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Is Science Fiction the Opiate of the Geek Masses?
jimharris writes "After reading Geoff Ryman's Mundane SF website, where he promotes a new form of science fiction based on real science, I got to wondering if traditional science fiction is just the opiate of the geek masses? Most science fiction is based on speculative fantasy rather than hard science - the common example being stories built around faster-than-light travel. Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing. SF writer Ian McDonald replied in his blog, Heads down, there's going to be incoming... and a rather wide-ranging discussion and elaboration of the idea is held over at mundane-sf.blogspot.com. Proponents of the Mundane Manifesto readily admit that traditional science fiction is just harmless fun, but I have to ask, how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do."
And I've always been quite fond of opiates myself. ;)
I got to wondering if traditional science fiction is just the opiate of the geek masses?
:)
Duh.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
From TFS:
It's statements like these that make all geeks look bad.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
My Treo is more powerful than a tricorder anyways. Star Trek is more like science history rather than fiction.
So is mixing pr0n and sci-fi the geek equivalent of chasing the dragon?
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
If you base your "SF" novel on currently accepted science only, then how can you do anything other than create a plot set in the present day? You can't know what "accepted" science will be like in the future... if you try to guess, you'll find yourself back in "standard" SF again.
Yes, FTL travel is far-fetched, but it's no less a fantasy than any other science-based predictions an author might make.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
If your "positive view of life" is based primarily on Star Trek please report to the nearest Suicide Booth.
Thank You.
This is why I rarely read the newer Science Fiction authors (newer meaning after the 1960s!), I prefer the older authors who actually had Doctorates of Science!
(or, in many cases, were on their way towards getting a doctorate in science and writing Science Fiction is how they paid for, in part, their education!)
Often times you can learn a lot about real world science from these authors (albiet some what dated now, as many areas of science have long since surpassed the knowledge possessed when these stories were originally written), something that I find lacking in modern day science fiction.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Ummm, duh!
BTW, nice pun with the "geek masses" thing... : p
If we "believe in Star Trek..."? Are you kidding me? Science fiction is ENTERTAINMENT, not religion. It's a genre of books, film, and television, not a protestant denomination or somesuch. If you "believe in Star Trek," I feel sorry for you.
That's the whole point. Science fiction, like all other good fiction, is the art of telling enthralling stories -- in the case of science fiction, that happen to take place in an imaginary future world, rather than in an imaginary present world like most fiction, or an imaginary past world in historical fiction. Occasionally people use fiction (incl. science fiction) as a medium to advance intellectual theories, e.g. social ideas or technological ideas or whatever, in which case the "serious" aspect either exists alongside the fictional narrative or adds to or detracts from its value, but essentially yes, science fiction is an opiate for a certain demographic.
Next time, try to come up with a better question.
Fuck it
Yes, and Isaac Newton would just laugh if someone told him about weird quantum effects which we accept as obvious today.
In fact, we know that we know almost nothing about the fundamental nature of this Universe, and it's just pointless to discuss what one can and can not do with it.
. . . I thought that was pornogrophy.
Yes, yes it is. Notice how most real nerds will frolic and adore anything with a science fiction theme. Even if those things, stripped of their sci-fi theme, are terrible. For example Star Trek is just a soap opera, it happens to be in space. Same for shows like Farscape. And the same goes for many books and fan-fics about various sci-fi universes.
Not that all sci-fi is actually crap. I'm not one to deny the quality of original Star Wars or great novels from Asimov or Heinlein or Stephenson. But it seems to me that many nerds will like anything and everything sci-fi just because its sci-fi.
What bothers me the most is that I'm a somewhat well rounded geek, but most sci-fi TV shows really don't do it for me. And when all my friends like a show they act like I'm lying when I have no interest and they think its the best thing ever. Things are good because they are good, not because they have a robot, alien, spaceship, magic, etc.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Does it really matter? If you have a positive view on life and you can function, why's it a problem how you become upbeat? Would you rather those people go around grounded in reality but depressed? This sounds like similar arguments that people have about beliefs in God, ghosts, and saucer abductions. They're mostly harmless.
It does not matter how many warp drives, alternate realites, laser guns, or jedi mind tricks a science fition work has...it all comes down to how the story is used to help the audience explore some segment of actual human nature. The science should be there to compliment the characters, not overtake them. What the hell good is a story if it does not give you a new perspective on your own existence/nature? If you want to strictly predict future technologies, that is what essays and doctoral thesis' are for. Sci-Fi is an opiate for the masses? Perhaps, but you can apply that label to many different genres of film and literature.
The universe sucks, we'll never travel faster than light, never leave the solar system and will become extinct as a species thanks to superior Microsoft technology.
Geez, pull the other monad.
some of it is just keeping our ears, eyes and options open.
There's nothing with stuff that could be, which lets out almost all 'space opera' but still leaves a great deal to the imagination.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Geeks just read crappy ass sci-fi novels because they aren't capable of comprehending serious works of literature.
Code Monkeys ain't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed.
In other news factory workers read a lot of detective novels.
If to stick to only what is possible today then it is not really science fiction?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What about new technology created due to science fiction? For example, I remember reading a few articles about how doctors thought the diagnostic beds they saw in ST: TOS were a great idea. They took an idea from science fiction and made into a very useful reality.
On another tangent, if you surveyed a large portion of scientists who like science fiction, you would probably see a lot of them having entered the sciences due to the influence of science fiction. So what if FTL is most likely impossible, does that mean all those guys at JPL who love Star Trek, Stargate, B5, etc. should stop watching since it isn't science fact?
My last tangent:
What about programs that look very much like science fact but in reality are much more science fiction? The common example here is the "oh let's just enhance this image through our nifty little computer software, and viola, there's your murder suspect." I somewhat think that this type of fiction does a disservice to real science, not helping it.
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
This is Fiction of Science. Things that might be. Why does everything has to be based on real facts. If it is based on real facts than it is rather a documentary and not a Science-Fiction Novel.
People believe in a lot of things: gods, fuehrer, presidents, whatever. So let those who want to believe in Star Trek or whatsoever.
Science Fiction is still something that might not be or might be. If you go back 100 years and tell someone you will have a mobile phone the size small than your hand, they will probably call you a loony. When Asimov wrote his Robot storries, who thought that this might come true. Nowadays we have already walking robots and who knows what the future will bring.
Nothing is impossible, until it is prooven impossible.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Suspension of disbelief... Suspension of disbelief...Suspension of disbelief... Suspension of disbelief...
Yes, FTL travel as we traditionally think of it (as opposed to using wormholes) is probably impossible. On the other hand, since most people *aren't* terribly well versed in the underlying relativistic mechanics necessarily to know this, it's not hard to suspend disbelief, and it makes for some good stories. When it takes 2,000 years to travel between stars, it makes it very hard to craft belivable Space Opera-type stories.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This is based on how much time I spend reading science fiction, vs how much time I spend reading slashdot.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
If I want reality, I'll go outside.
There's still plenty of good hard sci-fi being produced these days. The first one that comes to mind is Kim Stanley Robinson's series about the colonization and terraforming of Mars (Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars).
I'm willing to admit that I go in for lots of the more fantastical stuff myself, but I'm sure others here can make good reccomendations.
In a warp bubble, you are moving at sub-light speed relative to the space inside the bubble, but space itself is warped so that relative to the surrounding space you are moving at FTL speed.
My favorite author, Vernor Vinge, writes about a universe where we are in a "slow zone", and the laws of physics allow FTL travel in other places but not here. Vinge has a Ph.D. in math, and writes the kind of hard sci-fi that I like most. In fact it might be that writing with Einstein's constraints helped Vinge since he had to come up with a creative solution.
It seems that stories based on hard science, but predicting future events, are very similar to philosophy. If the story uses logic and the base axioms are existing technology, we should categorize it separately.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
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kulakovich
No science fiction is the marketing of the geek masses. We grow up with it, we often find refuge in its scenarios where geeks have friends, and are even respected as heroes. So we want to make or have all the stuff we read about in it. It's more like the psychedelics of the geek masses: it opens our minds, plants visions of a present distorted into a kind of future, which we then work to achieve. Either by inventing it, or just "early adopting" it when someone else does.
--
make install -not war
I always thought the phrase, "science fiction" was pretty self-explanitory myself. Why in the world would you want to limit authors to only using current science? Let's just assume for a second that we do know everything and our current model of the universe is 100% accurate and complete (which is such a laughable statement in itself), wouldn't it be more fun to escape into a different universe, one where FTL travel is possible, one where anything is possible? That's the point of fiction. Science fiction wasn't meant to be a rehash of your college physics book with a storyline thrown in, it was meant to be fun.
...but I have to ask, how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do."
HMMMM, as a lifelong SciFi Geek, with a real preference (after the GrandMasters) for the "hard" stuff ala' Charles Sheffield (RIP)..it's an interesting question.
which seems to me to beg another question...How of much what we are talking about in inextricalby interwoven with contemporary American politics?
ST:TOS came along during one of the most politically and socially dynamic periods of American history. TOS had a distinctly "Utopian" viewpoint, which many have extracted/inferred something of a "Fabian Socialist" viewpoint on the part of the show. Giving Gene Roddenberry's well-known political leanings, that's pretty unlikely.
It is MORE likely that Roddenberry intended a "technological utopia" where a politically-neutral science has advanced to the point where it has solved all the supply and demand and resource conflicts that have fueled international relations since the Hellenic Period.
Going all the way back to the Golden Age, and looking at early Vogt and the Lensmen series, where you have LOTS and LOTS of rayguns, and pretty routinely violate EVERY understanding we had (even then) of the "Laws,AHEM, of Physics"
Is the principle attraction of TOS its utopian politics, which gives us "future warm/fuzzies" about scientific solutions to all the global conflicts and crises that currently beset Gaia?
Or is it actually the "science" of TOS that attracts Geeks?
I would argue that there is so VERY LITTLE "science" in ST (as a whole)...that those who respond strongly to it are responding to the "sociology" of the future ST envrionment...
FWIW..YMMV
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
The whole reason interstellar travel gets ruled out is that it takes too long. But, what if humans could live for 5,000 years. Then, taking a trip to another planet would certainly be within reach.
This is my sig.
If you read SF and haven't read Vinge you better google for him right now
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Yup, judging from how I get mod-slapped every time I post anything remotely critical of NASA, space exploration, space elevators, or the billions of dollars we spend on space "research". Slashdot is completely intolerant of anything that goes against the "group think" that space is just the biggest goddamn thing since sliced bread. The same idiots answer my posts every time. "Oh, look at all the things we got from the space program, like velcro!", which a)assumes the item in question never would have been invented if it was truly necessary, and b)ignores all the nasty stuff that's come as a result of NASA research. Mainly, every jet fighter made by the US, spy satellites, and- our deepest, darkest technology- nuclear weapons, which thanks to all that space research, we can deliver clear across the planet at the push of a few buttons. Then there are the escapists- "well, it'd probably be a good idea to start living on another planet for safety". Hey, spaceshot- how about we learn how to get things right before we go galloping off?
I strongly suggest anyone who takes space exploration seriously give the NASA Parody about "wagonnauts" (titled, I think- "how the west wasn't won") a read. It points out just how collossally stupid the whole thing is- and it was written by NASA people, making it virtually untouchable.
Every time I saw the shuttle go up, all I could see was giant wads of cash burning. Folks- the US government doesn't spend money on space exploration just because it's romantic. It spends the money because much of the research is highly applicable to military purposes, and it does a great job of lining the pockets of defense contractors.
Let's at least ATTEMPT reducing our budget deficit, feeding+sheltering the homeless, universal health care, etc. After all- what the fuck good is colonizing another planet, if we've proven we can't get any of our basic societal problems fixed HERE? Priorities, people.
Please help metamoderate.
Science fiction can do a variety of things:
Early on, I read the works of Jules Verne. A bunch of things he predicted have come to pass. He took the science of the time and extended it. It was mostly, as I recall, about the technology.
Asimov asked questions about the social consequences of technology. What about sentient robots?
Another author, I forget who, asked: What would happen if technology could meet ALL our needs. What would society be like if we went to our cubicle and the computer provided all our socialization and sex?
What about Orwell? More about social prediction than technology; but the technology was necessary to provide the framework for social control. We're just about there.
It occurs to me that, over the years, I have read a lot of science fiction that was way more profound than just harmless fantasy.
It's fine sci-fi characters like Seven of Nine and T'Pol that really give me geek wood, not so much warp drive engines.
You can have those back.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I think it's that we have a hope, a faith, a wish maybe, that people will become better than we are now, regardless of if we're flying aroundat thousands of times the speed of light. We look around and see a dirtball with 6.3 billion dirty little people looking for new ways to kill each other because they have the wrong religion, the wrong color skin, the wrong land, the wrong language, the wrong whatever. We're not pleased at seeing this. We see CEOs of megacorporations worth billions of dollars, and not too far away we see thousands of people starving to death because local warlords hijack the sacks of grain good hearted people send to try to feed them. We'd like to believe that in just a few hundred years, humanity will finally have dragged itself out of the stone age. It's a nice dream.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
..and never was. If you think that SF is or should be nothing but an extrapolation of future technologies, then you've missed the point entirely.
SF is written in and illuminates the present, using the distancing effect of a hypothetical future to tell us something about now, or about human nature.
I suppose that it's as valid an approach as any to insist on particular kinds of hypothetical futures, but that's not anything intrinsic to SF as a phenomenon.
1: As countless others will reply, much of what we take for granted was "science fiction" a very short while ago. People can't fly, because they're heavier than air (I just flew from Iowa to Colorado earlier today. It took me less than two hours.) Everything dies (there are cell lines now that are essentially immortal; nerve tissue has been regenerated successfully in the lab). There are countless et ceteras I could include here, but this thread will be full of then in about ten minutes.
2: While FTL travel may be impossible, but we'll never know. We THINK our understanding of physics shows that it's not possible, but there are gaping holes in physics and those holes could be filled by new insights that show us a way around this "limitation". Or not. But since we see so much today that used to be "impossible" (see #1), your point is silly.
3: There are many kinds of SF. All one has to do is read Gardner Dozois' annual anthology or regularly read Asimov's or Analog to know that. Some is very much "fact based" fiction, whether it occurs in a recognizable world or not, near future or far. Other fiction isn't "fact based" and still manages to be great writing that just happens to be SF - calling it "an opiate" because it's not myopically limited to what's proven/likely does a disservice to its authors and readers. And if you prefer SF that's based on proven/likely technological limitations, there's plenty of it out there for you.
