[Science Fiction is:] a subdivision of fantastic literature which employs science or rationalism to create an appearance of plausibility
Posted to the mailing list SF-LIT, May 16, 1996
Science fiction reflects scientific thought; a fiction of things-to-come based on things-on-hand.
The Fantastic Mirror-SF Across The Ages (Panthenon 1969)
Science Fiction: fiction based on rational speculation regarding the human experience of science and its resultant technologies.
The major distinction between fantasy and science fiction is, simply, that science fiction uses one, or a very, very few new postulates, and develops the rigidly consistent logical consequences of these limited postulates. Fantasy makes its rules as it goes along...The basic nature of fantasy is "The only rule is, make up a new rule any time you need one!" The basic rule of science fiction is "Set up a basic proposition--then develop its consistent, logical consequences."
Introduction, Analog 6, Garden City, New York, 1966
Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws. The result can be extremely fantastic in content, but it is not fantasy; it is legitimate--and often very tightly reasoned--speculation about the possibilities of the real world. This category excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy.
from: Ray Guns And Spaceships,
in Expanded Universe, Ace, 1981
Plausible impossibilities should be
preferred to unconvincing possibilities.
The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true...and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.
The Shape of Things to Come and Why It Is Bad, SFC, December 1991
That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.
Pohlemic, SFC, May 1992
Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions.
That branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings.
(1952)
In short, the straw of a
manufactured realism with which the sf writer makes his particular literary
bricks must be entirely convincing to the reader in it own right, or the whole
story will lose its power to convince.
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the "willing suspension of disbelief" on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.
What is authentic about genuine science fiction is that the science fiction writer should not stop with just saying: Well, the plot needs this to happen, therefore I'll just do it and I'll invent an excuse for it being able to be done. Proper science fiction ought to require people to begin to explore the consequences of what they've invented. And thus, I think that science fiction is, in a real sense, capable of being scientific. Not in the sense that it can foresee the future of science, but it can adopt a kind of variation of the scientific method itself, it does feel compelled to explore the consequences of hypotheses and the way things fit together.
(from an interview on Science in SF, ConFuse 91)
Matthew 13
The Parable of the Sower
1That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. 2Such
large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while
all the people stood on the shore. 3Then he told them many things in
parables, saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4As he
was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate
it up. 5Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil.
It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6But when the
sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no
root. 7Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the
plants. 8Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a
crop--a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9He who has
ears, let him hear."
10The disciples came to
him and asked, "Why do you speak to the people in parables?"
11He replied, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. 13This is why I speak to them in parables:
"Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or
understand. 14In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
" 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never
perceiving.
15For this people's heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.'[1]
16But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. 17For I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
18"Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: 19When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is the seed sown along the path. 20The one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. 21But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. 22The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful. 23But the one who received the seed that fell on good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it. He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown."
Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his year long contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
All modern interpretation that is
not merely an attempt at ”re-cognition” involves some effort to divorce meaning
and truth. This accounts for both the splendors and the miseries of the art.
Insofar as we can treat a text as not referring to what is outside or beyond
it, we more easily understand that it has internal relationships independent of
the coding procedures by which we may find it transparent upon a known world.
We see why it has latent mysteries, intermittent radiances. But in acquiring
this privilege, the interpreters lose the possibility of consensus, and of
access to a single truth at the heart of the thing. No one, however special his
point of vantage, can get past all those doorkeepers into the shrine of the
single sense. I make an allegory, once more, of Kafka's parable; but some such
position is the starting point of all modern hermeneutics except those which
are consciously reactionary. The pleasures of interpretation are henceforth
linked to loss and disappointment, so that most of us will find the task too
hard, or simply repugnant; and then, abandoning meaning, we slip back into the old
comfortable fictions of transparency, the single sense, the truth.
The Genesis of Secrecy (1979)
vantage = view
hermeneutics = study of the methodological principles of interpretation (as of the Bible)
... science fiction "is the
myth-making principle of human nature today."
Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong tendency to myth.
Science fiction represents the modern heresy and the cutting edge of speculative imagination as it grapples with Mysterious Time---linear or non-linear time.
Our motto is Nothing Secret, Nothing Sacred.
SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.