Tag: Science Fiction

This is a #IWSG Post about U.F.O.s

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 19 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Kate Larkindale, Diane Burton, Janet Alcorn, and Shannon Lawrence.  To learn more about this amazingly supportive group, click here.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the U.S. Congress recently held hearings about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (U.A.P.s), which are more commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (U.F.O.s).  There was some… let’s say “interesting” testimony in that hearing.  Now I don’t know if anyone will find this IWSG post relatable, even a little bit, but U.F.O.s make me feel deeply insecure about my writing.

I’ve always been obsessed with space, and there was a time in my life, long ago, when that obsession included an obsession with U.F.O.s.  I believed U.F.O.s were real.  I was convinced that aliens were here, visiting Earth, possibly studying us the way we study dolphins or gorillas.  It was only a matter of time, I thought, before the truth finally came out.  Many times, I’d see something on the news or read something on the Internet that would get my hopes up.  Every single time, my hopes would be disappointed.

Today, I am much more skeptical.  Admittedly, a congressional hearing is a little different than previous U.F.O.-related news stories, but I’m not getting my hopes up.  Not anymore.  Maybe American pilots are seeing strange, hard to explain things in the sky, but lots of strange things happen on this planet without aliens getting involved.  At this point, unless stronger evidence is made public, I’m inclined to believe that that congressional hearing had more to do with Chinese spy balloons than anything like an extraterrestrial intelligence.

However, watching the congressional U.F.O. hearing did trigger this weird insecurity of mine, as a Sci-Fi writer.  What if, at some point in the near future, we do discover alien life?  The moment probably won’t involve a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn.  More likely, it’ll be the detection of weird gases in the atmosphere of some distant exoplanet, or maybe we’ll find a suspicious mix of amino acids on one of Jupiter’s moons, or perhaps (if we’re really lucky) we’ll find fossils buried in the strata of Mars.

As a space enthusiast, I’m eager for the discovery of alien life; but as a Sci-Fi writer, I’m dreading the day a discovery like that is announced.  Why?  Because I’ve done a lot of world building for my Sci-Fi universe.  I’ve invented multiple alien species.  I’ve put a lot of thought into where all these different species come from, how they evolved, what sort of technology they each use.  So if the day comes when we do discovery alien life, in real life, I’m dreading all the rewriting and retconning I’ll probably have to do.

Anyone relate?

What is Science Fiction?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 41 Comments

Hello, friends!

Imagine a story involving G.M.O. crops, ChatGPT, the ebola virus, virtual reality gaming, an accident aboard the International Space Station, a submarine reported missing in the Marianas Trench, and a rogue militant group in possession of a hydrogen bomb.  That’s an awful lot of science and technology packed into a single story, but is it a science fiction story?  I’d say no.  It would be one hell of a story—that’s for sure!—but it probably would not be a science fiction story.

So what is science fiction?  There are so many proposed definitions out there, ranging from “an imaginative exploration of the relationship between scientific advancement and social progress” to “it’s that thing nerds like.”  I’ve seen people argue that science fiction is just fantasy with a veneer of scientific language.  I also once read that the ideal science fiction story should contain 25% science and 75% literature (which is why, whenever I write Sci-Fi, I always measure my science precisely).

That 25% science thing actually comes from Hugo Gernsback, the man who generally gets credit for coining the term science fiction; or, if he didn’t actually coin the term, then he at least deserves credit for popularizing it as a genre label.

After years of reading about this and thinking about it and debating the topic with other science fiction enthusiasts, I’ve settled on my own personal definition of science fiction.  Science fiction is any story where the plot depends upon fictional science.

I like this definition because it’s pithy.  It’s easy to remember.  More importantly, though, I think it works.  Jurassic Park depends upon the fictional science of dinosaur cloning.  Frankenstein depends on the fictional science of reanimating the dead.  Isaac Asimov’s novels depend on multiple fictional sciences, like psychohistory and the three laws of robotics.  And Star Trek depends on the fictional science of warp drive, quantum teleportation, holodecks, extraterrestrial intelligences, etc, etc, etc….  All of these stories may be inspired by real science, and they may touch on real scientific facts from time to time, but they also all depend on the fictional science parts.  Remove the fictional science from any of the examples listed above, and the stories totally fall apart.

