What is it that science fiction readers (and writers) like about the genre? Is it that we escape the bounds of the familiar? Does it somehow excite us more if the villain shoots a laser, or a blaster at the hero instead of a 9mm? If the hero is driving an FTL (faster than light) cruiser instead of a BMW does that add to the interest in what he thinks to himself? If an android or a robot murders a politician instead of an antifa terrorist, does it make the killing more psychologically significant?
Maybe it’s the sense that we can get at the heart of things if we aren’t trapped in the ordinariness of the here and now. If the bad guys have capture not just a subway train but the whole Milky Way galaxy maybe we feel like we are dealing more with absolutes. Stark choices cry out for decisions. In the face of real evil, we will have clarity.
Or maybe it’s just the desire for freedom. Advanced technology provides the writer with mechanisms that simplify and clean up the story line. If the writer has painted himself into a corner in his narrative there’s no need to re-write the problem. Just pull out a heaping helping of unobtanium and leap over the obstacle with perfect ease.
Of course that can lead to some cheesy results. Probably 90+% of time travel stories fall into this category. By the end of the story the protagonist is busy murdering a dozen temporal versions of himself on his way to reclaim his life in the here and now. Heinlein did his “All You Zombies” short story all those years back but I’ve never gotten on board with all that jazz.
Maybe the thing I like about it as a storyteller is the way it allows you to build the story outward. You can start with a future world that has interplanetary travel and terra-forming and then at some critical juncture an alien race possessing FTL capability can show up and upend this whole fictional world. Or maybe it’s a species that just floats through space at galactic rotational speed but can live indefinitely in vacuum and when it reaches a new solar system it infects these new worlds and eradicates all other forms of life and then moves on to spread to the next system. Or maybe a small black hole is drifting into the solar system and will destroy the Earth and Sun unless some new force can be brought to bear against this irresistible force of nature. Or, or, or…
Of course, the danger is in pulling too many rabbits out of your hat. You can’t have small black holes, cosmic plagues and FTL aliens showing up all in the same week. At least not respectably. The days of the cliff hanger are long past their prime and unless you’re serializing your book by the chapter, surprise technology needs to be believable and can’t be hauled on stage just in the nick of time.
The reason for this topic is that I was just considering the other day a subplot where the underground technology that my protagonist possesses could accidentally discover a space ship that was buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. It would allow me to add new facets to the story but I’m afraid it will complicate and confuse the story too much. I think I will leave that for a later story in the same world. But I have to confess it’s fun to toy with what can be done with that kind of addition. It would be amazing.
Well, another time.
Fiction plotted in the present has so many constraints, social norms, technological, moral, legal, etc., that must be paid at least lip service. Without all the constraints inking in the borders, Sci-Fi can be clean sheet in every respect.
Well said.