A rant about Sci-fi

[zakalwe7]

So lately, been reading a bit of sci -fi - in particular, Blindsight by Peter Watts ( which I seem to remember getting rave reviews around these parts a while back) and The Atrocity Archives, By Charles Stross.

Both have interesting premises, are not terribly written, and had me intrigued enough to slog through at least. But..the science. It's too much. Far too much.

Ok, I'm a bit of a thicky, never studied any science other than high school physics, I kind of know what a black hole is as opposed to a worm hole and that's about the extent of my knowledge. These writers ( and they're not alone, it's an increasing trend) seem to think I have a Phd in astrophysics. ( or maybe just did first year maths at uni even - I have no clue how advanced or basic whatever they are talking about is, to be honest.)

I have no clue what they are talking about at all for large large chunks of the book, in fact.

Now I've been reading sci-fi since I was about eight, and my lack of interest or knopwledge in all things sciencey has never been that much of a handicap to enjoying the genre. Ok, I got a bit lost now and again, but say what you like about old school writers like Heinlein, Niven, Asimov - they at least tried to explain stuff in a way that a layperson can understand. And I came away from their books thinking if I didn't get it, it was most certainly my fault, not theirs.

But Sci-fi now? the assumption is not just of an intelligent reader, it's a reader that knows exactly what a mandelbrot set is ( heard of it at least), or a Parker Spiral ( dunno if that's made up or not?), understands N-space and tau dimensions and, oh hell, lets throw in some genetics and biology for good measure. One or two interesting twists, explained, I can handle - but a whole book of just science spewed at you so fast you have no idea what the plot is actually about any more? No, stop, give my bleeding brain a rest! I can't tell the made up stuff from the real stuff.

Anyway. That's my rant.

Anyone else experienced similar problems of late?

And how much is it up to the writer to try and explain things to the reader - should it just be a given that if you pick up a book with spaceships on the cover you have a thorough grounding in physics?

Or should there maybe be a little warning on the cover 'not suitable for those without university level science course'?

Topic started by needle not Zak..this is why I miss skins, can't tell who is bloody logged in!

[jurble]

You don't know what a Mandelbrot set is!?

[zakalwe7]

You don't know what a Mandelbrot set is!?

Nope, and would rather not watch something on youtube to find out..:P I have a vague idea it's something to do with fractals, but why it's important is beyond me. I knew it was too obvious an example to include, but can't be arsed flicking though two books for other examples.

[Werthead]

This is a common complaint against some of modern SF. Watts and Stross get criticised for it a bit (although Stross has less bleeding-edge books as well), as does Stephen Baxter, whilst Greg Egan is even more incomprehensible.

Basically, fifty years back the cutting edge of SF was travelling into space and to other worlds, maybe finding some form of FTL travel or alien life, which you can turn into a rollicking good story with ease. Nowdays the cutting edge is quantum foam, vacuum waveform fluctuations and advanced string theory, which is a bit more cerebral and trickier to make into compelling drama.

That's why a large chunk of the 'New SF' field, particularly the 'New Space Opera' guys, have stepped back a bit and instead of going after the cutting-edge has settled for exploring less advanced ideas in a more comprehensible manner. Baxter has done that with some of his more recent novels (less galaxy-sized torques ripping holes in the universe and more Waterworld, basically), whilst Brin, Hamilton and Reynolds have arguably always done that and Banks has always seen the setting as secondary to his characters.

That's not to say that authors like Hamilton and Reynolds don't use ultra-advanced concepts and ideas, but do so fairly sparingly and usually in a manner that doesn't require a phD in astrophysics to understand.

Interestingly, the best use of M-sets in SF I've seen is in Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost from the Grand Banks, in which he clearly outlines what they are and even has an appendix showing how they work. Old-school, but it worked.

[RaceBannon42]

Brasyl and Ian McDonald really made my head hurt.

Still loved it, but I felt really dumb reading it.

[needle]

Brasyl and Ian McDonald really made my head hurt.

Still loved it, but I felt really dumb reading it.

Yeah, see I love Ian McDonald, even though it makes my head hurt there's enough to keep me reading anyway...but those last two by Stross and Watts? just ..no. A step too far.

Though I'd probably prefer Ian McDonald slightly dumbed down, too ;p

[RaceBannon42]

Yeah, see I love Ian McDonald, even though it makes my head hurt there's enough to keep me reading anyway...but those last two by Stross and Watts? just ..no. A step too far.

Though I'd probably prefer Ian McDonald slightly dumbed down, too ;p

I found Blindsight a bit less cerebral than Brasyl. I havent read any of Stross's heavy stuff, just the Merchant Princes which is much fluffier, although there is a bit of heavy science in there as well, but not much.

[theMountainGoat]

By the way if you are looking for some forum skins you can try here:

www.sermountaingoat.co.uk/skins/index.php

Not that they would be useful for figuring out who is logged in unless you are using different browsers, but I figured you might want them for the different colour schemes anyway ;)

On topic: I agree to a certain point, when reading a sci-fi book I want to read a story rather than feel like I am reading a science text book, however authors are keenly aware that if they don't include some of the science theory for whatever they are describing then they will get criticized by those who do understand it and think the author got it wrong. Plus a little bit of good science does help me to feel like the author knows what they are talking about.

[ljkeane]

Both have interesting premises, are not terribly written, and had me intrigued enough to slog through at least. But..the science. It's too much. Far too much.

I definitely see where you're coming from, there are a lot of science fiction books where it goes over the top. I'd suggest Richard Morgan's science fiction books if you haven't already read them.

[Relic]

Anyone else experienced similar problems of late?

Yes i was thinking the exact same thing just yesterday. If you havent read Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire check it out. It's got a lot less techo-babble disguised as writing, but it's also pretty short.

[MattD]

1) It's your responsibility to determine if a book is something you'd like to read. Watts and Stross have well-known and well-earned reputations for hard SF that geeks out on the leading edge of science.

2) Ranting about something on the basis of just a few examples is silly. There are plenty of contemporary folks writing less science-intense (read: accurate) SF. Try some John Scalzi, Karen Traviss, Timothy Zahn, Tobias Buckell, Mike Resnick's Starship books, yes Scott Westerfeld's Risen Empire series, etc.

3) Book reviews exist not merely to guide people to what books to read, but also to help bring to light and explicate the more difficult layers of books. That's what I tried to do here, at any rate, for Blindsight; I'd also point you at this and this, just for starters. So if a book leaves you confused, going off on a rant about it is just one of your options.

[needle]

Relic - might go and pick that one up. Never heard of it before, but looks interesting.

ljkeane - Yeah, I do enjoy Morgan.

SMG : using different browsers would be the right solution. :P.

On topic: I agree to a certain point, when reading a sci-fi book I want to read a story rather than feel like I am reading a science text book, however authors are keenly aware that if they don't include some of the science theory for whatever they are describing then they will get criticized by those who do understand it and think the author got it wrong. Plus a little bit of good science does help me to feel like the author knows what they are talking about.

Well, see that's what appendices and footnotes are for, no? then the sciencey folk can geek out to their heart's content, yet the flow of the story doesn't get totally tangled down in scientific detail.

MattD -

1) It's your responsibility to determine if a book is something you'd like to read. Watts and Stross have well-known and well-earned reputations for hard SF that geeks out on the leading edge of science.

Well, you may have a point with Watts, I haven't read anything else of his, but for Stross - yes, he has a reputation, but out of the 8 or 9 of his books I have read, only a couple of them are incomprehensible, and can even be classed as hard SF. So hmm. Is it my responsibility to guess if he's in incomprehensible mode today or not? Or is it his, as a writer, to guauge his audience? Stross is obviously a versatile writer, but that just makes it difficult to decide before I try whether or not I'm going to like something he writes.

Merchant Prince series- soft sci-fi ( enjoyed, not the greatest)

Accelerando - hard scifi ( loved the first half, hated the post singularity parts)

Halting State - really enjoyed, wouldn't say was hard sf, more like cyberpunk.

Singularity Sky - only ever got half way through thanks to publisher misprinting the book and me not rebuying it, but didn't find it very hard SF. perhaps it got so.

Atrocity Archives - Not really hard SF as it's mostly made up, but too hard SF for me :P

See? how the hell am I supposed to guess which mood (or mode) he's in before I read it?

2) Ranting about something on the basis of just a few examples is silly. There are plenty of contemporary folks writing less science-intense (read: accurate) SF. Try some John Scalzi, Karen Traviss, Timothy Zahn, Tobias Buckell, Mike Resnick's Starship books, yes Scott Westerfeld's Risen Empire series, etc.

You have now annoyed me by calling me silly. which, to be fair, you have every right to do if you were discussing my lack of scientific knowledge, but no, it's being silly for ranting about something on a message board (as opposed to reading your blog and keeping my opinion to mysef, I suppose,) and not providing a wide enough sanple size for you.