Going back to that absolutely insane story idea from the beginning of this post—yes, that story is packed with science.  That story contains far more than 25% science, I’d say.  But all the key plot points, from G.M.O. crops to the International Space Station to hydrogen bombs—all those things are real.  The plot of that story may be a wild ride, but it doesn’t depend on any fictional science in order to work.  Ergo, it’s not science fiction.  It’s just regular fiction with a whole bunch of science mixed in.

Science fiction is about fictional science.  Science fiction depends upon fictional science in order for the story to work.  That’s the defining feature, at least in my opinion.

Want to Learn More?

Today’s post was prompted, in part, by a new series on Fiction Can Be Fun, examining speculative fiction in its various forms and flavors.  Click here to read the first post in that series, and click here for the second post.

And did Hugo Gernsback really coin the term science fiction?  There’s some dispute about that, and here’s a list of examples of people using the term before Gernsback introduced it.  My stance on the issue is this: other people may have put the words “science” and “fiction” together before Gernsback, but Gernsback still deserves credit for first using the term “science fiction” as the name of a distinct genre of literature.

And lastly, do you want to know more about Gernsback’s television goggles?  Click here!

#IWSG: The Future

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 24 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Patricia Josephine, Diedre Knight, Olga Godim, J. Lenni Dorner, and Cathrina Constantine.  If you’re a writer and if you feel insecure about your writing life, I hope you’ll consider joining this amazingly supportive group.  Click here to learn more!

Last month, I ended up taking a mental health break from blogging and from writing in general.  In an earlier draft of this blog post, I was going to explain all the problems I’m currently struggling with.  But then I decided to cut that part out.  I needed a mental health break, and I got a mental health break, and I don’t really need to say much more than that.

One thing I do want to talk about, though, is that I have been exposed to too much pessimism and cynicism of late, both online and I.R.L.  The other day, I saw somebody online mocking a famous quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.  It was the quote about how the arc of history “bends toward justice.”  Why is that quote worth mocking?  Because just look at the world today.  It’s so full of injustice.  The injustice is everywhere, and it gets worse and worse all the time, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

In my humble opinion, that sort of pessimism and cynicism is lazy.  You believe that bad things will happen?  You believe the bad things are going to get worse and worse?  Well, just sit back, do nothing, and you’ll get to see how very right you are.  Optimism, in my mind, is the belief that things can get better, if people make an effort.  But you do have to try.  Even if you can only do a little, you have to do what you can.

I’m not a fool.  I know the world has big problems, and I won’t presume to tell you that I have solutions for those problems.  War?  Climate change?  Systemic racism?  Income inequality? I don’t know how to fix those things.  I’m just a queer who likes outer space.  But while I don’t know how to fix any of the world’s problems, I am confident that those problems can be fixed.

In the past, whenever I’ve tried to explain why I write (specifically, why I write science fiction), I’ve said some quasi-mystical stuff about looking up at the stars, contemplating the vastness of the cosmos, admiring the beauty and majesty of the planets.  And that’s true.  That is the #1 most important reason why I write.  But this past month, I’ve come to realize there’s a secondary reason for my writing: hope.

Don’t give up on the future—not for yourself and not for humanity.  Just keep trying, just keep learning, just keep growing, and tomorrow will be better than today.  Writing science fiction is the best way I know to say that.  So as I emerge from my mental health break and as I pick up the pen once more, I recommit to spreading those two messages in everything I write: space is awesome, and don’t give up on the future.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

During my mental health break, I had to deal with a lot of pessimistic and cynical people.  This blog post by Sci-Fi author and science communicator Matt Williams was a very welcome relief from all that, and I think some of my regular readers will enjoy it, too.  It lays out a possible (I’d say highly plausible) vision for humanity’s future.  It may not be a perfect future, but I do think it’s a future worth hoping for.

Carcinization in Science Fiction

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.  This post may also contain spoilers for Tomorrow News Network books that I have not yet written.

Hello, friends!

In my research process, there comes a point where my brain switches over from learning science facts to making up science fiction.  Over the last month of so, I’ve been doing a ton of research on carcinization.  In that time, I have not become an expert on this topic—not by a long shot.  But at this point, I have learned enough science facts for my brain to switch over to Sci-Fi mode.

Carcinization is commonly defined as the process of evolving into a crab.  This has happened a surprising number of times, leading to Internet memes about crabs being some sort of “ultimate life form” or some sort of evolutionary end goal.  Given how common carcinization is (or at least how popular the memes about it are), I’ve often thought that we should see way more crab monsters in science fiction.  And nothing in my recent research has dissuaded me from that opinion.

Of course, giant crab monsters have appeared in Sci-Fi before.  The nameless time traveler in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine has a close call with some giant crabs:

Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters’ whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front?  Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there.  I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flicking and feeling as it moved.

The word carcinization didn’t exist yet when Wells wrote The Time Machine, but the idea of carcinization did.  As far back as the mid-to-late 1800’s, scientists were already puzzling over “the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.”  With that in mind, I think H.G. Wells knew exactly what he was doing when he populated the Earth of the distant future with giant, hungry crab monsters.

More recently, a crab-like extraterrestrial appeared in Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.  I’m pretty sure Weir even used the word carcinization in his book, to help explain how this crab-like species could exist (though after spending about twenty minutes flipping through my copy of Project Hail Mary, I couldn’t find the reference—it’s possible I’m misremembering things).  Fortunately for the protagonist of Project Hail Mary, the crab-like extraterrestrial he meets turns out to be friendly.  An important ally, in fact!

After all the research I’ve done, I feel pretty comfortable exploiting the concept of carcinization for a Sci-Fi story.  And given that H.G. Wells and Andy Weir already did this, I feel like I’m putting myself in good company, too.  Now I do not currently have a release date set for the next Tomorrow News Network novella, but I can tell you that I’m working on it, and there will be giant crabs from outer space.  Will they be friendly crabs, like the crab-like alien from Project Hail Mary?  Or will they be hostile, like the future crabs from The Time Machine?

Okay, yeah, they’re definitely hostile. Sorry for the spoiler.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Please check out some of my previous posts on carcinization, as well as my post on orthogenesis (a closely related concept).

Sciency Words: Orthogenesis

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at the definitions and etymologies of science or science related terms, in order to expand our scientific vocabularies together.  In today’s post, our Sciency Word is:

ORTHOGENESIS

Please be advised: orthogenesis is a discredited scientific hypothesis.  It has been for almost a century now.  That being said, the term has been coming up a lot in my research lately, and I do think there’s value in examining scientific hypotheses that didn’t make it, so to speak.  I think looking at a rejected scientific hypothesis, like orthogenesis, can give us a better appreciation for how the scientific method works.

Definition of Orthogenesis: In evolutionary biology, orthogenesis was the hypothesis that life evolves in a straight line progression, from simpler organisms to more complex forms.  Orthogenesis rather strongly implied that evolution is working toward some sort of predetermined end goal (i.e., intelligent life).

Etymology of Orthogenesis: The term was coined in 1893 by German zoologist Wilhelm Haacke, who was not convinced that natural selection alone adequately explained the evolution of complex life on Earth.  The word orthogenesis is derived from two Greek words meaning “straight” and “origin.”

When you think about the history of life on this planet, orthogenesis may seem to make sense.  Life started with just these simple microbes.  Then life “leveled up,” and we got more complex multicellular organisms.  And life kept “leveling up” after that to create fish and trees and dinosaurs and a surprising variety of crabs.  And then came humans, the most “leveled up” of all Earth’s creatures.

But as scientists learned more about genetics, and as they pieced together more of Earth’s fossil record, this straight line progression idea made less and less sense.  Evolution is a messy process.  It works in fits and starts.  It finds of-the-moment solutions without any regard for the future, leaving us with vestigial organs and other biologically inefficient stuff.  Increasing complexity is not necessarily advantageous; sometimes the simpler life forms survive while their more complex cousins go extinct.

By the mid-20th Century, orthogenesis had been soundly rejected by the scientific community.  Natural selection just made more sense in light of all the evidence scientists had accumulated since Wilhelm Haacke’s time.  However, while orthogenesis has not been considered good science for many decades now, certain orthogenetic ideas still linger in popular culture.  Whenever the mad scientist in a Sci-Fi movie starts ranting and raving about the “next phase of human evolution,” that’s orthogenetic talk.  Or when you hear dialogue about how one alien species is “more evolved” than another, that too is orthogenetic talk.

