Derivative Plots?

[Shecky]

That's precisely the point they're making - in that school of thought, all themes are recycled and recombined, with details only window dressing. And they have a point. The difference lies in how one looks at literature afterwards. Some sneer at it all and accuse authors of doing nothing but rehashing old ideas. Others take it as a given and watch for authors who put a fresh spin on all the old concepts, and they can actually ENJOY what they read as a result.

I'm in the second group. It's a pathetic bunch in the first group who take pleasure in trying to tear down successful authors by saying that they're doing nothing new; we all already KNOW that that's the case... and that it doesn't matter.

[Quantus]

See, that's what I disagree with.

The best of edge-pushing SF can go beyond that because, unlike mainstream, it can ask what if human nature itself changed in non-mimetic ways.

I think that is true up to a point.  I will grant you that many science fiction writers have used the loose limits of setting that SciFi allows (Asimov, Wells, and Verne all come to mind).  But when you get down to it, any of those stories could have been told in a completely non-SciFi genre.  The invading aliens could have just been invading barbarian tribes or unknown foreigners in a distant past.  The identity struggle and issues of persecution in some of Asimovs stories could have been told in the segregated South, or immigrant flooded new england a century ago, or a Muslin today.  Maybe not as effectively, but it could have been done. 

The point is that SciFi, when its all said and done, is a distinction of Setting.  One that allows for a much wider selection of plot devices, making it easier to delve into unexplored corners of the human condition.  But still just Setting.  The Nothing New argument is that when you strip away Setting, What is left is Theme.  And Themes are all just various facets of the Human Condition, and that all the facets have been covered at one time or another, in one form or another, in one setting or another. 


/end rant

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I think that is true up to a point.  I will grant you that many science fiction writers have used the loose limits of setting that SciFi allows (Asimov, Wells, and Verne all come to mind).  But when you get down to it, any of those stories could have been told in a completely non-SciFi genre.  The invading aliens could have just been invading barbarian tribes or unknown foreigners in a distant past.  The identity struggle and issues of persecution in some of Asimovs stories could have been told in the segregated South, or immigrant flooded new england a century ago, or a Muslin today.  Maybe not as effectively, but it could have been done. 

This is why I did not actually suggest these stories, but the examples I raised above, which do not work transferred to another genre.

This is getting way off-topic; I'm unsure whether Author Craft or media Favourites would be a better place to take it, but I am inclined to the former.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Not familiar with those; could you provide a summary as it pertains to this topic?

Permutation City is a novel about, among other things, being able to upload human personalities and edit them, so that people can, at a drop of a hat, pick something to be obsessively interested in and make themselves be so.  I don't want to spoiler it too much, but it examines the consequences of this in a really impressive way.

Diaspora is a sort of related book which does some similar things.  It opens with an amazing section called "Orphanogenesis" which starts off as a highly technical discussion of how one builds a new sentience out of software, and ends up in first-person POV of the sentience that has been built, and does, IMO, a smooth gradual transition between them.

Blindsight's narrator is a human who because of radical brain surgery has lost the capacity for empathy entirely, and who has hence had to develop the facility to intellectually deduce what's going on in other people's heads to an extreme degree; because of this, he is assigned to a crew of even weirder and more alien people going out to make contact with aliens, as an interpreter to translate their thoughts and insights for the folks back home.  I suppose one could just about force a story like that into mainstream, or at least as much embedded in a realistic world as, say, Arkham Asylum, except for the bit with the aliens.  But it would be a real push, and neither of the others seem to me to be doable in mimetic fiction at all.  Also there are some of Egan's short stories that do similar things, such as "Learning To Be Me", in which the narrator is having his mind recorded for long-term storage, and has a philosophical crisis as to whether he is really the copy of him running on his brain, which is mortal and going to die, or the copy running on the recorder which is less so, and whether there is any way of telling the difference.

[Shecky]

Most interesting. I can think of ways to parallel those themes in a non-SF way (and already have some roughed out mentally), though. Of course, it's never going to be an EXACTLY replicated theme, but the essentials are still there.

1) I've seen a few works that have people taking completely tailor-made medications/drugs to reshape their personalities, even though that can be thought of as borderline SF. Then again, there have been plenty of real-life cases of people deciding to change themselves and doing so through therapy or other help; only the mechanism and the efficiency of the mechanism are different from your example.

2) Combo of creation stories and first-person religion-heavy stories. Again, different mechanism, same concepts; as I was suggesting earlier, it's the combination that's new.

3) Certain kinds of autism present as a total lack of empathy; I believe there are a few books on the market today written by autistic people and their personal story of the fight to simulate social awareness.

4) ("Learning To Be Me") Hmm. Sounds quite a bit like any questioning of self-identity; for that matter, "which one is me?" applies perfectly easily to the "me" of 20 years ago, the "me" of now and the "me" after a brain-damaging accident.

The essential concepts of the characters' issues are not new. What's new to some degree or other is the method by which the concepts are combined and presented. So, yes, they're not new, while they ARE new, both in important ways.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

2) Combo of creation stories and first-person religion-heavy stories.

