A rant about Sci-fi

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

needle's sentiment

Ah. So you maintain that her assertions that you are misrepresenting her OP are incorrect. In fact, you're simply ignoring the multiple people who are telling you that your interpretation of her post is wrong.

It's rather amusing, then, that you're complaining about other people being scared off by intellectual rigor.

[Datepalm]

Here's the thing, lots of really great books that are very accesible to the many people, with great stories and all, are hit with needle's sentiment in the general. The least bit of geeking out, intellectual rigor, or difficult to empathise with protagonist, and BAM! Down the rabbit hole it goes. This effect *really* tends to hurt female authors and books with female or minority protagonists.

Y'what? Whats the connection to even your rather shaky premise, much less anything else?

However, hard SF is, pretty well by definition, the exploring of one or more scientific ideas and their consequences. This means less emphasis on characterisation, and possibly even plot (though done properly, the plot falls out from the exploration of the scientific ideas). For the purist fiction critic, this means all hard SF is necessarily flawed, just as all mystery stories are flawed because the mystery has to take precedence over everything else in the story. OTOH softer SF, where the SF is mainly just the wallpaper to the story, does not have this intrinsic flaw.

I really disagree, though it might come down to a question of what we define as hard and soft SF. I don't think good hard SF necessarily has to contain ten page lectures on quntum mechanics or whatever. Thats not an exploration of a technology, thats just explanation. If that was what i wanted to read, i'd go sign up for a physics class. (not that the two are at all contradictory). A good SF story, IMO, explores, as you say, consequences and ideas. Thats about effect on people, society, the story, etc. Maybe sometimes that needs the ten page explanation, which is perfectly fair enough...but scientific explanation for the sake of scientific explantion? Sorry, thats not good SF of any kind.

[Serious Callers Only]

... A good SF story, IMO, explores, as you say, consequences and ideas. Thats about effect on people, society, the story, etc. Maybe sometimes that needs the ten page explanation, which is perfectly fair enough...but scientific explanation for the sake of scientific explantion? Sorry, thats not good SF of any kind.

That is just one of the genres associated with science fiction, and normally one not associated with hard science fiction - that is mainly about the science.

Not that there can't be mixes. Like most of Jack McDevitt work for instance.

[Poobah]

The least bit of geeking out, intellectual rigor, or difficult to empathise with protagonist, and BAM! Down the rabbit hole it goes. This effect *really* tends to hurt female authors and books with female or minority protagonists.

You're making ridiculous gross generalisations, and badly misinterpreting the original complaint and/or subsequent posts in order to do so.

[needle]

I Don't know, Serious Callers Only - It seems to me you're more interested with fitting the right label to the work than anything else. I don't care if something is hard sci fi, or soft, or space opera, or pulp. Clearly, Atrocity Archives is pulp - it's urban fantasy with some maths chucked in. My point was I didn't get the maths, not what subgenre you rate the book in or how serious the conceptual themes behind it were. It being pulpy emphasises my original point even more - should something that is a light, fun pulpy read like that bewilder the average reader who has some familiarity with the genre yet very little actual math/science training?

And the counter-answer to that is that it's like a book with in jokes for those who know their n-space from their string theory. And really, there's inherently nothing wrong with that. It's a light book for science geeks, but it's filled with chunks that makes no sense for the layman. (from the bit I quoted earlier, a couple of people were kind enough to explain that a lot of wasn't supposed to make sense, right enough).

But I did enjoy the book, I do enjoy Charlie Stross's writing on the whole, and I find it a bit frustrating when what is a fun concept is rendered opaque by what I consider to be overuse of technobabble.

And likewise, if you go to hard sci-fi expecting soft sci-fi, and dislike what you find - fine, that's a matter of personal taste. But thinking that the author should have written something different, or that the book is flawed because it wasn't softer, or because you couldn't understand it yourself, being a soft-sf reader, is irrational. Or at least misguided.

But you know, these labels aren't set in stone, the genre changes over time - what was concerned hard sci-fi forty years ago might be soft sci-fi now. This debate came about in part because I was reflecting to myself over how sci-fi has changed in the thirty years I've been reading it.

Some hard fi does such a good job of explaining the conceptual science behind it that it really doesn't matter that you come to the book with little but a willingess to underrstand and learn, some hard fi is really deliberately impenetrable except to the cognoscenti. And yes, there is a place for all, but should people just stop reading hard sci fi because they find some of it difficult?

