Realism and SCIFI

[RobertScorpio]

Definately its a choice by the director. Star Wars, and Star Trek, are wonderful franchises, and in some cases probably the two best. But realism is something I don't think TREK/Star wars really strive for.

Where as Contact, Deep Impact, even Close Encounters are trying to ground their movies in a reality that, they hope, will suck the viewer in and make them believe that the events are happening now...in the present, and thus, could happen to them..the audience.

I pretty much believe I will never meet an alien that has pointed ears, and comes from a planet called Vulcan. But a comet coming towards earth? That I can see happening in reality, and I remember Deep Impact scaring the crap out of me and my nephew when we saw it.

Star wars? Pure bubble gum fun, and a better movie that Deep Impact to be sure. But realistic possibility of happening? ummm...no

Rob

 

[kv1at3485]

I don't mind when scifi jumps off the deep end and becomes "unrealistic". Being scifi means the implications of the jump are observed, which to me is what makes scifi... scifi. (Sure, throw out all the laws of physics if you want, but you better damn well figure out what that means to your setting...)

Naturally, then, there's a whole bunch of stuff where the jumps are made and the implications are not observed. There is no need to try to pass these things off as scifi, no matter how fun they may be to read/watch.

 

[Nowhere Man]

It depends, if I'm watching BTF then no I don't require any realism. If I'm watching Star Wars, I don't require any realism. If I'm watching Star Trek, yes I do require it because it is suppsed to be Humanity in the future. If I'm watching X-Files or Batman or Superman then I expect some balance. You want it to be realistic as possible , but still understand that there is that fantasy part of it. Now a movie like Mission Impossible where they have future tech, but it's so dumb looking or just completely outragous, that I hate. Or Bond has some impossible tech it's a complete turn off. I want to see something that looks like it's maybe 20 years off or maybe the military has it, but we don't . Which is usually the case anyway, so it really depends on what I'm watching. I mean is a hot tub time machine real, but it sure does sound cool.

 

[Christopher]

What mainstream scifi movies or TV shows are best as showing a quasi-realistic window of the future.

Minority Report (2002) for many things with society & technology in the near future (within 50 years).

On the other hand... psychics. And high-security agencies too stupid to revoke an employee's security access when he becomes a wanted fugitive.

The Fly (1986)

A movie about teleportation turning a guy into a fly monster? That's about as fanciful as it gets.

"Defying Gravity" (2009)

Well... there was some limited effort at plausible planetary science, from what I saw, but other things were entirely ludicrous, like the magnetic "gravity" nanoparticles and the oogy-boogy mystical entity that was "genetically" altering people in ways that had nothing to do with gene expression (like reversing the surgical procedure of a vasectomy). Not to mention the shoddy futurism; the world decades in the future looked exactly like the present aside from a few random cultural differences.

"The X Files" for some scientific lab-type stuff

But generally a work of pure fantasy.

Realism isn't what makes the movie, it's the writing. I've seen The Incredibles once. I've been told it is a very good movie. Is it because of the Realism........I am going to guess not. My guess is that it had something to do with the writing.

Well, see, there we get into the question of what type of realism you're referring to. The Incredibles is so good because of its character realism -- the believable ways the characters act and interact in response to their fanciful circumstances. The highlight of this is the "Missile Lock" sequence. Normally in an action cartoon with child heroes, everyone takes it in stride that the kids are right in the middle of the action. But that's not the way it is in real life, because putting children in danger is a horrible thing. When Helen begs the island to break off its attack because "there are children aboard," that's a moment of wrenching realism. And that's heightened by the realism of her delivery. They made sure that her aviation terminology was accurate, and Holly Hunter delivered the lines in the same tones that a real pilot would use, rather than something more melodramatic and cartoony. It felt intensely real and that was what made it so powerful.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

we get into the question of what type of realism you're referring to.

Christopher exactly. The films I listed above are what felt powerful and somewhat believable to me.
Read this:

This webpage really explains the many levels though:
Grading SF for Realism
Technologies, Themes, Examples of each of the below:

The Need for Multiple Parameters
The Hard-Soft Sci Fi Gradational Scale

 

[JarodRussell]

The fun thing are excuses like "They fly faster than light, and you complain about that they are able to breath in space!"

Because even if they have magical technology, a human is still a human, and a vacuum is still a vacuum. Sometimes, writers and fans use the label "science fiction" or "fantasy" as an excuse for a lot of unrealistic stuff. Nuking the fridge in Indiana Jones, for instance. Just because he deals with ghosts of the Ark, the powers of the Grail and meets with Aliens doesn't mean he can survive a nuclear blast in a fridge, that's just stoopid.

 

[Warped9]

SF realism can be something of a mirror of historical realism. We generally think of history in terms of rulers, generals, war and military campaigns and social upheavals. We rarely think of history in terms of the regular shmoes.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Although I wanted to argue with Dennis for saying so in another thread, he is right about one thing: science fiction is just a subgenre of fantasy. In the end, fantasy is defined by having a setting with elements that don't exist in the real world. You may have very strict rules that keep you as close to reality as possible (as in hard SF) or you may throw the rules completely out the window and make up your own from scratch (fantasy.) You have every degree in between, too. But you're still dealing in things that are currently impossible or beyond the realm of our knowledge and technology.

