Science fiction presents itself to us through different mediums, most notably through the written and visual. Have you ever wondered who owns it? Lou Anders has, and he submitted the following question:

This is like asking who is driving the food presentation industry, MacDonald’s or the French Laundry. They both work in food, to be sure, and they’re both good at what they do. But what they do is different enough that comparing the two in a general sense is silly.

To speak in wildly oversimplifying terms, written science fiction is about speculation; visual science fiction is about spectacle. The distinction was there from the beginning of science fiction as a visual medium: Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la Lune was made not because Méliès’ cared about showing men getting to the moon, but because he cared about showing off his state-of-the-art effects skills. Look at the list of the most successful science fiction films over the last three decades and you’ll understand how much spectacle is privileged over speculation. It doesn’t mean visual SF is doing something wrong; it means it’s doing something fundamentally different than written SF.

Written and visual science fiction have different goals, so to say one is driving the other (or that either is driving both) isn’t accurate. It’s more accurate to say that each influences the other in a more or less indirect way. Visual sf influences written sf (to go to another, different metaphor) very much the way movies are currently influencing Broadway: Popular movies are now being turned into hit Broadway musicals; Popular sf movies, TV show and video games are turned into profitable book series. Written sf influences visual sf very much the way avant-garde musicians influence pop music: Glenn Branca influences Thurston Moore, who influences Frank Black, who influences Liz Phair, who influences Avril Lavinge, who sells trillions of albums and mp3s to bunches of 14-year-old girls who would pepper-spray Glenn Branca if he walked up to them in public.

For his part, Branca might be entirely horrified at the idea that he’s in some small way responsible for Lavinge’s smash #1 hit “Girlfriend.” But on the other hand, it is catchy. It has a nice beat, and you can dance to it, as long as you don’t think about it too hard. And as you can connect Branca to “Girlfriend,” so too can you connect, say, Olaf Stapledon to Heroes. But being connected is not the same as driving the field. That’s more like being in the backseat, shaking your head and saying “you should have taken that left. Now we’re going to have to detour through all this crap.”

Suffice to say written and visual sf will drive themselves, independently, and that’s fine. And when they get hungry, one will pull over at MacDonalds, and one at the French Laundry. But which at which? Well, think: which one has more money? Yes, the irony, it burns.

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Science fiction would be nothing without the science. Who doesn’t like reading about new or interesting ideas inside of a story? But should SF authors know their stuff when it comes to the science behind the stories? To that end, our question this week:

No, science fiction authors don’t have any obligation to be scientifically accurate – up to a point. If we insisted on absolute scientific verisimilitude, then – at a stroke – we’d take out some of the best stories and books the field has produced – Dick, Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith – pretty much the entire “New Wave” and a lot that’s come since. But there have to be limits, and I think (since most written SF does at least give lip-service to scientific accuracy) this is best illustrated in relation to media SF. Star Trek, for all its undoubted faults, always exhibited a basic grasp of the scale and structure of the universe. The writers and producers, despite their reliance on “creatures of pure energy”, the “particle of the week”, and other such hokum, did at least understand that planets went around stars, that stars were an inconveniently long way apart, that the galaxy was composed of billions of such stars, and all the other galaxies were sufficiently far away that they may as well not exist. It was understood that warp drive was a necessary prerequisite for interstellar journeys, whereas impulse drive sufficed for tootling around the solar system. Compare and contrast this creditable stab at realism with the lamentable Space:1999 (which I nonetheless loved with an unbridled passion when I was 9) and there’s little or no sense of the writers having any grasp of the rhetoric of scale. Planets, suns, galaxies, etc, all seem to be essentially interchangeable entities. No known physics could ever account for the speed with with the runaway moon zipped from planet to planet, while remaining close enough to any given planet to facilitate back-and-forth travel by rocket for an entire episode’s duration. Star Trek‘s writers understood that the Enterprise would require inertial dampeners if its crew weren’t to be squashed by the immense accelerations associated with star travel. No such consideration was ever part of the thinking behind Space:1999, in which the entire moon was blasted out of Earth orbit with no repercussions beyond a few broken items of furniture. In my view, Space:1999 is beyond the pale and can’t really be enjoyed on any level except as dreamlike fantasy, filled with science fictional props that nonetheless don’t fit together in any coherent fashion. But the Eagle transporters did look way cool.

There’s a wider point, though, this is this: why would anyone not be sufficiently enthralled and interested in science to want to get it right? Science is an inherently fascinating and rich human enterprise. We would rightly scorn any writer who professed to a disinterest in the facts of history, or psychology. But science is too often seen as some kind of optional intellectual add-on, a bit like having an interest in early music or Swedish cinema.. That’s not to say that all SF should be scrupulously accurate, all-dots-crossed, my slide-rule’s bigger than yours Hard SF – it would be boring if that were the case. But I don’t think the injection of a tiny amount of real-world science has ever hurt a story, and it’s definitely helped some of mine.

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Young Adult fiction is a hot topic at the moment, mostly brought on by John Scalzi’s recent post about YA genre classification. He mentions that some adult readers overlook YA sf/f, but some YA books may be equally enjoyed by even the most discerning adult reader. So we asked some folks:

For what it’s worth, the recommendation at the front of my mind (probably because I just read it) would be Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. And I wasn’t the only one…

Read on to see how our esteemed panel responded. And be sure to offer up your own suggestions!

