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Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
An anonymous reader writes: Science fiction author Charlie Stross has a thoughtful post about an awkward aspect of the genre: too often, books set in the distant future seem far too familiar to us. Our culture evolves quickly — even going back 100 years would be a difficult transition to get used to. But when we're immersed in a culture 500 years ahead of us, everything's pretty much the same, but with spaceships. He says, "You can make an argument for writing SF in this mode in that it allows the lazy reader to ignore the enculturation issue and dive straight into the adventure yarn for which the SFnal trappings are just a brightly-colored wrapper. But I still find it really weird to read a far-future SF story that doesn't deliver a massive sense of cultural estrangement, because in the context of our own history, we are aliens." Some authors put more effort into this than others, but Stross points out that most just use it as a backdrop to tell a particular story. He concludes, "if you're not doing it to the cultural norms as well as the setting and technology, you're doing it wrong."
How about a culture that practices sex the same way the black widow spider does - by eating their mate? (ritual cannibalism)
How about a future human culture that has no men (Houston, Houston, Do You Read?)
What about a culture where people are allowed to "abort" children up to the age of 5 (short story I read years ago).
Well, that's a start ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That's wonderful - if you want one of the major threads of your story to be the weird shit that has become normal. Otherwise it's just noise that serves to discomfit the reader while making the writer's job more difficult, without any benefit.
Hey, you know what else won't be the same? Language! Try to talk with an english speaker from 500 years ago and you'll find the language has changed to the point that it's a struggle to understand. How come all these SF writers have everyone talking in contemporary english - that's just not realistic.
Oh wait, that would be silly - the spoken language is just a vehicle for the storytelling, mangling it arbitrarily in the interest of "plausability" serves no purpose and just makes it more difficult for the reader to focus on the important story elements.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, to give you some in-fiction examples that are portrayed negatively, in Brave New World blatant hedonism from childhood is not only condoned, it is taught. In The Handmaid's Tale, sex among unmarried couples is essentially forbidden, except to those powerful men that have been given extra women for the declared purpose of breeding, and those men are also essentially free to have sex with any women that offer it or sell it despite what the law actually says, and despite their having crafted the law in the first place. In Dune, Baron Harkonnen wants to have sex with anyone that he finds beautiful, whether they're family, or children, or otherwise don't want him. Also in the Dune universe, the Bene Gesserit intended to force the children of Paul Atreides to incest, to breed the Kwisatz Haderach, not realizing that Paul himself was it, through their multigenerational breeding programme that they'd subjected the Atreides family to.
Then you have real-world examples of past behaviors that are now anathema. The ancient Greeks apparently had adult men engage in sexual behavior with children and it was not considered a problem. In war, up through and including current times, soldiers that are typically men will rape women and girls in occupied territory. It probably isn't as common in the militaries of Western nations as it once was, but I don't doubt that it still happens even among supposedly civilized people, and it's claimed that it's commonplace in wars among developing nations. It's only recent that Western nations have made it a crime to rape one's wife, and it's still not implemented everywhere. During the American period where slavery was permitted, rape of a slave was not a crime, and after slavery ended, rape of a black person by a white person was de facto legal as it was really never prosecuted.
I can't think of any fiction where these are not only not considered bad, but are considered good.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Ian M. Banks' culture series doesn't include the specific items you mention, but he certainly does deal with the cultural as well technical differences of a far future. The Player of Games would be a good start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Elements include being able to change one's sex, glands to produce any number biologically useful/pleasurable substances at will, what do people do when they live in the embrace of a (mostly) benevolent AI that doesn't need them. And then there's a good story interwoven with it all.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good