Contact, for instance, is very realistic in terms of character portrayals, and they do a good job exploring how humans would react to a message from outer space. The actual transportation device, however, is entirely fanciful, and the alien encounter borders on pure fantasy. We can also ignore the whole thing with building one of the transports in secret, too.

In the end, the moviegoing audience doesn't care how realistic your sci-fi elements are. They just want them to behave consistently and contribute to the story. People will suspend their disbelief on just about anything, as long as the story being told is engaging. Screenwriters obviously know this, and I can't blame them for being unwilling to hamstring themselves to fit into a box only a tiny minority of moviegoers will appreciate.

And all the technically-accurate screenwriting in the world isn't worth much if your director decides he doesn't like it and wants to do something more outlandish.

People who want hard SF are better off sticking to books. I doubt we'll ever see it on TV or in movies. It's just way too niche for the mainstream. It's a subgenre of a subgenre.

 

[3D Master]

Although I wanted to argue with Dennis for saying so in another thread, he is right about one thing: science fiction is just a subgenre of fantasy. In the end, fantasy is defined by having a setting with elements that don't exist in the real world. You may have very strict rules that keep you as close to reality as possible (as in hard SF) or you may throw the rules completely out the window and make up your own from scratch (fantasy.) You have every degree in between, too. But you're still dealing in things that are currently impossible or beyond the realm of our knowledge and technology.

Nope, it is not. Fantasy is impossible PERIOD, while Science Fiction has a shot at become real. Look at Jules Verne's book about landing on the moon for example; a century before it happened pretty much as described in the book. A decade before the event, there was a movie about the same subject, which also got it right.

The two are lightyears apart, but the fact that people interchange them as being the same thing, THAT is a massive problem that should be combatted.

Contact, for instance, is very realistic in terms of character portrayals, and they do a good job exploring how humans would react to a message from outer space. The actual transportation device, however, is entirely fanciful, and the alien encounter borders on pure fantasy. We can also ignore the whole thing with building one of the transports in secret, too.

But then, Contact was bad.

In the end, the moviegoing audience doesn't care how realistic your sci-fi elements are. They just want them to behave consistently and contribute to the story. People will suspend their disbelief on just about anything, as long as the story being told is engaging. Screenwriters obviously know this, and I can't blame them for being unwilling to hamstring themselves to fit into a box only a tiny minority of moviegoers will appreciate.

The problem is of course, not that the movie-going doesn't care, it's that the movie-going audience doesn't have enough education to tell the bad from the good. Which shows a severe problem in a country's education system.

And all the technically-accurate screenwriting in the world isn't worth much if your director decides he doesn't like it and wants to do something more outlandish.

People who want hard SF are better off sticking to books. I doubt we'll ever see it on TV or in movies. It's just way too niche for the mainstream. It's a subgenre of a subgenre.

SF is NOT a subgenre, it's A genre. And good SF, with plausible science, and not outright bullshit, is not a subgenre, it's good writing. While the opposite, is bad writing, or bad directing, or whoever is responsible for the bullshit.

 

[Christopher]

Although I wanted to argue with Dennis for saying so in another thread, he is right about one thing: science fiction is just a subgenre of fantasy. In the end, fantasy is defined by having a setting with elements that don't exist in the real world. You may have very strict rules that keep you as close to reality as possible (as in hard SF) or you may throw the rules completely out the window and make up your own from scratch (fantasy.) You have every degree in between, too. But you're still dealing in things that are currently impossible or beyond the realm of our knowledge and technology.

I would say, rather, that science fiction and fantasy are subgenres of speculative fiction. It strikes me as imprecise to use the same term for two things, to say that "science fiction and fantasy are subgenres of fantasy."

Of course, it's been argued that all forms of fiction are subgenres of speculative fiction, since they all postulate the existence of things that don't really exist, even if it's just specific people, corporations, events, etc.

Contact, for instance, is very realistic in terms of character portrayals, and they do a good job exploring how humans would react to a message from outer space. The actual transportation device, however, is entirely fanciful, and the alien encounter borders on pure fantasy.

That's not true. As I said above, Carl Sagan tasked his friend, physicist Kip Thorne, with devising the most scientifically rigorous form of FTL propulsion that could possibly fit the needs of the story, and what Thorne came up with has sparked decades of genuine theoretical physics research into wormhole theory. So the transportation device in Contact, while still including some conjectural and fanciful elements, is probably farther from "entirely fanciful" than any other FTL propulsion system ever presented in fiction (except for other books that employ rigorous depictions of wormholes, such as Robert Forward's Timemaster). And as I recall, the motion picture version of the transportation system was pretty faithful to that in the book, aside from having only one passenger instead of five.

As for the alien encounter, that's where hard-science tales like Contact and 2001 always end up fudging things, on the premise that we can't imagine what aliens would actually be like, except that any technological civilization we encountered would probably be millions of years more technologically advanced than we are, bringing Clarke's Third Law into play. In a sense, it's more realistic to depict alien technology as seemingly magical than it would be to depict it as only a few centuries more advanced than our own.

In the end, the moviegoing audience doesn't care how realistic your sci-fi elements are.

