Zompist Bboard Again

Agreed on Campbell and the eugenism/libertarianism.

Since I mentioned Philip K. Dick, the interesting thing is that he wasn't (to my knowledge) even interested in any way in predicting the future or really into scientific accuracy, but for some reason made, if not predictions, at least interesting observations. He did predict global warming in the 1960s. Must be the alien pink laser
Also interesting is his picture of Mars colonization. He pictures Mars as a hellhole where colonists are horribly miserable. The specifics are of course wrong (he has colonists fighting telepathic Martian vermin, among other things) and again, they weren't intended as prediction, but the idea that living on Mars would be awful is, in fact, pretty accurate!

But anyway, I don't think SF is really about predicting the future. At heart, SF is about taking a handful of ideas (preferably but not necessarily related to science) and coming up with a good story about it. The worldbuilding is here to support the idea; if anything, accurate prediction may even hurt the story.
Did Robert Zemeckis believe there'd be flying cars in 2015? He didn't even care. Back to the Future wouldn't have been as good without them!

Seriously predicting the future 40 years for now is a daunting task. You'd need a wide (indeed, superhuman) breadth of knowledge in all sciences, including social sciences (which wasn't the Campbell writers's strong suit), unusual insight, and the result might disappoint the reader anyway.

All the more so with AI stories. AI stories are about human beings: they were written because by introducing artificial humans gives an excellent angle to talk about natural humans. Predictions don't even enter into it.
The Matrix is something else entirely; it's gnosticism updated for the movie going audiences of 1999. The machines are just there to play the part of the evil archons.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 6:32 am Philip K. Dick…did predict global warming in the 1960s

This is perhaps less astonishing than you might think. Wikipedia tells me that Eunice Foote demonstrated carbon dioxide's ability to absorb and reemit infrared radiation (i.e. that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas) in 1856, Svante Arrhenius published the first climate model tying atmospheric CO₂ concentration to increased temperature in 1896, and Guy Stewart Callendar published the first evidence for rising CO₂ levels in 1938. By the 1960s there was a scientific consensus that global temperature was increasing (Charles Keeling started his ongoing project to measure it in 1958)—the matter of active study was the extent to which it was anthropogenic.

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 6:58 am Wikipedia tells me that Eunice Foote demonstrated carbon dioxide's ability to absorb and reemit infrared radiation (i.e. that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas) in 1856, Svante Arrhenius published the first climate model tying atmospheric CO₂ concentration to increased temperature in 1896, and Guy Stewart Callendar published the first evidence for rising CO₂ levels in 1938.

I'm getting a bit off topic now, but I'd like to note that, as far as I know, none of the climate change deniers have ever come close to refuting any of this - that is, the mechanism of how and why global warning, according to those who accept it, works. That's why they prefer to talk about everything else, from sunspots to hacked emails to the current material well-being of polar bears to philosophical nitpicking about whether it "truly" makes sense to speak of an "average global temperature", instead.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 6:32 am But anyway, I don't think SF is really about predicting the future. At heart, SF is about taking a handful of ideas (preferably but not necessarily related to science) and coming up with a good story about it. The worldbuilding is here to support the idea; if anything, accurate prediction may even hurt the story.

I’ve come to think there’s basically two kinds of SF: that which has no interest in even pretending to predict of the future (as you describe), and that which pretends to be interested in it. Some people say it’s all about one or the other — e.g. Le Guin is on record as suggesting that SF is never about prediction — but anyone who says so is wrong: I definitely think that both camps exist and are important in SF. (Of course, very few authors have been really serious about prediction.)

It’s interesting to reflect that, for early SF, a lot of science (in particular physics) was developing at a very rapid rate. So you could seriously posit that the future would contain psionics or FTL travel or Martiain canals or whatnot, without looking like a complete idiot. (I’ve recently been reading a lot of old SF, and it seems clear to me that many people were completely serious in imagining a future with such things.) Since science popularisation lags the actual science, this state of affairs continued for a while: the last notable ’aliens on Mars’ story was probably Zelazny’s 1963 A Rose for Ecclesiastes, while Le Guin felt comfortable talking about telepathic ‘mindspeech’ in 1969 (but not in any of her later books).

