Okay, just because this is mildly fun to pick at:
Can we use technology to evaluate science fiction?
It depends on what you are using technology to evaluate in science fiction stories. Worth of science fiction, no. Other aspects, perhaps. However, for a lot of your post, you aren't evaluating science fiction; you are evaluating fantasy fiction and finding it deficient to you because it is not science fiction.
I know that is kind of funny but some of our educators are using computers to rate the Reading Levels of texts.
It's not really funny as there are too many texts for people to read them all and quickly enough to evaluate reading levels which are needed as baselines for classes. These programs coordinate the words used in the texts with the words being taught as vocabulary to grade schoolers in each year/age group. Some kids will be above those baseline levels and have an advanced vocabulary. Other kids will be below the baseline and have a smaller vocabulary and problems with long words and words with unusual pronouncements. The computer programs thus assist teachers on whether the text has vocabulary that the average student in the grade/age level will be able to handle alphabetically and phonetically, know and easily learn, and what vocabulary is better suited to an older age/grade level. The ages are done as a range of several years, with the understanding that kids who are more advanced can read books on an older age/grade level and children having problems can work upwards starting with stories on a lower age/grade level. It's meant to help the teachers with what books will be used in what classes so that children can develop their reading skills.
Various methods use the number of syllables in words, the number of words in sentences or number of letters in words then apply some mathematical algorithm to the data. But they don't test for which words are actually used in the text. So big words about simple ideas get a high rating and short words communicating sophisticated ideas get low rating.
No, it sounds like vocabulary. A big word is harder for a child to read, whether it's a simple idea or a big idea. Shorter words are easier to read and to learn, have fewer letters, etc. Vocabulary comprehension is another factor run through the programs. A word like ion is short and easier for a child to sound out, but would be considered a higher age level word. Common words like the, and, etc., are counted. Rhyming words are counted, etc. They've been doing this sort of thing for twenty-thirty years and the programs are designed by engineers as well as educators.
But what if we look for "real" science words in science fiction stories?
That wouldn't have anything to do with children's reading abilities and vocabulary abilities. Also, who is going to decide what is a real science word and what is not? There are a number of scientific terms that are disputed as being "real" science or not. New terms get invented all the time, but with the scientific process, it takes awhile before they become accepted terminology. How would those terms be counted? And even if a story is peppered with science terms, that doesn't mean the science in it is contextually correct. I can have a story that uses the word "engineer" in it 100 times and fill it with engineering and scientific impossibilities. Since you are concerned not just with the phonetic, structural aspects of the word for ease of reading but with their content, counting the mere presence of science words would not seem helpful to you.
But what about Bujold's fantasy works?
Why are you using a system you designed to test for the level of sciency words in science fiction stories on a fantasy story? We would already expect the amount of sciency words in a fantasy story to be low, especially if it is a pre-industrial historical fantasy or secondary world fantasy, such as Bujold writes in fantasy. You wouldn't really need to test it.
Curse of Chalion has a sci-fi density of 0.146 while Paladin of Souls is 0.109
I fail to see how they can have a science terms density of more than 0.0 when they aren't science fiction stories and are unlikely to use nearly any of your compiled sciency words. (You know that sciency is not actually a word, right?)
Dune by Frank Herbert 0.142
Are you not counting the spice as a sciency term?
Harry Potter 1 Philosopher's Stone 0.277
Harry Potter 7 Deathly Hollows 0.457
Again, why are you testing for sciency terms in fantasy fiction?
Deathly Hallows got a high score but what words were used how often? The word "wand" was used 318 times and "wands" 39 times. Others were "sword" = 132, "magic" = 58, "dragon" = 43, "magical" = 42. Deathly Hallows is over one megabyte in length at 759 pages but uses only a few technical terms, and rarely, telescope, relay, radio and electric a total of 12 times in 198,000 words.
Yes, that's because it is a fantasy novel, not a science fiction novel. Did wand, magic, magical, dragon and sword become sciency terms when I wasn't looking? Why are you measuring those words when your plan was to measure sciency terms? Deathly Hollows does use some tech terms because it is set in contemporary Earth and in our daily lives we do actually use technology like telescopes and electricity. Cars even. But it's not a science fiction story. Therefore, evaluating the science vocabulary content of Harry Potter novels does not allow you to measure the science vocabulary use of science fiction novels. You're using the wrong data set for your declared aims.
It seems to be a lot of reading with no serious ideas about the real world.
First off, again, it's fantasy fiction. Some fantasy fiction is set in the contemporary world, like Harry Potter. Other fantasy novels, however, are set in a pre-industrial historical period or an alternate version of the real world or in a totally imaginary world altogether. So saying that fantasy fiction is not about the real world is rather missing the point. Fantasy fiction may involve the real world or it may not.
Second, there are a lot of other things in the real world besides science concepts and science vocabulary. Family, let's say. Many fantasy novels have these real world things in them -- and therefore fantasy fiction can indeed look at the real world, by using the real world, or if the setting is different, mirroring the real world. The real world things that fantasy fiction looks at may or may not include science stuff. On average, science stuff will not be highly present in fantasy fiction. But that doesn't mean that it isn't looking at aspects of the real world. And it also has nothing to do with evaluating the presence of science vocabulary in
science fiction.
