thinking about System Shock. I love the era of sci-fi space station designs that just have... impractical amounts and types of stuff on them. I love spaceships with biodomes because 30 years ago people thought you'd go insane in space without like... a full-ass park.
It's only just now dawning on me, that the ISS and its long-term experiments in human space habitation, have... all taken place within my lifetime. Those guys first went in that thing in 2000. By the time I learned about it as a kid, everyone just treated it as like. A matter of fact. Yeah, that thing exists, isn't it neat?
But pretty much until that point, we didn't really have the modern, practical idea of what a space station would look like, in our culture, it feels like. We figured it'd have to be a lot more like earth. 2001 A Space Odyssey was cleaner, Cyberpunk stuff was more dirty & industrial.
The future that is the sleek, mundane mixture of cleanliness and practicality, the idea that the future would be this homogenous but largely unobjectionable slop... hadn't fully formed yet. Before my lifetime, that wasn't real, in the way it was today. Wild.
I dislike the way my brain is wired, around this gap. Because the thing is, I... have a hard time personally conceiving of futures that don't follow this modern practicality. I've tried to write sci-fi before, a little, and it... the futures I believed were imminently plausible. And they were almost completely without joy, or fun, in their creation.
I feel like I struggle with this mindset a lot. When I write, and I feel a... push, to make stuff realistic or practical. I've been really into the whole fantasy worldbuilder trope of "learn plate tectonics to design a map you'll look at once" before. Never because I thought anyone would call my stuff Bad if I made a river flow into a mountain range or something, but just...
I guess with the possibility I can learn so much about how this world works, always in my reach, I like doing that. I like knowing about stuff, and using my knowledge of that stuff. This is okay for me. But it ends up... lacking Fantasy. Or there's a tension, between that practicality and exploring narrative & emotional tension. For me.
