SomePossible minor advantage of Sci Fi over other genres

Of course Sci-Fi is not exactly a genre, its more of a convention or ethos about how you work out your plots...to wit, you have more room to work with as in:

In the Sci Fi ethos if I want to propose a completely alternative explanation for the basic symbols and narratives of a civilization, I could consider proposing the whole "thing" as an "alternate reality"...ie rather than proposing that everyone in a given civilization has completely deceived for thousands of years. The alternative reality method of exploring possibly different interpretations of basic symbols in civilizations offers a certain number of advantages:

1) you the writer get to work out many possible ramifications (while treating the re-interpreted civilization as in some sense "real" and coherent...in fact the more "real" and coherent the better in the scifi ethos)
2) the reader can maintain their own interpretations and compare them systematically with your construct, thus making for an interplay between their understanding and your playful reinterpretation
3) the story can move relatively freely through these possibilities

Of course the disadvantage is that people who believe in crackpot "conspiracy" or just plain insane "theories" (Chariots of the Gods, the evil Church, the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy, the Illuminati, the bicameral mind, worlds in collision and so on) will not be interested and you will not make millions since you will have made it clear that you are proposing an alternative reality and not a spurious explanation of a systematically skewed and deranged interpretation of this "reality"...of course paradoxically, by recognizing what is real in this reality, your alternative reality is actually a better commentary on this reality.

But you won't get rich...though you will have the satisfaction of adhering to your scifi ethos.

Wow! I wish I could get my Subject line to read: a possible minor advantage of Sci Fi over other Genres....

$ Boobs

MattW said:

Plus you can have hot aliens with 4 boobs.

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That would be hard to work out as a "now the truth is known" kind of conspriacy theory.

As in, they hid those boobs for thousands of years, and only now, thanks to something in Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks version 1, do we know that President Taft was really two different women.

Curiously implausible, on the face of it.

I'm not too concerned about the "actual" "mechanism"

Rllgthunder said:

Why not consider basing a Sci-Fi story on String Theory? The current hypothesis being when two planes of existence ‘collide’ another big bang is set off, creating a new universe.

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Is that the current best Scifi method for "explaining" alternative realities?

I've always preferred some verison of the co-existence multiple versions of the universe...or "parallel universe" convention.