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Risto_Saarelma comments on Rationality Quotes July 2013 - Less Wrong
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Instructor in The Guardian comment section
Story I heard from a bookshop clerk about the (sadly deceased) Ian M Banks. He was being interviewed on the South Bank Show and the interviewer asked, in a slightly condescending manner, "why did you start writing science fiction ?", and he replied "I wanted to make sure I was good enough first."
"The biggest difference between literary fiction set in the future and Science fiction is that science fictioneers don't really believe in the future. History is merely an adventure story of good guys beating adversity, and we are on the brink of a glorious new age. Any opinions otherwise must be sneered at."
Alternatively:
...So every dystopia and cautionary tale is "literature" and inferior, while generic pew-pew space opera is always produced by "real" belief in the future and never pure profit motive or anything of the sort?
(Edit: or status motivation, nostalgia/desire to emulate something one likes, "lasers are cool" aestheticism, or whatever other reasons.)
I'd guess the quotee wouldn't call generic space opera "science fiction" either. I sure wouldn't, myself.
Indeed. Space opera is Romanticism; science fiction is Enlightenment (tvtropes link).
I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. The Culture novels are space opera, for example. yet they fall on the Enlightenment side of the divide; likewise for Star Trek, modulo a few more Romantic episodes and themes. Star Wars, however, is very, very Romantic, and it's probably the first thing that comes to mind for most people when you bring up space opera.
There's definitely a spectrum. I'm with you on the Culture, but I'm not sure I agree about Star Trek. If Star Trek is space opera, what qualifies as science fiction...?
To me, the defining element of "real" science fiction is that it actually explores the possible consequences of worlds where the science is different (either because people have made inventions that don't exist in our world, because the laws of physics themselves are different, or - for scifi based on the social sciences - because the society is different; a lot of cyberpunk is arguably more sociological than hard-sciencial in focus), taking that as its starting point.
So I would say that anything that actually takes the science or scientific question as a starting point qualifies. Star Trek is infamous for doing the opposite - the writers would actually write scripts with dialogue like "Mr. Data, <tech> the <tech> so that the <tech> doesn't blow up", and then somebody would replace the <tech> tags with scientific-sounding words that fit into the wanted context.
If you include sociological sf in your definition (which, I agree, you absolutely should), then Star Trek seems to qualify. The utopian society of the Federation is one of the key background facts of the franchise (assumed in TOS, explored in more depth in TNG, then deconstructed to some degree in DS9).
You're right about the technobabble, of course. However, that's often just a mask for the actual exploration of sociological/psychological concepts. And there was technological/hard-scientific stuff too: TOS's "City on the Edge of Forever" was a classic time travel story. The Borg were an examination of transhumanism (a biased one, of course, but still). The Mirror Universe episodes are another example.
That's why I emphasized the "taking that as its starting point" bit.
The old joke about space opera is that they're Westerns in space, with space ships substituted for horses and laser guns substituted for ordinary guns. Now if a writer literally created a series by doing that - saying "hey, let's make a Western in space and make these substitutions" - they wouldn't be exploring the social consequences of space ships and laser guns, they'd just be adding fancy tropes on a story in order to make it seem more cool.
Now Star Trek is definitely not this bad. Many Star Trek episodes do seem to have been written with the purpose of exploring the consequence of something. But overall - especially with the more recent series - it does feel like there are more episodes that were conceived as a way of telling a cool story first, with the technological/social elements being added as the extra spice, rather than as serious exploration of the elements.
Of course, this is a spectrum and not a clear-cut split, and Star Trek is more sci-fi than many other series. But if I had to choose, I'd say it's closer to the "space opera" end than the "sci-fi" end. (In general, I can think of very few TV series that I'd really put in the "sci-fi" end - most "real" sci-fi tends to be written rather than televised, in my experience. Though The Prisoner would qualify.)
"It's not real science fiction, it's just a _ in space" is a common and tempting meme, but I'm not sure it holds together when you think about it. Imagine if we were to apply this reasoning to other genres, maybe even to Westerns themselves. "It's not a Western, it's just a romance with horses and cowboys. To be a real Western the Western setting must have some effect on the plot, but a romance can happen in any context. Just replace 'barmaid' with 'minimum wage clerk'" "It's not a police drama, it's a Western, they're just chasing each other using cars instead of horses. You're not exploring the social consequences of the fact that they're in a 21st century police station rather than just a sheriff in the West".
Or do it more narrowly. "Sure, it has some science fiction elements, but most of it is still a Western. The cloning device has social consequences that affect the story, but the spaceships and lasers don't. It could just as easily be a story that has a cloning device but is set in the modern era without any spaceships or lasers."
Actually, I find it hard to think of many stories where spaceships and lasers would have an effect at all. I realize, of course, that spaceships and lasers are just examples, but generally, spaceships and lasers don't have any effect on the story that couldn't have been done in a Western--spaceships let you travel faster, but the universe is larger than the setting of a Western, with the net effect being the same--there are some near destinations and some hard to get to destinations..
Is the X-Files not anything except a police procedural because investigations and government coverups could happen without there being space aliens? (Sure, some of the specific investigations and coverups require aliens, but the same basic thing could be done without them.)
Of course, many works traditionally labeled fantasy also prefer to explore the consequences of worlds with different physics (HPMoR, for example). I've heard this called "Hard fantasy".
That's a good question. Probably not one that has an answer you can get a decent majority of SF fans to agree on, unfortunately.
My take on it is that you're not going to have much luck defining genres in terms of static attributes; they're more like loosely bound clusters in the space of themes, tropes, and influences. Star Trek's clearly inheriting from older SF-genre stories -- Forbidden Planet, certain Larry Niven novels, all sorts of stuff if you break it down to individual episodes -- so I'm comfortable calling it that.
Space opera, meanwhile, points to a thread that's interwoven with SF but not encompassed by it. It influences a lot of media that also use SF themes and which I'd feel comfortable filing under both categories: the Culture books, Battlestar Galactica, and so forth. But it also influences some that don't; Star Wars draws from planetary romance, heroic fantasy, and samurai movies, but not much pure SF, so I might call it space opera but not science fiction. Or I might not, depending on how wide a net I want to cast with the term.
Vinge
I don't see any obvious reason for not counting A Fire Upon the Deep as space opera, actually. Maybe it's not a spectrum after all!