1. I’m surprised there aren’t more comments on this post!  I’ve had it saved for a couple days to remind me to come back and comment. 🙂

    I once heard that a book’s setting should not be static.  Something in society should be changing, to make it more interesting.  Culture war seems like an awesome element to bring to the table, to give a fictional world/country/place movement and upheaval.

    I HAVE actually used culture war as part of my book’s world (or plan to)…in the second book of my trilogy there is significant friction over the topic of humans and Earth.  Some people in that world want to cut off all ties with Earth and humans, while others think there is value in being connected to human society.  There is a lot of animosity toward the human characters themselves, too, which is going to be really interesting and fun to write.  I’m looking forward to exploring the culture war and seeing how it shifts my fictional world and affects all the people involved. 🙂  Eventually it escalates into an all-out civil war – but that’s because there are other factors involved too!

  2. I confess that I have to work hard in this area. Because I am such a live-and-let-live person, certain kinds of conflict just do not compute with me. Fortunately (?) for my writing, a number of cultural clashes do lead to the kind of issues that I feel very passionately about, so I can still have something to say regardless.

    Great post.

  3. dmdutcher says:

    A good example of a culture war in secular SF is Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain trilogy. Normal humans create a genetically enhanced human race called the Sleepless, who no longer need to sleep and who quickly outpace us. Then they create an enhanced version of themselves called the Super-Sleepless, and you’ve got three different types of humans who can’t understand each other. Each of the groups has their own agenda, and it’s a good analogy to social class-upper/elite, middle, and new lower class.

    I haven’t seen it much in Christian spec fiction, because most of it really doesn’t go beyond space opera/tolkien pastiches/paranormal ya. There’s the typical current culture war about abortion, etc, but not much idea of future or fantastic societies and their own needs. Like in a fantasy world, a Christian-analog having an affinity for magic that’s considered destructive, dark, or unclean vs a Christian who was raised that Christians only used white, blue, or green magic. You could see quite an internal culture war over that, and throw in the outside world who sees this and can’t understand why they bother.

     

What do you think?