It doesn't tell us in any way how the story is written. Science fiction has been written in comic form, for the screen, in prose, even in poetry.Trying to define science fiction as a set of sub-genres and themes is impossible. That's because "science fiction" is a term like "prose" or "realistic." These terms tell us how the story is written, not what kind of story, i.e., genre.
Science fiction is and always has been a real genre. It doesn't tell us anything about the form of the story, only of the content.
I don't agree either, and never said any such thing. Nice straw man argument, though.As to the notion that science fiction is a genre in the literature of ideas, specifically, the kind that examines the effect of scientific change on humanity, well, that seems to be a definition inspired by the thought there must be 1.)some weighty reason for the story, namely examining change and 2.) some unique purpose for the science, giving science fiction a justification for its existence. I don't agree with either proposition.
Of course. Many science fiction stories were written purely for entertainment. The genre title "science fiction" says nothing whatsoever about whether or not a story is written to entertain or enlighten of whatever.Entertainment is a valid purpose for fiction and drama.
Not sure what your point is. No one in this thread has rejected any genre as inferior. Even the thread title, which asks the question "why is there no pure sci-fi (which I take to mean science fiction) on TV today?" has nothing to say about the overall quality of one genre over the other, it only implies that one genre isn't being well represented on television.Criticism is concerned with why some things are regarded as entertaining, and may reject some forms of entertainment as inferior.
1) Who's "us?"This is not always very comfortable for us, which is why many people oppose criticism.
2) Where's the criticism in this thread? I don't see it anywhere, other than in the link I posted which i've already said I don't agree with.
I would say writing fantasy is at least just as difficult as writing science fiction. Fantasy writers may get to make up their own worlds, but they have to establish the rules early in the story and stick with those rules. It's not like anything at all can happen in the story. It's rules may be different from the rules of our world, but those rules need to be followed just as well as the rules that govern our known universe. Not only that, but the author has to be able to explain those rules in the natural course of the story, whereas in a science fiction story, unless a difference between the science fiction story and the real world is specifically highlighted, the reader is going assume there is no difference. A fantasy reader is going to automatically assume our world and the world of the story are different, and are going to expect the author to show those differences right away.Science is about reality, which is interesting in itself. This is reason enough to include science in science fiction, or in principle, any fiction. The objection to labeling science fiction as just more fantasy is that this false distinction relieves the science fiction writer of the obligation to write good science fiction, where the science isn't (for my taste, boring) BS. Fantasy writers not only don't have to worry about reality posing any strictures as to what's good or bad fantasy, they get brownie points for ignoring it.
In short, a fantasy story isn't any easier, it's just a different beast.
Not at all. If you are competent in chemistry, you can use your imagination to speculate about the future of chemistry. The writers of Analog and Asimov's do it all the time, and do it very well.The wikipedia definition is useless in practice. The vast majority of science ficiton, good or bad, is in no way any part of a literature of ideas. It is also a bad definition in principle, because the part about "pure imaginative speculation" directly contradicts the part about scientific possibility.
Wells wrote pure fantasy as well as science fiction. Certainly, mainy of his stories qualified as science fiction in the day. He used what we knew of the practice of vivi-section to write a story about what could have been the next nightmarish step. If he were alive today, the story would have probably had to do with genetics.There is plenty of scientific speculation but if it's pure imagination, it's not scientific speculation. A theoretical definition that would exclude not just H.G. Wells but most of Jules Verne is useless.
Wells wrote a short story called "The Plattner Story" that was about a guy who accidentally ends up in a higher dimension, a dimesion one step higher than the three we are able to perceive. When he returns, he's been "flipped" around in this other dimension and his heart is now on the opposite side of his body, he's now left-handed where he was once right-handed, etc. The story is every bit as relevent (and entertaining) today as it was over a hundred years ago.
(You can read the story online here. It's one of my favorites.)
This we can agree on.The other way of reading the question, why is there so little scifi that tries to be well written scifi in which the "science" isn't just gibberish? There's very little of that because science fiction isn't very popular, fantasy is popular. Television is a very mass oriented medium and it will aim for the fantasy audience first.