11 ms·

Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera (2016)

86 points by georgecmu 5y ago

marcinzm 5y ago
Much as I like hard and realistic science fiction I feel the most impactful science fiction is one that is a lens with which to examine humanity. That may include the impact of specific technologies on humanity. The setting is a means to an end rather than and end in its own right. Overfill it with details and it's hard to see the forrest for the trees. And for the schlock side of it the details don't really matter compared to the characters, action, romance or whatnot. I'm reading it for the protagonist hilariously killing fifty aliens with a spoon and not the realistic setting.
- tanbog4 5y ago
  "Much as I like hard and realistic science fiction I feel the most impactful science fiction is one that is a lens with which to examine humanity." This might be a controversial view, but I would argue all storytelling is ultimately an exercise in examining yourself and the context you live in. Whether the author is aware that that is what they are doing is another matter...
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  I don't think hard scifi is considered its own genre because its adherents think that reflection is less important than realism, but rather because if an author doesn't intentionally prioritize realistic thinking it tends to not happen at all. A lack of realistic / scientific thinking isn't a sin for any given story, but it can turn into a collective sin if everybody's mirror has the same convenience-driven blind spot.
  - LiquidSky 5y ago
    That's kind of the point of this list, though. So-called "hard" SF tends to only be "realistic" within the narrow confines of the author's specialty (which usually means the physics equations work out). It handwaves or outright ignores other areas, let alone tries to realistically consider them. This is most especially true for the "soft" sciences that the hard SF engineering types so often sneer at. Which is fine for fiction stories generally, they're just fiction after all, but hard SF likes to pretend it's somehow purer or more rational than other kinds of stories.
    - open-source-ux 5y ago
      I agree. Sometimes the 'hard' Sci-Fi novels are written by scientists who have interesting scientifc ideas but aren't necessary good writers or storytellers. The enthusiasm for their intriguing scientific scenarios come through in their writing - while plot, character or drama are all lacking.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Well, yeah, realism takes a lot of work, so you'll only ever see it happen in one or two areas, if you see it at all. > This is most especially true for the "soft" sciences that the hard SF engineering types so often sneer at. Sneering is always inappropriate, whether it is being done by hard scifi fans looking down at soft sciences or by literary types who don't see the point of ever engaging with realism. These feed each other, of course. To the hard scifi fan, the entire point of tangling with realism -- which is guaranteed to be difficult, involve sacrifices, and have limited scope -- is because it helps us understand humanity. Specifically, in the context of hypothetical technology. It's always frustrating when literary types stomp in and act like they have a monopoly on this type of thing, when really we ought to be on the same team. Ah well.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I feel like Greg Egan manages to do both very well (e.g. in Diaspora or The Arrow of time series) On the movie side, interstellar spends a lot of time on making things scientifically accurate, but also examines humanity much more than most sf movies. So i don't think they're at odds.
giantrobot 5y ago
Here's a non-TVTropes copy of the Evil Overlord's List: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
- mngnt 5y ago
  More on the space opera topic: How to Invade an Alien Planet https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/How_to_Invade_An_Alien_Planet https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/How_to_Invade_An_Alien_Plan...
f7ebc20c97 5y ago
Wow, is it even possible to form a science fiction setting without clichés?
- uncletaco 5y ago
  Well Neptune's Brood had a vaguely blockchain based economy. That was neat.
  - geoffpado 5y ago
    Somehow I suspect that won’t please the author of the original article, either, since he also wrote this: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-i-am-bored.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because... EDIT: Having not heard of Neptune’s Brood, I looked it up after posting only to find out it was also written by the author. Oops.
contravariant 5y ago
> Planets rotate east-to-west Seems odd to call that a blunder, surely that's just a matter of convention?
- geuis 5y ago
