Does Science Fiction have an equivalent to Fantasy's LotR as a trend setter?

[psikeyhackr]

I think the reason some SF dates badly is a lot more complicated that the "science" in them.

The writing in Skylark and Lensman series are really bad. But I have had people tell me that Isaac Asimov could not write. I suspect a significant factor is that the readers of SF in the Good Olde Days were and possibly are not as picky about that aspect as about "ideas". I think Andre Norton was a better "writer" than Mack Reynolds. But Reynolds came up with far more interesting ideas for SF stories than Norton in my opinion. It's the story, not the writing, and not even the "science" though that is intertwined with the story.

Interestingly Einstein's Relativity was not unequivocally verified until the 1922 Australian eclipse.
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/ins...heory-of-relativity-proven-in-australia-1922/

When was it determined that light set a speed limit and interstellar travel would be a problem?

So Skylark of Space was finished before then though not published. Skylark would have been interesting in the 1920s, but the ideas were old by the 60s and the bad writing would not have any compensations.

psik

 

[Ray McCarthy]

When was it determined that light set a speed limit and interstellar travel would be a problem?

May have been suspected after Maxwell published. 1865 and especially 1874. Certainly many scientists would have suspected so before 1922.
It was originally proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".
It reconciles Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism (1874) with Newtons laws of mechanics (1687)by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light.

Einstein described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton".
His most notable achievement was to formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as manifestations of the same phenomenon.
He predicted mathematically the speed of light / radio. It's sad he died only 48!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell#Electromagnetism

A man on a level with Newton and Einstein.

I was thinking more of the Iron thing. But of course almost all SF even half a century after relativity was ignoring it.

EDIT
This link is worth reading ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers#Special_relativity
Certainly scientists were aware of a problem

 

[JaimeRetief]

Exactly, SF is more complicated than fantasy so it cannot be analysed as simply. Psychic phenomenon was accepted as SF when I started reading it. Now some people want to classify that as fantasy. Now the term "space opera" is supposed to be respectable. Does this mean that "science fiction" has been corrupted because so many "writers" want to get in on the money to be made calling watered down techy stuff science fiction. The Hunger Games is called science fiction but the books got a really low scores from my word counting program, barely above fantasy.

psik

I agree, although i thought that telepathy and all the other extrasensory mumbo-jumbo was disproven before a lot of the New Wave books and stories I alluded to were published?

And there is also cyberpunk, which can be quite far from reality, Gibson is one excellent example.

And even if the sicnece has changed a lot of the stories follow the same patterns, even in the case of "hard" science fiction,like Rendezvous with Rama and Pushing Ice for example.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

telepathy and all the other extrasensory mumbo-jumbo

Pretty much dis-proven by 1920s. It's a fantasy, so often in SF presented as either something humans evolve to have in the future or that aliens have.

Harry Houdini (died 1926) and various stage magicians have debunked it, the Psychic, (Randi the most recent). Houdini exposed a lot of mediums as charlatans.

EDIT
Wiki has a link of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini#Debunking_spiritualists

Unreal! There is a Lovecraft connection!

In 1926, Harry Houdini hired H. P. Lovecraft and his friend C. M. Eddy, Jr., to write an entire book about debunking religious miracles, which was to be called The Cancer of Superstition. Houdini had earlier asked Lovecraft to write an article about astrology, for which he paid $75. The article does not survive. Lovecraft's detailed synopsis for Cancer does survive, as do three chapters of the treatise written by Eddy. Houdini's death derailed the plans, as his widow did not wish to pursue the project.

 

[Glitch]

...The Hunger Games is called science fiction but the books got a really low scores from my word counting program, barely above fantasy.

psik

The Hunger Games are more marketed as a dystopian post-apocalyptic story. Since they are set in a future time period and have a level of advanced technology they are also considered science fiction.
Some of the authors previous work (The Underland Chronicles) is epic fantasy. This might lean towards the barely above fantasy.


The following article lists several authors I've not yet seen mentioned on the thread yet. Just throwing it in for discussion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The following article lists several authors I've not yet seen mentioned on the thread yet. Just throwing it in for discussion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction

Certainly we got the first three "biggies".

The thread has drifted a lot from the original question (the answer seems to be "not really") but been very stimulating, thought provoking and interesting.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The writing in Skylark and Lensman series are really bad

maybe, and the science is terrible. But re-reading last year (first read some in 1960s) they are still fun.

 

[JaimeRetief]

Certainly we got the first three "biggies".

The thread has drifted a lot from the original question (the answer seems to be "not really") but been very stimulating, thought provoking and interesting.

