Storytelling and Space Settlement
New year, new series
The series so far:
Happy new year, and welcome (back) to Making New Worlds! I hope you all enjoyed my short series on personhood and space in the first half of last year. I’m thinking about expanding that topic into a larger work, and it was helpful to get to test it out on my newsletter readers.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about stories, and their power to inspire and to explore challenging ideas in a low-stakes environment. As I say as often as I can, science fiction writers have been discussing space ethics since long before humans ever traveled to space. These storytellers may stray pretty far from realistic physics and biology at times, but their predictions for how humans might seek to explore, exploit, and harness space for curiosity, profit, and power have proven surprisingly accurate.
I’m a computational physicist by training, which means I’ve spend a lot of my time developing different models of the universe, building simulations to test our ideas about the nature of things we can’t reach out and touch. Stories, to me, can function as models for humanity in the same way. Fiction is a way we can run simulations of what human societies in space might look like, and what lessons we can learn about ourselves and our future without actually risking any lives.
Plus: stories are fun! And I’m finding a lot of solace in stories and storytelling these days. After all, stories don’t just have to be explorations of what might be in the future if we’re not careful, à la A Christmas Carol, full of dystopian metaphors and cautionary tales. They can also be a way for us to express our vision of the world we’d like to live in, and to sketch a path between the here and now and the future we hope to see for all of us. It’s not just about escapism; it’s about showing the way for others to follow.
So next month, I’ll be kicking off a new series in this newsletter. The Storytelling and Space Settlement series will spotlight notable science fiction novels, films, and TV series that explore the potential consequences of space settlement. I also plan to include tabletop and video games that explore these topics through interactive and collaborative storytelling.
What parts of today’s world do these storytellers foresee us carrying into space? How do they imagine humans will adapt to the space environment, and be changed by it? What are the motivations pushing (or pulling) their characters away from Earth, and how do these forces affect the choices made there? And what’s realistic (or not) about these fictional models of our future— not in terms of the science and technology, but in the way the characters treat each other and the environment? Follow along for my thoughts, and please share your own as we go!
If you’ve got a favorite story that sparks your imagination about humanity’s future in space— for the better or the worse— let me know! Or if there’s a popular space settlement story that you really hope we DON’T model our future on, that’s certainly worth discussing, too!
Looking forward to your next post, Erika. I became a great fan of the TV show "The Expanse" (maybe some day I will begin to read the books too). It has a lot of interesting topics to discuss like propulsion (Epstein drive), solar system colonization, Mining, Ethics about the belters, for instance. I like the vision of the future from John Bernal (The World, the Flesh and The Devil), and Tsiolkovsky too...ideas from 1920s, all of them so fascinating.
I would love to see some discussion on Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series. I can never talk about those books enough. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is also great in a very different way.