“But I think the thing that appealed to me most [about SF and Fantasy] was the drama; the grandeur; the pretentiousness, which isn’t the bad thing we generally make it out to be. After all, what is the difference between pretentiousness and seriousness? Only a contract between the speaker and the author. People call things “pretentious” in order to put them in their place; if a thing has been conceded to actually occupy a place of seriousness, it’s immune from charges of pretension. I’m really suspicious of this process — it seems cliquish to me. At the same time, though, one has to concede a big difference between the seriousness of heavy hitters like Faulkner or Joyce and the would-be gravitas of stories about dragons that can talk.”
» Rubber Forehead Aliens (Television Tropes & Idioms)
The tendency for all sci-fi alien species to be one facial feature away from humanity.
…
Gene Roddenberry gave more reasons for this in an interview once. Budget constraints aside, if you try to make aliens look completely alien, you’ll firstly make them look ridiculous (cf. Doctor Who), and secondly make it doubly hard for the actor playing the alien to do anything mildly resembling acting. This has actually been isolated to extremely specific requirements: if an audience can’t see an actor’s eyes or mouth, their ability to empathize with or emotionally invest in that character is significantly impaired. This is one reason why Mooks, especially SF mooks like the Cylons or the Imperial Stormtroopers, are so often uniformed in face-obscuring helmets.
—tvtropes.org, completely destroying your productivity one fascinated click at a time
“In the early 1930s, readers of science fiction magazines such as Wonder Stories, in which [Leslie F. Stone’s] “The Conquest of Gola” first appeared, would have recognized several elements of its basic plot. The early magazines functioned as a sort of discussion group or pre-Internet bulletin board for writers. One writer would publish a story; another would find an intriguing detail in that story and develop it; a third would write a story that reversed everything in the first piece; a fourth would find a way to turn the whole thing into comedy. Robots are a good example: introduced as a metaphor for oppressed workers in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1921), the robot evolved into a potential threat in stories like Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!” (1941) and then into a comic foil in Henry Kuttner’s “The Proud Robot” (1943).
Like jazz, SF is a collaborative art. Together, the pulp magazine writers and editors of the 1920s through the 1940s created not only a genre but also a consensus about what sorts of settings, objects, stories, and characters belonged in that genre. Writers still make use of that collective future, though sometimes the use they make is to contradict or critique it.”
“It was fashionable at that time (we made it fashionable: one of our covert disinformation campaigns) to complain bitterly about the inappropriately erotic and ‘sexist’ cover art, that kept people from taking sf’s sober, intelligent, futurist speculation seriously. But we knew very well, and so did the men, that the art -all those air-brushed spacegirls in the crotch-hugging suits; all those wispily clad or bronze-breasted females ravished (as far as public decency permitted) by monsters or spacemen, told the honest truth. The real purpose of science fiction is to describe how Man gets out there to the edge of the known, grabs hold of a chunk of that alien dark, and pumps it full of his seed…”
“In praise of the sci-fi corridor” - Den of Geek:
Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they’re so utilitarian by nature - really they’re just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are ‘sold’ to viewers, movie magic is close at hand.
» Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched | The Onion
“I wanted to capture the sense of adventure, lust, and peril that these characters would feel, along with their utter lack of social context or emotional complexity.”
