What is science fiction?

[ysabetwordsmith]

When do new technological developments become 'realism' and not 'the future'? Writing about humans flying through the air in strange machines was once SF, but Snakes on a Plane isn't.

Discuss.

Comments

[acelightning73]

Science fiction, a/k/a "speculative fiction" imagines things we haven't invented or discovered yet - travel to other planets, humanoid robots, aliens visiting Earth. Although when someone speculates about the effect new discoveries and inventions will have on our future, you might consider that SF.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's exactly what makes the boundary fuzzy. Are all the Mars movies, books, etc. about going to Mars, that don't include aliens or other far-out stuff, science fiction because we haven't done it yet, or scientific realism because we have the technology to do it? Are they science fiction because they are made-up stories about science?

I find "near-future science fiction" useful because it contains a high proportion of stories based entirely on current technology and/or projections of "if we do X, then this could happen." Many cautionary tales are in there. But it's still a subgenre defined by its time period more than its content.

"Hard science fiction" is supposed to be based only on things that fit with what we currently think we know about how the world works. But that leaves room for stuff we haven't invented yet, as long as it doesn't actively conflict with current theories of whatever.

Re: Yes ...

[acelightning73]

Jules Verne wrote about fitting out a cannon shell as a thing humans could ride inside of, and then firing it to the Moon, which was an extrapolation of the technology of the time. In the 1950s, we had our stolen Nazi rocket technology which gave us the ability to put Telstar and Vanguards into orbit and evetually Project Mercury.

There were medieval tales of people being taken up to Heaven by angels and meeting God - they were the science fiction of their time.

[kengr]

Sometimes it's as interesting what they *fail* to predict as it is what they get right.

Using a few examples from Heinlein, Starman Jones totally missed programming languages for computers. It's all machine language (and apparently from *scratch* at that).

In Space Cadets and at least one other of his juveniles, he has cellphones.

In Between Planets he's got radar stealthed watercraft! And not by "magic" tech either. Note that this was in 1951!

A quick check shows that Between Planets is the other book with cell phones. It's on the first page!

He clucked and they started off. A few hundred yards further on Lazy shied again, not from a snake this time but from an unexpected noise. Don pulled him in and spoke severely. "You bird-brained butterball! When are you going to learn not to jump when the telephone rings?"

Lazy twitched his shoulder muscles and snorted. Don reached for the pommel, removed the phone, and answered. "Mobile 6-J-233309, Don Harvey speaking."