What the difference?
Sasha Bankrashkov
"yell" and "scream". I have seen only "cry" in classical literature
("Treasure island" for example) but our teather of English told that "cry"
is not to use in that meaning and that one should use "shout". And what
about other synonyms?
--
... fido7 - это гейт плюс фидолукизация всей страны. (KSV)
Richard Fontana
On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Sasha Bankrashkov wrote:
> Hi, people. I wonder what the difference between the word "cry" , "shout",
> "yell" and "scream". I have seen only "cry" in classical literature
> ("Treasure island" for example) but our teather of English told that "cry"
> is not to use in that meaning and that one should use "shout".
I think that advice is a bit strong unless you're only concerned with
learning conversational English. In AmE the "exclaim" usage of "cry" is,
I believe, encountered primarily in literature and not in contemporary
speech, but it is not regarded as archaic. The usual usage of "cry" in
ordinary speech is "weep".
"Yell" is probably louder than "shout". "Yell" is closer to "holler".
"Scream" is even louder than "yell". It could mean a sound indicating
horror, rapture, etc.
Mark Brader
> "Yell" is probably louder than "shout". "Yell" is closer to "holler".
> "Scream" is even louder than "yell". It could mean a sound indicating
> horror, rapture, etc.
A "shout" or "yell" probably contains words, or at least articulation
of some kind. A "scream" can contain words (in which case, yes, it's
probably the loudest) but is more likely just a single, prolonged,
high-pitched inarticulate sound -- the sound of extreme pain or,
perhaps, extreme pleasure.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto "Not looking like Pascal is not
m...@vex.net a language deficiency!" -- Doug Gwyn
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Mike Oliver
Mark Brader wrote:
>
> Richard Fontana writes:
> > "Yell" is probably louder than "shout". "Yell" is closer to "holler".
> > "Scream" is even louder than "yell". It could mean a sound indicating
> > horror, rapture, etc.
>
> A "shout" or "yell" probably contains words, or at least articulation
> of some kind.
What about the Shout that's supposed to come before (or is it after?)
Gabriel's trump announcing the end of the world? Actually I know about
it from Heinlein's novel "Job" (his best work after the 1960s) rather
than from Revelation, so I could have it muddled, but I don't know
that any specific sentence is being shouted.
meirm...@erols.com
Bankrashkov" <sash...@okclub.org> posted:
>Hi, people. I wonder what the difference between the word "cry" , "shout",
>"yell" and "scream". I have seen only "cry" in classical literature
>("Treasure island" for example) but our teather of English told that "cry"
>is not to use in that meaning and that one should use "shout". And what
>about other synonyms?
So the town crier was called by the wrong name. And the couple that
was cried in church last Sunday hasn't made any progress. And who was
it who wrote "Cry Freedom"? (Mbecke?) Was he wrong?
OTOH, was the teacher speaking in general, or was he criticizing one
particular sentence one of you wrote, where it might be true that it
didn't fit somehow? What was the sentence where he said it was
incorrect?
Normally I don't say this, but the meanings for cry were too long to
retype, and it finally occurs to that everyone should look in their
dictionary or on-line. This word at least has a variety of meanings.
Most words have some slight difference from the others but many, like
these, overlap a lot. For example, scream is often used for anger or
fright. But not always.
mei...@QQQerols.com If you email me, please let me know whether
remove the QQQ or not you are posting the same letter.
Posted on %date%, at %time%
Mike Lyle
Bankrashkov wrote:
>
>Hi, people. I wonder what the difference between the word "cry" , "shout",
>"yell" and "scream". I have seen only "cry" in classical literature
>("Treasure island" for example) but our teather of English told that "cry"
>is not to use in that meaning and that one should use "shout". And what
>about other synonyms?
>
>--
simplification; but as you go on you will find exceptions, including phrases
such as "He cried out in pain". I advise you not to bother about these until you
meet them, because "cry" is now most often used to mean "weep".
"Yell" is informal, not standard written English.
A "scream" is high-pitched as well as loud, may be long, and need not contain
words. A shout usually carries a word or words.
There are words with similar meanings, and you'll find them in a thesaurus. BUT
please don't use any word you find in a thesaurus until you've studied its
definition in the dictionary and talked about it to your teacher and other
English-speakers. This is because they aren't often exact synonyms, and are
often old-fashioned.
HTH,
Mike.
Tsippi Jelingold
If you're going to use sci-fi books as theological texts, then I recommend "The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Not only does it contain The Answer to Life,
The Universe and Everything, but also God's Last Message to Creation.
And as a bonus, it teaches you how to fly.
Regards,
Tsippi Jelingold
Skitt
"Mike Lyle" <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote in message
news:ZMdH6.3916$SZ5.3...@www.newsranger.com...
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2001 06:02:30 +0400, in
<98859618...@basic.maxnet.ru>, Sasha
> Bankrashkov wrote:
> >
> >Hi, people. I wonder what the difference between the word "cry" ,
"shout",
> >"yell" and "scream". I have seen only "cry" in classical literature
> >("Treasure island" for example) but our teather of English told that
"cry"
> >is not to use in that meaning and that one should use "shout". And what
> >about other synonyms?
> >
> >--
> A good dictionary will help you here. Your teacher's advice is a good
> simplification; but as you go on you will find exceptions, including
phrases
> such as "He cried out in pain". I advise you not to bother about these
until you
> meet them, because "cry" is now most often used to mean "weep".
>
> "Yell" is informal, not standard written English.
Where did you get that idea?
--
Skitt (in SF Bay Area) http://i.am/skitt/
I speak English well -- I learn it from a book!
-- Manuel of "Fawlty Towers" (he's from Barcelona).
Peter Moylan
>If you're going to use sci-fi books as theological texts, then I recommend "The
>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Not only does it contain The Answer to Life,
>The Universe and Everything, but also God's Last Message to Creation.
>
>And as a bonus, it teaches you how to fly.
Not very effectively. I still keep hitting my head on the ground.
By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
The latter term appears to have been appropriated by the
makers of second-rate films.
--
Peter Moylan pe...@ee.newcastle.edu.au
See http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au for OS/2 information and software
Mark Brader
> By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
> refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
Well, I think most of us do, but some of us are so deluded as to say
"speculative fiction" instead. This is the official expansion of
the "sf" in the newsgroup names rec.arts.sf.*, for instance.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto, m...@vex.net
"sci fi: the plural of scum fum" -- Spider Robinson
[sic]
R H Draney
news:9clflh$2p9u$1...@news.tht.net...
> Peter Moylan writes:
> > By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
> > refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
>
> Well, I think most of us do, but some of us are so deluded as to say
> "speculative fiction" instead. This is the official expansion of
> the "sf" in the newsgroup names rec.arts.sf.*, for instance.
I've heard this myself, and the explanation that "sci-fi" refers to the like
of "Revenge of the Brain Sucking Leeches"...I've always considered it a bit
defensive, like those people who weep in unison "You *can't* call us
Generation X, we're *all different*!"...
(I should probably add in my own defense that I read very little fiction
that *isn't* SF...I'm one of you)....
> Mark Brader, Toronto, m...@vex.net
> "sci fi: the plural of scum fum" -- Spider Robinson
> [sic]
Wrong declension...should be "scus fus", ne?...r
--
"I may not know much about art, but I know what they tell me I'm supposed to
like."
Fabian
"Skitt" <sk...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:6wiH6.2750$G77.3...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
>
> "Mike Lyle" <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote in message
> news:ZMdH6.3916$SZ5.3...@www.newsranger.com...
> > On Mon, 30 Apr 2001 06:02:30 +0400, in
> <98859618...@basic.maxnet.ru>, Sasha
> > Bankrashkov wrote:
> > >
> > >Hi, people. I wonder what the difference between the word "cry" ,
> "shout",
> > >"yell" and "scream". I have seen only "cry" in classical literature
> > >("Treasure island" for example) but our teather of English told that
> "cry"
> > >is not to use in that meaning and that one should use "shout". And what
> > >about other synonyms?
> > >
> > >--
> > A good dictionary will help you here. Your teacher's advice is a good
> > simplification; but as you go on you will find exceptions, including
> phrases
> > such as "He cried out in pain". I advise you not to bother about these
> until you
> > meet them, because "cry" is now most often used to mean "weep".
> >
> > "Yell" is informal, not standard written English.
>
> Where did you get that idea?
Au contraire, I have never heard anyone say (or shout, or ...) the word
'yell'. But I have seen it written many a time. Of course, we should realise
that written does not necessarily mean 'formal'. It may merely mean that it
is something to do with the literary tradition.
--
--
Fabian
The human didn't notice. Did other cats have this problem with their pets?
Odysseus
> >
> > "Yell" is informal, not standard written English.
>
> Where did you get that idea?
>
"not standard written English" sounds like a gross overstatement. I
don't have the _OED_ handy, but I'll wager it has plenty of citations
from 'reputable' literary sources.
As for drawing distinctions between "scream", "shout" and "yell": one
way of describing them might be to say they connote varying degrees of
voluntariness. "Scream" usually implies an involuntary cry, or one at
least fraught with uncontrolled emotion -- higher pitch would tend to
correlate with this, as pain, fear or excitement often have this effect
-- while a "shout" is more likely to be deliberate as well as
articulate. "Yell" seems to me to fall between the other two on this
scale, comprehending such vocalizations as war-cries and warning shouts
as well as exclamations of pain or anger. But there is certainly a broad
area of overlap among the three. I would suggest that "cry" is the most
general, but especially for the verb this general sense is losing ground
to the one meaning "weep" except in expressions like "cry out".
--Odysseus
Mike Lyle
<6wiH6.2750$G77.3...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, Skitt wrote:
>
>
>"Mike Lyle" <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote in message
>>
>> "Yell" is informal, not standard written English.
>
>Where did you get that idea?
>
>--
neither COD5 nor Collins 21stC appear to agree with me.
So: enquirers beware Internet advisors' prejudices and errors, as I've often
said!
Humbled by Skitt's First Law,
Mike.
Peter Moylan
>"Mark Brader" <m...@vex.net> wrote in message
>news:9clflh$2p9u$1...@news.tht.net...
>> Peter Moylan writes:
>> > By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
>> > refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
>>
>> Well, I think most of us do, but some of us are so deluded as to say
>> "speculative fiction" instead. This is the official expansion of
>> the "sf" in the newsgroup names rec.arts.sf.*, for instance.
Conceded. There are several acceptable terms, and my only point is
that 'sci-fi' is not one of them.
>I've heard this myself, and the explanation that "sci-fi" refers to the like
>of "Revenge of the Brain Sucking Leeches"...I've always considered it a bit
>defensive, like those people who weep in unison "You *can't* call us
>Generation X, we're *all different*!"...
I don't think of it as defensive, although there's a sense in which
it's used to keep out outsiders. To me it's comparable with the
attitude the people of San Francisco hold towards those who insist
on calling the city 'Frisco'. It's an outsiders' term, an attempted
imposition by those who don't belong. You can be reasonably certain
that those who say 'sci-fi' haven't read much SF.
Normally this shouldn't matter. You can't expect everyone to know
the preferred terminology of a special interest group. If it were
merely a matter of distinguishing those with an interest in SF from
those with no such interest, there would be no grounds for any sort
of objection.
The reason why 'sci-fi' raises the hackles of some people, including
me, is that it's the preferred term of a group of people who do
consider themselves sci-fi fans. They've followed the films and
the TV series. The only thing missing is that they haven't read any
SF books. Maybe it's a cultural clash between those who read and
those who don't. It doesn't help, of course, that those who read
tend to rate the films and TV series as having little originality
or artistic merit, and altogether very much inferior to the mainstream
of written SF.
--
Peter Moylan pe...@ee.newcastle.edu.au
http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au
GrapeApe
>Conceded. There are several acceptable terms, and my only point is
>that 'sci-fi' is not one of them.
For differing levels of acceptance. You will find many SF fans that do not mind
the term sci-fi whatsoever; however some will often be familiar with the rants
against the term by speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison (whose stories
often didn't deal with technology or science in any fashion).
Tsippi Jelingold
news:slrn9escg...@EEPJM.newcastle.edu.au...
> Tsippi Jelingold <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote:
>
> >If you're going to use sci-fi books as theological texts, then I
recommend "The
> >Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Not only does it contain The
Answer to Life,
> >The Universe and Everything, but also God's Last Message to Creation.
> >
> >And as a bonus, it teaches you how to fly.
>
> Not very effectively. I still keep hitting my head on the ground.
That's because you forget to not notice the ground when it comes up.
It's very simple really.
> By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
> refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
> The latter term appears to have been appropriated by the
> makers of second-rate films.
Interesting. I didn't know that, and I'm not alone because I often see
the term on game sites. I agree that SF looks better.
Actually I don't think The Guide can be called science fiction since
there's very litle science in it. I usually refer to it as "that
five-volume trilogy".
Regards, Tsippi Jelingold
--
I have an intuitive grasp of languages
(Intuition (n): an uncanny sixth sense which tells people
that they are right, whether they are or not).
Charles Riggs
wrote:
>Peter Moylan writes:
>> By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
>> refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
>
>Well, I think most of us do, but some of us are so deluded as to say
>"speculative fiction" instead. This is the official expansion of
>the "sf" in the newsgroup names rec.arts.sf.*, for instance.
I remember when I subscribed to rec.arts.sf.composition, this was
discussed a few times. The consensus was that sf stood for science
fiction. The term "speculative fiction" doesn't even make a hell of a
lot of sense to me. What other sort is there?
Charles Riggs
mplsray
"Tsippi Jelingold" <tsi...@netvision.net.il> wrote in message
news:9co61h$e8387$1...@ID-87321.news.dfncis.de...
> "Peter Moylan" <ro...@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au> כתב בהודעה
> news:slrn9escg...@EEPJM.newcastle.edu.au...
[snip]
> > By the way, Tsippi, those of us who like reading science fiction
> > refer to it as either 'science fiction' or 'SF', but never 'sci-fi'.
