The Heart of Fiction: SciFi
The Heart of Fiction: SciFi
If Fantasy deals with magic and how it affects the world, one might guess if SciFi deals with how technology affects the world it is in—
The fact is, everything we do, every thought we have, every advancement is a advancement on our technology.
Harnessing fire from random lightening to rubbing sticks together, to flint and steel, to matches, to a trusty Zippo lighter are advances in the technology of fire. Writing your amazing stories on a laptop or on Google docs is a far cry from scribbling on cave walls, or animal skins or parchment with a bird feather. And it makes editing way easier too. And I’m sure agents’ lives have gotten much easier with the form email as well.
Going from listening to Uncle Joe reflect upon the old days, to the librarian, to using a card catalog, to microfiche, to encyclopedias, to Google is technology advancing and marching the art of researching right along. AND It makes research so much easier that there should be no excuse for the lack of historical or scientific research that makes me want to take my eyes out with red hot pokers. The only saving grace is that if I do choose to blind myself I’m sure that science will have an app for that before long.
Now I can remember a time when I did not have a smart phone where games and Internet was not instantly available. I can remember it but I do not want to return to it for anything in the world. I am a big fan of Marvel Puzzle Quest, Marvel Contest of Champions and Professor Google at 3am. I like being able to text my kids’ pediatrician when they have fevers (she gave me her number), I like being to diagnose myself as a sociopath, no, wait a psychopath, no wait, merely agoraphobic, no wait… ;-)
SciFi does have to do with technology but not just how technology affects us, technology affects us all no matter whether we want it to or not. We live in an age where technology is impossible to avoid. The Heart of SciFi deals with whether all this technology is worth the price we are paying for it.
Ooo, that was interesting, let’s say it again; The Heart of ANY SciFi piece SHOULD deal with whether all this technology is worth the price we are paying for it.
We always give up one thing for another. Not to get too political but we give up liberties for protections. Whether that is right or wrong, it is how it works; my blog my opinions.
We cannot incite a riot for the same reason we cannot start forest fires. If they get too big to control people get hurt. If we want every part of our lives automated for ease and convenience, we will also get big brother looking in.
I laugh myself sick when parents cry foul that furbies and minions and Hatchaminals are saying curse words when in truth they babble and repeat phonemes they hear. I smile when groups want to sue companies who make toys with intelligent speech that respond to children by analyzing speech and beaming it to “the Cloud” then beam back a response for the toy. The parents want security. They want cheap toys that are smart and they want secure servers. Well, don’t bring the dang thing into your house. You want security and all the cool technology, its give and take! Technology comes with a price! At some point we will be offered implants with infrared or Internet hook up directly into our brains. What would you pay? I for one will pay double to be excused. I get enough targeted marketing just through my browser history and for using my debit card thank you.
So on to the SciFi Genres! What price do we pay for the technology we are about to receive? Does it nourish our bodies and enlighten our minds or does it take us to places man was never meant to go? Only you can decide.
As one final note: Be careful you don’t confuse a SciFi SETTING for a SciFi GENRE. They can look similar but they are very different in how they affect theme. Setting can affect your genre but setting and genre are different parts of the story.
Military SciFi: Hypermilitary setting. The community has strong militant values and therefore the tech and the setting go hand in hand with the plot. Be careful with this one, plots can be kinda thin for actual novels. Stories can very easily fall into the trap of high in body count but low in plot. Often becomes society vs society stories with who has the bigger badder tech. Think Starship Troopers.
Space Opera: This the SciFi/ Fantasy hybrid- generally SciFi because of the setting but nothing else about it is really SciFi. It is generally more Fantasy but its hard to ignore the SciFi setting. Examples are Star Wars, Star Trek, Serenity.
Hard SciFi: There is a focus on maintaining plausible or real science in the work and nothing is flubbed for the sake of the story. The details are as important to the story as the plot itself. The story has to be logical, accurate credible and try to stand up to the rigors of scientific minds. This is important because they play “the game” of trying to hack holes in the brilliant story and end up missing the forest for the trees. Important moments for Hard SciFi fans are how sound, explosions and weightlessness are handled in space, how telecommunications are limited by the speed of light RAM scoops, faster-than-light travel and the how the stable orbits would play in colonizing plants. Examples of Hard SciFi literature are Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones, The Andromeda Strain, The Martin and Solaris.
