seeing trends in science fiction
Jul. 22nd, 2011 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateI recently finished listening to the audiobook of Elizabeth Bear's Undertow, and aside from a couple quibbles with the recording: the reader rendered his "-alm" sounds in a way that sounded like "-ahm" or "-ahn" to me, thus turning "palm" into Pam or pom or pan and "calm" momentarily unintelligible; and the fact that the CD tried to cut off the last half-track of story-- it was a perfectly good book. Just not at all the sort of thing I would have picked up if I weren't investigating things by the VP instructors. So I don't regret having read (heard) it, am unlikely to read it again, and am left wondering if it's part of an entire sub-genre I've missed because I don't read a lot of science fiction.
I'd describe the basic structure as: resource mining company on an alien world runs into problems with the legality of their operation based on the sentience/tech level of the local inhabitants; complex politics from several angles ensue. I encountered the same thing over the winter in Little Fuzzy, also a library audiobook, which came highly recommended by Jo Walton, and I stopped listening to it half-way through because I was deeply uninterested in their evil corporate exec politics & legal battles, and because I know far too much about great ape psychology (which isn't a lot) not to be annoyed by the author's assumptions about what constitutes sentience.
So it makes me wonder when I read things like the increasing evidence that Neanderthals were just sub-species of human [different species being defined as not producing fertile offspring], or about the female Viking burials... how much of what we're writing now, that feels cutting edge, is going to sound incredibly stupid in a decade or two?
One that has aged well: I just finished Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake, which was quite sweet after a bit of a slow beginning. Another one for the "post-post-apocalyptic" box, though that's not particularly related to the focus of the story, and the lack of either detailed explanations or attempts to tie things into present-world technology served it pretty well. Apparently it's a bit of a cult classic among the people who ran into it half a generation back from me (it having been published the year I was born) and Ursula le Guin recommends it highly. I will be looking into tracking down a copy of my own.
I'd describe the basic structure as: resource mining company on an alien world runs into problems with the legality of their operation based on the sentience/tech level of the local inhabitants; complex politics from several angles ensue. I encountered the same thing over the winter in Little Fuzzy, also a library audiobook, which came highly recommended by Jo Walton, and I stopped listening to it half-way through because I was deeply uninterested in their evil corporate exec politics & legal battles, and because I know far too much about great ape psychology (which isn't a lot) not to be annoyed by the author's assumptions about what constitutes sentience.
So it makes me wonder when I read things like the increasing evidence that Neanderthals were just sub-species of human [different species being defined as not producing fertile offspring], or about the female Viking burials... how much of what we're writing now, that feels cutting edge, is going to sound incredibly stupid in a decade or two?
One that has aged well: I just finished Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake, which was quite sweet after a bit of a slow beginning. Another one for the "post-post-apocalyptic" box, though that's not particularly related to the focus of the story, and the lack of either detailed explanations or attempts to tie things into present-world technology served it pretty well. Apparently it's a bit of a cult classic among the people who ran into it half a generation back from me (it having been published the year I was born) and Ursula le Guin recommends it highly. I will be looking into tracking down a copy of my own.