Jareth Dakk brought up sci-fi games in Why not more Sci-fi?, and there were some good answers. But a passing comment there sparked a thought in my mind. But the idea is a bit fuzzy, so I'm going to clip a few things to try to get it clear in my own mind, and hopefully yours as well.

Uncle Lon Dark wrote: Star Frontiers was TSR's attempt at a basic SF game, but it was more of a mix of Star Wars and Star Trek elements than a generic game.

Then J. S. Diamond wrote: First, most sci-fi rpgs feature not-so-fantastical technology when compared to what we already have. Remember those wonderful yellow-spined DAW sci-fi novels? The wonderful stuff they came up with was weird and 'alien' and we could only imagine it with help from the author. Have we run out of ideas? I don't think so. Maybe a thread could address quality in sci-fi (or any other genre) as well.

M.J.,

I don't know if this answers (or rather, addresses) your question, exactly, but a pal of mine who's a biochemist has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to develop a sci-fi world in which the science is plausible. Not that this is by itself new, of course. But his argument is that most scifi tends to think primarily in physics terms: can it go that fast, can we do that with particles, can nanotech do that, and so on. As a biochemist, he's basically answering your question something like this:

Any technology which is plausible but so advanced we can barely imagine how it might be done has probably already been done biologically, in nature.

We're not talking about teleporters here, but he really starts to foam at the mouth when people talk about nanotechnology. His argument (Ron, you'd be a HELL of a lot better qualified than I here) is that proteins and enzymes pretty much already do insanely complicated engineering work, and are ridiculously small, and use very little energy, and are pretty difficult to break. So why bother trying to imagine "what if" we had such things? We do.

The result of all this, plus a hankering after way-out sim space opera, is the game Aurora. It's not free, although there's a free sample, but the CD-ROM has a really very large amount of stuff on it. Soon we're going to have a POD version, no really, promise. And I'm working on ridiculously large amounts of cultural material on the various species, including (I mention this for you in particular, though it's not available yet) a very lengthy (60 pages and climbing) discourse on the Pargin religion, a somewhat radical separatist faith among the metal lifeforms known as Uhrmina.

Check it out.

M. J. Young wrote: This is where the thought started to click. It's a problem I've had to face as an author and game designer, as well as merely running game worlds. To put it simply, what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?

That's the problem: doing something in science fiction that doesn't seem like it's really magic we're pretending is science. As Ruthra C. Kralc of Bah Ke'gehn has said, Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. If it seems too much like magic, it doesn't work in sci-fi; but almost anything I can think to do that isn't merely pasting together the pieces of other people's work in a new collage seems too much like magic.

It seems to me that one of the limits of generic SF games is that they are too wide open. You can do anything, but have no direction. One of the limits of genre-specific SF is inflexibility? Playing in a different world than the one the authors wrote often requires a rules overhaul.

So consider Sorcerer and Sword as a model for how to do a SF game. Not in terms of mechanics, but in how it handles the genre. S&S doesn?t give a setting, it gives examples of how to build a setting in the genre. It explains the genre in loving detail, how to do it, how not to do it. S&S never says ?your game needs to have Elves,? it says, ?if you want a non-human race in your game, here?s how to do it.?

The reason this works so well is because Ron gives us a well-defined arena to play in. He set up the basic conventions of a specific sub-genre of Fantasy, a skeleton for us to flesh out as we would.

So pick a sub-genre of SF. Spend some time working out the conventions, and spell it out for your readers. Show them how to play with it.

Lon

Hmm. I find it interesting that science fiction, unless it is so outlandish as to be fantastical (e.g. Star Wars), generally lets its technology date horribly. Computers, in particular, are more advanced now than most people before the 1980s projected them in 50 years; to create reliable projections of what computers will be like in another 50 years would require an even greater imagination. And I think that any science fiction that focuses explicitly on technology is bound to date, and date quickly.

A lot of the science fiction that survives is stuff like Star Wars (really a fantasy story in some SF trappings) and Star Trek (varies, but it was originally a frontier exploration story with SF trappings). That is, the kind of things that base themselves on familiar story elements, but place them in space with neat gizmos and technobabble. These are quite navigable as game concepts, as has been demonstrated by a variety of SW and ST and derivative RPGs over the years.

What I think remains is not the science fiction that projects technology into the future and says, "What if?" but rather the SF that projects humanity into the future. You see, there are fundamental differences; the former tends to have characters who are basically the people of the author's own era, and tend to date easily (read the Lensmen series to have it demonstrated firsthand). The second group has technology which is not central; it is an extrapolation of our own overall technological advancement, in essence an often dark mirror on our own world. It is the people who've changed, the people who've begun to be impacted by their own instruments. So these are stories where the science fiction is more than just trappings; it is the background against which these people have altered. Most literary cyberpunk (which has not been successfully captured in an RPG to date) is a good example of this thread of science fiction, along with a lot of its anime offshoots; also some of my personal favorite films, like Blade Runner and Gattaca, discuss humans pushed into a future that is a mirror of our own world, asking what becomes of them.

And that's why I hold that SF RPGs that won't date along with their technological assumptions (as Blue Planet and Transhuman Space slowly move away from reality, just as the Cyberpunk RPG did) are either games where the SF is a trapping, or are centered around humanity as forced into the future. I think this is the perfect ground for a very Narrativist-focused RPG; I'm even thinking of concepts for how to design one.

-Wayne

Hello,

My take on science fiction differs greatly from most people's. As I've presented before, I think the term best applies to taking some recognizable element of the writer's immediate political and social landscape and "tweaking" it - exaggerating or eliminating it to a degree than cannot be possible in reality at this moment, but remaining with an explanation or context that concerns material reality. The story provides commentary on the phenomenon being addressed, whether in very basic or very complex terms.

As far as I'm concerned, science fiction is never about "the future," but about the Now when it was written. I consider most of it to be explicit political cartooning. "The future" only represents one way in which the "not possible at this moment" criterion can be achieved.

