The Death of Science Fiction (Yet Again).

[Rulkez]

I get what your post is about I don't get the idea of this sci-fi groupyism like everybody is supposed to like what everybody else claims is sci-fi. Like that teacher expecting me to care about comic books just because he did.

psik

I edited my 2nd post with additional thoughts, but in regards to your reply, you yourself would seem to fit into this groupyism as you put it, as you have very strong views of what is, and what is not science fiction.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I edited my 2nd post with additional thoughts, but in regards to your reply, you yourself would seem to fit into this groupyism as you put it, as you have very strong views of what is, and what is not science fiction.

Saying what is and is not science fiction versus what people should and should not like are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. Anybody can like whatever they want.

I have NEVER said people should not like Star Wars though I have had people accuse me of that. I just said it wasn't science fiction and people go off. It's like people don't know how to separate emotional reactions from rational analysis. I like the first two movies and the third one is just OK. But I don't regard any of them as sci-fi.

psik

 

[Fung Koo]

Very strongly suggested relevant reading: Chip Morningstar's wonderful little piece "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure". Or you could simply read just about anything by R. A. Lafferty.

You're more or less proving my point -- here we have a layperson approaching one comparatively minor feature of academic criticism, slightly misrepresenting it, and then dramatically overemphasizing it.

At a surface level reading, everything that author says is completely reasonable. However, he clearly hasn't gone into the origin of deconstruction or the evolution of theory-based literary criticism. As he says in his article, the academes aren't forced to explain what they are doing to the outside world -- so, here's my attempt to explain it to you, as per the author's wishes!

Deconstruction is just one school of lit theory amongst several others. The shortlist of the majors is New Criticism, Historicism/New Historicism, Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Feminist, Structuralist/Post-Structuralist, and Deconstruction (I may be forgetting one or two). Above these there are a couple of other frameworks, such as Narratology (which is largely borrowed from linguistic theories, then including Structuralist/Post-Structuralist and New Critical) and Post-Colonial Theory (which is a combined New Historicist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, and Feminist approach) -- these have highly specialized applications.

The point of the theory/frameworks is to create a degree of common formality to the production of works of criticism. Which is to say, to try to get everyone speaking the same language, using a set of similarly defined terms (because yes, we are dealing with linguophiles here).

That article describes how Deconstruction works pretty well, actually. Deconstruction largely evolved out of Modernism, particularly from the early 20th century emphasis on early psychoanalytic therapeutic techniques such as Free Association and Stream-of-Consciousness. In deconstruction, the idea is to follow your own thoughts/associations as triggered by the text in question (yes, that nebulous catch-all), because that's how those books were written.

There's this idea that in order to accurately criticize a text (quantitative vs. qualitative), one must do so by approaching the text based on its own qualities. Deconstruction therefore is designed to fit to a specific sort of modernist text.

Post-Modernismism is to take any of the specialized theories developed as sympathetic interpretive frameworks and mis-apply them on purpose. So, you apply deconstruction theory to a text that is not stream-of-consciousness -- that's the post-modern approach. The reason for this is to see what else you can "pull out" of the text -- what link to something else you might be able to "discover," considering literature as phenomenological.

Compare this to something like engineering and construction. The engineer has specialized tools that he/she applies in specific contexts. Some of those tools can be used more generally, some less. Some are single-use. What a post-modern literary academic does with Lit Theory is take those specialized tools and mis-use them in foreign contexts. So, using a vertical pile driver as a lateral rail launcher. Serialized blasting dynamite instead of a hammer. A nail instead of a pin.

You can do that in the arts, but it makes less sense with something more concrete. People get creative with tools in the real world, too, but with the arts there's no real danger in doing so. So people play. The point is to try to understand why we understand things the way we do -- it's reverse-engineering language. Changing the angle of approach, coming at with a different perspective, can be beneficial.

