There’s an article in yesterday’s New York Times about the new CBS drama Threshold (which is about a team of experts investigating an ongoing alien invasion). The Times is very quick to point out, however, that despite its science fiction trappings, Threshold really isn’t sci-fi:

Sure enough, the extraterrestrial being pursued by the “Threshold” team isn’t a bug-eyed little green man, but rather a mysterious signal that propagates itself through everyday technology – radios, computers, MP3 players – and creates chaos wherever it turns up. Were it stripped of this one otherworldly component, “Threshold,” with its emphasis on forensic investigations and the interpersonal dynamics of its cast, could pass for another spinoff of “CSI.”

Yeah, because bug-eyed little green men are the only aliens you’d ever see talked about in that dirty backwater called science fiction. It’s just this dark and lonely place where geeks sometimes “get together…[to] to debate whether a particular red-caped superhero could best a certain green-skinned goliath in combat.” Nothing intelligent ever happens there. What the article seems to be saying, essentially, is that science fiction is by its nature stupid and immature and the province mainly of geekdom; what makes Threshold interesting is that it isn’t any of these things; it’s smart and real, and therefore it just can’t be sci-fi.

It’s an old argument and, in all fairness to the show (which I happen to like), not one that its creators necessarily seem to agree with. If anything, I think they’re pushing the “we’re not really sci-fi” angle simply to attract viewers and advertising. (Because The New York Times aren’t the only ones who think that science fiction is only for geeks.) But it is a pretty specious argument nonetheless.