How to define Science Fiction

[CorporalCaptain]

^ Yes, quite so. In fact, for my first post I spent a little time looking for references that could back up the idea that Lucas was using New Age terminology on purpose, but I couldn't find any. "Force" itself is New Age, as an abbreviation of "life force". I'd be curious to find a reference where Lucas cops to this.

But with respect to "energy field" in the 1977 film, I'm going to argue that context and delivery matters. In fact, I'm also going to argue that the New Age uses these terms precisely because they sound scientific, to give their beliefs an aura of legitimacy. In the universe of Star Wars, I believe we are supposed to assume that they are in fact scientific.

 

[chardman]

^Sorry, but by and large, Star Wars didn't use New Age Terminology, but Vice Versa. The New Age started using Star Wars terms. Star Wars terminology quickly wormed its way into the New Age, precisely because it gave the world a shared (and illustrated) lexicon of terms that could be applied to a number of different belief systems, and which was simple enough that virtually everyone understood it.

^^The term is employed by New Age types in pretty much the same way it was used in Star Wars, with little or no care for how actual science uses the term.

 

[stj]

The Damon Knight definition is only for people who've gotten tired of thinking.

Klaus' definition is pretty good. And if you don't read "our universe" too literally, as close to perfect as you can get, I suppose. The thing about SF supposedly being possible and the reader of fantasy knowing that the world is impossible is that readers who don't have much idea of what is or is not impossible still insist on projecting their confusion into discussions.

Possibility per se is irrelevant. Authors with bad science or lazy authors who sincerely believe that science really might be revolutionized so that all sorts of things will be possible or scientifically literate authors who just get outdated by the progress of science will always be on the shelves. But in science fiction, possiblity is part of the approach and the refusal to address it is a lapse in execution.

Which is to say, it's only important to define science fiction because you want to address whether it's good science fiction. Considering that in the movies cars always explode like nukes and guns can knock a victim across the room while the shooter stands unscathed and the cops really do want to protect "us," plausibility is purely a matter of convention or prejudice on the part of most viewers or readers. These are not rational criteria, hence the difficulty of defining science fiction to allow for what these people point at.

The thing about science fiction, like historical fiction, is that it posits change in the social order. Approved "literature" posits the permanence of the social order, even when it poses as critical. Neither will be acceptable as the finest literature, no matter what, even though world figures such as H.G. Wells and Jack London wrote science fiction.

PS Star Wars is science fiction because it throws in an energy field from a biological phenomenon instead of saying "GOD." The reviled midichlorians did not come out of nowhere but fit perfectly into the science fiction of Star Wars. Admittedly the science was pathetic but still. It was only strange people who convinced themselves that midichlorians ruined anything. Spiritualism's talk of vibrations and dimensions borrowed scientific terminology in an effort to be "scientific." This doesn't work for any religion that copies this tactic, whether spiritualism, Christian Science or Scientology, but it does work for Star Wars. It's only a movie, after all.

 

[Klaus]

I've heard Star Wars described as "space fantasy" [and done so myself] in contrast with a movie like CE3K that came out right afterwards, which was strictly "science fiction".

I agree that definitions like this are often used to defend something one doesn't like from something one doesn't like, but I'm not into that sort of mental masturbation. Call it what suits you lol.

 

[stj]

If Star Wars had been done with the Millennium Falcon as a dragon, the light saber as a magic sword, Kenobi in a pointed hat, R2D2 as a cat familiar,and mana instead of the Force, it wouldn't have been the same at all. Intellectually it would have been just as valid () but stylistically not at all. Style matters.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^Sorry, but by and large, Star Wars didn't use New Age Terminology, but Vice Versa. The New Age started using Star Wars terms. Star Wars terminology quickly wormed its way into the New Age, precisely because it gave the world a shared (and illustrated) lexicon of terms that could be applied to a number of different belief systems, and which was simple enough that virtually everyone understood it.

^^The term is employed by New Age types in pretty much the same way it was used in Star Wars, with little or no care for how actual science uses the term.