Yes, and it is confirming my hypothesis.
Namely that the genre is far too diverse where ideas, sub-genres and themes are concerned to have anything like Fantasy, with the massive Tolkien singularity at its heart

 

[psikeyhackr]

Yes, and it is confirming my hypothesis.
Namely that the genre is far too diverse where ideas, sub-genres and themes are concerned to have anything like Fantasy, with the massive Tolkien singularity at its heart

I was just going with that term "trendsetter". How much SF has involved interstellar travel supposedly done by technological means? There are just so many other trends. But you can't jump through hyperspace without an astrogation computer. LOL

psik

 

[J-Sun]

The closest thing I can think of is the film Star Wars, which didn't invent much, but copied from a lot of sources, gave a clear form to a lot of slightly vague ideas and - most of all - had a huge market. Of course, Star Wars is only one part of SF, and to some people it isn't science fiction at all, but to the great majority of people who aren't SF enthusiasts, their image of science fiction probably starts with "stuff like Star Wars".

Star Wars is a johnny-come-lately. People used to call it "that Buck Rogers stuff". But, yeah, Star Wars has probably been the last thing to stamp a critical mass of the masses with an idea of "SF".

Pretty much dis-proven by 1920s. It's a fantasy, so often in SF presented as either something humans evolve to have in the future or that aliens have.

Not exactly. John W. Campbell got a BS in physics from Duke in 1932 and Rhine began doing experiments in parapsychology at Duke's parapsychology lab in 1930 and continued on into the 60s (a major era for Analog-ish psi power pstories). Now, I don't know if Rhine was faking or mistaken but he at least appeared to be using the scientific method in serious research and could easily have made quite an impression on Campbell and, while it was always fringe/minority, that would have appealed to Campbell's contrarian streak even more. (Analog even today has an "Alternate View" column.) People tend to dismiss Campbell's ESP as pure silliness and it would be in writers today but people used to take phrenology and Freudianism seriously, too. Doing an ESP story in the 30s-60s is probably less silly than doing a Freud story and there were plenty of each.

(Plus telepathy beats the heck out of learning alien languages over long, boring periods of time.)

As far as the topic, while Weird Tales existed and had its impact and both SF and fantasy conceptually predate their commercial genres, SF really became a thing with Amazing and Astounding - and Amazing was originally built out of Poe, Verne, and Wells reprints and then gathered a host of writers and so on. It was always pretty communal and slow to develop and what developed was a huge variety of worlds and universes with and without spaceships and aliens and robots and covered the past, present, and future and was done in short forms and long and on and on. Fantasy always lagged behind as a commercial genre. It was really Wollheim pirating Tolkien for Ace that finally caused Tolkien or his "people" to get off their high-horse and allow Ballantine to produce "authorized" paperbacks instead of high-priced hardcovers. And, lo!, they became hugely successful and led to the Ballantine "Adult Fantasy" series (strange name there, I tell ya) and to the eventual fantasy behemoth we now witness. Tolkien was known and esteemed and all this before then (as were stray fantasies), but it was really the mass-market paperbacks that kicked this all off. So it's just a different history. Tolkien created this gigantic medievaloid secondary world playground of elves and orcs and that was that. Everybody copied it. SF began in magazines with multiple authors; commercial fantasy began as a book by a guy.

Obviously, Doc Smith's space opera and Heinlein's and Asimov's future histories and van Vogt's craziness and Dune and Neuromancer and suchlike have had their influences but, no, SF is too big and various to have a "trendsetter" like Tolkien since Tolkien wasn't so much a trendsetter as a genre-creator. Now, fantasy is also too big and various in its own way and fans should probably be very displeased at the magnitude of LOTR in the fantasy landscape (and some are) but I think it still pretty much defines fantasy in the same Star Wars does SF, except more so. The public mind thinks "LOTR" (or Harry Potter) and "Star Wars" but a lot more fantasy seems to actually be like LOTR than SF is like Star Wars. But I digress. Long story short: I agree with others' answer to the topic question: no.

 

[dask]

Didn't Heinlein's announcement back in the forties that he would or could write stories that fit unobtrusively into a future history cause something of a stir and a trend to do similar work by others? Kinda?

 

[tinkerdan]

I would have to say that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and possibly even Sir Author Conan Doyle set much of the pattern that might be comparable to LOTR in SF. The main problem is not so much the science, though.

It's more the social aspect that leaks into the fiction based on when the fiction was written. There have been some attempts to leap ahead and anticipate how social aspects might change but that's far more limiting than science. The tendency is to end up with future science built around characters that act like people contemporary to the current society. So when I pick up a classic of any type in science fiction the first thing I know is that I have to look at the time it was written to determine how the characters in the story relate to the story and try to disregard current standards or it tends to ruin the story in some way. Although I admit that looking at it as a window into the time it was written actually helps if I decide to make comparisons and then allowances.

Still SF way back contained so many other elements of fiction that branched off from it that to find anything like LOTR you have to look at all the branches and find that X number of works (one for each spinoff genre.)

You could almost end up with the same in fantasy so LOTR is only the benchmark for the ones following that convention.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

My immediate thought was Neuromancer. I can't think of any other SF novel that's created and defined a genre. I don't think Dune is comparable, despite it being the first properly environmentally aware SF novel.

