Science Fiction and Fantasy
Jan. 22nd, 2012 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethMy college units this semester are Dissertation Preparation, National Cinema and The Short Story. For my diss I'll be studying Doctor Who, so I will shortly be watching a lot of that. :-) I don't know what National Cinema will be about, the page is up but nothing is in it. It's a continuation of the postmodernism unit that got split into that and Contemporary Narrative, and it's with the teacher who is all serial killers and war movies, so I'm not expecting to actually like it. The Short Story is with the teacher for poetry and modernism. I seriously loathed modernism, got my worst mark ever, and have since been trying to repress. and the poetry unit spent a lot of time talking about suicide. honestly, turning up to class is seriously unnappealing this semester. But after this semester I will only have Life Writing and my dissertation to do. I have two semesters left to go. This time next year I'll be finished.
*blinks*
I'm... really not ready for this concept. I've been working towards that goal since 2002. I haven't a single solitary clue what will happen next.
It's likely to involve more study at the UEA from pure inertia.
ANYway, The Short Story does not look promising, but, I have a lot of books of short stories lying around. And that's without getting into the thirty year solid collection of Analog. So I got a recent SF anthology down that I hadn't started and I've been reading.
I have previously got into arguments about the definition of science fiction. (I spend three hours down the pub every two weeks talking about science fiction, naturally this comes up). I have said that science fiction is all about exploring the way new technology shapes lives. I've said it in a variety of phrasings, but I figured, the tech changes, and people change in response to that, and then we have story. I have been unenthusiastic about definitions that reckon science fiction is all about the props. There are many stories set on spaceships that are not, to my mind, science fiction. I've been known to get sniffy about it.
I might have to revise that quite a lot.
The problem is, the impact of technology on lives is incalculable. Perhaps if you take one single technology, near light speed flight say, or living in a tin can or pretty bubble, you could figure out what that would do to humans. You could explore the way humans interact with computers. You could see the near edges of what we could do with terraforming or biotech. But that's not how tech works. We won't go up a tech level in only one tech at a time. Even now the changes are coming thick and fast. I used to get so frustrated at olders who couldn't work the new machine. I've been one of them for quite some time now. I look at new things and wonder who even needs that? Mum thinks that about computers. It boggles me. Youngers probably consider their tech indispensible too. So already changes are leaving me behind, and maybe that's why I reckon this about science fiction, but the more I read, the more I reckon, you can't imagine the changes. There's too many, in too many fields. The outcomes go chaotic way, way too close to us to ever figure it out.
But it's beyond that. Once you start playing with biotech, you're not even talking about human people any more, you're talking about all the changes people can imagine and then the changes only the changed people can imagine and then... goodness knows. In a gen or two it's not science fiction any more, it's the courts of the sidhe or the goblin kings. The beautiful people and the spider things and the twisted things, and how they're not the ways round it might first appear. Lands where time goes different, closer to light speed. There's some techs that are total rabbit hole. Once you have memory alteration technology you can never know for sure if you have memory alteration technology. Once you have sufficiently advanced VR you never know if you've woken up. And there is no way to know if we already did that, and decided not to tell ourselves. Dream worlds, Matrix style. Not just faerie, all the heavens and all the hells. And they're the logical result of not just things we can currently imagine, but things we can currently do.
I guess the basic problem has been said long since: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So any sufficiently advanced science fiction is about magic.
Push my definition of science fiction only a step or two out, and we've run into my definition of fantasy.
I just read a short about how stories about Mars shape how people react to Mars.
That's not the only sort of world we've been dreaming on a long, long time.
As soon as it's technologically possible to make faerie, people are going to do it. Remake themselves or their avs and just... go.
So I'm left with a conundrum. Anything with the trappings of science fiction, the star trek kind with recogniseable humans on big metal starships, I no longer find a plausible extrapolation. And anything plausible isn't exactly what I'd been thinking of as science fiction.
Having twisted my brain in a knot I should probably go to sleep.
Then wave a little surrender flag on my definitions and go back to writing stuff like I've been watching: humans charging around the universe in tin cans.
*blinks*
I'm... really not ready for this concept. I've been working towards that goal since 2002. I haven't a single solitary clue what will happen next.
It's likely to involve more study at the UEA from pure inertia.
ANYway, The Short Story does not look promising, but, I have a lot of books of short stories lying around. And that's without getting into the thirty year solid collection of Analog. So I got a recent SF anthology down that I hadn't started and I've been reading.
I have previously got into arguments about the definition of science fiction. (I spend three hours down the pub every two weeks talking about science fiction, naturally this comes up). I have said that science fiction is all about exploring the way new technology shapes lives. I've said it in a variety of phrasings, but I figured, the tech changes, and people change in response to that, and then we have story. I have been unenthusiastic about definitions that reckon science fiction is all about the props. There are many stories set on spaceships that are not, to my mind, science fiction. I've been known to get sniffy about it.
I might have to revise that quite a lot.
The problem is, the impact of technology on lives is incalculable. Perhaps if you take one single technology, near light speed flight say, or living in a tin can or pretty bubble, you could figure out what that would do to humans. You could explore the way humans interact with computers. You could see the near edges of what we could do with terraforming or biotech. But that's not how tech works. We won't go up a tech level in only one tech at a time. Even now the changes are coming thick and fast. I used to get so frustrated at olders who couldn't work the new machine. I've been one of them for quite some time now. I look at new things and wonder who even needs that? Mum thinks that about computers. It boggles me. Youngers probably consider their tech indispensible too. So already changes are leaving me behind, and maybe that's why I reckon this about science fiction, but the more I read, the more I reckon, you can't imagine the changes. There's too many, in too many fields. The outcomes go chaotic way, way too close to us to ever figure it out.
But it's beyond that. Once you start playing with biotech, you're not even talking about human people any more, you're talking about all the changes people can imagine and then the changes only the changed people can imagine and then... goodness knows. In a gen or two it's not science fiction any more, it's the courts of the sidhe or the goblin kings. The beautiful people and the spider things and the twisted things, and how they're not the ways round it might first appear. Lands where time goes different, closer to light speed. There's some techs that are total rabbit hole. Once you have memory alteration technology you can never know for sure if you have memory alteration technology. Once you have sufficiently advanced VR you never know if you've woken up. And there is no way to know if we already did that, and decided not to tell ourselves. Dream worlds, Matrix style. Not just faerie, all the heavens and all the hells. And they're the logical result of not just things we can currently imagine, but things we can currently do.
I guess the basic problem has been said long since: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So any sufficiently advanced science fiction is about magic.
Push my definition of science fiction only a step or two out, and we've run into my definition of fantasy.
I just read a short about how stories about Mars shape how people react to Mars.
That's not the only sort of world we've been dreaming on a long, long time.
As soon as it's technologically possible to make faerie, people are going to do it. Remake themselves or their avs and just... go.
So I'm left with a conundrum. Anything with the trappings of science fiction, the star trek kind with recogniseable humans on big metal starships, I no longer find a plausible extrapolation. And anything plausible isn't exactly what I'd been thinking of as science fiction.
Having twisted my brain in a knot I should probably go to sleep.
Then wave a little surrender flag on my definitions and go back to writing stuff like I've been watching: humans charging around the universe in tin cans.