It's about the people, stupid

One of the things that sets modern SF apart from a lot of the so-called Golden Age writing is its focus on people instead of pure ideas, or on one piece of shiny new tech.  Sure, there may still be grand ideas at the bottom of a story, but today that story is far more likely to explore the way that tech affects the people who come into contact with it.  And show those effects through their eyes,

This is far more my kind of SF.  It means I can use tech in a story without having to be a scientist, and without knowing every last detail of how that tech works,  I can just use it in my story to carry out social experiments.  I can use it to poke and prod at human civilisation and culture, and work out how people react to other beings and ways of being,

I stumbled across Karen Traviss's Halo: Kilo-Five books recently.  On the face of it, they're pure military SF.  The main characters are a black-ops unit operating after a multi-species, intergalactic war.  But it's what Karen has done with this bunch of characters that's so magical.  Tough shock troops who'd never turn a hair about killing dozens of the enemy are torn up about the injustice of what happened to young children who were kidnapped and turned into enhanced  super-soldiers.  It's an exploration of the fall-out from tech big time.  Another of Karen's characters is BB, an artificial intelligence.  He tries to claim that he's not becoming human, but he's more human than some of the human characters, right  down to the ability to love others.  And she can even make us empathise with a terrorist.

Naomi Foyle's Astra books are an exploration of ecological issues,  but they're seen through the eyes of a girl who doesn't fit in to their strict regime.  Her story becomes a very personal quest to find her exiled father.  What drives her is that most basic need to know herself and where she came from.

I've taken lessons from these books in my own Genehunter.  My main character Aris is on a journey to find out why a bioship has been sent covertly to Deon.  But there's a personal connection to her quest.  Her father was piloting the ship, and she doesn't know if he's still alive.  Her story becomes a very personal one of going to find her father.

And in the end it's the people who populate our worlds, the people who use the shiny tech, who give our story it's substance and heart.  And if we're really lucky, we might have challenged a reader and persuaded them to change their views on an issue.  We might have got them to see things our way.  Now that's the real power of story-telling.  In the end it's about the people.