 

[JaimeRetief]

I was just going with that term "trendsetter". How much SF has involved interstellar travel supposedly done by technological means? There are just so many other trends. But you can't jump through hyperspace without an astrogation computer. LOL

psik

Hyperpace is IIRC actually a concept of set theory and it was one before science fiction took it and used it for something else.

 

[JaimeRetief]

My immediate thought was Neuromancer. I can't think of any other SF novel that's created and defined a genre. I don't think Dune is comparable, despite it being the first properly environmentally aware SF novel.

It did not create anything, the building blocks were already there and Rudy Rucker wrote Software years before Neuromancer came out.

 

[MWagner]

Tolkien seems to have, in the public's mind, the reputation of being the author who mastered fantasy...he brought it to what many see as its highest level of accomplishment; it was masterfully written by a renowned Shakespearean scholar. TLOTR is an all-time classic and the way to consider it is to consider its influence on the writing of all fantasy that came after it.

Science fiction was perceived as junk literature throughout the first half of the twentieth century (with the exception, perhaps, of only Wells); it was pulp, it was looked down on by almost everyone...authors of most other genres, teachers, parents.

Fantasy has long been regarded as junk as well. We need to keep in mind that when it was published, The Hobbit was regarded as nothing more than a charming children's story (the original recommended age for readers was 6-10). Lord of the Rings was dismissed by critics as an overlong, badly written, and ponderous curiosity, and its commercial success was a slow burn. It didn't achieve mass popularity until the late 60s, and it wasn't until Tolkien's imitators, writers like Terry Brooks who read Tolkien as a teen, hit the commercial jackpot with derivative works in the early 80s that fantasy became a mainstream genre. When I was a teen in the 80s, fantasy was considered junk, and anyone who still read it past about the age of about 16 was considered an immature misfit. Tolkien himself is only now being grudgingly recognized by the literary establishment, who have given up defying popular sentiment.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

My immediate thought was Neuromancer.

Neuromancer 1984, and not much copies / derives / pastiches it. I've read a huge amount of SF, and not even got round to reading it.
Brunner's Shockwave Rider (1975, inspired by and rather better than Toffler's pop "Future Shock"), nearly 10 years earlier. Despite being rather good, it didn't really inspire a lot of copies either. Of course AFTER the fact of ID theft, Ritalin for school kids, computer virus and internet, perhaps Shockwave Rider seems cleverer now than it did then.

writers like Terry Brooks who read Tolkien as a teen

I remember when it came out a Teen complaining to me that it rains too much in Shanarra. I think his Magic Kingdom books are rather more fun.

But the fact is that publishers in 1970s onwards increasingly tried to cash in on LOTR and reference Tolkien on blurbs for very many fantasy books that were not really derived from or like LOTR at all, creating the impression that LOTR is much more central and more of a source than in reality it actually is!

There never has been any equivalent SF title that Publishers could dishonestly / shamelessly exploit like LOTR!

 

[JaimeRetief]

Neuromancer 1984, and not much copies / derives / pastiches it. I've read a huge amount of SF, and not even got round to reading it.

Well as I said, most of the tropes were there already, a number of 60s and 70s stuff has a definite cyberpunkesque feel to it, and cyber crime and super A.I. have both been around since the golden age IMO.

If you need a decent acid trip and a technically "harder" ciberpunk that predates Gibson you should check out Rucker's various writings.

However I think that Neal Stephenson did by far the best job where early cyberpunk was concerned.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

But you can't jump through hyperspace without an astrogation computer.

Navigation Tables of Pulsars, Log tables etc, Slide Rules.

Post Computer age SF without computers and Interstellar Travel without Computers:
Dune series (start 1965) Might have read all the ones Herbert himself wrote and maybe one later title. They deliberately destroyed and banned computers.
Engine of Light Series (2000) I've read five of Ken Macleod's books, not reading any more. Navigation calculated by hand in the keep over several generations.

Slide rules are mentioned in many older stories. I must replace the one I used to have. Batteries for my calculator might be awkward after the apocalypse. Though actually I know how to make primary and secondary cells, the batteries can live outside the case. I also know how to make a dynamo that can be operated by wind, stream water or tide. Solar electricity panels are too high tech, but water heating is possible.

Of course perhaps Hyperspace doesn't exist, perhaps there is no way to travel the stars other than a Generation Ship.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Neuromancer 1984, and not much copies / derives / pastiches it. I've read a huge amount of SF, and not even got round to reading it.
Brunner's Shockwave Rider (1975, inspired by and rather better than Toffler's pop "Future Shock"), nearly 10 years earlier. Despite being rather good, it didn't really inspire a lot of copies either. Of course AFTER the fact of ID theft, Ritalin for school kids, computer virus and internet, perhaps Shockwave Rider seems cleverer now than it did then.

Exactly! I have read Neuromancer and still haven't figured out what is so great about it. After it became famous I tried reading it again. Didn't make it. I have listened to the audiobook. Shockwave Rider is way better. The Two Faces of Tomorrow is better also though it is an AI story rather than cyberpunk.

psik