Quote:
Originally Posted by altworld
The best sci-fi stories I've ever read have been character driven, where the use of FTL drives, spaceships, laser guns etc is just an every day thing. Battlestar Galactica is a very godo example of this. To them this technology is just common place, like us using a cell phone. The worst sci-fi stories I've ever read are hardware driven and try to explain everything.
|
Battlestar Galactica is definitely a good example of sci-fi, but not many people consider sci-fi to be an example of good literature. If you look, instead, at good SF, you'll find that consistency with specific departures from fact (or extrapolations of current facts) are important. That's kind of the definition. Going all the way back to, say, Smith's
Skylark books, they were rollicking fun to read, but the hero inventing a new order of force to save the day got rather predictable after the first couple of times. That's what comes of completely ignoring the constraints of actual science and technology: if your hero can do everything, your hero can't be genuinely threatened by anything, and the readers lose interest. Smith could pull it off because of when he was writing, that and the fact that he was a top-notch writer for any time. Other writers have since tried to extend his stories, and the results have come up flat; even using the same premises, the stories just didn't work.
When we look instead at good SF, it's a whole different matter. Unlike sci-fi, there is a certain amount of internal rigor expected. That is, the ground rules are laid out or implied, and the story has to go along with them. Your hero can't just invent a new force or call on a previously unknown super-being to get him out of the pinch he's gotten into. No deus ex machina can save the day. The author may not tell the readers the details, but those ground rules he has established are the skeleton he hangs the story on.
Purely technology-driven stories aren't SF; they're user manuals. Although there are rare exceptions (because there are exceptions to anything) they are naturally not very good stories; people don't like to read manuals. You've left out another category, though, in order to set up your dichotomy: event-driven (or plot-driven) stories. They are both common and popular. Moving into reality-based stories for a moment, consider your typical thriller: it's event-based. Frankly, you could switch the characters with the characters from most other stories of that genre and barely notice. Technology may play a role, though most often as a Maguffin, but the real story is about
what happens -- the events.
A lot of stories that people think of at first glace as character-driven are in fact event-driven. The question to ask is always "If I remove/change this, does that change the story?" Your typical "chick lit" story, almost completely character-driven, would be a very different story if you put in different people, but neither hardware nor events have much bearing on it. Sci-fi, like
Battlestar Galactica, is generally event-driven; take away the external events (the Cylon pursuit, for instance) and you've changed the story drastically. I haven't seen the remake, but I understand it's more about people emoting at each other than anything that happens; sort of
Friends in space. If so, that brings us back to changing things, and whether the setting is anything but stage dressing. For a genre story to
be of that genre -- and this goes for any genre -- the genre should be an important part of the story. I'm quite fond of Steven Saylor's "Gordianus" books, for instance, but the last few haven't really been mysteries. There's very little mystery there, and mostly, they're just stories about a man's life in ancient Rome. You can't have a mystery story without, well, a mystery. And if you could take the mystery out and still have essentially the same story, you don't have one.
Hard SF is dependent on its scientific basis -- take Hal Clement's
Mission of Gravity. That story might be told with different people (though it wouldn't be quite the same story) or different events (if they were compatible, it could be very similar) but it couldn't be told anywhere but Mesklin. Sci-fi, at the other extreme, uses that science (often contradicting existing knowledge, and without its natural consequences) solely as window dressing. It can produce stories that are good enough that the reader never stops to think "hey, if they have replicators, why don't they just replicate enough widgets for the whole crew?" but they don't hold up well to close examination, and when the story
isn't that good, the examination begins, and it all comes apart. As someone (Robert Huff?) said, "It is one thing to suspend disbelief, and another to hang it by the neck until dead."
So, we get back to fantasy. Like any other story, fantasy can be driven by events, characters, or technology -- because yes, magic is tech. And like any other story, it can be hard, soft, or downright squishy. In fact, fantasy can be thought of as a category of SF in which the technology is hidden and there are certain elements present in the world. This is one reason why some people lump SF, sci-fi, fantasy, and random others into "speculative fiction". In the beginning, before people stuck names and publishing categories on them, there was no distinction between the stories of Merritt or Verne; a lot of the differences since then have been artificially imposed. The real distinction, in my opinion, is the hardness of the story: does it establish and live by a set of divergences from actual fact, and are those contrary to existing knowledge? If it sets and lives by its own rules, fantasy can be remarkably hard; if it doesn't, what looks like SF can morph into sci-fi and space opera. The existence of magic is one of those changes: if you're going to have it and not explain why we don't, you've used up some of your suspension of disbelief right there, and the more other unexplained things you have, the softer the story gets. Because of that fundamental premise, fantasy (so-labeled) tends to be softer. But it can still keep solidly on its established grounds without haring off into insanity. If magic does something today, it shouldn't do something different tomorrow. And, apropos of the subject of this thread, things should work like they do in real life (ex. water running downhill) unless them doing otherwise is consistent with some element of the story (or
is such an element), and the consequences of them doing this have been taken into account.
So where does that leave
Discworld? Simple: despite their window dressing, the
Discworld stories are not fantasy. They're satire prancing around in fantasy clothes. They address matters in the roundworld that Pratchett thinks are relevant enough, or funny enough, to write a story about, set in an environment where he controls all the variables for better exposure and/or humor. Pratchett doesn't give a rat's tail whether there's any consistency between books and either each other or reality because that's not what he's writing for. He's trying (and in the main, succeeding) to skewer aspects of the real world and hold them up for observation. His events are outrageous, his people are over the top, and the world is what it is so that there can be no mistaking it for one based on science, or even sanity. The
Discworld stories would never work as ordinary fantasy; as satire, they work brilliantly.
Terry Pratchett is also a genius. I would not suggest that most people try to do what he's done. He's already done it better.