I think it’s no secret I’m a big fan of Scott Westerfeld’s work, but rather than recommend Scott’s wildly successful Uglies series, which really doesn’t need any more help, let me give a shoutout to one of his other books, Peeps. These days there are more “vampire reboot” sort of books than any one planet actually needs, but what makes Peeps worth the time is both the plot, and the every-other-chapter digressions into parasitology that actually manage to dovetail into the story Scott is telling. It’s clever, it’s exciting, and it’s good, and if you were handed the book without knowing where in the bookstore it was shelved, you wouldn’t know or care that it was YA.

Beyond this, my recommendation for titles is for adult readers to go into the YA section and do what they do in every other section of the bookstore: browse, damn it. Look at the covers and the jacket copy and maybe read a little of the book and just see if the book looks interesting to you. Oddly enough, it works as well in the YA section as it does everywhere else. Alternately, go to the library and ask the YA librarian to suggest some title. Oh, go on, you baby. You won’t be the first adult she’s recommended a YA book to in her life.

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This year’s summer movie slate is full of sequels and remakes of existing properties. As science fiction/fantasy fans we know there is a wealth of written material that deserves to appear on the big screen or on TV. The recent news that Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos is being adapted for the silver screen is welcome, even as we’re sceptical about the final result. Our question this week:

I like Dune as much as the next science fiction fan, but I find it disappointing that Hollywood keeps remaking the same stories instead of tapping into the wealth of science fiction literature. I’m not sure that every story can be easily translated into film, particularly if it features many non-humanoid or posthuman characters. I also think that there is a glut of action thrillers and SF-horror movies. Keeping that in mind, here are a few SF stories that I’d like to see on the big screen:

- I think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash could make a brilliant movie, if a screenwriter could be found who could pare the plot down to feature film length without eliminating the humor. What makes it enjoyable to me is that the over-the-top characters and settings – the reluctant hero Hiro, who is an excellent swordsman in both the real world and online, the badass teenaged skateboard messenger, the evangelist who wants to take over the world through speaking in tongues, the mafia-run pizza delivery business, the decaying crowded freeways, tacky strip malls and gated ‘burbs covering Southern California, the giant “raft” of refugee boats drifting along the coast – seem almost plausible. And of course there is the appeal of the Metaverse itself, where computer geeks can don an avatar of their own creation and are at the top of the social hierarchy.

- Connie Willis’s time travel novels are among my favorites, so I’d love to see them made into movies. The Doomsday Book would make a moving drama, with its contrast between young historian Kivrin’s experiences in the medieval village beset by plague, and her colleagues fighting the influenza epidemic in future Oxford. The ending is probably not upbeat enough for a commercial SF movie, though. On the other hand, I think Willis’s much lighter time travel comedy of errors, To Say Nothing of the Dog, could be fun light entertainment. I like to imagine it filmed in the style of a Merchant-Ivory production (maybe my fondness for period pieces makes me different from the “average” SF fan, though).

- The theme of environmental destruction in Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is as timely today as it was in the 1970s, as are the issues surrounding the ethics and technical limitations of cloning. While the multigenerational scope of the novel is probably too broad for a single movie, I think that it would work to focus the story on Mark, one of the few “singletons” in the survivalist colony of clones .

- My choice for an outer space flick would be Frederick Pohl’s Gateway. It’s got dangerous exploration of space and unknown worlds, flawed main characters, tense interpersonal relationships in the close quarters of the alien asteroid spaceport and, and, of course it the dramatic ending with the characters’ ships trapped by a black hole. While the novel doesn’t really have a feel-good ending, it could be combined with “Heechee Rendezvous” to provide a happy resolution to the story.

- Finally, my nostalgic entry is Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage. It features a teenaged girl whose coming of age story involves the development of both physical and mental toughness as she fights to survive on an unfamiliar planet. Perhaps it is out of date now, considering it was published 40 years ago, but I include it in my list because it made a big impact on me when I read it as a 13-year-old. It was the first (and one of the few) SF book I read that featured the heroics of a girl, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

- I was going to also suggest Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, but a search turned up that it’s already in the process of being made into film by Morgan Freeman’s production company. I’m looking forward to it.

I actually think that many SF novels can only be faithfully reproduced as miniseries, rather than 90 minute moves. That doesn’t mean that SF novel-based movies aren’t possible, but that they are necessarily something different than the original. Bladerunner is a great film, but it’s only loosely based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It’s not just that typical SF stories are sprawling in time and space, but that the speculative part of the speculative fiction is usually cut in favor of action. Personally, I would love to see the SciFi channel produce more original miniseries based on classic SF, rather than filling up their schedule with ghost buster “reality” shows and wrestling, but I’m not holding my breath.

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The lasting impression of a book is often conveyed by its ending, and that impression can be either good or bad. I remember finishing the lengthy Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton and still wishing there was more to read. That’s a great ending! Sadly, I also remember reading Hamilton’s otherwise excellent Night’s Dawn Trilogy and being disappointed by the deus ex machina finale of The Naked God. Great ending? Not so much.

