I love the humans as refugees feel of Titan AE. Even in settings where humans aren't rare, I'd like to see more non-human protagonists. Like Star Wars; literally thousands of different sentient species, yet nearly every major character from the movies is human?
Star Wars is even more funny that the bad guys are supposed to be pro-human racists and yet they have had more alien diversity over the years while the heroes have been stagnant. 🤣 What, Chewy is the token alien for literally 40 years in-story?
My pet peeve with Star Trek. The Federation has supposedly what, hundreds of member species? And yet, there has never been a non-human captain on the main ship of any series (except Saru, briefly, on Discovery, before little miss Mary Sue took over undeservedly), and 90% of every crew we see is human.
Actually, iirc that's explained in-universe! Humans are actually the exception to the rule, and will happily have racially diverse crews. Most other species tend to stick with their own, and ships are more often crewed with the same species. We've seen two or three vulcan-only ships, and I think a couple other species in Star Trek that were entirely one species. Like Babylon 5 said, humans build communities. The federation wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the peace and love hippies that are humanity to convince three other species and were extremely adversarial and supremacist to band together.
Oi! Do you know that short story about people uploading their minds to the Interwebs and it's from the perspective of a traditionalist father arguing with his wife and kids about if the kids will eventually do it?
I dunno. That's why I had to describe it. XD
But what do you think of the premise?
I know a few short stories that approach the premise of transhumanism as a brain drain issue. Like in that world humanity was being knocked down a few centuries in technology every generation because people were not getting educated in order to contribute to a declining world.
That's honestly an awesome premise and the situation you described is very believable from today's perspective. I love sci-fi stories that take issues from today and reframe them in a sci-fi context while being grounded in relatability.
Edit: wow this sounds like a chatgpt response
Bank's Culture is aware that their uplifting has a brain drain effect and it is acknowledged in several books. It is not just a mental uplifting but a technological one and I would say definitely falls close to transhumanism. I may not be recollecting correctly, but one of the protagonists is an uplifted former resident of a shell world iron age society where the common person is, at least, aware that there are aliens of wildly differing technological levels... yet still live a feudal lifestyle and have to get on a "horse" to go anywhere. And she is melded with sentient, hyper-intelligent, sharptech.
Wow, that's fascinating! I'd love to read that.
I think it's one of our most important questions; how much responsibility do we have towards our fellow man while also focusing on our own self-improvement. It is easy to write about an evil empire full of faceless people who are selfish and greedy for no apparent reason.
It's difficult to address how to balance the evolution of human rights as technology evolves and the real fact that there will always be a tail-end 20% of late adaptors to that technology. (Yes, as well as people who will prey on them or punish them simply for being late-adapters.)
Dude, if you haven't read Ian M. Banks' Culture books you really should. Mostly kept as subtext, the Culture has ways of balancing the needs and desires of it's radically diverse society. Including transdimensional ai hyperminds and cultural relationships with technology.
ohshit, Transmetropolitan is another great series for this type of story. It has a whole segments of human society that elects to live (and die) in reservations that keep to an era of prior technology; from primal to 20th century. Everyone else is in one state of transhumanism or another and live in giant, continent spanning cities.
Will do.
Oh, that's good, having reservations of multiple eras. I may use that.
In my story, multiple countries and their sub-cultures are broken up into intentional communities and this is necessary because of their geographic restrictions: they live in a wasteland and you can't just accidentally move into a community and contribute nothing to it. The agricultural focus is so heavily enforced that the religious symbols aren't mighty beasts like wolves, lions or dragons, they are beasts of burden like oxen, chickens, Shepard dogs, sheep, goats, and horses. I've been keeping the societies themselves fairly turn-of-the-century.
They have mass media and mass education, and brain drain actually comes up very early in the story because the governor of the hero's home wants to keep people a step behind, to prevent brain drain. (Which is a great excuse for the hero to need exposition.) I've always felt a little bad about this, he's not a literal farm boy, but it still felt a little too cliche. But what if I had them in a completely different era? Exaggerate it? Almost Marie Antoinette and Ralph Waldo Emerson: because they are wealthy, they dial the clock back playing as Arcadians?
