34 Comments

Seconding Greg Egan. For both Incandescence and Othogonal he's got a lot on his website about the setting. It's physics (real in the former case, fictional in the latter) rather than the effect of future stuff on society, but it's incredibly thorough.

Expand full comment

FWIW I don't think SF is only about the here and now. That said, the way it encourages and enables readers to view and judge their current circumstances in the context of a broader scope (of space, of time, and of well-delineated alternative or possible future realities), is certainly among my top 3 reasons for reading it.

My favorite quote along these lines captures the sentiment so well that I cut the author (T.S. Eliot) some slack on its oversimplification:

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

Expand full comment

Rarely. David Brin's "Earth", Vinge's "Rainbow's End", Egan's "Distress", Sterling's "Islands in the Net" and parts of Stephenson's "Snow Crash", are exceptions. Also a fair amount of Wells and plausibly Dick.

Expand full comment

arch1 & matt mention an interesting idea. the future setting is just a tool used by the author to focus the attention on an important subject that might be invisible to us due to our "everyday normal life".

i just can't remember the author of this quote: "SF purpose is to use future to talk about the present and use robots to discuss the human nature". Asimov, Ballard, who said this?

So, clearly SF is not about the future. wonder why intelligent Prof. Hanson haven't noticed this before.

Expand full comment

It's a bit off-topic, but I'm going to use the prominence of "settings" and "the future" in this thread as an excuse to mention a book which some of you will find fascinating. It is "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene, a prominent string theorist and author of "The Fabric of the Cosmos" and "The Elegant Universe."

The book is speculative science rather than SF. Its topic is multiple universes. It discusses 7-8 different multiverse concepts ("settings," ok?-), how they have emerged from recent physics / cosmology research, relationships among them, prospects for verification (in "the future"), etc.

For me, this book helped tie together a lot of scattered information I'd read over the years concerning various potential flavors of multiverse, added some stuff I hadn't seen, and seasoned it with context and commentary from a leading researcher who strikes me as also having good taste and judgement. It gave me a framework to build on.

The book is written in a clear non-mathematical style but demands much of the reader in terms of imagination and willingness and ability to grapple with difficult physical concepts. Certain parts will be very tough sledding for people unfamiliar with the relevant physics and cosmology. That said, Greene has structured the book so as to bring as many readers along as possible (and the relevant physics/cosmology background is well covered in the other two books I mention above)

Expand full comment

Science fiction is a subcategory of fiction; therefore its purpose is not anything found outside the purpose of fiction. If I had to state it in a single sentence, I would use Larry Niven's, and say that the message of SF is: "There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently."

Expand full comment

Also, I'm pretty tired of the meme that for Sci-fi to be worthwhile, it has to treat the actual sci-fi stuff as mere trappings for a character tale or real-world allegory of some sort.

Expand full comment

When I was a kid, one of my favourite books in the school library was an illustrated book that contained background and details about a sci-fi setting (I think it involved colonizing nearby stars), but no actual plot. I don't know if it was standalone or a companion to something else.

Expand full comment

Several times I've read summaries of Sci-Fi on wikipedia, and found it interesting enough to keep doing it. I do it mostly for the setting and general ideas, like you mentioned.

Expand full comment

I think SF authors choose that setting, not to explain their view of the future, but to free themselves from the constraints of reality of the present. The possibility that the setting could be true one day lends a certain 'verisimilitude' spice to the story that it would lack if the author were to choose to write the story in a different 'constraint-free' genre such as fantasy.

The popularity of mockumentary comedies such as "The Office" is relevant here, IMO.

Expand full comment

The works of Hal Clement in particular counter the author's claim. To a lesser extent, so do those of R. L. Foward, and Greg Egan.

Expand full comment

Do you mean that one could not state the insights of the story in anything other than story form, that one could not convince others of the insights with a non-story argument, or just that a story was useful in generating the insights?

Expand full comment

As it happens, Verner Vinge wrote an SF story ("The Ungoverned") based on a nonfiction scenario (institutions, not technology) of mine. I thought his story convincingly revealed implications of the institutions that had not occurred to me. Similarly, _Oath of Fealty_ by Niven and Pournelle made convincing points about the implications of their setting that an abstract description might not have included, and that might not have occurred to the author of such a description. The points could perhaps have been made in less space than the novel but not, I think, 5% or anything close.

My own two novels are SF in the sense of speculative fiction but not science fiction. I think each shows things about its setting that it would be difficult to demonstrate in the same depth and as convincingly without the story element.

Expand full comment

Agree and I think most people miss this point. I don't, and never will, RP but I own complete series of certain Sci-Fi RPG's with interesting settings just because the details of implementation, not the story, is need. Not sure why more people don't buy RPG's just as reading material.

Expand full comment

I'm paraphrasing here: Vonnegut says that creative authors with something to say will often get pigeonholed into the sci-fi stacks at the local library because they dared to include the theme of technology in some way in their story, or because they speculate on new ideas.(done paraphrasing)

That said, really good, original sci-fi, doesn't rely on story-elements like space aliens and techno-viruses to carry the story. It may include these things, but the story has to carry itself, this means the story has to have something to say, something real. The original 'Alien' wasn't a movie about an alien creature on a spaceship, it was about FEAR. Spider-man isn't about some guy who gets radioactive powers, it's about Responsibility.

Good scifi, like good work in any genre speaks to us about things we understand, but to be exceptional it will say these things in a way we've never seen before. It may put these ideas into the realm of the fantastic, and this is so we can relate in a more in-depth way with the ideas being shown.

Expand full comment

I thought it was widely assumed that most SciFi is intended by its authors to be a commentary on the present. The futuristic setting is not meant as a set of predictions, but instead functions to remove the reader from his usual factual surroundings to facilitate thinking about contemporary moral-political-philosophical problems in new and creative ways.

This is why 1984 alludes to the year it was written, 1948. It's also why Vonnegut's "scifi" is absurdist rather than realist.

Expand full comment