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What Makes Great Science Fiction?
cheesethegreat writes "Have you ever noticed how everyone breaks down into a near-religious frenzy when the topic of the "best" science fiction universe comes up? Everyone has a favorite universe, be it the Foundation Series by Asimov, or the classic Star Wars trilogy. So tell Slashdot what your favorite is, and what the most important part of a science fiction universe is to you."
Well, as far as books go, I'd have to say the Dune series by Frank Herbert (ALthough, I'm sure you all know that) The way it so elegantly combines action, suspence, twisty curvey plots within plots that actually require one to think... but the prequels... they are just pieces of crap that are poorly written..
As far as movies go... Donnie Darko, although not blatently science fiction, is one great piece of film... you should all watch it...
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
#1: Believable, REAL people.
Heinlien, Weber, Drake, Cook. All authors that have good solid characters.
#2: Believable science.
a limited number of WOW factor science. Make it easy for Me to believe, and make it well thought out and self consistant!
Iain M. Banks' Culture.
I'd love to live in the middle of trippy post-humanist apace opera universe... wouldn't evryone?
deus does not exist but if he does
There is no greater science fiction writer than the late Douglas Adams and there is no greater work of science fiction than the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and its five part trilogy.
Science fiction doesn't have to be dramatic to be good, but being nuts does help a little...
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I'm reluctant to cast a vote in the best SciFi category, mainly because there is so much great stuff.
I will, though, mention one author that is completely blowing me away right now. Her name is Octavia E. Buttler and for powerful, dramatic SciFi, she reigns supreme (for me at least). Clay's Ark and Patternmaster are definately not to be missed. Also, for great short stories, try her collection of short stories Bloodchild: And Other Stories
Also, for good old fashioned SciFi, check out Roger Zelazny. The first half of the Amber series is almost purely fantasy (while the second half is a mix of SciFi and Fantasy) so they probably don't count as an answer to this question. But Psychoshop and Donnerjack are definately fun to read.
Oh and I guess I might as well plug one of my all-time favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. All of them are so good that I can't even pick out one to recommend. Just try any (or all) of them.
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
It's just like things such as "what makes a great sandwich." Some swears by tomatoes while others can't stand them; the select few will go with anchovys and say that any sandwich without them is no food at all, etc.
/., eh?
/. to get them answered, anyhow... It's all about Karma-whoring right?
Furthermore, you can't really answer this without delving into a question like "what makes a good book." And if all of us had better ideas than you, we'd be making millions selling books instead of posting of
Of course, I can give you what I personally like in SciFi - imaginative worlds are always welcome (well described, mind you), and intellectually stimulating is also another plus (social / psychological / whatever problems that arise from these new and imaginative circumstances); beyond that, here and there some action / romance / whatever to help push the story along so I actually look forward to continue reading.
Of course, I have read books that may lack some of these qualities but were still very fun to read. So in the end, your question is still unanswered; but anyways... who posts questions on
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Stephen Donaldson once said in his "Gap" Series that there is a difference between Drama and Melodrama.
Imagine a triangle, with each of the main character classes at a point - the Villian, the Victim and the Hero.
To truly be drama, in the course of the story, at least 2, but preferably all three of the characters must change place:
The Villain becomes the Victim, the Victim becomes the Hero and the Hero becomes the Villain. That's the essence of true drama. Otherwise it's just melodrama.
Stephen Donaldson used this to good effect in the Gap Series. Like much of Piers Anthony's work, this story featured some pretty hefty brutality and abuse of women. Unlike Piers Anthony, it's not the mainstay of Donaldson's work. Anthony has managed an entire universe based around this Hero-Pirate, but essentially the characters always stay the same, and his work never makes it past low-grade melodrama. Donaldson uses almost exactly the same pretext and gives us an epic and dramatic tale.
This is also a reason why Episode II was so poor from a narrative perspective. [*spoiler alert] We all know that Anakin becomes Darth Vader, we know what happens to Obi Wan. We know from Episode IV where all these characters must be. So unlike most stories, the interest is not derived from where the characters go, but how they get there. Which is what Lucas failed to deliver. The story of Anakin is not so much a fall from grace as a slight trip - you can believe that he becomes Darth Vader, but his personal journey to the dark side isn't particularly interesting.
IMHO, the biggest rift in Sci Fi is between devotees of "hard" Sci Fi (focuses more on the *science* than the tale - think Greg Egan) and "soft" Sci Fi (space opera - swords & sandals epics in space - think Peter Hamilton).
I like both, and have always found the zealotry on either side to be kinda childish. Think emacs v vi... (sorry kids).
The bummer with Hard Sci Fi is that a lot of the really _interesting_ stuff will go straight over the reader's head: I've got a reasonable grasp of, say, the basics of quantum physics, but I get completely lost when someone a lot smarter than me starts using more esoteric aspects of the theory as a _starting_ place for an exploration of the logical consequences of said theory in a literary context. _I_ like it though, because even if I don't completely understand, I can still muddle through and figure out the gist of what's going on. The other downside of hard sci fi is that the writing tends to be _terrible_. You effectively have scientists attempting to write engaging stories. It's not, as a rule, their forte. Too much science, not enough fiction.
