I guess for me, the thing that draws me to SF is the way the science is part of the story. You may still have a thingamajig that enables the hero to do just about anything, but there is at least some attempt to explain how it could work - while the Platinum Uber Sword of Doom is just plain magic, a Light Saber is some form of projected forcefield (which is borderline "magic"), and a monafilament encased in a stasis field is hardly magical at all...

sorry, after re-reading my post it did seem to come out kinda crappily...

Quote:I hate to throw the big R word (realism) but maybe what so many are looking for is the semblance of a world / universe realistic enough to be lifelike on many levels. But if that were all, fantasy would be an equivalent, when I know for many it is not.

it isn't about being "lifelike on many levels" (any good author can do that in any genre), it is about being lifelike on many level while not crossing the line into the impossible or purely made-up (it is all purely made up i know, but fantasy doesn't care if it is magic that does it or if the third law of thermodynamics was just broken; SF will at least invent a good, logical-sounding reason for those wacky things to work). i guess what i am trying to say is that science fiction attempts to explain itself in terms of our actual reality, whereas fantasy expects a "oh that's cool" and gives no further explanation.
as for familiarity, i meant that people's brains are made to recognize and categorize patterns, and doing so "makes it happy" (so much for a technical definition, heh). that is why so many people see the face of jesus or elvis in mold or on trees, because their brain is "recognizing" a known pattern amid what is actually random stuff.
before you accuse me of going off on a tangent: one of those old final fantasy games had both Excalibur and a Masamune sword available at some point, because it is much more fun to get a legendary sword (one from a completely different mythos, and the other from reality, which i suppose counts as a different mythos than wherever that game took place) with all of those associations floating around in your imagination, than it is to get a powerful, but less familiar Platinum Uber Sword of Doom (much better quality, but there aren't tons of stories about it that everyone has read or at least heard of (yet)).
in the same way, it is more fun (for a hard-SF fan) to learn that this nifty thing in the game/book/movie is an extrapolation of something real, that they already know about (being a geek and all), and can kind of understand how it works. rather than a completely new random thing, it is a thing that fits in the already-known pattern, but in a new way (that hopefully relates to the theme, if it is any good).

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
I've been absorbing the feedback so far (big thanks!) and wanted to say how surprised I am at the responses surrounding worldbuilding and big ideas (social / technical impact, how things might turn out, etc.)

Would anyone care to hazzard a guess at what's behind this, psychologically? Is it just human nature to want to know how things work? Or do we subconsciously want to know how things will turn out if we experience this change or that technology shift (the "what-if" impact)?

Or is it, maybe, just a case of liking complexity and texture?

(Hope this question makes sense)

Well, I suppose what it boils down to is that stories are only interesting when we can relate to them.
We can accept weird aliens with lots of tentacles or squid for heads, because there's a lot we don't know, and hey, maybe those guys do exist somewhere. At least, we don't know for a fact that it's untrue. ;)
But a shallow world, or stupidly singleminded species (say, an entire race who are completely incapable of thinking about anything other than warfar, research or money (depending on which of these cliché's/traits have been assigned to the specific race)) is harder to swallow, because we know pretty damn well that people aren't that simple. We know for a fact that big ideas do have social / technological impact. We know for a fact that wherever lots of sentient beings get together, things happen, and an entire race of individual tends to disagree with each others and have different goals and ideas. Worldbuilding does take place, so to speak. Ignoring this just makes it seem flat and not very interesting.

Saying that we want "familiarity" might not be the right word, but we do want something we can relate to. Something that doesn't violate the things we know about. (Which might be less scientific that, say, the laws of thermodynamics, but instead refer to stuff like how a sentient lifeform thinks or reacts. There might be a way to travel faster than light, but there's no way we can accept a static, shallow world)