4: You ask about "having a positive view on life" because of Star Trek. Huh? Since when is that a required/anticipated outcome of watching a TV show? And since when is Star Trek representative of SF as a whole? ST is one small (some would say sad) corner of the SF world. Using it as an example suggests a limited sense of what's out there. Most people I know who read SF on a serious basis haven't paid much attention to ST in a very, very long time, except as an amusement.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
As my understanding of relativity goes, there is no real need to go faster than light. We often hera the phrase "light from that star takes blah blah blah years to reach us," but what is so rarely mentioned is we're measuring time from our point of view. From the photon's point of view, no time has elapsed at all. TRUE LIGHTSPEED TRAVEL IS INSTANTANEOUS FROM THE SUBJECT'S POINT OF VIEW. Read that over and over until it sinks in.
Yes, it is impossible to reach the speed of light, but that's not really a problem. Using slower than light technology, it is perfectly (theoretically) possible to cross the Milky Way in five seconds. Five seconds to YOU that is--the rest of the universe would strongly disagree (probably on the order of many millions of years.)
The problem has never been traveling faster than light, because such a thing is clearly absurd (what's faster than instantaneous travel?)--the problem is cancelling out time dialation which is really just good old fashioned time travel. For those of us that are joining late, remember that as you move faster through space the universe around you seems to speed up AND space itself seems to contract--from your frame of reference distances are shorter, and you thus do not need to travel as far.
Anyway, last time I checked most physicists were not comfortable completely ruling out all possibilty of time travel (if not on the macroscopic scale, then at least on the microscopic scale.) If time travel may still be possible, then so is faster than light travel. The two are, in fact, one and the same.
Appologies for errors, but I'm coming down off of a pretty nasty buzz right now. (Heh... it's a pretty sad state of things when a high school dropout with a hangover has to explain 100 year old scientific concepts.)
Science fiction is a review of the world we live in. It asks questions about our soical and moral and even ethical lives we live in. Star Trek is a fine example of the world we live in, with all the problems. Star Trek the Next Generation and even Star Gate seem to touch on this. Sure the technology is cool, but it is not an opiate. An opiate would be a sort of belief people will have saying everything will be alrite. Just like religion, where people think if they lead a certain life style there essence or soul will be saved. For geeks most probably the dynamic world of technology is there opiate. But not science fiction. Science fiction is a sort of technology mixed with a story line. Issac Assimov and Phillip K. Dick wrote stories about how our lives may change in the future because of non-moral and non-ethical uses of technology, even some Japanese Anime ( Mechs ) actually have some ammount of moral dialouge. End result science fiction is a package of a medium, one can read Shakespere for the essence of a story or read Arthur C. Clarke for another lesson. They are all the same yet different.
The Mundane Manifesto states that William Gibson works within the mundane guidelines.
I have often wondered if Gibson's Pattern Recognition was set in "present day" because of the increasing challenge of writing cyberpunk?
With nanotechnology featuring in HP ads, and virtual actors now standard fare, who can blame him?
Science fiction originally was science first and fiction second - look at the Grand Masters of Science Fiction, the Big Three - Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Anson Heinlein. All three of them wrote SCIENCE fiction. You have to look for it, but it still exists today. The problem with the science fiction world today is that too many people have grown up with Star Wars and Star Trek - the former is a technological fantasy and the latter is more speculative fiction than science fiction. Science fiction, unfortunately, has become a catch-all genre - if it doesn't have swords and serpents and isn't set in a relatively modern era, then it MUST be science fiction. Especially if it has technology. To get off of my personal soap box and address the topic, I do believe that it has become the opiate of the geek masses - it's both escapist and self-gratifying at the same time. It provides an escape, through the halo of Trekkie popularity, where one can be a 'cool' person. I mean, what else is a genius, a wizard, or a superhero than a glorified techie? Furthermore, by reading something that professes to be vaguely scientific and speaks of a greater future built by geeks, it can give people a purpose in life. Of course, there are a lot of geeks (myself included) who would rather just read a book than go outside or do anything else. Not quite escapist, but definitely a distraction from other things. In my opinion, though, the saddest thing about the science fiction genre at the moment is its bleak, dystopian outlook. It doesn't seem like people think there's much to look forward to nowadays.
http://www.tenjou.net/
Opiates are CNS (Central Nervous System) depressants. This class of drugs suppresses neural activity, deadening pain and thought. In contrast, good SF stimulates thought by presenting an interesting what-if with some combination of technical and social contexts and consequences.
SF may be a mind-altering drug (perhaps a stimulant or hallucinogen), but it is not an opiate.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"...but I have to ask, how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do."
/., where people mod up fantasy Sci-Fi posts and mod down those based upon science?
You had to ask on
Maybe you just wanted a bunch agreeable answers.
...to imagine a world of 2050.
It's not easy.
However, I have some puzzle pieces.
One of the characters is raised by the N'th generation upgrade of his parent's pokemon data. They started on the Gameboy, transfered them to the N64, then the GameCube games, and then with Revolution, to the Nintendo servers, where the pokemon AI were continually upgraded until such an age where people purchased back the hosting of their pokemon, who were, at that point, highly intelligent creatures.
There is a religious group called "The Explainers," which is basically the organized scientific perspective of today, combined with a story describing the recognized myth of Prometheus, the Enlightenment, and a metaphysics of progress. They formed out the realization on behalf of scientists and the non-religious public, that they need to actively combat a growing religious throwback conservatism, that is aggressively using virtual reality technologies to keep our minds in the middle ages and the BCs.
But really, it's just incredibly difficult to write a story like this. The changes that we'll likely see in the next 20 years are, frankly, shocking. We will see sophisticated AIs, significantly easier programming, the merging of the online and offline worlds, people being turned into robots in the workplace, robots being able to do most every physical labor. No telling when we'll get the Augmented Reality vision displays: 10 years? 20 years? Probably not much longer than that, given that we already have displays based on projecting laser light directly into the eye.
And then there's the mass public organizing going on online, and all these changes in how we think about and organize information...
Really, it's very hard to just project 20 years into the future, let alone 50.
I don't beleive he's saying that a large portion of people only find life worth living because of some geek, sci-fi fiction universe. At least not in that pitiful perspective that you can read it as. I believe what he's saying is that it is human nature to wonder about the unknown, and we find that teasing our imaginations of the unknown through fictional stories and universes like "Star Trek" and the like, satisfy a large part of our wonder despite being highly unplausible. Not only because of thier ability to paint a potential future for mankind, but also paint a positive one.
So what exactly is wrong with hoping that a future of peacful space travel and exploration that does not involve wanton destruction, prejudice and war (all things currently and constantly plaguing our race on this earth), is a bad thing? That thought alone *does* allow me to be a bit happier in life, because if I look around me right now, there aren't a whole lot of things our people are doing to making life better for everyone as a whole.
If you take a gander at the world today you can't help but see the damage the human race brings on itself and it's environment. If you see optimistic things though the extincting of animals, controlling populace through fear and war, and the growing of individual goverments world-power over controlled medicines, unhealthy food production and inequality in living conditions, then *your* opiate is to lie to yourself.
I hate "enhance". I hate it more than anything, no matter what it's in. We were watching Num3ers a couple months ago, and the genius wrote a program to "enhance" security footage. It took a picture of a guy in a mask so blurry you couldn't tell where his eyes were, and somehow managed to interpolate an expensive wristwatch.
Even Bladerunner enhanced...zooming in on a tiny mirror in the background of a photo...to the opposite side of the room as reflected in the mirror...close enough to show a woman's earring, if I recall correctly.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angrydome.
I happen to have a positive view of life IN SPITE OF the Communistic future that Star Trek portrays.
I hate the word "mundane" to start with, as sf fans have warped the meaning of the word to indicate those who have little vision or imagination, so I'm already biased against this "movement." Taking an objective step back, I still think it's full of crap. It's possible to play with the entire universe and stay within the realm of known science, which is something I try hard to do myself. I've even been funded by the National Science Foundation to edit an anthology to be used in conjuction with astronomy classes.
I teach this stuff. I live this stuff. I'm a working scientist and a published science fiction writer, a big believer in the positive power of science and the positive power of fiction to educate, illuminate, and enlighten.
Sure, write some "mundane" science fiction, but don't pretend it's intrinsically better than anything else. Do recognize you've put yourself in a box that will limit the stories you can do, and will eliminate some perfectly wonderful stories containing very good hard science. I have to say I pretty much agree with Ian McDonald here in his criticisms.
If Ryman wants to be such a "realist" and limit himself to what is known, he and similarly-minded people should probably write mainstream and forget the future entirely. His guesses are going to be as unlikely as aliens visiting us tomorrow, and he's foolish to think otherwise. Robert Heinlein, a visionary writer to be sure, had his characters using slide rules as they flew from planet to planet. While I think we can still use some thoughtful stories about near-future cloning, I think elevating such tales above and beyond those extropolating into a future where interstellar travel is possible is clearly hubris.
My personal manifesto is to use only known science, or new science that doesn't violate known science. I enjoy fantasy as much as anyone, but it does irk me when writers don't understand enough science to write science fiction. Star Wars is a fantasy, and a good one, but it's not science fiction.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
...Or rather, too much of a focus on fantasy, anyway.
Fantasy can unlock new ideas to the imagination, and can be a font of material for creativity. Things such as FTL travel, "The Force", etc. can act as great catalytic plot devices, so long as they aren't relied upon to stand place in lieu of an actual plot. (And as long as you don't demystify them with skepticism-tickling 'explanations', like midichlorians.)
Also, anything that we create with our hands was first created within our mind's eye; the nexus of our fantasies.
But too much of a good thing is bad. I've known so many people who sink into Fantasia almost 24/7, as though they have a perennial need to escape the demands of reality. For lack of a better stereotype, I find these people have almost no ambition... to the point that they talk a big game, but never actually accomplish anything.
Hence, Fantasy is the ghost of Ambition, strangled.
Sorry if this post sounds like I've gone all zen-master on everyone... I just woke up from a dreamy nap. "Mmmm, Father's Day ribs... aahhhghghghg"
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
I'm not entirely sure what science fiction the submitter has been reading, but to say that "most" science fiction is written by people who don't know what they're talking about isn't necessarily true. Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Charles Sheffield (and a whole host of others) have physics and astronomy backgrounds (PhDs). Other authors, such as Peter F. Hamilton, write SF that's got very good, very realistic science behind it... FTL travel and all.
Additionally, the statement that Einstein's rules can't be broken is probably true--but they can certainly be circumvented. Wormholes are one possibility--exotic matter and a few other advancements could make them quite possible. Another possibility is that there are alternate "universes" in the multiverse for whom the rules of distance is different. Use a wormhole to pop into one of those, travel, and pop back in, and you have FTL travel. Those are just a couple of possibilities, and they may or may not work. But the job of the SF writer is not to PROVE that their ideas will become reality. They just have to write it so that it can't be dispoven or dismissed.
Point being, to be good, thought-provoking science fiction, the author doesn't have to detail every step involved in making a particular aspect reality--it's just reasonable guessing, all the way along, as is every other part of science fiction. The point is to make one think about the possibilities, avoiding some and trying to work toward others. I wouldn't call that an "opiate."
Why would a story set in an interstellar spaceship suddenly become too mundane if that spaceship is limited to light speed? Would there be too much of the "present day" in a story about the lives of some of the quintillions of people an average solar system could support in orbital cities? Are nanomachines too boring when authors are careful not to turn them into thermodynamics-defying magic dust?
Nobody wants science fiction stripped of the fiction, some people just don't want it all stripped of the science. Science fantasy can still be entertaining, but it shouldn't be allowed to slip into otherwise consistent science fiction any more than traditional fantasy should corrupt traditional fiction. I suspect most of the Slashdot readers currently whining about how "why does everything have to be based on real facts" would turn the TV off in disgust if the next episode of "24" featured a nuclear bomb stolen by leprechauns or if "CSI" started occasionally solving mysteries with magic spells.
When you can imagine, you can set the next step.
For me thats, for the serious part of it, SciFi is all about. I heared the sentence on Discovery channel once (though in Dutch translation so i don't know if I retranslated it correctly)... Anyone can attribute this to an actual person?
I seem to remember that one Arthur C. Clark has been officialy recognized as the "inventor" of the satelite concept...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._C larke
/. articles)
And yes, he has a first class degree in mathematics and physics at King's College, London...
Lets see, hmm, yes it was in a sci-book.
I agree with having "knowledgeable" people writin sci-fi, but I also remember all I read about nuclear fusion and now I see it made available(ok, in actual testing and producing actual electricity) in a breadbox sized box...
What I really like about sci-fi is that sometimes you see In Real Life situations or Technologies that you already read about, already had a time to dream or think about or appreciate the implications and possibilities of something that is, for the rest of the world, new.
Lets take fusion and/or betavoltaics... (both recent
Now take everything you ever read on fusion, interstellar travel, cheap energy everywhere, human facilities and the such...
I already have 3-4 marketable products popping in my head just from the fact I have a possibly durable, cheap and transportable energy source...
On another subject, lets take solar sails.
I'm sure I read about them in some 50's scifi books.
They're launching the first one in 1 day, 18 hours, and 35 seven minutes as of now...
http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/
I always thought that books, and sci-fi books moreover, were made to make me think and dream.
And nowaday, wherever I look, I see the sci-fi from the past in everyday use, and some more sci-fi being announced as coming soon (sic)...
Well, at least I'm more ready than the rest if just because of that. And so are you 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Good sci-fi is not about good science.
It's about good fiction.
Simple as that may sound, that's really the reason why there will always be different genres of sci fi with different levels of attention to science and why nerds will like them all.
We nerds are interested in science and technology for the sake of understanding the system -- the "how" behind it all. But we are also human, and we are interested in how science and technology affect our lives. That is what good sci fi is about: not the "how" -- we'll figure it out, that's why we are nerds -- but the "what are the implications"?
How will changes in communications technology affect our relationships? Will we seek out "tribes" in other timezones who are more like us than our neighbors? (That's Cory Doctorow) Will the technology help bring us closer or keep us further apart? Will the technology make us better sons, fathers, lovers, husbands, brothers, friends? What new emotions will these technologies evoke in us?
Sci-fi is about writing technical how-to manuals, but about mapping trends and thinking out social implications. Note that this is what "mundane sci-fi" is about too. It's just that the trends being speculated upon are closer to us.
Sci-fi is no more about escapism than poetry or music. They are about our innate human need to integrate our understanding and relationship with technology into perspective with our relationship with other humans. Sci-fi simply appeals to nerds more because we also have this tendency to give technology more weight as an anchor of our perspective on humanity. Someone into romance novels just have a slightly different perspective (and yes, many nerds do like romance novels -- i don't understand why, but it would be interesting to find out)
The "mundane" or "real world" genre Ryman longs for sounds like what we used to call "hard" science fiction. There's no need to invent another term for it. As I recall, it starting losing ground to fantasy around the time the U.S. space program wound down in the early 70s when Lord of the Rings was becoming popular with college students, followed a few years later by Dungeons and Dragons. Writers responded to the changes in readers' tastes by injecting more and more sorcery and fantasy into SF, and the debate over where the boundary lies was endlessly debated. In the early eighties somebody, I think it was Algis Budrys in Asimov's magazine, wrote a similar essay expressing dismay that SF had not enough science and too many Dreamsnakes.
But you can't change what people buy by complaining about it. Instead of merely discussing the lack of hard science fiction and making up new names for it, the best thing McDonald and Ryman could do would be to write some hard SF and try to sell it. If they come up with something that catches on, others will imitate their success. But that's easier said than done, which is why most people with such opinions take the much simpler path of writing little essays on the web and being called pundits.
And how would mundane scifi be any different from just regular fiction? Everyone would have to be living on earth, there would be no aliens, no ray guns, no light sabers, no Jedi powers, and no space fighters. There would be absolutely nothing in the story that doesn't already exist today.
It is the year 3000 and the world is exactly the same as it was in 2005. We can't even have fusion power in the year 3000 because we aren't 100% sure that a discovery might be made in 2006 that makes fusion infeasible.
60 years ago people thought it was impossible for an airplane to go faster than the speed of sound. 100 years ago didn't even think about whether a plane could go faster than the speed of sound because that was so far beyond them, they couln't even contemplate it. 200 years ago no one knew the speed of light existed. But in the year 2005 science is finally complete, we don't need to do anymore research. Everything that is impossible now will remain impossible until the end of time.
Oh well, this is simply just a way for a group sci-fi nerds to feel more hardcore than the rest of the sci-fi nerd.
Modern Sci-Fi has very little science in it. Somebody, I don't remember who, remarked of Star Wars: "it's not really sci-fi, it's a cowboy western set in space." Perhaps what pisses me off the most is the "geek culture" that's arisen around sci-fi. It is at once ignorant (most sci-fi "geeks" know jack shit about real science), and arrogant (most sci-fi "geeks" think sci-fi is better than, say, cowboy westerns). The superior attitude a lot of people have about sci-fi reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about comic books. We came to the conclusion that comics like the X-Men are fundementally little different than soap operas. Sure, the plot lines are completely different, but both focus mainly on the characters, their growth, and how they cope with the world around them. Really, the main difference between "Apartment 3G" and "The X-Men" is that Cyclops gets mopey and emotional about a completely different set of problems.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
. . . is so much "Science Fiction" scary monsters and so little science?
POOR POOR NASA!!!!
Seastead this.
'apparent'='aberrant'
Serves me right for trying to type in the dark...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
When I want to read about science, I pick up a science book. When I want to read a story, I pick up science fiction... or heroic fantasy, or horror, or thriller, or whatever else I think will tickle my literary yearnings.
What makes a book "good" because it has somebody's notion of Real Science (tm) in it?
The only thought these people provoke is curiosity as to whether they're driven by snobbery or anal retentivity.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm not surprised by this statement. Three of my working mates talks about Star Wars and Star Trek as if it was true. On the other hand... a lot of people fall for religions and other non-scientific stuff (eg. Scientology).
With this in mind, bending the rules of science slightly (to allow for faster-than-light travel, for example) can help an author illuminate his or her point more clearly. An example might be in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, in which the main character, a soldier, travels faster than light to fight an interstellar war, only to find that he can never go home: time-dialation effects have made him a living anachronism. His only option is to fight. Haldeman, in this novel, was using exaggeration to shed light on a problem faced by himself and other Vietnam veterans; they left to fight, and came back to find themselves in a culture completely different from the one they had left. Without the faster-than-light travel in the book (which makes an interstellar war possible), it would have been far more difficult for Haldeman to create a novel which expressed his disorientation as he came back to a nation which he had fought for, and which was in some sense no longer his.
Now, I'm not saying that authors should break the rules of science in a cavalier fashion; this leads ultimately to a bad Star Trek episode, in which characters back themselves into a corner, but can get out by recalibrating the deflector phase array to 114.2 pulses per second - an unsatisfying way to end a conflict. However, carefully breaking the rules can make possible works which would not be allowed under the "Mundane Manifesto." The authors should consider carefully what they might throw away before they pledge to avoid writing about anything including aliens, interstellar conflict, colonization of other star systems, or any of the other fascinating, if unlikely, possibilities for the future.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Opiates they may be, but good speculative fiction is what expands the mind to think of the world in new ways.
Not just a novel, where the mundane world is muddled through over and over. SF lets the mind play "What if?", which allows wondering if the mundane things around us can become more.
Two of my favorite writers, L. Neil Smith and Robert A. Heinline aren't (weren't) afraid of putting very real human motivations into extraordinary situations. I think those make the best stories.
Wells, Verne, Tolkien, their characters tend to be rather more than human, in the latter case litterally. Black and white without truly reacting to the situations around them.
Bad writing happens in any genre, it's too bad that the "fantastic" attributes of SF allow for bad writing to make money. (and I'm not going to mention that any Star Trek paperback goes best-seller merely because of being a Star Trek paperback. interesting phenomenon that.)
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
...because it's not about science. Science fiction offers authors a chance to pose a massive what-if question and attempt to reveal something about humans by showing how they would behave in an impossible situation. There's a lot of scifi that is like "cool aliens and monsters and space lasers," I don't really like that stuff, but the best of it uses the construction of unreal settings to do basically the same things all good literature does.
But isnt that the point. Science fiction gives people something to strive towards. Whether it be a utopian society, an expansive universce to explore, or simply a future where technology makes life better, science fiction provides people with imaginative and currently far fetched ideas that may one day be realities.
Opiates don't make you think the world will be better, they make you think the world is better. Sitcoms are the opiates of the masses. They show people in "bubbles" acting out mundane, overdone, and common situations, over and over again. Sci-fi, if anything, gives you hope but also helps show whats wrong with the world now. If you think that the world today is as egalitarian, free, and open as it is in Star Trek, then you aren't reading enough good journalism
Most of Sci-fi is 'looking at our own condition using advanced tech as a setting.
It creates tech for the sake of plot devices.
The 'transporters' on Star Trek were there to get people into the middle of the action more quickly, for example.
They need a word for Sci-Fi which endevors to extrapolate realistically on current technology and deal with the social and tech landscape of the near future. They have things like 'space opera' etc. and the 'cyber-punk' genre often comes close to this description. Speculative Sci Fi, maybe?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Star Trek does convey a powerful positive view on life. No poverty. No money (inside the federation). No "alienated work" (people work to develop theirselves as human beings, not just to manage to simply exist). No religion.
Is amazing that such an obvious reference to the Marxist utopia came from Hollywood... =)
http://www.churchofreality.org/wisdom/terminology/ terminology/the_holy_tv_show.html
Trek is the opiate of the masses. As long as people aren't dieing virgins, the species should survive. Worst case scenario when geeks intermarry is Asperger's syndrome so I say go for it.
Also, if hope is all someone has in their life, do you really want to take that away from them?
~live life like you mean it~
The Warp drive , or Alcubierre drive, isn't actually a phantasy. You need exotic matter (i.e. negative g force) to make it work, but otherwise it doesn't violate relativity.
The Raven
I would like to toss the whole "cyberspace with the same capabilities and limitations as the physical universe" trope on the bonfire as well. No more Neuromancer, no "black ice", no looking at computers online and seeing how cool and powerful they are by the kind of hole they make in cyberspace, no "travelling through" cyberspace. Not for anything outside videogames, anyway.
p.s. Marx likened religion to opium because religion encourages people to accept doctrine and authority, lulling them into a docile state. No matter how escapist, SF does exactly the opposite. It stimulates thought and openness to new ideas, and to questioning the currently accepted vision of reality. Many scientists will tell you that Star Trek and other SF inspired them to become real scientists. Sci-fi has never been and will never be the opiate of the geek masses.
While the science in scifi books is often interesting, I find whats actually interesting is not the actual technology but its effect on society. To this end, I find writers like Philip K Dick intriging as he examines not so much actual techologies but what type of societies would create such technologies, where they may start to lead us, etc. To that end, I dont think making your science more realistic will nessessarily make any type of improvement to the genre if the content & philosophical ideas were not all built upon as well. As far as 'science fiction [being] the opiate of the geek masses', well to me thats a trolling statement and as another poster said, a way for some scifi fans to feel superior to other fans; someone else can come along and call those people idiots since they don't read Ayn Rand or Shakespeare, and they too would be wrong.
The author's statement that FTL travel never being possible is rather arrogant given our limited understanding of the universe; for one that's crying so loudly for real science in scifi, those are some pretty absolutist statements on something thats very much not absolute.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Why is this even displayed on slashdot? It has no real news and just consists of a few blogs... some saying things found in sci-fi will never happen, others saying, sci-fi is good. What is the point?
-Kruton
need more of those type sci fi
The main problem with realistic sci-fi is, you have to be updated on scientific discoveries and technology (well that shouldn't be so hard for us slashdotters, would it? :) . Let's take an example. Suppose you write a story around 2040 where cars don't fly. Suddenly in slashdot there's a story about flying cars to be appearing in 2030. Darn. You have to rewrite everything. Or how about this: You imagine a world where computer viruses are spread over common videoplayers. But then turns out that videoplayers will run Linux. Wham, no viruses.
In the end, this turns into a massive speculation. How accurate are your current predictions going to be?
Still, I find realistic sci-fi much more appealing than say, Startrek, because of the possibility of such future ACTUALLY happening. This has a very good potential.
Now - the second problem is, the future might be much darker than we imagine. Suppose you write about a near future (2050) where ecology is rule #1. But recently on physorg I read that global warming cannot be stopped easily and that the current trend is that the planet will heat about 1 degree centigrate per year. This means that in the future there would be a scenario of overheated regions of the planet (i.e. deserts), something like Mad Max. Not exactly a post-nuclear wasteland, but certainly worrysome.
So, the question is: How much realism do we want to impregnate our stories with, and how benevolent are we going to be with the future?
Well, there's got to be some degree of freedom. Besides these obstacles, writing a realistic story is very appealing, at least to me. I've been slowly losing interest for unrealistic sci-fi. Why? I know it's not real. There are no time portals, warp speeds, so I know this thing will NEVER EVER become real. So why think about something that will never happen but PRETENTS to be possible?
When Star Wars was created, I fantasized about all those things becoming real. (After all, that's the catch, isn't it?) Space travel was thought far-fetched, but NOT impossible. And this is what lets us dream.
Because, sci-fi and fantasy is about dreaming, isn't it?
When I saw "Star Wars", I loved it, and I loved Princess Leia. She was so beautiful. At that time, I had this hope that if I just believed in the values of the Jedi, then I could transcend my abusive childhood. This belief was just like a drug. It created a hallucination that was not real.
Later in life, I simply gave up hope. I stopped believing in Jedis and Christianity. I only wanted to die.
For me, science fiction did serve as an opiate that helped me to live throughout my abusive childhood.
As for now, I make sizeable donations to the local child-abuse-prevention organization. These donations help me to deal with the inner child that my father killed.
The genre of movie science fiction bears very little resemblance to the genre of printed science fiction, especially short stories, the heart of true sf.
The sci-fi channel is even less a part of the same genre. There is a little overlap, but not very much.
Sf purists (e.g. Asimov, when he was around) hate the term sci-fi. They consider it a Hollywood term that has very little to do with sf.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Oh, I'll just give the Google link to the ton of search results: here
Regardless, I was (once) a physics major and I couldn't easily find a flaw with it. Implementing it would require some funky spacetime/gravity manipulation, however. If you have not read it yet (it's been out a while), it will certainly fire up your imagination!
I find it interesting that all this sci-fi stuff seems intimately linked to gravity, which is not well-understood (yet).
People used to spend a year or two emigrating across continents when the average lifespan was below 50 years. A decade to alpha centuri on an entirely plausible starship* would be equally within reach if the human lifespan was 250 years.
I'd still rather send a robot, though I suppose the lag on the remote controller would get a bit annoying...
*in terms of physics rather than engineering, economics or politics...
But Slashdot is the opiate of the Geek Masses.
*ducks*
geek page at KY speaks
No Coffee is.
Great, thanks for moving 'em. Now how am I going to find them?!
Wikipedia entry on the alcubierre drive
;)
Read this, then reconsider all those UFO sightings and abduction claims in this new light
It really depends on what you're looking for. Science fiction can be divided (very roughly) into "hard" and "soft" SF: the hard being that based only on current science or its closest extrapolations, and soft being more free-ranging, and less concerned with detailed explanation of the science involved. You might also divide it into the "probable" as opposed to the merely "possible."
So, it depends what kind of story you want to tell. Hard SF is often much more restrictive: no galaxy-spanning civilizations, ESP, or conveniently human-shaped aliens. However, it's a wonderful format for exploring in detail the manner in which changes in science and technology change our lives, and teaching the readers more about what our world actually is in a way less boring than a textbook. Soft SF, conversely, is often more focused on the characters than the science. It's not about how the flying car works and what effect it will have on society, but more about how an individual person will interact with their much cooler flying car, and what sorts of adventures they can have with it. Overall the difference is a matter of taste, or the mood of the moment: I personally enjoy both kinds of story immensely.
No matter what the style, however, science fiction always has the same purpose. It's about telling stories that re-introduce us to our world, and inspire a sense of wonder and a new interest in what's around us. Whether you do that by exploring the rise of a flying car industry, or what happens when George Jetson crashes into a tree, doesn't matter so much as the fact that at the end of the story, some kid is going to want to build that car.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
It's funny, I've recently been re-reading H. G. Wells' stories "A Story of the Days to Come", "When the Sleeper Wakes", and "The Time Machine", all written in the late 1890's. It's fascinating reading someone 5 years before the Wright brothers flew writing about what air to air combat might be like. And many of his stories about city life are obviously the basis for the writings of Isaac Asimov and others.
