Some early science fiction isn’t so much about conflict as it is a relation of an unlikely experience. But then, the stories I have in mind weren’t exactly that great. So that’s not exactly evidence against the assumption. Still, I think a sufficiently skilled writer could create an enjoyable story without conflict, but it would be like a painter throwing out a primary color.
One of my favorite of OP’s short posts is Building Weirdtopia. (Yudkowsky’s no spoilers approach to scientific pedagogy is such an intriguing one, I’m a quite sad he hasn’t spun it into a novel yet. I’d seriously love to read a Neal Stephenson-length epic about a child in such a society recapitulating modern science, but maybe I’m just weird that way.) It strikes me that one could write a novel about a Weirdtopia that has no conflict, featuring only exploration of a counter-intuitive, yet highly intriguing, world. Conversations within, and descriptions of, this strange world (so long as the writer is very, very clever) would keep my interest. But then, this would be more like speculative anthropology than a story.
I haven’t found any exploration stories that don’t have some form of ‘actor versus environment’ that is critical to making the writing engaging to the reader. I’ve also seen plenty of ways to shift the conflict meta, by means of what amounts to a framing device.
I’m excluding descriptive fiction from ‘narrative’; I’m not sure exactly what the boundary is, but describing how something works is different from describing somebody operating it.
Some early science fiction isn’t so much about conflict as it is a relation of an unlikely experience. But then, the stories I have in mind weren’t exactly that great. So that’s not exactly evidence against the assumption. Still, I think a sufficiently skilled writer could create an enjoyable story without conflict, but it would be like a painter throwing out a primary color.
One of my favorite of OP’s short posts is Building Weirdtopia. (Yudkowsky’s no spoilers approach to scientific pedagogy is such an intriguing one, I’m a quite sad he hasn’t spun it into a novel yet. I’d seriously love to read a Neal Stephenson-length epic about a child in such a society recapitulating modern science, but maybe I’m just weird that way.) It strikes me that one could write a novel about a Weirdtopia that has no conflict, featuring only exploration of a counter-intuitive, yet highly intriguing, world. Conversations within, and descriptions of, this strange world (so long as the writer is very, very clever) would keep my interest. But then, this would be more like speculative anthropology than a story.
I haven’t found any exploration stories that don’t have some form of ‘actor versus environment’ that is critical to making the writing engaging to the reader. I’ve also seen plenty of ways to shift the conflict meta, by means of what amounts to a framing device.
I’m excluding descriptive fiction from ‘narrative’; I’m not sure exactly what the boundary is, but describing how something works is different from describing somebody operating it.