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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2267867" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm afraid I'm not much of an expert on Vance.  I've got much of his collected works downstairs, but I've only read one story and it didn't really grab me.  'Sufficiently Advanced Technology' provides a useful way to hand wave away the problems with realism, and its one of the reasons why definitions like OSC's (much as I respect him as a writer) don't fully hold up once we start talking about high sci-fi works like Iain M. Banks culture setting, Charles Stross's works, or for that matter even something as lowbrow as Star Trek.  There are alot of reasons in science to suspect that things like FTL travel, production of near infinite energy without waste heat, thousands of native sentient species per galaxy, interstellar trade empires, artificial gravity without rotation, time travel, long distance macro-mass teleportation and so forth are impossible.  Maybe not strictly impossible, because its hard to prove a negative, but certainly as best as we know impossible and the more we learn the more fraught with difficulty they appear sort of impossible.  Yet, we wave them off as a necessary conventions of the genera and pretend to themselves that someday the god of technology will render the strictly impossible as possible as it rendered the seemingly impossible possible in the past.  How can we then continue to think that we are talking about 'this universe' when the laws of this universe are broken whenever it is conveinent to the story?The answer is that being 'in this universe' isn't really the point.Look at it from a different angel.  If you are setting out to write a story - say a war story - what is the attraction of setting it in space?  Why not set the story in the present or past in the universe as we understand it?  Certainly some literary snobs seem to think that that is the surest sign of maturity.  But what is the attraction of placing the war in space when the fundamental conflicts and story could just as easily be set anywhere?  Put most simply, why write science fiction in the first place?  The answer is I think bound up in the notion of the 'the alien'.  The attraction of writing science fiction is it allows us to introduce the device of the truly alien, whether it be an alien species with appearance and custums different to us, or an alien place physically or psychologically (usually both) where we have no record of mankind ever being before.   By using this device, you can hold up humanity as if into a mirror and mentally examine humanity in a revealing way (or what you believe to be a revealing way) that you just can't when you have no basis of comparison or contrast.  I'm not sure I understand you.  Or you saying that the space opera is a 500 year-old genera, or are you merely saying that 'space opera' is fantasy with a high tech spin?  Or something completely different?  If you are agreeing that 'space opera' is merely the latest verion of a 500 year old genera, then I don't see on what disagree.  Let me just say that I don't think that 'alien abduction' stories are fundamentally different from 'being abducted by the faerie people', except that each is garbed in the trappings necessary to suspend a certain level of disbelief in the society of the time.   Likewise, 'space opera' is by and large just a genera of romantic fantasy.  I wouldn't however feel entirely comfortable with saying that all 'space opera' is merely reclothed romantic fantasy, and that in particular what we see at the beginning of the Golden Age is space opera's beginning to take on those more serious questions like 'who are we?'*shudder* I'd rather not.  Once was enough.  More than enough.  I'll say this, LRH's introduction to the story is a laugh riot.  Too bad the joke is on him.</blockquote>

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