Well then, you and I are on the same page, truly. The purpose to my pedantry is that I often find in this conversation (it comes up at least twice a month here) a sort of fetish worship of the technology itself in the genre, as if it is the goal, the golden egg, so to speak, instead of what its use allows one to consider in a work. There are times when I feel the readership has gotten wrapped up in the trappings, the stage, the props of the genre, instead of the story and I feel that this is one of the reasons for the much bemoaned decline of the genre. And yes, Herbert's concern with resource allocation in the early sixties, something that at the time was thought of as quirky and hippy-dippy, is the very thing setting polarized sides of so many topics ablaze in verbal warfare, sending volleys of narrative (in the political sense) flying in all directions.
No technology fetish worshiping here I just don't like it when writers(myself included sometimes), wrap a story in sf just because it looks more "cool" that way. Science fiction gives a writer pretty much limitless space for ideas, and it is something that the writers in the past century have taken full advantage of. And I just have this feeling that we are not exploiting that advantage enough these days. Or maybe I'm just part of that cult "60's, 70's and 80's were the golden age of SF, and nothing of today compares to it"
Well, if you are, then I'll see you at the next coven meeting. LOL But in truth, I think there are some gobsmackingly good writers giving a new face to Science Fiction, if only we are willing to accept this new face and welcome it in. China Mieville and M. John Harrison are stunningly good, though their works bring in tropes and props from what many consider to be foreign realms.
I don't have anything to contribute to the discussion but wanted to say thanks for the education. I've always snubbed most sci-fi based on its stereotypes and never considered other facets that could fit the genre. This is me removing my nose from the sky and trying to be more open minded.
Well said. I've read sci-fi from way back when and sci-fi from modern writers and I've noticed that modern day writers tend to stick random pieces of technology into the book, give it a futuristic setting, and call it science fiction, but the plot, simply put, just isn't a sci-fi plot. I've also seen the same "Save (insert city here) from (insert evil piece of technology here)" dilemma frequently used. It's good to hear from other writers about this and opefully improve on my sci-fi writing skills.
In the best SF, it is not "saving" the people from technology, but how they are going to live with the technology. The Internet is an excellent example. Ostensibly it is just a method of storing and sharing information, an advancement of the mail and library services. And yet it has changed human life in ways we are only starting to see. And what SF writer would have dared to predict that porn would be one of the primary drivers of the Internet revolution?
Question 1: Suppose a writer of long ago, wrote a SF story that included technology that was cutting edge at the time but is commonplace today. Would such a story still be regarded as SF? Question 2: If a writer today, wrote a story set in the past that included technology that was cutting edge in the period in which the story is set but it commonplace today. Would such a story be SF?
An easy yes to this once since eventually, assuming the writer hasn't used too much gloss, most science fiction stories eventually end up in this category. Again, for me, it's not the technology or the science that is the meter by which to measure, but the way that technology or science is used to consider a part of the human condition. Regardless of how far in the future or how amazing the techno-wizardry, the writer should be talking who are now through who we might become, and in a way the writer has no choice but to write this. The writer exists in the paradigm of his/her present. Everything he/she writes comes from a bank of knowledge, feeling, and mindset of the writer's now. This one is a little harder to answer. I'm going to go with a hesitant no. I realize that both questions are actually the same question when one removes the dynamic of the writer and when the piece was written. The books themselves, on their own, aren't going to give the history of their writing in a metafictional way. The one thing that will be different is that the writer of example #1 will be talking about his/her slice of time in the human condition, the period in question, from an inculturated POV. The writer of example #2 will not be doing the same because he/she comes from a different period of time with different sensibilities. For example: Having recently finished the latest season of Downton Abbey, I have no choice but to see the very modern take that was applied to the interpersonal relationships of the different classes. There is a clear nod to the idea that what we have now, today, is socially better than what was had then. But had the characters come to us through time, untouched by our modern ideas and comfort bubbles, would they really answer to the same descriptions? Would they hold our modern ideology as an ideal? Downton Abbey isn't about the people living in that time. It's about us living today. It uses the period as a lens of counterexamples that polemically preach to us. In a way, it's like looking down the wrong end of a spyglass, where looking down the right end let's us see science fiction. Both directions distort and both distortions have their value, but they equally talk about the person holding the spyglass who is living in the now. Another example is: 1950's Retro-Futurism. I love retro-futurism. The look, the feel, it's all so chic and completely impractical. It also has absolutely nothing to tell us about the real future, or our present as the case would have been when viewed by the creators of what we now call retro-futurism. What it does tell us is a great deal about the mindset, thoughts, aspirations, wishes,dreams and fantasies and cultural constructs of people living in the 1950's. It also speaks to us a great deal about their politics, for as we all know, the "1950's" is a fable, a magazine add, a television show and one of the best bits of propaganda ever sold to the (American) public. Almost no one actually lived what we think of as the 50's. Their "futurism" speaks to us about their then, not our now. Look at this image. It speaks volumes about then, but little about now.
