On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 03:49:06 -0700 (PDT), Damien Valentine
<valends3@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Ben:
>> Huh? Watership Down has talking rabbits, so it's inconsistent with
>> what we know about science.
>So are lightsabers and time machines. "Watership" would be "soft" sci-
>fi (if not downright "cuddly"), based around the biology of British
>rabbits and other local organisms, with their common sapience as the
>fictional element. (Even the rabbit culture and language Adams
>proposes could be tied in with, say, anthropology or linguistics.)
There would be an interesting ambiguity if someone wrote a story with
a highly rigorous examination of the anthropology and linguistics of
talking rabbits - would it be "soft" SF on account of anthropology and
linguistics being "soft" science, or "hard" SF on account of the rigor
and attention to scientific detail?
Interesting but mostly moot, on account of SF writers seem to almost
never actually do that, instead saving their quota of scientific rigor
for astronomy, physics, and engineering.
>> Jane Austen isn't speculative fiction.
>Nobody said anything about "speculative", whatever that means.
Uh, this is rasfs, the "sf" part being "speculative fiction", so it's
kind of important to know what that means.
What that means, is fiction about stuff that isn't known to exist
or to have ever existed. Including stuff that we absolutely know
doesn't exist, like e.g. Vampires, Dragons, and Little Green Men
from Mars, as well as stuff where we don't know yet, e.g. Artificial
Intelligence, 23rd-century Starships, and Little Green Men from Alpha
Centauri.
>We were talking about "science"...and if you've ever had the misfortune
>of listening to sophomore English majors talk for an hour about Jane
>Austen (as I have), you'll know that her links to the social sciences
>are...sadly...endless.
Yes, but not fictional or speculative social sciences. Single young
men in posession of a fortune and in want of a wife, and all the rest,
are known to have existed in Regency England. Specific names, places,
and plot details are fictional. The social sciences linking all these
things together, are quite real.
There does nontheless seem to be a disproportionate appeal of Austen
to SF fans, because that culture is so long gone and beyond forgotten
to most of us as to be quite alien, and SF dealing with the sociology
of (literal) aliens is a favored tradition in the genre. Though you
typically need at least a little bit of fictional astronomy, physics,
and engineering to arrange a meeting with the fictional aliens.
For science fiction based on speculative *human* social science, you'd
need something like Margaret Attwood's "The Handmaiden's Tale". Large,
culturally and technically sophisticated human populations with a gross
shortage of fertile women are not known to have ever existed and maybe
never will, so the sociology of such a culture is necessarily speculative
and the story based on said sociology is science fiction.
Even if the culture's astronomy, physics, and engineering are identical
to our own, with nary a robot, death ray, or spaceship in sight.
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