Future Shock

[Lorizael]

I'm about to post a me thread, but I haven't been on Apolyton in some time now so it seems kind of rude to immediately come back with a thread in which I demand (and ignore) your advice. So in an effort to pretend like I'm a good, selfless Apolyton citizen, I've posted in a few threads and now I'm creating a new one with a topic that's been on my mind recently.

So there's a fair amount of fiction out there in which a person from the past is brought to the present and stupefied by the dramatic changes in technology, culture, etc. Sometimes the changes are so dramatic that, from the perspective of the temporally displaced character, the present just doesn't make any sense. The present world isn't just faster or bigger or shinier, but fundamentally different in a way that is difficult or impossible for the character to get their head around.

Now, this is a thesis one might object to before I get to the next point, and I'm sympathetic to that. I think there's a difficult line to tread between thinking of the past and present as utterly foreign to each other and thinking that the past is probably mostly like the present. And you can go do down that route if you want, but I have something else in mind as well.

To wit, I have seen less fiction where travelers from the present are sent to an incomprehensible future. The future may be faster and bigger and shinier, but it's rarely the case that it just plain doesn't make sense. That is, once you've got cars, flying cars are not a huge conceptual leap. Once you've got smartphones, implanted holo-communicators seem pretty reasonable. So the question I have is... how much experience do you guys have with conceptually difficult SF? If you haven't seen a lot of it, do you think there's a reason why? If you have, can you recommend some? And more generally, what do you think makes a future setting difficult to grok as opposed to just mote futurey?

Okay, now to the me thread.

[Elok]

Well, a fictional future full of innovations too strange for a modern person to comprehend . . . would have to be written by a modern person, who invented all the incomprehensible things. Which is the sticky wicket.

I have read some alien encounter books where cultural or racial blind spots play a role, most recently The Mote in God's Eye. These have the similar weakness that the humans ultimately are able to figure out what's weird about the aliens, because if the aliens were really too weird for humans to understand a human could never have invented them. But I think it's common enough for the aliens to be too blinkered to likewise understand the humans.

[Lorizael]

Well, a fictional future full of innovations too strange for a modern person to comprehend . . . would have to be written by a modern person, who invented all the incomprehensible things. Which is the sticky wicket.

Well, I imagine it's not too terribly difficult to invent incomprehensible futures/aliens, but it's probably much harder to implement that in a way that remains (largely) incomprehensible and is still satisfying to the reader.

[Elok]

Yes, a society which makes no damn sense to the reader from start to finish is basically indistinguishable from a dumb dream where you're being chased through a ballroom by an ice cream cone who turns into a horse.

[Lorizael]

Right, but I think a good writer should be able to present something that is both truly alien and interesting. I try to do this with aliens in my stories. I never write forehead aliens and instead spend a lot of time crafting aliens that are basically playing by different rules and don't necessarily have the same kinds of motivations or emotions that humans do. Or at least, I used to. More recent writing tends to be transhuman/posthuman stuff rather than alien stuff. But the same ideas apply. I won't say that I necessarily succeed at this, but I think it's a useful way of doing SF.

That is, stories where the SF component only provides window dressing are not as interesting to me. I think the tools of SF let us explore the boundaries of and even the space beyond the human condition, but if we never venture that far out and only use the SF to paper over our transparent political allegories, I think we're missing out.

[Proteus_MST]

The most incomprehensible society I ever encountered in a SciFi-Universe must be either the Yuuzhan Vong in the (former) expanded Universe of Star Wars, or the [url=http://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Endlose_Armada]Infinite Armada[/ur] in the universe of Perry Rhodan, with the latter being an Armada that stretches over several lightears and wanders across the universe, has several alien species all united by something called "Ordobans Flame", which contains DNA from the creator of the endless Armada and has rather alien ways of handlng things.
(Link regarding the infinite Armada unfortunately only in german, as sources about Perry rhodan re rarely available in english (don't think that Perry Rhodan is known all too well outside of the german speakking world, despite it being a SciFi-Series that already is actve for more than half a century and has new novels coming out every week))
(Actually, I think that Perry Rhodan generally has the most alien universe of all SciFi series I know)

But generally I agree with Elok ... usually our imagination of truely alien societies seems to be hampered a lot by our own anthropocentrism / human society / experience with the natural world that evolved on our planet ... that makes it hard to break out from it and invent societies that are truly alien to us

[Lorizael]

Wow, yeah, I've never heard of that Perry Rhodan thing.

