Why Are Sports So Hard to Get Right in SF/F?
Jon-a-than!
Since moving to Portland, I have gotten back into NBA basketball. I haven’t watched basketball regularly since Michael Jordan retired, but Portland has no pro baseball or football teams. One trip to the Rose Center was all I needed to catch Trail Blazer fever.*
After watching their recent last-second loss to the Nuggets, I wondered: why don’t most fantasy and science fiction sports feel like real sports?
Consider the most famous fantasy sport from the last fifteen years: quiddich. It serves some dramatic functions for YA novels, but as a sport it’s a joke. Five seconds of action by one player overrules everything else that happens (barring extreme example).
Battlestar Galactica gave us Pyramid (in the remake, Triad in the original, but largely the same game), which wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t exactly memorable either. A YouTube search brings up a couple of videos, but they’re four or five years (yarons?) old.
There was that brief arena-league football takeoff in Starship Troopers, but that movie was so far over the top I don’t think anything in it – much less the sport – was intended to be taken seriously. (Confession – I do really enjoy the movie though. It’s a kick.)
Firefly touched on the question of sports with a no-clear-rules game that resembled pick-up basketball (and was appropriately entertaining). They never covered the question further.
But there is one exception, one sport generated by a SF/F story that has lingered decades past its appearance in Esquire and its feature film starring James Caan. I’m talking, of course, about Rollerball, from the eponymous movie based on the short story “Roller Ball Murder” by William Harrison. (Note: I am specifically not talking about that hideous remake.)
A more violent version of roller derby, combined with touches of football and basketball thrown in. The game is deadly, but as one of the characters observes, “This was never a game!” (I won’t say more to avoid spoilers.)
Perhaps the sport has to be the focus of the story for the writer to give it enough attention to make it memorable. Or maybe I’m overlooking something.
What do you think? Are there any SF/F sports you think merit mention? (Note: Blood Bowl started as a board game, so it doesn’t count. I’m looking for sports that came from stories.)
*Yes, I know the Trail Blazers are a long shot for the playoffs right now, but they have a lot of youth and talent. And damn, they’re an exciting team to watch!
