Sci-Fi: I See You Hiding There, Little Genre

  

Sci Fi YA

When I was in college, my girl friends and I would meet everyday for lunch. Like the Sex and the City girls, we’d pick a place and discuss whatever we wanted that day. Unlike them however, our conversations mainly revolved around literature and television rather than sex. As single lady nerds studying literature (library sciences for me though) in college, conversations about literature and pop culture came normally to us. During one of these lunches, a close friend of mine said something that has stuck with me. She said that she loved Sci-Fi and Westerns because they were, in her opinion, the only two genres that went well with everything. I agreed completely.

   Sci-Fi may not be the most popular genre in the market right now. Often, it gets misclassified or lumped in with regular fiction because of secondary elements. But it is still very present in all media. If you can dream up a genre and a medium, odds are you can find something that has somehow melded with it.

The Supernaturalist; Eoin Colfer (2012 edition)

   Take the young adult book genre for example, Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl managed to seamlessly blend sci-fi and fantasy in his titular novel. The first book alone features faeries equipped with top notch technology alongside magic and spells. This blend of elements remains a constant throughout the series. Another book of his, The Supernaturalist is more traditional Sci-Fi in nature. An orphaned boy called Cosmo suffers an accident and wakes up to find that a band of misfits tried to help him by fitting him with makeshift machine parts. Barely adapting to the change, he joins them to hunt down alien-like creatures. Both books are excellent reads, available in graphic novel format and an excellent introduction to Sci-Fi for teens.

   Movies are easier to pinpoint due to their accessibility to mainstream media and large budgets. Star Wars, Transformers and Alien are so deeply ingrained in our culture that most kids are born these days already knowing what is a Ewok. Television shows are a lot harder though. Most have a very limited lifespan (such as Firefly or Terranova) mainly due to big production budgets. On the flip side, the survivors tend to have longevity and some of the most loyal fan bases. An example is Doctor Who, which just had a fiftieth anniversary and it is still going stronger than ever.

  

Comics and videogames go hand in hand. These are mediums not really limited by budgets like TV shows and movies. Able to freely defy logic and physics, sometimes they provide stories probably not possible in movies. Games like Bioshock: Infinite and Mass Effect, while debated and even signed for movie adaptations still haven’t been able to be properly adapted. Maybe because these stories rely on both, stunning unrealistic visuals and deep plots, is the reason Hollywood has been unable to properly cash in on them. Comics are more versatile and often associated with Sci-Fi in general. Popular titles such as X-Men, takes Sci-Fi and blends it with pretty much everything. In X-Men alone, you have mutants, aliens, witches, social issues, time and space travel, gods and alternate realities contained within the same franchise. One look at most superhero comics will reveal at least one element of Sci-Fi.

   Far from a fading genre, Sci-Fi has elements everywhere in pop culture. Whether it’s the weapons your RPG heroes use, those aliens criminals in the old western town or that dimension crossing spaceship that is smuggling mechs that are piloted by mutants; the truth is no matter what your entertainment vice is, odds are sci-fi is involved.

  Then again, realistically speaking, it could also the conversation piece that four female literature students are having over a pizza, which you are reading from a device once thought to be the stuff of science fiction.

One never knows, right?  

Currently Listening To: Avant Garden- Aerosmith

Book on My Nightstand: Isaac Asimov- The complete stories

On my TV: Nip/Tuck (season 2) 

Currently Retro gaming: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Random Pop Culture Thought of the Day: "I would kill for a Dalek shaped blender. Is that a thing?"