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Doctor Who Makes Guinness Book of World Records
shadowlight1 writes "According to a BBC press release, cult favorite Doctor Who has entered the Guiness Book of World Records as the world's longest running science fiction show! There we go, it's official. Also, the second season of Who premieres on the SciFi channel tonight." From the release: "The series began on 23 November, 1963, and was revived in 2005 after 16 years off the screen. William Hartnell played the original Doctor Who, with Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker and Peter Davison among those following in his footsteps. Christopher Eccleston took up the mantle of the ninth Timelord last year - following the show's relaunch. He was replaced after just one series by David Tennant after Eccleston dropped out. "
A prime example of traditional great british entertainment
Being english, I can tell you that the idea of stopping a marathon, heading off to the pub for a few pints before stumbling onto the track again makes PERFECT sense :D
So... just to pull the last few books of Heinlein's I've read off the shelf and flip through them...
Stranger in a Strange Land
blurb: "The best-selling underground novel by the dean of American science fiction writers"
features: Martian psychokinetic abilities which include teleportation and mentally causing matter to cease to exist/
Starship Troopers
blurb: "the classic novel by the greatest science fiction writers of all time"
features a "brain bug" which controls a colony psychically, as well as good old-fashioned human psychics.
Glory Road
blurb: "the irrepressible science fiction classic!"
features: Magicians and transdimentional portals
I Will Fear No Evil
blurb: "Magnificent - a science fiction masterpiece"
features: A body which, after a complete brain transplant, interjects the donor body's personality into the consciousness of the new composite as a self-aware, sentient split personality.
Not much of Heinlein's work qualifies as science fiction under your definition.
Like it or not, but "science fiction" has become a genre based primarily upon finding necessary in the reader a willing suspension of disbelief in order to experience the story within the parameters given. The disbelief is generated because the story usually violates current scientific understanding. What we classify as 'hard sci-fi' as advancing only technology, rather than fundamentally changing what we know of science - and in its true form it's a rather small genre.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation