Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
In 2019, of course, the information in all of those printed manuals could be put into a wristwatch with room to spare, while manned interstellar travel is nowhere in sight.
Why weren't they equipped with a twenty-inch deci-trig duplex slide rule, like Seaton, in the Skylark of Space [0]?
"All right—let's see. Radius of rotation here in Washington would be cosine latitude times equatorial radius, approximately—call it thirty-two hundred miles. Angular velocity, fifteen degrees an hour. I want secant fifteen less one times thirty-two hundred. Right? Secant equals one over cosine—um——m—one point oh three five. Then point oh three five times thirty-two hundred. Hundred and twelve miles first hour. Velocity constant with respect to sun, accelerated respecting point of departure. Ouch! You win, Mart—I'd step out! Well, how about this, then? I'll put on a suit and carry rations. Harness outside, with the same equipment I used in the test flights before we built Skylark One—plus the new stuff. Then throw on the zone, and see what happens. There can't be any jar in taking off, and with that outfit I can get back U.K. if I go clear to Jupiter!"
[0] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php
My enjoyment of the Lensman series has lasted longer than my enjoyment of Flickr! One of the other superb old tech images I have from the series is a spaceship pilot 'playing arpeggios' on the massive bank of the controls of his starship.
In fairness, authors sometimes mimic something people understand in the present to make things easier on the reader. It can take a lot of text to explain concepts to people with no familiarity.
The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster.
"The Subliminal Man" (written in 1963) touches upon some interesting themes about manipulation via technology.
The more general prediction of having a lot of vapid TV and news content is rather widely covered.
Or with the revelation space cycle where the speed of light is a limit so you get multiple totally different society on different planets.
"Hard SF" is a term I'm deeply suspicious of; it originated in the late 1950s/early 1960s in the US SF publishing field as a twitchy counterpoint to the "New Wave" then appearing, as previous social taboos began to crumble -- "hard" had connotations of two-fisted manly-man engineers with slide-rules clenched between their jaws, support for the Vietnam War, and the implicit technocrat agenda espoused by the racist and sexist John W. Campbell, editor of Analog (the de-facto house magazine of the hard SF tribe), who over a 30-40 year period used SF to promote a white supremacist and ultra-capitalist agenda (hint: Heinlein's "Fifth Column" was written to an outline provided by Campbell, and Heinlein apparently toned down the racism in it, so it's now merely a screamingly racist "yellow peril" yarn).
There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/essay/starship-stormtrooper...
If you want constraints I'd recommend looking into Mundane SF, a much more recent (and much less visible, less successful) offshoot of the field:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundane_science_fiction
It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today.
(PS: gratuitous appeal to authority: I'm a multiple Hugo-winning SF author, and I write SF novels for a living. If you don't recognize my name, go feed "Charles Stross" into wikipedia before you downvote.)
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
The Expanse is popular because -- surprise! -- even a niche market can be a large market when it's a niche in a billion person audience.
It would be much more difficult for a hard sci-fi series to gain the kind of traction that Star Trek and Star Wars do, simply because the kinds of story it can tell are much more constrained...and it doesn’t allow for the same kind of wow factor.
I kind of disagree. What people want out of their stories is something that resonates with them emotionally or that speaks to the human condition. The fantasy vs science dichotomy doesn't really apply, and it's mostly subjective anyway.
Also, it helps to remember that Star Wars and Star Trek were pioneering in their respective media. Star Wars basically invented the motion picture blockbuster and "epic" sci-fi. Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
But both are also far more about people than technology or even extrapolation. If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings - it's actually a fairly grounded universe - and there are many such settings that somehow allow for telepaths as well. It's entirely possible to have hard sci-fi that has a wow factor and human drama (Babylon 5 comes to mind as an attempt, maybe the Expanse,) it's just not something people want to do because science is difficult, whereas teching the tech is easy.
Star Trek (TOS, this changed a bit with TNG and DS9) didn't even make the society the main characters were part of an important focus, it was more focused on external-societies-of-the-week, and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models.
> If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars
...wouldn't happen, because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
Fair enough, but TOS was more internally consistent and fleshed out than the anthology series of the time, and taken more seriously than Lost in Space. No one on the Enterprise got turned into a talking carrot, Kirk would never stand for such tomfoolery.