I wasn’t the only one to be bothered by that particular title — as you’ll see when you read the responses we got when we asked people this question:

Note: Some of the answers may be spoilery, so read on…if you dare. And be sure to tell us your own picks!

How do you really define “Best ending”? Is the best ending one in which the narrative relentlessly builds toward, one that’s inevitable and inescapable yet still provides a satisfying denouement? Or would “Best” be better defined by that unexpected twist, that out-of-left-field trump card that comes at the reader unawares, yet in hindsight seems a perfect–yet audacious–resolution to the story? Both are very different types of endings, appropriate to very different types of stories.

For the former, I offer Mary Stewart’s The Wicked Day. Anyone who’s ever come within sniffing distance of the Arthurian legends knows good and well that fate has some nasty business in store for King Arthur and his son Mordred. Yet it’s to Stewart’s credit that the reader feels for both sides in this prototypical dysfunctional family squabble, and even as the narrative follows the traditional course of events in a surprisingly faithful manner the reader hopes against hope that Stewart will pull back at the last instant to offer a less bloody resolution. That she doesn’t makes the tragedy all the more poignant.

For the latter type of ending, consider Ken MacLeod’s Cassini Division. A tour de force of a space opera novel, things go to hell in the proverbial handbasket very, very quickly once all the various subplots come to a head. The fact that the communist protagonists (a clever bit of political commentary on MacLeod’s part, that) seem stripped of their only weapons serves to ramp the tension up to 11. When the rabbit is pulled out of the hat–as it is in spectacular fashion here–I literally leapt to my feet, pumping my fist and shouting “Yes!” I never saw it coming, but instantly recalled all the seemingly throwaway bits of detail and worldbuilding that turned out to be far more significant in retrospect. That the finale was both unexpected and justified is a fine sleight-of-hand on the author’s part.

On the other hand, fingering the worst ending is a much easier task. Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud caps off one of the most wretched, tedious plots in the history of science fiction with the most spectacularly awful pull-it-out-your-ass ending ever. Wandering off to find God is something you’d expect from the lead character in some self-important New Age memoir, not an all-powerful star-devouring cosmic entity. I ask you, would those classic Fantastic Four stories hold up as well if they saved Earth only because Galactus decided to abruptly take up navel-gazing? The fact that the Black Cloud itself is one of the single most brilliant science fictional speculations of all time merely serves to amplify the many literary sins of this truly abysmal “classic” of the genre.

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Judging by the amount of books we receive here at SF Signal (see 2008′s list right here), science fiction publishing in doing quite well. Trying to keep up with the flood of new books by well known authors is hard enough, what if you want to find something new and interesting? How do you find that ‘underrated’ author whose books you have to read? Well, you ask for help! Which is what we did for this week’s Mind Meld.

I would nominate a few authors, first Stanislaw Lem, who I don’t think has had enough exposure in the West, his seminal book Solaris has apparently never had a translation he was happy with. Other works of his, such as His Master’s Voice rank up there with the best the west has had to offer, and offer a fresh perspective to the usual flawed notions of ‘moral and societal advancement through the pursuit scientific knowledge’ that permeates much of the genre. His later works push the boundaries of what constitutes science fiction like nothing else I’ve seen, dispensing with plot and focusing entirely on ideas, in books like One Human Minute, or A Perfect Vacuum, which consist of a series of reviews of non existent books.

Also I would nominate Olaf Stapledon, writing before the genre was truly formed, but with works like Starmaker and Last and First Men had a scope that has rarely been equaled in all the successive years.

These two are both pretty well known I’d guess, but I can’t help thinking more exposure could only be a good thing.

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One of the many perennial arguments in the science fiction blogosphere centers on the health of the short fiction market, so we turned the Mind Meld microphone to people in the field and asked them:

The SF short fiction market is toast. And if you’ve ever stayed at a London bed and breakfast, you’ll know the sort of toast I mean: toast that’s been out of the toaster and cooling on a toast rack till the only reason you can spread butter on it is that it’s acquired the consistency and tensile strength of a silicone rubber trivet. If you want to know what short SF’s future looks like, look at poetry’s present. Then subtract all the teaching jobs and grant money.

The traditional SF magazines are in hospice care waiting to die, and there hasn’t been a successful attempt at starting a new print SF magazine in decades. The online markets are loss leaders or labors of love.

And even if they weren’t, even if there were actual commercial SF magazines with workable long-term business plans, from an author’s point of view the so-called “professional” rates — that only a handful of markets can afford to pay — are a joke everyone’s heard so often it’s not worth groaning at. The penny a word John W. Campbell paid his authors in 1937 would be worth nearly fifteen cents now — three times more than what most of the “pro” markets are paying. Even Hugo Gernsback’s 1926 quarter-cent — three cents a word in 2008 — would put him at the top of the semi-pro pack today.

At a nickel a word you could fill every slot in every pro market every month and still not make enough to make the median mortgage payment in Chicago or Baltimore. Nobody’s making a living off selling SF short fiction to traditional markets, except maybe Howard Waldrop. There just isn’t enough money in the SF short fiction business to pay writers a living wage; there hasn’t been since prime-time TV went color, and there never will be again.

