LAck of Science Fiction

[Righ]

Explicit science just leads to silliness like Scott storing himself in a transporter buffer until he was rescued a few decades later, or Wesley's nanobots escaping an open dish and starting a new civilization in the space of 24 hours.  Ugh.

No, it doesn't always. Here's a nice short story about Bose-Einstein condensates.

[Ironwood]

But we have communicators now and we have succesful Quantum Teleportation.

It's all about scale...

[sarius]

I like Star Trek: Voyager, and none of you can ever take that from me.

I don't care what anyone else thinks, I find the series to be entertaining.

Voyager had a great plot design, and Kate. :)  BSG and SAAB (Space Above and Beyond) appeal much more to me than most of the fluff.  STNG got into so much damned "Q", DS9 and SG(x) decided to throw all powerful gods into the picture way too fast (IMHO), and I'm really tired of entertainment in any form where the ultimate objective keeps being becoming a god-like figure.

Funny enough, Farscape always seemed much more the action adventure than just a sci-fantasy.  The writing (past season 1) really kept you wanting for next week to get here.

[Furiously]

     I thought the first season or two of Andromeda were decent, but then they sort of lost sight of where they were going or what they were doing and every season had a new big bad - and you can't do that for more then 2 seasons.

[ahoythematey]

 

I happen to like both hardtype science fiction(the Dick-Asimov-Heinlein trinity, for example), and also popcorn variety like Stargate and The Fifth Element.

[Xanthippe]

I just watched Firefly and Serenity, and enjoyed them immensely.  The western theme bothered my husband, as did the Chinese.  Didn't bother me a bit, I just enjoyed the hell out of the characters.  Wish it was still on, although I heard they will be making more episodes for DVD or something.

[Pococurante]

No, it doesn't always. Here's a nice short story about Bose-Einstein condensates.

You're quoting the same longhairs you derided in our string theory thread some time back. Brian Greene wants to deep throat your credit card.

Now.  Seriously.  Put slow glass into a longrunning TV series that has any hope of retuning its production costs.  The production costs of a 5 kbytes short story on a web page is an orange fixed by rare gases in a single shipping carton marked Producto Grande Del Peru.  BSG is Northern Michigan's entire harvest of autumnal Indian summer apples.  The former may be unusually tasty for the lucky endowed few but the latter pleases tens of thousands for no more than the price to the local supermarket.

[Righ]

What the fuck are you on about Sally? It's an entertaining story that isn't full of silliness. I don't give a rats arse about your extensive TV production resume or your detachable penis. Leave it alone.

[Evangolis]

I liked the story, partly because it supports the point I want to make.  I used Medium as an example for the same reason, and because the episode I had just seen was pretty good, IMO.  And I'm going to throw in The Mote in God's Eye, by Niven and Pournelle, who were all about hard SF when I was young.  Jigsaw Man, there is another good hard SF short story.  But I need to digress a second.

I've just started reading Chris Crawford, On Interactive Storytelling, 2005.  If he has anything interesting to say, and if he doesn't, I've bloody well wasted time and money I don't have to spare, but if he does have anything interesting to say, I'll do a short review when I finish.  If he doesn't have anything interesting to say, I'll get bored and put empty pop cans on the book and never finish it.  Anyway, early on he points out that one problem games have with telling stories is that games tend to be about things, and stories are always about people.

Now, back on the topic at hand, I'd point out that this bit about stories being about people and not things would seem to undercut the worth of the whole Science Fiction as a Literature of Ideas bit, where stories are based around Science.  Except they aren't, really.

Look at Mote.  Sure, it's really about two different species which have very different reproductive processes, and who both assume that the other's processes are the same as their own.  Except they aren't, and that scientific detail drives the entire plot from start to finish.  But the story is about the characters, human and Motie, and what they do under the pressures of their biological differences.

So too with that story Righ linked to; it isn't about the properties of exotic matter states, it is about what those properties mean to people.  And it is the same with Medium.  It is not about the premise that there exist people who are sensitive to death, the energies of death, and the dead themselves.  It is about what, given that premise, happens to people who are confronted with the results of that premise every day of their lives.

Medium does not look like what we think of as Science Fiction.  There are no tight uniforms, no shiny space ships, no unusual aliens, no ray guns, no explosions.  But there is a consistant central premise about the nature of the universe that drives the entire story, through the interaction of the characters with the realities of that premise.  Science Fiction does not have to have any relation to actual 'valid' science to be Science Fiction.  It only has to have a consistant central reality which is different from our daily reality and which produces a meaningful effect on the lives of its characters.  And it is this core of genuine alternate reality that is missing from almost everything that is currently calling itself Science Fiction.

[MrHat]

Heh.

You guys have really caused me to examine what Sci-Fi is.