  In our own solar system, not all planets rotate in the same direction. Venus actually rotates west to east, very slowly. Its year is shorter than its day. Uranus rotates nearly 90 degrees in relation to the ecliptic. Mercury rotates east to west, but has a special orbital resonance with Earth. Because its so close to the sun, for decades we could only see it well enough at certain points in its orbit. Because of the resonance, we basically always see the same face which made it appear to be tidally locked. It rotates quite fine, but it wasn't until the last couple of decades of sending probes by Mercury that its rotation could actually be detected. There's just 3 examples in our own real solar system that disprove the "convention". Not even to mention the hundreds to thousands of other smaller bodies that are unique in their own ways.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    I'm curious how Venus's direction is decided, since everything I can find claims it has no magnetic field (except one generated in the atmosphere). Given that: how do you define what rotational-pole is "north", to derive east/west? Or is it not based on a planet's qualities, in which case it's likely something solar, and then what would Uranus' "north" (or east) be?
    - mcphage 5y ago
      Looking at it from above, wouldn’t one way be a clockwise rotation, and the other be a counterclockwise rotation?
      - retsibsi 5y ago
        Depends on which 'above' you're looking from though, right? (edit: that wasn't meant to be obnoxiously rhetorical, just to signal that I might be messing up the visualisation myself.) If the planet is rotating around the axis from pole to pole, then from above one pole (or anywhere that side of the equator) the rotation will appear clockwise, from above the other pole it will appear anticlockwise, and from directly above the equator it will just be 'left' or 'right' (or forward or back) depending on your orientation. edit: perhaps from directly above the equator you would still consider the spin to be clockwise or anticlockwise -- but which one would depend on your orientation.
Telemakhos 5y ago
A list of complaints about "mistakes" or "blunders" (as the author chooses to call these details) is not the same thing as a taxonomy. Taxonomies put things into some sort of order (τάξις); this is just a list of things the author does not like.
- leoc 5y ago
  Well, there's one degree of hierarchial classification.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Hence 'towards' in the title, which is an academic way of saying you have compiled a to-do list of things to study more carefully.
geuis 5y ago
I appreciate the direction Charlie is going with these lists. The best creativity tends to come from restricted/limited choices. By making a general list of stereotypes and tropes ahead of time, it will help to come up with unique ideas or to selectively pick the trope of choice to advance the story.
amyjess 5y ago
> This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes > Common blunders > many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome Referring to deliberate artistic choices as "mistakes" or "blunders" is in extremely poor taste. It's equivalent to attacking a stick figure comic for not adhering to rigorous details of human anatomy, and it makes me want to avoid any of Stross's work in the future.
- mcphage 5y ago
  Some of these are deliberate artistic choices, but often they’re just included without even being thought about. That seems to be the value in a list like this: even if you pick the same thing as almost everyone else, at least you’re aware of it enough for it to be even a choice.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lmilcin 5y ago
Entire list is a little bit forced. I love sci-fi and have been reading or listening to it almost every day for over 30 years, and most of these I don't even remember ever encountering or being a problem. Also, remember, the point of a good book is an interesting story. Since we are already talking about aliens and space travel, we are already assuming some scientific facts are at least bent to serve the story. Some examples: > Plate tectonics is easily ignored, unless the plot requires a Volcano/Earthquake Most planets do not have plate tectonics. And even if it does, why is it important to not ignore it when your story is about something completely different? > Planetary ring systems are picturesque, not dangerous They are not dangerous. It is not like it will go out of its way to kill you. Entire mass of the ring system is usually in very thin, small bands. Just avoid crossing those and you are fine. > You can change orbital inclination easily Of course you can. If you can easily travel to other stars, changing inclination should not be a problem. > New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies Maybe resort colonies are not fun to write about. Actually... Star Trek TNG has a bunch of episodes about Risa, which is a whole fricking fully climate-controlled resort planet. Why are you expecting parity on everything? Do you think there should be more fiction about garbage men than private detectives? After all, there is many more of them. > Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value Actually, I feel like most of stories do not have anything about money. A writer makes a choice. If everybody made choice to create world without money, would you be nitpicking about it, too? > Inflation? What is this, I don't even ... > Deflation? What will they think of next? > Sales tax? What's that? > Income tax? What's that? Now you are being silly. Are we still talking about science fiction or would you rather make every author include thousands of pages of explanations on every topic from physics to biology to economics to whatever else you are bitchin is not included there. And why do you assume economy can't exist without any or all of these things? At some time in the past we had thriving economy without inflation/deflation or sales or income taxes.