I would like to make a distinction between the themes of science fiction and the props of science fiction. The themes of science fiction are things like these:
Possibility and consequences of faster-than-light travel
Extended human lifetimes
Mind powers like telepathy, precognition, or telekinesis
The existence of aliens and the consequences of meeting them
Time travel
Space travel
Artificial intelligence
Alternate histories
Genetic engineering
Post-apocalyptic scenarios
Any far future history of the human race
Parallel dimensions
Suspended animation
Terraforming
Alien influences on the prehistory of the human race
On the other hand, things like laser guns, monsters, and faster-than-light travel (in the background of the story) are props. The themes of science fiction are the scientific ideas that are explored in the stories. They are what the story is about. The props of science fiction are the things that are in the background of a story in order to make it work, although they aren’t explained in any detail and aren’t the point of a story.
This is not quite a hard and fast distinction, but it’s useful in explaining the point I’m going to make. I don’t think laser guns, monsters, and faster-than-light travel are the themes of most science fiction. I think most of that impression is caused by the fact that a lot of the best known science fiction requires faster-than-light travel for the actual theme of the story to be explored at all. You just can’t get humans to other solar systems or aliens to our solar system without faster-than-light travel, unless you’re going to use certain complicated workarounds like generation ships which make the story too messy. I don’t think faster-than-light travel is the theme of most of those stories though.
Perhaps this explains why science fiction fans will often think after reading a science fiction novel or seeing a science fiction movie that it isn’t really science fiction at all, just a romance/adventure/war/mystery/etc. story dressed up in science fiction clothes. This doesn’t mean that science fiction stories can’t also be romance/adventure/war/mystery/etc. stories. Many of the best science fiction stories also fit in those genres. The question of how central the science fiction themes have to be for it to “really” be a science fiction story isn’t one I’m going to answer. The definition of science fiction is pretty loose, and I don’t see any point in throwing out various well known examples of it. I’m just explaining why certain things are themes of a story, in that the consequences of them are actually explored, while other things are props of a story, since they are just in the background of a story.
I strongly disagree - a book could have all the strong characterization and epic storytelling that would make it a good story in the eyes of a literary critic (which is the subjective “good” we’re discussing here), yet fail in being good SF because it relies on some tired trope like, oh, the end of the world and being the last few humans around as though this was in-and-of-itself a shocking new thing to contemplate. Never mind the scientific holes in the whole setting…
I agree
I disagree - it’s judged on those merits and some additional internal ones of its own. SF is more than just good story writing, it’s also a shared culture that has evolved over time.
I don’t know that I’d say that using tired tropes is enough to make an otherwise well-written book bad science fiction, but I would agree that a well-written work could fail to meet the expectations of a particular genre. This could be in part because the author isn’t familiar enough with the genre to know what sorts of things will seem tired and obvious to regular readers of the genre. On second thought, that’s probably MrDibble’s point above – not that one couldn’t do a fresh take on an old trope, but that if an author doesn’t even know that a trope is old then they’re probably not going to manage to do anything new or interesting with it.
I see science fiction as a broad enough genre that I’m having a hard time imagining a well-written book that is clearly identifiable as science fiction but fails to live up to my basic expectations for the genre. However, it’s easy to imagine a book that’s beautifully written and insightful with interesting, fully developed characters, but that’s intended as a mystery and the “surprise” identity of the killer is totally obvious from early on or the solution just doesn’t make sense.* Or there could be a horror novel that simply fails to be scary. So while I haven’t read The Road, I can believe it’s possible for it to be both a well-written book and one that fails to live up to someone’s expectations for a work of science fiction.
*Bit of a hijack, but the worst mystery ending I’ve ever read did come in a book that I’d otherwise enjoyed and considered reasonably well-written. The explanation for the mysterious crimes turned out to be almost literally “a wizard did it”. Although the book was apparently set in the mundane real world, the villain had managed to obtain an artifact that truly was magical. A villain wrecking havoc with the help of a magic artifact would be fine in a fantasy novel, but in a book presented as a mystery this was shockingly bad.
I don’t mind most non-fans only thinking about science fiction in a superficial way. Most of them only think about other things in a superficial way too. What’s bothersome is when mainstream literary types who think about their own favorite genres in a deep way happen to read a good science fiction novel (or, occasionally, see a good science fiction movie) and say something like “This is not science fiction. It doesn’t contain certain science fiction props that are in the small amount of science fiction I’ve read or seen. Also, it’s well written, which isn’t the case in the small amount of science fiction I’ve experienced.” As was mentioned by Exapno Mapcase in post #6, David Langford in his newsletter Ansible has a regular section called “As Others See Us” in which he compiles examples of otherwise perceptive mainstream literary types making silly claims about science fiction. If you’re going to be an expert on science fiction, you have to read and see a lot of it. You’re not privileged to speak definitively about the field if you know little about it.
