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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."
Lois McMaster Bujold does it very well, in her Vorkosigan-saga books, where she touches upon cultural attitudes to sex.
On Beta colony, when a girl has her first period, she visits the doctor and has her hymen removed, an pregnancy-suppression device inserted, her ears pierced, and get to pick colour-coded ear-studs, signalling to everybody what her relation-status is, and what she is interested in.
And she gets to have sex with whoever she wants, there are no STDs anymore, and she can't get pregnant without government approval.
Which is a fascinating thought, because let's face it: Controlling people's sexuality, has a lot more to do with cultural and especially religiously ingrained norms, than it has to do with any kind of harm.
And we aren't so stupid as to think that minors don't want to have sex. Are we?
bruce sterling wrote an extremely funny and valuable guide to sci-fi writers which i've mentioned here before on slashdot, and it has been expanded ever since. ah yeah here we go: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu... it's well-worth reading just for amusement value. the ironical thing is that this well-known sci-fi author, charles stross, is telling us that many sci-fi authors today are falling into some of the traps outlined by that lexicon and valuable guide.
whilist it seems flippant therefore to be telling them "write better sci-fi!" it has to be said that sci-fi writers have set themselves a much harder task than any other writing genre. first and foremost: they need to be good story tellers! and almost secondary to that, they need to be extremely knowledgeable about technology... *because their readers are*. whenever i read a new sci-fi novel by an author that i've never heard of before - and i do not do that often because it is a risk - i often find myself critiquing the author's style. anything where they assume i am an idiot (by doing things like explaining cloud computing to me), that's when the magic of the story is lost, and i know i just read a story by someone who is not going to ever be a successful sci-fi writer. it's a fine line to walk.
If you think that Roman culture is familiar, it has more to do with the way you're projecting your own cultural interpretations on ancient texts. That isn't really a harsh criticism, everyone does it. we make sense of things by the tools we're used to.
But you should be leery of the familiar, it's usually a tell-tale sign that you're misleading yourself. Suetonius is a great example. You miss a lot of what he's actually saying- in the context of his times and culture- and what he actually meant and was responding to.