I think it's valid to raise a debate about it at least, to say hang on - I like what these guys are doing, but the science is overrunning the story, or its poorly explained, or ( as in my case) I can't tell what's made up from what is a reasonable hyopthesis from science today? Does anybody else find this?

Oh, and I think your stuff about novels having nothing to with communication a little absurd. All novels are a form of communication.

Here's the thing, lots of really great books that are very accesible to the many people, with great stories and all, are hit with needle's sentiment in the general. The least bit of geeking out, intellectual rigor, or difficult to empathise with protagonist, and BAM! Down the rabbit hole it goes. This effect *really* tends to hurt female authors and books with female or minority protagonists.

Sha8, you're coming out with a lot of weird tangential points, but saying that because I'd like the science handled better in sci-fi, fewer female authors are getting published is the most bizarre yet (although you've made it, what, three times now?). Really, try and make your arguments at least vaguely cogent.

[Datepalm]

That is just one of the genres associated with science fiction, and normally one not associated with hard science fiction - that is mainly about the science.

Not that there can't be mixes. Like most of Jack McDevitt work for instance.

Still, to get into taxonomics for a bit, which is probably not ultimately hugely useful, as Needle rightly points out - What are things like Dune, or Foundation, or the Mars Trilogy, etc? Now I would categorize them as soft SF and something like Star Wars ("SF as wallpaper") some kind of "science fantasy", but my impression is that people would mostly disagree with me, so then what is hard SF?

[needle]

We could make a whole other thread for that...

In the meantime, I was googling and came up with this :

hard versus soft Scifi

Which is a nice wee article. I particularly liked this tongue-in-cheek definition the author included :

Hard SF is a form of alternate universe fiction, set in a world where the world-view of American engineers in the late twentieth century is a precise reflection of The Way Things Are.

:lol:

[mormont]

Two questions:

1. Why?

Because art without an audience is, or might as well be, just random scribbling (or the equivalent for the medium you're working in).

2. Why is 'what Mormont can understand' the standard by which impenetrability is measured?

I'm not setting myself up as an objective arbiter, if that's your suggestion. But I am saying that if a novel is impenetrable to me, then the writer has failed to communicate with me. That's important in the context of this discussion, because what shah has been grumbling about is that books that don't manage to communicate with many readers tend not to get published. Well, of course they don't. But where he seems to be suggesting this is not the writers' fault, but (so far as I can make out) the readers' or perhaps the publishers', I am suggesting that it's firmly on the authors. Their novels don't get through to enough people to justify publication: therefore they have failed, in my opinion, as artists.

The loss of interesting, thought-evoking science fiction and the rise of entertaining but utterly unimaginative fantasy in drag with technology props is but one natural consequence

What are you talking about? Lots of interesting, thought-provoking books that utterly could not be written in any other genre (but don't depend on the reader having more than an intelligent layman's understanding of physics) are being written every year. I rank Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, and Ian McDonald among my top ten writers, and there are many other successful writers who use interesting scientific concepts as a basis for wonderful writing.

It's not that hard to do, and dozens of writers do it.

This is the difficult thing about conversations like this...

Us hard cores not even really talking about *science* per se. We're talking about a toxic and public allergy towards any material that is challenging, to think of (like hard science) or to contemplate (like injustice you might be a part of).

No, sorry. You don't get to pull this rather weak false-equivalence fallacy without anything to back it up. Apples are not oranges, and hard sci-fi is not writing on social injustice. The criticism of the former on this thread has nothing whatsoever to do with the latter.

[Wastrel]

Because art without an audience is, or might as well be, just random scribbling (or the equivalent for the medium you're working in).

1. Why?

2. Even if that were true, it misses the point. Just because something is impenetrable does not mean that it has no audience - because much of the fun of many things is in trying to penetrate them, rather than anything inside them that you get given if you succeed.

I'm not setting myself up as an objective arbiter, if that's your suggestion. But I am saying that if a novel is impenetrable to me, then the writer has failed to communicate with me. That's important in the context of this discussion, because what shah has been grumbling about is that books that don't manage to communicate with many readers tend not to get published. Well, of course they don't. But where he seems to be suggesting this is not the writers' fault, but (so far as I can make out) the readers' or perhaps the publishers', I am suggesting that it's firmly on the authors. Their novels don't get through to enough people to justify publication: therefore they have failed, in my opinion, as artists.