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  > Actually, I feel like most of stories do not have anything about money. A writer makes a choice. If everybody made choice to create world without money, would you be nitpicking about it, too? The Star Trek TNG formulation for this is that scarcity of everything was eliminated with the invention of matter-energy conversion technology, along with limitless energy-generation tech like matter-antimatter reactors. In a universe where all advanced civilizations can convert energy into food, clothes, equipment, etc, and energy is effectively limitless, at least relative to human needs, then money becomes obsolete and people no longer use it for anything. At least one episode covers it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg I've always assumed any other post-scarcity sci-fi adapts the same premise - unlimited energy + matter-energy conversion = money is non-existent.
nradov 5y ago
For authors looking to write realistic space opera the Atomic Rockets site is a great resource. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
asymptosis 5y ago
> Because primates are a universal deterministic outcome of evolution on all worlds In all fairness, if you think of the constraints required for a species to become space-faring, you're going to be hard-pressed to make it work with an organism which isn't at least a bit like us. 1. You can't be a marine organism, because developing advanced technology requires combustion, and water isn't something you want to be carting into space with you. 2. You need a musculoskeletal system which can support a large brain. For non-marine organisms, this implies something with a big head on top of an upright stance. 3. Having a surplus of limbs is contraindicated for large organisms. Large limbs are expensive to build, and larger organisms are more constrained by gravity than surface tension, which makes multiple limbs less useful. 4. You need appendages for manipulating tools, and voices to debate and share ideas. 5. To develop non-trivial intelligence, you need to be multicellular, and multicellular organisms need to be able to reproduce. So, there is probably going to be sex involved, along with all the complexity that goes along with that, such as sexual competition and selection, caring for the young, and all the politics that arise from these kinds of interactions. Putting these constraints together, you don't have too many options for aliens which are both realistic and interesting enough to build a story around. Your aliens are either: * Bipedal politickers. * Robots. * Not capable of building something we would recognize as technology or civilization.
- fouc 5y ago
  technology or civilization doesn't require our recognition, it exists or not regardless. Our combustion-based technology is rather a fluke of having a huge amount of one-time crude oil reserves. Other planets won't necessarily have that.
  - asymptosis 5y ago
    We're talking about fiction. If you can't recognize it as technology or civilization, how do you plan to write about it? As for combustion, indeed, other planets may not have it. So how do you propose that they would start to develop a technology which would lead to building spaceships?
    - 5y ago
kragen 5y ago
It's always funny to me to see Charlie's blog these days, but kind of sad. So much of it comes down to "there's nothing new under the sun," which is so disappointing coming from someone who used to be one of the most imaginative authors around.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  The blog entry is from 2016.
  - kragen 5y ago
    By "these days" I mean since about 02010.
javajosh 5y ago
Oh come on Charlie! At any level of abstraction, nothing is new. But stories aren't abstractions; they're fundamentally about people, emotions, and reactions. "Oh geez, another story set in WW2 London," said no-one, ever. Heck, I challenge you: go through all of the Black Mirror episodes and write a story that, rather than emphasizing the worst, most cruel and horrific outcome of the setting, does the opposite. It's not the idea that makes the story, it's the people. It's the emotions. Imagine a close-up on a door-knob. It begins to turn. The door creaks.... What do you feel? Portent? Eagerness? Fear? What about a door-knob turning is unique? It's like human faces. They (mostly) have eyes, a mouth, nose, lips, etc. But a few are extraordinarily nice to look at, even though they really only have those same things. Stories are like that. They've got to have plots, characters, (and in SF) presumptions about the world, but the extraordinary ones don't need a new kind of orifice, a new kind of sensor. They present something extraordinary with the thingies we already have. No-one ever said about a super-model, "Oh her? She's just got eyes and a nose and lips. Nothing new..."
