Genre
I’ve come to realize recently that science fiction is one of the most beloved genres in the world of entertainment for a single reason. But first…
After posting some pages from my latest sci-fi script on a screenwriting messageboard, the feedback was quite positive. It was reassuring first of all, but secondly it was interesting how many people want to see original sci-fi succeed. The first reaction always involves “It needs some work, but I hope to God you succeed!” Almost every reply included this comment, and it really says something about movies.
The common saying is that people go to movies to escape reality. Whether that means our world as a whole, or the finite reality of our depressed lives or whatever. People want to escape. Comedy allows us to escape depression, or simply lets us forget about our terrible work day or work week. Drama allows us to feel empathy for those characters on screen, allowing us to deal with our own problems. Science fiction, I believe, transcends both. Whether it’s the time or place in which we exist, it allows us to escape. Science fiction reaps the greatest harvest of our collective imagination. It can be comedy or drama or adventure or crime or whatever. That’s the beauty of it.
The one reason science fiction is the greatest genre is this: it allows the viewer to escape to a world of utter sublimity, where everything he knows to be true can be made untrue in such a fashion that when the mind reconstructs it, he is forever transformed. And that should be the ultimate goal of science fiction — to transform the audience.
