Re: Do you dream in SF tropes?

Phillip Thorne <thorne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
[...]
A solo spacefarer, on a flight lasting tens of thousands of years
between galaxies, so prolonged it's not even lonely anymore, in a war
lasting even longer, [...]

On 8 Aug 2007, nebusj-@xxxxxxxxx (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
That's not a bad emotional component just from describing it,

Thank you. I think it's the rhythm of the prose. The effect could
probably be extended and amplified by careful choice of words,
sentence lengths, and spacing.

but it would be hard to keep up over the course of thousands of words
while maintaining reader interest. The pain of geologic-scale stories
is they so easily lend themselves to being boring for humans.

The *really* painful bit of plot (in the most recent version of this
trope) is that the spacefarer finally reaches his destination, makes
planetfall, then discovers that his cargo is contaminated -- three of
the ten cryo-frozen intellectuals contain a nanotech weapon, and it's
starting to bloom. He's forced by duty to return to deepest space.

(See Wil McCarthy _Bloom_, Vernor Vinge _A Fire Upon the Deep_ ... and
probably "paradise denied" eps of "Lost in Space" and "Farscape.")

Anyone else hereabouts dream anything that's identifiable in this way?

Now and then I do have recognizably science fictional dreams,
and they tend to have a heavy Clarke-ish influence, typically with a
world recognizable to James Nicoll's Nightmarish Future.

His what? (Googles.) Aha. Irony. "A future that's neither a utopia
nor a disaster, but really not all that awful, and therefore largely
uninteresting to authors."

Usually it's on or near Earth,

How are you able to tell the difference?

with a comfortably high standard of living and support
for a couple of prestige megaprojects, one or two of which (like the
space elevator)

I don't think a space elevator's ever featured in my mind-parade.
There *was* the one appearance of a cluster of flying islands --
imagine a long, narrow cylinder, with bucolic villages on both sides
and cap, and a railway going right over the edge; now stick four of
these together in the tetrahedral shape of an ammonia molecule; now
have an archipelago of them.

Think Escher woodcut, plus the megahabitat in Karl Schroeder's _Sun of
Suns_ (though this was years before he wrote that).

[...]
That's typically mixed with the ideas from the part of my brain
that does whimsy (chunky style, big and kind of dumb), but that I really
can't think of an author that really approaches.

Lewis Carroll? Roald Dahl? Early J.K.Rowling? Eoin Colfer?

[...] Similarly the rest of the world is crowded up with generally
pleasant, amusing absurdities and entertaining things to do, whether or
not one wants to pay particular attention to them. There's not a sense
of menace or futility to it, just a silly world that doesn't worry about
how much one participates in it.

In other words, no clowns, and no Disney scene-planners insisting that
You. Will Have Fun. Now.

There's a definite *voice* to those things, but not one of an
author I recognize.

Voice, as in narration, or just plot style? Sometimes I actually get
narration appended to my dreams, or alone; it's that
voice-in-your-head associated with reading a book, and usually it
purports to be the *continuation* of a book I was reading before bed.

It may just be that my dreams will put in perfectly
random bits, and the rational side of me or the side that's read enough
science fiction will back-build a somewhat acceptable explanation for
how it got there and why it's going on.

No, I don't think that's SF. *Everybody* does that; it's just the
brain doing its usual thing, of attempting to impose order, *any*
order, on input. Waking objective reality is sufficiently coherent
and immutable that such stories have predictive power.

(I'd hate to think I was being original about it, partly because I know
the style of writing which comes most naturally to me and writing in the
style those dreams evoke would take a lot of effort on my part.)

I think the phenomenon at play is this: the brain's "censor" is
deactivated, and you're able to be creative without second-guessing
yourself. Of course, if you tried to tap the dream as a wellspring of
creativity, you (you-waking) would *still* have to impose a filter to
make it digestible for anyone not sharing your brain.

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