- Retric 5y ago
  The issue is people get used to repeated stimulus. Trench warfare is about as stressful as things get, yet eventually soldiers would nap and play card games while being shelled. For science fiction you need enough familiarity for people to care without becoming stale. Which generally means copying from other science fiction to the point where people just accept things like planets with uniform weather and ecosystems.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  It's not about newness; it's about things that are obviously wrong when one thinks about it, like space combat being just like WW1 / WW2 naval warfare except with spacecraft. Mr. Stross is musing over whether it's possible to do space opera without omitting the "science" part of "science fiction".
  - javajosh 5y ago
    Interesting take, because it read to me like he was enumerating SF ideas in an attempt to not repeat them. Avoiding implausibility is a worthy goal for SF - to do otherwise is to write fantasy in science-fiction clothing.
atonalfreerider 5y ago
This describes Star Citizen to a T
kbob 5y ago
This is from 2016. Did Charlie end up writing the space opera he was mulling?
Causality1 5y ago
Fascinating, it's like an article from a parallel universe where TVTropes never existed.
Animats 5y ago
Scale is often a problem. Not just in the usual planetary/interplanetary/interstellar distance sense. But in civilizations. The "spaceport in the middle of a desert with a lot of ship traffic" is something of a cliche. Why are they there? What are they hauling? Why is there no groundside freight operation and ground transportation? This also comes in the "space station in the middle of nowhere" form. There's also organizational scale. Problems which would be dealt with at some low level make it up to Emperor level when they involve the protagonist. This applies to both businesses and governments. This is tied to the "chosen one" mindset. Star Wars was way too influential in this area. Disney/Pixar is way too into that. You don't see "worked their way up through the ranks" much.
sircastor 5y ago
This reads a bit like someone who wants to write hard sci-fi and has been asked to write space opera. I feel like the point of space opera is the setting. The hand waving is almost a component of the genre. Your audience doesn’t need you to explain why the blerf doesn’t affect the blorf. They excuse it.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  He wants to achieve something in the same ballpark as what Iain M Banks achieved, and rightly thinks that's going to be hard and take a bunch of thought. Lots of writers care about their craft, and are not pursuing the minimum that their audience will let them get away with, but rather have specific things or innovations they are looking to achieve. > The hand waving is almost a component of the genre. I take this post as asking "but what if it weren't".
stuartbman 5y ago
I think this could be balanced within the Mohs scale of sci fi hardness [1]. Sure there can be some hand-waving 'magic pixie dust' where you need to advance the technology to match the story, but many space operas choose a single limitation and do a deep-dive into it. Iain M Banks does this an awful lot in the culture series. 1. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
This reduces to "Space Opera is 1950s/60s US TV in Space" Which is almost tautological. It's very difficult to do free-form SF that isn't rooted in familiar cultural tropes because readers need something relatable to stand on. Something like Dune is probably as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the world. It has exotic elements - drug-producing giant worms, drug-induced space navigation, and so on - but it's really just a novel about colonisation and imperial politics. Everything - including the worms, the spice, the fremen, and the BG - is a metaphor for different vectors of power. If you wrote a novel where humans were a kind of cancerous fruiting body evolved by an intelligent forest - not too far from the truth, in a very lateral way - it would be far too weird for most readers because it would be too distant from familiar experience. Carping about hard SF details is beside the point, even when the points are valid. It's trying to turn fiction into engineering, which is not what fiction is for. Most readers don't give extra points for build-ability in SF, and if they did writers would be left with a very small imaginative space to explore - the one we have now, where everything is chemical rockets and budgeting.

