: Re: How do sci-fi stories hold up if their premise or details become discredited? I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi story that would resemble those written roughly 50-100 years

@Megan928

Vote Up Vote Down

Think up an alternate history and develop it logically - or parodically.

Take for example a more serious approach - Steampunk: Electricity never passed beyond "mad inventor" sphere, and world developed finding new miraculous fuels to power increasingly advanced steam engines; external combustion engines got more popular than internal combustion ones, chemistry (including biochemistry) took over in place where now electronic exists.

The flying contraptions and "death ray" devices are believable because our world never took that turn and we just don't know what could have been achievable. It has elegance, it has a somewhat believable background, it has some historical roots - people want to believe it.

Or pick the world of Fallout: the transistor never got past experimental stage. Electron lamps could be miniaturized a lot, but never to the point where transistors got; brains of dogs and monkeys were adapted as control systems of robots. Oil shortages widespread adaptation of nuclear power, including cars, trains, even handheld devices running on ubiquitous fission batteries. The Cold War shifted targets and escalated, but it took the sides a long time to "push the button". The style of 60s in the USA stayed in fashion, and "The American Way" was something the society clung to, fighting external influences.

Again, you suspend the disbelief of "Would people be this callous? With the precarious border between bravery and stupidity would they be capable of erring so far into the side of stupidity?" It's tongue-in-cheek, with consumerism and greedy capitalism drawn in parodistic thick strokes, like purposefully irradiated soft drinks to give them a glow (and kill dozens of "taste testers" before a formula with <1% mortality rate was developed)? It's not as believable, but the sarcastic humor helps to accept the story.

And so, if we take the authors of old, we can see how they believed the world could develop. Only rarely were their scientific theories of what's possible wrong. It's what they didn't foresee - inventions they failed to imagine - that caused our world to diverge and take current shape. Remove these inventions and you have an "alternate reality". By removing them, force progress in directions which are currently underdeveloped. Car engine has changed over past 100 years less than computers change in two or three years. Reverse that trend and you have a new - and believable world. And if it leads to ridiculous conclusions, lampshade them, embrace them, and let the reader smirk.

(0)

Login to post a comment!