james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2007-09-14 14:02:00
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Is LitFic assimilating the good parts of SF?
I sympathize with McAuley but I don't think his selection of examples supports his case as well as they might. I'm looking at Moonseed and Teranesia in particular as books where the word "realistic" is not what comes to mind when I think about them. I'm lean more towards "shrill" or "strident" or "excessively implausible, even for science fiction [1]".

I don't think the Kincaid essay supports its case particularly well but if SF was still engaged [2] with science, there wouldn't the pattern of SF authors as a group fleeing any subject matter that has attracted recent close scientific scrutiny.

I plan to steal "Brockmanism" at some point.

1: Granted, Teranesia is slightly more plausible than Bear's Darwin's Radio because in SF, quantum = magic and who can say what limits magic has?

2: If it ever was. The lack of angry fans storming the Analog offices over the Dianetics and Dean Machine articles (and the related stories from authors who knew where Campbell's itchy spots were) suggests that scientific rigor wasn't a high priority with the readers.

And don't get me started on that SF story where someone wants to recharge a comet by rubbing it on the galaxy like a balloon, a story that Donald Wollheim apparently thought very highly of.

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[info]ninebelow
2007-09-14 02:38 pm UTC (link)
I was just saying to [info]grahamsleight the other day that Teranesia is the book where Egan is closest to a mainstream sensibility - you know, characters and that - and also his shittest. "Serious, realistic, and sympathetic" were not words that occured to me.

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[info]bpholden
2007-09-14 04:28 pm UTC (link)
Egan's characters in Teranesia were pretty terrible. His normal characters are often better, but there is a certain sameness about them that I think he was trying to get away from. The magic pixie dust aspect of quantum mechanics was neither here nor there for me, but the rants about how post-modernism was going to destroy science and the internet was just absurd.

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[info]scentofviolets
2007-09-14 10:38 pm UTC (link)
Was there as cringe-worthy use of the magic pixie dust? I didn't see any (and, like you, I don't particularly care), but if that's not the case, I'd like to know what it was. Of course, it all probably comes down to a definition of what's considered a howler when promulgated by who.

Otoh . . . I think there was something to those rants. No, nothing about post-modernism, but this pernicious notion that science is something that scientists do (you can extend this definitional paradigm to other fields, of course.) No, science is most definitely _not_, ipso facto, what scientists do. Science is a way of thinking, a very artificial and formal way of thinking in comparison to what usually passes as cogitation.

Iow, 'holistic medicine' isn't medicine in any meaningful sense of the word, and the people who practice it aren't 'healers'. To give but one obvious example.

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[info]tomscud
2007-09-14 10:49 pm UTC (link)
I remember seeing a post or a quote from a post or something by Egan defending the dialogue he'd written for his po-mo characters as directly taken from academic publications. Like people would talk like that in casual conversation-oh.

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[info]ninebelow
2007-09-15 12:15 am UTC (link)
Egan defending the dialogue he'd written for his po-mo characters as directly taken from academic publications.

Which doesn't mean people actually speak like that. It is just embarassing. Egan is an extremely intelligent man and here he is basically going artz droolz, sience rulez. It is a stain on his body of work.

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[info]scentofviolets
2007-09-15 01:05 am UTC (link)
I don't mean to accuse you of having, shall we say, parochial views, but it seems pretty clear that you've never spent extended time in a faux-Boho coffee house. Yes, (some) people really do talk like that. At length. And think that they are the smartest bestest most enlightened humans ever. Plus, they smoke non-American cigarettes.

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[info]pyropyga
2007-09-14 02:54 pm UTC (link)
"Bruce Sterling’s Distress."

I think he's confusing Distraction and Egan's Distress to boot. Or that's my best guess.

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[info]kip_w
2007-09-14 05:18 pm UTC (link)
It looked like Teresiana at first, and I imagined a sort of cavalcade of TNH's Greatest Hits.

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[info]carloshasanax
2007-09-14 05:56 pm UTC (link)
In answer to your question: yes.

