I'd personally like to see more gender non-conforming roles in societies.
In a society with magic or space tech, why does there need to be a coded gender for certain jobs?
This goes for 'character classes' too. I'd love to see more healer archetypes that are cis male, or wizard types that are black or brown without relying on stereotypes.
I'd also like to see more of that in occupations too. Why not have a union of earth magic construction workers who happen to be mostly women in one city?
What about the rest of you? What cool things would you live to see in sci-fi/fantasy?
WORKING 👏 CLASS 👏 SCIFI
i know theres already several examples of this, but god why dont we have more movies about the clinically depressed guy who makes 8 credits an hour in the giant crane-operating room of the giant (space)shipbuilding hangar? We need a film/series/game that starts out following the epic morally grey star hustler spacefaring antihero or whatever but suddenly pans away to Glup Shitto, 33, whos mixing up some space margaritaville bullshit to ease the protag's monologue at Club Gorbus, then follows him home from work and through a pressured shift at his Mos Eisley ass job the next day!!! SHOW ME THE BOUNCERS WHO BREAK UP THOSE DEADLY BOUNTY HUNTER BARFIGHTS GODDAMMIT!!!! GIVE US CYBERPUNK TYPE JOB NARRATIVES THAT ARENT FUCKING COPS AND DETECTIVES (sorrydiscoelysium)!!!! GIVE US A PROTAGONIST WHOS HOMELESS IN ONE OF THOSE NIGHTMARE MEGACITIES!!! WE NEED SPACE 👏 FIRST 👏 RESPONDERS
I'm tired of all of the 'Great Man' type stories where a single individual or group changes the fate of the galaxy. Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks did it in an interesting way, the payoff of the heroic actions and sacrifice of the characters was revealed to be unimportant in the grand scheme of the war being fought, but this isn't revealed until the end, so it was a bit of a gimmicky 'gotcha' moment.
I want more slice-of-life sci-fi and fantasy. I recently read Long way to a Small, Angry Planet by Rebecca Chambers and really enjoyed the vignette based storytelling centered on a working class crew. You got to explore interesting corners of the galaxy a la Star Trek, but without the high stakes.
I also just finished reading Semiosis by Sue Burke, a humans-settle-an-exoplanet type story, and one of the things I really enjoyed was how the story was told in generations. It allowed for a cool materialist(?) storytelling where you could see how the culture of their 30-100 person colony is shaped by historical events that you just read about the chapter before.
Say what you will about The Hunger Games, Katniss isn't the Chosen One who single handedly topples the evil government. An organized proletarian uprising does all the work, while she never does much more than act as its mascot, and everyone knows it.
(Also her hubby and sister are named after Bread and Roses, separation of labor is how the government keeps the working class under control, it's a much more Lefty book than people realize).
I get what your saying, but counterpoint, I'm not going to use any YA novels as theory. I'm still crying over losing Harry Potter.
I like what they do for the culture series, earth humans aren't even a factor in the first chunk of books - there was some huge space battle in the 1600s that corresponded with some nebula activity or whatever. Although, there's something called "meta-humanity" which presumably means a bunch of humans were seeded everywhere or human-shape is apparently optimal for intelligence.
Also, you can change what you look like pretty freely in the culture - including to like clouds of gas and shit.
Iirc in the Culture "human" is just a series of checkboxes for your morphology and there's loads of aliens that don't look that way and have their own morphological kindred.
hard agree, it sucks that the largest and basically only scifi short story subreddit is like that, i still sometimes pick through for hidden gems but its like panning for gold in the sewer under that place with billion dollar gold encrusted pizza
The Hyperion Cantos depicts a world where everybody goes by "M." instead of "Mr." or "Mrs." but otherwise there's still a clear binary gender system of men and women. I'd love to read a book where gender is chosen later in life if at all.
OH, there is an episode of Lloyd in Space called "Neither Boy Nor Girl" where a teenage alien is revealed to be nonbinary, and is expected to literally choose their sex at a certain age. After the boys and girls in their class go berserk trying to steer them toward one gender over the other, the character decides they won't reveal which sex they picked and will continue identifying as genderless. Pretty solid for a 90's Disney show.
give me more out there power systems. i want fun stuff that's thought out
Challenges to medieval power structures in fantasy. I keep toying around with writing a novella about the Ciompi Revolt set in a dwarven mountain city. There's always so much prestige attached to the guild system in fantasy but the corruption and exploitation of apprentices is ignored.
The protagonist is doing the whole "hero's journey" trope but every major point in the plot where they are supposed to be heroic they fail and their side kicks save the day. Not in an asshole hero who takes credit or bumbling idiot way, but like a legitimate bad ass who just keeps making the wrong choices or not getting the timing right during the heroic moments. Nobody is angry or spiteful about it because the job gets done but it turns out that the prophesied hero who single-handedly saves the day was less effective than the rest of the group.
This is the true plot of Kingdom Hearts after the first game or two.
I can't explain it in a way that can make sense. Cosmic not horror.
I can only think of a few authors that even bother with it. The conflict is mostly finding ways to get by knowing about the scale of the universe and our relative place in it. Or figuring out how to ignore capitlaism so that we get a chance to see some of it.
Gregg egan's stuff, ruthanna emerys, the culture, william hope Hodgson.
That last one is especially intresting because he inspired lovecraft only he thought it was cool the universe was full of scary stuff to explore. So that is a trip.
Varying tech levels in fantasy. It's always some lame Medieval Times ahistorical mishmash anyway. Add better metallurgy. Gunpowder. Advanced clockworks. Just for variety's sake, at least, if not to open up new story possibilities.
Been working on a setting/story where decades prior unearthed ancient magitek from the ruins of the extinct elves started an overnight tech revolution, where they went from horses and swords and hand-crafted production to levitating airships and "mirages" (holograms basically) and wireless communication and death rays overnight, developing scientific modes of thought and of course having a series of increasingly large, horrifying, and apocalyptic wars, until splinter factions in the remaining slave armies of the mad kings that were left banded together to defeat and publicly execute their rulers and then continue a purge of all nobles, then clean up the mess and build a new kind of world without the Second Estate.
Hard figuring out how every society was affected by this without running away with it, but adds a good impetus for a band of misfits crewing an airship to have adventures in the exotic eastern continent, where the grandchildren of revolutaries are starting to invent colonialism and plunder more elf tech from ruins, and not let any scaly natives get in the way of profits. Sure, their weird exploding powder weapons kept invaders away before, but now the humans and orcs and goblins and dwarves and insectoids have lightning bolts in their pockets and there's purple magic crystals that power elf tech in them there hills, grandpa's orcish genocide flashbacks be damned
personnally I like my magic and magic users to be scary. There's that one english witchfinder who was himself accussed of being a witch. I think he would make quite a good basis for a horror story
