How do you handle medicine and medical technology in sci-fi settings...

How do you handle medicine and medical technology in sci-fi settings? It seems like you can almost always cure just about everything bar some kind of super form of cancer.

Are there people with disabilities in your setting in spite of technology that allows people to gain prosthetics with equal levels of functionality? Are most forms of organ failure easily rememdied with healthy clones or artifical versions?

On a Meta Level:

Should we have genre specific generals where questions such as this can be asked or would this fall under World building?

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I tend to think of it a lot like the real world. Advanced prosthetics, treatments, and cures certainly exist, but the poor and disenfranchised don't have access to them. You'll see a lot more disfigured and disabled people in a slum or third world country than you would in suburban America. Same thing with sci fi. I also like making treatments have varying levels of effectiveness and cosmetics depending on how much one is willing to pay. Pic related for someone who would be considered disabled, even with a functioning prosthetic.

Would that elbow actually bend?

Makes sense. The income gap is always going to be a barrier no matter what setting and if it isn't money exactly it's something else to create it.

That said, having various levels of effective treatment should be something more explored in games. Getting surgery from a back alley doctor shouldn't be nearly as good as going to a legit hospital but then that can change based on how much you're willing to pay give or take if your back alley doctor can get a proper surgery room or is cutting you up in a vets office.

Crazy stylistic augmentations could be a thing when you can't get the ones that look and feel like real limbs.

Some games have rules for that. An example off the top of my head is Stars Without Number (specifically the "Polychrome" splatbook). The book differentiates between the kind of stuff you can get bolted onto your body by "underhab stitcher-docs" and the kind of "tailored" cyberware you'll receive from megacorps. Considering how simple the cyberware rules are to begin with, it just boils down to a single-number stats adjustment for the piece, but I think it's nice that it's there.

It looks like it might be able to, but mostly just looks cool.

I like Aaron Beck's art but the way the left arm attaches to the shoulder weirds me out because it's hard to visualize properly

I wouldn't expect something too extreme when it comes down to it because you probably could have things like "The materials used in your aftermarket prosthetics is slowly giving you blood poisoning or your body's auto immune response is slowly destroying the flesh bits between your stump and the prosthetic" without slowlying down/hampering the game especially if it's not going to be a long running session.

Bacta?

I mean, the concept of it. You have an all-cure substance. It won't cure your runny nose, but it will patch you up after getting shot, assuming you've removed the bullet.

And then there is of course the high-end stuff from Alpha Centauri, where due to nanotechnology, retroviral gene therapies and alike you can pretty much cure anything and replace lost limbs, if not entire body sections.

>And then there is of course the high-end stuff from Alpha Centauri, where due to nanotechnology, retroviral gene therapies and alike you can pretty much cure anything
Always loved SMAC for this. It's one of those rare sci-fi settings that fully embraces the medical possibilities of advanced technology. I mean you can technically rebuild human body with that sort of technology, so not just remove genetical imperfections from your own DNA, but actually cure your kid with genetic disease.

Wouldn't this give you functional immortality if you can repair damage at the cellular level? I mean, if you're curing genetic diseases why not lengthen telemoraes while we're at it?

At that point science does that thing where it's functionally magic, so why not. Some settings say yes, and you get this upper-class of superrich ancients. Some settings insert some caveat where the human mind can't contain that much information and you go mad, or you become cancerous after so many hundreds of years, or the upkeep becomes so expensive that there's a race of "Immortals" that are so ravenous for biological resources that they become crazy dictators on subjugated planets and harvest their citizenry to fuel their unnatural life, or whatever.

>Wouldn't this give you functional immortality if you can repair damage at the cellular level?
That's the fucking point in SMAC. You even have a secret project called "Clinical Immortality" and as far as the fluff prompts during campaign progress go, this is what humanity ultimately achieves. Either in form of preserving your body or storing digital copy of your mind and using much more efficient cybernetic version of your mind, while using a solid-form hologram as your "body".

Settings like Ecplise Phase would, to me, seem like the early stages of society that can hop from body to computer and back even if they do keep the idea of continuity of self vague in regards to you going from body to body.

