Posted on 03/27/2009 5:38:49 AM PDT by jalisco555
Thank you!
Shhh, I haven’t caught up with BSG yet since I only watch it on DVD and so far only the first half of season 4 is out.
No Arabs in the original series of Star Trek, unless you count the Klingons.
I guess that’s because it’s set in the future.
I enjoy unexcerpted articles, I just found this one a little long. Interesting, but in need of a little tightening.
The author is the Managing Editor at City Journal. Who edits the editor, I wonder?
A fifth Star Trek series, called Enterprise, began its four-season run... The action-packed series quickly became the best Trek since the original...
Colossal mega-barf.
I had heard something like that in my SciFi and Politics class. My teacher made the statement that it was our fears of the future put into words (My professor also made the assertion that SciFi was progressive...), but that it reflects the present would fit it (though in our class we have a running joke that Asians seen as the other in all SciFi... wonder what that would mean.) Hmmm.... I’d need to mull that over.
But BSG absolutely ended on a religious note, with Caprica Six’s and Baltar’s visions being revealed as angels.
True.
The presenter on my “Classical Mythology” lecture CDs said that science fiction is the direct literary and cultural descendant of Greek and Roman mythology. She only spent a half hour on the topic, but there’s definitely a good case to be made.
Interesting. I hadn’t heard any of these before. I’ve actually heard the case that SciFi is an almost uniquely American thing (or atleast capitalist, which would explain the Gundum and other SciFi in Japan other asian countries). But it seems that with defining SciFi from the Greeks (or earlier) you would have figure out what the line between Scifi and Fantasy, but then again I just see SciFi as a subset off fantasy (a one with it’s own life, but still an offshoot)... so I see them inexorably linked in some ways.
I think there was another Star Trek episode that had an unmistakable Christian reference (although I might be confusing it with the same one you already mentioned - so correct me if I'm wrong.)
There was an episode in which the Enterprise encountered a seemingly primitive group of people who appeared to be Sun worshipers. Always referring to the Sun this and the Sun that, but near the end of the show it was discovered that they were not worshiping the Sun. It was the Son - Jesus Christ.
Was that a different episode or the same one you mentioned?
Science fiction and fantasy are both genres that work with religion frequently because they can discuss “controversial” issues by re-labelling them. The genres can examine the issues surrounding religion without actually getting into a religious debate. I recently sold an sf story that directly deals with “gods” in a post-apocalyptic world (and it’s the second story I’ve sold which deals explicitly with abortion).
The creation of gods and the issues surrounding belief in aliens and other things which exist outside a rational framework of belief, questions of what is and isn’t alive, etc. It’s a great playground for religious discussion. Too bad those genres are overwhelmed with LOTR ripoffs, “sexy” vampire stories, Trek and Star Wars retreads...
The sky is the limit in fantasy and sf, but 95% of the writers stick to the same old stuff.
It was the same episode. IIRC, it was set on a planet where the Roman Empire still existed into the 20th century. It's the only time I can remember where religion was ever even mentioned on a Star Trek series, although I didn't see all of DS9 or Voyager and almost none of Enterprise so I might be mistaken.
The lecturer observed that the modern Western experience of myth (fiction, fantasy) is distinct from that of other cultures, including Asians, and she theorized that it’s because of our culture’s assimilation of the literary and (as it were) psychological assumptions of Greek and Roman myth, which until recently had a very large role in our literary and cultural dialogue: everyone knew the stories, and everyone used them to discuss and illustrate how we see the world and how it could be.
She mentioned science fiction specifically, as opposed to fantasy, among other reasons because the projection of our fears and imaginations “out there” beyond the currently-reached physical boundaries is a characteristic of classical myth.
True dat. Although SF, like all of life, does obey Sturgeon's Law.
Bookmark for later
Was that a Teaching Company course? Those are terrific, aren’t they.
It’s American because science fiction is about pushing back boundaries and borders, and that has been an American thing lately. In many ways, science fiction is the heir of the classic western, but there’s more to it than that. SF is a genre that can encompass any other genre and is one of the few mediums where you can have a novel that is A. genuinely entertaining and B. genuinely about Something. “Literary” books tend to be dull, and “exciting” books tend to be stupid, but in SF, you get both.
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