What is Science Fiction?

 

Back in the olden days, when I attended many science fiction conventions (which I fear might be something that is fading into past), a number of us discussed what was science fiction and what was not. Those that I remember participating in these ad hoc discussions were Wilson Tucker, known around the convention circuit as Bob, Robert Cornett who has written a number of science fiction novels and me.

Wilson "Bob" Tucker (in plaid shirt) involved in the "smooth" process.

For those interested in those sorts of things, Robert Cornett, aka Bob and sometimes as RC Squared, wrote Seeds of Doubt, Remember the Alamo, The Aldebaran Campaign, The Aquarium Attack, Remember Gettysburg, and Remember the Little Bighorn with me.

Bob Tucker has a long list of very good science fiction books including The Year of the Quiet Sun, The Lincoln Hunters, Ice and Iron and The Time Masters to name just a few. He was quite popular at science fiction conventions, often surrounded by a bevy of his “granddaughters.” He was so popular that, at one point, Fandom created the Tucker Transfer, which was a collection to pay for his trip to the World Science Fiction Convention in Europe (or in other words, an attempt to transfer him to the convention). Today it would be a Go Fund Me page. But I digress.

We decided, with no authority to do so, that science fiction was based in real science. In the 1950s, you might consider Rocketship X-M or Destination Moon as science fiction. These movies reflected the science of the time and nearly everyone believed that humans would walk on the moon. In Forbidden Planet, made in 1956, that would not happen for more than a century. Of course, it happened in just 13 years.

As an interesting aside, in Apollo 13, director Ron Howard included a scene of the rocket heading off into space that was reminiscent of those old movies. I am convinced that he included that scene as a tribute to those science fiction movies.

The point is that the science fiction reflected real science. Rockets and missiles were being fired into space and they were going farther and farther from Earth. It wasn’t long before unmanned rockets hit the Moon and, of course, finally taking men to the Moon.

Fantasy, then, were stories set in exotic places but contained elements that weren’t possible. Magic worked in fantasy stories. Although I’m not sure that either Bob agreed with me, I thought of time travel stories as fantasy because I don’t believe we can travel through time, as outlined in most those stories. Yes, I recognize that we are all traveling in time as we live our lives, but we are unable to manipulate it. And yes, I understand that time dilation theory might allow us to manipulate time but in a very controlled sense. We won’t be speeding around time as is seen in The Time Machine or the End of Eternity, to name just a few time travel stories.

Finally, we came up with Sci Fi, which is not to say that we invented the term, only that we defined it. Sci Fi were stories and movies such as The Beginning of the End, The Blob or First Spaceship to Venus (which, for some reason I enjoy but it is a really bad movie with an internal logic that simply doesn’t work). A lot of things fit this category and I’m not at all sure what we would have done with SyFy, which, if you study the programming on that channel, often has nothing to do with science fiction or Sci Fi. Strikes me that is why they changed the name.

For the purists among you, I will note that Star Wars is strictly not science fiction but more like sci fi or fantasy, simply because it is set in another galaxy and includes faster than light speeds not to mention the Force. It works because we care about the people in the film. We want them to win (well, not Darth Vader, though I suspect there are a few who root for him as well). Sci Fi doesn’t have to be bad. It just has to incorporate elements that slip into fantasy or that are impossible given our current scientific knowledge.

No, we didn’t bother with horror because that is something completely different. Horror was once things like Dracula and Frankenstein, but it evolved into what, in the 1980s, we called dead teenager movies and other such slasher films.

These were our somewhat arbitrary definitions for this genre. The rules are not hard and fast and you can put a story or movie into more than one category as we see with Star Wars. It was conceived as a way of explaining what science fiction is and what is not.