On Science Fiction

Cafe Society
1

I’ve just finished reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Uval Noah Harari. It was a very interesting book but there was a reference to science fiction in the last chapter “The End of Homo Sapiens” the author writes “This is not science fiction. Most science-fiction plots describe a world in which Sapiens - identical to us - enjoy superior technology such as light-speed spaceships and laser guns.” Several months ago I was watching a movie review on CBC in which the reviewer stated that the movie she was reviewing was not your typical science fiction with monsters etc…

What sort of crap are these people reading or watching? I have probably 20 or 30 SF books, many of which are anthologies, and I don’t think that there’s a single story that fits those descriptions and I’m not even sure if anyone even writes stuff like that. If these people had actually read a random selection of 10 SF short stories they would probably not be able to find anything remotely fitting the above descriptions.

2

I’m not getting the outrage. The first quote should have said “some” not “most,” but ftl spaceships and laser guns are a legitimate staple of science fiction. And the second quote was talking about movies, where they’re even more firmly entrenched. I supposed it would be nice if everyone understood the distinction between space opera and science fiction, but it’s still a niche genre that doesn’t appeal to everyone, and I can’t get too upset if a non-fan’s first referent for “science fiction” is Star Wars. Shit, it’s still my first referent for it, too.

3

Spaceships and laser guns are hallmarks of sf…but not definitional of it.

For someone to say, “It doesn’t have spaceships, so it’s not sf” is laughably stupid.

(Although I’ve never accepted the Dragonriders of Pern as “science fiction.” Fantasy, I calls it. So it goes.)

4

I’m guessing the average person (and the average movie reviewer) isn’t very aware of written science fiction. In mainstream popular culture of today, “science fiction” = Star Wars and Star Trek.

5

There is even a story or two that takes place in space and does not involve vessels trying to blow each other up. I mean, in books, you can forget about that in movies.

6

Dave Langford’s venerable monthly newsletter Ansible has a regular entry called As Others See Us, which is normally something incredibly stupid said about science fiction by ignorant mainstream types. He’s been doing this, sometimes with multiple entries, every month for decades.

They will never learn. They have no incentive to learn, either. SF is now an incredibly huge multi-media world too large for even insiders to fully grasp. And there are too many bad examples, many of them incredibly popular, that reinforce the stereotypes.

The best thing to do is to remember that every single field of human endeavor goes through this. What people think from the outside is a ridiculous caricature of what insiders know. You yourself have many orders of magnitude more idiocies about other peoples’ stuff than you do insider knowledges, because you can only be an insider of a few things out of the millions in the world. And by you, I mean you, and them, and me, and everyone, including Dave Langford.

Doesn’t make it any easier to read about, I admit.

7

Given the current big controversy in the field, :D:D:D

8

I’m a huge SciFi fan, have been all my reading life, I’ll defend reading SF to the death. And yet I see nothing erroneous about the idea that most SF features at least one of: FTL spaceships, “laser guns” or monsters. Including books, not just movies.

Of course, Sturgeon was an SciFi author…

9

I don’t think it’s a wrong characterisation if used as a bit of semantic shorthand; much as ‘Swords, Sorcery’ might be used to sum up the Fantasy genre, or Crime/detective fiction called 'Whodunnit".

Any subculture is necessarily misunderstood by those outside of it. If they understood it, they would be part of it.

10

I think you misunderstand me - I don’t think it’s just shorthand or stereotyping, I think it’s objectively true (I haven’t done a survey, but this is my opinion based on observation): Most SciFi, whether movies or books, really does feature at least one of those 3 things. Cyberpunk and the dystopian YA stuff stuff being the only common exceptions in recent SF, I think. Even hard Sf that has STL-only ships usually has some sort of pew-pew rayguns or monsters of some description.

11

I don’t think most science fiction contains any of those three things:

  1. Faster than light spaceships
  2. Lasers used as weapons
  3. Monsters

Here’s a list of what someone has rated as the top science fiction novels of all time:

http://bestsciencefictionbooks.com/top-25-best-science-fiction-books.php

Most of them do not contain any of the three.

Here’s a list of what someone has rated as the top science fiction movies of all time:

I would have to count to discover if the majority of them contain at least one of the three.

I deliberately used lists that I have never looked at before. If I had merely looked at my own favorites, I could be accused of skewing the results to my own viewpoint. I picked the top lists returned by Google for “best science fiction novels of all time” and “best science fiction movies of all time” with 25 choices. So I’m not arguing with anyone about how good any of those books or movies are.

On the other hand, if you increase the set of things that need to appear to something like this group:

  1. Faster than light spaceships
  2. Lasers used as weapons
  3. Monsters
  4. Aliens
  5. Time travel
  6. All space travel
  7. Artificial intelligence
  8. Alternate histories
  9. Genetic modifications
  10. Post-apocalyptic scenarios
  11. Any far future history of the human race

then there’s a much better chance than at least one of them will be used in the majority of all science fiction. It’s also not a very interesting claim now. Yeah, there are common themes in all science fiction. There are common themes in any genre. That’s what makes it a genre.