And lastly, if your viewpoint is that the only serious ideas in the real world worth examining are science ones, then yes, fantasy fiction will mostly not interest you as serious. But if you are a person who believes that there are other serious ideas and topics to look at in fiction besides science, then fantasy fiction quite often is dealing with serious ideas, like love, loyalty, the costs of war, etc. It just doesn't happen to be concentrating on science topics because it is fantasy fiction.
Komarr by Bujold gets a lower density score at 0.37 than Rowling's Deathly Hallows even though Komarr is a shorter book which tends to raise the density. But the word usage is totally different.
Yes, that's because Komarr is a science fiction novel and Deathly Hallows is a fantasy novel. If you are measuring the science vocabulary of science fiction, then Deathly Hallows is an error in your data set and should not be involved.
So which would be more productive reading for a teenager?
Neither. You are measuring the presence of scientific vocabulary in science fiction stories, not how productive one science fiction story and one fantasy story are for a high school student's literature studies. If you were evaluating how productive either book was for a high school student's school literature studies and for placement in AP English and college English lit studies, then you would not be using the system of evaluating the presence of sciencey words. You would be evaluating other, ickier things like narrative techniques, metaphors, themes, etc. -- things that would develop the teenager's writing and reading skills, not the teenager's science skills. And again, no school is going to evaluate the presence of science vocabulary in a
fantasy novel.
But it is old science fiction that gets some of the highest scores.
Yes, but it is old science fiction that has some of the worst, most incorrect science in them. Again, you can use the words engineer or gravity as often as you like in a science fiction story, but if you get the engineering wrong, that's not really sciency, is it? Very few of the old science fiction writers were scientists or had much scientific knowledge. Most of them had journalism and English major backgrounds. They wrote about meeting aliens. They wrote about space pirates. They wrote about impossible utopian futures and time travel. They made stuff up on dares from the magazine editors (do one about a robot toaster!) and when they were drunk. When they weren't writing science fiction stories, they wrote made up true confessions stories, mystery stories and erotica -- anything that would get a sale. They didn't worry about their stories being scientifically accurate. They've been terribly open about this. It didn't mean that they were never visionary. It didn't mean that they didn't have fascinating things to say about lots of social problems, and what we hoped to find out there in the great beyond. It didn't even mean that they didn't influence science and inspire people to become scientists (as did Star Trek.) But they weren't, on average, very sciency. They made up sciency words like positronic and slipstream. Are you going to put those words in the sciency vocabulary you are counting?
Even when they had accurate science, they couldn't necessarily predict where technology would lead us. A slide rule is a sciency term, and are even still used today in aviation and for back up ship navigation. But they've been replaced by calculators. Is the presence of the word slide rule in a story set in the twenty-second century really going to be productive for a teenage reader when that person will never likely see one unless he or she ends up taking very specialized engineering courses as an adult? If I have a slide rule in a fantasy story about dragons (which happened in the past,) does that really make it more productive as a reading tool or a science inspiration tool than a fantasy story about dragons without a slide rule? As you note, it's not just the presence of the words that matters -- it's what you are doing with them.
The Secret of the Ninth Planet by Donald Allen Wollheim gets 1.67. It is so old, we do not even have a 9th planet any more.
You mean the story about aliens who set up stations on Earth and the other planets to steal the rays of the sun, which will possibly cause the sun to super nova? And the plan can only be thwarted by a high school student because it was a YA novel? Yes, that's a terribly, terribly sciency story there. Involving Neptune, which isn't a planet. By Wollheim, who was a book and magazine editor with no science background. But he put a lot of sciency words in his story. About imaginary aliens, which we know is a serious idea in the real world.
So how do we sort through the tons of sci-fi and fantasy STUFF especially when so much is easy to find and plenty is free?
We find stories we feel are interesting and we read them.
If the important thing to us personally is how many sciency terms are in a story, then we stick to science fiction stories -- not fantasy stories -- and we analyze them for the number of sciency terms in them. And then we read them, even if the science in them is gobbleygook, because they used sciency terms. If the important thing is whether the average nine year old could handle the vocabulary in the book because we are teaching them reading and writing skills, we analyze the words used in terms of length, ease of pronouncement, and other educational and cognitive development factors including some context (such as violence, sex and mature social ideas.) And then we let the nine year olds read those, while giving those nine year olds who are having trouble reading younger aged books to catch up. If we want to personally only read old science fiction, we read old science fiction. If we want personally to read only hard SF (lots of engineering and hard science content,) we try stories labeled hard SF that sound interesting to us. We may find some of those stories are not as hard as we feel warrants the label, and we may or may not like those stories anyway.
Now, will there ever be a numerical rating system of the hard scienceness of science fiction? (Not the hard scienceness of fantasy fiction because that's pointless.) People do make them up. But the data sets that you keep trying out keep changing. You start out with science vocabulary counting and then segway into fantasy fiction, for instance, which is not very scientific of you. Sticking to those books people have labeled hard SF would probably be best (with an exception for Bujold natch,) and then you could figure out how to evaluate those books for actual hard science content. Rather than just the presence of the word engineer, for instance, can you rig a counting program to look for more sophisticated engineering, physics, biologic and chemistry concepts expressed in the books?
But since you don't like fantasy fiction for its lack of science content, it doesn't make sense to measure fantasy fiction to see if it is lacking what you already know it's lacking. Or are you just trying to argue that teens should only read science fiction and not fantasy fiction? In which case the presence of sciency words really doesn't matter to that argument.
