On 24 Aug 2004, at 12:45 pm, G. D. Akin wrote:
On another list a few months, we were discussing Margaret Atwood's "The
Handmaid's Tale"
and "Oryx and Crake". Someone mentioned that Ms Atwood was adamant about
her works being NOT Science Fiction (apparently, if they are mainstream
novels, they sell better????))
One member disagreed and even offered to explain to Ms. Atwood why those
works are SF.
My question is this: what makes a book/story SF?
Any definitions appreciated.
Hugo Gernsback : "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story -- a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision . . . Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading -- they are always instructive. They supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form . . . New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow . . . Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written . . . Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well."
John W. Campbell Jr : "Scientific methodology involves the proposition that a well-constructed theory will not only explain away known phenomena, but will also predict new and still undiscovered phenomena. Science fiction tries to do much the same -- and write up, in story form, what the results look like when applied not only to machines, but to human society as well."
J.O. Bailey: "A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences . . . It must be a scientific discovery -- something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science."
Judith Merril: "Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue,hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, or 'reality' . . . I use the term 'speculative fiction' here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional 'scientific method' (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of changes -- imaginary or inventive -- into the common background of 'known facts', creating an environment in which the responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the characters, or both."
Brian Aldiss: "science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode"
Darko Suvin : "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment".
Robert Scholes : "the tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points of departure. Yet structural fabulation is neither scientific in its methods nor a substitute for actual science. It is a fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people who must live with those revelations or developments."
Leslie Fiedler : "the myth of the end of man, of the transcendence or transformation of the human -- a vision quite different from that of the extinction of our species by the Bomb, which seems stereotype rather than archetype".
Alvin Toffler : (sf) "by dealing with possibilities not ordinarily considered -- alternative worlds, alternative visions -- widens our repertoire of possible responses to change".
Marshall McLuhan : "Science fiction writing today presents situations that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies."
Kim Stanley Robinson : (sf was) "an historical literature . . . In every sf narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment of our past."
Damon Knight : "Science fiction is what we point to when we say it"
Norman Spinrad: "Science fiction is anything published as science fiction".
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone." - Bjarne Stroustrup
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