Realism and SCIFI

[3D Master]

Captain Nemo's interest is inseparable from his abilities, which are inseparable from the implicit predictions listed above. Which are wrong.

Bullshit. Captain Nemo's story aren't predictions, and to the navies that Captain Nemo faced, his ship probably was invincible. It wouldn't have stayed invincible, but at the time they didn't have much of anything that could go against the Nautilus.

But all of that doesn't matter; those aren't predictions, that's a story. The prediction is submarine.

You seem to be committed to validating science fiction for its predictive power.

Bullshit. I did that nowhere even close.

There have been practically no significant predictions from science fiction about anything that matters, especially in the way that invincible submarines destroying navies would matter.
The bare existence of submarines just isn't a big thing.

Except that it is a big thing, in fact, I'd say it was such a big thing that without captain Nemo it would have taken a lot longer before someone had the idea to actually build a submarine.

Also, you conveniently forget the moon landing, desktop computers, the internet, space-travel in/of itself, and although not technically accurate and more of a metaphor, you could say building a being from different other life forms in Frankenstein is a prediction as well. Then there's laser cannons and flight, and on, and on, the whole list that I mentioned, and that isn't even all of them.

There has been much inspiration from science fiction but this is not the same thing at all.

Yes, it is. If a prediction directly leads to what is predicted it's still an accurate prediction, even if it is a self-fulfilling one.

And there's been a lot of thought provoking commentary on where we might be going, but that's not the same thing either.

Which has no bearing on the discussion.

The story about a computer expert thinking a multitude of small computers everywhere, linked together, was unrealistic because it was so unlike his experience emphasizes that believability is a function of experience. Yes, subsequent events proved that story got a detail right. It did not tell us anything about how it's changed commerce, sexual mores, education and journalism. Do even you remember the name of this marvel of science fiction?

First, a story doesn't require to have every single last detail of the future correct in order to be realistic. And desktop computers linked together in an internet is not a detail, it's the very essence of the story, it's the large thing. The things you mentioned THOSE are the details.

Second, since I haven't read the story, I've read of it, the story may very well have predicted the rest as well.

Third, no, I don't remember its name.

Moreover, most stories of the period had the giant computers. People can still read Asimov's Multivac stories with a great deal of pleasure. I fondly remember All the Cares of the World and The Last Question. How can stories so unrealistic still be of interest, if good science fiction is not about correct predictions? In most Asimov stories, one big thing, that science and technology can give us new powers and pose new questions was gotten right.

I never said anything about Science Fiction being about correct predictions. I said good Science Fiction requires realism; aka, there are is no such thing as black holes sucking up planets in seconds when we know this stuff doesn't happen by just LOOKING AT THE DAMN THINGS. Aka, IT REQUIRES REALISM, the premise of the friggin' thread.

You just went off a tangent and said that just because things in Science Fiction aren't true, they can't have realism, which is what I disputed. 1 there's plenty of realism in SF stories, like the stories that have Black Holes not suck up planets in seconds. 2 there are even realistic portrayals of future technology and/or science in SF stories, then and now, even if they got a few details right because they aren't clearvoyant.

You spend your time saying an SF writer can write fantasy without any effort and research and pass it off as SF, because SF is just fantasy anyway. It isn't.

But I would think you agree about this. You call that near forgotten story about little computers "realistic." But you make this call using hindsight. My objection is, if "realism" is to be defined in hindsight, the term is so useless as to be misleading.

The term isn't defined in hindsight; he produced a realistic story even back then, despite "authority figures" claiming he wasn't. It's the reason why put quotes around "not realistic" and "realistic" in the post about that. The man writer wrote a realistic story, because made an assumption, "computers will get smaller" and extrapolated from that what it meant. Whether or not his assumption is wrong doesn't matter to his realistic extrapolation of what this would mean for computers and where they'd end up, and how this would impact the people and the world (whether or not he foresaw the full scope of what it would matters, again, not).

