I just may have to get a copy. The Wiki article looks interesting, save for the 23rd Century setting, which, as you may have guessed from some of my various posts, I think is grossly generous. At least we have a thread in the sci-fi genre now
BTW, the book with which it tied in 2010 for the Hugo, Mieville's The City and the City, is also stonkingly good. TCatC leans more toward magic realism, but with a heavy dose of the new weird thrown in. There are undoubted nods to the old weird in that the story has a definite feel of the Interzone about it. In it Mieville explores the concept of culturally imposed blindness, the things we are trained to acknowledge and the things we are trained to blur out of focus in our very real lives. I know some find Mieville a bit much, but I love him.
I think so much sci-fi has departed from reality. In the 60's we had the major innovation of 2001:A Space Odyssey. Mankind really expected that to manifest itself by then. Too many political withholdings pushed that back to an unrealistic near standstill. It wasn't until the late 80's that we finally had a working shuttle. More political pressure cast a bad light on it with the Challenger disaster. LBJ's and Kubrick's/Clarke's envisioned timeline became unrealistic. It seems that this politically driven failure has affected the intestinal fortitude of sci-fi visionaries. We project far into the future scenarios that omit the reality of what is taking place today. The "Windup Girl" you mentioned sees global warming effects at a couple hundred years away when they are on our doorstep now. It seems the sci-fi writer is afraid to be categorized as a prophet.
There are other technologic and sociological factors in play in the book that would require a timeline that's further out. Global warming effects present in ten years are still present in 40 or a 100. I don't think the author was shying away from a prediction of when we can expect to start really feeling it. In the book, the people alive and present are born into a world already deep in it.
That's assuming the escalation of the runaway effect doesn't hand out a big surprise that humanity is currently denying can happen. That book was written and acclaimed in 2009. In just 4 years, the projections have brought the horizon of "deep into it" less than 20 or 30 years away tops. It can be anticipated that projected "deep into it" time frame will split again in another 2 to 4 years.
It may well. It's not a topic I follow overmuch. The meat of the Bacigalupi's book lies elsewhere, though, to be sure, than just this one topic. It is but one of a complex array of dynamics - many purposefully done, not just irresponsibly - that leads to the world in which one finds oneself at page 1.
Nobody really wants to think about it, especially when it looks hopeless. It sounds like the book is worth reading, but so is 2010 and 2069. Things just didn't turn out like that.
But is science fiction meant to be predictive? I would personally say no. There are too many mundane variables of human life that make prediction subject to the expected outcome of simple randomness. None of the science fiction I read as a youth spoke with any weight about the impact of telecommunications technology on sociocultural dynamics. Everyone was to have had flying cars instead, never mind the skill needed by the average Joe/Jane in actually driving one. And the 'here we go off to the stars' subframe of so much of 50's and 60's science fiction completely ignores the economics of making such things happen. For me personally, the technological 'rightness' or exactness of the science in science fiction is much less important than the facet of the human condition in question in the story.
It depends on the world at hand. We live in the real Earth world. It's almost better to take our sci-fi to another, imaginary world. It seems less absurd then. To read for reading's sake knows no boundaries of absurdity. One example is "The Wild Wild Wild West." It, as you mention, creates fiction using the means of that day. It's entertainment. Matt Helm stories and 007 are about the same. Spoofs they are. We, as writers, may choose any reason or method we like to create a story. Writing for writing's sake. I personally am too much of a hard edge realist to toss in a 50 foot woman without clearly justifying the plausibility. If we think of "The Thing" ("Who Goes There?" I think was the short story it came from...) we are borrowing the plausibility from out of this world. Future civilizations here on Earth. especially in light of that technology impact, need technical accuracy. In Wind Up Girl, was it acclaimed for literary superiority or plausibility? Perhaps in 2009 it could have both. Today it could only have the literary value.
