I’m principally an SF reader, though I enjoy some fantasy. I think that one of the things I like about SF is that it tackles some big questions…but you write fantasy for the same reason.
Yes, it seems to me that the SF you like, as do I, so often the “ta-pocketa-pocketa” if you remember the old Walter Mitty movie, the ta-pocketa-pocketa takes over and the characters are just there to see that it happens at the right time. The best SF goes much beyond that and there certainly a lot of flaws in a lot of Fantasy as well, but perhaps that’s the reason I decided to go with Fantasy instead of SF.
Also, SF has absorbed something from mainstream literature, and that is something I think of as a moral ambivalence, which is the erroneous application of situational ethics. There really isn’t anything that’s right or wrong, there is no good or evil, it all depends on the circumstances.
Post-Modern ethics for a Post-Human culture.
And I look at this and say, no, no. There is right and there is wrong and there is good and there is evil, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. But it’s worth to try to tell the difference…you don’t just flip a coin.
Do you think that people are getting tired of this moral relativism?
I think so. Not to one value system. There are lots of value systems in this country. But I think that a lot of people want to believe in something, and they want a set of rules in life, or guidelines for life and behavior for what’s right to do, or what’s wrong to do and they may argue among themselves about whether this or that is right or wrong, but they want to believe in those things.
Tolerance is good, but being not caring is a bad thing.
Yes, there is a difference between being tolerant and being a sponge.
So, fantasy allows you to deal with moral issues, while SF focuses you on the technology though it grapples with them somewhat, it is a setting based genre rather than a character based one.
And the technology is very often much more important than the issues, it seems to me.
I say this as someone who likes Neil Stephenson. I like Greg Bear. I reread Heinlein periodically…I love Science Fiction.
Do you reread the Heinlein juveniles?
Absolutely. I hate what they did with Starship Troopers . I kept waiting for Heinlein to come out of his grave and beat them all over the head. They made it very blatant that we were going to have a Nazi future there…and it was clear that the people who made it had no understanding of Robert Heinlein, or what made him tick, or what he was writing about.
Aside from mucking up the concept, and with all the CGI they used, I really hated that they omitted the central technology in the film, the powered suit.
Ah, yes. I didn’t quite understand why they left that out. I looked at the whole movie and decided I didn’t want to buy the DVD on this one.
rj on reading ,
wot influences ,
rj on fantasy ,
rj on ethics
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.