On Aug 24, 2004, at 9:44 AM, Bryon Daly wrote:
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 12:03:39 -0400, Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 08:45:57PM +0900, G. D. Akin wrote:
My question is this: what makes a book/story SF?
Simple. It should be fiction, and it should involve science or something
related to science in some major or minor way!
So by this classification, would you consider Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" not to be SF?
I'd say not, but only conditionally -- that is, it's not SF in the same way that Orwell's _1984_ is not SF.
Dystopian futures are themselves a bit of a subgenre of SF, but I don't think they're necessarily classifiable per se as SF. While "Make Room! Make Room!"/_Soylent Green_ is often classified as SF, I don't think the genre categorization is valid. There's nothing in the movie, at any rate, that hints at spectacular future tech (cheesy arcade console games in home foyers notwithstanding). Making nutrient supplements out of corpses is not de facto SF; it's really recycling taken to its logical (and logically-supportable) conclusion.
Put another way I don't believe that something like Atwood's book -- which really needs, for the record, a rigorous culling of commas and a radical appendectomy -- is SF, nor is Bradbury's _F451_ (he would probably agree with me on that), nor _1984_. (For that matter, most of Ayn Rand's monotonous, indistinguishable diatribes fall into this non-category as well.)
So we know a little of what I think SF is not -- how about what it is, according to my majesty?
Well, we have slots and slots, hard SF, space opera, etc. -- and then there are the simply bizarre, such as _Space: 1999_, which in its first season had some of the most realistic moon-vehicle tech around (though everyone wore jumpsuits in crash-prone Eagles, go fig, and Alpha was built right on Luna's surface!) AND which dipped into fantasy, not too much unlike its two-decade late tangential heir, _Babylon 5_.
I like the SF/SF distinction: Science fiction and speculative fiction. Into the former I'd probably slot the works of at least one noted author on this list; into the latter I'd stuff most everything else clearly quasi-tech yet not fantasy, such as the rapidly self-destructing _Star Wars_ franchise.
The distinctions aren't all that arbitrary; verifiable or at least plausible science goes into scientifiction. Transporters, "subspace anomalies" and "blasters" that project visible beams ... the latter. (Though it gets contorted; _The Trouble with Tribbles_ is arguably one of the best Trek episodes ever and stands as a hallmark of SF as a genre; but the episode itself exists in a silly Trek franchise. Problem? That franchise did not exist in 1968, when the episode was written -- so then, it was most certainly SF, even if its storytelling vehicle, in later shambling incarnations, became goofy self-parodizing spec-fic.)
And the _Dr. Who_ thing is its own can of worms. Or, really, TARDIS. Very much a multidimensional and largely atemporal socio-artistic phenomenon that has had the balls to make it across four decades -- DECADES! -- of time in an era of intense international upheaval and notorious impermanence.
Oh yeah: Philip K. Dick. A subgenre unto himself.
As to why Atwood doesn't want her stuff labeled SF -- that's easy. L. Ron Hubbard wrote, according to Bridge Publications, SF. Would you really want your books to be genericized into the same category as such abjectly pulpish crap?
It takes Delany's orchids of brass or my own massive chutzpah (or Brin's feet etc. of clay) to willingly be part of the genre and STILL try to produce "literature" in the category.
And there it is. Delany, Brin and me all mentioned in the same sentence. I await the Fourth Horseman.
-- WthmO
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