Which is not to say the SF short story is dead. There are more places to read short stories, more places to get an SF short story published, than there have ever been. Do good work and you’ll get critical acclaim, the respect of your peers, and the right to munch cold cuts in the SFWA suite at Worldcon. You won’t make enough money to quit your day job, but then, SF novelists generally don’t make enough money to quit their day jobs these days, either.

Meanwhile, if you insist on wanting to know how to make money writing short fiction, talk to Nick Mamatas. But you won’t hear much about genre markets.

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This week we tackle one of our favorite science fiction sub-genres, Space Opera. Specifically for this question, we are going to be taking our cue from Alan DeNiro’s review of The New Space Opera over at Rain Taxi. (You can view the book online here). The question posed to our panel this week is:

Relevant? Today’s news will be dated tomorrow. Why bother with relevance? You might as well demand that Tolkien be politically correct. Space Opera being a retro style, it should be indulged in with mucho retro gusto. Human passions on alien worlds! Action! Adventure! Really Wild Things! The big evolutionary drama played out against the universe in a timeless way. It makes for good stories, and good storytelling stands the test of time. The Wild West vanished long ago, but no one ever remarks that western stories are irrelevant. If I’m going to write genre stuff I will revel in it, not cringe and worry whether I’m relevant enough for today’s tastes.

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This week’s question was suggested by Lou Anders, who not only received extra Mind Meld credit redeemable at imaginary nerd shops everywhere, but who also must serve penance by answering his own question:

You can’t generalize about this large a field. For every atheist or agnostic author you can name, I’ll name a religious one. For example: Gene Wolfe is a devout Catholic. Ray Lafferty was a devout Catholic. Avram Davidson was an Orthodox Jew. Michael A. Burstein is an Orthodox Jew. Etc, etc, etc.

In 1984 I wrote a very controversial novel titled The Branch, in which God and the true Jewish Messiah (not Jesus) were the two villains of the piece. The poor producer/director who optioned and made it got excommunicated from his church and thrown out of his country (Andorra)…and yet if you do not accept the existence of God and the truth of the Old Testament, there’s no story. So was it irreligious, or was it simply Politically Incorrect religion?

I am an atheist, yet I have given God speaking parts in four or five humorous stories, and have treated religion with respect in literally dozens of stories and novels. On the other hand, I know many devout Christian and Jewish science fiction writers whose religious beliefs are deeply personal, and who choose not to share them fictionally with their audience. Are they irreligious because they do not evangelize in print?

You can’t just a book by its cover…and you can’t necessarily judge an author’s (or a field’s) religious beliefs by that book’s contents.

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If you’re like us, there’s nothing quite like a really cool piece of science fiction or fantasy art. For this week’s Mind Meld we decided to ask the SF&F artist community about what they find appealing about science fiction, fantasy and art. (Special thanks to Lou Anders for his help in bringing this Mind Meld together. Thanks Lou!)

And now, our question:

Among my earliest memories are the dragon in Sleeping Beauty, as seen through the front windshield of the family car at a drive in, and of a giant eyeball chasing astronauts through a weird alien set on a black & white TV.

I was hooked early.

It was the era of the space race and television; Zorro and Batman and moonshot coverage competed with Gunsmoke and Wells Fargo for my love. One of my most treasured possessions was my G.I. Joe space capsule and astronaut. Lost in Space almost captured me in the third grade, though it became stupid pretty quickly. But Star Trek changed everything. Science, plus fiction, coupled with amazing visuals … and my first taste of social consciousness. Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey would push science fiction into philosophical terrain as yet undiscovered by me, and the first two Planet of the Apes movies would awaken my political awareness in a big way by killing my heroes, trashing our civilization, then destroying the planet. The movies drove me to the books, where Arthur C. Clark asked questions about life, the universe, and everything, and Isaac Asimov laid down the law for robots.

Everything I learned that I remembered best came from a science fiction movie or book. I learned about PH from The Andromeda Strain before I was old enough to have a chemistry class. Fantastic Voyage taught me more about the human body than any 5th grader had business knowing; most adults couldn’t tell you what a fistula was — but I knew. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man introduced me to Psychology. Valley of Gwangi pushed me right over the edge with dinosaurs; I devoured every text about them I could find. The fiction made me hungry for the science.

When I discovered Tolkien (after rejecting it several times; who wants to read about elves and dwarves?) I realized that Fantasy could have something to say, too. Fantasy and its mythic roots led me to Joseph Campbell and a whole new understanding of religion and mythology and the fuzzy boundaries between the two.

Fantastic fiction speaks to our thirst for knowledge, our hunger for personal discovery, our desire to shape and understand our environment, by asking “what if?” and playing with the answers.

As a visually-oriented kid, the art of it all was key. Good writing in books evoked mental images that I had to explore; I learned to draw largely by creating my own science fiction and super-hero comic books. The ground-breaking and mind-bending special effects in Forbidden Planet, 2001, and Marooned taught me to look at the world with a more critical eye, and to make use of the sciences to inform my art. Geometry and Perspective go hand in hand, the physics of bodies in motion are essential to good art, as are understandings of color theory, geology (a mountain is not a pyramid), astronomy and astrology, history, even the psychology of perception … on and on.

