Stuff and things and parts
Feb. 5th, 2015 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethYou can tell a lot of story with an empty room. But humans are very human centered, very focused on the animate. A half empty glass with a fingerprint on it is interesting only for what it implies, that there was someone here a moment ago, that there may be in a moment. A noticeboard covered in letters and certificates is a snapshot of someone’s life. The story wants to move on to the people part, or at least the reader does. You can create an impression from a handful of stuff, but the one who left it there is assumed to be what the whole thing is about.
Stuff acts connotationally too, and it’s a right bugger to get working in a science fiction story. You can grab a bunch of things from Tesco here and now, or from Head in the Clouds, and they’ve brought so much experience with them you get years worth of work out of them. Set it a thousand years forwards and there’s no reasonable expectation of Tesco still being there, or supermarkets, or to some extent mass market industrial scale production. I mean, home 3D printers should get so good you’d only need to design a thing, or draw on a bank of existing designs. You wouldn’t need a supermarket if you could order things swiftly put together from parts, food machines included. Replicators for everyone. And then what stuff would they carry? Samelike scrapbooks do now. A half full pocket is a half full pocket, and whatever you were doing when you carried it would still want remembering. But then you might, no would, have electronics and possibly cyborg interfaces that could do some enhanced remembering for you.
… project forward just a very little and we fall off the edge of the singularity. Our posthuman future is a tad bit hard to speculate about, since rather by definition it’s about people becoming what we can’t yet imagine. I’d have to posit a Fall of some sort, and a society After, and when I try and imagine that I keep coming up classic fantasy with a tech base twist. I mean you would get the immortals, and the invisible that has effects on the visible, and something called out of nothing. Assuming any of you have physical bodies at all. In virtuality the limit would be nothing as clunky as physical resources, more like complexity of behaviour.
But you'd still be hard pressed to draw people in to a story with a pocket of scraps and stones and a tapered stick. They'd need so many more words to know what any of it was about.
Stuff acts connotationally too, and it’s a right bugger to get working in a science fiction story. You can grab a bunch of things from Tesco here and now, or from Head in the Clouds, and they’ve brought so much experience with them you get years worth of work out of them. Set it a thousand years forwards and there’s no reasonable expectation of Tesco still being there, or supermarkets, or to some extent mass market industrial scale production. I mean, home 3D printers should get so good you’d only need to design a thing, or draw on a bank of existing designs. You wouldn’t need a supermarket if you could order things swiftly put together from parts, food machines included. Replicators for everyone. And then what stuff would they carry? Samelike scrapbooks do now. A half full pocket is a half full pocket, and whatever you were doing when you carried it would still want remembering. But then you might, no would, have electronics and possibly cyborg interfaces that could do some enhanced remembering for you.
… project forward just a very little and we fall off the edge of the singularity. Our posthuman future is a tad bit hard to speculate about, since rather by definition it’s about people becoming what we can’t yet imagine. I’d have to posit a Fall of some sort, and a society After, and when I try and imagine that I keep coming up classic fantasy with a tech base twist. I mean you would get the immortals, and the invisible that has effects on the visible, and something called out of nothing. Assuming any of you have physical bodies at all. In virtuality the limit would be nothing as clunky as physical resources, more like complexity of behaviour.
But you'd still be hard pressed to draw people in to a story with a pocket of scraps and stones and a tapered stick. They'd need so many more words to know what any of it was about.