1`. I don't see what this discussion has to do with the thread, although I admit I don't understand much of what shah is trying to say.

2`. Why is success as an artist a matter of how well-publicised their work is? Lots of writers are massively published, but not that good; others may not be published at all, yet be brilliant. So much of what we now consider brilliant was unpublished in its day, or published but ignored. Van Gogh only managed to sell a single painting, and that was to a friend - was he a failure as an artist? Schopenhauer published his magnum opus... but it was thirty years until anybody read it.

To me, you seem to be confusing "artist" with "businessman".

[The Evil Hat]

This effect *really* tends to hurt female authors and books with female or minority protagonists.

Now, maybe it's because I'm wussing out and not taking Physics next year, but I have NO IDEA what you're talking about. Where is the correlation between me disliking science lectures and me being a bigot? Somehow, I'm not seeing it. In fact, from what I can tell, you're arguing against your own earlier points here. You've implied that a sound scientific underpinning is, essentially, the most important part of the story, over characters and what have you. Now, you're saying that, somehow, our lack of scientific understanding makes it impossible to read books that are meaningful in other ways, such as exploring social themes? But I thought that such silly humane issues were beneath solid mathematical equations?

Forgive me if that's not your argument, though, I've had to try damn hard to piece together even that much, seeing as your main points don't really seem to have much to do with one another.

[shah8]

Mormont, do you actually needle can get through the Fall Revolution tetrology? It's not particularly demanding on the think side of things, but it's pretty demanding on the background knowlege sort of thing, Communist history, what some of the technobabble (and most of the tech stuff there is babble) means, etc, etc.

The opening paragraphs at needle's 87 comment is pretty much my moving sentiment. Many people that I'm aware of have absolutely no capacity to deal with the fact that they aren't 100% the intended audience of a work, and this attitude is highly aggravated by racism and sexism and other 'isms (like, oh, The Wire being the most famous survivor because of it being on HBO). Needle went on and read AA despite the fact that there were in-jokes she was aware she wasn't getting. Many people won't, and some of those because they were offended, kinda like the OP's original rant. I mean, there are tons of bad hard science fiction for the reason of too much science by my reckoning, like McAuley's The Quiet War being the primary example. Blindsight was not one of those, otherwise it wouldn't have been on so many shortlists, and it was plain to me that needle didn't or couldn't appreciate it, like if I just handed to her a cup of '50s puerh tea that tastes of wood and dirt (and costs $$$$).

Also, impeaching me on the basis of my "incoherence", and oh yes, I'm a pretty disorganized thinker, isn't going to make me care. I've been arguing online long enough to know when I'm dealing with narcissism rather than me failing to get the point across.

Heh, some of y'all are so clueless that you don't realize that the majority of the finest hard science (relative to contempoary peers) are inextricably linked to social justice. One of the best recent books, The Windup Girl, is all about that (tho' me personally would label it steampunk). From Frankenstein to Cyteen. Alfred Bester and Theodore Sturgeon will alway smush Flash Gordon. Because oddly enough (to some people), hard science lends itself to speculating on this sort of thing, with more credibility than if it was done with fantasy.

[needle]

Why on earth are you asking Mormont if I can get through The Fall revolution? ( yes, I have read it). That's just..rude.

[slim da reaper]

Let's ask all the countless writers who having written that book which eventualy got published but got rejected over and over again if they felt like true failures until they got published? This does not mean all unpublished writers are secretly successes, oh no no. But as Wastrel points out there have been many wrieters who are not appreciated until decades later, infact some of the best thinkers in written word, paint or any medium are constantly being re-evaluated, I do not even know how this you've got to be be published to be a success correlates, for there are writers who were massive successes in their time, and are now almost largely and completely forgotten.

Thankfully making money, or having popular ideas, are not any kind of measure of true success. This does not mean that making money or having popular ideas coincide with your ideas, isn't also true success, just that true success does not require those things. It is just that being published is completely seperate and achievable by other means, being hackneyed, completely deriviative or commercial.

[mormont]

1. Why?

That game gets very boring after a while, you know. And by 'a while' I mean 'immediately'.

2. Even if that were true, it misses the point. Just because something is impenetrable does not mean that it has no audience - because much of the fun of many things is in trying to penetrate them, rather than anything inside them that you get given if you succeed.

Art as intellectual game? The appeal of that, you'll find, is limited and largely consists of people who are much too invested in their own cleverness.

1`. I don't see what this discussion has to do with the thread, although I admit I don't understand much of what shah is trying to say.