>because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
I don't know... without that, you've still got an intergenerational conflict between two rival houses (Skywalkers and Palpatines,) which is standard space opera fare. The Force as religion and politics could still be a driving factor without tangible manifestations of the supernatural, as that already happens in the real world.
You could even go the Babylon 5 route and pull the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" card and call the Jedi "technomages." They're just doing some weird thing with quantum (mumble) that we don't understand.
Star Trek TOS was not that internally consistent or realistic.
Consider that within a couple of years they discovered that Jack the Ripper had actually been due to a non-corporeal alien, that aliens had visited Ancient Greece, resulting in the Greeks worshiping them as gods, and that Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, and Brahms were all the same person, still alive at about 6,000 years old .. and that Cochrane was still alive.
The odds that there are many others alien visitors, and ultra-long-lived humans, is very high. That should have a big impact on how humans try to understand their own history and cultural evolution, but it's never mentioned.
Or, think about how the ancient Greek myths influenced the later Roman ones, and how the Roman culture influenced even the German culture nearly 2,000 years later. The strong similarities between human history and the Roman-like culture of 'Bread and Circuses' (with the gladiator having the Greek name Achilles) and Nazi Germany ("Patterns of Force") or even US culture, as in 'The Omega Glory' with the Yankees and Communists, and holy words identical to the US Pledge of Allegiance and Preamble to the Constitution seemly written on Omega IV several hundred years before they were written on Earth.
This is hand-waved as Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development. Given that we know that aliens influenced Earth history, and other planets seem to have a similar history, shouldn't they be thinking how odd it is to still have parallel development? Does it mean that equally powerful aliens are affecting all of the other cultures too? Why don't humans meet any of them?
And, if mental powers can be created through an injection, why aren't more people doing it? Where is the research into understanding how that works?
> the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
The Quartermass Experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quatermass_Experiment It was near-future, but still in the future.
> most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings
I don't understand energy in Star Wars.
Why don't the imperial troops fire at the escape pod? So what if no life was detected. It's ret-conned that droids aren't allowed to use escape pods. But you can still place the plans in the droid, turn it off on a timer, stick it in the escape pod, and eject the pod, yes?
We know droids can be shut down because C-3PO shuts himself down for the night to conserve power. They've got two suns, plenty of land, and no excess solar power? And it's relatively cheap to get a flight off the planet, which requires loads of power - and potential energy is easily converted to kinetic. So, why is it accepted that C-3PO needs to save power?
Just one of those random things, I guess.
The first paragraph of Heinlein's Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein says "he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction."
Going the other way, the entry for "Hard science fiction" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction includes his "The Past Through Tomorrow" collection of stories and "The Rolling Stones" as representative of hard science fiction.
A lot of people write hard sf. Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorites.
Also just wanted to say I really enjoyed Accelerando, and the Laundry Files series is amazing so far (although I don't know how far I'll get if it keeps getting darker!) Thanks for all your good work.
I've really enjoyed (and reread) your novels and I'm a longtime fan of the works of Kim Stanley Robinson. Even though James A. Corey only sort of qualifies as "mundane SF" given the super alien tech, I really enjoyed the parts of his books where stellar orbits, transit times and such are treated as important parts of the plot.
His politics I would estimate as reasonably similar to the HN gestalt.
I read all kinds of SF regardless of politics and scientific accuracy. I often find authors whose politics I don't agree with give me the most insight into other ways of seeing and understanding the world.
I just love the idea of orbital mechanics, coriolis effects and zero g environments as plot points. I also wish there were SF video games that utilized a mundane SF solar system as a setting.
Being a staunch Trekkie, I protest. You can't put Star Wars in the same sub-genre as Star Trek! For instance, a common categorisation would have to explain the distinct absence of Ewoks or cute robots from Star Trek [1] or the much reduced focus on technology in Star Wars [2]. While (according to the wikipedia page on Science Fantasy) Star Trek is sometimes labelled as Science Fantasy, it's clear the aim of the show is completely different than the aim of Star Wars. I mean, one is an adventure with space swords and space knights, the other is ... an adventure, but with space captains and space lieutenants.
So very different.
