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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Maria on May 05, 2008, 07:05:52 PM
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Pft. Harry with a nice quiet day reading a book. Hah. $10 says the book is possessed and sucks him into a Book Hell dimension or something. Or he gets constantly nagged by Bob.
You mean like Fred from "Angel"? Hmmmm did those ghouls in "White Knight" seem a bit of a rip off from the end of Buffy? Oh well imitation is the most sincere form of theft.
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You mean like Fred from "Angel"? Hmmmm did those ghouls in "White Knight" seem a bit of a rip off from the end of Buffy? Oh well imitation is the most sincere form of theft.
That's quite an accusation there. Especially considering that every single plot point in Buffy had already existed somewhere.
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That's where you're wrong, Shecky. Joss Whedon totally came up with the idea of heroes fighting demons in a cave. And when the Fellowship fought off orcs and stuff in the mines of Moria, it was only because Tolkien had used a time machine to travel to the future and read Joss' mind!
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I
stand sit corrected. ::)
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That's where you're wrong, Shecky. Joss Whedon totally came up with the idea of heroes fighting demons in a cave. And when the Fellowship fought off orcs and stuff in the mines of Moria, it was only because Tolkien had used a time machine to travel to the future and read Joss' mind!
I see someone has gotten into the "happy" brownies.
You mean like Fred from "Angel"? Hmmmm did those ghouls in "White Knight" seem a bit of a rip off from the end of Buffy? Oh well imitation is the most sincere form of theft.
How exactly to man sized bald guys with Spock ears and fangs translate to 20 feet tall uber ghouls that pull themselves back together after they get chopped up? ???
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Ive heard it argued that everything has been re-hash for years and the last purely original fiction was Twilight Zone. They weren't right, but they weren't completely wrong either.
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The ancient Greeks were already saying, "There is nothing new under the sun," and they were pretty much right, if you boil each story down to its essentials. While science fiction is a little different because much of it hinges directly on the use/inclusion of advanced technology, even that can potentially be reduced to the role of plot device, thereby leaving the development and major points... which more than likely bear a strong resemblance to something that's already been done.
About the only truly new thing that can be done is a recombination of story elements and technical aspects. This does NOT mean that every story is utterly predictable, however; as with Jim, many authors, when faced with a choice between A, B and C, invariably find a way to choose D (which, of course, has been done before LOL). That, melded with proficiency in the storytelling itself, is what makes "new" fiction enjoyable.
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I am of the belief that with sufficient mental gymnastics, an argument can be made that any work of fiction is actually just a rehash of Arthurian legend.
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The ancient Greeks were already saying, "There is nothing new under the sun," and they were pretty much right, if you boil each story down to its essentials. While science fiction is a little different because much of it hinges directly on the use/inclusion of advanced technology, even that can potentially be reduced to the role of plot device, thereby leaving the development and major points... which more than likely bear a strong resemblance to something that's already been done.
About the only truly new thing that can be done is a recombination of story elements and technical aspects.
I disagree, actually. I think there are story possibilities that SF allows that could not be done any other way. Greg Egan does it rather a lot; I do not think "Learning to be Me", for example, is a story the mechanic of which works without the particular technological innovation involved.
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I think that the point of those arguing that there really is "nothing new under the sun" is that, when you boil a story down to its essentials, it's still going to be about how humans react to certain situations. If you choose to look at it their way, even, say, a time-travel story is not "new"; it can easily be equated to travel stories where a character goes to a strange, unknown land and has to figure out how to get out of it or keep himself safe while there, etc. The short story you mentioned could even be included if you look at stories about life after death or reincarnation - are those really the same people as before? - or even at stories from when prosthetics and artificial organs (*rings bell for "Hello, SF Themes!"*) were beginning to become widely-known. Is a person with major brain trauma the same person?
It all depends on how much of the essential story you believe hangs on those particular hooks. I'm not dogmatic either way; there's validity on both sides there.
