The biggest difference between literary fiction set in the future and Science fiction is that literary fictioneers don’t really believe in the future. History is merely a spiral of ever widening crap, and we are on the brink of the abyss. Any opinions otherwise must be exterminated.
Story I heard from a bookshop clerk about the (sadly deceased) Ian M Banks. He was being interviewed on the South Bank Show and the interviewer asked, in a slightly condescending manner, “why did you start writing science fiction ?”, and he replied “I wanted to make sure I was good enough first.”
“The biggest difference between literary fiction set in the future and Science fiction is that science fictioneers don’t really believe in the future. History is merely an adventure story of good guys beating adversity, and we are on the brink of a glorious new age. Any opinions otherwise must be sneered at.”
...So every dystopia and cautionary tale is “literature” and inferior, while generic pew-pew space opera is always produced by “real” belief in the future and never pure profit motive or anything of the sort?
(Edit: or status motivation, nostalgia/desire to emulate something one likes, “lasers are cool” aestheticism, or whatever other reasons.)
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. The Culture novels are space opera, for example. yet they fall on the Enlightenment side of the divide; likewise for Star Trek, modulo a few more Romantic episodes and themes. Star Wars, however, is very, very Romantic, and it’s probably the first thing that comes to mind for most people when you bring up space opera.
There’s definitely a spectrum. I’m with you on the Culture, but I’m not sure I agree about Star Trek. If Star Trek is space opera, what qualifies as science fiction...?
If Star Trek is space opera, what qualifies as science fiction...?
To me, the defining element of “real” science fiction is that it actually explores the possible consequences of worlds where the science is different (either because people have made inventions that don’t exist in our world, because the laws of physics themselves are different, or—for scifi based on the social sciences—because the society is different; a lot of cyberpunk is arguably more sociological than hard-sciencial in focus), taking that as its starting point.
So I would say that anything that actually takes the science or scientific question as a starting point qualifies. Star Trek is infamous for doing the opposite—the writers would actually write scripts with dialogue like “Mr. Data, the so that the doesn’t blow up”, and then somebody would replace the tags with scientific-sounding words that fit into the wanted context.
Of course, many works traditionally labeled fantasy also prefer to explore the consequences of worlds with different physics (HPMoR, for example). I’ve heard this called “Hard fantasy”.
If you include sociological sf in your definition (which, I agree, you absolutely should), then Star Trek seems to qualify. The utopian society of the Federation is one of the key background facts of the franchise (assumed in TOS, explored in more depth in TNG, then deconstructed to some degree in DS9).
You’re right about the technobabble, of course. However, that’s often just a mask for the actual exploration of sociological/psychological concepts. And there was technological/hard-scientific stuff too: TOS’s “City on the Edge of Forever” was a classic time travel story. The Borg were an examination of transhumanism (a biased one, of course, but still). The Mirror Universe episodes are another example.
That’s why I emphasized the “taking that as its starting point” bit.
The old joke about space opera is that they’re Westerns in space, with space ships substituted for horses and laser guns substituted for ordinary guns. Now if a writer literally created a series by doing that—saying “hey, let’s make a Western in space and make these substitutions”—they wouldn’t be exploring the social consequences of space ships and laser guns, they’d just be adding fancy tropes on a story in order to make it seem more cool.
Now Star Trek is definitely not this bad. Many Star Trek episodes do seem to have been written with the purpose of exploring the consequence of something. But overall—especially with the more recent series—it does feel like there are more episodes that were conceived as a way of telling a cool story first, with the technological/social elements being added as the extra spice, rather than as serious exploration of the elements.
Of course, this is a spectrum and not a clear-cut split, and Star Trek is more sci-fi than many other series. But if I had to choose, I’d say it’s closer to the “space opera” end than the “sci-fi” end. (In general, I can think of very few TV series that I’d really put in the “sci-fi” end—most “real” sci-fi tends to be written rather than televised, in my experience. Though The Prisoner would qualify.)
“It’s not real science fiction, it’s just a ___ in space” is a common and tempting meme, but I’m not sure it holds together when you think about it. Imagine if we were to apply this reasoning to other genres, maybe even to Westerns themselves. “It’s not a Western, it’s just a romance with horses and cowboys. To be a real Western the Western setting must have some effect on the plot, but a romance can happen in any context. Just replace ‘barmaid’ with ‘minimum wage clerk’” “It’s not a police drama, it’s a Western, they’re just chasing each other using cars instead of horses. You’re not exploring the social consequences of the fact that they’re in a 21st century police station rather than just a sheriff in the West”.
