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."

Comments

you're doing it wrong

[Mr D from 63]

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.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. There is no right or wrong in fiction writing. This guy is just full of it and stuck in his own rut.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[Z00L00K]

We have cultural familiar elements that persists, we also have cultural familiar elements that changes.

A century ago it wasn't granted that women could vote - much less colored people.

But the core values within a family - has that changed much?

Re:you're doing it wrong

[bill_mcgonigle]

Exactly. There is no right or wrong in fiction writing. This guy is just full of it and stuck in his own rut.

Even worse, he feels entitled to tell writers that they ought to be catering to his preferences specifically, and implicitly that they should feel bad about writing for other people's preferences.

He should, instead, be writing nice reviews about the authors who write the way he likes. Maybe it will catch on by increasing popularity, but the only effect the entitlement mentality ever has is to drive people away from his position. His essay will probably have no impact at all, but if it does, not in the direction he hopes.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[plopez]

"But the core values within a family - has that changed much?"

Yes. First off women could not vote as you pointed out. Secondly women had far fewer career choices and thus less economic freedom. They were expected in general to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. If they aspired to anything more than that the husband was often expected to "keep his wife in line", which often meant administering regular beatings. Women and children were considered chattel, a state not much better than live stock. Women could have their bank accounts raided by their husbands, assuming the bank allowed her to have one, and he could drink it away but she had no access to his. Children could essentially be sold into slavery in a factory or mine. Men were also expected to 'keep his kids in line'.

And the biblical version of 'traditional family values' often involved polygamy and an exchange of cattle.

Whenever I hear some preacher or politician talk about returning to traditional family values I shudder.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[BarbaraHudson]

The real problem is that he doesn't recognize the various purposes of story-telling.

1. Teaching: Making people consider some aspect of themselves, their ideas, prejudices and presumptions. You can't do that effectively with all the clutter of a completely alien setting.

2. Entertainment: People are not going to be entertained if they have to spend all their attention trying to figure out what the context is - if it's so alien that they need a series of intro courses in xenology before they can grok the story, they're not going to be entertained any more than trying to entertain them with a game that has a rule-book thicker than an encyclopedia (Sheldon Cooper excepted).

3. Reflection of society as it is and (optionally) as what the writer thinks it could become: Think of it as running a thought experiment, while at the same time preserving on record the social values of the day. Look at the works of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, etc.

4. People. It's about PEOPLE, people! Ultimately, if all the characters are so alien (no humans or human-like characters) that we cannot see even a bit of ourselves in any of them, it's more an exercise in mental masturbation than in story-telling.

5. Motivation: Sci-fi gradually got enough people used to the idea of going to the moon that, when Kennedy gave his speech, he wasn't laughed out of office. Imagine if he had given that same speech 50 years earlier ... (see - fictional story lines with alternate universes aren't that hard to come by, as long as they have to have something the reader can relate to :-)

In other words, whether it's a sci-fi, a crime thriller, an adventure tale, for our purposes we're doing it right.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[smallfries]

One hundred years ago may have been the end of a long period of change in attitudes towards children. The drop in child mortality rates heralded a change in how parents treated their children. wiki

Re:you're doing it wrong

[serviscope_minor]

Because there is a right well to tell fictional stories?

You are implying that there is no right or wrong way, but then say this:

If your express something using cultural references nobody has ever used before, maybe you're doing it wrong.

So clearly there are wrong ways of doing it. Every bad book is the wrong way of doing it.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[BarbaraHudson]

You don't have to go that far back in history.

1st black president - would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. Now every kid can become president.
Same-sex marriage - ditto.
TV comedy and drama shows starring blacks, TV talk shows hosted by lesbians or gays, etc.
Abortion on demand.
Tampon commercials on prime-time TV.
Beating your spouse or kid gets you arrested.
The "house with the white picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog" is getting more and more unobtainable each passing decade, and isn't seen as ideal to a large segment of the population anyway, both male and female, who actually prefer the single life.

A lot has changed.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[xevioso]

All of these are true, except that this holds true for all genres. Sci-Fi isn't just any genre; it has an additional purpose, which is to explore ideas, settings, and technology that don't yet exist. It is, by it's very nature speculative, and that should be item #6 on your list. And I think the argument is that sci-fi is not speculative enough. In this I would tend to agree.

The last good book I read that was truly speculative and actually pushed sci-fi in ways I havent seen in a long time is China Mieville's Embassytown.
A must -read.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[William Baric]

If an author feels the need to set his story, which has nothing to do with science-fiction, 500 years in the future (generally as a very cheap way to open up the mind of the reader), he's doing it wrong.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[careysub]

You don't have to go back in history at all. Consider present day Saudi Arabia. Its society is quite alien to the experience of modern Americans, and the status of women right now is as bad, or worse, than any historical examples given here, and quasi-slavery (various forms of trafficking and forced servitude) are still practiced.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[Aighearach]

True story: when my racist grandmother died in the late 90s, a family member quipped, "Well, she wasn't going to live forever, she'd have had a heart attack when the first black President is elected."

Re:you're doing it wrong

[Saint Fnordius]

It is actually an old argument, which Charlie is presenting here. I recall even Isaac Asimov himself mentioning this how a classic pitfall of a speculative fiction writer is to add tech but not consider the political ramifications of the technology. It was also at the root of the cyberpunk writing movement, and part of what reviewers loved so much about Neuromancer when it first came out.

I found Mr. Stross was being nice here. Instead of merely stating that he hated a certain book, he did say why specifically he couldn't finish reading it. And since he writes a lot of SF himself, it is only polite to be constructive in his criticism.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[Saint Fnordius]

I think it is best to remember that this is his own personal constructive criticism of why a story doesn't work for him as a reader, namely because he has an expectation that technology included in the story have its societal ramifications referred to.

I like to compare it to set dressing in a play or a movie: the story may be good, but if the stage isn't appropriately set, then it makes it harder for the audience to maintain suspension of disbelief. Part of why I detest Michael Bay movies so much is how he relies only upon glamorous explosions, but doesn't really make them match actual physics. That blatant disregard makes it impossible for me to build up even a smidgen of disbelief.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[jandersen]

The real problem is that he doesn't recognize the various purposes of story-telling.

Not sure I agree - it is all very well, making wise about somebody else's opinions, but it doesn't really address his concerns, which are very valid IMO.

It has for a long time annoyed me that so much science fiction is so uninspired - aliens are simply assumed to be a kind of humans with a funny hairdo/skin color/whatever. Stephen Baxter and Iain Banks are two that seem to reach a bit beyond that mindset, but even they seem to stay within the idea of basic, human psychology. What I'd really like to see is science fiction that is highly speculative, but scienfically plausible - for example, describing life evolving in the quark-gluon plasma in the first moments after the big bang would be interesting. On the other hand, confabulating about 'viruses' that are somehow, magically able to take over the body and mind of more or less any creature from whichever biological background and then grow uncontrollably beyond anything allowed by a simple matter/energy consideration, is simply no more than magic; I'd rather read Harry Potter, then.

I don't think it is unreasonable to criticise SF for being too unambitious and unimaginative - or lacking in real, scientific insight.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[Triklyn]

you're talking about the hardest of hard sci-fi. in most context, good sci-fi, readable sci-fi, i guess good fiction in general needs to have relatability.

Culture changes, norms change, but people don't.

the beast with two backs, mortality, gender relations, the relationship between society and the individual, they're all pretty timeless.

People who lived so long ago were just people who lived in shittier times, they weren't aliens, their humor wasn't any different than ours, they lived their own lives of quiet desperation.

Re: you're doing it wrong

[BarbaraHudson]

Stories that are people-centric are no more science fiction than vampire stories are history, or Microsoft manuals are about learning.

By the same token, stories about science can't be people-centric either. Like the discovery of penicillin by Fleming, natural selection by Darwin, or insulin by Banting and Best.

Re:you're doing it wrong

[dataspel]

Thanks, looks like a good book, will check it out.

Nonsense

[crow]

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.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. Powerful empire heavily extended into foreign occupations? Social mobility degraded and rotting from within? Permanent underclass who have to serve in the military for a chance at life? Completely open bribery of politicians?

Re:Nonsense

[Trepidity]

Have you read much about Roman culture? You can pull out bits that are similar (like the timeless complaint about decay of family values you mention), but by and large the societies seem quite foreign to me.

Re:Nonsense

[novium]

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.

Re:Nonsense

[aaaaaaargh!]

Exactly. It's a bit like traveling to other countries and foreign cultures today. Languages, daily habits and circumstances of living can be very different from the outside, but once you've get to know them people are essentially the same everywhere - worrying about jobs, love, passions, etc.

If you'd be catapulted into the 15th Century, you'd be able to connect immediately to the people without any problems except for the language and some external habits (norms of politeness, classes, way to dress) that can indeed change drastically over time. (And you cannot change the latter arbitrarily as an author, because you would not be understood and you're writing for today.)

Re:Nonsense

[Hognoxious]

And a certain monotheistic religion...

There's also the aqueducts.

Re:Nonsense

[fermion]

Absolutely. I really hope this was written by some adolescent who is fustrated because no publisher will accept the book, and not by someone anyone considers a real writer. First, the world has changed but no changed so much. For instance, my mother who was born a few years after the first war had little trouble assimilating late 20th and 21st century technology, or adapting that technology to her own uses. She owned a computer and a flat screen TV.

Second, most writers still use the novel format, which is around 400 years old in it's current format. This is different from older western forms, which tended to be more spoken word, such as Beowulf You can still buy 400 year old novels such Don Quixote. I would suspect that if one were doing something new, then moving from the novel format, or at least messing with it as Kurt Vonnegut did, would be the minimal requirement.

Third, the world has changed significantly in 500 years, but if one reads the old works we still identify the humans as humans and understand the motivation. Yes, most of us would die quickly because we did not bow down to the king, or because we helped a slave escape, or because we did not know to avoid the emptying of chamber pot, but I think the reason to read literature is to learn that we are not all that removed from our forebears.

And fourth, in this brave new world no one can make an author throw away 50 pages of work. If one thinks they through away 50 good pages, then that is a matter of one's own integrity, nothing else. Write the book you want to write, publish it, slip it into bookstore, no one is stopping you. If one is willing to give up one's artistic integrity for greed and actually sell books, then that is something different.

Science fiction helps us explore our relationship with the technology that allows us to amplify our creative abilities. It is different from fantasy that allows us to imagine a world where the rules are different. Imagining a different culture is not that useful because the world that is going to interact with the technology is our present culture. We do not live in a world that everyone, all of the sudden, is going to accept that their way of life is obsolete and immediately embrace new ideas.

Re:Nonsense

[UncleRage]

Read that post again, this time in Ron Perlman's voice.

Re:Nonsense

[plopez]

Ummmm.... nope. Very different. Women and children were chattel for instance. Slavery was still considered a good thing and institutionalized. Education was reserved for the rich. Often to get something done you had to talk to your village or neighborhood 'patron'. Talking to the patron was, from what I have learned of it, basically like making a deal with 'The Godfather'. And you had to venerate the Emperor as a living manifestation of the voice of the gods.

Re:Nonsense

[Hognoxious]

And you cannot change the latter arbitrarily as an author, because you would not be understood and you're writing for today.

This. Without some connection to the reader he wouldn't read it.

This, perhaps, is why so many stories based on animals - Watership Down, Duncton Wood, Fluke - anthropomorphise them.

Re:Nonsense

[serviscope_minor]

Second, most writers still use the novel format, which is around 400 years old in it's current format. This is different from older western forms, which tended to be more spoken word, such as Beowulf You can still buy 400 year old novels such Don Quixote. I would suspect that if one were doing something new, then moving from the novel format, or at least messing with it as Kurt Vonnegut did, would be the minimal requirement.

Another interesting one to read if you can is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" from 1769. Or at least look at. I failed to get more than about 1/4 of the way through.

The entire thing makes a complete mockery of the concept of "postmodern" since it did that first hundreds of years earlier and only about 50 years after the novel format realy settled out in its current form (not a series of letters, short stories or poetry). It's also packed full of pop culture references (I mean really stuffed---it's impossible to read without the footnotes which explain what the hell was current in terms of slang, memes and so on circa 1769).

Despite being next to unreadable, many of the things---zanyness, kind of random humour, pop culture refrecing, bizarre, random pictures---are things many people think of as recent but aren't and feel really familiar.

For more entertainment, read the commentary about the book from when it was written. By all accounts it was as almost as unreadable then as it was then. However some people latched on to it as the height of sophistication, so people argued about whether it was good or a total crock.

Basically you could transplant the entire thing to now and it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference.

Re:Nonsense

[bzipitidoo]

Disagree. Look how different our culture is to just 3 centuries ago, before the Industrial Revolution and the telegraph. The steam engine was in its infancy, too recently arrived to matter much at that time, and such railroads as existed used wooden rails. There used to be massive business ecosystems that revolved around horses and sailing which hung on until the 1920s and the 1850s respectively. The fastest a message or person could travel between London and NYC was 18 days, if the ship had favorable winds. Average was more like 30 days. Many people wore "homespun" -- made their own clothes at home, from threads they also spun at home, from crops they grew for that purpose. The change from horse to automobile changed NYC dramatically. No more horse manure in the streets, with the accompanying threats of typhoid fever and other diseases vastly reduced.

