I need "Let yourself cook" on my wall. In some ways, it is already well established in my brain. I haven't written just about anything since I finished by game in early June, and I persisted in not doing it even as I was feeling guilty. Now it's starting to pay off, as projects that were a month ago intimidating begin to look interesting again, and I find myself drawn back to the keyboard :)
Both of those space opera sounds great! I appreciate a morally ambiguous 23rd century vision -- maybe less narratively powerful than something (on the extremes) something like Star Trek or Fallout, but likely much more realistic. I do wonder to what extend some of the eschatology that one reads online is rooted in our generation having read a lot of scifi where history has resolved to some terminal (from a current human perspective) state. It's harder, but more true, to remember that no matter the Horrible Dumpster Fire that is happening today, the likely outcome is not dystopia but rather a shittier, worse world, where billions of people still survive and make art and are happy. And, conversely, that if one were to put out the Dumpster Fire, the result would not be gleaming utopia but just a slightly more pleasant version of the same world.
Venkatesh Rao has an essay somewhere about what he calls "hackstability", the tendency of social systems to neither hit escape velocity into paradise, nor to utterly collapse: thinking about it this way, science fictional predictions of utopia and dystopia are part of the psychological "balancing", wobbling between different extremes as we try to find a working path. It does, though, seem to me that civilizations do fail or fall apart--there are collapses that are seen and understood as collapses at the time. (Thinking about records of the Black Death years, for instance...) And yet... things do go on.
I need "Let yourself cook" on my wall. In some ways, it is already well established in my brain. I haven't written just about anything since I finished by game in early June, and I persisted in not doing it even as I was feeling guilty. Now it's starting to pay off, as projects that were a month ago intimidating begin to look interesting again, and I find myself drawn back to the keyboard :)
Both of those space opera sounds great! I appreciate a morally ambiguous 23rd century vision -- maybe less narratively powerful than something (on the extremes) something like Star Trek or Fallout, but likely much more realistic. I do wonder to what extend some of the eschatology that one reads online is rooted in our generation having read a lot of scifi where history has resolved to some terminal (from a current human perspective) state. It's harder, but more true, to remember that no matter the Horrible Dumpster Fire that is happening today, the likely outcome is not dystopia but rather a shittier, worse world, where billions of people still survive and make art and are happy. And, conversely, that if one were to put out the Dumpster Fire, the result would not be gleaming utopia but just a slightly more pleasant version of the same world.
Venkatesh Rao has an essay somewhere about what he calls "hackstability", the tendency of social systems to neither hit escape velocity into paradise, nor to utterly collapse: thinking about it this way, science fictional predictions of utopia and dystopia are part of the psychological "balancing", wobbling between different extremes as we try to find a working path. It does, though, seem to me that civilizations do fail or fall apart--there are collapses that are seen and understood as collapses at the time. (Thinking about records of the Black Death years, for instance...) And yet... things do go on.