Genre is more of an art than a science. Getting in the weeds trying to come up with a hard definition of what science fiction should mean, ignores that everyone is coming to the conversation with their own definition which may compliment or contradict each other. The idea that all of the tech and worldbuilding logic of a sci fi story has to fit within the confines of the contemporary scientific understanding of reality, or if it doesn't, goes into depth about how it theoretically could, feels limiting. Does it make sense to define a genre such that some of the biggest, most popular entries (Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who) would no longer fit? Does it make sense that what is widely considered one of the first sci fi novels (Frankenstein) wouldn't fit the definition if it was written today?
TO me, whether its soft SF or science fantasy would hinge on whether our current understanding of science forbids it. I saw an article in Scientific American many years ago stating that the laws of physics as we understand them doesn't outright prohibit it. A physics professor in the UC system in California said there has been some physics research pointing us toward a probably 'no' answer but that it wasn't yet considered an impossibility under modern physics. I'm not a physicist but if those views are correct it could be soft SF.
Star Wars has never been SF. It's basically high fantasy in space. When I look at whether something is SF my personal preference is to put it in context of the time period in which it is written. 1920s SF is still SF even though our understanding of science has changed. I don't believe SF as a genre had been much thought of at the time Frankenstein was written, but if it would have met the definition of SF at the time of its writing I'd still consider it SF. But I think the definition of the genre only makes sense when applied to works created since the advent of modern science.
Unless the the story is actually meant to educate on some scientific principle or otherwise be completely scientifically plausible, yes, it's bad advice. Plenty of great SF doesn't bother explaining key concepts or provides a rather implausible explanation for it (e.g. Alfred Bester's jaunting in The Stars My Destination). This is a rule written by dull people. Anyway people should write stories that are pleasurable and liberating, without a care as to conforming to genre definitions.
They never did fit, those are all science fantasy, though Blockbuster and other stores just listed them as sci-fi. But it did at the time it was written. The only way Mary Shelley could have made it fit today (or a century from now... where does it stop?) would be if she actually had a time machine. Actually I don't think the genre of science fiction existed when Frankenstein was written, did it? I think it's considered a forerunner, or was retroactively included in the category.
Victor Frankenstein effects his experiment through a synthesis of alchemy and modern science, at a time when alchemy was already considered superstition or "pseudo-science" in today's terms.
Many things are considered superstition or psuedoscience even now that actually have a great deal of truth to them. Look at how many 'old wive's tales' actuallly have been verified by modern science, as well as folk remedies and ancient diet concepts. Not all of them of course, but just because something is considered 'superstitious' is no reason to assume there's no truth to it. It's also not a very scientific attitude. Real science doesn't begin by assuming anything 'old' or that we think of as 'superstitious' is automatically false. Though many dogmatic scientists and science fans do.
The problem is that you'd still be traveling faster than the information about your trip could travel, since it can't go faster than c. Like if you fire up a Stargate on planet A and walk through to instantly arrive on planet B which is one light-hour away. People on planet B won't be able to observe the Stargate opening on planet A for another hour after your arrival, so you will have appeared to come out of nowhere. Then let's say a nuclear bomb goes off on planet B so you skip back through the Stargate in the nick of time. You tell everyone on planet A that a nuclear bomb just went off, but they won't be able to observe it for another hour, so you've essentially just brought back information from the future. Voila, time travel. I should add that when it comes to sci-fi I think the weirder the better so it's not like I'm saying Stargates are a bad idea, necessarily. It just depends on what sort of relationship you want your sci-fi to have with actual science. If you add any kind of FTL it's a big jump from established science to make it work if you don't want to completely handwave it.
Okay, but in that case there is no good reason to exclude Star Wars from scifi. If we can admit a book like Frankenstein on the grounds that medieval alchemy may eventually be borne out by science then we can do the same for magic, astrology, shamanism, acupuncture, and other such disciplines. Actually I think the Korean Netflix series Kingdom could be reasonably classed as scifi.
That's why I listed them. While we who make an effort to explore what a genre is/should be would classify them as science fantasy, the average layperson is going to label them sci-fi. Take a sampling of favorite sci-fi movies/shows and most likely those are going to represented somewhere on that list by multiple people. While it would probably benefit people to know the difference of science fantasy and science fiction, if someone asked me for a sci-fi recommendation, and said they love Star Wars, I'm not going to waste time trying to convince them Star Wars isn't sci-fi, I'm just going to recommend Dune, Farscape, or Firefly. It was a retroactive inclusion, at the time I think it was meant to be gothic horror, which to me emphasizes the fluidity of genre.
