Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfjacobi | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if other people share my perception that most science fiction written by scientists is not excellent fiction (especially when the first desire is realism).

It seems to me that crafting a story is a quite different tool set from being an engineer, physicist, etc., which is why at least seems rare to find a great physicist who is also a great writer. Perhaps the best balance, then, would be achieved by someone who writes stories deferring to actual scientists for review...?

Also, I'm interested in being refuted here. These are unexamined perceptions I'm writing out here.

View on HN

What no love for Knuth's Surreal numbers? https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html

I think if you're not into sci fi, you've discovered what most call the distinction between hard and soft sci fi. Soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies. Hard sci fi is what if this really thought provoking component datasheet or speculative theoretical physics paper were true, maybe I could sell more copies if I put some humans into the story as filler for my gimmick. I'm personally pretty bored with human condition stories; I've read them all or lived thru the experience myself over the decades, but sci fi still delights me with glorious creativity even if the bolted on characters are sometimes one dimensional cardboard cutouts.

The system you suggest of a human story teller deferring to the scientists is usually screwed up by one side or the other; when it isn't, its noteworthy. One example of an English Lit major not screwing up the science would be KSR's famous Mars Trilogy from around the turn of the century. That's a really good trilogy! Proving that at least theoretically your system is possible, having been successfully implemented at least once historically.

>soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies.

This is a pretty unfair description of the category. Soft scifi is a story that has fantastical tech/physics that aren't completely explained. The tech is usually crucial to the story in some way, but the how of the tech's functioning is left unsaid. I find it unlikely that you've somehow lived through the entire range of events and emotions that can comprise the "human condition", but that aside: a lot of the soft scifi stories out there are focused around hypothetical inhuman conditions for which the fantastical tech is crucial. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is focused on whether artificial sentience is less worthy than organic, Whedon's Dollhouse on the potential personal and societal ramifications of being able to save/load our brains digitally, Ancillary Justice on what it might feel like to have your consciousness simultaneously inhabiting multiple bodies, "The Measure of a Man" from TNG on what it means to be sentient and if artificial sentience is possible (or even possible to measure once achieved), Her exploring how a truly sentient AI would relate to humans and impact our society. There are a lot of vague stories out there that use spaceships as an attention-grabber, but that isn't what defines the genre.

I very much enjoy anything by Vernor Vinge, who's a computer scientist. He explores the idea of a universe where, in some areas of space, p=np. But it's not a dry read, it's fun stuff.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the_De...

Second Vernor Vinge as a recommended author. A Deepness in the Sky is one of my all-time favorites.

Perhaps I should try again, I thought it was totally unreadable last time I ploughed through the first few pages.

I'll suggest it's worth a retry. Those first few pages are a slightly cryptic intro to a complex, intelligent, and thought-provoking tale. YMMV, of course.

I think it really depends on what you're looking for when you read SF.

For me, I usually don't care very much about the characters or excellent prose or a lot of the typical 'literary' qualities of a work. When I go to SF I typically am looking for exploration of interesting ideas, settings, or premises. So I find myself being more forgiving of 'bad fiction' if it's the only place where I can find a particular idea being explored.

The way I see it, "someone who writes stories deferring to actual scientists for review" tends to end up treating science as something to throw onto a story to give it a veneer of legitimacy -- like various fantasy/space-opera shows that have 'science advisers' to supply the technobabble needed to make it sound plausible. Interstellar was probably the best example of this going right that I can think of, with the feedback from scientists playing a big part in how things were portrayed and explored.

In general, though, I think that what makes a lot of good SF interesting is the focus on ideas that may only come from having a writer who obsesses so much about such ideas anyway. It's why I'm frustrated by a lot of recent popular SF TV/movie series that tend to gravitate into the typical "character-driven serial drama" format that everything becomes.

Have a look at the work of Alistair Reynolds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Reynolds

fred hoyle wrote a couple of good novels back in the day.

also my favourite anthologist, groff conklin, put together a collection of sf shorts by scientists that is really good: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1179648.Great_Science_Fic...

A lot of legendary science fiction writers were also semi-professional scientists; Clarke was a real astronomer and physicist, and Asimov was a professor of biochemistry (odd, as there's so little biology or chemistry in most of his famous works!) Of course, those exceptional cases: it may be that most scientists are poor writers, most writers are poor scientists, and if you happen to be good at both, you'll be one of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time.

Asimov's clear style is the form I try to emulate whenever I'm called to write something. His use of parenthesis in particular is excellent at gracefully adding information to a sentence without bogging down the paragraph with excessive expository sentences or distracting from the idea.

He's even driven me to read his nonfiction for entertainment. A great wit as well, the humor is between the lines on most everything he wrote, even the nonfiction.

Others have suggested some very good counterexamples. David Brin is another. He's won the Hugo, Nebula and several other awards. Startide Rising is worth a read. You know an author is good when he can turn genetically altered dolphins and apes into compelling, realistic characters.

Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan obviously come to mind, but maybe they're exceptions that prove the rule. I agree that authors working with scientist advisors can produce excellent results. I think that's how Neal Stephenson works a lot of the time.

Primo Levi wrote great science fiction in the literal sense, his 'The Periodic Table' is a memoir around elements of the table.

Greg Egan has a BSc in mathematics, but hard to tell how much he works in science, he's so reclusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com