Interestingly, of his stories of 100-200 years in the future, a substantial portion appears to have come true already. In other writers' stories from 50 years or so ago about the present day, a lot of it hasn't come true. And stories 20 years ago about today, almost none of it. It's funny that one could predict 100 years in the future easier than 20 years in the future. Perhaps we need to get a little MORE speculative about our science fiction's horizons, not less.
As for the "hard science fiction" writers, obviously it's great that things like geosynchronous satellites were "invented" by science fiction writers and thus couldn't be patented by business, but in general if you limit SF to the science we know today, it seems awfully limiting. Even if H. G. Wells didn't believe a time machine would ever be invented (obviously, in his story, only one person in history ever had one, so he wasn't saying it was ubiquitous,) it was a great vehicle through which to explore his real thrust, which was the change of humanity over time. So including fantastical mechanisms in SF stories, I think, doesn't necessarily diminish the value of the story.
E pluribus unum
Reminds me of the mentality of Farenhieght 451.
Write what you want, read what you want.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
You can't say FTL, warped-space, or interdimensional travel is impossible, because there isn't a unified theory "of everything" yet.
Once there is, then you can all start up your bonfires and start burning geeks, but until then give us a break, eh?
"This is totally insecure, but very convenient."
Modern news seems to be based primarily on the same basis, speculative reality. I would prefer the news report the facts and let me develop my own perception rather than have it fed to me.
Science fiction wasn't meant to be a rehash of your college physics book with a storyline thrown in, it was meant to be fun.
Are you saying stories in a realistic world are not fun? How about The Three Musketeers, Les Miserables or Robinson Crusoe? How about Treasure Island?
And don't get me started on "20,000 leagues under the sea". That's the PERFECT example of mundane sci-fi.
And regarding your physics book, Sherlock Holmes could teach you a few things.
as it is for everyone.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
On the other hand...
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow."
- Robert Goddard (1882-1945)
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
After skimming over the manifesto. . . Most of it exactly mirrors the discussions I've had with my hard-SF loving friends. Most of that document is remarkably accurate in describing what I've felt about SF for several years.
Yes, it's time to put aside the Buck Rogers and Star Trek stories that go all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s. Yes it's time to focus on new technologies like robotics and AI, virtual reality, genetic engineering, nanotechnology. Surely we can craft interesting stories around those things.
Incidentally, I believe it takes about 30 years for a new idea in science fiction to make its way into the mainstream, mass consciousness. Please note that Engines of Creation was published in 1985. So I expect to see movies about nanotechnology appearing around 2015.
Another example: The End of the Dream was published in 1972. The Day After Tomorrow hit theaters in 2004. That's 32 years.
But here's what drives me up the wall. . . I agree with everything in their manifesto except their rejection of interstellar travel. Slower-than-light travel has been the subject of much speculation, and many of the schemes proposed have been thought through with care. If you rule out interstellar travel, then you've got to come up with some explanation of what will prevent us from doing it. I just can't see anything standing in the way.
Likewise, their statement that Earth-like planets must be vanishingly rare is. . . strange. It's especially strange coming in today's red-hot climate of astronomy, with exoplanetary discoveries coming rapid fire. Fact is, nobody knows whether planets like Earth are common or rare. We get an answer to that question sometime in the next 20 years or so, and that is exciting to me.
I think on these points the "mundanes" are just being reactionary. They're railing against a Star Trek view of the universe, which is fine with me, but they're also arbitrarily rejecting any idea that has even the slightest superficial resemblance to it.
Rather, it's always been about the application of science, even speculative science. FTL, wormholes, time travel, etc, it's always the devices that drive the story, not the science behind them. Consequently, the genre really should be called "Engineering Fiction", with hard vs soft now defined as being based on science as we know it vs speculative science.
Even the devices don't really "drive" the story, rather only enable it. You can't have a poignant reflection on the universal truths shared among different sentient beings if you can't get to their planet. And it loses its immediacy if the trip takes a millenium. Hence, the McGuffin of FTL drives.
The whole point of Science Fiction is to be speculative. The question to ask is "what happens if I change the rules?" not "what can I do within these rules?"
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
In some cases SF that tries to be accurate can be good, but if it's good then it'll be largely due to the story telling abilities of the author and not due to the accuracy of the science.
Personally I don't like any of the stuff they listed as good fiction. I would've listed John Wyndham, Arthur C Clark, and H.G. Wells.
Someone said:
When a scientist says something is impossible He must be wrong.
When a scientist says something is possible He might be correct.
n our case there are faster than light particles called taquions.
Just some months ago an article in nature mention the first negative time experiment.
So who is going to say what is possible, what is real!!
I like science fiction, but there's no question that my opiate is fantasy. I want a world where magic is possible, and where it comes from inside.
I could care less who has the bigger blaster.
Science operates by taking a vast field of possibilities and narrowing it down by experimental method to just one. Science is about determining what is.
Science fiction -- or speculative fiction -- starts with what is, and explores the consequences of what thinks might be like if the variables were tweaked and some unknown were introduced.
In a sense, the two are working at cross purposes. Moreover, science fiction is, or at least can be, literature. It's creative art for its own sake. The idea that there is something deficient about it because it's not just a propaganda vehicle for attracting fresh students and funding to science is nonsense. One might as well criticize Shakespeare for not hewing closely enough to modern historians' understanding of Julius Caesar.
If our current understanding of science becomes the test for valuing a particular work of science fiction, most if not all of the best science fiction novels would be tossed out as garbage. Let the scientists do science, and let the storytellers tell stories. Both are valuable.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Ten years ago I pointed this out to a secular humanist friend and was shredded for my efforts.
<sigh>
There's none so blind as those who won't see.
"But he's not wearing any clothes!"
__
Arse
or at least that is more consistant with the claims of not getting dates.
Einstein did NOT say it was impossible. However it would dip into tricky relativity questions.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"In short, the belief in God is very similar and parallel to the belief in science-fiction. Both
rely on an imaginary friend (or thing)"
Except that God isn't imaginary.
I've had plenty of proof of his existence.
I've had an imaginary friend, and it's not at all the same thing.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Those who have actually been reading SF, and not wanking at SF writing workshops, realize that there is more to SF than human looking aliens in latex prosthetics on badly written TV shows. It seems to me that the authors of the Mundane Manifesto have stopped their navel gazing long enough to set up a straw man and weakly thrash at it in the appearance of doing something cool.
There are plenty of authors out there writing SF that is thoroughly grounded in our understanding of physics and does not rely on any magic such as FTL, time travel, parallel universes, etc, etc, etc, and there have been for years. Of course these authors probably aren't hanging around Clarion East wanking away writing articles with titles such as Was Marx a Mundane.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Writing SF based only on "real science" is like trying to reinvent cooking by using only wooden utensils.
SF is not always about speculating where science is going. As a matter of fact, I would argue that GOOD SF is never about that.
Speculation is a process by which you create an allegory of the modern world, by removing and adding some elements. For a better explanation of this, pick up Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" in paperback, and read the introduction.
If all you're doing is focusing on the science, you'll just miss the point. You'll put a constraint on the story that will just limit your ability to speculate.
Replicator technology and FTL travel might never come to exist? No shit, Sherlock. For me, though, it's just a way to remove some elements of modern society (scarcity of resources) and provide an exciting setting full of potential (other star systems) to talk about the human condition.
Orson Scott Card did just fine without FTL travel in a few of those Ender books.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Hard science fiction, done well, is generally an exploration of the consequences of a universe which could be real but happens not to be (or isn't currently). Consider Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series; it raises a huge number of issues that arise as consequences of technology which is not yet available, but probably will be. When the real world catches up, we will have to deal with these issues, and it's probably worth starting now. (E.g., if we find ways to cure everything at a high cost, which seems likely, how will we deal with rich people who live forever, which the poor die of old age and the young have reproductive urges to replenish populations that aren't dying?)
Soft science fiction, done well, is generally an exploration of aspects of how the universe really is, projected for expository purposes into a universe that is different in many ways. The original Star Trek, for example, was a discussion of 1960s American gender and race relations, with a veneer of unreality that made it acceptable to broadcast in explicit detail. Aliens and FTL travel were just props; the vision of the future was a black woman on the bridge and nobody finding it notable.
Opiate? SF. No it's SEX and since we're talking geek sex it can only mean downloaded porn.
If you are a sci-fi freak, let us drop the "sci fi" from in front of that.
You have different sf traditions that I do.
The sf that is most traditional to me (1940 to 1960) seems to pay more attention to (then current) scientific knowledge than newer sf.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
If you think science fiction is just about writing cool stories that work within the confines of what we know right now, you're missing the point of the genre.
Sci-fi is largely about letting loose the imaginative side of science and letting it run rampant for a while; many stories start off with a underlying "what if" question and then build a reality around that. Many also include a cautionary message (like Frankenstein, the novel that really got science fiction going) that serves to give science a reality check.
Science has always been an ever-changing thing, and focusing on "hard" science fiction is doing a disservice to that creative drive that has propelled science to heights never before imagined by humans.
Besides, giant robots are cool.
"It never got weird enough for me." - HST (RIP)
Does this mean that Star Trek has a belief system based on its reality? If so there are some very troubled people out there. Although I think I knew that after attending an SF Convention in Portland a decade ago and riding up in an elevator where an entire family, dressed as Klingons, entered the elevator and the mom then ripped the 8 or 10 year old for improperly addressing some pseudo-Klingon in an inappropriate manner - as if it were all real.
If science fiction and geekdom is now into belief-systems then I'm agog.
It would be neat to see some well grounded SF set in the near future based on real science. I think Kim Stanley Robinson's "Forty Signs of Rain" might qualify.
But this "manifesto" disqualifies such works as "Solaris" and "Left Hand of Darkness". Star Trek, or Star Wars, shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence and I feel badly about using the same paragraph.
Yeah its fine to estimate the probabilities of various technologies based on existing theories. But remember that many many theories have bitten the dust. QM & Relativity seem particularly consistent but that is no guarantee that they are right or that some method of FTL wont be found.
Besides sometimes to make a point in a story you have to break a rule. Just so long as you don't do it too often (I think the writers call it The Tooth Fairy Principle). For instance, Foundation would be pretty crappy if they didn't have FTL wouldn't it? Whereas Benford's series about the war with the Machine Cultures (In the Ocean of night, Tides of light etc etc) does not use FTL at all and is still pretty good.
We are talking about fiction. If you make it too real it becomes boring. It was for this reason I could never stand anything Ben Bova wrote. SF is about vision not nuts and bolts.
Bitter and proud of it.
Science fiction isn't about the science... it is about telling human interest stories. Not that I think writers that paint themselves into a corner should fix it by 'reversing the polarity of the tachyon emitters', but come on... tell me a story worth reading - who cares if it involves FTL travel?
It's the ultimate extension of a safety obsessed communist culture. Life seems good for the ruling class (Starfleet) but for everyone else? Like the workers in Metropolis, they are hidden from view. Pretty much any form of self-improvement except new-agey personal well-being is frowned upon. No one in the federation travels without papers (in fact, there is not enough industry to support heavy starship building. Let alone interplanetary shipping and travel.) Intra-planetery movement is limited as well. Transporter usage is heavily rationed for civillians. (And why should this be the case in a civilization that has the technology to mine the stars for energy?) Unless you're in the ruling class, life is very prison like. It's a prison with glass walls and satin sheets, but it's a prison nontheless.
ST and the world from Minority report are very similar in this approach. After analyzing the situation, I would not want to live in either world, yet people (and i assume the creators as well) believe these societies to be goals for the future. (everyone has the same car? and like soviet russia, car drives you? what's up with that?)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
extremes. And those extremes are (at least in the better sci-fi) usually being used to explore social structures placed under extreme stresses. It is just a nice side effect that these writers exploring the social implications of both technical and non-technical progression have spurred technology itself. Many current day technologies were predicted in sci-fi.
The question of the day should be, if sci-fi hadn't predicted the technologies it has, would they have come into being? My opinion is that they would not have or they would have been delayed. I think that vastly more is possible than what we've imagined. The proof of this is that so many of the things we've imagined have become possible once that imagination spurred thought. Its not that sci-fi writers are good at prediction, its that predicting something that is possible is easy because virtually everything is actually possible.
a positive view on life because of sf? most science fiction, especially so-called "mundane" sf, has as its premise a breakdown of society ++ humanity, based on extrapolation from problems identified from our own time.
Yes, I was quite disappointed when I read that. I truly am surprised how little people understand about science in general, and relativity in particular. Then again, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised any more. What is it with people attributing blatantly false information to famous people. Is it human nature or something, to make themselves look knowledgeable? Doesn't really work, does it. Einstein was very open to the possibility that FTL speeds could be attained. As the parent said, it would be tricky since it requires using non-Einsteinian space, but it is still possible. Einstein said so, so there.
Santa's suicide mission go!
Trade depends on things worth trading. If we can travel the distance it would be worth trading Iron for Platinum with some planet (which would be humans or aliens) that has a different situation from Earth. Last I checked turning mass quantities of one element into another (ie the old alchemist goal of turning lead to gold) wasn't cost effective.
Find a planet with lots of one valuable element, such as platinum (which is valuable in industry more than in jewelery) and a scarcity of something we have... Preferably this would be something not down a gravity well - It is fairly cheap to mine iron in the asteroid belt and send it (via solar sail) to a different solar system. Even if it takes 50 years to arrive it would be worthwhile investment. (Though care would need to be taken to be sure both sides were fullfilling their end of the bargin)
I don't know where you would find platinum in abundance, but we could use a lot more on earth than we have. I'm also unclear on where iron is scarce, but perhaps there is something else we have a lot of?
Luxury goods would be a good trade too. Millionairs would pay top dollar for trinkets from a different solar system. Care needs to be taken to not glut the market, but if they have rich people who like to show off their rare jewels it could work. (This set of stainless steal spoons was made on Earth - I payed a billion zorkmarks for it)
Zoos would find it worth it. Trade dogs, cats and elephants with a zoo there. Set up captive breading programs and our zoos can see some different animals for a change. (Dr Seusse would approve) Expensive, but I'd pay to see such animals.
I'm sure there are more, that is just what I can come up with off the top of my head.
