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I used to be very much into science fiction. I've read Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and a thousand lesser authors. I liked Star Wars well enough, and watched even the worst of the various Star Trek series (the best is TNG).

But what gets classified as "sci fi" rarely has anything to do with science anymore. It ends up being about politics, or society, or is just an action or fantasy plot with a thin layer of speculative gimmickry layered over the top almost as an afterthought.

Science fiction is supposed to be about "What if this scientific idea turned out to be true and happened?" These days, that is the narrow and neglected genre of "hard science fiction" diluted almost out of existence by the flood of "soft sci fi" with no such scientific premise behind it. I liked the movie In Time, but it was cultural critique not science fiction. There was no claim that the arm counters were scientifically generated, or any scientific principle (real or imagined) being explained. They weren't even trying to explain the sociology or economics in scientific terms, but rather in moral and ethical terms. That is not science fiction. Perhaps we should call it "syfy" to distinguish.

On the other hand, there are movies like Contact and The Man From Earth. These stories that take scientific theories and aims -- contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and unnatural human longevity, respectively -- and expose them to narrative analysis. They are science fiction. (And I highly recommend them both.)

So when people ask me if I like science fiction, the answer to their words is yes but what they intend to ask is different than what their words actually portray. I like fiction about science. But taking some other genre and adding some impossible gadgetry or setting it in space so you can claim it is science fiction does not guarantee I'll like it. In fact, pretenders to the classification "science fiction" earn a little of my ire, which must be overcome for me to like them. They're actually less likely to earn my support than if they just confessed to being the genre they actually are.

So, what about you? Do you prefer science fiction or syfy?

   

Check out Defiance on the syfy chan. Try and catch the pilot episode, I seen it was on a couple days ago. Thats about the one show on the syfy now that I would recomend to ppl.

   

If you want to nitpick this you're probably correct in your analysis. The problem is that hardcore sci-fi, with the emphasis on the science, is damn boring. There's probably not a lot of readers who want to read a ten page chapter on how a mutated quark of 10 to the 500th power on a tangental x-y axis can create a warp drive. And there's probably no studio that would want to make it into a TV show/movie because the audience for it would be too small to make it worthwhile. That's why they make these shows and books mostly about trying to destroy the Borg or evading Imperial cruisers by flying recklessly through an asteroid belt. It's a lot more spectacular both visually and on the written page and will attract more customers.

Just think of it as adventure fiction placed in a future setting. It doesn't have to be understandable (or even real, as most of the alleged science in space fiction is completely manufactured) to be enjoyable.

   

Science fiction is a very broad term and I'm going to suggest that you probably like sub-genres of sci-fi more than others (I'm guessing space opera and military science fiction might be more your style). For example, Wikipedia lists a dozen or so sub-genres in science fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction

But Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was a comment on society, even though it may have taken place in some future setting. Isaac Asimov's I Robot asked similar questions about society and how muc automation is good for society. Star Wars was pitched as a western in space.

Even military science fiction like David Drake's Hammers Slammers examines war and society and makes you think about what is right versus what is necessary in combat.

   

Ha! 10^500 is the approximate number of other potential universes in string theory. Coincidence? I think not.

   

Thanos: I'm not arguing that action or character or drama or romance must be excluded, or that scientific explanations of devices are necessary. I'm only saying that to be called science fiction the premise of the story ought to have something to do with science. Merely being set in space isn't science; it is only setting. Hard science fiction can have any trait of any other genre, so long as it is centrally based on some scientific idea.

Take Ringworld by Larry Niven: it's got action, adventure, (too much) sex, crazy space aliens, and social commentary. But it's underlying premise is "What if you took the mass of Jupiter and spread it into a ring around a star the size of Earth's orbit around the sun? How could it be made such that people could live on it?" Everything else is essentially a fantasy constructed to give the story an excuse to explore Niven's speculation. It's some pretty impressive science fiction and some pretty great adventure, too.

And I do like genres other than science fiction, so I fairly often like movies that are those other genres mascaraing as science fiction. I just don't agree with the premise "If you like science fiction, you'll like this movie!" when the movie is, say, Treasure Planet. I like Treasure Planet, but it is because I like the pirate adventure of it, the human drama of it, and the incredible visual style of the animation. There's essentially no science in it, but I like it anyway. It's just not science fiction.

   

I like sci fi that delves in societal changes in the future, which is why I enjoyed Dune and Asimov's Foundation series. I also enjoyed Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction, with it's Edenist and Adamist factions. The Commonwealth Saga is pretty good too

   

Lots of science fiction in the world these days. Just turn on the news and you'll see all sorts of mind-bending stories like how Obamacare is raising everyone's medical costs by at least 30% yet it bend the laws of the universe by making health care 'more affordable'. You can also see stories in the media where revolvers 'spray' limitless amounts of ammunition and you can see stories where semi-automatic weapons fully-automatically fire hundreds of rounds out of 20-round magazines.

My favorite of late is the one where the government cuts unemployment benefits for millions of people, removing them from the unemployment rolls, and then the same government proudly announces how unemployment has gone down!

Yep....science fiction.

   

Glad you've confirmed that there isn't a single thread that can go by where you can't flog your dead horse in.

Prohibition is evil too.

   

Prohibition was proposed to eliminate drunkeness and instead it made it worse. In one of the few examples of logical behavior in the 20th Century people ended up realizing that the pie-in-the-sky ideal of Prohibition was a total flop and they repealed it.

And I wasn't 'flogging' anything but instead was just illustrating examples of science fiction in the news.

   

Trickle down economics turned out to be the biggest example thus far in economic thinking of how something born in the world of fantasy and fiction was allowed to rampage through real life, no matter how much damage it continues to cause.

   

Well...despite the contradictions inherent in Reagans' economic plan it worked. The 1980's saw a massive expansion of the US economy which only contracted when Bush Sr. became President and instituted the single largest tax increase in US history up to that point. That decision led to the recession that got Clinton elected (It's the economy, stupid!).

Clinton, wisely, rolled back selected portions of the Bush tax hike and his term almost surpassed Reagan's for economic growth.

Trickle down theory started to gel when Carter imposed his luxury tax to penalize the wealthy for buying large-ticket items of over $30,000 in price. The result of that tax was a demonstrable trickle-down effect when wealthy people stopped buying expensive cars and especially domestically made yachts and private aircraft. The luxury tax was the death of the US yacht industry and it put tens of thousands of blue collar workers out of work as the wealthy started buying principally from Italy.

That a negative effect could trickle down led to the consideration that a positive effect would trickle down, too. This was the case as when Reagan implemented his economic policies housing starts increased and the US started producing more high-end automobiles...which was good news for the union auto workers who built Cadillacs.

That's the real lesson of trickle down is that it works both ways: higher taxes on the wealthy have effects beyond the wealthy and lower taxes on those people have effects beyond them as well.

I know it is anaethema to some people to even contemplate that wealthy people can have positive impacts in an economy but the facts demonstrate that when you punish the wealthy that it's ultimately the working man who suffers the most.

   

that's fantasy

   

At this point that horse has been dead do long it is half rotten.

   

Damn I was going to say something about Sci fi too but all that talk of Obamacare are made me forget what I was about to say....while I'm at it would it be inappropriate if I brought in swimming pools into the thread ?

   

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