This is incorrect; you have it backwards. These terms have a history that predates Star Wars by many decades, and they were incorporated into the New Age movement before Star Wars.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_(esotericism)#Vitalism_and_spirituality_in_the_age_of_electricity:

The successes of the era of the Enlightenment in the treatment of energy in natural science were intimately bound up with attempts to study the energies of life, as when Luigi Galvani's neurological investigations led to the development of the Voltaic cell. Many scientists continued to think that living organisms must be constituted of special materials subject to special forces, a view which became known as vitalism. Mesmer, for example, sought an animal magnetism that was unique to life.

As microbiologists studied embryology and developmental biology, particularly before the discovery of genes, a variety of organisational forces were posited to account for the observations. From the time of Driesch, however, the importance of "energy fields" began to wane and the proposed forces became more mind-like.[10] Sometimes, however, as in the work of Harold Saxton Burr, the electromagnetic fields of organisms have been studied precisely as the hypothetical medium of such organisational "forces".[11]

The attempt to associate additional energetic properties with life has been all but abandoned in modern research science[12]. But despite this, spiritual writers and thinkers have maintained connections to these ideas and continue to promote them either as useful allegories or as fact.[13]

Some early advocates of these ideas were particularly attracted to the history of the unification of electromagnetism and its implications for the storage, transference, and conversion of physical energy through electric and magnetic fields. Potentials and fields were viewed after the work of James Clerk Maxwell as physical phenomena rather than mathematical abstractions. Aware of this history, spiritual writers positivistically adopted much of the language of physical science, speaking of "force fields" and "biological energy". Concepts such as the "life force", "physiological gradient", and "élan vital" that emerged from the spiritualist movement would inspire later thinkers in the modern New Age movement.[14]

(...)

10. ^ Lois N. Magner, A history of the life sciences: Third Edition, Revised and Expanded, CRC Press, 2002
11. ^ Blueprint for Immortality The Electric Patterns of Life, H.S.Burr, Neville Spearman, London, 1972. Foreword.
12. ^ Vitalism. Bechtel W, Richardson RC (1998). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E. Craig (Ed.), London: Routledge.
13. ^ Jonas, WB; Crawford, CC (2003 Mar-April). "Science and spiritual healing: a critical review of spiritual healing, "energy" medicine, and intentionality.". Altern-Ther-Health-Med. 9 (2): 56–61. PMID 12652884.
14. ^ Bruce Clarke. (November 8, 2001). Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. University of Michigan Press. p. Clarke, Bruce. ISBN 0472111744.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age#Contemporary_usage_of_the_term:

The subculture that later became known as New Age already existed in the early 1970s, based on and adopting ideas originally present in the counterculture of the 1960s. Two entities founded in 1962: the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and the Findhorn Foundation—an intentional community which continues to operate the Findhorn Ecovillage near Findhorn, Moray, Scotland—played an instrumental role during the early growth period of the New Age movement.[27]

Widespread usage of the term New Age began in the mid-1970s (reflected in the title of monthly periodical New Age Journal [which was founded in 1974]) and probably influenced several thousand small metaphysical book- and gift-stores that increasingly defined themselves as "New Age bookstores."[28][29]

(...)

27. ^ Hanegraaff 1996, pp. 38–39
28. ^ Algeo, John; Adele S. Algeo (1991), Fifty Years Among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms, 1941–1991, Cambridge University Press, p. 234, ISBN 0521449715
29. ^ Materer, Timothy (1995), Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult, Cornell University Press, p. 14, ISBN 0801431468
(...)
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (1996), New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Boston, Massachusetts, US: Brill Academic Publishers, ISBN 9789004106963

Verifiable references in TV & film predate Star Wars. For example, in Columbo: Double Shock (1973), there is a line spoken by the character Lisa Chambers (played by Julie Newmar), which as transcribed by http://movie.subtitlr.com/subtitle/show/232910 is:

it's a challenging time for me.
It's a time when you want to draw from
that-that interspacial life force,

All this being said, no doubt the success of Star Wars fed back into the movement. I mean, why wouldn't it?

 

[Greg Cox]

The problem with trying to come up with some sort of restrictive, ivory tower definition of sf is that, invariably, it will bear no resemblance to how the term is actually used in the real world. Any definition of science fiction that excludes STAR WARS, for instance, is only going to make sense to purists.