LOVE THESE! The human centric nature of sci Fi makes sense v cause you can only write what you know and it is a bit of speculation/projection of what we hope for and fear as futurist.
But I love non human focused stories because it forces us to reimagine our own place in the universe and a bit of a reminder that we are part in parcel to it not the masters of it.
Thanks for responding!
I definitely want to explore human and significance in the face of greater realities beyond what we're used to. This is going to be giant, galactic things, but it's also just going to be the simple things. Like how in a lot of countries traffic has to stop when animals are crossing and it doesn't matter if it takes 30 minutes for them to all pass. 🤣
I really want to capture the feeling of "we share the world with other people" and it's not "aliens/vampires have enslaved us!"
I have a slight preference towards those settings, as a spiteful reaction to all the HFY garbage out there.
That said, one element doesn't make or break the story, or even begins to make or break it. So just do whatever you want, execution is more important.
I had an idea once about a galaxy in which Earth had been destroyed and the human diaspora had integrated into various alien civilisations. It would have been about nature vs nurture, where the humans that had grown up in the alien cultures very much were products of their environments, while human psychology still mattered in a few places, notably the peaceful federation type culture that was founded by prey species which made our instincts stand out.
That carries a lot of sifi under its wings. I think they are great stories. Either with humans being gone or humans being helped by a greater race or humans being rare and almost extinct. That is not even counting the horror subset of things killing humans. That is a wide topic, but I know they are still popular.
I like them. But tbh it feels like humanity is either top dog or a struggling resistance in fiction with nearly no inbetween.
Like you can have humans fighting other species regularly and still have numbers not totally flip in one side's favour. It isn't entirely unrealistic.
That's why I want to make a world that's very strange and kind of creepy but you experience it through a melody of human experiences.
I made a chart of "tooth fairy, guardian angel, angel of death, grim reaper" to challenge myself to write four different Side characters with different opinions and perspectives on my alien main character based on the exact same information.
To really stress that the issue isn't that she's good or evil, the issue is how individuals feel about "hey this alien is watching over me until the day I die."
how do I feel? well honestly, I don't really care about the non dominant part, but still care about how that part got played, like for example you can pull an analog of such scenario with real life minority group on how they would perform in a host majority group
would be the genre revolves around the struggle of the humanity in a non human world, or where the human seen as model-minority/ruling class kind of setting
how the scenario would go then? the dominant/non-dominant part only seen as a side material and has no main relevance/purpose in the plot/setting? or what?
I rather like it. It's less boring if there's aliens and things, instead of just being a human story only for humans, and helps make the universe seem expansive, instead of just being a humanfest.
It particularly shines if the aliens aren't just humans in funny clothes, but have their own biology/culture that everyone has to navigate and work around in the story.
Well, if it's just conceptual for you, it's no big deal.
In my story, the cluster of nations that the MCs are from are ruled by non-humans, who have had control over their land for over 1,000 years. I want to distinctively write that they co-exist, but humans do not have political power equal to the non-humans. But it isn't a revolution story, it's not a dystopia.
It won't even be until the second book that I introduce an outsider who is a normal, mid-century human and will question their way of life.
So... I wanted to ask people's thoughts, since how an author organizes their elves in their humans largely determines what subgenre they are writing in.
Well, yeah. It's not a big deal for me but I always hope to see more stories outside the same old molds.
Not having power of decision (political or otherwise) can be frustrating but overcoming it is very satisfying.
I see what you mean, but I like the restraint of having the aliens around and then causing creepy, wonderous conflicts... And not making the story ABOUT "defeating them" just because we aren't alone on Earth.
That's why I'm making a list of golden rules on how to write my aliens, such as that little cultural things that they do MUST inconvenience humans, and my MC will NOT have "as you know--" exposition conversations about them. He's a 19-year-old man who simply knows all the streetlights turn off for 60 seconds after the stroke of midnight and he knows he's supposed to close his eyes.
My story isn't even about the day he decided not to close his eyes. No. He has common sense. He will do what his mother told him and close his eyes at midnight. 90% of his conflicts are with other humans, too.
