The Sword and Laser discussion

I've been dreading the inevitable debate about whether this counts as science fiction or not and here I am kind of starting it.
I'm ok with the alternative universe aspects, (view spoiler)[ different history, habitable planets and moons, "cannon" rockets, etc., (hide spoiler)] because it reminds me of the SF from the 30's and 40's that I enjoy or you can call it fantasy if you like. But I'm about half through and the part that's really bugging me is (view spoiler)[ Neptune is about go behind the Sun and they're going to lose contact with Earth for 72 years. Does Earth not go around the Sun every year in this universe? Shouldn't they get contact back in a few months when Earth comes around? Even if that weren't true couldn't they relay signals from other planets or moons that have line of sight to both? (hide spoiler)]
I can suspend disbelief with the best of them but even for fantasy this doesn't make sense to me.

It's definitely science fiction.

That part about Neptune bugged me too. (view spoiler)[You are correct that there could never be more than a few months of radio silence due to the sun blocking the line of sight. Plus Earth (and Neptune) always have line of sight with several other planets between them, so bouncing a signal would always be possible. Unless France has bad political relations with the other planets and can't access their radio dishes. Maybe the planets have a different length of orbit there. But that would mean Earth having an extraordinarily long orbit. (hide spoiler)]

Edit: I did a search and found a more precise answer (view spoiler)[Earth being behind the sun (as observed from Neptune) is rarer than we thought. It happens once a year (for a period of a few days) for 6 to 8 years in a row. Then there will be about 75 years where they never lose line of sight. The last time they lost line of sight was in 2006 and the next time is in 2081 (Then once a year to 2088). The radio signal loss would last for a a bit longer while the earth is close to and then behind the sun. (hide spoiler)]

At least she got Venus having a day that is longer than it's year correct.

Most of the other science and physics "mistakes" I let go. (view spoiler)[I just put them down to differences in the Laws Of Physics and different planetary formations between our universe and their universe. The author even addresses this later in the book, when talking about the other universes. (hide spoiler)]

I didn't ever think of them as mistakes so much as the misconceptions of the public in the 19th century treated as fact. Pluto with an atmosphere and a whole solar system full of planets with diverse life and such.

Spaceships that work like trains and bullet shots to the moon.

This is definitely one of those books where the basic labeling system just doesn't work. You got get into the deep stuff of like Weird Fiction and such to find something that fits.

It is an alternate universe, so really anything goes and the author gets to make the rules. I'm fine with that.

Except the Neptune problem. It is hard to come up with a solution that would work the way Valente describes in any universe.

Tassie Dave wrote: "Except the Neptune problem. It is hard to come up with a solution that would work the way Valente describes in any universe. ."

Having a little fun with it, maybe there is a shield of force just inside Neptune's orbit that covers half of the solar system. So "behind the sun" would be shorthand for behind that shield.

Could Neptune's orbit have a different axis? So for a bonker's amount of time, it's not behind the sun so much as at a 90ish degree angle, which for the sake of argument causes so much interference in this universe that nothing can get through?

In the end, I just take "behind the sun" to be "part of orbit with heavy interference." I mean, it makes a lot of sense for the setting/tone for that to be a thing to exist, even if it doesn't for orbital mechanics.

I wish CMV had explained it better.

Anything is possible with axis tilt. In our universe Uranus goes around on it's side with one pole always pointed at the sun.
The opposite pole only sees sunlight every 42 years. Anyone there wouldn't get radio signals from earth in that time.

But in Radiance the cities are built on ships that circumnavigate Neptune every 10 years or so. So even with tilt and keeping close to the pole they would drift into sunlight and radio waves occasionally. Plus there are at least 5 cities mentioned. Surely one would be in a position to see the sun.

At least it is fun to speculate. Damn you Catherynne for making me think ;-)

I mean axis of revolution, not rotation-- so it's not in the same orbital plane as Earth?

Rob Secundus wrote: "I mean axis of revolution, not rotation-- so it's not in the same orbital plane as Earth?"