NOTE: I am a history buff but am quite tech and science stupid. I am constantly asking my IT specialist husband for his help consulting on any of my attempts to write SciFi. But I throw popcorn at the TV while we watch The History Channel or anything claiming to be historic. My personal favorite in recent years was during The Tudors when Henry was wearing a doublet backwards. My family also refuses to watch historic movies with me after a BraveHeart incident.
Soft SciFi: The opposite of Hard SciFi (duh). We get to invent our tech and ask the readers to just accept it. We don’t need science to back it up but we should have some sort of logic behind it or we are dabbling in the realm of fantasy. Why does the matter transporter work? Unicorn farts and hope now let’s get back to saving the world already! Tally Ho! This science fiction does not have to be precise or explained by the reader’s definition of science but the people living in the world better understand how it works.
I would argue that Star Wars and Star Trek are closer to soft SciFi than hard SciFi. If we were given detailed diagrams of a lightsaber we could not build a working one but we could understand that it is technology beyond us. Soft SciFi also deals with biology, astrology and psychology. I have, on a shelf a book called The Science of the X-Men. It is really an interesting book where the authors tried to explain scientifically how mutants could exist. It made a bunch of fascinating hypothetical arguments not based on hard science but based on what the body might be capable of when testing known limits. One argument was that Wolverine was probably mostly colorblind because the eyes have rods and cones and one is for visual acuity, the other is mainly sensitive to color. Because he has super-human visual acuity and the eye only has so much room in it for rods and cones he is probably fairly color blind having traded visual acuity for color sensitivity.
This is a fascinating argument based in science but an argument that cannot be tested or proved. A) Studies like this have not been done on color-blind people; b) this is a hypothesis done by a biologist with a geek streak like mine based on a hypothesis about how eyes perceive color and visual acuity and cannot be proved as a double blind study without blinding folks (I believe that is unethical) and c) Wolverine is a fictional character. Therefore, this book, fascinating as it is, is soft science fiction. Soft science fiction has gravity without specific artificial gravity systems, laser beams, spaceships that can “dogfight”, engines stopping and spaceships screeching to a stop and my personal favorite, sound in outer space! Basically, everything that makes a good Star Trek drinking game. Examples of soft science fiction also include The Time Machine, and Dune and for the Non-Space variety, The Postman, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Stranger in a Strange Land, Back to the Future, Anything by Ray Bradbury, Terminator, Firefly/ Serenity and Doctor Who.
Near SciFi: Our technology has not gotten here but it is headed this way. Near SciFi tales are cautionary tales of a looming future and its dangers that can be if we are not careful. Examples of this are almost always man vs technology as we explore the merits of leaving technology as it is because we have gone far enough and technology is no match for our marvelous human brains. Examples of this are The Martian, Ready Player One, The Matrix. No one can beat the gloom and doom that comes with ignoring the ethics of what we should do with the knowledge of what we can do. Mankind is truly the herald of his own destruction. But at least we can know how we will screw ourselves over in the end with all the horrible futures painted in the near SciFi pieces out there.
Contemporary SciFi: Our current technology can do this with some clever applications to the tech we have, or the tech we are rumored to currently have. Okay conspiracy nuts, this one’s for you! This all about the tech the government is currently hiding from us or the technology we currently have and how we chose to use it. This often is a really gray genre with near SciFi because this deals with what we can do but don’t or the technology we have but don’t use in this manner. Near SciFi deals with tech still several logical leaps away. A great example of contemporary SciFi is Jurassic Park; we can clone animals, maybe not incomplete codes but we can clone body parts and full animals, there is a very small logical leap even if the scientific principles are not quite there, they are there in principle. We could do it, the question remains, should we do it?
Another rough example is The 6th Day. I put this one here because we have the tech to clone animals but we don’t the cloning of memory is still too far out. The 6th Day is either near or contemporary.
Car that runs on water? Sure! Secret Navy weaponized EMP that causes sea animals to beach themselves? Absolutely! Special secret sound cannon that causes healthy Americans to have heart attacks so they cannot testify before congress? Go for it! Tablet App that accurately predicts the next major stock market crashes and therefore the super secret wall street hitmen send secret assassins after the genius coding specialist before the app can go live in an effort to maintain the status quo between the haves and have-nots thus upholding the balance of power held by the upper .5%- hell yes, I might write it myself!
Or, if you are part of the Secret Wall Street death squad, I have no idea where you got such an outlandish idea— You get it.
Tune in next time so we can explore another genre of speculative fiction, The Bleaks and all the rest!