In other words, I am completely unimpressed by these interpretations of the term:
- Trappings (terms like "warp," tentacles, space ships, "the future")
- Extrapolation (which includes the issue of plausibility)
- Alternative-history per se

None of them denote science-fiction to me at all. Asimov's The Caves of Steel (arguably the only good novel the man wrote) is about androids and contains a good deal of extrapolation, thus it has two of the things above ... but it is science fiction because it concerns morality in the 1950s context, and its relationship to scientific Positivism, which was a big friggin' deal at the time (anyone out there know who C.P. Snow was? How about Vandevere Bush?).

(Correct: Star Wars is not science fiction by my interpretation. It's fantasy with space-y trappings. I classify fantasy mainly by the centrality of one or more of elegy, vitalist forces, symbols of internal conflict/wishes, or pornography [for which I do have a definition].)*

Now, so what? Ron goes off on some damn thing again. If I wanted that, I'd read old Harlan Ellison or recent Warren Ellis. Well, Wayne's point is so far the most coherent to my way of thinking, and it prompted me to present it - so that one can ask, where is 'science fiction' by the Edwards Definition in today's commercial landscape at all?

Star Wars: Episode II is not science fiction. Neither, in my view, are Iain Banks' books.

The Truman Show and Gattica are science fiction - no real surprise there, I trust.

And in role-playing? ... big pause. Uh-oh.

Best,
Ron

* I will discuss this paragraph by email or private-message only.

... Tentacles?

-Marco (who can't define Sci-Fi but knows it when he sees it)

And in role-playing? ... big pause. Uh-oh.

For me, Science Fiction deals with space in some way. Both as it deals with technology and people. But, for some it is all about the technology, or all about the people, rarely (in my opinion) do you see them both being dealt with evenly. For me, probably the two most ideal authors of science fiction are Robert A. Heinlein and C.J. Cherryh. Both are supreme authors in their own right and from differing eras and points of view. The main other point I would make that shows how they excell is they do not focus on the technology or people singly but in a reasonable equality showing how one effects the other. The other reason is that they do not fill pages upon pages with technobabble. Now I am not opposed to explanation of technology in how it applies to the universe in question but when it becomes extreme that is where I lose interest. I don't read science fiction novels for lessons in physics, I read them for a mental adventure. Good quick definitions that are good and plausible for the universe in question are good enough for me.

And here is where I get to the crux of my problem with sci-fi RPG's. Others lack of imagination or suspension of disbelief.

Over the last year I have been helping playtest a sci-fi RPG with one of my good friends. When playing we generally have no problems unless we get on a subject of technology. I prefer quick and to the point explanations that fit with the universe. My friend simply cannot allow any form of technology to be used unless it conforms to all known forms of accepted science and theory. His ability to go "What if" just isn't there. He claims the sci-fi I run or design is space opera, not science.

I think this is problem with many people who play or design sci-fi, be it novels or games, they are unable to suspend their disbelief and use their imagination to say "What if".

Has anyone else run into a similar problem?

Sylus

M. J. Young wrote: ...The idea is a bit fuzzy, so I'm going to clip a few things to try to get it clear in my own mind, and hopefully yours as well.

Uncle Lon Dark wrote: Star Frontiers was TSR's attempt at a basic SF game, but it was more of a mix of Star Wars and Star Trek elements than a generic game.

This was rattling in my head. I played Star Frontiers in the early 80's, and it was probably my favorite game to play at that time. I can't now recall anything about it that was reminiscent of Star Wars, and the resemblance to Star Trek was somewhat superficial--how different can two universes be whose basic premise involves the ability to use spaceships to travel between star systems which are predominantly at peace with each other? But I think that notion--how different can they be--had me in the frame of mind for this thought.

M. J. Young wrote:

Then J. S. Diamond wrote: First, most sci-fi rpgs feature not-so-fantastical technology when compared to what we already have. Remember those wonderful yellow-spined DAW sci-fi novels? The wonderful stuff they came up with was weird and 'alien' and we could only imagine it with help from the author. Have we run out of ideas? I don't think so. Maybe a thread could address quality in sci-fi (or any other genre) as well.

This is where the thought started to click. It's a problem I've had to face as an author and game designer, as well as merely running game worlds. To put it simply, what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?

M. J. Young wrote: That's not to say that there are no more good sci-fi stories to tell. I'm sure there are. I'm sure that there are people capable of devising new ideas in science fiction that will make for great stories. The problem that I see is that these great ideas are few and far between. Jules Verne gave us a trip to the moon and a journey under the ocean [This came at the height of the Industrial Revolution; gears and wheels and gunpowder could do anything!]; H. G. Wells gave us an invisible man and a time machine [Also from the Industrial Revolution, Wells was more aware of the soon coming saviour, electricity - Shelley was ahead of her time in many ways.]; Gene Roddenbury (well, I don't know that he didn't have a better source) gave us teleporters [Roddenbury wasn't at the forefront of teleportation - see Vincent Price in The Fly - but he was at the beginning of the computer age and remote sensing.], and Isaac Asimov gave us robots [Asimov did the definitive work - in the burgeoning era of computers and artificial intelligence - but robots have been around since the Industrial Revolution where they anthropomorphized men losing their jobs to machines.]. We've got ideas for clones and androids, supercomputers and starships [The last century offered astounding advances in biotechnology, information technology, and unified field physics.], nanotechnology and biocomputers and mind/machine interfaces [Our modern era has once again focused on the promise of existing technology taken to the extreme.]. And most of the science fiction we encounter is retreads of familiar ideas in some new arrangement.

M. J. Young wrote: Yet Clarke's words about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic is very telling in this regard. That invisible man probably is still magic; it is doubtful that anyone will ever be able to become invisible and remain both corporeal and alive. I hear that quantum non-locality might make it possible to do an end-run around Heisenberg and eventually build a real teleporter, but at the moment that still looks a lot like magic. The problem, though, is when we do these magical things, we have to make them sound like science. I used quantum non-locality as the basis for a communications system (which I have only recently been told won't work, just after I included it in a book). Star drives and hyperspace theory have been accepted. I suppose the question is something of a dilemma I think faces science fiction writers generally: what is there that hasn't been done in science fiction, and how can I do that without having it seem like it's really magic with a pseudo-scientific rationalization for it?