You could argue that human behavior has not changed much, and won't. I am not so sure of that either. We are evolving at a furious rate. But people are prejudiced against seeing many of them. We used to have duels, as depicted in the start of the Three Musketeers story, and more than stories. The mathematician Galois and politician Alexander Hamilton and his son were killed in duels. After a last surge in the wild west, that custom has faded away, and good riddance. Even so, there were a number of unwritten rules about dueling that made it less deadly, like that the duelist could purposely shoot to miss on the first shot, and somehow signal that the miss was deliberate. Then the other was supposed to also shoot to miss, and then both parties could honorably back down. War could be all out, no holds barred, until the Cold War. Now, total war could kill us all off. We've had to evolve to be less hot headed, and we have. This wasn't a recent change, this has been ongoing for centuries as weapons grew more powerful. Why was the disagreement over slavery settled through the US Civil War, rather than voting? Hotheads helped start that war. The result was a long brutal war that killed close to a million, not a few short battles delivering a knockout blow to end the dispute quickly. The hotheads at least put their lives where their minds were, and ended up dead. Evolution in action. The hotheaded tendencies also ultimately hurt the Confederate war effort. Despite being on the defensive, most Civil War battles feature Confederate assaults that killed more Confederate soldiers than Union ones. But that was the kind of fighting they wanted, manly and showy. There's the whole idea of the "southern gentleman" somehow being more manly than the men of the North. Cooler heads in the South surely realized the war was unwinnable, given the large imbalance in power between the sides, but if they were going to fight, dragging the war out was the better strategy.

Re:Nonsense

[phantomfive]

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.

Interesting.....what did he actually mean and what was he responding to?

Re:Nonsense

[JustOK]

yah, it got them in the end.

Re:Nonsense

[SuricouRaven]

"Projecting your own cultural interpretations on ancient texts."

For a very clear example of this, look at anyone who uses the phrase 'biblical marriage.'

Re:Nonsense

[careysub]

And let's not forget the downfall of the Roman empire included the introduction of homosexuality.

Odd. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire seems to correlate far more closely in time with the adoption of a homophobic religion.

Re: Nonsense

[hey!]

Not snobbish, just different. The idea of tolerating people who like different things seems to never have caught on.

Re:Nonsense

[mvdwege]

I really hope this was written by some adolescent who is fustrated because no publisher will accept the book

Ahem

Re:Nonsense

[drinkypoo]

Women and children were chattel for instance

Children still are, women are still treated inferior to men so we've advanced but not unrecognizably.

Slavery was still considered a good thing and institutionalized.

Yeah, we call that privatized prisons, and criminalization of victimless crimes like prostitution, which the Romans kept around.

Education was reserved for the rich.

If you're poor, you don't get so much educated as indoctrinated. Virtually everything you learn in history class is a lie. And then there's the idea that school puts forth that hard work and education are the keys to success, when they are very poorly correlated; the strongest correlators to success in our society (which is measured economically) are who your parents are. Everything you learn in school which is not a basic skill is a lie, and even those are taught poorly.

Often to get something done you had to talk to your village or neighborhood 'patron'.

That's exactly how it is now. If you go into business without the blessing of the local city council, they can prevent you from being able to do business. If your bathroom is a couple of square feet too small for code, but not too small to actually get a wheelchair into, then you'll get that permit if you're buddy-buddy and you won't if you're not. Or the guy who bought the local florist shop on Main street in Lakeport, he stocked some grow supplies so they started refusing him every permit (they're totally in denial here about how this place would dry up and blow away without that, but anyway) and he had to close up shop.

And you had to venerate the Emperor as a living manifestation of the voice of the gods.

So, there is one big difference. Welcome to the great experiment, where it is determined if you can control the people simply with one big lie, that they are in control.

Re:Nonsense

[drinkypoo]

And let's not forget the downfall of the Roman empire included the introduction of homosexuality.

The Romans were in love with all aspects of Greek culture, including buggery, from the beginning. The ancient Greeks in particular did not believe that an equitable relationship was possible between a man and a woman, because women were inferior. The Roman empire didn't collapse until after Christianity took over and began opposing sex in temples, sex between men, and so on. Those grubby sheepherders ruin everything.

Re:Nonsense

[david672orford]

Exactly. It's a bit like traveling to other countries and foreign cultures today. Languages, daily habits and circumstances of living can be very different from the outside, but once you've get to know them people are essentially the same everywhere - worrying about jobs, love, passions, etc.

If you'd be catapulted into the 15th Century, you'd be able to connect immediately to the people without any problems except for the language and some external habits (norms of politeness, classes, way to dress) that can indeed change drastically over time. (And you cannot change the latter arbitrarily as an author, because you would not be understood and you're writing for today.)

Sure, the fundumental human needs would be the same, but your ideas about the best way to go about satisfying them would be very different. All cultures are disfunctional in some way. We are blind to the disfunctions and absurdities of our own culture or see them as things which cannot be changed. Anyone from the 21st century sent back even to the 19th century would spend a lot of time in in frustrating and ultimately futile arguments.

You would find that you could not even make persuasive arguments for ideas commonly accepted in the 21st century. Your new friends would say things like: "Why shouldn't children drink beer? How are you going to send girls to cooed universities? You do know what the boys would do to them, don't you? So you are saying that we should keep the enlightenment of our culture to ourselves? Stop embarassing the servants by pretending they are your equals. And stop making those tastless jokes about how your house in the 21st century is mortgaged and your parents are divorced. It's not funny! Of course it's stuffy in here and I am about to faint, but if we open the window we'll all get sick and die. Shortening the hours of factory workers and paying a living wage is just idealist clap-trap. You know perfectly well that they would use the extra time and money to drink. Why would I give my children meat and vegetables? Everyone knows such food is too rich for children. They should eat toast and jam."

Sure, your new friends would be the same as people everywhere in that they would want to be loved, respected, successful, and live in confort. But their ideas on how to achieve these goals and what constituted success would likely be very different.

If we would read about real people from 500 years in the future, many of their decisions and behaviors would be puzzling. They would be well ahead of us in many ways, but they would also consider some societal ideas which we see as advanced and liberated to be backward and misguided.

Re:Nonsense

[david_thornley]

Currently,. in the US, women are pretty much legally equal to men, and that's major. Similarly, children have legal rights nowadays, and not in Roman times.

Slavery was all over the place in Rome, not confined to specific spots, and wasn't strictly a punishment for crimes. (BTW, there's a gap between "criminalization" and "slavery".) Roman slaves had considerably different rights than the earlier US slavery we usually think of, and some slaves were able to save up and buy their freedom.

I have carefully examined two people's education in the public school system (my son and me), and I've seen some pretty good education going on. While I can't comment on US public education as a whole, what you say is contrary to what I've observed.

You seem to be confusing patronage with legality. Normally, there are laws that you have to adhere to. I don't know what you're talking about with the small bathroom, as any competent builder would build it large enough for new construction, and older construction is normally grandfathered in (my house wouldn't satisfy modern codes in all respects, and nobody complains about it). While there is corruption in local government, there is a big difference between the rule of law with some corruption and the rule of men.

Re:Nonsense

[drinkypoo]

Slavery was all over the place in Rome, not confined to specific spots, and wasn't strictly a punishment for crimes.

It's not strictly a punishment for things which should be crimes, now.

Roman slaves had considerably different rights than the earlier US slavery we usually think of, and some slaves were able to save up and buy their freedom.

Well, that's basically how slavery works today. If more money can be made on you by letting you roam free, then you basically get to do that unless you make the whole sham too obvious. We permit illegal immigrants because our businesses depend on them in this economic and political climate — one in which goods produced with slave labor are cheaper than those made without. That is the natural state of things, but it is one which we must change if we are to move beyond what we have now - literal slavery in the form of people wrongly incarcerated in privatized prisons, and effective slavery in the form of illegal immigrant workers who can be deported instead of paid. Ironically, this is about the only time they are deported; certainly not when they commit a crime. There's a chance that they will pay some of their court fees, and help keep the system rolling along.

I don't know what you're talking about with the small bathroom, as any competent builder would build it large enough for new construction, and older construction is normally grandfathered in (my house wouldn't satisfy modern codes in all respects, and nobody complains about it).

Let's see, let me go back and check... yep, it was pretty clear that I was talking about businesses. Guess I don't need to address that further.

While there is corruption in local government, there is a big difference between the rule of law with some corruption and the rule of men.

I guess so, but only in that more of the corruption is written into the law. All the same stuff still goes on.

Re:Nonsense

[novium]

That could easily fill several PhD theses. I've already got my hands full with my own. But if you're interested, you might read Catharine Edward's the Politics of Immorality in Rome, which while not focused on Suetonius in particular, does get into the heart of a lot of Roman moralizing discourse and the way it was used (and how differently it was constructed.) The main thing to keep in mind is that where we today tend to explain things in terms of economics, politics, or psychology, for the Romans, all those things were discussed in terms of mores. And, considering it was the primary mode of discourse, Roman morality was very complex.

But, to give a very, very simple example, there's a line in Cicero about Caesar where he says something like, "you wouldn't think such a man would be the type of guy to scratch his head with one finger" which makes absolutely NO sense unless you understand it's a reference to effeminacy... which while a slur, is more than that, and there's more going on. Effeminacy for the Romans was conceptually related to a lot of other things - and not necessarily the things we'd associated it with- especially in terms of luxury and leisure, which were considered the symptoms and cause of immorality, and had links to the idea of the corruption of the state and the undermining of the mos maiorum. It was also linked with adultery, which tends to go against the biases of the modern reader. But for the Romans, it was a challenge to the power of the paterfamilias. Which, as a side note, was the purpose of a lot of Augustus' adultery legislation- not necessarily turning a tide against a presumptive wave of adultery (although writers were always claiming such, for the entire history of Rome, but there are reasons for that), but the legislation was basically a defacto usurpation of the rights and privileges of the paterfamilias, elevating Augustus in such a way that kind of brought all of Rome into his household and under his hand. So for him to be saying (or rather, for writers to be depicting him as saying) "you Roman fathers aren't doing your jobs and reigning in this immorality, which of course threatens the state, so I must step in and fulfill that role, aren't you glad for that" is never going to be a straightforward thing. Which basically is why modern ideas of Rome tend to be full of orgies and excess: the Romans never shut up about those things. But not because they were necessarily happening, but because they were coded in such ways that made them the common weapons of every agenda.

Re:Nonsense

[phantomfive]

But not because they were necessarily happening, but because they were coded in such ways that made them the common weapons of every agenda.

Kind of like in America we are constantly accusing the other political party of being nazis, or trying to become a dictator. And yet in reality probably no president has ever actively tried to become a dictator (much less a nazi), and have all voluntarily stepped down.

What is your thesis about?

Also, on the tangentially related topic of ancient gestures, if you don't mind me asking, what do you think of these two painted hand gestures? Would they be effeminate? Or is it too far removed to do any speculation?

Re:Nonsense

[novium]

Completely different culture on those paintings- besides, art has its own language (so to speak), so I would not be able to comment on those. Why the Romans thought that scratching one's head with one finger was girly we shall probably never know. It's just one of those things.

My thesis is about - well, Cato the Elder, but not the man as much as the cultural figure as he was used and understood in antiquity. To go off your example, we often make reference to hitler (or compare people or things to hitler or nazis) in ways that really are about hitler/nazis as short hand for other concepts- when someone compares a president to HItler, they usually mean something like "bad/tyrannical" rather than...well, everything else you could mean or say about Hitler. Similarly, Winston Churchill or Thomas Jefferson or Richard Nixon even fictional figures like Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood become stand-ins for discussing other themes/associations/concepts...but which themes etc isn't static- we're always kind of tussling over interpretations, everyone trying to stake out important cultural references for their ideological purposes (e.g. the Tea Party attempting to lay claim to the revolutionary war, fairly successfully, actually and somewhat unfortunately.) Eventually, the themes and associations that figures get tagged with begin to shape the way they're depicted (rather than the themes just being a product of how they're depicted. It's a feedback loop). So Cato the Elder was one of those type figures for the Romans, frequently as a stand in for Romanness, virtue, the past... and how they envisioned him and related to him changed a lot over time, so what I study is that change, basically, and what it represented. (Spoilers: Cato stands for a lot of republican virtues which did not have a place under the principate or the empire, so there's a lot of interesting stuff in how later Romans made sense of a virtuous figure whose virtues were obsolete or had become, in the new order, faults).

Let's talk about sex, baby

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[DerekLyons]

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 her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[SteveAstro]

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.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[Black Parrot]

Lois McMaster Bujold does it very well, in her Vorkosigan-saga books, where she touches upon cultural attitudes to sex.

But it seems like a kind of superficial gimmick. And most SF doesn't deliver any culture at all - art, music, religion, politics, etc - unless it directly relates to the plot.

What we need is someone who will do for SF what Tolkien did for fantasy.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[plopez]

It may be functional. A colony often has limited resources. Reproduction would have to be controlled to ensure the population did not out strip resoureces.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[plopez]

And don't forget Ursula K. LeGuin.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[MightyMartian]

I'd say Frank Herbert did. The Dune series laysa out a culture wildly different in key respects from ours. Even the march of technological innovation we are so used to has been arrested and certain humans (Guild navigators, Bene Gesseret, Mentats) have taken on the roles of "thinking machines." But then again Herbert did put a lot of work into background; history, philosophy, ecology, economics and politics.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[serviscope_minor]

What we need is someone who will do for SF what Tolkien did for fantasy.

Alien elf songs?

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[BarbaraHudson]

"like you now have to have an ID for cops to verify if needed"

A pretty alien concept to me, since I don't carry ID when I'm walking to dogs or going to visit a neighbor ...
How many kids go to school carrying legal ID? Another alien concept ...

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[BarbaraHudson]

Her The Left Hand of Darkness was a challenging read, for sure.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[timeOday]

Pfft, the sexual revolution might be THE most familiar topic of the entire 20th century, so it's a perfect example of simple extrapolation.

