The harsh virtual reality of home decorating
I spent much of this morning decorating, and because decorating is the most boring thing in the world, I entertained myself by trying to come up with some ideas for a science fiction story. Needless to say (though I’m going to say it anyway) this is the kind of idle thought that has drifted around my head for years now.
So far, no entertaining plot ideas have emerged, despite this being the third house I’ve co-owned and therefore been forced to decorate. Anyway.
I started out with this thought: “No galactic civilisations. No warp drives. No super zappy stuff. Let’s think realistically.” So I emulsioned the walls and imagined a future human history that remains stuck unhelpfully in the Solar System. Even 10,000 years from now. Which is a loooong time, plenty of time for people (the concept of person, even) to change, but pretty much nothing in celestial history terms. I ummed in my head about AI and Ganymede and half a dozen other ideas that Arthur C Clarke probably thought of half a century or more ago, then found I’d finished the painting and stopped for fried egg sandwich.
Then, this evening, Warren Ellis happened to mention something called “Mundane SF” and I sat up straight in front of my computer. He didn’t mean … surely not - someone had already written stuff like this? Gah! Of course they have. There’s a whole bloody genre full of it.
Now all the time I was hoping to spend writing my Mundane science fiction story will be taken up reading the backlog of stuff that’s gone before. At this rate, I shall have to decorate the living room and the downstairs loo before I have any chance of coming up with an original idea.
