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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."
Because there is a right well to tell fictional stories?
If your express something using cultural references nobody has ever used before, maybe you're doing it wrong.
Look how similar our culture is to that of the Roman Empire. Yes, technology has changed every aspect of how things are done, but the culture itself isn't much different. The Roman historian Suetonius was writing thousands of years ago about how they were upset about the decay of family values.
It's not like science fiction is new, it's got a history. And anyone who's familiar with that history knows that writers write in their era for an audience of that era. Not to mention for the acquisitions editors of their era.
So Victorian wonder story writers took imperialism for granted. Golden age writers took gender roles for granted -- even women like C.L. Moore. Sci-fi in the sixties was imbued with counter-culture and counter-counter-culture in a way that strikes us as dated today. And it's OK; if you like the good old stuff, as many of us do, much of the pleasure is in the perspective it offers in how the real world has changed.
An author has no duty other than to reward the time a reader spends with his work. It's certainly an admirable ambition to entertain people by challenging their assumptions, but the very nature of that challenge is a moving target. Ultimately you still have to tell a story that makes sense to your contemporary readers, unless you plan on dumping your story straight into a time capsule -- and good luck with that. Fortunately future audiences can make allowances for things you don't get right today, just the way we make allowances for the good old stuff.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, I also have griped about SF that shoehorns the distant future into the mold of today, or of the past. I have special disdain for those who want to recreate the wild west, or the age of piracy, or empires of the past with space opera trappings. If you love the old west, write westerns, man! The obsession with FTL travel (which seems unlikely to ever really become possible) also ties in with this.
To my way of thinking, conventional literature at its best explores the human condition. SF at its best explores how the human(-ish) condition could be different. SF that doesn't make it different seems like wasted potential, a missed opportunity.
However...
I learned a long time ago that SF stories and SF writers have limitations that they must work within. SF is about ideas, and there are limits to how many new and unfamiliar ideas you can cram into a story without either losing your readers or getting lost yourself. Your readers are embedded in the culture of today. Even if you as a writer can mentally break out of the culture of today, bringing your readers along for that ride is extremely difficult.
You might want to write a story exploring the potential of AI and robotics. Or nuclear fusion power. Or asteroid mining. Or molecular manufacturing. Or life extension. All good topics. Now try to write a novel where *all* of those scenarios have become real and are interacting with one another. Oops... That's going to be really hard to pull off without ending up in a muddled mess, and it's also going to be hard to explore each of those ideas in the depth it deserves. (Especially if you also have, you know... characters, and a plot, and so forth!)
But one thing that I always think is really weird when watching it is that all the cultural references are things that would be familiar to a late 20th century NPR-listening American. One of my favorite book series (Honor Harrington by David Weber) uses a lightly different period. It's references are almost universally to things that would be familiar to people who spend a lot of time with late 18th the early 20th century Western Military History.
It seems weird, but in a lot of ways that's the point. Star Trek isn't a sophisticated imagining of how culture could change if certain technologies appeared. It's about how a polity built on principles every 60s liberal would love (including a fairly muscular, militaristic, foreign policy that a lot of current liberals hate) acts IN SPACE. You don't hear anything about post 20th-century culture, shit that happened outside the main storyline, internal Federation politics (ie: who did Kirk vote for? why?), economic matters (for example once replicator technology exists almost all sectors of the economy are obsolete, because instead of spending months raising a chicken you can spend 2 seconds beaming a perfectly cooked chicken breast into existence, yet half the time they act like the economy is identical to the current US economy and the other half it's a socialist utopia), etc. It is barely Sci-Fi, because (unlike Star Wars) it actually cares how the technology works, and occasionally has story-lines based on said technology (ie: Riker gets cloned by a Transporter, every one of those hateful Holodeck episodes, etc.).
Weber's Honorverse is a bit more Sci-Fi, because he has actually put an awful lot of thought into precisely how the tech affects the culture, but he designed the tech specifically so that he could do things like create a massive ethnic Chinese Empire based on Frederick the Great.
There isn't a single right way because there are infinite possible futures, and it's reasonable to assume that inventive SciFi authors would want to explore that huge space of possibilities. There are unlimited right ways.
Nor is there a single wrong way, but if all authors narrow their horizons to describing only simplistic futures in which most cultural elements remain unchanged then clearly there is a problem of deliberate myopia which will inevitably lead to a poverty of novel material.
It's a bit like surrounding oneself with yes-men --- it doesn't promote pushing the envelope and expanding the mind in new directions. In the context of SciFi, if cultural elements are shackled to present-day norms then it creates a literary monoculture with very few interesting elements. Even worse, it's factually incorrect, since we know that cultures change strongly with time.
