How do I even wonder these things?

Today I got distracted by shaolin monk naming conventions
and I don't even remember how.

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I did learn that it is possible to become a Shaolin monk named Miao right now.

So that's a thing I didn't know this morning.


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Okay, I am never going to learn how to translate a poem by clicking around, and I logically have no use for monk names, even interesting ones with a dating element built in, so I'll go do something else.

The trouble with writing science fiction is...

Okay, so, my trouble with writing is never sitting down and writing. I know that.
but
specifically why writing SF is hard?

The future is not only weirder than we think, it's weirder than we can think.

Not a thought original to me, but google is giving me a lot of suggestions for who said it first. Most of those say 'queerer' though. I feel I can think pretty queer.

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So you wont get baseline humans in big tin cans exploring the universe ala Star Trek, you'll get every fantasy and sci fi convention and furry dream mixing together, maybe physically, maybe travelling on data and manifesting only for interaction. Going out to destinations that currently outnumber humans by orders of magnitude. Meetin species who have all the same tech and possibilities.


I mean what does an eldritch cosplayer even dream of?


And what kind of science fiction story can you usefully make, when this is just the beginning of a plausible baseline of possibilities?



I think TV hasn't been going long enough to get weird enough to cover it. Certainly no single author playground would get there. Probably closest so far is comics, superheroes very much included. The multi author multi lifetime epic crossovers that poke every corner of every genre? That's maybe getting there.

Though there's still too many humans to be really likely.




So you sit down with a keyboard in front of you and set out to write anything in all this?

How could you even?

And what would you even be wanting to say?



I find Star Trek style humanity implausible, but comprehensible.

If all humanity can cosplay forever or go out for sushi to suit deep space, that's... a little bit harder to comprehend.

But more plausible, if the technology is ever distributed.

We are going to get weird.

Weirder than comics would be if every invention was treated as replicable tech, and the whole world ran on cosmic energy and had cyborg tentacles and rewrote their own DNA, to be dinosaurs or no, as it pleased them.

Weirder than comics is really very weird.



So that's my trouble with writing SF. Logically everyone's dreams are going to collide, and what is the story to tell about that?

Other than every story. Ever. All at once.


Oy.