And what does it matter anyway? Science fiction, fantasy, horror . . . they all overlap so much that there's really no point in trying to keep everything in neat little categories.

Plus, to be honest, these "definitions" are often just ways to assert that science fiction is somehow intellectually superior to fantasy and horror . . .

Or spy thrillers or westerns, for that matter!

 

[Kegg]

PS Star Wars is science fiction because it throws in an energy field from a biological phenomenon instead of saying "GOD."

As far as the science goes Star Wars is science fiction because the Death Star is a moon-sized mobile space platform that destroys planets and is all done by science. If the entirety of Star Wars had some word swaps to set it in say, a medevial environment, the Death Star would still be a huge scientific contraption and thus at least qualify it as a kind of steampunk setting.

The problem with trying to come up with some sort of restrictive, ivory tower definition of sf is that, invariably, it will bear no resemblance to how the term is actually used in the real world. Any definition of science fiction that excludes STAR WARS, for instance, is only going to make sense to purists.

This is true, but I'd add to it the observation that anyone who tries to define science fiction as somehow exclusively about plausible science or realistic predictions of the future (or anything else fairly serious) will also exclude a lot of well regarded sci-fi literature - most all of Dick's books don't really fit into this allegedly serious sci-fi definiton, for example. Asimov's Galactic Roman Space Empire doesn't get in either and I can't see a place for that planet with giant sandworms. And so on.

Basically you either let the people with laserswords in, or you're left pretty exclusively with hard sci-fi, a slice so narrow as to be meaningless.

 

[Greg Cox]

The problem with trying to come up with some sort of restrictive, ivory tower definition of sf is that, invariably, it will bear no resemblance to how the term is actually used in the real world. Any definition of science fiction that excludes STAR WARS, for instance, is only going to make sense to purists.

This is true, but I'd add to it the observation that anyone who tries to define science fiction as somehow exclusively about plausible science or realistic predictions of the future (or anything else fairly serious) will also exclude a lot of well regarded sci-fi literature - most all of Dick's books don't really fit into this allegedly serious sci-fi definiton, for example. Asimov's Galactic Roman Space Empire doesn't get in either and I can't see a place for that planet with giant sandworms. And so on.

Basically you either let the people with laserswords in, or you're left pretty exclusively with hard sci-fi, a slice so narrow as to be meaningless.

Good point. Ditto for Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc. None of whom are really about plausible scientific extrapolation, etcetera, but who are definitely major science fiction writers.

 

[Kelthaz]

Science Fiction [sahy-uh

ns fik-shuh

n]

- Something with futuristic (for the time) technology or spacey stuff. Examples: Robots, space, time travel, aliens, robot aliens, etc. The key trick that works 99% of the time is to look for robots. You see a robot? Science fiction.

This is the grade school definition of SF...

Yes, you're right. Defining words is rather simple, so we tend to figure that stuff out when we're kids. I don't know why you're having so much trouble with it.

 

[Ubik]

Science Fiction [sahy-uh

ns fik-shuh

n]

- Something with futuristic (for the time) technology or spacey stuff. Examples: Robots, space, time travel, aliens, robot aliens, etc. The key trick that works 99% of the time is to look for robots. You see a robot? Science fiction.

This is the grade school definition of SF...

Yes, you're right. Defining words is rather simple, so we tend to figure that stuff out when we're kids. I don't know why you're having so much trouble with it.

Because your definition is useless, clearly. It doesn't allow any so-called New Wave science fiction at all (Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside, for example). There's plenty of great science fiction that doesn't take place in the future and also doesn't have any advanced technology. In fact, some takes place in the past (alternate histories and parallel dimensions are science fiction, like Dick's Man in the High Castle.)

I think attitude and style actually DOES have something to do with it. Why is Stephen King's Carrie not science fiction? The powers Carrie has are all over science fiction, but that book itself is not. It's because of the attitude and style of the book towards its content.

Stephen King is actually a great case-in-point. Is The Dead Zone science fiction? He's a psychic. He can tell the future. And yet, the book doesn't FEEL like science fiction, and I somehow can't consider it so.