Does this make sense?

M. J. Young wrote: I'm actually having problems with both sides of the equation. I can think of precious few things that might be done that science fiction hasn't already tackled in some way (and I'm usually pretty good at dreaming up things tht might be done), and then if I find any, they never seem like things you could do scientifically/technologically anyway.

Ah! An Example. Clockstoppers (some discussion and my thoughts on it here) revived the notion of a person being accelerated to the point that people around them appeared frozen in time. Star Trek did the same thing in the original series. In Star Trek, it was the result of a chemical; Clockstoppers used a machine that was supposed to shift the person into something called hypertime.

M. J. Young wrote: These concepts don't withstand even the scientific scrutiny of a theologian (me); to enjoy the show one has to accept that some sort of magic is at work here that defies scientific explanation. That's the problem: doing something in science fiction that doesn't seem like it's really magic we're pretending is science. As Ruthra C. Kralc of Bah Ke'gehn has said, Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. If it seems too much like magic, it doesn't work in sci-fi; but almost anything I can think to do that isn't merely pasting together the pieces of other people's work in a new collage seems too much like magic.

M. J. Young wrote: Is this fatal to sci-fi games? Or am I overreacting?

John Kim wrote: The problem, as I see it, is not at all that there is not stuff to do -- but rather that it quickly verges on being unplayable unless you use the well-worn tropes to give players the familiarity they need. It requires a careful arrangement to come up with a setting familiar enough to easily play while still having new stuff in it.

I'll jump in here, sort of at right angles to Fang's post, because the one idea which jumped out at me in the original thread sort of got skimmed over. Warning - long - feel free to skip over it, but there's a LOT of meat here.

The thing that got skipped could be seen as another 'category' of SF, but it's less a category - it meshes with the other ones fairly cross-board - than a motivation. One of the *reasons* people write SF... and I think that discussing it (and others) in that light may shed substance on the discussion here.

I'm thinking, in this case, of the Big Idea. The concept, usually a place, which is so mindblowing that it takes a novel - often several - just to dip a big toe in the ocean of its ramifications. This often shares some identifying markers with Tech Extrapolation, but IMO it is quite clear and distinct. Rama. Riverworld. Most of Niven's work, esp. Ringworld and the Mote, but also including smaller pieces like Destiny's Road. All of these introduce core ideas which are so pervasive that they absolutely soak into the setting, the story, and the action; depending on the skill of the author, the narrative will nearly always be exploratory in outline, but the character exploration is strictly secondary to the basic plotline of exploring the *ramifications* of the Big Idea, as they gradually become unveiled.

Not all SF fits this trope. Red Mars, for example, I would say is not; it may be (IMO) one of the greatest exemplars of people-in-tech SF, talking about how we interact with our own capabilities and with each other within the framework of those capabilities... but it does not have one big idea which nobody else has ever thought of, to blow up and explore. It does not express the raw ambition of thought that Philip Jose Farmer does, when he first said, "Hey... what if everybody, from every time of human existence, got resurrected and thrown into a pot?"... Red Mars expresses a subtler, many-small-ideas trope, brilliantly. (Riverworld is also my example of where people-in-tech-SF is orthogonal to Big Idea... because Riverworld, too, is primarily about how we interact with one another within the framework of, well, *somebody's* technological capabilities.)

Now, I can see some serious reasons why Big Idea would tend to fail, as an RPG modus. But I can also see some good reasons why, especially among people like those here, it should not be permitted to do so quietly.

Forget "all the ideas are used up." That's what distinguishes a brilliant Big Idea SF author from, well, at least me. :) "The ideas are hard to come by" does matter, though... coming up with the Big Idea and actually running with it is, IMO, one stumbling-block increment more difficult than running with something less mindblowing.

But more importantly, the literary model here is fundamentally a one-shot. Oftentimes, the ramifications run far enough that the author carries it to a second or third book, because they realized they weren't done yet. Invariably, that second or third book is less mindblowing than the first one; the Big Idea can shatter your preconceptions, but More About Big Idea can at best be a fun read. (Games "based on" a Big Idea novel fall in this same category - they're sequelized, and typically vanilla.)

RPGs are sometimes run as one-shots; it's a model of gameplay which deserves, and gets, good credit in environments like the Forge, with comparison to the endless campaign model. But that's *campaigns* as one-shots. Big Idea SF usually results in a SETTING which is, itself, a one-shot. Which would mean, in the RPG environment, one product, one game run, end of story, book sits on shelf. The publishing industry has words for this, all unkind.

That being said, the publishing industry can go hang. Because Big Idea SF is also mindblowing, the sort of thing which can totally alter your worldview and leave you numb for days. So I ask, is that or is that not the sort of sensation that Forge-inspired games would typically give their left indices for? :) That's gold, it is.

So perhaps, and the more I write the more I suspect this is core to the initial question of "why not more SF?", the question of increasing the SF presence in the RPG world runs hand-in-hand with advances in how we see the use of a setting, or a published game. If we do not ask it to be "infinitely reusable", then a game book could indeed present, for the first time, the likes of Ringworld, and succeed in doing so. All of our Explorer types (and the Explorer in all of us) would be thrilled - so why not?

The key, I think, would be in making such a product so that not all the cards were on the table. "Secret" heavy games try this and fail, because expectations are not in-line with the usage; your players can and often will go read the Player's Handbook to the Sabbat, and even if you ask them not to and they comply, they know it's there, they know the shape of the thing. Game masters who ask their players not to read the Sabbat book, read it themselves, and then throw out everything within it (without telling their players) and make that organization entirely a conspiracy theory crafted by the players' manipulative elders - they're touching a gameplay model which the Big Idea SF game would require to live.

I can cite a specific example, because I realize upon writing this that I have run a Big Idea game, just once, to the specs I'm seeing. It could never have sold - the "publishing model" involved only works when being pitched to friends by friends, it requires *trust*. But it also garnered arguably the most praise I've ever received for a game, and a decade later I still get pestered to continue it. Jared? You listening? You played in the last half of that first session. Remember Budapest Zoo?

