David Brin - The Difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy

[zakk]

http://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-difference-between-science-fiction-and-fantasy/

Why are SF and Fantasy so often grouped together? Obviously, because they share readership and so are well placed together in book stores. And... heck... some of us write both! Still, there are very real differences.

Look, fantasy is the mother genre — e.g. Gilgamesh, the Illad, Odyssey and most religions. Sci Fi is the brash offshoot. All literature has deep roots in fantasy, which in turn emerges from the font of our dreams.

Having said that, what is my definition of the separation? I think it is very basic, revolving around the notion of human improvability.

"Do you believe it is possible for children to learn from the mistakes of their parents?"

For all the courage and heroism shown by fantasy characters across 4000 years of great, compelling dramas — NOTHING EVER CHANGES! Aragorn may be a better king than Sauron would have been. Hurray. Fine. But he's still a freaking king. And the palantir on his desk that lets him see faraway places and converse with viceroys across the realm is still reserved for the super elite. No way are we going to see mass-produced palantirs appearing on every peasant's tabletop from Rohan to the Shire. (The way our civilization plopped such a miracle on YOUR tabletop.) It never even occurs to Aragorn or Gandalf to give the poor the godlike powers they themselves get to wield... let alone provide them with libraries, running water, printing presses or the germ theory of disease. Only little Peregrin Took seems to get a glimmer of an idea in that direction. The only character who briefly ponders possibilities, and he's soon bullied out of it.

Fantasy has its attractions. Something about feudalism resonates, deep inside us. We fantacize about being the king or wizard. Heck it's in our genes. We are all descended from the harems of the guys who succeeded at that goal. The core thing about fantasy tales is that, after the adventure is done and the bad guys are defeated... the social order stays the same.

It may be the natural genre... but should we be proud of that?

Science fiction, in sharp contrast, considers the possibility of learning and change.

Not that children always choose to learn from their parent's mistakes! When they don't, when they are obstinately stupid and miss opportunities, you can get a sci fi tragedy... far more horrible than anything "tragic" in Aristotle's POETICS. Aristotle says tragedy is Oedepus writhing futilely against fate. A sci fi tragedy portrays people suffering, same as in older tragedies... but with this crucial difference – things did not have to be this way. It wasn't "fate." We – or the characters – could've done better. There was, at some point, a chance to change our own destiny.

One type of tragedy makes you weep – hey, Oedepus is powerful stuff. But for millennia the deep moral lesson – the thing taught in all "campbellian myths" – is that resistance is futile. The overall situation, the rule of fate, remains the same.

The other type of tragedy – the new kind – is a cautionary tale that may change your decisions. It may alter destiny.

You can see why the absurd old farts who inhabit most lit departments hate science fiction. SF considers it possible that the eternal "verities" and relentless stupidities praised by Henry James might someday be obsolete! If we make kids who are better than us (our goal, duh?) then their Startrekkian heirs will still have problems. Why insist that our descendants have to fret over the same ones? Can't they assume the solutions we find, take them for granted, and move on to new, interesting issues of their own?

Isn't that what we did?

The implicit assumption in most fantasy is that the form of governance that ruled most human societies since the discovery of grain must always govern us. And when a fellow like Tim Powers resists that assumption, he is writing science fiction, whether or not there are pirates, or wizards or demons.

Anne McCaffrey says "Never call me a fantasy author! I write science fiction!" Indeed. Despite the dragons and lords and medieval craft and renaissance fair stuff... her characters have heard of flush toilets and universities and democracy...

...AND THEY WANT THOSE THINGS BACK! They want starships. And Anne is going to let them earn those things. They will get them back, and move on. And she is a science fiction author.

[scallop]

Baš se namučio. Nekako se uvek pitam zašto se pisci petljaju u definicije? Pa ustanove da pišu i SF i fantasy. Ili su uvek verovali da pišu SF, a trpaju ih u fantasy. Ili obratno. Jedino što funkcioniše je da lepo pasuju u istu policu knjižare. I imaju istu publiku.

[PTY]

Brin najzad odlucio da Mileru kaze bar pola od svega sto ga po pravdi boga sleduje...
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/11/move-over-frank-miller-or-why-occupy.html

[PTY]

...ovo Brinovo se zakuvava, ali stvarno! 


http://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/looking-upward/

[Mica Milovanovic]

Ted Chiang u intervjuu za BoingBoing:

Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there's actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding. In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science. Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it's how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.