> > The latter term appears to have been appropriated by the
> > makers of second-rate films.
>
> Interesting. I didn't know that, and I'm not alone because I often see
> the term on game sites. I agree that SF looks better.
> Actually I don't think The Guide can be called science fiction since
> there's very litle science in it. I usually refer to it as "that
> five-volume trilogy".
>
_Sci-fi_ is very definitely a shibboleth, and I, like Peter, prefer the
terms _science fiction_ or _SF._ Among other users of _sci-fi_ is the Sci-Fi
Channel (see their Web site at http://www.scifi.com ). They also label one
of their groups of science fiction shows _Intergalacticland,_ although they
very definitely mean shows which take place within the confines of our
galaxy.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
GrapeApe
>lot of sense to me. What other sort is there?
Its a euphemism for Fantasy, In particular Fantasy that doesn't necessarily
involve elves or fairy tale characters. It is your typical Twilight Zone stuff,
which wasn't really terribly scientific in nature most of the time, but not
realistic as most fiction might pretend to be. It is more speculative as to the
nature of the setting and actions of the characters, the exploration of what
would happen if an impossibility was tossed into a story.
Harlan Ellison, who probably started the anti Sci-Fi rant, didn't write science
fiction as much as "what if" stories. They weren't exactly Science Fiction, nor
exactly horror stories either. For example "What if a man falls in love with a
slot machine..." might be more of a metaphorical exploration into addiction, if
the reader chooses to accept it that way.
So Harlan Ellison probably helped pushed the SF equals speculative fiction
banner (in other words, don't pigeonhole me into that genre, although my books
are still going to be between the spaceships and the dragons anyway), at the
same time he was knocking Sci-Fi as an atrocious pun (so?) that gave the genre
less respect than he thought it deserved. He thought his ghetto was being
dissed, as he himself was stuggling to get out of it.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> >The term "speculative fiction" doesn't even make a hell of a
> >lot of sense to me. What other sort is there?
>
> Its a euphemism for Fantasy, In particular Fantasy that doesn't
> necessarily involve elves or fairy tale characters. It is your
> typical Twilight Zone stuff, which wasn't really terribly scientific
> in nature most of the time, but not realistic as most fiction might
> pretend to be. It is more speculative as to the nature of the
> setting and actions of the characters, the exploration of what would
> happen if an impossibility was tossed into a story.
Back when I used to read rec.arts.sf-lovers (and the SF-LOVERS Digest
before that), every once in a while there would be a flame war started
by someone saying, "That's not science fiction, that's fantasy, it
doesn't belong here." Regulars soon developed the response that "SF
stands for 'speculative fiction', not 'science fiction'" not so much
because the term had an agreed-upon meaning, but because we all
realized that we could each come up with a group of twenty books and
stories, hand them out to a dozen different people to separate into
"science fiction" and "fantasy" and get a dozen different partitions.
It was easier to just say that "SF" covered both. When
rec.arts.sf-lovers split into rec.arts.sf.* the topic came up again,
but the same resolution was reached.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Ye knowe ek, that in forme of speche
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U | is chaunge
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |Withinne a thousand yer, and wordes
| tho
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |That hadden prys now wonder nyce and
(650)857-7572 | straunge
|Us thenketh hem, and yet they spake
| hem so
| Chaucer
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Actually I don't think The Guide can be called science fiction since
> there's very litle science in it.
Whereas I would say that it's clearly science fiction because the
handwavy pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain explanations
of what's going on clearly pretend to be science rather than magic.
That they are not "real science" is irrelevant. Fantasy isn't about
real magic: it asserts that what it's talking about is magic.
Similarly, if a story asserts "this is all science and technology and
here's how it works", then, in the context of the story, it is.
But, as I said in another article, there's little agreement on how to
draw the boundary, let alone handle the hard cases, so it's better to
use an umbrella term.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Of course, over the first 10^-10
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |seconds and 10^-30 cubic
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |centimeters it averages out to
|zero, but when you look in
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |detail....
(650)857-7572 | Philip Morrison
jan sand
www.mantra.com/jyotish (Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:
>In article <ulmofa...@hpl.hp.com>,
> Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> posted:
>
>> grap...@aol.comjunk (GrapeApe) writes:
>>
>> > >The term "speculative fiction" doesn't even make a hell of a
>> > >lot of sense to me. What other sort is there?
>> >
>> > Its a euphemism for Fantasy, In particular Fantasy that doesn't
>> > necessarily involve elves or fairy tale characters. It is your
>> > typical Twilight Zone stuff, which wasn't really terribly scientific
>> > in nature most of the time, but not realistic as most fiction might
>> > pretend to be. It is more speculative as to the nature of the
>> > setting and actions of the characters, the exploration of what would
>> > happen if an impossibility was tossed into a story.
>
>> Back when I used to read rec.arts.sf-lovers (and the SF-LOVERS Digest
>> before that), every once in a while there would be a flame war started
>> by someone saying, "That's not science fiction, that's fantasy, it
>> doesn't belong here." Regulars soon developed the response that "SF
>> stands for 'speculative fiction', not 'science fiction'" not so much
>> because the term had an agreed-upon meaning, but because we all
>> realized that we could each come up with a group of twenty books and
>> stories, hand them out to a dozen different people to separate into
>> "science fiction" and "fantasy" and get a dozen different partitions.
>> It was easier to just say that "SF" covered both. When
>> rec.arts.sf-lovers split into rec.arts.sf.* the topic came up again,
>> but the same resolution was reached.
>> - Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com>
>
>I like and use the term Surreal Fiction for certain type fiction.
>
>Jai Maharaj
>http://www.mantra.com/jai
>Om Shanti
You may use, of course whatever terminology makes you comfortable, but
there is, to my mind, a difference between SF and fantasy. I have been
reading the stuff for about 65 years and am happy to believe SF is
fiction based on currently accepted scientific theories and their
implications. Fantasy is imaginative fiction not constrained by
scientific theory.
Jan Sand
Evan Kirshenbaum
> You may use, of course whatever terminology makes you comfortable,
> but there is, to my mind, a difference between SF and fantasy. I
> have been reading the stuff for about 65 years and am happy to
> believe SF is fiction based on currently accepted scientific
> theories and their implications. Fantasy is imaginative fiction not
> constrained by scientific theory.
So anything written after 1905 (or perhaps a little later, depending
on your definition of "accepted") that involved traveling faster than
the speed of light is fantasy, not science fiction?
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Giving money and power to government
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |is like giving whiskey and car keys
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |to teenage boys.
| P.J. O'Rourke
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
Peter Moylan
>Actually I don't think The Guide can be called science fiction since
>there's very litle science in it. I usually refer to it as "that
>five-volume trilogy".
Five-volume trilogies have become a disease that is blighting SF.
I have flat-out refused to read anything by Philip Jose Farmer
ever since he published the fourth volume of his 'Riverworld'
trilogy (after having the effrontery to leave his readers hanging
at the end of the first volume, without having had any advance
warning that the book wasn't self-contained). I've lost track
of how many volumes we're up to in Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy;
not only did he pile on extra volumes during his lifetime, but
they started getting ghost-written after his death. Not to
mention Piers Anthony, about whom it is said that one should never
read anything beyond the first book in each series. And don't
get me started in on Lazarus Long.
Having been stung so many times, I'm now reluctant to read any
book that's written in more than one volume. Unfortunately
the 'sequel' disease has become so widespread that I'm having
trouble finding anything to read.
While I'm in rant mode, I'll add a hint to new readers. Do
not under any circumstances buy 'The Reality Dysfunction' by
Peter F. Hamilton. Not only does it have sequels, but the
first volume is over 1200 pages long. And I don't think I've
ever seen a 1000-page book, not even a 600-page book, that
couldn't have been greatly improved by getting a decent editor
to cut it back to 100 pages. A book that long is a near
guarantee of piles of waffle and padding, and Hamilton
doesn't disappoint in that respect. After the first 100 pages
I still hadn't figured out what the book was going to be
about, so I gave up and put it into the 'to be used for
propping up broken furniture' pile.
jan sand
<kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
I'm afraid that is a bit tricky, since there have been various
suppositions that might permit "warp speed". There is speculation
about worm hole travel and some sort of movement in the fifth
dimension which might over ride light speed limitations. The latest
Arthur Clarke novel plays with that.
Star Wars, of course, is pretty much fantasy more because it is
basically a fairy tale with SF trappings than anything else. Good SF
explores and reveals interesting possibilities assuming one or two
unusual scientific premises, such as in Hal Clement's "Mission of
Gravity, Greg Bear's "Blood Music", LeGuin's "The Left Hand of
Darkness" and many many more.
H.G.Wells' wonderful "War of the Worlds" has become fantasy and Star
Trek always was.
Jan Sand
The Walkers
[...]
> You may use, of course whatever terminology makes you comfortable, but
> there is, to my mind, a difference between SF and fantasy. I have been
> reading the stuff for about 65 years and am happy to believe SF is
> fiction based on currently accepted scientific theories and their
> implications. Fantasy is imaginative fiction not constrained by
> scientific theory.
I have to differ. Science fiction need not be based on currently
accepted scientific theories (or their implications): it can be
based, reasonably and validly, on imagined science.
Imagining a world in which scientific principles we do not now
know, or now think incorrect, to be "fantasy" is, I think, serious
error. Fantasy is work in which, to be brief, magic works.
Now that is, in a sense, only delaying the reckoning, because the
point becomes "what is magic?" A short and not fully thought-out
answer, which is nevertheless not as simplistic as it might sound
at first, is that magic is anything that is not science.
"Science" we may, I submit, take to be any set of rules whose
workings can be discovered by application of that set of philosophic
rules we call "the scientific method"--data review, hypothesis,
crucial experiment, that stuff. Implicit in that sense of "science"
is that all experiments are repeatable and that results are
objective.
"Magic" is thus necessarily a force or power whose use is not
subject to perfect repeatability or objective results: the word
"magic" implies a force or power with subjective elements, which,
in an intelligently constructed imagined world, ought to mean
moral elements. If anyone can learn the rules of magic and
thus work magic, magic is just another physical force (old
sf&f fans will recall the Harold Shea stories)--in fact,
science.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
http://owlcroft.com/sfandf
Mark Brader
> I've lost track of how many volumes we're up to in Asimov's
> 'Foundation' trilogy;
To be fair, that series never was a trilogy except for marketing
purposes. That is, it wasn't viewed as three novels forming
parts of a unified whole. It was begun as an *open-ended* series
of *short stories*. After the first four, Asimov switched to
novella length for the next four. He then ran out of ideas to
continue the series and stopped writing them.
As is often done in SF, the stories were edited to form "parts"
of what were superficially novels -- the term "fix-up" has been
used for this technique. In this case the first four stories
plus a new introductory part formed one volume, and the other
four stories formed two more volumes.
> not only did he pile on extra volumes during his lifetime,
And, worse, squandered his creative energy on twisting what had
been essentially unrelated series of novels needlessly into a
single big series.
> but they started getting ghost-written after his death.
No, they didn't. The three novels in the posthumous "Second Found-
ation Trilogy" are properly credited to Gregory Benford, Greg Bear,
and David Brin respectively.
Let's see, now, to maintain the pattern I suppose the *next* trilogy
should be written by Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, and Michael
Chric-- oh dear. Never mind!
--
Mark Brader "A hundred billion is *not* infinite
Toronto and it's getting less infinite all the time!"
m...@vex.net -- Isaac Asimov, "The Last Question"
GrapeApe
I like to read the surreal box at breakfast.
Matthew M. Huntbach
> Five-volume trilogies have become a disease that is blighting SF.
> I have flat-out refused to read anything by Philip Jose Farmer
> ever since he published the fourth volume of his 'Riverworld'
> trilogy (after having the effrontery to leave his readers hanging
> at the end of the first volume, without having had any advance
> warning that the book wasn't self-contained). I've lost track
> of how many volumes we're up to in Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy;
> not only did he pile on extra volumes during his lifetime, but
> they started getting ghost-written after his death. Not to
> mention Piers Anthony, about whom it is said that one should never
> read anything beyond the first book in each series. And don't
> get me started in on Lazarus Long.
It's a long time since I've read any SF, but isn't the "Dune" trilogy
(can't even remember the author - Frank Herbert?) another example
of increasingly crappier additions beyond the first three?
Matthew Huntbach
jan sand
wrote:
I find your points quite valid. Science by its very nature transforms
regularly and that is what makes it so fascinating. Many of the
theories of modern science are quite tentative and very many
speculations have a tenuous connection with established theory.
Science fiction becomes interesting (at least to me) because it
investigates the impact of some of these theories on other science and
on the rest of the world assuming they are valid. It is a literature
based on the question "What if..." Early science fiction and some
today was written by scientists such as Fred Hoyle and Robert Forward
and others involved in technical areas such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac
Asimov, and many others. Although they utilized the mechanics of
story telling, their main interest was the consequences of making
scientific assumptions. As science moved along many of these
assumptions proved invalid and the probabilities in the stories
diminished to zero. During the late 1930's and 1940's, the pulp
magazine Astounding SF under the editorship of John W. Campbell
improved the science in the stories published and, to some extent, the
literary quality of the material. Many of the fans were introduced to
reasonable science in these stories and later progressed to become
real scientists. SF was, for many years denied a place in accepted
literature because its motivation was not understood in the early days
and frankly, much of the material had abysmal literary quality. But
with the advent of Ray Bradbury and other writers who had some
scientific capability but also a much better capability in literature,
the field changed and just plain stories in science with the emphasis
on story quality emerged. Space operas in which the science was more
decoration than an essential element became popular, such as the
Lensmen series by E.E.Smith Phd. which are the forefathers of Star
Trek and Star Wars and Battleship Galactica. In Europe, the French
comic book series "Valerion" which is beautifully drawn is strikingly
like much of the material in the Star Wars series.
A companion publication to Astounding was Unknown Worlds which dealt
in magic and some of the SF writers worked there. Heinlein did one
called "Magic Incorporated" in which the laws of magic were
investigated. The problems of obtaining paper during WWII probably
knocked out Unknown Worlds.
