The Official 'Is My Novel Science Fiction' Thread

Hi, I feel shy about explaining story too much, but basically, it's set in an entirely real world situation, with normal people, and no spaceships, aliens etc. Then something unexplained happens, and the explanation turns out to be sci-fi, but all the way through the story it's not clear if it's an unexplained event or mental illness. So it's kind of a mystery and a psychological thriller too.

The closest I can liken it to is something like John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos or Chocky... real world, one sci-fi event.

If anyone can tell me how I should classify it I'd be really grateful! :)

Deb

I'd consider that sci-fi. One sci-fi event in an otherwise normal world makes it sci-fi in my mind.

2008 Winner - Stray Kingdom
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TVM Spot. I'll consider it sci-fi, then. :)

Deb

My novel is set in the future (maybe 200/300 years time) where the majority of people communicate solely through computers and everyone's career is chosen for them at birth. Only, most of the novel I've planned so far is set in a civilisation much like our own, among the minority of people who chose a natural existence and are ignored by the high-tech world. It focuses on one person from each civilisation as they are forced grow to understand each other. I've never written sci-fi before, so I'm not 100% sure what qualifies.

"It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays..."

strdst_grl - Definitely scifi. You have it set in the future, and involve societal change and dealing with it and what it might mean. You're talking soft social science fiction here, from the sounds of things. Welcome! :)

My story is set in the near future (2012), not at all technology focused, and centers on the political, social/cultural, and military aspects of an extended U.S. war against terrorism, diverging from actual history in 2002. If anything, I think it should be classed as "speculative fiction". What do you all think?

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libranliterati - Science fiction doesn't need to be focused on technology! Soft, social science fiction describing "what if" might have happened in an alternate near-future? Sounds good to me!

My story is a bit complicated, since there are technically two settings. One is the story being told, by the narrator, that takes place in a high fantasy setting - but it's pretty technologically advanced; there's a lot of biopunk fun (some of which leads to zombies!) and nanotechnology, even amidst all of the dragons and elves and whatnot. The second is that of the narrator, a Professor of Interdimsensional Transportation at a Canadian (or American, haven't decided yet) university. Given that this is even a subject, there are obvious sci-fi undertones outside of the main bit of narration. To top it all off, the story is written as half-narrative, half-scientific study (with foot notes, references, and whatnot).

To summarize, a woman from a sci-fi future writes a scientific paper-novel on the going ons of a technologically advanced fantasy world. I'm putting it in fantasy for now, but the amount of sci-fi is pretty profound.

"I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated
With seeing the live, and fain would have thee dead.
I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet."

A general rule of thumb is that your story is "hard" SF if it couldn't be told without the scientific/technological element. Going by that standard, a lot of mainstream popular SF really isn't - it's "soft" SF, speculative fiction, or just fantasy with lasers.

An example of a "hard" SF story would be using an exotic kind of AI consciousness to explore what it means to be human. Or maybe exploring the effects of relativistic space travel on human culture. Or have a look at what kind of conflicts would arise on a space habitat in 10,000 years. You can't really tell that story without the science element.

On the other hand, most space opera like Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Star Wars is really just the Cold War/World War 2/some samurai movie...IN SPACE! If you change the setting and the names, you can still tell the same story. In this case, the "science" is just a backdrop for some humans to walk around and do things. You can play it off as SF, but there's no real reason to.

Now before the inevitable complaining starts, I'm not saying you can't or even that you shouldn't write these soft stories. There's nothing inherently wrong with re-writing Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica. Just realize that it's been done, and often you're not doing your story a favor by constraining yourself to the same-old.

On the other hand, some of the things posted in this thread, which may not seem like SF at first glance, really are - as long as they revolve around the speculative "what if...." element and the plot has some critical use of sci-tech, then you're golden. This can just as easily be the Internet and iPhones in 20 years as it can be antimatter starships racing around a black hole at the end of time.

2009: The Kings of Distant Stars

If you write space-based fiction and have questions, read the Atomic Rockets page.

I tend to call the movie / tV stuff sci fi (actually i tend to call everything sci fi, but i understand that that is so non U nowadays. SF is the new sci fi, and never shall the words that were used for generations ever be applied to the genre i love ever again.) As for Hard SF vs Soft SF, do it well and it doesn't matter, do it badly and it's just another few hours wasted reading the damn thing.