The question of bogosity (great word!) is certainly valid. The Academic Lit world is full of poseurs and grandstanding intellects -- and they tend to be the ones to get the press. But behind the stuff that makes noise, the basic culture of academic lit criticism is based on a set of well-structured frameworks to construct evidence-based arguments about the phenomenon of literature.

But as with the conclusion of the author of that article, there is some real meat behind the production of all that BS.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Commentary by science fiction author:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3s2p05OAmU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBaUpwC0ls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7zN2Na7bTQ

psik

 

[KatG]

LOL, well we did round on Mark around here for his piece: http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25017

He seems to be mostly worried about category SF titles' sales, especially compared to fantasy and especially in Britain. His argument is that a few successful authors like you, Neal, can't carry the category, and since we women don't like SF as much as fantasy, etc., category SF is going to sink, be banished, because it can't make a good enough showing on the front tables with the big hits and the booksellers won't tolerate it. He wasn't interested in past go-rounds of this issue, but the current sales situation now. (I hope I'm summing up correctly here.)

My counter arguments were that past sales issues -- many of which are not specifically about SF, but have to do with things like the shrinking wholesale market -- are relevant to the current sales situation, that Mark was ignoring what's going on in the YA market for SF which I find to be important, and discounting positive signs in the SF field while proclaiming those same signs in fantasy made fantasy the champ, and that I'd encountered no signs that publishers and booksellers were planning to dissolve the category SF market here in the U.S. or Britain. I find the claim that one sub-category or category is going to squeeze out others on the grounds that there is a limited audience that will only chose one over the other to be false and also perpetually put forth despite no actual scientific evidence whatsoever.

One of Mark's arguments, Neal, if I'm remembering correctly, was that you don't sell as well in the U.S. as you do in Britain. This is true for many fantasy writers too, of course, and has more to do with less ability to tour in the country and so less name recognition, at least initially.

As for de Vries' piece, I thought it made some interesting points, actually. I was unaware of some of the other controversies brewing in the blogosphere that he was talking about and I thought he tackled them pretty well. Re Mark's piece, he was mostly looking at Morgan's assertion that SF readers are risk averse and saying that he thought the opposite worked for SF. I don't agree with some of his claims -- that SF hasn't been proactive, etc., but it was generally a positive, SF isn't dying but is changing and that's good sort of essay.

As you point out, they've been proclaiming SF's death since the 1950's, when it was rapidly growing as a market. It's a very deep rooted fear. It makes for lousy PR, but I doubt we'll ever get rid of it entirely. The best you can do is talk about the positive developments in the field and hope some of that catches on, I guess.

 

[nealasher]

I agree with you Kat, as I just pointed out on my blog:

I have one little problem with this and with others, like Mark Charan, who make a comparison between fantasy and science fiction sales, or cite science fiction’s proportion of the market, as proof that science fiction is in decline, dying, whatever. Why do they assume it’s a zero sum game? Why do they make the illogical leap that because fantasy is selling well science fiction must be doing badly? Do people assume that because sales of teen vampire books are on the increase, thriller sales are decreasing?

I get the impression that science fiction (whatever that is) is a hypochondriac.

Fung Koo:

Deconstruction is just one school of lit theory amongst several others. The shortlist of the majors is New Criticism, Historicism/New Historicism, Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Feminist, Structuralist/Post-Structuralist, and Deconstruction (I may be forgetting one or two). Above these there are a couple of other frameworks, such as Narratology (which is largely borrowed from linguistic theories, then including Structuralist/Post-Structuralist and New Critical) and Post-Colonial Theory (which is a combined New Historicist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, and Feminist approach) -- these have highly specialized applications.

Sorry, but this made me giggle hysterically.

 

[Rulkez]

Commentary by science fiction author:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3s2p05OAmU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBaUpwC0ls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7zN2Na7bTQ

psik

Correct me if I am wrong, but why would you link those videos ? Sawyer doesn't share your view point......unless I am mistaken , I thought you disliked* SF with no science and/or SF that is used as a social commentary ( which is what Sawyer is advocating in those videos) or for philosophical meanderings ?


