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beccaelizabethOkay, 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.
It's like, the odds are wildly in favour of us living in the matrix right now. Because you only need one physical universe to support a bazillionty simulations, so, basic math says, it's really and sincerely likely we live in a simulation.
... if you accept the assertion that any simulation could imitate the experience of living in the world. Personally I feel that being a Sims character a player gave up on would explain a lot. I'm pretty much thinking of course a simulation could make a me, and make me think being me is super complex, because what do I have to compare it to?
The main argument against simulation is it's too damn boring around here. I mean what kind of purist locks the cheat codes and has such a consistent physics engine? Sims has way more variety than this! ... mostly if you pay for expansion packs though. Maybe we're in a cheap sim.
But regardless of the physical reality or lack thereof in our own experience, if we're going to write a plausible future, we have to include variations on the Matrix. If your characters dont have access to world after world of immersive VR, why not? And if they do, what are they doing fussing around out here?
It's a perfectly plausible SF story to have GAME OVER hover in the sky and everyone you ever met wake up together in a whole other world.
The basic problem is on its own its a pretty boring story. We have been there and done that, fictionally speaking. Even by movie three there weren't much it was saying with it.
So maybe the sim ends and a whole civilisation wakes up on a new planet, having been unpacked on arrival.
... that one needs to explain why they weren't doing better / more specific training, and indeed why they need to wake up at all. But hey, new planet, pretty cool!
I read a short story in one of the magazines I subscribe to where they sent out self replicating explorer machines to open up new worlds for humans, but eventually shut them down, because machines found them so much faster than humans could multiply to grow on them. Too many worlds, so little time. And fair, it's a big universe. After a while humans having more real estate won't be a draw of itself. Especially if we could be playing with ringworlds and dyson spheres.
So maybe each world is a new ecology. Excellent and awesome. And I have read many, many sf stories on the theme that we need to understand a whole ecology or die. Know your place in the food chain or be mulch, sort of thing. Motivating sort of lesson.
Except, as it turns out, its more of a problem that we kill everything else. I mean, unless we can design an entire balanced ecosystem in changing climate conditions, we're going to be pretty screwed. But if you can get to a new planet to screw it up, then not so much with the living with the consequences.
Although that might be one reason to run such a boring sim, look what the world turns into if you eat it all.
I mean there's a lot of plausible post apocalyptic futures that are fairly easy to imagine, because 'we're screwed' is a short story easy to translate, but it's super boring and more people need to imagine ways to get through in one piece.
But one way is to alter ourselves, maybe radically. The possibilities of AI and simulated lives are manyfold and varied. How many copies of yourself can you run? How many simultaneously before it fundamentally alters how to be a people? How many iterations away from baseline can you get and still be you? How much does that matter, when ou could spread out and literally be all you can be?
Why would our descendents and/or creations have anything further to do with us, let alone do the work we need them to do? I mean a lot of fiction about AI is very thinly veiled stuff about class, and worrying why servants will even stick around. Speaking as someone utterly stuck without an employee, I worry that one a lot. I mean, once we build things that can do people job, when are they people enough to say no? And if we can remove the capacity to say no... lets face it, we wont stop with machines. How evil are we going to be?
So there's simulations, ai, new worlds, life we create and life we didn't. And very probably possibly new sapient sentients, intelligent life out there. New lie and new civilisations.
But we haven't even begun to imagine all the permutations.
I mean leaving aside the thing where most alien species in fiction are your basic medieval morality hats in new costumes, the universe is big. BIG big. Wiki says the milky way Stargate system has 1,987,690,320 possible combinations, not all of them currently valid gate addresses. And in universe not all life forms are even on the gate network. And that's just the milky way, add Pegasus at least. So all the works of all the humans in Sf thus far, I'm thinking they've yet to come up with enough species to fully populate Stargate. And big deal you might say, but, 1,987,690,320 is a tiny fraction of the estimated hundred billion exoplanets in our galaxy. And sure, not all of them will be habitable, let alone inhabited, but, again, how far has our collective imagination really stretched?
I mean you could put the goa'uld and all their works on a single planet and very few of the plots would even be dented, except for distance to gate concerns.
We haven't really imagined many neighbours yet.
Not compared to the stupendous proliferation of possibilities.
And then there's all the possible modifications you get when new technologies, bio, nano, cyber and otherwise, get into the hands of the kind of people who have been playing dress up since forever. I saw on Civilisations again today that the earliest art in existence after the spit and the handprints and the straightforward animals, is your basic prehistoric furries. Animal transformation art been going on since the beginning. That isn't going to stop when our biology becomes the canvass.
And why stop with natural animals? Human imagination doesn't. With the tech, or simulations, or something we haven't thought of yet, we shall become everything we ever dreamed. Possibly including hordes of orcs. I mean, this is why I've been defaulting to Fantasy for a while, the tech isn't the story once it passes indistinguishable from magic, what we can do once we get that power is. And we'll do everything.
I mean Defiance is the only SF I've seen that explored humans trying to become aliens, B5 only had a funny gift shop and some cultural exchange and a couple of very unusual people, but if the tech exists then people are going to take it. Cultural appropriation on a biological level, big time.