If we're really supposed to want to read thing we can't relate to, don't look to sci-fi, because people (including authors) aren't actually capable of not being themselves. Look to the past, plenty of obscure foreign stuff from centuries past. Go read a few thousand pages of pages of Islamic philosophy from the 5th century. You'll be bored silly. But then, that's what's wrong with this premise in the first place. The idea that people like to dwell on ideas they don't sympathize with is simply incorrect. What people really want from sci-fi (and everything) is to be told that their values and vision of human nature and the future are correct. The most popular way is through dystopian future, which is a form of "I told you so!"

Re: Let's talk about sex, baby

[jd2112]

How is earrings in this example different than wedding/engagement rings today?

Re: Let's talk about sex, baby

[GrumblyStuff]

Or, indeed, promise rings or purity/chastity rings?

Re: Let's talk about sex, baby

[Your.Master]

Those words aren't contradictions.

Re: Let's talk about sex, baby

[Your.Master]

The rings are not mandatory and signal unavailability.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[I'm New Around Here]

That was a very good book. It wasn't what I was expecting, but turned out to be even better than I could have hoped. Very imaginative indeed.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[AK Marc]

https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd...

I'm older and heard of it many times.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[Boronx]

I am 38. They did not have this when I was a kid. I only know about because of my own kids. It does seem very weird. Not just slightly Orwellian, but also dumb because kids lose these things all the time.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[Firethorn]

And her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?

Hmm... Having read the series:
1. It's not restricted to 'young girls'. It's the cultural more that everybody wears the sign(in the form of earrings). First period-ish is when girls start though. Don't remember when the boys start.
2. Bujold makes no bones that Beta is, in many ways, MORE controlling that the 'right wing' traditionalist Barrayar. They may not control sex as much, but you need a government permit to have the sterility implant removed(and if I remember right, both boys and girls get them). Oh yeah, and their response to STDs are downright draconian. They probably won't let you on the planet if you have one.
3. It's the person's choice as to what they advertise - the system isn't broken down in the books that I remember, but there's over 40 signs, showing things like what you are, what you're interested in(straight, bi, gay, herm), what you're looking for in a relationship such as: not interested, don't bother: committed, flings only please, dedicated relationship, procreative, etc...
4. There isn't any penalty for 'false advertising', other than you will probably create a lot of confusion and may have people hitting on you that you don't want to be, or if you're displaying 'not interested' tags, not being propositioned when you'd actually want to be.

Despite this, I think you missed the point - things will likely be different in the future, not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but very much different.

Re: Let's talk about sex, baby

[Firethorn]

The earrings in the example actually display a number of different signals. Not having them on would probably effectively remove you from the dating pool because it's like making your profile private.

A summery of the basic 'signals':
I am male/female/herm*
I seek male/female/herm/bi/all
I am currently: not seeking/committed(closed)/committed(open)/seeking(fling)/seeking(long-term)/either

It's still more complex than this, but it's a start.

So at a glance, if you know the codings, you can tell whether you'd be in for a surprise in the bedroom*, whether they'd be interested in you, whether they're actually looking, and how serious of a relationship you should expect from them.

That's a LOT more information than a wedding or engagement ring.

Basically, assume Beta was settled by a bunch of Hippies, where they(and their children) ended up growing up, but a lot of the honesty/free love stuff remained.

*Hermaphrodites are a thing on Beta due to genetic engineering, and some trend male/female in dress and appearance. Plus unisex dress is pretty common.

Re:Let's talk about sex, baby

[Firethorn]

But it seems like a kind of superficial gimmick. And most SF doesn't deliver any culture at all - art, music, religion, politics, etc - unless it directly relates to the plot.

So if it doesn't relate to the plot it's a superficial gimmick, but most SF doesn't do anything on it unless it's plot-relevant? Doesn't that make you hard to please?

Also, going through the series it DOES become important to the plot many times. Sure, it's often more for explaining somebody's motivations, but it's not completely gimmick. It makes for good character interaction at times.

the future is not separate

[FudRucker]

as society progresses in to the future it brings with it ideas and things from the past and present, look at the car, from Henry Ford's Model T to a 2014 Ford Mustang, sure they are very different but they both have four wheels and a windshield and steering wheel, gas & brake pedal, seats, etc... the idea does not change, it just gets refined and improved upon

Re:the future is not separate

[dryeo]

At first the Model T had the hand operated throttle besides the steering column, a hand operated brake and pedals to shift the planetary gears with the reverse pedal often used as a brake, as well as other levers for things like spark advance. Some older cars actually had a tiller instead of a steering wheel.
It took a while to standardize the automobiles controls and the average person probably couldn't even get an older Model T started and might well break their arm trying.

It's done on purpose

[alzoron]

A lot of sci-fi has its roots in an earlier era where it was risky to question the way things were. Authors of the time got around this by setting everything in an alien setting to disguise what it really was. Most sci-fi to this day continues the tradition of being more about social commentary than getting things accurate.

Re:It's done on purpose

[dbIII]

Lem is a very good example of that, as is Phillip K. Dick for other consequences of risk. Lem may have been executed if his satire had a contemporary setting. Phillip K. Dick couldn't sell his contemporary novel "confessions of a crap artist" but publishers accepted his style when he wrote SF.

Re:It's done on purpose

[RicktheBrick]

Most stories whether they are sci-fi or not are based on past stories(Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella) and are basically just two steps).
1. Find something or someone to hate.
2. Rejoice when they are defeated.
There is not much difference between Harry Potter and Star Trek since they will say a few words and use some device to produce a desired result. In both cases the viewer or reader does not even need to understand why they produce any given results.
As for sexual commentary one only has to look at Playboy of the sixties or earlier. One can see just as much today on the beaches of Spain since Playboy did not show much of the virgina back then. Even now my spell checker does not know the spelling of virgina. I have two old large dictionaries that do not have it. They must maintain the sexual norms of today or they will not be seen or read by a larger per cent of the population.

Greg Bear

[MrKaos]

Eon is a particularly good place to see how it is done properly. Far too many stories like Star Trek and Star Wars are just accelerations of today, which is fun, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Re: Greg Bear

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Wars occurs in the past not the future.

Re: Greg Bear

[NicBenjamin]

All Star Wars films really skimp on the Sci bit of Sci-Fi partly because it's set far in the past, it's still all about the time when it was made.

Luke is a rebellious teenager who acts just like the rebellious teenagers of the 70s. His family runs a "moisture farm" which really seems more like a water factory or distillery then a farm. The audience is supposed to identify with him because the audience always identifies with the farm boy whose trying to prove he's a man. The Death Star is clearly inspired by nuclear weapons, and shouldn't be that big a deal for a space-going civilization. Build a really big spaceship (at least 2-3 miles wide, so bigger then a Star Destroyer, but orders of magnitude smaller then a Death Star), program the navigation computer to ram the planet when you say "go," get the fuck off, say "go." The planet technically survives. The people, OTOH...

Re: Greg Bear

[Bite The Pillow]

Star Wars occurs in the past not the future.

False.

It is in a different galaxy, closer to the Big Bang. And therefore the humanoids aren't even humans. But it does represent a point where a humanoid intelligence similar to ours has reached FTL travel and has met other intelligent beings.

It is the future relative to our position. If we evolved faster, or if they evolved slower, it could easily have been in the absolute future. And the culture is otherwise an extension of today into what would be our future. Which is the topic we are discussing.

In fact, because there is no way we could have influenced that culture, it is a much more egregious example of what Stross complained about. They should be so utterly alien that Lando's actions are expected or normal, or that family ties don't cause surprise or unease, or any number of divergences from people today.

And keep in mind that none of my critique suggests it is wrong. Your pedantry is not useful, informative, nor helpful, and in fact should be both redundant because everyone here should know the first words of the crawl, and off-topic as I illustrated.

Re: Greg Bear

[BarbaraHudson]

"Star Wars occurs in the past not the future."

So did the remake of Battlestar Galactica, if you watched until the final eposode. That didn't stop it from examining the difference between being a person and a human, etc.

Re: Greg Bear

[MrKaos]

Star Wars occurs in the past not the future.

Ok, so lets just call it fantasy then.

Re: Greg Bear

[AK Marc]

Because it's not our past, it could either be in the past or the future. Because they are more technologically advanced, "the future" is a reasonble place to file it.

It's precicely because it's in the future that the writer explicitly said "long ago", to set it in an alternate reality, neither strictly past or future.

Or --

[Anna Merikin]

I'm not looking for authenticity. If I were, I'd be reading non-fiction.

Epic Poetry, or Medieval Romance novels or some other form of metaphor, which fosters what Aldous Huxley called the Perpetual Philosophy.

Some very few SF writers have been able to include cultural/philosophic themes in SF -- Huxley, Heinlein, Burgess and few others, as Twain was able to do in ordinary fiction/humor.

Don't expect genius from today's publishers.

Re:NSA over your shoulder is your future

[camperdave]

... Living in country where barcode tattoo or patch on the cloths will be required.

Don't be ridiculous. Americans would never stand for these things. That's why the government is focussed on facial recognition. Why provoke a violent backlash when you don't need to? Everyone has a face. Everyone has a cell phone. Ergo, everyone's is tagged by voice, appearance, and location already.

Some people have no imagination when it comes to technology.

yeah, and?

[argStyopa]

Yes, some science fiction is little more than cowboys & indians "in space", or a detective novel "in space", etc because the primary impetus for science fiction (and its claddistic cousin, fantasy) is rarely only about hewing to some speculative verisimilitude.
Of course a culture set in the far future would be almost incomprehensibly different; it would also use language in a way we are unlikely to understand. Does that mean that it should +always+ be written in some sort of incomprehensible syntax? I fail to see how that would be entertaining, for all that it would satisfy some sort of weird "purist" esthetic.

For that matter, part of the wellspring from which science fiction flows is precisely the universality of the human experience. By divorcing the story from current contexts like nationality or gender (for example), an author is free to paint on a whiter canvas, and highlight subtle story elements that might otherwise get lost. By insisting that future cultures be incomprehensible, he's denying science fiction one of its most compelling abilities to tell stories that matter to people today.

Re:yeah, and?

[Bite The Pillow]

it would also use language in a way we are unlikely to understand. Does that mean that it should +always+ be written in some sort of incomprehensible syntax?

The author makes certain assumptions toward the audience. One I have always allowed when reading is that I speak the language. Near-future I expect to be in my native tongue, with differences in usage and wording similar to the same distance in the past. 2050 slang should be as unintelligible but learnable as 1950 slang, in other words.

But 1000 years on, it will be as alien as Chaucer. And unless the story is about piecing together what something 1000 years old means, I assume I speak the language or it has been translated. Of course the idea of translation can serve as a crutch to explain things you otherwise would not explain, but that's cheating.

So no, it is not reasonable to argue "ad absurdum". Remove that bit about syntax and your point still stands, so it is not needed, and distracts as a point of attack unrelated to the point you are trying to make.

The late George Turner had a few things to say lik

[dbIII]

The late George Turner had a few things to say like that too. A technology that is a major game changer is going to alter society a great deal so that someone kept in suspended animation or returning from an extended time in space is going to dealing with an increasingly alien society. He was writing in his late 80s though and had seen a great deal of societal change first hand.
However, the reader needs "somewhere to stand" to understand the idea the writer is putting forward, so the far future can be represented Asimov style as a combination of little 1930s Russian towns and 1960s New York only in space if the story isn't about societal change due to future events. Just like something you know but with robots brings the robots into focus. A totally changed society where few people are over 20 doesn't being robots into focus.

The Right Technology

[Livius]

Cultures change in some ways but in other ways do not.

The only thing that has truly significantly changed society into something less recognizable has been the technology of reliable birth control, which in many ways society is still trying to come to terms with.

Thinking sci-fi readers knew this all along.

[hey!]

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.

Re:Thinking sci-fi readers knew this all along.

[HiThere]

C.L.Moore often didn't take gender roles for granted. Consider Jirel of Joiry. But she also often did. E.g. Northwest Smith.

Re:Thinking sci-fi readers knew this all along.

[david_thornley]

Although NW Smith doesn't seem to do anything all that often. He'll go through stories just seeing things and other people doing things. He's stubborn, and quick with a raygun, but is oddly passive.

Keeping it Readable

[Zobeid]

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!)

Re:Keeping it Readable

[lkcl]

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!

in the turkey lexicon written by bruce sterling to help new sci-fi writers, there's a special phrase to describe the type of book where "laser pistol" replaces the word "six shooter" and "steed" replaces "six-legged mounted alien beast". it's called "The Western"!

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu...

there are many more: you are not alone in encountering badly-written sci-fi by novelists who quotes want to get in on the sci-fi genre act quote. but one that really really surprised me: a book in the "Eve Online" universe. it begins *literally* with the "White Room Syndrome" and i was like "OH NOOO! the white room syndrome!!" - that's where the main character wakes up in a white room, with only one (white) door, and no furniture, with no memory of past events, and it symbolises the author's own total lack of imagination at being able to begin the story even from page one - but i kept reading and found that, actually, there was a heck of a lot of good in it. it was the author's first and only book, and he was extremely brave to attempt it, and, apart from being semi-starwars-esque in places and "film-drama-queen-esque" in others, the story worked really _really_ well, kept my attention and made really good use of advanced biotech, cloning, machine consciousness, wormhole technology and much more to actually *tell a story*.

Re:Keeping it Readable

[Zontar The Mindless]

it begins *literally* with the "White Room Syndrome" and i was like "OH NOOO! the white room syndrome!!" - that's where the main character wakes up in a white room, with only one (white) door, and no furniture, with no memory of past events, and it symbolises the author's own total lack of imagination at being able to begin the story even from page one...