I have no idea what to say here: are you really saying you can't see how my response to shah's post has anything to do with the thread in which both appear?

2`. Why is success as an artist a matter of how well-publicised their work is?

This is a complete non-sequitur. I never mentioned publicity at all.

To me, you seem to be confusing "artist" with "businessman".

To me, you simply seem to be confusing. :P

Mormont, do you actually needle can get through the Fall Revolution tetrology?

I have the advantage of knowing both her and that series fairly well, so I know that she certainly could, yes. :)

The opening paragraphs at needle's 87 comment is pretty much my moving sentiment. Many people that I'm aware of have absolutely no capacity to deal with the fact that they aren't 100% the intended audience of a work, and this attitude is highly aggravated by racism and sexism and other 'isms (like, oh, The Wire being the most famous survivor because of it being on HBO).

Same tactic again? Where is your argument that racism has anything to do with what we're talking about? 'The Wire'? What has that to do with anything? Are you trying to argue that all barriers to readers/viewers are exactly the same - cultural, educational, linguistic, etc.? Then you need to make an argument as to how and why.

Basically you seem to be blaming other people for not liking the books you like. I'm afraid that sounds rather more like 'narcissism' than anything else I've seen in this thread.

[Poobah]

No, sorry. You don't get to pull this rather weak false-equivalence fallacy without anything to back it up. Apples are not oranges, and hard sci-fi is not writing on social injustice. The criticism of the former on this thread has nothing whatsoever to do with the latter.

Well said.

Heh, some of y'all are so clueless

Good to see that this discussion is founded on mutual respect and the free exchange of ideas in an intellectual debate.

[Werthead]

Still, to get into taxonomics for a bit, which is probably not ultimately hugely useful, as Needle rightly points out - What are things like Dune, or Foundation, or the Mars Trilogy, etc? Now I would categorize them as soft SF and something like Star Wars ("SF as wallpaper") some kind of "science fantasy", but my impression is that people would mostly disagree with me, so then what is hard SF?

I would call Dune and Foundation 'soft SF', as they are both set so far in the future that any realistic or real attempt to define technology or sociology goes out the window. The Dune books even have magic in them (telepathy, precognition, magic spice etc), putting them firmly in the science fantasy field as well.

Robinson's Mars Trilogy is much more hard SF because most of the three books use existing scientific ideas and pursue them through the story rigorously. I think he even has proper water and ice discovered on Mars at one point, prefiguring real discoveries by Mars missions in the years since the books came out. In fact, near-future SF is where the 'hard' label is best fitted since anything that gets too fanciful drifts away from the concept of hard SF in the first place. So Ben Bova's Grand Tour books (with absolutely not FTL travel and everything relating around the settling of the Solar system) are harder SF than Baxter's Xeelee series, despite the latter being held up as an example of mid-1990s hard SF. On this basis even Vinge's claim to be hard SF must be treated dubiously, since there is zero scientific evidence to support his 'zones of thought' premise about how the universe and galaxy works.

Similarly, since the Singularity and its aftermath are by their nature are completely unknowable, any works that seek to be set post-Singularity cannot be hard SF, as we have zero scientific evidence for what life will be like post-Singularity. In this case Stross' post-Singularity work is as fanciful and fantastical as Dune and counts as considerably less convincing as Hard SF as, say, Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain, which takes a simple premise (how would humans operate if we didn't have to sleep?) and expands on it logically, the basis of all good (hard or otherwise) SF.

[shah8]

Needle, I asked Mormont to make a certain point about the ridiculousness of his attitude! Because Mormont DOES essentially set himself up as an "impartial arbitrator" if you follow his reasoning all the way through.

Meanwhile, next thread over, people ask about how come there isn't all that much gritty fantasy.

Pretty simple. Fantasy is expected to gross more than some other segments of fiction. Unless someone like Bakker, GRRM, or Richard Morgan has already built up a loyal audience -- largely through high quality conventional pap, what "gritty" really means is alot of uncomfortable and tedious inaccessibility, as you figure out the nonreal elements like magic system. People tend not to like real grittyness like say The Light Ages by Ian R Macleod. Or the limited amount of that thing in Felix Gilmans novels.

[Wastrel]

That game gets very boring after a while, you know. And by 'a while' I mean 'immediately'.