* maybe not disliked , but you don't consider it sci-fi

 

[Fung Koo]

Fung Koo:

Deconstruction is just one school of lit theory amongst several others. The shortlist of the majors is New Criticism, Historicism/New Historicism, Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Feminist, Structuralist/Post-Structuralist, and Deconstruction (I may be forgetting one or two). Above these there are a couple of other frameworks, such as Narratology (which is largely borrowed from linguistic theories, then including Structuralist/Post-Structuralist and New Critical) and Post-Colonial Theory (which is a combined New Historicist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, and Feminist approach) -- these have highly specialized applications.

Sorry, but this made me giggle hysterically.

I'd love to form an antidote for your giggling, but I'll need a few more symptoms before I can properly diagnose what's causing the fit...

Have I grossly misrepresented something? Skipped a few of the other important ones? Or is it just the idea of Lit Theory itself that's so funny?

What's making you giggle so?

 

[Hereford Eye]

When you examine the entire bunch, then the humor becomes broader. I'd like to contribute:
Samuel Johnson's Prec-critical approach.
Traditional Approaches: Historical-Biographical
Traditional Approaches: Moral-Philosophical
Formalistic Approach
Mythological Approach
Archetypal Approach
Aristotelian Criticism (including the Chicago School)
Genre Criticism
Stylistics
The Rhetorical Approach
Phenomenological Criticism (The Criticism of Consciousness)
Genetic Criticism (source study and related approaches)
Hermeneutics
Dialogics
Reader-Response Criticism

Personally, I think hermeneutics has the coolest title but, upon further examination, since it shows up in phenomenological, deconstruction, dialogics, feminist, reader-response, and new historian approaches, it is less an approach than an emphasis. You just can't judge an approach by its title.

I have now lit my pipe, sat back in my reading chair, attempting to ponder the merits and demerits of the various approaches but find myself embarked on a serious crusade to control my giggling.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Sawyer doesn't share your view point......unless I am mistaken , I thought you disliked* SF with no science and/or SF that is used as a social commentary ( which is what Sawyer is advocating in those videos) or for philosophical meanderings ?

* maybe not disliked , but you don't consider it sci-fi

You are mistaken. Sawyer doesn't complain about BAD SCIENCE in Star Wars but I have.

Bad science and no science are two different things.

I would say that Rite of Passage by Alexi Panshin doesn't really contain any explicit science. But it does raise the social question of "intellectual property rights" even though that phrase is never used in the book and was not common in 1968.

I think people tend to focus on what they disagree with and then exaggerate that issue. I didn't say every science fiction book had to be about science in an explicit manner. What explicit science is in Clarke's Childhood's End? But there isn't any BAD science in it that I am aware of.

But how many people can't even recognize BAD science in some so called science fiction books these days? Or if it contains any realistically described science or engineering then it's BORING?

AND

I provided a link to Project Gutenberg Australia because it has CONAN stories which is definitely not science fiction though much better than Star Wars.

http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showpost.php?p=553257&postcount=57

psik

 

[KatG]

They think it is a zero sum game for two reasons: 1) Because adult category fantasy and SF are produced by the same publishers for the most part. Fantasy is doing better, SF feels like the neglected sibling who may get kicked out; 2) the persistent belief that fiction is Darwinian with titles and genres competing against each other for a finite audience and shelf space (a zero sum game.) In reality, the fiction market is symbiotic and requires variety to grow. It is very hard for die-hard SF fans to accept that fantasy's success actually shuffles readers and industry interest into SF. That's one of the reasons YA SF has taken off in recent years. The idea that fantasy destroys SF seems to be ingrained in a large chunk of the SF audience.

basically *one* SF novel in the top 100 (and it barely scraped in), and 5 in total in the top 150. Two of those by very well-established authors (Stephenson and Card), three of those media tie-ins. Fantasy? Already starting with Stephenie Meyer at number 3... Make no mistake: fantasy is selling better than SF, *much* better. Look at the 2010 catalogs of genre publishers, from Tor to Pyr: all predominantly fantasy titles.

