Sci Fi

I have dedicated the majority of my reading time over the past few years to science fiction. I've always enjoyed sci-fi and for the past few years I have been catching up to all the sci-fi I've meant to read in my life.

I've been making my way through the Hugo and Nebula award winners, dating back to the some classic authors and works in the 1950's and 1960's. I've been sure to include some more recent works by newer authors, too.

This range of eras offers some interesting contrasts, and provides what I think are two critical sci-fi components, or values, authors must keep in mind when writing. They are:

• Social morays
• Imaginative technology

All of the attitudes and customs we assume constitute our social morays. It's how we've been taught to act, think, and behave, and the roles we've been taught to accept since birth.

Reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series provides a good example of this. It is, at times, almost unbearable because of the overt "second-class-citizening" of women that saturates the language and story. It's the men who are doing everything and the women getting in the way. There is some of this in Robert Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold as well, but not quite to the extent as in Foundation.

So the first rule for sci-fi authors must be: don't entrench your work in the social morays of our day.

Unto itself, this provides a challenge for writers: how to you recognize today what will be perceived tomorrow as "archaic", especially given that you've been brought up within this emersion of social morays making it all the more difficult to identify them.

It also provides a challenging paradox. In order for the work to be appreciated by today's audience—which I presume they do, or their books won't sell—there must be some degree of social morays embedded in them or the audience won't be able to relate. An unrelated audience is an audience lost.

The second item is a really interesting one: imaginative technology.

Imaginative technology is the ability for an author to present ideas for technologies that don't exist today but that could exist tomorrow. Such technology presumably would alter, possibly dramatically, how we exist, interact, behave. Technology affects social morays.

We see the affect of technology all around us today with cell phones, text messaging, the Internet, and we know just how much it can affect us and how much is possible because we have personal life experience backing us. We remember the days when "Pong" was huge. We remember the days when they were called "car phones" and only rich people had them. It makes it easier for us to project what may be possible.

For me, this is the most exciting part of reading science fiction!

Last year I spent half the year reading Peter Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series; this year I am reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and it is offering an interesting contrast in imaginative technology.

Not to diminish the stature of Isaac Asimov, but aside from the then ground-breaking notion of a galactic empire with ships traveling from star system to star system and other supernatural phenomena, it is barren in imaginative technology.

This makes sense, really, because he was writing this series in the early 1950s, a time we may characterize as the early, early stages of the technology revolution. It was also a time just after World War II, so much of the imaginative technology content is based in the technology that advanced from the war. Hamilton, in contrast, writing at a time when technology advances are commonplace and their impact on our daily lives prevalent (daily), it offers no surprise that his imaginative technology is so much more alive and thrilling.