Science Fiction

[Nick91]

I have been looking up some top 100 sci fi lists. They are quite interesting lists. Enders Game often appears near the top, which is a book I hadn't heard of before. It surprises me some of the books that are listed as science fiction, even excluding fantasy books like The Hobbit and the Disc World series, which I consider part of a separate genre. Watership Down is sometimes listed as a science fiction book - why? It's about rabbits leaving one warren to establish another. What's science fiction about that? To me, it is odd to see The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy listed as science fiction, as I regard it as a comedy. To be fair, it does have more science in it than many so-called science fiction books. For example, the infinite improbability drive was a joke on quantum mechanics. The dystopias seem more a separate genre too. I would only tenuously regard 1984 as science fiction.

Still, I am in the mood for reading a few more science fiction books, when I can find the time. On my mental list is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (shelved under G not L in the local bookshop) and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Which Arthur C Clarke and Issac Asimov book would you recommend, as I do not want to read an entire series. Oh yes, and Frankenstein too.

I find it a bit strange that you would distinguish Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy as a comedy and not science fiction. Can't it be both? Science fiction is after all not necesarilly focused mainly on future tech, space ships etc. It can also just be a story set in a time and place where technology is more advanced than it presently is. It can be used to showcase humanity from a different perspective, or to explore a variety of social structures (Iain M. Banks' Culture series comes to mind). Sci-fi that has a specific focus on technology and science is usually called hard science fiction, at least if the hypothetical tech and science is well researched and grounded in actual, real world science.

1984 on the other hand features fantastic (for it's time) technology; mass surveilance, real time rewriting of history. Besides it is set in the future, which in my admittedly quite loose definition of Sci-fi definitly makes it at the very least halfway science fiction in and of itself.

I do agree with you about Watership Down though, because it is in no way, shape or form science fiction. I feel pretty safe putting a big, fat fantasy lable on it. And yes, the border between science fiction and fantasy is getting increasingly murky with every passing year, but not that murky!

[kev67]

I find it a bit strange that you would distinguish Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy as a comedy and not science fiction. Can't it be both? Science fiction is after all not necesarilly focused mainly on future tech, space ships etc. It can also just be a story set in a time and place where technology is more advanced than it presently is. It can be used to showcase humanity from a different perspective, or to explore a variety of social structures (Iain M. Banks' Culture series comes to mind). Sci-fi that has a specific focus on technology and science is usually called hard science fiction, at least if the hypothetical tech and science is well researched and grounded in actual, real world science.

To me the comedy subverts the science fiction. It is difficult to imagine a comedy crime novel or a comedy horror novel. Science fiction generally takes itself quite seriously. Science fiction authors have a difficult tas in making an alternative world seem plausible. That is not to say that characters in sci-fi books cannot have a great sense of humour.

1984 on the other hand features fantastic (for it's time) technology; mass surveilance, real time rewriting of history. Besides it is set in the future, which in my admittedly quite loose definition of Sci-fi definitly makes it at the very least halfway science fiction in and of itself.

Part of the trouble I have with regarding 1984 as science fiction is that the technology in the book is hardly more advanced than the time in which it was written. Television cameras were not widespread in 1948/9 when the book was written, but they had been invented. Apart from the surveillance technology, hardly any other aspect of technology had changed. By the same dint, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go does not seem like science fiction either. By contrast, Brave New World seems far more like science fiction.

[Nick91]

To me the comedy subverts the science fiction. It is difficult to imagine a comedy crime novel or a comedy horror novel. Science fiction generally takes itself quite seriously. Science fiction authors have a difficult tas in making an alternative world seem plausible. That is not to say that characters in sci-fi books cannot have a great sense of humour.

Well, I guess we have different opinions in the matter, to me it seems strange to draw such a distinct line between comedy and something else; black humor could for example i some cases be comedy-horror. Whether it's called comedic science fiction or science comedy or whatnot doesn't really matter, it has space ships, advanced technology, galactic government, aliens and it is funny in -here comes the point- that context. The comedy often comes from the main character, Arthur Dent, being cast into to him alien and unfathomable situations, places, ideas and possibilities. Sure, the situations are mostly in and of themselves comedic in nature, but they are also squarely in sci-fi territory; time travel, gigantic murderous robots, interstellar travel, aliens etc. Just because science fiction in general takes itself very seriously doesn't mean Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy isn't sci-fi, it just means that it's unusual. Sci-fi as a genre has come to a point where it's progenitors, Asimov, Verne, Wells, would hardly recognize it. There is such an endless amount of subgenres in sci-fi, and fantasy for that matter, endless combinations and mergings of different genres, that it to me seems faulty not to include comedy in that merry family.

Part of the trouble I have with regarding 1984 as science fiction is that the technology in the book is hardly more advanced than the time in which it was written. Television cameras were not widespread in 1948/9 when the book was written, but they had been invented. Apart from the surveillance technology, hardly any other aspect of technology had changed. By the same dint, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go does not seem like science fiction either. By contrast, Brave New World seems far more like science fiction.

Yes, the technology might not be so strange. But 1984, and other dystopian fiction isn't hard science fiction, its more social science fiction. Concepts like superstates, mass brainwashing, real time history revision, the eradication of the individual. Science fiction doesn't just take the technology into account, but also the manner in which it is used. Newspeak, the language Orwell invented, is for example science fiction through and through, every last syllable.
Now, that doesn't mean that I would put 1984 squarely into a folder, put a stamp on it and say: this is science fiction - THE END-, but you won't ever hear me say that it isn't science fiction. Because it is, but it is also many other things; it is a novel which, to me at least, falls into that ever expanding borderland of sci-fi, a grey zone; where all the interesting things happen.

[Nick91]

Whoops, double post, sorry!

[New Secret]

3. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. Pre-Vietnam war pro-military training and aliens combat book with political/social tones. Classic.

Starship Troopers was a real great action sci-fi book and I enjoyed the movie a lot when I was a teen. I discovered Robert Heinlein early on when I was getting into sci-fi. What really impressed me was "Stranger in a Strange Land" because at that time I was getting obsessed with the planet Mars and read all the library fictions that were on the shelf and looked at all the space photo albums. (I owned a text book published in 1951 that claimed it was scientific fact that people with wings on their backs lived on Mars and there were drawings to prove it.)

"Stranger in a Strange Land" was impressive because it was about a human raised under the Martians brought back to Earth. The main character had magical powers that made him godlike (but every Martian had) and he actually came to own half of Earth all on his lonesome. Things about this book that I disliked were all the religious references and the incorporation of hippy free love propaganda leftish foolishness. (It was written and published at the end of the 60s if I remember correctly.) One of the characters is based on Hugh Hefner and there are a lot of other pop-culture tie-ins with this novel that set it apart from it's contemporaries. The mentality of the main character is a real mind trip because he does not think like a human and Robert Heinlein did a great job of making him convincingly so. Considering all the science fictions that I read as a teen this one always stands out in my memory. I must've read it six or seven times.