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So I finally read/experienced 17776, which I had put off doing for very specific reasons I'm not getting into here, but were nothing against the story, author, or subject matter.
I've now read it, and I wish I had sooner. It turns out I didn't need to avoid it.
I've now read it, and I wish I had sooner. It turns out I didn't need to avoid it.
Actually, I guess I will explain. I have an idea for a story that I might never actually write because it's just the barest seed of a story, "a good idea for a story", and it's such a very specific thing and 17776 is such a very specific thing...
...so I didn't want to read 17776 until I had actually written my story or given up on it. I haven't written the story. I have mostly given up on it. But it transpires that 17776 is not the specific thing I thought it was but a very different specific thing, so maybe I still will
Nobody whose explanation of 17776 I saw, read, or heard explained or mentioned an essential element of the premise that completely changes what it's about, what it means. It's not only not "just" about how football changes in the future. It's not even about that at all.
Which brings me to my gripe, which isn't about the author or the story, but about the genre/industry.
Now, my gripe is premised on the idea that Jon Bois is a science fiction writer. I don't know if he considers himself one, but he wrote an important work of science fiction.
Now, my gripe is premised on the idea that Jon Bois is a science fiction writer. I don't know if he considers himself one, but he wrote an important work of science fiction.
And my gripe is: boy, a white man can write whatever he wants and have it accepted as science fiction. Doesn't matter the subject matter. Doesn't matter the plot structure. Doesn't matter if the essential speculative leap is a complete black box, unexplained and inexplicable.
And as I said: my gripe is not with the author. I don't want to take this power away from him. I don't know that he declared that 17776 was either science fiction or a story, much less a science fiction story, but it was (correctly, in my opinion!) accepted as one!
The thing is, though... this power is not evenly distributed. Earlier this summer I read someone's panel experience on her. She was quizzed exhaustively about her research to find out what she got wrong in her book; male colleague shrugged and said "I made it all up", got cheered
When I say it's not about how football will change... it's because it's about how it *would* change, *if*. And the *if* element is one of those "Alien Space Bats" type changes that is just... it is. That's all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats
And so much of male-dominated science fiction revolves around black box technological changes. Asimov didn't predict we'd make artificial minds. He doesn't know how it might be accomplished. "Positronic" was a buzzword, not a method.
He was writing about what it might *mean*.
He was writing about what it might *mean*.
So Jon Bois is writing a story that is about a lot of things. About play. About the meaning of life when there are no more external goals or drives, when survival of the species, individual, and gene are assured basically forever and there's no pressure...
...and so earth has now basically gone from being a wide open MMO to being a wide open sandbox physics simulator, a non-game or antigame like Second Life or Garry's Mod in which people can and will invent their own games just to have goals for themselves.
And to create the set up for this story, he... and I do not disagree with this decision... decides the world just changed this day, for reasons that are insensible to human beings and which humans will likely never make sense of.
Valid decision. The story requires the change.
Valid decision. The story requires the change.
And a lot of people would, to paraphrase Thank You For Smoking, had a single line somewhere that goes "Thank God we invented the, you know, whatever device." There would be some buzzword like positronic. There would be some handwave.
But the thing about stringing together a bunch of current scientific buzzwords to explain the MAGIC in your science fiction story is that sooner or later it will sound to future people like, "Is he strong? Hey, listen, bud... he's got radioactive blood."
Every science fiction story has magic in it. Not sufficiently advanced technology. Magic. It's a science fiction story because the magic is called "radiation" or "genetic engineering" or "nanites".
So Bois takes the bold step of instead of having the You Know, Whatever, Device, he has the *Shrug* I'Unno Effect, which changes the world enough to explain the later arrival of a You Know, Whatever, Device that brings the other half of the necessary change for the premise.
(His You Know, Whatever, Device is "nanos", for the record. But the *Shrug* I'Unno Effect actually shows up multiple times throughout the story in order to keep the premise of unlimited time as pure and literal as possible.)
Anyway. It's a great story and in sort of defense of the industry, the industry probably wouldn't have published it even from a white guy. But it's certainly been accepted as good and great and great and good, despite the unothodox storytelling, lack of traditional plot...
...and the wholehearted embrace of "Look, let's not even pretend this makes sense on any kind of scientific level. For the sake of the story, we need humans to be immortal. And the universe to be eternal. And several other changes I'll ask you to roll with along the way."
And so my gripe is: mostly people who look like Jon Bois get to write stories that explore whatever questions they want to pose, with whatever premises they need to lay out to arrive at their desired questions and answers.
And mostly other people don't.
And mostly other people don't.
"You didn't do your research." "This is hardly what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi." "Isn't this basically fantasy?" and so on.
(And let someone say they're writing soft sci-fi or fantasy and a whole new crop of objections pop up.)
(And let someone say they're writing soft sci-fi or fantasy and a whole new crop of objections pop up.)
I disagree with the premise here. I think it can be useful to distinguish science fantasy from science fiction, but all science fiction is a subset of fantasy. You can't explain the science in a non-fantastic way. If you can, it's not science fiction. https://twitter.com/BelisariusCool/status/1310946115513208832
Every You Know, Whatever, Device is sooner or later powered by the *Shrug* I'Unno Effect. If you can explain how the device does what it does, *that* explanation rests upon something else that needs explanation, and sooner or later you get something we know is wrong, or magic.
Now if you take technology that is explicable and you write a story about novel applications of that... I mean, we could say that's science fiction. But it would be a narrow genre and would exile most of the canon.
