How come science fiction films rarely use "exotic" fictional technology anymore?

Cafe Society
41

I don’t really have a problem with hard science fiction, and there’s some excellent work in it. I’m not a fan of military science fiction, but it’s a perfectly legitimate subgenre.

What I do object to is the assumption that science fiction is only hard SF. That has never been true; Hal Clement, who invented the subgenre,* was well respected, but not considered a major name. Isaac Asimov once wrote “there’s no science in science fiction”** and wrote the Hugo-winning The Gods Themselves based upon a scientific impossibility (as he cheerful admitted). Heinlein wrote “The Green Hills of Earth,” even though he knew that the conditions on Venus were nothing like that in the story and the ending of his classic “Waldo” clearly had no scientific basis at all. And, of course, the Ringworld is unstable.

This is different from consistency. The Gods Themselves is a consistent extrapolation on the error Asimov used. The Left Hand of Darkness takes some very dubious biology and uses it to explore all sorts of issues between the genders. Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers – the best science fiction book of the past ten years – doesn’t really have any hard science at all, but blows the reader away in every chapter.

The issue is tied in with Samuel Delany’s “red screamer” analogy (outlined in the notes to Triton). He gives the example of a society of children seeing a firetruck for the first time, and giving it a name “red screamer.” This becomes the name for it and, years later, a younger child comes along and asks why it’s called that. He’s told “because it’s red, and it screams.” But that doesn’t tell what the red screamer really is. Thus, people say “it’s called science fiction because it’s based on science.” But the words “science fiction” are a name, not a description or definition.

What makes SF work is good storytelling. But too often, readers (and moviegoers) are more interested in the accuracy than the story.***

I also don’t understand why people think science fiction is different from fantasy. The only difference is the in SF, the fantasy element has a “scientific” explanation. I put “scientific” in quotes because many elements of science fiction are not actually possible in the form shown. I have no problem with “indistinguishable from magic” science; some great works have been written that way (The Book of the New Sun, The Dancers at the End of Time).**** The important thing is the story and the characters; scientific accuracy is nice, but if those others are good, it doesn’t matter.

*Yes, I know that Verne did it earlier, but even he was willing to ignore the science – I find it hard to believe that he didn’t know that firing people to the moon in a gun would kill them all. Clement, OTOH, would not have allowed that sort of thing.
**Well, he quoted another writer saying it and said he agreed.
***This extends to other genres, too. It’s fun to find flubs in a movie, but to find some trivial mistake (which sometimes isn’t a mistake at all but is only due to the viewer’s not knowing the subject) and say it “ruins the movie” or “it takes me right out” is just the viewer showing off how clever he is to have found the mistake.
****Deus ex machina is different.

42

Well, that alone is a difference, and an important one. Even if the “science” is just some magical implausibility, if it has arrived via the scientific method, then that, in itself, implies certain things about it. It’s repeatable, it works the same for everyone, it is accessible (in some way) to everyone.

Fantasy generally connotes magic, which has a separate tradition: arcane, secretive, private, personal. Hogwarts is hidden away and most of us don’t even know it exists. MIT, Cal-Tech, and CERN, on the other hand, are about as open as can be. It may be equally hard to get into either kind of place, but at least the scientific ones aren’t secret.

An example I often give:

Science Fiction: The Flying Pill Dispensary.
Fantasy: The Boy Who Could Fly.

One explores the effects on society; the other explores the effects on one individual, and often involves him keeping his ability secret, even from his parents. Certainly this is no hard-and-fast rule, but it is, I think, a valid connotative distinction.

43

How do you figure Star Wars falls into your supposition? It was clearly designed to mirror old technology. Their ships mirrored WW-II era navy battleships and aircraft with wings (some of which were bi-planes). Their walking robot ships were closer to Hanibal’s Elephants. Their light sabers were swords. Their battleship guns were anti-aircraft guns. The series reeked of old iconic war machinery.

44

Where do the MEN IN BLACK movies fit?