Or do it more narrowly. “Sure, it has some science fiction elements, but most of it is still a Western. The cloning device has social consequences that affect the story, but the spaceships and lasers don’t. It could just as easily be a story that has a cloning device but is set in the modern era without any spaceships or lasers.”
Actually, I find it hard to think of many stories where spaceships and lasers would have an effect at all. I realize, of course, that spaceships and lasers are just examples, but generally, spaceships and lasers don’t have any effect on the story that couldn’t have been done in a Western—spaceships let you travel faster, but the universe is larger than the setting of a Western, with the net effect being the same—there are some near destinations and some hard to get to destinations..
Is the X-Files not anything except a police procedural because investigations and government coverups could happen without there being space aliens? (Sure, some of the specific investigations and coverups require aliens, but the same basic thing could be done without them.)
“It’s not a police drama, it’s a Western, they’re just chasing each other using cars instead of horses. You’re not exploring the social consequences of the fact that they’re in a 21st century police station rather than just a sheriff in the West”.
...to be fair, I’ve described a number of movies in exactly those terms before. You can find stylistic descendants of the Western all over modern action movies, even though the original genre is pretty much dead by now.
I was talking about style and themes more than about plot requirements, though, and I think it’s a mistake to ignore those in a discussion of genre boundaries.
Imagine if we were to apply this reasoning to other genres, maybe even to Westerns themselves.
The problem with this argument is that the “real sci-fi is about exploring the consequences of alternative worlds” definition is really a rather analogous way of defining a genre—genres tend to be more commonly defined by the tropes that they employ. A police drama doesn’t have “exploring the social consequences of being in a 21st century police station” as a necessary condition of the genre in the same way that “real” sci-fi has “exploring the consequences of alternative worlds” as a necessary condition. (And note the scare quotes on “real” sci-fi, because by the common definition of sci-fi, it’s all about the tropes as well, and the thing about having to explore new ideas is only a niche definition employed by a small group of people who take their sci-fi far more seriously than they should. Yes, I include myself in that group.)
Or do it more narrowly. “Sure, it has some science fiction elements, but most of it is still a Western. The cloning device has social consequences that affect the story, but the spaceships and lasers don’t. It could just as easily be a story that has a cloning device but is set in the modern era without any spaceships or lasers.”
But of course, if the story really is about the cloning device, then it would be just as much sci-fi even if it was set in the modern era.
Actually, I find it hard to think of many stories where spaceships and lasers would have an effect at all. I realize, of course, that spaceships and lasers are just examples, but generally, spaceships and lasers don’t have any effect on the story that couldn’t have been done in a Western—spaceships let you travel faster, but the universe is larger than the setting of a Western, with the net effect being the same—there are some near destinations and some hard to get to destinations..
You couldn’t really do generation ships in a Western, or explore the effects of travel at relativistic speeds, or the consequences of colder wars, or...
The potential room for exploration does seem smaller for laser guns, but it could be relevant in e.g. a police story—maybe it’s harder to identify the laser gun that was used to kill for someone than it is to identify a traditional murder weapon, which leaves a bullet in the body.
genres tend to be more commonly defined by the tropes that they employ.
Yes, that was part of my point. Why are we suddenly departing from this for science fiction?
But of course, if the story really is about the cloning device, then it would be just as much sci-fi even if it was set in the modern era.
But you wouldn’t say “25% of this story is about the cloning and 75% is about the bus rides and handguns, so this modern day story is only 25% sci-fi”. Yet replace bus rides and handguns with spaceships and lasers, and make it a series, and suddenly it’s “not very much sci-fi” because not very much of the technological elements affect society.
(Especially if it’s a series. Something that may appear every week in a series—because it’s a series—may not have social effects every week.)
You couldn’t really do generation ships in a Western
But in practice, a series that is not completely based around generation ships won’t have them most of the time. It’s unrealistic to say that Star Trek isn’t real sci-fi unless each episode with a spaceship has a generation ship or other element that shows the spaceships are having a social effect.
maybe it’s harder to identify the laser that was used to kill for someone than it is with a traditional weapon
Is that a social consequence, though? Or just a consequence? I can easily think of modern analogs for such a thing, after all.
Why are we suddenly departing from this for science fiction?
Because the “sci-fi is about exploring consequences” definition is useful for identifying a cluster of stories that some people (me included) find particularly interesting and enjoyable, and purely trope-based definitions wouldn’t identify that cluster correctly.
