koontz1973 wrote:ender516 wrote: I would not say there is science fact in Star Trek
Hypospray - Injectors like this have been in use for many years.
Personal communicators - who does not have a mobile telephone today?
Phasers - wicked lasers spider 3 is the closest today
Universal Translator - these are now around. Iphone have it I think.
Medical tricorders - A competition was won by a couple of students to build one of these for real. It had to diagnose 10 different things.
Ah, but none of these things existed when Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry in the mid 1960's. In my mind, it is science fiction if plausible technological advancements could bring about the essential elements of the story, so clearly Star Trek falls into that category. You are almost making my point for me. But the human brain will never be a source of telekinetic power, so the Force remains fantasy. (Inb4 someone says Star Wars does not portray humans, but humanoids who lived "long ago in a galaxy far far away".)
In my mind, science fiction is not fantasy. If it is supernatural, it is fantasy. If it might be natural, but we don't yet have the skills or evidence, then it can be science fiction. There is perhaps a spectrum between these two concepts: after all, Clarke's Third Law of Prediction is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Now you have me thinking about what distinguishes science fiction from "mainstream" fiction. In some ways, the "CSI" TV series are just barely science fiction in my mind, because what they do could be possible, but in reality, you do not get DNA results overnight. (But someday, perhaps we will.) And what about a novel like Harry Turtledove's "Supervolcano: Eruption"? It describes an eruption in Yellowstone Park, the likes of which has not been seen in over 600,000 years, but which geologists recognize as a real possibility. But we don't know precisely what the effects would be, so it is speculative fiction (another term occasionally used instead of science fiction).
