What's up with the anti-scifi stuff?

You may remember that recently I complained about Buzz Aldrin. Why? Was it to piss him off? Hell no:

Above: If you walk on the moon you get one free punch.

He just said some disparaging things about scifi, and I wanted to set the record straight. Buzz claimed that scifi leaves people disappointed with real science. I disagree with that, like I said before. Now the folks at Science 09 have some news on a similar front. A survey of science bloggers indicated that they feel like scifi makes people less able to understand real science. I think that's crap, frankly. I used to do some science blogging, and I work as a scientist, so maybe I come from a unique perspective here.

Maybe the issue here is that there's too much emphasis on mainstream scifi... stuff like Fringe and Sarah Connor Chronicles. A TV show is going to automatically be softer scifi than a good scifi novel. Same with movies; while they may have better science than a TV series, it can't compare to books. Yeah, a lot of these shows and movies are, well... bad. But they're bad conceptually first, and scientifically second. Most scif that is (in my opinion) good, has solid science in it. Read "A Fire Upon the Deep" and tell me it doesn't spark the imagination, doesn't make you think. Oh sure, there's some hand waving about this or that, but they don't go around ignoring the whole of science.

I can understand objections to say, CSI. I can't stand CSI. It's not really scifi, but I think it's an example of what we're talking about. They can magically reconstruct photos, extract DNA evidence from anything, and generally walk all over biological principals. The difference here is that it's not billed as scifi. People think it's based on fact, and that can be dangerous in legal settings where people expect all this crazy stuff to be possible. But that's the way CSI is presented. Not so with real scif, no matter how lame.

Science fiction is not supposed to be teaching science. I really don't think anyone watches Star Trek, and then automatically becomes unable to understand special relativity. I think people expect scifi to be fiction, it's right in the name. If there's anyone to blame about the lack of public understanding of science it's schools. When you can get through high school and only take one year of science, the systems has failed. Our society doesn't put enough emphasis on understanding science. THAT'S the problem. Not scifi, which I am on record saying I believe increases interest in science.