How far down can you bring the science in science-fiction before it becomes simply fiction? For instance, if we image a world were exploration of the moon never ceased, and wherein this exploration led to development and a permanent society but stayed within the context of current existing technology, is this science-fiction? Or is science-fiction simply described as anything different than what actually exist technologically? Where does a military drone, with A.I. on the level of the most advanced video game fall? Where does that which is imagined in contemporary fiction end and science fiction begin? At the same time I love (some) Arthur C. Clarke novels as much as I love (some) Alastair Reynolds. One will teach you something incredibly important and clever and the other will use every ounce of illusion to provide blistering entertainment of the kind that has every right to be regarded as significant as any SF. Cosy SF is pointless. It is based on taking an arbitrary point in development and stopping there as if no advancement is made past that point. It is more artificial to create Mundane than futuristic because there is no evidence technology will come to a stopping point. I read SF to be inspired with the grand and the yet to be. If I want what is and has been I can read History. One tiny crack in the hull and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait until you're sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles, see if you're still so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding. Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence. A lot of the "I-want-Space-Opera-vastness" turns out to just be a cry for something as simple as, say, Alentejo, or maybe Trás-os-Montes, but painted in very big letters and blocks; the lives of quadrillions of people who speak a billion languages are not more interesting than the lives of million of people who speak thousands of languages; for story purposes they're the same thing with six more zeros. Good Space Opera is not so much about plausibility as it is about ceasing to mindlessly buy into tropes that have been extant for 60 years or more. You don't want FTL? Fine. You don't want "Wait Calculation"plot devices in your SF (Sky Haussmann's spaceships periodically receive data from their point of origin with details on how to upgrade their ships and engines, i.e., later launched ships beat the earlier launched ones is a pretty standard SF trope)? Fine too. Are you sure cryosleep can even work? What are you going to do if it doesn't? You don't think aliens can eat carrots, or “ever” live on Earth even though they breathe oxygen, because microorganisms will clog up whatever they use for lungs? Cool. GO MAKE UP SOME NEW SHIT. Stop depending on those old old old ideas as though they were a suit of clothes or a reliable classic car. What baffles me when I think of Alan Turing, is that he wanted to create a machine that could think and be smart, he thought of that in a world where there was none of that, he created machines and started that road of discovery. Today, we have computers and smartphones, and the only think that I find closer of what Alan Turing was pursuing, are the algorithms that detect your pattern of likes and dislikes in a web browser and make suggestions to you. We are so far in having that Artificial Intelligence that still the "Turing Test" is valid. I wonder if he were to be alive in this era, how disappointed he would be, the machines that can think only exist in SF. The same happens with the Space Elevator that both Clarke (and Reynolds) use. In Reynolds' case the stupid first chapter almost made me abandon it. A space elevator? 1st floor: Perfumes, 2nd floor: Ladies Footwear, ..., 5th thousandth floor: Roof top Observation Deck and Smokie Joe's Cigar Emporium and Smoking Area. Ever play "crack the whip" as a kid? A wind storm, even a moderate one, at the base would whip that thing around and snap everything off at the top. Plus. You can't use centrifugal force at that height with the (Earth or any other planet or structure) rotating as slowly as it does. Attach vast ball of string to same? Let earth's gravity pull on the ball and it will thus unravel as it descends? Intrepid astronaut-to-be catches flailing end of string and commences climb. (Where's a patent-office when one needs one?) Nope. The string has mass unfortunately. How long does a piece of string have to be before it snaps under it's own weight? A lot less than 23,000 miles...The original space elevator proposed by Arthur C. Clarke (Kim Stanley Robinson has also used elevators to low earth orbit in his Mars trilogy) has the center of mass at the geostationary orbit. For the cable to be able to support itself and the payload, the weight needed depends on what material the cable is made of. For steel, the weight needed exceed the weight of the known universe, for carbon fiber, the weight is about the weight of the moon. For nanotubes and graphene sheet, the weight is only a few thousand tons. We still have a long way to go to manufacture a real cable using these new materials. I'm not saying SF shouldn't use far-out concepts, but please. When I was fourteen and walked into the Praça de Chile library and saw Clarke's "The City and the Stars" it was the entirely abstracted city that caught my eye. I say nay to the strictures of delimiting. Let that hyperdrive fire up, Buck. Let's FLY...I prefer thinking "Chasm City" is all about redemption to avoid getting tangled up in the details....
