Sci fi is about potential societal changes and how they will affect people. It doesn’t have to be spaceships and lasers. It could be, like Einstein said “the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and rocks” and so you’ve got some primitive cave-man humans battling it out for post-apocalyptic dominance. Though to distance it from an actual cave-man book, like Clan of the Cave Bear, you’d probably have detritus from our current civilization hanging around and being used in clever ways. Landfill miners and whatnot. “Cave people” who live in crumbling skyscrapers.
To clarify, sci-fi is about change that hasn’t happened yet (and may never happen, but it certainly isn’t about changes that already have happened). So a book about the Civil Rights struggle and how that affected the people who lived through it wouldn’t be sci-fi. But a book about a world in which Jim Crow still held force in 2015 would be sci-fi. Or conversely, a book about if the Black Panthers took over and forced white people into second-class citizenhood and/or slaves would be sci-fi. Although neither book would be about space, or aliens, or lasers, or even technology at all.
I think of “science fiction” like the scientific method, applied to people. You create a hypothesis, and the book (or movie, or whatever) is the experiment. “What would happen if people evolved a third arm?” “What happens if airplanes were never invented?” “What consequences would result if a planet destroying doomsday bomb becomes as cheap and readily available as chewing gum?” It just happens that a lot of the early sci-fi came out during an optimistic era when people believed we’d be flying our cars around the solar system on vacation, hunting alien meat with our blasters, any old day now.
Disagree… I think that SF can explore past events, highlighting the moral lessons, retelling the stories and drawing perhaps new conclusions from it.
Their Majesties’ Bucketeers by L. Neil Smith, was a re-telling of the Darwinian debate of the late nineteenth century, set on an alien planet, as the intelligent people there wrestled with the same moral and scientific issues our ancestors had to deal with. It’s a clever story, and an interesting look back.
One of the reasons this can be “extrapolative” fiction is that the results don’t actually have to match the results we experienced. An alien-species retelling of the Civil Rights struggle might end up rejecting the moral view of individual equality…or accepting it immediately as obvious without an actual struggle!
Hamlet is a very good work of literature, but terrible science fiction. One might object that it’s not science fiction at all… but if Shakespeare had set it on a different planet instead of a different country, and given Hamlet tentacles, it would still be terrible science fiction, if the planet and the tentacles weren’t relevant to the story. It would probably still be good literature, though.
But what about a retelling of Hamlet on a world where dead people’s personalities – memories and everything – are stored and can be consulted. Hamlet wouldn’t have been the only one to know his father’s tale: it could be brought out in open court, and Claudius publicly accused.
What about a retelling of Hamlet where Polonius had mind-reading powers? Or Ophelia?
Although not exactly SF, what about a retelling of Hamlet with everyone’s sex changed. The Princess of Denmark.
What about a retelling of Hamlet, set today, with modern criminal forensics? (“This man had poison dropped into his ear…”)
This is why I believe “The Literature of Ideas” is not wholly an invalid cognomen. The whole point is to brainstorm new ways of thinking about problems, and to come up with an angle, some “topspin,” that no one else has ever had before.
SF does have tropes and formulae…but fewer than other genres. (Like Romance, which is so formulaic, computer programs can write it.)
Interesting scenario. If all the animals, plants and other organisms on the Earth died and stopped respiring, the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would remain at tolerable levels for thousands of years, possibly hundreds of thousands of years. The oxygen in the atmosphere would remain where it was until it was absorbed by geological processes, and CO2 would slowly increase because volcanoes emit a certain quantity over time. Eventually our planet would resemble a very anaemic Venus - but not for millions of years. If there were any humans alive on the surface of such a dead world they would have plenty to eat and breathe- assuming there were no decomposing bacteria.
Hmm; these surviving humans would need a population of bacteria in their gut; this might be enough to restart decomposiition on a worldwide scale, and on a surprisingly rapid timescale, too.
Naah. Oxygen loves to combine with shit, if there wasn’t any active sources, it’s all gone real quick. With all our iron rusting and our cities burning (not to mention all those dead forests) it’ll be accelerated. Currently, oxygen has an atmospheric residence time of ~ 4500 years, but tip the balance towards strictly uptake without production, and that will drop drastically. Maybe expecting everyone dead in a few years from just that is exaggerating, but people’d feel the effects way before it got completely depleted. Just a drop by a few percent will do that.
Maybe if you’re going to talk about nothing except the plausibility of The Road it deserves its own thread, since this is now pretty far from the question in the OP.
Remember that the top surface of the crust of our planet is already bathed in a oxygen rich atmosphere; in short it is already oxidised. To remove significant amounts of oxygen from the atmosphere would require new material to be exposed by weathering and other geological processes, a process which takes time.
The atmosphere holds about 10E18kg of oxygen; chemical weathering absorbs only 5 x 10E11kg of oxygen per year. Oxidising the entire biosphere would eliminate about 10E15kg, so even if the dead life on the entire land surface caught fire the oxygen would only go down by one percent. No matter what you do to it short of removing it mechanically, the oxygen in our atmosphere isn’t going anywhere fast.
Consider what this means. The biosphere takes 4500 years to absorb and re-emit a mass of oxygen equivalent to the oxygen in the atmosphere; but if respiration ceased, the biosphere would no longer be involved in this cycle. The most the biosphere could absorb is equal to about twice the mass of carbon it contains - around 3 x 10E15kg. An insignificant amount.
All of those numbers are a factor of 10 high, and “5 x 10E11” is a really funny way to write 5E12, which leads me to believe that you’re misunderstanding scientific notation. “10E18” means “1010^18". “1E18” means "110^18”, or just “10^18”. If it helps, think of the “E” as meaning “times ten-to-the”.
Yeah. I usually write these figures as 1E11kg (or 1e11) and so on but the figure I found for chemical weathering gave it in the form 10E11, so I was attempting to be consistent. Apologies.
Perhaps my original source was worrying that he might have been talking to someone who doesn’t use base ten.
