Article - SFF World Building

For those of a creative writerly bent, the Gnu brings you an interesting article on creating SF worlds from SFF.net. The emphasis here is on SF rather than Fantasy with the onus on facts, planets, "the future" and other technological wizardry. A word of warning - its written by a published SF author so is a little on the heavy side but if you can get past "SF is that class of Fantastic Literature where this divergence is the result of a rational extrapolation of a change in the writer's reality" then you'll enjoy this little nugget.

Wired article - Gnu clambers onto soapbox

The Gnu's favourite geek-rag has an outstanding article this month entitled Take the red book: Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

The basic premise of the article is that modern contemporary fiction is just recycling the same themes over and over again within the confines of the reality in which it is based. For example - can you honestly recal the title of the last contemporary novel that you read that was about someone working in a large city and hating their job? how about the one before that? As anyone who works in a big city and hates their job will tell you - reality is dull and limiting. As the article states "And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality."

Clive Thompson argues that it is only in the genre of SFF that we can leave the confines of reality and actually discuss some of the deeper socio-philiosophical issues that are of real interest and relevance in the contemporary world.

Thompson believes the reason for this is that the main audience for SFF is the teen market - with most readers "growing out of" fantasy. Is this a sad reflection on society that we are beating the imagination our of people only to replace it with bland, despressing navel-gazing that fails to connect with us on a deeper level?

I think Thompson is right - you shouldn't need "books [....] adorned with embossed dragons" to look at alternative interpretations of reality. This is something that the urban fantasy genre has been pegging away at recently - you only have to look at Neil Gaiman or Jim Butcher's work to see that. Surely by turning to the unreal - we can gain a more realistic perspective?

Reality, after all, is subjective.