>How to show you are awful writer and know jack shit about basic biology: The Post
The sad part is that this exists as a cliche all by itself in sci-fi, being almost as cancerous as the idea of Killer AI, that will always and reliably try to wipe out human race, because some convoluted logic provided by writer.

Pro-tip: The moment you have functional nano- and retroviral technology, you don't need to worry about this crap breaking down, since each treatment by default restores you to specific point of your telomeres. And there is no fucking upkeep, unless you call another treatment in next 40 years an upkeep.

I'd be curious at what point you would try to keep something like this from the hands of the masses. If you're capable of expanding into space and having functional immortality you literally have an entire universe to fill and an entire universe of resources to make use of with the only real threat being death by accident or murder.

Like the other user already pointed out - you know jack shit about biology. The sole fact you in single post managed to combine your non-existing bio knowledge with yet another futuristic dystopia where only the rich can afford some treatment, which obviously is so super-expensive to make big money by the corporation, rather than, you know, being sold to masses to actually make profit from it, shows that you are most likely American and probably one that don't even realise there are other forms of medial coverage than the barbarism from your country.

Those are examples from sci-fi settings you morons, calm down.

I tend to think of it this way
>medical scanning is non-invasive and 99.999% accurate
>most genetic deformities/anomalies and hereditary diseases are cured in utero
>most medicines are free as long as a licensed medical professional give you a prescription
>there are a few non-fatal diseases that are currently not cured, but have treatments to improve quality of life and are still being actively researched
>there are at least four lethal diseases that are not curable because they don't even know the causes yet
>organs can be grown in case of emergency, and also used to extend the natural lifespan but laws prohibit people from taking them multiple times
>amputation is typically a war wound, replaced most commonly by vat-grown replacement limbs, but it takes some time and thus prosthetics are custom built as a stopgap measure while you wait
>keeping prosthetics are a choice, and only if the user's bodies do not reject them

>I'd be curious at what point you would try to keep something like this from the hands of the masses
And why should I? No, serious question, why should I. Because I see where you want to go with this and I've already got answer for that:
Fuck you and the horse you ride on.

There are so many fucking factors to consider in "eternal" humanity that your assumption it will lead to overcrowded universe and thus yet another Malthusian bullshit and squalor is just as likely as, say, utopian society when people live as long as they find fulfilling and then commit suicide, because they've achieved fulfilment, in accordance to the new mode the society works on.

Not even in the slightest. Most cyberpunk sci-fi (or hell anything really) hinges on the haves versus the have nots. I see no logical reason to withhold something like this from humanity proper aside from wanting to create an envionment where only certain groups have access and others don't.

This was my gripe with Elysium because if you can build a fucking space station why the fuck are people on earth still living in squalor? Why the hell arn't you going to Mars and giving your instant cure for cancer to everyone?

There's a point where the greedy and evil business people who are that way for the sake of being so gets old.

>>organs can be grown in case of emergency, and also used to extend the natural lifespan but laws prohibit people from taking them multiple times

Why though?

Probably because that is what exists today, and a lot of scifi is supposed to be a social critique looking at how technology won't advance a society in all the ways we might think it will.

Only example I can think of is a heavy drinker got like 2 extra livers after the previous two failed despite the subsequent rehab he's been put through.

Neither of them, but consider the following. You have access to one of the cornerstones of post-scaracity society. Nanomachines. They alone make... well, they are pretty much magic. You can do literally everything with those. And in your great wisdom you assume a society that still has such things like rich and poor. In a post-scariacity world.
Literally how?
I, for once, want to see a setting or work of fiction that realise there are other options than some moronic dystopia, instead indulging in actual possibilities created by high-tech. Why not eudaimonia? It's already a magic world with magic powers, why then not try to pursue fulfilment, enlightenment and even basic joy, or maybe devolving into pure id and pursuing animalistic desires, since... why not?
Instead it leads to yet another gritty, dirty quasi-punk world where The Man controls everything and you are... you, but set Xty years in the future.
Boring. And overdone, if not outright beaten to death.

to prevent either tyranny or apathy from extreme longevity.

few people can become immortal without going insane.

as a counterargument, I invite you to consider: the world, reality, other such things.