For the sake of brevity... 1. FTL and other 'impossible' technologies should have '... as far as we currently know' placed in front of the 'impossible' description. We still don't know far more than we know. 2. Science Fiction is not about gadgets or things - it is about people and societies undergoing profound change - usually as a result of or in a climate of technological change. As such, the 'science' is pretty much secondary. That said, 'bad' science can make a tale sound cheesy or ruin the tale, but still, we cut a LOT of slack for such things. 3. Dreams do not have to make sense to be compelling. If it stimulates the mind of one fat, shy, borderline-poor, socially inept kid to take out 20 library books at a time and imagine his way out of a life he doesn't like and is poweless, at the moment, to change, it doesn't matter how dumb the tale. Star Trek, the original series, is hands-down terrible science and unrealistic military culture to boot - but man, I didn't care how creepy the basement was, that's where the TV and Trek were! The question has no answer - because it does not matter. What matters is, are we better off with or without the 'bad' science fiction. Hands down, my vote is 'with'. Your mileage may vary.
Einstein did not say nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, he said that nothing going slower can pass the speed of light, in fact I think it's can't even trave at the speed of light. If your existance is already faster than the speed of light, life is fine and dandy.
Additionally, the asumption that what we think of as speed (Velocity = Distance / Time) is correct in all time and space is likely not correct. The idea of warping space to avoid the speed of light problem is reasonably accepted as possible, and if you did a VDT calculation you would find speeds beyond the speed of light.
Now please, some theoretical physicist correct my (likely) extensive errors.
Just because you write code, doesn't mean your an engineer. Unless you also drive a train...
Since when does science fiction necessarily involve things like spaceships, aliens, faster-than-light travel, extraterrestial cultures / settlements and all that, anyway?
Three of my favourite science fiction stories are "Flowers for Algernon" (Daniel Keyes), "Turn off the sky" (Ray Nelson) and "Terminal Beach" (J. G. Ballard). None of these involves any of the above, yet they're all science fiction.
So where does the idea come from that crap like Star Trek or Babylon 5 is the pinnacle of SF?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
For example, I did the calculations a few days ago and it would appear current technologies allow the assembly of mammalian sized genomes *from scratch* in a few days using technologies that are available now (though the assembly of complete chromosomes needs some work it is a "methods" problem not a "technical infeasibility" problem). This doesn't violate any laws of physics. That means any complex life form can probably be assembled if you can design it. The problem is that most SciFi writers know relatively little about microbiology and biotechnology.
And *very* few SciFi writers really understand the implications of nanotechnology. I'm reasonably sure I can count them on less than 10 fingers. You don't go to the stars in "starships". You go to the stars by taking a planetary sized mind or an entire solar system. It doesn't move fast but since you've reengineered the power source (for "planets") or the sun (for solar systems) to last trillions of years who cares? Those of you who don't understand this haven't been following the /. discussions regarding the "Blinding of SciFi" or haven't read the background material on Matrioshka Brains.
Worth noting in passing is that the recent submission of astro-ph/0506110 which we hope to have published soon. Once it is completely grasped astronomers, physicists, SETI fans *AND* the Science Fiction authors will have little excuse for not seriously considering Life at the Limits of Physical Laws.
It's self-limiting.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Hell, I am Sci-Fi -- anything Sci-Fi for me! There's so little science fiction shows and movies, that I've seen everything already. I say there isn't much out there, and I'll watch whatever netflix has. I think I've queued-up a signifigant portion of the really bad movies and tv shows I haven't seen.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
It's pretty commonly accepted that worm holes exist in space and pretty commonly accepted that there is potential to create worm holes.
.... never say never.
So this statement:
Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing.
is invalid
I believe SciFi is useful to the intelligent brain to keep it occupied - if there wasn't science fiction IMO there would be a lot less science fact - due to the inability to think outside the confines of laws that are disproven almost daily!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
yes
I happen to like SF because I like the kinds of situations presented, and the way SF looks at how people deal with the ambiguities of technology. I like it better when the "science" is at least plausible, but that's not going to stop me from reading a story about computing machines, written back when people assumed that computers would fill entire buildings.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Light does not move instantaneously. Relativity shows that as matter gets closer to the speed of light, time dilates. That doesn't mean time-dilation would occur with 'FTL' travel, though, as it has to circumvent relativity in order to work at all. Time travel could possibly be done with FTL as a sort of means, but that doesn't imply FTL is time travel. I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking, but time dilation works like this: Say a ship leaves for a star 20 lightyears distant. Whatever speed the ship moves at is exactly how fast it moves in comparison to its surroundings. IE, if it's almost, but not quite, the speed of light, it would take slightly over 20 years to get from point A to point B. Now, within the vessel moving at relativistic speeds, time passes differently, to the point where 20 years externally passes in almost an instant internally. I suppose you could call this time travel in the sense that you are effectively moving the vessel and its contents into the future without subjecting it to the effects of aging over a full span of 20 years, but again, this doesn't necessarily apply to FTL travel.
/. topic.)
I fail to see why you concluded that any reference frame used for FTL must be backwards in time compared to our own, as light does not travel instantaneously, therefore it is hypothetically possible for something to move faster than light without traveling backwards in time. (Actually, I believe some laboratories have managed to accellerate light to faster than its normal speed, though I can't be bothered to dig up any articles on it.)
As for the likelihood of time travel, there are hypothetical models that are possible, fit into modern physics, and which would allow for time travel to occur. (See a previous
And yes, FTL is often used for ambiance, as, quite frankly, it's rather difficult to have a multi-world society without FTL, as mere communications would take decades at the least, and interstellar trade would be pretty much nonexistant.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
they get better when you aren't there.
Or does being a science fiction bookseller count as being a pusher? "Yo man, if ya hardcore, I got some Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to set you up man. Unless you're totally freaky, and then I've got some R. A. Lafferty...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
The first version suffered from some "trivial engineering problems" like being impossible to turn off from the inside and requiring more energy than exists in the universe. It has since been tweaked so that you could do it with nothing but gravity control and some negative-density matter.
The point is, it's FTL and doesn't contradict our understanding of how the universe works.
isnt "mundane-science fiction" just called "fiction"?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
People will learn about science whilst being entertained!!! :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1) Velocity is a continuous function. In other words, to move faster than the speed of light, one must cross all possible velocities between your current and target velocities. This is a reasonable assumption unless one sees great breakthroughs in physics...
2) You travel entirely within Einsteinian space.
3) You travel in the conventional manner, and your position is a continuous function in three dimensions.
Under these assumptions, FTL is quite impossible. However, if any one of these can be circumvented, special relativity does not apply.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
...leading to...When you've bought and finished reading Crusade, we'll talk about masses and opiates. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, wait, that was utter junk science.
Sorry to be facetious, but I have (what I claim to be) a serious point: real science ability does not mean that you write hard science fiction. There are many science fiction writers, past and present, who have a science background and yet don't write hard science fiction. And in my opinion this doesn't really effect the quality of the writing, or even the quality of the ideas described, but only what category it is labeled under.
Many geeks, particularly the variety that hangs out in slashdot, are, if ever, fans of science fiction of the Star Wars variety. That is, they place a premium on adventure or novelty before the hard science. I'm not surprised. Most of computer geeks who see the laws of Einstein as an unnecessary limit on cyberspace. Thus I see the appeal of action adventure movies like the Matrix and Star Wars (despite their faults).
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
I haven't seen anyone make this point yet, but there is nothing that prevents FTL travel. What is ruled out is travel AT the speed of light. There are any number of theoretical methods of doing this, some of which have been mentioned on this thread. We just need to jump from sub-light to FTL speeds and avoid that tricky spot at or near light speed.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
"After reading Geoff Ryman's Mundane SF website, where he promotes a new form of science fiction based on real science,
...er... ...ah...
...what were we talking about?
In other news, Geoff Ryman's grandfather after reading his grandson's website decides to goes back in time and kill his younger self before he has any kids....
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
...Materialism and its Monks of the Sacred Evolution if you want to see karma not so much burn as explode.
The Monks are currently scrabbling to explain how T-Rex flesh can remain organic and pliable after 68 million years underground. Now that takes faith!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Current theories state that travel faster than light is not possible.
It is possible for theories to be superceded by other theories, so it's fair for science fiction to posit a universe in which the problems of FTL and/or reltivistic time dialation have been solved.
We can't do it yet. We think it's impossible. Authors don't have to be constrained by our own lack of discovery.
Maybe it is impossible to accelerate a mass beyond the speed of light. When we build an engine capable of accelerating something to interesting speeds, maybe we'll learn more. Maybe we'll learn we can't do it... or maybe we'll invent something clever.
...talking about the events of tens or hundreds or thousands of millions of years ago as if they were observed fact when even simple measurements show that it would only take 10 million years - max - to wear the entire planet's surface down far smoother than a billiard ball requires considerably more imagination, considerably greater miracles than a mere invisible friend.
We're talking about Materialism, here, and I'll bet you haven't even got it listed as a religion, nor its fellow travellers Humanism and Atheism. You're soaking in them.
Some of the deities presented in Trek episodes make far more sense than that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...what's left is petty power games.
As it stands, there is no lasting hope for humanity in Materialism. We're not going to break out of our little ecological shell before we kill each other, one way or another.
However, behaving morally can help make things a great deal better, stretch them out, even if you don't believe that there's an ultimate source for an enforcer of morality, per se.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On a (slightly) more serious note, because the speed of light is relative, the light will stream away ahead of the ship from your perspective, but because your ship has somehow managed to get to FTL in einsteinian space, time will be running backwards for you relative to the rest of the universe and so your headlights will appear to be sucking light out of space ahead of you.
You will also weigh a negative amount, and if you're only just FTL, a very massive negative amount. I interpret that to mean that you briefly turn into a white hole, but I could be wrong. Either way, the results are pretty much guaranteed to be spectacular. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
... parallel lines never met. Then I assumed that they do and, voila, I turned into Hyperbolic Man. (So please don't tell me what's safe to read, or believe.)
Say hello to my little sig.
I think the best SF is really just like the best literature in general -- it's about the "human condition", i.e. it reflects and exposes truths about ourselves that we might not see plainly otherwise. The difference is that SF often uses an extrapolation of current scientific knowledge to achieve an interesting setting or situation to further that goal. And in the process, it asks the reader to suspend disbelief about some detail that is relevant to the story. I'm OK with suspending disbelief once or twice--suppose that faster-than-light travel is possible (Star Wars), or that there's a spice that makes you omniscient (Dune), or that intelligent synthetic beings will once exist (any Asimov story), or that a human can be raised by Martians and come back to earth (Stranger in a Strange Land). Just think how much poorer we'd be without those wonderful stories, no matter how improbable their premises on a strictly scientific basis. But I hate SF that makes you suspend disbelief not once or twice, but continuously throughout the story, introducing one artificial element after another to cover up a bad storyline, or to use the fantastic stuff as an end in itself rather than a conceit to tell an insightful story.
Can you please provide an example of this?
Any space-like interval (two points in space-time whose separation distance exceeds the speed of light multiplied by their separation time, with both measured in the same reference frame) is an example, because for any two such points there is another reference frame in which they are simultaneous. If AB is such an interval, then even if in your reference frame event A occurred before event B, then in the reference frame of someone traveling fast enough (relative to your velocity) in the direction from A to B they were simultaneous. And, in the reference frame of someone traveling even faster in the AB direction, event B occurred first.
If you were at event B, event A would be in your past in the original reference frame. If you then accelerate to a very high speed away from A, then in your new reference frame A can be in your future. An FTL drive which works independently of reference frame (the way all physical laws work as far as we know) could then take you to A's location in space but prior to A in time. To finish the loop, decelerate back to the original reference frame (which now puts B in your future), then FTL back to B's location in space but at an earlier time than you left.
...between actions scenes would have somethign to do with it. (-:
And if you're talking about mere rockets, it takes how long to fly to Mars these days?
Yes, much good SciFi has been written withing these limitations (Podkayne of Mars, anybody? The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? The Fountains of Paradise? Footfall? Protector? Flight of the Dragonfly? Dragon's Egg? etc), but they do narrow the field a lot.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
and that Relativity doesn't describe anything
Sorry, folks, that should have been "everything".
But while I'm here waiting for slashdot to let me post again, why don't I expand a little? Personally, I think that a little sci-fi, fantasy, anything that sends the message that things are possible, is good for the ego, and the average Joe these days tends to have a seriously dented sense of self.
I love people who quote the laws of physics as if its a closed book and we can all rest assured that there will be no further understanding or adaptation to existing theory. this is the kind of thinking that got people tortured for Believing the earth isn't the Center of the universe and had a large portion of the population believeing the moon landing was a hoax.
it is certain that no great discovery will come from those who search only in a small box.
try explaining quantum physics with einsteins laws...seems to me that things like quantum pairing a perfect examples of how little we truly understand. so what if einsteins rules don't allow for ftl travel...do you really need to go that fast if your destination comes to you?
anyway, some say imagination defines science...we need only imagine it for it to exist somewhere.
I think it was A.C. Clack who said that SF is just like a ferrytale. The only difference is that SF explains how things happen and a ferrytale doesn't.
Most of the SF I have read needed the SF part as part of their story. Yes, Agathe Critie could have written a lot of books without killing so many people, but then they would be completely other books.
When SF talks about traveling faster then light or interstellar travel, they do this, because they need to go from planet to planet faster. If they don't, then the travel itself is the story.
Remember that the importent part in SF is Fiction. If you have no interest in that, just read fact books.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Pseudoscience in good sci-fi stories is just a plot device. I don't see a problem here.
http://technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistPubDate.asp has a list of timeline of inventions like the cell phone written about by Heinlein in 1953.
"Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done." -Heinlein
I believe it was Heinlein that said most science-fiction was crap, and books should be based on the human condition not technology.
"There is no physical God you can present to me (or anyone else)...
/.er that just happens to want to see proof of certain actions/reactions of subatomic particles?
only an imaginary one, am I correct?"
Yes, and no.
There is a physical Osama Bin Laden, but I don't expect you to be able to convince him to let you physically present him to me without some (to him) very good reason.
There is a physical God that is more than willing to give you all the proof that you can stand, if you can convince him that you're serious, and that the proof would do you any good. This isn't easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is.
I said that I've had plenty of proof.
I should have said that I've had pleny of verifiable, objective proof.
I'm not foolish enough to believe that proof convinces anyone. (e.g. I've seen plenty of health professionals smoking.) However, I'm willing to give you all the proof you need, if you can convince me that you're serious.
