Overgeeked, please do not make personal attacks of other posters. If you feel a poster is breaking the rules, contact staff. We do not allow flame wars here.
Okay, back to topic:
psikeyhackr said:
It is love of understanding how reality works but exposure to that came through science fiction. And then a lot of people who supposedly teach SCIENCE make it boring.
Yes, that's what I meant. A lot of people have been jazzed by what they've discovered in science fiction and from that checked out what is really happening in science and built on that (or have had good science teachers they liked -- it can happen.) But the reality is that this inspiration doesn't always come from very limited science theory. Again, many scientists were inspired by the stuff on Star Trek. From stories about time travel. From stories about alien squid. You were not, but everyone in the sciences is not you. The exploration of story can interest people in science as well as the science itself, and that includes sociological SF.
I suggested that some public school kids build a telegraph for their science project in 6th grade and then spent the next 4 days designing and building it.
That was very nice of you to help and teach them, but students are supposed to do their own science projects and make their own mistakes. How are they supposed to learn and learn how to research if you do all the designing and such for them?
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water .(*)
Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
You know, they had the same sort of stats back when I was a teen which was quite some time ago. And in the 1950's, those stats would have been worse, because a large percentage of kids then got no real schooling. (See the novel A Prayer for the Dying.) And in the 1930's, when people did know how to do more home chores and more families were agricultural, 4% of the population was illiterate and half had very little to no schooling. Don't get me wrong, we do a crappy job in most of the world educating our kids and it is very tied to family income still. So I'm totally with you on much better science education, starting in grade school. But we have actually improved the stats on general knowledge. And there are no stats that children given a diet of hard SF do better at science (though there is probably a stat that those who like science fiction are often also into science in general.) While it is certainly a great idea for a college seminar -- hard SF to explore science -- it is not very practical or feasible to fire all the high school science teachers and replace them with English teachers who would teach not the mechanics and analysis of writing and language but instead science through a limited group of hard science fiction texts.
So we need a better system sorting the huge amount of wheat from the tremendous amount of chaff.
The problem is who gets to play dystopian censorship tyrant and impose what they believe is the wheat on the rest of us. As said above, many things, not just hard science, about science fiction can inspire people to delve more into the sciences, including sociological SF stories about different fictional futures like Fahrenheit 451. Your problem isn't really the full realm of SF; it's that some books are being labeled hard SF when you don't feel they really fit the definition (and they may not.) That's a marketing issue, not an educational one.
I NEVER SAID the science content was the ONLY FACTOR in good sci-fi.
True, but you have basically argued that it's the only really worthwhile factor in SF many times, including in this thread. You don't really want to talk about other factors very often.
So what a person IS is determined by the degrees that they hold? In his day were there people with degrees in science who were less good at science than Jules Verne? If so then what does it matter?
Exactly. Jules Verne was an arts and humanities major. So saying that arts majors have no place trying to write science fiction, as you've basically said a number of times, would seem to be a pointless assertion. A person's degrees do not dictate what they can and cannot research and imagine.
I don't think science fiction is so much stagnating as being corrupted and bloated.
Again, not
being corrupted and bloated.
Always has been. This is not new. This is not a change from the past. Therefore, SF could not be stagnating or bloating now, as it is simply continuing as it was before with the same range of types of stories. This is why the stagnating, corrupting, dying, etc. arguments cause me to roll my eyes. It's a selection bias about the past, in my view.
A lot of stuff is being called science fiction which really is not.
As we've discussed in the past, you have a very narrow definition of what is real science fiction which tends to be "stuff in which I find the science acceptable and acceptably central." Which is hardly very practical as a working definition for everyone else. Science fiction is never going to be and has never been only very hard SF stories. (And I still argue that the throw the girl out of the airlock story, while it had hard science, was essentially a dystopian sociological SF story.) You're not going to change this. So if that's the corruption, it's not going away.
The Star Wars generation does not particularly care about the differences.
Neither did most of the readers in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's. Neither did Jules Verne's readers. Again, not new, not changing. As for the flood on the Internet, most people aren't reading it or aware of its existence. Most people don't read books. The Internet has no discernible change on science fiction, except that it seems to have possibly started a tiny resurgence of SF magazines by having them online. Also, the Internet makes it very easy for readers to look things up and call SF authors, including the scientist ones, on their science errors, and according to SF authors, they do this. Surely that would help your cause. The Internet also has allowed numerous older works of classic hard SF that were out of print to find new audiences. Surely that would also help your cause.
Well if you search this thread you will find that the only person who has used the term "real SF" is YOU.
That's not true. In the post just before that, which I also quoted earlier in this post, you said: "A lot of stuff is being called science fiction which really is not." I.e. a lot of stuff that is called science fiction isn't
"real" science fiction. I don't think you can argue that you don't say what you consider to be real SF quite often in this forum, because you do. If you want to argue that you never used the exact term of "real SF," you can do that, but when you make statements about what is and isn't science fiction, that is stating what you consider real SF -- is science fiction -- and what you consider fake SF -- is called science fiction but is not in your view. So while Overgeeked was being rude because the new member is still learning the ropes, Overgeeked was nonetheless accurate in this case.
Overgeeked was not accurate of course to say that you probably hardly read any SF. You read quite a lot of SF and if we can get you off of the subject of talking about hard science content and the poverty of U.S. education as you see it, you have many interesting things to say about stories.