I think it's possible to write about incomprehensible things, because I think we can see in our myth-making a lot of human attempts to do just that. For much of human history, weather and climate operated according to forces completely beyond our comprehension, yet this didn't stop us from interacting meaningfully with weather and climate. We tended to assign agency to big, unpredictable things (lightning = god's wrath, or whatever), and we were clearly very wrong about what weather was, but we still had a way of conceptualizing it that was not random or arbitrary. I think maybe this can be done in stories as well. Humans (and readers) might totally misunderstand what a future/alien society is about, but if there's enough of a pattern for our pattern-obsessed brains to latch on to, we'll come up with some meaning. /me shrugs.

[BeBMan]

I remember reading stuff that used the "contact with super-advanced aliens" theme mostly to deal with contemporary issues. I guess that's nothing special as it's done in various genres. (edit: the transfer into a diff setting I mean -- aliens otoh seem to be more scifi specific hehe)

Eastern European stuff written pre-1990 however often did that to make more or less subtle criticism on the existing political structures, which would have likely been censored if the authors did the same openly in books clearly situated in the (then) present.

[Proteus_MST]

You mean like Stanislaw Lems Sterntagebücher (The Star Diaries) .... which was brought to german TV as a small comedy series with 2 seasons

[BeBMan]

Didn't mean Lem only (I did read a bit of him as a kid, but also lotsa different stuff), but yeah, have seen the series - the ...errr..."effects", "costumes" and "filmsets" etc. were gold

[Elok]

Wow, yeah, I've never heard of that Perry Rhodan thing.

I think it's possible to write about incomprehensible things, because I think we can see in our myth-making a lot of human attempts to do just that. For much of human history, weather and climate operated according to forces completely beyond our comprehension, yet this didn't stop us from interacting meaningfully with weather and climate. We tended to assign agency to big, unpredictable things (lightning = god's wrath, or whatever), and we were clearly very wrong about what weather was, but we still had a way of conceptualizing it that was not random or arbitrary. I think maybe this can be done in stories as well. Humans (and readers) might totally misunderstand what a future/alien society is about, but if there's enough of a pattern for our pattern-obsessed brains to latch on to, we'll come up with some meaning. /me shrugs.

I think it's a mistake to focus on the role of religion, even primitive religion, in explaining natural phenomena. Religion is primarily about providing context to human life, and to the extent that human life involves nature, nature gets dragged in. Poseidon, for example, did not exist to appease a deep curiosity about the sea, but so that sailors and fishermen could have somebody to pray to for a safe voyage and more fish. Bits about "and he is responsible for this thing happening" are more artistic flourishes than real explanations, and not given much respect. So, for example, Apollo is routinely shown walking around talking to people in broad daylight when he's supposed to be driving the sun-chariot around. Because, really, very few things in our lives are totally explicable, and most of us, then and now, are fine with that. Almost nobody today could explain lightning in anything more than the vaguest terms ("it's electricity"), despite a more detailed explanation being readily available. All phenomena, natural or man-made, can be treated as background noise, provided they act consistently and predictably.

Fiction is similar to religion in that, whatever it purports to be about, most of the time it's really about people. Which is why things different from and incomprehensible to people don't get involved. You could invent a species that lives very differently from humans, and document all its workings meticulously, and maybe attract the interest of a handful of hardcore biology wonks, but that's about it. It's only when this species encounters us, or behaves enough like us to be an acceptable substitute, that it becomes interesting as a story.

[kentonio]

Well, I imagine it's not too terribly difficult to invent incomprehensible futures/aliens, but it's probably much harder to implement that in a way that remains (largely) incomprehensible and is still satisfying to the reader.

I think it would just either annoy or lose most people to be fair. If it was genuinely as different as we consider now to be to say medieval times, then so many very basic concepts would have to initially be confusing that you'd spend half the book just describing them, which doesn't leave must room to add an actual story in there.

[Lorizael]

I think it's a mistake to focus on the role of religion, even primitive religion, in explaining natural phenomena.

I had a feeling you would pipe in here, and I mostly agree. I meant to but clearly failed to convey this subtlety, which is that I don't think we invented gods to explain lightning, but that we had an entire worldview (primitive religion) which served as a conceptual tool for understanding the world around us. If we required an explanation for lightning, one was available. This does get into a bit of a chicken and egg, thing, though, and I think there's some truth to the fact that humans, being social creatures, have brains that are super obsessed with interpreting the intentions of others, and sometimes we end up interpreting the intentions of things that don't have intentions, too.

