Mixing the Anachronistic with Futurism

This is a big element of what I do; scouring world culture and history for alternative terminologies, familial concepts, social organization, and even the pop culture and commercialism of the worlds of my particular setting. It's 40,000 years or so in the future but many things are still the same, despite our coexistence with extremely advanced technology that can create shared consciousness between humans and A.I.s and fold space-time with wormholes to instantly transport a spacecraft hundreds of light years.

My thinking is, first, obviously there's thousands of inhabited planets, languages, variations of religion, culture, etc, it's a real open canvass with certain linkages to real history or world culture.

I guess my writing is rather inspired by "Dune," in that sense, another novel that juxtaposed the futuristic and the anachronistic thematically as well as, in the adaptations, visually.

I'm curious how other people on this forum mix these elements. In a way it's a bit like "the sacred an the profane," a delicate, subtle mix.

So how do other people do their era-blending?

Direct examples from my novel: Trading posts dealing in several different regions' currency. Planets that charge you insurance just to land your ship. Vocabulary denoting status and subcultural affiliation, for example, Starfarers, a culture of independents and clan-based spacefaring people, deride anyone who uses words like "starship," "bridge," "hyperdrive," etc, preferring a terminology derived more from the experience of 20th century astronauts and cosmonauts in the original space program ("Command Module," "Hab Module," "Work Module," "Drive Module,"). Most spacecraft, especially those that are designed to land and take off unassisted from planets, are something like 80% deuterium fuel in volume for the sublight engines. Out in the less civilized parts of space, there aren't any schools, and young people hold apprenticeships to learn a trade. Marriage at 14 isn't uncommon. A particularly avaricious young person in Starfarer culture could have their own tramp freighter by 22.

The Starfarers represent a minority of humans that travel regularly in space. Most never leave their home planets much less visit another continent more than once in their life. Certain planets, that experienced various catastrophes, have seen mass immigration offworld by the youngst, crudest and most criminally prone of the current generation. Several planets are known to harbor Mafia-like organizations. One of them is actually the disenfranchised warrior caste of a suppressed, feudal culture.

There are no aliens, unless you count microbes and very simple plants animals, basically worms, which humans farm for their protein. Humans really hoped they'd run into intelligent life but as far as they can tell it was a fluke on Earth; other lifebearing planets never evolved past small invertebrate animal life, moss, algae and primitive grasses. Obviously they were a boon for bioscientists, but they were relatively few compared to the inhabitable planets that were terraformed for human living and population with genetically engineered animals, plants, fungi and single celled organisms tailored specific to that planet's biologic profile, so as not to create situations like the Rabbit infestation of Australia. Corporations control the terraforming equipment and genetic engineering tech, and they lease it to various colonial groups like a charter. They size up the planet and determine which of their stock is best fit for introduction to the artificial environment, and tweak it genetically to make it more effective on a particular planet. Then when the work is done, the corporations leave and go on to a new job, and depending on what the settlers brought with them, that's the tech level they start out at. Usually they're able to build a small industrial power base and a city within a century or two, but then there are various primitivists, extreme religious sects and other nonconformists who charter the terraforming corporations' services as well. The Corporations maintain a "gene bank" of biodiversity and designer genes which is open to investment like a stock market. Theoretically they can find a gene in nature to make almost anything possible, from fusing an electric eel with somebody's arm as an exotic new weapon to tailoring viruses capable of targeting programmable genetic targets.

There's a sharp division between Planetsiders and Starfarers, who think of Planetsiders as either ignorant bumkins or know-it-all city slickers. That's just one of many ways in which I address class and ethnicity in the future.

There are very few white people, and they're mostly treated like freaks and forced to beg for scraps. Most everyone is a shade of brown, but there are other future-ethnic variants of humans including people with a strong preference for genetic modification. Cybernetics are widespread and given a status like iPods in our future, with some of them designed to look like cosmetic implants or jewelry. Nanotechnology is widespread but controlled by ingenious programmers against the possibility of a gray goo scenario, for example by creating a new programing language every generation. "Cyberneural links" and organic technology are becoming more commonplace, especially in computing and life support, the life support systems of most large vessels being carefully maintained artificial ecosystems incorporating tanks of genetically engineered super-algae. FTL has also, in the time frame of the book, become more commonplace on smaller vessels (Starfarers hate the word "ship") due to miniaturization.

i'M NOT giving you the politicial backstory, it's not important, I'm just curious how other people do this.

I usually take the aspects I like best from one era and the general aspects of the other.

I like taking culture A and putting it into environment B (both pre-existing), then seeing what happens when it evolves naturally. I've found Hard SF Far-futurism to be something that other people do (I suspect we're naturally going to disagree on a lot, fulltime ), as altered near-futures seem more amusing and easier to extrapolate.

Alternately, there's building an environment and then coming up with the culture that'd live in it.

Deliberate anachronism is something I try to avoid. It's... well, my stories are going to look like Zeerust in a very short time anyway, so why bother exacerbating it? Plus setting stuff too far ahead is no different from setting it in 10,000 B.C., I think - make it too far ahead or behind, and what can the reader align themselves with?

I look to giant robot anime for my inspiration, mostly Sunrise and Tomino stuff. And Patlabor, which got most of its futurism right by dint of being set only 10 years later.

Would the Final Fantasy games be a good example of mixing ancient and modern?

Yeah, yeah, this. You could make a case for 7 (Cosmo Canyon and Wutai seem like they're resisting the modern age hard), but I'd put 6 up as the best 'anachronistic' one.

Turn A Gundam and Sentou Mecha Xabungle are the premier mecha examples, I think. Turn A's probably the thing to riff off of, especially for one set on Earth.

edited 19th May '14 8:58:18 PM by DeusDenuo