Excuse me....

You don't think that "Believers" was SF. Tough.

No, it didn't have warp gates, or tachyon emitters, or lots of
technobabble...it was about people. And the dilemmas they face.

Part of what has screwed up so much of SF-TV is this sense that you
must utterly divorce yourself from current issues, from current problems,
from taking on issues of today and extrapolating them into the future, by
way of aliens or SF constructs. And that is *precisely* why so much of
contemporary SF-TV is barren and lifeless and irrelevant...and *precisely*
why such series as the original Star Trek, and Outer Limits, and Twilight
Zone are with us today.

Like Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry and Joe Stefano and Reginald
Rose and Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin and a bunch of other writers whose
typewriters I'm not fit to touch, my goal in part is to simply tell good
stories within an SF setting. And by SF I mean speculative fiction, which
sometimes touches on hard-SF aspects, and sometimes doesn't. Speculative
fiction means you look at how society changes, how cultures interact with
one another, how belief systems come into conflict. And as someone else
here noted recently, anthropology and sociology are also sciences; soft
sciences, to be sure, but sciences nonetheless.

It's been pointed out that TV-SF is generally 20-30 years behind
print SF. This whole conversation proves the point quite succinctly. In
the 1960s or so, along came the New Wave of SF, which eschewed hardware
for stories about the human condition set against an SF background. And
the fanzines and prozines and techno-loving pundits of hard-SF declared
it heresy, said it wasn't SF, this is crap. And eventually they were
steamrolled, and print SF grew up a little. Now the argument has come to
settle here. Well, fine. So be it.

I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that SF is anything I point
to and say, "That's SF." Go pick up a copy of "A Canticle for Liebowitz,"
one of the real singular masterpieces of the science fiction genre, and
it won't fit the narrow criteria you've set up for what qualifies as SF
by your lights.

There is a tendency among the more radical hard-SF proponents to
stamp their feet and hold their breath until they turn blue, to threaten
that unless the book changes or the field comes around or the series
cottens to *their* specific, narrow version of what SF is -- and that
definition changes from person to person -- they'll take their ball and
their bat and go home. Fine and good. And the millions who come to take
their place in the bleachers and on the field will get to have all the
fun.

Some of our episodes will fit your definition of SF. Some will not.
This worries me not at all.

jms