Imagination and Sci-fi
It seems to me there are two main types… those that are based on Earth dynamics and those that don’t so much — am I wrong?
Any series, film or book that explores a Universe that doesn’t include Earth can be a harder and more technical place to be imaginative in and harder to create either in roleplay scenario or on the screen / in games. Their Flora, Fauna, Culture, Communities will be made up of things that we most possibly would have to learn from scratch in order to ‘fit’ in and understand properly as a viewer (unless we/the main character were able to and could be accepted as playing someone who had just arrived from Earth and was terribly spacelagged, confused and new).
I guess this could include some planets in ‘backwater’ parts of Universes too — places where such things as silk and transmitted media were hard to attain or learn about….
But I feel that of the first type — the type that believe in Earth, they would recognise anything that we would right now as humans living on Earth (even if it was so far in the future that Earth in the scenario was dead and gone).
This is one thing I enjoy in Joss Whedon’s Firefly.. that it is so easy to Roleplay. Many scenes in the show are a jumble of all sorts of things we could imagine encountering in our daily lives… tomatoes, helicopters, babies, incense, horses, sponges, cartoons and cars. Things born out of Earth human minds in Earth human environments.
No offence to aliens of course.. I’ll just need my jotter if it comes to planning clear and realistically helpful communication ^^