Which is the point I was making in my initial response to this thread. For me, science fiction is/should be a venue in which to focus on facets of the human condition that might prove unwieldy or uncomfortable in other genres. It should always be talking about who we are now, through who we might become.
Interesting take. What would you say drives this? We write for so many different reasons. As a scientist, I write for humanity's enlightenment. As a writer I am obligated to write for the audience lest the message go unnoticed. The sci-fi readers are not the most plentiful bunch on the planet. I've talked with those who read Adams' HHGTTG, but only because it was not serious, albeit seriously well written.
The ease with which science fiction focuses at powers of magnitude that real life simply won't allow because then it's not real life anymore. Butler's Oankali series exploring human as animal evolved into self aware humanness ; Herbert's Dune series exploring, in the end, a very similar theme as Butler; Niven through his Known Space novels; Azimov, most beautifully through his robot novels; all of these explored the meaning of humanness in ways that real life forces into dry philosophical conversation.
I suppose I was fishing for the need of the audience to encounter something mortifying. Sometimes it seems some works, such as Dune, are written from a near generic manifest that covers the wake up call from a wider spectrum of audience needs. Same goes for the Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien's LOTR trilogy and even Star Wars. The reader or viewer or both can read into them whatever they want to the extent of imbuing religion over the plot, regardless of the intended philosophy.
This is true of any work, though, as Barthe argues in his essay, The Author is Dead. The reader is going to take away as much as he/she brought to the reading of the work. The writer offers the materials to be considered, but it falls to the reader to chose what and how to consider. In this way, science fiction answers to the same paradigms as any genre. Regardless, the genre does offer the author (or scriptor as Barthe would have preferred) a latitude in certain directions that permits the reader options for interpretation less available in other genres. I first read Dune as a kid of 8 or 9, and it was a fantastic adventure to me, but nothing more. In my teens it became a sounding board for many of the personal definitions with which people of that age are deeply engrossed. At university it became an obvious parable of U.S. - Middle East relations, and my college beard grew interesting. Later again it became an exploration of the capacity of the human mind that it would seem we have squandered through aids such as this computer through which you and I are speaking. In my 40's, today, It's obviously all of those things, regardless of Herbert's original intentions. But the reason this book and the other writings I have mentioned have stayed with me across the decades, where the uncounted other books I have read are only vague memory, is that the author offered me the materials for all of these interpretations, where the others proved thin and unable to grow with me because they only offered an adventure, and never really something deeper to ask me about myself.
Satire has some of the deepest meaning anyone could hope for, if they can keep from laughing or rolling their eyes. "Get me those books swiftly," said the man cynically.
I've been reading Sci Fi for over 50 years and what drew me to it then were not the monsters or the ray gun fights. I was a pubescent/adolescent and back then I was not far from the target audience, I think. I remember one of the first novels I read and really enjoyed was by Donald Wollheim about beings on Pluto doing something to the Sun to turn it nova and make Pluto nice and warm. I speak only for myself, but I get tired of human protagonists who are geniuses trying to save the world or the universe or whatnot. I also get frustrated when the science is too dense for my community college level science education. My favorite books are those that have real people in unusual circumstances, where the concept behind the novel is what pushes it forward, and isn't just a premise for action scenes. Personally, I find nothing exciting about a star going super nova. Yeah, it's a big deal, scientifically, but it only matters in the story (to me) if the plot turns on this event and the characters have to deal with its consequences. I always liked Larry Niven's stuff because the idea was always the driving force and the whole book generally was taking his characters through the development of the big idea. As a stylist he does lose me often, assuming I understand the implications of everything everybody does in the novel. He knows what's up and seems to assume I do although I don't. Still, his worlds, characters and concepts are wonderful. His sometime collaborator, Jerry Pournelle is unreadable to me by himself, mostly for his Ayn Rand worship. But I digress. Actually I will leave it there for now.
This is why I prefer to write exhaustively, proliferating into information the reader needs to understand what is going on. It isn't much more than fairy tale if I expect the reader to simply except an absurd notion that somehow became a law of physics after a couple additional centuries have swept us all along.