But you wouldn’t say “25% of this story is about the cloning and 75% is about the bus rides and handguns, so this modern day story is only 25% sci-fi”. Yet replace bus rides and handguns with spaceships and lasers, and make it a series, and suddenly it’s “not very much sci-fi” because not very much of the technological elements affect society.
(Especially if it’s a series. Something that may appear every week in a series—because it’s a series—may not have social effects every week.)
I can give a rough estimate of whether or not a story gives a sense of doing the kind of novel exploration of concepts that I haven’t seen done before. If a series only very rarely gives that kind of a sense, then it’s not very sci-fi.
But in practice, a series that is not completely based around generation ships won’t have them most of the time. It’s unrealistic to say that Star Trek isn’t real sci-fi unless each episode with a spaceship has a generation ship or other element that shows the spaceships are having a social effect.
I don’t think I ever said that the exploration had to always be about the spaceships? Plenty of other concepts that Star Trek could explore as well.
Is that a social consequence, though? Or just a consequence?
Sociological sci-fi was defined to be about social consequences, but sci-fi in general doesn’t have to be about them in particular. Could be e.g. the logical consequences as well—Asimov had a bunch of stories about the Three Laws of Robotics that were essentially just logic puzzles.
I don’t think I ever said that the exploration had to always be about the spaceships? Plenty of other concepts that Star Trek could explore as well.
So something can have many strange or futuristic elements, but only one or a few of those elements needs to have an effect in any one story for it to count as sci-fi?
If that’s the case, then even the Star Trek movies count as sci-fi. Even the first movie has a time traveller affecting history, Vulcan being blown up, and a transporter rigged up to go a very long distance. It’s hard to do those in a modern day story or a Western without something very contrived.
Heck, even Star Wars counts. It has the Force. Having a world where mysticism works is a big change that has noticeable effects on what the characters can do, and how the audience would react to them. Plenty of people here, watching a similar story taking place in the modern world where mysticism has no reproducible effects, would think that Yoda is a charlatan and that Luke should flee to keep his rationality intact (This goes double because in the real world there’s no such thing as a combat skill that only a few dozen people in all of existence are capable of learning. You’d have a very hard time writing Star Wars as a Western without wondering why Darth Vader shouldn’t be fought by a posse instead of by a single hero.)
That’s a good question. Probably not one that has an answer you can get a decent majority of SF fans to agree on, unfortunately.
My take on it is that you’re not going to have much luck defining genres in terms of static attributes; they’re more like loosely bound clusters in the space of themes, tropes, and influences. Star Trek’s clearly inheriting from older SF-genre stories—Forbidden Planet, certain Larry Niven novels, all sorts of stuff if you break it down to individual episodes—so I’m comfortable calling it that.
Space opera, meanwhile, points to a thread that’s interwoven with SF but not encompassed by it. It influences a lot of media that also use SF themes and which I’d feel comfortable filing under both categories: the Culture books, Battlestar Galactica, and so forth. But it also influences some that don’t; Star Wars draws from planetary romance, heroic fantasy, and samurai movies, but not much pure SF, so I might call it space opera but not science fiction. Or I might not, depending on how wide a net I want to cast with the term.
Instructor in The Guardian comment section
Story I heard from a bookshop clerk about the (sadly deceased) Ian M Banks. He was being interviewed on the South Bank Show and the interviewer asked, in a slightly condescending manner, “why did you start writing science fiction ?”, and he replied “I wanted to make sure I was good enough first.”
“The biggest difference between literary fiction set in the future and Science fiction is that science fictioneers don’t really believe in the future. History is merely an adventure story of good guys beating adversity, and we are on the brink of a glorious new age. Any opinions otherwise must be sneered at.”
Alternatively:
...So every dystopia and cautionary tale is “literature” and inferior, while generic pew-pew space opera is always produced by “real” belief in the future and never pure profit motive or anything of the sort?
(Edit: or status motivation, nostalgia/desire to emulate something one likes, “lasers are cool” aestheticism, or whatever other reasons.)
I’d guess the quotee wouldn’t call generic space opera “science fiction” either. I sure wouldn’t, myself.
Indeed. Space opera is Romanticism; science fiction is Enlightenment (tvtropes link).
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. The Culture novels are space opera, for example. yet they fall on the Enlightenment side of the divide; likewise for Star Trek, modulo a few more Romantic episodes and themes. Star Wars, however, is very, very Romantic, and it’s probably the first thing that comes to mind for most people when you bring up space opera.
