The Yin-yang of science fiction.

[GreenDragonKnight]

I recently had an interesting discussion with some relatives that I thought could make for a really interesting discussion if opened up for a much broader audience. What I suggested is that I think that all of science fiction can be placed into one of two very broad, very general categories that, like the yin-yang of Taoist philosophy, are fundamentally very different and yet compliment each other very well - or at least needn't be utterly in opposition. I'll, for simplicity's sake, just call these two categories serious science fiction and adventure science fiction. Sure, the "Serious" type can be adventurous and the "Adventurous" type can have a serious aspect: but, in general, the one's the more intellectual type, the other's mostly just about fun.
So, Category A is science fiction that tries to be exactly that: fiction, but based on science. In other words, this sort tries to be true to scientific reality, at least such as it's understood at the time in which it's written. Into this heading I'd put Bradbury, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and the like.
Category B is more in the school of doesn't give a pile of rat-droppings whether or not it's true to scientific reality, it's just all about thrills, it's all about fun. Here's where I'd place your Flash Gordons, your Buck Rogers, all your space opera, all your pulps that portray Mars and Venus as being habitable, and the like.
Of course, there are some that are a little difficult to clearly place in one category or the other, like, say, Frank Herbert. On the one hand, his stuff definitely has some strong overtones of space opera (Medieval feudalism with Space Age technology), but, at the same time, it's definitely very deep and very cerebral.
Still, overall I think this is a workable system.

 

[Valenti]

Why can't space opera be in category A? Unfortunately Sci-fi still has to appeal to aunt Maude in Peoria on tv and joe six pack in the movies. Most of the real sci-fi in our future probably won't include people per say but holograms and robots seeking out new life and new civilizations.

 

[GreenDragonKnight]

Why can't space opera be in category A?

I meant the term to be differential, not defer-ential

 

[Velocity]

I don't know about Bradbury being totally in Group A. He kind of straddles A & B, more so than Asimov at least. So would you put time travel in A, and what about steam punk? Or is steam punk considered more fantasy?

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Steampunk is so fun-but-preposterous that I think it would generally fit into the Adventure category. Time travel is less a sub-genre and more of a story device. There are plenty of cerebral time travel stories but also a lot of fun ones like Back to the Future and Terminator.

Why can't space opera be in category A? Unfortunately Sci-fi still has to appeal to aunt Maude in Peoria on tv and joe six pack in the movies.

There has been some cerebral sci-fi on the big screen in recent years-- Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Ex Machina, etc.

The stuff that I would have trouble characterizing is stuff that's "serious" but isn't nearly as smart as it wants me to think it is, so it just comes across as pretentious, i.e. Ghost in the Shell, Inception, or Interstellar (although that last one wouldn't be so bad if the twist of it being a predestination paradox was just a BIT more original).

For sci-fi that's incredibly fanciful space epics yet still feels grounded as a serious conversation about A.I. and advancing technology and the limits of that technology, I strongly recommend the "Culture" novels by Iain M. Banks. It's a great series full of technology more advanced than anything anyone on Star Trek could ever dream of yet it feels thoroughly plausible, if not inevitable. It also doesn't need to be read in order because, while it's a shared universe, it's such a sprawling universe that hardly any characters or events reappear from book to book. (For example, the massive, galaxy-spanning war that consumes the backdrop of the first book is reduced to nothing more than a historical footnote in the 2nd book.)

 

[Greg Cox]

I don't know about Bradbury being totally in Group A. He kind of straddles A & B, more so than Asimov at least. So would you put time travel in A, and what about steam punk? Or is steam punk considered more fantasy?

Bradbury would probably fit in a Category C: Literary SF that's more about the Fiction than the Science. Not just pulp adventure, but not rigorous Hard SF either. See also Rod Serling, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, etc.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.

A lot of sci-fi tries to make statements about the universal constants of humanity by removing it from modern cultural trappings and speculating what would change and what would remain the same in human nature when you radically alter the nurture component.

The sci-fi that does this is all over the spectrum in terms of scientific realism.

I would make this a two dimensional spectrum. The x axis is real science to made up science and the y axis is serious commentary vs fun adventure.

Real/serious is like Asimov. Fake/serious, people like Dick. Fake/fun, the space operas.

I kind of wish there was more population in the real/fun corner. Having trouble of thinking of much.

 

[Valenti]

Real only becomes unreal and fun when it's really good. Starship Troopers comes to mind. Haven't seen Ready Player One yet.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Real (aka hard SF)/fun? Tricky...

The Martian by Andy Weir perhaps and the Culture books by Iain M Banks (the parts set in the Culture; the rest of the universe is pretty grim).

