64
What makes a great sci-fi story?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
64 points (98.5% liked)
Science Fiction
13597 readers
5 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Most people I've talked to tend to disagree with me here, but my favorite type of book is one that focuses primarily on the fictional science rather than the characters. It's interesting how the main focus of most science fiction is not fictional science, but I suppose most people read stories to hear about the people in those stories. Personally, I don't care too much about how people think or what they want. I want to hear all about your wildest techno babble as others have called it. Anything that is fascinating to ponder, but of course the more it makes some type of sense the better. Characters to me are more like a necessity to move a story forward and to see it from a perspective that makes sense. They are simply a camera lens into the world I want to hear about.
For me it’s kind of both. If a book has flat, boring characters, I can still enjoy it if it has interesting fake science and/or worldbuilding. And a book with iffy worldbuilding can still be a gripping read if the characters are done well. The best books have both. But they do need to have one or the other.
I'm the same. I like hard science fiction. Or hardcore science fiction. You bend a few rules. But then you take them to their logical conclusions. The story and the people are used to demonstrate what this thought experiment does to the universe.
I've especially enjoyed Larry Niven's books, he has this very hardcore science approach.
I wonder if this is why I haven't enjoyed Dreaming Void or Pandora's star as much as I thought I would. The focus definitely seems on the characters more than the world/science.
Meanwhile some of my favorite books involve exploring new worlds and delving deep into what they're discovering: Aurora, Rendezvous with Rama, Long Earth, and the like.