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 7:47 am It’s interesting to reflect that, for early SF, a lot of science (in particular physics) was developing at a very rapid rate. So you could seriously posit that the future would contain psionics or FTL travel or Martiain canals or whatnot, without looking like a complete idiot. (I’ve recently been reading a lot of old SF, and it seems clear to me that many people were completely serious in imagining a future with such things.) Since science popularisation lags the actual science, this state of affairs continued for a while: the last notable ’aliens on Mars’ story was probably Zelazny’s 1963 A Rose for Ecclesiastes, while Le Guin felt comfortable talking about telepathic ‘mindspeech’ in 1969 (but not in any of her later books).

See zompist's 1990s lament that science is killing science fiction: https://zompist.com/killsf.html

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 7:47 am

I’ve come to think there’s basically two kinds of SF: that which has no interest in even pretending to predict of the future (as you describe), and that which pretends to be interested in it. Some people say it’s all about one or the other — e.g. Le Guin is on record as suggesting that SF is never about prediction — but anyone who says so is wrong: I definitely think that both camps exist and are important in SF. (Of course, very few authors have been really serious about prediction.)

It's a very good point! And there's probably a gradient between the two. Plus the subcategory of cautionary tales.
I'd say the story needs still come first (or more accurately, SF works that were all prediction and little story aren't memorable enough), which probably affects the predication part. Of course with cautionary tales, there's the added necessity of dramatizing and exaggerating the consequences.

It’s interesting to reflect that, for early SF, a lot of science (in particular physics) was developing at a very rapid rate. So you could seriously posit that the future would contain psionics or FTL travel or Martiain canals or whatnot, without looking like a complete idiot. (I’ve recently been reading a lot of old SF, and it seems clear to me that many people were completely serious in imagining a future with such things.) Since science popularisation lags the actual science, this state of affairs continued for a while: the last notable ’aliens on Mars’ story was probably Zelazny’s 1963 A Rose for Ecclesiastes, while Le Guin felt comfortable talking about telepathic ‘mindspeech’ in 1969 (but not in any of her later books).

Psionics were taken very seriously indeed, which makes for quite a surprising read. Telepaths were about as readily accepted as rocket engines.
I think that has to do with Campbell, who was very much into pseudoscience.

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 7:56 am See zompist's 1990s lament that science is killing science fiction: https://zompist.com/killsf.html

Speaking of predictions that one did come true. SF did get much closer to fantasy.
Though the science in classic science fiction was mostly physics; other sciences, such as biology, to say nothing of the social sciences, haven't been explored that much -- and they are the fastest moving fields.

There's another factor that is still unexplored: the breadth of resources available for worldbuilding. You can now describe an entire planet with a wealth of details in a way that wouldn't have been doable in pre-Internet days. Ditto with, say, spaceships. You can even get detailed NASA blueprints.

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 7:56 am See zompist's 1990s lament that science is killing science fiction: https://zompist.com/killsf.html

I don’t recall having encountered this essay of his before, but I’ve had precisely the same thoughts myself. I particularly agree that (a) this is what’s driven the blurring of lines between SF and fantasy, and (b) cyberpunk is pretty damn depressing, isn’t it? (Which is why I find older SF generally a lot more inspiring to read than what passes for SF today. See also further comments below.)

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 8:16 am It's a very good point! And there's probably a gradient between the two. Plus the subcategory of cautionary tales.
I'd say the story needs still come first (or more accurately, SF works that were all prediction and little story aren't memorable enough), which probably affects the predication part. Of course with cautionary tales, there's the added necessity of dramatizing and exaggerating the consequences.

[…]

Psionics were taken very seriously indeed, which makes for quite a surprising read. Telepaths were about as readily accepted as rocket engines.
I think that has to do with Campbell, who was very much into pseudoscience.

Agreed on all of this.

Though the science in classic science fiction was mostly physics; other sciences, such as biology, to say nothing of the social sciences, haven't been explored that much -- and they are the fastest moving fields.

