Tales of Outlanders

SF is particularly good at exploring the transport of a single person or even mass migration to a new place. Psychology (particularly memory), sociology, and technology are all involved. This is a looming problem for a world that is rapidly changing. As Captain Kirk once said, we’d better start solving problems faster than we encounter new ones.

Some books we might learn from:
A Memory Called Empire” - Arkady Martine
Stranger in a Strange Land” - Robert Heinlein
The Dispossessed” - Ursula K. Le Guin


Admin: What are some other stories depicting humans adjusting to strange places or new conditions – successfully or unsuccessfully?

As scidata infers, just about any SF tale concerns a new place or lifestyle.
While it’s obviously a huge ask for a story (often short) to cover every aspect of social change, I think this topic should focus on stories that provide some description of how we got to a new place.

Arthur C Clarke’s “Childhoods End” meets that requirement, as it tells the story of Humanity from First Contact to last.

Asimov’s Foundation series certainly covers changes in an empire (although not how we got to a galactic empire in the first place)

At the risk sounding like a scratched record, the game ‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’ provides a lot of mouldy bread crumbs as to what happened over the previous millenium.

It’s worthwhile checking Grist’s Climate 2200 project for suitable tales.

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Add in time travel.

Lest Darkness Fall

and

Lord Kalvin of Otherwhen

And of course, THE TIME MACHINE by H.G. Wells. The protagonist is the best kind of outlander: the reader.

The term “planetary romance” is sometimes used to described the sub-genre depicting fantastical adventures taking place on an exotic world. The canonical example here is John Carter of Mars. It’s generally closer to space opera than science fiction.

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