I Need Fiction but I need sense

[SamKool]

Are you one of those people that loves fiction but wants to find science and sense in everything?
So people tell oh read a non-fiction but you just smile cause they don't get it.
You like books like Sherlock Holmes and Mordern or classic dystopians......
So tell us your where-is-the-logic book and your ultimate fiction and sense....
Let me start off. Romance novels have always puzzled me so much. It is always a storyline where the first problem of earning a living is always solved magically!


My balance book is Sherlock Holmes ! Obviously!
Also I feel Gothic books are a fiction with a ting of sense so those too .....

[lightcrystal]

As someone whose childhood-literary diet involved skill 10, stamina 14, I feel unqualified to offer fiction that makes sense.

[redrun]

A balance author first:
I've always enjoyed the historical fiction of G. A. Henty. Most of his books include a romance, but they always struck me as more grounded than the romance novels you mention. Folks in these books have to earn a living - or at least, the kind of folks who would have to, in that historical time. The protagonist is sometimes a slave, more often a noble, but is always a diligent something.
Success in these stories is 90% preparation, and 10% opportunity. If those opportunities seem a little unlikely, well... so, often, do the historical events and figures that surround the protagonist. On balance, all of these advancements for him (nearly always him) serve to give me a better window into history.
I can forgive a few, say, assassination, abduction, or robbery attempts on influential people, all luckily within hearing range of our skilled swordsman protagonist, if it ties that protagonist closer to the real events of the day.


On the other hand, time travel stories are usually a bad balance for me. Time travel is either a mere plot device that solves (and/or causes) all the problems and doesn't follow any consistent set of rules, or it's the actual thing the author wanted to write about. That leaves the plot and characters as undeveloped and unable to resolve until time travel saves the day, or as just a means of illustrating the details of the author's technical conception of time travel.
There are a few exceptions. And then there are a very few stories which, while not being exceptions, are good enough in other respects to stand on their own. Like a serendipitous rescue, a time machine can just be the tool that gets us to the good parts.

[NurseBigHeart]

In my mind, any fiction with "sense" tends to be predicated upon the underlying sentiments and issues that people of a given time in history possess.

Something that comes readily to mind is a novel written Morgan Robertson called "Futility". It was originally published in 1898 and told the story of a mighty ship called the "Titan" and its eventual sinking.

Despite the novel pre-dating the sinking of the RMS Titanic by a full 14 years, well before the boat was even a fleeting concept in the minds of it's creators, it's bizarrely prophetic.

The truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction mirrors reality in an uncanny way.

I'd highly recommend giving it a read, and seeing for yourself.

[Availle]

I hear you about romances. My gripe with them is that everything could be solved so easily if the two people in question were just talking to each other, for once. Of course, then the rest of the book wouldn't happen, so...


Dava Sobel's "Longitude" is a historical novel about John Harrison who, over 40 years of the 18th century, devised a clock that was accurate even on board of a ship and thus enabled captains to calculate the longitude they were on, which let them in turn calculate their location on the ocean. Excellent story, and perfectly true to boot!


As for crime/detective novels, Keigo Higashino is my to-go author.
Every book has a twist on the last few pages that is so out of left field, you go "whaaa??", while still being believable. One of the sidekicks is a physics professor at Tokyo University who comes up with the most bizarre ideas, but always based on Occam's Razor.

Another Japanese crime specialist I enjoy is Hideo Yokoyama, a former journalist. His "Six Four" looks behind the scenes of the police headquarters in a (fictional) Japanese prefecture. It was absolutely gripping - almost 600 pages and I read it in 3 days or so - and that although 80 % of it is office politics. Do give it a try, I recommend the book left and right and nobody was disappointed so far.

[redrun]

Futility sounds fascinating! I've added the book to my listening list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have it on LibriVox.
https://librivox.org/futility-or-the-wreck-of-the-titan-by-morgan-robertson/

I'm also currently reading Longitude, by coincidence.
It's striking just how soon they knew a perfect clock would solve the problem, but they'd all given up on that as a dead end by the time he showed up.
If someone had written a science fiction book involving such a futuristic clock, they would also seem strangely prophetic when it finally arrived. The need was there, but the "how" required a self-taught but admittedly master craftsman to even imagine as a possibility.

[GettingTooOld]

Are you one of those people that loves fiction but wants to find science and sense in everything?

omg yes. I can't stomach usa hollywood movies anymore because if you have any brains, you're insulted. Like one of the worst ever made, independence day (aliens) they travel across the galaxy and then have to co-ordinate their attack on earth, not with a timer, or radio, but by hijacking all earths tv satellites for the sole purpose of broadcasting a countdown because they can't manage it any other way. 5 minutes later, when heros upload a computer virus to a single ship, that virus is transmitted by alien computer network worldwide to disable all shields, but that same network can't be used for syncronising an attack. crap like that, I can't stand it, the movies are screaming at you that the writers think you have the same intelligence they apparently do. ergh.

So tell us your where-is-the-logic book and your ultimate fiction and sense....

off the top of my head, and it's just a starting point in the same genre as above, Contact is a good movie. You can get for free at the moment the audiobook version of the novel read by the leading actress. Jodie Foster. It all makes sense, technically brilliant, perfect really, the whole entire thing. You look at the things they got right but didn't even point out, like the pod drops into the machine and looks as if it drops straight through because it's gone for only a moment. That is the only possible logical proper way to design such a machine. Makes me wish I could be there to defend her at the congressional hearing, because according to all orthodox scientific thought, when something can cause communication faster than radiowaves, then it can manipulate the passage of time as well. A machine that causes travel at faster than light arrives before it leaves, or perhaps any time it likes, so the logical reasonable time for the pod to arrive back on earth IS the moment after it leaves, even if she spends days offworld. Best part of this argument is the proof. The first machine was and is the proof that the only rational time to send the pod back is when the machine is still not destroyed 5 minutes after sending someone, the departure time is the only time you can be sure the machine is ready to recieve, and it's easier to calculate it's location on a spinning planet that orbits the sun.

Logic logic logic. I love it.

Let me start off. Romance novels have always puzzled me so much. It is always a storyline where the first problem of earning a living is always solved magically!

This is also an indication of 'better times' for example, in the 1950's usa, a single person on a single wage could afford to purchase a house and raise a family with nobody else in the family needing to work. This was because of better regieme policies. Today in china, people have gone from living in poverty 95% of them in poverty to 98% of them middle class in less than a generation or so. Times change, and people think "can I afford to get married" and "can we afford children". Some generations can afford to have 20 or more children, some can't afford a single child at all. That's the lower classes I refer to of course.

In 'better times' this is already answered and people have time not just for romance, but epic and intrigue and macinations of romance. Today, the characters in these novels would be flat out on minimum wage with no time for romance. People can dream of romance, but it's just a dream, like movie 'employee of the month'.

[SamKool]

So glad people also think the way I do sometimes.
But I am guilty of doing the opposite sometimes.
Watching senseless Bollywood or Hollywood movies. I mean sure half the times is spent in analysing the plot as if freaking Shakespeare wrote, but ya ....

[mightyfelix]

It's striking just how soon they knew a perfect clock would solve the problem

Teeheehee. Striking.

Sorry. I'll go PL something now.