Conversely, the bummer with "soft" sci fi for me has always been that it's just some-old-story-set-in-space. Star Wars is like that. In fact, it's a modern classic of the genre. Peter Hamilton is another good example. This kind of sci fi is more like fantasy than _science_ fiction. Even worse, the fiction is usually terrible too. I used to love space opera when I was young - laser beams, aliens, space ships, funky babes. But I think you kind of grow out of it unless there's something _more_ to it than big-arse space battles & galactic empires.
Which is why I'm a _huge_ fan of Iain M Banks. This is a guy who can _really_ write. His sci fi (he writes more standard fiction under the name Iain Banks) is space opera, but some of the best space opera I've ever read. Read the Culture novels - start with "Consider Phlebas" or "Player of Games". Seriously - they're worth reading just for the ship names.
So I guess what makes great sci-fi for me is great writing. There's plenty of "ideas" writers, and don't get me wrong - interesting ideas are part of what sci-fi's all about. But that's a neccessary condition, it's not a sufficient condition.
Long post - must sleep.
Jeff Noon too. I seriously recommend "Vurt" - Automated Alice says curious yellow.
As is the case with all fictional literature, the
:-)
"best" is that which most effectively triggers,
shapes, and gives life to the mental images which
writing can only stimulate in our minds rather
than convey directly.
Since minds are so different from individual to
individual, and sometimes utterly so, there can
never be a single "best". At most, the fact that
any given book is seen as "best" by more people
than any other simply means that there are more
people with that particular mental makeup which
allows that book to succeed. Quite often, this
translates to those people inhabiting similar
memespaces, which is very common especially in
high-bandwidth communities both online and off.
So, which SF books best trigger my mental imagery
at the present time? In several categories of
subjective assessment:
Iain M. Banks's Culture novels
-- most convincing galactic future
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
-- most convincing human-level future
C.J. Cherryh's The Chronicles of Morgaine
-- most forceful and single-minded heroine
Peter F. Hamilton's The Nano Flower
-- most luscious yet unobstrusive image weaving
Walter Jon Williams's Aristoi
-- most distant yet still recognizable future
E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series
-- fastest delivery of mental images
Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time
-- most endearing treatment of distant future
I'd expect a fairly good correlation with the
"bests" of other SF readers on Slashdot, as the
memespaces of the technical communities tend to
be fairly cohesive. Ultimately though, it really
doesn't matter, since "best" is a personal issue.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
There's great as in "great literary work", or great as in fun to read.
I'm gonna catch a lot of heat for this one, but I really like E.E. "Doc" Smith. It's not high literary art but if you read the Lensman and Skylark series there's an atmosphere to those books you just don't find anywhere else. I know people complain about how every gun is the new ultimate weapon, but really if you think about it that's what we do with computers, military weapons, and lots of other technology, so it doesn't bother me much. They do deserve respect as a precurser to lots of later stuff - I'm willing to bet George Lucas had read these books before thinking up the whole Star Wars thing. And I saw one of Smith's "nonsense" words appear in a modern Star Trek book, so I can't be the only one who likes his stuff. Most people would say his work isn't "great", and in a literary sense I'll agree, but they're great fun and to me that makes them worthwhile.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Best motherfucking book ever, and one of the least recognized. Imagine a more literate "Star Trek" with elements of "Alien" and "Forbidden Planet" thrown in (but it predates all of them by quite some time). Though it was born out of pulp sci-fi, it transcends the vast body of what was being written then; I'd rank it up alongside "Nightfall". Vernor Vinge is the only other author I've read who makes me feel anything like I do reading Space Beagle.
Other than that, all of Philip K Dick's short stories. His novels are even better, but most of them aren't sci-fi the way Asimov or Heinlein are; I think he just wrapped them in futuristic settings. Of all of these, I'd say "Eye in the Sky" and "Ubik" are my favorites.
1. The way it lets authors play around with and explore philosophical ideas of how society develops. Asimov did this with the Foundation series, basing a whole story on a theory of how society develops through crises, what steps are taken in what order, who gets in power when and why. That's quite hard to make in a non-science fiction novel, unless you write a historical novel which often gets more dull and predictable.
2. Separate what is undeniable facts in the world around us (i e many aspects of human nature, like love, hate, passion, greed, curiosity etc) and what is just the results of our cultural heritage (our economical system, democracy, patriarchalism, monogamy and focus on material wealth just to mention a few). A good science fiction novel can be an eye opener to what can be changed and what can not.
3. Let's us explore our possible futures. Good SF gives us a glimpse (although very simplified and exagerated) of how the future might look like. By comparing the scenarios of Star Trek with Cyberpunk and 1984, we can more easily get aware of what the future might hold and as a society make decisions on what we want and don't want of what's ahead of us. The novel 1984 has definitely helped to raise the public awareness of the threats of totalitarianism combined with technology, likewise has Cyberpunk woken up many people to how global corporations gathers more and more power and how that might affect society.
