Science fiction vs speculative fiction
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2024
- Hi guys! In this video I take a look at speculative fiction and ask, is it different to sci-fi?
#sciencefiction #speculativefiction #booktube
Sources:
www.masterclass.com/articles/...
bookriot.com/what-is-speculat...
oxfordre.com/literature/view/...
www.wired.com/2013/09/geeks-g...
urchin.earth.li/~sax/sf/review...
www.theguardian.com/books/201...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specula...
www.bookbub.com/blog/what-is-...
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MY STUFF
linktr.ee/bookodyssey
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vvv MORE vvv
MY SCI-FI NOVELS
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DELPHINE DESCENDS
After her family is killed and her homeworld occupied, young Kathreen Martin is sent to the distant world of Furoris for re-education. She will live the rest of her life as a serf - to be bought and sold as a commodity of the Imperial Network.
When her only chance of escape is ruined, a chance mistaken identity offers her a new life as the orphaned daughter of a First-Citizen Senator and heiress to a vast fortune.
She vows to claw her way into power to sit among the worlds’ elite. Then, with her own hands, she will reap bloody vengeance on them all.
But to beat them, she must play their game. And she must play it better than them all.
BLACK MILK
Prometheus has the chance to bring his wife back from the dead, but doing so will mean the destruction of Earth.
Spanning time, planets and dimensions, Black Milk draws to a climactic point in a post-apocalyptic future, where humanity, stranded with no planet to call home, fights to survive against a post-human digital entity that pursues them through the depths of space.
Five lives separated by aeons are inextricably linked by Prometheus’s actions:
Ystil.3 is an AI unit sent back in time from the distant future to investigate Prometheus’s discovery...
The mysterious Lydia has devoted her life to finding a planet that the last remaining humans can call home…
Tom Jones (he’s a HUGE fan!) is an AI trapped inside a digital subspace, lost and desperate to find his way back to his beloved in real-time…
Dr Norma Stanwyck is a neuroscientist from 24th Century Earth whose personal choices ripple throughout time...
Prometheus must learn the necessity of death or the entire universe will be swallowed by his grief.
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GOODREADS
You can stalk me on Goodreads to see what I'm currently reading. bit.ly/3rrcByD
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IMAGE USE
The images in in my videos are mostly licensed stock photos. However, occasionally I will use images found online. I always seek to properly credit artists and offer a link back to their amazing work but sometimes it's hard to find the original source of the work. If I've used an image you own and I haven't credited you, please feel free to get in touch as I am always more than happy to do so. - Zábava
It's a good sign that we have so much difficulty categorizing so many works. It means writers' imaginations keep pushing boundaries beyond the established compartments readers have used to order them.
WRONG!!!! EVERYTHING MUST BE CATEGORIZED AS NARROWLY AS POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!
I'm so old that I remember when Margaret Atwood wrote science fiction haha
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My brain hurts now. Its like tracking all the sub-genres of rock. everything seems to get more and more sub divided over time. some of my favourite authors that I used to find in the sci-fi section have been moved to the classics/literature section eg. ray bradbury and kurt vonnegut.
Lol, Ok Boomer
Atwood’s reductive description of sci-fi being limited to space travel and aliens is appallingly narrow-minded, but not all surprising given her generation.
She's a terrible author, all just overblown political tracts
It's an interesting question whether Margaret Atwood is considered a serious literary artist because she writes excellent speculative fiction, or was she taken seriously as a literary artist because she eschewed the science fiction label? (The same thing happens with a certain strain of reader, who want to be taken seriously as appreciators of the literary arts.) It also assumes that the study of people isn't a science, which must come as a disappointment to the world's anthropologists, sociologists, and quite a few historians.
Great point about the study of people, which is certainly a science in my view.
@@Sci-FiOdyssey I read a definition of 'science's that said, in it's original meaning, the term was understood as 'a body of knowledge.' Can't mind where I read that; maybe it says it in the Oxford English Dictionary - too lazy and currently drunk to look it up! But that would mean the study and understanding of any subject would be considered 'scientific.' Fair enough, in my book (forgive the pun, fnar fnar !).
A friend of mine, writer of a ferocious talent and dead Lo! these several decades, manifested nothing but derision for science fiction (which I have always loved), except when he found something he liked- whereupon he would proclaim it to be not science fiction, but literature!
@@mencken8 Kind of explains why most bookstores have Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and "compleat" collections of Sherlock Holmes in their Literature section, but where do you think I'm going to find The Girl Who Could move Sh*t With Her Mind?
Great video. I've found the distinction between sub-genres very interesting. And the visuals are really beautiful too. I love the work of Tithi Luadthong
You're 100% right, the 70's when I started reading Sci Fi was an open field of everything which I tried. There wasn't many or any series just authors, also getting another book of the author you liked was dependent on if the library had them as bookshops were very limited especially in Sci Fi.
Awesome breakdown, I didnt realize all the sub genres for sc-fi!
I think genre division is for the marketing division and no one else, because they do not understand the literary product at all so this genre division simply acts like a barcode reader in a checkout counter and makes it easy to package and sell books.
Well, genre classification is also a shorthand for what to generally expect from the work, like certain tropes or archetypes
I am working on a setting that I define as a “Occult Political Space Opera” dashed with alternative history, theological and cosmic horror elements. It doesn’t go nuts with tech overall but there are some far out concepts. I dunno, I mostly just wanted to tell a story that takes place in space but didn’t really want to read a dozen physics and astronomy books. Not out of laziness per se but id rather focus on other beats and thought space would be a cool place to explore that. So I was calling mine speculative fiction just to avoid getting caught in the hard vs soft sci-fi debate…dunno.
Thanks for the distinction!
Station Eleven was amazing! The HBOMax miniseries is a masterpiece too!
