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Yes, obviously

William Shatner: ‘Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu’

This probably isn’t original but I liken it to jazz.

In music you’ve the three, rhythm, harmony and melody. Play all three straight and it’s not jazz. Hold two constant and play with one – say Dave Brubeck with rhythm or Jaques Loussier with melody – and it’s jazz. Yes, yes, that’s very simplistic and so much so that it’s wrong but it works for me as an analogy. And when you try to play with two holding one constant it’s often very odd and sometimes just wondrous. Playing with all three at the same time gives you freeform which is just noise.

So too with sci-fi. Having humans acting humanly in a weird environment is sci-fi. Having humans acting like a fairy story in a weird environment is probably sci-fantasy. As is also non-humans in a normal one and so on.

Playing with all three – one story I recall had non-humans in another universe tryinmg to break through into this one (no, not following Rincewind) because theirs was dying and that was just a word salad – freeform.

Appealing to Sir Pterry also works here. We’re Pan Narrans. But it’s stories about us that interest. So, good stories are going to be about us – perhaps in a weird environment.

28 thoughts on “Yes, obviously”

  1. Not sure how Shatner would know good sci-fi, after all he’s the one that “wrote” TekWar’s which was utter garbage from the get go.

    Best story that Shatner ever concocted was how his divorcing wife drown in the swimming pool and it was bugger all to do with him, just one of those things that happened.

    Yes Bill. We’re ready to believe you Bill.

  2. I read heaps of sci-fi when I was young and the only piece I remember is the wonderful Flowers for Algernon.

    But I can remember jazz I heard over fifty years ago e.g. Carmen McRae singing “It’s a Raggy Waltz” in a nightclub in San Francisco.

    Tip for time-travellers: in those days it was easy to get an underage drink in the US. Show a British driving licence and claim that it proves you are 21.

  3. I recall a book about just this, ‘New maps of Hell’ by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, 1960. And indeed the formula for SF (never scifi in those days) was invent one change due to technology and take it as far as you can. More than one change and it’s in the fantasy category.

    I wonder if it’s in Wiki? No but it seems to have been in print a few times and can still be found. But no mention of Conquest, which I must have misremembered.

  4. The Original Star Trek had legitimate ( if there is such a thing ) sci fi writers doing the stories, such as Harlan Ellison and Dorothy Fontana.

    There is something optimistic ( even the apocalyptic stuff ) about 1950s and 60s sci fi. It all goes a bit dystopian after that.

  5. I’d question whether much 50s & 60s SF was science fiction. Star Trek certainly wasn’t. Most of the “science” was some unexplained McGuffin to make the plot work. They’re just variations of cowboy & indian, war heroes, police procedurals etc etc reworked into a fantasy environment. Often, one can actually work out the “real world” novels they were cribbed from.
    I watched the first of the Dune remakes couple of weeks back. It’s marginally better than the Sting version. But the novel was never scifi. It’s more Tolkien dungeons & dragons territory. There’s not a believable character in it. Tim mentions Sir pTerry. His “magic” is an alternative science with an internal logic. And his characters people we can recognise, living in that world. It is very clever.

  6. I’d always thought that good SciFi used the exotic science-based bit to create interesting scenarios. The robots or spaceships or technology wasn’t the point, it was the situations they put people into and how they reacted, what kind of world arose after the apocalypse.

  7. Esteban: I don’t read a lot of science-fiction but I like the stuff by Niven & Pournelle for that reason.

  8. BiS; Star Trek’s elevator pitch was “Wagon Train to the Stars” after all.

    Then again; paperbacks were popularised (sort of) just before WWII, but the contents were re-prints of previously released hardback titles. During the war, the US military distributed huge numbers of paperbacks to the troops, who were spending a fair amount of time trekking across the Atlantic and the Pacific, in ships that obviously had a Captain, a Doctor, a Chief Engineer and a bloke with sticky out ears.

    That effectively created the demand for the format, but original content wasn’t published until the 50s, so at that point, the authors would have to riff off the tropes of the reprinted content in order to be reasonably familiar to the new mass audience, as the format was low cost, low margin, and effectively relied on high volumes to turn a profit.

    Even Forbidden Planet is basically The Tempest.

  9. “Tim mentions Sir pTerry. His ‘magic’ is an alternative science with an internal logic. And his characters people we can recognise, living in that world. It is very clever.”

    To my mind, science fiction takes a scientific hypothetical – even if it’s the standard “easy space travel” – and explores the implications, almost always societal. So I’d argue that Pratchett is more science fiction than half of the stuff that’s actually given the title, in that he asks the question, “What would society really look like if the hackneyed themes of fantasy fiction actually existed and were scientifically observable?”

