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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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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.
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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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This is based on how much time I spend reading science fiction, vs how much time I spend reading slashdot.
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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 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.
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 ]
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.
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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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.
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.
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)
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Well considering that "Jedi" is a legally acknowleded religion in Australia, YES!
s tm
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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.
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.
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?"
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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.
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?)
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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'.