This is from de Vries? quoted in Neal's blog. And it makes me giggle. Twenty-five years ago, getting one SF novel in the top 100 main bestsellers of a year would be seen as doing really well, and same for fantasy. And media tie-ins were just really getting going. Fifteen years ago, it would have been seen as doing okay. Now, it's insufficient and a crisis. I see that as progress.

Yes, there are still a lot more fantasy bestsellers than SF ones. But what happens with these numbers is a bit of deceptive shuffling. For instance, people who make the complaint tend to add non-category fantasy bestsellers sold in the general market as category fantasy bestsellers -- as evidence of fantasy's great strides over SF. And since this includes the fantasy romance novels as well, that's quite a pool. But non-category SF bestsellers -- The Road, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Oryx & Crake, etc., -- they don't get counted as category SF bestsellers. Saying that there are only five SF novels in the top 150 of 2008? I'm guessing they didn't count all the SF. Making the division gets complicated anyway. Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was originally sold out of category in general fiction and was a bestseller. Count it as category fantasy's pot or no?

And then there's the YA/children's market. They don't have a category fantasy market. SFF is not separate from non-SFF in children's and YA. So if you're going to count the YA/children's bestsellers that are SFF, if you are going to count Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series -- which is YA -- and J.K. Rowling's last Harry Potter -- which is YA -- then you also have to count the YA SF bestsellers -- Westerfeld's The Uglies, James Patterson's Maximum Ride, Doctorow's Little Brother, etc. Yes, there are more fantasy bestsellers in the youth market than SF, but that's always been the case as fantasy dominates the youth field. The increase in youth SF and its sales is significant.

Yes, Meyer and Rowling are phenoms, with sales beyond anybody else's, but they're phenoms compared to thrillers, romances, and other types of fiction too. When John Grisham was the phenom, his legal thrillers were not SFF, but they did not crush either the fantasy or SF category markets, nor drive such books out of the general fiction market. And we've had SF phenoms -- Michael Crichton and Dan Brown. Brown's Angels and Demons is a SF technothriller involving an anti-matter invention, and the rest of the series -- Da Vinci Code and Symbol -- is nominally SF. They don't get counted, disparaged as not real SF, whereas two YA novelists get counted as adult category fantasy stars. And Meyer's adult novel, also a runaway bestseller, The Host, was SF in 2008 and is part of a new series, getting made into a movie, etc., but no one wants to count that either, of course.

So the numbers getting thrown about aren't that accurate. If you look at all bestselling SFF titles together, category and non-category, including media tie-ins, they currently make up anywhere from 20%-30% of the adult fiction lists, hardcover, trade paper and mass market, on a given week (U.S.) Of that percentage, about 5-8% is SF. In the youth market, SFF makes up fifty percent or more of the bestsellers, with SF running about 20% of that. To put that in perspective, twenty-five years ago, all the SFF bestsellers, category and non-category, including media tie-ins, would have made up about 5% of the adult bestseller lists, with SF making up maybe half of that or two thirds. In the youth market, they often stopped having bestseller lists, but in terms of actual sales SFF would still be about half of the market, because of fantasy's dominance, and SF would have made up about 5% of that.

So SF has actually had a small but significant gain in big bestsellers in the adult market and a substantial gain in the youth market, mostly in this last decade. Fantasy has more titles in the youth market because the youth market expanded, and it had a spectacular gain in the adult market. But a chunk of that gain was fueled by two YA authors -- Rowling and then Meyers -- who crashed onto the adult lists, so much so that publishers pressured the New York Times to re-start its children's list so that Harry Potter would be contained (which didn't really work, but did help out the youth market.) In comparison, the dominance of suspense fiction on the bestseller lists shrunk. They lost ground -- if you want to look it at like a war, which it isn't -- to contemporary fiction and fantasy. Romance lost dominance also, but has begun to reclaim it, in part by embracing fantasy romance.

