Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> 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.

While I agree in principle, I think there is too much variation in what is
considered 'proper' SF. I personally would classify Niven & co's "Lucifer's
Hammer" as SF, even though there is absolutely no science or tech extrapolation.
Likewise, Harris' "Fatherland", or McCauley's "Pasquale's Angel". These latter
are both extrapolations of a real society given a single small difference in
recorded history, again without any novel tech or science.

I'm sure you could say that these belong in a different genre, given that the
'science' in SF explicitly demands there to be some scientific whatifs. But I
think the speculation and extrapolation central to SF is the same process
regardless of what one is extending. I think the genre was named poorly, and
perhaps 'speculative fiction' is more apt (as someone else suggesed) - it just
so happened that science was the big society-changing thing in the genre's early
days.

As an aside, although I agree that much of star trek is indeed a soap opera that
could take place anywhere and anywhen, there are some genuine SF stories in
there. The same goes for Doctor Who. And personally I found a large proportion
of B5 to be good, if not original, SF.

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