Why do most wannabe SF writers reject science?

[Patrick Degan]

It's certainly rather hard to have much of a war story when the majority of humanity lives in immensely fragile terrariums in space. Making it work requires quite a few contrivances, all of which do indeed add a certain depth, but start--as I had postulated--taking over the story itself. Handwaving's one useful function is to keep people focused on the story instead of on the scenery. So that would fall into the "only so much..." category. At some point having thus-and-so many orbitals is still just a concession to the reality of the situation, and asks people not to have their wars with a quintillion soldiers, or planetary invasions, or so on and so forth--but to stick with orbitals and the like. It's like trying to tell a story of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but with it taking place as a gang war inside of a single city. Even with the change of scope and scale, there's certainly a story there, but it's a different story.

Not really. In such a setting, the story for your war could be patterned as a space "Battle of the Atlantic": actions between fleets and raider-ships being paramount, with control of the spacelanes and destruction of supply convoys to starve the enemy habitat-nations into surrender being primary objects of the campaign. There is no real necessity to depict invasions involving massed infantry forces to tell an effective war story in space.

[B5B7]

On the original topic, I suspect that most of these wannabe writers are getting their first introduction to 'putting the science in science fiction' in the format "you can't do that." You can't have a planet-city because of heat pollution, you can't have an FTL communication system because it creates causality loops, and so on.

It's pretty depressing when every cool idea you ever have is getting shot full of holes, especially by someone who talks down to you. At some point, the natural reaction is to say "Fuck it, I'm never going to get anything done if I keep listening to this guy drone on about all the things I can't do!" Science and fiction aren't the only place where this happens. People can only juggle a limited number of important points in their head at a time; if you pile enough rules and confounding variables on them they start rejecting some of them simply as a defense mechanism.

So I think a lot of them are rejecting science because of a marketing failure; science is presented to them as a list of things they can't do. And the list is so long that they can't possibly remember all the rules, which makes it even more off-putting. Talk to people about what they can do, or suggest what they should do, and they'll be less inclined to rebel against your advice than if you tell them they're wrong and dumb.

An interesting perspective, that I think contains a lot of truth.

New Space Opera - Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher, Peter F Hamilton, Ken MacLeod, Dan Simmons.

David Weber? Or does he not qualify in your eyes?

I am a big fan of David Weber (whilst still recognising the flaws in some of his stories, especially "At All Costs"), but I would consider his stories old/standard space opera [& I suspect he would also classify himself as such (there is an interesting interview video where he talks about the authors that influenced him and he mentions a number of the old style 1950s authors & he is too busy writing to read much of what is written by his contemporary authors)]. Note that I like both old & new space opera, and do not have any pejorative connotations in regard to the old [of course, I in general (in view of my age) like a lot of the old SF, whilst also finding new authors whose writing I like].

New space opera has certain concepts not found in old space opera that differentiate it - such as advanced self-aware machine intelligences in prominent roles, humans able to be restored to life and with memory restoration via backup memories, grand schemes & great mysteries, very large scale, and some other elements some of which are stylistic [note that some old space operas have some of these aspects].

[Darth Hoth]

To be fair to the fellow, when he wrote the walnut sized nuclear reactors the working of real nuclear reactors were still classified information under the Manhattan project (this was about two or three years after the Stagg Field pile went critical). And "positrons" were fifteen years old and understood only by a very restricted subset of physicists rather than being general knowledge.

So he just used fashionable buzzwords that he had no real understanding of to lend an air of authenticity to his magictech? How is this better than, say, the subspace "soliton wave" brouhahah that Trek tried to pull? Abusing scientific terminology in technobabble solutions does not become better because the specific subject is obscure enough that the general public will not realise that you are talking out of your behind.

Depending on your definition of "well-known", Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter . Reynolds has a PhD in Astronomy.

These two are actually interesting cases because of the sheer amount of utterly bullshit technology which is perpetuated in their stories. I have to wonder what Reynolds was thinking when he came up with hypometric weapons, for example. I have spent many minutes thinking 'gee, hundred gee fusion drives sure are pushing it' and then bam he just whips out a device which disappears matter at will.

I have not read Reynolds, so I cannot comment on him, but it amazes me no end that people keep calling the Xeelee books "hard sci-fi". People here throw fits over space fighters; that universe has trench warfare on asteroids - with gravity lasers as handguns and personal inertial modifiers so they can run around like on Earth in microgravity. Summed up in a sentence it would be Warhammer 40,000 with the overt magic replaced by technobabble. The Coalition of Free Mankind is basically the Imperium of Man in every respect, except with Communism instead of religious fundamentalism.

[Darth Hoth]

New space opera has certain concepts not found in old space opera that differentiate it

Really? Everything you list was already around in the '40s.

- such as advanced self-aware machine intelligences in prominent roles,

Asimov's "positronic brain"-brainbug forming robots?

humans able to be restored to life and with memory restoration via backup memories,

Edward Smith treated cognitive processes and memories as chemical and transferable by technology in the Skylark books in the '30s.

grand schemes & great mysteries,

Lensman should qualify here - billion-years-old struggle between super aliens that humanity becomes entangled in. Human history was artificially manipulated by ancient astronauts and so on.

very large scale,

Lensman - the good guys alone control a hundred billion worlds in two galaxies and make war with an enemy that, while weaker, can muster forces on the same order of magnitude. Planets are used as kinetic impactors on a regular basis. Not on the scale of the Xeelee, perhaps, but the Culture, which did count, is utterly minuscule beside it.

and some other elements some of which are stylistic

Which would be? That instead of hyperwaves they have quantum inseparability, instead of positronic brains, Minds, and instead of blasters, gravity guns? The technobabble is more "modern" in flavour, but still works mostly the same way in terms of actual results.

[Covenant]

The point of my first post, which has either been missed or dismissed, is that authors choose to ignore it because it forces them to make a lot of concessions and change the story they wanted to tell. Offering me alternative, highly divergent plot elements is just reinforcing that point--I was never saying that the fantastical elements were better, just FTL is one of those elements which basically makes everything else possible, even in a Hard fiction, and that's why most people will look the other way when a FTL system is involved. I'm answering the OP, not trying to step into whatever fight people are trying to goad me into. I'm not defending non-science.

So let me restate, so I'm not fielding responses to that for the next eon: I'm not saying the fantastical elements are better or necessary for good storytelling, but that most authors do not want to tell a story about humanity trapped in the solar system by the light barrier. They want to tell Star Wars or Star Trek or Starship Troopers, where there's a lot of themes and ideas at work but the science tends to demand big compromises and a larger portion of the story. This is the nature of an author, and while it's not to be excused, it goes to the question of the OP as to why people often ignore science. My big post was about why FTL is often accepted in the "Okay, you can have this one bogus science..." thing, even for Hard Sci-Fi, simply because it greases the skids for other major plot elements and removes the need to explain things--like if or if not space colonies are going to be fragile, and the implications of that.