And the amount of non-category SF has increased -- not just the "literary" SF, SF thrillers are rampant. (Mark sees this as a problem for category SF, but he doesn't see the huge amount of non-category fantasy and fantasy romance as a problem for category fantasy, which I find a bit weird, because the non-category fantasy contingent is one of the main reasons booksellers are very happy with the whole fantasy genre.) Which is why many of the SFF publishers have increased the amount of SF titles they have on their lists, not decreased, and are also reprinting classic works like mad (in hopes also of film deals.) Yes, Pyr has shifted more towards fantasy. Pyr is a medium-sized company owned by a game firm. They need cash. Anders has had a lot of luck with importing British SFF to the U.S. But the big British SF writers are bought up by the bigger houses. It's easier for him to snag the up and coming British fantasy writers like Joe Abercrombie.

Tor UK, we've been told, actually has more SF on its list than fantasy. Tor U.S. got its start in fantasy -- fantasy is always going to be dominant on their lists, it's not a new thing. They have a growing YA program that includes both SF and fantasy. And Tor also publishes paranormal romance, which gets sold in horror, SFF, romance and general fiction sections of bookstores. Are all the publishers, SFF and romance, starting to do more SF romance titles? Yes, they are. And if romance thinks that's a good thing, there's money there.

The screeching about paranormal romance and urban fantasy taking everything over just kills me. In 2003, there were two rising contemporary fantasy stars -- Neil Gaiman and Laurell K. Hamilton, older authors like Tim Powers were getting more attention and the publishers were putting more contemporary fantasy titles on their list. Charlaine Harris, a mystery writer, had a fantasy mystery series published in general fiction and it had built an audience and was starting to get a lot of attention. Ditto Jim Butcher. Plus, there was a revival in horror, which always increases the interest in dark fantasy, part of which is always contemporary setting, as is most of horror. So it was obvious that contemporary fantasy was going to expand and get more stars, but again and again I ran into the opinion that contemporary fantasy wasn't even real fantasy and certainly didn't count while alternate world fantasy would rule all forever.

Transfer to 2005, where contemporary fantasy -- which was called everything from supernatural to New Weird before urban was renewed as the term -- was now deemed to be Godzilla. Publishers are now taking less new contemporary fantasy and the market is stuffed with titles and will likely shrink a little. There will still be new authors, further bestsellers and hopefully it will stay healthy, because that's good for SFF. But it's not going to take over because no genre or sub-genre ever takes over. Historical fantasy is growing, more slowly, but growing. Dark fantasy/horror probably has a few more years to be a little diva. Elsewhere, we'll probably see a westerns revival in the next five years. (And yes, the return of many western romances.)

And SF is growing, slowly, unsteadily, but growing, especially in the youth market. Its new acquisitions are financed by fantasy's dollars. If Hollywood comes to play, the growth will increase. You weigh all that against one front table in one chain store in Britain, and, well, I'm not too worried.

(Apologies for the long wind -- happy New Year!)

 

[psikeyhackr]

Now that was a long post Kat-G.

And SF is growing, slowly, unsteadily, but growing, especially in the youth market. Its new acquisitions are financed by fantasy's dollars.

But that is what I don't get about the SF publishers. Using science education as an incentive to grow the Youth SF market seems a very logical thing to do in my opinion.

What LOGICAL reason could publishers come up with to get parents to buy Harry Potter for their kids?

Whatever its shortcomings, actual science fiction (as opposed to fantasy tricked out with space ships and ray guns) is a bastion of rationalism. The universe works by rules, even if those rules are imperfectly understood. Problems are solved not by wishing things were otherwise but by trying to understand what is actually wrong and taking action to change it.

http://henryjenkins.org/2006/11/the_craft_of_science_fiction.html

psik

 

[owlcroft]

But what exactly is "science"?

The universe works by rules, even if those rules are imperfectly understood.

