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Sigh. You never sigh stated what sigh your point was. Sigh.

NoCoPilot wrote:

So, your figure should be "one of several hundred million" not "one of eight" and yes I'd consider that rare.

Ignoring your asteroids and comets, if there was life on one out of every hundred million planets, then there would be life on 10 quadrillion planets.
Do you consider that rare? Or just sparse?

There is a branch of science fiction called alternate history. Suppose Richard Lionheart didn't die from his wound at the siege of Chaluz, but eventually recovered, and was so sobered by the experience that he settled down to be a good king. Hundreds of years later, the history of the world has gone quite differently, and the Anglo-French Empire rules a a large swath of the planet, including part of what we call the Americas. And so on.

Is this fantasy or merely fiction?

Now that's a genre I haven't heard of before. I don't know how I would classify it, other than as you have - alternate history. Come to think of it, I recently watched a television series - "SS-GB" - about Great Britain in the years following their loss of WW II, with the Nazis in control of the country. I never thought of the story line as science-anything.

The differences between science fiction and science fantasy are somewhat blurred. But when asked for the difference, one of the masters - Rod Serling - said, "[Science fiction] was 'the improbable made possible' while [science fantasy] was 'the impossible made probable'." This is a definition to which I would probably adhere.

Wikipedia has a short article on the subject. It's very incomplete and not very good, other than being my source for Serling's remark.

A slightly better article is available from Fantasy Magazine. The FM article takes note of the fact that the designations are subjective. I agree completely with that. What some may consider future possibilities other would consider simply magic.

And some stories, such as Star Trek, seem to wobble between fiction and fantasy from episode to episode. Of course, some people would consider every episode as fantasy, because of their use of the transporter.

The most famous example of alternate history fiction is "The Man in the High Castle" about the world after Hitler won the Second World War. This is definitely fiction, because history turns on key moments and in most cases the decision points are tiny and could have gone either way. There are a great many books out, from modern alt-hists to Medieval changes to dinosaurs surviving into the modern age, and sad to say I've never been the slightest bit interested in any of them.

When I read fiction I like to learn new things. The whole idea of alt-hist just seems like a titanic waste of words to me. That's just me.

_Howard wrote:

NoCoPilot wrote:

So, your figure should be "one of several hundred million" not "one of eight" and yes I'd consider that rare.

Ignoring your asteroids and comets, if there was life on one out of every hundred million planets, then there would be life on 10 quadrillion planets.
Do you consider that rare? Or just sparse?

I'd consider it irrelevant.

Of course you would. Because it doesn't support what you want to believe.

_Howard wrote:

Sigh. You never sigh stated what sigh your point was. Sigh.

I did, but you missed it apparently. Luckily you can reread this thread any time you want.

NoCoPilot wrote:

When I read fiction I like to learn new things.  The whole idea of alt-hist just seems like a titanic waste of words to me.  That's just me.  

In high school, our English teacher was totally disparaging towards science fiction, saying it was all rubbish. We pointed out that H.G. Wells wrote science fiction, and that most people didn't think his work was bad. Ah well, apparently Wells wrote stories about people, so his work wasn't really science fiction. Yes, it's easy to prove that all science fiction is rubbish if you simply redefine everything good as "not science fiction".

Most fiction is about people reacting to stressful situations. Whether the situations arise because of things relatively commonplace or because of circumstances bizarre (like meeting aliens, or living in a world with a different history than ours) is in many respects rather irrelevant.

richard09 wrote:

Most fiction is about people reacting to stressful situations.

Yes I guess that's true. Most stories are based around conflict of some kind. In theory at least fiction readers should be better prepared to deal with life's ups and downs.

Except the two people I know who read the most fiction, who are OBSESSED with fiction, are my two friends who are most ill-equipped to deal with life. Both of them are extremely impractical, extremely flappable, extremely dependent. Fiction doesn't seem to have prepared them for anything. It has only allowed them to inhabit a tidy little world where nothing matters and the plots are always sewed up by the final chapter.

I love science fiction, at least certain types of science fiction, in both books and movies. I cannot abide the stuff about dragons or wizards or transformers or superheroes, but I love stuff that postulates "what if" situations with advanced technology that might actually exist some day. I love John Varley and Isaac Asimov, I love Blade Runner and Her and Ex Machina and Demolition Man. Stuff that makes you think about where current trends are leading us, and where we might end up in the future if we stay on the same course.

That's why alt-hist strikes me as so pointless. Those decision points have already come and gone and different choices were made. Why debate what never happened?

I discovered science fiction when I was eleven years old. I immediately dropped all the western novels and books about pirates.

The first sci-fi book I read was The Martian Chronicles. I was so taken by the stories that it was the first non-child's book that I bought for my daughter about thirty-five years later. She was engrossed in the book when she was eight or nine years old. Even though she had been reading for five or six years, she often asked me to read this book to her at night. Nothing else, just this one book.

I don't think alternative history is any more pointless than other fiction - it's just there for enjoyment; enlightenment must be sought elsewhere. I remember reading The Man in the High Castle four or five decades ago and really enjoying it, possibly because I had never run across anything quite like it. That may have been my introduction to Philip K. Dick. When I watched the tv series which was (sort of) made from the book, it was very disappointing.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I cannot abide the stuff about dragons or wizards or transformers or superheroes...

I'm on board with this. Dragons and wizards are just fantasy novels (really just fairy tales); transformers are advertisements for toys; and superheroes are comic books. I would have been okay with just one Superman movie and one Batman movie. No more.

And I can't leave out Douglass Adams. It's okay for science fiction to be funny. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest books I've read, of any genre.

My first science fiction novel was A Wrinkle In Time, followed shortly by The Martian Chronicles, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dahlgren, Clans of the Alphane Moon and The Time Machine. Have a huge soft spot for all of these.

Somehow, I have missed Clans of the Alphane Moon. Of course, there is the possibility that I have just forgotten. Anyway, I've got to get that one. I am a real fan of Philip K. Dick (and before you ask -- no, we are not know as Dick heads.).

It looks as though I had just forgotten about Clans of the Alphane Moon. I had it in a collection of PKD stories on my old Kindle. But I looked on usesnet anyway and found another collection of his stories (38 of them). I know that I already have some of them, but I downloaded the new collection and converted them from epub to mobi for the Kindle. That last bit is really irritating. The fucking Kindle will read mobi files, but not epub files, which is the most common format for public domain literature. So  to read them you have to have a conversion program. Stoopid Amazon.

_Howard wrote:

It looks as though I had just forgotten about Clans of the Alphane Moon.

It's not one of Dick's best.

Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia, it sounds like something L. Ron Hubbard could have written. In fact, it's based on a 1954 short story by Dick called "Shell Game," and interestingly, Hubbard wrote "Dianetics" in 1954.

NoCoPilot wrote:

It's not one of Dick's best.

I just read it. You're right. The mind of Philip K. Dick must have been a scary place.