Mind reading, Personal shields, planetary nukes, FTL travel, cyborgs, history of AI war vs humans...
Science Fiction is speculative literature that generally explores the consequences of ideas which are roughly consistent with nature and scientific method, but are not facts of the author’s contemporary world. The stories often represent philosophical thought experiments presented in entertaining ways. Protagonists typically “think” rather than “shoot” their way out of problems, but the definition is flexible because there are no limits on an author’s imagination.
At its core, SF is putting characters into far psychological extremes and thought experiments.
> The stories often represent philosophical thought experiments presented in entertaining ways
Like acquired omniscience, for instance ? Or the idea of a galatical economy based on travel fuel ?
> Protagonists typically “think” rather than “shoot” their way out of problems,
About half of the story are analytical inner monologues...
> SF is putting characters into far psychological extremes and thought experiments.
Yeah well that's the TL;DR of the Atreides arc...
I love Lynch's Dune adaptation very much though.
Star Wars, for instance, is Fantasy because lightsabers. Star Trek is Sci Fi because phasers. Hobbit- swords. Dune- weirding modules. Highlander- swords. Blade Runner- no swords. Etc etc.
FWIW, I've been in TV and Film and storytelling for the better part of last ten years or so, so I might have another perspective on it. I'm looking at the distinction based on character development. SF stories have character arc driven by internal goals, whereas Fantasy is more the opposite where external motivation is the one driving the development of the inner goal (a proverbial journey, if you will). It's not a clear line when you look at the story structure, but it's definitely clear when you look at the arc and inner vs outer motivation on the character development front.
I've been taught of a certain way of developing stories, so maybe that's my bias. Always develop the character change first and then build the supporting ones and their arcs as well. Then, build a story structure around it (like a separate supporting structure on top of it). Character change IS the story. If character is the same in the beginning and the end, you haven't told a story. The way character changes, not the mechanics, but expression of goals is usually what defines the genre in my opinion. Theme, setting, story structure, and rhythm are flairs which can be genre-specific, but are on top of the 'main story'.
I might've gone maybe too much into it though.
The problem is that Science Fiction is, literally, Fantasy without swords (or sorcery, but my position is that the two basically go together).
Or at least that's what it started as, back in the Golden Age. For instance, you'll probably know that in that era the editors of Sci Fi pulps would reject a story if it had magic in it, so writers instead framed magic as "psionics" - because that made their stories sound more scientifically plausible (for their time, always).
So in essence, you could take the exact same story, with the same characters having the same motivations and advancing down the same goal etc, and simply change the external trappings, from sword and sorcery to ray guns and psionics, or vv, and- presto, genre change.
The distinction is entirely artificial, is what I'm saying, and dictated more by the needs of the publishing (or TV, film, etc) industry than what kind of stories a writer wants to write or a reader/viewer enjoy.
That is as true now as it was back then but it's actually a good thing, nowadays, because it means that you can tell the same stories either as Fantasy or as SF and all that matters is really how good the story is. Hero's journey with aliens and spaceships, for Star Wars, gritty realism with swords and dragons for The Game of Thrones. And why not?
The best Fantasy and SF is very often found in the boundary between the two genres. The flimsier the boundary, the easier for the two genres to intermingle to the delight of all of us who enjoy a good story, regardless of the trappings.
Btw, I should say that most of my interest in (and knowledge of) Fantasy and SF comes from novels, rather than TV shows and films. I appreciate that TV shows, in particular, have been able to tell more engaging stories in recent times (eg. I'm totally a BSG fangirl) but still TV prioritises tropes and specialises in providing a quick fix- which though makes my criterion even more relevant. In writing, it's a lot easier to escape the tropes and just tell a story about people doing things, rather than who-fought-whom-with-what.