[scallop]

Koješta.

[mac]

Znači svet stripovskih superheroja je epska fantastika, jer su samo neki ljudi superheroji?

[Melkor]

Zavisi, u Wildstorm univerzumu stancuju superheroje

[Mme Chauchat]

Ovaj... ovaj čovek... ovaj čovek nije normalan.

[scallop]

Ali je na engleskom.

[PTY]

Elem, ako se ovo takmičenje u nerazumevanju pročitanog završilo, da nastavimo sa Brinom:






What will the future be like?
That question is very much on peoples' minds these days. Yet, as a "futurist" and science fiction author, I am much more interested in exploring possibilities than likelihoods, because a great many more things might happen than actually do.
One of the most powerful novels of all time, published fifty years ago, foresaw a dark future that never came to pass. That we escaped the destiny portrayed in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, may be owed in part to the way his chilling tale affected millions, who then girded themselves to fight "Big Brother" to their last breath.
In other words, Orwell may have helped make his own scenario not come true.
Since then, many other "self-preventing prophecies" rocked the public's conscience or awareness. Rachel Carson foresaw a barren world if we ignored environmental abuse -- a mistake we may have partly averted, thanks to warnings like Silent Spring and Soylent Green. Who can doubt that films like Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach, and Fail-Safe helped caution us against dangers of inadvertent nuclear war? As for Big Brother, every conceivable power center, from governments and corporations to criminal and techno-elites, is repeatedly targeted by Hollywood's most relentless message... to stay suspicious of all authority.
These examples point to something bigger and more important than mere fiction. Something deeply human keeps us both fascinated and worried about tomorrow's dangers. We all try to project our thoughts into the future, using special portions of our brains called prefrontal lobes to envision, fantasize, and explore possible consequences of our actions, noticing errors and evading some mistakes.
Humans acquired these mysterious nubs of gray matter -- sometimes called the "lamps on our brows" -- before the Neolithic era. What has changed is our effectiveness at using them. Today, we devote much of our economy to predicting, forecasting, planning, investing, making bets, or just preparing for times to come.
Our civilization's success depends at least as much on the mistakes we avoid as successes we plan, but sadly no one compiles lists of these narrow escapes. They somehow seem less interesting than each week's crisis. People point to a few species saved from extinction, fixing the ozone hole, and our good fortune at avoiding nuclear war. That's about it for famous near-misses. But should you start a serious list, you'll tally a surprising roll call of dodged bullets and lucky breaks.
Learning how and why we've accomplished this ought to be a high priority.
Are we really using those famous prefrontal lobes better? Has something changed in the way civilization deals with the future?
* * * * *
What if tomorrow's chemists shrink their labs the same way cyberneticists transformed computers? Intricate techniques of chemical analysis have already been automated and miniaturized, as part of the Human Genome Project. Suppose a time comes when every teenager with a desktop MolecuMac can synthesize any substance, at will? Will chemical innovation and initiative flourish, the way creative software was unleashed by the arrival of personal computers? What will this do to our drug policies? Will we ever feel the same toward the food teenagers serve us at restaurants?
* * * * *
History is a long and dreary litany of ruinous decisions made by rulers in all centuries and on all continents. No convoluted social theory is needed to explain this. A common flaw in human character -- self-deception -- eventually enticed even great leaders into taking fatal missteps, ignoring the warnings of others.
As the late physicist-author Richard Feynman put it. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."
George Orwell portrayed the essential stupidity of tyranny in the ferocious yet delusional oligarchy of Oceania, inNineteen Eighty-Four. By keeping the masses ill-educated and quashing free speech, the Oceania elite strove to eliminate criticism and preserve their short-term status, guaranteeing long-term disaster. The same tragic and ubiquitous defect -- played out in ten thousand tribes and nations -- may have been the biggest factor chaining us far below our potential as a species, until we stumbled onto a solution.
The solution of many voices.
Each of us may be too stubbornly self-involved to catch all our own mistakes. But in an open society, we can often count on others to notice them for us. Though we all hate irksome criticism and accountability, they are tools that work. The great secular institutions that have fostered our unprecedented wealth and freedom -- science, justice, democracy and markets -- function best when all players get to see, hear, speak, know, argue, compete and create without fear.
Today, even our elites cannot escape being pilloried by spotlights and scrutiny. In moving away from rigid command structures, we seem to be gambling instead on an odd combination -- blending rambunctious individualism with mutual accountability. The two may sound incompatible, at first, but one cannot thrive without the other.
Technological advances like the Internet may help amplify this trend, or squelch it, depending on choices we make in the next few years.
* * * * *
What conundrums will we see, over the next few years? Try a new pill that lets macho husbands sire only boys. Or an effective lie detector. Or a laser that lets arsonists set fires from far away.
What about the 15 trillion dollars that baby boomers are set to inherit? Say six percent of it goes to cool projects, what might a trillion dollars finance? Reforesting the Sahel? A trip to Mars? Suppose prosperity spreads all across the world, will that mean having to put up with eight billion tourists?
If that sounds awful, try the opposite. Destructive technologies seep out among the mad, self-righteous, or merely angry. A city "dusted" with radionuclides. An aquifer laced with viroids. A civilization based on mutual dependency meets individualism at its worst, spiced by rancor, without accountability.
* * * * *
One can spin countless scenarios about the next few years, but whatever we forecast now will surely be surpassed by startling events, because the range of the possible exceeds by many orders of magnitude the reach of one imagination. What I can say with certainty is the key to our success -- both personal and as a society -- will be agility in dealing with whatever the future hurls our way. Moreover, there are reasons to think we already have what it takes.
Consider the following hoary clichés:

