Musings/Träumereien/Devaneios

Published 2007.

Is SF becoming SciFi? I hope not.

Dumbing down is the order of the day. Our marketing and publishing departments no longer want to see SF in SciFi, maybe because it couldn’t be labeled, but I think, like many others, because so long as they called it “SciFi” they had to give scifi. Now that they’re calling it “SyFy”, they can put on anything. The name isn’t a promise, it’s just a (TV) brand. Gynmastic shows, Wrestling, Ghost hunting, etc., with some science twists, like making ice cream with liquid nitrogen make it possible to brand something trivial as SyFy.

Not SF, Not SciFi. SyFy. An endless tirade of horror movies based on some crappy mutant animal ("Shark Attack” comes to mind).

I think this is the reason that SF has already kicked the bucket a few years ago. TV is telling us that SyFy is this kind of shit, instead of stories of the amazing and the speculative, the incredible and the awe-inspiring, the heroic and the terrible. Instead, we get the lowbrow and the crap, the easy and the lowest common denominator.

Read on, If you're into SF of the hard kind.