Once upon a time, in a kingdom marked by very fine architecture—I'm talking colorful onion domes and frescoes, jewel-inlaid marble, lots of gold obviously, just really soaring, colorful architecture—anyway, in this kingdom there existed (what else?) a King.
The Culture series is a good counterexample, but it's sort of uniquely predicated on the idea of minimal intervention. There's rarely a show of force; the plot almost always centers on placing the pebble that causes the avalanche.
In Player of Games, for example, why send two billion spaceships to conquer a solar system when you could just send one really sad guy who's pretty good at board games?
I agree that most sci-fi writers are either really good at zooming out or really good at zooming in, which makes it extra unfair that Iain Banks just... does both? Every time? Like it's easy?
I like this. A lot of my thinking and writing lately has also been animated by a questioning of the default individualism of the modern liberal Western world. I think we might just be at an historical inflection point where we've reaped most of the benefits of leaning into an individualist worldview... and now some of the downsides are becoming more clear (loneliness; difficulty finding meaning/purpose; a general mental health crisis including high rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide; a culture of comparison; difficulty raising children in more isolated and atomized family units; difficulty imagining a positive vision of the future to collectively aim for, etc.).
If there's a way to make the equal truth of less-individualized worldviews viscerally apparent, it may be through our fiction. Let's keep making art exploring this!
Curiously enough when I was reading your story I actually did think about Tolstoy (because I just finished Anna Karenina.) So it occurred to me that the story might in a sense be based on Russia.
It definitely has strong Russia vibes =] I just hate being pinned down by actual geography and history. Like…it’s sort of based on the various wars between Russia and Ottoman Turkey in the 19th-century (which Tolstoy himself participated in and wrote about!), but the fit isn’t exact.
I have been waiting for you to write a SF novel for like a decade! I definitely, absolutely, have faith in your ability to write some amazing SF!
Also, thanks for linking to those two substacks. I dont read literary fiction and it's the only kind that people seem to talk about (unless it's Octavia Butler or Stephen King). So I have been dying to read about speculative fiction and its community for ages.
I love New Wave sci-fi! I literally taught a class once on this (a student-initiated course) at Stanford. Russ, Delany, Brunner, Spinrad, Tiptree--some of my favorite writers. THEY definitely managed to figure out how to do it, but I never did.
I could see Knausgaard bridging this gap. His writing is so intensely focused on intimate moments with fully fleshed characters - yet in the Morning Star series whenever he veers into strangeness and speculation he goes all in and it is SO fun. I could see him really going wild with science fiction and far flung worlds. (It's possible his second novel A Time for Everything does something like this - a bible retelling with angels and etc, but I haven't read it yet - it's on my list).
Even then I suppose he has yet to accomplish the grand span of time... but again I could see him getting there if he were ever interested.
Neal Stephenson is the other author that comes to mind - specifically Seveneves. Some say his characters are underdeveloped but I think they work and he certainly accomplishes the grandness of history.
I love Neal Stephenson’s stuff! I liked seveneves a lot—esp the part before the time jump. As I said, other authors have definitely figured this out. Even I managed to do it at the short fiction level. But for me that balance always broke down at novel length.
The Culture series is a good counterexample, but it's sort of uniquely predicated on the idea of minimal intervention. There's rarely a show of force; the plot almost always centers on placing the pebble that causes the avalanche.
In Player of Games, for example, why send two billion spaceships to conquer a solar system when you could just send one really sad guy who's pretty good at board games?
I agree that most sci-fi writers are either really good at zooming out or really good at zooming in, which makes it extra unfair that Iain Banks just... does both? Every time? Like it's easy?
I know! I haven't read them all, and I came to them too late in life for them to be really formative on me, but that guy really knew how to do it!
I like this. A lot of my thinking and writing lately has also been animated by a questioning of the default individualism of the modern liberal Western world. I think we might just be at an historical inflection point where we've reaped most of the benefits of leaning into an individualist worldview... and now some of the downsides are becoming more clear (loneliness; difficulty finding meaning/purpose; a general mental health crisis including high rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide; a culture of comparison; difficulty raising children in more isolated and atomized family units; difficulty imagining a positive vision of the future to collectively aim for, etc.).
If there's a way to make the equal truth of less-individualized worldviews viscerally apparent, it may be through our fiction. Let's keep making art exploring this!
Curiously enough when I was reading your story I actually did think about Tolstoy (because I just finished Anna Karenina.) So it occurred to me that the story might in a sense be based on Russia.
It definitely has strong Russia vibes =] I just hate being pinned down by actual geography and history. Like…it’s sort of based on the various wars between Russia and Ottoman Turkey in the 19th-century (which Tolstoy himself participated in and wrote about!), but the fit isn’t exact.
I have been waiting for you to write a SF novel for like a decade! I definitely, absolutely, have faith in your ability to write some amazing SF!
Also, thanks for linking to those two substacks. I dont read literary fiction and it's the only kind that people seem to talk about (unless it's Octavia Butler or Stephen King). So I have been dying to read about speculative fiction and its community for ages.
Have you read 70’s era New Wave science fiction? They tried to grapple with these psychological issues, sometimes successfully, mostly not.
I love New Wave sci-fi! I literally taught a class once on this (a student-initiated course) at Stanford. Russ, Delany, Brunner, Spinrad, Tiptree--some of my favorite writers. THEY definitely managed to figure out how to do it, but I never did.
I could see Knausgaard bridging this gap. His writing is so intensely focused on intimate moments with fully fleshed characters - yet in the Morning Star series whenever he veers into strangeness and speculation he goes all in and it is SO fun. I could see him really going wild with science fiction and far flung worlds. (It's possible his second novel A Time for Everything does something like this - a bible retelling with angels and etc, but I haven't read it yet - it's on my list).
Even then I suppose he has yet to accomplish the grand span of time... but again I could see him getting there if he were ever interested.
Neal Stephenson is the other author that comes to mind - specifically Seveneves. Some say his characters are underdeveloped but I think they work and he certainly accomplishes the grandness of history.
I love Neal Stephenson’s stuff! I liked seveneves a lot—esp the part before the time jump. As I said, other authors have definitely figured this out. Even I managed to do it at the short fiction level. But for me that balance always broke down at novel length.