If the act of doing so is a private affair based on your ability to pay to do so then the restriction doesn't make a lot of sense in that regard

Clearly there are a lot of details missing but this assumes there are no methods of dealing with mental health issues or a situation where only one person is the president/king/wthaever until death?

you should read the Culture novels, however Iain Banks also has impeccable politics so don't expect any freaky free market bullshit

Yes, as of now people and groups accumulate power and resources because they are scarce and the one in control can call the shots.

I would say look at 's post and consider what the effect of post scarcity has on society as a whole? Would people try to subjugate others and withhold resources because it hasn't been done in a few thousand years and they're bored?

Various x-punk scenarios can be fun if done well, but I agree with you. I think people often prevent the full consequences of futuristic technology from playing out (such as post scarcity coming from fusion power plus nano-assemblers) because figuring out how a society that is truly different from either the present or the past is difficult, and they either lack the ability or desire to figure out how it would work.
The main trick is that having bad things happen is typically how you drive a plot: pursuing personal fulfillment in a utopia is tricky to write a gripping story around, although by no means impossible. The Culture books handle it by having other, less utopian cultures come in to conflict with the titular one, and Orion's Arm does it by having a vast variety of possible societies, some of which are ruled by insane god-AI.

this is me
no, even just the average citizen, after a few generations, might not be able to connect anymore with other people anymore when they watch others who didn't wish to go through it the process die off for a few hundred years.

tell me what kind of therapy can deal with watching 5 generations of your descendants come and go.

>Most cyberpunk sci-fi (or hell anything really) hinges on the haves versus the have nots
Only it is not

But answering your question - most fiction you are thinking about when rising the issue was either written by utter hacks (and we are talking literal, legitimate hacks) OR were reflection of specific period and insight of their creators. So on one hand we have things, like, say, RoboCop, which is a satirical extrapolation of Reagan-era America, with everything ramped into logical extreme (private Police and city run by a corporation anyone?). And on other you have things like mentioned by you Elysium, whre things are like this, because someone assumed "this looks cool".

In reality, there is no point to withold access of the cool toys, and it's always more profitable to market things to the masses than to make them "elite". For the simple reason there are more masses than "elite" customers.

Ever read Lem? You can ask heavy-hitting and always actual questions without indulging ino the whole bullshit started by Gibson and his cyberpunk (but then again, Gibson had an actual point and was good at what he did, unlike everyone that imitated him).
And there are REALLY better things to ask about in sci-fi rather than "will the Evil Corp eventually take over the world in the future"? Check this user, he has a good point - why not write about society where there are no issues and concerns and start to think what would it be like and affect people there, their perception of world around them and so on. Would they be extra-insightful on self? Would that make them numb to the world around them? Would they accidently create this way "earthly" Buddhist nirvana? After all, that would be a perfect situation to be a buddhist, in the purest form, because there wouldn't be any big deal about following all the principles of it in a world where you by default don't need to care about anything.
>TBC

Same therapy Stan Lee has as he approaches his mid 90s, or anyone who has lived beyond the expected average.

Why do people subjugate others and withhold resources now? Plenty of cultures have let citizens starve while grain rotted in silos--and not just from infrastructural incompetence. People kill each other with nothing to gain all the time.

Are you going to argue that every wrong done on earth is because someone needed to do it? That every war was caused because one side lacked a resource the other had, or they both wanted one that couldn't support both of them? There have been plenty of wars fought over resources, but you'd be ridiculous to suggest that it was the underlying cause for all of them. And even moreso if you were to claim that scarcity was the singular reason for human cruelty in general.

I won't say I know why man is cruel to man, but it is clear that "need" is not the only reason. A post-scarcity society is by no means a post-war one, and I can imagine no scenario, resource related or not, in which humanity is post-cruelty.

>Continuing
Or maybe reverse would happen, with a cold world with cold-hearted people that don't care about anything? You know, like in The People of Sand and Slag, where humans no longer can feel compasion, love or genuine care or interest toward others, because the ability to be literally indestructable made them numb to everything, including the fact they are living in a fuckign toxic wasteland, but they don't care, since they can eat irradiated sand for food and be perfectly fine.