4. Epical tales. I'm personally a real sucker for this and no other category except fantasy so easily allows for grand epical tales as SF.
These are to me the promises of SF and a good SF book should take advantage of at least one of these posibilities, otherwise there is no need to put the plot/characters in another space and time. Plot and characters must still be good though, but I expect that from books of any category.
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that not more of the ./ community has more elaborate thoughts of why they've fallen in love with SF and not just books with good plots/characters...
If you're saying that Clarke owned patents on satellites, communication or otherwise, I fear you are mistaken. In one of his short stories he recounts how he was unable to patent the idea at the time because the technology to put them into orbit wasn't there yet (gettting patents used to be harder) and by the time that it was the idea had achieved public domain status.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
War of the Worlds. A plot so far ahead of its time that the ending is still being copied. Ususally badly (V, Independence Day - although I believe that film to be satire for reasons I'll be happy to debate later). Or how about The Shape of Things To Come, which correctly predicated mechanised warfare. Perhaps you prefer The Time Machine, redone yet again on film in the last year or so. Or perhaps The Invisible Man, redone as Hollow Man. Maybe even The Island of Dr Moreux, which predicts human/animal hybrid experiments like Slashdot's human/mouse hybrid thread a couple of days ago. All of the HG Well's stuff was set in this universe, so it becomes that much more believable.
No? How about Jules Verne's undersea worlds. Or the book his publisher rejected as too depressing, in which he described light railways, telephones and fax machines. The name unfortunately eludes me.
No? How about Brave New World. George Orwell's excellent and entirely depressing book, though to my mind a bit ripped of from his namesake's Shape of Things To Come (George Orwell. Herbet George Wells. Hmmm).
Films. How about 1926's Metropolis, from Fritz Lang? The film without which Bladerunner simply wouldn't exist. The short story 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' probably would, but the short story and the film bear almost no resemblence to each other.
Need to look a bit further back than just the last few years. There's probably some visionary author writing before Wells that I've overlooked. If so, please tell me. I'd be interested to hear it.
Cheers, Ian
Secondly, the science is very hard. Hard science fiction is a genre that is very hard to pull off. A lot of authors who do hard sci-fi spend most of the pages of a book just describing their hard science. Baxter manages to seamlessly weave it in to the story and you barely notice, but is leaves an impression.
However, what truly makes it great is that he weaves the plot and the science together perfectly. A lot of sci-fi authors simply use sci-fi as a setting and tell a traditional type story. A sci-fi love story or a sci-fi crime thriller or a sci-fi horror story. These are all sci-fi, but can only achieve the rank of 'good' sci-fi. Truly great sci-fi needs to have science in it, but also relate it to the plot.
When I read a piece of science fiction, I like to know how the advanced science affected the culture. So, in the future there is some really cool technology. Well, how do people's lives change? What are the consequences? These are all focuses in Baxter's series. A big part of the plot is the interaction between the technologically superior Xeelee and the (comparitively) primitive human race, and the resulting war between the two races. Add to that the impending death of the universe and the pursuit of science among all of this, which leads to some startling discoveries about the Xeelee.
Few other sci-fi universes has these elements together. The only other one that I can think of off hand is the Foundation trilogy, which is second on my list. It only falls behind Baxter's series because the science is less than hard.
For me, at least, great sci-fi has to be realistic and believeable, and the tech has to be correct (at least, I have to be able to believe it could function and have some idea of how it is supposed to work).
I think the most wonderful genre is near-future science fiction. A lot of Asimov's work falls into this line, involving space exploration, etc... James P. Hogan was pretty good with his "Inherit the stars" trilogy, which I thought was pretty good. I like Heinlein a lot, because although some of his fiction goes pretty far into the future, at least the tech is handled in a very believeable way and he tries pretty hard to "get it right".
The whole cyberpunk genre is just awesome, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, et al... I like the fact that they're very tech-centric, and make some pretty good predictions about the near future (some of which are already coming true).
I'm not into the "faraway galaxy" thing at all, I recoil at fantasy stuff like sword-and-sorcery, and if a story is too far in the future, and the tech is just completely pulled out of the author's butt I generally ditch the book and write the seven bucks off as a loss. I think this sort of thing is a sign of laziness on the part of the author; instead of researching, and figuring out how something could work if it was happening in real life, the author just says, "it's fiction" and pulls the whole thing out of his ass. It's crap, you know?
What pisses me off more than anything else is when an author has no understanding whatsoever of computer science and tries to make up a situation without researching it. I've seen a couple of novels about how a "biological virus" is "infecting the internet", or how someone caught a biological virus by looking at an infected system's VDT -- usually with some hackneyed explanation about how the flashing on the screen "hacked the person's brain". Don't get me wrong, it's fun to laugh at some joker lit major who saw "the Matrix" and figured he'd cash in, but reading the tripe he puts out is too painful.
I know, I'm judgemental. But, Jesus, a guy's gotta have his standards.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!