Fine. More examples. Reynolds over-eggs the science quite a lot in my opinion, even Ian Banks can go off on too much of a tangent for me. Iain McDonald as previously discussed I find engaging enough not to be too bored by the technobabble, but it's there in large amounts. Scalzi, Brin, Hamilton all keep it manageable. Vernor Vinge in a Fire upon the Deep and a Deepness in the sky hits it spot on for me. That's my limits, other people will probably come in and talk about theirs as they have been doing so far. I don't see why it's a silly discussion to have particularly, but YMMV.

'The Sci fi these days' bit that I think you're objecting to being silly (because I only mentioned a couple of books) was meant as a bit of tongue in the cheek curmudgeonliness, not a literal hate on every sci-fi knowledge published in the last twenty years. *sigh*

3) Book reviews exist not merely to guide people to what books to read, but also to help bring to light and explicate the more difficult layers of books. That's what I tried to do here, at any rate, for Blindsight; I'd also point you at this and this, just for starters. So if a book leaves you confused, going off on a rant about it is just one of your options.

I'm certainly not going to go and have the book explained to me on your blog if I didn't like it that much in the first place, and I really don't see that you writing blog entries in any way answers the basic question I asked of how much science knowledge should be presumed by the authors. If I'm confused, I'm going to come here and discuss it, or rant about it, with fellow sci-fi fans whose opinions I know and respect, not go running to your blog for the answers. Sorry, but not a fan of the SFF blogosphere.

[Peadar]

Hmmmm...this is why I like fantasy. Faux-medieval settings are generally fairly static. Although there have been fans who will argue about how many hands high a horse a certain knight would ride, it's not usually something that affects a story greatly.

You wouldn't think about switching to fantasy, would you? :)

I agree with silly Zakalwe, although I really enjoyed both Watts and Stross*. I think that's why the fantasy shelves are eating into SF in the bookshops rather than the other way around -- as Chataya explains above :).

*It's not what you think.

[shah8]

I can be only glad that I am a well educated man, who didn't forsake the sciences while he studied other things. Blindsight is profoundly brilliant, and while I didn't take so much out of it the way Squire did, my previous exposure to neurology and philosophy stood me in good stead. I also have to say that I'm very hostile to the general tone of the OP. First, it sort of sounds like the kind of entitled whining that people with inferiority complexes do, like that guy in the Superbowl commercial who condescends/taunts the women who were have a book discussion on Little Women. Second, just about any book worth reading is going to challenge you, whether it's science fiction, mystery, general fiction, whatever. Through emotional work, or keeping up with the event threads and ambitions of the characters, or whatever. Thus the inferiority. I can't really help you with the not knowing science part, but hear me out, true, hard, sci-fi is always going to be tendentious because true science is a tedious amalgation of "it is not so". Greg Egan's Permutation City is not all that difficult in science terms, and certainly not nearly as difficult as, say, Schild's Ladder, but it's a fairly difficult book in other terms though, and one does not read Greg Egan in general for sedate reading. One read Greg Egan to friggin' light your brain on fire and spend the aftermath weaving what ifs in your mind after you turn the last page. To sweep to something a little lighter, Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series and Neal Stephenson's Anathem are substantially the same story, even though the Steerswoman stuff starts out much lighter and is always much less demanding in terms of background knowledge. However, by the second book, and definitly by the third, your imagination and reasoning is taxed about as hard or more than if you're reading Anathem (it gets to Douglass Hofstadter levels). Let's go to something even lighter, social science fiction! Kit Witfield and Octavia Butler are two good examples of writers who are superficially soft, but are as every bit as "hard" as Peter Watts. In fact Octavia Butler and Peter Watts are essentially very similar kinds of writers, even though she only has dabs of biology and he throws the Complexity Theory texts at you. Octavia Butler and Kit Witfield does alot of "science of power" stuff. In general, I'm hoping that I'm showing that you will not ever *really* escape the fact that good books, the truly good stuff will always make big demands on you, whether it's knowlege, reasoning, imagination, empathy, whatever.

I get sorta mad about this kind of thing because this general attitude among the reader populace means that truly great stuff gets stopped, like TA Pratt's Marla Manson stuff (She does stuff like drop terms Schwartzchild Radius in a perfectly normal conversation about space in a junkyard--in an urban fantasy series). Same with Jane Lindskold's wolf stuff stopping so abruptly. And it makes me afraid that I won't get too many more DD Barant (setting is developed from a race studies concept called whiteness) books or Lindskold's new series on chinese mythology (the magic system makes it a kind of "hard fantasy"). Light reading for smart people tends to be endangered, and while I love Justina Robson and Ian Banks, I want some good stuff that I could just read, but still spark off some, you know? I disliked Jim Butcher's Changes, you know?

