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Let me give you a schooling, n00bs who are clearly complete unaware of anything surrounding science fiction and cultural critique in any form:
Science Fiction is a political genre.
Every piece of fiction in influenced by both the author's beliefs and the culture it was written in, as well as whatever the writer explicitly wished to say.
This goes double for science fiction which, since its inception, has been used to critique and debate the current culture.
Let me repeat that: since its inception Science Fiction has been used to critique and debate the current culture.
It is a "literature of ideas."
It is about our beliefs, hopes, prejudices, desires, dreams and nightmares.
Go back to the earliest forms of science fiction and you will see the anxieties surrounding technology that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
Look at the Golden Age of Sci-Fi and notice the hope for the future (as well as, often, the utter silencing and vanishing of women).
Read Ursula Lee Guin and James Tiptree Jr to explore issues of gender.
Sci-Fi is political, it is social, it is our culture laid out for us to explore and critique and change.
This goes triple for the Star Trek franchise which was written with the express purpose of showing us Gene Roddenberry's imagining of the egalitarian heights to which our society could reach. The fact that his works -regardless of their incarnation- still show the biases of the dominate cultural mores just make our conversations about what Star Trek attempts and does and fails to do even more important.
So if your comment about a discussion about race, gender or sexuality in the new Star Trek movie boils down to:
"It's Science Fiction, it has nothing to do with real life."
You fail.
You are not obligated to wrestle with the work on that level but there has never been a genre more devoted to "real life" and the pride and problems of our culture than Sci-Fi.
Science Fiction is a political genre.
Every piece of fiction in influenced by both the author's beliefs and the culture it was written in, as well as whatever the writer explicitly wished to say.
This goes double for science fiction which, since its inception, has been used to critique and debate the current culture.
Let me repeat that: since its inception Science Fiction has been used to critique and debate the current culture.
It is a "literature of ideas."
It is about our beliefs, hopes, prejudices, desires, dreams and nightmares.
Go back to the earliest forms of science fiction and you will see the anxieties surrounding technology that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
Look at the Golden Age of Sci-Fi and notice the hope for the future (as well as, often, the utter silencing and vanishing of women).
Read Ursula Lee Guin and James Tiptree Jr to explore issues of gender.
Sci-Fi is political, it is social, it is our culture laid out for us to explore and critique and change.
This goes triple for the Star Trek franchise which was written with the express purpose of showing us Gene Roddenberry's imagining of the egalitarian heights to which our society could reach. The fact that his works -regardless of their incarnation- still show the biases of the dominate cultural mores just make our conversations about what Star Trek attempts and does and fails to do even more important.
So if your comment about a discussion about race, gender or sexuality in the new Star Trek movie boils down to:
"It's Science Fiction, it has nothing to do with real life."
You fail.
You are not obligated to wrestle with the work on that level but there has never been a genre more devoted to "real life" and the pride and problems of our culture than Sci-Fi.
