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opinion: magic fiction
Einstein said: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science."
That is one point where science and fiction would meet - at something mysterious.
The problem with SciFi is that it's so far from science. I often feel SciFi should be phrased as fictitious science (FiSci) or magic fiction (MagFi).
We love to indulge in a magical and fictitious world and call it SciFi for our ignorance in science allows us to do so.
Is Harry Potter SciFi? Critiques do not think so. How come Heroes is termed SciFi and not MagFi when there is so much magic in Heroes?
Heroes is a good story. I love(d) it. The plots are good, the characters are well developed and all that. But it breaks conservation laws - momentum and energy, defies length contraction, defies relativistic mass, defies compressive flow fluid mechanics and I can go on about the numerous theories of physics it spits on.
And this is apart from the magic about how gene alteration can make a person fly without wings. Levitation? Bending space-time? Time travel is not about bending space-time but levitation is. So they writers got their physics wrong. I can go on about how fictitious and magical the science in Heroes is.
Da Vinci Code. Let's not go to that 'history lesson'. I have friends citing the Da Vinci Code as a history resource. I suppose the author managed to convince the poor ignorant soul in to believing that what he is presenting in his work of fiction is actually factual! It took a few history critiques to debunk the Da Vinci conspiracies.
Science as we know it has managed to explain most phenomena in a logical sense. We call these theories. So these theories would tell us how things work in our universe. A starting point to a good SciFi is by changing these fundamental theories. Because all other dependent theories will follow it and that would allow a nice story to be written.
Take Star Wars for example. It's a good SciFi series. Midichlorians govern the Force. The Force can be felt by anyone because they would have Midichlorians in them.
My point is that, ignorance allows us to think magic is science and since science is factual, the magic in fiction is factual.
I remember when I was in school, in year 8, we had a poem to study for Sinhala. The author talks about a tree god called 'aiyyanayaka (අයියනායක)'. Village folk worship the tree god giving it offerings, breaking a branch in respect, etc. He talks about how us city dwellers would call that blissful ignorance when it offers solace to the village folk.
As a reader, would you tolerate bad grammar? If I am to say me is here, you would ask me to go back to school and learn some grammar. From the days of IRC and "/me" was a commonly used chat command. It allowed a user to express his/her status like for example "away from keyboard". The command presented whatever the user typed after the /me command in third person. For example if I typed "/me is AWFK", the IRC program would present it as "shehal is AWFK". But later it users stared expressing themselves using the /me command. For example "/me is hungry" was read as "shehal is hungry". So "/me is" became a form of expression among geeks because they like to express themselves in lines of code or something cool like that.
So if /me is to think that /me is a third person singular pronoun just like how the Heroes writer found that it was okay to allow Hiro to bend space-time and allow him to go back in time as opposed to levitate, would you allow it? You might even find it offensive and ridicule the writer for spitting on grammar like that.
But would you find it offensive if the writer used bad science? Why not? Is it not the same thing as using bad grammar? Just as much as grammar is used to express or describe an event, science is used to describe the phenomenon. Bad science is like bad grammar in the sense it distorts the phenomenon.
- shehal's blog
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Comments
I agree with this. I blame the audience. Most of the audiences are ignorant about science. So even if a movie makes blatant unscientific, or just plain illogical assertions .. people don't notice it. So obviously movie makers are going to take advantage. You know idiots are easily entertained too (ignorance is bliss) .. they can lower the budget and attract a larger audience.
I can't stand to watch movies that have magic and blatant logic flaws.
