I have been wanting to write a post on Science Fiction for a long time, but for various reasons I have been putting it off. Partly, I admit, out of laziness. The bigger reason - excuse - is that science fiction a slippery thing to define, and that much TV and film SF is pretty poor.

SF is my favourite genre of fiction, television and movies. It is wonderfully escapist, of course, and much commercial SF in books and TV is all about escapism. The same can be true of other genres, such as fantasy and historical, so what is different about SF? For me, good science fiction is the fiction of ideas. It starts with an idea, and explores what if - what if we could travel faster than light? Or live for a thousand years? Or teleport ourselves, physically, to any location on Earth? Good science fiction then constrains this, ceteris paribus, so that we are talking about human lives and experiences, with limitations and weaknesses. Bad science fiction throws constraints out of the window whenever they are inconvenient to the plot.

Science Fiction is generally conceived to be fiction of the future, as this gives writers free rein to imagine alternative lives and worlds. I'm not sure how I would categorise The X-Files, and the cancelled Dark Skies was an interesting attempt to write science fiction set in the recent past.

So, how would I define good science fiction?

  • At its core, there must be an idea, a what-if, a premise which is otherworldly, different, strange or novel.
  • The consequences of this idea must be explored and mapped out.
  • The idea must be constrained in some way, it must have consequences, limitations or challenges in its use, lest it fall into mere magic.
  • It must at least pay lip-service to the established laws of physics.

That final point is a bit of a challenge - there are lots of things we allow in science fiction which break the known laws of physics. Faster-than-light travel is banned by the theory of relativity, but it is such a useful tool to telling grand space operas and alien vistas that we forgive it. When we do, good science fiction should try to understand the consequences of FTL, and it should try to limit it either by range, or speed, or mass, or energy cost, or a combination of all. We generally forgive artificial gravity on spaceships on the TV, for practicality's sake, but authors would do well to consider it in their novels.

Proponents of hard-SF - and I consider myself one - can come up with a huge list of scientific challenges that SF writers generally ignore - heat dissipation on cloaked starships or in microscopic computers, the energy costs of a laser powerful enough to blast through a hull or a planet, and so on. But we forgive television and film SF most of these, as a true treatment would undoubtedly slow the pace of a story unbearably. Novelists should be more rigorous.

So what is good science fiction, according to my criteria? Well, there is very little good science fiction at all I'm afraid to say. There is plenty of what I call science fantasy, which takes many of the tropes of fantasy fiction and gives it a veneer of science - ray guns instead of magic wands, transporters rather than teleportation, evil aliens rather than evil warlocks. _Star Wars is my quintessential science fantasy film. Strip back the action sequences, the love stories, the gung-ho good vs evil plot, and I find Star Wars is lacking in ideas. It's just an adventure in space, and it fails my science fiction tests. I've never been a fan. Below I have given my own opinions on some of the most popular TV SF series, such as Star Trek and Dr Who. I have enjoyed pretty much all of these programmes - but many fail my science fiction criteria.

Star Trek

So what of grandaddy great television/movie series, Star Trek? Well, it is a very mixed bag. The early series of Star Trek (the original series and the first few seasons of The Next Generation) were very episodic and disconnected, but were often ideas driven. Some of these ideas were pretty lame, it has to be said (such as TOS episodes 3x15, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and the lamentable 3x06, "Spock's Brain"). But there were some genuine attempts to explore science fiction ideas, such as TNG's 5x25 "Inner Light" Voyager's 6x12 "Blink of an Eye". Voyager was perhaps the most idea-driven series of Star Trek. It's just such a pity they let the "fiction" take over from the "science" so often. The holographic Doctor is the prime example - though he features heavily in dozens of episodes, it's never made clear exactly what he is. A computer programme that far surpasses the android Data? An AI of the highest order? A projection of light and 'magnetic fields' that can perform complex surgery? There are many other examples of ill-thought-through ideas in Voyager.