Mr. Haldeman's remark is somewhat parochial. A great many fantasy tales are set in worlds wherein what is plainly something that 99.44% of readers will call "magic" functions, yet where that magic is manipulated by rote use of very definite and fixed rules, whether they be the chanting of certain words or the waving about of certain artifacts. In them, that is, the magic is prefectly and literally regular (regular: < L. regula, straightedge < regere, rule; conforming . . . to a rule, principle).

In such tales, such universes, what we are dealing with, whether writer or reader realizes it, is science fiction--because the forces involved follow set rules that can be discovered by use of the scientific method, and used or manipulated like any other law of nature. Whether, say, psikeyhackr would accept it as sf is doubtful, but it is no more or less "fantastic" than FTL: just very different. But sf necessarily depicts a world in which the laws of nature are more or different than we currently know or believe.

(As an aside, can we rightly consider fiction in which no natural laws are more or different than those we currently accept as "science fiction", even if the science plays a major part in the tale? After all, science plays a major part in, say, murder mysteries, except that the protagonist doesn't usually stand around saying "as you know, Bob, a firearm works on the basis of &c &c".)

So, in a sense, a lot of stuff accounted fantasy is really sf. That is why I invariably argue that the denominations are more marketing tools than meaningful descriptions of content. And it's not just the wallpaper, either: there are--assuming the author is any good at her or his craft--differences of all sorts that flow from the prime difference in worlds, whether they are ruled by natural law, however bizarre and "magicky" it looks to us, or by true magic. As has been asked sempiternally, how "magicky" would our world look to someone feom well before the industrial revolution? Tap a place on the wall and a dark room is flooded with light. Speak into a small thing in your hand and be heard around the world. And so on . . . .

 

[nealasher]

FTL is often the thing people point at when they say that so-and-sos SF isn't really SF but fantasy (the kind of thing the mundane SF crowd would like to lose) because FTL is impossible.

Quantum tangling and quantum tunnelling anyone?

 

[psikeyhackr]

Mr. Haldeman's remark is somewhat parochial.

The universe is a hell of a BIG parish.

FTL is often the thing people point at when they say that so-and-sos SF isn't really SF but fantasy (the kind of thing the mundane SF crowd would like to lose) because FTL is impossible.

Quantum tangling and quantum tunnelling anyone?

It was only relatively recently discovered that the expansion of the universe is ACCELERATING.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe

They talk all this stuff about DARK ENERGY but they might as well say its dragons for all the good that does. This proves there is still UNKNOWN PHYSICS running the universe so what might be figured out in the next 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years is still open to speculation.

Obviously without FTL a huge number of SF tales would be impossible. But even that degree of poetic license is no excuse to let obviously bad science in. We don't have enforcers so every reader has to decide for himself what to tolerate. How much the readers actually know or care about science then comes into the picture.

The first sci-fi book I read talked about a heart transplant which was not done for another six years and that was two years before the Moon landing. We just found WATER ON THE MOON last year but someone wrote about that 50 years ago.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24161/24161-h/24161-h.htm

Since then volcanoes have been discovered on a moon of Jupiter. Some people try to criticize Clarke's A Fall of Moondust because no deep superfine dust has been found on the Moon (yet ) but no one predicted those volcanoes on Io. That is the cool thing about speculation about science in the future; IT'S UNKNOWN. But how many fantasy readers think it is possible for vampires and magic swords to turn up in the next 100 years? How many hard science sci-fi readers are expecting light-sabers?

Science fiction is different from fantasy in that it can be speculation about possible futures. Most of these speculations will undoubtedly be wrong. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave was about people becoming more intelligent because of some electric field emanating through the galaxy. But instead we have the internet presenting us with the possibility of children getting more information faster and at an earlier age than ever before and outside of the control of adults. The effect of that will be WHAT?

