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Originally posted by FuzzQi Also, A Clockwork Orange has some pretty fantastic quotes. None of which come to mind right now.

"When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."

lolol

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"So I waited and, O my brothers, I got a lot better munching away at eggiwegs, and lomticks of toast and lovely steakiwegs and then, one day, they said I was going to have a very special visitor."

I agree with narcism on the boundary-pushing. Also with the quotes. Biased because I love fucked up movies.

quote:

Originally posted by FuzzQi Nice try Also, A Clockwork Orange has some pretty fantastic quotes. None of which come to mind right now.

New way, what's this about a new way.

No time for the ol' in out love, just came to check the meter.

It's a stinking world because it let's the young get onto the old like you have done. All this talk about man around the moon and there's no attention paid to Earthly law and order.

Ultra Violence.

Real horror show.

Leaves me be mum, I got a bit of a pain in the guluver, leaves me be and I'll be as right as rain.

Haven't you got everything you need? If you want a motor car you pluck it, if you want pretty Polly, you take it.

Mom, who's this guy munching away on eggy wegs and toast.

Well, well well if it isn't Billy Boy and poison. Are art thou you globby bottle of cheap stink oil? Come and get on in the yarrbles, if you have any yarrbles, you unic jelly thou.

Right right? Right right.

The book is better and has a different ending.

The movie looks stupid because it doesn't go deep and explain everything like the book. Same goes for american psycho. To some people it just seems like a silly slasher movie though the book could never come off like that.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I was halfway through writing a massive post explaining what science fiction is and whether Star Wars qualifies, then I realised it was Lira and there was no fucking point.

i'd read it!

i dont really see what distinguishes star wars from any other form of soft scifi. maybe SW is softest scifi.

i like the term speculative fiction anyway, to cover all the best stuff.

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Originally posted by Lews Star Wars isn't science fiction. It's an epic children's fantasy story.

I know it isn't science fiction, it was just a way of saying how much I don't care about either

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I was halfway through writing a massive post explaining what science fiction is and whether Star Wars qualifies, then I realised it was Lira and there was no fucking point.

By the way, Paul, Star Wars isn't science fiction because of the plot: with little effort you can remove the characters from that galaxy far far away and put them somewhere in Medieval times with just a few adaptations (forcesabers that feed on human spirit instead of lightsabers, for example) the story can go on. Science fiction, on the other hand, is porn for geeks. Everything revolves around science and how scientific endeavours make us (or themselves) awesome and/or catastrophic in the long run. Just take the one of the grandaddies of all science fiction: Jules Verne. The guy describes what an exploration to the centre of Earth would be like - and a professor guides the expedition rather than, let's say, a charismatic leader with no relationship to academia.

I'm sure Syst can fix any inconsistencies in this paragraph for you, but I'm sure something similar to this is the core of the argument. It does seem to explain the plot of the only science fiction I like (Torchwood).

ITT: People with bad taste in movies.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN i'd read it! i dont really see what distinguishes star wars from any other form of soft scifi. maybe SW is softest scifi. i like the term speculative fiction anyway, to cover all the best stuff.

Okay, the cut down version:

Science fiction is a fantastic (IE: non-realist) genre, and like all fantasy genres the textual universe is characterised by points of difference from our own reality. In SF these points of difference (or nova) are rationalised through a pseudo-scientific discourse. Star Wars is a science fiction/fantasy hybrid, much like Dune, because many of its nova are pseudo-scientific: TIE fighters, alien species, blaster weapons. The science is never explained, but the language of science is used around the film: light speed, proton torpedoes, ion cannon hyperspace, implying there is an advanced level of science that makes everything we see possible, we just don't understand it yet. SF profitably utilises the thinking encapsulated by Arthur C Clarke's famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"... in other words, we're surrounded by technology we don't understand anyway, so if men in white coats told us deflector shields and X-Wings were possible, we'd believe them.

In this sense, Star Wars is science fiction. However, it contains other points of difference (namely, the Force) that are not rationalised through pseudo-science. The Force isn't rationalised at all, so it becomes magical, spiritual, some mystical force. That's a pure fantasy element - although George Lucas infamously tried to recalibrate it as science fiction through that disastrous "midichlorians" idea in The Phantom Menace. Note how different it feels, despite acting exactly the same within the plot - from spiritual essence permeating all living things in the universe to the side-effects of weird bacteria. Science fiction is a despiritualised genre, one where fantasy and escapism are possible, but they are rooted strictly in a godless, scientific perception of reality.

So Star Wars is basically a science fiction/fantasy hybrid. Another example of this would be Dune. It's sort of implied in Dune that all the visions and prophecies and religious aspects are side-effects of melange consumption, but there's no attempt at rationalising why.

