Writer's Blog 2010-07-11

Well its been another month since I've posted here. Never seem to get to it, as I've said before and probably will say again, but the question is: Is their anybody there? Anybody but my brother reading this. If you exist leave a message ideas for a story that you'd like to see.

Writing is a strange old thing and I have found an interesting phenomenon recently - it is easier to be creative, in science fiction, the further from today you are writing. Let me show you what I mean. It depends when the story is set.

2110: We probably won't have FLT - we might have met aliens. (OK those might me contradictory) - probably have landed, if not have some sort of colony on mars.

2210: The 2200s are where Babylon 5 is set (2258-2262) will we have that level of technology?

2310: The century of TNG and such. They have all sorts of wacky technologies we can conceive of today - How do the transporters work? Very well thank you.

Can't think of a sci-fi set in the twenty-fifth century. Just looked it up - Buck Rogers - but I know nothing about it.

2510: The approximate setting of Firefly. No aliens of FLT but they do have artificial gravity. But then Firefly, though a great series don't get me wrong, isn't about being in space as such.

So across these centuries different authors have had different ideas of the future. Some are just telling a story. So science doesn't matter at all. JMS however has said that B5 is an achieved future - its part of the idea.

Roddenberry wasn't the best of writers, sorry, but conceived an excellent universe. Star Trek was always more about the people than the science. That to presents problems as a writer. Do you take the US, or Royal, Navy and put them in space, traditions, ranks and everything or do you not?

For some reason the year 2344 called to me as the setting for my science fiction. But we know a lot now - whats possible and what isn't possible. Some how the twenty-four century feels to me like a time where one has to consider the real world.

Somehow a story set in the year 3000 feels like you could have all the freedom you could want. Its far enough away that modern ideas have transformed. Military ranks for one thing. I've been devising a list of ranks for my stories military trying to make it smiler to today. But all the nations I've researched have their own ideas and most seem to make sense on some level.

There are no answers to how to write science fiction. Setting a story in 3000 has its own problems. Will the shopping mall in our town still exist for instance or will it just all be ordered online.

Of course none of us will know but one thing all science fictions seem to have in common is that for some things they are way off, i.e there is no hint of us developing warp drive by the end of the century - but they can also be off in the other direction. We have better data storage devices that the...

"Enterprise...1 7 0 1, no bloody A,B,C or D," Montgomery Scott - Relics