When you shed all the layers of genres, when you come down to the basic principles of dramaturgy, you're left with the core of storytelling that's in all stories ever told. From Plato's Cave to Aristotelian unities onwards to Star Wars and Seinfeld, there are certain core principles which hold true in form and structure. Form, not formula. In dramatic arc and story structure there are elements which morph and trade places and these, along with psychological and visual motifs make a genre. It's probably valid approach to view/interpret this on a whole other level, and that's the beauty of it. This is just my viewpoint based on some experience and background in dramaturgy. It's a view on abstract principles of storytelling where you get to manipulate form and structure itself before you materialise it into particularities. Kind of like virtual functions, or better yet a class diagram of a story before you write it down. Dramatic theory is not competing with literary theory - it complements it, specializes it. I took dramatic theory as a heavy weapon which I find extremely useful in my work, but I didn't dwell much further into literary theory. I took some bits and pieces that I find useful for my work, like intertextuality (esp. biblical - which is tropey as it gets, Star Wars for example and Hero's Journey, but most modern literature as well)... etc. I have colleagues which are far more well-versed in literature theory than I am for when I need insight. I'm more concerned with dramatic mechanics and structure, because that's what I do and what interests me.
What I'm saying is that behind all of the layers of a genre, there is a common subset to all stories. If you start with that and build towards a genre, you get to see the specifics of how it modulates that core structure. SF, in that regard, is always heavily biased towards internal-driven change with accentuated wants and needs switch[1] where character is in an extreme psychological situation driven by an extreme physical situation flared by science. Character is driven into a corner where he/she has to act on his core flaw in order to achieve the need in order to change. Whereas fantasy has a character on a journey both physical and psychological through which he/she overcomes the flaw in his character in order to act on it when third act kicks in.
It's a bit of an abstract way of thinking, but I don't know how else to put it without first explaining all of the intro to dramatic theory, hah.
[1] Wants vs needs is the epitome of character arc mechanics. There's something character wants that drives his story arc, only to be exposed to his actual needs (what he really wants). Shedding his wants and fulfilling that need he discovered he overcomes his major flaw and thus changes his character.
Now, if you view through prism of that mechanics (core one though) and go back to genre structures you can clearly see where most differ (not all, there are blurry ones!). For example, if you look at Star Wars or Conan which are fantasy (one with SF theme and one with fantasy theme) - there's a clear flaw in the character that gets replaced by a need and fulfilled on the journey (actual one). Be it Force training vs Dagobah cave or Sword training vs Valeria. It's an actual quest! Now look at a clear-cut SF, for example Inconstant Moon episode from Outer Limits (check that out if you haven't!) or any of the more fabled STNG or DS9 episodes. In Inconstant Moon, main character realises this might be the final night of his (and everyone's life - Sun has gone Nova on the other side of the Earth (it's nighttime), and he notices Moon is exceptionally bright because of it... so he calls up his ex girlfriend (wants) and he becomes more open and free (needs).. or in DS9 Pale Moonlight (Moon, again!) where cptn. Sisko wants an action attack plan or whatever only to need to become vile and dirty character in order to win, thus overcoming his flaw (being a good guy)... no quest. When we return to Dune, that's where lines get blurred and there's an endless debate.
I mean, I could go on forever and we all could probably be right to most extents. This is just my way of thinking. Flair on top of all of that is of least concern, but is the most visible in a genre. By that I mean spaceships vs swords or whatever. It's just a motif. Hence why people commonly confuse Star Wars as an SF - which it isn't at all. Also a reason why new Star Trek movies aren't really SF. It's a fantasy or in ST case action story with an SF theme on top.
I'm really passionate about this subject (storytelling) and we have debates like these almost on a daily basis because we all love it. We all agree on one thing and that's that everything lies in character development and arc and grows from there, so excuse my elaborate intro to debating the topic!
But- I got into computers and specialised in AI and I'm always thinking of ways to use my new knowledge to do what you say: tell stories. I agree with you that regardless of the medium, the story is what matters (although I'll also say that what attracted me to writing was my love for words and language, what I refer to as form: the written word as a purpose in and of itself. Most of my knowledge in AI is in natural language processing, particularly tasks like grammar induction and language generation).
So, one of the projects I've had in the back of my mind for a long time is some kind of system, or (programming) language, to help writers author their works. In particular, what I would really like to achieve is to create a system with these two capabilities: a) given a story skeleton authored by a human writer, the system should flesh out the skeleton producing a "rough draft" that the writer could then edit further; b) the system should have parameters giving the writer control of such things as theme, style and "voice", so that by adjusting the parameters the writer could turn a horror story to a romance ("Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath, their love everlasting"... though that would probably count as comedy) or, there you go- turn a Fantasy story to an SF story.
Suffice to say that this capability is still light years away from our current technology and probably also from our understanding of how a story works and so I haven't really made much progress. One big problem for me is that it is very hard to identify concrete and objective story elements that could constitute the "bones" of a story-skeleton, with enough clarity that an automated system could manipulate in the way I want.