86 points by georgecmu 5y ago

Much as I like hard and realistic science fiction I feel the most impactful science fiction is one that is a lens with which to examine humanity. That may include the impact of specific technologies on humanity. The setting is a means to an end rather than and end in its own right. Overfill it with details and it's hard to see the forrest for the trees. And for the schlock side of it the details don't really matter compared to the characters, action, romance or whatnot. I'm reading it for the protagonist hilariously killing fifty aliens with a spoon and not the realistic setting.

tanbog4 5y ago
"Much as I like hard and realistic science fiction I feel the most impactful science fiction is one that is a lens with which to examine humanity." This might be a controversial view, but I would argue all storytelling is ultimately an exercise in examining yourself and the context you live in. Whether the author is aware that that is what they are doing is another matter...
jjoonathan 5y ago
I don't think hard scifi is considered its own genre because its adherents think that reflection is less important than realism, but rather because if an author doesn't intentionally prioritize realistic thinking it tends to not happen at all. A lack of realistic / scientific thinking isn't a sin for any given story, but it can turn into a collective sin if everybody's mirror has the same convenience-driven blind spot.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  That's kind of the point of this list, though. So-called "hard" SF tends to only be "realistic" within the narrow confines of the author's specialty (which usually means the physics equations work out). It handwaves or outright ignores other areas, let alone tries to realistically consider them. This is most especially true for the "soft" sciences that the hard SF engineering types so often sneer at. Which is fine for fiction stories generally, they're just fiction after all, but hard SF likes to pretend it's somehow purer or more rational than other kinds of stories.
  - open-source-ux 5y ago
    I agree. Sometimes the 'hard' Sci-Fi novels are written by scientists who have interesting scientifc ideas but aren't necessary good writers or storytellers. The enthusiasm for their intriguing scientific scenarios come through in their writing - while plot, character or drama are all lacking.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Well, yeah, realism takes a lot of work, so you'll only ever see it happen in one or two areas, if you see it at all. > This is most especially true for the "soft" sciences that the hard SF engineering types so often sneer at. Sneering is always inappropriate, whether it is being done by hard scifi fans looking down at soft sciences or by literary types who don't see the point of ever engaging with realism. These feed each other, of course. To the hard scifi fan, the entire point of tangling with realism -- which is guaranteed to be difficult, involve sacrifices, and have limited scope -- is because it helps us understand humanity. Specifically, in the context of hypothetical technology. It's always frustrating when literary types stomp in and act like they have a monopoly on this type of thing, when really we ought to be on the same team. Ah well.
bawolff 5y ago
I feel like Greg Egan manages to do both very well (e.g. in Diaspora or The Arrow of time series) On the movie side, interstellar spends a lot of time on making things scientifically accurate, but also examines humanity much more than most sf movies. So i don't think they're at odds.

giantrobot 5y ago

Here's a non-TVTropes copy of the Evil Overlord's List: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

mngnt 5y ago
More on the space opera topic: How to Invade an Alien Planet https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/How_to_Invade_An_Alien_Planet https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/How_to_Invade_An_Alien_Plan...

f7ebc20c97 5y ago

Wow, is it even possible to form a science fiction setting without clichés?

uncletaco 5y ago
Well Neptune's Brood had a vaguely blockchain based economy. That was neat.
- geoffpado 5y ago
  Somehow I suspect that won’t please the author of the original article, either, since he also wrote this: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-i-am-bored.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because... EDIT: Having not heard of Neptune’s Brood, I looked it up after posting only to find out it was also written by the author. Oops.

contravariant 5y ago

> Planets rotate east-to-west Seems odd to call that a blunder, surely that's just a matter of convention?

