The role of the supernatural in hard science fiction

The answer is its all made up. So write what you want, and let other people worry about what genre it falls into.

For me exhibit A of this is Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. The first book started out with people bonding with, and riding, fire-breathing dragons in a medieval setting. They periodically needed to do this to combat occasional death rain, falling from the sky.

100% Fantasy, right?

Later books in the series explained the dragons as a small native species with a really useful behavior (neutralizing the death rain), genetically engineered and bred over centuries, as the original colonists slowly lost their tech. The death rain ended up explained in detail as coming from a comet.

Now its Science Fiction.

Think about this; later books retroactively made the earlier books SF instead of Fantasy.^*

If I can change the genre of a book simply by writing another book in the same series, without altering a letter of the original work, the genre distinction is not really self-contained. It basically doesn't really exist, except in some marketer's head.

More to the point, even if there is a line between the two, modern authors are tromping all over it with big muddy boots. Take the Monster Hunter International series. It pretty clearly comes straight out of the tradition of Military SF. To the point where I'd not recommend it to any reader who claims to like "Fantasy" but not Military SF. But all the antagonists, and some of the protagonists, are supernatural creatures. So which genre is it? The proper answer is, "Who cares?"

Another pretty enjoyable Military SF book I read a few years back (David Weber's Out of the Dark) was about Earth being invaded by aliens, from the POV of some of the bands of survivors fighting guerilla warfare against the invaders. Hard SF all the way.

Right up until the end that is, when the vampires decided enough was enough and took over the invaders' ships (a bit of a Deus, but I still enjoyed it).

Seriously, these days just write a good story. Let the 3-drink minimum crowd over in marketing figure out what it is.

^{* - David Freer's The Forlorn managed to pull off what I'm calling The Pern Trick within a single novel. It started Fantasy and ended up SF.}

posted over 6 years ago

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T.E.D.‭

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I would propose that there is a simple yardstick to measure whether your "supernatural" elements are making your story a fantasy story.

Imagine stripping out the Sci-Fi elements and setting the story in the present. Is it a fantasy story now? That's your answer.

A ghost story in space is not a fantasy story. It's still sci-fi.

A story with religious faith and maybe a miracle or two in space is not a fantasy story. It's still sci-fi. Example: Out of the Silent Planet

A story about wizards and unicorns in space is probably a fantasy story. Example: The Darksword Trilogy (On the other hand, maybe your story happens on a holodeck, maybe? But that's still probably going to appeal more to a Fantasy audience.)

(Star Wars is a famous example of a story that would clearly be a fantasy story if it wasn't in space and with robots)

posted over 5 years ago

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Jedediah‭

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Regardless of the technology they possess, people will still be people. There have always been people who have believed in magic and the supernatural, and there likely always will be, even once we've gone and colonized Mars using nuclear-powered rockets or whatever hard scifi technology your story's centered around.

Whether things like Christian faith-healers, "spirit cooking" Luciferians, or various varieties of New Age psychics count as genuinely supernatural is left for you (and/or your readers) to decide, but the people in question would certainly believe that they would have real, repeatable supernatural powers (or, at least, that God does, and He's acting through them).

How do you incorporate them into a scifi story? Charismatic revival conferences on Mars. Children disappearing on an asteroid habitat, ritually murdered by villainous Satanistic politicians who think it gives them supernatural prowess. A freighter captain who ships the volcanic crystals of Io to buyers who think they have healing properties.

posted over 6 years ago

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nick012000‭

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My first instinct was to say "you can't" - the very essence of the science fiction genre is that things are not supernatural - they make sense within the in-universe rules, if not right from the start, then in the end, when we get to the bottom of the mystery.

But then I thought of some examples to the contrary. Look at Star Wars - what is the Force, if not magic? In fact, when the prequels attempted to make the Force less supernatural by talking about "medichloreans", the response was negative, because they took the magic away and replaced it with something mundane.

Similarly in Dune, you've got precognisance, lie-detection, rendering consumed poisons non-lethal, and a bunch of other supernatural abilities. The Bene Gesserit are even called 'witches' in-universe.

At the same time, there is one important caveat: while the Force, the Bene Gesserit abilities etc. appear supernatural to us, they are not framed as such within their respective worlds. They are framed as part of the natural order, and referring to them as "magic" is, in-universe, considered superstition. The setting in those cases is completely fantastical, if you think about it, but instead of calling it "magic", the author calls it "science". Then, the author doesn't even resort to technobabble to handwave away your claim that it's supernatural, but goes straight to "there are more things in heaven and Earth..."

posted over 6 years ago

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Galastel‭

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+1 Galastel. Along the same lines, you can keep a "supernatural" element in the realm of science fiction by having characters refuse to acknowledge it as supernatural, and insisting (as scientists would) that just because we don't know how something works, and just because it seems miraculous, does not make it supernatural.

My crowd (professional scientists that eschew ALL supernatural explanations [which is not 100% of scientists by a long shot]) would say that anything that doesn't fit with our theory of physics is only proof that our theory of physics is wrong or incomplete, we'd say there just is no such thing as phenomenon that are not natural. We would rather say "I don't know" than accept any explanation that cannot be proven by logic and experiments. This is one reason we reject String Theory; it has been shown there are more possible solutions to String Theory than there are protons in the visible universe. IMO (and that of others) It has strayed into the realm of faith.

Thus even though there ARE no supernatural events, there are at least a dozen phenomenon (even now IRL) that do not fit the most advanced and current models of particle physics and gravity. Einstein's theory of general relativity tests very well, super accurately. The current theory of Quantum theory tests very well, even more accurately than general relativity. They cannot be reconciled and one or both of them are wrong. But no scientist should ever accept that the exceptions to these theories should be attributed to supernaturalism, or God's Will, or anything else.

For scientists, such attributions are a brick wall that shouldn't exist, a false explanation that, intentionally or not, thwarts any further real explanation, and thus interferes with or even prohibits scientists from finding a deeper or different model that will explain all the current models do, and explain some or all of the apparent anomalies in the bargain. That would be an advance in science.

So, given a setting of a complacent science that thinks it has all the answers, justified by the fact that what they do actually does work, any apparently supernatural event that is prohibited by their science should cause a hurricane of activity in the scientific community to see where their science has gone wrong, in prohibiting something so obviously possible.

Or trying to debunk what happened as an illusion, intentional or not. (No real scientist believes Penn and Teller can make either a coin or a woman vanish, we know there is a trick even if we don't know what the trick is.)

Accompanying that hurricane will be tornadoes of the non-scientific, of various stripes, pointing at the event as proof the snooty scientists have been wrong all along, there is a God, or magic, and by implication an afterlife and all those they loved still lived on another plane of being!

Like Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, Heroes, and the current series "Colony" and "The Expanse" and many other scifi movies and series, you can include devices and events that are effectively impossible (e.g. FTL travel) by real-life current science, and even unexplainable by your in-world science (in the Expanse, the Alien Ring portal, slowing down time, etc).

The trick they use is to not call it supernatural, or magic, or anything but some version of "unexplained". For SciFi, as an author adopt the scientific attitude: Embrace the answer "I Don't Know," and let the non-scientific amongst your readers think and say what they will.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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