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HG_WELLS_ONE

                                                  March 28, 2022


H.G. Wells, had an approach to his "scientific romances"
where one fantastic premise is allowed at the outset,
with implications explored through the rest of the story.


  As Gregory Benford put it:
                                                 THE_HARD_EQUATIONS
  "H.G. Wells admonished us to make one
  assumption and explore it; a world of
  infinite possibilities is uninteresting ..."


  Damon Knight, in his response to Benford in the
  following issue of "Science Fiction Review"
  makes much of the H.G. Wells example:

   "Let us return to Wells. He called his stories
   'scientific romances'; he used devices he knew to
   be inpossible-- Cavorite, the elixir of
   invisibility-- in order to turn the world over
   and see what it looked like from the other side.
   The core of science fiction, I suggest is
   philosophical speculation."

           I don't particularly object
           to this nomination of
           "philosophical speculation"          My usual line: there's
           as the true center of SF,            something fundamentally
           though I suspect the best            strange about a notion of
           answer is always "none of            "the core" of a field that
           the above".                          excludes so much of it's best
                                                and brightest works.
  Knight simply dismisses Benfords talk
  about "playing the game" (i.e. looking for    Focusing on one mode of
  scientific errors) as an absurd candidate     thought, one kind of appeal
  for the appeal of Science Fiction, but        can blind you to others--
  myself, I find that with *any* fiction
  (not just SF), a lot of the mental                HEINLEIN
  activity I'm engaging in is a critique of
  the "realism" of the story, there's a               RAYMONDS_FOLLY
  continual comparison going on of my sense
  of reality and the world depicted in the
  story, and quite a lot of it involves
  small practical details about things--        The things that matter to you,
  someone who dismisses these as unimportant    that you personally know about,
  often seems to be just making excuses for     are often ones you're unwilling
  their own ignorance.                          to shrug off-- e.g. I note that
                                                cellphone people go crazy at
                                                apparent anachronisms in phone
                                                models.

                                                  For myself it often seems
                                                  strange that Korean dramas
                                                  have some warped consensus
                                                  reality that bears little
                                                  connection to the actual
                                                  physical world-- they don't
                                                  know that human beings float
                                                  in water or that smoke
                                                  inhalation is a grave risk in
                                                  fires...

    Knight harps on H.G. Wells deploying
    impossible premises as though this is a
    counter-argument to Benford, but Benford
    himself cites Wells as an example he             This sort of approach is
    of: for Benford, logically working through       sometimes called the
    the logical implications of a wild premise       "Unknown" school of
    qualifies as "hard SF".  E.g. he praises         fantasy-- after
    Niven's fantasy stories, which work with a       Campbell's fantasy
    form of "magic" that complies with physical      spin-off of
    law.                                             Astounding/Analog.

    That many of the interesting implications
    are in the realms of philsophy is not
    the kind of thing that would distress          HARD_PURPOSE
    someone like Benford.


But back to the Wells approach:

If you take seriously the idea that 
you're going to write a plausible 
scenario about future events, wells 
allowance of a *single* speculative 
element is not at all adequate: 

   
   Pretend you're a writer working in 
   the year 1900... can you get to              
   anything like 1950 by the Wells method?
   





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