One of the big failings of Star Trek - and this is common to a lot of science fiction on television - is the lack of technological limitations. An evil new enemy spurs a flurry of invention, and suddenly shields can hold up to a star's chromosphere or the combined firepower of several Borg cubes. A weapon that glanced off the armour of one spaceship gets a boost that blasts it through another in the next episode. Star Trek, particularly Voyager, slips into the realm of science fantasy far too easily.

Stargate

Stargate: SG1 is mostly an adventure series, but one which takes its science quite seriously. The premise is carefully constrained - a galactic network of wormholes allows near instant travel between distant worlds, but only if you know the co-ordinates of the world you wish to reach. In the early episodes, travel through the wormhole is disorientating and cold; this was cut for convenience, but explained away in the series as the crew learned to compensate for the rotation of the galaxy - fair enough. Travel through the wormhole is one-way, though electromagnetic signals are bidirectional. Wormholes can only be held open for a fixed period of time. There is even some serious attempt to explore the age-old question of matter-or-bits of teleportation, and the Goa'uld teleportation rings are limited in their usefulness. Even when the 'rules' are broken, there are usually consequences that are explored in the show. Of course, as the series went on, more and more of these rules were relaxed - such as the Asgard teleportation system, which had none of the limitations of the Goa'uld rings, and the development of FTL starships. Although I have watched most of SG1, I've missed the sequel series, so I can't talk of Atlantis or Universe.

Battlestar Galactica and Caprica

I hugely enjoyed the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, a sweeping, dramatic, intelligent space opera full of flawed heroes, ambivalent villains and great action sequences. It was a vast improvement on its 1970s predecessor. There's surprisingly little science fiction in Battlestar, however, beyond its obvious space setting and the killer-robots-with-God premise. Sure, the colonial fleet has an FTL drive, the mechanics of which are never explained. Some of the "science" of the humanoid Cylons is a bit muddy - whatever did happen to Baltar's DNA test? What's great about Battlestar is that, unlike Star Trek, technology is never the solution to the problem. But this also means that there's very little science fiction in the series.

The prequel series Caprica, however, showed a lot more promise of being a good science fiction driven programme. It was set up to show the origin of the Cylon race, and in doing so it was, to my mind, one of the first serious attempts to explore a society on the cusp of true AI. Caprica also started to explore virtual worlds and their impact on the "physical" world - from holoband addiction to the "avenging angels" tee-shirts for sale. I was very sad to see Caprica cancelled. Perhaps its strong anti-religious theme pushed it too far - in the series the religious group "Soldiers of the One" performed the will of the "one true God", in opposition to the colonies' polytheistic beliefs.

Dr Who

There's nothing science fiction about Dr Who, particularly the 21st century reimagining. It's barely science fantasy, either - the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is so powerful as to be magic and has become a lazy get-out clause for the writers. There's no science behind the TARDIS, which can tow a planet, there are confused reports how often a Time Lord can regenerate (13 was always considered cannon), and the Doctor even manages to restart the Big Bang. The loud, showy, fast-paced new Dr Who might be entertaining to watch, but hardly any episodes are ideas driven, and most end in a handy deus ex machima.

Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is a big space opera of the kind we rarely see on TV, and its long story arc seems inspired by space opera novels. This long story arc means that many of the core ideas explored in the series take a very long time to play out - for instance, how will a society adapt to the emergence of telepaths? Thankfully the series avoids the Star Trek trap of using technology to solve every problem, and indeed the science fiction tropes of hyperspace and cloaking and alien biologies are simply enabling devices to carry the story, and are never explained or explored. In one small concession to physics, the humans in Babylon 5 do not have access to artificial gravity, though it is gifted to them at the end of the series.

Firefly

Another series that was cancelled before it really began, Jose Wheadon's Firefly is a Western in space. Our rag-tag band of heroes eek out a living as mercenaries for hire, hopping between desert worlds on the edge of a busy solar system. There is no SF here, at least in the storylines, but there is plenty of background sights and sounds to show that the writers have taken it seriously. Only the Firefly film, Serenity, has at its core an SF idea - can mankind's violence be engineered out of him, and what might happen if this went wrong?