12

“Laser Guns” covers more than just strictly actual lasers, and it’s disingeneous to think ST phasers or SW blasters aren’t covered when a mundane uses the term. Ditto for the distinction you make between “monsters” and “aliens” - The 2001 aliens count as monsters in that story, for instance.
Let’s look at this top 25 list of yours. I’m highlighting the ones that I already know contain at least one of the 3:

Dune (Frank Herbert)
Ender’s Game(Orson Scott Card)
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)
Foundation (Issac Asimov)
The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester)
**2001: A Space Odyssey **(Author C. Clarke)
Hyperion Cantos (Dan Simmons)
Neuromancer (William Gibson)
1984 (George Orwell)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
Ubik (Philip K. Dick)
**The Forever War **(Joe Haldman)
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)
Old Man’s War (John Scalzi)
Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan) (yeah, pedantically not FTL ships, but needlecasting is FTL)
Book of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe) (Definitely monsters in this series)
**Player of Games **(Ian Banks)
The Night’s Dawn trilogy (Peter F. Hamilton)
Gateway (Frederick Pohl)
**Spin (**Robert Charles Wilson)
The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
**Anathem **(Neal Stephenson)
Blindsight (Peter Watts)
Miles Vorkosigan Saga (Lois McMaster Bujold)

I’d argue that “most feature one of the 3 tropes” is a perfectly valid characterization when 72% of a list you proposed do.

13

It’s not outrage per se, it’s more big annoyance at the laziness on the part of the reviewer or writer. Similar, to me, to when CBC TV will have a news item about a Lancaster bomber that was discovered buried in a wetlands and then they show footage of C-47s dropping paratroopers, followed by footage of Heinkel 111s as they’re describing the significance of the Lancaster.

14

And that was the book list, for the movie list I get 19/25 or 76%.

15

MrDibble writes:

. . . this top 25 list of yours . . .

Once again, this is not my list. I deliberately chose it because I had never looked at it before. It was just the list that came out when I Googled on the term “best science fiction novels of all time” and chose the first one with 25 entries.

What does the term “laser guns” mean other than “lasers used as weapons”? If you meant “aliens”, why didn’t you say “aliens” rather than “monsters”? “Monsters” means something different, if it means anything, which I’m not convinced of. Which of the three things on the list is in Anathem?

Most of the books contain some implication that faster-than-light travel is possible to set up the situation. Monsters and laser guns are not mentioned in most of them. So, yes, “implicitly needing faster-than-light travel to set up the situation of the story” is part of the background of most science fiction.

16

Interesting. There is quite a bit of SF that deals with the human race abandoning outside exploration (no FTL travel, no alien worlds, etc.), in favor of exploring the human mind. I recall such a story-where humans have given up conscious reality in favor of dream explorations-for get the name of the story. Everybody spend their lives in induced sleep, dreaming away. Apparently, this was much better than exploring alien worlds.
And if Einstein is right (no FTL travel), will future generations get bitter an frustrated, stuck on earth? Mars colonization might expand things for a while…but not being able to move outside th solar system…that could be a problem.

17

I agree with the bulk of your post, but take issue with the last line – FTL travel is not at all required in an awful lot of science fiction, and I’d argue that it’s not in “Most Science Fiction”. It’s certainly not in most SF set on the earth, in most time travel stories, or even in space travel if it stays within the solar system or uses generation starships or the like. There’s no FTL in H.G. Wells or Jules Verne. Neal Stephenson has been campaigning for years to keep SF away from FTL and similarly unlikely technology (which is why Seveneves is set in our Solar system).

18

“This list of yours” is shorthand for “the list you introduced into the conversation”, nothing more.

It’s the same as “ray gun” - a generic descriptor for a gun that doesn’t use bullets. It would be, in my view, ridiculously pedantic to think a mundane journalist means “only guns that fire coherent visible light beams” when he says “laser guns”.

So you’re really saying phasers and blasters aren’t “laser guns”. What next - wormhole travel isn’t FTL because the ship itself isn’t using an FTL engine?

I’m not the one who originally said “monsters” (and pedantically, she said “monsters, etc”,) I’m just pointing out that to the laymen, they overlap, they’re not distinct classes.

maybe it’s the way that book is written and I’ve gotten it wrong, but there was an “alien” starship (with human aliens, but still).

This is underselling things. Hell, more than one of them has portions of story take place on FTL ships going FTL. A couple have FTL starships as characters in the story.

Would you like me to highlight the ones that just contain monsters, never mind the rayguns?
Dune (sandworms),
Ender’s Game (formics),
Starship Troopers (bugs, skinnies),
Hyperion(shrike),
2001(monolith aliens),
Hitchhikers(vogons, numerous others),
Forever War(taurans),
Fire On The Deep(various aliens),
Old Man’s War(various aliens),
Book Of The New Sun(various creatures like man-apes, cave creature, flying creature in Claw, )
Player Of Games(The Azad are monstrous indeed),
Night’s Dawn(This has straight-up space zombies),
Blindsight(vampires AND aliens).

That’s a whole lot of not mentioning…:dubious:

19

That’s a level of pedantry that I think even most sci-fi fans would balk at, let alone anyone outside the genre.

20

Hey, I like FTL travel. It makes for good stories.