This is another reason I love Le Guin’s work. She’s written somewhere of her irritation that the ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ inevitably excludes the social sciences; to make up for it her books and short stories are packed with speculative societal structures. To me, this makes the experience of reading her books more similar to that of reading old SF — ‘widening the power of imagination’, as zompist puts it in his essay. But then, of course, Le Guin has no problem ignoring inconvenient physics, or even inconvenient biology. Similar comments apply to more modern SF writers interested in social structures, like Orson Scott Card, Iain M. Banks, or Judith Moffett (who, incidentally, probably deserves to be better-known). So, it seems quite probable that modern SF must incorporate some fantastical physics if it’s not to be overly depressing. Which is itself depressing, I guess…

(Possible exception: Greg Egan, who despite being a physicist himself who writes the hardest of hard SF, seems just as interested in the social structures of his worlds as in their physics. But then, his writing is a bit depressing, isn’t it? At least I find it so, which is why I generally don’t read it very much.)

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 9:18 am
This is another reason I love Le Guin’s work. She’s written somewhere of her irritation that the ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ inevitably excludes the social sciences; to make up for it her books and short stories are packed with speculative societal structures. To me, this makes the experience of reading her books more similar to that of reading old SF — ‘widening the power of imagination’, as zompist puts it in his essay. But then, of course, Le Guin has no problem ignoring inconvenient physics, or even inconvenient biology. Similar comments apply to more modern SF writers interested in social structures, like Orson Scott Card, Iain M. Banks, or Judith Moffett (who, incidentally, probably deserves to be better-known). So, it seems quite probable that modern SF must incorporate some fantastical physics if it’s not to be overly depressing. Which is itself depressing, I guess…

(Possible exception: Greg Egan, who despite being a physicist himself who writes the hardest of hard SF, seems just as interested in the social structures of his worlds as in their physics. But then, his writing is a bit depressing, isn’t it? At least I find it so, which is why I generally don’t read it very much.)

Le Guin isn't bad at the physics part, I think. You get that the ships get on 'nearly as fast as light' and that's about it, which isn't a bad formula.
I liked the descriptions of Shevek's work. It is a bit strange that Shevek is just one guy without a computer, but that would be nitpicking. His struggles with academia felt real.

I concur that hard SF feels, um, bleak. That was probably a fad, not a necessity of the genre. Depressing prose is one way to convey the universe is vast and uncaring.
I felt that with Charles Stross. First, reading his blog, you sort of get the idea he isn't a very upbeat person to begin with... But I think he felt there were way too much over-enthusiastic space cadets, and set out to correct some misconceptions. So you get over-the-top descriptions of how much space travel gives you cancer and radiation poisoning, plus the other passengers are just rude and the seats are not comfortable at all.

At some point SF writers were enamored with the grimdark. You got the Singularity (the AI uprising is inevitable and the AIs are just mean), the Dark Forest (the aliens are just mean) and so on...

I don't think it's a necessity; there are certainly other ways to show that the universe is vast and uncaring. It just wasn't much in fashion these past decades.

On fantastical physics; I think even hard SF has to take a bit of liberty with conventional physics -- sticking to current physics, you don't even get depressing stories -- you don't get anything at all. STL travel feels harder... you still have to ignore inconvenient stuff like 'how do you even have fusion reactor chambers at the required temperatures?'

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 9:56 am At some point SF writers were enamored with the grimdark. You got the Singularity (the AI uprising is inevitable and the AIs are just mean), the Dark Forest (the aliens are just mean) and so on...

In an interview Liu mentioned that other Chinese SF writers think he's an optimist! Apparently most Chinese SF is dystopian.

I think these things go in cycles. Grimdark was popular in comics as well, and non-SF movies. I think there's been a craving lately for cozy and casual. For grimdark we can just read the news.

On fantastical physics; I think even hard SF has to take a bit of liberty with conventional physics -- sticking to current physics, you don't even get depressing stories -- you don't get anything at all. STL travel feels harder... you still have to ignore inconvenient stuff like 'how do you even have fusion reactor chambers at the required temperatures?'

If you want oodles of worlds, yeah. But limitations in art are often a boon to the artist. I think my own Incatena, for instance, is more rather than less interesting for relying only on STL. The restriction makes you think harder and come up with new models.

