Pointers from the Professionals

[Lester Curtis]

Ol' Ike had a snarky way of putting things sometimes . . .

I used to have an old (1921 edition, IIRC) copy of The Seven Famous Novels . . . Wells wrote a forward in it about how to properly write good sci-fi.

Boiled down, what he said to do was to begin with a perfectly ordinary everyday world, and add one -- and ONLY one -- Impossibility to it, then follow the characters around and record their reactions.

Still works today.

[Lester Curtis]

Tao,

Nice observations.

The tech is an especially sticky problem. Heinlein never saw the transistor coming; he projected a future where space travel was routine, but the navigators calculated their courses with slide rules and whatever they had for computers used vacuum tubes.

Trying to be an accurate futurist is just no picnic at all (Popular Mechanics has been predicting the widespread availability of personal helicopters/jet-packs/self-driving cars, etc. for fifty years or more -- well, self-driving cars are getting closer) -- but being a speculative futurist is a bit easier, because you can invent excuses for people having (or not) some futuristic item. As long as your excuse is plausible, you're good to go.

I could see modifying Wells' formula thus: "Build a future world that is self-consistent, but based on tech that we don't currently have, and a society consistent with that tech. Then, don't bother with an Impossible Thing, just throw in a conflict that your characters have to get through."

The Impossible element becomes inbuilt with the future -- it's the whole setting, obviating the need of a further Impossibility on top of it. Wells did this himself to an extent with The Time Machine: Morlocks and Eloi.

[Lester Curtis]

One can also explore the notion of prejudice in science fiction by having a society including aliens - and having alienist prejudice of some sort or another. District 9 actually did this rather well.

District 9 -- as excellent as it is -- rather exaggerated the situation . . . really; out of a million or so of the aliens, there was only ONE that had enough smarts to act anything but brutishly? That was done for a reason: drama and plot focus (and we weren't supposed to notice).

The main character in my novel encounters lots of prejudice; he grows up on Earth in a time when there are various aliens living here, and human reactionaries want them out; eventually these groups consolidate their political power and succeed in isolating Earth from interstellar commerce, losing a lot of the more enlightened humans and their organizations in the process.

[Robert_Moriyama]

One can also explore the notion of prejudice in science fiction by having a society including aliens - and having alienist prejudice of some sort or another. District 9 actually did this rather well.

District 9 -- as excellent as it is -- rather exaggerated the situation . . . really; out of a million or so of the aliens, there was only ONE that had enough smarts to act anything but brutishly? That was done for a reason: drama and plot focus (and we weren't supposed to notice).

The main character in my novel encounters lots of prejudice; he grows up on Earth in a time when there are various aliens living here, and human reactionaries want them out; eventually these groups consolidate their political power and succeed in isolating Earth from interstellar commerce, losing a lot of the more enlightened humans and their organizations in the process.

Then the remaining population celebrates with a big Tea Party...