The very first issue of Galaxy, October 1950, had a back cover with a parallel Western and bad space opera story, with the headline “You’ll never see it in Galaxy.” Gold was saying that their science fiction was not going to be bad rewrites of bad pulp. I think most would agree that he kept his word.
I’ve been seeing more of this kind of thing in the stories in the magazines I get. Not bad pulp stories translated, but rather stories that are basically mundane made “science fiction” with a few sf things thrown in. An example is “This Good Lesson Keep” by James van Pelt in the current Asimov’s. It is about a teacher about to retire teaching Hamlet and getting the class drawn in. It takes place in the near future, with slightly different enhanced reality hardware, some kids from odd religions, and a student teacher who has never read Shakespeare because he is no longer in the curriculum. None of these are at all important to the story, and they could be eliminated with no problems.
This is not a rant. Writers have to eat, and perhaps this story didn’t sell in mainstream magazines and was rewritten for Asimov’s. And this is far from the only example.
I wonder about the back story here. Do editors take these to make their writers happy? Do they suggest sf additions?
Maybe Bat now has an MFA, but he seems to be back.
Well, the flip side of this is the type of science fiction I call “Gee, Wally, technology and Martians!!”
It was particularly popular in the 1950s and seemed geared to a reading audience of teenaged boys. Simplistic plot lines, pathetic character development and interaction, cartoon-level black-and-white good versus evil stuff, and paragraph after paragraph of slick devices and futuristic engineering and medicine and whatnot, with the latter occupying the spotlght and the sense that, if you stripped all that technofuture stuff out, you’d have no story.
The pendulum has definitely moved towards “if it doesn’t show us anything about the human condition and how we behave and cope, and doesn’t illustrate any universal points, it’s crap”, so the hypotheticals about future or alien life forms or possible science-driven capabilities are used as mechanisms for doing so, rather than providing the plot in and of themselves, and some authors don’t need a lot of “here’s how this sci-fi world is way different from the world you live in” to do their stuff.
Ah, Tom Swift and his Electric Chair. I never read the Tom Swift Jr. books as a kid, but I read a bunch in the last ten years, and they fit your description exactly. SF, but really bad sf. The original ones are a lot better - more scientific and better written.
The winner of a competition I judged was about a woman who was trying to figure out her background. The plot wouldn’t work without the sf aspects, but it had no gosh wow stuff and was all about the human condition. Flowers for Algernon is probably the classic example of this kind of story.
Bad science fiction is different from good but not really science fiction.
Yeah, Flowers is a really good illustration. The science fiction is more than just a setting, you’d have to work pretty hard to create the same situation in a non-sci-fi tale. Unlike some of the ones you described in the OP where it being the future, or taking place on the planet Tricuspid some 397 million light years over thataway, is not at all necessary to the story. But it (Flowers) sheds light on the human condition and presents us with a warning about the consequences of treating knowledge as an uncomplicated resource (i.e., it ain’t Tom Swift!)
There’s also a long history of authors taking a fantasy story and sticking a random spaceship in it somewhere just so they can call it science fiction. Most of McCaffery’s Pern stories and Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones” are notable examples.
As far as I’m concerned, any story with psychic powers is indistinguishable from magic, but I think we have to include it as sf since this has been done back to
Slan at least.
But I got one book that said “oh, 20 years ago magic started working” as in spells. Nope. The contest had a fantasy category also. I suspect many bad writers today don’t really know why magic isn’t science.