FTL stories are basically "the Age of Sail but with lasers." They are a great excuse to visit extremely exotic countries, now that we really can't shoehorn any into our own planet. But you don't need FTL to do that... e.g. the anime/manga One Piece throws any number of exotic species, powers, and nations into a single planet.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 9:56 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 9:18 am
This is another reason I love Le Guin’s work. She’s written somewhere of her irritation that the ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ inevitably excludes the social sciences; to make up for it her books and short stories are packed with speculative societal structures. To me, this makes the experience of reading her books more similar to that of reading old SF — ‘widening the power of imagination’, as zompist puts it in his essay. But then, of course, Le Guin has no problem ignoring inconvenient physics, or even inconvenient biology. Similar comments apply to more modern SF writers interested in social structures, like Orson Scott Card, Iain M. Banks, or Judith Moffett (who, incidentally, probably deserves to be better-known). So, it seems quite probable that modern SF must incorporate some fantastical physics if it’s not to be overly depressing. Which is itself depressing, I guess…

(Possible exception: Greg Egan, who despite being a physicist himself who writes the hardest of hard SF, seems just as interested in the social structures of his worlds as in their physics. But then, his writing is a bit depressing, isn’t it? At least I find it so, which is why I generally don’t read it very much.)

Le Guin isn't bad at the physics part, I think. You get that the ships get on 'nearly as fast as light' and that's about it, which isn't a bad formula.

Fair enough. On the other hand, ansibles totally break causality — a fact which she actually acknowledges once or twice, but never pursues. And the biology is totally implausible (another fact she cheerfully acknowledges, not that I can remember where).

I liked the descriptions of Shevek's work. It is a bit strange that Shevek is just one guy without a computer, but that would be nitpicking. His struggles with academia felt real.

I concur. I felt that her attempts to display him actually doing physics were a bit weak, but the overall depiction of the life of a theoretical physicist is fantastic, and one of the best representations of scientific research I’ve seen in fiction.

(Not having a computer isn’t necessarily a huge problem for a theoretical physicist. A lot of mathematics is done with pencil and paper anyway — computers are an aid more than a necessity. In general, I get the impression that Le Guin consciously steered away from computers in her fiction.)

I concur that hard SF feels, um, bleak. That was probably a fad, not a necessity of the genre. Depressing prose is one way to convey the universe is vast and uncaring.
I felt that with Charles Stross. First, reading his blog, you sort of get the idea he isn't a very upbeat person to begin with... But I think he felt there were way too much over-enthusiastic space cadets, and set out to correct some misconceptions. So you get over-the-top descriptions of how much space travel gives you cancer and radiation poisoning, plus the other passengers are just rude and the seats are not comfortable at all.

I think this is part of it, but not the whole story. It’s worth taking Cordwainer Smith as a counterpoint: he gets very dark, and his universe is (in my opinion) far more actively malevolent than anything Stross devised, yet throughout his stories there still runs the hope that humans can build a better world in spite of it all. Whereas Stross just gives up on humanity entirely, in the face of superhuman monsters.

At some point SF writers were enamored with the grimdark. You got the Singularity (the AI uprising is inevitable and the AIs are just mean), the Dark Forest (the aliens are just mean) and so on...

This may be closer to the truth. Again, it’s possible to show the Singularity, or mean aliens, without being completely deprived of hope — e.g. Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep or Niven & Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye. That writers choose to block off all alternatives except the most depressing is their own decision.

On fantastical physics; I think even hard SF has to take a bit of liberty with conventional physics -- sticking to current physics, you don't even get depressing stories -- you don't get anything at all. STL travel feels harder... you still have to ignore inconvenient stuff like 'how do you even have fusion reactor chambers at the required temperatures?'

On this point, I agree with zompist. It’s still possible to write good SF without FTL travel, without psionics, without humanoid aliens, etc. etc. It’s just harder in some ways.

(Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to read APAF… I really should get around to it!)

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm And the biology is totally implausible (another fact she cheerfully acknowledges, not that I can remember where).

I assume you mean the whole 'Earth is a Hainish colony' idea? Yep, that doesn't really make sense. Come to think of it, the stories would have worked without that -- no reason the Cetians had to be related to humans somehow.