Good art makes it all the more real. Art informs. Art, like writing and movie-making, is an exploration into the unknowns without and within. It ponders realms that cannot be photographed or described with words, because they are ineffable and timeless. It helps connect the emotional and visceral with the cognitive and philosophical, the unreal with the real. At its best, it teaches or amuses, shocks or disturbs; it makes you look again, and then again – only deeper.

It takes the question “what if?” and answers “perhaps this…”

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Here’s Orson Scott Card’s response to last week’s Mind Meld on young adult sf/f fiction, which was received after the post was published:

It seems to me that if YA writers want to write about adult stuff, they should change category. Nothing stops young readers from following them into the adult shelves. When the YA label is placed on a book, it’s a promise to parents, teachers, and librarians that certain standards are being adhered to.

This is not a trivial matter. There is genuine damage to some young readers from being exposed too early to sexual or overly violent material. Other young readers seem to be unharmed. But the writer is in no position to judge the maturity of each reader. That is up to parents, teachers, and librarians – and part of the information they use is the YA label.

When you put out a book with “adult” content under a YA label, you’re not a hero of artistic liberty, you’re a liar and a cheat. You want to keep getting the same income by pretending your writing belongs in a category that you have left behind.

A recent post by Nancy Kress concerning the mature themes of current young adult science fiction struck a chord with my own observations over the last few years. Namely, that the fiction being marketed to today’s young adults deals with adult themes more than the young adult fiction from yesteryear. This seemed like a good topic to throw at some of the people in the field:

[UPDATE: See also, a belated answer from Orson Scott Card.]

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer:

I have a dear friend, a hospital pediatrician, who told me her father had explained that “sex is wet and messy.” This kept her from experimenting with same for nearly two years longer than she would have otherwise. This, in of itself, would justify more explicitness. My book (it’s all about me, Me, ME!), Jumper, was on the American Library Association’s 100 Most Banned Books List (1990-1999) because it essentially said, “If one of your parent’s is an active alcoholic bad things may result” (page 2) and “If you run away from home you may become the target of sexual predation” (page 9).

Now let’s try a thought experiment. You have a child. You want them to find out that they could be targeted for rape as a homeless teen by (a) Reading about it in fiction or (b) experiencing it.

Anybody choose B?

The job of writers is, foremost, to entertain, but we have other functions too. We give people experiences about choices and consequences from which they can draw conclusions for their own lives, and they didn’t have to go through that sexual assault or become a drug addict or live in a war ravaged city or kill somebody themselves. But, we also have to sell it–to make it real, to make it believable and sometimes that calls for explicit detail.

Looking back two hundred years, we can see a significant shift in what is explicit and what isn’t. We aren’t tying skirts around the legs of our tables lest the exposed nature of the “limbs” unduly excite the young (but the Victorians did.) Bare midriff’s would give them a heart attack.

And what is too explicit shifts widely between cultures and even between families. It shifts too much to expect school and public libraries to be able to decide (other than on a broad basis) what is and isn’t appropriate for your kids.

That’s your job.

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If you take a look around your local bookstore’s SF section, you can’t help but notice the preponderance of book series on the shelves, especially in the fantasy arena, which seems to specialize in doorstopper series. Inevitably, the store won’t have all published books in the series, leaving the customer out of luck if they decide to buy right then. Which leads to our question:

As a reader – I’m fascinated and perplexed by people who will pick up a series six or seven books in. Really amazed that anyone will do that, and surprised even more when folks do do that and then complain about being lost. That being said, I’m more amazed at the author’s who can pull off making a book so deep into their run comprehensible. I read Jim Butcher’s Proven Guilty to get a sense of what he’s about, and found no trouble jumping in despite the various levels of competing back story he’s obviously been developing across several books.

As an editor, I always feel a bit of trepidation when I’m pitched a multi-book story. If it takes off, as Mike Resnick’s Starship series has done for us, your golden, because you can return to it again and again. But if it doesn’t, then you watch each subsequent book perform less well than the one before. As to series as an impediment to gaining readers – I believe that Kay Kenyon is currently expanding her audience significantly with her brilliant quartet, The Entire and the Rose. Though my advice to first time authors would be to start with a stand-alone. If it has “series potential” that’s great, but don’t pitch it that way. At least not to me!

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Common sense and statistics say that, even when you think you’re watching a decent SciFi film, you should refrain from celebration until after the end credits – because sometimes movie endings suck. We asked a host of luminaries the following question.

*** SPOILER WARNING! ***

Some of these answers (and accompanying videos) contain spoilers. But in this case, the answers are more entertaining than the end of the movie anyway, so…spoiler warning redacted.

First, what makes for a good ending? The hallmark of a great movie ending is that it’s impossible to anticipate while watching it, but seems like the only ending possible in hindsight. It shouldn’t fall prey to sentimentality, at least not overly so, and should follow through with the power of the premise. Surprising, inevitable, memorable; some examples that come to mind include: A Boy and His Dog, 12 Monkeys, The Thing, Planet of the Apes (1968). I guess I like the shocking sci-fi horror ending! A lot of sf movies have conventional endings, a little too pat and expected, but not weird or ugly.