Some of us do. And we get tired of having our interests ignored because of such blanket generalizations. It's fine if there are movies and shows that are just fanciful, but why can't they coexist with movies and shows that satisfy those of us who do care about realism?

In fact, there's now a formal collaboration between Hollywood and the National Academy of Sciences, The Science and Entertainment Exchange, dedicated to increasing the presence of good science in Hollywood productions. Even if only a small number of people care about technical errors, they're able to be much more widely heard in their criticisms today because of the blogosphere, and that gives filmmakers an incentive to get the science right. The SEE's advisory board includes not just scientists (including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Gregory Benford, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky), but film professionals such as David Zucker, Frank Darabont, Dustin Hoffman, Lawrence Kasdan, Michael Mann, Rob Reiner, and so help us, even Seth MacFarlane. So the idea that "nobody cares if the science is right" is outdated. Lots of people in the audience do care, and Hollywood is starting to care too.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Although I wanted to argue with Dennis for saying so in another thread, he is right about one thing: science fiction is just a subgenre of fantasy. In the end, fantasy is defined by having a setting with elements that don't exist in the real world. You may have very strict rules that keep you as close to reality as possible (as in hard SF) or you may throw the rules completely out the window and make up your own from scratch (fantasy.) You have every degree in between, too. But you're still dealing in things that are currently impossible or beyond the realm of our knowledge and technology.

Nope, it is not. Fantasy is impossible PERIOD, while Science Fiction has a shot at become real. Look at Jules Verne's book about landing on the moon for example; a century before it happened pretty much as described in the book. A decade before the event, there was a movie about the same subject, which also got it right.

You don't know that magic is any more impossible than, say, faster-than-light travel. You could try to argue it, but let's face facts: both are equally impossible based on our current understandings of science.

The two are lightyears apart, but the fact that people interchange them as being the same thing, THAT is a massive problem that should be combatted.

If you think it is a "massive problem" you may want to recheck your priorities.

Contact, for instance, is very realistic in terms of character portrayals, and they do a good job exploring how humans would react to a message from outer space. The actual transportation device, however, is entirely fanciful, and the alien encounter borders on pure fantasy. We can also ignore the whole thing with building one of the transports in secret, too.

But then, Contact was bad.

Purely a matter of opinion, of course.

In the end, the moviegoing audience doesn't care how realistic your sci-fi elements are. They just want them to behave consistently and contribute to the story. People will suspend their disbelief on just about anything, as long as the story being told is engaging. Screenwriters obviously know this, and I can't blame them for being unwilling to hamstring themselves to fit into a box only a tiny minority of moviegoers will appreciate.

The problem is of course, not that the movie-going doesn't care, it's that the movie-going audience doesn't have enough education to tell the bad from the good. Which shows a severe problem in a country's education system.

Most people have no use for the science they learned in elementary and high school, much less a need to learn more. You could point out much more serious problems in the education system, such as declines in literacy and a widespread inability to do basic math. Knowing enough science to determine whether an alien life form is plausible or whether a portrayal of a moon base is "realistic" is not something of great use to the majority of the population.

And all the technically-accurate screenwriting in the world isn't worth much if your director decides he doesn't like it and wants to do something more outlandish.

People who want hard SF are better off sticking to books. I doubt we'll ever see it on TV or in movies. It's just way too niche for the mainstream. It's a subgenre of a subgenre.

SF is NOT a subgenre, it's A genre. And good SF, with plausible science, and not outright bullshit, is not a subgenre, it's good writing. While the opposite, is bad writing, or bad directing, or whoever is responsible for the bullshit.

So, all fantasy fiction is "bad writing"? Any SF that contains implausible elements is "bad writing"?

If you set about telling a story and you make technical accuracy the top priority, at the expense of everything else, sorry--that's probably not going to be good writing. A good writer knows when to play fast and loose with the facts, and do it well enough that you don't even notice unless, perhaps, you go looking for nits to pick.

I am not saying that scientific accuracy has no value in TV and movies, just that it does not determine whether or not a given movie or TV show is bad. If you are using that as your sole barometer for gauging the quality of these things, it seems like you're missing the point.

Although I wanted to argue with Dennis for saying so in another thread, he is right about one thing: science fiction is just a subgenre of fantasy. In the end, fantasy is defined by having a setting with elements that don't exist in the real world. You may have very strict rules that keep you as close to reality as possible (as in hard SF) or you may throw the rules completely out the window and make up your own from scratch (fantasy.) You have every degree in between, too. But you're still dealing in things that are currently impossible or beyond the realm of our knowledge and technology.

I would say, rather, that science fiction and fantasy are subgenres of speculative fiction. It strikes me as imprecise to use the same term for two things, to say that "science fiction and fantasy are subgenres of fantasy."

Of course, it's been argued that all forms of fiction are subgenres of speculative fiction, since they all postulate the existence of things that don't really exist, even if it's just specific people, corporations, events, etc.

I would accept that. I think you can draw a pretty clear line, though, between fiction that uses only elements available in the real world, and fiction that makes things up--even if they are made up within the bounds of stringent rules (such as sound science.)

Contact, for instance, is very realistic in terms of character portrayals, and they do a good job exploring how humans would react to a message from outer space. The actual transportation device, however, is entirely fanciful, and the alien encounter borders on pure fantasy.