I think the hard sci-fi category is being marginalized and the meaning of the term science fiction has been watered down but I am not worried about it dying out. I do find it very curious that our so called educators aren't much more enthusiastic about using it for science education considering all of the complaining that we have about education in that area.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=53031

http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showpost.php?p=555479&postcount=33

psik

 

[nealasher]

Not sure where you can find it, but I recently read an article about the Voyager probe starting to speed up as it leaves the Solar System, and some puzzlement as to why. Maybe it's passing outside of the speed limit.

 

[nealasher]

Oops, wrong spacecraft. It was the Pioneer probes.

http://www.adrianberry.net/ftl.htm

 

[owlcroft]

Round and round she goes . . . .

The universe is a hell of a BIG parish. That's thoroughly disingenuous. It is Mr. Haldeman who apparently possesses a limited view of what the parish encompasses, which is anything and everything that follows the laws of nature, whether or not the scope and depth of our understanding of those laws is adequate. In context, Mr. Haldeman's remark differentiates between, on the one hand, phenomena that follow the laws we know or suspect or can without apparent wild implausibility posit, and on the other hand "fantasy". That excludes, for purposes of discussion about literature, the idea of what we would today consider "fantastic" events that are, by definition--mark that term, by definition--science. From an author of speculative fiction, that constitutes parochialism.

They talk all this stuff about DARK ENERGY but they might as well say its dragons for all the good that does. This proves there is still UNKNOWN PHYSICS running the universe so what might be figured out in the next 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years is still open to speculation.

Um, yes: that was exactly the point. "Science" does not describe a particular body of knowledge, but rather a type of knowledge: knowledge of phenomena that follow laws, and of the nature of those laws, as discoverable by application of the Scientific Method. So yes, exactly and literally, it might be dragons: we don't know.

Obviously without FTL a huge number of SF tales would be impossible. But if that degree of poetic license is no excuse to let really bad science in, but we have no enforcers so every reader will have to decide for himself what to tolerate. But how much the readers actually know about science then comes into the picture.

"Really bad science"? You mean science that doesn't align much with what we think are the laws of nature? And after we just got through with the dragons business? But even taking that at street level, where, say, we see the usual noisy and flaming explosion in deep space--so? Why do the Carrie Nations of "hard sf'dom" at once grab for their hatchets? Which body part experiences the pain?

Is such stuff bad sf? Of course. But the bad science is almost always a secondary symptom, not the disease. Remember what Jack Paar famously said about television: "I have never seen a bad television program". That makes sense when you add on the rest of the remark: "because I refuse to. God gave me a mind, and a wrist that turns things off." Or closes books.

That is the cool thing about speculation about science in the future; IT'S UNKNOWN. . . . Science fiction is different from fantasy in that it can be speculation about the future. . . . And there, Heaven help us, we go again. Speculation about what science might one day, near or far, discover, and what we might make of such discoveries for good or ill, are interesting speculations, and the science shelves of any decent bookshop are filled with books by eminent scientists on exactly those topics. They are entertaining and stimulating reading. What they are not is science fiction . . . and what science fiction is, if it be good science fiction, is not what they are.

Fiction--as seems to need endless repetition--is many things: a way of expanding one's understanding of the human condition, of experiencing thousands of other lives and viewpoints and emotional and intellectual makeups, of grappling with what it means to live and be human. What it is not is Gus's Garage in Outer Space.

Speculative fiction is--when written by decent authors--written in a world with different laws of some sort chosen by the author to allow that author to better or more readily shine a spotlight on whatever particular aspect or aspects of the human condition that the author intends to deal with in that tale. When written by hacks, it is just Ripping Yarns with a change of wallpaper and window curtains.

Among other things decent authors strive for is to follow the principle of Least Cervical Displacement, which is to say they try not to write things that would likely make their target reader snap up his or her head in disbelief or distress. That principle covers everything from grammar to, in sf tales, the science. But there is, for the 'leventy-'leventh time, a major difference between avoiding neck snaps and nicking most of some physicist's latest paper. Does Coleridge's famous "willing suspension of disbelief" not signify for you? By and large, readers read science fiction because they are interested in fiction in which science forms an enabling backdrop; they are not, save at the comic-book level, chiefly interested in Exploding Spaceships or gee-whiz tech existing in the tale for little or no purpose save to try to get "gee whiz!" as a reader reaction.