Somewhat controversially, placing it under Real, I think The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams counts because its science, while bonkers, has internal consistency (mostly).

 

[Timewalker]

So, Category A is science fiction that tries to be exactly that: fiction, but based on science. In other words, this sort tries to be true to scientific reality, at least such as it's understood at the time in which it's written. Into this heading I'd put Bradbury, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and the like.

Bradbury himself considered at least some of his SF stories to be fantasies, rather than science fiction. It's certainly true that most of them are obsolete by now, as we know that humans can't live on the surface of Mars or Venus without space suits or some kind of enclosed environment.

That's the same problem with a lot of earlier Heinlein novels, btw. I have to mentally reclassify them as "okay for the time in which they were written but not serious science fiction now, since the various probes sent back so much information about what these planets and moons are really like."

Category B is more in the school of doesn't give a pile of rat-droppings whether or not it's true to scientific reality, it's just all about thrills, it's all about fun. Here's where I'd place your Flash Gordons, your Buck Rogers, all your space opera, all your pulps that portray Mars and Venus as being habitable, and the like.

You put Bradbury in the other category, when a lot of his stuff had humans wandering around in the open on Mars and Venus.

There is plenty of good-quality space opera that does take science into account. Ben Bova and C.J. Cherryh come immediately to mind.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Still, overall I think this is a workable system.

No, it isn't. I mean, you even listed your own counterexample, and it was major. Others in-thread have provided other counterexamples.

Here's another counterexample: Larry Niven, example Ringworld. He posits fantastic elements that are very specific and do very specific things, such as be strong enough to be the Ringworld floor. Everything else obeys known laws of physics, and he is very specific about that, so much so that the sequel The Ringworld Engineers had its genesis in addressing the mathematical stability of the structure according to real-world orbital mechanics.

So, no. That's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction that's in neither your A or B category, but with some aspects of both, and given all this, it's an entirely unworkable system that you've devised. It's really naive and restrictive.

 

[Owain Taggart]

There's also a type where it might use a sci-fi setting, ie a different planet than ours like Mars for instance, but everything else about it might be more contemporary, sometimes just leaving the setting to fade into the background and not really taking advantage of it unless the plot demands it. It's almost like it's 'really light sci-fi' using the different setting to tell different kinds of stories with a bit of a different flavour, and not really much beyond that.

There are a number of those I've come across over the years, but a few that comes to mind:

Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer: A set of interconnected mysteries set on Mars. Other than making use of a few things that he created to make use of the sci-fi setting, it ends up feeling quite contemporary.

Moving Mars by Greg Bear: A political soap opera set on Mars. The setting just fades into the background until much later when the story demands it and when it does, it swings widely into the fantastical style.

 

[JD]

One that's kind of borderline for me would be Caprica, it does have robots, and a VR world, but other than that it's fairly contemporary.

What about stuff like with multiple stories like Star Trek where some stories are serious, harder sci-fi, some are goofy fun, and some are pure action/adventure?

 

[GreenDragonKnight]

I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.

I never said that they are.

 

[GreenDragonKnight]

Getting back to Bradbury for just a sec, my reaction to the stories of his I've read has always been, essentially, huh...????

I mean, any fans of his I certainly hope you don't take offense to this, but the stories of his I've read, as soon as I finished reading them I just kind of sat the book aside, then scratched my head like, what just happened...???

Now of course, Fahrenheit 451 wasn't meant to be science fiction or even fiction so much as a very thinly veiled attack on the McCarthy hearings.

 

[GreenDragonKnight]

You put Bradbury in the other category, when a lot of his stuff had humans wandering around in the open on Mars and Venus.

As far as anyone in the 40s knew, Mars and Venus could be habitable. That was, bear in mind, the beginning of the age of terror fearing nuclear apocalypse, so Bradbury thought it likely that in decades to come people would head for Mars or Venus to escape it - which seemed credible at the time. I was really contrasting his works with Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose portrayal of Mars and Venus were never meant to be the least bit believable, but they were hugely popular.

Of course, Burroughs' Africa was every bit as much of a fantasy setting as his Barsoom...

 

[Timewalker]

Getting back to Bradbury for just a sec, my reaction to the stories of his I've read has always been, essentially, huh...????

I mean, any fans of his I certainly hope you don't take offense to this, but the stories of his I've read, as soon as I finished reading them I just kind of sat the book aside, then scratched my head like, what just happened...???

Now of course, Fahrenheit 451 wasn't meant to be science fiction or even fiction so much as a very thinly veiled attack on the McCarthy hearings.