I decided to start with a list of movies I think have endings flawed one way or another, a list that includes a lot of movies I truly like. 2001 is pretty confusing. Contact is a bit of a let down and the government cover-up seemed unnecessary. AI goes for the weird alien happy ending. The Hulk ending is a dark mess. The finale of Sphere sucks. Changing the ending of Armageddon sure couldn’t hurt it. Return of the Jedi is full of Ewoks and happy happy joy joy Darth Vader. Ridley Scott himself has changed the ending of Blade Runner several times.

And then there’s the movie I finally settled on: Signs…

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If you look around, you’ll see that science fiction seems to be very popular, especially in movies (The Matrix, Star Wars) and TV (Heroes, LOST), but you may have noticed that science fiction still doesn’t seem to get the respect from the teeming masses that it’s popularity would seem to indicate it deserves. This time we asked science fiction bloggers and authors the following question:

I’m going to answer this in a roundabout way. As a sci-fi consumer, I’m betting you have one of those friends who doesn’t “do” sci-fi despite being an avid reader, movie buff, of TV watcher. Every time you recommend a sci-fi show or flick to this person, they respond with a typical line: “I just can’t get into it.” In my experience, what this phrase really means is “I can’t identify with the characters.” The average-joe schlub in the sitcom, everyone can see themselves as. He doctors and lawyers and police detectives that catch bad guys—everyone wants to see themselves as. The polymath engineer-cum-diplomat starship captain? Not so much. This is the central divide between geek genre and mainstream genre.

By virtue of its setting, science fiction and fantasy have a certain distance from conventional experience. For some folks, that’s the draw. For others, it’s a put-off. Geeks, to lean on a stereotype, have no trouble envisioning themselves in these foreign settings. (Heck, most of us are willing to literally dress up in costume to emulate them.) Sadly, this puts us in the minority. Geek shows only become mainstream when they design themselves to be accessible to the regular viewer, not the geek viewer.

For example:

“Chuck”—about an average-joe schlub who gets thrust into a wacky action-movie goofy CIA underworld, played mostly for laughs. The protagonist is designed to appeal to the average guy, even if he does trend a little geeky. The cast makes this show rise above its McG origins.

“Heroes”—despite a subpar second season (I wasn’t wild about the first, either), is about ordinary people who wake up one day with superpowers and extraordinary destinies. Dash in some maudlin soap opera tropes, and you’ve got a network darling.

“Lost”—a bunch of average folks thrust into a bizarre, byzantine, mysterious situation that is only barely revealing itself each episode. Also, the island castaway setting let them sneak the show past you, getting a larger audience hooked before they realized this was a geek show. Admit it, you thought this was a dramatic version of “Survivor” or at least Tom Hanks’s “Castaway—The Series” before you ever heard of the Dharma Project. But by then, it was too late.

The new “Battlestar Galactica” fails this test. Despite having what I would argue are some of the most human and humanly complex characters on television, BSG presents a setting that is just too outside the norm for regular folks to buy in. By any aesthetic measure, BSG is the better show than any of the three listed above, but that trio will kick BSG’s ratings butt from here to eternity, largely on the strength of accessibility. (Being on major networks helps, but BSG is owned by NBC, and it could have had mainstream positioning a long time ago if there was any hope of it justifying a network timeslot.)

Wildly successful sci-fi movies, by contrast, don’t have to play by these rules, for two reasons. One: They can get by on spectacle, with folks coming in just for the eye candy and explosions. Two: They are a one-off commitment, so they have a certain measure of accessibility built in, and where that fails, the movie-goer is a bit more forgiving. And anyone who does make a long-term connection with the characters is almost instantly branded a geek—hello, Star Wars fans who wear costumes in line for the next movie.

Take a look at the all-time (inflation adjusted) box office gross Top 30 list, and pick out the sci-fi members: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

#2 Star Wars – Spectacle, the original Memorial Day tentpole move

#4 E.T. – Average kid meets cute alien, everyone identifies with Elliott

#12 Empire Strikes Back – Spectacle, the sequel

#14 Return of the Jedi – Spectacle part three

#16 Raiders of the Lost Ark – Spectacle with classic movie feel, plus everyone hates Nazis who steal religious artifacts

#17 Jurassic Park – Average kids get chased by dinosaurs while scientists save them. We rooted for the dinos.

#19 The Phantom Menace – Raping the corpse of spectacle for a new generation

#30 Ghostbusters – Screwball comedy with sci-fi elements, likeable schlub Bill Murray as main lead

As geeks become more and more identified as “the average guy,” this stigma will fade a bit, but never completely. While “the computer guy” is now seen as an average fellow by most people, simply incorporating computers no longer qualifies a work as science fiction. As sci-fi continues to push the edge of the plausible, those who enjoy these outlandish settings and ideas will always be viewed as outlandish and unusual themselves. It’s the price of admission. One, incidentally, I’m more than willing to pay.

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When we asked Mike Resnick if he would like to participate in this week’s Mind Meld on short fiction, he graciously offered to respond to past questions as well. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: From your point of view, how has the proliferation of online book reviews affected the publishing world?

Mike Resnick: Very little. They certainly haven’t affected print runs or distribution, and I doubt that they’ve had anywhere near as much effect on sales as the self-proclaimed cognoscenti think they have.

Q: How has the internet impacted your ability to sell books and what impact do you see it having in the future?