There are obviously various levels of science fiction, based on how much they want to say. The "softest" science fiction operates just like fantasy, it's purely escapist and uses science only as a plot device to justify unrealistic features. The hardest science fiction is extremely rigorous in its pseudo-science. It doesn't mean it's necessarily accurate - Larry Niven's Ringworld made it to print with some massive errors in its mathematics, but hard science fiction is much more concerned with the maximum amount of science and the minimum of fanciful extrapolation. The science fiction critics love the most tends to be allegorical, its nova becoming metonymical devices in a metaphorical text that comments back on our own reality. That, by the way, doesn't necessarily make that kind of SF better than the rest, but critics tend to like something more if they can write an essay about it. Godzilla is an extremely potent piece of allegory, and so is much-lauded even today, but it's quite a shitty film in all honesty.

Well, I guess I wasn't too far off

quote:

Originally posted by Meat187 ITT: People with bad taste in movies.

Quick reminder: You ARE in this thread

Star Wars certainly has that fairytale feel to it, which is possibly why it's so popular, and the science fiction elements are secondary in plot importance to the spiritual stuff. The space ships and alien races are just facilitators of the action, where as it's about Luke's discovery of the Force and the battle between good and evil that results. But at the same time, all the awesome ships and weapons and stuff is almost certainly what sold all the toys that made Lucas so much money. They're a big part of the Star Wars universe.

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Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Star Wars certainly has that fairytale feel to it, which is possibly why it's so popular, and the science fiction elements are secondary in plot importance to the spiritual stuff. The space ships and alien races are just facilitators of the action, where as it's about Luke's discovery of the Force and the battle between good and evil that results. But at the same time, all the awesome ships and weapons and stuff is almost certainly what sold all the toys that made Lucas so much money. They're a big part of the Star Wars universe.

Indeed.

By the way, Jack, I do know I hold a very deflationary view of art (It's just art!) and I'm often knocking big names (with few exceptions: I still haven't found a flaw in Dostoevsky), but that's precisely because I love it and I do that because I hold the opinion that taking anything too seriously stifles creativity (if you read my other posts, I do just the same in science and philosophy - and I'm a PhD candidate in a topic that involves both fields; and, hell, why do you think I never finished that novel? If I really didn't care about literature either, I'd have finished it ages ago ). I don't know if you refrained from writing that earlier based on this iconoclasm of mine, but I do want to let you know that I do care about your opinions, and that you've never wasted a minute of yours writing something for me

Even when I knew what the argument would be (such as Star Wars being fantasy rather than science fiction), it's always nice to see a different way to structure the same ideas.

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Originally posted by Lira Quick reminder: You ARE in this thread

My reaction:



Also Lira, where is your token review criticizing the book for how much of a linguistic nonsense the Nadsat slang in it is?

And, except for 1984, I don't think I've ever mentioned any erroneous ideas about language in any other book

Whenever some hippy tells me about how people are basically good and how with just the right cultural changes (read: communism) we can all live together in a happy society with no poverty I tell that their vision is Clockwork Orange.
Fucking hippies!

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Originally posted by Meat187 Whenever some hippy tells me about how people are basically good and how with just the right cultural changes (read: communism) we can all live together in a happy society with no poverty I tell that their vision is Clockwork Orange. Fucking hippies!

And you disagree with that because...?

... because I haven't smoked myself retarded with pot.

Also because people are not good. And because there always will be poverty and social inequality. And because no amount of shitty flower power festivals in the mud will change that always a bunch of assholes will exploit and rule over a bunch of suppressed fucks. And because a society that forces its people to be "good" by any standard, one that tries to control them like a clockwork, is a nightmare.

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Originally posted by Meat187 ... because I haven't smoked myself retarded with pot. Also because people are not good. And because there always will be poverty and social inequality. And because no amount of shitty flower power festivals in the mud will change that always a bunch of assholes will exploit and rule over a bunch of suppressed fucks. And because a society that forces its people to be "good" by any standard, one that tries to control them like a clockwork, is a nightmare.

All right, that sounds like more of an argument

I'm not that pessimistic about society, though. Inequality and suppression are OK as long as I'm on the right side of it. I fully embrace my evil nature.

It was really fucked up when it came out?

This thread gives me a headache. Are Brazilian chicks hot?

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Originally posted by Chimney This thread gives me a headache. Are Brazilian chicks hot?

Some of them are. Why?

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Originally posted by Lira Some of them are. Why?

I need a reason for visiting Brazil.

EDIT: Spelling

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