If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared fluid identities before AOL chat rooms, and we’re not worried about black holes now we’ve made a big machine to create little ones. Possibly we got bored of science fiction when reality caught up – and now, given to romance and nostalgia, we’ve got steampunk and a million remakes.
But for all the debate about what SF is and isn’t, the best stuff is still based around big ideas. A big idea; a mirror to our present fears, advances, social structures, institutions and other big words.
With Twitter, and all the web stuff that’s growing with and around it, I reckon there’s a lot for new genre fiction writers looking for new, big, original ideas in science fiction. And that’s because I think Twitter is an excellent parallel for fictional technology – the fictional technology around which the very best SF writers build their worlds.
Mostly I’m writing this on the back of something I read a couple of weeks back. Charles Stross was getting fresh about Star Trek. Hates it, he said. It’s a drama pretending to be science fiction by having a few tech-sounding words lobbed into the script. He said it’s not SF unless you’ve considered what the true extent of a new development is on its culture. And then he brilliantly explained how he plans science fiction novels himself:
I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.
There’s not much value in fictional technologies if their possibilities are not fully explored, is what he’s saying.
He’s saying that if you’re going to invent a brilliant new technology for your story, then that same technology must, through use (or misuse), come with wider implications, or ‘second order effects’.
He’s saying, if you want to write the best science fiction, you make rules to break them. And, along with the rest of his piece, he’s saying there’s sometimes too much of a reliance on the Big Idea carrying the story – and not the human conflict arising BECAUSE of that Big Idea.
Robust, successful science-fictional worlds depend on these details.
So what’s that got to do with Twitter? Well, put Twitter into the Stross argument. It’s still very new, very nascent, always changing – it’s part of a technological shift demonstrating Big Ideas in real-time, in a comparatively short period.
Twitter’s now recognised for much more than people telling other people what they’re doing. It’s a political discussion. It’s a PR tool. It’s a campaign’s mouthpiece. It’s a link resource. It’s a writers’ forum. It’s a demo coordinator. It’s a freelancer’s networking tool. It’s a reactionary funnel. It’s a commentary tool. It’s a dating site. It’s a fan-base manager. It’s a newswire. It’s an eye-witness account. And it’s a place for fans to harass celebrities.
This wasn’t planned.
Filtered through Stross’ argument, if Twitter were only a big idea – the future-tech of some story written in an alternate universe someplace – then all of these uses are Twitter’s wider, second-order effects – and in turn, the things that would actually be worth writing about.
As the Guardian quotes Wired in a piece about the Jan Moir affair, Twitter ‘rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism.’
Just as millions of people use (or misuse) Twitter, it’s really important that writers imagine how the inhabitants of their fictional worlds might use or misuse their own technology beyond its primary function.
Course, if you’re doing robo-monsters for Nanowrimo, just have them smash the world, won’t you?
___
Picture credit: Don Solo @ Flickr
Science fiction, technology and Twitter
If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared fluid identities before AOL chat rooms, and we’re not worried about black holes now we’ve made a big machine to create little ones. Possibly we got bored of science fiction when reality caught up – and now, given to romance and nostalgia, we’ve got steampunk and a million remakes.
But for all the debate about what SF is and isn’t, the best stuff is still based around big ideas. A big idea; a mirror to our present fears, advances, social structures, institutions and other big words.
With Twitter, and all the web stuff that’s growing with and around it, I reckon there’s a lot for new genre fiction writers looking for new, big, original ideas in science fiction. And that’s because I think Twitter is an excellent parallel for fictional technology – the fictional technology around which the very best SF writers build their worlds.
Mostly I’m writing this on the back of something I read a couple of weeks back. Charles Stross was getting fresh about Star Trek. Hates it, he said. It’s a drama pretending to be science fiction by having a few tech-sounding words lobbed into the script. He said it’s not SF unless you’ve considered what the true extent of a new development is on its culture. And then he brilliantly explained how he plans science fiction novels himself:
There’s not much value in fictional technologies if their possibilities are not fully explored, is what he’s saying.
He’s saying that if you’re going to invent a brilliant new technology for your story, then that same technology must, through use (or misuse), come with wider implications, or ‘second order effects’.
He’s saying, if you want to write the best science fiction, you make rules to break them. And, along with the rest of his piece, he’s saying there’s sometimes too much of a reliance on the Big Idea carrying the story – and not the human conflict arising BECAUSE of that Big Idea.
Robust, successful science-fictional worlds depend on these details.
So what’s that got to do with Twitter? Well, put Twitter into the Stross argument. It’s still very new, very nascent, always changing – it’s part of a technological shift demonstrating Big Ideas in real-time, in a comparatively short period.
Twitter’s now recognised for much more than people telling other people what they’re doing. It’s a political discussion. It’s a PR tool. It’s a campaign’s mouthpiece. It’s a link resource. It’s a writers’ forum. It’s a demo coordinator. It’s a freelancer’s networking tool. It’s a reactionary funnel. It’s a commentary tool. It’s a dating site. It’s a fan-base manager. It’s a newswire. It’s an eye-witness account. And it’s a place for fans to harass celebrities.
This wasn’t planned.
Filtered through Stross’ argument, if Twitter were only a big idea – the future-tech of some story written in an alternate universe someplace – then all of these uses are Twitter’s wider, second-order effects – and in turn, the things that would actually be worth writing about.
As the Guardian quotes Wired in a piece about the Jan Moir affair, Twitter ‘rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism.’
Just as millions of people use (or misuse) Twitter, it’s really important that writers imagine how the inhabitants of their fictional worlds might use or misuse their own technology beyond its primary function.
Course, if you’re doing robo-monsters for Nanowrimo, just have them smash the world, won’t you?
___
Picture credit: Don Solo @ Flickr