I'm not so sure that your conclusion regarding #2 and the use of Downton Abbey as an example are appropriate. If I write a story based in the past I do my very best to have my characters think and act as people of that age. I would not, for example, assume that slavery is to be seen as a bad thing, or even genocide (going back far enough). Or in a Downton Abbey type of story, the class and social structures of the time would be the correct ones for the characters, and I would not be tempted to "improve" their outlook or make it more PC. There would be no "upstairs downstairs" romance, or unionist tendencies amongst the servants. If a cutting edge, or better still an anachronistic scientific development is introduced by the story into a historical situation where it did not (as far was we know) actually exist in that milieu, then I would see it as valid SF, because I would be extrapolating the effects of that technology upon people who do not have the social context or experience to deal with it.
I posit that what you claim is actually not possible. There is no way for you (or I, or anyone) to divest ourselves of our inculturated now to write about a different then or will be. You clearly would not write "Downton Abbey" over again, but your now would be imprinted in the story of their then. The details of how that imprinting would happen would be different for each and every one of us, but it would be there. We have no choice but to see through our experiences and write through our knowledges and things we feel need saying. I use Downton Abbey because, in the case of that story, the distortions are unavoidably obvious.
There we would have to disagree. I hold nothing sacred or proper when writing historicals. If the culture I pick deemed human babies to be a delicacy, then my characters would dive right in and argue about the proper sauce. The only limit is what was recorded in history and can be safely assumed by the events and cultural artifacts that carried forward. If an important decision is to be made, then the characters would make it based on the approved method of the time - consulting an Oracle, asking a priest, taking magic mushrooms, or simply arguing about it using the logic of the time (or lack of it), etc. Part of the writing process would be to question every one of my impulses and decisions in the light of history, not based on what I would like to happen. If that didn't work for my plot, then I wouldn't write that story or I would write it a different way so that it was consistent with their way of thinking.
I think we are looking at two differing things. Let's take the story of Thomas, the gay footman/soldier/butler from Downton Abbey. How the characters treat him and react to him, how he himself behaves, be it period correct or not, all those little simple plot points are not the point itself and isn't where the writer's stamp of modernity leaves its mark. It could be, and in the case of this example sometimes is, but it doesn't have to be for it to be valid. The fact that the writer tells his story at all is where the mark is left. Now, clearly we gays did not just pop out of the woodwork in the 1970's. We've been here all the time. We have had lives. There have undoubtedly been real, historic examples of gay footmen, soldiers and butlers. But it's a recent advent that their stories even see the light of day in media and only just an eye-blink ago that the storytelling, even when it is at it's most period correct and cruel, started being presented with any kind of sensitivity or reality and not pandering to long accepted (socially requisite?) myths of what gayness means. Regardless of being spurned by the Duke, blackmailed by Lord Swarthypants Badtickerson, rebuffed by the pretty new blond footman, regardless of any of that, the fact that Thomas is even in the story, and is treated by the writer as a person, not some vile shadow, is a huge fingerprint of our who we are now. It speaks much more of our changed view on the matter than it does on their Edwardian view. He is neither vilified nor idealized. Whole sociological theses could be written on that. Had the characters in the story all embraced Thomas and given him a big warm "You're still the same old conniving Thomas to us, buggery or no!", that would have been silly and lampoon. What matters is that he's there. That's the mark. It's not the minutia of plot points. It's the overall why of the story and what the writer wishes to say with its elements. That is the part that is irremovable from the writer's inculturation. I cannot slip into another writer's paradigm and write from his or her POV, bank of personal history, historical period, or station in life. I can approximate. I can make very educated guesses, but I, the writer, not the characters, cannot ever slip out of my own now and my own me. And again, for the same reason I picked Downton Abbey, I picked Thomas because he's the most obvious example. The writer's treatment of all the characters, how he asked us to consider them, in that show is very modern, even when their behavior, one to another, is very Edwardian.