Now, if he had gone on to simply write complete bullshit, like say... an magnatic south pole and north pole repel each other, we got something that would be unrealistic and utter bullshit.

The reason it is so misleading is that there is no meaningful sense in which science fiction is truly realistic, it's just written that. Or, it was, but the fantasy pays better, so more and more stuff is written like fantasy.

PS Days of the week named after Roman gods, January named after Roman gods, July and August named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar mean that our calendar dates back to the Roman Empire, if not earlier. Gregory did a minor reset. If the Pope and Robespierre couldn't change the calendar, then it wasn't going to change to honor Henry Ford. (And the amusing part is that Anno Domini dates, which are a significant part of the calendar, don't go back to either Julius Caesar or Pope Gregory so literally we're both wrong!)

Which of course, DOESN'T MATTER. Whether or not the implementers of the Gregorian calendar chose not to overhaul everything, doesn't matter. The Gregorian calendar wasn't simply a minor reset. For example December 25th used to be the Winter Solstice in the Julian calendar. They did not however shift Christmas to a proper Gregorian 21st of December - for Christians, that's a big thing. In fact, they probably did this deliberately: to (further or complete) the divorce of Christe's birth celebration from the pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice the church hijacked.

 

[stj]

Realism is a literary and dramatic mode that aims to be true to life....one can't know what's realistic, i.e., mundane. Restricting science fiction to the merely probable would be like restricting historical fiction to only documented events and characters.

This is from my second post in the thread. Science fiction doesn't aim to be true to life, or mundane. That's what I mean by realism. Please don't keep distorting my position.

It's a better definition that the slippery nondefinitions that end up meaning probable or possible or merely believable whenever one of the meanings is convenient to the user's argument. It's also a definitioin that can't be applied to science fiction for the simple reason that the science fictional situation is not life as we know it, nor is it mundane.

I suggest using "realism" in a meaningful way (i.e., my way,) because the notion of "realism" in science fiction is impossible to pin down. The people who use it are blurring the distinctions between probable, possible and believable in ways that cause confusion. Also, the people who use science fiction to justify the impossible (on the grounds that science is unpredictable and might discover just about anything) are still writing science fiction. If science fiction is about realism, how can that be?

You don't need meaningless academic jargo like "realism" (meaningless as it is misused by the majority of people in this thread, anyhow,) to criticize bad science. Bad science is like bad spelling or bad grammar. But good science is far more likely to be relevant to use, because it is about the real world.

 

[RobertScorpio]

What I meant by realism? Obviously some of you in this thread have some great ideas as to what that is, and are way above my paygrade on the subject. I meant movies, like Contact for example, that the common person (general audiences not Trek fans) could better relate too because they seem like they could happen right now.

The use of CNN anchors, Jay Leno doing one liners, things like that. Things that ground the movie in the here and now, though they are scifi. Or even a movie like THE FLY with Jeff Goldblum (an Oscar calibre performance). The movie is scifi, but it just has that 'feel' of being real at the same time.

Rob

 

[Kelthaz]

My definition of realism is simply hard science fiction. A realistic sci-fi story would be one where the technology and the science behind the story is plausible and fits in with established scientific theories as we know them today. It may be totally wrong, it may be set a million years in the future, but as long as the writer uses actual science to create his universe he has achieved realism. Of course, realism is not a binary state; it's a scale.

 

[Christopher]

^That's right. Some people here are claiming that realistic SF is impossible because we don't have direct experience with the conjectural things it depicts. But that's not valid. What defines hard SF is that it's consistent with the science we do know, that it doesn't make mistakes the savvy reader could catch. Hal Clement, one of the great masters of hard SF, described it as a game in which the reader tries to spot the scientific errors in a work of fiction and the author tries to make as few of them as possible. Which sounds contentious, but it's more of a friendly competition, and it can drive creativity. When fans discovered a critical conceptual error in Niven's Ringworld -- namely that the Ringworld would be unstable because its center of mass was inside its primary star rather than orbiting it -- it led to a whole sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, whose plot revolved (so to speak) around that instability and how it was dealt with. That kind of constructive critical feedback is a key part of how scientists refine their understanding and ferret out their mistakes, and it's also part of how hard science fiction develops its concepts.