45

Spinning tapes and blinking lights were the user interface of the time. Making a future UI look like Windows or Apple isn’t extrapolating to the future any more than having tapes in Star Trek was.

Now, what Tom Cruise used in Minority Report was an extrapolation (that has been picked up in other shows).

46

Science farce! (Lovely movies!)

47

Well, maybe an impossibility regarding ‘real science’, but not an in-universe impossibility. The distinction here is the same as between ‘realistic’ depiction of car crashes according to how they happen in real life, and realism as relative to what the movie’s trying to do. And IIRC, the central conceit of The Gods Themselves was in fact the existence of a universe with different physical laws; everything else flowing from this conceit.

This is, to me, what hard science fiction is about (and I think that Gods would typically be considered an example of the genre): taking a possibility and running with it. It’s also what distinguishes it from fantasy: in fantasy, there’s no way to get there from here, while in SF (hard or soft), a certain possibility is being explored. Hard SF just makes the extra effort of grounding that possibility as much as is feasible.

Anyway, my point wasn’t that ‘all SF should be hard’, far from it. I happen to prefer hard SF, but that’s just a personal preference (and my liking of Doctor Who—or Star Trek, or Star Wars—shows that it’s not exactly a hard and fast rule I stick to no matter what). To me, the problem is that if you have a story, and you can strip away anything that involves future tech, and set it just as well in the present, without much loss—as is the case for a lot of contemporary SF—, then you haven’t really written a science fiction story, but just some story accidentally set in the future. Although there are great stories of this kind, it just isn’t what I turn to SF for.

48

On the contrary, I’d say this was reasonably safe extrapolation of realistic technology. Given a hundred years worth of advancement in brain-machine interfacing and robotics (perhaps much less), this sort of thing seems almost certain to be achievable. Unlike faster-than-light spacecraft, or anti-gravity unobtainium, remote-controlled bodies seem to be both reasonable and attainable technology to me.

Half Man Half Wit mentioned Greg Egan’s novel Diaspora. This sort of wildly imaginative but determinedly hard science fiction is the sort of stuff I like too - but it would be very tricky to make films about this stuff, because the experiences of the protagonists are so far removed from our present day reality.

49

Right, there’s a reason why I read SF as opposed to mundane literature. It’s not JUST the rayguns and space ships, it’s how people react to having instantaneous teleportation disks available.

A simple example: I do read non SF/fantasy. I was re-reading an old Nero Wolfe novel, and Archie (the legs of the business) was once again hunting up a public pay phone, to call Wolfe to relay information and to get further instructions. Cell phones have changed the way that we act. And smart phones have changed our society even more.

50

Personally, the reason I like SF is the scope and the story possibilities. I mean, I know how the real world works. I know that scruffy bands of misfits don’t go around saving the *real *world. It just doesn’t happen. But an invented world? Sure! That’s why it doesn’t matter to me whether they are going up against a demonic overlord in a fantasy world or a evil galactic overlord in a futuristic world - so long as there’s a good story being told.

The real world simply isn’t interesting enough for the stories I like.

51

Clearly elegent weapons from a more civilized age.

There is very little in Star Wars that we would directly recognize from contemporary Earth. Sure there are parallels. But they dress differently. They fight with laser blasters and lightsabers. They have floating cities and space stations the size of a small moon. Antigravity and force fields are common, every day technologies. In short, Lucas created a completely new world.

In fairness, James Cameron did the same thing in Avatar. And then he invaded it with the ISO Standard Earth Forces.

Hard Science: People can’t fly. You dreamed that!

52

The FN P90 didn’t exist when Aliens was made - the Pulse Rifles were made from M1A1 Thompson SMGs, Remington M870s and (IIRC) SPAS-12s. FWIW, the Steyr AUG has been doing duty as film and TV’s “Futuristic Space Gun” pretty much since its production began in the late 1970s.

