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RE: He's right, though
Yeah, I definitely think Sawyer's got a point. I think there's a difference between SF literature and pulp sci-fi. Above all, SF poses questions and makes you think, while sci-fi is mostly good for digesting popcorn and marketing action figures.
That said, I know what you mean--Science Fiction fans are curious about things--which means we'll watch just about anything no matter how crappy it first appears. I think this might diminish with age--as I get older and have less time to waste, I find I'm more selective about what I watch.
RE: He's right, though
the robots in "i, Robot " were not evil and were not trying to kill us because they hated us. Did you watch that movie? They were actually trying to protect us, but were using their own logic in doing so. the only robot to become truly sentient was also the only robot that was on our side.
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He's right, though
Star Wars is hardly among the great SciFi literature of the world. It's mostly cheesy space opera. What it did was to bring SciFi to a much broader audience.
Prior to Star Wars, SciFi on TV or film was almost uniformly directed at a juvenile audience. The Flash Gordon serials, the many different "space ranger" types, and so on. Adults had to get their SciFi fix from books.
I'm a huge fan of the genre - when I read fiction, it's almost exclusively SciFi/Fantasy, and I watch most of the SciFi/Fantasy shows that are on TV - even the really bad ones - I watched Blade, the Series, for crying out loud. I catch most of the movies, too. Trust me - the books are always better, and there are books that haven't made it to screens anywhere that are far better than almost anything put on film or videotape.
Popular SciFi is dumbed way down. Look at ''I, Robot". The book was a collection of related short stories that explored the boundary between "person" and "non-person". It was quite thought provoking (at least, at the time - we've come quite a ways since then, and I haven't read them in years, so they might not hold up quite so well anymore) and pretty deep stuff.
The movie? Other than the bad guys being robots, was it any different than any of the Die Hard series? Not to my eye. "Robots are starting to think - they'll hate us and try to kill us!" Sheesh. No wonder people are afraid of cloning. Every clone they've ever seen in the movies is a murdering monster.
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