fiction and you should go and take the genre fiction class instead. Hilariously, the same classes will often go on to teach Slaughterhouse-Five in the same session, which is considered by them to be "postmodern" and thus can not be genre writing by definition. On a similar note, many Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) programs, the terminal degree for creative writing, will not admit "genre writers." This has led critics of this attitude to say that the "creative" part of "creative writing" is a misnomer, since you're only allowed to be creative within a certain box. Veronica Roth, the author of the popular young adult series Divergent, once recalled in her blog about how a professor in her creative writing class had said that writing fantasy would be like an easy vacation compared to "real writing". She also recounted how surprised her fellow students were whenever she told them that she wanted to write commercial genre YA, with them asking if she was just trying to get her bills paid. Believe it or not, there are actually movements in universities to try avoid these — some professors believe that pulp magazines and popular and contemporary fiction should still be critically studied the same way other works are, especially since mythology and fairy tales sometimes get a free pass. China Miéville has also written an essay saying that science fiction should be considered equal to literature because many of them include a rational discourse of scientific literature. |
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Dark City was initially ignored on its first release, and given an R-rating by the studio because it had a "weird" concept. However, once Roger Ebert gave it a favorable review and named it the best film of 1998, its reception began to change. It's considered something of a cult classic today. | |
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Person of Interest has been described (even by its showrunners) as hard science fiction disguised as a Police Procedural. | |
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Margaret Atwood also made the infamous comment that Oryx and Crake wasn't science fiction because SF is about "talking squid in space", which went memetic in the SF community. Later, her benchmark became "talking cabbages" and "Planet X". | |
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Several critics have argued against the idea that Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved is a horror book, despite it having a very Silent Hill 2-like plot of a person being haunted by the vengeful ghost of a loved one they murdered. This article goes into more detail about how Beloved is the most critically-acclaimed book the horror genre has never claimed. | |
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An essay in a book called British Comedy Greats in which the author stubbornly and repeatedly insists that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not really science fiction. Because it's satirical, apparently. It is likely that the author was trying to make the distinction between genre as driving force of plot and genre as setting. | |
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Margaret Atwood's near-future (at the time of writing) The Handmaid's Tale was obviously social/cultural science-fiction note It takes place in a Bad Future where high levels of radiation and strains of HIV and syphilis caused wide-spread sterility, and when an extremist Stay in the Kitchen Christian group took over the US, the entirely digital currency made it easy to deprive women of economic power. (and even won a prestigious scifi award), but she refused to admit that. Another Atwood novel, Oryx and Crake, is even more blatantly science fiction: genetic engineering has run amok and destroyed everybody except the protagonist. Margaret Atwood also made the infamous comment that Oryx and Crake wasn't science fiction because SF is about "talking squid in space", which went memetic in the SF community. Later, her benchmark became "talking cabbages" and "Planet X". There are signs that Atwood has mellowed; she even participated in an online article for The Guardian titled Why We Need Science-Fiction It seems she's seen the error of her ways. The genre confusion surrounding Atwood's books seem to stem from the fact that she uses the term "speculative fiction" rather than "dystopia", but given the settings of The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, her work undeniably falls under that heading. All dystopian novels (Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and so on) make heavy use of sci-fi elements, but their main focus is on society, which appears to be the point she's making by refusing to refer to her work as sci-fi. |
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Interviews with people from The 4400 and Battlestar Galactica insisted that their shows are "so much more than just a sci-fi show". Because apparently, science fiction doesn't involve relationships, politics, or take on current issues. TV Guide justified their admiration of Battlestar by insisting, "Oh, it isn't really science fiction!" The New Battlestar and Caprica are described as dramas with sci fi elements by the writers; they at least are not trying to hide the science fiction, even if fans accuse them of downplaying it. |
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The Time Traveler's Wife: Both the book and the film are usually listed as romances, even though the title sums up everything that makes it science fiction — it's about a woman who is married to a man who time travels. Not only that but the way he time-travels is given a scientific (if somewhat unusual) explanation without resorting to the supernatural, but best-case scenario is for it to occasionally be labelled as fantasy. | |
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In the late 90s there were three supernatural-themed television shows that were reluctantly greenlit by producers who didn't think the sci-fi and fantasy elements were a good sell. The shows? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed (1998). Buffy was seen as too expensive to produce and not expected to have more than a cult fan base - and the first season was only granted thirteen episodes. Sabrina was only produced because Melissa Joan Hart had a pre-existing fan base from Clarissa Explains It All and the network hoped it would appeal to adults nostalgic for the likes of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Charmed was only greenlit when the three protagonists were made sisters rather than best friends - because the network felt witchcraft wasn't a good sell. All three of the shows lasted at least seven seasons (eight in the case of Charmed!) and broke out of the ghetto. | |
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Pan's Labyrinth is a dark fairy tale and ended up so acclaimed that when it was screened at Cannes, it received a twenty-two minute standing ovation - so it should count as a subversion right? Except there's a significant portion of the audience who tries to claim the fantasy elements were all figments of Ofelia's imagination (which was thoroughly debunked by Word of God). Because of course a movie can't be fantasy and serious at the same time, can it? | |
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The Skeleton Key is a horror movie and was marketed as such. Critics trashed it, especially the performance of Kate Hudson. However audiences were more favourable and the general reaction to Hudson's performance from viewers is She Really Can Act. The film did gross over $90 million at the Box Office, so it seems as though it fell into the ghetto with critics but not audiences. | |
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Jennifer's Body suffered from the studio marketing it as a trashy Megan Fox Fanservice vehicle (the writer Diablo Cody recalls the original marketing campaign literally being "Megan Fox hot") that led to audiences either ignoring it or being disappointed with the end product (one reviewer complained the film wasn't sexy enough). As the years went by, the film's statements about rape culture, girl on girl crime and victim blaming have been seen in a better light. | |
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Terra Nova: Creator Brannon Braga was reluctant to call his show science fiction, even though it involves future humans traveling back in time to the late Cretaceous period. For more see in this article. | |
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In-universe example: In one episode of Frasier, Frasier and Niles discover that one of their favorite Shakespearean actors is now making a living playing an android on a Star Trek Expy. They attempt to get him back into "real" acting by producing a one-man stage show. | |
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