It is acceptable to be factually incorrect in fiction, but when a whole genre that is predicated on gazing into the future knowingly avoids addressing cultural change then there is indeed a problem, and a very big one. SciFi readers deserve better than just present day stories adorned with spaceships.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Which is rather Stross' point. Here is an example where the cultural norm is wildly different from your own, and you can't imagine it. It might be perfectly acceptable in that culture to say "not interested", it was also important, in the context of the culture Bujold was describing, for reproduction to be controlled, because of extremely limited resources under a dome colony. An extra mouth to feed, and lungs to breath the air was significant to everyone's resources.
about a month ago i was reading a 20th century US history book and discovered that Calvin Coolidge, Jr,, president Calvin Coolidge's 15 year old son, died from a blister on his foot he got when playing tennis on the White House lawn in 1924.
consider that for a moment...only 90 years ago, the son of perhaps the most powerful and well connected man on the earth died from a blister. playing tennis.
if this doesn't explain truly how much and how quickly things have changed, i'm not sure what could.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
There are plenty of bright ideas that don't require the elaborate setup, and the point could be lost if constructed against that background. This expectation seems to be a preference for a particular style of far-future sci-fi, where other people may have a different preference. Stross is mistaking his own preferences for wisdom.
The difficulty is in framing the story, so that the reader is a natural audience for the narrator.
If you are a tyrant of Jupiter, for example, there are things that people on Earth might not be aware of, and those things can be described as if they are new. There are things, though, that you would not explain, because they are universal. Communications would need no description, fashion would need only the differences pointed out.
It is no different from telling a timeless story of just people, without describing the people directly. Letting their actions define if they are good or bad, friendly or distant, all with no actual descriptions. Only now you have to have a narrative point to describe all of the differences, without sounding like a dictionary.
Stross doesn't seem to care about the readability or art - just the scenarios. Sure he claims the opposite. But if I created an entirely new culture for every story, there would be so much work going in to the backgrounding, of the environment and the people and how everything is interconnected - you're asking for epic invention every time. Vast amounts of outlining would be required, just to make sure that points don't contradict each other. The notes and fact sheets or "encyclopedia" could well be hundreds of times larger than it would be in order to get a point across. And none of that work is the actual writing that people will read.
A thousand page book would benefit from a huge amount of background work. But there's the normal work, and on top of that creating a new culture. I would expect that from maybe 10% of the writers, with the rest forgiven for not being so thorough because the writing is better, or the ideas are better, or even the books are cheaper, or are popular among people not named Stross.
The biggest problem with what Stross is saying is that people, in general, want to read about situations that are familiar to them. It's damn hard to come up with a truly believable far-future culture in the first place, but it's much harder to do so in a way that makes it both alien to us and something that people can identify with enough to actually enjoy reading.
If you really follow Stross's advice when writing far-future sci-fi, you're likely to lock yourself into a very small niche of potential readers. And if you're writing that way because that's the story you want to write, or because you truly believe it's important to the integrity of the story that the culture be very different than our own, and you're OK with selling a few thousand copies or less, then that's fine. But I dare say most sci-fi authors who actually publish do so because, at least in part, they actually want to have people read their books, and to make a little money off them.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Yes. And I still remember the blow-back when a bunch of us read Stranger in a Strange land back in high school. The kids from socially conservative backgrounds rejected it as garbage. Because it was inconceivable that anything would ever challenge the established Judeo-Christian foundations of our culture.
Some authors do investigate culturl changes that could be brought on by new technology or contact with alien cultures. But they risk rousing the rage of those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Interesting note: In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the revival of Klaatu (after being shot and killed) had to be explained as 'temporary' so as not to enrage Christian audiences.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's not an 'alien' concept to you. You are fully aware of the concept. You just don't do it.
Kids carrying ID to school is not an Alien concept. Its frequently discussed.
They have name tags, school IDs, uniforms, all variants of IDs.
You might have personal reasons for not carrying an ID, or opposing kids with IDs but its hardly an 'Alien' concept.
Your just being obnoxious.
And technically in the US no state actually requires you to have an ID. Well, except maybe Arizona.
You do need a drivers license to drive a car. It's more like that, at the appropriate reproductive age you need a license to show you can freely engage in sex with anyone, anyone. Both girls and men get to carry these.
No one in the stories cares, because they have no stigma regarding sex itself. They don't see it as controlling.
If you still insist it is controlling even though the society as represented in the book does not, then perhaps you are the reason authors don't introduce lots of 'Alien' concepts in their books.