There are so many fundamental changes in cosmology and basic science
now emerging that it becomes difficult to define SF as huge unknowns
loom in science the more we discover. Greg Bear has written some of
the best stuff lately and stories about cyberspace by William Gibson,
author of "Neuromancer" are worth investigation, although the field
has proliferated so much in these later years that I cannot keep up.
Also there is a large bulk of material which pays small attention to
real science and is merely shallow comic book stuff.
Jan Sand
Mike Lyle
Huntbach wrote:
>
>Peter Moylan (pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au) wrote:
>
>> Five-volume trilogies have become a disease that is blighting SF.
In which dimension is it possible to have a five-volume trilogy?
Mike.
Daniel James
> I have to differ. Science fiction need not be based on currently
> accepted scientific theories (or their implications): it can be
> based, reasonably and validly, on imagined science.
Agreed. Absolutely.
> Imagining a world in which scientific principles we do not now
> know, or now think incorrect, to be "fantasy" is, I think, serious
> error. Fantasy is work in which, to be brief, magic works.
No, I think that's far too narrow a definition of "fantasy" to be useful
(at least in the context of the OP's question). "Fantasy" is anything that
is "fantastic", it is (to select just one definition from the SOED) "A
literary genre concerned with imaginary worlds and peoples; a composition
in this genre". That can include worlds in which "magic" (whatever that
is) "works" (whatever that means), and also worlds founded on imagined
scientific principles.
> Now that is, in a sense, only delaying the reckoning, because the
> point becomes "what is magic?" A short and not fully thought-out
> answer, which is nevertheless not as simplistic as it might sound
> at first, is that magic is anything that is not science.
Yes, but, to misquote I forget whom: "Any science sufficently more
advanced than our own is indistinguishable from magic".
I think that the real difference between "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" -
as we tend to use them as labels to classify works of literature - is the
manner of telling the story. If the story is set in a world that uses
technology that - although fantastic to us - is portrayed as being based
on scientific principles understood by the inhabitants of that world then
the story is the kind of fantasy that we classify as science fiction. If
the story is set in a world in which there are forces that are regarded as
fantastic by the inhabitants of that world then the story world cannot be
regarded as scientific, and the story is a fantasy that we would probably
not classify as science fiction.
There are, of course, a great many stories that defy so simple a
classification by including recognizable traits of both kinds of stories
(e.g. both spaceships and wizards). The existence of these stories should
tell us that it is important not to take any categorization of the
genre(s) too seriously.
Cheers,
Daniel.
Fabian
"Peter Moylan" <pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au> wrote in message
> While I'm in rant mode, I'll add a hint to new readers. Do
> not under any circumstances buy 'The Reality Dysfunction' by
> Peter F. Hamilton. Not only does it have sequels, but the
> first volume is over 1200 pages long. And I don't think I've
> ever seen a 1000-page book, not even a 600-page book, that
> couldn't have been greatly improved by getting a decent editor
> to cut it back to 100 pages. A book that long is a near
> guarantee of piles of waffle and padding, and Hamilton
> doesn't disappoint in that respect. After the first 100 pages
> I still hadn't figured out what the book was going to be
> about, so I gave up and put it into the 'to be used for
> propping up broken furniture' pile.
I disagree. I found that book to be highly entertaining. Unfortunately, the
final chapter left so many loose ends it was obvious from context that a
sequel, or at least another chapter, ought to be present. The book itself
made no hint of a sequel. You might reasonably expect that a book of that
length would be self-contained, especially when it does not hint at a sequel
on the self-praising cover reviews. I was so pissed at being misled that I
vowed never to buy another book by that author.
jan sand
I can go along with much of what you say.
The quote is by Arthur C. Clarke
Jan Sand
Frances Kemmish
> While I'm in rant mode, I'll add a hint to new readers. Do
> not under any circumstances buy 'The Reality Dysfunction' by
> Peter F. Hamilton. Not only does it have sequels, but the
> first volume is over 1200 pages long. And I don't think I've
> ever seen a 1000-page book, not even a 600-page book, that
> couldn't have been greatly improved by getting a decent editor
> to cut it back to 100 pages. A book that long is a near
> guarantee of piles of waffle and padding, and Hamilton
> doesn't disappoint in that respect. After the first 100 pages
> I still hadn't figured out what the book was going to be
> about, so I gave up and put it into the 'to be used for
> propping up broken furniture' pile.
>
Yesterday, my son gave me a copy of "Little Dorrit" by Charles
Dickens - he had just read it and thought it wonderful, and wanted
me to read it too. I was surprised to find that the book is 780
pages long (in the Penguin Classics edition). I am not a fan of
Dickens, having been force-fed too much of it at school, and I am
quailing at the thought of trying to read 800 pages of small print,
but unwilling to disappoint my son, after he was so thoughtful. I
suppose I need the decently-edited 100 page version of this book.
I see that it was originally published in 19 weekly parts - a sort
of 19th century soap opera. I suppose that all Dickens books are of
this sort of length (or at least I remember that they seemed that
long when I was young). I had thought of the 700-page novel as the
product of modern word-processing and lax editing, but obviously
Dickens did it first, and in longhand.
Fran
Evan Kirshenbaum
> On 03 May 2001 17:06:45 -0700, Evan Kirshenbaum
> <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
>
> >jan...@mindspring.com (jan sand) writes:
> >
> >> You may use, of course whatever terminology makes you comfortable,
> >> but there is, to my mind, a difference between SF and fantasy. I
> >> have been reading the stuff for about 65 years and am happy to
> >> believe SF is fiction based on currently accepted scientific
> >> theories and their implications. Fantasy is imaginative fiction not
> >> constrained by scientific theory.
> >
> >So anything written after 1905 (or perhaps a little later, depending
> >on your definition of "accepted") that involved traveling faster than
> >the speed of light is fantasy, not science fiction?
[snip sig. You really don't have to quote it.]
> I'm afraid that is a bit tricky, since there have been various
> suppositions that might permit "warp speed". There is speculation
> about worm hole travel and some sort of movement in the fifth
> dimension which might over ride light speed limitations.
Yeah, but I'd say that the "currently accepted scientific theory" is
still "you can't go faster than light". Not that it really matters.
Most science fiction authors that have a need to have people travel
long distances quickly just take the dodge of having it been
discovered some time after our own that either we were wrong or there
are exceptions to the rule. Depending on the author, they then either
take the "baffle you with bullshit" approach or the "just name it"
approach. In the first case, you put in an essentially meaningless,
but technical-sounding explanation (perhaps drawing on explanations
that are currently considered possible, like "wormhole" or "fifth
dimension") that allows the reader to say, "I don't understand, but it
doesn't matter; he's saying that it's all science that's been
discovered in the future or on another planet". In the second case,
you merely have characters refer to the process or device by its
common name, noting that people these days don't generally spend much
time talking about, for example, the technology that goes into making
a phone call, so it's cool to have the characters use "sub-space
transmission" without any further explanation.
> The latest Arthur Clarke novel plays with that. Star Wars, of
> course, is pretty much fantasy more because it is basically a fairy
> tale with SF trappings than anything else. Good SF explores and
> reveals interesting possibilities assuming one or two unusual
> scientific premises, such as in Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity,
> Greg Bear's "Blood Music", LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" and
> many many more. H.G.Wells' wonderful "War of the Worlds" has become
> fantasy and Star Trek always was.
This is why I assert that twenty people will give you twenty different
partitions into "science fiction" and "fantasy". For me, _Star Wars_
was clearly science fiction, with some mystical elements, because
whatever the scientific implausibilities, they were asserted to be
science, not magic. Ditto _Star Trek_.
Your "science fiction" pile would be small; mine would be considerably
bigger, because I tend to see it more as the default. Pretty much
unless a book is set in the present or historical past and is
completely compatible with our currently accepted notions of reality
(or at least plausibility), I'd consider it either fantasy or science
fiction. Within that group, unless the author asserts (or implies)
that there's a supernatural element, I'll consider it science fiction,
however bogus the science (now) seems to me. It's a matter of
authorial intent. So _Frankenstein_ is clearly science fiction. If,
on the other hand, there is a reliance on magic or gods, but the
technology presented or implied is otherwise unremarkable, I'll
consider it fantasy. Then there's the middle ground of hard cases
that have elements of both. Sometimes one side is pretty
overwhelming. _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_ is
science fiction because it's basically about a man going back in time
and introducing advanced technology, even though the actual method of
travel is brushed off with an off-hand reference to the fantastic
"transmigration of souls". On the other hand, Terry Pratchett's
_Discworld_ books are basically fantasy, even though the themes of a
number of them have been the effects of the introduction of (to them)
advanced technology (e.g., telegraph) into society. Sometimes, as in
Chalker's _Soul Rider_, the book has a fantasy feel, but the author
asserts strongly enough that there's a scientific basis for the
"magic" that I'd put it in the science fiction pile. Not all would
agree. And some, like Anthony's _Split Infinity_ simply defy
classification.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Code should be designed to make it
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |easy to get it right, not to work
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |if you get it right.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Now that is, in a sense, only delaying the reckoning, because the
> point becomes "what is magic?" A short and not fully thought-out
> answer, which is nevertheless not as simplistic as it might sound
> at first, is that magic is anything that is not science.
>
> "Science" we may, I submit, take to be any set of rules whose
> workings can be discovered by application of that set of philosophic
> rules we call "the scientific method"--data review, hypothesis,
> crucial experiment, that stuff. Implicit in that sense of "science"
> is that all experiments are repeatable and that results are
> objective.
>
> "Magic" is thus necessarily a force or power whose use is not
> subject to perfect repeatability or objective results: the word
> "magic" implies a force or power with subjective elements, which,
> in an intelligently constructed imagined world, ought to mean
> moral elements. If anyone can learn the rules of magic and
> thus work magic, magic is just another physical force (old
> sf&f fans will recall the Harold Shea stories)--in fact,
> science.
The problem with this (to my mind) is that it makes things like
Chalker's _Dancing Gods_ books science fiction, when they are
obviously intended to be fantasy. In those books, magic and the
lots of other aspects were indeed governed by rules, and the rules
were written in books, but the rules themselves were subjective and
only gained force by being passed and entered into the books.
[1] E.g., Rule XL, 227, 301(a): "Barbarians must be tall, dark, and
handsom, exotic in race but of no known nationality."
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |The mystery of government is not how
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |Washington works, but how to make it
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |stop.
jan sand
<kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
I agree with you that much science fiction brushes off detailed
explanation of the way effects are made, but the essence of science
fiction is the direction of the author to the reader into a " what if"
situation. Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" is much more science fiction than
Star Wars because it focuses interest on a modification of social
constructs and then attempts to examine the results. Star Wars may
have utilized science-fiction props but the interest of the story is
the very hackneyed good guys and bad guys plot with the princess and
the young hero that saves the world. It is a scientific fairy tale.
There is no new idea to be examined. This is not science fiction. It
is what used to be called space opera (in the same way other hackneyed
genres are horse operas and soap operas). Nevertheless, on its level,
I enjoyed it. But certainly not the same way I enjoyed "2001".
Jan Sand
Dr Robin Bignall
<kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
Getting down to basics, most SF which is not set in our solar system
or based on generation starships has to tackle the problem of FTL
travel, which, as far as we know, is not possible according to
Einstein. So most of it is, strictly speaking, fantasy. Most writers
have for a long time taken it as a given that we will, someday, cross
that bridge.
Many writers have tried codifying magic and come up with suitable
explanations as to why it doesn't work in all cases in their stories.
It must be written down in a book, as you say, or it depends on some
strange material which is found only in certain places (Niven's 'The
Magic Goes Away', for example) or, more often, it depends on the
particular powers of the person doing it (Merlin, or Gandalf). This
latter case is interesting. Is it any different from that 'magic'
which makes a great pianist, for example? We can all say, 'Well, if I
started at two years old I could have done it, too.' But is that
really true? And are great performances by such an artist repeatable
at the drop of a hat? I think not. Maybe there is magic, but few
performers (or none) are any good at it.
(Just a Friday night theory!)
--
wrmst rgrds
RB...(docr...@ntlworld.com)
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Tsippi Jelingold wrote:
>
> >Actually I don't think The Guide can be called science fiction since
> >there's very litle science in it. I usually refer to it as "that
> >five-volume trilogy".
>
> Five-volume trilogies have become a disease that is blighting SF.
> I have flat-out refused to read anything by Philip Jose Farmer
> ever since he published the fourth volume of his 'Riverworld'
> trilogy (after having the effrontery to leave his readers hanging
> at the end of the first volume, without having had any advance
> warning that the book wasn't self-contained). I've lost track
> of how many volumes we're up to in Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy;
> not only did he pile on extra volumes during his lifetime, but
> they started getting ghost-written after his death.
To my mind, this misses the distinction between a "trilogy" and a
"series". A trilogy is a multivolume work, conceived of as a single
story with an overarching plot, but in which each book also works as a
separate novel having its own plot. As the name implies, these are
typically three books, probably because most stories partition into a
beginning, middle, and end, but they can be more (such as Chalker's
_Four Lords of the Diamond_) or fewer (Pratchett's _The Colour of
Magic_ and _The Light Fantastic_).
Just as a single book can find itself spawning a sequel and,
eventually, an open-ended series, so can a trilogy, but the follow-on
books aren't in any real sense part of the trilogy, as the author
didn't plan them when they started. Your comment about Riverworld
points up another category, what I would call the "serialized novel",
in which an excessively long novel is broken up into separately
published volumes at the insistence of the publisher, but without the
author going back and doing the work that is necessary to make each
book work as a standalone novel. Other instances of this are
Chalker's _Soul Rider_ and, IIRC, some of Cherryh's _Chanur_ books.
Examples of all of this can be found in Chalker's _Well World_ books,
which features a standalone novel, a sequel novel that was split into
two books, the reconception of the work into an overall plot that
turned it retroactively into a four-volume trilogy by adding two more
books, and then, later, either the transformation into an open-ended
series or another trilogy as a sequel to the first. (I've only read
the first five books and the first of the follow-ons.)
