What makes a Science Fiction film?

[Wolfenbarg]

You think Star Wars is not sci-fi?

Well, go watch K-PAX [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272152/], a movie about a psychiatrist patient who claims he is an alien. (Spoiler: he is not.) The only 'sci' thing is a visit to an observatorium. Nothing else.

Dude, be very glad that something like Star Wars exists in this time and age...

There's kind of a different element behind the two though. I consider Star Wars to be straight fantasy because the key element that drives the plot is something that is most certainly mythical in nature. The setting with all of the advanced technology wasn't incredibly relevant and could have been completely removed from the film, and all of the key themes and story could have been exactly the same. It's all about the force.

K-PAX on the other hand centers around the idea that the character the entire plot turns around might just be an alien. While the story is probably considered by most to be a drama, the strange bit of mystery in the end still leads to the possibility that this character might not have been from our world. That has sci-fi elements to it.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

That is why as a writer when I write science fiction I can't stand it when people point out, "Oh, that can't happen, the science isn't believable, such science doesn't exist and can't exist today or in the future."

The problem is:

A.) I'm writing fiction.

B.) In my fictional universe, such things are science and possible.

I bloody hate the argument that science fiction should be more fiction than science. It just strikes me of laziness; there are so many things that you could do even within the mundane laws of physics that we know now, and yet, you decide that you're going to be ridiculous and lazy and just completely free yourself from any sort of rational arguments.

Read this. [http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/respectscience.php] Science fiction doesn't have to be "fictional science". Look at the Big Three of science fiction - each of them trained well enough in science to make properly hard SF without bitching about how the laws of physics were holding them back. A good science fiction writer should be able to write within plausible limits of scientific knowledge and hypotheses as much as being able to disregard them.

I'm not lazy, and I didn't say that science fiction should be more fiction than science. You are putting words in my mouth. My post even states that the science in science fiction can totally be real and plausible in the real world. Fiction doesn't mean that everything in the story has to be fake, just as having science on the front of fiction doesn't mean that the science in a science fiction book has to be real and doable....ever.

I was only pointing out that science fiction that deals with science that can never be done in the real world, is still science fiction. It is just the science of my fictional world. It doesn't matter in the science is real or fake, it is still science fiction.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Nuclear weapons still emit enormous quantities of energy at various points in the EM spectrum. Such that a single 1 megaton nuclear device has sufficient energy to heat an aluminum surface (for example) by hundreds of degrees in an instant.

If the explosion is within a kilometre or so, yes, it will do a lot of damage. In vacuum, though, if the explosion is any further away, ablation effects pretty much disappear to the intents and purposes of armour penetration, and most of the energy is released as various forms of radiation. Mainly X-rays, if I remember correctly.

Actually, its quite easy to calculate the energy over a given area of space as you can get a reasonably accurate answer by simply assuming the energy is evenly distributed over the outer edge of a sphere. A 1km sphere has a surface area of ~12,600,000 m. This shows that at 1km the blast has still has about 330 million joules per meter. At a distance of 2 km, this figure drops to 83 million joules and at 4 km it is only 20 million joules. Sure, not all of this energy will be absorbed by the spacecraft, but to put it in perspective a .45 ACP handgun produces a muzzle energy of a mere 800 joules or so (and most of them are far lower than that) while a modern APFSDS round (the sort of round a modern tank uses to kill other modern tanks at a distance of several miles) yield a tens of thousand up to a few hundred thousand joules of energy.

Once you reach a range of say 16 km, the energy levels become incredibly manageable at around a mere million joules per square meter or so.

 

[Wintermoot]

if it uses science in a way of fiction and uses technology not available in this point in time (like mechs,space ships etc.) it doesn't have to be set in the future (for example Patlabor is set in the late 90,s early 00,s but still is a science fiction series) Star Wars uses unavailable technology in combination with fantasy (the space ships and the use of the Force)

 

[Manatee Slayer]

There's kind of a different element behind the two though. I consider Star Wars to be straight fantasy because the key element that drives the plot is something that is most certainly mythical in nature. The setting with all of the advanced technology wasn't incredibly relevant and could have been completely removed from the film, and all of the key themes and story could have been exactly the same. It's all about the force.

