Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
Indeed, but that is always the challenge of a writer. But if you introduce magic in your story, and you do it in a way to show the limitations and what is roughly possible, then you can give hints later, if there was a murder with the help of a magic trick. But I actually think I only ever read one detective fantasy story
https://www.der-spurenfinder.de/
(just in german as far as I know)
It mostly works, but in one instance there was a surprise fantasy ability, that I could have not guessed before. But the actual murderer in the end, there were enough hints that gave them away despite magic, as the skills were explained and then you could combine.
It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.
For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too.
What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.
A magic unobtainium drive which works in a consistent way is fine, just call it “hyperspace” or whatever
There’s a difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, but they are both still sci-fi, you can tell optimistic stories of the future with a “battle drive”, as long as you keep it consistent. If the drive cancels relativity effects and allows travel at 5000c that’s fine. Just ensure you travel at 5000c, no hoping across the galaxy in a few days, but travelling to another star in a few days or even hours is fine.
Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.
> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.
> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
Yeah I think most readers care more about consistency than realism. Being completely realistic makes consistency easy but a harder sell in terms of entertainment.
Maybe one way to view consistency is modelling the story world as a network of criss-crossing character threads. Where one axis is time and the other(s) are uh something? Anyways, consistency is how predictable (smooth / linear) the thread is. We follow the main character's thread pretty closely so that thread is allowed to suddenly curve (plot twist) without risk of losing the reader. We only catch glimpses of the supporting cast / antagonist so those have to be either predictable or the narrator has to backtrack and reveal any twists where necessary. And maybe how intricate yet well-behaved this network appears is what gives the feeling of stories coming alive. Or maybe I'm just on too much caffeine and ranting.
The typical poorly received uses aren’t when the cre beams down from orbit, or even when they can’t beam down, it’s when they de age people and retrieve their pattern from the buffer to cure an illness, and never do it again, or when they beam light years away for a throw away story element.
It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on.
And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
That definition would imply that sufficiently large flying dinosaurs qualify as dragons. And at least personally I think I agree with that conclusion. Dragons aren't purely fantasy, they're merely extinct (and never breathed fire IRL).
These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first.
That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the easiest way to communicate the idea.
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
Archaeopteryx would have you for lunch long before you realized that it doesn't spit fire.
I'm not even clear what the criteria are. We've got examples in fiction that run the gamut. Even limited to fairly traditional post-Tolkien western high fantasy examples of creatures with a long neck, two wings, a distinct abdomen, and a tail we've still got concrete examples ranging in size from a small lap dog up to larger than a McMansion. Plenty of reasonably canonical examples don't spit fire (although being able to certainly furthers the general vibe). And weight? As I said earlier, that's (imo) solidly in the domain of secondary characteristics.
Semantic arguments aren't any fun (and are largely pointless). Is Pluto a planet or not? Unless it's a technical discussion where the distinction matters for some reason, who cares? What matters is if Pluto fits the pattern that you (ie the people conversing) care about.
Hence my posing the example of a particularly buoyant variety of dragon. I think most people would consider it to fit the pattern well enough but I'm sure there would be at least some disagreement.
Also as long as we're talking about wild far future sci-fi possibilities such as visiting other stars in person then you can't rule out dragons in the form of a wildly advanced, needlessly decadent military technology show piece. Something like a nuclear powered bio engineered cyborg for use as some sort of fighter jet. (Apologies if I just inadvertently ripped off some anime I've never heard of.)
No, because one is theoretically impossible while the other is theoretically possible.
No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.