That's actually not much different from the beginning of the first Amber novel IIRC.

Re:Keeping it Readable

[mavi_yelken]

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!)

You might wanna check out the The Quantum Thief and its sequels. It covers everything you just mentioned and much more...

bruce sterling's guide to sci-fi

[lkcl]

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.

Re:bruce sterling's guide to sci-fi

[Bite The Pillow]

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.

Re:All sci-fi is about the present

[Zobeid]

That's exactly the sort of thing I dislike when I encounter it in SF.

Star Trek is a Great Example

[NicBenjamin]

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.

Re:Star Trek is a Great Example

[Scryer]

I enjoyed Honor Harrington for a while... at least until it devolved into tree-cat fan-fiction. But the parts that appealed to me least were the parts you're referring to. When even the names of her monarchy's opponents were cribbed directly from the French revolutionary leaders I cringed. Other writers also crib a piece of history and file off the serial numbers to disguise their laziness, but Weber doesn't even bother with the file.

Re:Star Trek is a Great Example

[NicBenjamin]

That's part of the appeal for long-term readers. I like that you can figure out precisely which historical figure he is talking about from wikipedia and a hard copy of the book. As an American all I knew about the French Revolution was that a) the King died, b) Jefferson was for it, c) Adams was against it, and d) Napoleon was involved. Thanks to the Harrington books I actually read some on it, and it was fascinating history.

Game of Thrones probably has as much historical inspiration in it as the Honor Harrington series, but unless you've studied Medieval history (particularly the Wars of the Roses) quite thoroughly already you ain't gonna figure it out. You're just gonna think that it's a cool story.

Re:Star Trek is a Great Example

[Zontar The Mindless]

I don't think it's a cool story.

I read for information, inspiration, or entertainment. After the first 3½ GoT books, I decided that allowing myself to be bludgeoned any longer by an author who seems to delight in building up sympathy for characters then killing them horribly would amount to masochism, which (for me, at least) doesn't fit into any of those three categories.

Re:Star Trek is a Great Example

[NicBenjamin]

I think you've got it backwards.

In 99% of fantasy the story is BS. Evil arose sometime in the past, a complex and confusing prophecy appeared telling how to defeat it, the prophesied one (who just happens to be a character who is sympathetic to most American teenagers) and a merry band of friends appear, have various startling adventures in which nobody important ever dies, and defeat the evil by fulfilling the prophecy. They fulfill the prophecy literally, which turns out to be subtly different then the way everyone thought. The only reason to read the story is the characters because it's a boring story. And that means that the series would suck if they killed one of the characters halfway through.

OTOH, George RR Martin's books are solely about the story. The story is a story of the total collapse of Westerosi society, the human destruction it leaves in it's wake, the difficulty of combining a system dependent on purely honorable behavior by all political players and the human reality of frequent dishonorable conduct, etc. The characters are important in that they make us care about the Red Wedding in a way that you don't care about the Black dinner. If he didn't kill off characters at fairly regular intervals he'd be telling a much different story, and while the characters would be much more rewarding, the story itself would be incredibly boring.

That said, I also stopped reading the books after I finished the one with the Red Wedding. I have torrented all the episodes, but I haven;t watched them.

Re:Star Trek is a Great Example

[NicBenjamin]

Every 60s liberal voted for the guy who started that war twice. They voted for the guy who started on the path that led us to the war once. They strongly supported the war until the 60s were almost over because without the War Johnson doesn't have the credibility to pass any Civil Rights Acts, Medicare, etc.

70s liberalism's claims of pacifism are quite similar to current conservative claims that they're isolationists opposed to high government spending in principle.

Near-term Sci Fi

[CohibaVancouver]

This is one of the reasons I much prefer near-term science fiction like Andy Weir's "The Martian."

I remember reading The Foundation Trilogy as a kid and thinking it was preposterous reading a story set thousands of years in the future, as we'd have no idea how humanity would look at behave.

Re:Near-term Sci Fi

[CrimsonAvenger]

remember reading The Foundation Trilogy as a kid and thinking it was preposterous reading a story set thousands of years in the future, as we'd have no idea how humanity would look at behave.

And since you have no idea how humanity would look thousands of years in the future, why are you so sure Asimov was wrong in his depiction of the future?

Re:Near-term Sci Fi

[HiThere]

Well, for one thing he had robots, but not personal computers or cell phones. And cell phones have already changed how people react to each other. He also didn't have video games, but he might have just decided to ignore that.

Still, you can argue that the robots don't actuall belong in the Foundation universe, even though he did merge them. But I still don't believe in a Galactic Empire without personal computers in some form or other. The exact form would (partially) determine the social consequences, but they would be major.

OTOH, the purpose of Science Fiction is not to make accurate prophesies, but either to warn or inspire. Foundation was a combination, warning that all empires collapse, and offering a hope that you design a resurgence before the collapse happened. I don't know if anyone is taking that combined message to heart, but the US seems clearly headed for collapse. One may hope that it will take a long time happening, as the period of collapse is terrible to live through. (OTOH, the transition from British dominance to US dominance was relatively peaceful. If China, Japan, Europe, or India become the next dominant power we can hope the transition will be at least equally peaceful...but that's not the way to bet.)

Re:Near-term Sci Fi

[HiThere]

Yes. That's way I said *relatively* peaceful. Most transitions in history have been worse. The fall of Rome, e.g. (And I'm considering things on a percentage of population/degree affected basis rather than on an absolute numbers basis.)

Most people in most countries involved in WWII survived. And it only lasted 5 years. That's "relatively peaceful".

Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Morgaine]

Because there is a right well to tell fictional stories?

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.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

Probably one of the biggest problems authors in-general have is making the societies or protagonistic characters advocate for things that they don't agree with. That seems to be easier for authors of historical fiction since they have an existing historical context from which the character's perspectives can be built, but it's much harder to create a protagonist or society that's not seen as flawed within the context of itself but has opinions, characteristics, or behavior that we as readers find to be wrong. Those traits are usually reserved for the antagonsitic characters, to help us to judge them.

Even the heavyweights have done this. It's not common to find a society built on an intentional oligarchy or dictatorship that's viewed in a positive light by the main characters. It's not common to find sexual behavior that we find to be truly anathema nowadays (and I'm not talking simple polyamory or group sexual encounters) to be represented as positive or normal.

Trouble of it is, if an author develops a culture in a fictional work that does advocate something far outside of what's socially legal or acceptable, that author will probably not find a large audience for the work, and might find one's self made an example of as a degenerate author on the evening news. The "Think of the children!" aspect.

As a consequence you'll never see these things portrayed as socially acceptable and positive at the same time.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[BarbaraHudson]

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 ...

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Immerman]

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.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

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.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

Please give us some examples. I like to read, and unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio in science fiction and fantasy is poor, so it's hard to find good reads. I've been through most of Philip K. Dick's works, some Heinlein, some Asimov, some Bradbury, much of Kim Stanley Robinson, most of William Gibson, most of Neal Stephenson, some Orwell, some Huxley, just about all of David Weber, most Douglas Adams, much of Eric Flint, a large portion of Terry Pratchett, most of Robert Jordan, a good chunk of Niven, a lot of Herbert, and much of Piers Anthony.

Of what I've read, Anthony is the only one that seems to consistently and regularly advocate in favor of things that aren't generally socially acceptable, both in his humor work like Xanth and in his more serious works like Mode and the novel Mute. Just about everyone else either acknowledges that things our society perceives as wrong are wrong, or else acknowledges that our society thinks they're wrong but advocates for a loosening of that perspective (ie, polyamory in Stranger in a Strange Land).

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[anagama]

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.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Guppy]

Hey, you know what else won't be the same? Language!

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi would be a good example of a story that pushes that boundary (within the constraints of being able to still communicate with the reader). Not just choosing to invent silly terms for familiar things, but creating a culture-shock effect, where new slang is invented to reflect a new culture.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[rmstar]

I like to read, and unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio in science fiction and fantasy is poor, so it's hard to find good reads.

There is a yearly "the year's best science fiction" collection of stories and short novels (edited by Gardner Dozois), and there are a couple of decent journals (like Asimov's). If you buy these, you will read sample stories of good writers that also publish books. That way you will find enough good SF to read for the rest of your life.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Aighearach]

Brian Herbert does a great job with likeable oligarchs, and it doesn't represent sexual misconduct positively, or gender discrimination. Many characters on all sides have these failings, but it always represented as a weakness, a negative characteristic that rallies opposing forces to work together against them.

Indeed, he manages to keep it morally familiar.

There does seem to be some strange code-wording there, though.

It's not common to find sexual behavior that we find to be truly anathema nowadays (and I'm not talking simple polyamory or group sexual encounters) to be represented as positive or normal.

Why would it be? That is, in fact, the familiar and awful, not the unfamiliar. If something is unfamiliar, you don't really know if it is good or bad at a glance.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Aighearach]

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.

That is similar to the complaints that people had about Anathem by Neal Stephenson, but I felt that by removing the familiar words he forced the reader to actually think about the subject and create a working, self-consistent understanding of the subjects based on context that isn't just mimicking relative word placement.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

With that statement I meant that typically things that are looked down upon or are abhorrent when the work was written are looked down upon or are abhorrent within the story of the book, and are used as a means to identify the antagonists or possibly the anti-heros. It' rare to find something considered morally repugnant represented as positive, good, or normal-as-accepted in such fiction without it being attributed at least as a vice.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

Haven't read Anathem yet. Knowing this about how it's written I'll have to wait to be in the correct frame of mind to pick it up.

I didn't care for the odd use of stream-of-consciousness in the first part of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and I suspect I just don't go in for that style of writing. I didn't mind how Salinger did it in The Catcher in the Rye though.

David Weber's Safehold series annoys me with the character names. I like the story, but attempting to read through the variant spellings of relatively common names breaks my reading pace frequently. In my mind I end up substituting unpronounced placeholders for the characters as I see their names.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Fwipp]

So, both, then? You'd wish we could still rape our wives and want to have sex with "beautiful children."

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[rtb61]

Perhaps this will help explain to you the reason why the noise in science fiction. Science fiction - the art of creating every single other genre of fiction writing within a reader appreciable science fiction schema. So what was once science fiction can in fact cease to be science fiction except as part of the historical record of fiction writing. Of course space pirates will always be space pirates, whether attacking ships in space or making raids on planets.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[abbamouse]

Part of David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series portrays pedophilia as something understandable given the context -- from the perspective of our protagonist. He changes his mind, but molests his boys and others along the way. (Can't remember which book does this -- it's been more than 20 years since I last read the series).

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Grekan]

What about a culture where people are allowed to "abort" children up to the age of 5 (short story I read years ago).

That's probably "The Pre-persons" by Philip K. Dick. An excellent story, the very first of his I read.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[I'm New Around Here]

Speaking of Piers Anthony, have you read Firefly? Or Pornucopia? If not, find them.

also: http://hradzka.livejournal.com...

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[I'm New Around Here]

People buy Brian Herbert's Dune universe re-hash books like crazy. I've read a few thousand pages of them myself. But how many people read his earlier book, Sudanna, Sudanna? Not the best storytelling ever, but one of the most charming and original.

Was that the one with one-eyed aliens that lived on a peanut? Read it 20 years ago, and strongly recommend it for this thread.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[AK Marc]

Go read Diamond Age and tell me whether that qualifies.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

I tried to read it, but fairly early in the book when the silly man lost what he had bought for his daughter (if my memory serves) in being robbed because of the deal with his hat, I put the book down and haven't picked it back up for over a decade.

I'm not a fan of cringe-moments like that. I stopped reading Anansi Boys for the same reason.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

but creating a culture-shock effect, where new slang is invented to reflect a new culture.

How very.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

The authors I've listed are ones that I've read several works from that I could remember off of the top of my head. I've read some Foster and some Farmer, but not much, and I'm pretty sure they were short stories, and in the case of Farmer, was compelled to read as part of an English literature curriculum. I have a Searoad anthology from Le Guin that I have yet to read, and I've read some Virginia Demarce and some Margaret Atwood as well. When I first got into reading science fiction I started with Star Trek novels, and Judith Reeves-Stevens and her husband Garfield wrote many of them; they were good but they were also someone else's universe rather than one of their own.

I read when I have time. As that's not as often as I'd like it's sometimes hard to find time to take a chance on something instead of reading something that I expect to be good based on the author's previous works.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

That passage you linked to actually helps graphically illustrate the point, in that when authors choose to write that sort of thing, they are judged for it.

I'd tried to read the first book of his Bio of a Space Tyrant series, but the juxtaposition of the value of virginity immediately followed by the brutal gang-rape in front of her family as a display of power was enough that I put that book down, and I've never really read much of Anthony's work since. Xanth was amusing, Mode was sad, and Apprentice Adept was an interesting mix of science fiction and fantasy with more than a little humor thrown in that I hadn't encountered before, but trying to get into his serious stuff I didn't care for it. I guess the world's already a hard, gritty place, no need to intentionally make it so much worse.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[I'm New Around Here]

Yeah, it does show how people judge him. Thankfully for me, he is one of my two favorite authors, mainly because of his disregard for our common sense of decency. (Isaac Asimov is my other favorite.)

The Space Tyrant series has sex throughout it, graphic to an extent. Xanth always had the "stork calling ritual". I read the book that page mentions, Tatham Mound, with the honey lube/birth control. Firefly is a full length novel that contains a section that, IIRC, is presented as something one of the characters dreams while being affected by a powerful aphrodisiac. In truth, that part was actually written by a pedophile serving time in prison.

