From: seawasp@sgeinc.invalid.com   
      
   	Dorothy asked me to post stuff on writing, so I figured why not! Maybe   
   people will actually use this group! And I have some articles that   
   appeared on my site that are appropriate...   
      
      
      
   	I've written, to this point, five hard-SF novels, with two more on the   
   way – the Boundary Series (Boundary, Threshold, Portal), the Castaway   
   Planet novels (Castaway Planet, Castaway Odyssey, and forthcoming   
   Castaway Peril), and one tentatively titled Fenrir. As hard-SF novels, I   
   worked hard to make these stories as accurate-to-known-science as I   
   could, within the limits of dramatic necessity and the need to not bore   
   my readers with calculations and details that they didn't really want.   
      
   	But even within hard-SF, the author has to make a lot of choices about   
   what they depict. And contrary to many people's surface impressions, a   
   hard-SF author is (generally) not trying to predict the future; they're   
   trying to tell a cool story set in *A* future – not, in virtually   
   certain likelihood, our future or one terribly like it.   
      
   	"But why? I thought hard-SF was supposed to extrapolate into our future!"   
      
   	Well… yes. Sort of. Sometimes. We're telling stories, and the core of   
   most hard-SF stories is "what if" – we ask a question of something that   
   we think is possible, and then build a story around it. Sometimes, yes,   
   that is an extrapolation of technology or social change or whatever that   
   we're looking at… but almost always we're then going to be following it   
   to a focused conclusion. That is, for the sake of a good story, we're   
   not going to look at the slow progression of a set of consequences from   
   one new technology and examine how the whole civilization that we know   
   progresses in the meantime; we're going to drive the extrapolation   
   strongly, to its ultimate conclusion, and preferably in a way that   
   allows a small number of characters to be involved in that conclusion.   
      
   	So in Boundary the question is "what if aliens DID visit us back in the   
   age of the Dinosaurs… and had a real nasty argument about who owned the   
   local real estate?" This question and its answer lead to the action of   
   the Boundary series that spans a large chunk of the solar system, with   
   most of the same characters staying involved in the key actions.   
      
   	Is this likely? Of course not! To tell a fun story, I have to make   
   things that are very unlikely to happen… seem inevitable within the   
   context of the story. To an extent, choosing the way in which I answered   
   that question helped. I allowed there to be some extensive, significant,   
   and pretty-well-preserved remains of the alien presence which made it   
   important for people to get to them and examine them, in a detail and   
   with flexibility that no automated probes would be likely to accomplish   
   in anything like the timeframe needed.   
      
   	For space-setting hard-SF, that bit – "automated probes" – is a real   
   problem. I provided a sequence using automated probe exploration in   
   Boundary, when A. J. Baker's "Faeries" explore Ceres and make a key   
   discovery, and it was pretty interesting as a one-off. But in general,   
   people like stories about people in space – even if, being honest, it's   
   getting less and less necessary to send people out. Aside from making   
   those automated probes into functional AIs (i.e., "people" like WALL-E   
   or R2-D2 or C-3PO who just happen to be metal), the reader's not going   
   to have the same connection with an automated rover as they would over a   
   person.   
      
   	Thus, a hard-SF author may have to ignore the basic fact that most   
   outer-space exploration work isn't going to be done by human beings;   
   machines can survive in worse environments, tolerate more acceleration,   
   withstand all kinds of abuse, don't require food and water… and don't   
   have friends and family at home who will be devastated if they die. And,   
   as time goes on, those probes will be more and more capable, rather than   
   the current devices that can't move faster than a slow walk and need   
   constant instruction modifications to do their jobs well. It takes very   
   special circumstances (like those I invented in Boundary) to justify   
   sending "naked apes in a can" into deep space.   
      
   	Automation and intelligent systems have an even greater impact in other   
   areas; in Grand Central Arena I follow some of the current research to   
   logical conclusions that result in what amounts to a post-scarcity   
   society where few people have anything resembling a "job" and people are   
   mostly independent entities from almost everything (very little   
   significant government, etc.); what "work" people do is something that   
   they WANT to do, that's FUN for them.   
      
   	This unfortunately makes for a difficult-to-grasp environment; many   
   people either have a hard time understanding it, or simply don't believe   
   it could work. And in the latter case they may be completely right, for   
   various reasons.   
      
   	Such advances, however, also can be very bad for maintaining drama. The   
   modern reader understands the idea of needing a job, of working at some   
   particular task or in some specific category, and keeping at least some   
   of that element present provides a good anchor for the reader as they   
   encounter more outré elements of the story.   
      
   	Moreover, with super-AIs to do everything for you, and replicator-type   
   technology to give you all the "stuff" you want, the setting is kinda   
   boring, potentially. So in the Arenaverse I make it so that a lot of   
   that stuff DOESN'T WORK because the Arena's rules are set up to force   
   *people* -- of all species -- to do the work.   
      
   	This kind of thing applies even in hard-SF. In the Castaway series, for   
   example, I not only disable all sorts of automated technology to keep   
   our castaways in a position to be "castaway", I also deliberately ignore   
   the likely level of advancement of even the most casual devices these   
   people have with them.   
      
   	Castaway Planet takes place about 150-200 years after Portal, and   
   Boundary itself takes place about 30 years in the future, with Portal   
   ending 13 years later. So even taking the lower estimate, that's almost   
   two hundred years in the future. Yet all the devices they use are ones   
   not only based on known science, they're ones whose functions are   
   extrapolations of things that we're already working on. Two hundred   
   years ago, it was 1817; the United States had barely started on its path   
   to becoming a significant country, guns were still one-shot   
   powder-patch-and-ball affairs, long-range signaling used flags or fire,   
   and electricity was a curiosity.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)