Science fiction and/or/versus Fantasy

[Maria]

"Hard science fiction" has been a legitimate sub genre for as long as I can remember. When explaining how the hardware in the story works is most of the story, then it's hard sci fi. I don't particularly care for it, myself, but my son loves it so we have some in the house.

I don't think calling everything else casual works for me, though.

[Primula Baggins]

Or me; my own books are not casual SF but certainly are not hard SF, and pretty much all the SF I most enjoy reading falls into the same "other" category.

Frelga, I want to thank you for recommending Cherryh's Foreigner series. I am deep into the first book and really enjoying it, enough that I ordered the other two in the first trilogy last night. I don't know why I bounced off Cyteen, which many very discerning people love, but I did, two or three times.

This is also definitely good reading in light of what I'm working on next. She's got the richness of detail and setting plus good characterization and "alien" aliens that I'm working for.

[Frelga]

I'm glad you liked, Prim. The first book took some getting into, because its first chapters are essentially. "Something happens. Now it's fifty years later and everyone you just met died, but something else happens to interesting characters. Oops, now it's hundreds more years later, and those characters are also dead and never mentioned again. OK, that's couple hundred pages, now on with the actual story." Cherryh said that she considered throwing the first chapters out and I think she should have.

But other than that it IS a wonderful book, just as you say.

Thread movers (and shakers) - even though I was the one who asked for the thread to be kept in the private forum, I've never posted anything private in here.

[vison]

????

I guess I'm out of the loop.

Best "hard" scifi I ever read: Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward. I probably said that before.

But the "people" in it are wonderful. Not the humans, though. The bits with humans are just awful.

[Primula Baggins]

I really like Dragon's Egg. Also Hal Clement's books that I've read. Both are hard SF, but they also have interesting characters (even if those characters aren't necessarily the humans in the story).

Hard SF is big on Really Cool Ideas, and I love that stuff. I just want a few characters I can care about, too, and you can't always have both.

[vison]

I loved the Cheela. Alien, all right. But very cool.

[Primula Baggins]

Have you read any Frederik Pohl, vison? His Heechee series, which starts with Gateway, is classic big-idea hard SF, but the characters are also interesting.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I've gone ahead and moved the thread to the Library, but left a shadow in Red Book. Frelga, I had totally forgotten that there was a discussion about where the thread should be when it first was split.

[Frelga]

Thanks, Voronwë, and sorry, everyone, for confusing things.

[vison]

Have you read any Frederik Pohl, vison? His Heechee series, which starts with Gateway, is classic big-idea hard SF, but the characters are also interesting.

Yes. As a matter of fact, I am on a quest right now to find my copies of the Heechee saga. I thought Gateway was brilliant, but I also thought the series petered out somewhat. I am looking for it because the current fuss over health insurance in the US reminded me of it. You remember that part?

I have put away or given away so many books in the last few years that I've lost track of things.

It was a shock to my system when I found out that the Pern novels were actually scifi and not fantasy. I enjoyed most of them. Some more than others.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

You have nothing to apologize for, my dear Frelga.

The only "hard science fiction" that I have read was James Hogan's Giants trilogy (plus the additional book that he wrote later in the series, but by that point he had wandered to far from current scientific doctrine for it to still be classified as "hard" science fiction). Anyone else read those books?

[Primula Baggins]

I just went and looked, and I have a copy of GIANT'S STAR, which I must have bought in 1981 when it first came out, but apparently never read. Not sure how that happened.

There's no indication on the cover or inside that it's part of a trilogy, so am I right to think it's the first book?

In any case, I'll move it onto the "to be read" shelf. Or take it to the beach next week, if I don't get the next Foreigner books in time.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Prim, Giant's Star is the third book of the trilogy. I think it would make less sense to read it without reading Inherit the Stars and then The Gentle Giant's of Ganymede first, than it would to read The Dark Reaches before reading The Hidden Worlds and The Cold Minds.

Edit to add: I have the three books printed together in one volume: it's not that, is it?

[Primula Baggins]

No, it's not, darn it.

Interesting that nothing on the book indicates any relationship to any other book. But I see the ones you list are listed in the front of the book along with several others.

Well, I'll add them to my Powell's Books list. We're overdue for a vi$it there.

[Frelga]

I'm stuck for the second Foreigner book. Might have to order it.