A lot of popular misconceptions about science seem to come from science fiction.  As a Sci-Fi writer myself, this is something I worry about.  “Evolutionary paths” and “evolutionary destiny” are such common tropes; it’s easy to write them into a story without realizing you’ve done it.  But I do not want to make these popular misconceptions about science worse, especially when it comes to a topic as controversial as evolution.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

I’m going to recommend this article from tvtropes.org on “Goal-Oriented Evolution,” which does a good job summing up how Sci-Fi and other popular media keep getting evolution wrong.

I also highly recommend this research paper entitled “Fossil Horses, Orthogenesis, and Communicating Evolution in Museums,” because orthogenetic ideas don’t only linger on in Sci-Fi.  They’re an ongoing problem in museums, school textbooks, and other educational resources as well.

#IWSG: The Planets Make Me Write

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 22 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to another meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a monthly blog hop hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by SE White, Cathrina Constantine, Natalie Aguire, Joylene Nowell Butler, and Jacqui Murray.  To learn more about this amazingly supportive group, click here!

I read somewhere once that every writer has a “thing”—something that they’re desperately trying to say.  It’s something that’s hard to put into words, a feeling or an idea that defies the conventional use of language.  If this “thing” could be said in a simple and straightforward way, we writers would just say it and move on rather than spend the bulk of our lives writing.

What is that “thing” for me?  I wish I could tell you!  It would be so much easier if I could just tell you the “thing” that keeps poking at my mind, but of course I can’t.  All I can say is that my thing has something to do with the stars.  It has something to do with the slow and stately motion of the planets.  It has something to do with that feeling I get whenever I look up at the nighttime sky.

Is it curiosity?  A sense of wonder at the vastness of the cosmos?  I guess that’s part of it, but those words feel wholly inadequate.  Wonder and curiosity are nice, but there’s something more.  There’s so much more!  The planets and stars inspire something in me that simply must be said—something that must be put into words, no matter what—it must be!

But no words ever seem to express this “thing” well enough.  So I keep trying.  I keep writing, in the hope that maybe someday I’ll find a way to say the thing I don’t know how to say, and maybe somebody else will read my words and understand what I’m talking about.

So, friends, do you have a “thing” that you’re trying to say through your writing?  Care to give us a clue (if you can) about what your “thing” might be?

Arguing with Myself: The Search for Alien Life

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 24 Comments

Hello, friends!

So a certain argument has been playing out in the back of my mind for a long, long time now.  Whenever I write, there are really two different versions of me who do my writing.  On the one hand, there’s science enthusiast me.  On the other, there’s Sci-Fi author me.  And these two versions of me view science, space exploration, and the universe at large in dramatically different ways.  One of the biggest ongoing disagreements I have with myself involves alien life.

Science enthusiast me believes that extraterrestrial microorganisms are pretty common in the universe.  Science enthusiast me thinks we will find evidence of extraterrestrial microbes in the very near future, perhaps hiding under the ice on Mars or swimming around in the oceans of Europa, Enceladus, or even Titan.  (I almost wrote unambiguous evidence there, but science enthusiast me also expects that confirming the discovery of extraterrestrial microbes will be tricky—just ask the researchers who found (or thought they found) microfossils inside a Martian meteorite back in 1996).

As for complex multicellular life—plants and animals, or whatever the extraterrestrial equivalent of plants and animals might be—science enthusiast me is far less optimistic.  While microorganisms have proven again and again that they can survive almost anything, even direct exposure to the vacuum of space, multicellular organisms seem to be far more fragile, far less resilient.  Earth may be one of the very few worlds where complex, multicellular organisms like us are able to survive and thrive over cosmic timescales.

And intelligent life?  Science enthusiast me believes intelligent life must exist elsewhere in the universe—surely it must!  But the universe is an awfully big place.  Our nearest intelligent and communicative neighbors could be many galaxies away.  Humanity is not alone in the universe, according to science enthusiast me, but we may as well be.

Sci-Fi author me, however, sees things from a different perspective.