> Having been stung so many times, I'm now reluctant to read any
> book that's written in more than one volume. Unfortunately
> the 'sequel' disease has become so widespread that I'm having
> trouble finding anything to read.
Have there ever really been many popular writers that didn't "succumb"
to the request to tell readers "what happened next"? Shakespeare,
Twain, Dickens, Verne, ... all wrote sequels. Personally I like both
sequels and series. Especially in science fiction and fantasy, the
effort that goes into establishing a world makes decrying sequels a
bit like saying "well, I've read one book set in New York, no point in
reading another".
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Never ascribe to malice that which
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |can adequately be explained by
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |stupidity.
Richard Fontana
> "transmigration of souls". On the other hand, Terry Pratchett's
> _Discworld_ books are basically fantasy, even though the themes of a
> number of them have been the effects of the introduction of (to them)
> advanced technology (e.g., telegraph) into society.
I've been thinking about this lately as I have begun reading those books.
I think Pratchett makes an attempt, though it is playful and comical, to
describe "magic" in a way that is supposed to give it some sort of
(fantastic) scientific basis within the universe in which the magic is
supposed to work, and it differs from standard fantasy novels
in that respect. But perhaps his books are not truly either science
fiction or fantasy in any conventional sense, as they are so obviously
satirical in their thrust, which seems to make them different from the
bulk of the science fiction and fantasy literary corpus (at least in my
experience of it, which I guess is somewhat limited though). Pratchett
reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut, who actually started out being
classified as a science fiction writer.
Mary MacTavish
<rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> said:
>But perhaps his books are not truly either science
>fiction or fantasy in any conventional sense, as they are so obviously
>satirical in their thrust, which seems to make them different from the
>bulk of the science fiction and fantasy literary corpus (at least in my
>experience of it, which I guess is somewhat limited though). Pratchett
>reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut, who actually started out being
>classified as a science fiction writer.
I've told folks that Pratchett writes pieces set in a world of magic,
trolls, and a flat world. Other than that, they're satire, political
commentary, intrigue, *life.* He writes in a fantasy setting, but
that's not really his genre.
.
Mary MacTavish
http://www.prado.com/~iris
Joe Manfre
Might he be at all comparable to Stanislaw Lem? Of authors generally
classified as writers of "science fiction", Lem is the only one who
really appeals to me personally. (I like things that are tongue-in-
cheek and a little absurd, and the science fiction that I've read
seemed too earnest for my taste.)
Or how about Tom Robbins? I don't like Tom Robbins at all; he reminds
me of those smarmy self-righteous hippie people who I, as a badass
snot-nosed punk rocker, am constitutionally required to despise.
JM
jan sand
The only writer who was clever enough to be in a class with Stanislaw
Lem's "Cyberiad" to my mind was John Collier who wrote "Fancies and
Goodnights" which was not SF at all but very funny fantastic stories.
Robert Sheckley had a very funny collection of SF short stories titled
"Citizen in Space" It's worth reading.
Jan Sand
Richard Fontana
> Mary MacTavish (ma...@removeleftoftheWwrexham.net) wrote:
>
> >On Fri, 4 May 2001 18:32:52 -0400, Richard Fontana
> ><rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> said:
> >
> >>But perhaps his books are not truly either science fiction or
> >>fantasy in any conventional sense, as they are so obviously
> >>satirical in their thrust, which seems to make them different from
> >>the bulk of the science fiction and fantasy literary corpus (at
> >>least in my experience of it, which I guess is somewhat limited
> >>though). Pratchett reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut, who actually
> >>started out being classified as a science fiction writer.
> >
> >I've told folks that Pratchett writes pieces set in a world of magic,
> >trolls, and a flat world. Other than that, they're satire, political
> >commentary, intrigue, *life.* He writes in a fantasy setting, but
> >that's not really his genre.
>
> Might he be at all comparable to Stanislaw Lem? Of authors generally
> classified as writers of "science fiction", Lem is the only one who
> really appeals to me personally. (I like things that are tongue-in-
> cheek and a little absurd, and the science fiction that I've read
> seemed too earnest for my taste.)
Pratchett isn't like Lem, at least based on what I've read from both of
them. Pratchett's style is sort of hilariously wacky -- actually it
reminds me of the sort of comedy exhibited in _The Simpsons_, strangely
enough.
If you like Lem, you might like Italo Calvino's beautiful _Cosmicomics_.
Mary MacTavish
<rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> said:
>
>Pratchett isn't like Lem, at least based on what I've read from both of
>them. Pratchett's style is sort of hilariously wacky -- actually it
>reminds me of the sort of comedy exhibited in _The Simpsons_, strangely
>enough.
Hilariously wacky, and very, very smart. And with time and the
development of his characters, sometimes very real and moving. His
earlier books were mostly wacky and silly. His later ones can be
fairly deep.
Good info is here:
http://www.co.uk.lspace.org/
Mark Brader
> A trilogy is a multivolume work, conceived of as a single
> story with an overarching plot, but in which each book also works as a
> separate novel having its own plot. As the name implies, these are
> typically three books, probably because most stories partition into a
> beginning, middle, and end, but they can be more (such as Chalker's
> _Four Lords of the Diamond_) or fewer (Pratchett's _The Colour of
> Magic_ and _The Light Fantastic_).
I agree with all of this except for the "can be more or fewer" part.
We have other words such as "tetralogy" and "dekalogy" to use when
the number is different. There isn't a literary term that I know of
for the general N-alogy case, but the (geometrically peculiar) term
"cycle" seems to mean about the right thing.
--
Mark Brader "After all, it is necessary to get behind
Toronto someone before you can stab them in the back."
m...@vex.net -- Lynn & Jay, "Yes, Prime Minister"
Mary MacTavish
said:
>I agree with all of this except for the "can be more or fewer" part.
>We have other words such as "tetralogy" and "dekalogy" to use when
>the number is different. There isn't a literary term that I know of
>for the general N-alogy case, but the (geometrically peculiar) term
>"cycle" seems to mean about the right thing.
I use "series", too. But I'm weird.
(Cycle only makes sense to me if there's a cycle to the themes or
plots of the book.)
jan sand
<kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> wrote:
>
>The problem with this (to my mind) is that it makes things like
>Chalker's _Dancing Gods_ books science fiction, when they are
>obviously intended to be fantasy. In those books, magic and the
>lots of other aspects were indeed governed by rules, and the rules
>were written in books, but the rules themselves were subjective and
>only gained force by being passed and entered into the books.
>
>[1] E.g., Rule XL, 227, 301(a): "Barbarians must be tall, dark, and
> handsom, exotic in race but of no known nationality."
>
>--
>Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
> HP Laboratories |The mystery of government is not how
> 1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |Washington works, but how to make it
> Palo Alto, CA 94304 |stop.
> | P.J. O'Rourke
> kirsh...@hpl.hp.com
> (650)857-7572
>
> http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/
To pursue the characteristic if the genre a bit more, really good SF
is the projection of a new way of looking at the universe.
J.B.S.Haldane once remarked that the universe is not only queerer than
you think, it is queerer than you can think. Good science fiction
shows you that. "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have nothing at all of
that in them. The spacecraft were merely WWII airplanes in space
costume doing the old dogfight thing all over again. Real spacecraft
don't have to manoeuver like airplanes. They can "fly" sidewise just
as easily as any other way. Fred Hoyle wrote good SF. In each of his
stories he showed you things you had not imagined before. In "The
Fifth Planet" he demonstrated an intelligence totally alien to
humanity.
In "The Black Cloud" he showed how cosmic dust could be more
intelligent than a man than a man is to an amoeba. In "September the
First is too Late", he showed how different parts of Time could exist
together on Earth. These are new and weird ideas and worth exploring.
In the Russian novel "Roadside Picnic" the idea was that an alien
group had visited Earth and left behind their equivalent of empty Coke
bottles and candy wrappers and they not only were extremely puzzling,
they were dangerous and the countryside they had visited was so
twisted in time and space that its four dimensional topology was
murderous to traverse.
In "Solaris" Lem created an entire planet that was conscious and it
played with the waves of its seas creating and destroying huge
mathematical structures which were its method of thinking.
This is real and strange imagination and this is the soul of science
fiction.
Jan Sand
Charles Riggs
wrote:
Easy question. The first part of the trilogy could consist of two
volumes, the second part one volume, and the third part two volumes.
I'll leave the other possible combinations for you to work out.
Charles Riggs
GrapeApe
>[...]
>In which dimension is it possible to have a five-volume trilogy?
Usually it is the dimension in which a book has spawned to sequels to such
success, that the publisher decides to promote and market the series as a
trilogy. Then the trilogy sells so well, another sequel is demanded, after the
works have almost been canonized as "The <name of series> Trilogy. Usually in
the interim during the build up of the Trilogy as a classic set of stories, the
writer has gone on to other story lines, having thought there couldn't possibly
be anything else that could be said in that earlier series, and frequently
saying so in writing. But the writer becomes in$pired, And the trilogy becomes
four, then five books.
Such was the case with several classic 'trilogies". Doug Adams decided to take
advantage of common "trilogy aint over yet as long as there is insistant
demand" occurance to humorous effect when it happened to the "The Hitchikers
Trilogy". He just kept referring to the series as "The Trilogy"
Bill McCray
wrote:
>"Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have nothing at all of
>that in them. The spacecraft were merely WWII airplanes in space
>costume doing the old dogfight thing all over again. Real spacecraft
>don't have to manoeuver like airplanes. They can "fly" sidewise just
>as easily as any other way.
True. At the end of the opening sequence of Star Trek: Voyager,
Voyager banks around a planet and then zips into warp drive. I've
commented that the bank is just like it would be if there were a
strong gravitational field below the TV screen, just like an airplane
would do. I still like the show.
Bill McCray
Lexington, KY
Peter Moylan
>>Peter Moylan (pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au) wrote:
>>
>>> Five-volume trilogies have become a disease that is blighting SF.
>[...]
>In which dimension is it possible to have a five-volume trilogy?
I'm not going to accept the blame for that one. The abuse of
terminology is part of what I was griping about.
--
Peter Moylan pe...@ee.newcastle.edu.au
http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au
Peter Moylan
>It's a long time since I've read any SF, but isn't the "Dune" trilogy
>(can't even remember the author - Frank Herbert?) another example
>of increasingly crappier additions beyond the first three?
An excellent example, except that I would have said "beyond the first
one". I think of Frank Herbert as a one-book author.
"Dune" is an admirable book, and well worth reading, but I've been
greatly disappointed by every other book of his that I've read.
It's not necessarily the author's fault. If you write a best-seller
called, say "Bush", the publisher will be at your door almost
immediately for a "Son of Bush". They don't care whether or not it's
crap, they just know that sequels make money.
And we, the gullible public, buy the sequel because it just might
turn out to be good. To quote another one-book author, it's a
Catch-22 situation.
jan sand
I think Star Wars is great fun, as I am a guy who spent his childhood
reading fairytales. But I do not confuse it with science fiction. The
opening lines are a modern version of "Once upon a time...."
Jan Sand
Richard Fontana
> It's not necessarily the author's fault. If you write a best-seller
> called, say "Bush", the publisher will be at your door almost
> immediately for a "Son of Bush". They don't care whether or not it's
> crap, they just know that sequels make money.
I hope this doesn't mean I shouldn't read the forthcoming _Monkey's
Uncle_.
Dr Robin Bignall
wrote:
>On Sat, 05 May 2001 14:31:37 GMT, BillM...@mindspring.com (Bill
>McCray) wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 05 May 2001 04:03:46 GMT, jan...@mindspring.com (jan sand)
>>wrote:
>>
>>>"Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have nothing at all of
>>>that in them. The spacecraft were merely WWII airplanes in space
>>>costume doing the old dogfight thing all over again. Real spacecraft
>>>don't have to manoeuver like airplanes. They can "fly" sidewise just
>>>as easily as any other way.
>>
>>True. At the end of the opening sequence of Star Trek: Voyager,
>>Voyager banks around a planet and then zips into warp drive. I've
>>commented that the bank is just like it would be if there were a
>>strong gravitational field below the TV screen, just like an airplane
>>would do. I still like the show.
>>
>>Bill McCray
>>Lexington, KY
>>
>>
>>
>>
>I think Star Wars is great fun, as I am a guy who spent his childhood
>reading fairytales. But I do not confuse it with science fiction. The
>opening lines are a modern version of "Once upon a time...."
>
>Jan Sand
I couldn't agree more. 'Star Wars' is like SF was in the days of Doc
Smith and the Lensmen (a good name for a pop group) -- Space Opera,
beautifully filmed. The written variety has progressed somewhat since
then. Unfortunately, people who are not SF devotees think that 'Star
Wars' is all there is, and that the whole genre must therefore be
childish etc. My favourite SF film -- 'Dune' -- which sticks to the
story-line well and was made as a labour of love by the De Laurentis
family because it was Dino's favourite book, was a box-office flop.
I once loaned Clarke's 'Childhood's End' to my professor at college.
He is a nice chap, but he thought it was rubbish. Maybe SF is like
golf -- you're either devoted to it or think it's stupid that adults
should waste their money buying expensive pieces of wood and metal to
spend hours knocking a ball into a hole.
--
wrmst rgrds
RB...(docr...@ntlworld.com)
jan sand
In the old days when literary people automatically spit on all science
fiction because they couldn't see the point of a story that was more
concerned with speculations on how the universe might be made rather
than how and why the protagonist made his/her sex object, there was
not much capable writing in the genre. Things have changed, but the
distinction of what is and what isn't science fiction is still a
vigorous topic.
Although I found the social context and science of Dune intrigueing I
still feel it is closer to Star Wars than well thought out science
fiction. A planet totally devoid of vegetation could never develop an
oxygen atmosphere and the final rain at the end required an entirely
different ecology to take place. Nevertheless, I found the special
effects delightful. It seems to me that if any art form would be
appreciated from this era in the future, it will be that of film
special effects which, it seems to me, is far more challenging than
that pointless stuff which is regularly exhiibted in the modern
museums.