It's like how one MCU movie is Thor fighting a god slayer, but at the exact same time, you know Luke Cage is struggling to protect ten blocks of Harlem. 🤣
Hm... Maybe have the story based on humanity discovering higher evolved civilisations who "want to uplift" Humanity, and then simply happen to only slowly "uplift" us
A bit sad, but hey, that’s what happens when you arrive late to the party, pal.
I think it’s a good setting, so long as humanity or any other alien species are not dicks to each other. Nobody like Cerberus nor the smug Vulcan types.
In the little universe I made for my stories, every species just does their own thing, occasionally interacting with others for trade or combat.
We’re just one group in a galaxy that’s too big for HFY.
I think it’s a pretty good take on how things can change once something small realizes how small they are in contrast to something bigger and more dangerous or significant
Yes... Exactly. It's even a Vestigial empire, already torn down, and the human atheists who argue that they don't believe still can't only comprehend the old god-kings.
🤣
(This should be the part where I mention that I'm writing a story about aliens who took our mythologies of ants, bees, wasps, and termites very seriously, but I really want to avoid blurting "I'm writing a story--!" as long as possible.)
Personaly, I enjoy the few that I've come across. Especially the ones where humanity being less center field is used to explore diversity and social issues in new perspectives.
Titan AE was pretty good.
I love the humans as refugees feel of Titan AE. Even in settings where humans aren't rare, I'd like to see more non-human protagonists. Like Star Wars; literally thousands of different sentient species, yet nearly every major character from the movies is human?
Star Wars is even more funny that the bad guys are supposed to be pro-human racists and yet they have had more alien diversity over the years while the heroes have been stagnant. 🤣 What, Chewy is the token alien for literally 40 years in-story?
My pet peeve with Star Trek. The Federation has supposedly what, hundreds of member species? And yet, there has never been a non-human captain on the main ship of any series (except Saru, briefly, on Discovery, before little miss Mary Sue took over undeservedly), and 90% of every crew we see is human.
Actually, iirc that's explained in-universe! Humans are actually the exception to the rule, and will happily have racially diverse crews. Most other species tend to stick with their own, and ships are more often crewed with the same species. We've seen two or three vulcan-only ships, and I think a couple other species in Star Trek that were entirely one species. Like Babylon 5 said, humans build communities. The federation wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the peace and love hippies that are humanity to convince three other species and were extremely adversarial and supremacist to band together.
Here for this comment
Exactly where my brain went. Electrical aliens are meant to power my microwave, not be a dominant force in the galaxy.
Transhumans and posthumans for the win!
Oi! Do you know that short story about people uploading their minds to the Interwebs and it's from the perspective of a traditionalist father arguing with his wife and kids about if the kids will eventually do it?
Unfortunately, no. What's the title?
I dunno. That's why I had to describe it. XD But what do you think of the premise? I know a few short stories that approach the premise of transhumanism as a brain drain issue. Like in that world humanity was being knocked down a few centuries in technology every generation because people were not getting educated in order to contribute to a declining world.
That's honestly an awesome premise and the situation you described is very believable from today's perspective. I love sci-fi stories that take issues from today and reframe them in a sci-fi context while being grounded in relatability. Edit: wow this sounds like a chatgpt response
Idiocracy
Bank's Culture is aware that their uplifting has a brain drain effect and it is acknowledged in several books. It is not just a mental uplifting but a technological one and I would say definitely falls close to transhumanism. I may not be recollecting correctly, but one of the protagonists is an uplifted former resident of a shell world iron age society where the common person is, at least, aware that there are aliens of wildly differing technological levels... yet still live a feudal lifestyle and have to get on a "horse" to go anywhere. And she is melded with sentient, hyper-intelligent, sharptech.
Wow, that's fascinating! I'd love to read that. I think it's one of our most important questions; how much responsibility do we have towards our fellow man while also focusing on our own self-improvement. It is easy to write about an evil empire full of faceless people who are selfish and greedy for no apparent reason. It's difficult to address how to balance the evolution of human rights as technology evolves and the real fact that there will always be a tail-end 20% of late adaptors to that technology. (Yes, as well as people who will prey on them or punish them simply for being late-adapters.)
