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.
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Date: 2011-07-26 12:47 am (UTC)It also brings back visions of the various early dinosaurs put together wrong (the iguanadon with the thumb on its nose being the one that comes to mind) though I'm sure in the days of gene sequencing there are subtler and stranger errors to be made...