Wolfe Vindicated Again!

António Pedro Marques · 16 Dec 2011, 15:53 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:53:25 +0000
Subject: (urth) Wolfe Vindicated Again!
In-Reply-To: <CAJ8=rti-8wG+pqEwmcTbNejRojomnZOeV2N2DmEidy5Mpu_Pdg at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAJ8=rti-8wG+pqEwmcTbNejRojomnZOeV2N2DmEidy5Mpu_Pdg at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4EEB6975.8010208 at gmail.com>

I think I should say what I think regarding GW's science (and history and 
mythology).

Some apparently believe GW to be some sort of expert physicist and biologist 
(and historian, and mythographer), who cannot make any mistakes or ignore 
any facts. That's obviously untenable. NOBODY can know everything Mankind 
knows today, and never make mistakes, and even if one could, Mankind itself 
has not progressed that far in its knowledge that such a person would never 
err. To believe that current knowledge is unshakeable and its progress will 
be merely gradual from now on is recentist. It really is the same as all 
those data tapes in early sf. Now, what people don't usually realise is that 
so-called hard sf is itself a matter of abundant data tapes. Then there's 
the opposite - people who consider that since current knowledge is never 
complete, then anything goes when devising their sceneries.

I don't think GW falls into either trap. For one thing, his stories are sf 
because sf frees him to do what a 'naturalist(ic)' framework wouldn't allow. 
Otherwise, they might do without the sf element. Yes, sometimes he is 
interested in exploring the real-sf possibilities of sf (as opposed to just 
the freedom from 'naturalism'), but that's not imo a very significant part 
of his work. Now, how does he cope with the problem of recentism vs 
absurdism? Quite well, I think - he does what he thinks can be reasonably 
defended. He doesn't try to make it defensible, nor offer tedious 
explanations for it; he just avoids that which would be awkward to defend. 
So if he wants an item that current knowledge has no way of producing, what 
he has to look into is whether it _is_ possible that a breakthrough in the 
understanding of the Universe will make it achievable. If so, why not use 
it? (Conversely, Ray Cummings's _Insect Invasion_ or tGitGA, while 
interesting, are simply too difficult to defend - but then RC's objectives 
were different from GW's.)

GW doesn't mean to teach science or history. He uses them carefully in 
building his world(s). He takes care not to do anything with them that can 
be absolutely invalidated. For instance, the Sun's visibility from Blue may 
or may not agree with current astrophysics, but our knowledge of 
astrophysics is not only seriously in its infancy, but the only way it will 
progress significantly is if most of it is wrong [and we come to be able to 
observe more of the Universe than it allows us today].

As to what hard sf really should be, I think some of AC Clarke is a good 
example - and it has nothing to do with projecting current knowledge and 
technology. It's rather having stories driven (at least in part, of course) 
by the logical outcome of actions and starting conditions, as understood by 
a science that may or may not be our own but is consistent. RVwM is a good 
example of this, imo, if one excepts the part about the 3-limbed aliens 
(which however was integral to the story, but I think the book would be 
better if the episode had been left out - the implication was there anyway, 
and one might think of better alternatives than the one presented).

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net