That's not true. As I said above, Carl Sagan tasked his friend, physicist Kip Thorne, with devising the most scientifically rigorous form of FTL propulsion that could possibly fit the needs of the story, and what Thorne came up with has sparked decades of genuine theoretical physics research into wormhole theory. So the transportation device in Contact, while still including some conjectural and fanciful elements, is probably farther from "entirely fanciful" than any other FTL propulsion system ever presented in fiction (except for other books that employ rigorous depictions of wormholes, such as Robert Forward's Timemaster). And as I recall, the motion picture version of the transportation system was pretty faithful to that in the book, aside from having only one passenger instead of five.

Given that we have precisely no evidence that wormholes exist, I would still qualify the transportation system as "fanciful." Yes, I know the story behind the story, and that a great effort was made to come up with something plausible, but it's still an invented element that we have (thus far) not found in reality.

As for the alien encounter, that's where hard-science tales like Contact and 2001 always end up fudging things, on the premise that we can't imagine what aliens would actually be like, except that any technological civilization we encountered would probably be millions of years more technologically advanced than we are, bringing Clarke's Third Law into play. In a sense, it's more realistic to depict alien technology as seemingly magical than it would be to depict it as only a few centuries more advanced than our own.

All of which draws from SF conventions and has no bearing on reality. In fact, you even came out and said it: we have no idea what a real alien intelligence would be like, so we have to make it up out of whole cloth.

In the end, the moviegoing audience doesn't care how realistic your sci-fi elements are.

Some of us do. And we get tired of having our interests ignored because of such blanket generalizations. It's fine if there are movies and shows that are just fanciful, but why can't they coexist with movies and shows that satisfy those of us who do care about realism?

Don't shoot the messenger. I'd love to see more accuracy in Hollywood SF, too, but let's face it: movies aren't made for us. They're made for the vast moviegoing public.

No one is interested in satisfying us because there aren't enough of us to matter. That's just how it is. Most people don't care about science beyond what they learned in high school, and that ain't much. Science simply isn't sexy to most people, and it makes no sense for TV and movie studios to box themselves in just to please a tiny segment of the market.

In fact, there's now a formal collaboration between Hollywood and the National Academy of Sciences, The Science and Entertainment Exchange, dedicated to increasing the presence of good science in Hollywood productions. Even if only a small number of people care about technical errors, they're able to be much more widely heard in their criticisms today because of the blogosphere, and that gives filmmakers an incentive to get the science right. The SEE's advisory board includes not just scientists (including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Gregory Benford, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky), but film professionals such as David Zucker, Frank Darabont, Dustin Hoffman, Lawrence Kasdan, Michael Mann, Rob Reiner, and so help us, even Seth MacFarlane. So the idea that "nobody cares if the science is right" is outdated. Lots of people in the audience do care, and Hollywood is starting to care too.

That's good news, and I hope it's fruitful, but I won't hold my breath.

I still think you are overselling how many people actually care about scientific accuracy, though. I mean, there is nothing scientifically accurate about the Iron Man movies, and those make hundreds of millions of dollars!

You can also look at Avatar, which grossed an incredible amount of money, and SF elements in it are pretty soft. (I am excluding the tie-in materials like books, and taking only the movie as presented, since only a tiny fraction of those who saw Avatar would even be aware of the tie-in materials, much less have read them.)

 

[Owain Taggart]

That's a good post, Christopher. I'm glad to see there's some effort into making science more realistic and accurate.

Sure, there are lots of times when a Sci-Fi movie doesn't need realistic science due to the fantastical nature of the movie itself, but then there are movies that try to present a situation, usually in the near future, and when it comes time to show off and explain it, the science in their sci-fi suddenly doesn't matter anymore, which then sends the movie off into improbable-land. That kind of stuff only negates the point of the movie for me.

The frustrating part about that is that, there are points where movies are brilliant at depicting something, and just when you think they have it, they go and do something completely wrong. There's a shuttle sequence, I think in the Day After Tomorrow that I thought was pretty good, and the movie's actually not that bad. It seemed to me they at least tried to be scientific while still being fantastical, if that makes any sense.

But errors in general don't just happen in movies. My Dad's an accomplished amateur astronomer, having won awards for making a 21" trailer-mounted telescope in the 80s, and he can spot errors pretty easily, and he's noticed tons of factual errors in documentaries, which can be very frustrating since it's trying to inform the populace. So, a lot of it is down to research.

Btw, I did meet Lawrence Krauss a few years ago. Very interesting person. He was doing his Science of Star Trek talk. I can see how someone like him can be depressing by poking holes in our favourite franchise, but I think he's doing people a service. We need more people like him.

 

[stj]

There is no such thing as realistic science fiction. If the science isn't fictional, it's just plain realism. If the science is fictional, but treated in the story as if it really were possible by the laws of nature, that the story takes place somehow in our world (most commonly, the future,) then it is science fiction. The cheapest, least effort way of writing science fiction is to implicitly build on previous science fiction works, seizing on the gadgets or phrases and letting the reader remember the rationalizations. The most commonplace events, when set in the future, are fantasy since no one knows what the future is really like. "Realism" when no one knows the reality is a nonstarter.

