in conversation

[rushthatspeaks]

B.: "One extreme of science fiction is called hard science fiction, but one extreme of fantasy is called high fantasy. What do you think of that?"

Me: "It makes me want to write high science fiction, and hard fantasy, if only we can figure out what they are."

B.: "Well, there already is hard fantasy. The Worm Ouroboros..."

Then the conversation went into whether he meant simple difficulty, or something more along the lines of hardcore, or something else entirely, so we never figured out:

what is high science fiction? Does anyone know any?

Comments

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

what is high science fiction?
*tries to come up with erudite answer that doesn't involve mentioning drugs*

*...fails*

[sovay]

what is high science fiction? Does anyone know any?

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun? Deep time, elaborate language, classic tropes of science fiction reworked to the point of estrangement; it is instantly and recognizably epic, but it defamiliarizes the more you look at it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I would think so, yes.

Also, I would posit, some of the Vance which Wolfe is influenced by, Dune, Zindell's Neverness and sequels, and I had one other example in mind that fell out of my head before I reached the end of the sentence.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

This was the way my own mind was tending, only then I thought that - coming along behind and beneath you this way - I ought probably to have caught the one you let slip, but...

Sorry. Butterfingers here.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Aha! I have answer. Ish.

Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden and Sky Coyote. There are others in that series I haven't read (and I want to do violence to the people who write the synopses on the back of her books, because they're appalling), but I love those two deeply for the combination of prose style, brilliant ideas, and clashing paradigms.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I can't really read anything where the time-travellers a) sound so terribly turn-of-the-twenty-first-century and b) seem to have almost no cultural referents outside of those a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century film buff would have as timeless enough for high anything, even if I could get past finding the prose boringly staid and the plot not getting past odious on Icky Romance* grounds.

*Icky Romance: a technical term meaning "romance rysmiel does not like". Hard to pin down precisely, though regarding centuries of pining over a loft love as sympathetic rather than a particularly selfish value of screeblingly insane is part of it; perhaps easiest to pin down by defining its polar opposite within the field of romance plots, which is Shards of Honor.

[sovay]

I can't really read anything where the time-travellers a) sound so terribly turn-of-the-twenty-first-century and b) seem to have almost no cultural referents outside of those a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century film buff would have as timeless enough for high anything, even if I could get past finding the prose boringly staid and the plot not getting past odious on Icky Romance* grounds.

I semi-bounced off In the Garden of Iden; what pulled me into the series was a short story collection, Black Projects, White Knights (2002). If you're interested in giving Kage Baker another shot, you might wish to check it out.

though regarding centuries of pining over a loft love as sympathetic rather than a particularly selfish value of screeblingly insane is part of it

The character of Joseph would agree with you.

[kate_nepveu]

You sooooooooooooo do not want to read that series.

*considers, goes back, adds more "o"s*

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I figured bouncing as hard as I did off the first three was enough to overcome even the OCDish inability to put things down that has me still reading Anita Blake.

[kate_nepveu]

Many people don't have a problem with the ending of the series.

I am not one of them. You would not be, either.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Now I want to write something clever and poetic about loft love and leaden lust, and how one screebles into the other over the centuries.

[larryhammer]

Or even loft love and cellar lust.

---L.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd corrected that typo, but on balance am not at all sorry it slipped through.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

HAH! I thought you were affecting an interefting lifp to indicate your difdain. :p

To be fair, I read those books when I was just starting to read SF, so I don't know how they'd hold up to a re-reading. But I didn't know that timelessness was a quality of the "high"; in fact, I tend to think of one of the qualities of "high" things is having characters so steeped in narrative that they're more effective as symbols than as characters to be related to realistically. Witness Beren and Luthien's relationship, or the World-Defining Tragedy That Isn't Beren and Luthien in The Fionavar Tapestry, etc.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Also, I fail to see any way in which The Worm Ouroboros can be classified as "hard". The Zimiamvia books maybe, but not in the sense in which "hard" is used in the phrase "Hard SF".

(Humankind is the taxonomising animal.)

[zdenka]

For high science fiction: Poul Anderson's The High Crusade?

If you define "high science fiction" as sci-fi which deals not with gadgets but with quests and feudal lords, in space. If you define it that way, most of the Vorkosigan series qualifies.

Or maybe The Martian Chronicles, though that would be a different definition.

I think "high" needs to mean "noble and lordly and ringing," because that's what it means for fantasy. (Though sometimes it just means that the author is imitating Tolkien badly.)

I don't really think that The Worm Ourobouros is "hard fantasy," as some commenters have already said. It's pre-Tolkien fantasy, which is different. For hard fantasy . . . maybe Conan the Barbarian-type stuff? Or something that focuses on shiny magic items and is stereotypically male-oriented?

[edenfalling]

I think "high" needs to mean "noble and lordly and ringing," because that's what it means for fantasy.

Yes, this.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think the idea of "high SF" as "high fantasy in space" adds any useful structure to SF as a genre. "Highness" in fantasy has to do with how much it concerns itself with ultimate things, and how it handles them, and in SF the typical palette of "ultimate things" is very different.

I'd definitely hold up Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Brin's latter Uplift trilogy as high SF, as others have mentioned, because they deal with stuff like technology beyond mortal ken (tm), the long-term fate of starfaring species, and galactic societal structures so vast they transcend the normal concept of "history".

As for hardness, I think it's a matter of the level of rigor in the world-building. In SF, "rigor" usually means scientific, but there are many other dimensions along which an invented world can hang together (or fail to do so). Of course, a work can have hard and soft spots, as it can have high and low spots.

[chomiji]

Hmm ... the definition I had heard for "high fantasy" was essentially "fantasy that creates a complete alternative world in which ours does not exist" (example: LotR) whereas low fantasy was essentially "fantasy in which fantastical elements occur in our own world" (example: Tea with the Black Dragon and most recent urban fantasies). I found those definitions in pre-Intarwebs days (probably while I was writing papers about SF&F as an undergrad in the late 1970s), and I can't recall where I found them.

Of course, some books are both - the Chronicles of Narnia, for example.

[larryhammer]

Some of Brin's Uplift books, especially the trilogy Brightness Reef/Infinity's Shore/Heaven's Reach, might qualify as one sort of high science fiction. If you squint in the right direction. Unfortunately, it's the same direction that includes Piers Anthony's Macroscope. But also Benford's Galactic Center series.

---L.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

For "high" in the sense it is used of mackerel, perhaps.

("Not so much high as positively stinking.")

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Verner Vinge is perhaps high science fiction?

Though I might just be confusing "high" with "convoluted and very long".

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

When I tried to think of "high science fiction," the first example that came to mind was Lord of Light. I don't think I can actually defend the classification with any rigor, because the category doesn't have rigorous boundaries in the first place. But if we're going by "I know it when I see it," I see it there (and also in the Book of the New Sun.)

[khava.livejournal.com]

Cryptonomicon?