Sex is not a taboo subject for him. No aspect of it seems off limits, as far as story line goes. I wonder if that Stross guy considers him to be worthy of praise for that.

--I just looked for mention of Piers Anthony in Stross's essay. There are a couple comments that mention one of his short stories, but I'm not sure if the comments are from Stross, a reader, or both. PA's story "In the Barn", which they attribute to a collection edited by Harlan Ellison, was actually published first in a collection of short stories by PA, called "Anthonology". I read that back in the late 1980s. Certainly doesn't get praise for not following our social mores.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[dgatwood]

With a little effort, you can read middle English from 600 years ago. Before that, it's really tough, and even that can be problematic. 500 years is about the limit. The last time English really changed radically was after the Norman invasion of 1066, which brought a strong French and Latin influence, rapidly changing English from an almost purely Germanic language into a hybrid Germanic and Romance (Latinate) language. At this point, modern English is widespread enough that it is probably unlikely to suffer that fate again.

However, even as late as six or seven hundred years ago, English was still a very different language than it is today. As spelling became standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, pronunciation changed quite a bit, resulting in both the great vowel shift and the transition from Middle English to Modern English. Those changes were mostly finished by the late 1500s (though the vowel shift continued into the 1600s), and since then, the core of the language has been pretty close to constant.

I mean yes, English has changed a bit since Shakespeare—a few slangy secondary meanings of words have fallen into disuse, causing certain bawdy puns to no longer be funny, some pronouns (e.g. thee and thou) have fallen into disuse, causing them to seem archaic (but still widely understood), and we had a big spelling simplification in the U.S., mostly in an act of rebellion against Britain, but otherwise the core of the language basically hasn't evolved at all. Instead, the language has mostly just added new words for new concepts that didn't exist previously and borrowed words from other cultures to describe local foods, clothing, and so on.

Why? Three things really cemented the language in place: the strength of the British Empire (not getting taken over again), the advent of the printing press, and the resulting rise in literacy. It is likely that the rise of global communication will slow the evolution of language even more, as standardization improves (though one might look at a typical Facebook post and argue the exact opposite, but I digress).

So assuming we discovered a way to freeze somebody for 500 years, there's a lot of things they'd be confused by, but I'd be very surprised if the English language were one of them, notwithstanding minor spelling changes and new words for things that haven't been invented yet. I doubt they'd even be shocked by people's accents in 500 years, much less have trouble understanding the words. After all, the rise of audiovisual recordings is likely to nail down pronunciation in much the same way that the Gutenberg press nailed down spelling and grammar.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[jd]

Science fiction isn't fiction that has elements that aren't science but might appeal to geeks who like science.

Science fiction isn't science fantasy.

Science fiction isn't pure fantasy with stuff science geeks like.

Science fiction isn't biologically improbable females fulfilling spotty teen fantasies.

Science fiction is science that is fictional. Very different animal and naturally restrictive.

That's life. Or will be.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Bonus Mop]

The novelization of Asimov's "Nightfall" had a preface along these lines. It's probable been 20 years since I read the book, so I won't get this completely correct, but in a nutshell, Asimov (or possibly Silverberg) pointed out that he could have gone out of his way to invent a new language and a new culture for the characters in his book. However, doing so wouldn't have added to the story. The story tells us something about humanity. He had to invent a specific star system to do this, and since it wasn't Sol, the main characters had to be alien to make the details work. But in every other way that mattered, the characters were us. Drastic changes to language or culture would have only muddled the underlying story. This preface changed how I viewed science fiction. I still prefer hard science to fantasy, but if the story has someone 500 years from now using modern-day idioms in dialog, I can live with that. It helps me understand their thoughts and actions, and that's why I'm reading it after all.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[jsh1972]

Try Alistair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" series, among my favorite Sci Fi novels. "House of Suns" and "Pushing Ice" are two more good novels of his.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[drinkypoo]

but creating a culture-shock effect, where new slang is invented to reflect a new culture.

How very.

much shock very culture how slang

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[drinkypoo]

By the time I'd graduated Junior High I'd moved on from Piers because I found people with more than good ideas, they could write, too.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Triklyn]

we all had to start somewhere, and PA was my gateway drug too :).

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

?

Did you have a brain-tumor for breakfast?

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[drinkypoo]

Did you have a brain-tumor for breakfast?

Congratulations, you are even more out of touch with pop culture and memes than I am. If you don't know what I'm on about, you've clearly been far from the pulse of the internets.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Immerman]

I'm far more interest in how the speculative changes in technology might alter the human experience. Or in how the technology itself might operate. But if you're resorting to spray-painting the culture neon plaid to be "exotic" you likely just have a fantasy novel with SF trappings. In which case I'll take an actual fantasy novel - it will likely be more plausible.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Immerman]

Amen. I remember that preface.

I think of it as cultural translation. Obviously the Plublaxians don't speak English - they don't even have parts capable of making the right kinds of sounds, but it makes the book far more interesting if you can understand what they're saying. Similarly idiom and cultural context must be translated if you want to impart the subtleties of interaction without three pages of appendices for every line of dialog. At least insofar as it can be translated - obviously a highly advanced society is going to have situations with no modern-day human analogues - and whenever those are significant to the story you get your dose of the *real* changes in this exotic far-off place, rather than having it buried in an avalanche of culture-shock.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[TWX]

And apparently you're not familiar with Heathers.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Aighearach]

The abhorrent is the known. That your fetish is unpopular doesn't make it unfamiliar as a cultural feature. It is simply defeated as an acceptable behavior.

That is totally different than the issue being examined here.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Aighearach]

Yeah, that sounds about right.
If they actually count as aliens is left up to the reader. :)

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[I'm New Around Here]

Yes, I'm sure you read everything he wrote by time you graduated eighth grade, and can compare it to your new favorite author now. Good for you.

Or did you just read a couple Xanth books and the first Space Tyrant book and decide he wasn't serious enough for you?

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[I'm New Around Here]

I agree with your sentiment as well.

Unlike stick-up-his-ass drinkypoo, I like Piers Anthony's books, and always will. But if he was just some random author that got people reading, who then moved on to other authors, fine. No skin off my nose. Same thing if someone first got into reading because of the classics, or westerns, or sparkly vampires.

Good to see another PA fan, though. :^)

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[I'm New Around Here]

I still mention the carnival ride to people: The riders have a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying. And I don't simply mean "statistically" or "potentially".

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[AK Marc]

I'm hazy on the details. I read it once, when it came out (about 20 years ago). But there was a thing in it with a computer virus that infects people, and it's an STD. Some odd sexual practices revolve around that, but again, I don't remember the details.

I don't even remember the scene you are referring to.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[AK Marc]

English is pretty understandable to a person that understands French, German/Dutch, and Latin/Italian/Spanish. English is more a mix of other languages than anything other than Esperanto.

If anything, it'll be more like Joss Whedon's idea of the future. Where English has absorbed some Chinese, as it absorbed many words from other languages before. (at least based on his representation of the future in Firefly)

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[drinkypoo]

And apparently you're not familiar with Heathers.

I've seen it. It had a couple of moments, but I didn't find it too memorable. I can barely quote movies I really love, I don't waste that much space on Hollywood.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[volmtech]

Oh great, another plot line to add to my collection. At 18 children have to pass stringent tests to be allowed to live and enter society, at least those who were not eliminated at 5 in the first culling. Some who don't think they can pass the test escape into the wastelands and part of the entrance test is capturing escapees. Of course the whole thing is televised. No, it's nothing like The Hunger Games.

Of course there are the parents of doomed 5 year olds who hide their children and then all the escaped undesirables who have grown up and are trying to fight the system, oh my, a trilogy. Excuse me, I have some best sellers to write. Movie rights are extra. I also claim copyright.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[14erCleaner]

For a good example of mangling language in a tale of the future, try Riddley Walker. Tough reading, but an interesting book that won several awards. There's even a website devoted to interpreting the more confusing verbiage.

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[BarbaraHudson]

You can't claim copyright on an idea for a story - only the actual text. Anyone who plagerizes it or makes only minor changes, so the original story is clearly identifiable, is guilty of plagerism. But good luck with the trilogy, and may you make beaucoup bux.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[dgatwood]

If anything, it'll be more like Joss Whedon's idea of the future. Where English has absorbed some Chinese, as it absorbed many words from other languages before. (at least based on his representation of the future in Firefly)

In concept, anyway, yes. I'm not quite sure why we'd adopt Chinese swear words when we have plenty of our own, and my bet would be on Spanish being the predominant source of new words in English, rather than Chinese, simply because of the relatively large number of Spanish-speaking people living in the U.S. and interacting with English-speaking people on a daily basis. But otherwise, yes.

That reasoning is somewhat supported by the fact that English speakers hardly even seem to notice when Spanish words slip into English. As an example, I was reading one of the Dresden Files books, and in literally every single place that talked about a "dais", the word "dias" was used instead. I figure his copyeditor didn't catch it because it is potentially a word. :-)

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Eunuchswear]

I like to read, and unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio in science fiction and fantasy is poor, so it's hard to find good reads.

What an original observation.

Re:Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Triklyn]

well, i really must protest the inclusion of sparkly vampires in that list... :)

reading good, make america's english not terrible :)

Re: Diversity is good, especially in SciFi

[Mr. Slippery]

Science fiction isn't fiction that has elements that aren't science but might appeal to geeks who like science....Science fiction is science that is fictional. Very different animal and naturally restrictive.

You are using a defintion of a term, which is at odds with the defintions of that term used by almost every other educated native speaker of English. This will probably make it hard for you to communicate. You might want to look to that.

Stories readers can relate to

[seven of five]

On the one hand, an SF writer wants to challenge the reader's beliefs, but if you take things too far, the characters become unrecognizable. How do you write dialog, for example, between beings with digital RF implants instead of speech? And let's face it, with advanced technologies, the human body itself will likely become obsolete in a century, tops. Stories like this are not only a huge challenge to write, readers won't know what to make of them. People read for escapism, and to have their perspectives stretched, but they're also looking for morality tales where good triumphs and order's restored. They want characters they can relate to, even to a small degree.

Re:Stories readers can relate to

[Fnord666]

How do you write dialog, for example, between beings with digital RF implants instead of speech?

That one's easy. Everyone knows that you use italics!

Jack Vance

[HazelMotes]

besides Gene Wolfe, Frank herbert, Isaac Asimov and countless others wrote volumes of SF where the culture was central to the story and as foreign as the environment. Heck, even Piers Anthony tried his best to do this; he just couldn't separate his yarns from his present-day cultural fixations.
What the heck is this sape reading?

Footnotes, that's why

[paiute]

If you write about a society to far in the future and want to show all the changes probable by then, your work will consist mostly of footnotes and explanations and definitions. Not a great way to tell a story.

Woosh. It's from fallout.

[doug141]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:The first rule

[aaaaaaargh!]

I cannot think of a single good fiction novel that is only entertainment. The idea of fiction is that you have less restrictions as a writer to make the point and develop the story you want to, be that for entertainment or other purposes.

But it's true that there is a mass market of fiction books that is intended only to entertain, and that's totally okay. It's just not a "rule".

Read much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert A. Heinlein set up humanity's culture different from our own; and most of his books are set 50-200 years into the future. I guess they never watched Star Trek TNG, either. A society with no currency, very Utopian in its set-up(the Federation), seems to me pretty radical a vision of the future, The thing is, if you think the basics of human interactions and culture are going to change much in 500 years, you really need to learn some history. "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." We are still going through the same crappola, with politics, religion, and disease, that we were 500 years ago. The names change, but the issues are still the same. We are still using the same brains, have the same bodies, and have the same dual-sexual arrangement we've had for eons. The way we see the world around us won't change much.

Re:Read much?

[sir-gold]

I would argue that the internet itself has caused a dramatic change. The only reason we don't notice it yet is because we are at the very beginning of that change.

It allows a collective level of thinking never before possible at any point in human history. Never before has it been possible for a large group of very smart people scattered all over the world to collaborate on an idea in real-time without ever meeting face-to-face.

It is social interaction that has driven changes in human society, and if you accelerate the social interaction, it will accelerate the social change.

We have seen smaller examples of "jumps" in social interaction speed before, like the invention of the written word, followed by the printing press, the radio, and the TV. Each one of these inventions accelerated the rate of social change even faster than it was before, and as long as we continue to advance in technology, we will continue to increase the speed of social interaction (which also accelerates the rate of technological advancement, creating a feed-back loop).

I predict that the world 100 years in the future will be FAR more different than 100 years in the past. We are already seeing signs of it within a single generation (Millennials, vs. Gen Xers vs. Boomers) with each generation being progressively more different in their way of thinking than the previous generation. If you go back more than 300 years ago however, you don't see very much difference in thinking between generations.

Re:All sci-fi is about the present

[aaaaaaargh!]

Cory Doctorow is wrong. That's an old platitude. There are no such rules in writing. Science fiction can be about anything you want and can convey any message you like. It can be pure entertainment, philosophy, hypothetical scenarios, fascination with engineering, etc. Whatever you want as an author and whatever you are capable of transmitting in your writing.

Of course, publishers want to sell books according to their profile. So if you want to sell your books you'll have to fit the profile of the publisher, and if you want to sell lots of books, they should at least create some suspense or attract readers by its mastery of language, or be about a currently "hot" topic. But that's an entirely different matter.

you want change?

[Connie_Lingus]

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.

Re:you want change?

[Livius]

What, because humans never get infections any more? That exact scenario might be less probable, but it's not beyond the comprehension of people today.

Re:you want change?

[dunkelfalke]

the son of perhaps the most powerful and well connected man on the earth

This is a quite biased look at history. 90 years ago USA wasn't nearly as important. It only changed after WW2 when it emerged as the only developed country with an intact infrastructure.

