The Laws of Science Fiction

[altworld]

Simples piece of advice for all Authors...

Its your universe...

If up is down and down is up that is your decision. Just stick by your own universe rules, the rest is up to you.

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by BVLarson

I dislike aliens that are anything near the category of "a guy with a rubber mask on". In other works, I'm sick of fuzzy/leathery-looking humans with cloaks being called aliens.

Yes, they Ain't Gonna Look Like Mr. Spock.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

As nyrath's article post suggests, communicating with aliens has also been one of those things that we take for granted in SF, but I always felt would be as highly unlikely as meeting humanoid aliens. Many alien forms could be so different as to not be aware we are there... and vice versa. (Something I planned to explore in my next book, until the project got shelved.)

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Many alien forms could be so different as to not be aware we are there... and vice versa. (Something I planned to explore in my next book, until the project got shelved.)

Yes, there have been a few novels with that background.

Telempath by Spider Robinson
Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell
The Great Slow Kings by Roger Zelazny
The Foundling Stars by Hal Clement

and a few others that I can't recall just now

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by altworld

Its your universe...

If up is down and down is up that is your decision. Just stick by your own universe rules, the rest is up to you.

The trick is properly specifying those rules to begin with, and the field is littered with examples where that wasn't done. TV and film are particular Bad Examples, where things are included with no thought to the implications, but written SF isn't immune to it.
______
Dennis

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by nyrath

...and a few others that I can't recall just now

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke seemed to cover almost every variation on alien life in one book, as I recall.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke seemed to cover almost every variation on alien life in one book, as I recall.

Well, some of them. The aliens who visited Earth had reached the peak of their possible evolution, and were used by the ones they served to help races capable of becoming such as they along the road to to that sort of transcendence.

A lot of it depends on what you count as "life".

Vernor Vinge had a take on it in his _A Fire Upon the Deep_ novel. In his book, AIs were capable of transcendence, morphing into something we couldn't understand which rapidly lost interest in communicating with organic life. (In email, he indicated the Puppies, who were a form of organic communal intelligence, might be able to Transcend, and implying that humanity couldn't.)

David Brin did several explorations in his Uplift series, with organic life (based on long chain carbon molecules), hydrogen based life forms, and machine based AIs, and postulated a possible merged entity deriving from all three bases which would be fairly god-like. In a later Uplift book, Brin postulated a level of hyperspace populated by entities that were intelligent memes - thoughts that existed independent of minds to think them.
______
Dennis

[Joebill]

In C. J. Cherryh's stories there are hydrogen beings who use a matrix of words in a pattern matrix. I think it was hydrogen, could have been methane. It has been a long while since i read them.

The Pride of Chanur stories are mostly told from the perspective of a cat-people.

Humanity shows up later on, a few here and there, strugling to deal with the sudden locating of several star faring civilizations.

I think she is one of the few authors who handle well truly alien to us species.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Joebill

In C. J. Cherryh's stories there are hydrogen beings who use a matrix of words in a pattern matrix. I think it was hydrogen, could have been methane. It has been a long while since i read them.

The Pride of Chanur stories are mostly told from the perspective of a cat-people.

Humanity shows up later on, a few here and there, strugling to deal with the sudden locating of several star faring civilizations.

I think she is one of the few authors who handle well truly alien to us species.

She is, and I read the Chanur series with pleasure. The problems of inter-species communications are something of a constant in her work, as is the question "How much can you really know about an alien culture?", where such knowledge may be crucial to your own survival.

I liked the late James White's Sector General stories, set in an interstellar hospital station, where the patients took myriad forms and came from many different evolutionary trees. White bowed respectfully at Dr. Jack Cohen, a lecturer in comparative animal taxonomy in the UK. Whenever White thought he'd developed a truly weird alien species, he mentioned it to Cohen, who immediately mentioned at least two Earth species twice as weird as what White had postulated. (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle make similar comments about Dr. Cohen.)
______
Dennis

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

So... we could consider easy communication with aliens as akin to fantasy. OTOH, it also ranks as being an accepted part of the convention, no matter how unlikely.

Maybe our SF rules need a subcategory of conventions that, strictly speaking, do not fit the accepted rules of SF, but have been accepted nonetheless:

• Star Drives
• Time Travel
• Psi Powers
• Communicable Humanoid Aliens

Anything else for this list?

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

So... we could consider easy communication with aliens as akin to fantasy. OTOH, it also ranks as being an accepted part of the convention, no matter how unlikely.

Maybe our SF rules need a subcategory of conventions that, strictly speaking, do not fit the accepted rules of SF, but have been accepted nonetheless:

• Star Drives
• Time Travel
• Psi Powers
• Communicable Humanoid Aliens

Anything else for this list?

- Superpowers ("Psi Powers" could be a subcategory of this)
- Tangent history (a history that is identical to ours until the point it diverges)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

So... we could consider easy communication with aliens as akin to fantasy. OTOH, it also ranks as being an accepted part of the convention, no matter how unlikely.

Maybe our SF rules need a subcategory of conventions that, strictly speaking, do not fit the accepted rules of SF, but have been accepted nonetheless:

Er, I wasn't aware we had codified "accepted rules of SF".

• Star Drives
• Time Travel
• Psi Powers
• Communicable Humanoid Aliens

Anything else for this list?

Quite possibly. The basic rule of thumb I apply is that you can postulate whatever you like about things we don't know/things we can't do now, but you have to get the "things we do know" right. Like, you can't have domed cities under the oceans of Venus ala Henry Kuttner, because we now know Venus doesn't have oceans.

You can certainly postulate that all of the above are fantasy, because they aren't possible, and you may be right, but that hasn't been conclusively proven, so they are still grist for the SF mill.

If you want, you can base your story on the idea that what we think we know is wrong, like a variety of stories that suggested the speed of light was a local limitation that did not hold elsewhere, and suggest that a wholly new paradigm of How Things Work will be developed that will make the impossible possible, but that's a much harder row to hoe.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

- Superpowers ("Psi Powers" could be a subcategory of this)
- Tangent history (a history that is identical to ours until the point it diverges)

Certainly Tangent History, better known as Alternate History in the genre. That's become so widely accepted that we are seeing things that arguably aren't SF, set in a present day in which history turned out differently than ours has, and the only difference is that diverging path.
______
Dennis

[Steven Lake]

Well, there's two basic "types" of sci-fi if you want to go into what's allowed and what's not. "Hard" scifi is any sci-fi story that sticks as absolutely close to accepted rules and theories of science as possible. "Soft" or "mass media" scifi is any type of sci-fi that goes into the impossible or the extraordinary. IE, FTL, Time Travel, etc.

The most common and most popular kind is soft scifi, simply because it's the one people enjoy most. Why? Because it breaks far enough away from reality to allow the reader to properly engage in the escapism they desire. Yes, there is a point at which their "suspension of belief" ends. But if you can get yourself comfortably inside that bubble, you're almost guaranteed to keep the vast majority of people happy. Well, so long as the story is good. ^_^

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Well, so long as the story is good. ^_^

Or the effects are good.

Or the actors are popular.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Er, I wasn't aware we had codified "accepted rules of SF".

Isn't that what this thread is for?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You can certainly postulate that all of the above are fantasy, because they aren't possible, and you may be right, but that hasn't been conclusively proven, so they are still grist for the SF mill.

Well, maybe if all SF, hard and soft, is speculation, and even the most unlikely elements are still possible simply because they haven't been proven... what's the use of labels? It's all SF, then. Or it's all Fantasy. Or it's both at the same time. Maybe we should be calling it all Science Fantasy.

Seems like there are simply too many unknowns and variations to allow useful labels (or rules, for that matter) to exist. If Star Wars and Solaris can be painted with the same brush, that brush must be awful large. And very gray in color.