The Sci fi Equivalent of...

Sokal said:

So for example: the sci-fi equivalent of opium is jargon tree juice

The sci-fi equivalent of the French-Aztecs is the local low tech population

The sci-fi equivalent of fascists is the non-local high tech interlopers

And so on. Are there a lot of arbitrarily plausible sci-fi equivalents for things?

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Taken by themselves, your examples sound to me like the things that get picked out in some beginners' SF stories as being the reason the stories aren't SF. (If you can replace an important story element with a non-SF equivalent and the story remains essentially the same, it's not SF.)

Rather than assumptions, SF makes extrapolations from existing social and technological ideas. The plausibility comes from asking "what if?" using something that is real as your starting point. That's how I think of it anyway. I hope I'm interpreting your question correctly!

SF is what could be in an alternate or advanced technology.

Fantasy--Merlin travels backwards in time with magic SciFi--HG Wells' protagonist does it with a machine

I don't there are stock lists of "sci-fi equivalents." It just sounds like you're matching things up to suit your world, which is what readers do. It's how we put things into context, and writers must do the same thing in reverse.

One of the oddities about sci-fi is that it shows, no matter what universe we live in, human nature is essentially the same. If you carefully remove human nature, what's left can be flat and incomprehensible. Sci-fi as a genre simply has elements of plausible science or technology; the people are what they are, and the level of plausibility varies. One can even joke: right at the edge of a black hole ... humans will still stab each other in the back.

Once you get into social extrapolations or governments (really, how many choices are there?) -- the "science" isn't really impressive, just like in the real world.

I can't see humans without mind-altering drugs. It would be just as sci-fi to ask "what if humans never used drugs at all." But that's probably a hard sell.

Part of that comes from trying to translate far future worlds so they can be understood by people in 2007. Not that most writers put so much thought into it -- it's just that we're constrained by terms we're familiar with, many of which are borrowings from previous sci-fi (intentional or not). There's a rich and barely-touched field of sci-fi folklore, which can be fun to look at. Many sci-fi folklore items like the transporter have become parts of our everyday language.

A true account of the far future would be in an unintelligible language, which, even if we had a Rosetta Stone, would be full of words for things we have never seen. There is a very small bunch of readers who think that would be interesting, but to be a "story" requires characters we can relate to.

So, sci-fi is science turned entertainment with all kinds of constraints, and a long history that's hard to escape.

Okay, Sokal, nice discussion.

However, take the gun in your hand that is pointing at your temple and put it down.

Then tell yourself, to quick stopping you from writing Sci-Fi.

I haven't seen one reason here for you not to write Sci-Fi.

I haven't seen one reason here for you not to write Sci-Fi.

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Exceptin' them looks lahk Cowboys y'got there at the bottom of yer thing.

But then I remember: WESTWORLD. FIREFLY. Cowboys can work in SF too, pardner.

I do think the comments are sort of coming down on the "Speculative" side of the SCI-FI fence. Obviously, we can have SF which doesn't necessarily HAVE to speculate about the Future, right?

Can someone explain this one to me?

The sci-fi equivalent of the French-Aztecs is the local low tech population

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Is that an "alternate history" reference?

Sokal said:

As usual, I'm starting to wonder about the hidden assumptions in composing Sci Fi...I have to confess I've mostly given up Sci fi because
all I could do in reading or writing it was wonder what was so
plausible (as opposed to springing from pure fansy) about its assumptions.

So for example: the sci-fi equivalent of opium is jargon tree juice

The sci-fi equivalent of the French-Aztecs is the local low tech population

The sci-fi equivalent of fascists is the non-local high tech interlopers

And so on. Are there a lot of arbitrarily plausible sci-fi equivalents for things?

Click to expand...

Personally, I've not come across examples 1 and 2 (except 2 can possibly be a veeeery long stretch if you look at the Minmatar race in the MMORPG called EVE.) This from someone who has read a bit of sci.fi. The techno-fachist example is likely to happen as we have seen several times only in modern history. It's also an easy way to play on people's emotions, because we all know how evil The Hitlers were.

Anyway, I see the difference between fantasy and sci.fi as such:

In sci.fi you explain exotic phenomena as a thingy which does something to something else.

"Hey, Captain Spannerleg, how do these VFM 5000's make the ship go faster than light??" (Very Fast Motor)
"Well, you ill-fragrant rascal, what they do is they make the ship go faster, and faster, and faster until finally, we're going faster than light. Clever, huh?" Spannerleg answered, chest swelling visibly with pride.

In fantasy, you'r allowed to say "It's Magic!". Broadly speaking.

"Congratulations tiny elf-person, you have earned this here ring, Wolfsbane." Lord Whatshisface announced.
"Great!" Bruce Grashoppa replied, "how's it work?"
"Uhm.. Magic?"

I know that the sci.fi. explanation might be a bit longer, but to most sci.fi. afficionados I know (like me), that's part of the charm. (We are all nerds, you know. )
And there are other differences. One of which is that in sci.fi. movies all the lights have a blue tinge, but in fantasy movies it's green.. Aaand. There're more laser-guns in sci.fi.

Sokal said:

Well its the method of the extrapolating that I find odd. For example, most Sci fi writers assume that in the future people will have an array of more interesting mind-altering drugs to take...this extrapolation is so generally applied that it is just a conventional assumption and not an extrapolation at all.

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I think there's a shared corpus of pre-baked extrapolations that science fiction works pick from to 'flavour'. In the fifties it was flying cars and nuclear-powered toothbrushes, in the eighties it was virtual reality and megacorporate shenanigans, these days it's all wearable computers and weird technoreligious syncretist hoohah. I don't think this crap ever should be the sole focus of SF. If it is, like ElaraSophia suggested it marks you as a beginner. It's seasoning. If the core idea behind your work isn't an earnest attempt at extrapolation on your own then you're not writing real 'hard' science fiction. (If however you can take nuclear-powered toothbrushes and write a fascinating and original examination of the impact the tech has on society and people, by all means do so.)