Hello. I’m the new mod of ScienceFiction. I just wanted to introduce myself as you’ll be seeing my name a lot more around here. I also wanted to get some community input on a couple things.
First, you’ll notice we have revamped the about/rules sidebar. Please familiarize yourself with the guidelines, it’s not much different, just trying to be more welcoming and informative as well as make sure we are having a safe, good experience for our members. I like to be transparent as well as get community input often because after all, this community is for you all.
Second, one of the things I came on for is to post weekly discussion threads to make sure conversations about ongoing shows/movies/books, etc are easy to find and take part in. So I wanted to see what all you would like to discuss. Obviously Foundaition is airing now, so I will be making sure we have a pinned discussion post about each week’s new episode. I also wanted to see what else you might want to talk about and what upcoming media you were looking forward to that you would like to have discussion threads for. Izzy has been making monthly “What are you watching/reading?” posts but we also want to have more specific weekly threads as well. So what are you looking forward to?
The intent was to be science fiction without the fantasy or horror. Some things are going to be a mixed bag of these elements so it didn’t make sense to be so restrictive as not everyone is going to care about the nuanced differences between them. So if there is a spectrum from the maximum science fiction to maximum fantasy then we should be leaning into the science fiction side of that.
Personally I don’t think Lemmy is big enough with enough traffic to start worrying about gate keeping. So unless someone is trying to suggest something like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones is science fiction I would let it slide. For now our rules are going to be a bit fuzzy until things develop more naturally.
I’ll change the text to “science fiction” just to avoid any potential confusion.
Yes, please, let’s keep the focus on the science part of science fiction, or at least as a North Star. Otherwise we’ll start discussing Barbie or romcoms because after all they are fiction / fantasy.
Let’s not make the same mistake bookstores make. They may have a reason to mix the genres because of lack of space, but we don’t have that excuse.
Thanks Izzy. Yes I agree. I was using Sci-fi and science fiction more or less as synonyms but I do understand that some have a hard distinction. I’ve always used them interchangeably to encompass “science-based” media not including fantasy and horror. So that would include Star wars, Star Trek, and most space based things even if they aren’t purely based in realistic science. I’ve always heard “hard Sci-fi” as things that seem to be based on realistic science.
I’ll admit I’m a layman when it comes to the extreme science fiction media. I’m also not a big reader. But I love sci-fi movies and shows. I volunteered to help with discussions of that mostly but to also learn more and get into reading more as well.
I hope I’m making sense but my view is to be more broad and inclusive.