For question one, I would have to point to HG Wells and say that I consider his submarine book to be Sci-Fi. (Haven't actually read it, but my dad had an audiobook that included a detailed critique of it... that he kept inflicting on anyone within earshot of the boombox when he was working.) For question two, I say that is sticky. I might let a convincing "recently unearthed lost manuscript" type of book be with the Sci-Fi. Otherwise, I don't know where I would stick it. Maybe just stick it in Sci-Fi because it fits the general style if there isn't a category that works better.
I agree that it would be at least very difficult for an author to write from the POV of a someone living in some other historical period. There would undoubtedly be gaps and those gaps would be filled by modern attitudes etc. But much the same could be said for a story set in the future or on an alien world. Besides, if the author's intention is to write a SF story then historical accuracy may not be the primary concern. If it is acceptable for a writer to set a story in the future but to actually write about their now, why would writing about now not be unacceptable when setting the story in the past? In both cases the story is set somewhere other than here and now and both would be relevant to here and now. Wouldn't both stories be just as meaningful to present day readers? If the story is written in the first person then there would, undoubtedly, be an issue. But the writer could describe the events as if looking through a time machine. Suppose you have a story about Galileo building a microscope. Regardless of how well or badly this is written, would having such a concept qualify it as SF?
It's not unacceptable in the least. I'm making no judgement. My point is that a writer has little choice but to do this. And again, I'm not at all speaking about historical accuracy. I'm talking about the writer's sensibilities in what he or she choses to tackle and how that reflects the writer's now. Maybe I'm just explaining myself poorly, but I can't think of any other way to put it. If I write Story X today, 2014, and someone else wrote that same story, but 40 years ago, hid it away, and then showed it to me when I finished my version, the stories would each reflect in some way the period of time of the respective writer and the writing. It's not the details and the plot points. The only reason I emphasized the point is that the two questions you asked are really the same question, just with the arrow of time pointing in opposite directions, and both asking if the end result would be Sci-Fi. In question #1, the writing would be talking about his/her now, written in the direction of the future, so a blank page, so to speak. In question #2, the writer is doing the same thing, but written in the direction of the past, so not a blank page, there is already story there.
William Gibson expresses it a lot better than I can. Here is an interview he gave to College Crier Online talking about the topic: http://www.williamgibsonboard.com/topic/4393793103256916
No, I understood your meaning. However, you are talking about how an Edwardian *writer* would have treated the character (or not treated). But during the Edwardian period, just as in all other periods, homosexuals, and all manner of despised minorities *did* exist and live amongst the rest of the population as you point out. I do not say that I would (or could) write as a period writer would write, but that my characters would think and behave appropriate to their time and place in society, *including* a character such as a gay footman. In my story he would be despicable, and even *he* would know that he was despicable, an aberration under the eyes of God. Just as non-whites and Irish were not quite human, and women were lesser than men in all ways. There would be no character or situation that would try to demonstrate a "better" way of thinking, because everyone would *know* that what they believed and thought was right and proper. My footman would not dare to approach another man in a romantic or sexual manner since he would likely be beaten to death or at best be dismissed with no references and possibly on the run from the law, like Oscar Wilde. I can't say that I would not or have not ever made a mistake, but I do a huge amount of research not just on the forms of the society of my story, but on the way people saw their world, and how they would act and respond based on what they *knew* to be right. I do everything possible to purge my social and moral opinions from my characters and plot. The whole point of a period piece, in my opinion only of course, is to include the strictures and advantages of the particular time in history as part of the plot and story. Anachronistic thought is just as bad as anachronistic technology.
Precisely, which brings us back to the original set of questions posed by Aled: The focus of these questions, to me, is the writer, not the writing, because the only difference in the two questions is the arrow of time of the writer, which way s/he is looking when s/he writes. For me, the answer to #1 is yes because regardless of when it was written, even if it's quite aged, the story, when written, was written forward into a blank future, a tabula rasa. For me that tabula rasa is a requisite for it to be sci-fi. For me, the answer to #2 is no because regardless of the fact that it deals with technology, it's written backward into the past, tabula scripta. The fact that it deals with tech is not enough for me to make it Sci-Fi, any more than Downton Abbey could be called social science fiction. Both writers will undoubtedly be writing through a filter of their now, but both are not creating Science Fiction, for me.