The pitch: You live in war-shattered Budapest, sometime in the near future of now. You eke out a living as best you can, but there are more bullets than beans in this city, more bombs than children. Now make a character.

The Big Idea, and the Truth: Humanity - as a whole - has achieved peace, matured to the point where strife is not necessary. Except in Budapest. The inhabitants here - civil rights? whassat? - are kept in this state by grey-garbed agents of the outside world, who provide both the subsistence food and the plentiful ammunition which allows it to remain as it is. Homeostasis of death. Your home. What do you do about it?

The ramifications and interpretations here are what make me really class this as a Big Idea story. What *is* Budapest? A zoo, kept for the edification of enlightened humanity? A prison, a life sentence for those who still have genetic predisposition toward violence? The ultimate, cruel, reality-TV program? Or simply the most visible expression of a never-truly-suppressed violence of the racial soul?
(This is stolen outright from a short story I would like to find again sometime but cannot recall the details of, out of a collection entitled When The Music's Over - but since nobody else had read it, it worked as stolen. The SF short story may just be the perfect source for this sort of thing.)

It hit hard, because they were totally not expecting it; the shape of the thing was very different from the pitch. (I still think the game should have ended at the conclusion of the one-shot, when the outside-world reporter in their midst betrayed them all to prevent the inhabitants of the Zoo from learning the truth. They badgered me into a second session.) And I suspect this is necessary, for Big Idea works in gaming... you cannot alert the players ahead of time to what's coming up, or the Big Idea itself loses savour. But if you can't put the cool part of the game on cover or back-cover text, how do you sell it? And if you can sell it, how do you ever make money selling an RPG which is best savored only once?

I suppose not all Big Ideas require surprise, so you can paint the concept without spoiling it. Continuum, for example... the game's universe is definitely Big Idea SF, it even has an obvious "What if..?" thought of the nobody-ever-actually-ran-with-this type. And it's not spoiled by letting the players know in advance that this is a time-travel game, rather the reverse. What distinguishes the type is not the shock value of leaning the Big Idea for the first time, it's the intellectual rush of figuring out what that means to people living in that world.

However, despite the lack of dependence on surprise, Continuum (alas) is still largely a one-throw game. The dependence on Exploration of -what the Big Idea means- still means that once the Exploration phase wears off (which will vary per player - I suspect that Budapest Zoo could have kept up the social contradictions and exploration of the ramifications nigh-forever), it may grow stale. I suspect it depends on whether the game garners sufficient momentum-of-character and passion, before the Exploration phase ends, or not, like achieving escape velocity to make orbit.

So, to wrap up, I think my contribution to the analysis here is that there is a broad class of SF which is poorly represented in gaming literature because the form itself has a mismatch with several traditional gaming tropes: book publishing, indefinite replayability, having to show off its essential coolness to prospective players before they begin. But that none of these aspects are *necessary* to gaming, and that this class of SF might therefore be beautifully handled using Indie gaming styles. Go for it!

Oh, and as an appendix to the above...

I challenge someone to take the Big Idea concept and come up with an RPG which meta-handles this, and does it well. Because Big Idea games must be one-off (one story arc or extended story arc), to build a game which (a) encourages the modes of thought necessary to allow prospective GMs to come up with Big Idea settings - why *not* have everyone who ever lived resurrected all at once? - and (b) provides a system specifically tailored to the Exploration-heavy (both IC and OOC) needs of this style.

Then the game would be replayable... as a different SF/hard-SF novel each time.

Harlequin wrote: (This is stolen outright from a short story I would like to find again sometime but cannot recall the details of, out of a collection entitled When The Music's Over - but since nobody else had read it, it worked as stolen. The SF short story may just be the perfect source for this sort of thing.)

Thanks. And I stand corrected, I think... the *obscure* SF short story may be the perfect source for this sort of game. You hope your players haven't read it. :)

Harlequin wrote: I'll jump in here, sort of at right angles to Fang's post,

Harlequin wrote: I'm thinking, in this case, of the Big Idea....

…Coming up with the Big Idea and actually running with it is, IMO, one stumbling-block increment more difficult than running with something less mindblowing.

The key, I think, would be in making such a product so that not all the cards were on the table. "Secret" heavy games try this and fail, because expectations are not in-line with the usage; your players can and often will go read the Player's Handbook to the Sabbat, and even if you ask them not to and they comply, they know it's there, they know the shape of the thing. Game masters who ask their players not to read the Sabbat book, read it themselves, and then throw out everything within it (without telling their players) and make that organization entirely a conspiracy theory crafted by the players' manipulative elders - they're touching a gameplay model which the Big Idea SF game would require to live.

...For [the] Big Idea [to work] in gaming...you cannot alert the players ahead of time to what's coming up, or the Big Idea itself loses savour. But if you can't put the cool part of the game on cover or back-cover text, how do you sell it? And if you can sell it, how do you ever make money selling an RPG which is best savored only once?

...So, to wrap up, I think my contribution to the analysis here is that there is a broad class of SF which is poorly represented in gaming literature because the form itself has a mismatch with several traditional gaming tropes: book publishing, indefinite replayability, having to show off its essential coolness to prospective players before they begin. But that none of these aspects are *necessary* to gaming, and that this class of SF might therefore be beautifully handled using Indie gaming styles. Go for it!

Harlequin wrote:
So, to wrap up, I think my contribution to the analysis here is that there is a broad class of SF which is poorly represented in gaming literature because the form itself has a mismatch with several traditional gaming tropes: book publishing, indefinite replayability, having to show off its essential coolness to prospective players before they begin. But that none of these aspects are *necessary* to gaming, and that this class of SF might therefore be beautifully handled using Indie gaming styles. Go for it!

Ron Edwards wrote: As far as I'm concerned, science fiction is never about "the future," but about the Now when it was written. I consider most of it to be explicit political cartooning.

The Truman Show and Gattica are science fiction - no real surprise there, I trust.