For me, it's always been pretty simple:  magic = fantasy, science = sci-fi.  Force = magic, so Star Wars was fantasy.

Basically, if I can kinda imagine it being a plausible technology, it's sci-fi because the craziness that makes the genre is man made.

[Johny Cee]

Heh.

You guys have really caused me to examine what Sci-Fi is.

For me, it's always been pretty simple:  magic = fantasy, science = sci-fi.  Force = magic, so Star Wars was fantasy.

Basically, if I can kinda imagine it being a plausible technology, it's sci-fi because the craziness that makes the genre is man made.

That distinction breaks down when you get into the science as magic crowd.  Zelazny, Wolfe, Drake's "Northworld", etc.

The beautiful thing about scifi/fantasy is that,  by throwing in aliens or elves,  we suspend disbelief.  This can allow us to look at moral/ethical/societal issues without our kneejerk reactions or preconceptions.

Hard sci fi, in my mind,  is generally tied with future societies that are either utopian or distopian.  Fantasy/science fantasy more towards moral and ethical choices.

Sci fi on TV is generally more a setting against which you have an action-adventure show (Stargate) or drama (BSG, Farscape).

I think Whedon does do a decent job of threading in moral/societal issues (hard scifi) in his dramas/action stories.  I just wish the guy could move a plot a tad bit faster,  and stop writing his dialogue all in the same voice....

But then, I always liked the space show with muppets,  so I have no taste.

[Righ]

So too with that story Righ linked to; it isn't about the properties of exotic matter states, it is about what those properties mean to people.

Yes, that's exactly what good science fiction is about, "hard" or otherwise. The genre encompasses all manner of speculative fiction that asks the question "what if?" whether or not it involves science or the future. Brunner examines the social dimensions of an overcrowded world in "Stand on Zanzibar", Dick examines how things would have been had the Axis powers won WWII in "The Man In The High Castle", Miller examines matters of faith and knowledge in a post-apocalyptic setting in "A Canticle for Leibowitz". Taking a step further away from alternative realities and futures, there are novels like Christopher Priest's "The Affirmation" which examines a protagonist that imagines his future in a contemporary setting and the imagined and real world start to connect - this being a study of the psyche's descent into madness. However, including hard science, whether it be practical science or fanciful extrapolations does not require that the story degrade into whimsy.

Medium does not look like what we think of as Science Fiction.  There are no tight uniforms, no shiny space ships, no unusual aliens, no ray guns, no explosions.  But there is a consistant central premise about the nature of the universe that drives the entire story, through the interaction of the characters with the realities of that premise.  Science Fiction does not have to have any relation to actual 'valid' science to be Science Fiction.  It only has to have a consistant central reality which is different from our daily reality and which produces a meaningful effect on the lives of its characters.  And it is this core of genuine alternate reality that is missing from almost everything that is currently calling itself Science Fiction.

Indeed - the author asks "What if?" and the characters are set in motion. That's what speculative fiction is about, be it considered Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror.

[Venkman]

all the way down to providing a natural history explanation for the common myths found across all races.

Preservers!

Oh wait, wrong license :)

Otherwise, I continue to wish I could finish a Heinlein book. The only success I had was "Methuselah's Children", and I attribute that entirely to the length of the book. I always like his ideas, but find his storytelling technique plodding and directionless. I assume there's a point in there somewhere, with something resembling a synopsus and ending, but I can never get through the weed of words that precede it. I'm probably missing out on stuff or something.

[Stormwaltz]

I have a more subtle determinant for whether something is science fiction or science fantasy. What drives the plot and provides the resolution?

If it's a god/alien, magic/the Force, an ancient inexplicable enchanted item/technobabble device, or similar deus ex machina, it's science fantasy.

If it's a person, it's science fiction.

Science fiction is what people do to themselves and each other when exposed to something wondrous, not what the something wondrous does to us.

It's not a perfect definition, but it seems to cover most of what I like about science fiction.

[Simond]

Explicit science just leads to silliness like Scott storing himself in a transporter buffer until he was rescued a few decades later, or Wesley's nanobots escaping an open dish and starting a new civilization in the space of 24 hours.  Ugh.

No, it doesn't always. Here's a nice short story about Bose-Einstein condensates.

As a tangent, thank you for linking that because i remeber reading it about fifteen years ago or so and could never remember what it was called or who wrote it.

[Righ]

It's scandalously difficult to find Bob Shaw's books these days. However, if you can find the novel "Other Days, Other Eyes" where Shaw makes slow glass the focus of murder investigations, you'd probably enjoy it.

[eldaec]

For me, it's always been pretty simple:  magic = fantasy, science = sci-fi.  Force = magic, so Star Wars was fantasy.

But, but, Midichlorins r teh science!1one!