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Comment by fallingfrog | Hacker News Reader

Science fiction is always really hard, because when you think about it, many of the cultural references of today would be baffling to people 200 years ago. But when we write a story that takes place 200 years in the future, the references can’t be baffling to the reader, first because then the story wouldn’t make sense, but also because nobody is so creative that they can invent 200 years of actual culture. So, they pretty much always use events and themes from current and past events and then re-interpret them in creative ways. Dune is no different- and I love the book but is there another resource you can think of that is found buried in the desert that is needed for transportation that western powers fight wars over?

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All fiction is anchored in "its" time to some significant degree. SF & Fantasy give the author more freedom to place a story, but as you note the author is incapable of entirely divorcing themselves from their context. Intentionally or otherwise, most fiction has allegorical elements reflecting current stories or ideas. Often this is intentional I think, with (some) authors in these genres engaging in ongoing social/political/whathaveyou issues in a way that sidesteps constraints and perspectives you would have in a "present day" setting.

I was thinking about this recently while reading the fourth book in the series and you put my thoughts into words tidily.

Tangentially, I also think the time gap between the third and fourth books (some 3,500 years) necessitated some more creativity with changes to the culture but I got the impression that the author still reused a lot of the same references despite the gap which felt kind of lazy, like humanity was just TOO stagnant for that long. That's when I started thinking that it must be a difficult endeavor to just invent a lot of new culture, especially when you've got to do service to the previous books in the series. The fifth book appears to follow the same trend despite another 1,500 years of time.

Normally I would agree on those timescales, but… the whole point of God Emperor is stultifying stasis, specifically to build up so much tension that humanity explodes outward.

So in this case “language stood still” doesn’t seem particularly out of place.

Either I hadn't gotten to the point where that was explicitly stated, missed it, or I didn't connect it myself (highly likely, ha). Still working my way through #5. I did get that the golden path was basically a kind of progession stasis but not that the point of the thing was the scattering and whatever happens after. That's very interesting, thanks for pointing it out. I love these books anyway!

That humanity was forcibly stagnant during that period is kinda explicitly the point, though.

My favorite kind of sci fi is the stuff that throws you into a new world with new cultural references and doesn’t bother to explain them. Gibson is a good example. It’s a similar good feeling to getting off the train in a foreign city pre smartphone.

The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy by M. John Harrison is quite good for that, too.

That's like... anti Neal Stephenson. He feels the need to describe exactly what the thing he introduces works like. Repeatedly.

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