Those are interesting posibilities and I've just hit the peak of the iceberg here. And they are much better than "Megacorp rules your live, because reasons". It makes no real sense nowdays to dwell in mid-80s technoparanoia and extrapolate issues with corporate business, because we are no longer living under Reagonomics. At "best" the aftermath of them. But Japan didn't take over the world and neither did Evil Corp. Inc.

I'm talking low 200's.

This is what gets me about settings like Star Trek. You have a post scarcity setting for all intents and purposes but it assumes humanity are all these enlightened individuals who are 100% on the same page (except when they're not as per the Maki Rebellion).

I think settings where the technology is set to it's logical conclusion would shift the problems from a more personal one to a more "mythic" one but that doesn't stop people from being petty or cruel or pathetic or evil on an individual basis. What happens when you get someone who's way into kiling peopel that can be revived from back up. How does a society handle something like this?

>tell me what kind of therapy can deal with watching 5 generations of your descendants come and go.
Hell if I know, why is there an overacing organizations that dictates that to be the reason why you can't extend your life span? I could see a religious reason but you havn't said your setting is some kind of theocracy.

Damn, I didn't link, but the user you should check is this one

First one you responded to is me, a different user than the one who suggested limits on replacements. I think that it would be a private affair in which there would be no restrictions, thus leading to greater and greater disparities between classes.

this particular setting is a Kritarchy.

Well. That depends on information we don't have for instance if the procedure is very expensive or not but I assume the guy from is the one who originally posted the list so finding out it's some kind of theocractic rule satisfies my initial question.

I'm not saying that Evil Corps are the only answer to the question of what will come in the future, it's just that if all these new technologies were to come up in the real world without any societal shift to accommodate them, the most likely result would be haves and have nots. Just like with any other time in history. It's interesting to think about what happens when that dichotomy ends, but that theory isn't reliant on futuristic technology.

>How do you handle medicine and medical technology in sci-fi settings?

MAC vs PC style feud between people who swear by either BioTechnology or Cybernetic Enhancements.

Though, sometimes it does get out of hand and it turns into a less friendly rivalry and more of an actual: North Ireland vs South Ireland, domestic terrorism, civil disobedience, style kind of feud within the public.

It isn't even a question of diseases or cancer anymore, but a conflict of culture, religion, identity, and heritage.
It's the kind of blown-out situation where most people are either ghosts in their shells, hyper-police furries, or some other abomination in between that provided you're sufficiently devoid of artificial junk enhancements; you can apply to the government to be a "heritage human"- and receive government incentive in the form of benefits, guaranteed income, etc.. So you'll 'remain pure' for the sake of the species.

>The main trick is that having bad things happen is typically how you drive a plot: pursuing personal fulfillment in a utopia is tricky to write a gripping story around, although by no means impossible. The Culture books handle it by having other, less utopian cultures come in to conflict with the titular one, and Orion's Arm does it by having a vast variety of possible societies, some of which are ruled by insane god-AI
This way we are scratching yet another annoying thing from the list
Conflict.
I know and understand that American culture is almost entirely build on concept of conflict and struggle and that after WW2 burgers did their best to export their popculture aroudn the planet, but that doesn't change the simple truth:
You can have a story without a conflict. It will be just as gripping, if not more gripping, and can entirely go away without a conflict. Or rather than creating Huge Main Story Arc Conflict Dominating Everything (which is one of signs of shit-tier writing by the way), you can have a bunch of tiny micro "conflicts", still driving the plot further and still asking questions. In fact, a post-scaracity world by default is conflictless in traditional sense, because you no longer have issues about resources, wealth, comfort and basically entire bottom of Maslow's pyramid is always and constantly fulfilled. Now you have all time in the world to focus on the top part of it

What about society that worked for itself a system where you don't pursue murder? Like said, why not assume you have quasi-Buddhist society. Or any other, new or neo- system used to organise their society
Besides, your question is somewhat moot. You handle them by constant and prolonged supervision combined with resocialization. After all, we all know that people actively desiring to hurt others (and in non-consecutive way) are mental. So you try to cure and condition them, after all you have all the tech and time and knowledge now. Or other choice

But your problem is entirely based on following assumption: a societal shift didn't occure. At all. Ever. Never.
Things are not working like that. And I'm not talking about people eventually getting fed up and leading to revolution - not the first and probably last time, since most humane changes in human history were either directly achieved with violence or were the outcome of violence - but the sole notion most sci-fi relies on. That nothing changed. That everything is the same in the N-th century.
All while world around us changed dramatically few times in the last century alone.