Speaking about fantasy - my son is now being awfully quiet with the grandfather of it all - a copy of Greek Myths he got from the library just now. I pretty sure it's a kid's version.

[axordil]

Spice = oil?

I don't know. I don't think you could tell substantially the same story set in modern Saudi Arabia. Herbert invents a lot of future history and culture that are vital to the plot, and the spice is actually more necessary to his world than oil is to us.

And then there are the sandworms—a detail of setting that turns out to be not just kewl but essential to the story.

Spice=oil, fremen=dispossed Arabs (they practice what, zensunni? and their language is spiced, if you will with Arabic and Persian elements, Guild=the Corporate West, the Empire is British..it's not just the Middle East, but the Middle East of WWI-WWII. It's not the ONLY thing going on in the story, but it, along with the ecological angle the sandworms represent, is one of the three legs it stands on (the last being Paul's apotheosis).

What the SF setting allows Herbert to do is to combine the political, ecological, and religious elements into one story, which I agree could not be done in a historical or current setting. But then, I said "on one level."

I do think this points at a crux, though: the elements of story in SF are no different than those in any other form of fiction. Plot, character, conflict--wipe off the serial numbers and it's all the same. This expands on what Mith said: SF and fantasy provide an extra degree of freedom in the way these can be combined with credulity, by removing the restriction that credulity be entwined with historical or modern plausibility.

[Primula Baggins]

I do think this points at a crux, though: the elements of story in SF are no different than those in any other form of fiction. Plot, character, conflict--wipe off the serial numbers and it's all the same. This expands on what Mith said: SF and fantasy provide an extra degree of freedom in the way these can be combined with credulity, by removing the restriction that credulity be entwined with historical or modern plausibility.

Yes, of course. But I'd add that historically, SF has often gotten away with very weak characterization. The focus in those books, including some absolute classics of the genre, is the cool ideas and a gripping story; fully rounded characters and their emotional concerns and interactions would just clutter up the place.

Now that is changing, or maybe has changed. And from what I've seen it has corresponded with a huge change, the arrival of women in significant numbers as both writers and readers. I know very little about the history of fandom; there were certainly female fans right from the start, but how many I don't know. But there weren't many female SF/fantasy writers back in the Golden Age, and some felt it necessary to write under male-sounding or ambiguous names (Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, others). Whether or not the SF readership was mostly male, the publishers assumed it was.

I'm inclined to think that the emergence of characterization-heavy SF and the increase in readership by women is a positive-feedback loop, especially because people who read lots of SF, if they become published writers, often write SF—and it tends to be the kind they like to read.

[Frelga]

Now that is changing, or maybe has changed. And from what I've seen it has corresponded with a huge change, the arrival of women in significant numbers as both writers and readers.

I was thinking precisely that just yesterday. Or, possibly, it is that the girls who read this stories now grew up to be mature women.

I mean, I used to love the very macho stories, like Dumas, Jack London, Kipling, as well as the sort of SF you mention. And... it just doesn't work for me now. The heroes don't impress me with their ruggedness. I seek for different sort of a story. That's why Cherryh hits the spot, for instance, although heroes don't get much more ruggeder than Banichi.

It could be just me, of course - I am not arrogant enough to think that my experience is universal, but neither I am so arrogant to assume that it's unique.

[axordil]

I would expand what Prim says: genre fiction as a whole has had a higher tolerance for shallow characterization since about the time one could distinguish it from "maintstream" fiction. The point of mystery was to puzzle out whodunit, the point of horror was to give goosebumps, the point of SF was to make you go "gee whiz." I couldn't tell you what the point of romance was, but I know it had one. But there have always been better and worse examples. I leave it to everyone to recall their own.

To some extent I blame publishers past, who in their drive to provide what their particular niche public "wanted," offered them sausage made in volume from the cheapest literary cuts and byproducts rather than being selective.

[Primula Baggins]

Well, I really only felt comfortable slagging my own beloved genre, but certainly you're right, Ax. However, I think it went a little beyond that in SF (maybe it did in other genres too and I don't know, but)—in SF some of the recognized classics of the genre, written by grand masters in the field, pay little attention to characterization. So it's not a function of haste or incompetence, or a result of pulp conventions, because the books I'm talking about are not pulp. It's a product of the conventions of the genre, or I should say subgenre.

It also doesn't hurt the books. They are still amazing to read.