My take on "What is science fiction?"

Last year in Professor Cox's science fiction class, we tried to tackle the big questions like "What is science fiction?" and "What was the first work of science fiction?" And this year is no different, except we'll be covering more books. I think what I like most about science fiction as a genre is that there is no set definition. Science fiction authors and enthusiasts try make their definitions as inclusive and specific as possible, but something doesn't work with it. I agree with Darko Suvin's idea of combining estrangement and cognition, but there must be a simpler way to say it than Suvin's definition.

I don't have a definition of science fiction yet. I haven't read enough and some science fiction classic would surely disprove my definition or something like that. But from our brainstorming in class, I thought the idea of a circus mirror fit the best. It presents the reality we know with a few very obvious changes. The mirror exaggerates the problems and catches your attention. A nose the size of your face is hard to miss. However, the definition of science fiction is not simply "circus mirror." That would not be very helpful in a dictionary.

Since I don't have my own definition to end this post with, I'll borrow Tom Shippey's definition: "Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it." Hopefully by the end of this course I'll have more of an idea of what I think science fiction is.

Metropolis

Since I won't be at the movie I thought I'd write some background about the movie, without ruining the story. A little interesting fact is that Metropolis was the most expensive movie to ever be produced at the time, 1927. It cost around 7 million Reichsmark, the music that will be in the background was added later on and was not part of the original movie. For those who are history buffs this is right before hyper-inflation took a hold of Germany. The reason that their isn't a complete version is because Hitler put this on his banned movies list and confiscated all the copies, and with the allied bombings, most of everything was destroyed. Once you get past the massive amount of makeup on all the actors and actresses (that's Expressionism for you) the story is really interesting, at least to me. When I first saw it I could hardly believe some of the special effects could actually be done back in 1927, most likely because they built really good models for the film.

Welcome

Welcome to our Social/Science/Fiction blog. Hopefully everyone finds blogger relatively easy to use; I know I do. I am going to go ahead and require the use of a blogger account in order to make comments, just to make it easier to respond directly to someone who makes a comment.

I suppose I will make this my first post:

I enjoyed yesterday's class, the syllabus looks good, and our discussion of "What is Science Fiction" was entertaining. I must admit that I have a slightly more inclusive view of science fiction than what both the class, and Prof. Jackson came up with. I don't quite agree with the idea that only works both using space, aliens, etc., and which have characteristics of good literature should be included in our definition. I don't have to read bad sci-fi (and I try not to), but I won't deny it's still sci-fi--every genre had its share of junk there is no reason to assume our preferred genre is somehow better.