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Science Fiction

The authors I have been reading for the last ten years have a hard sf context - sometimes there are wobbly bits but
Dan Simmons, Alistair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, David Brin, Greg Egan, Peter F. Hamilton, Vernor Vinge, David Zindell
do tend to see the future as a state of rapidly accellerating progress (and strangeness) rather than as an extension of soap opera-
yes, and they are all blokes
 
Oith

Earth by David Brin was impressive, and he got a lot of it right I fear about the greying of America and the repression stemming from fear, as well as the pervasive intrusions into privacy. (What's that?)

I've long since given up on Simmons, who is only capable of pastiche, it seems.

Greg Bear is a favorite, as is Gregory Benford; both top notch hard sf writers with big imaginations and good characters, too. Moving Mars by Bear is recommended for both its mind-boggling concept and its very human portrayal of a Mars colony.

Vernor Vinge's got the space opera title once held by E. E. "Doc" Smith, I'd say. Very much enjoyed his A Fire Upon the Deep.

Iain M. Banks is a name I encounter often; what is his stuff like? I'd be curious to read him, I suspect.

Oh, anyone got an opinion on the fiction of Jack McDevitt?
 
Iain M. Banks is a True Master of the genre. I heartily recommend all of his work.

Jack McDevitt is also very good. I've read the Engines of God and Eternity Road. Both are ArchaeoSF, the former dealing with xenoarchaeology and the latter is post-apocalyptic.
 
Thanks

Thanks for the recommendations, I'll have to explore these two writers. McDevitt will be in my local area in the Spring, (early April, I think), in Wayne, NE to open a Smithsonian exhibit of some sort. My friend Terry is driving him from the Omaha airport, having met him as the Guest of Honor at the first Wayne State College science fiction convention, WillyCon. (Who or what willy is/was, aside from the rudely obvioius, I don't know.)

I'm especially curious about archeologically based science fiction, seems an under exploited area.
 
Both my sister and my wife like to read character driven sf, like Herbert, Niven and Le Guin ...
I prefer the hard stuff heh heh
Xenoarchaeology? this is one effort...
it comes up in Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space as well, but it could be an interesting field to explore...
 
Recently I've been obsessing with David Weber's Honor Harrington series, which is surprising as I've usually got little patience with Space Opera.

(For 'em as don't know: the series is a female Horatio Hornblower in space: big space battles, millions dead, lots of derring-do, buckled swashes and utterly unbelievable heroics that somehow you swallow while you're reading, but as soon as you close the book you're like "What, she and her handful of POW associates just happen to find enough ships to rescue all the prisoners on an entire heavily-defended prison planet..?" And it's all leavened with an atrocious SOH that occasionally veers into silliness but, IMO, gets away with it somehow.)
 
Re: Oith

FraterLibre said:
Iain M. Banks is a name I encounter often; what is his stuff like? I'd be curious to read him, I suspect.

He also writes "normal" fiction under Iain Banks. The wasp factory is a good one.
 
Isn't Iain M. Banks, SCOTS?

I'm sitting here with a copy of Banks' Excession, I bought last year. I suppose I'd better read it, now.

No spoilers, please! :p
 
Eburacum45 I've only just now sat down and had a browse of Orionsarm. Fantastic site.

Makes me wish I could write something other than sword and sorcery... :(
 
Thank you:)
Very little of it is mine, although it is growing all the time...
Have you had anything published?
 
The only slight tribble - i meant quibble sorry :) I have with the definition of "Hard" SF there is that many episodes of casualty might qualify as SF - Set in the future (a week from now, maybe), and firmly based on what is currently known in medical science.
H.G.Wells didn't write real hard SF, he included time travel and aliens.
Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein didn't either, aliens, faster than light travel, AND time travel have all featured in their work.
But godlike Artificial Intelligence is not a problem. We know this because we can currently make a machine that has the ability to avoid large objects under exactly the right conditions.

Iain Banks wise I can thoroughly recommend "The Bridge." A strange book that incorporates elements of Kafka, The Prisoner, It's a Wonderful Life, and the Wizard of Oz.
 
Eburacum45 said:
Thank you:)
Very little of it is mine, although it is growing all the time...
Have you had anything published?

I have a SF vignette called simply "The Ship" published about a decade back in a small RPG fanzine (called "Roleplayer"). More recently I was published in part of an anthology called "Blue" produced by the Oxford based Random Writers group, of which I was a founding member. It was a auto-vanity print run of about 50 copies with hand created covers (using rubber stamp and ink pad).

