Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
I disagree. Fiction is the telling of stories which are not real. A "made up" story. To me science fiction is a made up story about future worlds or events with a techno basis. I don't think a book is "science fiction" just because it is based in the future... it's gotta be about the science as much as it is about the fiction... even if the science is totally made up and defies the law of physics, I'm ok with that. If you want to categorize that as "soft" SF... I'm fine with that too.
|
The concern is "suspension of disbelief". You can postulate whatever you want, including spaceships powered by beer*, but it needs to be plausible enough that the reader will accept the possibility.
What's plausible has changed over the years. As mentioned upthread, a fair bit of stuff is now an accepted part of the furniture, not requiring an explanation to make it plausible. Credit things like Star Trek and Star Wars for that. Once upon a time, SF writers felt compelled to provide an explanation for
how their characters went superluminal, even if it
was handwavium.
These days, there's less perceived need, unless the explanation ties into other things as well. An example of the latter is the "impeller wedge" used by David Weber as the technology for FTL travel in the Honor Harrington books. Weber is retelling the Napoleonic Wars in space, and his starships are the equivalent of the old three masted ships of the line. He uses his FTL method to let him do things like having ships of the line drawn up stationary relative to each other in a "wall of battle", whaling away with lasers, grasers, and missiles in best Napoleonic War fashion.
One requirement for SF is that the science be
possible, and that you get what we currently know right, even if you postulate new stuff based on things we don't currently know. L. Sprague de Camp decided FTL
wasn't possible, and he therefore couldn't use it in SF stories. Sprague was in a minority, there, and I can't think of any other SF writer who felt that way.
* "A Bicycle Built for Brew", by Poul Anderson
______
Dennis