Based on that quote about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic .. I would like to state the following:
"The bigger the fool, the more they can't distinguish magic from science"
is indistinguishable from magic
an interesting read. but i think that you have some elements mixed up.
lets start off with the term "science fiction".. most people call it "speculative fiction" now.
of course it can be argued that ALL fiction is speculative. ranging from what if four kids and a dog ran off to an island and find a treasure wreck and and andandandandand.. all the way to aliens killing planets harvesting souls and hiding them in volcanoes..
but on the whole the two genres known as "fantasy" and "scifi" are both considered to be in the uber-genre of "speculative fiction"
the line between them can be rather blurry however
star wars is an epitome of the blurry line. many would call it sci-fi,but its not. it is a fantasy story. it has magic (the force), the old magician (ben kenobi), the young apprentice (luke), the rogue (han), the barbarian (chewbacca), the princess, the dark magician, the evil emperor, it even has swords. yes they have aliens and space ships, but this is pretty much incidental.
in the same way, the original battlestar galactica, and star trek (described by roddenberry himself as "a wagon train to the stars") can all be called 'space opera" - normal people and normal situations set in space. while star trek especially had some interesting "science" episodes, what was dealt with was mainly human parables in a futuristic setting.
a basic, and inaccurate, breakdown would be, if it has magic and swords, it is fantasy, if it has lasers and spaceships, its sci-fi.
but this is not a good split. after all, how is "eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog" any different from "reverse the polarity of the forward defence matrix by reconfiguring the dilithium crystal reactors"?
if you want to see mystery novels done in a sci-fi futuristic area, read "isaac asimov's mysteries" - very good book. but some of the best sci-fo for me is what is referred to as "hard" sci-fi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction) which looks to a more technical approach to science. it also looks at how people react to the science itself. david brin is a very good author in the field (i recommend both "earth" and "the heart of the comet"). i'm yet to find a "fantasy" book that does that.
another recommended reading is "the hero with a thousand faces" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
for me heroes was ok as spec-fi. "what would you do if you woke up and found you had $power" sure we can say yes the power comes from a genetic manipulation etc etc etc, but lets face it, its just a fancy way of saying "magic"
hard sci-fi tries to address the issues, and even hard fantasy may work. what if magic suddenly returned? (read the shadowrun rpg for more). would/could you have a magic wand that can be hacked or modded with science.. or vice versa?
trying to classify any form of fiction as "real science" is difficult, unless you are dealing in the hard-sci-fi area. otherwise people would believe that you can take a crainy closed circuit camera image and blow it up so that the reflection of the robber in the window of a car on teh street outside can be blown up and enhanced until you see that the robber has a missing front tooth and a mole under his left eye.. oh they already DO believe it? my bad
trying to take any work of fiction as a scientific/religious document is BAD. (see the bible and dianetics)..
just read it, enjoy it, put it away. if you want science read the scientific journals, if you want philosophy and something to think about read hard-sci-fi. if you just want to put your brain in neutral and chill, read pretty much anything else.
that is all
"trying to take any work of fiction as a scientific/religious document is BAD. (see the bible and dianetics)..
just read it, enjoy it, put it away. if you want science read the scientific journals, if you want philosophy and something to think about read hard-sci-fi."
I am not saying that fiction should be scientific document. I'm being critical about how far the science in fiction is from science as we know it. Stories like Heroes defy fundamental science over and over without a basis. At least in Star Wars there was a basis.
Would you read something that has bad grammar and be able to enjoy it? Or something with a weak plot or badly developed characters?
Recall that Da Vinci code was portrayed to be historically accurate. Then after history critiques debunked most of the claims in the Da Vinci code, loyal readers were saying "yeah but you know it's just fiction".
Everything about Da Vinci code was nice accept that it 'historical facts'. By 'historical facts' I mean the study of history, validated by archeology, etc. The story and writing was so appealing that readers wanted to believe it's fiction as fact.
So yeah it would be pretty sad if one was to read fiction as a means of educating himself/herself of history, science, law, etc.
