Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

Of course it hasn't. The problem is that science fiction split into two factions. The people who thought sci-fi was about the pulp stories went on to write pulp stories. The people who understood the real idea behind science fiction became more commonly accepted as literature and get ignored by the so-called science fiction elite.

Science fiction's not about the technology. It's about creating a hypothetical situation and using it to examine ourselves. In good sci-fi, the only technology that exists is there to mirror us. Look at Dune, the greatest sci-fi I've ever read, for the ultimate example: It deals with ecological scarcity, religious fanaticism, chemical addiction, and a plethora of other topics, and merges them all together to create the core universe in which it takes place. What makes it good is how every bit of information about the universe is relevant both to the plot and to the social issues it talks about.

We still have that today. The problem is it's been co-opted by "serious" writers who include Herbert and Dick as literary canon. Doris Lessing, Michael Cunningham, a slew more whose work is science fiction but for the fact that it bears about it the pretenses of more literate fiction, so that it's ignored by people looking for the low-fi attitude of earlier science fiction, before it was commonplace.

Science fiction's not about the technology.

Well, except that some of it is. I get the impression that what you're calling pulp includes all the sensawunda, which is all that really separates science fiction from other genres (since other than that, most science fiction is in another genre... fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, etc -- including Dune, actually).

This. For Ringworld, Niven invented several coherent non-human intelligences that set titanic forces in motion, and explored what the results would be like to live in. For a writer to merely "examine ourselves" seems almost lazy in comparison, and not at all what's unique to science fiction. Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and politics that I think it would have worked better as fantasy set in ancient Egypt.

    Dune in particular was so dominated by mysticism and
    politics that I think it would have worked better as
    fantasy set in ancient Egypt.

I've never thought of this. Strongly agree. I've grown a distaste for science fiction because often it's a lot more elaborate than it needs to be to communicate a point. It trades away the benefit of a completely fictional setting in that

Scifi requires you to invest a lot of energy in the read, yet a lot of it is rubbish so the ratios are wrong.

Part of the reason I like Philip K Dick is that for the sort of fiction he writes, science fiction often is the best medium for communicating. And, he doesn't mind producing books where part of the story doesn't even make sense in a rational sense, so long as it's progressing the message.

In _Time Out of Joint_ the game world is implausible. The messages on paper doesn't make sense. The brainwashed characters seems like a big thing to be taken for granted. The edge of the world doesn't add up. However, the protagonist's attempts to come to terms with the world he's in is believable.

Dick writes fiction as I seek to hack. "Am I solving the problem I care about?"

The benefit of the lack of context is that scifi can serve as a literary equivalent of a rapid development environment. The author is able to summon technology or magic in order to create settings that exercise the characters. _Ubik_ uses not-subtle examples of this in order to explore the ideas it cares about - precognition and a variation of brain-in-the-vat.

Unfortunately, the mainstream culture of fiction and fantasy epic (Lord of the Rings, Dune) actively fights this flexibility. They try to construct castles in the air - worlds that take significant energy to build and comprehend, and which thereby become limited by the same barriers that affect tales set in real settings. Having done all this work, many then tell stories about princesses, knights and dragons. Dune managed to rise some way out of that.

For many, the world building is the point. While your favorites throw in just enough tech to make the plot work, mine throw in just enough plot to take us through the world. There are authors who take such pride in this they go to conventions and seminars with other authors just to design shared worlds from scratch.

And "summon technology or magic" is where a lot of bad sci-fi fails. Magic can have ridiculously arbitrary rules attached, but technology has to work systematically. If you add technology but omit all the effects it obviously should have had on your society (especially on other technology), readers like me are going to quit in disgust.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WallBanger

You might like Hal Clement's work, especially "Mission of Gravity", "Close to Critical", and "Cycle of Fire". "Iceworld" and his next to last "Half Life" are interesting but not as well written as some of his others. "The Nitrogen Fix" isn't paritcularly well written either, but is an interesting near future, post-unexpected-apocalypse novel. Note Clement was a high school science teacher, and tried to make all his science at least plausible though sometimes he goofed, like the shape of Mesklin.

Joe Haldeman: "Science fiction isn't about the future; it's about the present."

Ender's Game is the best science fiction story (or story in general) I've ever read, and much of what makes it science fiction fades into the background as you read. The important thing when I read is the character, whom I can relate to, not the technology itself, which I can't.