geuis 5y ago
In our own solar system, not all planets rotate in the same direction. Venus actually rotates west to east, very slowly. Its year is shorter than its day. Uranus rotates nearly 90 degrees in relation to the ecliptic. Mercury rotates east to west, but has a special orbital resonance with Earth. Because its so close to the sun, for decades we could only see it well enough at certain points in its orbit. Because of the resonance, we basically always see the same face which made it appear to be tidally locked. It rotates quite fine, but it wasn't until the last couple of decades of sending probes by Mercury that its rotation could actually be detected. There's just 3 examples in our own real solar system that disprove the "convention". Not even to mention the hundreds to thousands of other smaller bodies that are unique in their own ways.
- Groxx 5y ago
  I'm curious how Venus's direction is decided, since everything I can find claims it has no magnetic field (except one generated in the atmosphere). Given that: how do you define what rotational-pole is "north", to derive east/west? Or is it not based on a planet's qualities, in which case it's likely something solar, and then what would Uranus' "north" (or east) be?
  - mcphage 5y ago
    Looking at it from above, wouldn’t one way be a clockwise rotation, and the other be a counterclockwise rotation?
    - retsibsi 5y ago
      Depends on which 'above' you're looking from though, right? (edit: that wasn't meant to be obnoxiously rhetorical, just to signal that I might be messing up the visualisation myself.) If the planet is rotating around the axis from pole to pole, then from above one pole (or anywhere that side of the equator) the rotation will appear clockwise, from above the other pole it will appear anticlockwise, and from directly above the equator it will just be 'left' or 'right' (or forward or back) depending on your orientation. edit: perhaps from directly above the equator you would still consider the spin to be clockwise or anticlockwise -- but which one would depend on your orientation.

Telemakhos 5y ago

A list of complaints about "mistakes" or "blunders" (as the author chooses to call these details) is not the same thing as a taxonomy. Taxonomies put things into some sort of order (τάξις); this is just a list of things the author does not like.

leoc 5y ago
Well, there's one degree of hierarchial classification.
anigbrowl 5y ago
Hence 'towards' in the title, which is an academic way of saying you have compiled a to-do list of things to study more carefully.

geuis 5y ago

I appreciate the direction Charlie is going with these lists. The best creativity tends to come from restricted/limited choices. By making a general list of stereotypes and tropes ahead of time, it will help to come up with unique ideas or to selectively pick the trope of choice to advance the story.

amyjess 5y ago

> This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes > Common blunders > many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome Referring to deliberate artistic choices as "mistakes" or "blunders" is in extremely poor taste. It's equivalent to attacking a stick figure comic for not adhering to rigorous details of human anatomy, and it makes me want to avoid any of Stross's work in the future.

mcphage 5y ago
Some of these are deliberate artistic choices, but often they’re just included without even being thought about. That seems to be the value in a list like this: even if you pick the same thing as almost everyone else, at least you’re aware of it enough for it to be even a choice.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

lmilcin 5y ago

Entire list is a little bit forced. I love sci-fi and have been reading or listening to it almost every day for over 30 years, and most of these I don't even remember ever encountering or being a problem. Also, remember, the point of a good book is an interesting story. Since we are already talking about aliens and space travel, we are already assuming some scientific facts are at least bent to serve the story. Some examples: > Plate tectonics is easily ignored, unless the plot requires a Volcano/Earthquake Most planets do not have plate tectonics. And even if it does, why is it important to not ignore it when your story is about something completely different? > Planetary ring systems are picturesque, not dangerous They are not dangerous. It is not like it will go out of its way to kill you. Entire mass of the ring system is usually in very thin, small bands. Just avoid crossing those and you are fine. > You can change orbital inclination easily Of course you can. If you can easily travel to other stars, changing inclination should not be a problem. > New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies Maybe resort colonies are not fun to write about. Actually... Star Trek TNG has a bunch of episodes about Risa, which is a whole fricking fully climate-controlled resort planet. Why are you expecting parity on everything? Do you think there should be more fiction about garbage men than private detectives? After all, there is many more of them. > Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value Actually, I feel like most of stories do not have anything about money. A writer makes a choice. If everybody made choice to create world without money, would you be nitpicking about it, too? > Inflation? What is this, I don't even ... > Deflation? What will they think of next? > Sales tax? What's that? > Income tax? What's that? Now you are being silly. Are we still talking about science fiction or would you rather make every author include thousands of pages of explanations on every topic from physics to biology to economics to whatever else you are bitchin is not included there. And why do you assume economy can't exist without any or all of these things? At some time in the past we had thriving economy without inflation/deflation or sales or income taxes.