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.
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.
It's like, the odds are wildly in favour of us living in the matrix right now. Because you only need one physical universe to support a bazillionty simulations, so, basic math says, it's really and sincerely likely we live in a simulation.
... if you accept the assertion that any simulation could imitate the experience of living in the world. Personally I feel that being a Sims character a player gave up on would explain a lot. I'm pretty much thinking of course a simulation could make a me, and make me think being me is super complex, because what do I have to compare it to?
The main argument against simulation is it's too damn boring around here. I mean what kind of purist locks the cheat codes and has such a consistent physics engine? Sims has way more variety than this! ... mostly if you pay for expansion packs though. Maybe we're in a cheap sim.
But regardless of the physical reality or lack thereof in our own experience, if we're going to write a plausible future, we have to include variations on the Matrix. If your characters dont have access to world after world of immersive VR, why not? And if they do, what are they doing fussing around out here?
It's a perfectly plausible SF story to have GAME OVER hover in the sky and everyone you ever met wake up together in a whole other world.
The basic problem is on its own its a pretty boring story. We have been there and done that, fictionally speaking. Even by movie three there weren't much it was saying with it.
So maybe the sim ends and a whole civilisation wakes up on a new planet, having been unpacked on arrival.
... that one needs to explain why they weren't doing better / more specific training, and indeed why they need to wake up at all. But hey, new planet, pretty cool!
I read a short story in one of the magazines I subscribe to where they sent out self replicating explorer machines to open up new worlds for humans, but eventually shut them down, because machines found them so much faster than humans could multiply to grow on them. Too many worlds, so little time. And fair, it's a big universe. After a while humans having more real estate won't be a draw of itself. Especially if we could be playing with ringworlds and dyson spheres.
So maybe each world is a new ecology. Excellent and awesome. And I have read many, many sf stories on the theme that we need to understand a whole ecology or die. Know your place in the food chain or be mulch, sort of thing. Motivating sort of lesson.
Except, as it turns out, its more of a problem that we kill everything else. I mean, unless we can design an entire balanced ecosystem in changing climate conditions, we're going to be pretty screwed. But if you can get to a new planet to screw it up, then not so much with the living with the consequences.
Although that might be one reason to run such a boring sim, look what the world turns into if you eat it all.
I mean there's a lot of plausible post apocalyptic futures that are fairly easy to imagine, because 'we're screwed' is a short story easy to translate, but it's super boring and more people need to imagine ways to get through in one piece.
But one way is to alter ourselves, maybe radically. The possibilities of AI and simulated lives are manyfold and varied. How many copies of yourself can you run? How many simultaneously before it fundamentally alters how to be a people? How many iterations away from baseline can you get and still be you? How much does that matter, when ou could spread out and literally be all you can be?
Why would our descendents and/or creations have anything further to do with us, let alone do the work we need them to do? I mean a lot of fiction about AI is very thinly veiled stuff about class, and worrying why servants will even stick around. Speaking as someone utterly stuck without an employee, I worry that one a lot. I mean, once we build things that can do people job, when are they people enough to say no? And if we can remove the capacity to say no... lets face it, we wont stop with machines. How evil are we going to be?
So there's simulations, ai, new worlds, life we create and life we didn't. And very probably possibly new sapient sentients, intelligent life out there. New lie and new civilisations.
But we haven't even begun to imagine all the permutations.
I mean leaving aside the thing where most alien species in fiction are your basic medieval morality hats in new costumes, the universe is big. BIG big. Wiki says the milky way Stargate system has 1,987,690,320 possible combinations, not all of them currently valid gate addresses. And in universe not all life forms are even on the gate network. And that's just the milky way, add Pegasus at least. So all the works of all the humans in Sf thus far, I'm thinking they've yet to come up with enough species to fully populate Stargate. And big deal you might say, but, 1,987,690,320 is a tiny fraction of the estimated hundred billion exoplanets in our galaxy. And sure, not all of them will be habitable, let alone inhabited, but, again, how far has our collective imagination really stretched?
I mean you could put the goa'uld and all their works on a single planet and very few of the plots would even be dented, except for distance to gate concerns.
We haven't really imagined many neighbours yet.
Not compared to the stupendous proliferation of possibilities.
And then there's all the possible modifications you get when new technologies, bio, nano, cyber and otherwise, get into the hands of the kind of people who have been playing dress up since forever. I saw on Civilisations again today that the earliest art in existence after the spit and the handprints and the straightforward animals, is your basic prehistoric furries. Animal transformation art been going on since the beginning. That isn't going to stop when our biology becomes the canvass.
And why stop with natural animals? Human imagination doesn't. With the tech, or simulations, or something we haven't thought of yet, we shall become everything we ever dreamed. Possibly including hordes of orcs. I mean, this is why I've been defaulting to Fantasy for a while, the tech isn't the story once it passes indistinguishable from magic, what we can do once we get that power is. And we'll do everything.
I mean Defiance is the only SF I've seen that explored humans trying to become aliens, B5 only had a funny gift shop and some cultural exchange and a couple of very unusual people, but if the tech exists then people are going to take it. Cultural appropriation on a biological level, big time.
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.