Fiction is similar to religion in that, whatever it purports to be about, most of the time it's really about people. Which is why things different from and incomprehensible to people don't get involved. You could invent a species that lives very differently from humans, and document all its workings meticulously, and maybe attract the interest of a handful of hardcore biology wonks, but that's about it. It's only when this species encounters us, or behaves enough like us to be an acceptable substitute, that it becomes interesting as a story.

I don't want this to be true, but I accept that it probably mostly is. I think SF has a potential function that other literature cannot fulfill, which is to expand our conceptual horizons about people/life/the universe/etc. It's a far cry from hacking our bodies and minds to gain new senses or experience new emotions, but it'll do for now.

[Proteus_MST]

Wow, yeah, I've never heard of that Perry Rhodan thing.

I think it's possible to write about incomprehensible things, because I think we can see in our myth-making a lot of human attempts to do just that. For much of human history, weather and climate operated according to forces completely beyond our comprehension, yet this didn't stop us from interacting meaningfully with weather and climate. We tended to assign agency to big, unpredictable things (lightning = god's wrath, or whatever), and we were clearly very wrong about what weather was, but we still had a way of conceptualizing it that was not random or arbitrary. I think maybe this can be done in stories as well. Humans (and readers) might totally misunderstand what a future/alien society is about, but if there's enough of a pattern for our pattern-obsessed brains to latch on to, we'll come up with some meaning. /me shrugs.

Yes, but this works in one direction:
I.e. you have a black box phenomenon and then invent humanlike gods to explain it (and whenever your predictions fail you can explain it away wth the inpredictability of the gods)

In SciFi-Writing (if you want to invent something really alien) it is, howver, the other way round:
You only have your human experience (and the experience with the other animals nd plants that evolved here on Terra) and then try to exrapolate this knowledge on the invention of something that may have evolved under totally different conditions.

I think this is extremly harder than just invnting gods for natural phenomena
(example: Almost always alien cultures are seen as similar to ours, in that they have wars, trade, sex between 2 genders (usually also together with rituals that unite 2 specimens of different gender for life), often also religion. But the assumption that those are necessary factors (for an advanced society that attains spacefaring capabilitis) already is a rather anthropocentric viewpoint)

(on the other hand, how hard it is, to diesplay an alien sciety, of course also depends on the depth with which you want to display it ... if you want to display (in a form that is understandable for humans) the individual thoughts of a gas grazing monstrousity living in the cloud nebula of eta Carinae, you will most likely fail ... if you just want to describe a short stay of human heroes on the slave markets of the doomed world of Beteigeuze c (without going deeper into the history and culture of the beings living there), this will be much easier)

[Elok]

I had a feeling you would pipe in here, and I mostly agree. I meant to but clearly failed to convey this subtlety, which is that I don't think we invented gods to explain lightning, but that we had an entire worldview (primitive religion) which served as a conceptual tool for understanding the world around us. If we required an explanation for lightning, one was available. This does get into a bit of a chicken and egg, thing, though, and I think there's some truth to the fact that humans, being social creatures, have brains that are super obsessed with interpreting the intentions of others, and sometimes we end up interpreting the intentions of things that don't have intentions, too.

But that's just my point: religion is not really about "understanding the world around us," it's about understanding us. Most deities in most societies are very anthropocentric, not just in looking and acting like humans, but in existing to patronize human concerns. Look at the Greek pantheon (I'm sticking to Greece here since they're the best known) and you'll see that most of the deities are dedicated to specific aspects of human life. Zeus is there for kings, his wife for marriage, his daughters for lust, craftiness and hunting, his sons for smithing, the arts, commerce and athletics, war, and drinking. One brother is there for sailors, the other for facing up to death, his sister for the all-important business of agriculture. Purely natural functions are on the fringe, and only touch the core where they concern otherwise-uncontrollable dangers such as famine and earthquakes. Zeus had lightning not because we were curious about lightning, but because he was the most powerful and controlling lightning is something you'd expect a powerful deity to do. The ancients and medievals did have a mechanistic understanding of at least some natural phenomena--the separate spheres of earth, water, air and fire, for example. That this understanding was grossly erroneous does not make it any less mechanistic.

I don't want this to be true, but I accept that it probably mostly is. I think SF has a potential function that other literature cannot fulfill, which is to expand our conceptual horizons about people/life/the universe/etc. It's a far cry from hacking our bodies and minds to gain new senses or experience new emotions, but it'll do for now.

I view SF as a way to examine human life from perspectives unattainable in other forms of fiction. But I think of transhumanism as a broken animal finding ways to break itself further.