And in role-playing? ... big pause. Uh-oh.

I think in order for any use of Science Fiction to have any real meaning one has to define what one means by it. I think the core to that definition is nicely highlighted by Ron's post above.

Fact is the stuff that originally came out under the label of SF is far different from the recent stuff. Sooo there's really two ways to go about it. One could apply the broad heading of SF to all the stuff and treat the original stuff as being one particular manifestation while the other stuff is a different but equally SF manifestation. This would be much like "fantasy" being subdividable into epic fantasy, and D&D fantasy, and sword & sorcery etc.

Or one could take the approach that I think Ron is using which is to say, the original stuff is SF. It is what was meant when the coin was termed. In which case much recent stuff isn't really SF at all, rather it just usurped the term and could more properly be called Science Fantasy, or Techno Drama.

Ron's defintion doesn't address the science part of the term--the Simpsons would qualify.

Working Science Fiction Definition: fiction with the trappings of advanced or alternative science.

-Marco

Hi there,

1) John, I'm with you on the Star Trek (why does everyone think I'm picking on Star Trek?). The original series was quintessential science fiction. Similarly, I agree with you about the potential length of the piece in question; your inference that I must be talking about short fiction and film only is incorrect.

2) Marco, I'm a little surprised that you're distinguishing between "indie" and traditional/powerful (and I take your "traditional" to mean long-standing). I don't see them as different; you should know by now that the "fringe, alternative, hip, off-beat" interpretation of "indie" cuts no ice with me. My whole "Mainstream: a revision" thread was all about this.

I agree with you regarding Universal/Generic design entirely. No need to defend it to me.

Best,
Ron

For me, my best internal definition of SF is:

"Stories about the effects of science on people, or conversely, the effect of people on science."

I don't think technology or outer space have to come into it at all. They just frequently do because they are the past few generation's most visceral examples of "science". Remember, there are social and biological sciences as well as physical ones.

I definitely don't personally believe that SF is obligated to "follow the rules" of known science. Indeed, you'd severely limit the horizons of speculative thinking if the thinker is not allowed to open up the mind to the seemingly impossible.

There are incidental limits to this, of course. An author would certainly not be taken seriously if he speculated that "the United States launched it's first FTL vessel in the year 2005". I'm sure that we all know the value of "suspension of disbelief", so I won't bore you with an explanation of why "not following the rules" of known science IS limiting in this scenario (a least without a damn good explanation of where such technology comes from within the next 2 years).

To get back to the application of all this to RPGs, and the apparent limits to what can really be effectively portrayed in SF RPGs, I think that gamers and creators alike have largely not been able to see beyond the trappings of the "things" of SF to the potential of games that focus on (I'll repeat it here):

"Stories about the effects of science on people, or conversely, the effect of people on science."

This premise is not only limited to "what happens to a guy that I shoot with my raygun?". We've certainly already got enough games that focus on this. I firmly believe that we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible in SF RPGs. No "Flat Earther", me!

For my money, "Paranoia" is the most effective "true" SF RPG that I've come across over the years.

In my personal game-writing over the past months, I've been taking another look at books like "The Stars My Destination/Tiger! Tiger!" and "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester; "The Weapon Makers" series, "Slan", and "The World of Null-A" series by A.E. Van Vogt, and the "Dune" books. Can you spot my theme?

This has been a fascinating thread!

-Rod

Ron Edwards wrote:

2) Marco, I'm a little surprised that you're distinguishing between "indie" and traditional/powerful (and I take your "traditional" to mean long-standing). I don't see them as different; you should know by now that the "fringe, alternative, hip, off-beat" interpretation of "indie" cuts no ice with me. My whole "Mainstream: a revision" thread was all about this.

I agree with you regarding Universal/Generic design entirely. No need to defend it to me.

Best,
Ron

"this class of SF might therefore be beautifully handled using Indie gaming styles"

Wow.

Once again I start a thread, and come back the next day to find more on it than I can possibly digest. I do appreciate all the responses, whether I pick on you or not in this one. Thanks for the ideas.

I am glad that Ron mentioned Harlan Ellison in his rant, because that's exactly who was coming to mind as I read it. I heard Ellison raving about how Science Fiction and Sci-fi were not the same thing, and shouldn't be in the same category, and I'm afraid my reaction to that is simple: you can't distinguish genre on quality. It is not a valid distinction to say that all the good stuff is part of the genre we love and all the dross and copycat and trash and fanfic is some other genre. Quality is not a genre convention.

I am quite aware that sci-fi stories are usually commentary on the present. One of the reasons the new version of The Time Machine bothered me so much was that on that particular point it did not represent the original. Wells' story is about a man who travels to the future solely for the sake of scientific inquiry--a motivation that made perfect sense to the nineteenth century man. In the film, he builds the time machine solely for love, which seems the only valid motivation in modern minds. Wells' future is populated by two thoroughly post-human races, transparently evolved from the lords and the peasants of that age (the one, elohim, actually is named with the hebrew word for "lords"); the movie keeps one human, so it can imply a happy ending in which the hero finds happiness with the girl. In Wells, it is merely the product of evolution; the film requires a catastrophic event to destroy civilization and bring about the new race. All the social commentary of the original is lost. In a very real sense, the book is about something that has been completely erased in the movie.

Yet the movie is certainly science fiction; so is the book. In a sense, they are different stories told in the same setting.

It was several years ago that I was arguing elsewhere that one of the problems is science fiction is not a genre (like romance or adventure) but a setting (like western or historic). You can tell love stories, murder mysteries, action adventures, thrillers, and any other kind of plot-story in a science fiction setting.

In the same way, fantasy is a setting. You can tell any kind of plot-story in a fantasy setting as well.

This also clarifies another point, and that is that when I say it's a setting, I don't mean it's one setting, but that it's a kind of setting defined by certain aspects. Chief among those for science fiction is advances in science or technology that are outside what we know (even if placed in an historic context--Alias Smith and Jones is sort of a science fiction western setting). With fantasy, it's generally the presence of some kind of magic (although there might be other aspects, such as the presence of magical creatures even in the absence of magic).