I think the hard sci-fi category is being marginalized and the meaning of the term science fiction has been watered down but I am not worried about it dying. I do find it very curious that our so called educators aren't much more enthusiastic about using it for science education considering all of the complaining that we have about education in that area.

Maybe they think that science is pretty exciting stuff all by itself, without any need for Cowboys and Indians wallpaper pasted over it.

 

[Zeratul]

I wonder how the huge success of Avatar (it just reached 1 Billion box office worldwide in 17 days, way faster than any movie before, and could well end up being the highest grossing movie of all time) will reflect on written science fiction and how much, if any, it will help it.

Oh, well, for a dying genre it sure is doing pretty well at least when it comes to movies and box office.

 

[Fung Koo]

Oops, wrong spacecraft. It was the Pioneer probes.

http://www.adrianberry.net/ftl.htm

Funny -- when this was first presented to me it was that they were slowing down for no known reason, not speeding up.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=270

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

This little factoid has been used make a bunch of arguments, including that it's proof that red/blue shift (used to establish the accelerating expansion of space) is perhaps only an effect of the heliosphere on light coming into our solar system. Or that there's an "energy barrier" between our solar system and everywhere else (the starry firmament, anyone?). Or that gravity is a coalescing force and the slowing is caused by the relative density of distant collections of objects where gravity ends being stronger than the sum of its parts.

Of course, we lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2002 so who knows what's going on. All we can really say is that something funky is happening...

I do find it very curious that our so called educators aren't much more enthusiastic about using it for science education considering all of the complaining that we have about education in that area.

I understand this idea, but a large part of the problem (which even you've pointed out before somewhere) is that the way we teach sciences has shifted away from applied sciences toward theoretical science. Not in the sense of cutting-edge high-level theory -- in the sense of learning the equation and writing it on the test (theory) as opposed to going outside to build a catapult and write a report (applied).

Reading science fiction -- while an important part of fostering a student's imagination and reasoning skills and interest in learning -- isn't actually altogether that useful in the classroom (in fact, it's mostly the opposite). For one, it's another example of keeping science in the head instead of observing it in the real world -- kids in general don't relate to abstract ideas as well as they do concrete ones. And for two -- Mostly you're dealing with pseudo-science at worst, and quasi-science at best. Even in Hard SF the science is rarely spot-on, or it's some extended application of some comparatively minor observation that is only one small part of a much larger theory (that isn't in the curriculum anyway). And when it is spot-on, it's usually presented in such a way that is well beyond the expected level of knowledge for high-school students (and in a lot of cases, it's even beyond the knowledge required of someone with a bachelors degree in the sciences). Again, too much in the head.

The emphasis on empiricism has to come back into the way we teach science, IMO. It used to be that schools had applied sciences -- Home Ec, Woodshop, Auto Shop, Phys Ed, Music, etc. But those programs all got removed to make more room in the budget for theoretical science. Go figure...

It would be great if SF was more useful in the classroom, but it really is more of a curse than a blessing in most contexts. You also have to bear in mind that SF traditionally pushes the boundaries on a lot of social issues -- like religion and politics and sexuality -- which schools (especially publicly funded schools) shy away from addressing.

In my Grade 12 English class we read Clarke's short story "The Star" (which is a great example of perfectly OK science for the classroom). My school (private) was Anglican, and when the higher-ups found out that my teacher gave us that story he was reprimanded and had to send a letter to all of our parents explaining why he had us read the story. What a headache. Is it worth having your kids read Ender's Game for the science, only to be labelled a "dangerous" teacher because it features a child murdering another child in the first chapter?

I sympathize with your lament, psikey, but the practical reality is that SF isn't altogether well-suited to the classroom, either as science or for its political ramifications.