the FUTURE

If something is set in the future, surely it's to show that something is different from today, and most of those qualities of difference are "science fiction". Or prophecy, which is the sort of science fiction you believe in. Or philosophy, which is the sort of science fiction that wants you to take it seriously.

I supopse there are some books set in the not-too-distant future that don't paint the future as being different from today. But if you don't have the sense that your society is going to change radically over time, why set anything in the future?

The two commonest forms of speculative fiction are science fiction and fantasy. (I'd say the utopian and distopian genres have mostly been subsumed into science fiction or fantasy in the past century.) The fantasy genre merely requires that the time and place be far, far away from the here and now, and the relation of that time and place to the present is usually unspecified, because it is irrelevant. That leaves you with science fiction, more or less. Any fiction that meets your criteria is going to be pretty oddball.

I'd categorise fantasy as distinct from speculative fiction - speculative fiction deals with things as they could be in this world; in the future, or if certain historical events had happened differently, or any number of conditionals. Fantasy deals with other worlds or universes, unrelated to this one, as you say.

One could then argue that scifi is that branch of specfi which deals specifically with technological progress or other scientific issues - and so many of these modern mainstream novels set in the future would be speculative but not scifi.

If you attempt to define science fiction too narrowly, and say that it's only fiction that deals _specifically_ with scientific issues.... well, good luck defining what _specifically_ means. Is 1984 about the technological issues, or is the society only enabled by them? How about Brave new World? Fahrenheit 451? The Handmaid's Tale? Oryx and Crake?

Of course, we've also had the "hard science fiction" tag invented for similar reasons. It's pretty interesting how people can say that they hate any and all fantasy, yet think of Dune as a great book. It's science fiction, y'see. Not made up, illogical rubbish!

That's a conditional too far for me. Ok it's going to be tricky to nail down exactly why, say alternative histories are acceptable where fantasy isn't, but I think it's pretty easy to get a broad distinction between scenarios which could be possible in this universe (speculative) and those which couldn't (fantasy).

That said I can see the utility in an umbrella term for all this stuff - although my preferred one was always skiffyfantasymindrot - and y'know now we're just arguing semantics which is of course boring and pointless :-)

"fantasy" = it contains dragons and shit

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to me it seems sort of odd in some ways that anyone should set a story in the present. i don't think george saunders or david foster wallace tends to get discussed in terms of science fiction. maybe they are and its escaped me, i don't read much comment on them i suppose.

it seems to me quite a nice idea to be able in fact to argue that SF invented "the future" for (literary) writing.

chris, revelation would seem to be an early contender, although i think it's expressed as a vision (but, fair enough: what other kind of access to the future was ol john of patmos supposed to have). i think your other two examples are glib. :P

tom, i actually thought about wallace when looking for examples, because he's one of the only ones i could think of that didn't seem very appropriate to discuss as 'science fiction'. which does beg the question what the point of setting the book just about in the present, but a little in the future, has, that setting it in the present proper can't achieve. (later use-by date?)

and yes tom i thought it would be quite surprising if more or less true.

(once a creative writing teacher asked me what i liked, and i said 'gravity's rainbow', and he didn't seem to know that much about it, but referred to it as 'science fiction'; i couldn't tell if he meant to cleverly emphasize the SCIENCE part or what.)

(in fact i wonder if it isn't interesting that much science fiction proper retains this device: set in the future, but more or less derives its setting from taking a journey to somewhere else in order to sort of get free difference.)

Sorry, trying again for curiousity's sake...

IJ is clearly science fiction.

Revelation is apparently one of a whole genre of such end-times visions that were big in the last few centuries BC and the first few AD -- see also the book of Daniel? I don't know how many of the non-canonical books are still extant.

The other issue: If you set your fiction in the future, how are you going to explain how people of today can read it? It seems like that sort of accountability for the existance of a text was important up until the 20th C. -- even [some of?] Wells's SF (Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues) accounts for itself, doesn't it?

xpost You're kidding, right? 1984 is totally sci-fi, just like Animal Farm is fantasy.

How would Haruki Murakami's books be classified?

Where does horror fit into these delineations?

*i.e. don't tell me about the writings of cyrano defuckingbergerac or whatever

SF is a publishing category. Publishers publish a book as SF if they think it will sell better that way. They don't study it to see if the technology is really possible and think "Hmmm, sounds implausible, maybe we should market as Fantasy". It's a simple question of "Will this sell more in the SF section or the Literature section"
And that's what 'slipstream' is (somebody had to notice Lauren) - SF that publishers think will sell better from the Literature section. Borges, Ishiguro, Murakami, Atwood, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Specimen Days, Atomised, Grimus, 1984, Brave New World - all things that are SF on any reading of their contents, but for one reason or another will sell better without a picture of a spaceship fighting a dragon on the cover.

1984 seems to be the point at which it becomes possible to argue about whether certain texts are are literary or SF in this particular unproductive way. i don't know when people started having that argument, though. probably sometime before actual 1984.

did people have arguments over whether certain other texts properly belonged to literary or paraliterary genres before that? they must have done.

tom, i would think that the early arguments over the edifying or pernicious effect of novel-reading were conducted in terms of whether novels were literary or not, but i can't be sure.

(also, there's the ulysses obscenity trial, which was actually before 1984, and for that matter before 1948.)

'The Child in Time' (1987) by Ian McEwan appears to be set in what was the future. There's a reference to an incident at the Olympics provoking the Russians to close the border at Helmstadt, during the last good summer of the twentieth century.

The only other examples I know (1984, The Road, etc) have to be set in the future to explain the existence of items crucial to the plot. The Child in Time is the only book I can think of which does this just for the hell of it.

http://yankees-chick.com/conan.jpg

IN THE YEAR 2000!!!!

did the future really exist before around SF started? i mean a future that would be expected to be different than the present in interesting ways.

Isn't that what SF is, though?

I'm not knocking you down, just struggling to draw a distinction.