If a story is set in such a world, it is science fiction, whether it is a great story that deals with human conditions and political concepts or merely some swashbuckler in another world.

All that said, I think there are a lot of great ideas here (and I really hope John Kim will find the time to post those other ideas he's considering). I'm going to have to let a lot of this simmer.

--M. J. Young

Hi everyone,

Look, Marco, we're agreeing again! ('cept on the Culture, but I'll spot you that one) Thanks for clarifying. I also agree that I haven't provided a working definition; I used a lot of personal qualifiers in my post for that reason. I'm not expecting anyone to buy or apply that input; it only explains why I'm a lousy respondent for threads that pose questions about SF this-or-that.

M. J., indeed, you've pegged one of my slightly-unhealthy influences in life in the inimitable Harlan Ellison* ... although as it turns out, my statements above are not the same as his. You'll notice that I don't claim any degree of "good" or "bad" in the categories. Star Wars, by my lights, is brilliant, just not science fiction (which is why Fang's comments about "coming of age" and so forth are not refuting any point of mine). Again, by my lights, a great deal of the self-titled New Wave SF from the 70s is definitely science fiction, but it's also unreadable wanking trash.

Best,
Ron

* Everyone: I refuse to permit a big ol' "discuss Harlan" fest at the Forge. Take it to private communication.

To briefly refute - Marco, I meant exactly the same thing you do. Small press, author-owned, and so forth. I used "styles" because this environment permits styles of game authorship which are effectively disallowed in more established publishing... such as the precise ones I identified in my post, where the game book may only be "playable" once by any given gamer.

The publishing industry wouldn't permit this; small-press could.

And heavens, I wasn't suggesting that the independent gaming "experience" was inferior - I have no idea where that cropped up. Much rather the reverse, to the point of bias. :)

That being said, I think we agree on the relevant points.

(Also, John Kim, you read an "only" into my comments about the short story, where there was none - "well served by" is about as far as I go out on that branch.)

So - We have agreed to disagree on some minor points, but have three main "working definitions" of SF (and I use the initials so as not to have to say whether I mean science fiction, "sci-fi", or speculative fiction, since in this case connotations may be the death of meaning - we wish to discuss all three), each of which has proponents.

Ron says SF is literature which uses an extrapolative mask to both empower and disguise present-day commentary, probably social.

Fang and I look at (some) SF as literature designed to explore the far-flung ramifications of a setting or concept too strange or too big to test in the laboratory. :)

M.J. and others are happy to envelop anything under the term SF, so long as it has technology and science as the primary way it's different from the world we live in.

(And there may be a fourth, in Rod's definition of literature about people relating to science, or the effect of science on people. This dovetails somewhat with Ron's definition, but could be argued as distinct.)

Taxonomy only gets us so far. M.J.'s definition is the most inclusive, with the others as increasingly smaller subsets of the picture, though the subsets may actually include examples not included in the broadest version. Lovely.

Do we have any insights on the original question?

*None* of our definitions seems, to me, to get "its share" of the RPG limelight, compared to fantasy. (Which latter term I will simply not define here, nor should we. You know what I mean.) By this neither M.J. when he started this thread, nor I, mean that it somehow "deserves" more intellectual bandwidth... but it is nonetheless interesting to ask why it doesn't get it.

So, whether or not we identify SF by Ron's definition or any other, why does it seem to be either less appealing to write in RPG form, or more difficult, or both? And, subset of question, does it seem to be more difficult to do *well*? I'm less sure of the answer to that one.

Harlequin wrote: Fang and I look at (some) SF as literature designed to explore the far-flung ramifications of a setting or concept too strange or too big to test in the laboratory. :)

Harlequin wrote: Ron says SF is literature which uses an extrapolative mask to both empower and disguise present-day commentary, probably social.

M.J. and others are happy to envelop anything under the term SF, so long as it has technology and science as the primary way it's different from the world we live in.

I think there are some interesting ideas here on how to re-evaluate what was once considered to be in the vein of Science Fiction.

I was watching a History Channel show (yeah I know History channel is not end all and be all but) and it was showing the progression of the Sci-Fi genre... They classify it as starting in the early 1800's with Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and then progressing to EA Poe's work. Now I personally would say Poe was horror but I suppose one could view it in the context of what we generally consider Science Fiction.

In the Early days of our own Century, they had a different word... Scientifiction I believe it as called but one Editor (forgive me I forget his name) moved from Amazing to some other mag, he had to come up with a new term, and Science Fiction was born.

Ok so where does that leave us? We have HArd Sci-Fi and Sci-Fantasy and Space Opera (which is how I classify Star Wars btw) but none of these seem to quite fit anymore. When we hear Science Fiction, we tend to think SPACE. Well its not always about Space. Fundamentally I think all "Science Fiction" is about Humanity and Human beigns, along the lines of what others have said. Even Alternate History can fit into the catagory.

I think breaking it down into Sub Genres is the best, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Futuristic, etc etc there are many ways to do it. Also, I see the word Fantasy used alot, but I was thinking, we try so hard to define Science Fiction, and we define it by using Fantasy, how do we define what is Fantasy? Defining subsets or elements of one genre with another can be dangerous and lead to confusion.

Also Genre, the term itself may be overused or not-understood or defined enough to be useful. Personally I define it as the framework in which a story is told. Saving Private Ryan can be a sci-fi Story just as easily as it can be a Fantasy. All depends on the Framework.

BAsically to sum it all up, perhaps we need to define how we are re-defining. i.e. X is Science Fiction but Y is Fantasy and Z is Space Opera, well it does us no good if Fantasy and Space Opera themselves are not defined.