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I think that the point of those arguing that there really is "nothing new under the sun" is that, when you boil a story down to its essentials, it's still going to be about how humans react to certain situations.
See, that's what I disagree with.
The best of edge-pushing SF can go beyond that because, unlike mainstream, it can ask what if human nature itself changed in non-mimetic ways.
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Interesting. You'd think that with as much SF as I've read, at least one example would come to mind. Can you provide one? I'd very much like to explore that possibility.
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Interesting. You'd think that with as much SF as I've read, at least one example would come to mind. Can you provide one? I'd very much like to explore that possibility.
Greg Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora would strike me as good examples; so would Peter Watts' Blindsight, in which pretty much all the central characters have distinctly stretched versions of human nature.
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Not familiar with those; could you provide a summary as it pertains to this topic?
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The thing about the theory that there's nothing new under the sun is, if you distill the stories down far enough of course they're the same. It's like saying that all life is identical because they all contain Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Thymine.
But, I'm pretty sure there's a significant difference between a horse and a hawk. Having identical base elements does not mean the result will be identical.
Thus, while I recognize thematic similarities between Hamlet and The Lion King, and between Shoujo Kakumei Utena and Gilgamesh, they're not the same thing.
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That's precisely the point they're making - in that school of thought, all themes are recycled and recombined, with details only window dressing. And they have a point. The difference lies in how one looks at literature afterwards. Some sneer at it all and accuse authors of doing nothing but rehashing old ideas. Others take it as a given and watch for authors who put a fresh spin on all the old concepts, and they can actually ENJOY what they read as a result.
I'm in the second group. It's a pathetic bunch in the first group who take pleasure in trying to tear down successful authors by saying that they're doing nothing new; we all already KNOW that that's the case... and that it doesn't matter.
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See, that's what I disagree with.
The best of edge-pushing SF can go beyond that because, unlike mainstream, it can ask what if human nature itself changed in non-mimetic ways.
I think that is true up to a point. I will grant you that many science fiction writers have used the loose limits of setting that SciFi allows (Asimov, Wells, and Verne all come to mind). But when you get down to it, any of those stories could have been told in a completely non-SciFi genre. The invading aliens could have just been invading barbarian tribes or unknown foreigners in a distant past. The identity struggle and issues of persecution in some of Asimovs stories could have been told in the segregated South, or immigrant flooded new england a century ago, or a Muslin today. Maybe not as effectively, but it could have been done.
The point is that SciFi, when its all said and done, is a distinction of Setting. One that allows for a much wider selection of plot devices, making it easier to delve into unexplored corners of the human condition. But still just Setting. The Nothing New argument is that when you strip away Setting, What is left is Theme. And Themes are all just various facets of the Human Condition, and that all the facets have been covered at one time or another, in one form or another, in one setting or another.
/end rant
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I think that is true up to a point. I will grant you that many science fiction writers have used the loose limits of setting that SciFi allows (Asimov, Wells, and Verne all come to mind). But when you get down to it, any of those stories could have been told in a completely non-SciFi genre. The invading aliens could have just been invading barbarian tribes or unknown foreigners in a distant past. The identity struggle and issues of persecution in some of Asimovs stories could have been told in the segregated South, or immigrant flooded new england a century ago, or a Muslin today. Maybe not as effectively, but it could have been done.
This is why I did not actually suggest these stories, but the examples I raised above, which do not work transferred to another genre.
This is getting way off-topic; I'm unsure whether Author Craft or media Favourites would be a better place to take it, but I am inclined to the former.
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Not familiar with those; could you provide a summary as it pertains to this topic?
Permutation City is a novel about, among other things, being able to upload human personalities and edit them, so that people can, at a drop of a hat, pick something to be obsessively interested in and make themselves be so. I don't want to spoiler it too much, but it examines the consequences of this in a really impressive way.
Diaspora is a sort of related book which does some similar things. It opens with an amazing section called "Orphanogenesis" which starts off as a highly technical discussion of how one builds a new sentience out of software, and ends up in first-person POV of the sentience that has been built, and does, IMO, a smooth gradual transition between them.
