[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Yes, I think this is mostly right.

I think this is almost completely wrong. The most common technology used in SF, I think, is FTL travel. Not only does FTL travel not exist, based on everything we know about physics, it *can't* exist. If it existed, pretty much all of our physics would be broken. It would be like biology if evolution didn't exist. FTL travel is the intelligent design of science fiction.

Ummm... actually, we don't know that FTL cannot exist. In fact a number of scientists have found loopholes in Relativity that would allow FTL travel. In particular, wormholes, Alcubierre warps and Krasnikov tubes all are consistent with Relativity. They all have problems (possibly, even most likely, unsolvable problems), and they could simply be an artifact of the mathematics that has no real world counter part.

That being said, from a Science Fiction perspective, these loop holes can be used to achieve FTL without actually violating any physical law as we now know it. Granted many sci-fi writers, especially ones who don't write hard sci-fi (though even some that do), just use a hand wavy solution and rightly proceed with the assumption that the reader won't care, but some take their time to get it reasonably right. Robert Forward wrote a Hard Science Fiction story about FTL travel and its implications called Timemaster.

However, it doesn't matter for science fiction because science fiction is not really about the real science. All science fiction has to do is posit the impossible technology and then realistically treat it as if it existed and had been created through the scientific method. But the real purpose of the technology is just to further the story - if the story is about the interaction with humans and aliens, for example, the FTL drive just isn't important to the story. In the same way that the fact that Yoknapatawpha County doesn't really exist doesn't matter for Faulkner's work.

I think it depends on the Science Fiction. Sure stuff written by a lot of SF writers is just made up, but some Science Fiction is really about real science; essentially thought experiments given a story form by their author.

Of course, once we've posited the "technology," we do need to treat it realistically, so the FTL drive will probably need fuel of some sort, and will work in a certain way, and may need maintenance, and may break down...and we want all of these to be internally consistent and superficially plausible (given the impossibility, of course). But the genre is science *fiction,*, not science. And the science has usually been as fictional as anything else. And that's okay.

Again, depends on the author. In Hard SF, part of the game is trying to find mistakes in the author's story.

He may have been an optimist.

Star Wars is science fiction. It requires too much special pleading to argue otherwise. You can't just wave away the aliens, spaceships, technology, etc. It's as least as "sciency" as, say, "The Demolished Man."

I suppose I might call it "science fiction lite," though.

Actually, I would say The Demolished Man is considerably more scientific. Yes, it posits the existence of Telepaths which is at best on the very edge of things that could be considered scientific. But what it does from there is that it rigorously examines the implications of a world with Telepaths, particularly with respect to how it might change law enforcement (and how society might try to protect personal privacy in such a world). Star Wars is an adventure story with mystical and semi-scientific elements grafted on to it. If we consider both stories to be SF, they are definitely in very different sub-genres.

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Bill