It would not be enough to just describe such a set of elements in narrative language- one would need something like a formal grammar, some kind of structure that a computer could use. Some might think that just training a neural network, or some other machine learning algorithm would do the job, as if by magic, but what exactly would one train a model on? If you just hand over a bunch of text to an automatic learner it learns to reproduce the text. The structure language-learning algorithms learn is the structure of the language, not the structure of the story.
What one would really need is a big corpus of literary works annotated with the kind of story elements you'd want your algorithm to learn- just as natural language corpora are annotated with syntactic elements in order to allow training language modelling algorithms. Such a literary annotated corpus of course does not exist- and it would be extremely hard to create one, given that, like I say, what constitutes a narrative element is very subjective and there is probably little agreement on that even among people with your background in dramatic and literary theory.
So I guess where I'm coming from is that I've tried, and failed, to systematise story authoring, a failure that I attribute to the elusive nature of narrative elements, and that may be partly why I tend to focus so much on superficial elements, tropes, that can be much more easily represented.
Of course, I still think that there is value in tropes- because there is a difference in how writers and publishers etc see literary works, and how the general public does. I think sometimes people just want to read, or watch, a thrilling story with spaceships or swords- and they don't really analyse the character's traits, or the plot, very deeply as long as they feel pleased when they put the book down, or exit the screening area.
If you're interested in writing, want to write, or just want to talk about it every now and then, hit me up via email. It's in my profile.
A lot of it feels an awful lot more like magic than science. Like the mind reading and prophecy stuff. The more interesting technology, personal shields, is just an excuse to explain why people fight with swords instead of modern weapons. Which lends to the medieval feel thing. And an awful lot of technology is missing, like anything remotely like a computer. The robot wars happened in the distant past and aren't part of the story. Just an explanation for why there aren't any computers. It's barely mentioned in the book at all actually.
Human computers (mentats), drug-assisted spaceship navigation, genetic manipulation and cloning (the Tleilaxu), ecological reshaping of planets, complex ecological lifecycles, etc.
Anyway you dice it, Dune is a genuine work of SF with a rennaissance/medieval flavor.
If your definition of sci-fi is anything set in the future or with some futuristic technology, then sure. But there is something very different between Dune and "typical" sci fi. It reminds me a lot of Star Wars, which people have described something like "fantasy adventure that just happens to take place in space". But at least star wars is filled with blasters and droids and space battles.
It's true there are no clones in the first Dune book, but there is genetic engineering (that's what the Bene Gesserit breeding program is, after all). There is drug assisted navigation -- how else do you think the Guild Navigators manage to do it? That's a main plot point and why Arrakis and melange are so important. The mentats go beyond being "highly trained" people (they are the "human" response to computers after the Butlerian Jihad), and they claim the drugs they sip (called "sapho juice") assist them in their mental powers -- but if they were merely highly trained people, that would still be firmly within the realm of SF and outside Fantasy :) This is all from the first book, by the way.
Dune has plenty of SF, as myself and others have already mentioned.
I think you missed something.
> They certainly haven't been an important part of the story.
Directly? No. But they're why the spice is necessary to space travel, which plays a major role in the economics (and thereby politics) of the situation.
It's hard to imagine any kind of modern government where your armies have to be trained in hand-to-hand rather than conscripted with rifles, and where you can't have computers to keep track of records.
I can understand why you might not buy into it, but it is very much a speculative fiction type book.
They also have computers, but they're limited.
I tend to think of Fantasy as linked to philosophy (moral choices etc), while Sci-fi is linked to sociology (what would society be like if...). But those classes don't really help with Dune, so I choose the HPA definition.
Dune is great sci-fi even just for pointing out the future might look more like the past than the present.
Then, the middle books cover prescience and its implications. The last two have more typical 80's sci-fi: ships, planets, weapons, dystopian overcrowded cities.
The final clincher for me though is the strong thread of politics* throughout and the exploration of relationships outside of the bounds of the possibilities of past or present.
In case you can't guess, I highly rate it all! (Although 2 and 3 are a bit weaker.)
* Indeed, in an early scene, Paul identifies the purpose of the Bene Gesserit as politics, and they are arguably the main thread of the books.
Fortunately dune didn't have mind reading.