So no. ;)
 
Iain Banks

Aha, I was wondering if there was another fellow by that name, sans middle initial. Interesting, and I'm envious he's able to do both. Perhaps publishers are more percipient in Blighty, hm?

Oh, and as for publishing histories and so forth, check http://www.genestewart.com sometime for a decent cross-section of yours truly's.
 
Thanks for the link re writings, interesting stuff. I haven't gotten anything in print yet , but it is interesting to hear from those who have.
 
Here's a surprise!

Salman Rushdie says TV drama series have taken the place of novels
Booker-prizewinning novelist to write sci-fi drama for television, citing The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men as an inspiration
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

Salman Rushdie is to make a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories.
"It's like the best of both worlds," said the novelist in an interview with the Observer. "You can work in movie style productions, but have proper control."

The new work, to be called The Next People is being made for Showtime, a US cable TV network. The plot will be based in factual science, Rushdie said, but will contain elements of the supernatural or extra-terrestrial. Although filming is yet to begin, a pilot has been commissioned and written. It will have what Rushdie described as "an almost feature-film budget".

Showtime has announced that the hour-long drama will deal with the fast pace of change in modern life, covering the areas of politics, religion, science, technology and sexuality. "It's a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people," said Rushdie, 63, best known for Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. "It's not exactly sci-fi, in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it, but there are certainly elements which are not naturalistic," he said in the interview, which will appear in full in the Observer later this month.

The idea that Rushdie might create a television show came from his US agents who suggested that he would have more creative influence than with a feature-film script.
"They said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality – or the writing quality – of movies has gone down the plughole.
"If you want to make a $300m special effects movie from a comic book, then fine. But if you want to make a more serious movie… I mean you have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight's Children."

Deepa Mehta, an Oscar-nominated director, is currently making a film version of Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize winning novel, under the title Winds of Change, that will be co-scripted by the author. "I'm in this position where, for the first time in my writing life, I don't have a novel on the go, but I have a movie and a memoir and a TV series," said Rushdie, who is working on an account of the most famous and troubled era of his life – the period when his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses put him at the centre of a dangerous international controversy.

In 1989, Tehran radio broadcast a fatwa, or religious edict, from the Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran, which called the book blasphemous and put a price on the author's head. Rushdie lived through the next decade in hiding.

The former advertising copywriter's first novel Grimus, was partly science fiction and his novels since have often been described as examples of the vivid literary school of "magical realism".

Rushdie agreed that "my writing has always had elements of the fantastical" but said that he was drawn to television by the comparatively high status of the writer in the process. "In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee. In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
"You have control in the way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, West Wing was Aaron Sorkin," he explained.

Rushdie said that he is also considering doing much of the writing for an ensuing series alone. "Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel."

The Next People is being made by Working Title, the film company behind many of the most successful British Films of the last 20 years from Four Weddings and A Funeral to Bean, Shaun of the Dead and the Nanny McPhee films.

Rushdie has written the first draft of the script and will executive-produce the show, alongside British producers Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Shelley McCrory, the former NBC executive who runs the company's TV projects.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/ju ... e-tv-drama
 
I've only read one of his books - The Moors Last Sigh - and I really enjoyed it. Clever and much wittier than I anticipated. This could be a 'good thing'. Don't know much about Showtime, but Working Title seem to do good dramas, as well as being vaguely populist.
 
Science fiction — or, as aficionados tend to call it, speculative fiction, because it’s based on speculations about humanity’s future — has become a seriously mainstream business. The teen market is lapping up futuristic worlds that project today’s trends into terrible technological dystopias, from Divergent to The Hunger Games, while adults are going for films like Elysium and upcoming thriller Ex Machina. But it turns out there might be more to promoting sci-fi than just a liking for androids and a fondness for Leonard Nimoy (RIP). Some prominent fans of the genre are also advocating science fiction as a way to make people and societies more ethical. But are they correct, or full of hot space-gas?

Michael Shermer, a prominent advocate for science who edits Skeptic magazine, gave an interview to WIRED this week in which he made the case for science fiction’s ethical credentials. And he’s not alone. After a series of revelations about the power of reading fiction in general (it turns out that a few hours in the head of a fictional character makes our brains more empathetic) science fiction, which has spent decades maligned as the stuff of “un-literary” readers, is gathering allies as one of the biggest sources of ethics on our shelves.

So do the arguments hold up, or are they just fantasy? Here are six reasons that reading and watching sci fi might make us better people. (Better nab that Isaac Asimov bookquick.)