Blindsight's narrator is a human who because of radical brain surgery has lost the capacity for empathy entirely, and who has hence had to develop the facility to intellectually deduce what's going on in other people's heads to an extreme degree; because of this, he is assigned to a crew of even weirder and more alien people going out to make contact with aliens, as an interpreter to translate their thoughts and insights for the folks back home. I suppose one could just about force a story like that into mainstream, or at least as much embedded in a realistic world as, say, Arkham Asylum, except for the bit with the aliens. But it would be a real push, and neither of the others seem to me to be doable in mimetic fiction at all. Also there are some of Egan's short stories that do similar things, such as "Learning To Be Me", in which the narrator is having his mind recorded for long-term storage, and has a philosophical crisis as to whether he is really the copy of him running on his brain, which is mortal and going to die, or the copy running on the recorder which is less so, and whether there is any way of telling the difference.
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Most interesting. I can think of ways to parallel those themes in a non-SF way (and already have some roughed out mentally), though. Of course, it's never going to be an EXACTLY replicated theme, but the essentials are still there.
1) I've seen a few works that have people taking completely tailor-made medications/drugs to reshape their personalities, even though that can be thought of as borderline SF. Then again, there have been plenty of real-life cases of people deciding to change themselves and doing so through therapy or other help; only the mechanism and the efficiency of the mechanism are different from your example.
2) Combo of creation stories and first-person religion-heavy stories. Again, different mechanism, same concepts; as I was suggesting earlier, it's the combination that's new.
3) Certain kinds of autism present as a total lack of empathy; I believe there are a few books on the market today written by autistic people and their personal story of the fight to simulate social awareness.
4) ("Learning To Be Me") Hmm. Sounds quite a bit like any questioning of self-identity; for that matter, "which one is me?" applies perfectly easily to the "me" of 20 years ago, the "me" of now and the "me" after a brain-damaging accident.
The essential concepts of the characters' issues are not new. What's new to some degree or other is the method by which the concepts are combined and presented. So, yes, they're not new, while they ARE new, both in important ways.
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2) Combo of creation stories and first-person religion-heavy stories.
You don't count those as inherently fantasy ?
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My great aunt was a voracious reader well into her 90s, and I remember discussing this subject with her one time. Her take was, "If you boil a plot down to its bones, in the end it's always about sex."
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You don't count those as inherently fantasy ?
Yes, which is one of the reasons I separate fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy is perhaps THE original human fiction form (I wasn't there, of course, but it seems a pretty safe bet ;) ); SF has only been around since the 19th century. In fact, I'd class fantasy, mythology and legend in the same gang. Look at those very same "nothing new under the sun" ancient Greeks; a big chunk of their writing was fantasy, if you think about it.
SF's about as close as we get to truly "new", and even that builds on the same stuff; it's the mechanics that differ.
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Yes, which is one of the reasons I separate fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy is perhaps THE original human fiction form (I wasn't there, of course, but it seems a pretty safe bet ;) ); SF has only been around since the 19th century. In fact, I'd class fantasy, mythology and legend in the same gang. Look at those very same "nothing new under the sun" ancient Greeks; a big chunk of their writing was fantasy, if you think about it.
SF's about as close as we get to truly "new", and even that builds on the same stuff; it's the mechanics that differ.
Nah, the first human fiction was the good old fashioned boast: "I swear, that bear musta been eight, no nine, ten feet tall. And I think there mighta been two of them. No, Im sure, there were four!"
I dont so much separate SF and Fantasy because the only difference is that scifi calls the magic Science. The potion is just a drug, the monster is a genetic creation, or an alien, the magic sword actually has nano-bots in the hilt, the man could through lightning because of implants in his hands, etc. SF just takes tech across the line into fantasy. its just easier for us to buy since the 19th century because we believe in science now instead of magic.