By the way, do you know anyone that is willing to build a supercollider for any random
I eagerly await evidence of your sincerity.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Robert Lull Forward and some of Larry Niven's stuff.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There is nothing in the theory of relativity that prohibits speeds greater than the speed of light.
Since a significant SF work has used FTL travel as a significant plot point. The most recent examples I can think of are James P. Hogan's works where the plot concerned the development of FTL or unlimited supplies of energy or time travel.
You could argue that David Brin's Uplift series also make use of FTL as a plot device (notably Startide Rising), but the central theme of those works is ecology and the relationship between species. Like Brin's, many newer SF societies pre-suppose FTL travel or communication, but nowadays the theme and plot of those stories is completely unrelated to FTL and its consequences.
Serious SF has already thoroughly examined the direct consequences of FTL travel and has moved into speculating on the nature of societies that have FTL available.
The classic definition of hard SF used to be to make one assumption that is not accepted by current scientific theory, or is distinct from current society and examine the consequences of that change. This could be anything from the existence of FTL to the south winning the US Civil War to the world being a flat disc on the backs of 4 elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle (once again Terry Pratchett pushes the envelope until it rips).
On the other hand the central premise of the article is correct. Apart from the fact that 90% of SF is crap, just like it was in the 1950's and '60s, modern SF books don't put the science at the center of the story. This doesn't make the SF any worse as LITERATURE. Lois McMaster Bujold, Terry Pratchett and other top SF and fantasy authors write more complete and well-rounded NOVELS than just about any SF from the "golden age". But science is no longer the theme.
Don't blame the authors or the publishers though. This just reflects society's attitude toward scientists now (intellectual elitists trying to usurp God) vs. our attitude in the 50's (intellectual heroes able to usurp God, given enough time). Neither view is reasonable, but the literature comes from the society.
We are the 198 proof..
...energy + hydrogen + time => you.
How unlikely is that? Do the maths one day. The big sugar daddy in the sky is quite reasonable by comparison.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Einstein did NOT say it was impossible.
I didn't say he did. In fact, I was merely pointing out why we can say "FTL is impossible" far better than our 1900s counterparts could say "flight is impossible" or our 1940s counterparts "supersonic flight is impossible."
It's entirely plausible that there exists an as-yet undiscovered propulsion mechanism that will allows us sufficient accelleration to break objectively-measured C--we might outrun out our own image similiarly to how supersonic flight outruns its own sound. We've never gotten anything macroscopic to go that fast, and it might act very differently when we do it.
(OTOH, certain supercollideresque experiments do come darn close on a microscopic scale, and to date no one's totally revised Special Relatvity due to the actual experiements.)
The belief that hydrogen will eventually self-assemble into philosophers has me LMAO. So...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We just had a big "mundane" era - cyberpunk. Most cyberpunk novels contained quite feasible technology. Cyberpunk died partly because it was too much like reality. The cyberpunk novels are now in the "technothriller" section, with Tom Clancy's lesser works (i.e. the NetForce series) featured prominently. So that's been done.
Mundane SF is likely to be dystopian. We have a big problem coming up - the oil is running out. The era of cheap energy is over unless somebody comes up with something really good really soon. And there's nothing as cheap in sight. We can get another century out of shale oil and coal, but it's going to be messy. SF about the return of "dark, satanic mills" can be quite readable, but it's not escapist literature. It's closer to the "theater depresso" era of the 1950s, when Arthur Miller's dismal "Death of a Salesman" played on Broadway for months.
Biotechnology offers some options. Michael Crichton turns out moralistic horror stories, most inferior to Mary Shelly's original work. Bujold handles biotechnology well, although in a space opera context. She's one of the very few authors to think through the moral issues of biotechnology. We need more like that.
Hey it says you can write about "Virtual Reality" how about if in the virtual reality you can have Aliens, FTLs, etc... Just a thought
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
Think about it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
They make an ass of u and me.
"Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing."
/. story yesterday or whenever it was do not give me any confidence that modern day physics necessarily has all the answers. And I DO think time travel is utterly impossible in any form. But I cut slack for FTL.
Sorry, I think that's bullshit. Low probability perhaps, but zero? Nope. Any physicist who talk about time travel like these guys in the
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So, no, I don't believe in a Star Trek future - although I do enjoy the shows and movies.
I believe in a MUCH more EXTREME future. One that would probably be unrecognizable by most sci-fi writers and fans.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The world economy is stagnating. As a result, many people will be idle and in a mood to daydream and fantasize.
If you want to sell sci-fi books, lean a little more toward the fantasy side.
Want a science-friendly SF? Read novels by Stanislaw Lem.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Science FICTION is just that, you try and add only pure know science facts, what would we end up with? We have True Crime based on real life criminals and investigations, should we create True Science? would this be limited only to proven laws of science, leave out theoretical ideas? My intrest is in the theoretical areas. "Snow Crash" by: Neal Stephenson that I just finished reading had ideas based on computer science, and even creatively placed foot notes to real life theories, and there authors.
Why matter or information cannot exceed the speed of light.
A lot of FTL proponents discuss the mechanisms that prevent matter from exceeding the speed of light, which lead some to hope that the matter can be finessed with wormholes or the like, and thus avoid these speed-limits.
I propose to discuss the consequences of matter or information travelling from A to B by any means in less time than light can, and thus show the whole enterprise to have severe logical inconsistencies. I'm aiming at an overview without the math. You can find more details in other writeups and in the links provided.
Spacetime diagram
My undergraduate physics was a while back, but a few things stuck from relativity. A useful diagram is a spacetime diagram, particularly a light-cone. Now, as you know, two observers travelling rapidly with respect to one another have different frames of reference, and don't see things the same way; time dilation and length contraction see to that. So what's a 45-degree line on observer A's light cone won't be so on observer B's diagram.
Causality in light cones
The light cone divides the universe into three parts for the observer in the center: the past, the future and and what's neither, elsewhere. This ties into cause and effect. For instance, if you want to cause something to happen on Mars from here on Earth, like sending an instruction to your remote Mars-rover, you need to send a signal to it, and it takes the radio waves 4 minutes to get there when the conjunction is favourable. So whilst an event on Mars in four minutes time is within the bounds of your possible future, an event on Mars in two minutes time is not, it is just elsewhere. Likewise an event on Mars two minutes ago is not in your past right now, since you cannot know about it and cannot react to it until another two minutes pass.
The relativity of simultaneity.
Relative simultaneity is a consequence of this: On the spacetime diagram, simultaneous events, i.e. events taking place at the same time have the same vertical (time) position. But different observers use different axes, because they measure space and time along axes which are skewed with respect to other observer's axes. What is simultaneous for one observer is not necessarily so for other observers with very different velocities.
So when observer A sees event P happening just before event Q, observer B can see Q happening just before P. That's OK if P and Q are well-separated, but what if P causes Q? But we'd hope that all observers, no matter how fast they travel, always see causes happening before the effects. the effect aloways belongs inside the future light cone of its cause. Yes, in order for this reversal of order to occur, the one event must be outside the light-cone of the other.
The equivalence of time travel and faster-than-light travel
But if you travel faster than light, you step outside of your light-cone. There can be an observer speeding past who sees you arriving before they see you depart. Furthermore, if they too travel faster than light they could take a message from you when you arrive, and deliver it to you before you depart. What if your future self convinces your past self not to go? What if they take a passenger not a message? The only way you can make sense of the paradox is that you end up in a parallel universe every time you switch on the FTL drive.
FTL travel, regardless of how it might be accomplished, be it big-ass rockets, warp drives, wormholes, spacetime-fabric zips, blue boxes, genetic mutation, frantic handwaving or mental telepathy, is equivalent to time travel into the past, and you'd have to make sense of that. It is "incompatible with causality". Without causality (i.e. the notion that things happen for explainable reason that occurred beforehand for all observers), making sense of the universe is a lost hope. Causality has not been shown to hold globally throught all space and time, a thought that makes some physicists very nervous. But if we know anything, we know
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
You befoul the memory of your great namesake with this ill-conceived and -executed, embarrassingly unamusing, ass-bitingly self-adoring post.
I guess the parent hasn't heard of electron tunnelling.
I'm a gnu world man.
What will happen? The same thing that happens when you turn on the speakers on the nose cone of your supersonic aircraft.
In other words it's a stupid question.
If one steps outside the Einsteinian box, as Einstein stepped outside the Newtonian box, a hint toward FTL travel is actually suggested by the answer above. We've never SEEN anything travel faster than light because we SEE light. We've also never heard anything travel faster than sound.
Like sound, the speed of light is NOT constant; it varies by medium. Postulate a creature who possesses our level of technology, living in a medium with a slower light speed than what we consider to be the vacuum speed--for fun let's say the lightspeed in that medium is 100km/h. If the creature performed the same experiments we have, they would conclude that 100km/h is the maximum speed at which information can travel anywhere in the universe. (Just as many of us have concluded that 280,000 mi/sec is the maximum speed of information).
From our perspective we know that the creature would be wrong, because we have a wider frame of reference. By analogy, unless we are willing to assume seemingly arbitrary, anthropocentric limits (and not having any conclusive experimental disproof), we must conclude it's at least possible that a wider frame of reference than our own exists. The question is: can we access it?
We've never directly heard anything travel faster than the speed of sound (in whatever medium we're working in), but we have transmitted information by another means (light), that was then converted to sound. Again, by analogy, it is possible that light information could be transmitted by a new medium that is faster than light. The information would then be re-converted to light for consumption at the far point.
Information is not subject to light speed limits because information does not exist; it is an abstract creation of the human mind that is deduced from actions. Sound information can be routed around the sound limit by conversion to and from a faster medium for transport. The door is NOT closed to such a solution for light information. We can't see any way to open it right now, but that's a very different statement from saying we've conclusively ruled out the existence of a door.
This seems to me a recent misperception
I'm in my 20s but used to read a lot of the golden years cifi. I recall that in those years there was what used to be called "hard cifi" autors (like arthur c clark, asimov). They made the effort to extrapolate and extend the science and technology in relistic ways, but only to develop new and posible contexts in wich to place histories that, trough the humman nature of the caracters, more clearly made a critic and warned about real world situations.
The hard cifi was not escapist... was giving insights to the future. So many things, like: satellites, atomic bombs, terraforming, etc. and his unexpected consequences where first talked in the cifi. The hard cifi fans where more political developed about those subjects that the other people of the time.
Many of the hard cifi autors where scientists (or at least selft thought technologist) trying to promote their midset, a more rational point of view of the world with a positive knowlege of the science.
There was also what was called the soft cifi, less interested in the science and more in the new, alien, unexpected contexts around pretty traditional common cliche histories (cowboys, pirates, knights, etc). Also, some of them where great... but much of the comercial mass produced garbage was like that, soft cifi.
At the end of the 70s was really hard for the young writers in any genre to get published. The only genre still with magazines accepting texts from unknowns was the cifi. So writers with no interest in science and even with a negative view of science started to write cifi, and making a better litterature as they where writers not scientists... so was born the cyberpunk on the pessimistic visions of the early 80s.
All this is at least what i recall... im sure there must be cognitive dissonance depending of wich set of autors you prefer.
Bruce Sterling(?) commented in Wired in the 90s that it was hard to write science fiction as we are now living in the future. "The NASDAJ is science fiction". (I added at the time - certainly fiction)
After 9/11 kids I knew who had grown up knowing only the media theme park that was America during the Clinton boom were shocked, scared and uncertain, but those that had read, for instance, Shockwave Rider or Stand On Zanzibar had already thought out some of the issues.
So go read The Sheep Look Up to get ready for the next 50 years.
I picked up Heinline in 5th grade and never looked back. A friend trying to get his teenage cousin to read gave her Sidhartha - a great book mind you but not a first book - I suggested a Heinline juvenile (or The Maltise Falcon).
More random observations
Read an article somewhere with someone (hey it was years ago) pointing out that science fiction novels were references to the times they were created during.
1984: Lots of grey burned out buildings and shifting superpower alliances is post WWII Britian.
Clockwork Orange: Crazed kids dressing funny and riding scooters in gangs -> Mod England in the 60s.
Science fiction also gives the writer freedom to explore issues from different perspectives: The Left Hand of Darkness is a very human book that needs the 'fantasy' to explore humanity. The Disposessed manages to frame political arguments without sectarian Earth references.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
"Most science fiction is based on speculative fantasy rather than hard science"
Right stuff like the comunicators in the original Star Trek series of 40 years ago could never come to be, Oops sorry we've got cell phones that are smaller than those communicators.
"the common example being stories built around faster-than-light travel. Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing."
Acepting something as impossible is just a way of limiting your mind, if no one ever tried because it was impossible half of what we know to be possible today wouldn't exist. By the way they already know several ways to get around Einsteins Theory of Relativity to make FTL transportation possible. Some people should do their research.
I truly am surprised how little people understand about science in general, and relativity in particular.
You mispelled "especially".
You can't take the sky from me...
FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing
and 100/200 years ago, it was believed that a train travelling at 21 mph or faster would kill everybody on board because all the oxygen would be sucked out of it.
just because we cant think of a way to do it now, doesn't meant it wont ever be done. im sure there are aspects of science we dont even know exists, never mind know anything about (quantum physics 100 years ago?)
Stop being so bloody pessimistic! FTL travel is known to be possible through bending space-time or simply using artificially created wormholes (assuming energy supplies are available). Teleportation has already been shown a minor success with photons. The zero-point energy field has been proven to exist. And gravity--that most elusive yet down-to-earth riddle--is currently under assault by both academia and amateurs in attempt to understand it better and crack it. So why is science fiction the opiate of the geek masses?
:-)
I contend what many others contend too: science fiction is science future. It's what people want to exist, and it's what encourages young aspiring engineers and scientists to work hard in school--to bring about a better future for everyone (and to profit along the way). Honestly, who would have thought 100 years ago that we would have cell phones? Airplanes globetrotting the planet? Rockets to the moon? These were all ideas of science fiction, once thought to be impossible, but again proven to be possible.
Oh, you may argue how ignorant people were back then: no Einstein, no aerospace engineering, no computers--so why are we all of a sudden so much better than our predecessors? I'm sure 100 years from now, people will marvel at our stupendous stupidity. No antigravity, fossil fuels as our primary energy supply, and no starships! Who were these primates, they might ask? And how did they survive without sub-space communication systems?
