Environment plus culture equals a story world

This week I was reading a Sarah Galo article in The Guardian about Margaret Attwood.  She was reporting on Attwood's recent talk at the Book Riot Convention in New York.

Attwood said in that talk that her birth year had influenced her world view.  That sounds like an innocuous comment, until you learn that she was born in 1939.  So the first few years of her life took place against the backdrop of the Second World War.  It's no wonder that her birth year has influenced her world view.

As a science fiction writer, most of my work is a comment on various aspects of my current society and culture,  usually I'm pointing out the dangers of human overbreeding, or some aspect of how humans are affecting other creatures on the planet.  I'm very clear about my beliefs and values.  They've come into sharp relief in the last five years or so as I've examined the events of my life and begun to figure out how they all fit together.

But, of course, I'vs focused on my personal history to come to my view of the world.  And Attwood's comments reminded me that personal history isn't the full story.  As individuals, we are placed in the middle of a societal group, a culture, and we live in a specific geopolitical region.  And all those things influence how we see the world and what we focus on in it.

I was born after the Second World War, In England.  I've lived there all my life, and I've been fortunate not to have been forced to lived through a war that affected me.  England has been a peaceful country for all my life.  And my immediate family have no connection to the military and haven't been affected by the wars we've been caught up in in other lands.

And this peace has worked its way through into my literature world.  I'm often reluctant to read - and certainly don't want to write - military SF.  The world of the services isn't one I understand, not do I want to.  My background explains why my protagonists are never military, and why my heroines are usually civilians working away from areas where war is raging.

I'm one of the lucky ones who has never suffered in a war.  And that peace has engendered hope in me that humans will find a bigger peace as a species.  So, for me, no dystopian wandering in a ruined world.  My characters are out rebuilding that world, adding essential hope to the story.