Why Does Fiction Like to Create Worlds Set in the Future?
Theo Macklin It is commonly held that all books published can be permanently and certainly defined into one of man’s favourite systems of classification: true or false; non-fiction or fiction. After entering the latter of these two amorphous definitions the boundaries cloud and the two self-declaring factions of Sci-fi and Fantasy emerge. One of the ways this is achieved is by the partitioning by timeframes: Fantasy inhabiting a never land- never been and never will be and Sci-fi: the might have been or the, scarier yet, might be. The reason for the creation of stories in the future yet still varies by the subject or style of story. So we, therefore, should tackle them as reasons just as independent as the tales themselves. The type of universe such stories are set in can be broken down into three separate regions with their own justifications for existence: Hard science-fiction, Soft science-fiction and Dystopias. Hard Sci-fi is defined as the type of story where the laws of physics are strictly obeyed and real world considerations taken fully into account. The simplest justification for setting a story in this accurate future is that the reader can be fully immersed in the, although unknown, understood scene that the author is painting. The difficulty with this argument is that often filling a book with science and the perfect explanation for all occurrences is that, other than being a drag to read, there is no space left for the reader to use imagination and experience the story for themselves. For this reason this category becomes a scarce commodity as striking the balance between truth and wonder is a skill reserved to the likes of Clarke, Asimov and Robinson. The true purpose or hard Sci-fi is far more than perfectionism though; another explanation for this appealing tendency to create a realistic future is to act as a forum to express ideas is a huge range of fields. For example; Arthur C. Clarke introduced such a potent concept for orbital construction that, in his honour, he now has a field of astro-engineering named after him. This form of discussion thus has proven its worth due to the freedoms that the future holds over the limitations and cynicisms introduced by a novel set either in a fantasy or alternative history. A feature appealing to this genre, also, is that the author has the power to justify him/herself and receive more patience than that of any less accurate kind of fiction. The power to create an invention in hard Sci-fi that defies current perceptions of physics, chemistry or biology is treated with less contempt thanks to the integration with hard evidential material of the rest of the story. This outrageous contraption benefits from the perplexity induced around it by the juxtaposition, suggesting that there are things beyond current human understanding and that, perhaps, some such things should be sought out. As said by Clarke again in his famous second law: ‘The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.’ My final point on this topic, however, is that hard science-fiction is another rung in the ladder of learning that we all constantly climb. True science can inspire. To a huge extent its influence is designed to enrapture the next generation of scientists-cum- Sci-fi writers. In a similar way, in 1984(unrelated to the book) a revolutionary video game, Elite, was released- a technical revolution- and its creator David Braben was, in 2014, awarded an OBE for his work which had acted to kick start for the British computer science industry. Thus in this way hard science-fiction acts as an inspiration for a generation of new scientists; a feat that would not be accomplished had authors’ work been set in the past with the limitations of the science of history. Hard Science-Fiction
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