In all, Star Wars is just six films...
IMHO about 3 films too many But what do I know? I might just be bitter because they just now finally started shooting Indy 4

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

I was going to respond to this, but Gillianren beat me to it:

I sat down and watched Serenity again this weekend. The first time Wash said, "I am a leaf on the wind..." I got a lump in my throat.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

I'm wary about that, too. No, not really wary, to be honest. I just don't expect anything good out of it. I probably won't even go see it. It's just outside my radar.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I'm tearing up because you mentioned it.

Story I heard about Indiana Jones IV: Callista Flockhart has chosen not to be in it, because she's too young for Indiana Jones. (Though apparently Shia LeBouef will be in it. Seriously, what's his agent on?)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Money.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I think we need to separate some factors in this discussion.

Firstly - what may or may not be created on screen.

Secondly - What makes a good SciFi story.

As to the first the technology today and the technology comming along shortly will enable small budget producers even amateurs to make Movies that even big studios would have been scared of funding as recently as the 1970s.

Probably the most obvious example of this is "Star Wreck - in the Perkining". Now I am not holding that up as an example of a great SciFi production. It does however show that a bunch newbies working with largely begged or borrowed materials were over a number of years able to produce something with superior images than Hollywood was able to produce in the 1950s.

Now this trend is likely to continue, allowing small producers and TV companies to create things that do not look like they were made out of bits of salvaged cardboard. Therefore the capability exists to produce quality SciFi on screen, with a small budget and therefore not needing to compromise the writer's original idea by throwing in a few extra explosions just to increase boxoffice sales. In that respect SciFi will be democratised.

It may even go further than that maybe it will become an audience participation event if one considers what the future use of something like son of "Second Life" might be. Perhaps a future SciFi production will be an on-line interactive event a "role play" run in a HiRes Hiquality graphical environment - something that lies between SL today and the Matrix.

That however is only part of the problem. The other issue is the story.

Here we have to come back to what is SciFi about its origins and its asperations. You can debate all you want about what was the first SciFi story and did SciFi start with, Wells - Verne or Mary Shelly. The underlying truth though is that SciFi emerges in a society that can foresee a world in which things in the future may be different or done in a different way from today. It is inextricably tied to the idea of scientific discovery and progress (even those post nuclear holocaust stories need that as a start point). Therefore it is no surprise that SciFi as a story telling concept (and here I draw the line between SciFi and pure myth & fantasy) largely grew out of the industrial age.

To be of any merit SciFi stories need to explore the scientific "What If's". Take something we know today look at where it might be going and suggest what the implications and outcomes might be while at the same time fit in how we humans would cope in that new world.

In order to do this writers of SciFi stories need to have a basic premise around which to construct their story and that premise if people are going to buy into it needs to meet some criteria.

A. Can we recognise from the world we know now how such things as described in the story might come about.

B. Is the premise of the story something new - for example Nuclear wars and invading aliens are not exactly a sensational new idea.

C. If the basic SciFi premise is not new then can the human interaction and response to it be portrayed in a new and interesting way.

This last one is rather tricky because in a sense you are not really presenting a new SciFi story rather just creating a different dramatic interpretation of an old idea.

Now going back to the start of this thread. I would ask the question are there enough new ideas left for SciFi writers to use as the basis for their extrapolations or have they all been done to death.

Is there anything more to be said about the future of AI or genetic engineering for example - Nanotech devices have already found their way into the SciFi mainstream on several occasions, so is there any fertile ground remaining in this area.

Wells had Anti-Gravity - Aerial Warefare - Time Travel - Alien Invasion all open to him as new and largely untried concepts - is it now getting too tough for today's SciFi writers to come up with an original idea? I do not pretend to know the answer but things must be more difficult now than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

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^
My impression of reading the genre nowadays is that new ideas are less important than *any* idea well-used. Like "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur"--there's nothing original about time travel back to the Mesozoic, but the crux of the story itself is, IMO, very original. Characters also mean more; compared to older SF, it seems like character development and complexity is much more important than it used to be, ideas notwithstanding.

Just my two bits.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State