But it could be an even better example of what you were thinking about. Britain used to be a superpower. Nowadays not so much.

Re:you want change?

[david_thornley]

FWIW, in 1924 the US was in many ways the most powerful country in the world, having great area and natural resources, a large population, and a very large industrial base. The Washington Naval Limitation treaty had given the US Navy parity with the British Navy, and the British needed the excuse to stop building large warships much more than the US did. Don't underestimate US power of the time just because the US was mostly focused inwards.

Re:you want change?

[strikethree]

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.

Not to be terribly pedantic here but 90 years ago, the American President was not THAT important of a person. Sure, America participated in World War 1, but America did not emerge as a superpower until World War 2.

The essence of your point is still valid though: The son of a leader in a technologically accelerating country died. From a blister. Within range of the greatest medical care available. Died. From a blister. When a previous president had been shot in the chest and continued giving his speech before getting medical attention. And lived. Crazy.

There's a (sub)genre for that...

[Cinnamon Beige]

It's called 'social science fiction' and my experience is that it tends to anger people and be poorly written, though on the whole there isn't a complete overlap between the two and the first can be due primarily to the latter. It's one of those places where having an actual idea of how society and cultures actually work makes a huge difference, and the majority of writers seem to try backfilling from the culture they want the future to have regardless of how likely it is, in fact, to ever happen--the purpose, ultimately, is wish fulfillment and to try to push their own sociopolitical ideology, though it's not necessarily their authorial intent.

I'm really not sure how Charles Stoss might have failed to be aware of the genre's existence and its problems, though I can easily and cheerfully say that he's certainly wrong about the amount of culture shock a switch from 2014 to 1914 (or the other way around) would be. People don't change that much; the main changes would be in what technology is in use, and what things we consider appropriate in public. (For example, Western culture has lost a lot of the distinction between public and private behavior.)

More importantly, though, is that social science fiction tends to date itself quite swiftly, especially if the story is one of the wish fulfillment types and how the ideology works in practice has become better known. Then there's examples like 1890's Caesar's Column, which is set the 1980s...

Honestly, what might be more interesting is a science fiction novel exploring the possibility that things like the internet could result ultimately in the primary stream of culture not changing as much anymore, and the consequences of stabilization of the primary culture...

Re:There's a (sub)genre for that...

[Livius]

the purpose, ultimately, is wish fulfillment and to try to push their own sociopolitical ideology, though it's not necessarily their authorial intent.

I find the greatest weakness to be that the political agenda is precisely the intent and that the intent is painfully transparent.

As usual, Stross is spot-on

[gweihir]

That is a reason why he will always have trouble being really successful, because most people want what is familiar in their entertainment, spiced only with a little divergence. On the other hand, those that do not have this limitation (few) will always be looking at what authors like him produce and with global distribution selling enough of what cannot sell to the masses because of its high quality gets easier.

What people want to read

[danaris]

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

Re:What people want to read

[William Baric]

Then why set a story in the far future if it has nothing to do with the far future? Is it because authors think "pew pew" sells more than "bang bang"? Is it because their stories were told countless of times using "bang bang", so they now use "pew pew" to make it looks like they're original stories?

What irks me is someone calling himself a science-fiction author simply because he use "pew pew" instead of "bang bang".

Re:What people want to read

[0123456]

Mod parent up.

I write and publish SF as a hobby. The stories that sell are the traditional space opera which is just the present day with spaceships. The stories that actually try to predict what a weird place the future will be sell far less, because that's not what most readers are looking for.

Re:What people want to read

[Aighearach]

I grew up with science fiction, believing it to be the freest form of literature for exploring social issues facing society. While modern feminists might be shocked by Heinlein's sarcastic sexy characters, the more shocking thing was the idea that female leads can be awesome superheros who save the world on their own two feet.

Childhood's End explored various import social issues.

1984, etc, are no-brainers here.

If it is totally unfamiliar, how can it be a vehicle for exploring the human condition that we experience now? It claims to want to elevate the stories, but it seems to only be attempting it at a very academic and obtuse level. If the stories are divorced from purpose, they become abstract art; art so abstract the artist isn't trying to communicate anything specific at all. I'm not saying there is, or should be, no room for that expression. But I just don't see how it would be an improvement for science fiction.

It is generally regarded as assisting the purpose to keep things outside the point of the story familiar. The differences stand out, and should be shining light on the purpose of the story. If the story is entirely unfamiliar, it either has nothing to say, or is unable to say it clearly. Or even to set up a context for the reader to explore the implications of.

Re:What people want to read

[Applehu Akbar]

A lot of SF is a satirical funhouse mirror held up to the present. You're supposed to read the story in terms of a familiar society.

Re:What people want to read

[epine]

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.

If you don't write that way—with integrity and determination—then what you're writing isn't SF, it's what I call GSF, or genre science fiction.

Genre is primarily a form of entertainment. SF is properly a form of deep enquiry. I pretty much won't read genre anything. Of course, people lump much of what I do read into genre, but I don't support them in this activity (and none of Vonnegut, Le Guin, or Atwood would—or did—so far as they could get away with it).

One or two pieces in Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds (circa 1986) were very much to my liking. He shit on genre, too, and in a big way.

Re:What people want to read

[Aristos Mazer]

It can be done. But as Piers Anthony noted, a writer has to be already established to tell the stories the writer wants to tell. "If I want to actually make money, I write a Xanth novel." This was in the commentary for his novel _Firefly_, which, relevant to this thread, includes a disturbingly mature sexual relationship between an adult male and a 5-year-old girl. I don't recommend reading it unless you're really prepared to explore that "what if." It's fairly graphic.

Re:What people want to read

[radtea]

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.

The same is true of historical fiction. Protagonists from as little as a century ago, if depicted realistically, would be both wildly implausible and utterly unpalatable to modern audiences. Even modern novels from other cultures have a lot of heavy lifting to do if they want to get an audience in the Anglosphere.

Two reasonably good historical authors are Patrick O'Brien and George MacDonald Fraser. The former manages by making his characters genuinely alien to us, and the latter by having a hero (Flashman) who is a complete reprobate, so when he--for example--sells his nominal wife into slavery we are shocked but not surprised.

On this basis, even near future SF is hard to do well. I've written a near future novel (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418030663&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem) and even a decade or three in the future is hard to handle realistically while still keeping characters accessible to the modern reader.

I'd go further and say that when we read historical authors, from Shakespeare to Austen to Dickens, we often gloss over just how weird the worlds they are writing about actually are, and the pace of social change in the past generation or two accounts for most of that shift. If things keep up at this rate none of us will be able to communicate meaningfully with our grandchildren.

While his argument has some merit ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... it perhaps overreaches. Some 2,000 years later, most Westerners still idenitify themselves as "Christian". Over a century-and-a-half after John Tyndall demonstrated that changing the composition of a gas affected its ability to absorb energy, many in the public deny any anthropogenic contribution to global warming. Oh, and where are the flying cars?

Re:While his argument has some merit ...

[HiThere]

Identifying yourself with a label doesn't mean that you mean the same thing other people did when they used the same label. Consider the difference between a Quaker in 2014 and a Clavinist in 1700. Both call(ed) themselves Christians, but they don't have many beliefs in common. And I left out the Catholic of 1200.

Re:While his argument has some merit ...

[Rambo Tribble]

What you say is true, but I fail to see the point. There are still those who hold Calvinist-like beliefs who identify themselves as Christian, and the central tenet of the divinity of Christ, (Filioque aside), remains the same across Western Christianity. Some details of belief and observance may vary, but the Bible remains the central thesis. What's more, there is a remarkable consistency across denominations in what is touted and what is ignored. Try to find, for instance, a congregation whose leader has informed it of the full ramifications of Luke 19:27.

I might add, little has changed since Ambrose Bierce defined a Christian as, "An individual who believes the Bible is a divine text, perfectly suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor."

Re:While his argument has some merit ...

[HiThere]

OK, then the Calvinist of today doesn't hold the same beliefs as the Calvinist of the 1700's. And use the label Calvinist. (And, no, they don't hold the same beliefs. Sometimes they use the same words, but even then they mean different things by them.)

Mind you, time isn't the only dimension. You can find the same separation among different people at any one time. When you separate by time you are comparing mean apparent belief (which is heavily biased by public speakers/writers). When you compare individuals you can dig much more deeply into what they are willing to admit to believing.

Re:While his argument has some merit ...

[Rambo Tribble]

Okay, but, personally, I'm more of a Calvin-and-Hobbesist.

It does expose those blind spots

[Greyfox]

If you read them later, it's interesting to see where the blind spots were. My grandfather had a bunch of 50's-era scifi books that I'd read while visiting. In one series they had faster than light spacecraft but would do all the calculations to go to light speed with slide rules. Earlier authors would often be set on Mars, Venus or the Moon, which all naturally had perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity. That doesn't mean the stories were in any way bad. Often they were written to provide some commentary on some aspect of the society of the time.

Re:It does expose those blind spots

[Cinnamon Beige]

If you read them later, it's interesting to see where the blind spots were. My grandfather had a bunch of 50's-era scifi books that I'd read while visiting. In one series they had faster than light spacecraft but would do all the calculations to go to light speed with slide rules.

Actually, I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate, which might actually make doing those calculations at least in part with slide rules (using a computer to set them up) a very good idea with FTL--accuracy probably will be more useful than speed, and you might also train people still to do the calculations by hand even when computers can handle much of it, much like how people still learn celestial navigation.

If your navigational computer going down doesn't strand you (a nightmare in and of itself), then being able to figure out which direction to point yourself and how long to run the engines so you can reach a place where it can be fixed is vital. And remember, its problem may not be that it's merely needing a reboot...

Earlier authors would often be set on Mars, Venus or the Moon, which all naturally had perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity. That doesn't mean the stories were in any way bad. Often they were written to provide some commentary on some aspect of the society of the time.

Actually, at the time people honestly believed that Mars, Venus and/or the Moon really did have perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity, so it's not really social commentary as much as it's what TV Tropes calls Science Marches On.

Re:It does expose those blind spots

[colinb8]

"I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate"

A competent slide rule calculation is likely to be more accurate than an incompetent computer calculation, but given a competent user why might a slide rule be more accurate than any likely electronic computer? I've used log tables, slide rules, mechanical calculators, electronic calculators and computers, and I think even 32_bit single precision floating point arithmetic will be more accurate than a slide rule.

But I'd be delighted if someone can give a counter-example.

Re:It does expose those blind spots

[Cinnamon Beige]

From what I understand? It's how they handle the numbers--a computer will use a decimal value, which produces issues of the significant digits sort when the decimal value is an approximate one, and this can make a difference. This is actually what floating points are all about, and they have known problems with accuracy.

Have a thought experiment: You are traveling from from Earth to Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away, and to keep the math relatively simple your ship travels at the speed of 4 light years per hour. Assuming that the nature of your FTL drive means you basically need to point it at the destination and run the engine for the correct amount of time (ignoring anything in the way), how far off course will you be if you have an error in the thousandths' place and do not realize it until 64 minutes later when your FTL drive shuts down? (For the purposes of this, a thousandth in either direction will do the trick, and you're only calculating deviation from the correct course so the correct heading is unimportant. Use 0 if that makes the math simpler.)

Calculation errors in courses increase with time/distance, and this was well-studied in many senses of the term back in the age of sail...not to mention every so often even now when an airplane has the problem I just outlined above. This is also why people are still learning the old-fashioned navigational techniques, because sometimes your navigational computer doesn't announce its failure to work properly by a nice honest crash-and-burn but by giving you wrong numbers--and you need to be able to both cope with it no longer working and to tell when it is giving you nonsense before you get into too much trouble.

And yes, this is actually a social change we can pretty much predict and guess with some accuracy should manned space travel outside the solar system become a major issue: It's only a scaling up of a problem which humanity has had before and solved before...repeatedly. (We like reinventing the wheel, here, it seems.)

Re:It does expose those blind spots

[david_thornley]

Slide rules have significant digits, typically two or three. The usual 32-bit float has more like six, which would be impossible to match with a handheld slide rule. Whatever accuracy problems a modern computer has, a slide rule has more. The limits for a slide rule are how accurately you can set and read one, and how little the slide is going to be accidentally nudged by something, while the limits for a computer are digitally imposed.

A slide rule might be faster than entering numbers into a calculator, and it may look cooler, but it's less accurate. One possible advantage for the slipstick is that it enforces a certain discipline on arithmetic, so the user is pretty much compelled to know the the approximate answer before the calculation, meaning that getting a completely wrong answer due to user error is less likely, but there's no reason you can't adopt that discipline with a calculator.

Re:It does expose those blind spots

[Eunuchswear]

Actually, at the time people honestly believed that Mars, Venus and/or the Moon really did have perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity,

How "early" are you aiming for here?

Verne and Wells knew that the Moon and Mars didn't have Earth-like gravity or atmospehre. (I think they both overestimated the atmosphere of the Moon or Mars, but the knew it wasn't earth like).

what a load of condescending guff!

[thebeastofbaystreet]

I mean, really, now I know why I can't stand his writing. He's just bitter because Peter Hamilton sells way more books!

Re:what a load of condescending guff!

[mvdwege]

Perhaps you dislike his writing because liking writing presupposes an amount of literacy you obviously lack. Charlie specifically praises Hamilton in the linked blog post.

Now go back to your homework and stop bothering the adults.

Re:Iain M. Banks Culture novels FTW

[Scryer]

I agree that Iain M. Banks's Culture novels show that Stross's goal is at least possible. He did a brilliant job of imagining a distant future that gave me severe culture shock, but was also entertaining and engaging. Books set thousands of years in the future where we have the same viewpoints and aspirations do indeed make it difficult for me to suspend disbelief.

