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Overly Familiar Sci-Fi
An anonymous reader writes: Science fiction author Charlie Stross has a thoughtful post about an awkward aspect of the genre: too often, books set in the distant future seem far too familiar to us. Our culture evolves quickly — even going back 100 years would be a difficult transition to get used to. But when we're immersed in a culture 500 years ahead of us, everything's pretty much the same, but with spaceships. He says, "You can make an argument for writing SF in this mode in that it allows the lazy reader to ignore the enculturation issue and dive straight into the adventure yarn for which the SFnal trappings are just a brightly-colored wrapper. But I still find it really weird to read a far-future SF story that doesn't deliver a massive sense of cultural estrangement, because in the context of our own history, we are aliens." Some authors put more effort into this than others, but Stross points out that most just use it as a backdrop to tell a particular story. He concludes, "if you're not doing it to the cultural norms as well as the setting and technology, you're doing it wrong."
Because there is a right well to tell fictional stories?
If your express something using cultural references nobody has ever used before, maybe you're doing it wrong.
Look how similar our culture is to that of the Roman Empire. Yes, technology has changed every aspect of how things are done, but the culture itself isn't much different. The Roman historian Suetonius was writing thousands of years ago about how they were upset about the decay of family values.
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?
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.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
It's not like science fiction is new, it's got a history. And anyone who's familiar with that history knows that writers write in their era for an audience of that era. Not to mention for the acquisitions editors of their era.
So Victorian wonder story writers took imperialism for granted. Golden age writers took gender roles for granted -- even women like C.L. Moore. Sci-fi in the sixties was imbued with counter-culture and counter-counter-culture in a way that strikes us as dated today. And it's OK; if you like the good old stuff, as many of us do, much of the pleasure is in the perspective it offers in how the real world has changed.
An author has no duty other than to reward the time a reader spends with his work. It's certainly an admirable ambition to entertain people by challenging their assumptions, but the very nature of that challenge is a moving target. Ultimately you still have to tell a story that makes sense to your contemporary readers, unless you plan on dumping your story straight into a time capsule -- and good luck with that. Fortunately future audiences can make allowances for things you don't get right today, just the way we make allowances for the good old stuff.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, I also have griped about SF that shoehorns the distant future into the mold of today, or of the past. I have special disdain for those who want to recreate the wild west, or the age of piracy, or empires of the past with space opera trappings. If you love the old west, write westerns, man! The obsession with FTL travel (which seems unlikely to ever really become possible) also ties in with this.
To my way of thinking, conventional literature at its best explores the human condition. SF at its best explores how the human(-ish) condition could be different. SF that doesn't make it different seems like wasted potential, a missed opportunity.
However...
I learned a long time ago that SF stories and SF writers have limitations that they must work within. SF is about ideas, and there are limits to how many new and unfamiliar ideas you can cram into a story without either losing your readers or getting lost yourself. Your readers are embedded in the culture of today. Even if you as a writer can mentally break out of the culture of today, bringing your readers along for that ride is extremely difficult.
You might want to write a story exploring the potential of AI and robotics. Or nuclear fusion power. Or asteroid mining. Or molecular manufacturing. Or life extension. All good topics. Now try to write a novel where *all* of those scenarios have become real and are interacting with one another. Oops... That's going to be really hard to pull off without ending up in a muddled mess, and it's also going to be hard to explore each of those ideas in the depth it deserves. (Especially if you also have, you know... characters, and a plot, and so forth!)
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.
But one thing that I always think is really weird when watching it is that all the cultural references are things that would be familiar to a late 20th century NPR-listening American. One of my favorite book series (Honor Harrington by David Weber) uses a lightly different period. It's references are almost universally to things that would be familiar to people who spend a lot of time with late 18th the early 20th century Western Military History.
It seems weird, but in a lot of ways that's the point. Star Trek isn't a sophisticated imagining of how culture could change if certain technologies appeared. It's about how a polity built on principles every 60s liberal would love (including a fairly muscular, militaristic, foreign policy that a lot of current liberals hate) acts IN SPACE. You don't hear anything about post 20th-century culture, shit that happened outside the main storyline, internal Federation politics (ie: who did Kirk vote for? why?), economic matters (for example once replicator technology exists almost all sectors of the economy are obsolete, because instead of spending months raising a chicken you can spend 2 seconds beaming a perfectly cooked chicken breast into existence, yet half the time they act like the economy is identical to the current US economy and the other half it's a socialist utopia), etc. It is barely Sci-Fi, because (unlike Star Wars) it actually cares how the technology works, and occasionally has story-lines based on said technology (ie: Riker gets cloned by a Transporter, every one of those hateful Holodeck episodes, etc.).
Weber's Honorverse is a bit more Sci-Fi, because he has actually put an awful lot of thought into precisely how the tech affects the culture, but he designed the tech specifically so that he could do things like create a massive ethnic Chinese Empire based on Frederick the Great.
There isn't a single right way because there are infinite possible futures, and it's reasonable to assume that inventive SciFi authors would want to explore that huge space of possibilities. There are unlimited right ways.
Nor is there a single wrong way, but if all authors narrow their horizons to describing only simplistic futures in which most cultural elements remain unchanged then clearly there is a problem of deliberate myopia which will inevitably lead to a poverty of novel material.
It's a bit like surrounding oneself with yes-men --- it doesn't promote pushing the envelope and expanding the mind in new directions. In the context of SciFi, if cultural elements are shackled to present-day norms then it creates a literary monoculture with very few interesting elements. Even worse, it's factually incorrect, since we know that cultures change strongly with time.
It is acceptable to be factually incorrect in fiction, but when a whole genre that is predicated on gazing into the future knowingly avoids addressing cultural change then there is indeed a problem, and a very big one. SciFi readers deserve better than just present day stories adorned with spaceships.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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".
about a month ago i was reading a 20th century US history book and discovered that Calvin Coolidge, Jr,, president Calvin Coolidge's 15 year old son, died from a blister on his foot he got when playing tennis on the White House lawn in 1924.
consider that for a moment...only 90 years ago, the son of perhaps the most powerful and well connected man on the earth died from a blister. playing tennis.
if this doesn't explain truly how much and how quickly things have changed, i'm not sure what could.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
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...
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The biggest problem with what Stross is saying is that people, in general, want to read about situations that are familiar to them. It's damn hard to come up with a truly believable far-future culture in the first place, but it's much harder to do so in a way that makes it both alien to us and something that people can identify with enough to actually enjoy reading.
If you really follow Stross's advice when writing far-future sci-fi, you're likely to lock yourself into a very small niche of potential readers. And if you're writing that way because that's the story you want to write, or because you truly believe it's important to the integrity of the story that the culture be very different than our own, and you're OK with selling a few thousand copies or less, then that's fine. But I dare say most sci-fi authors who actually publish do so because, at least in part, they actually want to have people read their books, and to make a little money off them.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
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.'
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Yes. And I still remember the blow-back when a bunch of us read Stranger in a Strange land back in high school. The kids from socially conservative backgrounds rejected it as garbage. Because it was inconceivable that anything would ever challenge the established Judeo-Christian foundations of our culture.
Some authors do investigate culturl changes that could be brought on by new technology or contact with alien cultures. But they risk rousing the rage of those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Interesting note: In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the revival of Klaatu (after being shot and killed) had to be explained as 'temporary' so as not to enrage Christian audiences.
Have gnu, will travel.
this from an author that includes slashdot in his far-future scifi
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
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.