You need to get into more sci-fi and more literature. Ender's Game is just intro-level. It's got a plethora of problems, too: The more you read it, the more you realize what a deeply sick worldview it and its author have. I can still read some of the later books in the series, but Ender's Game nauseates me a little more every time I try.

That said: Orson Scott Card is an excellent teacher, and his story collection Maps In A Mirror unveils a lot of his tips for writing well.

While I haven't read Maps In A Mirror, I did read Card's Characters and Viewpoint, and found it rather lackluster in its advice compared to Stephen King's memoir. Considering that I like Ender's Game more than most of King's work, I thought that was a bit odd.

In response to your edit: sick in what way? I never got that sense.

If you don't see anything wrong with Ender's Game, for your own sake, don't read anything of Card's past Speaker for the Dead. I loved Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow - but it gets harder to read them the more you're aware of Card's, uh, political stances.

There's such thing as knowing an author too well. Namely, when it starts effecting your interpretation of his earlier works.

I have to agree that On Writing was surprisingly good. I've read a few Stephen King novels and have mixed feelings about him, but that was probably the most helpful writing advice I've yet come across.

King's one of the great 80s writers. He's not at his peak anymore, but when he started he was one of the best.

Ender's Game can be read as a genocide apologist novel. I don't totally buy that, but it does espouse a universe in which smart people are allowed to kill their enemies gruesomely and not be punished. It's also almost sociopathic in the way it revolves around Ender. He's the center of the entire universe.

Card's politics don't shine out as much in it, which is why it's only slowly decayed with many, many rereads, but it's there. He's very xenophobic — he excuses disliking foreigners with the excuse of "Other people think I'm xenophobic but secretly they're all very evil", but it's straightfaced enough that you don't notice it until you've read his later bigoted stuff and come back to it. It does avoid his religion and his sexism, though, which is good; later parts of the series aren't spared.

Not to say the series isn't a great young adult read: Speaker For The Dead introduced me to maturer themes in SF/F in the first place, and the Bean parallel novels are delightful fun military strategy reads. But they're very flawed, sometimes irreparably so.

sick in what way?

I think the primary characteristic of Card's writings is that he likes to explore the nasty, and a lot of the time he's apologizing for it. Ender's Game is about murder writ small and large, and the provocative question it asks is whether you can blame Ender for what he did. Hart's Hope does that with adultury; Pastwatch with slavery and cultural imperialism. Even when he's not that provocative, the world just tends to be nasty and not always in a very redeeming way. Kingsmeat and Unaccompanied Sonata may be the worst offenders.

Asimov's stories are about reason triumphing over puzzles, and Heinlein's are about facing tough decisions with a bold face. But Card's are about characters who wrestle with the guilt and psychological problems they inherit from living through twisted circumstances in a twisted world and can you really blame them for what they did?

As a teenager, I thought that was interesting. I thought it was deep and morally provocative and philosophically enlightening, I thought the characters were even admirable. As an adult, I mostly find it tragic and morally hasty. I'd rather read about heroes and courage and reason and responsibility than guilt and pain and evasion.

I actually thought "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" was "worse" than Unaccompanied Sonata. Still I wish he'd write more short stories like that...they're more engaging than the novels I've seen recently from him.

Fair. It depends on what bothers you, I suppose. Now that I think about it, "A Thousand Deaths" was also pretty disturbing.

I suppose I shouldn't be so judgmental in my description. Whether you like or dislike those types of stories, they are good illustrations of why some people find Card's writing disturbing. Then again, some people like to be disturbed. I might go so far as to say that is the point of his stories in the first place.

Yeah I think Card is at best a mediocre writer. And I thought that before I knew he was an ultra-right-wing nutjob.

The problem with sci-fi and fantasy is that because they're so niche, and because so many people are predisposed to liking them based on subject area alone, the average successful writer makes even Dan Brown look like Charles Dickens. That makes Card look good by comparison because he isn't a bad writer (certainly far better than Brown) and most in the genre are.

That's a good way of putting it. For all his flaws, Card is an actual writer. Many of his contemporaries never were.

Of course, there's legitimate literate science fiction out there that's among the best literature of the century. Frank Herbert and Philip Dick are going to be known as some of the greatest forces in writing; Isaac Asimov wasn't a brilliant prosist but conceptually he was in a league of his own.

The original novella was better than the novel, which I don't often say, I like all the extra little details that work their way into longer works. Card just got worse and worse as he went along.

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