As I said, Ray Bradbury himself said he considered most of his stories to be fantasy.

As far as anyone in the 40s knew, Mars and Venus could be habitable. That was, bear in mind, the beginning of the age of terror fearing nuclear apocalypse, so Bradbury thought it likely that in decades to come people would head for Mars or Venus to escape it - which seemed credible at the time. I was really contrasting his works with Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose portrayal of Mars and Venus were never meant to be the least bit believable, but they were hugely popular.

Of course, Burroughs' Africa was every bit as much of a fantasy setting as his Barsoom...

You made no mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs in your previous post.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Real (aka hard SF)/fun? Tricky...

The Martian by Andy Weir perhaps and the Culture books by Iain M Banks (the parts set in the Culture; the rest of the universe is pretty grim).

Somewhat controversially, placing it under Real, I think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams counts because its science, while bonkers, has internal consistency (mostly).

I forgot about The Martian. I never read the book but I loved the movie. I must have seen it at least 3 times by the time it came to the discount theater.

I think that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy loses its "real" status based just on the Infinite Improbability Drive alone. I love the series but I don't think that "internal consistency" is enough to place its delightfully outlandish ideas into the "real" category.

As far as the Culture, the technology is so far advanced that it's hard to really say what is and isn't plausible. But given how intuitive stuff like Google has become in the last few years, it makes the advanced Minds and Drones of the Culture seem pretty plausible given sufficient centuries of development. (And given that the series started in the 1980s, it also seems kinda prescient.) It also feels more grounded the way that they have advanced interstellar travel but it's still not instantaneous. If you want to go more than a few star systems over, it's going to take you a few years. And while the Milky Way Galaxy is pretty well charted, no one has been to any other galaxies. (Which seems really weird when held up next to something like Stargate Atlantis, which is set in the present day but says that the U.S. Air Force has starships capable of reaching the Pegasus Galaxy in a mere 3 weeks.)

As far as how "fun" the Culture series is, I guess it depends on your definition of "fun." Certainly, if you're a citizen of the Culture, you are most likely going to be living a life of extreme luxury and choice beyond your wildest imaginings. If you're outside of the Culture, there are lots of other benevolent alien societies out there but there are also a lot of relatively primitive worlds--by Culture standards, Star Trek would be primitive--where life continues to be nasty, brutish, & short and where the Culture's well-intentioned meddling often seems to get other people killed. There's definitely a dark side to the series. I think the only book where our protagonist outright "wins" is The Player of Games. Many of the other books either end in failure (Consider Phlebas), futility (The Hydrogen Sonata), or with everything turning out ok irrespective of anyone's efforts for or against (Excession).

Spoiler: The Hydrogen Sonata

Banks' final book before he died, The Hydrogen Sonata, spends the entire story focusing on a mission to retrieve some evidence to corroborate something that the leading Minds already kinda knew. Thousands of people are injured or killed over the course of this mission. And in the end, the Minds decide to do nothing with the information anyway, which they already kinda said they were probably going to do from the beginning. It was a fitting end to a magnificent series full of boundless creativity and pyrrhic victories.

A good chunk of Surface Detail takes place in a realm that is pretty much literally Hell. But while the books are often not happy tales, they nevertheless have an escapist adventure element to them. After all, Aliens & The Terminator are both dark, death-filled movies that often veer more into horror movie territory but they're also a helluva ride!

 

[Greg Cox]

Getting back to Bradbury for just a sec, my reaction to the stories of his I've read has always been, essentially, huh...????

I mean, any fans of his I certainly hope you don't take offense to this, but the stories of his I've read, as soon as I finished reading them I just kind of sat the book aside, then scratched my head like, what just happened...???

Which stories have you read? Some of my favorites are "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Homecoming" and "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "Usher II." None which, I guess, are terribly plot-driven, but are so evocative and darkly beautiful that they've stayed with me for decades. And "The Skeleton" (which is horror) seriously skeeved me out as a kid.

Although I'll admit that, as youngster, "And the Moon Be Still as Bright," kinda flew over my head, probably because I was expecting something more plot-oriented instead of a tragic, elegiac mood piece. .

I'll cop to preferring his short stories to his novels, which is probably why "The Martian Chronicles" and "The October Country" are my favorite of his books.

 

[Timewalker]

Which stories have you read? Some of my favorites are "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Homecoming" and "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "Usher II." None which, I guess, are terribly plot-driven, but are so evocative and darkly beautiful that they've stayed with me for decades.

The only word I could ever use to describe "There Will Come Soft Rains" is depressing. There is nothing beautiful about it, unless you find death by nuclear annihilation beautiful.