You don't count those as inherently fantasy ?

[Yeratel]

My great aunt was a voracious reader well into her 90s, and I remember discussing this subject with her one time. Her take was, "If you boil a plot down to its bones, in the end it's always about sex."

[Shecky]

You don't count those as inherently fantasy ?

Yes, which is one of the reasons I separate fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy is perhaps THE original human fiction form (I wasn't there, of course, but it seems a pretty safe bet ); SF has only been around since the 19th century. In fact, I'd class fantasy, mythology and legend in the same gang. Look at those very same "nothing new under the sun" ancient Greeks; a big chunk of their writing was fantasy, if you think about it.

SF's about as close as we get to truly "new", and even that builds on the same stuff; it's the mechanics that differ.

[Quantus]

Yes, which is one of the reasons I separate fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy is perhaps THE original human fiction form (I wasn't there, of course, but it seems a pretty safe bet ); SF has only been around since the 19th century. In fact, I'd class fantasy, mythology and legend in the same gang. Look at those very same "nothing new under the sun" ancient Greeks; a big chunk of their writing was fantasy, if you think about it.

SF's about as close as we get to truly "new", and even that builds on the same stuff; it's the mechanics that differ.

Nah, the first human fiction was the good old fashioned boast:  "I swear, that bear musta been eight, no nine, ten feet tall.  And I think there mighta been two of them.  No, Im sure, there were four!"

I dont so much separate SF and Fantasy because the only difference is that scifi calls the magic Science.  The potion is just a drug, the monster is a genetic creation, or an alien, the magic sword actually has nano-bots in the hilt, the man could through lightning because of implants in his hands, etc.  SF just takes tech across the line into fantasy.  its just easier for us to buy since the 19th century because we believe in science now instead of magic.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

My great aunt was a voracious reader well into her 90s, and I remember discussing this subject with her one time. Her take was, "If you boil a plot down to its bones, in the end it's always about sex."

There does come a point at which categories are so broad as to become useless...

I always used to hate it when people told me my frequent dreams about looking for books were "really" about looking for love, or sex.  Especially when they were about very specific books that I very much wnated for a long time, and put a lot of effort into hunting down.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I dont so much separate SF and Fantasy because the only difference is that scifi calls the magic Science.  The potion is just a drug, the monster is a genetic creation, or an alien, the magic sword actually has nano-bots in the hilt, the man could through lightning because of implants in his hands, etc.  SF just takes tech across the line into fantasy.  its just easier for us to buy since the 19th century because we believe in science now instead of magic.

Science isn't about belief, though.  It's inherently testable and it works.  What it's for is a matter of belief, sure, but equating it with magic at that precise level is a scale error.

At risk of opening a long and complicated argument, I disagree entirely with your main point too.  The difference between SF and fantasy isn't furniture, it's attitude.  In SF the unknown is there to be explained and figured out, and everything, even if not rationally explained, is rationally explicable.  It's the faith in the explicability of the universe that makes SF a distinct thing.

Yes, this makes Star Wars fantasy, but really, will affecting reality directly through The Force ? Fantasy. However many spaceships you add.

[Shecky]

I've never understood the idea that will's having an effect on physical reality automatically counted as fantasy. Why does this get assumed (I'm guilty of it sometimes, too)?

I think (re-tangenting here) that what you're calling SF is really hard SF, the stuff written with science clearly thought out. Non-hard SF, the kind that says "Oh, yeah, really, this funky scientific advancement DOES work - trust me", edges closer to fantasy than to the SF ideal. I mean, the Dresdenverse is rigorously thought-out, with consistency being of great importance; it qualifies more as SF than does some of the non-hard SF I've seen.

[knnn]

The ancient Greeks were already saying, "There is nothing new under the sun,"

...and they stole that from King Solomon   

"What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
There is nothing new under the sun."

Ecclesiastes 1:9

knnn.

[Shecky]

Where do you think old Solly got it?

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I've never understood the idea that will's having an effect on physical reality automatically counted as fantasy. Why does this get assumed (I'm guilty of it sometimes, too)?

Because it translates emotional reality directly into physical in ways that have no basis in our actual understanding of the universe.

I think (re-tangenting here) that what you're calling SF is really hard SF, the stuff written with science clearly thought out.

If we have this argument, we'll just all draw our own lines in different places, and I do not think anything will be resolved.  Since Damon Knight is no longer with us, we can't even call on him to come over and point at things for us.

I mean, the Dresdenverse is rigorously thought-out, with consistency being of great importance; it qualifies more as SF than does some of the non-hard SF I've seen.

Agreed, to an extent; there is too much intentionally left blank - cf. the discussions elsewhere about the exact nature of God in the Dresdenverse - for it to really feel like an entirely SFnal world to me.

Contrast Mike Carey's Felix Castor books, urban fantasy with exorcist protagonist, in which all of a wide range of supernatural stuff happening is, seemingly, consequences of one Event about a decade before the first book, the exact nature of which is being worked out as the series goes on. To my mind those are science fiction.