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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."
From TFS:
It's statements like these that make all geeks look bad.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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 ]
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.
What the hell good is a story if it does not give you a new perspective on your own existence/nature?
I believe that it's then called entertainment, and its the whole reason most people watch movies, read books and play games. Whenever some form of entertainment starts to try and make me get some 'new perspective,' I go to something else. If I wanted that I'd stick with real life, the rest of this is to get my mind off things, to be entertained and relax a little.
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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?
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...
...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.
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... =)
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?
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.
Star Trek functions in much the same way as religions in that it predicts dark times but eventual triumph. It encourages the belief that no matter what happens, we'll get through it. Sartre might have called this a form or collective bad faith, but frankly, I see nothing wrong with this. Pure defeatism just isn't a productive attitude. Pessimists may have a more accurate estimation of their own abilities, but optimists are more likely to succeed. We need both.
The main upside to the Star Trek 'prophecies' is that it is supposed to be based upon cooperation amongst the entire human race (tribalism is death), requires the application of hard science to address our current problems, and stresses that no hand from the sky is going to reach down and clean our diapers for us. We're going to have to do it ourselves. I'll take that over the Great Wet Nurse in the Sky any day. The boneyard of history is littered with civilizations whose motto was "God will provide."
Does it serve as an opiate? It probably does...to trekkies. But then, the really hardcore fanatic is always winged out on something. Better "Live long and prosper" than "Die, unbeliever!" I prefer my loonies sedated rather than armed.
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.
What you have hit on is exactly the opiate of the masses. The idea of entertainment, disentangled from any thought or life experience, is exactly the sort of pleasurable escape offered by any drug use.
It's this whole thing that "entertainment" is so sanctified, that it is above any reproach. Really, it's fine; I really am not judging, but I guess that it seems worth it to have a life that's not so bad that one needs escape from it. Once can be engaged in games, books, or movies, and experience them as a useful part of getting to know others, the world around us, or ourselves. Or one can only take those same things as frivolity, tune out the mind, escape. If that's the aim, it's the same as crack or opium. In fact, I have to say that the experiences I got when I tried crack were overall more interesting (if not necessarily positive) than I ever got from playing a video game or zoning out on the television.
When something is looked at as only "entertainment," it's basically like saying, "I just want to sit and let the thing push the positive brain chemical buttons in my brain." It's a denial of any true depth of experience and it seems a waste. I dunno... I'm not trying to get all agro, it just seems like your opinion comes up over and over again here, that when someone engages a subject another person has to rejoin them with, "relax, it's only *entertainment*". It's as if that's some god-given reason why critical thinking should just be discarded.
Real life can offer relaxation too... it just seems a waste of the small time we have to disregard it. Even the experience of reading a book or playing a game with someone interesting can be a cool addition to life rather than a dulling of it. Advertisers and media agents just love the entertainment angle though; it allows them to make crap that is disconnected from anything that might inspire tumult or conflict. I'm not saying that I don't disengage sometimes, it's just worth realizing that when we do that we're doing no different than smoking the crack pipe, hitting the opium... sometimes hard to resist, but ultimately incredibly dull.
Impossible? Unrealistic utopia? My god, what world are you lot living in? Ask any noble in the 14th century or thereabouts, doubtless he would have said it was impossible for a person who was not a born noble to become wealthy and be respected in upper-crust society. Ask a peasant, he would have said it a 'utopian dream'. Capitalism sUx0rz!
If you flip a coin ten times and get heads each time, the chances of that having occured are not 2^-10, they are 1. Put another way, shit happens.
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'.
You obviously don't read much science fiction these days (or don't know where to look for the quality stuff).
A much higher percentage of science fiction writers have advanced degrees today than in the "golden era" and 60's. There are many physicists, mathmaticians, etc. out there writing (I can think of several just off the top of my head, including at least one who has already been mentioned in this thread).
There are even a couple of prominent NASA engineers who often grace the pages of Asmimovs from time to time.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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