I guess I did misunderstand you. It may be true that popular-outside-of-subculture examples are somewhat dominated by those things, but I don’t feel like that is the case for the material I read (almost exclusively short SF) - I find this to be a fairly even mixture including the items you mention, but also:
Time travel
Alternate history
Artificial life/AI
Genetic engineering
Post apocalyptic (including ecological and technological disaster)
Juxtaposition of primitive culture and tech
Causality weirdness
Dimensional weirdness
Afterlife weirdness
Technology/invention
Etc.
Spaceships, lasers and BEMs sometime feature in these stories, and sometimes they are the story, but not in ‘most’ cases. (I’m interpreting ‘most’ to mean, say, > 75%, right?)
Geez. Aliens have not necessarily been monsters since at least “A Martian Odyssey” and probably all the way back to Skylark times. Many, many covers of sf magazines in the '50s (the lower rent ones) did have BEMs - I can’t think of many from the '60s with them, except maybe ironically, and I have most of them.
Zap guns? Pretty rare. FTL travel, while not in a majority of stories, at least registers, but usually as a way of getting people from here to there.
I get the impression that many writers about science fiction in the mainstream press would be somewhat surprised if told the stuff actually came in books. This is recent. When I started reading SF films were few and far between.
I tend to interpret “monsters” broadly: we’re talking about distinctly inhuman entities that probably evolved separately from humans, are probably intelligent, and are perceived by humans as dangerous. Their definition when discussing literature should be according to their literary function: they frighten and challenge the protagonists with their inhuman nature. Frankenstein’s creation is a monster, as is the creature in Alien. But so is Wintermute from Neuromancer. So is the titular Wind-up Girl.
Not necessarily - but they’re often still written that way. The aliens in Blindsight, for example - complex, mysterious, dangerous - but also, monsters (and not the only ones in the story)
But they don’t have to be sentient aliens - sandworms are monsters, the Shrike is a monster, etc…
The original quote didn’t say that most science fiction has FTL and laser guns. It said that most science fiction has superior technology, such as FTL and laser guns. Most SF does, in fact, center around technology superior to what we have now. FTL spaceships and laser guns are two examples of such technology, but they aren’t an exclusive list.
Chronos: You’re right, but you left out the damning first sentence.
“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.”
That’s like saying “Nebraska is not a state. Most states have a bicameral legislature.”
The conclusion does not follow from the given reasoning, even though the stated reason, itself, is true. Some science fiction does not involve advanced technology.
Eh, the point is close enough to true. A relatively small proportion of SF deals extensively with beings other than current-era Homo sapiens, and a far smaller portion yet deals with our evolutionary descendants. It is science fiction, but it’s not the vast majority of science fiction.
Weak. Simple majority is not, I think, what most(!) people expect the word ‘most’ to mean in everyday terms.
I flip a coin 1000 times and get 499 tails, 501 heads, I don’t say ‘most of the time, it landed on heads’
Fair enough, if that’s what you think, that’s fine. I’m still not going to concede that 72%* isn’t* most because it doesn’t cross a magic 75% threshold. 72% looks like “most” to me, especially with as low a sample as 25.
But lots of sf deals with a tiny bit of advanced technology. Flowers for Algernon does, for instance. But I’m not sure I’d include it with the regular bunch of very advanced technology stories.
Exactly. I bristle at the common notion that sci fi is, by definition, about space ships, lasers and monsters. It ignores the more subtle and thought-provoking stuff like Her, Robot & Frank, Eternal Sunshine, Gattaca and the like, as well as even action spectacular types like Inception. Never mind mind-fuck time travel flicks as diverse as Back To the Future and Primer.
Flowers for Algernon is built entirely around a technological advance. It fits the standard SF template of “posit a technological advance, then explore how people react to that”. I’ve even seen that template presented as a definition of science fiction, though of course there are still exceptions.
I don’t get where people are getting prescriptivism from the two quotes in the OP. To me they sound like people’s observations of what (they understand) SciFi to be, not what they think it should be or* has to be* to be considered SciFi. And as just the top 25 lists show, they are not wrong.
If laypeople get the idea most SciFi is hyperdrives, rayguns and BEMs, that’s because that’s what they see. This isn’t ignoring the subtle stuff, it’s pointing out that for every Her, there’s how many Transformers flicks, 4? Robot & Frank - vs how many *Marvel Universe *movies, 11 so far: hell, even the WWII one had rayguns and only the modern Cap one had none of the 3 tropes. One Eternal Sunshine vs … how many is the Star Trek series up to now, 9 or so? One Gattacca, 8 Star Wars movies and counting… One Inception, 6 Alien movies.
I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered that notion, with the “by definition” part. I mean, I remember overhearing a high school librarian tell a class that fantasy novels were about young men setting off to discover their destiny, and I sure bristled at that. But as MrDibble points out, the quotes in the OP are observations, and they’re fairly accurate–especially if you use a broad definition of laser gun (which, why wouldn’t you, a “laser gun” is a fairly unlikely weapon and not actually one I’ve seen depicted almost ever in SF), and a narrative-function definition of monster, as I suggested before. Edit–and extraspecially if you acknowledge the “such as” in the OP’s quote.
I do know that if I list my favourite SF, the stuff that’s on there mostly fits the tropes and in a big way - Banks is all over those 3 tropes, Brin likewise, Cherryh too. Le Guin is best at not following them, with her non-FTL ships and sociological message. But even she often has monsters…
The only two I can think of offhand are the antique Lassiter laser pistol in Firefly and possibly some of the CREWs (Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons) in the Culture books