This thread is inspired by a thread I started recently where I came across what was to me a new concept in a book by Iain Banks where a group of humans had taken from Earth thousands of years ago resulting in non-terran human societies across the cosmos. It was a cool idea which I had never heard of before and I was wondering if it was original to Iain Banks…of course I subsequently learned that its an idea going back decades, as any fool knows…
So I was wondering, have there been any genuinely new and original ideas or concepts in recent science-fiction (post year 2000 for a marker point), or at least ideas you personally have never come across before (being aware that this place will prove said ‘original’ ideas actually go back to Sumerian clay tablets)
I’m mostly thinking of literary science-fiction but its all good.
I thought China Mieville’s Embassytown had a very interesting premise - a species that, very roughly paraphrased, doesn’t/can’t distinguish between language and reality, i.e. a word for them doesn’t refer to a thing, but is the thing - sort of…
It half did my head in and I studied Philosophy of Language once. I’m also not sure I liked all of this book, but they were probably the most alien aliens I’ve come across and I though the idea was fascinating.
I certainly had never read several of the strange stuff in Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music. Technologically enhanced smart and cynical babies, known as baby-heads, who hang out at their own bars drinking alcohol. Psycology falling out of favor and treated like religious quackery. Super-enhanced drugs to make you forget past memories, which are frowned upon. Sexual nervous systems surgically switched with your lover.
There were also enhanced animals, like a gangster kangaroo, but I’d read too much David Brin to consider that new.
A couple authors have been exploring what it means to be Human, but that is not a new concept. (They are new-ish to me.)
In terms of sci-fi, the authors were using the premise that our technology advanced to the point where nano-technology, implants, and genetic manipulation were allowing us to fundamentally reshape the body and mind in a directed manner. Some good old fashioned issues are still around (prejudice against non-augments, for example), but also philisophical questions regarding what the future of the race should (or would) be are touched on.
There seems to be a number of writers rediscovering Heinlein and being gushed at for newness. I guess Heinlein’s other 70 works are now obscure enough that they can be repainted and resold without most sf fans noticing.
Peter Watts’s Blindsight is a First Contact novel, and it proposed something I had never seen explored before: that sentience, or the “burden of consciousness” is a disadvantage to humankind.
It also has a pretty badass genetically engineered vampire, who has a “crucifix glitch”: without the aid of drugs his brain goes haywire at the sight of right angles (which are virtually non-existent in nature, the glitch was weeded out of the human genome when they developed Euclidean architecture, etc.).
Not quite the last 10 years, but Quarantine by Greg Egan came out in 1992. Not sure how unique it is, but I’ve never read anything like it before or since. I’m going to spoiler box the rest, because while it doesn’t spoil the whole book, it does spoil a big chunk.
[spoiler] Bare with me because I’m not a physicist. The book is about quantum mechanics and the Shrodinger’s cat thought experiment. How the act of measuring or observing a system causes it to collapse into a single state. In the book, we’re the only lifeforms in the universe who can do this and the rest of the universe would like us to stop.
As our telescopes get better and better, we collapse more and more of the universe. So the aliens decided to put a ‘bubble’ around our solar system to stop us from observing the rest of the universe any more. The story is about discovering how the bubble came to be and why. I may have messed up the explanation a bit, I haven’t read the story in awhile. Think I’ll reread it. [/spoiler]
Depends on what you mean by “recent”, but one of the more interesting things I’ve read in a long time is “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge, and the whole concept of the Zones.
I think The Invention of Lying qualifies as science fiction and it did a good job of showing 1) what the world would be like if everyone told the literal truth all the time, and 2) what if would it would be like if one individual discovered the concept of lying.
It’s a concept I don’t recall seeing being used before.
I just recently read that book myself and yes the Zones are a spiffy idea. I also thought the idea of a subsentient individuals forming a sentient group mind as in the alien wolf-like society was interesting as well.
David Weber’s sentient treecat species are natural empath/telepath communicators. A big influence on their relations with humans is the totally mindboggling (to them) discovery of the concepts of lying, purposeful deception, and of believing in things that don’t match reality. To put it bluntly, they thought our species was congenitally raving mad.
Not exactly; what was completely new to them was the idea of doing so face-to-face, in actual communication (IIRC, in the novel version of A Beautiful Friendship, they name a human “Speaks Falsely” because he’s the first being they’ve ever met who does so) They did have the idea of indirect deception, like leaving a false trail.
Not an exact parallel, but you might want to look for a 50’s short story called “The Country of the Kind,” by Damon Knight. It’s about the only criminal in an otherwise crime-free society.
H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzies had no concept of lying. There’s a major plot point in one of the books where they are having to ironically teach a Fuzzy how to lie in order to prove that it is telling the truth about something. (The society in the book has a perfect lie detector but they have to be able to prove that it works on Fuzzies (by showing that it will detect one of them lying) in order to prove that its statements are in fact true)
That is a pretty common theme in sci-fi.
Usually with aliens not familiar with the concept of lies or people are conditioned somehow.
There was a Twilight Zone that used the first method.
I think there was even a Carol Burnett sketch where they had to perform a song while electronically monitored for lies.
Plus a few short stories I don’t remember the names of off the top of my head.
In Peter F Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star, he was using trains to go through wormholes. Never seen that coming, with space opera using primarily spaceships to go where no man has gone before.