If something impossible happens in a story and it is forthrightly explained as supernatural, or unexplained, it is a fantasy. (If the story assumes that explanations are arbitrary scripts imposed by the "powerful" or some such, it's postmodernist fantasy. Apparently true postmodernism is a resolute foe of science.) Those stories where vampirism is really a blood disease or werewolves are an alternate product of Darwinian evolution, or ghosts are quantum probability waves are science fiction.

The difference between science fiction and fantasy may seem like a meaningless distinction, but in practice most readers prefer one approach to another. Fantasy fans have essentially rejected so-called "fantasy" that rationalizes the fantastic element. SF fans, for their part, don't take rationalized traditional fantasy tropes and motifs seriously. Finally, the people who most vociferously argue that fantasy and science fiction are the same in my experience have a violent distaste for so-called "hard" science fiction. This is so striking that I'm convinced that they dislike basic principles of science, like the notion of cause and effect, or the existence of truth.

Referring to judgments of the plausibility of the rationalizations as realism (or "hard") science fiction is a bottomless well of argument. Does plausibility mean probability or possiblity? Does the current state of knowledge or that when written serve as the standard? Does the scientific education of the writer or the reader matter most?

The science in science fiction, fictional as it it, is most important when it is a speculation about the real world. Unless you are not interested in the world around you, that give science fiction an interest that other forms of literature have usually disdained. It is shocking how many people are not interested in the world around them. (They prefer daydreams.) Disdaining the world reflects an ideological commitment to literature and drama as piercing the veil of reality to reveal the eternal truths. The only eternal truth is that the notion of a veil to pierce in the first place is a swindle.

But most science fiction is just stories from various genres, adventure and war being the most popular currently, done in science fiction style. People who like adventure stories or war stories done with gaudy fantastic gadgets and such (but that don't admit to being flat out imaginary but somehow might be real,) don't necessarily care for this kind of science fiction.

Actually, after thinking about it, this thread is just flat out misconceived. It's action movies that need a shot of realism. Some basic facts about physics, especially the Third Law of Motion, and some basic biomechanics, like the fact that impact can concuss the brain really need to be drummed into screenwriters. Perhaps aversive conditioning?

PS I suppose it was crossposted or something. But the remark above that it is impossible to say "magic" is more impossible than wormholes is ridiculous. It bespeaks a childishly black and white notion of science (aka knowledge) as completely certain and provable. Magic is nonsense, as attested by centuries of experience, which is knowledge by any rational use of the term. Wormholes are speculation.

And, insofar as science fictions conventions are based on genuine scientific speculation (which is not making things up on a whim,) science fiction conventions do have a bearing on reality.

As a thought exercise on the value of scientific speculation having a bearing on reality, compare the speculations in Brave New World and 1984.

 

[Christopher]

Given that we have precisely no evidence that wormholes exist, I would still qualify the transportation system as "fanciful."

That's not how science works. Everything is connected. Things don't exist in isolation. The equations that define wormholes are simply one solution to the equations of General Relativity, the same equations that define and govern every gravitational phenomenon in the universe. And General Relativity is one of the most solidly verified theories in all of physics. Literally every prediction of General Relativity except one (the existence of gravity waves) has been experimentally verified. We know that GR is an accurate, truthful description of the way the universe works. So while we have no experimental or observational verification that wormholes exist, we know that they could exist, and we can calculate and predict how one would behave if we ever found or made one.

That's the beauty of science. It's not limited to what you've observed. The whole point of a theory is to let you make informed predictions beyond the available data, to go beyond just cataloguing the universe and actually codify the underlying rules that tie all your observations together. To say that anything we haven't directly observed is outside of science is to demonstrate a fundamental incomprehension of what science even is.

And there's certainly no requirement that a story must limit itself only to things that have actually been observed to qualify as hard science fiction. That makes no sense at all, because just about all science fiction is about postulating things that haven't been observed or created in reality. Hard SF is SF that accurately reflects scientific theory as it stands at the time the work is created. It's not about things that do exist, it's about things that plausibly could exist. For example, a hard-SF work about aliens would be one whose aliens plausibly reflect the known laws of biology, physics, evolution, thermodynamics, etc., whose anatomy and sociology are consistent with their environment, whose planetary environment is based on plausible astrophysics and exoplanetology, etc. You don't have to have firsthand observations of the aliens in question before you can call it hard SF. You just have to create aliens that could believably exist in the environment you've postulated.

All of which draws from SF conventions and has no bearing on reality.

That's completely wrong. It's not an SF convention, it's the best judgment of astrobiologists and other scientists. Hell, it's simple statistics. The galaxy is 13 billion years old, while human civilization is a paltry few thousand years old. From that alone, it should be obvious that the odds of any alien civilization being within mere centuries of our level of development are astronomically low.

In fact, you even came out and said it: we have no idea what a real alien intelligence would be like, so we have to make it up out of whole cloth.

That is not at all what I said. You're twisting my words to support your preconceptions. You're also reducing the issue to something pointlessly absolute: either we know it for a fact or it's pure fantasy. That's a totally useless standard here. We're talking about speculative fiction here, so certainty is not even on the table. The issue is one of plausibility, of how reasonable and likely a conjecture is. It's a relative standard, not an absolute one. Based on our best understanding of the universe, based on available theory and logic, it is more probable that any given alien civilization would be separated from us by millions of years than that it would be on exactly our level give or take a few paltry centuries.