SkyMarshal 5y ago
> Actually, I feel like most of stories do not have anything about money. A writer makes a choice. If everybody made choice to create world without money, would you be nitpicking about it, too? The Star Trek TNG formulation for this is that scarcity of everything was eliminated with the invention of matter-energy conversion technology, along with limitless energy-generation tech like matter-antimatter reactors. In a universe where all advanced civilizations can convert energy into food, clothes, equipment, etc, and energy is effectively limitless, at least relative to human needs, then money becomes obsolete and people no longer use it for anything. At least one episode covers it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg I've always assumed any other post-scarcity sci-fi adapts the same premise - unlimited energy + matter-energy conversion = money is non-existent.

nradov 5y ago

For authors looking to write realistic space opera the Atomic Rockets site is a great resource. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php

asymptosis 5y ago

> Because primates are a universal deterministic outcome of evolution on all worlds In all fairness, if you think of the constraints required for a species to become space-faring, you're going to be hard-pressed to make it work with an organism which isn't at least a bit like us. 1. You can't be a marine organism, because developing advanced technology requires combustion, and water isn't something you want to be carting into space with you. 2. You need a musculoskeletal system which can support a large brain. For non-marine organisms, this implies something with a big head on top of an upright stance. 3. Having a surplus of limbs is contraindicated for large organisms. Large limbs are expensive to build, and larger organisms are more constrained by gravity than surface tension, which makes multiple limbs less useful. 4. You need appendages for manipulating tools, and voices to debate and share ideas. 5. To develop non-trivial intelligence, you need to be multicellular, and multicellular organisms need to be able to reproduce. So, there is probably going to be sex involved, along with all the complexity that goes along with that, such as sexual competition and selection, caring for the young, and all the politics that arise from these kinds of interactions. Putting these constraints together, you don't have too many options for aliens which are both realistic and interesting enough to build a story around. Your aliens are either: * Bipedal politickers. * Robots. * Not capable of building something we would recognize as technology or civilization.

fouc 5y ago
technology or civilization doesn't require our recognition, it exists or not regardless. Our combustion-based technology is rather a fluke of having a huge amount of one-time crude oil reserves. Other planets won't necessarily have that.
- asymptosis 5y ago
  We're talking about fiction. If you can't recognize it as technology or civilization, how do you plan to write about it? As for combustion, indeed, other planets may not have it. So how do you propose that they would start to develop a technology which would lead to building spaceships?
  - 5y ago

kragen 5y ago

It's always funny to me to see Charlie's blog these days, but kind of sad. So much of it comes down to "there's nothing new under the sun," which is so disappointing coming from someone who used to be one of the most imaginative authors around.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago
The blog entry is from 2016.
- kragen 5y ago
  By "these days" I mean since about 02010.

javajosh 5y ago

Oh come on Charlie! At any level of abstraction, nothing is new. But stories aren't abstractions; they're fundamentally about people, emotions, and reactions. "Oh geez, another story set in WW2 London," said no-one, ever. Heck, I challenge you: go through all of the Black Mirror episodes and write a story that, rather than emphasizing the worst, most cruel and horrific outcome of the setting, does the opposite. It's not the idea that makes the story, it's the people. It's the emotions. Imagine a close-up on a door-knob. It begins to turn. The door creaks.... What do you feel? Portent? Eagerness? Fear? What about a door-knob turning is unique? It's like human faces. They (mostly) have eyes, a mouth, nose, lips, etc. But a few are extraordinarily nice to look at, even though they really only have those same things. Stories are like that. They've got to have plots, characters, (and in SF) presumptions about the world, but the extraordinary ones don't need a new kind of orifice, a new kind of sensor. They present something extraordinary with the thingies we already have. No-one ever said about a super-model, "Oh her? She's just got eyes and a nose and lips. Nothing new..."