You can tell a story using only the most realistic elements--there will be stories of epic and sweeping stuff in the future, real ones, based in our real universe, so it can certainly be done. But it's not a hatred of science that drives people to FTL, just a desire to get away from Earth and humanity's reach. I'm not writing a story and have no vested interest, I was just drawing upon examples from Star Wars and other easy on-hand sci-fi series to make a paralell between what your general author has in mind (Space opera! Starbases that can blow up a planet! Quintillions of battle droids across millions of worlds!) and what reality would demand of him.

[Covenant]

The point of my first post, which has either been missed or dismissed, is that authors choose to ignore it because it forces them to make a lot of concessions and change the story they wanted to tell.

I think the core of our disagreement is I view this as being desirable. Being forced to change the story is a good thing - it forces you to think it through and leads to a better final product.

I'm confused as to what end this works towards though. While I want to agree, I'm uncomfortable with people consistently making it the defining quality of the literature, as if hardness is goodness regardless of the rest of the story at play. I preferred the line you took earlier where you said "if it's not important, why make it unrealistic?" as I think that's probably a better premise. Making it a sci-fi story should not be an automatic blank check for bullshit and magic wrapped in techno-lingo, so unless the story demands it be unrealistic, it shouldn't be--no more than it should be in a drama or mystery or any other literature. I suppose I'm wondering mostly if you think any non-real story element should go, and stories that depend on those elements should be scrapped entirely, or if you just think these are simply not science fiction and fine to exist in their own sub catagory, valued as according to taste of the viewer.

Even the softest of science-fantasy has the potential for a good and fulfilling story though, and that shouldn't be lost. There's certainly no need to burn it all just because it's blatantly impossible within a hard sci-fi setting to do the things presented in those books. I certainly hope that's not what people are talking about. We'd be left with very little indeed. I suppose what I'm saying is, we shouldn't hold science fiction to some kind of inane double-standard, we just should expect it to have the same pretenses towards realism as it would have if it weren't set in a future world, unless that break with reality is the crux of the story. That might make it science fantasy (like a story about time travel and the implications thereof) but does that automatically make it a bad story?

I'm not really making a point here, just trying to figure out what it is people are advocating, since applying this rule would seemingly obliterate most of the well-known and loved 'science fiction' works in great part or in total, so it would seem that there's certainly still much enjoyment and storytelling potential to be derived from science fantasy, even from advocates of hard sci-fi. At which point I wonder why there's a zero-tolerance policy for unrealism, rather than just a "keep that SoD-pushing shit to a minimum" policy. Do we say Star Wars must go, or just that it's fine, but it's science fantasy? I'm of the latter line of reason, for reasons stated months ago in other threads, so I feel I'm being an uncomfortable devil's advocate for nonscience-fiction here and trying not to get trapped or labelled as one.

I'm skirting along the line here trying to avoid flames, since I like reading hard sci-fi more than nonsense sci-fi, but I think that there's a role for fantastical elements within sci-fi to let it explore themes and concepts that only it can really address. This is especially true when it comes to movies and television, since those automatically demand a lot of concessions as well, just to make it viewable. I don't think those are bad things, but I don't see what's wrong with having science-fantasy and science fiction as different genres. Does it all have to be hard?

[ThomasP]

I think the gist of it (for myself, I can't speak for Destructionator or anyone else) is that a good SF author should understand and respect science, even if s/he chooses to ignore it or handwave it.

Also that there's a lot more room for creativity by letting realism shape your universe, vs. violating the knowns just because "lol i got a great idea".

[Batman]

IMHO Star Wars qualifies as science fantasy because although there is some magic and general silliness in it, most of the universe is depicted as running on technology and science equivalent in form (though obviously not detail) to the technology and science we have in reality.

But this doesn't work: Star Wars is fantasy in space. There was obviously no scientific attitude going into the writing, and there's no shred of science being used in the story.

Um yes there is. They're still suffering from the lightspeed limit (to an extent), they're still suffering from inertia (hence them needing acceleration compensators), they use reaction engines for STL travel. Whatever attitude went into the WRITING is irrelevant to the OUTCOME. No, Wars isn't within hailing distance of HARD SciFi. But it DEFINITELY qualifies as SciFan. Nobody (okay, nobody sane) ever claimed more than that.

Virtually everything present in it is patently absurd from a realism standpoint, obviously not given any thought beyond "hey that would look cool" and we never see the attitude in the story that science is the solution to any problem.

Err-since when is important in determining wether something is SciiFi/SciFan?

Instead, the characters depend on something little better than religion.

Except the Force actually WORKS. And nobody ever said Star Wars was HARD SciFi.

Rather than having a machine take down the Death Star (what kind of worthless computer can't make that shot anyway?)

Um-that was the original idea you know.

they depended on a very vague feeling a guy had inspired by a voice in his head.

They did no such thing. Nobody (INCLUDING Luke) knew that was going to happen.

Star Wars didn't even bother trying to wrap up its magic as anything other than magic. If the presence of something resembling technology is enough to grant it the 'science' title, then the title is meaningless.

No it's not.

Eeek, preview before you submit Bats!

Doesn't help. The quote tags just plain hate me. Besides, I'm posting from the distant past. Even for me that's not easy.

And yes, a lot of stories could be told without the SciFan elements. Why in Valen's name is that desireable?

It is:

• More likely to be consistent and well thought out. The rules help guide you and the process of thinking about what is going on keeps you answering questions as you go, leading to a stronger story.

Baseless assumption. As evidenced by the vast majority of modern TV it's entirely possible to write a shitty story without ever violating the laws of physics.

Every single plot revision I did to my own work with the goal to harden up the science also made the story stronger. Every last one of them. Why? Because instead of saying "X happens because I want it to. It can't? Well I make up tech Y to allow it." I started saying "X would be nice. How can I logically get there from here, within my established limitations?"

Which means your ignoring of the laws of physics should be CONSISTENT. NOT that adhering to the laws of physics automatically makes a better story. I think everybody here including me agrees 'consistency=good". Simply adhering to the laws of physics however does NOT guarantee consistency.

And sometimes, I find that X can't happen, so I revise it. What's the thing I actually get while going in that direction, while keeping to the rules? Ah, Z. What does Z mean?
With the soft approach, tech Y would be pulled out of my ass and then I'd have two roads: a) what does tech Y mean to everything else? To answer this, I basically have to go back and redo everything to ensure the consequences work out. Well, that's a lot of work and I'm sure to miss something. Hello plot holes!

