Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2285139" data-attributes="member: 4937">Woo hoo!!&nbsp; I've almost made a convert.&nbsp; Good show, but not quite (unless of course you convince me otherwise).&nbsp; SF stories are about identity.&nbsp; SF is about the question, &quot;Who am I?&quot;, &quot;Who are we?&quot;, &quot;What does it mean to be human?&quot;, and the method it employs is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be (and what we would do) if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience.&nbsp; Alot of SF stories are about society, but that's just because our society is one of the ways in which we define who we are. Greg Bear, Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, Asimov and the like are fundamentally concerned with how are identity is defined by the societies we are in and form.&nbsp; But if you move to some more introspective author, say a Robert Silverburg or even (when he's in good form) a David Gerrold then you are dealing with the question of identity on a very intimate level.I keep trying to point out that the reason so many people think my definitions overly broad is that they are using a truncated version of what I actually said.&nbsp; I did not say fantasies were merely stories about good and evil.&nbsp; I did not say that science fiction were merely stories about what it means to be human.&nbsp; I said that they were stories that approached these questions using a particular sort of device.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 2285139, member: 4937"] Woo hoo!! I've almost made a convert. Good show, but not quite (unless of course you convince me otherwise). SF stories are about [i]identity[/i]. SF is about the question, "Who am I?", "Who are we?", "What does it mean to be human?", and the method it employs is to speculate who we would be if we weren't who we are or who we would be (and what we would do) if we were someplace completely outside our ordinary experience. Alot of SF stories [i]are[/i] about society, but that's just because our society is one of the ways in which we define who we are. Greg Bear, Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, Asimov and the like are fundamentally concerned with how are identity is defined by the societies we are in and form. But if you move to some more introspective author, say a Robert Silverburg or even (when he's in good form) a David Gerrold then you are dealing with the question of identity on a very intimate level. I keep trying to point out that the reason so many people think my definitions overly broad is that they are using a truncated version of what I actually said. I did not say fantasies were merely stories about good and evil. I did not say that science fiction were merely stories about what it means to be human. I said that they were stories that approached these questions using a particular sort of device. [/QUOTE]

Verification