this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
37 points (89.4% liked)

Science Fiction

13637 readers
3 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Rylyshar 5 points 9 months ago

That would have been just as funny if I had just read it, as opposed to watching commercials on you-tube.

[–] waterore 4 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

This is a decent one, but a ton of the HFY stories are just so problematic. Many just feel like they're congratulating humanity on being vicious and creatively violent, like they think the Terran Empire in the Star Trek Mirror Universe were good guys.

Otherwise, a bunch just feel lazily formulaic and repetitive with others. Take a random human trait or convention from a human culture like say...fried foods. Use an alien narrator to describe how weird they think it is to fry foods. Find an angle to portray humans as plucky and great for their fierce devotion to frying foods and involve it in a narrative about humanity winning against greater odds. "And the human just dumped the entire chargizoid corpse into a vat of boiling oil! And then he took it out with something called tongs and ate it, skin and all! And that's when I knew I needed humans on my side in the coming galactic war..."

I guess I feel like the subgenre plays on the optimism of Star Trek utopianism, but ditches any real criticism of humanity's past (or our present). I think the message from Orville's Season 3 Episode 10 about what made humanity better in their past is a better heir to Star Trek utopianism than most of the HFY stories I've read.

[–] mesamunefire 3 points 9 months ago

I like quite a few of the HFY sci Fi.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

This was fun