1. You have to at least partially believe fantasy or science fiction stories to enjoy them

2. Enjoying fiction is a lesser thing, something for young people who don't know any better or for people who haven't matured enough to understand the world as it really is

3. People indulge in fiction because fake reality is more exciting than real reality

I often agree with Keyes, but as someone who still reads fiction as an adult, I'd have to say that I disagree on virtually every point above, with some reservations. This isn't an attempt to besmirch Keyes and his opinion of fiction. Most people think fiction, especially science fiction, is at a lower literal and artistic level than other works – it's a common view and he certainly isn't alone. Of course, most people don't read scifi – their only exposure is what trickles into movies and TV. In any case, I'd like to provide an alternative view.

The first item above isn't true, at least not in my case, nor in the case of many who partake in the reading of science fiction or fantasy or horror or alternate histories, often lumped together today under the heading, “speculative fiction”.

Fantasy has no illusions – the title of the genre suggests as much. I doubt many people really believe in dragons or that there is a secret school hidden in a different dimension in England where young witches and wizards go to get trained, using owls as mail-delivering animals. At least, I doubt many adults reading such stories believe in such things, and there are many adults who enjoy such stories.

The human mind allows for fantasy, and it's fun to imagine non-real people in non-real circumstances. There are elements of realism, however, in how the humans act. Fantasy is often judged not by explanations which purport to explain the existence of magic, or the feasibility of a large flying fire-breathing reptiles, but how people respond to given situations. How would you respond if you got your back side singed by dragon breath? Did the character in the story act the same way? If so, it lends the story a sort of realism, especially for good stories which are always character driven in my view and in the view of many who analyze such things.

How did the detective react when he saw the dead body? How did the wizard react when his parents got killed? Does the fact that detectives really exist, and that wizards don't, matter? Not really, not if you judge the story based on the realism of the characters. Some people can't get over the unreal devices used to tell such stories. I don't have a problem myself. Among the moderns, I've read Stephen King and Koontz and Anne Rice and various other lesser fantasy tales. Yet, I don't now, nor have I ever, believed in vampires or people with rat heads or Nazi time machines.

Anne Rice has some of the most detailed and involved characters and her books are a joy to read. But while I enjoy fantasy, I prefer science fiction. And to further subdivide, I prefer hard science fiction. I'll get to hard scifi later on. First, let me explain why reading science fiction, of any kind, is good for even mature adults, above and beyond merely a good story with believable characters.

When Einstein performed his famous mental thought experiments, imagining himself in a glass elevator in space and such, to help him deduce that gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable in some sense, he was putting himself into an imaginary world. Imaginary, though one constrained by science as best he understood it.

Similarly, good science fiction stories present advanced ideas for us to ponder, often based on that which today's science tells us is plausible. What if we really could live in virtual worlds? What would the implications be? Would someone hacking into the computer in which I reside be able to destroy my being, my self? What am I? What is self? If I get scanned into a computer and my real body dies, have I died as well? Is there a part of me independent of my body? Am I just a clone, a perfect copy? Does that really matter so long as I remember and think that I am myself? Were there two of me for an instant, and, did that other sentient being die, sacrificing himself for me, now a new being, as he was scanned in?

What would happen to the human race if we met aliens one million years more advanced? Would it cause irreparable harm to us, like the South American Indians who were only 100 years behind the Spaniards technologically when they came knocking? Would really advanced aliens with god-like powers work together for some cosmic goal, or would they hide from each other, doing their best to remain invisible? Could it be that the thing to be most feared in all the universe is another sentient race, perhaps the only real danger to any super-advanced civilization, like two adult male crocodiles of equal strength?

Often more importantly, this tossing about of “what-if?” questions is applied to society, politics, religion, and morals. Issac Asimov never makes any of the banned-book lists at public schools as far as I know – Christan fundamentalists are too busy attacking Harry Potter – but do they realize that Asimov has a whole series in which adults have sex with their own children? He paints that world so well, that we can see objectively, that for those non-existent people, such traditions might make sense – the ultimate in sex ed, you might say. War of the Worlds, the original book version, not the Americanized Hollywood versions, used another common tactic in scifi: a way for the author to point out the flaws in his own society, Victorian England in that case. It was a way for people to see themselves in the real world through a literary device, an imaginary war with advanced aliens who had no regard for primitive humans. The best scifi usually has such themes, exposing the short-comings of the human race or attempting to evaluate other views and belief systems that would be impossible to “study” in the real world – philosophical thought experiments, in other words.

Before I talk about hard scifi, let me mention the popular Hollywood sicfi. Many of these stories deal with very old ideas. The stories in the Twilight Zone were already old when that show ran, which was quite a few decades ago now. The space-opera type stories, Star Wars and Star Trek, are also loaded with very old scifi ideas (though more recent incarnations of Trek include more experimentation with modern ideas). The sad fact is that most ordinary people aren't interested enough in real science to get most modern scifi, at least the hard variety. Before current science thoughts and findings trickle into common knowledge, many new ideas will be developed. The offerings that most ordinary, non-scifi-reading people are exposed too most of the time aren't in the hard scifi genre, they are what I and others call sci-fantasy. Still enjoyable, often with good stories and good characters, but clearly running afoul of science-fact quite often.

