The Letters to the Editor department is intended to be a forum for our readers to express their own opinions and ideas. While we appreciate the many complimentary letters we receive each day, you won't find them on this page. Instead, you will find letters that go beyond or even contradict what we have written, letters that offer a different perspective and provide a different view of science fiction.
— Scott Edelman, Editor-in-Chief
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ear Editor: I feel that, as a personal friend of SF author Mike Resnick, I should respond to the thinly veiled charge of plagiarism fired by a Mr. Edward J. Wood in your Dec. 19th letter column ("Starship Channels Anime Captain"). I know for a fact that Mike didn't get the idea for his new novel, Starship: Mutiny, by watching Japanese anime programs, simply because I know for a fact that he doesn't watch such programs.
In fact, except for Cincinnati Bengals football, Chicago Bulls and U.C. Bearcats basketball, and the Kentucky Derby, Mike doesn't even watch television!
He has a saying, which he will gladly repeat to you if you meet him at a con: "I can watch television or I can write books. I can't do both. Life is too short. I choose to write books."
To that I can only add: Amen.
Jeff Calhoun
jeffcalhoun(at)cincinnatilibrary.org
rom last week's letter by J.G. te Molder ("Science Matters Most of All"): "We take a science, or create a new one but still linked to present-day science, then project it forward. The world we create in such follows certain rules of logic, partially created by science."
Here is the basis for my problem with hard-core science-fiction purists. Science is, very generally, our best educated guess at any given point in time. The number of theories that have been wrestled with for 80 or more years, only to be discarded and replaced as our ability to make better educated guesses on the nature of things, is staggering. I revere science. You may not think so, but I believe that scientific study is probably our single most important endeavor
as beings. I believe our ability to improve ourselves can only come through scientific study. I don't, however, believe science is capable of giving us final answers, because it is a living thing, constantly open to new ideas, understandings and revisions, and, also, it is limited by our capacity to understand and express it. To take a current scientific theory and extrapolate it out to a logical conclusion is good and well for creating an internal logic for any fiction—in this same way fantasy writers must maintain rules about their worlds or they too degenerate into much babble—but to dismiss something because you feel the science in it is unprovable is not only arrogant, it is quite foolish.
How many hard-core SF folks have laughed off intelligent, easily mistaken for human, robots? How about zipping across the galaxy in a large ship in a matter of days or weeks? Perhaps you've read about time travel and found the underlying science a joke? None of these can be pulled from science as we understand it today and projected as a real possibility in the centuries ahead, but still stories, fine stories, with these basic assumptions exist. Imagine, superluminal (faster-than-light) speeds were considered impossible until our study of quasars implied otherwise. In fact, the debate over quasars is an excellent example of the nature of science to peel away layers of a truth, and once finding it, discover we must begin peeling again.
So, we have two basic types of science: theoretical science and practical science. Basing a work on practical science will probably be reliable for some time to come—if not forever. However, it might creak of age when viewed in 10 or 20 years as our ability to apply it improves. Anything based on the practical will be pretty safe. For example, there is no doubt about the nature of phosphorus. Its practical uses and behaviors have proven themselves time and
time again.
Theoretical science, on the other hand, hangs by a string. Take electrons, for example: We know there are electrons, but can only know where they are at a given instant. We believe we know how they work, what their purpose is, and we can find them. We can't, however, trace their travel routes or know their trajectory when moving between two given points. In short, as has been observed, "An electron must be assumed to be everywhere at once and yet nowhere" (a very rough quote from A Brief History of Everything). Do you want to write a story that extrapolates on the behavior of an electron? Is it possible that we, too, can be everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time.
Theoretical science asks questions, posits possibilities and names things, placing them in the stack of unknowns, waiting for a time in which it will, by investigation, be understood. At that point it may be renamed, it may be discarded, or it may create a larger problem. Remember we still haven't found the elusive Unified Theory, though String Theory goes a long way toward taking us there. Practical science, on the other hand, is science that is proven by replication. This is how science works: It sets up a sacred cow and begins throwing things at it until it falls down. If we fail to dislodge it, after a while, it becomes canon. Maybe someday it will fall, but until it does, we will accept it as known fact.
For all we know, the thing we are most certain of is, we know so little of what there is to know. In short, there is a great deal of Phlogiston still out there. Let's not be so arrogant that we think otherwise. And please, let's not dismiss good fiction on that basis alone.
Dirk Griffin
dirk.griffin(at)insightbb.com
irs: I'd like to remind Dirk Griffin ("SF Needn't Be So Narrow") that Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories appeared originally in Amazing Stories, the world's first science-fiction magazine and the magazine that gave science fiction its original definition. So a serious case can easily be made for the Carter stories being SF. Science fiction is fiction about scientific topics; science is about scientific facts. I think he should not proceed in his otherwise fine argument without these basic facts in hand.
As to Mr. te Molder ("Science Matters Most of All"), who is on the same topic, I don't think he could point to any example of science fiction where the science is perfectly sound and expressed understandably. Science fiction isn't science, but it is science fiction. However, Mr. David Cooper ("Writers Have Science Responsibility") is right in asserting that the science in science fiction should be improved for the benefit of the reader. There's certainly no harm in doing that.