The Star Wars energy small arms are based on real world guns as well - Han Solo’s blaster is a Mauser C96, Princess Leia’s is a Russian Margolin .22 target pistol, the blaster rifles the storm troopers carry are modified Sterling SMGs (with some MG-42 and Lewis LMGs as stand-ins for heavier weapons, the Jawas are carrying sawn-off Lee-Enfields with grenade launcher attachments, and even Boba Fett’s gun is a WWI-era Webley signal pistol developed for the RAF.

This I agree with. The problem is, it’s hard to predict how much (or little) things will change from technology being introduced - I mean, I don’t think the year 2013 is drastically different from 1985 (besides the advent of mobile phones, iPods and decent computers) but if you watch Back To The Future II we should all have flying cars and the like by now. Admittedly I was a kid when the film came out, but my understanding is everything in the film except the flying cars and the time machine was conisdered, well, not particularly outrageous from a What The Future Will Look Like perspective.

As to the OP’s point though, I have wondered the same thing - if you set your story in a mythical land with dragons, swords, [del]gratuitous sex and nudity[/del] and knights in armour, you can wave anything you like away with Magic™, but if it’s set in the ostensibly modern era or The Future, people don’t seem as cool with the idea of things being handwaved away with “Science, bitches!” for some reason - unless it’s Steampunk, in which case, see my earlier comments on sword & sorcery settings but substitute Science! for Magic™.

53

I thought the “Mr Fusion” in BTTF was a bit of a stretch.

54

Avatar didn’t have FTL spaceships. Pandora orbits around alpha Centauri, and the spaceship just takes years to get there. It’s plausible, with a sufficiently powerful and efficient drive technology, and making those starship drives was one of the things they needed the unobtainium for.

55

Personally I didn’t think Pandora was that interesting or unique and didn’t understand people’s fascination with it or the Na’vi. It was certainly very pretty but only in a neon Terran jungle with bright-blue natives sense.

I enjoyed Avatar but was somewhat disappointed in the story-world depicted.

btw part of the problem is that in some respects real-world technology advances have been faster than expected but of course slower than others. I recently read the Colonial Marines Technical Manual, a very well written fan-made exploration of the technology in the Aliens movie. It was written in 1995 and, for example, describes one military aircraft having an LCD sensor with a jaw-dropping 800 x 640 full colour display, that must have seemed very futuristic at the time but it was rather quickly outstripped by real-world technological advances.

bttw Iain Banks was very good at depicting interesting and different worlds, in his latest (and last :\ ) Culture novel he depicted a heavily weaponised asteroid that had been gradually lowered until it was orbiting in an also heavily defended massive trench below the surface level of its airless moon. That was something I had never come across before.

56

Well, what about flying cars, or personal flight suits. It requires only a smallish extrapolation in energy sources. Give us “beamed energy” (not impossible in theory, just not possible today) and you could do it easily.

Lovely books! The sociological changes are intriguing. Just look at how dominant liquor and tobacco are in those books! It isn’t the same world any more.

And, yeah, mobile phones have made mystery writing a HELL of a lot harder! And how do you do a “mysterious monster attack” scene when every square inch of, say, London is covered by closed-circuit security cameras? A new “staple” of these genres is the “excuse why the cameras and phones didn’t work.”

For instance, Jim Butcher’s “Harry Dresden” books propose that Harry’s personal magic makes electronics devices short out and fail in his presence. Ben Aaronovitch used the same plot device in his books to cancel mobile devices. It’s what Samuel Goldwyn asked for: “Let’s have some new clichés!”

57

Not too many years from now, the presence of an inhabitable planet in the Alpha Centauri system may be definitively ruled out by direct observation, making legions of stories as outdated as Burroughs’s Barsoom novels.

58

If you have ever played Second Life, you have a feel for how it might work.

59

Interesting, I always thought the *Sulaco *looked like a rifle…

60

Oh, I have. Add to the Second Life experience realistic graphics and haptic and proprioceptic data and you have an idea of what we might all be doing in a century or so.

The Moon is only a light second away- we could even teleoperate remotes on the Moon if we could get used to the moderate lag.