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My great aunt was a voracious reader well into her 90s, and I remember discussing this subject with her one time. Her take was, "If you boil a plot down to its bones, in the end it's always about sex."
There does come a point at which categories are so broad as to become useless...
I always used to hate it when people told me my frequent dreams about looking for books were "really" about looking for love, or sex. Especially when they were about very specific books that I very much wnated for a long time, and put a lot of effort into hunting down.
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I dont so much separate SF and Fantasy because the only difference is that scifi calls the magic Science. The potion is just a drug, the monster is a genetic creation, or an alien, the magic sword actually has nano-bots in the hilt, the man could through lightning because of implants in his hands, etc. SF just takes tech across the line into fantasy. its just easier for us to buy since the 19th century because we believe in science now instead of magic.
Science isn't about belief, though. It's inherently testable and it works. What it's for is a matter of belief, sure, but equating it with magic at that precise level is a scale error.
At risk of opening a long and complicated argument, I disagree entirely with your main point too. The difference between SF and fantasy isn't furniture, it's attitude. In SF the unknown is there to be explained and figured out, and everything, even if not rationally explained, is rationally explicable. It's the faith in the explicability of the universe that makes SF a distinct thing.
Yes, this makes Star Wars fantasy, but really, will affecting reality directly through The Force ? Fantasy. However many spaceships you add.
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I've never understood the idea that will's having an effect on physical reality automatically counted as fantasy. Why does this get assumed (I'm guilty of it sometimes, too)?
I think (re-tangenting here) that what you're calling SF is really hard SF, the stuff written with science clearly thought out. Non-hard SF, the kind that says "Oh, yeah, really, this funky scientific advancement DOES work - trust me", edges closer to fantasy than to the SF ideal. I mean, the Dresdenverse is rigorously thought-out, with consistency being of great importance; it qualifies more as SF than does some of the non-hard SF I've seen.
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The ancient Greeks were already saying, "There is nothing new under the sun,"
...and they stole that from King Solomon ;D ;D ;D ;D
"What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
There is nothing new under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9
knnn.
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Where do you think old Solly got it? ;)
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I've never understood the idea that will's having an effect on physical reality automatically counted as fantasy. Why does this get assumed (I'm guilty of it sometimes, too)?
Because it translates emotional reality directly into physical in ways that have no basis in our actual understanding of the universe.
I think (re-tangenting here) that what you're calling SF is really hard SF, the stuff written with science clearly thought out.
If we have this argument, we'll just all draw our own lines in different places, and I do not think anything will be resolved. Since Damon Knight is no longer with us, we can't even call on him to come over and point at things for us.
I mean, the Dresdenverse is rigorously thought-out, with consistency being of great importance; it qualifies more as SF than does some of the non-hard SF I've seen.
Agreed, to an extent; there is too much intentionally left blank - cf. the discussions elsewhere about the exact nature of God in the Dresdenverse - for it to really feel like an entirely SFnal world to me.
Contrast Mike Carey's Felix Castor books, urban fantasy with exorcist protagonist, in which all of a wide range of supernatural stuff happening is, seemingly, consequences of one Event about a decade before the first book, the exact nature of which is being worked out as the series goes on. To my mind those are science fiction.
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Because it translates emotional reality directly into physical in ways that have no basis in our actual understanding of the universe.
I just don't see why that's a problem. There are many theories about consciousness that essentially require the possibility of mind affecting physical reality.
If we have this argument, we'll just all draw our own lines in different places, and I do not think anything will be resolved. Since Damon Knight is no longer with us, we can't even call on him to come over and point at things for us.
Wasn't intended as an argument, merely an illustration of how fluid the lines are even within genres. SF is not so separate from other genres as we might believe.
Agreed, to an extent; there is too much intentionally left blank - cf. the discussions elsewhere about the exact nature of God in the Dresdenverse - for it to really feel like an entirely SFnal world to me.