Science fiction drives us towards a better future and gives hope to those who are not tolerated to dream--scientists. Science is a historically conservative field, unwilling to accept breakthroughs without serious resistance. I recall reading an article from a Johns Hopkins professor about a week before the first Wright Brothers flight where it was stated that manned flight was utterly impossible. And remember the inquisition of Galileo before the Catholic Church? Planets revolving around the sun? Heresy!
This trend will continue indefinitely, and I have no doubt that the next 100 years will give us plenty to look forward to. I just hope I get to see it all, and maybe pitch in along the way. Stay tuned.
I always wonder, why do only wacky aliens with just 2 fingers or one eye have the best technology? How do they build those light-year ripping ships with hell a lot of disabilities? Even the brainiest, 10 fingered humans arent able to do no such thing, then why those wackos! ?
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste
"suggests" != "proves"
I think that's prejudice. Science Fiction is not all about lasers and spaceships in pulp fiction settings. Authors actually check their "science" part. What about Arthur C. Clarke? The inventors of the first American satelite couldn't get it patented since Clarke had described it so detailed twenty years or so prior to its creation.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
I think the focus on the "hardness" of sci-fi is completely misplaced. Granted, there is a divide between science fantasy (say, star wars) and there's science fiction (say 2001). But ultimately, other than being fun escapism (which I wholeheartedly endorse BTW) the function of science fiction has always been to explore the societal impacts of technology. It's not good science fiction just because the author is a PhD and spends an entire chapter lecturing me on a spaceship propulsion system that adds nothing to the plot (although that is ever so slightly better than an author who in real life couldn't build a model rocket from a kit who cribs something he read in scientific american). It's good science fiction if it makes you think hard about something you never thought about before. A good science fiction author immerses you in a world that you, by the end of the book, could actually believe exisited in some future history book. Technology is not a plot gimmick or a crutch but something that brings a new aspect of humanity under the magnifying glass, and none of us would be even reading this news site if we weren't fascinated by how society is shaped by technology, right? My 2 cents (and don't get me wrong, I do like hard-science fiction if its done well, but being a graduate student in science, I have to read enough hokey articles obfuscated by irrelevant technical details in modern journals as it is!)
Storytelling almost always involves implausible, unrealizable, or impossible ideas: premonitions, improbable crimes, implausible conincidences, unrealistic human behavior, supernatural phenomena, etc.
Science fiction is no different from that, it just happens to use technological symbolism and metaphor. And it uses technological symbolism because it represents ideas like "progress" and "rationality" in the context of a story. Whether the symbols are physically realizable makes no more difference to whether it is a good story than the physical realizability of a Midsummer Night's Dream or King Lear.
Geeks like SciFi not because the technology it represents is necessarily realistic (although it is fun to speculate about that), but because it is about a technological approach to human problems, as well as the tension between technology and humanity.
If I want to read SF, I will try to find hard SF. That means, SF with science and technology at the centre, and even if it contains stuff that does not exist, it is mostly speculative with science at the base of it, more or less. People complain about bad character development, but if I wanted to read something where that is central to everything, I could read many other genres instead. What I'm after is new ideas, fascinating speculations and new worlds, and as scientfic as possible. I can enjoy other kinds of SF, I suppose, but some of it seems to blend a little with fantasy, or, they seem to be stories that could be placed in any other setting, and the rayguns and giant starships are just there for show. Also, I don't care for the genre fantasy with the usual magical sword that has to be found and brought through the mystical forest so the prince of darkness can't take over the murgaburga-land, a land with castles made out of crystals and fair maids dressed according to 12th century Europe fashion. Gag me with a rusty fork.
Science fiction is not just entertainment for geeks. Sure, it does that well, because geeks are attracted to technology, and science fiction is per definition related to new technology. Historically, though, sci-fi has been about what mankind will do with new inventions. About the dilemma of the individual obtaining god-like powers (see some of the early Star Trek or the excellent Forbidden Planet as an example). The earliest sci-fi was basically typical western stories set in space (frontier stories). Later on it was used to paraphrase political problems like during the red scare. When sci-fi has nothing better to do it tends to preach morality - like newer Star Treks that have a tendency to deal with basic human issues, diplomacy and so on, when it doesn't stray from the beaten path. Note that I'm not saying it doesn't, I'm just talking generally here.
Great sci-fi makes us think about issues that actually involve ourselves. Because they're set in an alien setting it's easier to be detached from normal prejudice. Take Planet of the Apes as an example. No, it's not an opiate for the masses. It's a wake-up call for the masses.
Against the grain
After surveying a non-representative sampling of people(my friends) on a saturday night, i have come to the conclusion that opiates are in fact, the opiates of the masses.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Science Fiction is, to me, largely about one thing: "What if". A SF-setting enables the Author to depict societies and situations which do not exist, which might exist someday, which might exist if something in the past would have turned different.
It is of course possible to write anything (including wild west novels, history, crime stories or soap operas like Star Trek) in a Science-Fiction setting. But thats beside the point; and disregarding the biggest advantage of SF above all other settings.
And asking the right "what if"-question is where SF really gets interesting. From Orwell to a lot of Heinleins work, to Le Guin, Dick, Bester, Lem, up to more recent Cyberpunk-Authors. "How would a real anarchy (not chaos and rule of the strong) look like?", "What happens if fascism really wins?", "How might we try to communicate with something really alien?", "How would a telepathic society look like?" and so on. All of these interesting questions each with possible answers in the form of a Science-Fiction works.
And this kind of Science-Fiction is definitly not "opiate of the masses", but the opposite. Things to make you think, to wake you up.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
In general terms, if it interacts electromagnetically, you can observe it by looking for the photons it gives off. Assuming it doesn't interact electromagnetically, by observing the effects it has on the objects around it through the strong or weak forces, or especially gravity. Everything interacts gravitationally, even energy.
Now to answer you with a specific example, read up on Cherenkov radiation.
To understand why it isn't possible to accelerate matter faster than the speed of light in a vacuum read up on the Lorenz transformation. In simple terms, as energy is input into a system to accelerate an object the actual mass of the object goes up (remember, energy feels the effect of gravity, too). This increase in mass is non-linear and is described by the Lorentz transformation. As an object aproaches the speed of light in vacuum the mass aproaches infinity therefore it equires an infinite amount of energy to accelerate the mass to the speed of light in vacuum, at which point the mass would be infinite. To go faster, it would require a greater than infinite amount of energy (and the mass becomes an imaginary number, weirdly enough) which is nonsense.
In closing, I hope I've been able to explain this in understandable terms in plain English (and I've also taken a few liberties to make it simpler to understand, so forgive me there.)
Which is why some have relabelled SF as 'speculative fiction'. Many science fiction writers have zero interest in the scientific plausibility of their invented past/present/future. For them, SF is just an enabler that has allowed them to explore different notions of reality, or insights into the human condition. In the stories of Philip K. Dick, the super-computers run on vacuum tubes - clearly that science is all wrong, and yet his characters are complex and real, and in novels like 'Flow my tears...' and 'A scanner darkly', he achieves moments of almost unbearable poignancy. Conversely, and all too often, those writers who get the hard science right have characters of laughable wooden-ness. I'd say 80% of the SF I've read/watched, has a rather autistic notion of human interactions. All subjective of course, but I'll take Barrington J. Bayley over Isaac Asimov any day.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do
Too many if you ask me, this is a tv show not a religion and anyone worshiping it as a religion deserve the sarcasm. But to directly answer your question: probably as much as people thinking coke better their life or that extasy and raving is good for the body and expand the mind, this is the same rationnal, if a tv show make you feel liberated you have a problem, admit it, consult, go home.
As an example here's a quick question for the science gurus. Two quarks are able to communicate instantaneously, no light speed involved. We're able to teleport quarks. Considering these two possibilities why is FTL travel definitely off the table? How sure are we that this can't be projected into a macroscopic solution?
I also have one other major gripe. If this manifesto is meant to be complete how on Earth does the Singularity get let off the hook? It's by definition unknowable so surely it should not be allowed to be speculated on, or is it only scientific fallacies that must be prevented, logical errors are OK?
What science fiction should be striving for is not more scientifically accurate stories. What is more important is the kind of stories that investigate the effect of technology on man, or the type that deals with interspecies communication. That's real science fiction.
Who are the greatest sci-fi authors? In my, and many other opinion, the two great ones are Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick. While they do try and make their stories as realistic as possible, they do not attempt to restrict themselves to the known.
Take Lem's "Fiasco". Lem posits "sidereal" technology, which enables the protaganists to do all sorts of extremely advanced stuff. The technology is never explained, but it serves as crucial to the plot. And yet the book is not about it, either, it is merely a plot device to what is really important: showing the futility in trying to communicate with alien intelligences.
If you want consistency with established theory then that consistency should be absolute. If you allow only some extrapolation and no more then you are just argueing about taste and matters of extent, not principle.
There is NO truth in science.
Watch you don't sail right off the edge, as sure as the Sun rotates around the Earth the Sky will fall on your head.
Imagine a few hundered years ago predicting walking on the moon, burn the witch!
Just because theories, such as Einstein's, are accepted today does not mean they will never be challenged and/or disproved.
Didn't Einstein have a problem accepting Quantum Mechanics?
The moment mankind stops dreaming or aiming for the seemingly impossible is the exact time to pack up and quit living.
Lack of reading comprehension on /. never ceases to amaze me.
I didn't say I'd seen God.
I thought that my example of physicans that smoke amply explained why I don't expect proof to convince anyone.
Since you seem to missed that explanation, consider politics and other marketing. If proof is so effective in convincing people, why don't those two areas use proof instead of emotional arguments to try to convince people?
If I were that afraid of ridicule I wouldn't have fed Lew Paine's troll in the first place. However, upon rereading the New Testament you may realize that Jesus generally taught people what they were ready to hear. He often saved "deeper" and "plainer" discussions for just his closest disciples.
I hope I wasn't too sarcastic for you, AC. I get impatient when people complain about a post that they haven't read carefully.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
The largest change in my life is increased understanding of how the world works. I'm talking about relationships here, not science, though it hasn't kept me from understanding physical sciences.
This perspective has helped me have a better relationship with my wife, be a better father to my children, and be a better friend to my friends.
It isn't that I was bad, but the more I know the happier I am.
I can't say how it would affect you.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Which is rubbish. There is tons of science fiction out there that obeys the laws of physics in as far as we know them (or at least, as they were known at the time of writing) -- some of it more than a century old, some of it current, and an awful lot in between. Most is in book form, but there are a few good examples in movies and other media. As has been pointed out, Arthur C. Clarke and others have created new uses for technology in their books which later became reality. And writers from Wells to Asimov, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Benford, Geoff Landis, and tons more have all written perfectly logical, intelligent stories using real science.
There is also a large crop of material which is logical, intelligent, and based on science, but which posits some change or other in the laws of physics, often in order to investigate those laws more imaginatively. You might call this 'speculative fiction', and if it's done well I don't consider it any less worthy than strictly-conforming stories. In fact, sometimes this can teach you even more about the universe we live in.
And yes, there's a lot of mindless pap which clearly doesn't understand enough physics to tell what's possible or not, and doesn't care either way. (Sturgeon's Law applies!) But please don't think that's all there is to SF. If it's the only sort that makes it to your TV screen, then that says more about programme-makers than about SF.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
You've convined me that proof is not what you want, nor would you accept it if you had it. I may be mistaken, but I tend to go with the available evidence.
You pretend to know what "proof" I have
You ignore the meanings of "verifiable" and "objective."
You distort the evidence that you already have.
You've convince me to be stop feeding the troll for now. Bye.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
From the blurb: where he promotes a new form of science fiction based on real science
I've always been a believer that science fiction without some basis in actual science is nothing more then fantasy. I posted not too long ago about this, probably in a Star Wars thread. What seperates stuff like LOTRs from sci-fi? If an author can some up with any crap he likes and tag it as science we're just fooling ourselves.
And as for Star Trek; my problem with trek isn't as much the technology but the way they try to idealize the human spirit. Basically Trek (at least TOS and TNG) tries to claim that the human spirit alone will motivate people and not the promise of reward (such as a paycheck). Give me a holodeck and see how much work I get done.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If you pay attention to what Einstein actually said in the Special Theory of Relativity, much of the "rules" have more to do with what an observer sees than with what actually happens with the object being observed.
This is no small thing. Imagine for a moment that a particle accelerator on earth has fired a subatomic particle into space at an observed velocity of 99.999% of the speed of light. Of course, we would only consider the acceleration of a subatomic particle to such speeds because Einstein's theory tells us that, since mass increases with velocity, only the most infinitesmal particle can be so accelerated without impossible expenditures of energy.
Except.
From the perspective of that subatomic particle whizzing off into space, the earth is observed as having the same velocity. In fact, velocity is properly always a relationship between two objects, not a property possessed by one object (and then "objectively" observed by another).
And if the earth is observed as traveling at 99.999% of the speed of light, then it, too, must have gone through a similar increase in mass.
The fact is, some of Einstein's rules have to do mainly with observation - with our ability to perceive - and particularly with the limits of using light as a means of perceiving objects that we are in a relationship of motion with.
More rules may yet be needed.
Call me a geek, but I really don't care if my Science Fiction is raw or cooked. Every time I watch 'Star Wars The Empire strikes back', I get a sqidgy feeling in my tummy when Han Solo can't get the MF to light speed for the second time. I also can't see a future where I'm slicing bread with a metre long beam of light but I still wave my arms about making 'zzzooosh zzzuuummm crshhhhh' noises. Do I care, ... not one jot .. coz it's E-N-T-E-R-T-A-I-N-M-E-N-T!
The amount of fuel required to get from here to anywhere interesting would mass more than ... well, than the Earth for a reasonable interstellar flight even on a generation ship. So without really radical breakthroughs in physics - not just engineering - SF must limit itself to the solar system.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Has anybody else ever noticed... okay, I'm relatively new to Slashdot (this is my first post) and I'm sure Star Trek has been discussed here A LOT, so it probably has been brounght up... that the "entire human race" portrayed on ST is not even as ethnically diverse as the current US population? I don't even think it matches the gender makeup of the modern American workplace. Of course, so many of the early, scientist-type SF writers who are praised later on in this thread tend to write about futures that extrapolate based on the scientific trends of their time but entirely ignore the sociological trends.
I'm just sayin'.
And Whitey's on the moon.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Sure, you can do a *lot* without FTL travel and communication. You can make some really interesting stories involving only what current physics says is possible or likely... but some of the staples of science fiction are gone.