SF has about as much to do with science as superhero comics at this point. (The chemistry errors in Metal Men #2 made my head hurt. A familiar feeling.) It's become a genre of well-used circus furniture, as impossible as Kryptonite. FTL, "nanotechnology", cyberjunk... at least it's not psychic powers any longer.

The relatively high percentage of active cranks among the genre's authors doesn't help; and at least in most comics, it's not really a plot point if the Earth is expanding like an inflating balloon or not. Imagine if the historical novel (or mystery) had the same proportion of historical cranks. Yeesh.

Meanwhile, there are eight million people in the U.S. who could be classified as science professionals. I'm sure they read more novels than average. Think they're going to be impressed with Greg Whatever's grasp of Darwin/Einstein?

(I knew something was up when people started shoving Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams at me in significant numbers. This was a few years back. A small, slight book which played Calvino-style games with Einsteinian concepts.)

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[info]mmcirvin
2007-09-14 08:19 pm UTC (link)
I know a few scientists who actually were impressed with some of Egan's other stuff; he knows enough math and physics to be dangerous, though in most of his stories he does what's sometimes described as a magic trick--he'll slip in a bogoscience gimmick and then crank out quasi-logical consequences of that until the universe cracks wide open.

I do think that on the whole he engages with science better than 99% of SF practitioners. Granted that is a low bar.

That said, the science in Teranesia was really, really implausible, and the rage-filled satirical bits about academic postmodernism seem more ridiculous every year--very much a creature of the 1990s, Sokal Hoax-era, post-"Science Wars" environment.

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[info]carloshasanax
2007-09-14 10:14 pm UTC (link)
Egan tries, sure. He has a presence on a bunch of science blogs, and apparently did a number-crunching job for John Baez, IMS a nasty spin network thing in the style of Penrose that didn't uncomplicate itself at higher orders.

But, jeez, I read his tutorials on his website, and it reminded me unpleasantly of learning to drive stick. This is not a guy who has an intuitive grasp of physics or mathematics. He uses horror tropes for several reasons, but one of them (I think) is because he can't explain his underlying concepts more elegantly.

And Teranesia -- yup, a window of about five years, and you can tell he got it half from the Skeptical Inquirer.

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[info]scentofviolets
2007-09-14 10:40 pm UTC (link)
Well, anybody whose working for John Baez deserves some consideration over and above the mere fact that he writes 'the thinking mans science fiction'!

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[info]mmcirvin
2007-09-16 04:59 am UTC (link)
...Also, Schild's Ladder isn't really a good example of realism either, since it takes place among uploaded posthumans of the distant future dealing with a local change in the laws of physics; there isn't much relationship to anything that happens in current Earth society. Personally I usually like it when Egan gets into the heavy made-up physics--I liked Diaspora and Permutation City, but Schild's Ladder, I thought, actually took it too far--the characters almost disappeared in a cloud of abstractions.

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[info]womzilla
2007-09-18 11:47 am UTC (link)
"the characters almost disappeared in a cloud of abstractions."

I think that was deliberate. That doesn't mean it was or wasn't good, but I'm pretty sure it was the effect he sought.

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[info]celestialweasel
2007-09-14 08:27 pm UTC (link)
"The relatively high percentage of active cranks among the genre's authors doesn't help" deserves taking out of context and using as a T-shirt slogan, novel's epigraph, blog title, or something like that.

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[info]roseembolism
2007-09-15 05:55 am UTC (link)
I wonder if the crankyness problem started as a reaction to the complete lack of atomic rockets and flying cars?

The future not being as predicted had to be hard on the SF community.

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[info]mmcirvin
2007-09-16 04:30 am UTC (link)
SF was always full of cranks. If anything it was worse during the "Golden Age". John Campbell was a raging crackpot in at least half a dozen dimensions.

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[info]martin_wisse
2007-09-14 09:23 pm UTC (link)
Science fiction never was about science.

Thank god.

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[info]scentofviolets
2007-09-14 10:43 pm UTC (link)
You betcher unobtanium-plated booties. Which is why looking at the letters section in those old Analog's can be so entertaining.

