Worldbuilding

[supergee]

Or, Why M. John Harrison & Charles Stross are both wrong

Thanx to File 770

Comments

[arlie]

Interesting timing on this.

My sister and I were having a discussion yesterday about settings for adventure novels/movies, and their total lack of realism being caused in part by the almost total absence of novel-worthy adventure in real life. What little exploration there is seems mostly highly scientific and technical - more about controlling robotic explorers from reasonably safe surface vessels, or living in well appointed Antarctic bases. Yes, sh*t occasionally happens, due mostly to isolation, leading to things like an untrained person doing an emergency appendectomy. But that's not really adventure novel fare - and in any case, the only participants are highly skilled and highly selected - not something the average Joe or Jane can imagine themselves doing. The only adventure currently available to ordinary people involves joining some military with active combat. (Well, you can go hiking and get lost, or get yourself guided up a mountain by highly skilled local guides - and maybe still have something go badly wrong. Or you can have the ill luck to get shot at school/work, particularly if you live in America. But that's not really normal adventure story fare.)

Our conclusion was that's why completely implausible ideas like the zombie apocalypse are so popular. But while getting there, we also touched on implausible genre truisms - e.g. castaway stories are almost all based on Robinson Crusoe, complete with elements that make no sense in their putative setting. (Just how much reusable st0ff would there be in a broken landing craft, compared to a half-sunk wooden sailing ship?)

On the other hand, I've frequently wished there was a genre for hard science fiction. 99% of the science fiction I read is pure fantasy, if you take fantasy to mean setting it in a universe with major elements known to be impossible. If those elements are labelled "magic", we call it "fantasy". If those elements are labelled "technology", or if the situation allegedly arose via technology (time machines, past space travel), we call it "science fiction". But there's really no clear genre which start with the current situation, and attempts to extrapolate - those stories are jammed into "science fiction", and no more clearly labelled than old-style (non-RTS) strategy games among the modern "strategy game" genre. And those who write them - but focus on economics, or sociology, or anything much other than technology - seem to feel compelled to throw in an implausible technological or scientific deus ex machina or 5, or at least a job lot of futuristic sounding new technology, cribbed from other genre fiction (flying cars etc.)

Where are the science fiction novels extrapolating the likely results of climate change by 2200? Where are the science fiction novels taking crispr and similar biotech, and running with it? What social changes will result from self driving cars, and how will they play out in practice? What if the US Red and Blue tribes schism to the point of civil war? Given what we know about the universe, is contact between intelligences from different star systems possible? And if so, how?

They seem to be buried in zombie apocalypse, space empires of the far future, retellings of Belisarius' career with tech changes, and most commonly of all, stories of people/societies with magic.

Now I like many of those tropes/genres. And I miss some of the themes that still seemed plausible in the 50s, but are now obviously bogus. But I also really miss reading honest science fiction.

Back in the 50s, a lot of people were writing novels set after a nuclear holocaust. Many of those weren't too plausible by modern standards, given what we know now. Some weren't plausible even then. But authors - and readers - were worried about nuclear war, and trying to explore their fears/reassure themselves. So why nothing much about our current most severe risks? (In the only biotech-gone-insane novel I can recall, the biotech was just an excuse for a less-implausible-than-usual Zombie novel, which was clearly trying to tick all the favourite boxes for a certain reader subgroup, at the cost of internal consistency, never mind plausibility. This worked (financially), and a series resulted.)

[lavendertook]

That was a really good argument. Thanks for bringing Buhlert to my attention.