There’s definitely a spectrum. I’m with you on the Culture, but I’m not sure I agree about Star Trek. If Star Trek is space opera, what qualifies as science fiction...?
To me, the defining element of “real” science fiction is that it actually explores the possible consequences of worlds where the science is different (either because people have made inventions that don’t exist in our world, because the laws of physics themselves are different, or—for scifi based on the social sciences—because the society is different; a lot of cyberpunk is arguably more sociological than hard-sciencial in focus), taking that as its starting point.
So I would say that anything that actually takes the science or scientific question as a starting point qualifies. Star Trek is infamous for doing the opposite—the writers would actually write scripts with dialogue like “Mr. Data, the so that the doesn’t blow up”, and then somebody would replace the tags with scientific-sounding words that fit into the wanted context.
Of course, many works traditionally labeled fantasy also prefer to explore the consequences of worlds with different physics (HPMoR, for example). I’ve heard this called “Hard fantasy”.
If you include sociological sf in your definition (which, I agree, you absolutely should), then Star Trek seems to qualify. The utopian society of the Federation is one of the key background facts of the franchise (assumed in TOS, explored in more depth in TNG, then deconstructed to some degree in DS9).
You’re right about the technobabble, of course. However, that’s often just a mask for the actual exploration of sociological/psychological concepts. And there was technological/hard-scientific stuff too: TOS’s “City on the Edge of Forever” was a classic time travel story. The Borg were an examination of transhumanism (a biased one, of course, but still). The Mirror Universe episodes are another example.
That’s why I emphasized the “taking that as its starting point” bit.
The old joke about space opera is that they’re Westerns in space, with space ships substituted for horses and laser guns substituted for ordinary guns. Now if a writer literally created a series by doing that—saying “hey, let’s make a Western in space and make these substitutions”—they wouldn’t be exploring the social consequences of space ships and laser guns, they’d just be adding fancy tropes on a story in order to make it seem more cool.
Now Star Trek is definitely not this bad. Many Star Trek episodes do seem to have been written with the purpose of exploring the consequence of something. But overall—especially with the more recent series—it does feel like there are more episodes that were conceived as a way of telling a cool story first, with the technological/social elements being added as the extra spice, rather than as serious exploration of the elements.
Of course, this is a spectrum and not a clear-cut split, and Star Trek is more sci-fi than many other series. But if I had to choose, I’d say it’s closer to the “space opera” end than the “sci-fi” end. (In general, I can think of very few TV series that I’d really put in the “sci-fi” end—most “real” sci-fi tends to be written rather than televised, in my experience. Though The Prisoner would qualify.)
“It’s not real science fiction, it’s just a ___ in space” is a common and tempting meme, but I’m not sure it holds together when you think about it. Imagine if we were to apply this reasoning to other genres, maybe even to Westerns themselves. “It’s not a Western, it’s just a romance with horses and cowboys. To be a real Western the Western setting must have some effect on the plot, but a romance can happen in any context. Just replace ‘barmaid’ with ‘minimum wage clerk’” “It’s not a police drama, it’s a Western, they’re just chasing each other using cars instead of horses. You’re not exploring the social consequences of the fact that they’re in a 21st century police station rather than just a sheriff in the West”.
Or do it more narrowly. “Sure, it has some science fiction elements, but most of it is still a Western. The cloning device has social consequences that affect the story, but the spaceships and lasers don’t. It could just as easily be a story that has a cloning device but is set in the modern era without any spaceships or lasers.”
Actually, I find it hard to think of many stories where spaceships and lasers would have an effect at all. I realize, of course, that spaceships and lasers are just examples, but generally, spaceships and lasers don’t have any effect on the story that couldn’t have been done in a Western—spaceships let you travel faster, but the universe is larger than the setting of a Western, with the net effect being the same—there are some near destinations and some hard to get to destinations..
Is the X-Files not anything except a police procedural because investigations and government coverups could happen without there being space aliens? (Sure, some of the specific investigations and coverups require aliens, but the same basic thing could be done without them.)
...to be fair, I’ve described a number of movies in exactly those terms before. You can find stylistic descendants of the Western all over modern action movies, even though the original genre is pretty much dead by now.
I was talking about style and themes more than about plot requirements, though, and I think it’s a mistake to ignore those in a discussion of genre boundaries.
