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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Real SF Fans Can Distinguish Science From Science Fiction Even If Futurologists Cannot

I often deride Robot Cultists for their inability to distinguish science from science fiction. So, too, I often deride futurologists as little more than bad science fiction writers (or, much the same, PR hacks peddling especially hyperbolic ad-content) whose “scenarios” amount to a sub-genre of scene setting without characters, plots, themes, or style commitments to make them worth reading, and inevitably borrowing even their settings from notions usually decades old by the time the futurologists get to them on top of that. One of the keen pleasures I get from reading the work of fellow sf fans on a site like io9 is observing that few intelligent readers and watchers of science fiction exhibit anything like the inverse inability to identify science fiction with science, and, even better, reading the comments sections that inevitably savage facile futurological efforts that would smudge this distinction -- as witness the delightful righteous chorus of cackles following upon an earnest proposal that we could launch anti-asteroid robot armies by means of magnetic levitation trains, rushing through thousand-mile tunnels then upward on a superconducting cable rising twelve miles into the low orbit from the Antarctic ice sheet for pennies to the dollar with technology ready to hand.

2 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

Eric has warned me that when he followed the link later last night a crowd of credulous nitwits had elbowed in to undermine my hasty overgeneralization somewhat (which is what I get for always looking on the bright side, /smirk). Still, he assures me that all the really smart and funny people are having none of the nonsense, of course.

jimf said...

> I often deride Robot Cultists for their inability to distinguish
> science from science fiction. . .
> [F]ew intelligent readers and watchers of science fiction
> exhibit anything like the inverse inability to identify
> science fiction with science. . .

I have to admit I can't parse this. "Inverse inability
to identify. . ."?

I mean, I guess you meant "Robot cultists can't distinguish
science from science fiction. Few intelligent SF readers
make this mistake."

But that would just be a (very plausible) guess. I
can't make the actual words come out that way (or any
intelligible way), even by attempting to fill in a missing "not",
replace an inadvertently-used antonym, or identify some
other malapropism. (Don't you just love that game? -- spot
the malapropism and try to think of the word that the
author **should** have used. Happens often enough, but I can't
think of a **single** example at the moment.[*])

Unless I'm allowed to transform "inverse inability to identify. . .
with. . ." into "corresponding inability to distinguish. . .
from. . .".

;->

[*] Oh hell, here's one. When somebody says "purveyed"
when they meant "pervaded". As in the documentary
"The Life of J. R. R. Tolkien"
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCqd9U43XGs )
when JRRT's eldest son Father John T. says that the
spirit of his father's Catholicism "purveyed" his books even
though it wasn't explicit.