: Re: Sci-fi change: Too much or Not enough I am in the process of editing a short story. It is science fiction of the "if this goes on" kind: I take a social trend I see, and paint its event

@Odierno164

you are weakening your argument by presenting the extreme edge of the phenomenon you wish to engage with rather than its mainstream.


That can be true, at one extreme (IRL) people get out and picket a studio for canceling a favorite series, calling for boycotts. The mainstream says, "Damn, I liked that show. Too bad," and moves on. But once in a while the 1% on the picket line win, by scaring the studio, or reversing an arbitrary decision, or whatever, and in that case, the extreme has an impact on the mainstream: The series comes back from the dead, perhaps for a final season, perhaps longer.

You need to show in your story why the extreme matters to the mainstream, how the extreme pulls it, or causes hardships for it, or creates guilt for it.

For example, climate refugees, fleeing starvation or drought or widespread crop failure and starvation, have impacts by flooding other countries with refugees, past the breaking point of their capacity to care for any more. What happens then becomes a matter for the "mainstream", a lot of complacent people that are not refugees but suddenly feel overwhelmed by them. That leads to a rise of nationalism, bigotry, racial or religious prejudice, and that in turn can have a counter-push of tolerance and altruism and seeking answers to the problem, and all of that can play out in politics that affects everyone.

It doesn't take a lot of poison to infect the whole body.


This is not enough. If you give that phenomenon free reign, it would go much further, get much worse than what you present.


Well, that could be a simple misunderstanding. Nearly all natural phenomenon have some braking mechanism. Imagine a company starting out, say a restaurant chain. A few good places have grown at exponential rates, doubling the number of outlets every year. But even if their profit structure supports that, it won't continue indefinitely, because the market is not infinitely large. It is going to level off someday, so will their revenue, and their profit.

The USA grew rapidly, but it leveled off, before we even took Canada and Mexico.

Look for the braking mechanism. It may even be the death of everybody, but there is likely some limit, somewhere. We have physical braking mechanisms, and emotional braking mechanisms (revolution, war, crimes of desperation), and political braking mechanisms, and "scientific" braking mechanisms -- even though some things are theoretically physically possible, we haven't been able to scientifically figure out how to do it. You might call that a cognitive braking mechanism, our ability to innovate and come up with new stuff can only go so far. We have that problem with fundamental physics right now, the theories of physics have been stalled over forty years, since the 70s.

By explaining the braking mechanism, you make it plausible that no, your phenomenon isn't occurring in a vacuum and will not accelerate forever, it is interacting with other things (dependent on or affecting) that will sooner or later slow it down. Nothing, ever, goes to infinity. (But many things can decline to zero.)

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