7.0 KiB
[TIP] Is science killing science fiction?
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Author: u/None *
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Score: 7
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Created: 2014-01-28T13:17:04
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+9] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Science fiction has always run the gamut from hard to soft, and hard scifi doesn't show any signs of going away anytime soon. I could list off a half dozen hard scifi books of the past decade without even trying. Yes, science necessarily constrains what's considered "hard" scifi, and perhaps there will be a point where everything that's theoretically possible to do will be done, but come on, there are all sorts of things that are possible and haven't been done.
It's just that people like fantasy, they like laser swords, reactionless drives, and space opera. And that stuff has always been there, it hasn't gotten any more or less popular that I can see.
u/Paradoxius [+2] (17 hours later)
Honestly, this person seems to mean that things are "ruined" because we know they're not actually possible, which is pretty pretentious to be honest.
u/trifith [+5] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (an hour later)
Lets write a realistic space sci-fi real quick. Considering AI is the only not-impossible Sci-fi trope I can think of, we'll go with that.
Post-AI humans make a one-way cryo trip to a extra-solar planet that long range viewing says could support them. Upon arriving they find a alien race that does not yet have AI levels of tech. Now what? There's no trade between a post-AI society and a pre-AI society, the pre-AI society simply does not have anything to offer the post-AI one. A military conflict is similarly one-sided, the post-AI team wins.
Okay, story two. Post-AI humans arrive and find a post-AI alien race. Now the story is all about how two AIs compete to fill their utility functions. A story with two completely alien minds that are also alien to each other with no human mind to get in the middle is VERY hard to write, and to read.
Story 3 is Post-AI aliens show up at earth and you have the same problems as story 1, only this time the humans lose. Not exactly going to be popular fiction among a human audience.
Realistic Sci-Fi is hard. The easy stuff is impossible, and the possible stuff kills story options.
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
You're missing a whole ton of "possible" sci-fi tropes:
- Human cloning
- Brian uploading
- Genetic engineering
- Spacestations
- Terraforming
- Nanotechnology
- Virtual reality
- Brain alterations (chemical or physical)
- Super-viruses
- Body backups
- Cloaking devices
- Asteroid collisions
And I didn't even mention aliens!
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Most of those are either going to go horribly, story-killingly wrong, or be a bunch more boring than scifi authors and fans like to believe, or turn out utopian.
Terraforming is brilliant, though. I always wanted to read something like Dune that covered the planetology angle much more closely.
I think what might be killing science fiction is that by now, hard scifi tropes are very high impact compared to the days of yore in space opera. Space opera just meant space was an ocean and ships sailed the ocean! It gets hard to write a scifi story about people whose basic version of the human condition is just fundamentally different from ours.
EDIT: So the above poster was correct, yeah.
u/flame7926 [+1] The Lone Power (2 days later)
Red Mars and the sequels cover the planetary impact of terraforming a lot.
u/Jinoc [+2] (8 hours later)
Even for rationalist science fiction that's limiting the options a bit too much. For one, you could assume that FAI is hard, and hence there is a wealth of possibilities before FAI become widespread but during, say, a post-scarcity time. Or before post-scarcity but after some measure of space exploration.
Or even with AI, the utility function needs not be something so simple that it wouldn't allow for storytelling. Imagine an AI has decided it would have its fun simulating (or creating) a futuristic civilization without AI ? (which is basically similar to having no AI in the first place, but is somewhat realistic).
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Now the story is all about how two AIs compete to fill their utility functions.
Assuming the two species are still around (ie: they got their AI right), you might imagine the AIs are hands-off, so you don't have to write a game theory textbook instead of a scifi novel.
Now what? There's no trade between a post-AI society and a pre-AI society, the pre-AI society simply does not have anything to offer the post-AI one. A military conflict is similarly one-sided, the post-AI team wins.
Diplomancy? Does your future culture have a Prime Directive like Starfleet? Basically, are they forbidden from interfering to help out these poor backwards aliens somehow? Is it right for them to help the poor backwards aliens? I mean, at the tech level you're talking about, if our post-whatever humans desire to just conjure the other species their own AI, overthrow the existing government, cure all the hospital patients, and have a new curriculum sent out to the local equivalent of schools, they can. So why is it going to come to a military conflict?
u/Geminii27 [+2] (18 hours later)
Science drives science fiction.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (43 minutes later)
Bleh. I haven't been alive long enough to have experienced these distinct "eras" of sci-fi, so my perspective might just be moot, but I don't agree at all.
Things like Worm show there's plenty of things to be imagined which fit just fine with modern science. I have an Arthur C. Clarke anthology with like 150 stories in it and all of them still make sense even with decades of technology past their writing.
This isn't a case of science killing sci-fi, it's just that the market got tired of the low-hanging fruit. Things like the Internet, with its TvTropes and its Wikipedia and so on and so forth put the pressure back on the authors to outdo their predecessors.
Personal anecdote: I'm working on a novel with a magic system based on manipulating higher-order dimensions. Writing a fight scene which takes place inside of a hypercube is fun, and it's something I probably couldn't pull off without the resources available to get the relevant knowledge without taking a degree in Math.
Edit: I x-posted this to /r/yawriters. Should get some good responses.
u/Jinoc [+9] (8 hours later)
I wouldn't say Worm fits with modern science in any way, shape or form. The powers explicitly break the laws of physics, and the justification for them is shady at best.