The boring laziness of speculative fiction
Human civilisation spreads across the stars.
We find a resource-rich planet, populated by a kindly alien race. But we don’t see them as sentient or having legal ownership of their planet, so we begin harvesting.
Or we encounter aliens who enslave us, just as they’ve enslaved countless other worlds.
See, it’s an allegory.
It turns out the real monsters were us all along.
Insert shocked Pikachu meme here.
Science fiction has a habit of spinning a fantastic tale, thinly covering a social issue of our time or from history.
And this is good! It’s part of fiction’s power to teach by allegory. Lecture people and they’ll turn off. Evoke the right feelings in them and it’s a harder lesson to shake.
It’s also incredibly lazy. Also, at this stage in the world, it’s been done.
I’m keener on the environment than most folks you’ll meet. My lifestyle is very green. Yeah, everyone says that, but mine actually is. One of the easier things to quantify is my electricity usage, which is significantly less than half the average for single-occupant homes like mine. My diet is harder to quantify, but it’s extremely low-impact too.
So, yeah, I’m a dirty hippy.
And even I was turned off by the eco messaging at the end of Peacemaker.
Yeah, I agree with the message, but it was boring - partly because it was shoehorned in with no relevance to the rest of the plot, partly because it made the aliens seem less alien.
If this had been written a few decades ago, it would have been nuclear war that did it. I’m also concerned about that and I also get bored when I see it in outlandish fiction.
There are other existential risks besides those nuclear war and climate change, you know.
If you (deliberately or accidentally) tell a story where the aliens are just like humans-the-oppressors or humans-the-victims, you’ll probably get away with it.
But do you want to?
Or do you want to tell a story that actually challenges your readers?
Confront them with truly non-human aliens - that will really get them thinking. They say that travel is the best way to challenge your own assumptions about what’s “obvious” and “common sense”. I say, encountering aliens that don’t think like you would do that better.
Yeah, even in fiction.
Of course, if you’re a GM, this doesn’t matter as much. You’re allowed to borrow from cliché and convention. You’re telling an interactive story on the fly - it’s both harder and less necessary to push the conventions of fantasy and scifi.
Then again…
Run a few games and you start to grow bored. You’ve told the story about the bad of heroes defeating a stock villain a few times.
It’s time for something new.
Something alien.
For that, you need Call of the Gods - your guide to getting out of your human head and thinking like an Other.
You can find it here: