How big is your universe?

Deciding on the world of our story is one of the first decisions we have to make.  How big is your universe going to be ?

Although SF gives us the universe to play in, we need to reduce it to a scale that humans can relate to.  This might mean a series of scenes on different Earth-like rocky planets.  Or if we're in a hostile environment like the atmosphere of a gas giant, we're going to need a place of safety with familiar tech around us.

If we choose to travel across the universe, most of us choose to send our characters in some kind of physical spaceship.  We create a home away from home for them out in the icy, inky depths of interstellar space.  One of my favourite series is C J Cherryh's Chanur series, where most of the action is set in and around the interstellar trading ship The Pride of Chanur.  One of my favourite moments is where a starship of a rival Hani family comes into the system with its drive destroyed and can't stop.  Cherryh describes how crews of other ships, even when they're of different species, immediately go to rescue the crew.  Cherryh's description of how devastating the loss of the ship is to the crew has stuck with me for years.  "Home and life to the Faha crew".  Such a short phrase, but so full of meaning.

Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war series takes us jumping all over the universe, but we see each scene through the eyes of the viewpoint character.  Her canvas is the universe, but made manageable through the human viewpoints.  People are scattered on many planets, but they still need to eat, trade, sleep.  The broad canvas is anchored through the familiar actions of human everyday living.

Near or far, settings can be as big as we like - or as small.  How big your universe is is shaped by your story, and by what the characters do in it.

Age in SF stories

I recently challenged a comment on Twitter where the writer was focused on getting young people into an SF convention.  My response was "why is everything focused towards the young?"  Being a woman of a certain age, I often find this focus insulting.

It's got me thinking about age in SF stories.  One of my favourite characters, Pyanfar Chanur, is a wily starship trading captain.  She's not young, and her age gives her the wisdom and the nerve to steer a very tricky course through the interstellar politics and warmongering of several species.  She wouldn't have survived five minutes against the mercenary Kif if she wasn't older and wiser.

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population features an older woman as the heroine of the story.  She's not well educated, and she gets left behind when the colony is lifted off the planet.  She uses her age and her wisdom to make contact with and get along with the indigenous aliens.

Androids can often live fantastically long lives in SF stories, so can AIs. Philip Reeve's Stalkers from his Mortal Engines series of books are ancient tech, and even more terrifying for it.  Anne McCaffrey's Aivas from the Pern books is at least 2500 years old, and still functioning perfectly.

These stories provide a counterpoint and a challenge to our culture's present obsession with everything youth.  Older characters have seen this war before, they know how this menace was successfully tackled twenty years ago on some obscure frontier world.

Age gives us the chance to take the long view, to spot disturbing trends that might be emerging that somebody needs to do something about.  Is there a resurgence of piracy in one sector of space? Who remembers the old pirate Turek? Is this a new incarnation of an old conflict?  Older characters are memory-keepers, and memory and history are important for civilized societies.

FEM-SF AUTHOR'S RANT

Welcome to my blog, where I’ll be periodically ranting about the state of FEM-SF – or more likely the lack of it.

I got into reading the SF genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and for me this is the Golden Age of SF.  I was hooked by fabulous books like C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur Saga, Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed, Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen, Katherine Kerr’s Polar City Blues.   Real SF with real heroines.

So what happened?  Many of those authors have switched their allegiance to writing fantasy instead of true SF, and some of the others have switched to writing mainstream books.  Certainly when I go down to my local bookshop I see very little that I like on the SF shelves, and almost nothing by those authors that is contemporary SF.

It seems to me that SF publishers, both magazine and book, are still seduced by shiny technology at the expense of cultural exploration of how that technology impacts on the lives of humans.  And even more depressingly, the number of heroines in powerful roles seems to have shrunk.  What that means is the FEM-SF viewpoint is virtually non-existent.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the genre in the last decade or so.  I was brought up on Anne McCaffrey: brainships, telepathy, starship designers, colonists, all with strong female characters.  More recently I’ve got into Eizabeth Moon’s military SF.  But for several years now I haven’t seen anything that makes my heart sing written by female authors.

I want to see SF that challenges traditional family structures, that doesn’t reinforce the stereotype that all women want to breed, and that shows that some women don’t do sex either.  In other words, I want SF to reflect the variety of women’s experience in the real world today.

Edit this entry.