What are we missing in SF?
Sep. 22nd, 2018 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talkswithwindCharlie Stross spends an essay to ask the question, what big [sf] themes am I (and everyone else) ignoring?
Which indirectly caused me to ask myself why I've been spending whole novels in fantasies when I was a hard-core SF reader while I was a kid. I wanted to be an Astronaut as a kid, and that desire was constant until sometime beginning 11th grade and ending my 2nd year of college. I wanted a space future. I was quietly sure the more likely future was depicted in the Cyberpunk novels, full of megacorps having more power than governments, but I still had hope I'd get to space.
What happened to get me from thinking of stories in possible futures, to thinking of stories in secondary worlds (that may look like this one a lot, or be completely different)?
I gave up my Astronaut ambitions when I ended up in a CompSci major rather than a hard science. I knew that to get on a rocket, you needed a Masters in something useful in space research, which was either biology or materials science. Astronauts were level 18 scientist-warriors, who have advanced degrees, jump out of planes, do technical diving, and probably flew the plane they jumped out of. I was this asthmatic kid with glasses, without nearly enough money to pick up expensive hobbies like jumping from planes, SCUBA diving, or flying planes. And finally, I didn't have the math for a Masters in a field like that; strictly a C student in math classes, and I needed to be at least a B to do well there.
Dropping my Physics minor was me admitting that I'd never get into space on the merits of being me. I'd pay for the privilege, if I ever got there. As it happens, if buying my way into space was still a goal I could actually do that now. No commercial flights are running yet, but more than one company are selling tickets. If I wanted to get up in the next 15 years, I could. But I digress.
What stole my space-bound future from my fantasies came from the hard economics of space. Long-term human habitation in space will require at least a few of the following:
The final straw came with the slow understanding that the utopian approach to abstracting the essence to get at the purity simply does not work with biological systems. You can't feed humans with four spigots labeled, carbs, protein, fat, and water. The humans will sicken and die before too long due to some micronutrient we're missing. In my lifetime the mnemonic for what humans need has moved from CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) to CHNOPS (adding Sulfur and Phosphorus). Humans spent a gigayear evolving in an Earth-like environment, and it's becoming very clear we need to take the whole Earth with us (at least in the biospheres we construct) when we head into space.
Which leaves me with planet-bound futures to play with. Planet-bound futures will explore the evolution of technology, social systems, and the impact we're having on our planet. I read some of the After the Fall books popular in the late 1960's and 1970's, of the worlds that will come after the nuclear holocaust we'd been promised actually arrived, and I didn't like them. Plucky settlers holding onto the shattered candle of civilization facing extinction at the hands of the Wasteland Army, and the subtle racism of anti-mutant sentiment. Bleh.
Since then, the holocaust de-jure has moved from nuclear Armageddon, to other things. For a while it was the Zombie Apocalypse. Various magical apocalypses have been envisioned. Climate apocalypses are being written about, kicking off Solarpunk futures. I still mostly stay away from them, for mental health reasons.
You see, the planet-bound futures I'm envisioning aren't the sort of speculative a-better-way futures that Stross was asking about. Ironically, Stross retweeted something this morning that touches on the why of it.
I find myself unwilling to spend head-space on a future like that. Instead, I'd rather build worlds that don't inherit all of that bias and have their own. I don't have to spend time in my dark place to write them.
Which indirectly caused me to ask myself why I've been spending whole novels in fantasies when I was a hard-core SF reader while I was a kid. I wanted to be an Astronaut as a kid, and that desire was constant until sometime beginning 11th grade and ending my 2nd year of college. I wanted a space future. I was quietly sure the more likely future was depicted in the Cyberpunk novels, full of megacorps having more power than governments, but I still had hope I'd get to space.
What happened to get me from thinking of stories in possible futures, to thinking of stories in secondary worlds (that may look like this one a lot, or be completely different)?
I gave up my Astronaut ambitions when I ended up in a CompSci major rather than a hard science. I knew that to get on a rocket, you needed a Masters in something useful in space research, which was either biology or materials science. Astronauts were level 18 scientist-warriors, who have advanced degrees, jump out of planes, do technical diving, and probably flew the plane they jumped out of. I was this asthmatic kid with glasses, without nearly enough money to pick up expensive hobbies like jumping from planes, SCUBA diving, or flying planes. And finally, I didn't have the math for a Masters in a field like that; strictly a C student in math classes, and I needed to be at least a B to do well there.
Dropping my Physics minor was me admitting that I'd never get into space on the merits of being me. I'd pay for the privilege, if I ever got there. As it happens, if buying my way into space was still a goal I could actually do that now. No commercial flights are running yet, but more than one company are selling tickets. If I wanted to get up in the next 15 years, I could. But I digress.
What stole my space-bound future from my fantasies came from the hard economics of space. Long-term human habitation in space will require at least a few of the following:
- Heavy genetic engineering to reduce the severe impacts of weightlessness (new biology).
- Development of either ant-grav (unlikely with known physics; a 1G field has a planet-sized impact on orbits), or mega-engineering in the form of spinning habitats.
- Development of high-impulse, high-efficiency vacuum rockets to provide 1G fields through thrust (new engineering)
- Development of extensive biomatter ecologies that span habitats, since humans have large dependencies on our environment.
The final straw came with the slow understanding that the utopian approach to abstracting the essence to get at the purity simply does not work with biological systems. You can't feed humans with four spigots labeled, carbs, protein, fat, and water. The humans will sicken and die before too long due to some micronutrient we're missing. In my lifetime the mnemonic for what humans need has moved from CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) to CHNOPS (adding Sulfur and Phosphorus). Humans spent a gigayear evolving in an Earth-like environment, and it's becoming very clear we need to take the whole Earth with us (at least in the biospheres we construct) when we head into space.
Which leaves me with planet-bound futures to play with. Planet-bound futures will explore the evolution of technology, social systems, and the impact we're having on our planet. I read some of the After the Fall books popular in the late 1960's and 1970's, of the worlds that will come after the nuclear holocaust we'd been promised actually arrived, and I didn't like them. Plucky settlers holding onto the shattered candle of civilization facing extinction at the hands of the Wasteland Army, and the subtle racism of anti-mutant sentiment. Bleh.
Since then, the holocaust de-jure has moved from nuclear Armageddon, to other things. For a while it was the Zombie Apocalypse. Various magical apocalypses have been envisioned. Climate apocalypses are being written about, kicking off Solarpunk futures. I still mostly stay away from them, for mental health reasons.
You see, the planet-bound futures I'm envisioning aren't the sort of speculative a-better-way futures that Stross was asking about. Ironically, Stross retweeted something this morning that touches on the why of it.
The same way, the attitudes of the American South from 150 years ago are still informing attitudes today. Prejudice and institutions are sticky. Any near or medium term future needs to include them. You don't get to a middle-future North America where Jim Crow has finally been turned to ash and fired into the Sun without a serious, and likely violent bordering on genocidal, revolution along the way. Even then, sentiment will still remain, even if the institutions have been created anew without the ghostly specters of the Roman Empire, Commonwealth, and European Christianity.🇹🇩 The map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) overlapping the results of the 2014 presidential elections in Romania.
— Xavi Ruiz 🎗 (@xruiztru) September 20, 2018
An example of the long term impact of past institutions. pic.twitter.com/3tkroLbJmA
I find myself unwilling to spend head-space on a future like that. Instead, I'd rather build worlds that don't inherit all of that bias and have their own. I don't have to spend time in my dark place to write them.