Sci-Fi author me wants to write stories where encounters with alien life are commonplace, almost routine—stories where the aliens are sometimes friendly and sometimes not so friendly—stories where all sorts of weird and wacky interspecies adventures are possible!  And Sci-Fi author me takes a particular and peculiar pleasure in handwaving away all the concerns and objections science enthusiast me might have, not just regarding alien life but also in relation to faster-than-light travel, time machines, cybernetics, et cetera, et cetera.  Part of the fun, for Sci-Fi author me, is thinking up clever excuses for why impossible things are now possible (in the context of the story world, at least).

So there is this ongoing argument happening in the back of my mind.  This argument is never going to end, and I’ve decided that that’s okay.  Not every argument needs to have a winner and a loser, nor do arguments necessarily need to end in compromises.  Sometimes a house divided can stand after all.  Science enthusiast me believes the universe is like this; Sci-Fi author me would prefer (for story reasons) if the universe were more like that.  And the tension between these two different versions of myself drives my creativity, both as a science blogger and a science fiction writer.

P.S.: For those of you who might be interested, both the “I Heart Science” and “I Heart Sci-Fi” designs in this post are available in my RedBubble store.  Click here if you heart science, or click here if you heart Sci-Fi.  And remember: nobody’s stopping you from clicking both if you heart both!

And Some Things Must Stay the Same

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog post entitled “Something Must Change,” because something in my life really does need to change.  I’ve had some time to think more about what, specifically, that change needs to be, and I’ve taken my first tentative steps toward making change happen.

But the problems I’m dealing with and the changes I’m making—for the most part, all that stuff lies beyond the purview of this blog.  This is a blog about science.  This is also a blog about fiction.  And, most importantly, this is a blog about putting science together with fiction to make some sort of—what would you call it?—some sort of scientifiction, I guess.

In other words, this blog is about the things in my life that are not changing, the things that, quite honestly, cannot change (not even if somebody tried to convince me that they should).  Because if I stopped writing about planets and spaceships and extraterrestrial empires, if I stopped writing about homicidal telepaths and astronaut-hungry dinosaurs and self-appointed Galactic Inquisitors, if I stopped writing about intergalactic news agencies and cyborgs struggling with their feelings and sassy blonde time travelers named Talie Tappler… if I stopped writing about those things, I wouldn’t really be me anymore.

In my “Something Must Change” post, I did promise myself that I would not give up on my writing (or my art).  But I now realize I need to be a little more specific than that, because not any old writing and not any old art will do.  Not for me.  When making promises to yourself, it’s tremendously important to be clear and specific about what your promise is and what it really means to you.

As Jean Luc Picard once said, “The line must be drawn here!  This far, no farther!”  I’ve drawn my line.  I’ve separated (in my mind, at least) the things in my life that need to change from the things that must stay the same.  It is a small step in the process, but an important step nonetheless.

And it’s a step I hope you can take too, friends, if the need ever arises.  I hope you’re able to draw your line, to know what you can afford to change and what must always, always, always stay the same.

P.S.: And if you’re into sassy blonde time travelers, then I hope you’ll check out The Medusa Effect: A Tomorrow News Network Novella, available exclusively on Amazon Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

P.P.S.: And if you’re into that other stuff I mentioned—the homicidal telepaths, astronaut-hungry dinosaurs, etc.—more Tomorrow News Network novellas are on the way.  I promise!

Are Scientific Papers Worth Reading?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 21 Comments

Hello, friends!

So over the course of the last few months, I’ve been learning about metascience.  I’ve been reading lots of metascientific articles and papers, and I’ve been watching a few metascientific lectures on YouTube.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, metascience is the scientific study of science itself, for the specific purpose of identifying fraud, correcting errors in the scientific process, and making science overall a more accurate and trustworthy thing.

Before I go any further with this topic, I think it’s extra important for you to understand who I am and what my perspective on science (and metascience) is.  I am not a scientist.  I have no professional or educational background in science.  What I am is a science fiction writer who wants to do his research so that science (as I portray it in my fiction) is accurate.  Well, somewhat accurate, or at least somewhat plausible.  At the very least, I want to make sure the science in my stories is not laughably implausible.