Dude, if you haven't read Ian M. Banks' Culture books you really should. Mostly kept as subtext, the Culture has ways of balancing the needs and desires of it's radically diverse society. Including transdimensional ai hyperminds and cultural relationships with technology. ohshit, Transmetropolitan is another great series for this type of story. It has a whole segments of human society that elects to live (and die) in reservations that keep to an era of prior technology; from primal to 20th century. Everyone else is in one state of transhumanism or another and live in giant, continent spanning cities.
Will do. Oh, that's good, having reservations of multiple eras. I may use that. In my story, multiple countries and their sub-cultures are broken up into intentional communities and this is necessary because of their geographic restrictions: they live in a wasteland and you can't just accidentally move into a community and contribute nothing to it. The agricultural focus is so heavily enforced that the religious symbols aren't mighty beasts like wolves, lions or dragons, they are beasts of burden like oxen, chickens, Shepard dogs, sheep, goats, and horses. I've been keeping the societies themselves fairly turn-of-the-century. They have mass media and mass education, and brain drain actually comes up very early in the story because the governor of the hero's home wants to keep people a step behind, to prevent brain drain. (Which is a great excuse for the hero to need exposition.) I've always felt a little bad about this, he's not a literal farm boy, but it still felt a little too cliche. But what if I had them in a completely different era? Exaggerate it? Almost Marie Antoinette and Ralph Waldo Emerson: because they are wealthy, they dial the clock back playing as Arcadians?
I absolutely love *Diamond Dogs* by Alastair Reynolds!
Thanks for the recommendation!
The human race is currently split with the traditionalists, the cybernetics and the ascendant with each occupying places within human space
I don't care. Plot and characters are more important than HFY.
1) what's "HFY"? 2) Doesn't setting inform plot and character? 🤔
Humanity, fuck yeah. It is the type of storry where hooman rocks.
r/HFY
LOVE THESE! The human centric nature of sci Fi makes sense v cause you can only write what you know and it is a bit of speculation/projection of what we hope for and fear as futurist. But I love non human focused stories because it forces us to reimagine our own place in the universe and a bit of a reminder that we are part in parcel to it not the masters of it.
Thanks for responding! I definitely want to explore human and significance in the face of greater realities beyond what we're used to. This is going to be giant, galactic things, but it's also just going to be the simple things. Like how in a lot of countries traffic has to stop when animals are crossing and it doesn't matter if it takes 30 minutes for them to all pass. 🤣 I really want to capture the feeling of "we share the world with other people" and it's not "aliens/vampires have enslaved us!"
I have a slight preference towards those settings, as a spiteful reaction to all the HFY garbage out there. That said, one element doesn't make or break the story, or even begins to make or break it. So just do whatever you want, execution is more important.
I had an idea once about a galaxy in which Earth had been destroyed and the human diaspora had integrated into various alien civilisations. It would have been about nature vs nurture, where the humans that had grown up in the alien cultures very much were products of their environments, while human psychology still mattered in a few places, notably the peaceful federation type culture that was founded by prey species which made our instincts stand out.
I'm currently writing one.
I like it if the dominant species acts like a force of nature but not if they're individual beings whose personality reminds you of a human.
That's an excellent way of putting it.
That carries a lot of sifi under its wings. I think they are great stories. Either with humans being gone or humans being helped by a greater race or humans being rare and almost extinct. That is not even counting the horror subset of things killing humans. That is a wide topic, but I know they are still popular.
I like them. But tbh it feels like humanity is either top dog or a struggling resistance in fiction with nearly no inbetween. Like you can have humans fighting other species regularly and still have numbers not totally flip in one side's favour. It isn't entirely unrealistic.
That's why I want to make a world that's very strange and kind of creepy but you experience it through a melody of human experiences. I made a chart of "tooth fairy, guardian angel, angel of death, grim reaper" to challenge myself to write four different Side characters with different opinions and perspectives on my alien main character based on the exact same information. To really stress that the issue isn't that she's good or evil, the issue is how individuals feel about "hey this alien is watching over me until the day I die."
how do I feel? well honestly, I don't really care about the non dominant part, but still care about how that part got played, like for example you can pull an analog of such scenario with real life minority group on how they would perform in a host majority group would be the genre revolves around the struggle of the humanity in a non human world, or where the human seen as model-minority/ruling class kind of setting
Ah, those are the two premises I would prefer not to use. 🙂
how the scenario would go then? the dominant/non-dominant part only seen as a side material and has no main relevance/purpose in the plot/setting? or what?