That could work. Not in our universe obviously. But CMV could have weird matter above the solar ecliptic that blocks radio waves. Her universe, her rules :-)

Neptune does move above and below the ecliptic in our universe. That is why we get blocks of 6 to 8 year cycles where transits and occults (sun between Earth and Neptune) are possible. This is when Neptune is on or near the ecliptic. The rest of the time it is far enough above or below for it to always be visible (telescopically)

I don't see how this is even up for debate. Radiance is clearly Fantasy.

If this book had been written 100 years ago, it absolutely would have been Science Fiction. In 1915, despite all of the amazing technology they had and the leaps in scientific knowledge, predicting things like "talkies" would have been out there, and the planetary stuff would have mostly passed muster because so little was known about them.

We still had War of the Worlds as the primary touchstone for Mars and Burroughs had just written the first of his Barsoom series, A Princess of Mars.

Although if it had been written 100 years ago, Pluto wouldn't be in it. My grandmother is 101 (and people think she's maybe 80), and in her lifetime we discovered Pluto, made it the ninth planet and then demoted it to "piece of rock meh". I'm not too far into the book so I haven't come across any mention of the various moons, but the vast majority of moons discovered in our solar system have been found in the last 50-60 years, including all of the ones orbiting Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. So positing those would be SF.

But writing it now, where we know that's not how science works? Fantasy. Even with the caveat of alternate universe, some parts just don't make sense, such as the blackout of Neptune mentioned upthread. I suppose one could construct a solar system where such a blackout took place, but the conditions would have to be so specific and odd that it would take a lot of finagling to make it work. (Which, given that our universe is infinite, there probably is just such a solar system out there.)

It's fun to nitpick though ;-) and speculate on the conditions required to make it work. I'd love to see someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Phil Plait come up with the maths and orbits it would take.

I'd be a terrible sci-fi writer. I'd want the maths and science to be perfect. Good in principle, tedious and time consuming in practice. At least with fantasy you can explain anything with magic.

I would still classify Radiance as sci-fi (not hard sci-fi obviously)

Yeah, the problem is that we all know what the words "science fiction" signify. We all know that in the extreme majority of usage, Star Wars is scifi. We know that stuff with space, lasers, aliens, time travel, futuristic technology, or stuff adjacent to those things is scifi, and stuff with elves, swords, magic, or stuff adjacent to those things is fantasy. Generically, this book is also a novel. Generically, It is also epistolary. Arguing that the novel isn't scifi is about as pointless as arguing that isn't epistolary because it contains documents other than letters. The entire argument is founded upon a definition narrower than all but a tiny fraction of human readers use.

The interesting genre questions are never "where should I shelve this?" as it's immediately apparent to 99% of readers, barring some generic twist ala Pern. Asking how those generic tropes are used/played with, and what effect this use has, on the other hand, actually lead to discussion.

Rob Secundus wrote: "Yeah, the problem is that we all know what the words "science fiction" signify. We all know that in the extreme majority of usage, Star Wars is scifi. We know that stuff with space, lasers, aliens,..."

I wonder if there should be a term for artifact tech scifi. Or retro scifi (although "retro" usually evokes a particular time period). Basically you pick a time period, take a solid and well-researched look at how they thought the world worked, and write an idea-based, tech-grounded story that conforms nicely to the science of the time.

Like the two stories in Stories of Your Life and Others, a previous S&L pick. "Seventy-Two Letters" and perhaps less of a good example, "Tower of Babylon".

That way those who want their science to be as tight as possible will know what they might be getting. Those who want the elements usually associated with a scifi story but maybe with a more creative setting or to play with an unfamiliar worldview can know what they are getting.

*reads what I just read* I think I might be part of the problem in regards to genre confusion. Me: "Overlabel everything! That'll help smart readers figure it out for themselves!"

https://xkcd.com/592/

We *do* need a name for it. Chiang's the master, but I'll add Tregellis' Something More Than Night-- in which Scholastic Cosmology exists alongside modern physics and is applied strictly-- as another example.

Since it operates like the subgenre of Hard Science Fiction and takes place in an alternate universe, my humble suggestion is simply HardAlt SF. Or Hard AU.

