Am I too grounded?

This week I’ve been wrestling with an old question which keeps recurring.  It’s the question of whether I’m too grounded to write science fiction.

I”ve never had the imagination, or the desire, to write far-future galaxy-spanning science fiction like grand space opera.  And while I use a great deal of shiny tech in my stories, it’s normally not the point of the story. My focus is usually on a smallish  group of individuals, and they’re usually going about their business on a world where technology - or people - aren’t destroying things.

I have several novels set on undeveloped wildworlds.  These are the complete opposite of the ‘shiny science fiction’ image of the genre.  They have have no cities or roads, no mining, no exploitation of natural resources.  The people who live there bring everything they need with them.  Which is a bit of a cheat, really, because it allows the manufacturing and other processes to go on out of sight.  I, instead, focus on observing the local wildlife, and sometimes I have my characters talking to it.  Telepathic big cats are a regular feature in my stories.

Nothing I do seems to work to get my stories published, but I do know I don’t want to write rambling five-thousand year old romances between a human and a dragon to get published.  Yes, that was a published story.  I only got part way through its ramble before boredom and my anger that the piece had been published bailed me out.

Just because science fiction talks about the future doesn’t mean it shouldn’t bear any relation to the past.  The future will be built on the science we know today.  But sometimes, that groundedness does cause problems for me.  

This week I’m rewriting an old story, and the heart of it is about meeting sentient trees.  Nothing difficult about that, except that I need my human characters to talk to them.  They need to get their help to stop settlement of the planet.  I wanted the trees to communicate in chemical language, so I had my human character built a chemical transmitter/receiver to talk them.

The grounded part of me was whispering away, saying she’d never be able to learn their language without some kind of Rosetta Stone, some way into the language.  But there’s a load of SF which doesn’t worry abut practical stuff like that, and somehow still seems to work.  So that’s what I’ve done too.

This time I’ve pushed my groundedness aside for the sake of the story.  Let the trees speak!