So essentially you admit you fall back on real world physics because you don't want to think your fantasytech's consequences through. That doesn't mean it can't be done you know. It DID work for a lot of modern popular SciFi

or b) say 'fuck it' and just move on. Now the reader is going to be saying "what the fuck happened here?! Why the hell didn't they just do Z? Why didn't they use tech Y last chapter where it would have been a huge help?!" And this sucks.
The end result might not even be all that different, but the subtle changes this thought process implies will strengthen the story.

That simple thought process could ALSO be applied to making the fantastic technology of the original concept remain coherent you know.

[*]Hard sci fi is exciting because it is something that could actually happen. I really like this since I enjoy thinking the future of humanity is a bright thing that superior intellect and dedication will bring about.

Serious amounts of money on that never actually happening.

It is much more satisfying to escape into a world where mankind faced the challenges of the world and lifted himself up to greatness than to see a world where God did all the work for us.

Excuse me, could you point me to the part where God entered into this? Soft SciFi/SciFan is STILL about stuff eventually achieved by human(insert species appropriate for whatever series/universe you're thinking about)kind. We're not talking about the Valendamned burning bush here, we're talking mankind (etc) actually DISCOVERING Warp Cores, hyperdrive, transform cannon and so on. I don't see how GOD figures into it.

[*]Why not? Are you just too lazy, stupid, and imaginatively limited that you can't figure out how to tell a story without resorting to breaking rules?[/list]

It's my story. WHY SHOULD I BE CONCERNED? Me adhering to those rules DOESN'T make it an inherently better story. If I NEED those physical limitations to make my story coherent I have no business telling stories to begin with.

I'm bothered by Destro claiming it shouldn't be considered SciFi PERIOD, and his (at least as I read it) implication that it would automatically be a better story WITHOUT the SciFan elements.

Both are accurate descriptions of my position. Why should something get the label "science" when it isn't written with science in mind?

What should be in the mind of the author is telling a good story. By your reasoning Asimov's Foundation stuff is Fantasy.

This doesn't necessarily mean realism throughout, but realism helps a lot. It provides that solid guide to keep you on track while going through the writing process. The fewer rules you break, the more that guide helps.

That's a damned good argument for consistency. It completely fails to show how scientific realism would automatically improve a story.

From what I understand Destro is saying if it ISN'T hard SciFi it's straight fantasy, and I'm sorry, I'm not buying that.

Not necessarily - it is a scale of greys. You can bend or break the rules without throwing it all out so long as you do so with caution and diligence. Give it the right treatment throughout and you can keep it and the science label.

It is when you put coolness or flavor at a higher priority than thinking through all the consequences that you've thrown the science label right away. When you have space swords and space airplanes, it is obvious that you just don't care anymore. At that point, you don't deserve the label of science.[/quote]

[loomer]

Good god, Destructionator, it's not always going to be a better story if you put giant goddamn clamps on your creativity like you're advocating. If I want to write a sci-fi story, I'm going to write a fucking sci-fi story, look at the tech involved, and incorporate it realistically into the world, not go 'well, that might mean I'd have to go back and change things so why even bother lets just keep it 100% realistic'. That's a fucking retarded way to go at it for anyone with even a passable capability as a writer.

[Dark Hellion]

I think something that is being missed in all of this is that the story is not the plot. If we look over the classical canon we see this very clearly.

Homers Odyssey: The plot is almost entirely about shoehorning Odysseus through the various adventures he has to go on. It has survived over 2000 years despite this because it tells of a hero's journey home to his faithful wife.

Shakespeare: Few if any of Shakespeares plays have what would be called a tight or complicated plot. The were written for uneducated peasants for the most part. For example, the plot of Macbeth can be diagrammed by a high schooler on a single sheet of paper. It is much more a play about how his ambition leads him to ruin.

The Romantic era: You could make a truck stop from the number of plotholes that infest the canon of this period. Amazingly most have still survived for more than a century.

Lovecraft: Lovecraft was never about having a good story or exciting characters but about an exploration of the human fear of the unknown. Most stories can be summed up by the following: Student from Miskatonic University goes to weird place, scary shit appears, guy tells about it in book of paranoid ramblings, the end.

As pointed out, the idea that telling a good story is simply about having a tight and consistent plot has been one of the biggest misconceptions of modern fiction. Fiction has been memorable because it utilizes the plot to map out and explore the human condition.

Now, consistency is important to maintain the readers interest, but beyond that consistency for consistency's sake is mostly just pedantic.

When we look at what modern science fiction is considered good, it generally tried to explore some type of human interest theme. Star Wars explores the hero mythology and also explores the theme of redemption. Star Trek explored themes of power, morality, and just what it means to be human. Culture novels have explored themes of forgiveness, hatred and revenge, and how we deal with things beyond our comprehension. I could continue but I think the point is made, these series were memorable not because they had realistic science or even because they had the most consistent plot or environment (Star Trek especially) but because they made us think about ourselves and let our minds wander into realms of introspection we could not do in the real world.

[Junghalli]

Personally, one of the things I find a little irritating about the way most SF writers go about building fictional universes (and something that ties into other issues that have been touched on here), is what might be called the "the future will be just like the present, but in space, with lasers" syndrome.

I'm talking about the approach a huge amount of sci fi seems to take where any technology that might fundamentally change human existence is either ignored or handwaved away, so you get a civilization where people are jetting around in mile long FTL starships that do 99999 G acceleration and have 999999 teraton lazors but those starships still need crews of thousands of meatbags and everybody seems to still live fundamentally pretty much that same way a modern Westerner does and dies of old age in a century or three.

I get that it supposedly makes the characters easier for modern readers to relate to, but I'm personally a little sick of the giant glut of such fiction that exists, because it honestly starts to look like a really unimaginative and depressing view of the future after a while.

I can understand that most writers don't want to write transhumanist fiction, but even if you want to write a future where humans still matter that doesn't mean it has to be basically today's world with fusion reactors, starships, and lasers. I wouldn't mind seeing more settings a bit like the Culture, where the average person's lifestyle is radically different and better than the lifestyle of a modern First Worlder in a way comparable to how our lifestyles are better than that of an average person in 1500 or 1900.

I say this partly because, to piggyback a little off Destructionator's point, I found one of the ways in which making my own uni more hard science made it way more awesome was that I stopped furiously trying to handwave away ways that the future would logically be unlike the present because "I don't want to have to deal with that" and instead started thinking of dealing with those things as part of what the whole exercise of trying to write stories set in a more technologically advanced future interesting. For instance:

1) Immortality. What would the consequences of a world where nobody ages unless they want to be?

