Your conclusions about my own tastes are unfounded – nothing I have said could possibly give you any reason to think I’m a Golden Age fan. In fact, I ain’t!
This isn’t a question of tastes. Tastes are fine, and I wouldn’t dream of arguing them. If you like Larry Niven, and I like David Drake, who but a fool would say “You’re wrong?”
But words have meanings, and labels point to things. The label Science Fiction points to something other than Sea Stories. If you like Sea Stories (I sure do!) that’s great, but don’t try to claim that they’re SF. You can’t judge the two by the same criteria, which was your claim. I hold that claim to be really bad genre criticism.
It may be entirely valid criticism, but it’s bad genre criticism.
1984 is “social science” SF. It deals with an exploration of the technology of social control. It doesn’t go into much detail over the exact means by which the society is tyrannized, but it does depend on advances in technology over what was known when Orwell wrote the book.
(The Burton/Hurt film was interesting in that it gave a reason for Smith’s torment, something the book never actually specified. Big Brother was recruiting Smith, to make him into the sort of person who would do horrible things to other people. It was Big Brother’s self-replication and reproduction process.)
Well, the Darksword series is kind of all over the place with this.
(SPOILERS, obviously.)
The answer to the question nobody asked: back when folks hereabouts were persecuting heretics and burning witches at the stake, why didn’t the magical population fight back? Because they pooled their mystic energies and left for another realm, where druidical healers and hardworking conjurers could live in peace with entertaining illusionists – well, so long as the royal family is guided by useful prophecies, and makes sure the occasional criminal gets turned to stone.
Anyhow, the first two books are all about sending the lead character into exile, by which I mean to our world, by which I mean he comes back with the military and guess what happens next. And by guess what happens next, I mean oh, no, you don’t understand; I wasn’t talking about our present world; I meant the military from our future world, with the rayguns and whatnot, arriving in magic-land before the alien invasion from outer space can show up for the win.
I sort of half agree with you. The problem with this definition - a classic, and very close to what Knight held - is that people - readers, writers, editors, and publishers - have very different ideas of what a scientific idea is. You really can’t exclude Bradbury from science fiction, but he almost never had a scientific idea in his life. He used science-y words like Mars and spaceships, though. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, to me like you, a clear example of social science fiction, yet while it is set outside the mundane world it isn’t science that moves it. (Same with Animal Farm, to a greater degree. Is it social fantasy? No, it’s social sf.) Doc Smith doesn’t have a thimble’s worth of science in a thousand pages yet it is held up as the hardest of hard sf.
In more than 40 years of looking at the field I’ve never come across a definition of science fiction that worked, and I’ve probably read more definitions than anybody here since I got involved in the academic side for a few years. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t define science fiction any more than you can pornography. Nobody will ever stop trying, for either one, but I’ve got a question for all of you. Once you think you have a working definition, what will you do with it that will make it worth the effort put in?
Huh? By whom? Smith can be called a great many things, many of them complimentary even, but I’ve never once heard his work described as “hard SF”, much less its epitome.
I agree with this. Calling Smith “hard sci fi” is like calling Edgar Rice Burroughs “hard sci fi”, ie ridiculous. Also, I’ve never heard the claim either.
My library has a good set of SW and ST books, but they are all paperback, go on the paperback racks without covers, and are probably relatively cheap. I’m all for it - these books are so disposable that they are perfect for the library, since you can read and return them and go on to the next, and it is unlikely that anyone reads them twice.
ST and SW books are the one thing I actively do not collect.
Parts of Smith’s stuff was “hard” – where it touched on his own experience and expertise, like his descriptions of mining. Most of the “science fiction” elements, like space battle tactics and the like, were so far out there that they were pure speculation and make-believe. (One reason I think his stuff remained popular is that this kind of thing doesn’t get outmoded, because it’ll take a long time for reality to catch up). Smith’s stuff may be self-consistent and even plausible, but it’s not “hard sf” , based on actual physics, chemistry, and engineering and likely extrapolation in the sense that Heinlein or Hal Clement are.
In that sense, Smith’s stuff on mining is "hard’ for the 1930s and 40s when they were written, and some of it may still be today. But the SF stuff wasn’t hard in the 1930s, the 1940s, in 1965, or today.
