On 25 Aug 2004, at 12:13 pm, Andrew Paul wrote:
From: William T Goodall [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 24 Aug 2004, at 12:45 pm, G. D. Akin wrote:
snipOn another list a few months, we were discussing Margaret Atwood's "The
Handmaid's Tale"My question is this: what makes a book/story SF?
Any definitions appreciated.
<snip interesing definitions>
Forced to choose one, I like this one:
Darko Suvin : "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment".
That's one of the better ones, although not inclusive enough I think.
I think Science Fiction has outgrown its name, sure its roots were in test tubes and ray guns and guys in white coats, but its slowly morphed into something less restrictive, more about a way to explore ideas within a new framework, be they science, philosophy, magic etc.
I tend to agree that sf is defined more by the way it explores ideas than by the furniture or the plots. By 'furniture' I mean the robots, rocket-ships and time-machines that are often used in definitions of sf. The obvious problem with defining sf as being stories incorporating some of {list of furniture} is that when a writer writes a story about some new piece of furniture (nanotechnology or such) it isn't sf since it isn't on the list! And adding it to the list requires using some other better definition of sf which is the one we really want.
The problem with defining sf in plot terms (some elaboration of 'the protagonist has a problem which he solves using science') is that it's too exclusive (excludes stories where the protagonist fails to solve the problem (for example _The Cold Equations_)) or too inclusive (*everything* ends up looking like sf). There may be some plots that are exclusively sf, but sf also borrows plenty of plots from other genres.
Its certainly a broad church, with many rooms in it, one of which is
'Science' Fiction, senso-stricto. I prefer Speculative Fiction, we can keep
the SF and include works like The Handmaids Tale, and 1984, and any other
number of Hugo/Nebula award winners, and all the other things we
identify as SF, but that dont actually depend on a lot of science.
Books that depend on taking an idea, or a group of ideas, and exploring
their possibilities, without the restriction of it all having to make sense,
or fit into the universe we or our ancestors lived in. Ideas without limits.
Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Structural Fabulation - as long as the acronym is SF :)
Of course, the futlity of stressing too much about definitions is highlighted by the semi oxymoronic nature of a term like Speculative Fiction, but I reckon the more good books we can claim as SF the better.
What about good books that could be claimed as sf but aren't good sf? I remember John Wyndham's _The Midwich Cuckoos_ was a book taught in my high-school English class, so the Establishment must have thought of it as a 'good' book in some sense. It's a lousy piece of sf though.
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone." - Bjarne Stroustrup
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