Sci-Fi Month: Retrospective

First off, the list, in its entirety, for easy access:

My Top 10 Sci-Fi Movies

10. Metropolis
9. A Scanner Darkly
8. Silent Running
7. THX-1138
6. The Mysterious Georgraphic Explorations of Jasper Morello
5. The Truman Show
4. Wall-E
3. The Rocketeer
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
1. Dark City (Director's Cut)

My Top 10 Sci-Fi TV Shows

10. The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
9. Red Dwarf
8. Babylon 5
7. The Lost Room
6. Jeremiah
5. Futurama
4. Reboot
3. Tin Man
2. Firefly
1. Doctor Who

And Now, the Honorable Mentions

Before I launch into another list of TV shows and movies, I should probably detail why I put certain things on this list and excluded others. My primary goal with listing some of my favourite sci-fi TV shows and movies was to showcase the diversity of science fiction in pulp culture. That meant crossing a fairly wide amount of time, subgenre, and intended audience.

TV shows were much more heavily weighted towards present day. This is mainly because I'm not too familiar with older programs, especially because tracking them down can be difficult. Also, watching them retroactively generally means seeing a LOT more dated effects than in movies. Because movies - especially long-standing classics - have bigger budgets behind them, the effects often look better and we can forgive them their foibles.

I knew when I started listing I'd want at least one comedy driven piece, one family piece, and one "outside the norm" piece. I also knew I'd list at least one great, really well known piece because it's important to recognize the classics as much as the indies.

So, the most glaring omissions:
- Star Wars (any)
- Star Trek (any)

Well, for me this is a redundancy. Reminding science fiction fans that Star Wars and Star Trek exist is a bit like reminding people that someone once wrote a book called the Bible.

We all know they're the most well-known, we all know they're great (sometimes), and well remember the outfits, the terminology, and especially the music. As great as they both are, however, when it comes to reviews they serve more as benchmarks than anything else. You'll notice I've brought them up time and again (especially Star Trek) to refer to how to judge other series. That's because I don't NEED to say anything about them. You already know it all (except maybe one of you. You know who you are).

Quite honestly though, I don't enjoy them the same way I enjoy these other shows and movies. That's not to say they're BAD. They were simply the pioneers, the standard to which others are compared. It's safe now to move them aside and look at the broader spectrum.

The other tricky thing with inclusion on this list was that I wanted to have seen the ENTIRE series / movie. This meant knocking off well-known series like The X-Files, Stargate, or The Outer Limits. I'm sorry to say I've never seen the entire run of any of these, but again, that's nothing against them. They're all exceptionally well known, they all have massive followings...etc. etc. This also applied to some movies, which I'd seen chunks of on TV, but never have got round to renting / streaming entirely. That's more a commentary on me than anything else, but it means I haven't seen, front-to-back, Forbidden Planet, E.T., The Day The Earth Stood Still (original, I saw Keanu and blech) or Solaris.

There's a number of glaring omissions from the movies as well, not because I hadn't seen them but for a variety of individual reasons. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an interesting movie, but I tend to overlook it mainly because I find the first three quarters boring as hell. Sorry, I guess. The Mad Max series is notable as starting a trend in wasteland / post-apocalyptic fiction, but only the second movie approaches true GREATNESS. I edge it out because it's more high-octane action than anything else, which might be unfair. The Road Warrior does have great character development, but...Mel Gibson, you guys.

Then there's the big one. Blade Runner. Blade Runner regularly tops "best of sci-fi" lists, it's got a fantastic cast, a tremendously good director, and it's bigger than Jesus. So why not include it? A number of reasons. For starters, the theatrical release was awful. That's not the fault of the creative team per se, but nonetheless I count it as a point against it because any movie that takes about four releases to become a cult classic is trying too hard (or not hard enough). I also skimmed over it because out of those cuts, which would I choose as "the best?" But above all, I just didn't have anything to say about it that hadn't been said already. That might seem like a lousy reason, but I think people that like this stuff will have seen Blade Runner and have their own interpretations of it (whichever version they saw), and I think I'd rather hear what people have to say than talk about it myself.

I felt a little guilty about not including any sci-fi horror. It's probably one of the most common ways people are introduced to sci-fi, but I was so uppity in my listings they might've felt like a downer piece. Alien, is, in my opinion, still one of the most finely crafted horror movies of all time. The Terminator had a tremendous protagonist in Sarah Connor, and it didn't treat its victims like meat the way some horror movies do these days. And, of course, perhaps one of the best known classics, The Thing, still scares the holy bejeezus out of audiences with its shocking splatter effects.

I'm a little loathe to include films like A Clockwork Orange or Brazil , only because the opinions on them split so widely. I've heard some people complain that "cult" sci-fi movies like these are hugely overrated. Others point to them as high art. My own opinions on them are that they're both very memorable, very interesting, and worth a look. I don't think I had enough to say about either to make it worthwhile.

The Matrix can go fuck itself. That is all.

You heard me, you repellant little self-indulgent mini-Gandhi.

The last thing I'll mention is the omission of any and all anime. The very simple explanation for this is that there's just too much of it. Anime holds a spot all to itself, and I think trying to whittle down that considerable list for inclusion on a sci-fi list would be a great injustice. The other thing is that I've only seen a tiny portion of the parts that get filtered through to North America. Beyond that I know there's literally thousands of series, movies and comics devoted to the science fiction genre. I don't think I'm at all well-read / well-watched (?) enough to talk at length about anime.

So Why Sci-Fi?

It may have become obvious that the George Takei concert (which was AMAZING by the by) was a simple excuse to put out a list of faves.

Science Fiction has been a part of my life since I was about five. My father had (still has) a vast collection of all the classics of the modern age: Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein...and beyond the supreme greats, some also-greats, like Larry Niven, Philip Jose Farmer, Spider Robinson...the list was endless.

It goes without saying that our upbringing affects who we become, and in that environment it seems inevitable that I'd become a sci-fi geek. On the other hand, my sister has little to no interest in science fiction, so who's to say. I like to think that those books had a profound effect on me outside of simply emulating my father. There's a reason these great stories are celebrated, adapted, re-read and re-mounted.

To me, Science Fiction is the genre that above all else celebrates human innovation and exploration. Even in the darkest of books, set in grimy dystopias or hellish post-apocalyptic earths, we find a spirit of humanity that persists in the face of overwhelming adversity. It's a universal characteristic that is continually worth celebrating, across cultures, generations and worlds.

It's science fiction. I consider myself lucky to have contributed to it in my own tiny way, but especially to live in an age where it not only is alive and well, but it's thriving and growing.

Here's to the future! The past! Anything in between! Here's to Sci-Fi!