To me hard SF is Bear, and Baxter, and Brin not Banks though I think of his stuff as postmodern space opera with a softly cultural reference to the dystopian nature of a reality where the AI's simply let us live as pets and we in turn live our lives in hedonistic pleasure without rhyme or reason or even a full appreciation of our deminished state.

Of course you could argue that Bank's work can only work with the science elements in place, which makes it Hard, but i see it more as Soft.

Such a dificult thing to do classfying a genre that can and does contain every other genre within it. I don't mean that all fiction is SF, but SF can utilise the tools of all other styles of fiction. I think it is unique in that respect.

Mind you we don't want to go down the conceptual arts BS route of its Science Fiction coz i say it is. There are enough grifters in the world making a living by putting a red dot on a tile and selling it for a 10 000% mark-up.

:~)

Edited for a missing want

You have a problem with me? Then spit it out. Or do you only do passive/aggressive. Because nobody has ever accused me of being passive.

In one of the "Is It Sci-Fi?" threads last year I posted a famous quote by the late great Grand Master Damon Knight:

"Science fiction is what we point to when we say 'science fiction.'"

By which he made the excellent point (one that holds more true today than ever before) that "science fiction" is as much a community of writers and readers as it is a genre, and perhaps the biggest determining factor in whether something is or is not science fiction is whether or not it's embraced by that community.

Which isn't to say that there isn't a certain objective standard — stuff with galactic empires and faster-than-light space travel (quiet down, mundanes!) and nanotechnological post-humans would be hard-pressed to escape the classification. But on the other hand, look at Margaret Atwood's horrified repulsion at the notion that her The Handmaid's Tale and The Year of the Flood might just be science fiction; or the collective indifference with which the aforementioned sci-fi community regards Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I guess my point is that if something's in that shadowy borderland that defies definitive classification, like say a near-future military/political thriller (i.e. M.J. Engh's Arslan) or an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II (i.e. Robert Harris's Fatherland or a dozen others), if you present it as sci-fi to sci-fi readers, we the community will likely embrace it warmly as "our" science fiction. If you present it as a mystery or as literary fiction or as a romance novel to an audience that doesn't know the meaning of the words "grok" and "ansible", then it probably won't get labeled as science fiction, at least not without qualifications.

(Note this says nothing about quality, either of story or genre. One genre ain't better than another, nor is a story better just 'cause it's got spaceships and whatnot. Well, except for Foundation, just 'cause it's friggin' awesome. ^_^)

Ah, okay, good then.

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I think where most 'literary' types go wrong when they try to write science fiction (or for that matter fantasy -- look at the confused ending to His Dark Materials) is that they don't READ the classics, so they write a cloning story without reading ... er...(damn memory for titles really bad) ..Rendevous with Rama (that's the Clark story with a family of clones, right?) as a for instance. So they get the details wrong. The stuff that Science Fiction reader simply see instantly. "What, but enviromental factors determine the expression of genes so why would they be identical and think the same way. Flaming idiot." but critics gush bloody tears because of the beauty of the prose (what they mean is one of their own is slumming)

You have a problem with me? Then spit it out. Or do you only do passive/aggressive. Because nobody has ever accused me of being passive.

okay leaving now before my ranting becomes an annoyance to people who just want to know if their prospective story is sci fi...sorry..SF

You have a problem with me? Then spit it out. Or do you only do passive/aggressive. Because nobody has ever accused me of being passive.

Okay, My turn.
The storyline takes place in the close future, 2018. A new race of humans, called Hellions for their superhuman abilities, have been forced into hiding to escape genocide. The reason for their powers was genetic mutation on part of the cure for cancer gone wrong.

The reason why I ask is because other people I have asked said it sounds more fantasy that science fiction.

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You said that the super-powers were caused by scientific means. That makes your story sci-fi.

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This depends on the execution, really.

If by "superpowers" you mean amplified intelligence, maybe increased physical performance or healing ability to a degree, I'd buy that. Those kinds of things are feasible with biological means.

If you're talking X-Men or Superman, then it's pretty much fantasy. There's no way anyone will develop eye-beams or teleportation or the ability to fly from a genetic mutation.

2009: The Kings of Distant Stars

If you write space-based fiction and have questions, read the Atomic Rockets page.

Yeah, they develop powers, but it was gradually over the years since the release of the cure for cancer.

Also, with feasible means, that does happen. Example, the lead character of the book was confined to a wheelchair most of her life because she was born with underdeveloped legs. However, when she contracted the "virus", her legs were "fixed", as she gained the ability to walk and run faster than any normal human.