I find this argument to be fairly poor. The Man in the High Castle is still a science ficiton novel, written by, possibly, one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, which centres completely around people that even upon the time of writing didn't even use any sort of futeristic science.

A genre is defined as much by it's setting than it is by story construction. If you had said Star Wars was a science fiction/fantasy movie then that could be correct, especially when only taking the first trilogy into account. I would still disagree however, as the Force in star wars is like any other natural force in our world, the only difference is that some things can interact with it and some can't, depending on the concentration of a microorganism living on (or in) the being trying to use it.

 

[Wondermint13]

Guns that dont need reloading!

Thats how you make a Sci-Fi movie!

 

[Nouw]

Snipped for Science...in fiction!

Strange how this didn't come as a notification...
EDIT:I beat the Escapist Messaging System!

About your post, I whole heartedly agree. It can build upon science that would be impossible (for now anyway) or just be insane! That's the beauty of it, the stories that 1900s era Sci-Fi writers would have been deemed impossible hence not Sci-Fi but they're classics of science for this very reason. Which I have to admit isn't what I usually think about in Science Fiction but nevertheless believe. (Not all of the books, the really good ones!)

Science Fiction is in the future, you're writing about what science might be in the future or in your world.
[sub]Note that it isn't necessarily in the future.[/sub]

Awesome awesome.

Going back to are agreement in the television thread many hours ago:

Before I saw and posted in this thread, I had just watch the steam-punk episode of Castle, with Castle's "time travel" theory about the murder. It is now my second favorite episode.

Aaaah I must have missed that one, I saw ads for Castle ages ago when it first appeared on T.V. (I live in New Zealand so things may have been a bit slower) but I wasn't interested. I had a feeling it was Nathan Fillion and after a promising episode I got sucked in!

Hopefully I can pick that one up some other time, sounds very interesting.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Aaaah I must have missed that one, I saw ads for Castle ages ago when it first appeared on T.V. (I live in New Zealand so things may have been a bit slower) but I wasn't interested. I had a feeling it was Nathan Fillion and after a promising episode I got sucked in!

Hopefully I can pick that one up some other time, sounds very interesting.

I don't know what your situation is like down there but I recommend this:

Go to http://www.sidereel.com/Castle

There are links to all the episodes out so far. I recommend the links that go to Megavideo. The only draw back is that you can only watch 72 minutes, then you have to wait 30 minutes before you can watch more. It remembers over time too, if you watch one episode and then watch another 8 hours later, it will cut off for the 30min break. I don't think the tracking lasts more than a day though, so one episode a day is a good viewing stride.

Oh and not all episodes will have links to Megavideo, but all the link lists have links to sites that have links to Megavideo.

 

[Nouw]

Aaaah I must have missed that one, I saw ads for Castle ages ago when it first appeared on T.V. (I live in New Zealand so things may have been a bit slower) but I wasn't interested. I had a feeling it was Nathan Fillion and after a promising episode I got sucked in!

Hopefully I can pick that one up some other time, sounds very interesting.

I don't know what your situation is like down there but I recommend this:

Go to http://www.sidereel.com/Castle

There are links to all the episodes out so far. I recommend the links that go to Megavideo. The only draw back is that you can only watch 72 minutes, then you have to wait 30 minutes before you can watch more. It remembers over time too, if you watch one episode and then watch another 8 hours later, it will cut off for the 30min break. I don't think the tracking lasts more than a day though, so one episode a day is a good viewing stride.

Oh and not all episodes will have links to Megavideo, but all the link lists have links to sites that have links to Megavideo.

I'll give it a look, judging from your experience I'm betting it will be fine for me.

 

[MagicMouse]

To me it all depends on what the MAIN focus of the plot is. A Sci-Fi film should put the majority of its effort on the universe it creates.

Lets take two popular Sci-Fi series.

Battlestar Galactica- Main focus on realistic character interactions. It is just a drama in space.

Stargate SG-1- Main focus on fictional plot and universe exploration, a true Science Fiction.