Don't shoot the messenger. I'd love to see more accuracy in Hollywood SF, too, but let's face it: movies aren't made for us. They're made for the vast moviegoing public.

No one is interested in satisfying us because there aren't enough of us to matter.

As I've already demonstrated, that is simply an untrue statement on both points.

That's just how it is. Most people don't care about science beyond what they learned in high school, and that ain't much.

Which is exactly why it's a good thing that both filmmakers and scientists are trying to collaborate more closely in order to change that. Again, you're making a mistake by reducing the question to black-and-white absolutes. Most of reality can always be found in the middle ground. Yes, studios are in the business of making profit and appealing to the largest possible audience, but that isn't incompatible with trying to portray science more accurately and trying to promote education and understanding. It is possible to do both. Look at Numb3rs. That's a show that's always made a serious effort to depict mathematics and scholarship in an accurate way, and it's been quite a successful show overall (it's been cancelled now, but it ran for six seasons, which is definitely a successful run). Most audiences may not notice or care too much whether the science is right, but that doesn't mean they'll run away if it is right.

I still think you are overselling how many people actually care about scientific accuracy, though. I mean, there is nothing scientifically accurate about the Iron Man movies, and those make hundreds of millions of dollars!

Actually the makers of Iron Man consulted with the SEE on some of their technology. Again, you need to look at this in relative rather than all-or-nothing terms. There's always going to be poetic license, but there's a difference between conscious poetic license and just not bothering to try. There's always room to slip in some good science and engineering even in a story that takes dramatic liberties where necessary.

And you don't need that many people to care. You just need enough dedicated people to recognize it as something worth pursuing and to make an effort to pursue it. And that's actually happening now. As Margaret Mead said, "Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has."

You can also look at Avatar, which grossed an incredible amount of money, and SF elements in it are pretty soft. (I am excluding the tie-in materials like books, and taking only the movie as presented, since only a tiny fraction of those who saw Avatar would even be aware of the tie-in materials, much less have read them.)

Which doesn't disprove my point in the slightest. It proves that viewers don't need scientific accuracy, but that in no way suggests that they would reject it. Indeed, I gather a lot about Avatar, at least where the technology designs are concerned, is very realistic. For instance, there's no FTL propulsion, but a sublight ship that takes a reasonable amount of time to get to Alpha Centauri. Again, it's wrong to define it as all-or-nothing. Avatar has both good science and bad in it, and the good science didn't drive a single viewer away. Indeed, a lot of people have complained about the bad science, but I haven't heard anyone complaining about the good science intruding on their fantasy movie. And as I said, the Internet lets such complaints be heard much more widely, and that bad press gives studios an incentive to change.

 

[Owain Taggart]

There is no such thing as realistic science fiction. If the science isn't fictional, it's just plain realism.

I think you're confusing realism and fiction. It doesn't have to be an either-or. Both should be able to exist in Sci-Fi. It's down to how something is portrayed. Something can be realistic and still be great sci-fi and still be fictional. Like a trip to Mars, for instance. Have a realistic launch, realistic facts and figures about how things operate and should operate, and don't fudge up on the physics and do some handwaving by having a flimsy excuse for how it's happening on screen. Your story can still be sci-fi, but your plausibility will be better if the details are paid attention to. If a rocket doesn't act like a rocket, people are going to notice. If rockets can turn on a dime, people will notice. If your movie's set on the moon and your gravity is the same as earth's, well, I don't have to tell you people will notice it. It's all about how science can integrate meaningfully into something that has a scientific basis, otherwise it might as well be Lord of the Rings in space. You don't want it too far off base, otherwise people will roll their eyes. That's all we're asking for. We're not asking for a revolution in sci-fi. We're just asking for an acknowledgment when it comes to scientific details. They're there to use, afterall.

 

[stj]

I think you're confusing realism and fiction. It doesn't have to be an either-or. Both should be able to exist in Sci-Fi. It's down to how something is portrayed. Something can be realistic and still be great sci-fi and still be fictional. Like a trip to Mars, for instance. Have a realistic launch, realistic facts and figures about how things operate and should operate, and don't fudge up on the physics and do some handwaving by having a flimsy excuse for how it's happening on screen. Your story can still be sci-fi, but your plausibility will be better if the details are paid attention to. If a rocket doesn't act like a rocket, people are going to notice. If rockets can turn on a dime, people will notice. If your movie's set on the moon and your gravity is the same as earth's, well, I don't have to tell you people will notice it. It's all about how science can integrate meaningfully into something that has a scientific basis, otherwise it might as well be Lord of the Rings in space. You don't want it too far off base, otherwise people will roll their eyes. That's all we're asking for. We're not asking for a revolution in sci-fi. We're just asking for an acknowledgment when it comes to scientific details. They're there to use, afterall.

Realism is a literary and dramatic mode that aims to be true to life. A trip to Mars might take place in the future and a novel or movie might portray such a possible flight with the greatest intent at "realism" but, no one knows what the future is like. The whole notion of realism is moot. You could have the science be pretty good but it's still not "realistic."