Sean

ADGBoss

Hey everyone,

Where SF games like Blue Planet, Aurora, and CyberSpace fail for me personally is in the extent to which they institutionalize the setting, always at the expense of character individuation, despite that main characters in classic SF literature always transgress against the setting in some way. In Asimov's The Caves of Steel, Detective Elijah Baley is assigned a robot for a partner, and as far as the reader knows, this arrangement is unique to the setting. In CyberSpace, I can create a character who has an artificially intelligent, mechanical war creature implanted in a cavity in his body. It's in the biomod rules. But who the fuck cares. Any character or NPC could have the same thing, differentiated only by the most superficial elements of Color. The setting is entirely prepared to respond to my character having such a biomod. Color-based differentiation, I'm sorry to say, isn't contributory to the significance of a character. Can I be the first individual ever in the setting who is psychically in tune with a cosmic consciousness? No. Any character I can create in CyberSpace is an expression of the setting. And it's not just chargen mechanics that institutionalize a game's setting. Imagine a Jeotsu male in the Aurora setting who falls in love with a female during the mating season, and decides he wants to stay with her, that he doesn't want to return home to help his sister with her offspring. Can I transgress against the setting like that? You might say, "sure," because at least in this case there aren't mechanics constraining me...but the fact that there are 250 pages of rules and 350 pages of setting material really does suggest that the game is about the characters responding to the setting, and not the setting responding to the characters. Someone needs to write me a SF game that provides a provocative cultural substrate for interesting and thematically meaningful transgressions, which Aurora clearly does, but that also actually facilitates the individuation of player characters at the expense of the setting. It seems that for fully realized SF settings, anything less than active facilitation of character individuation functions as passive deterrent.

Paul

Hey Paul,

Beautifully said.

A lot of what you say about the classic SF also applies to fantasy that succeeds in having a "mythic" quality. Mythic stories, too, are about unique beings and unique situations. There may be other rings, but the story is about the One Ring. Luke doesn't fight a battle fleet, he fights THE Death Star as he attempts to become the universe's ONLY active Jedi.

In fantasy games, though, it appears to be fairly easy to play so as to present specific things and characters as unique in the game world, even if they're hackneyed for the genre as a whole. A certain type of magic sword can easily be portrayed as the only one of its kind, even if it's right off of Table IV-C. A player-character can easily be portrayed as the only elf who keeps the company of humans, or vice versa, even if it says otherwise in the Race Profiles.

Your last sentence tells me that a place where drift can, with some effort, take you in a fantasy setting, SF games must be consciously designed to get to.

- Walt

That /is/ lovely.

I'm not sure that Walt's feeling that this quality of individuation is easier to achieve in a fantasy setting is not a touch facile, though. Perhaps the distinction lies partly in lowered expectations - thank you, D&D fantasy? - on the players' part, and partly in the manner in which the setting itself is evoked.

Lowered expectations crosslinked to the fantasy trope must, I think, play a part... people are willing to play "a thief" where playing "a rogue AI", not *the* rogue AI, grates. Lowered expectations meaning a willingness to play a member of a type, rather than a frontrunner or Unique Status character of whatever sort. I think this is in part beneficial; as a recentish article on RPG.net commented, "Not everyone in the playgroup can take on the one-in-a-universe wildcard role." A Caves of Steel or the like provides for one, sometimes two, rarely three True Uniques. Three is smallish for a gaming group, where I come from, so a certain amount of willingness not to require this as part and parcel of SF roleplay would be very useful. Thus, perhaps Paul's analysis is a touch flawed, or points to a way in which this type of character, prevalent in SF literature, may not be able to be as much a staple in roleplaying. Or recommends that SF RPGs on this mold carry smaller playgroups, certainly a valid option.

Alternately, the difference may lie in the way in which the RPG's setting is evoked, as Paul suggests. After all, in theory, Hero Wars should promote exactly the sort of highly individuated characters Paul talks about - it's roleplay on mythic scale, and I agree with Walt that this should, properly, require the same element of the One of a Kind. And Hero Wars theoretically targets its mechanics toward achieving this, in part through heavily grounding them in a societal matrix so that differentiation is more relevant if and when it comes. [Caveats here are because I'm personally not impressed with how it succeeded; different thread, that.]

So maybe the problem is simply that the RPGs Paul is citing present the setting in such wise that it hinders, rather than supporting, this level of uniqueness.

Certainly, I can see one way in which they might... in that, contrary to the literature, SF RPGs generally want to put all the tech goodies on the table to be savored. When there is an indication of unavailability, indicating perhaps that this toy might not be commonplace, this indication is undermined by two very strong factors. It is usually presented as simply an availability number, or legality index, generally a terse code... which needs to be parsed through special filters and ends up with the quality of the exotic pasted on like a price tag, rather than intrinsic to the description. More importantly, the act of providing enough specifics on how something works - whether it be a piece of technology, or a type of relationship - tends to render it commonplace. We assume that information in the game book is generally information which a sufficiently well-informed person would have, especially when it comes to the effects and so on of a described implement or scheme. It's put forth as a fait accompli - somebody made one of these. This robs the sense of wonder, and (when it contributes to a character's uniqueness) diminishes the bearer considerably.

In a way this brings us back toward the Big Idea trope. Presenting the full information - as one in theory does, when presenting a setting - backlashes, because once it's laid down, it's unmysterious and concrete. Even the shape of the thing, as laid down, robs it of some quality of the abrupt which seems to be necessary to its proper existence. The players may not know the details, but they know that autonomous AI implants exist in the setting, so having a character with one may be *cool*, but it can't be *unprecedented*.

There's definitely a correspondence going on here. In both cases, what's wanted seems to be a setting which leaves gaps. Which not only permits the GM to add in his own cool tech concepts (small and large), but also in some clear and specific way encourages and supports this activity. Then it's a unique and fascinating thing to have a character with an AI whispering in his ear at all times, and the *feel* of SF is much more well preserved.

I'm excited about this because it confirms a previously unformed gut feeling about my own work, that the specific setting I'm working with (not actually my creation) is rich not because it provides all the fabulous details, but because it does not - it instead provides a fertile plot in which such details grow and blossom. Putting it in words like this lets me see a little of what might be called for, in terms of permitting such weeds to sprout.

Supporting their generation... that's harder. I want to do that too... but it's always simpler to write games which fail to prohibit that which you want out of them, than to write games which actively promote that activity, make it rewarding and accessible to players and GM alike.