"Too bad human decency and justice haven't kept pace with our technological progress."

"No past era featured as much cruelty and misery as this one."

In spite of their vogue, both are patently false. Over half of those alive on Earth today never saw war, starvation or major civil strife with their own eyes. Most never went more than a day without food. Only a small fraction have seen a city burn, heard the footsteps of a conquering army, or watched an overlord massacre the helpless. All these events were routine for our ancestors.
Of course, hundreds of millions have experienced such things, and the terrors continue. Our consciences, prodded by the relentless power of television, must not cease demanding compassion and vigorous action. Still, things have changed somewhat since humanity wallowed in horror, during the middle years of the Twentieth Century. The ratio of humans who now live modestly safe and comfortable lives has never been greater.
As for comparing technical and moral advances, there's no contest. For example, while I truly love the Internet, its effects on real life have so far been exaggerated. Telephones and radio had far greater immediate effects when they entered the home. Yes, we have fancier autos and sleeker airplanes. But people still pack their kids in a car and fight traffic to reach the airport in time to meet Grandma's flight from Chicago... as they did when I was seven. Life's tempo has speeded, but the basic rhythm is little different than it was in 1958.
It is our attitudes -- toward all sorts of injustices that used to be considered inherent -- that underwent a transformation unlike any in history.
When the famous Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey appeared in 1967, two monumental projects transfixed the people of the United States -- conquering outer space and overcoming deeply ingrained social injustice. Who would have imagined that colonizing space would prove so grindingly slow -- but by 2000 we'd refute so many cruel bigotries once taken for granted, back in 1967? We still don't have the fancy space stations of 2001, but our astronauts come in all sexes and colors. And kids who watch them on TV feel less fettered by presumed limitations. Each may choose to hope, or not, without being told you can't.
I think that may be the most important thing to notice, as we turn away from the past and face the future. The road ahead remains long, hard and murky. Our achievements often seem dim compared to imperfections that are left unsolved. But at this rate, who will bet me that a woman or a person of color won't preside in the White House long before the first human being steps on Mars?
Progress doesn't always go the way we expect it to.
It is sometimes wiser than we are.
THE END

[PTY]

VIDEO: David Brin Talks at Google TechTalks

[PTY]

David Brin on the Need to Restore Optimism to Science Fiction


David Brin fans can rejoice: It's been nearly a decade since his last novel, Tomorrow Happens, but the critically acclaimed science fiction writer is now set to release his much anticipated book, Existence, on June 21st.
Brin, the author of such hard SF works as Kiln People, The Postman (which was adapted into a major motion picture), and the Uplift series of books, is renowned for not just his ability to weave an entertaining sci-fi yarn, but for his remarkable prescience as well. He has a excellent track record when it comes to making predictions, and has long speculated about such things as global warming, cyberwarfare and the rise of the surveillance state.

[PTY]

David Brin's List of "Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales" 

   

Many folks have created tallies of favorite Science Fiction novels.  I've already weighed in with my Top SF for Young Adults and my Top Ten list. See also these essays: A Comparison of Science Fiction vs. Fantasy and How to Define Science Fiction.