To me, 2001 is outstanding because it presents so many unexplained
aspects of the universe in such a dramatic way, although I had to read
the book version later to figure out what was gong on.
The John Carpenter version of "The Thing" was also an excellent
rendition of the Don Stuart (aka John W. Campbell) short story "Who
Goes There?" and it presents a life form that is exceedingly strange.
"The Body Snatchers" (the one with Donald Southern in it) was also
quite good with a somewhat similar theme.
Films such as "The Thirteenth Floor" and "The Matrix" which challenge
our concepts of reality are, in my opinion, solidly within the science
fiction category although the concept of using humans as power sources
struck me as ridiculous.
I am awaiting a screen version of "The Left Hand of Darkness" wherein
humans undergoing estrous switch sex. It might be popular in the gay
communities and has a basis in reality in some species now existing
here on Earth. And it is a good story.
The series of films based on "Alien" also has a reasonable science
basis with high quality special effects, but the series as a whole, it
seems to me, never was much better than the original film and seemed
to me repetitive, as were the two "Terminator" films.
Jan Sand
Don Aitken
wrote:
>
>"Peter Moylan" <pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au> wrote in message
>
>> While I'm in rant mode, I'll add a hint to new readers. Do
>> not under any circumstances buy 'The Reality Dysfunction' by
>> Peter F. Hamilton. Not only does it have sequels, but the
>> first volume is over 1200 pages long. And I don't think I've
>> ever seen a 1000-page book, not even a 600-page book, that
>> couldn't have been greatly improved by getting a decent editor
>> to cut it back to 100 pages. A book that long is a near
>> guarantee of piles of waffle and padding, and Hamilton
>> doesn't disappoint in that respect. After the first 100 pages
>> I still hadn't figured out what the book was going to be
>> about, so I gave up and put it into the 'to be used for
>> propping up broken furniture' pile.
>
>I disagree. I found that book to be highly entertaining. Unfortunately, the
>final chapter left so many loose ends it was obvious from context that a
>sequel, or at least another chapter, ought to be present. The book itself
>made no hint of a sequel. You might reasonably expect that a book of that
>length would be self-contained, especially when it does not hint at a sequel
>on the self-praising cover reviews. I was so pissed at being misled that I
>vowed never to buy another book by that author.
>
I think the edition I read made it clear that it was book one of a
trilogy. And at least he has *finished* the series - three books
(admittedly fat ones) and it is definitively *over*. The real blight
is series that just go on and on, as long as the books continue to
sell, and are then, as often as not, just abandoned unfinished.
Incidentally the first author to advertise "A Trilogy in <more than
three> Books" was Douglas Adams. At least he meant it to be funny.
--
Don Aitken
The Walkers
just who said what, but I cannot face redoing this ab origino,
so I apologize for unclear attributions.]
[...]
> >In article <3AF21872...@owlcroft.com>, The Walkers wrote:
[..]
> >> Imagining a world in which scientific principles we do not now
> >> know, or now think incorrect, to be "fantasy" is, I think, serious
> >> error. Fantasy is work in which, to be brief, magic works.
> >
> >No, I think that's far too narrow a definition of "fantasy" to be useful
> >(at least in the context of the OP's question). "Fantasy" is anything that
> >is "fantastic", it is (to select just one definition from the SOED) "A
> >literary genre concerned with imaginary worlds and peoples; a composition
> >in this genre". That can include worlds in which "magic" (whatever that
> >is) "works" (whatever that means), and also worlds founded on imagined
> >scientific principles.
Sorry, I again disagree. I simply will not admit that a tale set in
world for which imagined scientific principles are the essential
difference between it and our world is a "fantasy."
I think that much of the confusion arises owing to style: "fantasy"
works tend (especially the commoner inferior sort) to be written in
a recognizable style that is notably different from the style in which
"science fiction" works are commonly written. When one encounters a
fantasy work in the s.f. style, the result is either jarring or
amusing (whether by authorial intent or not); but when one encounters
an s.f. tale in the fantasy style, there is a reader tendency to take
that tale as "fantasy" (think "Pern")--but that does not actually make
any such tale a fantasy.
> >> Now that is, in a sense, only delaying the reckoning, because the
> >> point becomes "what is magic?" A short and not fully thought-out
> >> answer, which is nevertheless not as simplistic as it might sound
> >> at first, is that magic is anything that is not science.
> >
> >Yes, but, to misquote I forget whom: "Any science sufficiently more
> >advanced than our own is indistinguishable from magic".
The famous--or notorious--quotation is from Arthur C. Clarke, a much
over-rated "hard s.f." author (as a writer, he's a fine engineer), who
said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from
magic, thereby demonstrating his literally abysmal lack of
understanding
of what magic is.
[...]
> >I think that the real difference between "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" -
> >as we tend to use them as labels to classify works of literature - is the
> >manner of telling the story. If the story is set in a world that uses
> >technology that - although fantastic to us - is portrayed as being based
> >on scientific principles understood by the inhabitants of that world then
> >the story is the kind of fantasy that we classify as science fiction. If
> >the story is set in a world in which there are forces that are regarded as
> >fantastic by the inhabitants of that world then the story world cannot be
> >regarded as scientific, and the story is a fantasy that we would probably
> >not classify as science fiction.
As has been widely noted, *all* fiction is, by definition, "fantasy"
in
that it portrays things that never happened. Stories that portray
worlds
in which scientifically sound (within the science imagined for the
story's setting) occurrences are regarded as fantastic by the
inhabitants
of that world are a staple--one might say a cliche'--of science
fiction
(generation starships whose inhabitants have forgotten who and what
they are is a typical example). They simply are not fantasy
literature.
> >There are, of course, a great many stories that defy so simple a
> >classification by including recognizable traits of both kinds of stories
> >(e.g. both spaceships and wizards). The existence of these stories should
> >tell us that it is important not to take any categorization of the
> >genre(s) too seriously.
That last is probably true--indeed, sf&f *authors* rarely make
anything
like the fuss that readers do concerning categorization. That is the
main reason for the now-common term "speculative fiction," meant as
an umbrella covering both types, sf and fantasy.
* * *
On a different tack, I also want to take exception to the statement
that sf&f is based on asking "what if?" I will take the gross
liberty of quoting myself on this:
A final thought: SF&F is also commonly portrayed, even by its
friends, as supplying answers to the question "What if?" What if
a flying saucer landed on the White House lawn tomorrow? What if
we were all androgynous? What if we were each made twice as smart
overnight? And so on. In honesty, a great deal of SF&F *is*
written from just such considerations. That does not make it *good*
SF&F, nor does it define the field as the answering of such
questions.
There is in baseball an expression that describes a class of poorly
handled infield grounder: "He let the ball play him." Writers who
generate SF&F tales simply because they have asked themselves "What
if?" and thought of a clever answer are letting the ball play them.
The task of an SF&F writer is to create a tale wherein the special
liberties available allow a more focussed or wider or deeper or more
*something* presentation of the ideas than would a "mainstream"
treatment. Such a tale can be an answer to a "What if?" question,
but if so the answer provided, and the question, should flow from
the
necessities of the tale, not the tale from the necessities of the
answer--otherwise the boors who incessantly drone on about SF&F not
being "real" literature have another bullet in their gun.
The full text that is the source of that quotation is the lengthy
"Apologia," a wide-ranging discussion of sf&f as literature, on the
sf&f
website shown in my sig line below. Sorry for the horn-tooting.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
http://owlcroft.com/sfandf
Tsippi Jelingold
news:9csrqp$r2e$9...@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au...
> Tsippi Jelingold wrote:
>
> >Actually I don't think The Guide can be called science fiction since
> >there's very litle science in it. I usually refer to it as "that
> >five-volume trilogy".
>
In principle I agree, but I'll read anything that Adams publishes no
matter how it's called. Also Terry Pratchett. Good humorous fiction is
so rare.
> I have flat-out refused to read anything by Philip Jose Farmer
> ever since he published the fourth volume of his 'Riverworld'
> trilogy (after having the effrontery to leave his readers hanging
> at the end of the first volume, without having had any advance
> warning that the book wasn't self-contained).
Read one of his a long time ago and gave up.
>I've lost track
> of how many volumes we're up to in Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy;
> not only did he pile on extra volumes during his lifetime, but
> they started getting ghost-written after his death.
I read the first three in my teens, together with the robot stories.
They're great when you're 15 but I have no intention of reading anything
else of his.
> Not to
> mention Piers Anthony, about whom it is said that one should never
> read anything beyond the first book in each series. And don't
> get me started in on Lazarus Long.
I won't, I promise! Talk about juvenile writing...
> Having been stung so many times, I'm now reluctant to read any
> book that's written in more than one volume. Unfortunately
> the 'sequel' disease has become so widespread that I'm having
> trouble finding anything to read.
I was trapped into reading the first three volumes of Robert Jordan's
epic. Eight volumes and about 65,000 pages later I'm heartily sorry and
also sick and tired. I'll probably plod through the rest though. What
can I say, I'm weak.
> While I'm in rant mode, I'll add a hint to new readers. Do
> not under any circumstances buy 'The Reality Dysfunction' by
> Peter F. Hamilton. Not only does it have sequels, but the
> first volume is over 1200 pages long. And I don't think I've
> ever seen a 1000-page book, not even a 600-page book, that
> couldn't have been greatly improved by getting a decent editor
> to cut it back to 100 pages. A book that long is a near
> guarantee of piles of waffle and padding, and Hamilton
> doesn't disappoint in that respect. After the first 100 pages
> I still hadn't figured out what the book was going to be
> about, so I gave up and put it into the 'to be used for
> propping up broken furniture' pile.
Thanks for the warning. I'll be sure to avoid PFH.
While I have the soapbox, let me recommend several books that aren't SF
and aren't exactly fantasy though they use elements of fantasy. I'll
rephrase
that - *warmly* recommend:
A Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Artist and Margarita - Mikhail Bolgakov
White Book - Pavel Kohut*
The Man Who Could Fly and other stories - Karl Capek*
The White Deer - James Thurber (this one is especially obaue)
* A search for Capek and Kohut in amazon (us/uk) turned up surprisingly
few results, and in google not many more. I was trying to find out the
titles of the English translations: the Capek may be called Tales From
Two Pockets. Maybe there aren't any for Kohut.
Regards, Tsippi Jelingold
--
I have an intuitive grasp of languages
(Intuition (n): an uncanny sixth sense which tells people
that they are right, whether they are or not).
Fabian
"jan sand" <jan...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
> I think Star Wars is great fun, as I am a guy who spent his childhood
> reading fairytales. But I do not confuse it with science fiction. The
> opening lines are a modern version of "Once upon a time...."
For those who can make a distinction between fantasy and fairy tales,
perhaps a modern fairy tale classification ought to be made for Star Wars?
--
--
Fabian
The human didn't notice. Did other cats have this problem with their pets?
Tsippi Jelingold
news:3af34873...@news.mindspring.com...
> The only writer who was clever enough to be in a class with Stanislaw
> Lem's "Cyberiad" to my mind was John Collier who wrote "Fancies and
> Goodnights" which was not SF at all but very funny fantastic stories.
> Robert Sheckley had a very funny collection of SF short stories titled
> "Citizen in Space" It's worth reading.
>
> Jan Sand
Sheckley is great, I've read several story collections of his. In one
story he presents a theory that deals with the best cure for childhood
terrors - hide under a blanket until the monsta goes away. Naturally it
worked for adults too. This fits my definition of science fiction.
And then there's Frederik Brown. Didn't they publish an anthology of
funny stories together?
jan sand
wrote:
>
>> >In article <3AF21872...@owlcroft.com>, The Walkers wrote:
>[..]
>> >> Imagining a world in which scientific principles we do not now
>> >> know, or now think incorrect, to be "fantasy" is, I think, serious
>> >> error. Fantasy is work in which, to be brief, magic works.
I suppose you could be satisfied with a simple answer which makes
fantasy something which deals with magic, but I have encountered tales
with no reference to magic as such which, to my taste, are easily felt
to be fantasy. Such as Carroll's Alice stories, Gulliver's Travels,
Charlotte"s Web et cetera. The stories of John Collier almost always
dealt with fantasy and only occasionally with magic.
>> >(at least in the context of the OP's question). "Fantasy" is anything that
>> >is "fantastic", it is (to select just one definition from the SOED) "A
>> >literary genre concerned with imaginary worlds and peoples; a composition
>> >in this genre". That can include worlds in which "magic" (whatever that
>> >is) "works" (whatever that means), and also worlds founded on imagined
>> >scientific principles.
Much good fantasy deals with our real world in which some of the
things we take for granted are suddenly exaggerated to the point of
demonstrating how ridiculous they are when looked straight in the eye.
Mel Brooks has done a good job in this area.
>I think that much of the confusion arises owing to style: "fantasy"
>works tend (especially the commoner inferior sort) to be written in
>a recognizable style that is notably different from the style in which
>"science fiction" works are commonly written. When one encounters a
>fantasy work in the s.f. style, the result is either jarring or
>amusing (whether by authorial intent or not); but when one encounters
>an s.f. tale in the fantasy style, there is a reader tendency to take
>that tale as "fantasy" (think "Pern")--but that does not actually make
>any such tale a fantasy.
To my mind, most of what is considered space opera may well lay in the
fantasy catagory as the point of the tale is not exposing a
peculiarity of the real world but merely amusing one' self with a
baroque romantic tale.
>> >> Now that is, in a sense, only delaying the reckoning, because the
>> >> point becomes "what is magic?" A short and not fully thought-out
>> >> answer, which is nevertheless not as simplistic as it might sound
>> >> at first, is that magic is anything that is not science.
One can be anthropological about magic, but the common understanding
of the term is the performance of some feat which is contra to natural
law. And what makes the Clarke quote so pertinent is that an advanced
civilization would, by its very definition, have a set of natural laws
to work with that range far outside those we accept and understand
today.