I've always found his pyramid to be a bit janky, as some things on it, don't seem particularly needed or even useful in it.

I've never understood the idea of bio vs. chrome considering you need both ends of the spectrum to make the whole work (in my mind at least). Granted, if you go the route of people uploading their minds into synthetic bodies versus people who essentially become Alex Mercer then I can see that.

I guess, why not? We're trying to contemplate the way a society operates where death is an inconvience using our standards today when we don't have even less then a fraction of the tech or social ideals to work off of beyond pure speculation.

Kritarchy means rule of natural law over man's law, and judges are the leaders of the state.

vat grown organs aren't natural, but the judges in charge recognize they can't close pandora's box completely, so they imposed limits with their rulings once the technology became available.

And I went through enough shit in my life, along with being homeless, to consider it perfectly valid. After all, we are having here this conversation, solely because I have all my biological needs fulfilled, I have a steady relationship going and I've managed to organise my way in a way that makes me feel good, so I can have a conversation about human development and spend rest of the free time on reading textbooks about solar panels. Solely because I want to know about that field, even if it doesn't benefit me at all in my job or daylife.
But I can and want to.

>Natural law
Can we finally get over this stupid idea of Thomas Aquinata? He himself, during his life, managed to figure out this shit is retarded and goes back go man-made laws, full of exceptions, loopholes and other bullshit. Hell, your own example shows it in great fashion, with some self-appointed judges that follow natural law over man's law, that's why they make man's law to follow about how to follow natural law and of course has the classic "when we will be able to, then we will switch" loophole.

>This entire thread
I have no fucking clue what happend here, but I like the discussion more thant OP's questions

Not that OP but it would be deliciously ironic if they were aware of this and made it that way.

People are always aware of this shit when setting up anything in accordance with "natural law". The trick is to use it as a slogan for the masses rather than actually believing in it yourself.
Of course there is a group of genuine "believers", but those people are really, really stupid, since to have a genuine believe in the sole concept of natural law, you must be unable to use basic logic to realise it's a loop.

this user gets it.

but don't you see how that makes for a more interesting setting? are they rulings really interpretations of natural law or are they abuses of man disguised, however blatantly obvious they may be or not. can they be reinterpreted or do all decisions stand for a length of time? what happens when two judges have contradictory rulings?

The first two layers are of course valid, but already at the third layer you're at the point of "well that's nice to have but hardly a necessity". And so on to the point that considering them any sort of "need" seems absurd to me.

>but already at the third layer you're at the point of "well that's nice to have but hardly a necessity"
Please don't take it the wrong way, but I assume you are below 30, right?
And this is going to sound really condescending now, but there is on other way to put it, so here it goes: one day you will understand that point. Maybe next year, maybe next decade, but you will.

user, I'm living in a country where the ruling party uses this logic to justify abolishment of law protecting women from being beaten by their husbands. I don't find having this shit in fiction interesting at all, when I have to deal with it on regular basis in my normal, day-to-day life.
It's like that old notion that post-apocalyptic settings and visions only really pick up in two situations - when things are going good and people want to have some thrill or as a cautionary tales when things are going grim to not escalate them further.

Nope, I'm a bit over 30.

Not the user you're responding to but now my curiosity is peeked. How much of this is driven by the Orthodox Church or rather is this just a thing in society over there ?

i never said it was a good idea in REAL life.

fiction is one thing, but in reality its a horrid idea. if you're living in a Kritarchy, or a Theocracy as you have mentioned a few times, get the hell out.