____________
[1] I doubt anyone would consider Lt. Cmndr. Data a "cute robot" and anyway, he's an android.
[2] See: "the tech is overteching" (copied here so you can avoid opening that atrocious syfy.com page):
"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/ron_moore_calls_star_trek
P.S. I know my comment comes along as a bit ironic, but I really see a difference between Star Wars and Star Trek and the kind of SciFi they represent. My best attempt at an explanation: in Star Wars, starships are cool. In Star Trek, how starships work is cool.
Perhaps because writers have so far only needed nine plots for Star Wars but needed 79 for Star Trek (TOS alone!) episodes.
In Star Wars, this conflict is largely but not entirely absent. In a climactic scene of A New Hope, the rebels get to blow up the Death Star, except—“It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.” Very short bursts in the middle of other conflict. Similarly there is a short moment of Han Solo explaining that he needs to give his computer time to make hyperspace calculations lest they all die—it is another really tiny moment to enhance a larger existing conflict.
Whereas with Trek it is usually more pronounced, “no one has ever done those things with these tools, how do we even begin to do it?” ...
A lot of the rest of the apparent difference comes down to format. The Trek that we remember had to be rushed and crushed. The episodes were short and the TV stations reserved the right to show them out of order, so just like virtually all TV off that time, there was typically a short circular arc by which everyone at the end of the episode must more or less be however they started.
One really interesting thing someone pointed out to me about reality TV was that it was extremely cognitively complex for its time, and indeed this was its selling point. People watched Survivor because something changed as a result of every episode and there was a lot of mental stimulation of the form “ooh I wonder who would be the best strategic target for him to take out?!” . There was a little of this in other places; I like to think about how we used to debate whether a French chef should really challenge Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, or whether he should have the audacity to fight the nearly undefeatable Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. But even those shows returned mostly to the same place week after week.
I also can't think of a single episode where it was rock-hard. There has always been a lot of fuzz in how fast the Enterprise can actually travel, for instance, that a truly hard series would need to commit to, even in the context of an episode. Even when they try to set for a particular story that the Enterprise could get to this destination in X hours, it's still soft because if they just try harder there's always more that can be pulled out of the engines if necessary.
Been watching some of the original series and next generation lately. Next generation definitely focusses more on consistancy and explaining how the 'tech' works. I've noticed a lot of TOS is completely inconsistent with the technology and abilities of different things and even people between one episode to the next. TNG, at least for the most part, seems to try and keep the explanations more 'realistic' and consistent between episodes, at least from what i've noticed.
(I run on the theory that if the Enterprise can accidentally do it, even if it is risky, surely you can build a thing to do it deliberately if you try.)
(TBH I don't love where Star Trek is right now, but they've got a long way to go before they run out.)
>(TBH I don't love where Star Trek is right now, but they've got a long way to go before they run out.)
I just wish they'd continue the story after Voyager instead of going further and further back in time. It seems pointless to me. We already know what's going to happen. I never was a big fan of prequels in general, but it just seems worse with star trek.
You should read the "orthogonal" series by greg egan :)
I think this doesn't reflect poorly on the authors so much as on how difficult it is to get all of this stuff right, even with a ton of research. One advantage mainstream fiction has in this regard is that by relying on a backdrop of "real world" events they will at least pass a sniff test even if you as the author haven't put much thought into it. Not that spec. fiction. authors don't crib extensively from history etc., also - but the desire to demonstrate the alien nature of things often unravels quickly as an author reaches the limits of their expertise/time/research abilities.
I think it is one of the weaknesses of novel (let alone series) length work in this area that you can't help but expose the holes in the artifice. It's ok, readers have suspension of disbelief, but a strength of short fiction here is that you don't end up building in implausible or contradictory content in background material.
It is interesting when a SF author chooses to try and get some other part of the world "right": e.g. Vinge, Butler, Stross, etc.
It's purely audience demand. If your readers like physics and themselves hold magical beliefs about biology, they'll enjoy thinking about your physics and won't notice the problems in your biology.
I dont think Science Fiction needs a subcategory for that, just a meter of timeless storytelling conventions
If an author can't even get their physics straight, why should anyone care about what they came up with on the social side, where it's a lot easier to get away with blind guesses or wishful thinking?