This is an interesting idea–that a book can be good in isolation, but bad in context. I think I sort of agree, but I’d phrase it differently. A book must be considered good or bad from the perspective of a particular person. It’s true that one person can think a book good while another thinks the book bad. The first person might think it’s good because she’s never encountered the tropes therein before, while the second thinks it bad because she has encountered them.
However, if I’m considering a book, I’ll consider the question of whether it’s good or bad separately from the question of whether it’s SF. There are therefore four possibilities. Something cannot be a good book and a bad SF book, because being a bad SF book is predicated on its being a bad book and being an SF book.
Oryx and Crake, for example: end-of-the-world book by Atwood. I really didn’t like it: it added nothing new to my understanding of post-apocalyptic books, and the characters weren’t especially interesting. The Road, however, was another end-of-the-world book by a literary author, and I loved it, because among other things it added something new to the apocalypse genre (for me at least): this was an apocalypse that wasn’t fooling around in the way that most apocalypses are.
A critic who hadn’t read a bajillion apocalypse books might really like Oryx and Crake, finding it fresh and new, and that’s fine for them; I’m glad they’d get something from it. They might find it good and find it SF. I find it bad and find it SF. But a single person can’t think it’s a good book and a bad SF book, the way I use the terms.
No, I disagree. While I can’t think of any really clear examples at the moment, it seems obvious to me that a science fiction book could be a good book by virtue of doing well and successfully what good fiction in general does (e.g. tell a good story, present compelling characters), while doing poorly or unsuccessfully the things that science fiction does. (Just as I can easily imagine a mystery novel being a good novel but a bad mystery.)
So what about Lois McMaster Bujold’s *Vorkosigan *books? They’re not literary science fiction by any definition of the term, and yet, they’re certainly not “literature of ideas”, either. In pure science fiction terms, they’re bog-standard space operas with very few original concepts and ideas - with some minor editing, they probably could have been published in the 1970s. And yet, I know for a fact that the books are beloved by many, including many on this board, including many on this board who read a lot of science fiction. So are they good SF?
The title of the Italo Calvino book is Cosmicomics, actually:
It may or may not be a good book. I haven’t read it yet. However, the description given in the Wikipedia article makes it sound like each story uses some scientific concept in a scientifically implausible way.
In that case, I might say it’s not really science fiction. The Road is a good example of this: it’s not really firmly in the SF genre, due to reasons I mentioned above. But I wouldn’t say it’s bad SF, because it’s not (IMO) bad, and bad SF is bad and is SF.
I’m not the person who says SF is the “literature of ideas”, I think that’s an unbelievably precious, pretentious and wrong idea of what SF actually is.
Bujold isn’t treating the concepts of FTL and space wars and the like as though they were new and interesting and she deserved extra credit just for going there, though. She’s already fluent in the language of SF, speaks it as her native tongue, and then uses it to write an underdog story with strong characterization. And she does incorporate some ideas that weren’t common at the time (80s-90s), like the posthuman quaddies and gay themes in Ethan and her overall themes of medical ethics and bioengineering and the like are very much “the literature of ideas” Even though I hate that term, I do note it’s the “the literature of ideas” not “the literature of only brand new ideas”…
Not off the top of my head. Even near-future cyberpunk uses AIs. But the issue isn’t using or not using the tropes, the issue is using them in a boring way or not.
Were the survivors still breathing? Oxygen, I mean. You know, the stuff made by all those plants that died. And if all the animals are dead too, including bacteria (or why would windfall apples still be good to eat years after the trees are dead?) we wouldn’t be able to survive for more than a couple of years, I don’t think…
No, if it’s not firmly in the SF genre, it is therefore not a good example of what I’m talking about.
It just seems to me that there’s no logical or practical reason why a book couldn’t be genuine bad SF but a good book. Why it couldn’t do the things that real SF does, but do them poorly. Why it couldn’t contain elements of real SF, but handle them badly. And yet, it has enough other, non-SF, good stuff going for it to qualify it as a good book. It can be, like the Wizard of Oz, a good man but a bad wizard.
The bottom line is that science fiction is still fiction. It’s not intended to be an accurate prediction of future events. It’s a genre of entertainment aimed at a contemporary audience.