It's not a game, it's the essence of a worthwhile life. Don't just declare things blindly without being able to support them with reasons or explanations! You made what, on the face of it, is a preposterous claim - preposterous both in its narcissistic scope and in its shear... weirdness. It's hardly unreasonable to ask why you might think this thing! In any case, you put it forward as an explanation - but an explanation based only on your personal fiat is no explanation at all.

Art as intellectual game? The appeal of that, you'll find, is limited and largely consists of people who are much too invested in their own cleverness.

Ahh, personal flaming, what a surprise again. And, it goe without saying, utter hogswash as well - enjoying reading for its own sake, enjoying any art for its own sake, involves no 'investment' in 'cleverness', whatever such an investment could consist of. Well, in any case, you may hate me as much as you want, and call me whatever names and impute whatever ridiculous motivations to me you may choose, but that doesn't make my views or tastes invalid. Nor are they mine alone. In the 100 Books poll I did here, I seem to recall Gene Wolfe being number three in popularity!

A purer example here is music: in a symphony, there is no "content" of any kind. A symphony is inherently impenetrable - but listening to one can still be enjoyable! And of course the same instinct, of enjoying the exploration for its own sake rather than for its rewards, is at the core of most academia. But then, since last time we argued you said that all abstract argument and intellectual exercise was worthless, I guess I should no longer be surprised by the luddism.

I have no idea what to say here: are you really saying you can't see how my response to shah's post has anything to do with the thread in which both appear?

Well yes, that's why I said that. I don't see your characterisation of his posts, or of the discussion, as being relevant to what has actually been said. But, again, I concede that some of his posts I don't understand the point of myself, so you may be correct.

This is a complete non-sequitur. I never mentioned publicity at all.

Er... it was your entire point. No art without an audience and all that? Without being published you're a failure?

To me, you simply seem to be confusing. :P

Oh, a pun - how wittily touché! Although coming from someone accusing the rest of us of being "too invested in our own cleverness"...

Then you need to make an argument as to how and why.

Oh, that intellectual game of supporting statements with arguments gets boring sooo fast, donchakno?

Basically you seem to be blaming other people for not liking the books you like. I'm afraid that sounds rather more like 'narcissism' than anything else I've seen in this thread.

He's saying that you're blaming the books/authors for not writing books that you personally like.

[needle]

Robinson's Mars Trilogy is much more hard SF because most of the three books use existing scientific ideas and pursue them through the story rigorously. I think he even has proper water and ice discovered on Mars at one point, prefiguring real discoveries by Mars missions in the years since the books came out. In fact, near-future SF is where the 'hard' label is best fitted since anything that gets too fanciful drifts away from the concept of hard SF in the first place. So Ben Bova's Grand Tour books (with absolutely not FTL travel and everything relating around the settling of the Solar system) are harder SF than Baxter's Xeelee series, despite the latter being held up as an example of mid-1990s hard SF. On this basis even Vinge's claim to be hard SF must be treated dubiously, since there is zero scientific evidence to support his 'zones of thought' premise about how the universe and galaxy works.

Funnily enough, we were discussing where The Mars trilogy sat on the hard/soft this morning, just before Datepalm mentioned it. I reckoned it was hard Sf ( as I thought the description of the espedition being set up, and the exploration for water was fairly rigorous) where as Zak thought it was definitely soft SF as the primary focus of the trilogy was the interaction between the colonists. I'm glad to see you and Wiki back me up :P

[Wastrel]

Incidentally, I'm baffled by shah's mention of Bester and Shelley as writers of "hard sci-fi". Surely they're extremely soft sci-fi?

EDIT: that said, it seems to me that there are four different hard/soft dichotomies here:

1. "Hard" SF is rigorous and plausible, while "soft" SF is unsupported by evidence or even contravened, or else doesn't care about how justified it is

2. "Hard" SF is based upon exploring the developments of the scientific assumptions, while "soft" SF only uses those assumptions as a background setting

3. "Hard" SF puts its 'scientific' content front-and-centre, while "soft" SF hides it in the background

4. "Hard" SF is concerned with ideas in the physical sciences, while "soft" SF is concerned with the social sciences.

These four are all related, but are all independent. From how it sounds here, the Atrocity Archives seems to be "soft" by 1 and 2, but "hard" by 3 and 4. "Foundation" is "soft" by 1, 3 and 4 but "hard" by 2. "Frankenstein" is "hard" only by 4, and "soft" by the other three - the mechanics by which Frankenstein is created, and their plausibility, is irrelevant to the plot.