Re: Warner announces Forbidden Planet for November
Quote:
| Is On The Beach sci-fi? If memory serves, it postulated a world after a nuclear war, something all too possible. |
Does it have to be
impossible to be sci-fi?
Are
The Andromeda Strain and
The Terminal Man SF? I'm not sure. Both were contemporary novels that involved perfectly possible scenarios and at most postulated slight and entirely reasonable developments of current technology. And yet I'm tempted to say "Yes" to both, especially if we understand SF to mean both "science fiction" and "speculative fiction". In part it is the affinity for science that puts them across the goal line for me. It is specifically how they deal with the consequences of scientific inquiry and application that make them seem like SF.
I think
On the Beach qualifies because it presents a genuinely changed world, an alternate universe to the one we live in - one where the bomb really was dropped and a civilization collapsed. I think that's qualitatively different than an ordinary piece of mainstream fiction that asks a single "what if" question like what if a woman were elected president or what if a the U.S. had a chance to capture a Soviet nulcear sub - or even "what if a terrorist exploded a nuclear bomb in the U.S." because those scenarios change one thing about our present and let us imagine how they would play out in the world we know. Also they key element that is changed, and to which we are reacting
isn't really connected to science and its consequences in quite the same way. A stolen nuke used by terrorist is somehow a very different thing psychologically than a world-wide holocaust brought about by the civilization that developed the technology.
On the Beach and similar tales ask us to step across a divide into a completely different world and ask ourselves how we'd cope with having to live there.
Of course, defining what is and what isn't SF is one of the great intellectual parlor games, and there are never any "right" answers.
Joe
If you ever visit Century City in Los Angeles, just remember that it is sitting on what used to be the Fox back lot - which they had to sell off to cover the cost overruns on Cleo. 