William Gibson's recent "Peripheral" provides two more near-term futures, both of which I would expect Stross to approve - the first perhaps two or three decades ahead that's a (perhaps appropriately) cynical view of the direction our civilizations are going, and the second perhaps a century on from that. With the closer one I could see where it was all coming from, and with the second the protagonist was able to relate better than I was... but then she was a couple of decades closer to it. It seemed to me a real tour de force. Recommended.

Looking back, though, I like to see how various authors did predicting their future in which we currently live. Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" is still one of my favorites, but didn't work as a crystal ball. One of the Lazarus Long books placed his sidekick and tame math genius Andrew Libby on the spaceship's bridge using his slide rule to work his calculations. Gibson's 1984 "Neuromancer" hasn't held up very well either in this regard.

But Vernor Vinge's groundbreaking 1981 "True Names" still seems spot on to me, except perhaps underestimating the bandwidth that was going to be available. Anonymous hackers mostly stayed ahead of the governments, and Vinge foresaw some of our current network-based threats only a few years after the ARPAnet started spreading out from the universities. Like the protagonist Mr. Slippery, I feel impaired when I'm on a cruise ship with limited bandwidth and can't get instant answers to fleeting questions -- it seems that I'm not as effective a problem solver when I'm unplugged from the Net. Vinge even predicted the role of Homeland Security, though he had the Welfare Department cast in that role: when confronted by the authorities, Roger Pollack said "I do know my rights. You FBI types must identify yourselves, give me a phone call, and--". The response was "Perhaps that would be true, if we were the FBI or if you were not the scum you are. But this is a Welfare Department bust, Pollack, and you are suspected--putting it kindly--of interference with the instrumentalities of National and individual survival." And it keeps getting better. Pardon me, time to go read it yet again.

Re:your analogy is too short sighted

[BarbaraHudson]

But a horse is a horse is a horse. They're familiar, fun to ride, and take less training to learn how than driving a motorcycle does.

If we end up with a huge population and tech collapse, people in the future might still find riding horses useful.

Exploring Change?pe

[NotSanguine]

I think the premise of the TFA is stupid. Yes, culture changes. And yes, we can incorporate such changes into our stories.

However, It seems to me that the essence of science fiction (or, as Heinlein also called it, "speculative fiction") is to identify a particular change in something. A change in culture, a scientific breakthrough, a technological innovation or some other event or idea, then explore how such a change could impact people, and tell a story which incorporates those implications.

Essentially, it's asking "What if...?" and examining the consequences, in human and technological terms, of the answer.

It's not necessary (in fact, in many cases, it will get in the way of telling the story) to create a completely new culture, unless that culture directly relates to the theme (answering the "What if...?" question) of the story.

Re:The human brain is a limiting factor

[BarbaraHudson]

Mentally, we cannot change all that much.

I have the world's biggest library at my fingertips. 20 years ago, I would have believed that such a tool would transform my life.

It always astonishes me how little the internet has changed our lives.Our brains are not designed to make use of so much information.

Would you have been able to have such a discussion with people all over the world, (including those who didn't know how to troll usenet) 20 years ago? The nature of discussion has changed. 20 years ago, discussions were about the new tech itself - now, it's about how it affects our lives, sometimes in very negative ways.

Heck, at the turn of the century stories about the lastest distro release actually got read. Now? Yawn :-(

vi vs emacs can't get a good flame war running. Even windows vs linux, and apple-bashing, is boring and a bit gauche. We've lived through it and moved on (with the exception of systemd, which is about the only real OS debate that polarizes people).

6. Profit, too

[mrflash818]

I imagine that, if a book portrays a future too different, the reader may not find it enjoyable, relate-able, or worth recommending to their other sci-fi reading acquaintances

So, unless the author has other revenue streams, they are dis-incentivized to write something 'too far out.'

Re:6. Profit, too

[SuricouRaven]

Compare historical fiction - and note that most historical fiction depicts a culture far more similar to our own than that which actually existed at the time.

Re:6. Profit, too

[Applehu Akbar]

Relatability is an important criterion. A common critique of SF writing is, "Why aren't your aliens realistically alien enough?" The answer, most commonly, is relatability.

Re:6. Profit, too

[AK Marc]

And, in the absence of evidence otherwise, why not make them just look like humans in bad makeup? Niven is one of the few that spend great detail on the non-humanoid aliens. Both anatomically and culturally.

Re:6. Profit, too

[RockDoctor]

Niven is one of the few that spend great detail on the non-humanoid aliens. Both anatomically and culturally.

In Known Space, true. Sadly, I'm ploughing through Niven's recent collaboration with Greg Benford ("Bowl of Heaven", ISBN 0765366460) and thinking very much along the lines that Charlie is. Much though I like Niven's work (hint: I found it on the "N" shelf, where I was looking, not on the "B" shelf where I wasn't looking), I'm reading it and thinking "the Emperor's New Ringworld". I'll leave the rest as spoiler - but I haven't finished reading it yet.

What do I think of Charlie Stross's work? I'd used up my kilogramme new book allowance before I got to the "S" shelf, otherwise I'd probably have succumbed to the temptation. The last time I met Charlie - at a Linux User Group meeting - I hadn't read any of his stuff ; when I meet him again, I will feel obligated to buy him a pint.

Re:All sci-fi is about the present

[serviscope_minor]

There are no such rules in writing.

There is one single, immutable rule which there is no way of breaking in a book worth reading: don't waste the reader's time.

The remaining rules of writing are strictly optional. However, a good first order approximation is that you aren't good enough to break them. Rare, sufficiently skilled writers can break all sorts of rules and still write a good book.

I'm not a writer (I certainly am not good enough to break the rules), but I've been learning about it for interest's sake. It gives one a whole knew appreciation of some works when the author has successfully broken the rules and written a good book.

Mostly the rules are more technical. Few people want to read massive wodges of exposition, hackneyed characters speaking in "accents" and featuring a massive mary-sue POV character.

So who "did it right"?

[RevWaldo]

I'm hearing lots of carping, but not a lot of citerefs of SF stories set in the far future that do honestly depict the impact advanced technology would have on society, culture, etc. at least in a way Mr. Stross would expect it to. Any /.ers have any in mind?

.

Re:So who "did it right"?

[itsdapead]

I'm hearing lots of carping, but not a lot of citerefs of SF stories set in the far future that do honestly depict the impact advanced technology would have on society, culture, etc. at least in a way Mr. Stross would expect it to. Any /.ers have any in mind?

Well, there's the classics - both "The Time Machine" and "Brave New World" deal with societies dramatically transformed by technology, and deal with the storytelling challenges by contriving to have a contemporary narrator arrive on the scene via plot device.

Then, Asimov's Elijah Bailey sequence is really about two societies divided by their preparedness to embrace particular technologies. In fact... a society of people that are repulsed by actual physical proximity but think nothing of exposing themselves online... sound familiar? :-)

More recently, someone has already mention Iain M. Banks and The Culture... although its interesting to note that most of the actual stories just used the post-scarcity Culture as a backdrop to Special Circumstances agents interfering with more 20th-century-or-earlier-like civilisations (including 1970s Earth in "State of the Art").

Greg Egan has had a good go at tackling posthumans: most of the characters in Diaspora are intelligent software, and the remaining flesh-and-blood communities have diversified so much that different groups find it hard to communicate.

However, a lot of the "failures" pick their anachronistic societies for good dramatic reasons, not through lack of thought: I'd say that the (new) Battlestar Galactica quite deliberately made their society look like 1980s earth with spaceships. Firefly wasn't really a prediction that we'd all be wearing wild west costumes and talking cowboy in 500 years time: but that piece of whimsy saved a whole shedload of exposition about the structure of that society (also, if you're colonising, not only can horses make more horses out of grass, you can eat them if you have to: try doing that with high-tech a fusion-powered locomotion unit).

Re:So who "did it right"?

[Boronx]

Stanislaw Lem's "Return to Earth" is all about this subject.

Haldeman's "Forever War" deals with it in parts.

Both deal with people who do to time dilation come home far in the future.

I don't remember the details, but at one point the main character returns to earth to find his mother, now old, in a lesbian relationship and is disgusted, even though society now accepts it. Interesting that Haldeman got that right back in the '70s.

Re:The late George Turner had a few things to say

[dlingman]

So did Spider Robinson. Go read "The Time Traveller" in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.

Transplant shock.

Re:Heinlein

[PPH]

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.

Agree. District 9, for example

[mrflash818]

Agreed. Although not a book, I'd say "District 9" a good example: sci-fi critique on apartheid.

Re:Agree. District 9, for example

[Gramie2]

It was not a critique only of apartheid, but also of the situation afterwards, and the way that migrants from other African countries were (and often still are) being treated in South Africa.

great read

[mrflash818]

...thanks for sharing it.

kettle calling...

[fikx]

this from an author that includes slashdot in his far-future scifi

almost all sci-fi is a warning

[mrflash818]

Almost all sci-fi is a warning about how things can go wrong, in the times the author wrote the story.

In a future 100,000years from now, what would the warnings be that the author's of today could pen?

I think probably the best example, written in 1895, is "The Time Machine", giving the technocopian/distopian example that, if we're not careful, humans would split into cattle (Eloi) and those that eat them (Morlock). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As someone that is a computer programmer, I see that warning today, $((2014 - 1895)) = 119 years later: How many of society just 'use' technology vs those few "the technological one percent?" that create/engineer/produce it?

Missing The Point...

[NotSanguine]

TFS says: "Our culture evolves quickly — even going back 100 years would be a difficult transition to get used to"

I don't think that comparison is an apt one. Our culture does evolve quickly, but I'd posit that given the technological culture that's developed over the past 150 years or so, it would be much more difficult to adjust to the culture(s) of the past than of the future. No antibiotics, no ubuiquitous telecommunications infrastructure, much more primitive agricultural techniques, etc., etc., etc.

Unless you presume social, economic and technological collapse (which is possible, I guess) for the future, the world of 500 years from now would be more recognizable to a resident of the early 21st century than the world of even 200 years ago, IMHO.

There's a reason...

[Brett Buck]

Of course it's a familiar cultural setting. Unless the nature of the culture and social interactions is the theme, you would rather have something that the reader can relate to. You need to relate it to something the reader will understand, because, otherwise, you will either use up inordinate space and words describing it, or leave the entire thing unexplained which loses the reader.

    Moreover, human nature hasn't changed consequentially for 10,000 years. The same motivations, reactions, and through processes are on some level universal. The culture *hasn't* changed all that much at the root level. The means and mechanism, and superficially changes, but deep down nothing is really all that different since the development of "civilization" coincident with the agricultural revolution.

Perhaps for You

[pubwvj]

"going back 100 years would be a difficult transition to get used to."

Perhaps for him or you but not for many of us. Things are substantially the same as they were 100 or even 200 or more years ago. Yes, we have great new things like the Internet but that was a fairly minor invention compared with the really important things like hot water and pipes. Dropping back 100 years means you'll lose some of your gadgets but life was not all that different and it is substantially similar to how it is for many of us outside the cities.

Speaking of doing it wrong . . .

[taustin]

Charlie Stross, of all people, should know that science fiction isn't and has never been, about the future. It's about today, told in a way that makes it easier for people to examine the hot button issues without getting too emotional. Or it's put escapism, and it just doesn't matter whether the details are right or wrong.

Plus, anybody who makes up a word like "enculturation" should be beaten with a stick.

Re:Speaking of doing it wrong . . .

[0123456]

Nonsense, of course. Very little of the SF I read as a kid was just 'making it easier for people to examine the hot button issues without getting too emotional'. As far as I can see, that attitude was largely an invention of the 'New Wave' SF writers of the 60s.

Re:Speaking of doing it wrong . . .

[Cinnamon Beige]

Charlie Stross, of all people, should know that science fiction isn't and has never been, about the future. It's about today, told in a way that makes it easier for people to examine the hot button issues without getting too emotional. Or it's put escapism, and it just doesn't matter whether the details are right or wrong.

Really, mostly this has just served to ensure that regardless of how attractive I find the covers (front and back) for his books, I'm not going to spend time or money on them.

Plus, anybody who makes up a word like "enculturation" should be beaten with a stick.

It's actually from social science with the meaning "the process by which an individual adopts the behaviour patterns of the culture in which he or she is immersed." Typically it applies only to when you're gaining your native culture, with acculturation used for later cultures. (There are differences between the two.)

That said, I'm not sure I'm not sure Mr Stross knows what the word means, which is actually kind of ironic given his complaint here...

Science fiction: How not to build a future society

[mrflash818]

Science fiction films have many warnings for us – not least, how the road to a perfect future society is fraught with peril.

http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...

Re:Iain M. Banks Culture novels FTW

[0123456]

Uh... the Culture is just Commies In Space, but, this time, Communism works because everyone's so fluffy and lovely.

It's precisely the kind of story Stross should be whining about.

Re:The first rule

[William Baric]

1984 and Brave New World are probably the most read sci-fi books. You think they were about entertainment?

This isn't writers' faults

[StevenMaurer]

Have you ever tried to get science fiction published these days? I have. I've learned that publishers don't want science fiction. They want fantasy childhood adventure stories, with a veneer of unscientific "sci-fi". You can't make it unless good and evil are delineated in clear, bright, lines, and your tv-tropes run thick and hackneyed.

These days, I write only for myself. But everyone I do a reading for says "Boy, that's interesting! Why don't you publish?". Then I explain.