If you're limited to significantly slower-than-light travel your stories have to take place in our solar system. They can't involve any alien species, because no aliens would bother spending millenia coming to earth. You *might* be able to include a *message* from aliens, but you couldn't have any two-way communication, unless your story spanned centuries. Basically aliens are gone completely.
You'd have to pick one planet for a setting, and stick with it. Travel between planets would be a very rare and costly thing, and if you want people walking on the surface of that planet then you're probably limited to Earth, Venus or Mars.
To me, the lack of aliens is the biggest problem with no FTL travel. You can have great science fiction without FTL travel, but what's fiction with only humans?
For as long as there have been stories, there have been non-humans. Ancient egyptians had their half-animal gods. Ancient greeks had the a variety of non-human monsters. In modern times, we're pretty sure there are no "monsters" on earth, certainly nothing out there that has an intelligence comparable to ours... so does millenia of telling stories with non-humans have to come to an end? I guess we can make the modern science-friendly equivalent be "the self-aware machine", but when the "monster" is your own creation, that's a whole different brand of story.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is keeping the world internally consistent. Decide on a mechanism for FTL travel, fully figure out how it works, what its limits are, etc, and tell a story from there. Just because a story has FTL travel doesn't mean it has to have leprechauns, violate thermodynamics laws, etc.
I like really hard science fiction, but I also like well written fantasy, and ancient myths (I highly recommend the Iliad). Star Wars and Star Trek are the softest of soft science fiction. They modify the laws of the world as needed to fit the story they want to tell. Why not have "firm science fiction". Create a set of rules that govern the world, make sure they all logically coexist, and then stick to those laws. The physics need not be the physics we understand today, but make sure that the differences fit in the areas that we don't fully understand today. Oh, and include aliens. Let's not abandon millenia of precedent just because modern physics can't fully explain how it would work.
I think it's the main problem. And here's my main objection to this manifesto: it's overlooking some very old and very depressing science itself. The "Club of Rome" folk have been criticized for the World3 model for 30 years... but most criticism has focused on global crisis not following simplistic dates from the base case model. This overlooks (1) that it's "only a model" with very uncertain input parameters, (2) that the simulation was run with a large range of values for the input parameters, and (3) that while the exact dates varied, the long term end result was generally disaster. Post-technological agrarian societies do not generally make for lots of interesting and novel stories that people want to read. (World3 doesn't always end that way, but scenarios set in the alternatives generally read like a depressing tract from a ZPG population control fringe movement.)
Peak oil is another tested scientific projection, which was accurate the first time in the 1970's, and which the general public is also ignoring. I don't blame them-- it's depressing. It's one big reason I dropped out of Nuclear Engineering a decade back-- I took a hard look at all of the solutions to the impending energy crisis in sight, and all are infeasible on a useful timescale for either political or engineering reasons. Arguably, if you want to stick with this "Mundane Manifesto" and write about anything more than 20 years down the road, you need to detail how the energy problem was solved-- if it was. (And agrarian SF is still boring....) And you need to solve it without violating the laws of thermodynamics, physics, or sociology.
And if you can do that, you shouldn't be writing Science Fiction, you should be starting a political campaign for public office. Or a military campaign-- the time table is a little close.
Science fiction is a literature of hope. And an unreasonable hope may be all that's left.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
We also still haven't figured out some weird quantum effects where some matter appears to move faster than light (I believe it's part of the uncertainty principle, but physics is WAAAY behind me, and far understudied).
A physics major I once knew suggested a bubble of slow time riding on a bubble of fast time. If that were possible, then you wouldn't need to go faster than the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light.
Then there's the possibility that some constant isn't really a constant and can be manipulated that may upend everything we know about physics. Einstein did this with time-space already (relativity), and I'm sure we don't even fully understand the implications and possibilities from that, alone.
I write as a scientist who has been reading science fiction for 50 years.
Back in the old days, there were a handful of writers producing what was known as "hard SF." which some people now wish to rename "mundane" SF (an odd word choice for people who style themselves as advocates). Stories built off of extrapolation contemporary developments in science and current theory. Hard SF provided an important counterpoint to space opera that incorporated outlandish fantasy elements like ray guns and hand-held computers.
And as time went on, adolescent readers of science fiction grew up, went into science. But many of them never lost interest in the outlandish notions of the space operas they read in childhood. And today we have lasers, and particle beams, and microcomputers. And physicists are seriously pursuing ideas like teleportation, wormholes, and alternate universes. Some of these notions will doubtless never become physical reality--the prospects for faster-than-light wormhole travel still look pretty slim. But even in these cases, the investigation of these "impossible" ideas has yielded important insights into nature and mathematics. I contend that fantastic SF has made at least as great a contribution to scientific progress than "mundane" SF, both in terms of inspiring interest in science and in providing ideas that have yielded important scientific insights.
There will always be a role for hard SF. It hasn't gone away. Conservative and wild speculation provide the boundaries of the future--with the caveat that the real future will probably include elements so fantastic that even the most fantastic writers don't expect them, such the ubiquity of internet commerce and communication. Pedantic attempts to draw hard boundaries are foolish. Even among scientists, you will find wild diversity of opinion as to the boundaries between the probable and the possible.
Of course, there's always the possibility that the 20th century physicists' understanding of space and time is flawed. It could be that FTL travel is simply a matter of creating a strong enough propulsion field.
Yeah, yeah, I have a theory... hehe.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
What true geek subscribes to the concept of "opiate of the masses" implying the good-old natural derivative of the opium plant when you could be subdued by the "opioid of the masses" including all synthetically manufactured futuristic, advanced, potentially very potent opiate-like substances! Think "sufentanil/alfentanil/fentanyl of the masses", what a rush!
This is actually in response to all the other responses saying that we can say it is impossible because we haven't observed it. You should be very careful with the "I" word, since it is so absolute.
The 1900s folk that said everything was impossible although they could observe it were at least using mundane observation methods. Its possible that we could observe the stuff you are saying is impossible if we just knew HOW and WHERE to look.
I have all the respect in the world for Einstein and all the other pioneers throughout history that paved the road that leads to where we are in science, but they are only human. Just because they said this is how it is (general relativity, etc) and SO FAR it has been proven out, doesn't mean that it is set in stone. It just means it has worked so far. Who knows what is on the horizon.
In fact, I prefer to think of the laws of physics as... the guidelines of physics. We just haven't figured out how to circumvent the guidelines yet, but my guess is we will.
This is almost the same argument Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had in the 19th century.
Jules Verne chided H. G. Wells for his fantastic Ideas, saying they could never happen. But as we all know, many of H. G. Wells fantasies have happened.
Separating realistic science fiction from fantastic science fiction takes away one of the greatest motivations of the scientific community.
I also remember all I read about nuclear fusion and now I see it made available(ok, in actual testing and producing actual electricity) in a breadbox sized box...
m l
Um, no. The breadbox-sized fusion device reported on a few weeks ago is nowhere near the break-even point.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0606/p25s01-stss.ht
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I see that people have already responded about hard SF. What I also see, both in the original story, and in a number of posts, is the assumption that SF == Star Wars, Trek, etc.
The answer is, no, assholes, it's not. 99.99% of all SF is *written*. If you don't know names like Haldeman, Varley, Cherryh, Bear, Vinge, or a bunch of others (I could go on for pages), then you don't know SF.
Here's a start: go read all the Hugo and Nebula winners for the last five years... then talk to me about "mundane sf".
One last note: one of the many definitions of SF is "it must obey all known scientific laws. If it breaks one (and only one, per story), then a) that needs to be *necessary* for the plot, and b) it needs to do believable handwaving that *also* does not violate known scientific laws.
That, of course, tosses 90% of so-called sf in movie and tv out the window.
mark "why, yes, I *have* been a *real*
SF&F fan for nearly 40 years..."
Arguably, if you want to stick with this "Mundane Manifesto" and write about anything more than 20 years down the road, you need to detail how the energy problem was solved-- if it was.
:)
Efficient solar power (coming soon - check out latest advances in quantum dots), ocean-waves, air power.
Efficient cars (fuel cells), efficient computers (nanotech - achievable in 10 years, maybe in 20 we'll reach spintronics), efficient fridges (nanotech heat transfer - already here but experimental), efficient lighting (ultra-efficient leds - already here).
There ya go
It doesn't matter *how* you get information or matter from point A to point B at a speed faster than light. As soon as you can do this, you violate causality, and you have all the negative effects of time travel whether or not you get to have the fun. In a world where FTL is possible, effect can cause cause rather than the other way around.
A reasonable description of this effect can be found at: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/ 000089.html
My point is that nothing is proven by the capacity for humans to believe in a fictional TV show. You may take from it whatever you wish. For you, that may reinforce your innate skepticism of religions in general. For another, it might reinforce the belief that humans are all just looking for something.
That's the same thing! They're looking for something, anything, to fill that void. And they can find it in religion or in TV. It takes TV and religion to the same level (the original poster was lamenting that we shouldn't elevate TV to that level, I said I don't think anything is elevated here).
Who knows? The Shadow knows!
P.S. That's not innate skepticism.
You can't take the sky from me...
Most good science fiction is not as popular, but is much more entertaining and infintely more intriguing.
I have been telling people to look for Science FACTion or Hard science fiction for almost 3 decades. Nothing beats a tale with a little bit of "magic" involved, like FTL flight. But when the start explaining the heories behind the propulsion of intersteallr travel, and not just use some Worm hole" technology, its very entertaining.
I like tech manuals too though, so my opinion is probably worthless.
Inasmuch as I don't go around taking random factoids and using them as "proof" that the God I believe in exists, I think others shouldn't go around using random factoids as "proof" that he doesn't, either.
Whether or not these issues lend themselves to certain beliefs (or disbeliefs) is an interesting discussion, provided we all maintain that ultimately this one singular instance cannot either prove nor disprove either side.
This is important because it allows us to draw meaningful conclusions while also avoiding petty religious flamewars.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
- Defend his theories to his grave
- Attempt to refute or discredit anyone who challenged him
- Refuse to accept the dissertation of any grad student who disagreed with him
- Fight like Hell to keep any faculty who disagreed with him out of his department (and fight against anyone who did make it in with all the emotional maturity of a 5 year old)
That's what "hard" science really is!-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What about the worms? And sandtrout? You know -- the crux of the whole story?
Engineers need to adhere to Murphy's law to succeed. If we design it in a way that it can fail, it will. If we design it in a way that it can only fail if a certain thing happens at a certain time, it will. This restatement of Murphy's law better captures the original intended spirit. No, Murphy was not an optimist. He was a good pessimist engineer like me.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
mmmmm opium
I agree that the majority of SF writers today have little to no clue about "true" science behind the fiction. To me, in order to make plausible fiction, you should know about some of the facts regarding that sort of fiction. Robert A. Heinlein was one of those "old school" writers. He was mentioned briefly by another poster, but I would like to dredge his name up again. He was a graduate of OCS in the 20's, and made it 20th in a class of around 240... not bad. (Funny enough, if it wasn't for his behavioral issues (he was a bit of a problem child with discipline) he would have ranked 5th in that class.) But, if you ever read some of his NON fiction, you will find that if he didn't know about the subject himself... he would refer to those that DID know about the subject. He studied astrophysics so that he would know what he was talking about when he was referring to orbital velocities (he would also work out all the ugly math for such... so those in the field that read his work wouldn't be put off... not to mention, RAH always seemed like a scientist first... that wrote fiction.) it made at least mathmatical sense. Too bad he's gone...
Stone
Galaxies in the expanding universe speed away from each other at many times faster than the speed of light. They achieve this without breaking relativity because the motion is due to the intervening space-time expanding, rather than the galaxies moving through space-time.
Star Trek's Warp Drive concept is meant to allow FTL travel by Warping space-time, while the ship itself travels through space-time at less than the speed of light
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
Ok I'm a major geek; I collected Star Wars toys from 1977 till just before the first movie when I finally parted with my entire room full of "paraphernalia". I have played D&D since I was 12 and still do to this day! I read strictly fantasy Sci-Fi books and I only watch one day of television and that's Sci-Fi Saturday when all the good cheesy movies are on! I'm a computer geek for a living on top of this so I would say I definitely qualify to answer this post. I also have a majorly bum pancreas thanks to years of heavy drinking in front of the computer which has led me to the realm of "real opiates" Opiates are the ultimate when it comes to feeling good and taking you completely away and planting you on cloud 9! I'll admit that I've been so deeply into a game of D&D, a book or movie that I have dreamed of them and woke up feeling very blissful but never have I considered any of the things I love as past time/hobbies as an "opiate". They might even be addictive (such as the time I spend with my 800 title pc game collection) but I've never went through 3 days of withdrawals from not having access to them! I think the author should try some real drugs, get some Mr. Brownstone and take a ride on the wild side for a couple of weeks before making such a stretched comparison. Sci-fi might be like chocolate but it's not like heroin. As far as the link between Sci-Fi and Religion, Come on people! Walking on Water, Raising from the dead, talking snakes offering lovely naked young ladies apples of evil, these are all sci-fi standards so what's the big deal. As far as I'm concerned you're just as well to worship William Shatner as to worship Buddha! To each his own I guess.
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
A physics major I once knew suggested a bubble of slow time riding on a bubble of fast time. If that were possible, then you wouldn't need to go faster than the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light.
This is similar to the "collapse and expand the universe" argument. Oddly enough, "warp drive" is in fact a plausible FTL drive system--once you get over that whole "bending the fabric of space and time" thing.
You get "Pretty much any form of..." from "They warned us at the academy about you guys"? You put Elastigirl to shame... do you have any more corroboration than this?
There was the TNG episode where they revived the people from the 20th century. The texan investor was ridiculed for wanting to check his investments and was given an ignorant sounding fake accent for no good reason.
about a third of the episodes have mentioned, "We have evolved beyond the need for money" (which i'll agree doesn't necessarily mean that material wealth accumulation is discouraged and implies that it is not necessary.. but what about those who get joy from such accumulation? Is their joy somehow less valid than those who get joy from tomb robbery? (a la jean luc))
Every merchant shown in ST is creepy and dispicable and the characters have a disdain even for the ones that are only slightly dispicable. (such is the case where merchants are driven into a periphery that should be reserved only for lawyers.. who by the way seem to have an exhalted status in ST. (Though in the ST universe they may deserve it: every lawyer we see is interested in either the rights of the downtrodden or to the principle of justice even if it means losing the case)
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