I remember Heinlein's Man Who Sold the Moon, Fredric The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, and C.M. Kornbluth's Takeoff, where the science was done as plausibly as possible where it came up in the plot. But every single one of these novels we know now is preposterous. Heinlein and Kornbluth imagine space flight as a private enterprise and Brown imagined a hero fighting blinkered bureaucracy.

Also, you seem to be assuming that realism is equivalent to probable. The biological speculations in Brave New World are mostly wrong, but being reasonable scientific speculations are still somehow about aspects of contemporary life, and more may still come to be part of daily life, albeit not in the novel's form. Brave New World is now known to be improbable but was it unrealistic? The television series Jericho was set in such a near future with very little speculative science. Was it therefore realistic? No more than Alas, Babylon or On the Beach. No one knows what a post-nuclear war world would be like.

Unlike historical novels, 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.

 

[3D Master]

I would say, rather, that science fiction and fantasy are subgenres of speculative fiction. It strikes me as imprecise to use the same term for two things, to say that "science fiction and fantasy are subgenres of fantasy."

Of course, it's been argued that all forms of fiction are subgenres of speculative fiction, since they all postulate the existence of things that don't really exist, even if it's just specific people, corporations, events, etc.

I disagree. There's no speculation going on in fantasy, it's just impossible stuff. When you speculate on something, you at least consider on something having a chance of occurring. That happens with Science Fiction, but not Fantasy.

You don't know that magic is any more impossible than, say, faster-than-light travel. You could try to argue it, but let's face facts: both are equally impossible based on our current understandings of science.

Wrong. Not only does science tell you that FTL is possible, science even has multiple ways to do it. The only question is, HOW to do it.

Most people have no use for the science they learned in elementary and high school, much less a need to learn more. You could point out much more serious problems in the education system, such as declines in literacy and a widespread inability to do basic math. Knowing enough science to determine whether an alien life form is plausible or whether a portrayal of a moon base is "realistic" is not something of great use to the majority of the population.

They're symptoms of the same problem. And knowing science is not only useful, it's a necessity. Not knowing science is where you get people believing in creationism from. Not knowing science is where you get people asking "what's the use of space travel" from. Not knowing science is where you get people believing in homeopathic medicines from, throwing away money on at best useless water, and in other such cases taking stuff that's dangerous.

And that's not even talking about the questions we're going to be dealing with in the political arena; stem cell research, human cloning, research into zero point energy generation here on the planet; how dangerous is it; etc. etc. etc. Given that all these kinds of questions will become ever more important in the political arena as science progresses; it means you have an entire population that's supposed to be voting on these things, and not knowing jack shit about it.

So, all fantasy fiction is "bad writing"? Any SF that contains implausible elements is "bad writing"?

Fantasy fiction is not SF, and the criteria that hold for SF, do not hold for fantasy. I also said nothing about implausible, I said impossible. Those are two different things. Implausible is highly unlikely, but not impossible.

If you set about telling a story and you make technical accuracy the top priority, at the expense of everything else, sorry--that's probably not going to be good writing. A good writer knows when to play fast and loose with the facts, and do it well enough that you don't even notice unless, perhaps, you go looking for nits to pick.

I never said anything about technical accuracy being your top priority, but it better be one of the higher priorities. Besides which, a good writer can technical accuracy 100% and still write a good story. The idea that just because someone cares about technical accuracy it immediately means you have a bad story is idiotic. Not even trying to get technical accuracy in a story because of that faulty logic is deplorable.

How did that scientist say it again a few weeks back? You're allowed to have two scientific inaccuracies in story and those are in the advanced conceptual science department; not things we can see with our very own eyes.

I am not saying that scientific accuracy has no value in TV and movies, just that it does not determine whether or not a given movie or TV show is bad. If you are using that as your sole barometer for gauging the quality of these things, it seems like you're missing the point.

And where did I say anything about the sole barometer?

The fact however is, that you can have only so many problems before your thrown so far out of the story, no matter how good the rest is, it's not going to get you back into the story.

Star Trek's black holes are a perfect example. Black holes aren't high advanced conceptual science, we've detected these things, we've photographed them, we can see them with our very own eyes. Black holes do nut suck up planets in seconds, if a planet doesn't achieve a stable orbit and actually falls into the event horizon, it takes a black holes thousands and more years to devour a planet.

It is utterly ridiculous, it's as if someone throws a rock and it falls upward all of a sudden. It's nuts.

Given that we have precisely no evidence that wormholes exist, I would still qualify the transportation system as "fanciful." Yes, I know the story behind the story, and that a great effort was made to come up with something plausible, but it's still an invented element that we have (thus far) not found in reality.

Actually, since wormholes solve some mathematical problems with Einstein's theory of relativity, many scientists consider that evidence for the existence of wormholes. True, not proof, but evidence. But then, the same was said to be black holes at one time; despite the fact that all scientific theory said they should exist, we hadn't seen one yet. The use of a black hole in a science fiction story at those times is fanciful now? No, the only thing fanciful in such a story, would be speculation on how they work, what they can and can't do, when we did know these things; and even that, it would call it more speculation, and possibilities, than fanciful.

All of which draws from SF conventions and has no bearing on reality. In fact, you even came out and said it: we have no idea what a real alien intelligence would be like, so we have to make it up out of whole cloth.