The problem with this argument is that the “real sci-fi is about exploring the consequences of alternative worlds” definition is really a rather analogous way of defining a genre—genres tend to be more commonly defined by the tropes that they employ. A police drama doesn’t have “exploring the social consequences of being in a 21st century police station” as a necessary condition of the genre in the same way that “real” sci-fi has “exploring the consequences of alternative worlds” as a necessary condition. (And note the scare quotes on “real” sci-fi, because by the common definition of sci-fi, it’s all about the tropes as well, and the thing about having to explore new ideas is only a niche definition employed by a small group of people who take their sci-fi far more seriously than they should. Yes, I include myself in that group.)
But of course, if the story really is about the cloning device, then it would be just as much sci-fi even if it was set in the modern era.
You couldn’t really do generation ships in a Western, or explore the effects of travel at relativistic speeds, or the consequences of colder wars, or...
The potential room for exploration does seem smaller for laser guns, but it could be relevant in e.g. a police story—maybe it’s harder to identify the laser gun that was used to kill for someone than it is to identify a traditional murder weapon, which leaves a bullet in the body.
Yes, that was part of my point. Why are we suddenly departing from this for science fiction?
But you wouldn’t say “25% of this story is about the cloning and 75% is about the bus rides and handguns, so this modern day story is only 25% sci-fi”. Yet replace bus rides and handguns with spaceships and lasers, and make it a series, and suddenly it’s “not very much sci-fi” because not very much of the technological elements affect society.
(Especially if it’s a series. Something that may appear every week in a series—because it’s a series—may not have social effects every week.)
But in practice, a series that is not completely based around generation ships won’t have them most of the time. It’s unrealistic to say that Star Trek isn’t real sci-fi unless each episode with a spaceship has a generation ship or other element that shows the spaceships are having a social effect.
Is that a social consequence, though? Or just a consequence? I can easily think of modern analogs for such a thing, after all.
Because the “sci-fi is about exploring consequences” definition is useful for identifying a cluster of stories that some people (me included) find particularly interesting and enjoyable, and purely trope-based definitions wouldn’t identify that cluster correctly.
I can give a rough estimate of whether or not a story gives a sense of doing the kind of novel exploration of concepts that I haven’t seen done before. If a series only very rarely gives that kind of a sense, then it’s not very sci-fi.
I don’t think I ever said that the exploration had to always be about the spaceships? Plenty of other concepts that Star Trek could explore as well.
Sociological sci-fi was defined to be about social consequences, but sci-fi in general doesn’t have to be about them in particular. Could be e.g. the logical consequences as well—Asimov had a bunch of stories about the Three Laws of Robotics that were essentially just logic puzzles.
So something can have many strange or futuristic elements, but only one or a few of those elements needs to have an effect in any one story for it to count as sci-fi?
If that’s the case, then even the Star Trek movies count as sci-fi. Even the first movie has a time traveller affecting history, Vulcan being blown up, and a transporter rigged up to go a very long distance. It’s hard to do those in a modern day story or a Western without something very contrived.
Heck, even Star Wars counts. It has the Force. Having a world where mysticism works is a big change that has noticeable effects on what the characters can do, and how the audience would react to them. Plenty of people here, watching a similar story taking place in the modern world where mysticism has no reproducible effects, would think that Yoda is a charlatan and that Luke should flee to keep his rationality intact (This goes double because in the real world there’s no such thing as a combat skill that only a few dozen people in all of existence are capable of learning. You’d have a very hard time writing Star Wars as a Western without wondering why Darth Vader shouldn’t be fought by a posse instead of by a single hero.)
That’s a good question. Probably not one that has an answer you can get a decent majority of SF fans to agree on, unfortunately.
My take on it is that you’re not going to have much luck defining genres in terms of static attributes; they’re more like loosely bound clusters in the space of themes, tropes, and influences. Star Trek’s clearly inheriting from older SF-genre stories—Forbidden Planet, certain Larry Niven novels, all sorts of stuff if you break it down to individual episodes—so I’m comfortable calling it that.
Space opera, meanwhile, points to a thread that’s interwoven with SF but not encompassed by it. It influences a lot of media that also use SF themes and which I’d feel comfortable filing under both categories: the Culture books, Battlestar Galactica, and so forth. But it also influences some that don’t; Star Wars draws from planetary romance, heroic fantasy, and samurai movies, but not much pure SF, so I might call it space opera but not science fiction. Or I might not, depending on how wide a net I want to cast with the term.
Vinge
I don’t see any obvious reason for not counting A Fire Upon the Deep as space opera, actually. Maybe it’s not a spectrum after all!