Note Bene:

Richard Morgan is a bad idea for anything other than Takeshi Kovacs. All his other novels are at or close to Stross, Stephenson, the usual suspects levels of sophistication in one way or another.

[Bellis]

As a scientist, I am sad that people are learning science from fiction, because it's usually not so much correct as it is cool.

And Blindsight is terribly poorly written.

[ambyr]

I get sorta mad about this kind of thing because this general attitude among the reader populace means that truly great stuff gets stopped, like TA Pratt's Marla Manson stuff (She does stuff like drop terms Schwartzchild Radius in a perfectly normal conversation about space in a junkyard--in an urban fantasy series).

You're aware Pratt is still writing the Marla Manson books, right, on a crowdfunded basis? Though I'm sure he'd be happier if his traditional publisher hadn't dropped them.

[zakalwe7]

gah. wrong poster

[needle]

Chats : there is some great sci-fi out there, hard or soft. please don't let my rant put you off ;p

First, it sort of sounds like the kind of entitled whining that people with inferiority complexes do

OUCH! :lol: But good post.

Hmm, after a glass of wine and discussion on the subject with Zakalwe ( who DIDN'T post originally, or at all...) I think I possibly did come over as very 'aw shucks I hate them intellectualls'.

I suppose I don't particularly want sci-fi dumbed down to my level. There will be times when I just want entertained, sure, and times when I'm ready for a little more. And so I guess that means there will be a lot of stuff that I am, frankly, incapable of understanding as I just don't have the basic scientific knowledge for it, let alone any knowledge of the cutting edge, (or the bleeding edge as it seems to be called now).

But as Zak said, there's a lot of cool stuff you do learn from Sci-fi that perhaps you didn't know before; like Dyson Spheres, like what the singularity is/will be, oh, I don't know, all sorts of little things like understanding the words perogee and apogee in context.

Sorry Bellis - I do kind of disagree. No, people won't learn the hard formulae, but they may glimpse the concepts behind some stuff, and even more importantly may be driven to go and find out more. though I agree on Blindsight being poorly written :P. I think this rant was mostly because I really didn't like Blindsight and was very disappointed in it.. It felt like hollywood sci-fi, not real sci-fi, despite the conceptual 'depth'.

But what I do still think is that there is an art to explaining science, that many many sci-fi writers do seem to eschew in exchange for a quickpaced, lots of technogabble story telling style. And instead of having coming away learnt things, I instead feel like an entire conversation happened over my head. So maybe it's more about the style of talking about science, rather than the content that I'm objecting too? (but after all, why should they even talk down to my level?)

ETA : Paedar, I do like Stross too. But only sometimes :P (and sometimes only for half a book...)

[shah8]

Yes, I do know the series is continuing. What I resent is that the body of work is actually really good for light fiction and deserves more respect than it has while upteen bad chick 'n chainmail are published every year.

Bellis, I definitly get that Blindsight is not the best written novel. Certainly not like say, Richard Powers' Goldberg Variations. However, it's just very, very cumbersome to do anything like true hard sci-fi and also get that poet's sensibility with words. I mean, I read Samuel Delany's Babel 17. The plot is terrible, but the writing is really good, and some ideas about the nature of lanuage is beautifully expressed. So Peter Watts isn't great. Neither is O. Butler, but that isn't where the value is. I mean, the best written novels that are anything like hard science fiction I've read are horror novels by Caitlyn Kiernan. If you want better, you have to go soft--towards Ryman, and even softer to Murakami and Vonnegut.

[Starkess]

I get sorta mad about this kind of thing because this general attitude among the reader populace means that truly great stuff gets stopped, like TA Pratt's Marla Manson stuff (She does stuff like drop terms Schwartzchild Radius in a perfectly normal conversation about space in a junkyard--in an urban fantasy series). Same with Jane Lindskold's wolf stuff stopping so abruptly. And it makes me afraid that I won't get too many more DD Barant (setting is developed from a race studies concept called whiteness) books or Lindskold's new series on chinese mythology (the magic system makes it a kind of "hard fantasy"). Light reading for smart people tends to be endangered, and while I love Justina Robson and Ian Banks, I want some good stuff that I could just read, but still spark off some, you know? I disliked Jim Butcher's Changes, you know?

While I somewhat agree with your sentiment, I find this statement very off-putting. I've known plenty of smart people who aren't up on the leading edge of science. Science isn't the only field one can be knowledgeable in, after all.