1. Sci-Fi Has Always Been Focussed On Moral Messages
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We’ve been writing fiction that takes scientific issues and speculates about their future for centuries. And it’s always had a double purpose: working out humanity’s moral knots, as well as geeking out about shiny technology. Venerable French author Voltaire even made fun of humanity’s absurdity through the perspective of a visiting gigantic alien inMicromegas (1752).

Science fiction has taken on everything from slavery to mind-altering drugs to the propaganda qualities of television, in many cases decades before contemporary culture had caught up. And even if the story is only focussed on some future invention going horribly wrong, it’s still got a deeper human message: the danger of hubris. ...

http://www.bustle.com/articles/7070...ience-fiction-makes-you-a-more-ethical-person
 
... Michael Shermer on The Day the Earth Stood Still:

“My favorite all-time film is The Day the Earth Stood Still. Most people don’t realize that it’s a Christ allegory. Klaatu comes down to earth … and he wants to deliver this warning that we have a sinful nature—like original sin—and we have to repent or else. … Then the authorities—like the Romans—the government tracks him down and kills him. … So Gort the robot … takes him back to the spaceship and resurrects him. And in the original script the Patricia Neal character, who’s sitting there watching this with her mouth open, is like, ‘Whoa, that’s amazing! He’s alive again. He was dead. You mean this is the power that science and technology have in the future?’ And in the original script he says, ‘Yeah,’ but in the film he says, ‘No, no, nobody has that sort of power. It’s reserved for the great spirit in the sky,’ or some such thing. And the reason for that is that the Breen censorship board in 1951 said, ‘You can’t say that to American film viewers. They’ll freak out. ...

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/geeks-guide-michael-shermer/
 
I think there's a lot in this.
Speaking personally, I read a HUGE amount of SF when I was young, and I think it's what made me the broad-minded person I am today. Otherwise, I wouldn't have thought so much about so many diverse issues, considered possibilities, experimented with ideas...and I wouldn't know half as much as I do.
 
I think there's a lot in this.
Speaking personally, I read a HUGE amount of SF when I was young, and I think it's what made me the broad-minded person I am today. Otherwise, I wouldn't have thought so much about so many diverse issues, considered possibilities, experimented with ideas...and I wouldn't know half as much as I do.

In my experience, people who read science fiction tend to be intelligent, sensitive, empathetic and highly trustworthy. It's not a genre I am familiar with, but that doesn't mean I'm a cad.
 
The Day the Earth Stood Still is definitely a Christ-allegory; why do you think the alien takes on the name Mr Carpenter?
 
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Incidentally my new avatar is a depiction of my most recent character for Orion's Arm; Lefty Mulligan, a cyborg cop who has two left-hand sides, one facing forward and one facing backward. Not the most convenient arrangement. The first story about Lefty was in the second book of OA short stories; I'm in the middle of writing the second story about him now.
 
How about the theory that the Terminator Trilogy is an allegory of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ?

(Obviously this was written before Terminator 4 - I guess you could interpret that film as being an allegory of the apocalyptic battle of the Book of Revelations. Or you could just interpret it as a boring mediocre mess.)
 
Science fiction and social justice: giving up on utopias
ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN 18 August 2015

We make fiction that disrupts the status quo, examines change as a collective, bottom up process, centers marginalized communities - and is neither utopian not dystopian.

I've been facilitating visioning sessions for organizers for a while now. We get together and imagine the world as we say we want to see it. There are often themes - gardens and local food, schools, children safe and free, abundant water, gender fluidity or equality, and the absence of isms, injustice, prisons, violence.

We articulate these things with each other and affirm our visions, and then we go back to our work and lives, where the majority of our practices run counter to the utopian visions we espouse. We are punitive with each other, with our families, with our friends, in our movements. We hoard and waste resources. We laugh at difference, we hide our hearts.

We dream well, we mean well, then we keep on being human.

The visions don't feel attainable, they have nothing to do with our daily lives. They are utopias, perfections. Even the most righteous among us don't live like that.

The more social justice work I support, and the more science fiction I write and read, the more I realize the danger of utopias. ...

https://www.opendemocracy.net/trans...ans-giving-up-on-utopias#.VdMGDg4Nd2w.twitter
 
Thank you for that link, that was a very cool , concise and well written piece by Ms. Brown
And I just love the last words,

"... Relinquish utopia. Justice is our work today."

Kind of need to hear that, repeatedly.
 
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