I wish sf felt more foreign. I wish it felt more like my attempt at learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphics did.
I know this isn’t practical. But at least steps in that direction could be.
Just watched the Star Wars: Rogue One trailer. First, I think it’s great that two Star Wars movies in a row have had female protagonists. It’s weird that some people see this as a “stunt” when they don’t say the same thing about a male protagonist in any film.
But back to the main point — the trailer didn’t at all feel like it was from a galaxy long ago or far away. Even accepting the humanoid morphology of the main characters, they felt culturally American/British. A Western in space — again. (Don’t get me wrong. I like Westerns in space. Firefly, the paragon of the genre, anyone? But we need more than that.)
Strange how nearly all sf contains characters with our mores, or even worse the mores of the 1950s, with similar clothes and hairstyles and ontological outlooks as contemporaneous people. I know why it is this way, philosophically speaking. But it no longer pleases me. It’s no longer enough for me.
I don’t think anyone makes the sf I’d most want to read or to watch. Maybe I’ll have to do it myself.
If the past is a foreign country, surely the future is as well. I think SF tends toward a grounding in mores, clothing and aesthetic from conservative eras or the current era precisely because it’s extremely difficult to deal with the future or an imagined world on all fronts. Even world building SF writers tend to be derivative. There’s an anthropological mindset that most SF writers simply do not have. Even if you’re a consummate world builder writers feel they have to have a hook from the past or the present or their readers will not be able to follow them.
For the same reason, we see a recycling of fashion, music and themes from past eras precisely because we’ve gone through so much change within our lifetimes or even the last two decades. We went from “let’s go look up information in a library using the card catalog” to “knowledge and information crack 24/7 in the palm of your hand” in thirty years.