Personally, I think the best advice that could be given to science-fiction writers on the subject of science is to get away from genetics and medicine and on to some of the sciences that have greater appeal to the reader and viewer.
John Thiel
thiel(at)dcwi.com
m I the only reader who is of the correct chronological progression point (yes, I mean age) to remember why science fiction actually began to be called "science" fiction?
It was, if memory serves me, meant to indicate to the casual newsstand browser that this was fiction dealing with imaginary places and people and things that at that time could not exist. This was so that readers of "real literature" wouldn't be contaminated by accidentally picking up one of those "trashy" things. As the writers in the genre at that time were mostly strongly based in one or more scientific field, real accurate science was a large part of most of those books, so the tag "science fiction" was appropriate.
The "speculative fiction" tag was a later attempt to again designate the nature of these works while unifying the field, at the time that the fantasy vs. science fiction schism began to cause real hostility between fans of the genre.
As an avid fan who has read most of the earliest "science fiction" from Burroughs (and yes, Tarzan was as much science fiction at that time as John Carter) to Wells through Verne and all the way up to Martin to Hobb to Stross to McDevitt via Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, DeCamp and Lieber, I have to say that both sides are right in that both science and character are vital. Like chickens and eggs, you can't have one without the other. However, I totally disagree that the absence of one or the other changes the work from science fiction to fantasy, any more than the way eggs are prepared changes them from eggs to chickens. It doesn't matter if they're scrambled or over easy, they're still eggs. And whether it's a science-based space opera or a fantasy-based ride with wizards, dragons and magic amulets, it's all imaginative fiction, just like it's always been.
So, folks, what are we fighting about? It's all wonderful, amazing stuff that stretches our imaginations, and lets us walk among the stars, swim beneath an ocean or ride a dragon. Isn't that what really counts?
Peace to all,
P.S.: And by the way, that really is how science fiction, and those of us who read it, were viewed in the '50s and right up through the '70s. It wasn't until the '80s, with the success of the space shuttle flights, that SF began to be accepted as "real literature." Before that it was "just that pulp stuff."
Peg Davis
PDavis(at)fullsail.com
his discussion about science versus fantasy ("SF Needn't Be So Narrow", "Science Matters Most of All", "Writers Have Science Responsibility") is very interesting, but I'm afraid everyone is missing the true spirit of science fiction: hot chicks in tight spacesuits.
Hugo Gernsback knew this, and it's time we all remembered it.
Also, if the chick is being carried by a robot or monster, double good.
Pablo del Moral
pdelmoral(at)gmail.com
f anyone has read any early, early sci-fi stories, you may note that they were heavy on scientific detail. I remember one, written in the 1930s, that contained a detailed explanation of how goods were shipped from department stores to the shopper's home via underground conveyer belts, addressed by the "notches" sticking out from a "handle" on top of the box. This one also took three pages to explain how the lead character and his wife were playing chess, with the game thrown up on a big screen over their fireplace for their guests to watch.
They talked and explained everything to death to each other. It was really boring.
But it was science fiction, according to J.G. te Molder ("Science Matters Most of All") et al., as all the science was present and explained, and a major part of the story to the expense of plot development. (The aliens snuck in, isolated some people, including our lead and his wife, who were "scientists," turned off the
gravity in their houses, and flooded them with an aphrodisiac mist, resulting in frequent lovemaking. They then stole the subsequent offspring, who were returned five years later as "advanced, highly intelligent" beings. End of story.) This is science fiction. Emphasis, I guess, on science, and none on the fiction.
To me, if it has spaceships, it is science fiction. If it has elves, it is fantasy. If it has both, even better. As long as the plot, characters, et al., are well written and consistent, who cares? Stay up late at a con and argue it, but quit insisting that everyone define it by your rules! My personal favorite is Mercedes Lackey, who has "artificers" in her universe, who are disgruntled because they aren't getting equal respect with the "mages," but they're working on it.
Jessica S. Lucens
lucens(at)earthlink.net
've been following the debate online on good science versus good characters and say, "Why not both?" The best written sci-fi has both good character development and good science. The best of the Golden Age authors, Herbert, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, to name a few, were strong on both science and characters. Why can't movies and TV give us both? I'd like to roll my eyes and take a shot at J.G. te Molder ("Science Matters Most of All"), who said:
Joss Whedon's Firefly is the perfect example. Hundreds of worlds in a single solar system; hopelessly backward technology, using cattle that will only decrease the colonist's chances of survival—it just makes no sense, and therefore the characters are just as empty, if you judge it by a science-fiction meter, that is. As a bit of fantasy, you just turn your brain off and watch. Possibly nice, but I'd like to keep my brain on when I watch science fiction—I'd like [it] to challenge me, not just put forth any dumb story.