What about Lovecraft's monsters from another dimension? Are the Cthulu stories science fiction? Parallel universes work as science fiction well enough in Star Trek, after all.

Anyway, my point is, I don't believe content alone can classify it. I think style and attitude, like in film noir, does have an influence on a story's classification.

 

[Kegg]

Because your definition is useless, clearly. It doesn't allow any so-called New Wave science fiction at all (Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside, for example).

Conversely, say someone wrote a hypothetical novel about real world robotics. It would have robots in it, but since it's dealing with real things of the present day, it would not be sci-fi.

The 'but robots' tag does point to something helpful, though. Science ficiton has dependable signals. Generally we're looking at the unusual, the improbable or the impossible given a scientific or pseudoscientific justification. A dragon is one thing, but a genetically engineered dragon grown in a vat by a scientific coroporation for some wildly unlikely reason? That is something else.

What about Lovecraft's monsters from another dimension? Are the Cthulu stories science fiction? Parallel universes work as science fiction well enough in Star Trek, after all.

This is more of a case by case basis. Many of Lovecraft's early stories are pure fantasies (especially when he was just aping Poe) and some of his tales of eldritch gods - "Dagon", for example - can be read as such. Others, of course, usually those that emphasize an extraplanetary origin for the grim horrors, are easier to see as science ficitonal...ish.

 

[Klaus]

My definition's simplicity is both a strength and a weakness, I think... but I do think the important part of what we're kicking about is the ex/inclusionary aspects of the defining process -- making sure you have the authority to participate in your particular discourse of choice and the keep out the riffraff. It's no different than the fights over "Trekkie/Trekker", etc....

Only hard-core fans care about this stuff, and I'm not even sure we should care much beyond the intellectual exercise.

Brings to mind my definition of art:

"If you make it and say it's art, it's art."
"If you can get someone else to agree with you, it's successful art."
"If you can get someone to give you a quarter for it, it's commercially successful art."





*No-prize to anyone who got the Foucault reference

 

[RJDiogenes]

Science Fiction is the extrapolation of science or applied science and its effect on an individual or society. Both words have equal weight.

Most of the stuff that is thought of as Science Fiction, especially in TV and movies, are not Science Fiction. Flash Gordon and Star Trek and Star Wars are all Space Opera. It's almost understandable that the common people would think of stuff like that as SF, since they only see the trappings; what really blows my mind is when people think that things like Buffy are SF.

Words have meanings. I don't understand why some people are so afraid to define things. Definitions have no reflection on quality. Just because Ray Bradbury wrote Fantasy as well as Science Fiction (not to mention Science Fantasy) doesn't mean he's not one of our greatest writers.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera, Hartwell, David G. and Kathryn Cramer [in The Space Opera Renaissance; Tor Books, 2006; ISBN 0-76530-617-4] define space opera as a sub-genre of science fiction. In other words, by that definition, all space opera is science fiction. Other sub-genres of science fiction would include hard, soft, cyberpunk, etc.

I used to classify Star Wars as something other than science fiction ["science fantasy" is what the magazine Starlog classified it as in the late 1970's]. But now I agree with both stj and Kegg in this quote.

PS Star Wars is science fiction because it throws in an energy field from a biological phenomenon instead of saying "GOD."

As far as the science goes Star Wars is science fiction because the Death Star is a moon-sized mobile space platform that destroys planets and is all done by science. If the entirety of Star Wars had some word swaps to set it in say, a medevial environment, the Death Star would still be a huge scientific contraption and thus at least qualify it as a kind of steampunk setting.

The problem with trying to come up with some sort of restrictive, ivory tower definition of sf is that, invariably, it will bear no resemblance to how the term is actually used in the real world. Any definition of science fiction that excludes STAR WARS, for instance, is only going to make sense to purists.

This is true, but I'd add to it the observation that anyone who tries to define science fiction as somehow exclusively about plausible science or realistic predictions of the future (or anything else fairly serious) will also exclude a lot of well regarded sci-fi literature - most all of Dick's books don't really fit into this allegedly serious sci-fi definiton, for example. Asimov's Galactic Roman Space Empire doesn't get in either and I can't see a place for that planet with giant sandworms. And so on.