2) AGI/postscarcity. What will a world where robots can do any job much better than a human can look like? What will happen when everybody can enjoy unlimited free time and a lifestyle comparable to modern billionaires as their birthright?

My uni became vastly more interesting (in my judgment at least) when I started seeing these sorts of things as interesting things to explore rather than as problems. At the very least, it moved a lot farther away from just being another fairly generic background for WWII in space with lasers (albeit harder than most such settings), which is basically what it was before.

[Darth Hoth]

As I see it, people are arguing a nonissue. Whether you think a story automatically becomes better by being "realistic" (and yes, I put that in brackets, because a lot of the stuff that is usually touted as "realistic" or "hard" is really anything but) is purely subjective, as are the boundaries between science fiction/space opera/science fantasy/fantasy. An objective consensus cannot be reached on what is essentially a matter of taste. A lot of it is just genre conventions and style over substance anyway - most people will readily accept a "quantum inseparability communicator" as realistic when compared to a "hyperwave transceiver" or a "subspace radio", even if they all produce the same practical results and are all impossible (violating realitivity), and similarly a lot of people seem to regard any given story as more realistic if it has "transhuman intelligences" in charge, with humans being either extinct or regressed into pets, than if it has "fleshy organics", even if the first story has, say, FTL and artificial gravity and the second does not. Most of it is just what the audience expects.

[Simon_Jester]

So in the end; You've not got a point. You are really just being snooty about nomenclature. Oh no! That's not science fiction! Its space opera!

Is it really outrageous to ask that science fiction include science?

But, hey, if you want to write fantasy, that's your choice. Fantasy plays by different (more difficult) rules - its own.

There's "does not include science" and there's "does not include ALL science." A setting with artificial gravity and hand-portable laser weapons is not including all science, but it may surely include quite a lot of accurate science (say, planets where Earth-life and native life are mutually inedible for chirality reasons), portray its weirder aspects as being the product of "science we don't know" as opposed to "magic," and so on.

I'd say that it's best to include as "science fiction" stories that have specific, limited exceptions to the science we know today if they still operate in a universe that is broadly comprehensible in scientific terms. Even if that doesn't mean you can go to a university physics department and have someone tell you how everything in the setting works, it's still a world with actual laws that make sense, of the type we're familiar with.

Call it "soft" if you like. I prefer to use "soft" for science fiction that is very dramatically not-hard, where the limited exceptions are so numerous that they begin to overwhelm the overall character of "scientific comprehensibility." Star Wars is "soft" to my way of thinking; stereotypical space opera without psychics is often not.
______

It's a genre distinction. Don't call it hard SF unless it IS hard SF, and if it has unicorns and pixies and magic spells it's not science fiction at all.

Perverse question: imagine we're setting a story after a hypothetical Nanotech Revolution has given us a post-scarcity economy, we can upload consciousness into machines and download it into anything with a suitably complicated brain, and so forth. You might very well find someone loopy enough to actually try and genetically engineer a functioning unicorn. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but someone will try it. Ditto dragons, ditto mer-people (and if you don't believe that one, read this Telegraph article).

Hell, if it turns out to work, it will probably become more popular, not less. At what point does a story set in a world where things like this are possible become a fantasy story?
______

What of Heinlein's or Asimov's work WAS hard SciFi? The hardest Asimov did that I know of (outside ordinary fiction) were the Robot stories and those ALWAYS had the positronic brain.

To be fair, "positronic brains" were not far beyond the limits of what we now know electronic computers to be capable of. Aside from the buzz-word, Asimov robots are fairly hard science fiction, and I suspect that "positronic" was introduced more to make people shut up instead of saying "a machine can't do that!" It turns out that machines can, but the average Astounding reader of 1942 would not have believed that.

Nobody said a word about HARD SciFi. Valen knows franchises that AREN'T hard SciFi got grilled about fucking up the math (Go Rhodanites!), and how about Weber's styrofoam starships in the Honorverse leave alone what happened here WRT Trek and Wars.

Though at least Weber acknowledged and retconned his own screwup. You've got to respect that; some authors wouldn't bother. Or would go berserk and try to launch a counterattack on the square-cube law.
_______

So I think a lot of them are rejecting science because of a marketing failure; science is presented to them as a list of things they can't do. And the list is so long that they can't possibly remember all the rules, which makes it even more off-putting. Talk to people about what they can do, or suggest what they should do, and they'll be less inclined to rebel against your advice than if you tell them they're wrong and dumb.

An interesting perspective, that I think contains a lot of truth.

Thank you. I've come to that conclusion from my experiments with liking sci-fi and science more than mocking stupid people. It's surprising how much further discussions of the first two can go when the third is subjected to deliberate restraint.

David Weber? Or does he not qualify in your eyes?

I am a big fan of David Weber (whilst still recognising the flaws in some of his stories, especially "At All Costs"), but I would consider his stories old/standard space opera [& I suspect he would also classify himself as such (there is an interesting interview video where he talks about the authors that influenced him and he mentions a number of the old style 1950s authors & he is too busy writing to read much of what is written by his contemporary authors)]. Note that I like both old & new space opera, and do not have any pejorative connotations in regard to the old [of course, I in general (in view of my age) like a lot of the old SF, whilst also finding new authors whose writing I like].

Could you post (or, failing that, PM) me about what flaws you find in "At All Costs?"

And I see what you mean about the idea of Weber being old-school space opera; I haven't read enough of the new-school stuff to have a good sense of it as a genre or subgenre.

[Samuel]

hand-portable laser weapons is not including all science,

Any reason you can't use guns?

portray its weirder aspects as being the product of "science we don't know" as opposed to "magic," and so on.

It doesn't work for what the main characters are up to unless they are a cargo cult species.

Perverse question: imagine we're setting a story after a hypothetical Nanotech Revolution has given us a post-scarcity economy, we can upload consciousness into machines and download it into anything with a suitably complicated brain, and so forth. You might very well find someone loopy enough to actually try and genetically engineer a functioning unicorn. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but someone will try it. Ditto dragons, ditto mer-people (and if you don't believe that one, read this Telegraph article).

Hell, if it turns out to work, it will probably become more popular, not less. At what point does a story set in a world where things like this are possible become a fantasy story?

The Practice Effect?

To be fair, "positronic brains" were not far beyond the limits of what we now know electronic computers to be capable of. Aside from the buzz-word, Asimov robots are fairly hard science fiction, and I suspect that "positronic" was introduced more to make people shut up instead of saying "a machine can't do that!" It turns out that machines can, but the average Astounding reader of 1942 would not have believed that.

Starglider is going to beat you to death. Robots don't work that way!

