How Death Separates Sci-Fi From Reality

As I was planning this week's SyFriday column (and you just thought I came up with it on the fly), I wanted to talk about how much it irks me that death in science-fiction is never really death, almost to the point that it's a joke in mainstream media. "Don't worry, I know [insert your favorite character's name here] died, but wait until sweeps, and he/she will be back in no time. It is sci-fi after all."

And it's true. As if taking its cue from the afternoon soap operas, beloved characters in science-fiction -- if a show stays on long enough -- find a way to come back to life, one way or another. It's almost to the point where fans expect it. I mean, look at the people who want to resurrect Capt. Kirk from the dead. All you need is a katra, a Genesis planet, and a pissed off Klingon who bears a striking resemblance to Doc Brown.

I think that we, as fans and maybe even as a society, have become desensitized to what death really is. Even with the passing of the great sci-fi author Kurt Vonnegut this past week, it still really doesn't sink in.

When I was a kid, my dad would love to watch the kind of action movies that either had Bruce Lee or Charles Bronson in it. Watching these movies, the death toll of unnamed, faceless characters was high. Even at 8 years old, I was becoming desensitized to what I was seeing on the screen.

Then once, my dad and I were watching a movie where the main character didn't kill the army of anonymous fighters that were attacking him. I turned to my dad and asked what was wrong ... why not just kill them? And my dad just looked at me and asked me if I thought those guys had families, had friends who cared about them? These weren't people who just appeared out of thin air. They were people who had homes, who had jobs, who had a brother or a sister, who had a mom and a dad.

Ever since that day, I found it difficult to watch a movie with a lot of death without thinking of those very specific ramifications, almost to the point of, "What if that was me?"

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