I’m not sure why I made that connection, but I did. This leads me to the idea behind all good stories. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those stories that you remember for years after reading them, almost as if you read them last week.

Why is that?

It is because you connected with the story. Something in the tale reminded you of something in your life, obvious or otherwise. The message behind the story struck a chord and spoke to you.

And this point brings me full circle to Arthur C. Clarke. Why is he so remembered? Because he wrote stories that people could connect with. He was so good at it that people who claim not to like science fiction liked his work.

Of course, that thought makes me think of one of my pet peeves. A good story is a good story is a good story, regardless of where or when it takes place, or what species (real or imagined) populate it. But I’ll stop here, or I’ll just rant on forever.

Farewell Arthur, I hope you rest in peace You earned it.

Here are some articles I found around the ‘net that talk about this subject:

Life … but not as we know it
By Richard Watson, The Sydney Morning Herald

Hunter: Technology keeps own pace
By David Hunter, KnoxNews.com

One Giant Leap, Followed by Decades of Baby Steps
By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but there is a pretty good theory about the rise of science fiction that says science fiction couldn’t exist until people realized that the future was going to be different than today. Basically, people’s lives were pretty much the same as the lives of their parents until the Industrial Revolution brought rapid change to society.

So, fast-forward to today where change is so fast, and so constant that people’s lives can change radically — several times even — within their own lifetime. Now its not just my grandchildren or children who will live their lives differently, but myself.

Heck, I reading something the other day where a person was talking about the importance of making your business name easy to remember. As an example, the author mentioned a company called Mimeo and said she had a hard time remembering the company’s name because it didn’t relate to printing.

Now, this author is only about five years younger than me. But it seems obvious by this statement that she has no recollection of a mimeograph, a machine used in printing and duplicating until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This just illustrates how rapid societal change has become. How does one think about the far future when the near future can be so unpredictable? So, I pose this question: When change becomes so rapid that it is almost a blur, how does one see into the future to create great science fiction? Maybe it is not malaise from which science fiction suffers from, but perhaps and off form of obsoleteness?

What are your thoughts?

Alternate histories are stories or scenarios which consider the question of what if the events of the past had turned out differently. For example, what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War, what if the Germans had won World War II, what if Al Gore had won the 2000 US Presidential Election, or what if Michael Portillo had become the British Prime Minister.

In most (but not all) alternate histories, these history is generally assumed to have gone the same way as our actual history, until some specific point (known as the “Point of Divergence”) when a particular event has a different outcome. Sometimes the event may be important, and seen as such as the time, (for example, a battle going to other way), whereas in other alternative history stories, even subtle changes can result in profound changes to history because of the butterfly effect.

Some alternate histories (usually known as “counterfactuals”) are serious attempts to consider what if leaders of the past had made different decisions, or if chance had resulted in different events – and by considering these scenarios, they often also help explain our history as it actually happened.

On the other hand, there are also many alternate history novels and short-stories, which are principally designed to entertain. Sometimes in these works, the changes to history (and how they came about) are the main subject of the story, but in other cases they simply forms a background (much like warp drives and transporters might in a science fiction story) against which the story is set.

By S. Tanna. First published at www.alternatehistorybooks.com/p1_glossary_alternate_history.php.

For more alternate history books, please visit www.alternatehistorybooks.com/.

Is is all semantics? Here’s what I think.

Science fiction is a subset of speculative fiction, which also includes fantasy, magic realism and sometimes even horror. Speculative fiction encompasses all fiction that speculates on something that isn’t accepted as fact today (an outpost on Mars, sorcery, magical coincidence, ghosts, etc.) and treats it as a fact within the story.

Science fiction is more specific. It is a fiction that speculates on scientific concepts and theories, or at least pretends to. There is a fuzzy line there. The Barsoom novels are kind of science fiction, but are also purely fantasy (I mean really, a placental human successfully mates with a monotreme Martian?).

Now, just to let you know where I’m coming from, I tend to be a very tolerant, easy going person. I don’t like fighting and tend to find common ground when I can. Maybe that’s why I just don’t see what all the fuss over “science fiction” vs. “speculative fiction” is all about. I think they can coexist peacefully. What do you think?