Different user, but he's right. When I was in college I technically had everything, but I have nobody to talk with. At all. Not in the sense of literally nobody to talk with, but not talk about all the intimate stuff or the nonsensical stuff that I wanted to talk. And shit was depressing af, not to mention putting a serious damper on all other things, because I simply couldn't focus properly due to how fucking lonely I was.

Surface level stuff is changing all the time, but ever since the first single celled organism decided to eat the others around it instead of feeding off of sunlight or whatever, there have been haves and have nots. Again, I'm not saying that imagining a scenario without this is bad, just that if we were to realistically look at most possible futures, the majority would still have people withholding technology from others.

You know what? I'm not mad in the slightest. The fact this whole thread has turned into a conversation on the nature of man-kind when presented with the chance for post scacity technology and how we may or may not apply it is better than a dead thread.

>Granted, if you go the route of people uploading their minds into synthetic bodies versus people who essentially become Alex Mercer then I can see that.

Naw, I've been doing it more like: one woman goes to the hospital for some cosmetic gene therapy shots/injections and over the course of maybe 5 months grows fully functioning cat ears or a senior citizen goes through a radical treatment -body in a healing tube style- where his entire body is basically jelly-fish-style degenerated back into a 15 year old.
The other group though on the other hand is more about full-body-robot prosthesis, robot body parts, connecting their consciousness to the internet, being robot-people, etc..

It's Catholic. But somehow "God" and "natural law" are what gives you right to smack your wife if you feel like it.

And I've simply pointed out that having to deal with thing X IRL makes it boring in fiction. No, boring it's the wrong term.
Let's try again. People put in fiction things they don't have IRL. That includes problems they don't have or don't have to deal with. Remember the zombie craze when it started 15 years ago? How the biggest problem people had back then was (and only for some people) American invasion on Iraq? And how the whole thing virtually imploded right before the 2007 financial crisis, only to die out and lost any momentum around 2010, aka the time when everything went to shit for everyone due to said economic meltdown?
People had real problems, much bigger and pressing than fiction. Watching grim movies about grim stuff wasn't good anymore.
Now apply above to your notion of natural law and law-making issues in my country and you should get the picture.

Predation is a different thing from have/have not. The latter came about the moment we had two single cell organisms sitting around in environments that had different amounts of the various shit they needed, not when one tried to feed upon the other.

Of course, trying to draw conclusions about the behaviour of sapient creatures form what cells without a hint of sentience and basically no agency either end up doing...

"Conflict" in a writing sense is not the same as American-style militarism (and I do not live in the US anyways). "Conflict" can take the form of say, Man vs. Nature: for example, a post scarcity utopia can be faced with imminent destruction by naturally occurring cosmic rays, and have to figure out a way to handle this crisis. Or the story could be about investigating an unusual phenomenon not predicted by current scientific models and grappling with explaining it. Or the conflict could be purely internal, with an immortal having an existential crisis about whether his life, while pleasurable and functionally unlimited, has any fundamental meaning. All of these are perfectly good plots, and all of them create conflict without involving warfare.

glad to hear that!

I've always been fascinated by post-scarcity, because if we get rid of "things we need", it just turns into "things we want" and after that, what kind of motivation does the common man have?

and I understand that concept very well simply because we don't have that concept in play in my country. its interesting to me as a fictional concept because of that.

a capitalist society stratified by social-economic-status classes with megacorps ruling over it while barely legal private security forces go running around arresting and shooting people based on some seemingly arbitrary quota is boring to me as a fictional setting because that's where I live.

its all relative, I suppose.

I feel like we're getting away from Veeky Forums and more into /POL/ here though.

I don't feel like explaining this, so let's try to condense and use shortcuts. Mostly because I'll be leaving for work pretty soon.
Now, for the record, I don't agree fully with all the statements, but the general idea is true:
youtube.com/watch?v=exdR6lhN4bk
And you've basically just told us and yourself a story about "you must have it this way, because I have a story for it". The same applies to "realistically looking into future means entirely basing it on current situation and just changing the date" story. Pic related for that.

There we go, that shit happened even before predators. It would also persist even in a society where everyone thinks everyone should all be perfectly equal. Acts of god are still going to disadvantage some more than others.