And I still say #2 would be SF. The introduced technology would be anachronistic and hence alien to the time. But the way the characters react to it should be based upon what they think and believe as people of that time. For instance, the earliest working steam train was nearly rejected as a passenger vehicle because it was commonly believed that people could not survive the speed. Rather than to embrace "advanced" technology, there is every likelihood that it would be rejected and the inventor or promoter persecuted. However, if the assumption is that the technology is accepted, the writer would still need to understand how this invention would fit in with the world as it existed then, and what the cascading effects might be, without taking into account how things have worked out in "reality". It really has to be clean slate time, even if the "reworked" results don't appeal. The extrapolation cannot employ known historical milestones which might now never happen at all because of the changes the introduced technology has made. Too many "alternate history" books fail in my opinion because the author insists on believing that things will somehow still work up to the present world with only minor cosmetic changes. That is fantasy, not SF.
I added this to my above post just as you were posting a response, but I think it speaks to your response as well.
Perhaps it isn't possible to have a meeting of minds on this But my thinking is that when you go back and inject "new" technology, the entire future from that point onwards should be tabula rasa. It is not "History +" but an entirely new timeline. Nothing that happened in history, WWI, WWII, antibiotics, the oil industry, all of it - gone. Personally, I would find such a project extremely daunting, sort of like trying to predict the weather. A few days ahead is fine. After that, you might was well throw eight sided dice.
I think it's just that we're not reading that second question in the same way. When Aled says "...included technology that was cutting edge in the period in which the story is set but [is] commonplace today..." I'm not seeing technology out of time and place or anachronism. I'm seeing period correct tech, just their very latest tech, for them. For example, were I to write a story about that week in early 1981 when my dad spent a stonkingly huge amount of money in 1980's dollars for a boy's birthday present, buying me an Atari 800 computer, making me one of the very first kids (or people in general) of whom I knew to have a home computer, that story isn't science fiction to me. It's historical. If I take your meaning correct from your last post in how you interpret that second question, then we actually do agree completely, in that sense of reading the second question.
I have a question... Where do librarians stick the Steampunk books? (Assuming that it's a library that does it by Genre.) Does it go into Historical because it's set in the past, get stuck in Sci-Fi because of the technology, Romance if it simply has a romantic sub-plot, Fantasy because electricity is treated like magic? My copy of "Familiar Dragon" has F on its library sticker. It's Fantasy / Mystery crossover but I agree that the Fantasy is the bigger part. I'm asking because perhaps a book becomes Sci-Fi based on its perception.
Were I the librarian, it would go in Science Fiction. There's never any magic in Steampunk and it constitutes a particular flavor of alternate history, so Sci-Fi.
Technically, that would be Jean-Luc Picard, not Kirk To go back to original post: Technically, the Librarian would just put all of those in the SciFi section. However, not based on the fact "advanced technology" or "scientific concepts" appear in those stories, but because of the science fiction tropes in those stories. Because, let's be honest: neither time-travel nor humanoid robots are anywhere near a realistically expected concept of the 21st century. Sure, you could argue that a "sort of time travel" is predicted by quantum mechanics, or that today's engineering could easily produce a humaniform automaton, but that's not the question here Time-travel as described by authors since H.G.Wells is a complete fantasy, as are Asimov's positronic robots. So, and I know this goes contrary to what most people wrote here, but I don't think a "science" aspect is in anyway necessary to label a text SciFi. I think it's LeGuin's position that the ultimate theme of literature (and science fiction, as a literary form) is the "human condition" (maybe it's not her, but it sounds like her ) And, while I know it can easily trip into meaningless solipsism, it's obviously the present human condition. The only position possible for an author (as a human being) is his own position. The extent of his personal intellectual boundaries are still within himself, so any claim of taking an absolute Other's point-of-view seems a bit ignorant. So, I'd completely agree with @Wreybies on this: Of course you are going to do your research. However, there is a trap there which many readers of historical novels fall into (and some writers, of course). If you base your research on history, you are basing it on a specific reading of historical narratives from a different (usually your own contemporary) point in time. From the historian's point-of-view. If you read actual documents from the time period that interests you, you are reading your own contemporary perspective into them. There is absolutely no way to avoid it. You construct the historical narrative around constructs of your own culture, injecting a sense of understanding of past events that is specific to you, not "them". In a way, you are just being a historian. If you try to decipher the "minds" of a time period by reading the intellectual, artistic or in any other way secondary sources, you are going to face the style of both the period and the author which, again, you have to read-through from your own perspective. You cannot hope to get 100% into the mind of an average 19th century homosexual by reading Oscar Wilde.