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm And the biology is totally implausible (another fact she cheerfully acknowledges, not that I can remember where).

I assume you mean the whole 'Earth is a Hainish colony' idea? Yep, that doesn't really make sense. Come to think of it, the stories would have worked without that -- no reason the Cetians had to be related to humans somehow.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 6:00 pm If you want oodles of worlds, yeah. But limitations in art are often a boon to the artist. I think my own Incatena, for instance, is more rather than less interesting for relying only on STL. The restriction makes you think harder and come up with new models.

FTL stories are basically "the Age of Sail but with lasers." They are a great excuse to visit extremely exotic countries, now that we really can't shoehorn any into our own planet. But you don't need FTL to do that... e.g. the anime/manga One Piece throws any number of exotic species, powers, and nations into a single planet.

Oh, I definitely agree! My point was, rather, that even STL interstellar travel is kind of a stretch, if you go by known physics.

One idea I'm toying with is FTL, but difficult FTL (as in long, horribly expensive, and impractical.)

(Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to read APAF… I really should get around to it!)

I can only recommend it

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm That writers choose to block off all alternatives except the most depressing is their own decision.

I think the idea might be that it's really important to smash and shatter all of a society's self-serving delusions, and portraying a society, even a fictional one, as anything else than grimdark supposedly goes against that goal. I get the impulse, but then again, the more you portray every possible future as dystopia, and the more you insist that even future scenarios that might look Utopian at first glance must always be exposed as having been secretly dystopian all along, the more you’re sending the message that things could never possibly be any significantly better than they are now. And that message is both simply false – some aspects of life have improved seriously at some points in history – and not at all desirable for people who want to improve anything.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 5:15 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm And the biology is totally implausible (another fact she cheerfully acknowledges, not that I can remember where).

I assume you mean the whole 'Earth is a Hainish colony' idea? Yep, that doesn't really make sense. Come to think of it, the stories would have worked without that -- no reason the Cetians had to be related to humans somehow.

That’s the big one, yes. Although it is fairly important as background to the stories — many of them are presented as journals from people sent to re-establish contact with far-flung Hainish colonies (e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness).

One idea I'm toying with is FTL, but difficult FTL (as in long, horribly expensive, and impractical.)

Last we spoke about it, weren’t you investigating wormholes as an option?

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 5:23 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm That writers choose to block off all alternatives except the most depressing is their own decision.

I think the idea might be that it's really important to smash and shatter all of a society's self-serving delusions

This may be part of it, but I somehow feel that it’s not a complete answer. I never got the impression that, say, Gibson was particularly interested in shattering any delusions as an explicit goal. (Mind you, it could well be true for Stross. For that matter this explains Philip K Dick as well, especially if you include in the list of self-serving delusions that ‘we are not being talked to by pink space lasers’.)

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 6:27 am Last we spoke about it, weren’t you investigating wormholes as an option?

Yes; they're interesting in that they're a prediction of general relativity, so you can figure out some of the properties they would have. The bad news I can't really follow the math

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm For that matter this explains Philip K Dick as well, especially if you include in the list of self-serving delusions that ‘we are not being talked to by pink space lasers’.

Philip K. Dick is in a class of his own. I don't know if he can really be explained!

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 8:05 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 6:27 am Last we spoke about it, weren’t you investigating wormholes as an option?

Yes; they're interesting in that they're a prediction of general relativity, so you can figure out some of the properties they would have. The bad news I can't really follow the math

I think I remember the paper you linked last time; I’ve been meaning to have another look at it anyway. (Though I’m sure I won’t be able to follow it either!)

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 10:30 pm For that matter this explains Philip K Dick as well, especially if you include in the list of self-serving delusions that ‘we are not being talked to by pink space lasers’.

Philip K. Dick is in a class of his own. I don't know if he can really be explained!

Nah, his fiction is just straightforwardly paranoid. Now, RA Lafferty, on the other hand…

(To wrench this thread back on topic: Lafferty has a book about an AGI, namely Arrive at Easterwine, which I happen to be reading right now. Or rather, attempting to read — apparently it’s considered the most opaque of his books, and when you’re talking about Lafferty, that’s quite something to behold.)