Using the panel
discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in London this
past August, I will jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with
the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. The link is
provided below…
8/14/2014 – 10:00 am
“One of the most common complaints about Suzanne Collins’
The Hunger Games is that the world she proposed was, at best, implausible.
Collins is not alone in this. But to what extent do we need veracity from our
imagined futures, and how much does the measure of ‘plausibility’ differ from
reader to reader? Is a science fictional story diminished if it’s too divorced
from the physical reality we live in? Is there a difference between a future we
can see and a future we can only hypothesize in the abstract? Vylar Kaftan (M),
Janet C Johnston, Kin-Ming Looi, Ian McDonald, Stephanie Saulter”
Tough questions!
I’ve discovered that “implausibility” is a slippery concept.
For example, Robert A. Heinlein in a narrative from his 1942 novel BEYOND THIS
HORIZON wrote: “For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty and war have been
things found only in the history tapes.”
Tapes? REALLY???
Certainly Heinlein was ahead of his time for a while there.
Then CDs, ipods, and electronic databases left him behind. Written at the turn
of the century, this article http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/compulit.htm
completely misses out on smartphones. Not even the “greats” were able to
imagine a future in which eight-year-olds would walk around their schools and be
able to not only take pictures with a flat device that is entirely electronic
but reproduces sounds of mechanical devices; but can access global databases
without using a physical keyboard by merely speaking a search into their
smartphone. No one imagined 20-somethings
seriously addressing their cellphones by the name “Siri”.
In fact the total miss of science fiction writers regarding
computers is so profound that when I typed smartphone and database, the spellchecker
on this computer didn’t underline them as misspelled words – it didn’t even
underline spellchecker as a misspelled word.
So what is “implausible”? Certainly second-grader-global-internet-data-searches
would have been implausible twenty years ago!
By the same token, antigravity, a staple of SF stories for a
long time, hasn’t even reached the theoretically applicable stage yet. In fact,
“The Institute for Gravity Research of the Göde Scientific Foundation has tried
to reproduce many of the different experiments which claim any ‘anti-gravity’
effects. All attempts by this group to observe an anti-gravity effect by
reproducing past experiments have been unsuccessful, so far. The foundation has
offered a reward of one million euros for a reproducible anti-gravity
experiment.” (Wikipedia, “Anti-gravity”)
Is “antigravity” implausible? If we granted that, we’d
eliminate virtually all space opera (writers from Asimov to Zahn) and pretty
much limit space exploration to chemical rockets in the nearer parts of the
Solar System and only robotic exploration of anywhere beyond.
Like I said, all of the questions above are good ones, but
in the long run, most of us read and write SF because we don’t really care
about plausibility! So, the criticism of Collins’ HUNGER GAMES books? Their
popularity – and the fact that most of the writers on this panel have more than
likely read at least once of them – makes it appear to me that plausibility is
far from being enshrined in even the hardest science fiction.
Program Book: http://www.loncon3.org/documents/ReadMe_LR.pdf
Image: http://www.sportsmanskihaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/c9fb0618_mcfly-682_1393873a.jpeg
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