If it makes you feel any better, I find such settings boring without living in them. Mostly because that's what sci-fi is doing since Neuromancer became a thing

I have the same feeling, unfortunatelly, but in next 20 minutes I will leave, so at least I won't see the collapse into /pol/tier bullshit

I mean, no matter what we do the roads are going to cross in some way or another. Arn't the stories we make driven by our beliefs afterall?

point taken. I guess I just wish it had -stayed- fictional.

It had nothing to do with militarism. At all.
But you are going back to square one - Huge Main Story Arc Conflict Dominating Everything. Don't do that.
You can spin entire story around, say, slice of life narrative. Or daily struggles. Can you even imagine daily struggles in post-scaracity world? That's more interesting than telling yet another "The planet is in danger and we must try to save it" story. How many of those have you read, heard or saw? And how many stories trying to figure out what could be your daily struggle in an utopian world do you know? Any at all?

>Don't do that

Why, save for it being allegedly over-done?

Going step further. Do you recall Brave New World? I never read it, but as far as I know, there is no "big" conflict in it. Instead, its the main character's struggle to be accepted by his own society and then maturing into realisation that he doesn't want acceptance, but at this point he's banished and it's too late to do anything about his mistakes other than regret over being an individual rather than part of the community.

Am I supposed to respond to the points raised on economics, or on building a story?

If it's on building a story, that's exactly what all fiction is. I think that there can be fiction on any topic that takes any side, but I believe true science fiction should do it's best to stick with a sense of realism that hypothesizes new technologies and their social implications. To help visualize that, I believe it is best to look into the past and analyze how other technological advancements changed society. So far, nothing has ever come remotely close to eliminating all disparity and I personally don't believe any technology outside of shared consciousness ever will. That doesn't mean someone can't write about a future like that, I just wouldn't find it write it or enjoy it as much.

I guess I've just explained here why. But let's give it a slightly different spin.
What's better: an original story in original world, or a story you already know before it even fully starts, but set in original world?
In other words: would you rather water down interesting setting into a cliche story that could happen in any other world, or rather try to find an unique story that could happen in said unique world?

It's about potential and not wasting it. Kind-of-sort-of how there was this mega-hype for Avatar when it came out. But it was literally Pocahontas story in slightly different (but not even that much different) world. There was absolutely nothing original in it, aside filming technique.

Respond to the points about making a story for yourself. A story that excused your story structure (I know how this sounds), where you convinced yourself that no matter what you do, you will have to have a situation of class struggle. Marxism is literally so 60s. There is no point trying to shovle that into story created today, because even the counter-movement to that died by late 70s. And your current reply only further reinforces you are a slave to your own story that you simply can't get away from disparities.
Why not? You are writing an utopian world. Why not make it utopian and WITHOUT engaging into it your believes in the same time? I get it, it wouldn't be engaging for you, but the main question is - can you do it at all? Create a setting that doesn't follow your own story on how world works? That's a great writing exercise, because it serves three roles in the same time:
- basic creativity
- making sure you create something that isn't X (in this case - your personal convictions)
- making you realise what exactly makes the X (in this case - your personal convictions)

I can write a fully functional theocracy setting based on the cult of the law as deity. It has zero bearing to my own leanings or believes, but I can. I actually did and sold it for a pretty penny as a ghost write. Sure, they've watered it down when adopting for a text-based game, but I didn't make it for anything else than exercise and few "bucks"

Anyway, back to the subject - are you capable of creating a setting where there are no haves and have nots? It's not a question you have to answer. Consider it rather... hm... assignment? As an exercise to perform in free time. Don't rush it, don't jump on it. But eventually do it.

And here endeth the lesson. I have a lecture to make in 50 minutes. See ya in few hours, if this thread survives

thanks for the discourse and have a good lecture!

Just going to respond for the lolz. I can write a story that completely ignores how the world works, I just don't want to and don't want to read anything that does.

Lmao. Looks like samefagging here because I think I'm the only one he's been discussing with. Could be wrong though.

With all the advances in stem cells and regenerative therapy its usually easier to say it's something like pic related. Scifi writers always have to make up some weird new virus or disease to either point out human folley or have both cakes: One for a setting where what people suffer from has been cured and the other for having people suffer like they do today.

