Bear with me here, because I’m trying to coherently define what I mean. The closest I can put it in one sentence would be “science fiction based on disproven science”. Or maybe “when hard SF softens”. A good term might have been “Science Fantasy”, but according to Wiki that is already used to describe something else, namely science fiction with arbitrarily added fantasy elements.
I was inspired to ask this by the latest made4SciFi movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth. I have no idea how they’ll try to justify it, but today it is pretty certain that there is simply no physically possible way the Earth could be hollow. At one time though that was not the case, and until people knew better you could have a speculative story featuring a hollow Earth. Or to put it another way: suppose the long sought Theory of Everything was devised, and it turned out to be the final word in physics: it was how the universe works, period. And said theory uneqivocally demonstrated that faster than light travel or time travel were absolutely no-question impossible.That from then on, any story which featured FTL travel or time travel was accepting a known impossibility, like a story in which a mechanical engineer devises a perpetual motion machine.
This isn’t the same as “obsolete” science fiction, although there’s obviously overlap, because I’m not thinking of fiction that’s been superceded by mere information (Mars doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere, Mercury doesn’t always have one side face the Sun, etc.). Rather, it’s when formerly credible science now has to be relabled as psuedo-science fiction.
I’ve never heard an existing genre word for it. The closest I can come is pulp science fiction, which often pulls on such elements (lost lands with dinosaurs, hollow earths, Martian invaders, etc.)
So you get to make it up.
What about discredited science fiction? Fictional science fiction?
I suppose you could call it science fiction set in an alternate universe. (Though if somebody publishes the ultimate Theory of Everything and it proves once and for all, six ways from Sunday, that there aren’t any alternate universes. . . . well, some people just won’t let you have any fun.)
I would argue that the term “Science Fantasy” works for these - they might not have obvious elements of traditional fantasy, but “The earth is hollow” or “getting from point A to B in the blink of an eye” are arguably elements that have been used in a fantasy.
Or to put it another way, a story that treats its technobabble by the same rules as magic spells, instead of actual scientific/mechanical discoveries we might not have made yet, qualifies as Sci-Fantasy to me.
As an alternate term, I can propose: Pseudoscience Fiction.
I’m working on a story along these lines too; for it to “work” in the context of the universe, Space has to be made of Aether and not vacuum (Is something made of vaccum? You know what I mean).
There is hard science fiction, and soft science fiction, so perhaps this is soft in the head science fiction?
I don’t like psuedoscience fiction, since pseudoscience has a specific meaning, not necessarily the denial of known scientific conclusions. ESP stories these days might qualify.
I’d go with science fantasy myself, where the fantasy element comes from the violation of known laws. As an example, I’d offer The Martian Chronicles. Mars itself was a bit iffy in 1950, but the real thing that bugged me the last time I read it is that his characters could see an atomic war on earth with their naked eyes. Not bloody likely.
It’s more of a term for an artistic movement, but it’s found its way into literature. It’s a way of depicting the normal as something that’s secretly fantasy, or defiant of normal.
I tend to refer to this as Science Fantasy as well. By that term I usually mean that the “science” in the story is not actual science, but pretend science.
The hollow Earth idea goes back to ancient times, and even as recently as the 19th century was (an admittedly far-out possibility) deemed worthy of some exploration. There’s a long tradition of using the idea in literature, including some writers considered to be among the first telling stories using science as a framework, like Jules Verne.
Ever hear of hyperspace, space plus, warps, wormholes, etc.? If you want to have any kind of space travel that doesn’t take half a century or more to get from one very nearby star to another, you need to postulate an FTL drive or dodge around the lightspeed barrier. The idea is probably older than Einstein’s equation, considering that people who were into science had probably read about Lorentz’s work which formed the basis for Einstein’s later refinements and theories. Without impossible space travel, a huge swath of stuff that’s normally considered solidly in the realm of Science Fiction, and sometimes even hard Science Fiction would be thrown into your Science Fantasy category.
