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

[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.

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.