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[info]lpetrazickis
2007-09-15 12:21 am UTC (link)
One only needs a single counter-example to disprove your statement as phrased.:P

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[info]mmcirvin
2007-09-16 04:40 am UTC (link)
Sometimes it is, and I always find the result interesting.

Stanislaw Lem wrote intelligent SF that really was about science as a process--His Master's Voice and half of the chapters in Solaris probably being the best examples.

Gregory Benford may be increasingly irritating in recent years, but I still admire the fact that he sometimes put his professional experience into writing SF about scientists who actually do the kinds of things real scientists do. I recall a scene in Timescape in which a graduate student basically gets gang-stomped by hostile professors in an oral exam, and it was such an on-the-nose portrayal of what happens when a bunch of physicists start thinking that the person talking to them doesn't know what he's talking about, it stung. The actual tachyon physics in Timescape is full of cheating (which I think has to be deliberate on Benford's part, since his nonfiction writing indicates that he knows better), but he got the scientific community right.

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[info]austin_dern
2007-09-15 04:13 am UTC (link)

> And don't get me started on that SF story where someone wants to recharge a comet by rubbing it on the galaxy like a balloon, a story that Donald Wollheim apparently thought very highly of.

[ * ], kindly, if it wouldn't re-create Stitch learning he's on a small island with no big cities?

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[info]roseembolism
2007-09-15 05:47 am UTC (link)
I guess I'm not the only one who thought that Lilo and Stitch would make a perfect classic SF story? It sounds like exactly the sort of thing Joseph Campbell would latch onto.

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Nicked from an old review of mine
[info]james_nicoll
2007-09-15 04:25 pm UTC (link)
Edmund Hamilton's Crashing Suns, set 100,000 years from now.

In the first story, aliens are steering their sun towards ours so that they can ram ours and rekindle their clinker of a star (Hamilton used the "Stars start off hot and slowly cool off" model). Humans have just developed FTL so we go out to see why this star is headed towards us. In the end, the aliens are exterminated with their own star-steering
device.

In the Star Stealers, the Interstellar Patrol (multi-species, although they all seem to use the same naming system) ivestigates a dead star that seems bent on stealing the Sun. Again, it is doomed (but bad) aliens trying escape entropy. The IP uses the alien star steering devices to make them miss the Sun.

The Orion Nebula is suddenly spinning faster and faster, threatening to explode from v^2/r, which would destroy the entire galaxy because Hamilton has no idea about things like scale or lightspeed. It turns otu there's a doomed civilization inside the nebula that is trying to prevent the nebula from collapsing. Helpfully, the IP causes the nebula to collapse, killing all the aliens.

In the Comet Drivers, a giant comet seems bent on ramming the galaxy, which would destroy it (Again, no idea of scale here). It turns out that the comet is inhabited and the inhabitants want to recharge the electrical coma of the comet by rubbing it on the galaxy, in the manner of a charged balloon. Once again, plot foiled, aliens wiped out.

In the Cosmic Cloud, eyeless aliens who have only just been informed of the galaxy's existance are stealing ships so that they can conquer the galaxy. This plan relies on their etheric technology, which lets them create anti-light zones. The IP uses the cloud people's technology to wreck the invading fleet and exterminate the cloud people.

This only gives a taste of how horrid the science in this is in terms of the time it was written. Yes, the Bethe Cycle wasn't understood until the end of the decade but people knew comets weren't bigger than galaxies. Also, ether seems to have been the 1930s version of quantum: it can do anything.

From a later follow-up:

I forgot to mention the introduction, which were by Wollheim. Basically, his thesis is that the IP stories are SF done right and he snarls about something he calls "slide rule SF", whatever that is.

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Re: Nicked from an old review of mine
(Anonymous)
2007-09-15 04:58 pm UTC (link)
One wonders just how many alien species Hamilton commited genocide on over the course of his writing career...

Bruce

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[info]calimac
2007-09-18 03:21 pm UTC (link)
The lack of angry fans storming the Analog offices over the Dianetics and Dean Machine articles

Your premise is wrong. No literal office-storming, no, but both ideas were hugely controversial within the field, were argued over and denounced intensely, and did a lot to account for Campbell's declining reputation in the 50s and 60s.

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