A lot of it is just genre conventions and style over substance anyway - most people will readily accept a "quantum inseparability communicator" as realistic when compared to a "hyperwave transceiver" or a "subspace radio", even if they all produce the same practical results and are all impossible (violating realitivity),

I'll give you an example of what people don't like. I'm reading Playing God- terraforming a war-torn alien world. Anyway, some obvious problems are:
- an anthropologist being amazed that the aliens are so good at working together in group and warlike out group.
- biotech is big, to the point where scavanging other worlds for their genetic information is profitable. Oh, they also have AIs and instant FTL communication. That doesn't fit!

Contradictions are annoying because they imply the characters are idiots.

[Simon_Jester]

hand-portable laser weapons is not including all science,

Any reason you can't use guns?

...No. Not really. But it really doesn't matter; I'm not sure we're on the same page.

I'm saying that a story which includes one or a few elements which do not jibe with the limits of (today's) scientific knowledge does not automatically become fantasy on an either-or basis. I think it is unreasonable to demand "either you can explain to me how every piece of technology in the story works at the level of detail I require, or it is fantasy."

portray its weirder aspects as being the product of "science we don't know" as opposed to "magic," and so on.

It doesn't work for what the main characters are up to unless they are a cargo cult species.

I think you misunderstood again. An FTL drive can be posited as "magic" or as "a bunch of scientists figured out a way to build stargates." There's a real difference between the two backstories, even if we today do not know how to build a stargate. "A stargate is a technological artifact that we [the reader] don't understand" is different from "A stargate is a magic artifact." That's what I meant by "science we don't know." I mean "we" as in the reader.

The users of the technology in the story presumably understand it, or are at least part of a civilization that does. That doesn't mean WE understand it.

Pieces of technology couldn't have been built in the past are quite common; you're looking at one. The idea of technological progress is not foreign to the scientific worldview. Nor is the idea of scientific progress that overturns previous ideas and makes possible that which was once impossible. You can write a story featuring tech that does not exist as of your writing and still have it be a "science story," a story that reflects a scientific understanding of the universe, that employs a scientific worldview*, and a story that is far more faithful than not towards science as we know it today. I contend that even though such a story includes things I can't explain to you if pressed for an answer, it can still be non-soft science fiction.

*i.e. a comprehensible universe that follows well-defined laws, rather than following vague principles or the whims of powerful intelligences
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Perverse question: imagine we're setting a story after a hypothetical Nanotech Revolution has given us a post-scarcity economy, we can upload consciousness into machines and download it into anything with a suitably complicated brain, and so forth. You might very well find someone loopy enough to actually try and genetically engineer a functioning unicorn. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but someone will try it. Ditto dragons, ditto mer-people (and if you don't believe that one, read this Telegraph article).
Hell, if it turns out to work, it will probably become more popular, not less. At what point does a story set in a world where things like this are possible become a fantasy story?

The Practice Effect?

And yet I would argue that John Ringo's Council Wars novels are fantasy novels, even though they use this conceit as a way of placing the fantasy setting in the future of our civilization rather than on some world that does not and never did exist.
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To be fair, "positronic brains" were not far beyond the limits of what we now know electronic computers to be capable of. Aside from the buzz-word, Asimov robots are fairly hard science fiction, and I suspect that "positronic" was introduced more to make people shut up instead of saying "a machine can't do that!" It turns out that machines can, but the average Astounding reader of 1942 would not have believed that.

Starglider is going to beat you to death. Robots don't work that way!

What, machines capable of supporting general intelligence in a brain-sized brain can't exist? I'd be surprised to hear Starglider say that, let alone beat me to death in outrage over the notion. They don't exist NOW, but the proposition that they can exist is far closer to the truth about computers than anything else anyone was likely to predict in 1942.* So using a buzz-word to shut up complaints about "how does this insanely powerful computing machine work?" seems forgivable to me. After all, if he'd used the words "Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor" that would have been a meaningless buzz-word in 1942 as well; they hadn't been invented yet. But it would also have been TRUE, because those are actually possible, and awesomely effective.

*Notable exception: Murray Leinster, in "A Logic Named Joe," predicted the Internet and Google in clearly recognizable form in 1945, although he superimposed it onto '40s/'50s style culture and the effect is jarring.

[B5B7]

New space opera has certain concepts not found in old space opera that differentiate it

Really? Everything you list was already around in the '40s.

- such as advanced self-aware machine intelligences in prominent roles,

Asimov's "positronic brain"-brainbug forming robots?

humans able to be restored to life and with memory restoration via backup memories,

Edward Smith treated cognitive processes and memories as chemical and transferable by technology in the Skylark books in the '30s.

grand schemes & great mysteries,

Lensman should qualify here - billion-years-old struggle between super aliens that humanity becomes entangled in. Human history was artificially manipulated by ancient astronauts and so on.

very large scale,

Lensman - the good guys alone control a hundred billion worlds in two galaxies and make war with an enemy that, while weaker, can muster forces on the same order of magnitude. Planets are used as kinetic impactors on a regular basis. Not on the scale of the Xeelee, perhaps, but the Culture, which did count, is utterly minuscule beside it.

and some other elements some of which are stylistic

Which would be? That instead of hyperwaves they have quantum inseparability, instead of positronic brains, Minds, and instead of blasters, gravity guns? The technobabble is more "modern" in flavour, but still works mostly the same way in terms of actual results.

I worded my post badly - Yes Lensmanverse has a lot of the specific aspects mentioned, I was thinking more of modern space operas - Weber and similar that operate on relatively small scale. It is more a case of how the ideas are treated that is the main differentiation. So one has stories that have people basically like us with ftl spaceships & beweaponed warships but that have standard computers, people only have one life, it is similar to old-style SF. Much of the computer and biological stuff is just background.

Contrast with the Culture [Iain Banks] or the Polity [Neal Asher] where have computer intelligences running the show, where many people have major biological augmentation or implants, etc. Now the individual elements can be found in a lot of prior SF, especially individual non-space opera SF stories. The difference is the approach - the New Space Opera is a literary movement like the New Wave or Cyberpunk of earlier generations, that integrates various elements to create within the novels societies where these elements are integral aspects of everyday life.

Simon_Jester - I will have to get back to you about 'At All Costs' but as a simple summary, my major objections are that Haven was winning and Manticore pulled out a Deus ex Machina (the Apollo pods) that worked much better than they should have, and the stupidity of the main "good characters" in being so easily tricked by the Mesans.

[B5B7]

Darth Hoth - an addendum to my previous reply.
Lensman was the original space opera, and the new space opera tries to reflect the grandeur and sense of wonder of it, with modern twists.
The series such as David Weber's Honorverse and Starfire, Elizabeth Moon's marvellous Serrano series, Jack Campbell's excellent Black Jack Geary books, are more traditionalist -- like the Traveller RPG. They are mainly centered on the military aspects, and have societies that are more "old school".