Re:This isn't writers' faults

[Fnord666]

These days, I write only for myself. But everyone I do a reading for says "Boy, that's interesting! Why don't you publish?". Then I explain.

There are so many alternative ways to publish today that you shouldn't let this stop you. Get your work out there and let the readers decide!

Re:The first rule

[jbeaupre]

Yes. Entertainment doesn't have to be frivolous. They were successful because they were entertaining on many levels.

The alternative form would have been to write a white paper on the hypothetical dangers of government forms. Non-fiction.

Re:Sci-Fi is not about the future

[mvdwege]

If, however, you overemphasise the relatability to the point of never challenging the reader's comfort zone, then you are just writing cheap escapism. If Science Fiction isn't about introducing new concepts, what is it about then? That was Charlie's point.

Damgerous Visions

[westlake]

How about a culture that practices sex the same way the black widow spider does - by eating their mate? (ritual cannibalism)

In real life, what you get is either:

1) Thw pulp fiction shocker, based on an idea which had been run into the ground back in the days when beer was still 5 cents a glass.

2) The author's defense of incest or whatever, which rambles on forever and with the dice so loaded they would be banned in every casino in Vegas.

Antibiotics...

[Etherwalk]

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.

No -- consider for a moment that we could be there again 90 years from now. Science fiction looks toward the future, and the current trend is that antibiotics are becoming useless.

Re:The first rule

[I'm New Around Here]

I read one of those for school, and never touched the other. They certainly were not for entertainment.

Re: Sci-Fi is not about the future

[I'm New Around Here]

In the original story, the ship doesn't even land on Earth. It is in a completely new solar system.

By "original story" I mean the book by Pierre Boulle.

Re:Heinlein

[PPH]

fossil fuels will become too valuable to burn for personal transportation

Not sure why you have to single out personal transportation here. As fossil fuels become more expensive, we'll see whether people are still willing to pay the premium for the personal aspect. Keep in mind: The diesel fuel for the busses will be going up in price as well. And (the recent drop in energy prices aside), mass transit was being hit a lot harder by cost increases than personal transportation. And much of the subsidy for mass transit is dependent on people paying those gas taxes in their cars.

Have fun when we all park our cars and take the bus. With a complete collapse in the subsidy system, your fare will reflect actual transit costs. And of all the horrors that the social engineers can envision, mass transit that has to pay its own way will be one of the worst.

post-oil future without some magical energy source

Got it. I'll plug my Tesla into the hydro power supply system here in Seattle.

Mary Shelly, failed writer of speculative fiction

[Accordion Noir]

My favourite example of missing future changes is Mary Shelly's other book, The Last Man (1826). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

It's not great, but interesting for a number of reasons. For one, it inspired dozens of "apocalype-plague" movies like The Omega Man and such. The other grim element is that everyone in book dies of plague (spoiler, except the Last Man), but all the characters are based on people in Shelly's real life who had actually died and left her alone – her husband, her children, friends etc. Yikes.

One of the most interesting things about the book though is that it is set in a Europe 400 years in the future. And Shelly, writing in 1820, totally missed the coming Industrial Revolution. So in her 2100 the only new technology is a few hot air balloons. One result of this lack of technology is that without germ-theory the plague of the book is a totally uncontrollable force with no hope of controlling with any medical science.

Of course forward-looking writers miss things. We can't foresee the future. And preoccupation with the events of today (like everybody you know dying) are a reasonable excuse for focusing on the story instead.

Re:The first rule

[AK Marc]

Interesting and compelling aren't the same as entertaining. Many would object to "entertaining" being used to describe 1984, instead calling it "disturbing" or something else they mean to be contrary to "entertaining".

Re:The human brain is a limiting factor

[AK Marc]

Touchscreen vs mouse/keyboard for a laptop/tablet?

Re:Heinlein

[HiThere]

Personal transport is rightly singled out, because in many locales public transit is powered by electricity, often trolleys. Also, before cars were common, street cars existed that didn't burn fuel, but were powered by electricity (and before that, drawn by horses). So mass transit if feasible without gasoline or diesel.

For that matter, the paving of streets can be considered a massive subsidy to cars and trucks much more than for transit. Buses could be retrofitted to use rails (it's been done). But trucks, or the equivalent, are necessary. Still, we could rebuild the railroads, and make a lot less use of trucks. And railroads can run on electricity.

That said. if you do a bit of redesign, you can make recharging at every traffic light feasible, and then electric cars become arguably superior to gasoline powered cars.

OTOH, any of these approaches would require a massive redesign of our social and transport systems. Perhaps, overall, it would be less of a problem to overbuild the electric generation capability (windmills and solar cells, perhaps nukes) and use the spare capacity to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere to generate synthetic gasoline. It's my understanding, though, that the process if quite inefficient, so you need a considerable generation overcapacity. And that means gas becomes a lot more expensive.

Kulturayl futshocklings

[mbeckman]

Charlie stosser a skiker plossing. Being green. Ans a moloko man in the dustbin. Crater him.

If...

[jd]

...It's Cheers in Space, or Eastenders on Mars, then no it is not science fiction. It is Cheers in Space or Eastenders on Mars. There is no science and there is precious little fiction.

What is true in 5000 years? Look back 5000...

[Aristos Mazer]

Dan Simmons, author of _Hyperion_ and other novels, was once asked to write a short story set 5000 years in the future. He said in the introduction that he drew his inspiration by asking what was true 5000 years ago that is still true today. His answer? "In 5000 years, someone will still be trying to kill the Jews." In that respect, a "cowboys in space" type of sci-fi like Star Trek was actually very optimistic... it offered hope of a human society that didn't still have those divisions... and in only 400 years!

Re:Heinlein

[Aristos Mazer]

What? Michael Valentine Smith didn't come to challenge Judeo-Christian values! He came to enshrine them! Heck... they even had communion!

Yeah, it was fun pulling certain chains back in high school... :-)

Re:The first rule

[Necroloth]

Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy? Pretty much a comedy all through?

Re:The first rule

[jbeaupre]

Chaulk that up to the dumbing down of entertainment. It's sad that the definition of entertainment is changing to only cover things that are mindless.

The usual mistake

[camazotz]

Stross makes the usual mistake of assuming that SF is exclusively about modeling potential futures in all their various aspects. Most science fiction is actually about saying "what if WE as a culture were actually in the future and had cool stuff." It's about modelling our culture today in a different SF-based context. As many others have pointed out this is at least partially to engender familiarity with the intended focus of the SF elements. Social science fiction is its own beast and alive and kicking, albeit with the caveat that they did it better a few decades ago when the SF market was narrower and therefore more tolerant of the concept. Be that as it may, these are all valid forms of SF; at best I'll side with Stross and say we're not getting enough of the social SF elements these days, and it would be nice to see more of that and less of, say, IP tie-ins and military SF which are massively over-represented in today's market.

Re:The first rule

[AK Marc]

So, if you don't like the current definition of a word, then it's everyone else that's using it wrong? That's not how language works. https://www.google.co.nz/searc...

Pick your favorite definition, and let me know which it is. Most I saw implied a frivolity.

Re:your analogy is too short sighted

[david_thornley]

Of course I know how to operate a 2365 Ford Falcon. "Take me to work, then return and wait for orders." It's really not that complicated.

Stanislaw Lem - "Return from the Stars"

[richieb]

This is an example of a culture shock novel. The hero of the store returns from to Earth 200 years in the future and finds the culture incomprehensible.

It is pretty difficult to imagine what a thing you cannot comprehend is like, and Lem does an outstanding (though still imperfect) job.

If you haven't read this book give it a shot.

I think it depends...

[Amigo Van Helical]

...on the circumstances of the plot. Say you're writing a story about a dystopian future in which the plutocrats have their foot firmly planted on the population's neck. In such a future, technical & social changes will be meted out according to the rulers' priorities. For example, in today's world, we see a significant difference between rates of cultural change in (historically) open societies versus those that have solidly established oligarchies. And what about colonized worlds? Say you have a colony on a planet that's inhabitable but not particularly valuable from an exportable resource point of view. Say the colonists develop an agrarian society. Perhaps they maintain some contact w/ other worlds but they haven't the financial clout to keep up w/ technology so their recapping the past 200 years of western development. Yes, they "get" the science, but science w/o technology isn't often developed into rapid culture shifts. So while I can imagine stories for which Stross' premise is valid,I don't think all stories -- even modern stories -- have to feature societies unfathomable to 21st century minds. MC Glaviano

Thats the point

[davydagger]

The point of science fiction is to tell a story, using abstractions to make us look at our lives today from an outside perspective. The future, outer space, aliens, a galaxy long time a go, far far away, are all supposed to be abstractions to make parables about life today. Technology in sci-fi is supposed to be a plot device, nothing more. Ray guns are less messy than projectiles, lightening the plot, most of them also look less dangerous.(imagine the original star trek if they had .45s instead of funny looking ray guns), instead of falling down with neat clean wounds, they wer violently ripped to shreds?

Problem - we live in the future.

[Leo Sasquatch]

This morning, the radio switched itself on and gently brought me awake with the news. After 10 minutes, I rolled out from under the duvet and reflected how the money we'd spent on that memory foam mattress had been totally worth it. 5 minutes in the shower saw me both cleaner and more awake in equal measure, and I rapped on my son's door as I went past. I'm sure he was on the Xbox until 3:00 a.m., and he knows it's a uni day, but there was no response. I made some scrambled eggs in the microwave, and by the time the toast had popped and the kettle had boiled for a cup of instant, I felt almost human. The bus stop isn't far from my house, and I paid my £3 and took my seat. My phone picked up the wi-fi automatically, so I pointed my browser at the BBC and started streaming an episode of ISIRTA I hadn't heard, before settling in for a few games of Angry Birds. Halfway to work, the sun was rising over the Pentlands, so I grabbed a couple of quick shots, and updated my facebook status.

When I got to work, I flashed my badge at the building and it let me in. I'd checked the rota the night before and knew I was gutter rat this week- cleaning up the messes, so I downloaded the overnight error logs to my workstation and got busy tracing batch script failures. Peter, Mandy and Eddie were already there, but my team leader, Meera, was off ill, so I covered her phone. 3 cappuccinos, and 16 error logs later it was lunchtime, and I'd been so busy, I hadn't even gone out for a cigarette.


A normal morning, slightly compressed to fit everything in. There's a lot in there. Socio-economic status, employment, I'm old enough to have a son at university, the fact that my immediate boss is both female and non-Caucasian, no smoking in the building. The team's split roughly equally on gender lines. Eddie's gay, but that won't enter into the story so I'll never mention it. There's a lot of implicit assumptions - the reader will know what an Xbox is, cultural references. Never mind 100 years, you only have to roll it back 10 years for the 'Angry Birds' and 'Facebook' items to have no intrinsic meaning. Roll it back just 50 and we lose 'Xbox', 'microwave', 'memory foam', 'wi-fi', 'browser' as words, and the concepts that go along with their use. And how would I take shots of the sunrise without a camera? 'Streaming' is still a word, but the context is missing. And in 1964, the idea that my boss at any job, let alone a technical one, would be female and non-Caucasian, would be pretty unusual. Why would I leave the building for a cigarette? And what's with £3 for bus fare to work - where do I live, the Outer Hebrides? How did I get cappuccinos at work? Why have I got a phone on a bus?

We live in a world that would have largely been science fiction just 50 years ago. Extrapolating was hard then, and harder now. You don't need the Singularity or a post-scarcity economy to mess things up, just the micro-processor and the Internet. Nobody saw them coming. The changes they've brought have been so staggering in magnitude that it makes it all the more obvious that attempting to predict the future changes is getting sillier all the time.

Mr Stross writes lovely Mythos stories, and Accelerando is pretty good. But the one I'm trying to read at the moment, about the immortal robots all pretending to be human after the humans all died out is purely fucking tedious. It's super-futuristic, and the hard science of long, boring planetary travel is well done, but I can't remember its name right now, or the main character, and that never bodes well.

SF invents worlds

[iMactheKnife]

A good writer invents interesting characters and lets them interact. A good SF writer invents whole worlds and plants the characters in it. All the excuses about character-driven stories are just that - excuses, often by authors who don't understand enough about science to carry a good SF world line, and who can't do the research to find a good SF "hook" and make it work. Look up SF or go into a book store and you will see Star Trek, Star Wars and other space operas.
Clarke's "Childhood's End", or Niven's "Ringworld" are real SF. "Blood Music", "Neutron Star" are about worlds that are scientifically plausible but far from human. There are too few like that.

I write SF, and I know, first hand, how hard it is match that standard.

Look at Kay Kenyon, "Bright of Sky" and sequels, look at Iaian Banks "culture" series. I won't tout my stuff here, but you can reply and get references.

Re:Iain M. Banks Culture novels FTW

[iMactheKnife]

I did not find them communistic, fluffy or lovely. More like porcupines with adamantine quills.. The Culture is innately competitive and meddlesome. Wage-slave rituals are no longer applicable because resources are almost unlimited. the former is a plausible outcome of the latter, which is also plausible given the Culture's technology.

Well..they are in space. So is Earth.

Re: Sci-Fi is not about the future

[Eunuchswear]

Dont they come back to Earth in the end?

Haven't read it for something like 40 years.

Re:Iain M. Banks Culture novels FTW

[Eunuchswear]

I agree that Iain M. Banks's Culture novels show that Stross's goal is at least possible. He did a brilliant job of imagining a distant future that gave me severe culture shock, but was also entertaining and engaging.

Well, for values of "a distant future" that include "the distant past".

The bad news is that we are not one of the ancestor civilisations of the Culture. In fact they visited us in the '80s and decided we were boringly horrible and to be left alone to see if we'd get interesting in the future.