The Lack of Fiction/Entertainment in Science Fiction Worlds

Ever notice that, when you watch a bunch of Sci-Fi almost no one ever references music, or literature that is recent to the story? It’s as if all great art stopped right around when the story was written. Funny that.

And of course it makes a level of sense. Creating fictional books and music will never have the same impact for the viewer. Having a character play music and harken it back to their favorite works can be tricky if the work is unknowable by the viewer. There is a distinct information gap there that will throw a viewer out of a story.

I’ve run into it myself, when doing Sci-Fi stuff. Not trying to say I have a great answer. Just noticing a thing that yanks me out of a world from time to time.

Star Trek might have Klingon Opera and Vulcan music every now and then but watch Next Gen and they have musical recitals of mostly old Earth composers (again not always but mostly) or do Shakespearean plays. They read Dickens.

They also don’t watch TV. Or films. Except for old Earth ones, on super rare occasion.

And while you could claim that in the enlightened future we have moved past TV but that’s bullshit. Filmed entertainment, both whimsical and dramatic, can be a powerful medium to get ideas across. Like if, say, you had a series of shows and movies that showed us an enlightened future where we went to the stars like Star Trek. Wait. Right.

By eliminating it they manage to accidently say they need to be left behind as well. Whoops.

This also brings up the problem of something referencing people who are still alive. They can reference “great minds” of an era and add people who, wow, even a year later, really should’ve been reconsidered (they should’ve been reconsidered then, too but…). It’s tricky math.

And that’s just Star Trek. Look at Star Wars, where they can’t read old Earth stuff, but also seem to not really have TV, or the internet. They have live music, but no one just plays recorded stuff in the background, really. Not often. Not the way humans do. And I guess that’s fine there because they aren’t, really, humans.

It’s still strange.

Farscape does it. Aliens just don’t seem to really find entertainment the way humans do.

And again, jumping back to Star Trek, and other things like it where we have humanity in the far future, they just seem to ditch a lot of the ways we interact with our creativity and story itself.

Which is why it throws me out. Creativity is so hardwired into humanity the idea we would leave this stuff behind bothers me. We’ve seen musicians, and pottery makers, and artists to be sure. But they’re stuck in the past. Is no one creating truly memorable works?

And we loop back to the start here where we, in a meta-sense, understand it. Still bugs me. And that’s all this is, just a small thing that bugs me from time to time and I wanted to call it out.

The future is an empty bookcase of new classics.

It says something, by accident, about the future, that I’m not sure how to firmly address in a way that works and doesn’t end up feeling like a different sort of dodge.

So we’ll stay there, because it is minor. If annoying. Still less annoying, realistically, then the alternative I suppose.