That does happen - an author will be educated in a particular field or have some specific domain expertise, and their work will obviously be correct in that one regard, but the science everywhere else will be kind of ridiculous. An author may put meticulous detail into the command structure and tactics of a military sci-fi setting but still portray concepts in physics, biology, etc. which are outdated or inaccurate, or filtered through the author's own prejudice.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect even a "hard SF" author to be an expert in everything, or to expect all the science in such stories to be rigorous and correct. Remember that the reason positronic brains exist in Asimov's books is that he thought "positronic" sounded cool and futuristic. It's complete and utter technobabble, yet his robot stories are still considered "hard SF" by many.
People just have to accept that even so-called "hard SF" is mostly BS, and enjoy stories for what they are.
Because they require different set of knowledge and different focus. Perfect physics does not imply good characters or understanding of society regardless of how difficult they comparatively are.
Moreover, Asimov resonates, because he wrote feel good stories. Many of them are effectively detective stories with some futuristic simple idea of world.
Asimov however does not appeal to people who care about characters nuance and exploration of society under this or that condition. Asimov appeals to people who want to have fun with a creative idea without uncomfortable feelings.
Not even Elijah Baley?
None of which is a fault with the stories! You could say the same for, say, Sherlock Holmes: these are not convincingly rendered human characters because that's not the point of this kind of storytelling. My point is that Asimov's work succeeds on its own terms, and resonates today, without needing any of the things that the literary/soft sci-fi fans will tell you are essential.
I still wait for actual hard-social-sci-fi - but its author(ess) would be hunted down the streets by the mob. Because humans are deeply flawed, and exploring those bugs and the hacks used by meta-organisms (like companys & states) would make for a thoroughly uncomfortable read.
TL,DR: There is very little hard, uncomfy social scifi. Because we rage when dragged out of our mental comfort zones.
For example, i consider greg egan (e.g. "Diaspora") and peter watts (e.g. "Blindsight") to be authors whose works are improved and excellent because they are hard sf.
Which is not to say there arent plenty of bad hard sf novels out there, there are. There are also plenty of amazing "soft" sf too. Hard sf is just a different type of novel, with different benefits and weaknesses. Like any (sub) genere it can be amazing in the right hands and terrible in the wrong.
There is a second type, which is technically a subset of this set, where the author gives the reader enough information to participate in the investigation, and gives them enough information to technically finger who the perpetrator is and exactly why before the characters in the story do. (To date myself a bit, this is Encyclopedia Brown-type stories.) They have all the features of the previous type of story, but also have this feature. However, since a well-written story is on the Pareto optimality frontier of the combination of story, plot, character, etc., to add this to the story usually requires some room to be made somewhere else.
Hard vs. soft science fiction is a very similar relationship, I think.
In addition, I'd at least pick a nit that while a story is welcome to "explore the relationship between humanity and technology" as much as it likes, it is seriously weakened when the technology itself is soft and ill-defined. Such stories are limited to exploring the author's personal opinions, if not outright neuroses. While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, it's not anything special either; many genres have that. Where hard science fiction becomes interesting is when taking the tech and science seriously produces results that surprise even the author, and aren't just a reflection of the personal attitudes of the author. This is a high bar, rarely met, but it's one soft science fiction can't even try for.
The thing I like about hard SF is that it allows the exploration of questions we can't answer, but that are clearly implied by real-world science. I.e., what is consciousness? You can definitely give a great not-hard-SF exploration of this idea, that focuses on imaginary technologies and the relations people have with it. But you can also explore it from the angle of extrapolating real-world experiments, like the famous split-brain experiments, and trying to dig into what they could mean for the question of consciousness.
Permutation City asks questions which are most interesting because they are real questions we don't know the answer to.
Your point of view is much nicer, however.
First, the manga and the anime were both based on the immediate destruction of Tokyo — 1982 for the manga, 1988 for the anime. A new megalopolis called Neo-Tokyo is built over, and the story starts, in 2019.
Then the main theme, the psychic powers induced by drugs, are more akin to the genres of horror, fantastic and superheroes than to the science-fiction genre.
Oh, the name of the two-volume series is "American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s". Maybe the specifics of criteria -- "America," "1960s" -- influenced the choices?