Fantastic Worlds

[marycatelli]

This new blog has a couple of essays on subgenres.

The Fear of Boundlessness: Explanation for the Mundane SF Movement
Historical Cycles and the Anachronism Argument as Applicable to Space Opera

Comments

[jryson.livejournal.com]

Which is where steampunk came from. I think.

You can leave out FTL, antigravity, and the paranormal, and still have plenty of places to set fiction -- space habitats. Each twenty-mile long cylinder offers about 400 square miles of terrain- just about right for a fairy-tale kingdom. The far-out ones will be isolated and will develop their own social norms. Racial characteristics will evolve. While they may not be bugs, they would soon meet the criteria of ST:FG: humans with funny foreheads.

[marycatelli]

Ah, yes, steampunk -- which is fun

Space habitats would work -- though there is the question of communication. Unless the habitats are isolated, there is a certain herd tendency in humanity.

[jryson.livejournal.com]

They're isolated by the concept. You can destroy one but invading one is a momma dawg. You can only get in it though the axes. Some will be founded on utopian ideologies or other social theories. So there will be wide differences between the early settlers of each habitat.

Recruits will include malcontents. Habitats will compete for skilled colonists, with less concern on the part of the recruiters for conformity or compatibility.

So I think the colonies will be very individual at the outset. There is your source of strange worlds for "mundane" SF.

[marycatelli]

Ah, but there's the little fact that the next generation can not be engineered into the concept. You can try to teach them but they tend to get uppitty about it.