This isn't to say that one form of fiction is better than another, it is merely to lay the ground work for my next point. Based on this bit from his article, I'd say that Thomas hasn't read very much modern scifi or even much classic hard scifi:

This sort of thing is true in science fiction too. If you still believe in the possibility of interstellar travel, or even intergalactic travel, if you believe in teleportation, speed-of-light spaceships, extraterrestrial civilizations and all the usual trappings of science fiction, you can really have a good time with tales like Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey. A part of your mind tells you this is real, and that maybe one day you’ll be a part of it all, exploring the crossroads of the universe and touring the gleaming cities scattered throughout the galaxies. This was my case anyway. When I was younger, I loved science fiction, but as, little by little, I realized that this was all illusory, I began to lose interest.

2001, in many ways, was scientifically accurate. It featured highly advanced aliens of course, as well as a sentient computer - I won't argue their realism here. But there was no false gravity – people either floated, or stuck to the walls and floor via Velcro shoes or the force generated by spinning the craft, like swinging a bucket around without spilling the water, where the water is pulled towards the bottom of the bucket regardless of where the bucket is in relation to the ground. The craft that carried the crew during the second half of the film left for the outer solar system, getting there in scientifically accurate time – not in Star Wars hyperspace time. We don't see Luke Skywalker working out to keep his bone calcium from deteriorating, and so on and so forth. In other words, there is a range of plausibility and accuracy in scifi, a LARGE range. One can hardly lump 2001 and Stars Wars into the same category by this criteria, even though both are enjoyable films with good stories.

There is no reason to disbelieve in the possibility of interstellar travel, for example, and actually, every reason to expect this as an inevitability, assuming humans are willing. I doubt Thomas has ever read an accurate modern account of such trips in a hard scifi novel. This is what sets hard scifi apart – it attempts to be as accurate in terms of real science as possible (not that I have issues with the scifi classics, they are still worth reading). As I mentioned in some of my recent articles, while very difficult now, it seems merely an engineering and logistics issue. There are no science laws which need to be broken, even to get current short-lived frail humans to the closest stars.

As for warp-drives, there's a trend in modern hard scifi to steer away from the faster than light hyperspace travel that is almost ubiquitous in the scifi most people are exposed too. ETs are still to be found, though they largely reflect reality and guesses based on what we know about evolution for example. No mere English-speaking hominids with deformed faces, funky hairstyles and colourful clothes, in other words, that have all of the same social problems we do.

The Fermi Paradox is also commonly addressed and explored: Given that interstellar travel is assumed possible based on what we know now (and in fact, inevitable for long-term survival for any sentient species), and given that a race even slightly ahead of us would have vastly more knowledge and ability, and given that by hopping from star to star the entire galaxy could be inhabited in at most millions of years (short compared to the age of the galaxy), and assuming that we likely aren't special (not the very first sentient race in the galaxy nor the last, given the age of the galaxy), why don't we see alien activity everywhere we look?

I don't know of a single popular Hollywood or TV bit of scifi that takes this conundrum into real consideration, yet in terms of any real honest view of aliens, it is virtually unavoidable.

Teleportation is also treated accurately in hard scifi. Of late, quantum teleportation has been en vogue, at least in what I've personally read. Quantum teleportation is real, though there are some serious caveats in terms of practicality. You don't actually teleport an object, you teleport its description at the quantum level. It involves quantum entangled pairs and such (what Einstein called, “spooky action at a distance”) and we've already been able to teleport small particles. To thoroughly scan something as complex as a human down to the particle level and then rebuild at a new location seems extraordinarily difficult in a logistical way, though it is scientifically possible. Of course, you'd need a proper receiving station – no beaming people to the surface of a planet that hasn't been touched before, and no beaming faster than light speed, as information can't exceed light speed. So, given an extremely advanced alien race as a plot device, a race capable of near infinite computer processing power and storage ability relative to ours, even teleporation can be thought of as accurate in such a context. Such a book still qualifies for the “hard scifi” moniker.

Again, this isn't to say that teleporattion in a story that doesn't at all explain how that actual transfer might take place is something lesser, it's merely to differentiate between soft and hard scifi.

Scifi is actually quite good at predicting the future, though not by any one specific author and not in a psychic-like way. Cell phones, submarines, space travel, robots, the Internet, bionic limbs, supersonic airplanes, satellites and many other current realities have all been the topic of past science fiction.

Spaceplanes, space elevators, orbiting hotels/colonies, bases on the Moon, Mars and asteroids, thinking computers, and colony ships bound for the nearby stars are near future realities that could happen based on what we know about today's technology projected forward, and the laws of nature. Teleportation is probably much further off, and meeting aliens is anyone's guess, though both are well within reason, and indeed, possibly even expected to occur at some point.

Finally, those who’ve followed hard scifi over the years might agree that truth is stranger and more exciting than fiction, at least in terms of the science in speculative fiction. The more we learn about the universe, the more possibilities open to us. Between machine intelligence, nano-technology, genetic engineering, instant world-wide communication and the possibility of life everywhere, even on many space-bodies in our own cosmic “backyard”. I'd say that we are living science fiction in this age.

	Web useless-knowledge.com