>> >Yes, but, to misquote I forget whom: "Any science sufficiently more
>> >advanced than our own is indistinguishable from magic".
>
>The famous--or notorious--quotation is from Arthur C. Clarke, a much
>over-rated "hard s.f." author (as a writer, he's a fine engineer), who
>said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
>from
>magic, thereby demonstrating his literally abysmal lack of
>understanding
>of what magic is.
Having read much of Arthur C.Clarke I very much doubt he is as
misinformed as to the formal definition of magic as you seem to think.
He is using the term in the common sense of everyday usage and I find
his statement reasonable.
>[...]
>
>> >I think that the real difference between "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" -
>> >as we tend to use them as labels to classify works of literature - is the
>> >manner of telling the story. If the story is set in a world that uses
>> >technology that - although fantastic to us - is portrayed as being based
>> >on scientific principles understood by the inhabitants of that world then
>> >the story is the kind of fantasy that we classify as science fiction. If
>> >the story is set in a world in which there are forces that are regarded as
>> >fantastic by the inhabitants of that world then the story world cannot be
>> >regarded as scientific, and the story is a fantasy that we would probably
>> >not classify as science fiction.
Here, you have made the blunder of excluding the basic intent of a
science fiction writer. The first accomplished science fiction writer,
H.G.Wells always set his stories in our world and to an overwhelming
degree accepted common scientific principles. And then he proposed a
small change and developed the consequences of that change so that the
world we know became fantastically distorted by that difference. He
was a very good writer and the quality of his stories, which are in
the range of a hundred years old, stands up very well today, even
though we are well aware that Mars is pretty lifeless and there is no
gigantic insect life on the Moon. The intent was to demonstrate
possibilities in our world that are not evident and this intent is
part of the basic architecture of writers like Clement, LeGuin,
Heinlein, Bear, Lem, Clarke, Niven, Asimov, Tenn, Van Vogt, Forward,
Kuttner, and many others. That the literary quality of a good deal of
their work had serious lacks I do not dispute, but I did not read them
for that. I read them for ideas, and some of the stuff even was
fairly well written.
>As has been widely noted, *all* fiction is, by definition, "fantasy"
>in
>that it portrays things that never happened. Stories that portray
>worlds
>in which scientifically sound (within the science imagined for the
>story's setting) occurrences are regarded as fantastic by the
>inhabitants
>of that world are a staple--one might say a cliche'--of science
>fiction
>(generation starships whose inhabitants have forgotten who and what
>they are is a typical example). They simply are not fantasy
>literature.
>
>
On a different tack, I also want to take exception to the statement
>that sf&f is based on asking "what if?" I will take the gross
>liberty of quoting myself on this:
>
> A final thought: SF&F is also commonly portrayed, even by its
> friends, as supplying answers to the question "What if?" What if
> a flying saucer landed on the White House lawn tomorrow? What if
> we were all androgynous? What if we were each made twice as smart
> overnight? And so on. In honesty, a great deal of SF&F *is*
> written from just such considerations. That does not make it *good*
> SF&F, nor does it define the field as the answering of such
>questions.
No, a mere "what if" story is not necessarily a good science fiction
story. But to my mind it is an essential element in good science
fiction. It is not a crutch, it is very very basic to the genre. But
it is also important as to how the question is answered and what
specific area is exolored. It is not at all trivial.
> There is in baseball an expression that describes a class of poorly
> handled infield grounder: "He let the ball play him." Writers who
> generate SF&F tales simply because they have asked themselves "What
> if?" and thought of a clever answer are letting the ball play them.
> The task of an SF&F writer is to create a tale wherein the special
> liberties available allow a more focussed or wider or deeper or more
> *something* presentation of the ideas than would a "mainstream"
> treatment. Such a tale can be an answer to a "What if?" question,
> but if so the answer provided, and the question, should flow from
>the
> necessities of the tale, not the tale from the necessities of the
> answer--otherwise the boors who incessantly drone on about SF&F not
> being "real" literature have another bullet in their gun.
I am not afraid of the "boors" of literature as science fiction is
sturdy enough and has sufficient following to ignore elitist criticism
as it has from the beginning when much of the quality of the early
stuff was frankly abysmal but nevertheless was interesting for the
basic curiosity of the nature of the world.evoked in the reader.
>The full text that is the source of that quotation is the lengthy
>"Apologia," a wide-ranging discussion of sf&f as literature, on the
>sf&f
>website shown in my sig line below. Sorry for the horn-tooting.
>
>
>--
>Cordially,
>Eric Walker
>Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
>http://owlcroft.com/sfandf
Jan Sand
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>I once loaned Clarke's 'Childhood's End' to my professor at college.
>He is a nice chap, but he thought it was rubbish. Maybe SF is like
>golf -- you're either devoted to it or think it's stupid that adults
>should waste their money buying expensive pieces of wood and metal to
>spend hours knocking a ball into a hole.
Professor of what?
I've known English departments to prescribe "Brave new world".
Steve Hayes
http://www.suite101.com/myhome.cfm/methodius
ref
> On Sat, 05 May 2001 17:49:16 +0100, Dr Robin Bignall <docr...@ntlworld.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> >I once loaned Clarke's 'Childhood's End' to my professor at college.
> >He is a nice chap, but he thought it was rubbish. Maybe SF is like
> >golf -- you're either devoted to it or think it's stupid that adults
> >should waste their money buying expensive pieces of wood and metal to
> >spend hours knocking a ball into a hole.
>
> Professor of what?
>
> I've known English departments to prescribe "Brave new world".
I've known English departments that had special courses (classes) on
science fiction.
But I wouldn't call _Brave New World_ science fiction. It's sometimes
classified as "dystopian fiction", I believe, along with such works as
Orwell's _1984_ and Zamyatin's _We_.
Dr Robin Bignall
wrote:
[snipped for brevity]
I'm not prevaricating if I say that I agree with both you and Eric.
Eric's view of the definition of magic is very much a modern, 20th
century one which comes from the insights of today. But it's not too
long ago that magic was thought of as anything that was not understood
by the accumulated knowledge of a more superstitious age. The Cargo
Cults, and the Salem Witches, for example. Clarke's definition fits
that sort of belief better. I've often wondered about what sort of
society this 'primitive' one would have to be in order to believe that
what we do today is magic to them. The ancient Chinese formulated and
documented the art of war so completely, and they had gunpowder and
rockets, that if faced with ICMBs and hydrogen bombs they'd probably
shrug their shoulders and say, "Bigger bangs. So what?" Leonardo da
Vinci would probably be more disconcerted by the lack of culture in
everyday life than he would be impressed by technological
achievements.
One of the problems with magic is that it gets bound up with
superstition and religion. Thus, to some, one kind of magic is black
and therefore bound to Satan and evil in some way. The other is white,
and emanates from the gods and goodness. But suppose that it is just a
force, about as indiscriminate as gravity, but much rarer. Suppose it
manifests itself, quite repeatably, in only in about one in a hundred
billion humans. Thus we've only ever had maybe one or two real
magicians on earth. Being affected by gravity does not mean that one
understands either it or anything else. Being a 'carrier' of magic
would not necessarily mean superhuman intelligence. Maybe, just maybe,
2001 years ago such a carrier was born. He was a product of his time:
superstitious and bound up with religion because everyone was. He had
no knowledge of how he made magic happen; he just did it.
It's a theory no worse than any of the others! :)
--
wrmst rgrds
RB...(docr...@ntlworld.com)
Dr Robin Bignall
wrote:
Biophysics. 'Brave New World' is not just a good speculative story,
it's also written beautifully, so I'm not surprised.
--
wrmst rgrds
RB...(docr...@ntlworld.com)
Daniel James
> Sorry, I again disagree. I simply will not admit that a tale set in
> world for which imagined scientific principles are the essential
> difference between it and our world is a "fantasy."
Although you replied to Jan Sand the quote was from my earlier posting....
That isn't what I said: I said that if the characters in the story accept
that the workings of their world are explicable in terms of a (real or
imaginary) science then the story is science fiction. Note that I'm not
talking about whether the readers can explain the world in terms of science,
but whether the characters in the story can (or wish to) - it's more a
distinction between different styles of writing than an issue of content.
If the characters in the story are themselves unable to conceive of a
scientific explanation for the workings of their world then the story is not
(or is not purely) science fiction. We might term this latter type of story
"supernatural fiction". My point, however, was that I see both types of
story as being /types/ of fantasy. I don't accept that the term "fantasy"
can be applied only to those stories in which - as you put it - "magic
works".
I do agree, though, that many people have chosen to apply the label
"fantasy" only to those forms of fantasy that are not readily amenable to
any other form of categoization. Surely we are above such sloppy thinking
here?
> When one encounters a
> fantasy work in the s.f. style, the result is either jarring or
> amusing (whether by authorial intent or not); but when one encounters
> an s.f. tale in the fantasy style, there is a reader tendency to take
> that tale as "fantasy" (think "Pern")--but that does not actually make
> any such tale a fantasy.
The Pern setting is cleverly done: The stories are, for the most part,
written as fantasies but we are shown glimpses of science that suggest that
they are based on scientific possibility, and which ask us to categorize
them as science fiction. There are, however, elements of the setting that
defy any plausible scientific explanation. That the dragons are genetically
engineered from fire-lizards suggests a scientific setting, but their
aerodynamics would be hard justify on scientific grounds without bending the
laws of physics and their almost-instantaneous physical teleportation (going
"between") and time-travel are firmly in the realm of fantasy. What is
interesting is that the characters in the story don't say "it's magic" they
say "that's jolly useful - dunno how it works, though", and the reader is
asked to accept that its all a perfectly natural and scientifically
acceptable consequence of the genetic material of the fire-lizards.
This kind of cross-over between the scientific and the non-scientific is
strongly reminiscent, in some ways, of Asimov's Thiotimoline stories - the
first of which was written very much in the style of a serious scientific
article but describing - in scientific terms and with admirable legerdeplume
- a molecule with the fantasy-physical property of existing partly in the
present and partly in the future. Is that SF or fantasy? It certainly isn't
"magic", by any of the usually accepted definitions.
> > >Yes, but, to misquote I forget whom: "Any science sufficiently more
> > >advanced than our own is indistinguishable from magic".
>
> The famous--or notorious--quotation is from Arthur C. Clarke, a much
> over-rated "hard s.f." author (as a writer, he's a fine engineer), who
> said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
> from magic, thereby demonstrating his literally abysmal lack of
> understanding of what magic is.
Ah, Clarke; it could well have been he. I think you do him an injustice, he
is a better writer than you suggest (though, I concede, possibly a little
over-rated by some).
In that quotation Clarke is not saying anything about the nature of magic,
he is saying that when we are faced with a technology that is based on
priciples beyond our understanding we are liable to believe that those
principles cannot be explained - that the technology is supernatural -
rather than to recognize the limitations of our own understanding of
scientific principles.
There's a nice illustration of advanced science being mistaken for magic in
Colin Kapp's "The Wizard of Anharitte".
I don't think *any* of us understand what magic is - perhaps one of the
reasons why so many magical fantasy stories are so readable is that each
writer has a new and fresh concept of the meaning of magic, and that that
freshness prevents the genre from becoming stagnant.
> On a different tack, I also want to take exception to the statement
> that sf&f is based on asking "what if?"
The "What if?" story is certainly a familiar type of tale throughout the
fantasy genre /sensu lato/. These tales in particular invite the term
"speculative fiction". They are not /necessarily/ bad: as always, a good
writer will make more of the basic premise than a poor one.
Cheers,
Daniel.
mplsray
"ref" <rfon...@wesleyan.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.3.95.101050...@mail.wesleyan.edu...
Dystopian, certainly, but _Brave New World_ is very definitely science
fiction. Orwell's _1984_ contained very little in the way of new technology,
but _Brave New World_ depended upon it. Without the new drug _soma,_ and the
new classes of humanity through technological modification, there would be
no story. Orwell could have written his book with no more technology than
that which existed in the 1940s: It deals, in fact, with a variation (and,
in my opinion, not a particularly interesting variation) on Stalinist
totalitarianism.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
Richard Fontana
While actually I am inclined to agree with you, I now see clearly that I
do not think "new technology" is necessary for you to have science
fiction. I'm not yet prepared to define what science fiction is,
however.
Steve Hayes
<tsi...@netvision.net.il> wrote:
>> I have flat-out refused to read anything by Philip Jose Farmer
>> ever since he published the fourth volume of his 'Riverworld'
>> trilogy (after having the effrontery to leave his readers hanging
>> at the end of the first volume, without having had any advance
>> warning that the book wasn't self-contained).
>
>Read one of his a long time ago and gave up.
I read the first, a couple of chapters of the second, then skipped to the
fifth, when I found it in a library.
Steve Hayes
http://www.suite101.com/myhome.cfm/methodius
jan sand
It is probably much a matter of one's personal attitudes and the
definition keeps elaborating itself as one thinks about it, but one
aspect seems to me to be rather thoroughly connected to what is
accepted as existing and how a variation of the constrictions through
the introduction of one or a few factors might thoroughly transform
what we consider normality. Some of the introduced variations may be
technological, or it may be sociological or it might be a new
perception of nature in general. It seems to me that the device
requires the establishment of normality first as a literary device to
set the scene. If the initial scenes are bizarre, there is a loss of
contrast and thereby a loss of drama. This is a standard technique in
most literature wherein a character or a scene is first introduced in
a way that allows the reader to accept it as a part of normal reality
and the it participates gradually in the distortion through the
introduction of abnormality so that the reader is led gradually into
the final total peculiarity. This works frequently in both science
fiction and horror plots. And it is the lasting effect of this
conviction that the world we know has subsequently changed permanantly
which makes, to my mind, a work of science fiction valuable.
In pieces like "Erewhon" and "The Time Machine" and "1984"
the normality is embodied in the protagonist who carries the viewpont
of the reader with today's values.
