scrape_r_rational/data/cache/1zz0ea.md

[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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• u/alexanderwales:

  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:

    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:

      >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.
      

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