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Warp schrieb:
> Isn't *all* fiction speculative? If a piece of art is not speculative
> fiction, then it's a documentary (if not outright a historical account).
> Kind of makes the word "speculative" a bit obsolete. Or is there some type
> of fiction other than speculative?
I wouldn't call most pulp fiction "speculative". It usually just tries
to entertain, typically being set in a familiar world, without raising
any questions of "what-if" (i.e. speculate) - unless of course you
include trivial speculations such as "what if this guy now falls in love
with that girl" in that definition.
I wouldn't even consider most whodunits as "speculative", even though
there's inevitably a lot of speculation going on, as those are no
/fundamental/ "what-ifs", and the aim of the story is not to have the
reader /speculate/, but /discover/.
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gregjohn wrote:
> Or you'd have the same theme if they went on a sailing ship to a faraway island,
> found strange beastly apparitions that later turned out to be sentient men, and
> then the ship's doctor's tobacco miraculously cured the chieftain of some
> disease.
Indeed. And I think most people would rate both the Illiad and the Island of
Dr Moureau as speculative fiction if not sci fi in the latter case. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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clipka <ano### [at] anonymous org> wrote:
> I wouldn't even consider most whodunits as "speculative", even though
> there's inevitably a lot of speculation going on, as those are no
> /fundamental/ "what-ifs", and the aim of the story is not to have the
> reader /speculate/, but /discover/.
The speculation part is by the author, not the reader. ;)
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>
> Indeed. And I think most people would rate both the Illiad and the Island of
> Dr Moureau as speculative fiction if not sci fi in the latter case. :-)
>
I've been reading some of those 19th century tales. It is interesting that
there is a very different feel to "20,000 Leagues" than a typical 60's scifi
novel. In the older works, the authors are all about amazement at the grandeur
before them. In the latter ones, everyone is jaded about how society's worst
problems came along with them to Mars or the moon.
I am preparing a DVD compilation of public domain books. I chose to make the
access on the virtue of "genre", and I put Verne and Wells in with the old sea
tales, not with the 1930's scifi.
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Darren New wrote:
> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_hate_star_trek.html
>
>
> This pretty much says why I consider science fiction to only be that
> where you couldn't write the story without the technology. Could Star
> Trek be written as a western or a Spanish Armada kind of story? Yes.
> Could Ringworld? Not hardly.
>
> If you can still tell the story without the technology, it's not SF.
> Oddly enough, most of the original Star Trek series that people liked
> the best (say, the one with the Horta) were ones where you couldn't take
> out the tech and tell the same story.
One element that is very common in SF is the political dimension.
Generally, an SF tale revolves around the effects of a given technology
on society; either the explorers stumble onto a society that is
different because of some piece of technology, or some new technology
causes our society to be shifted in a significant way.
For instance, Trek used the "society run by a computer" for multiple
episodes, and several episodes had the characters doing something less
than intelligent in order to avoid violating the sacred Prime Directive
(TNG was far worse in this regard).
Regards,
John
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gregjohn wrote:
> In the older works, the authors are all about amazement at the grandeur
> before them. In the latter ones, everyone is jaded about how society's worst
> problems came along with them to Mars or the moon.
Another excellent point. And some of the stuff from the 40's and 50's,
there's a bit of "oh *that's* how it works" kind of moments, without the
"awe" as such.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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gregjohn wrote:
> I've been reading some of those 19th century tales. It is interesting that
> there is a very different feel to "20,000 Leagues" than a typical 60's scifi
> novel. In the older works, the authors are all about amazement at the grandeur
> before them. In the latter ones, everyone is jaded about how society's worst
> problems came along with them to Mars or the moon.
I guess after a couple decades of science promising New York but
delivering New Jersey, people got a bit cynical ;)
...Chambers
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"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message
news:web.4ad70d5f48067d0f34d207310@news.povray.org...
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>
>> Indeed. And I think most people would rate both the Illiad and the Island
>> of
>> Dr Moureau as speculative fiction if not sci fi in the latter case. :-)
>>
>
>
> I've been reading some of those 19th century tales. It is interesting
> that
> there is a very different feel to "20,000 Leagues" than a typical 60's
> scifi
> novel. In the older works, the authors are all about amazement at the
> grandeur
> before them. In the latter ones, everyone is jaded about how society's
> worst
> problems came along with them to Mars or the moon.
>
> I am preparing a DVD compilation of public domain books. I chose to make
> the
> access on the virtue of "genre", and I put Verne and Wells in with the old
> sea
> tales, not with the 1930's scifi.
>
>
> gregjohn wrote:
>> In the older works, the authors are all about amazement at the grandeur
>> before them. In the latter ones, everyone is jaded about how society's
>> worst
>> problems came along with them to Mars or the moon.
>
> Another excellent point. And some of the stuff from the 40's and 50's,
> there's a bit of "oh *that's* how it works" kind of moments, without the
> "awe" as such.
Prior to, oh, about the 1930's most people's idea of "science" was medicine
(to a small extent) and electricity (to a large extent). Most popular
stories were written around that idea. By the time of the war in 1939, most
people could only name one scientist, if that (well, that's mostly still
true... <g>). After the war, people began to think of "science" in terms of
"physicists" which were in demand and somewhat feared (they made bombs,
don't ya know).
People *were* in awe of being able to flip a switch and light a room without
burning anything, and the possibilities seemd to go on forever. But after
the Big War, people started getting scared of what "science" could do, and
popular stories began to reflect that.
Also, SF got a bad rap up to that point because there were so many
bug-eyed-monsters-chase-the-screaming-daughter-of-the-mad-scientist-
who-are-then-saved-by-the-big-square-jawed-galoot stories that were
*called* SF. (Yes, there were some exceptions, but not many). Then in
the 1940's, along came some authors who assumed their audience could
think, and enjoyed doing so (I'm thinking of Heinlein and Asimov in
particular, but it was a fashion that caught on for a while).
Starting slowly, then picking up steam after 1977, cinema began to reflect
the idea that SF stories had to blow things up (blowing things up, after
all, is totally cool... in a movie). An awful lot of what passess for SF in
books these days will have space travel in it, and something, somewhere will
explode.
I'm not sure it matters, really, whether Fiction is Science or Speculative
or anything in between. I just wish there were more authors who paid
*attention* to actual science, and don't just make up miracles in tech
disguises that grate on the nerves. :D
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Some of the best "Sci Fi" I've ever read isn't even "Sci Fi." Still
really good books, though :) (I'm thinking of Donaldson's GAP Cycle).
I think part of the reason that Sci Fi remains a niche market is mainly
because many authors get the "Sci" part right, and the "Fi" part wrong.
So many of the books are just downright *bad*, and even many of the
good ones have poor character development (wasn't it said of Asimov that
he "[wrote] about people as if he'd never met one"?).
I would really love to see more quality Sci Fi, that's actually good
fiction and not just good Sci Fi. I realize Star Trek made attempts at
this (to the point of ignoring the science except as a Deus Ex Machina),
but they failed so horribly at the fiction part that it remains in a
class by itself.
...Chambers
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_hate_star_trek.html
>
> If you can still tell the story without the technology, it's not SF.
When he talks about scripts containing "tech the tech", I think this could be
called literary greebling. Greebles do not detract from an object's main role
in a scene unless the entire substance of the object are the greebles
themselves*. If a SF story has nothing more than "literary greebles" setting a
certain style, then I agree, it's less of "true SF" and more of conventional
story telling in a relatively arbitrary setting.
*in some application other than a greebling demonstration.
Charles
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