191
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
191 points (99.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43027 readers
1419 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think the best reasoning for this has more to do with the practicalities of writing than with the accuracy of the speculation about future human endeavours. As you say, there haven't been any naval missions in space, which is exactly why when drawing from more familiar analogues you can find a richer vein by looking upon naval tradition instead. While fiction, and sci-fi in particular is going to involve some imagination to literally create and invent things all fiction tends to deal in with what we know and only a small dose of the fantastical to reframe it in a more interesting context.
The lack of similar real life equivalents for long missions with a lot of personnel and very large craft and opportunities for internal rivalries, promotions, ambition and rival navies with largely equivalent structures and traditions in current spaceflight, means that the work of writing about scenarios where that happens in space is going to be much harder and probably less resonant without drawing on something where all of that already exists. In addition to that, the hundreds of years of different naval traditions and rituals makes for more pomp and circumstance and delivers a ready-made atmosphere that's well understood even by the layperson as in those hundreds of years it has seeped in to the public imagination.
Tapping in to all the practical similarities between the scenarios often portrayed in SciFi and naval contexts along with all that cultural baggage makes for a much richer and more vivid atmosphere and setting within which the characters can interact with one another. This is reason enough to transpose naval tropes in to your space based science fiction story whether it makes the most sense or not for the way such endeavours might actually be organized in reality in the future.