I think there's a little of that there, too... the last playtest (a LARP) ended with one of the last characters I would ever have expected to be an interesting continuing character, now having one of the most fascinating life-summations I've heard yet. This may be owing to the same phenomenon of individuation, operating on the theological rather than technological level (the game supports both very heavily). [If you're curious, the character in question began play as "a captive angel," ended play as "newly fallen from grace, nearly died along the road, saved only through the preservation of her soul (?) in the flame of a candle - which must now never be allowed to go out." She'll be back, for sure, even though the game itself was a one-shot.] But I don't know what combination of setting richness, player ingenuity, flexibilty of the tools given to them in the system, and Kibo only knows what else, helped empower this result.

It is clearly, however, a *good thing*. And something I would like to get a handle on. As the example demonstrates, it's not limited to SF, nor to technological or "cosmological" (Big Idea settings) uniqueness... though Paul points out, in this phrasing, that much SF depends upon it, so getting a handle on uniqueness-promotion could mean getting a better handle on SF to boot.

I think I'll take this to another thread, once I've had time to sleep on it... it's fascinating, and I think I've only touched the surface of what can be done here. How do we *actively promote* uniqueness of this degree, when encoding it in the rulebook seems to stifle it?

Sean a.k.a. ADGBoss wrote: When we hear Science Fiction, we tend to think SPACE.

he also wrote: Well its not always about Space.

Then Sean wrote: Fundamentally I think all "Science Fiction" is about Humanity and Human [beings], along the lines of what others have said. Even Alternate History can fit into the catagory.

M. J. Young wrote: what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?

Hi, I've been following this one on and off, and I think there's something very interesting to be said...

Rod quoted:

"Stories about the effects of science on people, or conversely, the effect of people on science."

Fundamentally, sci-fi is about putting humans into situations -- accompanied by plausible technology.
<big snip>
And ultimately, that's what stories are...communication about the human condition.

I want to expand on what Greyorm said about humanity, the future, and SF.

Our best evidence indicates humanity has not changed since the species emerged. Archeology indicates that the basic concerns of humanity: sustinence, social rewards, sex, and death have been consistent for at least 30,000 years. History indicates the same for the past 5,000. The basic experience of being human has not changed.

Now, of course, humanity has changed it's ways of of living, thinking, and organizing, usually based on innovation in technology of production. These are changes in society and culture. The most enormous of these have been the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, and the industrio-information revolution of the past half millenia. Still, the nature of humanity has remained the same; the experience of being human endures. What has changed is system - new needs and rewards encourage different kinds of behavior.

Given the endurance of the nature of humanity, one might not expect SF to explore what humanity is, but it has. SF literature has explored changes to the species, through evolution, genetic engineering and selective breeding. (Early examples include Slan by A.E. Van Vogt, and "Gulf" by Heinlein.) SF literature has explored fundimental changes resulting from technology (my favorite example is A is for Anything by Alfred Bester, but Gibson's Neuromancer is also an example). There's also a literature of social change, which often comes from mainstream authors: Handmaid's Tale by Atwood or 1984 by Orwell.

So one might conlude that SF literature has explored the limits of humanity much more than the species itself has in reality.

That said, I want to pull my discussion in to one point. SF isn't about predicting the future - it's about considering the consequence of our choices in the present. The audience is the present and the ultimate subject is the nature of humanity now.

Hello,

OK, I was going to do this before Paul's post about Blue Planet et al., but his post and the responses changed my mind. However, posts since then have moved it back.

The Forge is not a forum for debating or even musing about the definition of science fiction. Please note that my first post in this thread was not presenting such a definition, but a personal limitation on the contributions I'd be able to make.

Quit the "what SF means to me" stuff, folks. That's it, no more. If the purpose of this thread's first post has been served (M. J., speak up), then it needs to be closed.

Best,
Ron

M.J.'s originaly question was:

"what can science fiction do that hasn't been done, from a setting and technology perspective?"

I read Greyorm's post to read that SF had not covered certain areas that I thought it had, so I responded. After rereading my post, I realize the last line sounds like a definition. It wasn't intended as such. Rather I meant to point out that SF can always address something new because it addresses the present.

In other words my answer to MJ's question is "SF has already done everything, but you can do it again if you make it relevant to your current audience."

Getting back to RPGs, I'd like to respond to Harlequin's "Big Idea" concept for gaming.

If I understand you correctly, you're proposing a style of gaming (let's ignore system and GNS and whatnot here) in which the GM comes up with a Big Idea, such as the Budapest Zoo. The players and PCs do not know what the Big Idea is. Then they explore the world, the plot, and so forth, until the Big Idea is discovered or revealed. It doesn't really have to be a surprise, but that would be the dominant mode.

I was thinking you could perhaps expand the concept for a different sort of result. You take a sort of "basic SF backdrop setting," or at any rate one that doesn't require much thought on everyone's part to "get." It could be right now, just as easily as the future. Now you propose the Big Idea, and tell everyone about it. After musing briefly together to be sure everyone has the Big Idea down pat, you let 'er rip, and have the group mutually explore the implications of the Big Idea on areas of the setting.

For example, the Big Idea is Fang's mLife=Borg. The GM does the sort of run-through Fang did, and makes sure everyone gets the basic idea; you also make sure everyone's agreed on just how far this technology has gone (i.e. has it reached the full potential Fang eventually described, or are we just starting to have the jacks in our heads, or what). Now you have an explorative game in which everyone together thinks through versions and applications of mLife Borg-tech. If player X comes up with a nifty idea about how laundry-machines are going to work, and player Y is fascinated by the possiblity of using this tech for criminal purposes, that's all part of the show.

Among other things, this means that the GM doesn't have to think it all through herself. My sense of some SF problems (gaming, TV, whatever) is that if I the audience feel that you the GM/author/etc. have not thought it through, because I can see that your idea isn't "going to work that way" in whatever sense, then I get annoyed. Here it's my problem to write it into the world; I can't blame the GM.

Ron Edwards wrote: If the purpose of this thread's first post has been served (M. J., speak up), then it needs to be closed.