In order to do my research (as a science fiction writer), I have challenged myself to read peer-reviewed scientific papers.  I try to read at least one peer-reviewed paper each week.  As you can imagine, this is not easy.  These papers are packed full of jargon (some papers define their own jargon; most do not) and a whole lot of math (the kind of math where you see more of the Greek alphabet than Arabic numbers).

And now I learn, thanks to metascience, that the peer-review process is deeply flawed, and that science has way more problems than I ever realized.  There’s a lot of fraud going on, and also a lot of laziness and complacency, and scientists are not double checking each other’s work the way that they should.  That last problem—scientists not double checking each other’s work—is commonly known as the replication crisis.  It’s a problem which this article from Vox.com calls “an ongoing rot in the scientific process.”

No branch of science is immune to these problems, but I can take some solace in the fact that some branches of science seem to be more afflicted with problems than others.  Fields like medical science, computer science, and engineering (i.e.: the big money-maker sciences) are far more prone to fraud than fields like cosmology, astrophysics, or planetary science (i.e.: fields that I, as a science fiction writer, take the most interest in).  But still, as I said, no branch of science is immune.  Lazy and/or biased and/or unscrupulous researchers are everywhere.

And yet, despite some very valid concerns, I intend to keep reading these peer reviewed papers.  Why?  Because my alternative would be to get most of my science news and information from the popular press.  When it comes to science, the popular press has an annoying tendency to dumb things down, to gloss over boring (but important) details, and to hype up hypotheses that are the most likely to attract clicks and views but are the least likely to actually be true.  If I wrote my Sci-Fi based solely on what I read in the popular press, the science in my fiction would be laughably implausible.

I’d rather struggle through reading a peer-reviewed paper once a week.  Those papers may not be perfect, but reading them will get me much closer to the truth than relying on any other source of information currently available to me.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

If you’d like to learn more about metascience and the replication crisis, I suggest checking out some of the links below.  These links are organized from “easiest and most accessible” at the top to “most technical” at the bottom.

How to Make Me Absolutely, Positively, Unambiguously LOVE Your Story

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 25 Comments

Hello, friends!

So as part of my writing recovery plan, I’ve been re-reading and re-watching some of my favorite Sci-Fi books and films.  The point of this is to remind myself why I wanted to be a Sci-Fi writer in the first place.

Last weekend, I re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I like that movie.  I like that movie a lot.  But I don’t love it.  Not in the way that I absolutely, positively, unambiguously LOVE Star Wars, or Alien, or The Martian.  And that’s got me wondering: what differentiates a story that I, personally, love from a story that I merely like?

Obviously this is a subjective thing, but still there must be a pattern to my preferences.  And now I think I’ve finally figured out what that pattern is:

  • First off, a story needs good world building.  There must be enough vivid detail (and also enough internal consistency) that I can picture myself actually living in the story world.
  • Next, I have to feel like I really know the protagonist.  I have to feel like know her or him well enough that we could be best friends.
  • And lastly, there needs to be a serious threat: something big enough and scary enough that I feel genuinely frightened, either because this fictional world I now live in is threatened or because my new best friend is in danger.

Again, obviously, this is a subjective thing.  But if you are telling me, J.S. Pailly, a story and if you want me, J.S. Pailly, to absolutely love your story, then you need to nail all three of those bullet points above.  Witty dialogue, clever plot twists, hyper realistic science, insightful allegories about modern life—I’m happy to see those things in a story, too; but the three bullet points above are what really matter to me, personally.

In the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the world building is excellent.  Just change the title to 2061, and I can totally believe this is what the near future will look like.  As for having a serious threat, well… I really, really, really would not want to be trapped alone on a spaceship with HAL.  Would you?  Where 2001 falls short for me is its protagonist.  We never learn much about Dr. David Bowman—certainly not enough to make me feel like I’m B.F.F.s with him.

Looking at other movies that fall just a little bit short for me: the villain in The Fifth Element doesn’t scare me much, and the world building in Gattaca has always felt a bit flat to me.  Each of these films ticks only two out of three of my boxes, and thus I like them—I like them a whole lot, in fact!  But I don’t quite love them.

But of course, different people come to a story wanting and expecting different things.  I’ve told you which buttons a story has to push in order to make me absolutely, positively, unambiguously love it.  What about you?  What differentiates the stories you love from the stories you merely like?