Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction — or “speculative fiction” or “SF,” or whatever you’re supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-’70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir.
–Slate Magazine, Troy Patterson, 13 October

Stick with me, we’re going to wander a bit here.

So, it’s 1974, we don’t have VCR’s, we don’t have Blockbuster, we are just getting cable TV. I’m in College at Texas A&M University and a member of Cepheid Variable, the few, the proud, the weird, the Student Programs Committe for Science Fiction and Fantasy. We are one of two Student Programs Committees that show films. It’s a division by genre. We get SF and Fantasy and Horror, Aggie Cinema got everything else.

Now, at that time, this meant we had one or two movies a year that were current, and the rest were retrospectives. Aggie Cinema pretty much did a current release every weekend. We very rarely got the weekend slot but usually showed an older film midweek. This was how we made money to run our SF Convention in the spring, AggieCon. I ran AggieCon V (badly, I might add) with GoH Larry Niven. The year before we had Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer.

Okay, here comes the SF revolution. Big Budget SF and Fantasy starts becoming a really big deal. And suddenly AggieCinema is getting quite upset that Cepheid Variable getting to show movies that fill the 2500 seat Rudder Auditorium.

And suddenly definitions began changing. “That’s not SF–it’s too popular. That needs to be an Aggie Cinema film.” In the short run, they took away the larger films. In the long run they took away all the films, but that may have changed in more recent years. I did a web search that showed some “co-sponsorship” of Aggie Cinema showings for the film “Flight of the Navigator” but no mention of Cepheid on a showing of the first “Harry Potter” film.

This still burns.

Now let’s go back to Ansible. “As Others See Us” is a regular component of the magazine for as long as I’ve been reading it. It mostly consists of comments like the one above–critics and reviewers explaining how this book or this movie is not SF. Half the time they really don’t seem to understand what SF is.

Caryn James of the New York Times discusses P.D. James’s book as well as the film: `”The Children of Men” is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction. It is a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment, a 14-year-old work that remains surprisingly pertinent. [...] In both forms “Children of Men,” which opened Monday, is a story of redemption, set in England just decades in the future (the film takes place in 2027), when women have inexplicably lost the ability to become pregnant.’ (28 December) [NH] No nasty future speculation there!
–Dave Langford in Ansible

The other half of the time, they recognize that the work contains fantastic or sfnal elements but they testify that clearly it “transcends” the genre. Because, apparently, their definition of the genre not only includes terms like “extrapolations of the known into the unknown” or “paranormal” or “supernatural elements”, it also includes “hokey”, “sucks”, and “really bad.”

So, if it’s good–it can’t be in the genre.

Now, Lois Tilton (at Deep Genre) maintains that marketing forces are actually to blame for this. I can see the argument and even buy into part of it, but I’m not going all the way down the path. In a nutshell (please read it–she’s being far more eloquent than my paraphrase) she says that marketing forces push images of a least common denominator to help sell books to reliable buyers. And, as a result, people think of the genre on the whole as represented by its crappier examples.

But this doesn’t forgive people who aspire to be the guardians at the gates of culture and don’t even know what academically accepted definitions of the genre are.

“I don’t like SF. I like this. Therefore it’s not….”