Can we enable readers to connect to far future humanity, without pretending they wouldn’t be different?
Everything about our culture has changed so dramatically over the course of the last hundred years that it’s very hard to believe that we’d be the same as we are now in five hundred years.
This is an issue I have when writing and reading far future science fiction; it seems difficult to believe that people would talk the same as they do now, and hold to the same values and cultural norms. Yet if we don’t write that way then we remove our readers’ ability to connect to the characters and setting.
Obviously this is, in part, a question of suspension of belief. It’s not so unreasonable to use behaviours, values and even modes of speech, to create a connection between reader and characters. But how daft does it seem when confronted with punks straight out of the 80s in a dystopian future?
Is there a way that we can show believable change in humanity over time, while retaining enough recognisability to enable readers to connect? The closest I’ve seen is Joe Haldeman’s Forever War series, in which he uses people like us as outcasts in the future to bridge the gap. Are then any other examples that you’ve seen work well?
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Some cultural changes over the past century or five have been very deep, and some have been shallow. It’s much easier for women to get divorced; that’s a deep change. They often announce those divorces on Facebook; that’s a shallow change. (The growth of social media in general is a deep change, but this particular use of those media is shallow.)
For world-building a novel set in the future, I would suggest concentrating on a few deep changes (the ones most relevant to the plot you want to write) and then providing lots of shallow changes to convey the atmosphere. Your protagonist could be anxious about getting a marriage contract renewed, and your story could explore the various expectations, conflicts, jargon, child-rearing practices, etc. etc. surrounding renewable marriages... but you can also drop in occasional references to self-cleaning clothes, robot butlers, and functional health-insurance companies, just to prevent the reader from feeling that your setting is “just like 2013 but with renewable marriages”.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/9487. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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No matter how different science fiction characters are from humans – whether they be extraterrestrials, artificial intelligences, or a far future species evolved from Homo sapiens – they must be relevant to readers. That doesn’t necessarily mean that readers identify with those characters, only that those characters “say” something about humanity that the reader then finds relevant.
To achieve that, ask if these non-human “others” in story serve any of these purposes:
- Metaphors or stand-ins for human characteristics – For example, Mr. Spock with his logic stands for the human philosophy of rationality and logic. HAL 9000 represents how the inability to distinguish between two contradictions can lead to paranoia. The metaphor/stand-on approach is especially useful for writers wishing to criticize a specific human characteristic.
- Mirrors/counterpoints for humans – In “Star Trek,” the Vulcans’ suppression of emotions is a counterpoint to humans’ expression of them. An alien species that develops space travel might consider those races lacking it (such as humans) to be less evolved, just as we might consider technology-vacant Homo erectus to be less evolved than us.
- Shed light on the human condition through their interactions – Data of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” does this by questioning his crewmates about what being human means. Such interactions need not be between the non-human and a human but can be between two of the non-humans; as we learn about them, readers then learn something about themselves.
Arguably, as a human writer, all of your non-human characters can’t help but possess some characteristics of humanity because that’s your only frame of reference to work from. Whether or not that be the case, what matters most to a reader is how relevant you make such characters (Whether or not the nonhuman character has a scientifically plausible basis for existing is important, too, but a topic for a different discussion!).
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/9484. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I think you're confusing motives and details.
You mentioned people from 500 years ago being very different from us. What concerns do we share over the centuries?
- Survival basics: food, shelter, clothing. There really wasn't a "middle class" in 1513, but you could argue there was a merchant class, so a Genovese trader could be worried whether his next shipment of cloth will survive the storm season and pirate raids and make port so he can sell enough to pay his liege lord, compared to a middle manager at Wernham-Hogg who's worried that she'll be laid off and won't be able to pay her mortgage. Project it forward: How do people acquire homes in this future setting, and how could that be jeopardized?
- Family troubles: marriages, children, grandchildren, siblings. The Genovese trader might be trying to make a good match for his daughter with the son of the duke. The middle manager might be worried that her sister is settling for a boyfriend who treats her poorly because she's afraid of being alone. People will still have families in the future. Will they still marry? Maybe marriages will be limited-term renewable contracts, and the concern is whether someone will renew, or how to convince someone to sign a five-year instead of a one-year.
- Job concerns: Workplaces have politics. Invent some macguffins to worry about.
And so on and so forth. Don't worry about whether people are talking via smoke signal, telegraph, wrist radio, Facebook, or shunt squirt. Focus on the conversation. Our connection to future humanity (and past) is that we have similar problems and concerns and loves. The particulars may change, but mothers are still going to remind their daughters to pee before a long trip.
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