But now let's try something much more ambitious -- a bigger, broader reading compilation.  This is still just a sampler - for something comprehensive, see the Science Fiction Encyclopedia or the user-friendly Worlds Without End. But any person who has read all the books and stories and authors noted here (and I admit they are heavy on "classics") can come away with bragging rights to say: "I know something about science fiction."

For this list I divide the novels authors and stories in my own quirky manner, according to categories...

* DIRE WARNINGS AND SELF PREVENTING PROPHECIES:


These novels and shorter works have drawn millions to ponder many different kinds of danger that may lurk down the road ahead. Among our possible tomorrows, so many might be dreadful-but-avoidable - from tyranny to ecological deterioration to some tragic failure of citizenship.  A few of these books even attained the most powerful status any work of fiction can achieve ... changing the future, by alerting millions, who then girded themselves, discussing the problem with neighbors, becoming active, vowing to help ensure the bad thing never happens.

The following examples of self-preventing prophecy stand out. All of them help us focus on something that we may desperately miss, if it were ever gone

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell.
The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Make Room! Make Room!  by Harry Harrison (basis for the film Soylent Green)
Brave New World,  by Aldous Huxley
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
On The Beach, by Nevil Shute
We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Cool War, by Frederik Pohl
The Disappearance, by Philip Wylie
Flood, by Stephen Baxter
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Unincorporated Man, by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin

   ... plus almost anything by Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.), or Nancy Kress or Octavia Butler... I leave it to others to decide whether my own apocalyptic warning novel, The Postman. belongs on this list.

[PTY]

* HARBINGERS OF HOPE:These tales offer something almost as important as warnings... a tantalyzing glimpse at (guardedly and tentatively) better tomorrows. It's actually much harder to do than issuing dire warnings! (That may be why there's so little optimism in print. Most authors and directors are simply too lazy.)

Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner
Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein*
Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge
Consider Phlebas,  by Iain Banks (and his Culture Series)
The Golden Age, by John C. Wright
Island, by Aldous Huxley
Pacific Edge, by Kim Stanley Robinson

... plus the entire sub-genre known as Star Trek, among the few places where you come away feeling envious of our grandkids - the way things ought to be....



* HUH! I NEVER REALIZED!

Some tales simply rock readers back with wondrous stories that also broaden their perspective... from strange cultures to alternate social systems to unusual ways of thinking.

Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
Dune, by Frank Herbert
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Courtship Rite, by Donald Kingsbury
The Years of Rice and Salt,  by Kim Stanley Robinson
A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

...plus the "Nine Worlds" series of John Varley and the brain-twistings of  Samuel Delaney...



* THE HARD STUFF:

Take me someplace new. Boggle me with possibilities grounded in this strange-real universe of science! Almost anything by these authors will give you tons of the real meat of SF.

Timescape, by Gregory Benford
Eon, by Greg Bear
The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
FlashForward, by Robert Sawyer
Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson
Ringworld, by Larry Niven
Diaspora or Quarantine, by Greg Egan
To Crush the Moon, by Wil McCarthy
Vast, by Linda Nagata
Anti-Ice, by Stephen Baxter
The Web Between the Worlds by Charles Sheffield
Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

... plus many works by Joe Haldeman, John Varley, Elizabeth Bear, Charles Gannon, Jack McDevitt....



(ima jos mnogo toga, ali na njegovom blogu: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/01/david-brins-list-of-greatest-science.html

[Gaff]

A evo i najnovijeg intervjua s tog bloga.


"Frank Catalano (FC): What is right with Science Fiction Today?

David Brin (DB):  Science Fiction has so flooded into popular culture and beyond that it's becoming a staple of discussion in politics and philosophy and daily life.  The New Yorker just ran a "science fiction issue" featuring works by some of our literary lights... a few of whom spent decades denying they ever wrote SF. People appear to have realized, at last, that we're in the 21st Century.  Time to buy that silvery spandex outfit, I guess.
Another good thing, the sheer number of brilliant young writers coming down the pike. Michael Chabon, Charles Yu, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mary Kowal, Daniel Wilson, Kay Kenyon.... and dozens more. They can turn a phrase with the best in any genre, any era, and there are so many of them!  Liberated by new technology to explore innovative storytelling methods, like novels with embedded media or animated storyboards... zowee!"




i tako dalje:

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/07/geekwire-asks-david-brin-about-world-of.html