Jan Sand
jan sand
<illi...@NOSPAM.mninter.net.invalid> wrote:
>Dystopian, certainly, but _Brave New World_ is very definitely science
>fiction. Orwell's _1984_ contained very little in the way of new technology,
>but _Brave New World_ depended upon it. Without the new drug _soma,_ and the
>new classes of humanity through technological modification, there would be
>no story. Orwell could have written his book with no more technology than
>that which existed in the 1940s: It deals, in fact, with a variation (and,
>in my opinion, not a particularly interesting variation) on Stalinist
>totalitarianism.
>
>
>--
>Raymond S. Wise
>Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
But that, of course, was the point. Orwell was thoroughly
disillusioned with communism and his motivation was to discredit the
system for a great many people who still felt that communism held
something worthwhile.
Jan Sand
Steve Hayes
A lot of works could be classified as belonging to more than one genre. I
might say that "Childhood's end" is not science fiction, but fantasy. It
doesn't really make much use of science. "Brave new world" does make use of
projected developments in science - most notably genetic engineering.
Add another example to the mix - C.S. Lewis's "That hideous strength", which
projects a dystopia based on social engineering.
At one level one could call all three books science fiction, in that they are
set in a future that assumes some developments in science and technology that
had not taken place when they were written. Clarke and Lewis assume the
development of interplanetary travel, though Huxley does not. Huxley and Lewis
develop dystopias based on social engineering, Clarke also assumes social
engineering, though for him it is in pursuit of a Eutopia. Both Lewis and
Clarke express a religious and theological worldview - Lewis sees what he
wrioters about from a Christian point of view, Clarke writes more from a
Buddhist perpective.
Steve Hayes
http://www.suite101.com/myhome.cfm/methodius
Peter Moylan
Daniel James wrote:
>This kind of cross-over between the scientific and the non-scientific is
>strongly reminiscent, in some ways, of Asimov's Thiotimoline stories - the
>first of which was written very much in the style of a serious scientific
>article but describing - in scientific terms and with admirable legerdeplume
>- a molecule with the fantasy-physical property of existing partly in the
>present and partly in the future. Is that SF or fantasy?
Neither. The original thiotimoline article was pure satire, whose purpose
was to point out the awfulness of the writing style expected in scientific
journals. (I've yet to see any evidence that the message reached the
editors of any of these journals.) As for the remaining thiotimoline
stories ... well, I've already expressed my opinion of sequels, elsewhere
in this thread.
One might well asked why the thiotimoline story was published in an
SF magazine if it wasn't SF. The way I see it, the reasoning was
similar to what happens when we get thread drift in these here
newsgroups. The author and editor knew that the piece wasn't on-topic,
but they also knew that it was the sort of joke that could appeal
to a typical reader of that magazine.
If you wish, you can think of thiotimoline as a variety of sheep.
>There's a nice illustration of advanced science being mistaken for magic in
>Colin Kapp's "The Wizard of Anharitte".
See also "The Flying Sorcerers" by Niven and Gerrold. An excellent
example, in my opinion, of something that is at the same time comedy
and hard SF, although initially it seems to be about a wizards' duel.
Peter Moylan
Was the point finally revealed, or did the point turn out to be
that there was no point?
jan sand
wrote:
>[Indian and pseudo-Indian newsgroups trimmed]
>
>Daniel James wrote:
>
>>This kind of cross-over between the scientific and the non-scientific is
>>strongly reminiscent, in some ways, of Asimov's Thiotimoline stories - the
>>first of which was written very much in the style of a serious scientific
>>article but describing - in scientific terms and with admirable legerdeplume
>>- a molecule with the fantasy-physical property of existing partly in the
>>present and partly in the future. Is that SF or fantasy?
>
>Neither. The original thiotimoline article was pure satire, whose purpose
>was to point out the awfulness of the writing style expected in scientific
>journals. (I've yet to see any evidence that the message reached the
>editors of any of these journals.) As for the remaining thiotimoline
>stories ... well, I've already expressed my opinion of sequels, elsewhere
>in this thread.
>
>One might well asked why the thiotimoline story was published in an
>SF magazine if it wasn't SF. The way I see it, the reasoning was
>similar to what happens when we get thread drift in these here
>newsgroups. The author and editor knew that the piece wasn't on-topic,
>but they also knew that it was the sort of joke that could appeal
>to a typical reader of that magazine.
>
>If you wish, you can think of thiotimoline as a variety of sheep.
>
>Peter Moylan pe...@ee.newcastle.edu.au
>http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au
It's been a very long time since I've read the original stuff in
Astounding Science Fiction back a half century ago, but there was a
special department in the magazine called "Probability Zero" and I
believe the Asimov thiotimoline material originated there. The
articles were spoofs of science and science fiction and some of them
were quite funny.
Jan Sand
The Walkers
"filaments," it is difficult to know to whom to respond;
I'll try this.]
Daniel James wrote:
> In article <3AF45EDA...@owlcroft.com>, The Walkers wrote:
> > Sorry, I again disagree. I simply will not admit that a tale
> > set in world for which imagined scientific principles are the
> > essential difference between it and our world is a "fantasy."
>
> Although you replied to Jan Sand the quote was from my earlier
> posting....
>
> That isn't what I said: I said that if the characters in the
> story accept that the workings of their world are explicable in
> terms of a (real or imaginary) science then the story is science
> fiction. Note that I'm not talking about whether the readers can
> explain the world in terms of science, but whether the characters
> in the story can (or wish to) - it's more a distinction between
> different styles of writing than an issue of content.
Ah, but that is a crucial part of our apparent disagreement. The
characters in a tale do not announce "I'm in a science-fiction story"
or "I'm in a fantasy story"; only *we*, the readers, make--if we so
choose--those distinctions, and we make them, or should, on the basis
of what kind of story the tale *really* is. (If we do not choose to
make any such distinction, this entire discussion is moot.)
> If the characters in the story are themselves unable to conceive
> of a scientific explanation for the workings of their world then
> the story is not (or is not purely) science fiction. We might term
> this latter type of story "supernatural fiction". My point, however,
> was that I see both types of story as being /types/ of fantasy. I
> don't accept that the term "fantasy" can be applied only to those
> stories in which - as you put it - "magic works".
And again, that is the crux. A tale in which all that happens is,
_to the reader_, obviously (or very likely) explicable purely as
matters of natural law--science, even if science superior to or
different from what we at the moment believe--is science fiction;
if matters are not thus explicable, it is fantasy. To call a tale
"fantasy" because the science in it is not either what we now
believe or even facially plausible is, in my opinion, to pervert
the meaning of the term.
I cannot overemphasize the importance to my view of this principle:
if the phenomena can be discovered by the scientific principle and
manipulated objectively by knowledge of the laws so discovered,
the knowledge is science. The ability to levitate by chanting
appropriate spells, if the principles governing such levitation
are known and can be applied equally by anyone possessing that
knowledge, it is just science, period the end.
> I do agree, though, that many people have chosen to apply the
> label "fantasy" only to those forms of fantasy that are not readily
> amenable to any other form of categorization. Surely we are above
> such sloppy thinking here?
I do hope we are above all sloppy thinking; that is why we write here.
> > When one encounters a fantasy work in the s.f. style, the result is
> > either jarring or amusing (whether by authorial intent or not); but
> > when one encounters an s.f. tale in the fantasy style, there is a
> > reader tendency to take that tale as "fantasy" (think "Pern")--but
> > that does not actually make any such tale a fantasy.
>
> The Pern setting is cleverly done: The stories are, for the most
> part, written as fantasies but we are shown glimpses of science that
> suggest that they are based on scientific possibility, and which ask
> us to categorize them as science fiction. There are, however, elements
> of the setting that defy any plausible scientific explanation. That
> the dragons are genetically engineered from fire-lizards suggests a
> scientific setting, but their aerodynamics would be hard justify on
> scientific grounds without bending the laws of physics and their
> almost-instantaneous physical teleportation (going "between") and
> time-travel are firmly in the realm of fantasy. What is interesting
> is that the characters in the story don't say "it's magic" they say
> "that's jolly useful - dunno how it works, though", and the reader is
> asked to accept that its all a perfectly natural and scientifically
> acceptable consequence of the genetic material of the fire-lizards.
Again: "elements of the setting that defy any plausible scientific
explanation" do not make the work fantasy so long as they are presented
as true science within the tale, as they are for Pern--though such may
make it poor science fiction in some eyes (not mine: unless the science
in an s.f. tale is literally laughable, I pay little mind to it, since
literate tales are about people, not things). Mind, I am not a fan
of Pern, but that's not because of any dubious science in it.
[...]
> > > >Yes, but, to misquote I forget whom: "Any science sufficiently
> > > >more advanced than our own is indistinguishable from magic".
> >
> > The famous--or notorious--quotation is from Arthur C. Clarke, a much
> > over-rated "hard s.f." author (as a writer, he's a fine engineer), who
> > said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
> > from magic, thereby demonstrating his literally abysmal lack of
> > understanding of what magic is.
>
> Ah, Clarke; it could well have been he. I think you do him an injustice,
> he is a better writer than you suggest (though, I concede, possibly a
> little over-rated by some).
(Did you ever try getting through, for example, his Rama stuff? I
would think a high-school senior could do better writing. Anyway,
that's OT.)
> In that quotation Clarke is not saying anything about the nature of magic,
> he is saying that when we are faced with a technology that is based on
> priciples beyond our understanding we are liable to believe that those
> principles cannot be explained - that the technology is supernatural -
> rather than to recognize the limitations of our own understanding of
> scientific principles.
[...]
> I don't think *any* of us understand what magic is - perhaps one of the
> reasons why so many magical fantasy stories are so readable is that each
> writer has a new and fresh concept of the meaning of magic, and that that
> freshness prevents the genre from becoming stagnant.
But we all do know, or should, what it *isn't*--science. What then is
it? If it is not science, it is not a uniform, objective process with
set laws, by definition. There are several schema that might fit, but
by and large they can all be described (again by definition) as being
"supernatural"; moreover, I think it is probably essential that any
such imagined system have a personal or moral element in it, else
it falls back to being repeatable natural law. Beyond this, deponent
sayeth not . . . .
> > On a different tack, I also want to take exception to the statement
> > that sf&f is based on asking "what if?"
>
> The "What if?" story is certainly a familiar type of tale throughout the
> fantasy genre /sensu lato/. These tales in particular invite the term
> "speculative fiction". They are not /necessarily/ bad: as always, a good
> writer will make more of the basic premise than a poor one.
Just so. That is indeed the crucial difference: a poor writer thinks of
a clever "what if?" question and then answer, and makes that answer into
a tale; a good writer uses such a question and answer as a method to
say something about Life, the Universe, and Everything which "something"
would be harder to say effectively in a tale without the speculative
element.
Speculative fiction, rightly written, is a sort of spotlight effect,
allowing careful authors to sharply illuminate key issues or matters
while keeping the background dim and thus out of need for consideration;
a "mainstream" author must deal with a stage uniformly illuminated.
(There's more such personal philosophy on the website in the sig.)
jan sand
wrote:
>[This interesting thread having thrown off several related
There is a peculiar line of thought that runs through this post which
somehow perceives science as an immutable solidity which can be
simulated in some stories accepted as science fiction even if the
science is a product of the imagination of an author...in other words,
science that does not match the science we accept in the real world
but includes the general principles which generate our everyday
science. Under that definition, a world of what we understand is
magic is automatically science if reproduceable effects can be
accomplished by regular rules. But it is a commonplace that tomes of
magic with reproduceable formulas exist in stories of magic. In other
words, magic and science are not all that far apart in concept. It is
just that in the experience of our world, the magic rules do not work
and the science rules do.
To return to my first sentence, science itself keeps changing the
basic understanding of reality from time to time and some of the
effects of quantum mechanics that makes this post possible would have
been ridiculed as magical nonsense by scientists early in the last
century. The fact that there is a continuous warfare among scientific
theorists at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge is one of the
sources of science-fiction which proposes that one or another of the
tenuous theories at this cutting edge may have interesting
consequences. Whether or not Clarke satisfies your literary
requirements, his ideas are still interesting to me.
And his portrayal of the huge internal volume of the strange world of
the Rama spaceship is something I found both interesting and
impressive.
Jan Sand
Robert Lieblich
>
> In article <3AF6E92B...@owlcroft.com>,
> The Walkers <wal...@owlcroft.com> posted:
> > This interesting thread having thrown off several related
>
> I posted the original post under the title
> "SF - Surreal Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction" --
> here is a copy:
>
> [ Subject: SF - Surreal Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction
> [ From: address....@web.site www.mantra.com/jyotish (Dr. Jai Maharaj)
> [ Message-ID: <English-118...@news.mantra.com>
> [ Date: Fri, 04 May 2001 03:38:19 UTC
> [
> [ In article <ulmofa...@hpl.hp.com>,
> [ Evan Kirshenbaum <kirsh...@hpl.hp.com> posted:
> [
> [ > grap...@aol.comjunk (GrapeApe) writes:
> [ >
> [ >>>The term "speculative fiction" doesn't even make a hell of a
> [ >>>lot of sense to me. What other sort is there?
Um, Dr. M. -- I know how concerned you are to use language
correctly, so I beg leave of you to point out, most respectfully (if
not grovelingly) that you did not "originate" the thread. You
"renamed" it in the process of responding to a question in an
existing thread. You do get full credit for introducing the term
"surreal fiction," but as best I can tell the thread has gone its
merry way under its new name with relatively little mention of
"surreal fiction." For example, I skimmed Eric Walker's lengthy
posting, which occasioned your response quoted above, and I spotted
no mention, either in what he wrote or in what he quoted, of
"surreal fiction."
I do hope your arm isn't unduly sore from patting yourself on the
back.
Chris C
<illi...@NOSPAM.mninter.net.invalid> wrote:
1984 was written in 1948 (though published one year later). Orwell simply
reversed the year's last two digits to create a book that was intended as
a critique/satire of contemporary politics.
This does not mean that it is not SciFi. Many (maybe all) of the best
SciFi books are commentaries on current society, e.g. Joanna Russ's Female
Man, or Theodore Sturgeon's Venus plus X (or almost everything else he has
written).