 

[Kelthaz]

"The fun, and the material for this article, lies in treating the whole thing as a game. I've been playing the game since I was a child, so the rules must be quite simple. They are: for the reader of a science-fiction story, they consist of finding as many as possible of the author's statements or implications which conflict with the fact as science currently understands them. For the author, the rule is to make as few such slips as he possibly can"
— Hal Clement, "Whirligig World" (1953)

Stolen from the TV Tropes article on hard/soft science fiction.

 

[Christopher]

^Whereas I went to my bookcase, found that exact same quote in my copy of Mission of Gravity, then came back to my computer and paraphrased it.

 

[stj]

^That's right. Some people here are claiming that realistic SF is impossible because we don't have direct experience with the conjectural things it depicts. But that's not valid. What defines hard SF is that it's consistent with the science we do know, that it doesn't make mistakes the savvy reader could catch....That kind of constructive critical feedback is a key part of how scientists refine their understanding and ferret out their mistakes, and it's also part of how hard science fiction develops its concepts.

The problem with this, as I've stated, is that "realism" refers to the game that writers like Flaubert and Zola, Turgenev and Tolstoy, Ibsen and Strindberg play. Which is nothing like the one that Hal Clement plays. Hijacking the term "realism" to describe the oeuvre of Hal Clement is grotesque. Lots more people read realist novels and stories, and watch realist plays. Not to mention, those guys have seniority.

It is still true that "realism" as used above, has a conveniently undefined meaning. What is this "realism?"

1)A correct use of science;
2)a mere possiblity indulged for the sake of the story;
3)a genuinely feasible speculation (in which case professional scientist should be interested, except their judgment is that no science fiction is of professional interest to them!);
4)a probable development;
5)a believable development, which commonly means deliberately being improbable especially in imagining that people in the future will be exactly like us (even though most wouldn't be so foolish as to imagine foreigners the same way!)

And what does "savvy" reader mean? College educated? Or convinced that science might eventually discover just about everything we "know" is wrong and that the blue sky's the limit to our imaginations? Savvy for 1920 or 1940 or 2000 or when? And since the writer is playing the game, how savvy does he or she have to be? What if they make a subtle or obscure mistake? Does that violate realism? Do they develop their ideas from untrammeled id, then tame them? Or do they poll their readers/skim the fanzine/float trial balloons at cons? Or do they get their ideas from real science? (The last seems unlikely.)

Another reason for rejecting the use of the term "realism" for hard science fiction, is, by that standard, there is practically no hard science fiction. And most of that is not too popular. (I never cared for Mission of Gravity but quite like Needle, which is not very hard biology, and Iceworld, which has marvelously human-like aliens.) A definition that misleads about what its ostensible subject is, and why it's appealing (what it's doing,) is worse than no definition in my opinion.

Finally, I prefer what I think is a far more radical alternative: Regard stupid science as a flaw, not just in science fiction, but in regular fiction, including, yes, genuinely realistic fiction. This is most obvious in the innumerable action movies where bullets routinely break the Third Law of Motion. But one thing that science fiction can do, know that Tomorrow Will Be Different, is something that has been banished from so-called literary fiction, to its detriment.

 

[FluffyUnbound]

The problem with this, as I've stated, is that "realism" refers to the game that writers like Flaubert and Zola, Turgenev and Tolstoy, Ibsen and Strindberg play.

Not to be too big a jerk about this or anything, but none of those writers do anything. Not any more. They are all dust.

Their exclusive claim on the concept of realism has lapsed.

 

[stj]

^^^There's sort of a point there. But I suggest an alternative: Since Homer and Hesiod, Vergil and Ovid, and gloriously vocal Milton are dust as well, we science fiction readers should appropriate "myth" and "epic."