Some science fiction is primarily about people. But unlike most other fields, it is possible to have competent and even good sf that is not primarily about people - where people are just there to show off the main scientific or pseudo-scientific idea.
What do you remember from “The Roads Must Roll?” The people or the roads?
One editor (I forget who) noted that a reason why this is the case is that much space that in a normal story is used for characterization must be used for world building in some types of sf.
Since we’ve been talking about Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” is an example of a pure sf story which is very powerful and has no people at all.
Smith’s stuff can seem hard to someone who doesn’t know a lot of physics. When Skylark was written using a spaceship to get to the stars, not astral projection, was damn hard sf. ST:TOS might not be hard sf, but in 1966 it was a lot harder than Lost in Space or Twilight Zone stories.
BTW the original Tom Swift books were hard if not exactly adventurous sf. I saw little in them that was outrageously stupid. The Tom Swift Jr. books on the other hand violated all sorts of physical laws all the time. Maybe respect for science has something to do with it.
Verne, Hale, and others had written stories about using real means of getting into space decades earlier*. Lots of people (many before Wells) had written stories about using the Imaginary Science of anti-gravity to get into space well before Smith. It might not be “hard” sf in that sense, but the contradictions weren’t obvious in those pre-relativity days. There were lots of options besides airy-fairy “Astral Projection” before Smith. That still doesn’t make Smith “damn hard sf”.
*Although lethal to the astronauts. It’s assumed Verne ignored this for the sake of the story. The inhabitants of Edward Everett hale’s Brick Moon would probably get their necks snapped, too. But the method was real, if unlikely, physics.
Perhaps I should have phrased it better. Epitome of a style of science fiction, maybe. But space opera is coterminous to science fiction in many peoples’ eyes. And after Star Wars and Star Trek destroyed the print field, it’s hard to disagree. How many times have we heard: It’s not science fiction, it’s about people!
My point remains that science-y words and concepts are not equivalent to scientific ideas and yet orders of magnitude more words of science fiction depend on them than on true science. Science fiction is that thing I point to when I mean science fiction.
Agreed. The descriptive difference (not “definition!”) I like to use is that SF addresses ideas in a world that can assess them openly, whereas fantasy creates ideas for personal, private use, not societal exploration. Science Fiction is “What if Someone Invented a ‘Flying Pill’ and Everybody Could Fly.” Fantasy is “The Boy Who Could Fly.”
Magic Incorporated (Heinlein) is Science Fiction – even though it’s magic! Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away is also a SF treatment of a magical theme. But Harry Potter is Fantasy, not SF, because the “new technology” is kept isolated from the real world. It’s handled as a private realm only for the few chosen.
SF is “How does this change the world?” Fantasy is “How does this affect me?”
Why, gosh, I’ll post it for free on an internet discussion board, so it can get torn to shreds. What nobler fate?
So when H G Wells wrote The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, that wasn’t sci fi? How about if one Terminator and one future soldier appear in modern Los Angeles?
As Robert Sheckley once said, “Don’t pick at the metaphor. It leaves a nasty scab.”
Yes, those two SF stories involved the protagonist keeping his discovery to himself.
Another more interesting pair of books for compare-and-contrast analysis: Timescape, by Gregory Benford, and Thrice Upon a Time by James P. Hogan.
Very much the same story: people find a way to send a message back in time.
Benford’s characters are at a major university, and their science is done by committees, grants, undergraduates, and so on: all the messy business of real university research. Hogan’s characters work in an old Scottish castle (!) Their work is isolated from the rest of the world. The latter, thus, has a more “fantasy” tone to it.
Sci-fi time travel kinda does this a lot, doesn’t it? Everything from Back To The Future to Quantum Leap, from Primer to Seven Days, if the general public had access to a time machine IT’S GAME OVER, MAN! GAME OVER!
Peter Hamilton’s *Night’s Dawn trilogy *has some pretty good hard SF tropes combined with dark fantasy elements. At first I found this cross-over a bit hard to take, but it works quite well, especially when superscience starts to win against the massed forces of evil.
I must admit I like my science fiction to be particularly hard and plausible; this doesn’t mean certain fantasy tropes can’t be adapted to fit in a scientific world. Zombies, for instance, can be explained in a reasonably plausible scientific manner as a plague, especially as a deliberately engineered plague. Thus you get Night on Mispec Moor.