Retric 5y ago
The issue is people get used to repeated stimulus. Trench warfare is about as stressful as things get, yet eventually soldiers would nap and play card games while being shelled. For science fiction you need enough familiarity for people to care without becoming stale. Which generally means copying from other science fiction to the point where people just accept things like planets with uniform weather and ecosystems.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
It's not about newness; it's about things that are obviously wrong when one thinks about it, like space combat being just like WW1 / WW2 naval warfare except with spacecraft. Mr. Stross is musing over whether it's possible to do space opera without omitting the "science" part of "science fiction".
- javajosh 5y ago
  Interesting take, because it read to me like he was enumerating SF ideas in an attempt to not repeat them. Avoiding implausibility is a worthy goal for SF - to do otherwise is to write fantasy in science-fiction clothing.

atonalfreerider 5y ago

This describes Star Citizen to a T

kbob 5y ago

This is from 2016. Did Charlie end up writing the space opera he was mulling?

Causality1 5y ago

Fascinating, it's like an article from a parallel universe where TVTropes never existed.

Animats 5y ago

Scale is often a problem. Not just in the usual planetary/interplanetary/interstellar distance sense. But in civilizations. The "spaceport in the middle of a desert with a lot of ship traffic" is something of a cliche. Why are they there? What are they hauling? Why is there no groundside freight operation and ground transportation? This also comes in the "space station in the middle of nowhere" form. There's also organizational scale. Problems which would be dealt with at some low level make it up to Emperor level when they involve the protagonist. This applies to both businesses and governments. This is tied to the "chosen one" mindset. Star Wars was way too influential in this area. Disney/Pixar is way too into that. You don't see "worked their way up through the ranks" much.

sircastor 5y ago

This reads a bit like someone who wants to write hard sci-fi and has been asked to write space opera. I feel like the point of space opera is the setting. The hand waving is almost a component of the genre. Your audience doesn’t need you to explain why the blerf doesn’t affect the blorf. They excuse it.

kybernetikos 5y ago
He wants to achieve something in the same ballpark as what Iain M Banks achieved, and rightly thinks that's going to be hard and take a bunch of thought. Lots of writers care about their craft, and are not pursuing the minimum that their audience will let them get away with, but rather have specific things or innovations they are looking to achieve. > The hand waving is almost a component of the genre. I take this post as asking "but what if it weren't".

stuartbman 5y ago

I think this could be balanced within the Mohs scale of sci fi hardness [1]. Sure there can be some hand-waving 'magic pixie dust' where you need to advance the technology to match the story, but many space operas choose a single limitation and do a deep-dive into it. Iain M Banks does this an awful lot in the culture series. 1. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

This reduces to "Space Opera is 1950s/60s US TV in Space" Which is almost tautological. It's very difficult to do free-form SF that isn't rooted in familiar cultural tropes because readers need something relatable to stand on. Something like Dune is probably as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the world. It has exotic elements - drug-producing giant worms, drug-induced space navigation, and so on - but it's really just a novel about colonisation and imperial politics. Everything - including the worms, the spice, the fremen, and the BG - is a metaphor for different vectors of power. If you wrote a novel where humans were a kind of cancerous fruiting body evolved by an intelligent forest - not too far from the truth, in a very lateral way - it would be far too weird for most readers because it would be too distant from familiar experience. Carping about hard SF details is beside the point, even when the points are valid. It's trying to turn fiction into engineering, which is not what fiction is for. Most readers don't give extra points for build-ability in SF, and if they did writers would be left with a very small imaginative space to explore - the one we have now, where everything is chemical rockets and budgeting.