I've always been more interested in medical stuff so my settings have more regeneration for healing instead of prosthesis.

Junkrat?

yep, you're wrong.

The issue here is that audience might just not relate to a unique story in a kind of circumstances they never experienced.
Think a hunter-gatherer Bushmen tribesman reading a "tfw no group" greentext on /tg. Even if you explain to him what TRPGs are, he'll probably think the author of that greentext is a moron with wrong priorities in life. Our way of life is just too much removed from his for him to understand our problems, or rather, regard them as actual problems and not stupid whims.

You should never overly rely on historical knowledge, because everything happened for the first time once.

If you're rich or very well equipped (high-tech medic bay), it's pretty much "poof, you're healed". Even a basic med kit can heal most wounds. Unless you get outright killed, it's pretty easy to put you back into action. That's if you have access to this kind of tech. If you're poor or stranded in a primitive place, medical support will be less advanced.

>Viewers are morons
Not him, but this is literally the most destructive stance you can EVER have about your own audience or toward your work. Dumbing things down or making them easily digestable is just a full-time failure, because you end up with cathering to the lowest common denominator, stripping just about any work of any kind depth or originality it could have for the sake of... what exactly? I mean at least when you are production executive, you can say for profit, since technically you've gained bigger audience. But otherwise? That's literally knee-capping your own creativity.

>Reading things I didn't write.
Imagine a book about a person's struggle to be recognized as having some ridiculous gender with six-word name and suffering when people don't call them by the pronoun they devised for themselves. Could you relate to that, or would you think that character is a retard and the book is about nothing? If the latter, then by your own definition you're a moron.

What I was writing about has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with values and worldview. A Bushmen isn't stupider than you, he just places different values on things and has experienced different circumstances.

I all for and eudaimonia, but the Culture is an horrible society, one that is founded on the most terrible values you can imagine.

I wish I still had that post made by a conservative about how Star Trek, for all its Communism, was a far better future for humanity than the Culture. Star Trek is all about humanity transcending, becoming better, while the Culture is all about Humanity regressing to animals with daddy issues.

The Culture is deeply disgusting.

>nothing original

I hate the message and I hate Cameron but you have to admit, the whole thing about primitives who are dependent on high technology they now view in superstitious terms is not something you see as a major, non satirical think in media.

If you wanna nitpick, then yes, nothing is new under the sun, but even 40k in any sort of cinematic format tries hard to avoid the whole "primitives using tech they no longer understand" angle in favor of trying to look like clean, modern scifi.

>the whole thing about primitives who are dependent on high technology they now view in superstitious terms is not something you see as a major, non satirical think in media.
The fuck you are even talking about? Nothing like that goes on in Avatar.

It has nothing to do with nicpicking or the retarded "nothing new or original" attitude. I'm simply pointing out this particular production was Pocahontas: IN SPACE!

>but at this point he's banished and it's too late to do anything about his mistakes

But the dude who banishes him remarks that he'll be happier where he's going because the place he's being banished to is full of freethinkers like him

I used to think that the Culture was great, but as I got older I've come around to this perspective.

Has anyone else had this sort of perspective shift as they got older?

But the discussion is about a post-scarcity society, not about a non-horrible one.

So are we designing horrible, post-scarcity societies now? I think the world of the Matrix might count.

>I'm simply pointing out this particular production was Pocahontas: IN SPACE!

...with crazy advanced technology, even on part of the "primitives." Mind uploading and a planet with ubiquitous cybernetics where random ass animals have dataports.

The locals in particular, or the avatar things in particular, must have had some sort of computer-like component to their brains for the whole uploading process to work.

Yes. There's no 'true' objectivity - humans are values all the way down. Destroying cultural-layer values doesn't free humans from value, it devolves them to biological-layer values.

ST was about becoming better people by building better cultural-layer tools. A technological ascension that many people missed, because they think all technology is gadgets.

The Culture replaced better character with brute force gadgets for hedonism, to wallow in base layer values instead of understanding and overcoming them. And on top of that, it hand-waved away any consequences through super-AI that just so happen to agree 100% with late 90s Guardian readers.