[Samuel]

...No. Not really. But it really doesn't matter; I'm not sure we're on the same page.

I'm saying that a story which includes one or a few elements which do not jibe with the limits of (today's) scientific knowledge does not automatically become fantasy on an either-or basis. I think it is unreasonable to demand "either you can explain to me how every piece of technology in the story works at the level of detail I require, or it is fantasy."

My objection is they are an element added to be cool... but thinking about yields problems. If you have weapons as powerful as things that can melt through metal it means you have insanely good battery techology and that causes effects that ripple thoughout society.

And yet I would argue that John Ringo's Council Wars novels are fantasy novels, even though they use this conceit as a way of placing the fantasy setting in the future of our civilization rather than on some world that does not and never did exist.

Why? Is 3001 fantasy even though the main character hits upon a dragon rider (who is surprised he was circumcised- you'd think she'd have checked before hand)?

Heck, Star Trek had something similar with the holodeck, amusement park planet, Camelot and others and there isn't anything inherently wrong with the idea. Of couse, actually making fantasy ideas work to people satisfaction (not to mention the fact fantasy can change dramatically) is an entirely different problem.

What, machines capable of supporting general intelligence in a brain-sized brain can't exist?

Robots would not work the way that the positronic robots did. I'm not talking 3 laws (which I can excuse)- I'm talking about things like robots learning friendship, a robot twiddling its thumbs, a robot discovering religion out of predjudice, etc.

So using a buzz-word to shut up complaints about "how does this insanely powerful computing machine work?" seems forgivable to me. After all, if he'd used the words "Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor" that would have been a meaningless buzz-word in 1942 as well; they hadn't been invented yet.

Or just refer to the robot's brain as... robot brain.

[Simon_Jester]

I think it is unreasonable to demand "either you can explain to me how every piece of technology in the story works at the level of detail I require, or it is fantasy."

Thou hast done well in defeating the strawman. Of experience points thou hast gained one. Of gold thou hast gained zero.

I don't think the strawman is as far from the standard you're applying as you'd like, possibly because I don't fully appreciate what your standard IS.

I'm arguing in good faith here; if I'm not representing your standard of scientific quality properly then I invite you to correct me, rather than simply berating me for getting it wrong.
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An FTL drive can be posited as "magic" or as "a bunch of scientists figured out a way to build stargates." There's a real difference between the two backstories, even if we today do not know how to build a stargate.

If your story was about the development of the drive, that may very well still be pretty hard sci fi.

OK, but what about the story set 100 years after that, when stargates/hyperdrives/whatever are mature technology that people use without thinking about, much as internal combustion engines are today?

What I'm getting at is that you can have unexplained technology in a story set in a scientific universe- one where rational investigation is the key to understanding things, where logic works consistently and you don't make things happen just by thinking at them. Even if some of the tools the characters use are not explained to the reader except in terms of their effects (this is a teleporter, it works by "quantum induction"), the story can is still about a scientific universe.

Things start to break down when tools are used inconsistently, or when the number of unexplained tools is so great that it overruns the parts of the story that can be understood in scientific terms. But there's a fairly wide band between the rock-hard stuff that uses no unexplained tools and the truly "soft" stuff dominated by technology indistinguishable from magic.

========

My objection is they are an element added to be cool... but thinking about yields problems. If you have weapons as powerful as things that can melt through metal it means you have insanely good battery techology and that causes effects that ripple thoughout society.

Absolutely. I'm not opposed to consistency here. But you can display the ripples: never have a powered device run out of juice unless the owner is truly careless, have other sorts of high-energy powered machinery run off similarly compact power sources, maybe demonstrate what happens when the battery shorts out. And you can do that without having to say exactly how some 22nd century genius figured out how to create a workable battery with an energy density measured in megajoules per cubic centimeter.

And yet it can still be a scientific story, one where results such as the hypothetical hand laser are products of science and engineering, not sorcery, and are treated as such.
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And yet I would argue that John Ringo's Council Wars novels are fantasy novels, even though they use this conceit as a way of placing the fantasy setting in the future of our civilization rather than on some world that does not and never did exist.

Why? Is 3001 fantasy even though the main character hits upon a dragon rider (who is surprised he was circumcised- you'd think she'd have checked before hand)?

Heck, Star Trek had something similar with the holodeck, amusement park planet, Camelot and others and there isn't anything inherently wrong with the idea. Of couse, actually making fantasy ideas work to people satisfaction (not to mention the fact fantasy can change dramatically) is an entirely different problem.

I'm just thinking there's got to be a line somewhere. Ringo's Council Wars involve classic Fantasy Gun Control (world-dominating AI with force field manipulation capability that is programmed to suppress explosives), actual elves (genetically modified supersoldiers), sailing ships (same explosives prohibition makes high-pressure steam engines impossible), elites who can still access the fusion-powered energy grid for things like teleportation and nanomanufacturing who are therefore indistinguishable from wizards in-context... you get the idea.

3001 is about a future that decided to go fantastic for the heck of it. The Council Wars are very transparently an attempt to take Earth and make it into a fantasy setting, and never mind the physical limits of the technology because it's so far into the future that we can barely perceive those limits except in relative terms of A is more capable than B.

Somewhere in between, I think a line between science fiction and fantasy gets crossed, and that was all I was ever saying.
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What, machines capable of supporting general intelligence in a brain-sized brain can't exist?

Robots would not work the way that the positronic robots did. I'm not talking 3 laws (which I can excuse)- I'm talking about things like robots learning friendship, a robot twiddling its thumbs, a robot discovering religion out of predjudice, etc.

OK, that's an interesting point, although one that I'm not confident of because we still have little idea how a functional AI would be created and therefore don't have a clear picture of what bizarre brainbugs it can and cannot catch.

On the other hand, you're talking about a second-order impossibility: "Yes, humanoid robots can exist, but they surely won't act the way he thought," as opposed to the first-order impossibility "no one can build a computer capable of doing what he thought." I think that's impressive enough, given a gap of at least seventy or eighty years in terms of available computer hardware and programming.
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So using a buzz-word to shut up complaints about "how does this insanely powerful computing machine work?" seems forgivable to me. After all, if he'd used the words "Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor" that would have been a meaningless buzz-word in 1942 as well; they hadn't been invented yet.

Or just refer to the robot's brain as... robot brain.

