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Future Story Tropes
6 years ago
While working on the space SF story "The Dream Of Aveire", the original commissioner pointed out that I'd done the same foolish thing I'd made fun of in other people's work: assume that in the future, everybody is obsessed with pop culture from the writer's own era. So I had a whole story arc where the heroine visits a fantasy land, and what characters does she meet? A knight on a dragon, and a kitsune mage.
Which raises the question: what interesting story concepts might become cliches in future fiction, in the same sense that people write about "cowboys" and "hackers" and "princesses", with about as much period accuracy at this? http://xkcd.com/771/
Some ideas:
-The Spanners: Patriots, technologists, drone operators, soldiers and protesters of the 21st century who upset the growing power of surveillance, globalization, and a variety of corporate cartels. These chaotic figures included everything from actual terrorists to gleeful hackers who menaced major banks and governments with a variety of illegal or just plain annoying tricks. The stories of the Spanners play up the heroic angle instead of the outlaw thugs, and tend to assume there was a lot more solidarity of goals than there really was. The typical Spanner character is a shaggy figure in a trenchcoat with a drone robot, a mask, yellow stripes, and a wrench insignia somewhere combined with two or three contradictory logo patches. (Think, "early 21st century protesters as written by someone who thinks the dudes with the hammer-and-sickle, the yellow vests, and the yellow rattlesnake flags were the same people, and were awesome hackers".) Stories about them include heist stories, rebellions, and plots to blow up the Internet.
-The Griffins: Early uploaders and AIs who operated frequently in the real world using robot bodies and teaming up with humans. They liked griffins for some reason. They're seen in fiction hunting the worst Spanners, rescuing abuse victims, preaching on behalf of the first AIs, treating plague victims, and protecting uploading centers. Their stories are often about the conflict between virtual paradise and real-world dangers; the current story's people play up the idea that they were heroic back then and then somehow retreated into their own little worlds. The stories make it look like they were almost all griffins in shape, and that their robot bodies were significantly more awesome than in reality.
-The Extra Men: Men from China who were unwanted at home, and went to Africa to serve their Party by taking gradual control of a whole continent. They're compared to cowboys, Cossacks, Boers, and the Chinese story "Outlaws Of the Marsh" (Suikoden) as romantic people who turned their back on their old home, the center of civilization, to get involved in a new adventure abroad. A typical Extra Man has a mix of anachronistic Chinese clothes and African fashion and is a gunslinger, a farmer, and a small businessman all in one, looking to get married and build a new society. Their stories are about the mix of national pride and the pull of a foreign land, and the conflict between individual honesty and the resentment the Men got for being colonizers. These stories usually ignore the fact that there were Extra Men coming from India, too.
-The Ceres Pirates: Oh, those wicked rock-hoppers who colonized and fought for control of the great icy asteroid! They nearly killed each other off completely before there was any semblence of peace, and even then there was all sorts of exciting spying and sabotage. Four countries and as many corporate or AI alliances were involved. Cybernetics, AI, and hardy biotech life were all used to gain dominance there, leaading to several disasters with self-replicating machines, mass drivers, fusion reactors, tailored plagues and hijacked ships. Any Ceres Pirate worth the name was a cyborg with at least one robotic limb and some sign of gengineering and scarring, always armed and watching his back. (In reality those disasters each happened at least once, but not regularly once per weekly episode.)
Which raises the question: what interesting story concepts might become cliches in future fiction, in the same sense that people write about "cowboys" and "hackers" and "princesses", with about as much period accuracy at this? http://xkcd.com/771/
Some ideas:
-The Spanners: Patriots, technologists, drone operators, soldiers and protesters of the 21st century who upset the growing power of surveillance, globalization, and a variety of corporate cartels. These chaotic figures included everything from actual terrorists to gleeful hackers who menaced major banks and governments with a variety of illegal or just plain annoying tricks. The stories of the Spanners play up the heroic angle instead of the outlaw thugs, and tend to assume there was a lot more solidarity of goals than there really was. The typical Spanner character is a shaggy figure in a trenchcoat with a drone robot, a mask, yellow stripes, and a wrench insignia somewhere combined with two or three contradictory logo patches. (Think, "early 21st century protesters as written by someone who thinks the dudes with the hammer-and-sickle, the yellow vests, and the yellow rattlesnake flags were the same people, and were awesome hackers".) Stories about them include heist stories, rebellions, and plots to blow up the Internet.
-The Griffins: Early uploaders and AIs who operated frequently in the real world using robot bodies and teaming up with humans. They liked griffins for some reason. They're seen in fiction hunting the worst Spanners, rescuing abuse victims, preaching on behalf of the first AIs, treating plague victims, and protecting uploading centers. Their stories are often about the conflict between virtual paradise and real-world dangers; the current story's people play up the idea that they were heroic back then and then somehow retreated into their own little worlds. The stories make it look like they were almost all griffins in shape, and that their robot bodies were significantly more awesome than in reality.
-The Extra Men: Men from China who were unwanted at home, and went to Africa to serve their Party by taking gradual control of a whole continent. They're compared to cowboys, Cossacks, Boers, and the Chinese story "Outlaws Of the Marsh" (Suikoden) as romantic people who turned their back on their old home, the center of civilization, to get involved in a new adventure abroad. A typical Extra Man has a mix of anachronistic Chinese clothes and African fashion and is a gunslinger, a farmer, and a small businessman all in one, looking to get married and build a new society. Their stories are about the mix of national pride and the pull of a foreign land, and the conflict between individual honesty and the resentment the Men got for being colonizers. These stories usually ignore the fact that there were Extra Men coming from India, too.
-The Ceres Pirates: Oh, those wicked rock-hoppers who colonized and fought for control of the great icy asteroid! They nearly killed each other off completely before there was any semblence of peace, and even then there was all sorts of exciting spying and sabotage. Four countries and as many corporate or AI alliances were involved. Cybernetics, AI, and hardy biotech life were all used to gain dominance there, leaading to several disasters with self-replicating machines, mass drivers, fusion reactors, tailored plagues and hijacked ships. Any Ceres Pirate worth the name was a cyborg with at least one robotic limb and some sign of gengineering and scarring, always armed and watching his back. (In reality those disasters each happened at least once, but not regularly once per weekly episode.)
V.
Groundhogs: Uploaders who solve the vexing problem of "after a century or so a simulated brain goes to pot because it just isn't evolved to last that long and hold that much information" by periodically rolling back to decades-old backups of their brain state. Maybe they start each life by carefully studying the history of each previous life; maybe they just don't care.
Fashion victims: Rich people who get increasingly-gaudy-and-implausible genetically-engineered bodies to outdo each other.
Cicadas: people who were uploaded on an emergency basis due to accidents and such, but who can't afford the hardware to have their brains continuously run; so they take turns on shared simulators, only getting a week or so every few years.
Wage slaves, definition 1: People who live in a post-scarcity economy where all of life's needs and wants are met for free, but who still have full-time jobs because they can't handle life without that structure.
Wage slaves, definition 2: People who are forced by desperation (or possibly for other reasons) to accept jobs that require heavy modification to both their bodies and their minds, making them unable to quit, either because their bodies are no longer suited to normal life or because they're no longer able to think about quitting.
(that commission offer is still very much on the table, by the way...)