Tim on Current Science Fiction in General

A Mild Rant

    Right.  How to start....

    Probably by first indicating where I'm coming from on this.  I'll admit, I'm not the best-read when it comes to modern science fiction; most of my literary SF background are in the Classics (1930s-40s), the Golden Age (1950s-60s), and the Late Golden Age (1970s), which ended somewhere in the early 1980s, with the exception of my cyberpunk fixation.  That's what libraries personal and municipal had on hand; that's what I was exposed to and enjoyed, essentially ending with Larry Niven's KNOWN SPACE series.  More recent authors--Weber, Banks, Stackpole, et al.--I was only introduced to recently and my interest depends on the subjects at hand and the authors' handling of them.

    All in all, I'm oldskool in my leanings.

    Despite being oldskool, though, I've never fallen into the trap of defending various brands of oldskool over other brands other than the occasional opinion.  I've never argued that Clarke was better than Asimov was better than Bradbury; they're all different animals who wrote different things.  Clarke was a futurist who did his homework, ran the numbers, and wrote in the same vein (albeit probably a more spiritual capillary) as Tom Godwin in "The Cold Equations."  Asimov was a self-described "topical episodist" who translated the Dark Ages into space opera terms and wrote essentially the first pro-robot material.  Bradbury was a fantasy writer who used sci-fi trappings to frame the fantasy.  All different animals, and although my personal scale of preference runs Asimov-Clarke-Bradbury because I enjoy a little off-the-cuff fantasy but not too much, that's no reason to say that X is better than Y.

    Get to the point, Tim, I hear you cry.

    Right.  This leads into the Soft Sci-Fi Conflict of the latter XX Century, known colloquially as the "Vs." debates.  Essentially, get two groups of wankers--one preferring Star Wars, the other preferring Star Trek--and have them "debate" (read: troll and countertroll) endlessly on the Internet.  Now, I for one have no right to think anyone else should get a life... but the extremes this is taken to simply blow my mind.  And when my mind is blown, I get curious, and curiosity leads to research.  I won't bore you with details of flamewars across stardestroyer.net, SCN, and various personal websites, although I will share that it aggravates me to no end that someone with an astrophysics degree pisses it away in supporting fantasy as if it were science rather than going out and studying neutron stars or some such... and that aggravation leads inexorably to self-analysis on my part.  Why does Dr. Saxton's (and probably a few less-famous pile-it-high-and-deeps on the Trek side) hobby annoy me?

    I think, and I come to the conclusion: because it is the misapplication of science.  Alchemy, as it were, except even less useful--at least al-Razi discovered alcohol and invented distilling.  It's like performing alchemy, or phrenology, or deriving a geocentric mechanical model of the universe while knowing that it's hopelessly flawed.  All this use of screen captures and photo manipulation and in/deductive reasoning based on frames of celluloid like so many intelligence analysts... over something that is fake.  It's fiction.  Has everyone forgotten the phrase "dramatic license?"

    It goes past that, though.  The Vs. debate has been a core nerd battle for decades; even as more rational nerds, dorks, and dweebs work very hard to ignore it, it's leached somehow into the common consciousness.  Everyone has a favorite, and everyone defends it with vigor; my particular gripe is with people who argue that the Terran Federation (Starship Troopers) is fascist/racist/sexist/whatever without anything to back it up.  Likewise, everyone seems to find things that are outside their preferred style as inferior.  While this is a standard I understand due to by thoughts on centrism (which is another essay for another time), it's still annoying.

    Well, if you're still reading after this, then you're probably wondering:  "Gee, Tim, that's great.  You don't like something.  Whatchya gonna do about it?"  Not much.  Can't, really, except lead by example.  However, I do have suggestions based on a list of the things that seem to pop up the most often:

1. The Modern Demand for Versilimitude

    Oddly enough, most science fiction fans now demand that their fiction be as hard-science (sounding) as possible, no matter how ludicrously nutty or broken it actually is.  Old Star Trek-style wankiton-of-the-week technobabble doesn't work anymore; everyone demands to know operating principles of devices, numbers, design... things that really have no bearing on the story.  Coming from oldskool roots, this staggers me; in the paraphrased words of Harry Harrison, it's about the willing suspension of disbelief--all technology in the end is a fanciful plot device that enforces its own constraints whether or not it's actually feasible.  This in and of itself is not a problem; David Drake made up some bullshit about Van der Waals forces and superpure copper so his powerguns could be ammunition-dependent laser-phaser guns, and that's fine.  Disbelief suspended.

    For example, let's take Asimov's oldskool gravity drive.  It let the Foundation get from point A to point B, constantly accelerating, really fast.  It used gravity.  Did he ever specify how many gravities, or its exact mode of operation (bias drive, or Alcubierre bubble drive)?  No.  It was a plot device, to get from point A to point B.  Some were better than others; so some got from point A to point B faster.  It worked for the story.

    Counterexample:  David Weber wants to write Horatio Hornblower in space.  First step, develop the plot device: the impeller wedge which, for the uninitiated, is two big flat plates of gravitically distorted space above and below a ship, forming the shape of a wedge.  This wedge makes the ship go, with the added benefit that it is Completely Invulnerable, capitalized, to the top and bottom.  Boom, now it's Broadsides for the Empire!  Two-dimensional wet-naval warfare has been achieved in space (although he still keeps the third dimension in mind from time to time).  With that achieved, Weber continues to specify just how many gravities each ship can accelerate, tonnages, rotation rates, so on and so forth.