MR: It’s made instant contact and feedback with editors — especially foreign editors — incredibly easy, and it has presented endless new ways of marketing your books, both to editors/publishers and thereafter to readers/buyers. And it’s only going to become a more important tool in the future.

Q: With most television shows on hiatus due to the writers strike, it’s a good time to reflect on the quality of the genre shows of this past TV season. If you ran Hollywood, what changes would you make? What would stay the same?

MR: Can’t answer this. I gave up watching network series 25 years ago, and to this day I have managed not to feel culturally deprived.

Q: Everyone knows the “Old Guard” definitions of science fiction. As part of the “New Guard,” how would you define science fiction?

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I’m an avid fan of short fiction for many reasons, so a Mind Meld question about short fiction seemed to be in order. Trying to skirt around the futility of the “short fiction is dying” rhetoric (though learning something about that in the process) I asked a handful of Editors, some of them authors as well, to comment on the purpose of short fiction. The responses reaffirm my belief that short fiction can be every bit as entertaining – if not more so – than novel length stories…

Here are the responses…feel free to chime in.

For readers, short fiction provides a lot more stuff to READ–and it’s still where the majority of readers find new writers whose work they enjoy. It’s easier to invest a half-hour or less in reading something by a writer you may end up not liking than it is to invest days reading a novel. Cheaper, too. If a reader finds a writer he really responds to, whether in a magazine or in a Best of the Year collection, the first thing they usually do is to go out and look more work by that author; SF is a very name-oriented field. Eventually, they may end up ordering novels by those writers, if they have novels–but it was short fiction that set the hook. For writers, short fiction is still the easiest way to break into print, especially in an era where many publishing houses no longer read their slush piles at all, turning novel manuscripts around in the mail room without any editor ever getting a look at them. Because the turnover is high, short fiction markets, whether e-zines or traditional print magazines, need to be continually finding good new writers, which means that they actually have to READ their slush piles, as opposed to just “dealing with” them. Even today, the best way to break in and establish a professional reputation is to write and sell lots of strong short fiction. The book editors keep an eye on what’s happening in the short-story market, and once a buzz begins to generate among short-fiction readers about the work of a particular author, they frequently then swoop in and offer that writer novel contracts–which may make them too busy to write short fiction, which is why you need the constant turnover. (There are writers who continue to make time to write short fiction even when they could be making more money writing novels, though, simply because they LOVE writing it.) Charles Stross is a good example. He wrote several novels that he was totally unable to sell, but after he started selling a lot of short fiction to markets like Asimov’s and Interzone, and it started generating a lot of buzz among readers, novel editors swooped down on him, and he’s not only sold a number of novels since, he’s retroactively sold many of the ones he’d written before and was unable to sell.

It’s also easier to get away with radical experimentation in short fiction than it is in the novel market, too, which is one reason why some writers continue to write it even after they’re established enough to sell novels instead. It’s a lot less risky, and expensive, for a magazine editor to take a chance publishing an experimental story in a magazine, where if the audience doesn’t like it, they’ve still got five or six other stories to read and not feel cheated, than it is to publish an experimental novel, where there’s a LOT more money at risk if it should fail.

Since these arguments apply just as well to the online world as they do to the print world, I don’t see any of this changing dramatically anytime soon.

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Today we’re focusing on science fictional ideas. The ones that capture our imagination and fire the sense of wonder that drives us to read science fiction. Things like psychohistory, or the Culture, or Rama. There’s plenty more. We asked several authors about these ideas, but with, as you’ll see, a twist.

An ‘idea’ here meaning a character, setting, piece of technology or anything else that fired your imagination and, possibly, made you a bit envious that you didn’t think of it first.

A little professional jealousy isn’t a bad thing, right?

I kind of wish I’d been the guy to think up the idea of a giant ringworld, like Larry Niven, because if that was the case I’d been on the phone with every press outlet I could find saying ‘hey, they ripped off my really cool idea.’ I wouldn’t sue them or anything, but what a great platform that would be for talking about your own idea! Halo is totally an incredible world that every Xbox player recognizes, any attempt to reach out to those players would be a lot of fun. Plus, then you’d be able to frag bad guys in a video game that looks like it crawled out of something you wrote. How cool would that be? I think it’d be pretty cool.

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Although science fiction fans know better, the general populace likes to think of sf as being written with the express purpose of predicting the future. So we posed the following question to a bunch of people in the since fiction community:

Science fiction has included a lot of speculations that look like predictions, and some of them have come to pass, most spectacularly spaceships and atomic power and bombs, but prediction is a side effect of creating plausible scenarios about future change, not its intent. SF has been more important as a means of persuading readers to think about issues and the ways in which they might develop and how that might affect the human condition. As Isaac Asimov said in 1973, “We live in a science-fiction world, a world very much like the one we were writing about in 1939.” It is a world that might well have been significantly different if science-fiction writers had not imagined it in detail. More specifically, to quote Isaac again, “Science-fiction writers and readers didn’t put a man on the moon all by themselves, but they created a climate in which the goal of putting a man on the moon became acceptable.” The same process is at work on other potential changes, in which, as John Campbell put it, futures are tested for human habitability. Or, as he went on, science-fiction is a way of practicing in a no-practice area. Some changes, like a parachute jump, have to be perfect the first time.