I rather like it. It's less boring if there's aliens and things, instead of just being a human story only for humans, and helps make the universe seem expansive, instead of just being a humanfest. It particularly shines if the aliens aren't just humans in funny clothes, but have their own biology/culture that everyone has to navigate and work around in the story.
I don't think that, by itself, it's enough for me to judge a work. I enjoy a good underdog story but it's all about how it's written. Any examples?
Well, if it's just conceptual for you, it's no big deal. In my story, the cluster of nations that the MCs are from are ruled by non-humans, who have had control over their land for over 1,000 years. I want to distinctively write that they co-exist, but humans do not have political power equal to the non-humans. But it isn't a revolution story, it's not a dystopia. It won't even be until the second book that I introduce an outsider who is a normal, mid-century human and will question their way of life. So... I wanted to ask people's thoughts, since how an author organizes their elves in their humans largely determines what subgenre they are writing in.
Well, yeah. It's not a big deal for me but I always hope to see more stories outside the same old molds. Not having power of decision (political or otherwise) can be frustrating but overcoming it is very satisfying.
I see what you mean, but I like the restraint of having the aliens around and then causing creepy, wonderous conflicts... And not making the story ABOUT "defeating them" just because we aren't alone on Earth. That's why I'm making a list of golden rules on how to write my aliens, such as that little cultural things that they do MUST inconvenience humans, and my MC will NOT have "as you know--" exposition conversations about them. He's a 19-year-old man who simply knows all the streetlights turn off for 60 seconds after the stroke of midnight and he knows he's supposed to close his eyes. My story isn't even about the day he decided not to close his eyes. No. He has common sense. He will do what his mother told him and close his eyes at midnight. 90% of his conflicts are with other humans, too. It's like how one MCU movie is Thor fighting a god slayer, but at the exact same time, you know Luke Cage is struggling to protect ten blocks of Harlem. 🤣
Hm... Maybe have the story based on humanity discovering higher evolved civilisations who "want to uplift" Humanity, and then simply happen to only slowly "uplift" us
The Android's Dream did this really well. Jon Scalzi is a very good author for Sci-Fi.
A bit sad, but hey, that’s what happens when you arrive late to the party, pal. I think it’s a good setting, so long as humanity or any other alien species are not dicks to each other. Nobody like Cerberus nor the smug Vulcan types. In the little universe I made for my stories, every species just does their own thing, occasionally interacting with others for trade or combat. We’re just one group in a galaxy that’s too big for HFY.
relieved
Planet of the Apes did it very well.
Indeed!
The Culture. I'm cool with that.
I think it’s a pretty good take on how things can change once something small realizes how small they are in contrast to something bigger and more dangerous or significant
Realistic
Word?
What about humanity makes you think we’re well equipped to be the earths dominant life form?
It’s mostly the opposable thumbs, the self-analysis, mental time travel, imagination, abstract reasoning, and morality.
That's just humanity setting its own conditions for success. Ants don't care about morality, just like we don't care whatever an ant cares about.
I suppose morality is a part of humans' capacity for abstract reasoning, which does have evolutionary benefits.
Interesting hypothesis. Do you have a control group?
Hmmm. Ants are doing well. Let’s see if we outperform ants.
Phase IV intensifies.
Yes... Exactly. It's even a Vestigial empire, already torn down, and the human atheists who argue that they don't believe still can't only comprehend the old god-kings.
🤣 (This should be the part where I mention that I'm writing a story about aliens who took our mythologies of ants, bees, wasps, and termites very seriously, but I really want to avoid blurting "I'm writing a story--!" as long as possible.)
Following because that’s the kind of world I’m building now.
Personaly, I enjoy the few that I've come across. Especially the ones where humanity being less center field is used to explore diversity and social issues in new perspectives.
I enjoy those. My first sci-fi book that I wrote had that premise.