Yes, that would be fine. But I'm still willing to forgive the buzzword. Buzzwords are a tool that can be used for good or for stupid, depending on whether they are used to denote specific, limited devices that cannot be explained by the author or to the readers (good or at least neutral) or entire categories of devices with capabilities that change unpredictably and which come to dominate all technical discussion (stupid).

Asimov tended to use buzzwords sparingly, and I feel he stayed short of the stupidity threshold.

[Samuel]

But you can display the ripples: never have a powered device run out of juice unless the owner is truly careless, have other sorts of high-energy powered machinery run off similarly compact power sources, maybe demonstrate what happens when the battery shorts out.

That is the part writers tend to forget. It isn't the laser guns that are bad- it is when they are paired up with things that don't make sense. You can get away with it for the most part without anyone noticing, but if you try to do anything that tries to be predictive, people will get annoyed.

And you can do that without having to say exactly how some 22nd century genius figured out how to create a workable battery with an energy density measured in megajoules per cubic centimeter.

Have we had major inventions made entirely by geniuses in the last 50 years? I thought alot of the more complex problems require teams of workers. Off topic, but the only examples I can think of are things like sticky notes.

Somewhere in between, I think a line between science fiction and fantasy gets crossed, and that was all I was ever saying.

Or we can just blame Ringo. After all, the idea of banning explosives or that everyone is going to buy into Western European fantasy post world war two is stupid.

actual elves (genetically modified supersoldiers),

therefore don't have a clear picture of what bizarre brainbugs it can and cannot catch.

Friendship is something that we exhibit based upon our brains being wired that way. For species that did not evolve to favor group behavior, they don't have it. While robots might display weird emergent behavior I really doubt it would be things that we would consider cute or admirable.

Yes, that would be fine. But I'm still willing to forgive the buzzword. Buzzwords are a tool that can be used for good or for stupid, depending on whether they are used to denote specific, limited devices that cannot be explained by the author or to the readers (good or at least neutral) or entire categories of devices with capabilities that change unpredictably and which come to dominate all technical discussion (stupid).

He also talked about how there were positronic pathways, how the three laws were inherently coded into the positronic brain, how the reactions of matter being annihilated, etc. It was not just a buzzword.

I know this is all a bit nitpicky, but for the most part I am willing to overlook it. The problem is when the plot revolves around it and you are forced to wonder why the characters are idiots.

[Junghalli]

Friendship is something that we exhibit based upon our brains being wired that way. For species that did not evolve to favor group behavior, they don't have it. While robots might display weird emergent behavior I really doubt it would be things that we would consider cute or admirable.

Robots might have human-like emergent behavior if their brains were closely modelled on that of humans. Considering that the human brain is the closest thing we have to AGI I don't find it wildly implausible that robot builders might rip off its design to a greater or lesser extent as a short-cut to get around the difficulties of building their own AGI system from scratch. It's probably not a good way to go about building a robot (the human brain has a lot of features I wouldn't want in a AGI), but I can see how there could be scenarios where people might do it that way to save effort, time, and money, or simply because they buy into the probably erroneous notion that slavishly copying the human brain is a great way to build a AGI system. This is the SoD explanation I use for SF where they have robots acting in anthropomorphic ways.

Cylons in nBSG actually seem to be a good example of this, as IIRC according to Caprica the initial Cylon prototype had a human upload embedded in it, which goes a long way toward explaining a lot of their behavior.

Interestingly, if we accept the Caliban books as part of the canon they mention that to create a robot without the Three Laws they had to use a whole different type of robot brain because positronic brains were so completely designed around the three laws that you'd have to re-invent them from scratch to build a robot that didn't have them. That makes it sound a lot like Asimovian positronic brains are a lot like human brains in that there's no hard dividing line between software and hardware, but rather the software corresponds at least somewhat to physical features of the hardware (neural connections in the case of humans), and to thoroughly rewrite the software you'd have to rearrange the hardware. That doesn't necessarily imply a biomorphic architecture, but I find it an interesting tidbit.

[Samuel]

Interestingly, if we accept the Caliban books

Or Little Lost Robot where they say the same exact thing.

Asimov's robots only make sense if you assume that the population is insanely paranoid about robots so that they are made intentionally to be incapable of self improvement and to be as human like as possible in order to get individuals to accept them. The problem with that is that the paranoia is constant and unrelenting- people do not change even though robots should have become part of daily life and normal.

It is both grim and insanely exploitable- in The Naked Sun a single robotist thought he had a chance of seizing control of human civilization.

[Formless]

The third is over the definition of science fiction. I say if science isn't at least a decent part of the story, it shouldn't be called a work of science fiction. (Again, contrasting with the straw man "either you can explain to me how every piece of technology in the story works at the level of detail I require, or it is fantasy.")

The distinguishing feature of science fiction should be science, no? This can be unrealistic/soft if the story is still about science (such as "what if ftl was possible?" and exploring the direct consequences of that) or it can be realistic/hard and making real science an integral part of writing the story.


If your FTL drive is just a background enabling tool used to tell a Star Trek like adventure story, what you have is an adventure story IN SPAAACE, which I think should be a separate genre to science fiction.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this isn't the definition most people use for science fiction as a genre. Most people use the method of genre classification TV tropes encapsulates so well: to them a genre is a collection of common conventions, and any story that uses those conventions is part of that genre. That's why Star Wars is classified as Sci-Fi thanks to all the spaceships and pew-pew lasers, and Tolkien is fantasy because it has Orcs and swords. Not high-class enough for you? Too bad. That's what audiences expect, and you can't as a writer just dismiss your audience's expectations out of hand. You can not control how people use the language to suit your whims.

Frankly, I don't think anyone has disagreed with any other points you've made. Having limits obviously helps writers write stories, and science conveniently provides those limits. But that doesn't mean that the story has to fit some rigid "LOL, all about science" regime. I personally think Dark Hellion hit this one on the head: having hard science makes for better plots, but a story is about more than just the plot. Theme for instance is another important element your definition of Sci-Fi misses. There isn't anything that says Star trek's theme of exploration for example cannot or should not be explored by sci-fi, but it simply can't be done without FTL.

[Simon_Jester]

And you can do that without having to say exactly how some 22nd century genius figured out how to create a workable battery with an energy density measured in megajoules per cubic centimeter.

Have we had major inventions made entirely by geniuses in the last 50 years? I thought alot of the more complex problems require teams of workers. Off topic, but the only examples I can think of are things like sticky notes.

Gack. You know what I mean, and I'd like to think that you know that I know that research is not done by lone cranks in basements. If it makes you happier, read that as "and you can do that without having to say exactly how some platoon of 22nd century geniuses figured out how to..."

Or we can just blame Ringo. After all, the idea of banning explosives or that everyone is going to buy into Western European fantasy post world war two is stupid.