And also it wouldn't solve the problems of trying to define the genre in strict terms. If I write a story in which people get shot with a gun, that's a speculative application of real life technology. The gun was not put to this specific purpose in real life!
Doesn't work at all without magic radiation-absorbing cloth. https://twitter.com/shoefaceblue/status/1310953455427739648
This is the definition some people give for "hard sci-fi" but name a piece of hard science fiction and I will tell you the magic in it. https://twitter.com/PhanTom_lt/status/1310953790569435141
The book The Martian is premised on the idea of a man surviving for more than a terrestrial year (and prepared to live for several of them) on Mars. The principle obstacle to this, we know, is not nutrition or oxygen (these are solvable problems) but radiation.
Now, Weir could have solved this by making the habitat underground and heavily shielded, but this would be logistically harder to explain and would also cause the reader to dwell on how much radiation his Mars dweller might be getting every time he goes topside.
So instead he invents an impossible (so far as we know) material for the habitats to be made out of, something that is compact and lightweight enough that its presence on a space mission doesn't require special explanations, but which has miraculous radiation shielding properties
This is not a criticism of the story! He had a story that he wanted to tell that was more about logistics and the enduring triumph of the human spirit (but mostly about logistics) and he told it. That the radiation *would* be dealt with or waved away was essential to the premise.
(A criticism of the story is he didn't call his magical habitat fabric "habric". But on the other hand, he didn't want to call attention to it. That's not what the You Know, Whatever, Device is for.)
The Martian is not a story about magic cloth. But it's a story that doesn't work without magic cloth. You couldn't tell a story that has the passenger of a rocket removing its nose cone, seat, and control panel for weight...
...and also has tons and tons of earthmoving equipment and metal shielding sent to Mars to construct a radiation-proof habitat, so you need magic cloth.
Yeah, it seems like a natural corollary to the You Know, Whatever, Device. Which I'm not sure I'm quoting exactly, but again is a paraphrase from Thank You For Smoking. https://twitter.com/dolores_ex/status/1310954320301522950
Okay, I haven't read Seveneves but the first line of the Wikipedia plot summary is "In the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter." and the prosecution rests, your honor. https://twitter.com/Asmodean_/status/1310956719846182918
In alternate history circles, this kind of thing is known as an Alien Space Bat, which I referenced upthread. It's essentially a change that you make that has (and allows for) no explanation, it's just there because the story requires it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats
I would say that Seveneves is probably "harder" science fiction for offering no explanation for the lunar cataclsym. Because he's done no work to explain it, it is impossible to say what he got wrong. Any element introduced to explain it would be "soft sci fi".
But that still leaves us with "One day the moon blew up FOR NO RAISIN" as the opening to a story which, I also see from Wikipedia, is generally accepted as a work of hard science fiction.
Okay, this one might qualify.
And yet I wonder... if a woman had written it, would it have been accepted as science fiction *without* an element of the fantastic? https://twitter.com/tomscud/status/1310959455857790977
And yet I wonder... if a woman had written it, would it have been accepted as science fiction *without* an element of the fantastic? https://twitter.com/tomscud/status/1310959455857790977
Because this is my actual point here. I am showing how porous and soft genre definitions are not because I think we need to shore them up.
It's because subjective valuations are a tool of gatekeeping. https://twitter.com/LeeFlower/status/1310950497017356290
It's because subjective valuations are a tool of gatekeeping. https://twitter.com/LeeFlower/status/1310950497017356290
When your goal -- even if unstated and unacknowledged even to yourself -- is not about deciding *what* gets in but *who* gets in, but you want to pretend -- even to yourself -- that it's about merit, there's no better tool than tests that are open to interpretation.
I mean, that's valid, but I feel like rather than acknowledging that this liminal space exists, people mostly pretend that people they ping as "real/hard sci-fi writers" are actually making predictions and people they don't are being sloppy and wrong. https://twitter.com/Fromage10x/status/1310965810400243716
I think that's the sweet spot, though. Something that we can't yet say is right or wrong, true or false. Maybe lightning CAN do this. Maybe radio waves CAN do this. Maybe atomic power CAN do this. Maybe genetic engineering CAN do this. And so on.
But nothing can live in that liminal space forever. As I said upthread, sooner or later it's all "radioactive blood".
This is why I think the "sonic screwdriver" is brilliant in Doctor Who. Take the least "exotic", most easily understood form of energy wave imaginable.
This is why I think the "sonic screwdriver" is brilliant in Doctor Who. Take the least "exotic", most easily understood form of energy wave imaginable.
Not the positronic screwdriver, not the ionic screwdriver, not the radioactive screwdriver, not the genetic screwdriver, not the nano screwdriver.
The sonic screwdriver.
It outright proclaims, "We don't care. We know. We don't care. You can't make us care."
The sonic screwdriver.
It outright proclaims, "We don't care. We know. We don't care. You can't make us care."
Oh but maybe some unknown form of radiation could... no, this is sonic. Oh but maybe in the future with nanites we could... no, this is sonic.
You can't pretend the sonic screwdriver would work, which means you *have to* pretend the sonic screwdriver would work, which puts you in the perfect state of mind to watch Doctor Who.
The golden age of Doctor Who were the writing was good, the science and history were sound, and the stories made sense doesn't exist; there's only the era you were most charitable towards, the era where you didn't care.
And that's genre conventions in a nutshell.
And that's genre conventions in a nutshell.
