As I mentioned in the Inexplicably Missing Technologies thread, Weber
and Stirling appear to be missing a great opportunity to do real
science fiction by having their fictional societies exploit
sophisticated water power as a replacement for electricity.
It occured to me recently that the reason for this is that they don't
see their audiences as being at all interested in that sort of thing.
They write "rousing adventure stories", full of blood and thunder,
with an Speculative Fiction background, not science fiction that
really examines the ramifications of the setup. This applies even
more to Weber than to Stirling, but Stirling hasn't really done
anything new with the Emberverse novels past Dies the Fire (1), and
the description of the Mars and Venus books seem to hark deliberately
back to the era of "rousing adventure stories".
I'm not sure why this disappoints me, since I'm still following the
stories if not buying the books. Perhaps its because the stories are
targeting the teenager in all of us rather than the adult, and it
reminds me that are problems over the past few decades have been from
too few adult acting adults and too many overgrown teenagers. For all
that people hear don't talk about them, the Sharing Knife books
involve the adult type problems of changing the behaviors of people
dead set on maintaining their behaviors up until the point it gets
them killed.
The Safehold books are at least dealing with the problem of
overturning a world wide religion based on falsehood.
(1) It is probably a bit hypocritical of me to complain about the
Emberverse books since Stirling does seem to be moving the world to
one in which at least subtle magic is real, as I suggested awhile
back. I guess I just want to eat my cake and have it too.
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