Why

[james_davis_nicoll]

Do SF authors make up new elements? The elements don't seem to be in Seaborg's island of stability, either.

Actually, what I really mean is why would the sort of person who can't be bothered to look at a table of elements or think about the general decline in half-lives as atomic mass increases past a certain point bother with SF? What's the attraction for them?

Comments

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

They're attracted to science fiction as a style rather than a set of ideas?

I can't make fun--in my heart of hearts, I know that's how I got into it as a wee little one.

Whoosh! Spaceships! Pew pew pew!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Shiny is a metaphor. Or something like that.

(I'm convinced this is the explanation for Adam Roberts.)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Devil's advocate: given the lack of scientific realism in SF, can you blame him? On the other hand, he doesn't get that attempts at scientific realism drove written SF for decades. As far as I can tell, he thinks getting the science right is something for continuity anoraks.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Your devil's advocacy is sound.

AIUI he's an SF lover but he followed the literary career track, PhD and all, to the exclusion of the science side. So he teaches SF, and writes the stuff, but makes glaringly obvious errors -- not even sophomoric: more the kind that suggest he slept through science classes in secondary school -- and suffers from a bad dose of Dunning-Kruger effect insofar as he doesn't even grasp the extent of his own deficiency.

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

But how important are these errors?

I mean, I've done my time in space physics research, and I enjoy books (including your own) that play cleverly on real science, but there's a lot more to SF than that. Just looking at my bookshelf right now, I see stacks of Dick, Ballard, Ellison, Moorcock, all genuinely brilliant SF authors, none terribly bothered by scientific rigour.

Take The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: even when it was published, any scientifically literate person could have driven a coach and horses through its depiction of Mars, and much of the rest of the novel's background. So what? It's still one of the best SF novels ever written.

Imaginative expansion on rigorous science is one way in which SF can be good, but it is not the only way.

(NB: I have never read anything by Adam Roberts)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Roberts had orbital colonies using hoses to pump air from Earth's atmosphere in his "hard" SF novel. During subsequent conversations, Roberts revealed that he didn't understand why a pipe linking the depths of the ocean to the surface wouldn't result in a fountain from the pressure difference. "Some people don't like their science playful."

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

OK, that's funny.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It was actually a little painful. You could watch the idea not get through, and then when it did get through, you could watch his defenses reject the idea it mattered.

Still, somewhat better than the SF writer who couldn't understand how lift didn't require power (after editing an anthology on the theme).

[autopope.livejournal.com]

One of the perennial aphorisms of the writing biz is that you have to know the rules before you can break them.

This is usually applied to the basics of spelling, grammar, and then higher-level literary structure.

But in SF, it applies equally well to the science, if you're writing that variety of SF where the science is meant to be internally consistent, as opposed to that variety where it's basically window-dressing for a metaphor about the human condition.

Adam Roberts doesn't seem to understand the difference between the two formats -- or rather, to appreciate that when a rocket ship is just a rocket ship, stuff like its mass ratio and the specific impulse delivered by its fuel matters. He seems to be of that caste who relate to video recorders and toasters as magic boxes with runes on the front that cause it to Do Things when you perform the correct ritual, rather than as a collection of subsystems which are amenable to rational investigation.

Dick, in contrast, wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch while stoned out of his box on LSD and amphetamines in a single mad 72-hour rush, and he wasn't trying to describe a plausible future: he was trying to commit a vision of pure hallucinatory evil to paper before the ice weasels ate his fingers. Or something like that.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think Roberts has made the conceptual error that since he can parody something effectively, he understands it.

It's a little like a figure painter who can get the flesh tones right, but has no knowledge of anatomy.

I also get the vibe that there's some weird class-based willed ignorance going on, where actually caring about the correctness of scientific details is Not Done. That would really put him in a dying caste. (Who can afford to think like that these days? To rephrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in science, but science is interested in you.)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

That's classic British two-cultures stuff you're describing, and it's still with us. It's not the same as American know-nothingism, but it's just as pernicious.