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Actually, the kinds of abilities usually associated with X-Men and similar stories are theoretically possible. In fact, some of them have already appeared in nature. We've all heard the story of the mother lifting a car off her baby. That sort of thing is due to high levels of adrenaline, but it suggests that humans are capable of developing super-strength. Sharks can sense the electrical impulses in the nerves of its prey. Since thoughts are little more than electrical impulses, it stands to reason that sensing those impulses could allow one to "hear" thoughts.

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This is probably a silly question, but if the main character is an AI robot it's probably safe to assume the story is Science Fiction, right?

Not necessarily - it depends how grounded the robot's working principles and the surrounding milieu are. M:TG has what can be described as AI robots, but you wouldn't describe it as science fiction, would you?

Well, hmm. I've always been a little unsure, since I'm probably not as well-versed in Science Fiction classics as I probably should be. The robot (named Sherlock) comes from a society of robots that spawned from the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic planet and eventually used the planet-wide junkyard to rebuild and inhabit the cities. They're completely aware of the inhabitants on other planets, especially Earth, and have always been secretly arguing about whether or not the Laws of Robotics even applies to them, since not only are they the only inhabitants of their planet, they have no idea who originally created their race.

It sounds like scifi to me. (M:TG's "robots" would be more properly called "golems", generally, anyhow. Sure, they've got the occasional clockwork or steampunkish thing, but nothing I'd really call a "robot".)

I think AI robots are certainly sci-fi. Though, they are rapidly becoming real science. The University of Maryland has owned a little AI robot for years. I've seen videos of it. It's actually kinda cute.

2008 Winner - Stray Kingdom
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I don't know whether to call my story sci-fi or fantasy. It's sort of both. I'm leaning towards fantasy with sci-fi aspects.

Basically, there IS space travel involved. A character finds a crashed spaceship and the owner of that spaceship (who is not from space, but from a kind of isolated area of the world that is secretly more advanced than other parts of the world). Oh, and it's a fantasy universe I've used in another novel, so there is magic involved. He is chasing after some myth or other about the stars. I haven't decided what yet. But the reason he's going to space isn't for aliens or anything. He's going there because he believes in some cultural myth about outer space and he wants to find the source, or see whether it's real or something.

The reason the above was written so badly is because my idea isn't fully developed yet. But would you say it's sci-fi or fantasy? Or something else? I'm suffering from genre confusion.

~Lomelindi~

Alright. Thanks, guys! :)

Lomelindi -

I think your story sounds like both, and my gut reaction is that there's no reason you can't call it both.

But if it would help you to place it in one box or the other, then I'd say it'd more likely fall under the fantasy umbrella. Most stuff I've seen that involves real-world science (like space travel) and real functioning magic tends to be presented as fantasy. I'm thinking specifically of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novels or Charles Stross' Merchant Princes novels, just off the top of my head...

My novel is set on Earth, in an experimental community set up to see if humans would be able to get along with an alien race that we contacted 30 years before the beginning of the story. Most of the story follows a teenage girl and her [failing] attempts not to fall in love with one of the aliens. Oh, and it turns out she's part alien, too, but she doesn't know that. Don't tell her!

I'm guessing this is sci-fi, but there's so much "everyday" stuff coming up in the plot that I was wondering if it still counted.

---`It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light
and one of the stars has been lost.'

- from "Lost Star", by Rabindranath Tagore

dssmith - There's aliens. 'Nuff said. Even Mork and Mindy was science fiction.

I want to say that my story is SF... in the beginning at least. There's space travel and AI systems and at least one android...

But the "high tech" element goes out the window right in the beginning when the two protagonists crash land on a planet with an abandoned colony that basically went Luddite several hundred years before and smashed all their high tech goodies, reverting back to a pre-industrial level. So the bulk of the story is about these old-fashioned-future-cultures rather than the technology. The android is still around, but he's posing as a human... the protagonists still use the knowledge they had in their more "advanced" culture, but they really don't have any doodads to work with.

I guess I'm more concerned as to whether a SF audience would be interested in reading something like this than figuring out whether it's *technically* SF or not.

I'm almost thinking of it as writing "fantasy without the magic" (I've lost my taste for magic lately). But what is fantasy without magic? Or SF with the technology missing? Meh. I'm gonna write it anyways because I'm totally in love with the idea, but I don't know if anyone will be interested in reading it.