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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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