Very few SF works discuss everything. Much is left unexplained or even completely ignored - for example, Damon Knight's Why Do Birds leaves the majority of the SF-specific aspects entirely or minimally unexplained. Yet it's considered good SF.
It's just been my experience that little truly separates the genres; even hard SF, when well-written, is not so different from others - at its heart, a good story is still... well, a story. And for human readers, there's a certain set of shared-experience considerations that always enter into play.
Don't misunderstand me - I think that SF/fantasy are more freeing than are other genres. They put the human experience into unexpected and even new contexts, yet the human-experience aspect always shows through. They go beyond but bring it all back home to the human. And that's a good thing, in my opinion. :)
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I just don't see why that's a problem. There are many theories about consciousness that essentially require the possibility of mind affecting physical reality.
One of the few things that many philosophers can actually agree on is that the idea of emotional responses or some sort of non-physical (ie spiritual) part of the self affecting the physical realm in ways we don't understand is actually a necessary requirement of Free Will. the argument being that if there is not some immaterial x-factor, then the brain is just one big chemical reaction that has only one possible path of responses and outcomes based on the inputs exposed to it, and that our belief in our own choice is simple a delution of grandeur.
Very few SF works discuss everything. Much is left unexplained or even completely ignored - for example, Damon Knight's Why Do Birds leaves the majority of the SF-specific aspects entirely or minimally unexplained. Yet it's considered good SF.
It's just been my experience that little truly separates the genres; even hard SF, when well-written, is not so different from others - at its heart, a good story is still... well, a story. And for human readers, there's a certain set of shared-experience considerations that always enter into play.
Don't misunderstand me - I think that SF/fantasy are more freeing than are other genres. They put the human experience into unexpected and even new contexts, yet the human-experience aspect always shows through. They go beyond but bring it all back home to the human. And that's a good thing, in my opinion. :)
Thats what i thought. SF/Fantasy taken as a whole are definitely a separate thing from other fiction, because they live in the Why Not over the Why; in what could be possible, not what is. But within it, does it really change anything but flavor whether the super-strength was a result of gamma radiation and genetic manipulation or Troll blood and a magic ritual? And does the fact that the word "gamma radiation" appears in science books make its use any less Fantastic?
And it goes both ways. Some fantasy worlds are ordered and logical enough to have the feel of SF; dresden is a good example at times, so is the Young wizards series by Diane Duane. Similarly some SF definately cross into a more fantasy realm; Dune is a big one, so is Star Wars (no matter how many microscopic organisms are in my blood).
I guess I just think any hard division between the two are all going to be cosmetic, rather than effecting what kind of story-telling can be done.
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One of the few things that many philosophers can actually agree on is that the idea of emotional responses or some sort of non-physical (ie spiritual) part of the self affecting the physical realm in ways we don't understand is actually a necessary requirement of Free Will. the argument being that if there is not some immaterial x-factor, then the brain is just one big chemical reaction that has only one possible path of responses and outcomes based on the inputs exposed to it, and that our belief in our own choice is simple a delution of grandeur.
Personally, if I have a choice between intellectual rigour and believing in free will for the sake of believing in free will, intellectual rigour wins.
At some levels it's a spurious opposition, though; free will and determinism are not necessarily contradictory. The arguments there are too complex for me to do them justice in the time I have available; I recommend Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves.
And does the fact that the word "gamma radiation" appears in science books make its use any less Fantastic?
If it's used as magic handwaving, it's fantasy. If it's used as a part of the world in much the same way as heat and light and gravity and the bits of reality that are intuitively obvious to us because they're the ones that have always been directly palpable to us are, it's SF. My degrees are in genetics, so I don't default read "mutation" as magic password to superpowers, I read it as a very specific phenomenon that works in ways as understandable as going down to the shop for a loaf of bread.
I guess I just think any hard division between the two are all going to be cosmetic, rather than effecting what kind of story-telling can be done.