You're saying Science is factual. Science is not factual, all science is theory. Your writing is also far too convoluted and doesn't offer an elegant arguments to any of the points you claim to make, and perhaps you should stick to/ indulge in taking pictures of food? :p :p
thank you for you opinion
convolutions
but i think you have misunderstood my (convoluted f*g) functions, f and g
:p
i said:
"Science as we know it has managed to explain most phenomena in a logical sense. We call these theories. So these theories would tell us how things work in our universe. A starting point to a good SciFi is by changing these fundamental theories. Because all other dependent theories will follow it and that would allow a nice story to be written."
and then i said:
"My point is that, ignorance allows us to think magic is science and since science is factual, the magic in fiction is factual."
What I meant to say is that readers would like to think that magic is factual in the same sense they would think science is factual. Perhaps I should have rephrased it. My apologies.
I am not of the view that science is absolute or factual. (and I have expressed this in several blog posts)
"all science is theory"
The literal sense of theory and the scientific sense of theory are quite different. Theory is a significant end product of science. But science is not about that. It's like saying cooking is about food. Food might be the end product but is a process to make food.
From a scientific, all science is not theory. Theories are a component of science.
The Theory status of science is the second highest next to the status of being a Law. For example, conservation of energy is a Law and Newton's laws of motions are theories (although we call it laws).
Then there are hypotheses, including String theory, which are being tested.
Observation and measuring is another important component of science. The experiments conducted at CERN's LHC for example is an attempt to test some predictions made by String theory.
my arguments - functions f and g
"My point is that, ignorance allows us to think magic is science and since science is factual, the magic in fiction is factual."
"But would you find it offensive if the writer used bad science? Why not? Is it not the same thing as using bad grammar? Just as much as grammar is used to express or describe an event, science is used to describe the phenomenon. Bad science is like bad grammar in the sense it distorts the phenomenon."
And convolution f*g is confusing?
But then again Popper's arguments were not clear to you.
As to what I should be stick to
I suppose the number visits to my posts would be a good judge.
I get 25,000-45,000 visits per month (depending on the month).
About 40% of them are from Sri Lanka.
I have not blogged about food for a few months.
If there is an audience then why not?
http://kanabona.com/?q=all_posts&sort=desc&order=Views
Science is factual? First I've heard dude. See Karl Popper http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
Science Fiction, maybe - If scientists used L Points. http://alien-space-fiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/lagrange_points_make...
thank you ru for taking time the reading my post.
by science i didn't expect to include social sciences.
according to the popper's article you cited, he is comparing the non-factual-ness of some social sciences with physics.
he is saying that "the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability"
listed below are some phrases i found interesting:
"Among the theories which interested me Einstein's theory of relativity... The three others were Marx's theory of history, Freud's psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler's so-called 'individual psychology'....
...with the result of Eddington's eclipse observations which in 1919 brought the first important confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravitation. It was a great experience for us, and one which had a lasting influence on my intellectual development.
...
The three other theories I have mentioned were also widely discussed among students at the time.
...
It was the summer of 1919 that I began to feel more and more dissatisfied with these three theories—the Marxist theory of history, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology; and I began to feel dubious about their claims to scientific status. My problem perhaps first took the simple form, "What is wrong with Marxism, psycho-analysis, and individual psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from Newton's theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?
...
It was rather that I felt that these other three theories, though posing as science, had in fact more in common with primitive myths than with science; that they resembled astrology rather than astronomy."
and finally
"One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability."
science is limited on how accurately we can observe and measure a phenomena. thus, science keeps getting updated with the advancement of technology - with better and accurate observations.
at any given moment in history, science had the best factual explanation to a phenomenon.
if you analyze the inaccuracies of scientific theories most of them can be attributed to the inaccuracies of measurement and observation.
for example: newton's laws of motion are true for terrestrial applications where effects of relativity are not that apparent. it was accurate and factual enough for the US and russian space agencies to use in manned space missions. if you find science inaccurate and non-factual, don't drive. you never know when your breaks would fail or if your air conditioner would explode.
if you're not happy with that then you're more than welcome to indulge in a fictitious, magical or divine explanation as to how things work.
:p :p
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