  10. @Estaban
    But you have to consider what sort of society evolves with the constraints you’re positing. As our current society is the products of the constraints it operates under. Larry Niven wrote a short story call Flash Crowd. It posits a transport system based on teleportation. Which puts everyone a step away from everyone else. And what could result. It actually anticipates our interweb thingy. Which puts everyone a virtual step away from anyone else. So for Flash Crowd read internet pile on, on social media. Now that’s pushing us in the direction gives us “hate speech” legislation, trannyworld, Twatterworld, BLM & the rest of it. Society is becoming a very different place than it was a couple of decades ago. Much of 50s & 60s scifi just moved college educated US suburbia to another planet. Although since that was who they were writing for…

  11. BiS – Dune was spot on about how, in the future, the economy will be run by fat perverts in flying suits and be full of gigantic eyebrows and Sting milking a cat.

  12. Best story that Shatner ever concocted was how his divorcing wife drown in the swimming pool and it was bugger all to do with him, just one of those things that happened.

    Respect for Shatner: +1701

  13. The future, the past, exotic lands, another science: all ways to give the author a little more free rein. But to be effective it needs to be limited, compensated by being more perceptive and believable elsewhere.

  14. “the formula for SF (never scifi in those days) was invent one change due to technology and take it as far as you can. More than one change and it’s in the fantasy category.”

    Usually FTL travel is a gimme; since all it usually allows is for the plot to happen in different places. There’s usually a different change that’s the “one weird trick”.

    Flash Crowd did have a lot of stuff we’ve seen on the internet, though it’s also different. When you teleport, you can be punched in the face by the person you’re talking to. When it’s anonymous internet trolling, not so much.

    I’ve attempted a little plotting of SF stuff for RPGs and one thing does occur to me: most people use standard fantasy because when you make up your own thing, you’re putting a lot of you out there. Much of SF and fantasy in books reveals too much information about the author’s fetishes. For example, I give you the Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones series for fantasy, and much of Heinlein’s later output for SF…

  15. Joe Haledman’s Forever War had soldier’s returning to a future Earth where everyone was gay as overpopulation controls had led to heterosexuality becoming the minority, there’s times in western culture these days that seems very prophetic

  16. When you teleport, you can be punched in the face by the person you’re talking to. When it’s anonymous internet trolling, not so much.
    Online aggression is now treated, legally, as seriously as a punch in the face.
    I rest my case.

  17. A lot of SF in the 50s, 60s, 70s was called “Space Opera”, a take on Western movies’ “Horse Opera”, and for the same reasons. I remember a SF magazine cover that featured a “Space Pirate” boarding a spaceship with a slide rule clutched in his teeth. There was a lot of profound SF though, some of which (mostly Heinlein) is still quoted today.
    One of my favorites is “Tau Zero” by Poul Anderson.

  18. I remember a SF magazine cover that featured a “Space Pirate” boarding a spaceship with a slide rule clutched in his teeth.
    I can certainly remember remarkably well endowed young ladies wearing bikinis & bubble helmets. What first attracted me to the genre. Looking back, there may well even have been printed words behind the covers…

  19. ‘I remember a SF magazine cover that featured a “Space Pirate” boarding a spaceship with a slide rule clutched in his teeth.’

    I think that was one of the old Astoundings. The illo being for Leinster’s ‘Pirates of Zan’.

    As for the plots, since I agree with Tims’ argument that to be interesting to us the plots must deal with humans, the tales necessarily use the standard plots available from ‘literature’ or our culture in general.

    Or BiS’s birds in bikinis.

  20. But you have to consider what sort of society evolves with the constraints you’re positing.

    I remember an Asimov, I think, short about an historian in a society where all research was tightly controlled by the government, frustrated by being unable to get permission to use a device that allowed the viewing of historical events anywhere in the world, going off grid and researching it himself, discovering the official line that it could only be done with exorbitant amounts of power and could only view thousands of years ago were lies. Whereupon his wife became addicted to viewing her dead child. Then the police came to nick him, pointing out that as the past starts a Planck instant ago, the device abolished privacy, which is why the controls on research were introduced in the first place and the stories about the technology’s uselessness circulated. Which made him rather sick about having widely distributed his findings…

  21. Rollerball ( the proper one with James Caan ) amongst the carnage is actually excellent SF. It has that scene where Jonathan E goes to Switzerland and meets Ralph Richardson, who is the controller of the archives.

    Access to histoical information Before the Corporations is only available through this digital archive and poor Ralph has “lost” the 13th Century.

  22. BIS,

    “I watched the first of the Dune remakes couple of weeks back. It’s marginally better than the Sting version. But the novel was never scifi. It’s more Tolkien dungeons & dragons territory. There’s not a believable character in it. Tim mentions Sir pTerry. His “magic” is an alternative science with an internal logic. And his characters people we can recognise, living in that world. It is very clever.”

    Dune isn’t really supposed to be sci-fi. It’s more allegorical about power, prophets and so forth.

    I didn’t really know the story, but at the end of Part 2 (which I loved on the big screen), I’ve decided I want to read the book.

  23. Dune (as a series of novels) started brilliantly and coasted downhill. I gave up at “God Emperor”.

  24. @dearieme – “in those days it was easy to get an underage drink in the US”

    Buy why? I prefer my drink to be properly aged!

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