There's more than one borderland, IMO, and as an aspiring author I am interested in how things work differently, what makes something feel SF or fantasy and where the edges are. Magic with strict scientific rules, on one hand, and a world with underlying rational workings inhabited by people who think of them as magic, on the other, are very different things, but they're both edge cases between SF and fantasy.
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I just don't see why that's a problem. There are many theories about consciousness that essentially require the possibility of mind affecting physical reality.
Insofar as sentience as software has to run on something, yes. [ Though to loop back to the start of the thread for a moment, Permutation City does a lovely deconstruction of even that notion. ] But there is a difference of scale between that and magical thinking.
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All the good stories are remade every so often. That's how come stories of King Arthur are still told today.
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Insofar as sentience as software has to run on something, yes. [ Though to loop back to the start of the thread for a moment, Permutation City does a lovely deconstruction of even that notion. ] But there is a difference of scale between that and magical thinking.
Not being argumentative here - I honestly don't see any intrinsic difference there, just ones that are functions of the authors' choices.
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Not being argumentative here - I honestly don't see any intrinsic difference there, just ones that are functions of the authors' choices.
Well, unless you want to go all cognitive zombie apocalypse*, the scientific method suggests that human minds are actually working and running on human brains in some way of which we are only just now starting to grasp the details. The scientific method does not, as yet, support the proposition that Willing It Really Hard makes fireballs come out of your fingers. Not to say the author cannot choose to do the latter and make a good book out of it, just that it's not SF to do so. Come up with a rigorous enough take on it and it might feel like alternate science, like a lot of what Ted Chiang does.
*See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombie-movie.html for example
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This is why I said some theories work that way. Given that they're just as valid as mind-as-emergent-phenomenon theories (i.e., nobody's got convincing data either way and there are more than enough inexplicable phenomena to support at least the possibility of a non-material mind), I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept them as reasonable possibilities; the scientific method neither excludes nor includes without sufficient data. In the absence of sufficient data, even "alternate science" is a reasonable option.
... which brings us back to the original point: mind over matter cannot be rejected out of hand.
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mind over matter cannot be rejected out of hand.
If it were, Star Wars couldn't be considered SciFi. (Nor Star Trek or Babylon5, though the Jedi Knights are really the closest thing to wizards that scifi's got.)
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This is why I said some theories work that way. Given that they're just as valid as mind-as-emergent-phenomenon theories (i.e., nobody's got convincing data either way and there are more than enough inexplicable phenomena to support at least the possibility of a non-material mind), I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept them as reasonable possibilities; the scientific method neither excludes nor includes without sufficient data. In the absence of sufficient data, even "alternate science" is a reasonable option.
When all else fails, though, Occam's razor feels more scientific than postulating extra-scientific agencies to me.
I suspect I find software-is-sentience more easy to believe than many people because I have seen more examples of how easy it is to program the appearance of sentient behvaiour into something.
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When all else fails, though, Occam's razor feels more scientific than postulating extra-scientific agencies to me.
I suspect I find software-is-sentience more easy to believe than many people because I have seen more examples of how easy it is to program the appearance of sentient behvaiour into something.
... which brings us back to the Zombie Apocalypse link you gave us (highly entertaining, by the way!). ;)
All this says is that the concept of will affecting material reality is, at present, a moot point, both in and of itself and as a tool for fiction. *shrugs* Nice topic, though; I've spent many an hour talking about it and related subjects.
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If it were, Star Wars couldn't be considered SciFi. (Nor Star Trek or Babylon5, though the Jedi Knights are really the closest thing to wizards that scifi's got.)
Yet some people still wonder why
We say "SF" instead of "SciFi";
It's because there's a fine line
Between Robert Heinlein
And "Son of the Two-Headed Fly".
Star Wars is fantasy.
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Star Wars is fantasy.
Why? Not that I disagree completely, but what's to stop SF from having fantastic elements? Look at Heinlein's multiperson pantheistic solipsism if you want to see BIG-time mental effects on physical reality couched in SF.
