Free Nonfiction 2011 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2011-05-26T18:48:00+00:00

Science and Society in the Citizen Series

by John Lambshead

There is an old saying about science in science fiction: If the story could be written without the science then it's not SF and should not be written as such.

“Hard” SF is supposed to encompass stories that use science and technology that is at least theoretically possible, as opposed to “soft” sf which embraces fantastic developments. The difference between soft SF and fantasy is largely a matter of style, or to quote Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The downside of hard SF is that it can date awfully quickly.

One of the fascinating blindspots in most hard SF stories, is that they rarely considered the social implications of innovative technology. The future is often depicted as socially exactly like the present, only with impressive gadgets.

What strikes me most looking back at the original Star Trek communicator, apart from the large size, was that they only used it as a mobile telephone, perhaps the dullest and least important use of a modern device that has generated a societal revolution in human mating rituals. While on the subject of “love,” I would suggest that the contraceptive pill has done far more to change the world than, say, nuclear or electronic technology, because it changed our culture.

Which brings me to the science of Into the Hinterlands and The Citizen series. The series is a science fiction tale based around the life of George Washington. It is not a biography but a trilogy of novels that try to distill key issues in this remarkable man's life and present them in an exciting and readable format.

It is not unusual for sf authors to draw upon historical events to provide the background culture and plot for a novel. After all, nothing is more persuasively real than reality. David himself is a past master at this. Consider the Lt. Leary/RCN series.

Drake himself says: “I've read Patrick O'Brian's novels and I love them. Some reviews have referred to my Leary/Mundy series as an SF version of Hornblower. That's not correct; I did an SF version of the Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian's superb knockoff of Forester's Hornblower.”

But the Leary series is far more than that. Daniel Leary may be an officer in a Republic of Cinnabar Navy that draws its culture from the Royal Navy but Cinnabar is not Eighteenth Century Britain. Culturally, it is the late Roman Republic: David read classics at the University of Iowa.

The series also draws heavily on historical events for the background politics to the novels. For example, the political situation of Some Golden Harbor is based on the life on Aristodemus, Tyrant of Cumae, and the general political situation in Southern Italy in 500 BC, intercut with events from the South in the American Civil War and the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Drake's genius is to recognize the essential human interaction from disparate sources and to merge them seamlessly into a believable whole.

There is a further subtle advantage of drawing political situations from the classical world.

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