Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
I was talking with some co-workers (one of whom does not read for fun) about a current book I am reading, and a problem I am having with it. Basically, I feel that the book does not make any sense. The two main characters get transported to the future, where there is a highly advanced technological utopia-esque society. Yet the entire world (except for a portion of mid-town Manhattan) has been rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war and other catastrophes. There are literally no people living anywhere else.
So, after pages of a parade of cool new technology including some special bathtubs, I started wondering how a society as 'large' as mid-town Manhattan would be able to sustain the manufacturing and agricultural infrastructure to support such things. It just did not make sense to me. If Manhattan was all you had to work with, you'd lose a lot of useable space just growing food to support the people, never mind manufacture the special bathtubs. It just defied logic that the society portrayed in the book could exist.
And he told me that it's all pretend anyway so it doesn't have to make sense. I say fiction or not, it still has to make sense and if there is some special explanation for something illogical, they need to clue the reader in. So, what do you think...it's all pretend so who cares, or I am right to demand an explanation.
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I share part of that feeling also. As I judge scifi work when I read it, every action must obey laws of physics and of nature. If they don't they're fantasy. What I also like about a good scifi story is the aspect of futurology in where tangents from our actions reflect what will happen in technology and other fields. The stories built around those scientific facts are the fiction. But all that is my personal preference.
There are numerous stories using time travel, light year speeds, teleportation, all those I've switched over to fantasy as I learned how they'll never be possible. But I still like them as fiction or fantasy, just not as science fiction. A space ship appearing does not automatically mean a scifi work. To me Scifi must remain credible.
Fantasy work, to be good must also remain credible in its subject and treatment, not necessarily in nature's laws but in the realm where it takes place with the laws of that place. No transgressions allowed. If I see a single one, I'll lose interest. Harry Potter is a good example of a well composed fantasy. There is not an action that takes place out of the laws and nature of
that world. Carver's 'Sunborn' is an other excellent example of wishy-washy scifi but excellent fiction.
This is my way of seeing it and I will not judge any one off track for thinking otherwise, it's just my apraisal of what makes quality work in scifi. I'm sure as I read more and more and as I get further experience in thinking fiction that my way of judging scifi will change.
BTW ficbot, In a story based on cataclysm, technology and manufacturing are the first casualties. Maintenance is vital, and you're right in assuming that it's unrealistic. If only one major city in the States was to disappear, every aspect of technology advancement would suffer brutally. We have a technology ecology, a tiny bit is made here an other one there, some material mined there, its processing made elsewhere, any part of which takes time to rebuild and slows the whole project. It can also affect worldwide evolution.