Excellent!
The video started slow but you concluded it perfectly.
This was excellent! I've been taking notes all the way through the essay. May I offer an alternative definition for "Super-Hero Fiction"?
"Super-Hero fiction" Focuses on Characters with Heroic abilities or strengths and how they overcome conflict with said abilities".
You clearly put a lot of work into this essay. I'm a better writer for it! Cheers, mate!
Lots of things to think about in there... thanks! I tend to think that it hard to disentangle elements of science fiction from speculative fiction because our lives are so intertwined with advanced technology. Things that would have been speculative fiction just 50 years ago are now part of our everyday lives and, thus, a larger part of the stories we all tell in multiple genres. So, authors who did not grow up with this technology have a hard time understanding that what they see as SF elements are, in many ways, every-day elements for those that did.
I know there are many lines that blur within each sub genre, but I just love a thinking science fiction, whatever that falls into. Great books that you make you think are great books that make you think.
Great video blog Darrel, thanks! I have always read anything by anyone in any genre. I just want to have my imagination engaged by a captivating story more than anything. What the genre is called is irrelevant to me. That said, I most often turn to science fiction and fantasy as those are the books that tend to have the types of stories that grab me the most. I want my imagination to be transported to another world even if it is a so-called "realist" novel.
Exactly how I feel about reading . Great post.
Thanks for this. I would say science fiction is part of spec fic (last definition rather than the second one). Speculative fiction helps us empathize with each other, explore the implications of our scientific and other advances, and develop imagination and even hope, as my free Assembling Terrania Cycle tries to do.
isn't all fiction speculative then?
I do think there is a degree of literary snobbishness because some still look down on science fiction as being less than other genres of fiction. Some authors do not want their work associated with a term like science fiction. It is true to a degree that not speculative stories are science fiction but I think some people get way too wrapped up in labels about what they are reading. As long as you enjoy it who cares.
You are right!
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Love the video! One question: Is your definition of "Urban Science Fiction" (7:50) correct? Sounds like "Urban Fantasy" to me. Or is there an overlap of some sort there?
I was thinking there would be overlap and that part of this could be 'urban fantasy'. But for the sake of the video and trying to condense these into a somewhat comprehensive list, I came down on the side of 'urban sci-fi'. Listening back, perhaps it would have been better as urban fantasy 🤔
I think speculative fiction for all of science fiction is a more accurate term since so much of the "science" in sf, if any, is either out of date or simply made up. And the nice thing is that it's still "sf". An interesting video!
It may be a nice thing, but it doesn't really detract from the confusion. We'd have to sort out if we're still including "what if stories" with speculative magic or the supernatural. Also, do we not use "science fiction" as a term just because our understanding of science changes? It's still what the authors were playing with and, theoretical or not, is useful for readers interested in science, who aren't so interested in theoretical social change (though they often go hand in hand). We could make a longer genre name: "Speculative Science/Fantasy/Urban Science/Urban Fantasy/etc. Fiction", but the fact those are speculative kind of goes without saying (unless they're mundane).
I think we just need to agree on what to call George Orwell and Margaret Atwood stories, a term that doesn't sound so broad is probably better...like "dystopian", we need not assume there's any science in "dystopian" or "utopian".
@@MagusMarquillin I would advocate making science fiction a sub genre of speculative fiction, a term used to describe the type of story that is "hard science fiction" today. As you point out, there are already lots of sub-genres of sf already, so making the term science fiction actually describe the story makes sense. That said, I think we both realize that people will be debating these terms long after we're dead, if only because it's fun to do so.
Yeah! Doctor Who really pisses me off, majority of the stories got very little science, only few of them got science.
Even when the science in sf stories gets disproved, eg, because science has advanced or even because it has always been, say, too fantastic, it continues to be fictional which, imho, is the fundamental element of the genre.
@@israelnoletto I certainly respect your opinion, but science isn't necessary for a book to be described as science fiction. This is why I think it would be more accurate to describe the very broad field of science fiction as speculative fiction, and save the "science" for books under the broad umbrella of speculative fiction that are focused on scientific speculation. And seeing that there were books written that are now considered science fiction before science fiction was invented, I don't think that "science" is fundamental to the genre. But, of course, that's just my opinion, which the world will ignore:)
I actually consider Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Historical as Background and not a Genre. You can have a Sci-Fi Romance, Mystery, Adventure, ect. Such as Caves of Steel which would have a Sci-Fi Background and a Mystery/Action Genre.
I find Speculative fiction a an answer looking for a question. I my self found the term to be a other way to say Hard Science Fiction.with out saying Hard Science Fiction. My favorite sub genre is Space Opera. I do not consider that genre part of Speculative fiction. Mainly as Space Opera dose not Speculate at all. Star Wars is a prime example of Space Opera,not Speculative fiction.
Most of the stories I write are speculative fiction. To me, it's a whole lot more fun to write 🤔
Hi, do you know the sources for the art please? Thanks!!
Hi there! Yes I use an iStock subscription service for my artwork and the artist for these goes under the name “grandfailure”. They’re such a talented artist.
@@Sci-FiOdyssey Yes. They should do book covers.
@@Sci-FiOdysseywould you think a book about nephilim living among us should be categorized as speculative fiction? Or angels living among us or visiting us and being the cause of some of our tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc (war between angels).
I thought space opera was a reference to classic opera. But I guess it’s all the same
I prefer paranoid speculation.
Do you accept the use of supernatural elements as science-fiction? (Magic, gods, etc.)
Personally, I don’t generally, no. I’d say this is fantasy or in some instances possibly science fantasy.
All fiction is speculative.
They're both speculative, as that's what fiction is. 'Speculative fiction' is like saying equestrian horse riding, rendering the concept and distinction meaningless.