But - and I ask this with sincerity, no snark - at what point does the exhaustive writing sift your readership down to upper-level researchers at CERN?
@Wreybies Hopefully it has the opposite effect. I'd think CERN physicists would throw my work in the trash because it insults so many years of their work. If you'd been painting things red all of 20 years, to the delight of older colleagues that spent 20 years painting things red, progressively back 200 years, you might take offense to someone saying all that should have been painted blue. The ones who are willing to entertain the possibility of it all needing to be painted blue should not be denied some in depth reasoning. A book about time travel, to be plausible at all, needs much more than mere blind faith. Blind faith can be handed a bucket of blue or red paint and it really doesn't matter. They're blind.
Your reasoning seems very all or nothing to me. What of David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself and Octavia Butler's Kindred and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. None of these books attempts to publish a thesis on the plausibility of time travel, yet deal with the subject at a very human level, and do so with great care and adroitness. I don't scorn your personal need for plausibility, but I do question at what point the pages of technical explanation occlude the human story that every fiction book, in the end, should be about. To extend your metaphor a bit: While everyone is concerned with whether the paint should be red or blue, as a reader, I'm much more interested in the fellah' holding the brush than what color is dripping from it.
Science Fiction can sometimes be predictive if that is what the author wants, but I think maybe it should be inspirational instead. If some of the ideas one day come true, is it because the inventors and engineers were inspired by SF? Dreams come first, are written down sometimes as part of fiction, then they become reality because they are awesome.
"The problem" I have with predictive sci-fi is that I can't help but think about the future generations reading that book and laughing their cyborgic heads off. But I don't usually mind it per se. The story and characters are more important to me, a world I can lost myself into, even if it wasn't entirely plausible. Technobabble generally bores me -- and this seems to be something of a consensus among consumers apart from the usual exceptions. Unless the writer actually knows what s/he's saying, I'd keep it to a minimum. It's a decoration I don't otherwise find particularly important. Give me a cool device, show me what it does, but I don't always need to know how exactly it does it. And I think it'd be quite arrogant to assume that readers who don't really care about it are dumbed-down dumbos. Some people just like to enjoy their hard science and (sciency) entertainment from seperate plates. As for time travel... It can spur entertaining scenarios, but to pull it off credibly in hard sci-fi might be a bit tricky...
Until the short guy in the smock turns around, is seen to obviously be a chimp and, worse yet, everyone realizes what he's been using for brown and, even worse yet, he's starting to throw it at everyone. Wrey, you grossly underestimate me, while placing unrealistic expectations for me to read all those works. I spend a vast majority of my time writing and doing other creative activities, as well as some mundane chores. Neither colors nor monkeys are recognizable at a distance to the blind. When SHTF everyone will know what happened. Finland, New Zealand, Japan and America have drastically different social needs. America is floundering in it's lack of basic educational skills. If the target sci-fi audience is America, they will need far more explaining than someone in Japan. Personally, I do my arrogant best to humbly admit to arrogance. Murphy's law defines it as a necessary byproduct of excellence. When one has a moral too their story, it's unrealistic to expect people to just accept it without something to validate it. If someone just wants to be entertained, they probably wont ignorance of any moral value. Why not just watch Star Trek and skip over the task of reading entirely? If something new is wanted, one just might be advised to read the ingredients part of the label. It looks like Nutella. That monkey on the label is soooo cute.
In my sci-fi script, I'm not even going to touch hard science. I don't care if people berate my movie for not being sciency. It's not about the science, but what the effect it has on a particular man and what he tries to accomplish with it on behalf of the human race. Also, in my movie, to avoid the time travel difficulties, time travel is forbidden under the legal premise that life that exists now has precedence over life that could exist. The penalty is severe. TT is shutdown without having to discuss research and development and overcoming paradoxes.