Basically you either let the people with laserswords in, or you're left pretty exclusively with hard sci-fi, a slice so narrow as to be meaningless.

I agree with everyone in this quote, stj, Kegg, and Greg Cox.

Why did I change my mind, and learn to love the b--I mean, learn to love Star Wars as science fiction? In part for what Kegg said at the end about letting "the people with laserswords in" and in part for what Greg Cox said. I began to accept that the reason for excluding things from the genre was simply on the grounds that they were not "serious enough".

That's when I focused on two questions. First, if one is going to admit any fictitious science into science fiction, then just how plausible must the science be? It turns out that, except in cases that are actually known to represent impossibilities, "plausible fictitious science" is a nonsensical term. The reasons are as follows.

In the first place, only real science ever could be truly plausible. Anything else will always run up against situations where it is contradicted (at least I have no reason to doubt this proposition, at this time). In the second place, scientific theories are by their very nature refutable, which means that they may strictly speaking be proven false, and found to be in need of either revision or rethinking, should experimental evidence indicate that this is so. So, even actual scientific theories [i.e. real science] cannot be proven to be free from implausibilities. Therefore, it cannot logically be faulted to postulate something that cannot be (or that hasn't yet been) disproven. Furthermore, formally assessing the likelihood of such a thing is really mathematically very problematic and could not in practice be rigorously done except in trivial and uninteresting cases. It is at this point that one sees that the distinction between plausible and implausible fictitious science is arbitrary. The only logically meaningful distinction is between the possible and the impossible, where by "possible" we mean simply not having been proven impossible. Real science falls into the realm of the possible, but so does anything else speculative [for which no proof of impossibility yet exists].

It is furthermore at this point that more interesting, and incidentally literary, considerations rise to the fore as means of subjectively grading works that all share a broad and inclusive genre. One should be willing to accept certain seeming implausibilities if there is a payoff in terms of moral lesson, education, characterization, entertainment value, or anything else that one finds personally engaging.

And so at this point, the second question suggests itself. What sorts of fiction should be admitted that develops stories in terms of science? This question really answers itself, though: as many kinds of stories as are in fiction itself.

 

[stonester1]

It was only strange people who convinced themselves that midichlorians ruined anything.

Yes. It was only a tiny number of "strange people" who had a problem with that piece of Lucas misfire bullshit.

 

[Set Harth]

It was only strange people who convinced themselves that midichlorians ruined anything.

I'd use the term "factually challenged". And that's the polite version.

Star Wars is a favorite target for revisionists who seem determined to continually insist that the way they want things to be is the way things actually are.

Biologically inherited Force sensitivity was already an established fact in the SW franchise no later than 1983. The Star Wars Tea Party either aren't aware of this or don't really give a shit about facts. Either way, it doesn't change the reality of the situation. But those having the, shall we say, "uncomplicated" view that the OT can do no wrong and the PT can do no right simply can't accept that their darling OT is ultimately responsible for the thing that's pissing them off.

 

[stonester1]

It was said that the tendency ran in some families. But that does not automatically mark it to biology.

I love Star Wars, and enjoy the prequels, but to say he has made some loopy decisions in his latter day filmmaking and that he had the support/resistance of other talented filmmakers that were essential in making the original trilogy superior in every way that truly matters to the prequels does not make for some Star Wars Tea Party.

Any more than lapping it up unquestioningly makes one a Lucas Worshipper.

 

[Set Harth]

It was said that the tendency ran in some families. But that does not automatically mark it to biology.

Yes, it does.

he has made some loopy decisions in his latter day filmmaking

I'll say it again since you seem to have missed it the first time: this was not a decision made "in his latter day filmmaking". According to Rinzler's book it already existed as a concept in the 1970s.

An example of a questionable decision made in his "latter day filmmaking" would be Jar Jar. You might try sticking with that one, but really, why stick to the truth when blaming the PT for the "crimes" of the OT is so much more fun?

 

[stonester1]

It was said that the tendency ran in some families. But that does not automatically mark it to biology.

Yes, it does.

No. It doesn't.