    Is this a bad thing?  No, not at all.  An attention to detail is good... but it's when this mindset is taken backwards that it annoys me.  People complain that Star Trek and Star Wars should have been more realistic and judge them based on modern standards of science fiction; most notable was probably Orson Scott Card being an asshole recently about Star Trek being "bad in every way possible" (and yes, riding cult-figure status into a position where you can directly insult the work of hundreds of people is being an asshole).  People demand that Star Trek be utterly realistic, and complain when ships zoom within shiplengths of each other, and argue about the silliest things (which is back to Vs.) when they all ignore one simple fact:  Trek's production model is not to be "accurate," it is to be entertaining.  The visual effects look the way they do because they look cool, not because it's a prediction of future technology or a "documentary," as Vs. people are keen of imagining.  You have photo analysis skills, good; now join the goddamned CIA and make it useful.  If the Vs. community was let loose to find terrorist bunkers in the Middle East, I swear that the region would be terrorist-free within the month.

2. Demanding Retroactive Continuity... in Reality

    Demanding versillimitude is fine.  It's the culture of the times... but don't go around pretending that modern stuff is actually any more hard-science.  If there's FTL travel, visible beam weapons, and sound in space, then there's some raping of reality going on somewhere.  Demanding that the past conform to today's standards is also plain silly; it's like expecting the Ancient Greeks in The Illiad to just stop and think about all the people they're killing and every individual soldier they lost, interviewing their families and posting their pictures really big on the late-night national news.  Sorry, people, but in the Greco-Trojan War life was cheap, and if you didn't die in war you were dead by 45 anyway from flu.  "Characters" in the barest sense of the term get named just long enough to catch a spear in the groin and fall over dead, never to be mentioned again--such was life back then.  In the 1960s, grown adults knew that Star Trek was unrealistic; they did, however, find it entertaining.  Everyone was still riding the wave of Kennedy Idealism; the shit hadn't totally hit the fan in Vietnam quite yet but the world was a scary place, and idealists wanted hope, and wanted to watch a hopeful show.  Yes, all the Feddies are all one-dimensional idealists for Mom and Apple Pie, and even I consider it surprisingly prudish now, what with all the squeamishness concerning genetic and cybernetic modification... but that's what people wanted to see, the human utopia, the happily-ever-after nation that we'd all get to after a dark time.  Besides, Roddenberry's background was in average westerns and cop dramas; the fact that he had any effect on s-f culture as a whole is astounding in hindsight.  Lucas is a special-effects man who wanted to make Flash Gordon but couldn't get the rights, so he watched The Hidden Fortress, threw in his own synthesis of Eastern mysticism, and off we go with Star Wars--this was after Watergate, everything was always serious (this is the Parallax View period, after all), and people wanted fluff... and got fluff, and were happy.  Such is the nature of the two major soft sci-fi franchises today.

    I'd just like people to keep context in mind while they're considering the long past.  We may think we're all hot shit right now in the present, but read some ancient philosophy and it eventually gets across that people way back when were hot shit in their day too.  Standing on shoulders, my friends.

3. Soft Versus Hard... Someone Is Compensating For Something

    My science-fiction is harder than yours.  Note how this ensures greater pleasure and higher probability of breeding superiority.

    People say "soft sci-fi" as if it were a bad thing.  Unfortunately, everyone's science fiction is a little flaccid.  Weber's impeller wedges have a bad habit of ignoring the difficulty of getting gravity to act perfectly planar (as opposed to a spherical effect, a la an Alcubierre bubble); Ian Banks channels Doc Smith with his system-ravaging zero-point-energy gridfire; even the Television Producer With The Hardest S-F Pseudocock, revered in the trigrammaton MJS, forgot to make sure that his true-science Omega-class destroyers spin down their gravity decks before combat... and this is not a rant against Mr. Strazinksy, who I have no evidence of being a jerk, but against his jerk cultists.

    Now, let's look at what makes "good" science fiction.  At this rate, I am not looking for petty delineations such as "Star Wars is better than Star Trek and therefore Star Trek is bad;" I am Aristotlean in the concept that people are attracted to the good and therefore anything with a popular following must have more than at just a little good in it.

    Now, these are the reasons I generally get when I ask people why they watch and enjoy these things.  Notice something?

    Science and technology generally aren't a part of it.  Sure, some of the tech is nifty and interesting, but I'll go watch Modern Marvels if I want to see a show dedicated to technology.  There's a reason none of these shows are Sixty Minutes of Scientific Description; indeed, ST: Voyager was derided for relying too much on technological and technobabblistic solutions.  Good hard SF writers describe their toys, sometimes at length, but in the end it isn't Space Doohickey that is responsible, it's The Character With The Space Doohickey.

    Ideas, epics, characters, plot... all ancient components of drama since Greek and Egyptian theatre.  Firefly never bothers to explain any of its technology (something Voyager managed to do many times in the first 13 episodes) but it does remember that there's no sound in space.  All with varying levels of  "realism" involved, but the best examples are always driven by character interaction, overarching themes, plots, and so forth.  Anything else is just fluff and candy.

    So, in the end... I can understand why a technologically-savvy gang of people with plenty of knowledge at their fingertips on the Internet could be extremely interested in absolute realism.  It goes with the standard cynicism of the modern age.  In the end, though, it would be very, very nice if everyone would realize that in the end, fiction is fiction.  Hard sci-fi can make great situations; I'm slowly working on my own version of "The Cold Equations" where reality is very much everpresent.  I also write plenty of soft science fiction where the technology--and I mean all the technology--are plot devices; they have their own constraints but are just part of the characters' environment.  Hard or soft, in the end it turns out that what makes good fiction is a constant throughout human history from Tale of Genji to today, and it are those constants that people should aim for.

    Not arguing whether or not a Death Star is realistic (it isn't) or complaining that it looks like the rocks hitting Captain Kirk are made of styrofoam (they are).

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