Comments | sunnyskywalker: Writing the semi-near future looks hard

sunnyskywalker

Writing the semi-near future looks hard

Apr 24, 2021 18:37

My most recent book club book got me thinking about the difficulties of writing science fiction set only about twenty years in the future. If it's set "five minutes from now, with one wild card invention," you can write the world pretty much as it is. If it's set fifty or more years in the future, it's far enough out that any number of changes in ( Read more... )

reviews, books, gender, sf/f

Comments 4

mary_j_59 April 30 2021, 01:17:49 UTC

True! I'm not sure I would dare to do that. Take my beloved (pre-Abrams; pre-Discovery) Star Trek. Some of the tech on that show is still unimaginable; some, we carry around in our pockets. And that's supposed to be nearly 300 years into the future. Our tech has changed much more than the show anticipated, and our society has changed much less (though Past Tense, set in late August/early September 2024, is still looking eerily prescient. They filmed that one in the 90's, so were aiming about 30 years ahead.)

sunnyskywalker May 8 2021, 16:31:59 UTC

It does seem just so incredibly hard to pull off! But it does seem to work out better if you can tell the author(s) at least thought about these things.

Even this book I didn't like (so much that I couldn't bring myself to finish it) might have seemed more convincing if the author had made more of an attempt. Like, giving the 1990s housewife character a passing thought about how she was glad she'd taken a more "traditional" path and was adjusting better to the state of their world than career women who were having a hard time coping now that all the ecological catastrophes and economic hard times had *mumblemubmlehandwave* pushed women back out of the workforce. (I don't think the book ever mentioned women being a significant presence in the white-collar workforce at any point, but it could have.) Or that she was finding she actually kind of preferred being a housewife to her hypothetical former office job which seemed pointless and was generally awful. SomethingDS9 is on my long, long list of things I want to watch and still haven't ( ... )

mary_j_59 May 11 2021, 03:30:31 UTC

The sort of thing where you would HOPE to be wrong--oh, yes. But, when we saw the documentary on DS9, the showrunner said, when they were developing the episode, a California politician was actually talking about putting homeless people in some sort of sanctuary district. He said it was eerie, to be writing something that was already so close to the truth ( ... )

sunnyskywalker June 12 2021, 20:23:23 UTC

It sounds like the premise for a different kind of story. The "wait, did we actually make this happen through writing-magic somehow?" kind of horror story.

(It was Timescape by Gregory Benford.) There were brief mentions of people doing...something?...about all the catastrophes, but not about who was actually doing the (apparently unsuccessful) work. (Not the hands-on parts, anyway. We heard a lot about the creepy administrator guy.) And then I think there was something about a program where spouses could share jobs, because there wasn't enough work. Maybe just white-collar work? I don't know, it was unclear. I got the feeling the author didn't care that much. But the university office politics were spot-on (based on what some of my academia-affiliated acquaintances said) thanks to his experience with them, so there's that! And I did like how it portrayed doing science as actual work, not just waiting around for inspiration to strike. You fiddle with the machinery and run experiments, get weird results, try to fix the machinery, run ( ... )