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In our Mind Meld posts, we pose a single question to a slice of the sf/f community and, depending on the question, other folks as well. This week we follow our previous post about our surveillance society (we also have a poll question up on this very subject. We are clever. Or lazy.) Our question this week is:

As you’ll see, we received some interesting answers.

I don’t see the problem as an either/or choice. For example, David Brin’s The Transparent Society discusses an alternative.

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In our Mind Meld posts, we pose a single question to a slice of the sf/f community and, depending on the question, other folks as well.

This week, continuing the answers from part one, we asked a seemingly simple question about the definition of science fiction.

You don’t need a lot of careful parsing to define what science fiction is. It’s very simple. Science fiction is fiction that has science as a central topic. It doesn’t necessarily have to be *the* central topic, but it’s *a* central topic.

This definition allows us to include lots of stuff that all SF geeks reflexively know to be science fiction (Neal Stephenson’s BAROQUE CYCLE) as well as lots of stuff that the mainstream refuses to recognize as science fiction (Audrey Niffenegger’s TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE). It even lets us include many works of alternate history (Philip K. Dick’s MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE), insofar as those works take a rational, scientific approach to understanding the effects of that changed history. As an added side benefit, it lets us put some distance on works that only use science in the most tangential way (STAR WARS).

Unfortunately that definition also pulls in some things that most SF folk would rather not see in our camp (Michael Crichton’s JURASSIC PARK). But as far as I’m concerned, the more inclusive the definition the better. Anything to get serious readers to wander down the aisle in the bookstore with the life-size cutout of Mace Windu standing at the end of it. And hopefully even — gasp! — spend some money there.

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In our Mind Meld posts, we pose a single question to a slice of the sf/f community and, depending on the question, other folks as well.

This week, we asked a seemingly simple question about the definition of science fiction.

Note: Thanks to my poorly worded question, the answers received varied a bit. I meant to ask for personal definitions of science fiction but instead tripped up relating it back to an already-existing set of definitions. Thus my unfortunate use of “New Guard” became the focus of some responses from folks. Nevertheless, I promise the responses make for good reading.

Also: The turn-out for this question was higher than expected, so expect a Part 2 in the very near future. (UPDATE: Part 2 has been posted.)

Science Fiction is fiction set in a future which is not inconsistent with our present knowledge of the world, or such knowledge as it exists at the time the work was written. In other words, there must be a logically-consistent roadmap between the present and the future. The future may be the moment immediately after the present, or an arbitrarily distant era. Alternate histories are not therefore science fiction, nor are fantasy works incorporating science fictional tropes. Science fiction works may come to resemble alternate histories or fantasies as they become invalidated by historical developments, but since such works were not intentionally written as AH or fantasy, they are still to be considered science fiction.

I hate this question…

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In our Mind Meld posts, we pose a single question to a slice of the sf/f community and, depending on the question, other folks as well.

This week, we address the the (possibly) misguided efforts of Hollywood to produce quality science fiction.

The facile answer is to say that there should be fewer crappy shows and more good ones. Just what makes a show “good” or “crappy” is, of course, purely subjective (with the caveat that anyone who disagrees with me about Heroes being crap is just kidding themselves), but I think most viewers can agree about a certain level of objective quality. Or can they?

I think when it comes to genre shows, fans are often like abused girlfriends. “He doesn’t hit me much!” They approach a show that incorporates fantastic or sfnal elements with a certain set of expectations, some of which depend on the show’s quality as a television show–writing, acting, directing, even wardrobe and sets–and some of which involve its use of the “furniture” of genre–originality of concept, execution of ideas, etc. Often, sf/f fans will excuse a considerable amount of failing in the former category if a show does reasonably well in the latter. And if the deplorable quality of writing, or the wooden acting, or the lumpen directing is called out, fans will often respond with “It could be worse” or “At least it isn’t as bad as X,” or they’ll squint and say “Yes, but look at the story arc” or “check out the orbital physics of that starfighter.”

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It’s Tuesday, so that means it’s time for another Mind Meld question, where we grill those in the science fiction community on a question of interest. This time, a we ask a cross section of authors and editors our question.

Recently, Reuters ran a story (article here) about the internet and traditional book publishers. This gist being that, despite the easy availability of used books, the internet has actually helped publishers sell more new books.

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Welcome to what we hope is a long-running feature of SF Signal: The Mind Meld!

In this series of posts, we pose a single question to a slice of the sf/f community and, depending on the question, other folks as well. The idea is similar to the Brain Parade posts that used to appear on the long-defunct Meme Therapy blog. What we hope to get is an interesting cross-section of views and opinions that open a particular topic up for discussion. We’d love to hear what you think!

For now, let’s begin this post’s question:

Online reviewing at this point is a hopeful mess, rather than a hopeless one. A majority of it still has the validity of a late night bar conversation, or an offhanded phone call, blurting out undefended opinions, to which everyone is entitled. The hopeful sign is that a small portion of it is written to publishable print standards, and an even smaller portion is actually edited. That small portion is what publishers and sensible writers pay some attention to. Readers tend to find their own level, and as in contemporary politics, go where their own opinions are reflected back at them. That’s the real mess part. So no one learns anything.

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