Obviously he's neither well-read nor well-traveled (hundreds of worlds in a single solar system, I must have missed something in the storylines, I thought the travel took place between worlds in multiple star-systems; anyway, I digress, back to my main point), or his brain's been off for a while. Anyway, Joss Whedon's universe, and those of authors like Heinlein, Herbert, Anderson, and more contemporary authors, reflects the reality of our own world projected into the future, a not at all strange mixture of high-tech and third-world agricultural/subsistence societies. It would be economically and societally unrealistic to expect a future full of cookie-cutter little Star Trek worlds where technological, social and economic benefits are distributed evenly (a galactic Sweden?) across the galaxy. In the future, despite whatever technological advances may come, one should still expect space travel to be an expensive, dangerous enterprise, with high technology and lawful structure deities limited to those worlds in the geographically closest solar systems, and the frontier to be exactly what it has always been. And what has the frontier always been in history? Low-tech, agricultural, lawless unless you make your own law and a refuge for the outcasts, the rebels and the weird. J.G. needs to step away from the TV screen, and the movie theater, and read a little history, some economics, and travel like I have in the third world.
I've been in the military for 30+ years, and been a sci-fi fan even longer, and measure what I read in fiction and see on the screen in terms of my own experiences. For sci-fi to be good, it not only has to get the characters and the science right, there are also the little details that make the story even better. Is the social and political backstory usable? Just like the present, the future is going to be a reflection of the world we live in today with all the human baggage we've dragged along from previous centuries, dragged into next few centuries. If it's a military-based story, does everything from the hardware to the haircuts mirror the real-world military, are tactics and soldier/(star)sailor/pilot/marine-speak talk realistic? For those who don't think the past and future mix, here's a little history: The weight in equipment and weaponry a 21st-century soldier/marine is expected to carry on his person, on foot, hasn't changed in over 2,000 years, approximately 80 to 100 pounds.
Hopelessly backward technology, using cattle that will only decrease the colonist's chance of survival (another environmentalist?)—welcome to the third world, welcome to the frontier. Welcome to Afghanistan, or somewhere in Africa or South America, tooling down the road in America's latest piece of military technology equipped with satellite navigation systems and night vision while passing a guy in a donkey wagon loaded with wood. Now that's science fiction!
The problem with too much of what passes for TV/movie science fiction, or even fantasy, is that the little bit of scientific or historical/social/technical detail that would add to the stories' plausibility and realism, along with character development, is often sacrificed to special effects or gore. Firefly isn't bad science fiction; it has its flaws, but it's better than most, certainly better than Star Trek and Star Wars. (And yes, I'm fans of both; brain candy can be fun.) [Firefly] wasn't on long enough to fully develop the background story, but its universe is no more implausible than any other adult sci-fi program, and best of all it had characters you cared about and a libertarian storyline. So, SCI FI Channel, and the rest of you B-movie writers there, how about giving us some good stories, some good characters and some real science?
Dennis O'Grady
texogrady(at)prodigy.net
s 2006 begins, the science-fiction community will carefully evaluate last year's SF and prepare nominations for various awards. But 2005 was unique—a new science-fiction author achieved international fame for SF whose impact will be felt around the world for years to come.
Too often the awards process becomes a popularity contest or an opinion poll. Publishers and movie studios are sometimes suspected of influencing the voters, but don't look to the best-seller lists or your local multiplex for this breakthrough SF. Odds are no one reading this letter has read a single word of it, but if SF is to be judged on its influence on science and society, there can be only one winner of the Hugo and Nebula for 2005.
His name is Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean researcher who claimed to have cloned human cells, but who fabricated evidence for all of that research, according to a report released today by a Seoul National University panel investigating his work.
Those who believe SF must be a novel, a short story, a play or a movie might want to re-examine that limited criteria. With his papers on human cloning, Hwang Woo Suk has proven that an SF author can generate millions of dollars for scientific research and become a national hero, even get his portrait on a postage stamp.
In 2005, no other author of SF even came close.
Kevin Ahearn
ahearn4(at)verizon.net
lthough not as prolific as North America, the U.K. occasionally produces SF TV worth shouting about. One such gem is a new show, already commissioned for a second series by the BBC, called Life on Mars. The title comes from the David Bowie song, but the show is set very much on Earth. The plot concerns a British police detective inspector, who has a bad car crash in 2006, and wakes up in London, 1973. Or does he? What's been presented so far is an enticing cross
between Back to the Future, Lost and The Sweeney. For the information of those not old enough to be familiar with the last of these, The Sweeney is a shortened version of the Cockney rhyming slang for Sweeney Todd. Not the demon barber, but the rapid response police division properly named the Flying Squad.
Life on Mars is a breath of '70s-scented air and an idea that a bright spark working for a U.S. networks might try adapting to stateside style. Would it work as well? U.S. culture, from this side of the Atlantic, seems not to have changed all that much over 30 plus years. Sure, the music and clothes are different, the politics are more vicious, but the essence of what makes U.S. society is not radically altered. So having a show where a U.S. detective of yesteryear woke up in the 1970s would, in all likelihood, lend itself to easy comedy, than be a vehicle for serious drama with a few acerbic hindsight jokes tossed into the mix. It's a pity, if I'm right, as the idea of a modern detective, marooned and thinking he might have gone mad back in disco-era New York, has potential.
Nathan Brazil
nathanbrazil(at)inkdigital.org
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