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Why? Not that I disagree completely, but what's to stop SF from having fantastic elements? Look at Heinlein's multiperson pantheistic solipsism if you want to see BIG-time mental effects on physical reality couched in SF.
Because George Lucas said so.
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Star Wars is fantasy.
Well, really, it's Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies rewritten with lightsabres.
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Well, really, it's Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies rewritten with lightsabres.
That's how they started out, but the story evolved quite a bit. From the Making of book.
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I think the question of what is Science Fiction versus what is Fantasy can at best only be answered vaguely. I think one problem is the perceived hierarchy between the two - anything can be considered fantasy, but there are "standards" for science fiction.
In general, for something to be "Hard" SF, it must not contain elements which are not directly supportable using current science. Science Fiction in general only contains elements which do not contradict current science, but may contain elements which are not necessarily supported by science.
Fantasy does not answer to science at all, and may contain elements which contradict science.
Many stories contain a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, but where they cross the line from being "SF with fantasy elements" and become "Fantasy with SF elements" is up to the reader.
Regardless of whether a work is SF or Fantasy, the work should still be self-consistent.
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If the definition of a science fiction novel is that it must not contradict science, then I believe I've never read one in my life :D
Fantasy contradicts science a lot less, since it doesn't talk about it much at all. ;)
BTW, I write Fantasy, do you have any idea the kind of research the author has to do to get all the flora et fauna, geography, climates, the medicine, mathmatics, and history right? That's all science (even the last, because a huge part of it concerns the history of technology).
Personally, I can't stand/read any kind of fantasy where the heroes march through some dragon-infested high plateau under a hot merciless sun where there isn't enough water to wet their parched lips and not even a shrub to take shade, and then the author says: they lived on berries and mushrooms.
Imho, the modern reader (unlike the readers of say Jules Verne or Asimov or . . .) expects more realism and scientific correctness both in Fantasy AND in Science Fiction.
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If the definition of a science fiction novel is that it must not contradict science, then I believe I've never read one in my life :D
Fantasy contradicts science a lot less, since it doesn't talk about it much at all. ;)
Imho, the modern reader (unlike the readers of say Jules Verne or Asimov or . . .) expects more realism and scientific correctness both in Fantasy AND in Science Fiction.
My favorite example, and the Only series I think qualifies as not contradicting science is Tom Swift, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift) the original ones. Science Fiction in the 1900 about an inventor: Tom Swift and his Motor Cycle, Tom Swift and his Electric Train, Tom Swift and his Moving Pictures. Its why I believe in Science; science fiction is just science Not Yet.
That really has no real bearing on the discussion of the sf/fantasy dichotomy and where the line falls, but I thought it was a relevant example
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BTW, I write Fantasy, do you have any idea the kind of research the author has to do to get all the flora et fauna, geography, climates, the medicine, mathmatics, and history right? That's all science (even the last, because a huge part of it concerns the history of technology).
If you are bothering to do that, you're way ahead of an awful lot of published fantasy writers.
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If you are bothering to do that, you're way ahead of an awful lot of published fantasy writers.
Sad but true - it's one of the reasons I tend to shy away from fantasy. It's so often SCREAMINGLY intellectually inconsistent.
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If the definition of a science fiction novel is that it must not contradict science, then I believe I've never read one in my life :D
Shame you picked "novel" there, because there's a whole pile of Asimov short stories that don't have anything in contradicting science, particularly the more mystery-like ones. I'm sure if I were at home and looking at my bookshelves I could come up with some counterexamples here.
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Sad but true - it's one of the reasons I tend to shy away from fantasy. It's so often SCREAMINGLY intellectually inconsistent.
And occasionally there will be one that really thinks through the economics, or what magical healing does to infant mortality and how that affects population, and basically nobody ever seems to notice.
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And occasionally there will be one that really thinks through the economics, or what magical healing does to infant mortality and how that affects population, and basically nobody ever seems to notice.
It's what I call the Good Politician Syndrome - they're so few and far between that people don't believe in them when they DO appear. ;)