10 KiB
[HSF][D] Savanna Poets - In real science fiction, the science is intrinsically part of the plot—you can't move the story from space to the savanna, not without losing something. When we find strangeness, we should respect it enough to tell its story truly.
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Author: u/asd7ua7 *
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Score: 13
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Created: 2014-03-09T16:10:20
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (9 hours later)
I've long heard that comparison made, and I've always thought that it falls down when you start allowing for fantasy.
Is a science fiction story no longer a science fiction story when you put it in the Middle Ages and add in magic? Let's say that I have a story about an aggressive hegemonizing swarm - robots that build more of themselves, and whose only goal is to build more of themselves. I can pretty easily "fantasize" that - the robots become golems made of mud, they have their instructions written on a piece of paper held inside their head, etc.
I fully believe that savannah people could understand that story, with the science replaced by magic. Yet I also believe that that's a science fiction story. So either that phrasing of what science fiction is needs to change, or there are whole swaths of stories that I've wrongly classified as "not space opera".
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+3] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)
All science fiction plots have analogues in sufficiently lawful fantasy plots, though the reverse is not true. I think the idea is that a plot is Space Opera if it can be transposed to a Western, or a historical setting plus the sort of magic that humans already used to believe in, without having to invent especially new and interesting magic.
Although this would make E. E. "doc" Smith Not Space Opera because you can't actually put Kimball Kinnison and Eddore and Arisia into the old west. Eddore and Arisia are not classical deities and you can't transpose them onto classical deities without losing the story...
Which you might consider a reductio because "doc" Smith has always been considered classic space opera, but now that I stare at this argument I have just written, I think "doc" Smith is actually science fiction masquerading as space opera.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
All science fiction plots have analogues in sufficiently lawful fantasy plots, though the reverse is not true.
The contrapositive is certainly true. All fantasy plots have analogues in sufficiently soft-core science fiction plots -- most of which are "Doctor Who", "Star Trek", or "Twilight Zone" episodes.
This was a point emphasized in the Science Fiction Literature course I took in college: the major point of science fiction is to examine how the world works in the presence of some novum, some component of reality that has been changed from how things are in real life right now. The more plentiful and the larger the changes constituting the novum (for example, a reality based on five colors of mana rather than a few handfuls of quarks and field quanta), the "softer" the science fiction.
Yet when you see this literary logic, that the in-story reality flows from the novum, you've got proper speculative fiction. The opposite is true, too, of course: the hardest science fiction is Speculative Science in which the in-story novum contradicts nothing we know about reality right now. A fair portion of the stuff you've written falls on that end of things: you're literally engaged in speculating about the effects of a novum you yourself are trying to build.
(Note that this lets us preserve a distinction between speculative fiction and things like fairy tales, which have no rules to their reality and often don't even follow the narrative logic of a fantasy story.)
This way in which soft scifi still functions as science fiction in the literary sense can be seen most clearly in just those shows mentioned above: the original purpose of Twilight Zone, Doctor Who and Star Trek was to provide a framing story for filming one speculative-fiction short-story per episode/serial, with each single story being driven by its own novum and examining that novum.
u/asd7ua7 [+1] (23 hours later)
That's a good point and I don't have a perfectly viable counterargument against it.
That's just very rarely how fantasy is written, often it's focused on people and not on something that could be a technological or a scientific concept. In that case I'd say 'magic' is just 'science' by another name (technological or scientific concept to be precise)
I fully believe that savannah people could understand that story
It'd be nice to know what exactly does "understand" mean in this context. If you use 'magic' as a placeholder then you are not supposed to understand it in most cases because you can't understand magic. Technology is something that can be understood, magic can't.
Then you have books like Accelerando of Blindsight that are filled with technological concepts and it would still be utterly incomprehensible even if you replaced it all with magic.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
That's just very rarely how fantasy is written, often it's focused on people and not on something that could be a technological or a scientific concept.
I think a good question is: does the magic behave more according to the rules for nonliving materials, life forms, or minds?
- Nonliving materials -- "hard" fantasy that's more like scifi
- Life forms -- traditional fantasy literature, based on Romanticism, in which a fundamental component of the in-story reality acts alive without being reducible to anything nonalive. Can still be very lawful.
- Minds -- mythology and fairy-tails, based on attributing volition and even conscious sapience to fundamental components of reality. Usually not very lawful, since the in-story reality is literally being bent around the desires of living minds that aren't reducible to anything else.
u/asd7ua7 [+1] (a day later)
Oh this was surprising. That distinction is actually what I had in my mind, but I was afraid to generalize my little experience of reading fantasy literature to the whole genre because I wasn't sure if this actually holds true for most fantasy books. If you look at magic battles in Harry Potter or LOTR for example the simplified version of them goes something like this "I use the power of FREE WILL to beat you! - I use my even stronger free will to counter your spell etc."
u/None [+2] (a day later)
If you look at magic battles in Harry Potter or LOTR for example the simplified version of them goes something like this "I use the power of FREE WILL to beat you! - I use my even stronger free will to counter your spell etc."
Uuuuh, no, that's shounen anime you're thinking of.
u/asd7ua7 [+2] (2 days later)
It's a long time since I've read the books, but at least some duels in the movie versions seem to follow that pattern, especially those in which Gandalf fights. Yeah, but Dragon Ball Z and the like of course.
Anyway, I think that's slightly bad influence on young people. Wishful thinking is useful in some situations, but I think it would be better to teach kids that you can actually bend the reality around your desires, but to do so you must do the physical act of bending and wishful thinking in itself doesn't change anything outside your own mind.
When I was a kid I melted a toy gun on a heater and I really, really wished it would turn into a real gun overnight. It didn't, and this was my first contact with empiricism. Well, fortunately market forces are stronger than that and I could just buy a gun from the black market if I really wanted to. At an older age I bought lottery tickets and I really, really wished I would become a rich man. I did this many times until I realized that the simple act of buying a lottery ticket doesn't bend the reality enough to make me a rich man. One of those lottery simulators made this really intuitive when I played something like thousands of rounds and didn't win anything but dimes and kept playing like forever and never won a jackpot.
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
When I was a kid I melted a toy gun on a heater and I really, really wished it would turn into a real gun overnight. It didn't, and this was my first contact with empiricism.
Yes, we all have stories like this. I swear that 100% of all "rationalists" have a story like this. If you are on this subreddit and had never tried acquiring superpowers of any kind by any method, you should really go try it.
Actually, I'm embarrassing. I have several. There was the time I took the Wizard's Oath, the time I bought a book on telekinesis and tried to learn it, the time I asked God to keep me from ever growing up, the time I attempted acausal trade with a future superintelligence, and probably some others I can't remember.
Except for keeping from growing up, none of them ever worked. That one may be experimental error.
u/asd7ua7 [+1] (2 days later)
If you are on this subreddit and had never tried acquiring superpowers of any kind by any method, you should really go try it.
That depends on how powerful the superpower will be. There's a threshold of superpowers before it's worth a try and that threshold is really high.
So be sure to hope for a really powerful superpower!
u/AmeteurOpinions [+1] Finally, everyone was working together. (a day later)
You mean the Manton Effect?
(sorry, I couldn't resist)
u/None [+2] (a day later)
That would work so much better if I'd already read Worm.
As to why I have not read Worm, don't ask.
u/asd7ua7 [+1] (2 days later)
It's funny that you still know about the concept.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
It's less funny that I know about Google, actually.
u/asd7ua7 [+1] (2 days later)
Oh.