It's at least implied that other parts of the world bought into other fantasies; we just don't see it because the protagonists are fighting in the cultural West, not the Middle East or China or whatever. But hell, yeah, blame Ringo.

Thing is, I don't actually think there's something WRONG with the conceit of trying to set up a fantasy scenario using post-Singularity technology as the proposed mechanism. You can write some decent stuff that way, at least as good as the equivalent fantasy story would be without the technological conceit. I'm just saying that at some point the line between science fiction and fantasy blurs if you use science fiction explanations and terms to introduce fantasy tropes... or vice versa. Call it an application of Clarke's Law.
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therefore don't have a clear picture of what bizarre brainbugs it can and cannot catch.

Friendship is something that we exhibit based upon our brains being wired that way. For species that did not evolve to favor group behavior, they don't have it. While robots might display weird emergent behavior I really doubt it would be things that we would consider cute or admirable.

Unless, of course, the robots are designed so that they can, broadly speaking, get along with people... remember that a lot of the Asimov robot stories revolve around the idea of debugging a robot that's designed to function in human society but is somehow dysfunctional. They're not just generic AIs left to evolve into whatever the hell they want in a box.

The specific failure modes Asimov invokes are improbable, but since the set of all failure modes is huge, any individual mode is going to be improbable anyway.
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He also talked about how there were positronic pathways, how the three laws were inherently coded into the positronic brain, how the reactions of matter being annihilated, etc. It was not just a buzzword.

Saying "positronic pathway" is no more of a buzzword than using "positron" in the first place. Invoking annihilation reactions just means that he knows broadly what a positron IS.

Buzzwords become bad in my eyes when they dominate the plot: Our Heroes are faced with a seemingly insoluble dilemma that they resolve by reconfiguring the fibulator to emit Whozit rays that vogelar the krzjdlwsc... which somehow saves the day in some unspecified way because we don't really know what any of those words MEAN. When none of the terms are clearly defined, that's functionally equivalent to saying "and somehow they won and all lived happily ever after, the end," which is a terrible ending that translates into plain English as "I have written myself into a corner that I don't care enough to work my way out of."

But I think buzzwords are acceptable when they're used in the same places that a normal person would see technical terms they don't understand in real life. Most people, including most people who actually use computers, don't really know how a MOSFET works; that requires a fairly sophisticated grounding in solid state physics and quantum mechanics. They may know that their computer uses something called "MOSFETs," but it might as well be called a "vogelar" or a "krzjdlwsc" for all that the name really matters to them. So long as the entire plot doesn't revolve around some bizarre and exotic property of MOSFETs, but rather around the things that MOSFETs can do.

Having the story be about the was MOSFETs react to temperature variations is just annoying; having the story be about some activity enabled by MOSFETs (such as letting users access the Internet and use a search engine to find embarrassing or dangerous information)* can be worthwhile, even if I don't say anything about the actual computer used to do the deed except "it runs on MOSFETs." That's all most people could reasonably be expected to know, anyway.

The better Asimov robot stories abstract out how the computer hardware in the robots works and concentrate on the software- the behavior of buggy AI in various exotic situations. Which is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

*The plot of Murray Leinster's 1945 story "A Logic Named Joe," only with different words in place of "Internet," "search engine," and "MOSFET" because Leinster had never heard of those things and was making it up as he went along.
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It's probably not a good way to go about building a robot (the human brain has a lot of features I wouldn't want in a AGI), but I can see how there could be scenarios where people might do it that way to save effort, time, and money, or simply because they buy into the probably erroneous notion that slavishly copying the human brain is a great way to build a AGI system. This is the SoD explanation I use for SF where they have robots acting in anthropomorphic ways.

It's also a good way to impose hardware limits the AI can't think its way around to block it from recursively self-improving itself into a serious threat, which is a common concern of people who like to worry about things like that.

Intentionally effing up the robot's ability to think straight using stuff like "restraining bolts," "memory wipes," or "the Three Laws of Robotics" may not be nice to the robot, but it sure makes the things relatively safer.

[Samuel]

It's at least implied that other parts of the world bought into other fantasies; we just don't see it because the protagonists are fighting in the cultural West, not the Middle East or China or whatever. But hell, yeah, blame Ringo.

Because everyone in the west has the same tastes- it isn't like the current version of elves are "borrowed" from Record of Lodoss War . Or that some people like different time periods. Or that new versions of fantasy will arise. Or... yes, I blame Ringo for that.

I'm just saying that at some point the line between science fiction and fantasy blurs if you use science fiction explanations and terms to introduce fantasy tropes...

So the difference between fantasy and science fiction is how things are labeled? That seems rather shallower than the differences between every other genre. I thought one was a future you could imagine being in and one was a future you aren't getting to except magic portal.

Unless, of course, the robots are designed so that they can, broadly speaking, get along with people

Not really. The overwhelming majority in I Robot are industrial robots- in fact it is stated in Robbie that after several years personal robots were banned.

Of course the robots I am complaining about were purposely made to be special, so I suppose that explains it.

Saying "positronic pathway" is no more of a buzzword than using "positron" in the first place. Invoking annihilation reactions just means that he knows broadly what a positron IS.

That just makes it worse. It means that it isn't just a buzzword- the robots really function with antimatter coursing through their brains. It is unnecesary- he could have used positronic and just gone with that is what they are called, but instead we have robots being built with magic brains.

"I have written myself into a corner that I don't care enough to work my way out of."

Catch that Rabbit fits that, although the reason is a set up for a groan inducing pun

But I think buzzwords are acceptable when they're used in the same places that a normal person would see technical terms they don't understand in real life. Most people, including most people who actually use computers, don't really know how a MOSFET works;

I agree... er, what is a MOSFET? It is just a problem when it turns out it isn't just a buzzword and actually describes something impossible.

The better Asimov robot stories abstract out how the computer hardware in the robots works and concentrate on the software- the behavior of buggy AI in various exotic situations.

It is worth noting that the "exotic" situations are work conditions away from human supervision. Asimov devotes his books to showin how badly the three laws work. That is what I find great about them- they aren't about what the future will be like, but all the ways we can screw things up. The reason I am annoyed with the whole idea of positronic brain running on antimatter is that it is an unnecesary detail that dates the work and just doesn't fit.

It's also a good way to impose hardware limits the AI can't think its way around to block it from recursively self-improving itself into a serious threat, which is a common concern of people who like to worry about things like that.

Intentionally effing up the robot's ability to think straight using stuff like "restraining bolts," "memory wipes," or "the Three Laws of Robotics" may not be nice to the robot, but it sure makes the things relatively safer.

Not really. Asimov himself points out the problem with this method in The Naked Sun.