Chris C
Mike Oliver
> I once loaned Clarke's 'Childhood's End' to my professor at college.
> He is a nice chap, but he thought it was rubbish.
As an SF devotee myself, I have to say I sympathize with your professor.
Oh, the story had its points, but what a depressing slog it was. Clarke
is one of those writers whose work might have been improved substantially
by modern pharmaceutics.
The Walkers
[...]
> There is a peculiar line of thought that runs through this post which
> somehow perceives science as an immutable solidity which can be
> simulated in some stories accepted as science fiction even if the
> science is a product of the imagination of an author...in other words,
> science that does not match the science we accept in the real world
> but includes the general principles which generate our everyday
> science. Under that definition, a world of what we understand is
> magic is automatically science if reproduceable effects can be
> accomplished by regular rules. But it is a commonplace that tomes of
> magic with reproduceable formulas exist in stories of magic. In other
> words, magic and science are not all that far apart in concept. It is
> just that in the experience of our world, the magic rules do not work
> and the science rules do.
Yes and no. I think that *true* magic (I mean "true" conceptually,
not that I personally believe in such--or disbelieve) is far apart
from science; but I agree that much of the "magic" in literature
is indeed closely akin (c.f. the Harold Shea "Enchanter" series,
with references to "magicostatic charges" and suchlike). Science
deals with what we may call the impersonal, fixed rules of the
universe (or *a* universe). Magic, properly conceived, deals with
powers manipulated by subjective means, possibly including
intellect, will power, and especially morality. (When I say
"properly conceived" I am, obviously, arrogating to myself
Humpty Dumpty's famous prerogative.)
> To return to my first sentence, science itself keeps changing the
> basic understanding of reality from time to time and some of the
> effects of quantum mechanics that makes this post possible would have
> been ridiculed as magical nonsense by scientists early in the last
> century. The fact that there is a continuous warfare among scientific
> theorists at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge is one of the
> sources of science-fiction which proposes that one or another of the
> tenuous theories at this cutting edge may have interesting
> consequences. Whether or not Clarke satisfies your literary
> requirements, his ideas are still interesting to me.
> And his portrayal of the huge internal volume of the strange world of
> the Rama spaceship is something I found both interesting and
> impressive.
His ideas are interesting to me too, and I guess to a lot of others.
What disappoints is his manner of conveying those expansive and often
strikingly original ideas. As an essayist in science and technology,
he would be excellent; as an author of fiction, though, he lacks.
Obaeu: Yes, I think "lacks" can be used without an object. (Only
after writing that did I look in a dictionary, which surprised me
by agreeing.)
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker
Owlcroft House
mplsray
"Chris C" <redwine...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:redwinesnospam-...@news.btinternet.com...
So, do you consider the 1964 film Fail-Safe to be science fiction? It was
certainly a commentary on our society, and was also a cautionary tale. And
it had futuristic science: picture phones!
My opinion: As science fiction, it doesn't pass muster.
Cybes
<illi...@NOSPAM.mninter.net.invalid>:
</delurk>
<snip>
* no story. Orwell could have written his book with no more technology than
* that which existed in the 1940s: It deals, in fact, with a variation (and,
* in my opinion, not a particularly interesting variation) on Stalinist
* totalitarianism.
i think you might have the cart before the horse... '1984', istr,
dates from 1948, which i believe was before stalin really got going.
also, i've heard russian ex-pats in a position to know who have
referred to stalin-era officials and kgb operatives possesing 'special
edition' translations of that book. (a book banned to 'the
population', btw)
Evan Couche (a.k.a. Cyberius Teaser)
UIN : 5361099
Mail: cybe...@chariot.net.au.SPAMOFF
URL : http://www.chariot.net.au/~cyberius/
Steve Hayes
>>>> I have flat-out refused to read anything by Philip Jose Farmer
>>>> ever since he published the fourth volume of his 'Riverworld'
>>>> trilogy (after having the effrontery to leave his readers hanging
>>>> at the end of the first volume, without having had any advance
>>>> warning that the book wasn't self-contained).
>>>
>>>Read one of his a long time ago and gave up.
>>
>>I read the first, a couple of chapters of the second, then skipped to the
>>fifth, when I found it in a library.
>
>Was the point finally revealed, or did the point turn out to be
>that there was no point?
It was fairkly obscure to me.
The question that was raised by the first one was how people got there in the
first place, and with what purpose, why children grew up but none were born,
why males were circumcised and so on.
The last book purported to anwer the first question, not the other two, but
the answer was so obscure and banal that it really wasn't worth reading.
Someone told nme that the questions about children and circumciasion were
answered in some of the other books, but I wasn't going to wade through them
to find out.
Steve Hayes
http://www.suite101.com/myhome.cfm/methodius
jan sand
wrote:
>jan sand wrote:
We are probably on somewhat the same wavelenght in many ways. I too
would feel happier about Clarke being able to conceive and elaborate
more sophisticated forms of literature. He is nowhere near the
sophistication of Stanislaus Lem in wit and comprehension of humanity
and its contradictions, but I am very grateful for what he can give.
Heinlein and Asimov also demonstrated large lacks in literary
capability but most of their stuff had other offerings that I found
worthwhile, although the later Heinlein I found difficult to swallow
and I found his cynicism abhorent, but, considering the current
political administration in the USA, not too far off track. What I
find disturbing in a great deal of the "hard" science fiction is a
lack of humor which is eased only occasionally by someone like
Sheckley and some of Lem. L.Sprage DeCamp could be funny at times,
but his devotion to the combination of medieval culture and magic
which is so characteristic of the sword and sorcery type of stuff
which even, in its character, pervaded "Star Wars" could be
oppressively predictable and boring. DeCamp's "Against the Fall of
Night" as a redo of "A Connecticut Yankee" was an interesting
exercise, but Twain, of course was a better writer with a rather
bitter sense of humor, as in "The Mysterious Stranger". Vonnegut's
"Sirenes of Titan" is, to my mind, unsurpassed in its black humor.
Jan Sand
jan sand
<illi...@NOSPAM.mninter.net.invalid> wrote:
>
>So, do you consider the 1964 film Fail-Safe to be science fiction? It was
>certainly a commentary on our society, and was also a cautionary tale. And
>it had futuristic science: picture phones!
>
>My opinion: As science fiction, it doesn't pass muster.
>
>
>--
>Raymond S. Wise
>Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
>
>
>
It was in the tradition of a short step into a possible future.
Like "On the Beach" and "Dr. Strangelove". I don't know if this
qualifies as science fiction, but it certainly is on the doorstep of
the genre.
Jan Sand
Mike Lyle
Moylan wrote:
>
>Mike Lyle wrote:
>
>>>Peter Moylan (pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Five-volume trilogies have become a disease that is blighting SF.
>>[...]
>>In which dimension is it possible to have a five-volume trilogy?
>
>I'm not going to accept the blame for that one. The abuse of
>terminology is part of what I was griping about.
>
I'm sorry, Peter: after sending I thought "Fool! that was Peter Moylan, as usual
in perfect control of his language." I'm not usually irony-proof.
Mike.
Daniel James
> Daniel James wrote:
>
> > ...Asimov's Thiotimoline stories .... Is that SF or fantasy?
>
> Neither. The original thiotimoline article was pure satire, ...
Actually, I'd have said both. Satire, too, of course...
> One might well asked why the thiotimoline story was published in an
> SF magazine if it wasn't SF.
Someone has 'borrowed' from me the only book in which I have seen the
thiotimoline stories. ISTRT the explanation was that the magazine had taken
to publishing short pieces on science fact as well as fiction - I suppose
to show that fact was catching up with fiction, and that fact could often
be stranger. Asimov's satirical piece certainly increased the strangeness
rating of the fiction!
Incientally, the piece was first published just before Asimov's doctoral
/viva/, despite Asimov asking that it should be withheld until afterwards
in case the examiners should chance to see it. As events turned out the
examiners did see it and asked about it in the /viva/, but in good humour.
Cheers,
Daniel.
Daniel James
> Magic, properly conceived, deals with
> powers manipulated by subjective means, possibly including
> intellect, will power, and especially morality.
But even this "subjective" magic might be subject to universal laws that
described the manner and extent to which a person of given intellect, will,
power and morality would be able to wield it. Would it not then be just another
science?
Cheers,
Daniel.
Daniel James
> The characters in a tale do not announce "I'm in a science-fiction
> story" or "I'm in a fantasy story"; only *we*, the readers,
> make--if we so choose--those distinctions, and we make them,
> or should, on the basis of what kind of story the tale *really*
> is. (If we do not choose to make any such distinction, this
> entire discussion is moot.)
[smile] No, the characters do not (usually) make such an announcemtn, but
the writing often gives the game away. We, the readers, do make that
determination, but often the writer has given us hints a mile high as to
how he intends us to regard the story (and sometimes, of course, he
deliberately misleads us).
For myself, I read a story as a story, and don't bother much about the
genre. If the story is a good story, so much the better.
[snip stuff with which I mostly agree]
> To call a tale "fantasy" because the science in it is not
> either what we now believe or even facially plausible is,
> in my opinion, to pervert the meaning of the term.
Ah, but I might call a tale "fantasy" even if every phenomenon in it
seemed to be absolutely describable in terms of science as we understand
it in the real world, and even if the characters in the story also
accepted the same scientific explanations. All that is possible in a
story which is nevertheless "fantastic", in the broad sense.
You seem to be clinging to the term "fantasy" as a label for a certain
kind of "non-scientific" story, out of some - inexplicable, to me - need
or desire to impose a classification on the literature from which neither
it nor we can derive any benefit. This is the thinking of publishers and
booksellers, not of readers or of writers.
> I cannot overemphasize the importance to my view of this principle:
> if the phenomena can be discovered by the scientific principle and
> manipulated objectively by knowledge of the laws so discovered,
> the knowledge is science. The ability to levitate by chanting
> appropriate spells, if the principles governing such levitation
> are known and can be applied equally by anyone possessing that
> knowledge, it is just science, period the end.
I acept that view - it is not wholly inconsistent with my own view that
science fiction is just one branch of fantsay. Where we differ is that I
would (of course) say that a fiction written in such a setting could
legitimately be described as fantasy - which is what you seem very
specifically NOT to be saying.
[snip some more stuff I agree with]
> ... literate tales are about people, not things ...
Well, they can be about things as well - but they are certainly about
things and (especially) people rather than simply about settings. ("'The
things,' said Ford Prefect quietly, 'are also people.'" - but I wasn't
thinking only of those sorts of things.)
> But we all do know, or should, what it *isn't*--science.
Do we? You just said:
> The ability to levitate by chanting appropriate spells, if
> the principles governing such levitation are known and can
> be applied equally by anyone possessing that knowledge, it
> is just science, period the end.
.. but if we read a story in which one protagonist can levitate by
chanting, and we don't /know/ whether the priciples are knowable and
universally available in the world of the story (and, lets face it,
writers delight in not telling us that kind of thing) how can we make a
reasoned judgement? I find it much more satisfying not to care whether
it's science or not, and just to enjoy the story for what it is.
> (There's more such personal philosophy on the website in the sig.)
I can see that I really shall have to take a look at that, someday.
Thanks for an iunteresting discussion.
Cheers,
Daniel.
Daniel James
wrote:
> This does not mean that it is not SciFi.
Note that the term "SciFi" is often used by critics, journalists, and others
as a term of belittlement when describing science fiction and its fandom. The
followers of science fiction commonly reject this term and prefer the
abbreviation "SF".
SciFi (pronounced "Skiffy") has come to be used by some SF fans to describe
their own satires and parodies of the genre.
Cheers,
Daniel.
jan sand
Actually, it was a regular feature of the magazine to publish
articles. Wiley Ley who had been a member of the German Rocket Society
contributed regularly. Unfortunately the editor accepted some of the
first material on Dianetics which degraded eventually into Scientology
(if it can be considered as one scam collapsing into another) and
towards the end of John W.Campbell's editorship he got into some
really wierd stuff. A brief conversation I had on the net some time
ago with Marvin Minsky who is involved with the artificial
intelligence lab at MIT indicated that he had known Campbell and tried
to convince him of the error of his nonsense, but failed.
Jan Sand
jan sand
Only if it could produce reproduceable results.
Jan Sand
jan sand
<inte...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
For a while, way back when, there were some who used the term STF to
signify scientific fiction.
Jan Sand
mplsray
"Daniel James" <inte...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:VA.0000050...@nospam.demon.co.uk...
[snip discussion concerning the difference between science fiction and
fantasy]
While reading your post, it suddenly occurred to me that much skit humor of
the type seen on Saturday Night Live, SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv is
fantasy. I am thinking particularly of that type of skit which seems to be
set in the world in which we live with the exception that certain behaviors
of the characters are very different from what we would expect in real life:
There are many skits, for example, where people take incredible amounts of
abuse and do not vigorously protest, leave the situation, or use violence as
they might in real life.
Mark Brader
> Incientally, the piece was first published just before Asimov's doctoral
> /viva/, despite Asimov asking that it should be withheld until afterwards
> in case the examiners should chance to see it. As events turned out the
> examiners did see it and asked about it in the /viva/, but in good humour.
Actually, he asked for it to be published under a pseudonym. He later
recounted a conversation along these lines (I'm going from memory here,
but you can find it the first volume of his autobiography).
Colleague: I liked that thiotimoline thing you wrote.
Asimov: Thanks. Wait a moment, how did you know I wrote it?
Colleague: Well, when it said "by Isaac Asimov" under the title...
Asimov then asked the editor, John W. Campbell Jr., what had happened
and Campbell said he'd forgotten. Asimov guessed that he might actually
have decided that the piece would do Asimov's reputation not harm and
"forgotten" on purpose.
--
Mark Brader | The "I didn't think of that" type of failure occurs because
Toronto | I didn't think of that, and the reason I didn't think of it
m...@vex.net | is because it never occurred to me. If we'd been able to
| think of 'em, we would have. -- John W. Campbell Jr.
My text in this article is in the public domain.