I read this as “Don’t forget the *lasagnas *in Dune.”
Opens up huge vistas for the next direction in the field.
I’m thinking a Garfield/Dune mashup. Jon as the Padishah Emperor. Nermal as Alia. Liz as a Reverend Mother. “I am the tabicat rillyfat!”
20 out of 25 of those books contain at least one of those elements. Most combine all three, especially if you are generous with your understanding of “Monster” and understand “laser” to mean any directed energy weapon.
Often, but certainly not always. Arthur C. Clarke, in “City and the Stars” (I believe, quoting only from memory) had a bit about how humans had lost the instinctive fear of heights, because of safety equipment.
More profound, “Brave New World” explores post-humanity…and did so eighty some years ago. Books like “Half Past Human” and “The Godwhale” by T.J. Bass look into similar ideas with updated technology.
There is the problem of making the drama relevant to the audience. Imagine, if you will, trying to promote and perform a play, in the year 1775, having to do with the socially dividing effects of the abortion controversy. Would audiences even begin to comprehend it? They’d just throw cabbages!
Science fiction has long suffered from a ceteris paribus effect, where one single social change is presented, and the consequences of this are explored, but pretty much everything else is shown as unchanged. It’s a dramatic limitation, a problem inherent in the medium. (It’s also H.G. Wells directive: introduce one new idea, but leave everything else unchanged.)
If your story is about robots, and self-aware DNA, and advanced aliens, and alterations in the basic physical forces, and time travel, and the sexualization of children, and the breakdown of organized religion, and the warrior-honor of a strong swordsman…it’d be a buggered-up muddle!
National Lampoon’s * Doon * by Ellis Weiner featured a dessert planet entirely devoid of entrees .
Why do I get the feeling that this is an actual example, and that Orson Scott Card wrote it?
I don’t consider it unreadable. It should be considered given points in the OP. If there’s any other reason, then perhaps one can consider the awards it received:
I also found it depressing.
I think the future envisioned in the work is plausible given the fact that we face multiple predicaments, as explained here:
Finally, it was probably these two reasons why I could not see anything pretentious about the work.
I do note the conspicuous lack of any Science Fiction awards there.
I find most of the works of modern “literary” writers to be pretentious as all fuck. This doubles down when they use the well-worn tropes of an entertainment genre (such as science fiction) in an “artistic” fashion.
I suppose that’s their job and their intention, so I cannot fault them for doing it, but dayum I hate it.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I used to read a great deal of fiction. I read f&sf genre almost exclusively from my teens into my twenties, read a great number of classics - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Russians- through my thirties, and now that I am in my fifties my light reading is mostly history and biography. I never seemed to have developed a taste for consciously crafted “literature.”)
Agreed. There seems to be, as you say, a self-consciously crafted element to this, almost a formula. And it’s a formula I don’t care for either.
I far prefer the “formula” of a story the reader enjoys.
Literary award will do, especially
I don’t think it makes sense to compare fiction with non-fiction.
Generally all narrative works from different media use them. The irony is that these elements generally mirror reality, which is part of non-fiction.
That doesn’t make it good SF or readable as such.
I disagree - a good book that happens to be SF is by definition good SF. SF is legitimate literature, and is judged according to the same merits as any other form of literature.
I think The Road is not definitely SF, but it’s also not definitely not-SF. As I said earlier, I think SF requires a Maguffin which has some sort of scientific or quasi-scientific explanation, and which plays a pivotal role in determining how the characters act in the story.
In The Road, there’s an apocalyptic event which among other things destroys all plant life, and to which the characters spend the book responding. That could make it SF. However, it’s deliberately VERY light on the explanation part: while it sure feels like a meteor strike or something, the “or something” is kind of key. Even books like The DIspossessed, with its ansible technology (very poorly explained), at least spend some time talking about what it is. McCarthy never tells you what’s going on.
That said, people who call it unreadable? Again, obviously different tastes, but for me I couldn’t put it down. It was exactly up my alley, beautiful and dark and suspenseful and dreadful and bleak as all fuck, and I genuinely loved it. There’s a lot of “literary” SF that I think is a steaming pile, but not this one.