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Back in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein proposed the initials “SF,” which at the time was a common abbreviation for “science fiction.” But he had another idea. He felt it should stand for the broader term “speculative fiction.” To this day, there are passionate debates about which term to use.

Is is all semantics? Here’s what I think.

Science fiction is a subset of speculative fiction, which also includes fantasy, magic realism and sometimes even horror. Speculative fiction encompasses all fiction that speculates on something that isn’t accepted as fact today (an outpost on Mars, sorcery, magical coincidence, ghosts, etc.) and treats it as a fact within the story.

Science fiction is more specific. It is a fiction that speculates on scientific concepts and theories, or at least pretends to. There is a fuzzy line there. The Barsoom novels are kind of science fiction, but are also purely fantasy (I mean really, a placental human successfully mates with a monotreme Martian?).

Now, just to let you know where I’m coming from, I tend to be a very tolerant, easy going person. I don’t like fighting and tend to find common ground when I can. Maybe that’s why I just don’t see what all the fuss over “science fiction” vs. “speculative fiction” is all about. I think they can coexist peacefully. What do you think?

“The alien is the creation of a need — man’s need to designate something that is genuinely outside himself, something that is truly non man, that has no initial relation to man except for the fact that it has no relation …. it is through learning to relate to the alien that man has learned to study himself.”

From the prefact to Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction,
edited by George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin

This morning a bird flew into the patio window and knocked itself out. I found it lying on its back breathing rapidly. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. It just looked at me.

This got me to thinking about aliens in science fiction. Just like that little bird, the likelihood that an alien would have any true understanding of my intentions are pretty low. Or are they?

Read more »

“One of Descartes’ students asked the master how he would know when an automaton had become a true man.

“‘When he tells me so himself,’ Descartes said.”

– “Cybernauts in Cyberspace: William Gibson’s Neuromancer” by David Porush

Robots, androids (and gynoids), and other assorted automatons have been a stable of science fiction since before it officially became science fiction. They’ve been simple servants, “logical progressions of the refrigerator and the steam shovel and autopilot and the thermostat” says Noel Perrin. They’ve been guardians and saviors — rescuing human kind from their own foibles. And they’ve been the ultimate nemesis — seeking to destroy and/or enslave all of humankind.

According to H. Bruce Franklin, the machine was “the first great idol of science fiction.”

What it is about this archetypical character that intrigues us so? Could it be our desire to understand the creator by becoming the creator ourselves? Could it be our desire to understand ourselves through the eyes of a construct much like ourselves?

Tales from Isaac Asimov’s robot stories to movies like The Terminator series and The Matrix trilogy try to answer those questions. And maybe there is no one answer, as each tale only tackles one small aspect of the over concept of “human and machine.”

What are your thoughts?

Once upon a time — it was 1866 — Jules Verne wrote an adventure story in which a group of Americans build a large cannon to shoot the first men to the Moon.

Later, Sir Isaac Newton developed a thought experiment that placed a cannon on a very high mountain that, with the right amount of gun powder, was able to shoot a canon into orbit.

To some degree, this is how we launch space vehicles. But not really.

Now, according to Bart Leahy, a group of graduate students and academics hopes to launch low-cost satellites into orbit using a concept similar to that of Verne.

Read more in The Space Review.

Loyd Case of Extreme Tech thinks so. In an article he wrote posted Aug. 6, 2007, he claims that the ease of which fandom can be procured is part of the poison killing it. The Internet is also to blame.

“Today, of course, anyone with a credit card can trumpet his or her obsession. You can get T-shirts, you can get posters, you can buy books dissecting and analyzing your favorite obsession to the nth degree,” he writes. “What’s more, marketing has discovered there’s gold to be made from fans— lots of latinum, if you will.”

Read more »

A few years ago, I read a couple of book by Paul Nahin: Time Travel and Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction. I was so captivated by these books that I actually sent Dr. Nahin an email asking him about this time travel thought I had: If got into a time machine that traveled only in time, wouldn’t you end up either somewhere in space or possibly inside a mountain because the Earth was moving through space and time? Read more »

It seems to me that quite a lot of science fiction — in fact speculative fiction as a whole — is used to comment on the current political climate when it was written. On television, Star Trek, Babylon 5 and the re-imagined Battlestar Gallactica are good cases in point. In literature, I could probably list thousands, if I took the time. Top of mind are Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Read more »