Sure, and where we have no idea what anything is like, you can speculate, and take liberties. Completely alter how things work, like black holes, when we already know that's not how things work, because we have concrete observations that tell us otherwise, that's a big no-no.

Some of us do. And we get tired of having our interests ignored because of such blanket generalizations. It's fine if there are movies and shows that are just fanciful, but why can't they coexist with movies and shows that satisfy those of us who do care about realism?

Don't shoot the messenger. I'd love to see more accuracy in Hollywood SF, too, but let's face it: movies aren't made for us. They're made for the vast moviegoing public.

No one is interested in satisfying us because there aren't enough of us to matter. That's just how it is. Most people don't care about science beyond what they learned in high school, and that ain't much. Science simply isn't sexy to most people, and it makes no sense for TV and movie studios to box themselves in just to please a tiny segment of the market.

Which is a problem that should be combated. How do you have a shot at combating it; by making scientifically accurate or at least plausible scenarios. How many people didn't become scientists and engineers because they liked Star Trek. The other part, is to improve the bleeding education system. People not caring about science isn't something you should just roll with, it's something we have to fight with every tooth, claw and nail we have.

Realism is a literary and dramatic mode that aims to be true to life. A trip to Mars might take place in the future and a novel or movie might portray such a possible flight with the greatest intent at "realism" but, no one knows what the future is like. The whole notion of realism is moot. You could have the science be pretty good but it's still not "realistic."

I remember Heinlein's Man Who Sold the Moon, Fredric The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, and C.M. Kornbluth's Takeoff, where the science was done as plausibly as possible where it came up in the plot. But every single one of these novels we know now is preposterous. Heinlein and Kornbluth imagine space flight as a private enterprise and Brown imagined a hero fighting blinkered bureaucracy.

Uh... there are multiple private enterprises preparing to go into space. From space tourism and space hotels (mostly Japanese preparations) to companies planning on mining the moon's He3 so they can build fusion power plants that work.

Also, you seem to be assuming that realism is equivalent to probable. The biological speculations in Brave New World are mostly wrong, but being reasonable scientific speculations are still somehow about aspects of contemporary life, and more may still come to be part of daily life, albeit not in the novel's form. Brave New World is now known to be improbable but was it unrealistic? The television series Jericho was set in such a near future with very little speculative science. Was it therefore realistic? No more than Alas, Babylon or On the Beach. No one knows what a post-nuclear war world would be like.

Unlike historical novels, 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.

Except that all of the ones you named ARE realistic. Something being realistic doesn't mean it must be real, or even must come true, it means it is not impossible.

 

[stj]

Heinlein and Kornbluth imagined space flight being created as a private venture. Which didn't happen. Unrealistic.

On the Beach was quite unrealistic about the threat from the Soviet Union (and probably about the way nuclear war might end life.) Alas, Babylon, again, wholly unrealistic about the threat from the Soviet Union. Those were Cold War fantasies, using "fantasies" in a nontechnical (but still meaningful) way. Jericho early on had a mine that had no way to drain water. A key motive for inventing steam engines was to drain mines of water!

Brave New World imagined that the years would be named after Henry Ford. This is realistic? The future is unknowable, and all visions of the future are by definition not like life because that life hasn't been lived yet. Science fiction aspires to seem like realism, sometimes anyhow. But it isn't.

Science fiction can still matter, because the universe around us matters, and science fiction, even fictional science based on scientific speculation, can therefore be very relevant to us. And most fiction somehow pretends tomorrow won't be different. Even though every one knows the past was different!

As to the idea that realism means possible, maybe. But those ways FTL/time travel are scientifically possible, according to the best current speculation? They are practical impossibilities! There is no feasible way to separate probability from possibility. It is possible there will be a ticking bomb scenario or a locked room mystery. But it is highly improbable either will ever occur. They are not realistic.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Also, you seem to be assuming that realism is equivalent to probable.

I can see what you're saying, but that's not what I'm assuming at all. I see your point of view though. Obviously, some things will have to be speculated on, as it's sci-fi afterall. It's only natural. As human beings, we often look forward, as it's part of our curiosity, and we like to bridge the gap by speculating about what tomorrow's technology will be like. Sometimes we hit it right on the money, sometimes not, and I think that's part of the draw to Sci-Fi. It's fascinating.

But there are some things that we do know, in the now. Things that are very much fact, and it's when these facts are ignored or either badly researched that some of us begin to roll our eyes. More often than not, the science in something is just bad, as if the writers of a movie aren't researching the subject that they're writing about. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. We can keep speculating all we want, but there's always one constant, and it's what we know in the now that we can use to apply it and make something more grounded in realism. Little details can make a big difference in how it feels. Realistic details are more like a setting; a groundwork to build upon. That's a far cry from restricting sci-fi to being only probable.

 

[stj]

^^^Oh, you're talking about grossly stupid stuff being awful to watch. Yeah, that's true. I particularly dislike scifi for being grossly stupid but still insisting on taking itself seriously as Art. Practically every writer who says "technobabble" and really means it is condemning himself as a hack. A writer who bragged about not being able to spell or do standard grammar would be laughed at. But a scifi writer who brags about not knowing science is supposed to be taken seriously?