Re: BBC 100 Most Popular books

In article <cli422hpv256vj5c9otpmratpv48upb2lf@xxxxxxx>, r.rice@xxxxxxxxxxx
says...

On 22 Mar 2006 21:44:51 -0800, "trike" <dougtricarico@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

It seems to me that it's a whole lot easier to refer to a post-it note
stuck to your monitor than it is to learning the actual laws of physics
and then sticking to them. Especially if we're talking about molding a
world to reflect the character's inner journey. That's so much easier
to do in Fantasy than in Science Fiction that there isn't even a way to
compare it. In Fantasy everything -- literally everything -- that
happens or even exists in a world can all go to support the point you
want to get across. In SF it's far more difficult to get away with
something like that, because the world has to behave as we already
understand it to. In Fantasy, you can just make up whatever rule you
want so as to underscore whatever point you want.

So, books with time travel, FTL, AI, nanotech, cyborgs, aliens,
antigrav, auto-docs, transporters, and replicators are all fantasy?
Because none of that behaves like the world that we understand.

The world most of us understand, includes the following very important
feature:

There are parts of it that we understand that we do not understand, yet.
From time to time, scientists figure out parts that had not been previously
understood, and engineers use this new understanding to make and do things
that had not been previously possible. These new understandings and new
capabilities tend to follow certain patterns, e.g. they tend to be consistent
with prior understanding, they tend to involve gadgetry, they tend to be
universally applicable (the gadget can be mass-produced and used by anyone),
and so forth.

The idea that scientists and engineers might, at some point in the future,
build a cyborg, is entirely consistent with the world most of us understand.


It is, as has been pointed out, "theoretically possible". But there is
a difference between theory and reality. In 1400, it was theoretically
possible to get to China by sailing west from Europe. Discovering a
huge chunk of land in the way changed that theory.

Yes, and in 1400 AD, a story in which someone built a better sailing ship
that could travel ten thousand miles without reprovisioning, and with it
sailed direct from Spain to China across an empty hemispheric sea, would
have been science fiction. Entirely consistent with the world as then
understood, but containing substantial speculative elements.

A story in which someone, perhaps possessed of the aforementioned supership,
perhaps possessed of secret geographic knowledge, perhaps very desperate or
very foolish, sailed west from Spain and ran into a new and undiscovered
land before the crew all starved to death, would also at that time have
been a work of science fiction.

A story written in 1400 AD, in which someone sailed west from Spain and
fell off the edge of the flat Earth, would have been a work of fantasy.
Or, perhaps, of very bad science fiction, if we allow for the author
being a fool instead of a fabulist.


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