You make a good point. I'd have to think about it for a while. I think Star Wars definitely fits as fantasy, but for a layperson who doesn't look beneath the surface I have no arguments with them calling it sci-fi.
That doesn't seem right to me. The fact that we can't observe distant events for many years doesn't mean the occurrence of those events is in the 'future' until the light reaches us. Whatever we're seeing from Betelgeuse, for example, happened over 700 years go. 50 years ago, it wasn't a 'future' event just because the light hadn't reached us yet.
I can agree with that. When considering laypersons we definitely can't expect them to geek out on these details the way we do.
Yes, it's mostly academic and of interest to some readers and writers of the genre. From a practical standpoint, if you're going the traditional publishing route the publisher is going to decide where to put the work. I know someone who published a series through one of the big five (six? four? I lose track) and they had her remove a particular scene from the book and embellish some other content because they wanted to shelve it with romance instead of fantasy, even though the author envisioned it as a fantasy series with a romantic subplot.
I feel like this is more of a philosophical question. Between something that happens right next to where you're sitting, but 50 years from now, and something that happened near Betelgeuse 50 years ago but of which there is no possible way you could have knowledge yet--what's the practical difference? By the way, I remembered where I first read that trilemma take on FTL travel. It's at Atomic Rockets, here. If you haven't come across it before I highly recommend that site as a sci-fi science resource, although I admit my eyes glaze over a bit when they get into the heavy-duty math...
Coincidentally, saw this posted elsewhere on social media: Spoiler ETA: I didn't realize this would show up so large. Is there a way to make the site scale it?
I don't know that there's a practical difference in terms of our experience of it. I'm just saying there is no violation of causality or relativity like there would be if you were actually going backward in time.
Thanks. That looks like a good resource. They're arguing that wormhole-type travel also violates causality, even if you're not going back in time to before the event at issue. That doesn't seem right to me but I'm also not a physicist (though I know a couple I could ask).
But you still encounter relativity issues with respect to an outside observer. The Alcubierre warp drive works like this. Within the "warp bubble", the ship is not moving faster than light, so that's fine. But to an outside observer, it still is. Even if the travel works instantly, it's still relative to the observer. Star Trek gets around this by saying there's an absolute frame of reference called "subspace".
Personally, I reckon the only reason to put an explanation in of how tech works is "is the reader/audience going to care". Some will. Others won't. It's a bit like historical films. Some people will have spluttered out their coffee at the end of Inglorious Basterds. Others won't give a hoot, and will care more about Brad Pitt's pronunciation of "gorlami".
This wouldn’t be the case with a wormhole, though. You’re literally just taken a physical shortcut. Even if an outside observer could watch you wouldn’t be going faster than light.
I think the idea is that the outside observer could see you arrive at planet in peril before they see you enter the wormhole. So does that mean, that if they had FTL communication they could message you saying "hey don't enter that womhole and save that planet I just saw you save". This website does a good job explaining it (similar to the link posted earlier), although I admit I only get it conceptually and didn't bother trying to follow the complicated graphs. But they point out the fact that it's hard for some, including me, to comprehend because we always think "this comes first, then this is next" but by including an outside observer it violates known laws. Why FTL Implies Time Travel
I wish I was more well-versed in physics. I'll give an example of what I have in mind and you all can let me know if you think causality is still violated. Suppose there is a space station at Point A, and docked at the space station is a ship that wishes to travel to Point B. Point A and Point B are 100 light years apart but there's a wormhole conveniently near the space station that would allow the ship to get to point B in tens years, traveling at sub-light speeds. Let's suppose also that the ship and crew are capable of making a ten-year journey. As the ship is about to enter the wormhole, an observable Event occurs at Point B. Of course, neither the ship nor the space station know about it because it's going to take 100 years for light from the Event to get to Point A. The ship goes through the wormhole and gets to Point B at a time equivalent to Event+10 years. They don't get to see the event, but let's suppose they can make observations and figure out what happened. They acquire information. Point A (the station) can still only learn about the Event, at the earliest, at Event+20 years (the space ship goes back through the wormhole to tell them (for simplicity assume they can't send a message through the wormhole, but it would still work if they could I think)) and in any event will learn about the Event at a time equivalent to Event+100 years. The station at Point A could get a message to the ship at point B no earlier than Event+100 years (if they sent the message right when the ship left; of course, they wouldn't know of the Event yet). The station could get information about the Event to point B no quicker than Event+200 years. And so on. Hopefully my example makes sense. It seems to me that the order of events in time is preserved in all reference points in this example and that there is no violation of causality. So long as the wormhole is just a physical shortcut and not a path back in time, it seems to work. But that's my layman view of things.