There've been numerous SF novels in the last decade where Earth's economy is dependent upon mining helium-3 on the moon even though the concept makes no damn sense, and yet those books are treated as not only SF but hard-SF. Classics of the genre include people with magical powers that are handwaved away with talk about "psionics" that didn't even make sense when they were published. And let's not even get started on the awful things writers do to the Theory of Relativity.

Let's face it, "science fiction" is a cargo cult built upon popular histories of Thomas Edison, the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program. It has no connection to real science and complaining that a book that takes a more impressionistic approach to its "science" isn't doing it right is like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian complaining that Lindsay Lohan is a talentless hack.

The general rule of thumb is that you are allowed one gimme (maybe two) before you lose the audience. Once you start compounding it by adding a little bit of impossible stuff here and a little bit or impossible stuff there, you've tilted the scale from SF to F.

Space operas like Star Trek are solidly in Fantasy territory regardless of how they are popularly categorized, precisely because impossibility upon impossibility is piled up.

Hahahaha "X is in genre y even if it's not categorized in genre y." Ok dude. Ok. That's how words work, sure.

You keep telling yourself that SF only means strictly hard science fiction, and the rest of humanity will carry on using the words the way we've been using them.

I guess Foundation, Dune and Ringworld aren't SF because they require way more than two "gimmes".

Trike wrote: "The general rule of thumb is that you are allowed one gimme (maybe two) before you lose the audience."

It's funny, huge Niven fan that I am, I still noticed he asked us to swallow one huge whopper per book. Protector? Great use of sublight travel, Ramships that would work and described down to the spectra emitted. But he asks you to believe that humanity evolved off world despite the huge fossil evidence.

World of Ptavvs? Alien comes out of stasis after a billion years. Following that, interesting take on life in the Belt and landing on Pluto.

Integral Trees...there's a big livable blob of gas in space, people live in zero G, no one dies of radiation...yeah, I got half through and then dropped it. Too many gimmes.

By necessity you have to have a loose definition of science fiction and a lot of genres, other wise everything ends up being fantasy. Then fantasy loses it's definition and just becomes a general 'catch all' genre.

If it looks like science fiction, then it is science fiction in my eyes. We know 'faster than light' speeds are impossible. But we automatically give sci-fi authors that one for getting their ships over vast distances, to let them get their story told. Teleporting, time travel etc we know they are probably never going to be viable but we can pretend they are possible.

For what it's worth if I were discussing this book with friends who were asking what it was about, I would absolutely caveat it with a "it's fantasy in space, even more so than Star Wars." Because none of my friends would accept that a world where Pluto is chained to its moon Charon by a Gigantic Lotus Plant is even remotely what they think of when they think of Science Fiction.

Ultimately though the genre distinctions are at best vague helpers in discussing books. I think it's always best to look at the context and who you are talking to when wielding them, because really that's all they are good for. There is no real world-wide definition of these things.

For example I hear "Literary Fiction" people go on at length about Shakespeare. However two of his plays are filled with magic and primary characters who are faeries. Literal magic wielding faeries. But it rarely occurs to most people to call the Tempest "High Fantasy". Yet, by any sane definition it is.

If it's just a shelving/categorization inquiry, I think GRRM's dividing line works as well as any: "My own definition of the two genres is pretty simple. It's all about the furniture. If it has spaceships and aliens, it's science fiction." So, I guess Radiance would be SF under that definition. It has no swords or magic as far as I can tell, just physics, cosmology and planetary science that isn't remotely like our own.

That said, I'm not relating to Radiance in the way that I would most good science fiction books (and I do think it's a good book, whether or not I like it yet). The closest equivalent SF books that spring to mind are things like Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand or Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, where it's a science fiction setting used to explore issues of identity that are largely unmoored from questions of science. (I guess Radiance is a bit different in that Valente is intentionally picking "science" that can't possibly be part of our universe but has resonance with our vague recollections of pulp SF (and stories told about pulp SF).)

What do you usually look for in your science fiction? What do you usually look for in your fantasy? For me, this book doesn't satisfy my itch for either genre but parts of it sure are lovely.