(no subject)

Things:

- Yesterday was the March meeting of the Bainbridge film discussion group, so I went and watched Streetcar Named Desire, which I had never seen before. And oh, you guys, but that film is hard to watch. I mean, it's wonderfully made and wonderfully acted and is quite enthralling but it is full of dreadful people, who are either horrible or pathetic or both, and I did not want to spend five minutes with them, let alone two hours. I have found, recently, that I do not want stories about pathetic and horrible people, no matter how wonderfully written they are. I want to watch or read about people with a core of decency to them. I don't mind if they do horrible things afterwards - they don't have to be heroes - I just don't want to read about rotten people right now.

- On the other hand, yesterday I read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. People! Do you like steampunk? Alternative history? Giant flying whales? Did you, in fact, love Naomi Novik's Temeraire books but think to yourself, "Self, what these books need is Austrians in big steel mechas"? Then you should read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, which is a steampunk alternative history of WWI, in which one side has giant metal war machines and the other side has genetically engineered animals, some of which are giant flying whales. We have POV characters on both sides, both of whom are awesome. One of them is a (non-historically accurate) Hapsburg prince, who is thoughtful and quiet and politically-minded. The other is a Scottish girl-disguised-a-boy who has joined the British air force in order to fly on the giant whale dirigibles and is a bumptious swaggering piece of awesome. I love them both, and I am now anxious awaiting the sequel.



And this has been today's entry in Media I Have Consumed Lately.

(no subject)

And then I had a patron come in and ask me to put the dvd of 2001 on hold for her. "All these years, I thought that was science fiction," she said.

Not wanting her to get the dvd while thinking it was something other than it was, I said, "It is science fiction."

She smiled and said, "Well, yes, but my friend told me that it was more of an exploration of human nature and the human condition."

And I blinked a couple of times and said, "That's what science fiction is."


My god, but that bugs me. Yes, some sci-fi is Star Trek and spaceships and explosions, sure. And those things are a hell of lot of fun. But they're just stage dressing things. Any good story is an exploration of human nature and the human condition in one way or another*, whether that story is told with spaceships or wizards or monsters or middle-aged housewives. And of course people can have preferences as to what kind of trappings they like best, but the trappings do not negate the importance of the story.

A story doesn't suddenly stop being sci-fi (or horror, or fantasy, or whatever) simply because it's a good story. The Sparrow is a good story and science fiction. House of Leaves is a good story and a horror novel. Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. And is the important word here.

I don't mind people not liking sci-fi. That's perfectly fine. I don't tend to like books about middle-aged housewives, no matter how popular they are with bookclubs. But I don't dismiss the genre as a whole - I'm sure that there are some good and important stories being told about those middle-aged housewives, even as there are good and important stories being told about my spaceships and wizards and monsters. Dismissing entire genres is stupid and lazy.

Hopefully, our patron will like 2001, if only so that she won't dismiss the whole genre next time.




*Even if that exploration is only "What are humans like when they live on spaceships?"