Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Would anyone care to hazzard a guess at what's behind this, psychologically? Is it just human nature to want to know how things work? Or do we subconsciously want to know how things will turn out if we experience this change or that technology shift (the "what-if" impact)?

Or is it, maybe, just a case of liking complexity and texture?

Are you familiar with the idea that fiction is important because it's the only form of communication complicated enough to be capable of transmitting memes? This is related to TechnoGoth's comment that sff = modern mythology; one theory of mythology is that it evolve as a vehicle for tribe members to be able to teach each other how to solve various problems, like how to kill a 'monster', how to deal with someone who is jealous, how to make it back to civilization after being abandoned alone in the woods, how to become an adult - a lot of the basic problems of early human life.

By using a time period/technology/culture other than our current one, science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction avoid the ambiguous muddle of real life and replace this with a deep coherent worldbuilding of their own to communicate to audiences new ideas(memes) about individuals in societies. What DungeonMaster said about utopias - "a complete system where life for an individual is better than it is in our society", and pwrhaps more commonly dystopias - a society designed to highlight one particular problem and force the characters to deal with it in a variety of aspects from a variety of angles.

A sf story with good worldbuilding is like having an interesting intelligent discussion about how the world works; a story with no worldbuilding is like listening to someone repeat the same old thing over again; and a story with rudimentary incoherent worldbuilding is like listening to someone babble nonsense.

I like science fiction because there can be some very clever ideas in them that may come to fruition in the real world sometime in the future (star treks' communicator waay back then was simply amazing to me the first time I watched and now we have the mobile phone). Although I like fantasy too, it doesn't interest me too much because I know there's no magic in the real world...sob.

IMO science fantasy is just futuristic fantasy instead, and I like pretty much all fantasy for the same reason - different possibilities. It isn't that the new possibilities are better, there are more of them, or any of that really (well, as long as the new possibilities aren't entirely inferior to existing posibilities) just that they offer something different.

I guess that would be 7, but I feel the way you worded #7 isn't quite the same as what I'm thinking.