jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner) (05/23/85)
[...] >P.S. -- I'll pose a counter-question I've been curious about for some time > Why do people in technical fields tend towards "escapist" > entertainment (not only science fiction, but role playing games, > the SCA, etc) more than people in other fields? Is there something > inherent in the work or the water? The attention to Science Fiction is fairly easy to understand. What other fiction really takes technology seriously? People in technical fields are interested in technology and no other field of fiction looks at it at all. Indeed, I am often dismayed at the attitudes of writers who come from the humanities. If and when they ever talk about technology, they seem to treat it as an insignificant sideline of human endeavour. Personally, I feel that technology often has a more long-lasting effect on humanity (good or bad) than philosophy or political science. Talk about that some other day... But another aspect of the technical mind is the appreciation of artificial worlds and models. We play games. Mathematics, for example, is a type of game: move symbols around according to certain rules and win the game by establishing something interesting. Computer programming is also an attempt to achieve some goal by following artificial rules. We tend to like situations where all the rules are known (in some sense) and we can play within them. To use myself as an example, I am a technical writer. This means that I believe I can write accurately and well (at least if I pay attention). However, I always had a dislike of essay questions on exams because the rules were too vague for my liking. It's so much easier in technical courses where there is a right answer and a wrong answer. I think a good many other technical people are the same way. Given this preference for known rules, certain forms of escapist entertainment become very attractive. In SF and Fantasy literature, the artificial world aspect is very clear. In role-playing games, you are sort of living life, but living by rules. Same thing in SCA: yet another artificial world, even if it is based on the best historical authority. Of course, all works of fiction create artificial worlds in some sense (otherwise they wouldn't be fiction). It's just clearer in some genres. Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo