I’ve been a Science Fiction & Fantasy junkie since I learned how to read. The two earliest books I remember reading that didn’t involve Dick and Jane were “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “The Magician’s Nephew”. I don’t agree with Harlan Ellison that the shortened “Sci-Fi” is an anathema that ruins the genre; and as such I wish to now coin the counter-term Stu-Fi as a shorted version of Stupid-Science-Fiction.
I want to coin this term because I’ve been watching a mini-series called Impact. It is supposedly a science fiction piece, but the science is so frelling bad that it is damn near Fantasy. Since there are no Unicorns, I can only conclude that it is Stupid-Science-Fiction, or Stu-Fi for short; which is basically the science fiction genre written for the inhabitants of the movie Idiocracy. To put it bluntly, if you have a sixth grade understanding of science this mini-series will make your head explode.
It’s one thing for Star Trek to show warp drives, and Star Wars to have super-light drives; because these are theoretical technologies that we may still develop even though we don’t currently know how to accomplish it. It is an altogether different thing to show a scene where the counter balance of a massive orbital object effectively neutralizes the Earth’s gravity causing an ocean freighter to rise out of the water, which then closes up the hole where the ship had been. Hey, you fraking boneheads, water closes up and forms a smooth surface because of gravity! If you neutralize that gravity, even if it is by means of a completely wrong understanding of mass and orbital mechanics, the water would rise up with the ship! What kind of moron wrote the CGI scripting to show a ship float out of the water because of ‘gravity fluctuations’ and yet coded the ship to be dripping water back down to the ocean? Did anyone consider that without gravity water doesn’t drip downwards? Please, don’t bother trying to explain that the ship is metal and is somehow affected differently, because the next scene showed bales of hay floating in the air. If you are inconsistently stupid you are still stupid!
Einstein was right: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
I wanted to credit Mike Rohl with inspiring me to coin the term “Stu-Fi” but a little bit of IMBD searching reveals the disturbing fact that he has been involved in a lot of shows that I have enjoyed. The thing is, Supernatural and Smallville are more Fantasy than Sci-Fi, and so I can cut them a lot more slack. Impact takes itself much more seriously, and so my condemnation is more serious. As much as I want to shield someone whose work I have liked, I still can’t blame just the writers; Mr Rohl, as the director, surely had some ability to quell the stupidity that this show not only displays but damn well flaunts.
I have googled it. “Stu-Fi” doesn’t exist anywhere else as of 2009-07-02. This is where you heard it first. I blame Michael Vickerman,Mike Rohl and Impact.
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