This morning, Boing Boing linked to an article I found interesting, on the way science-fiction stories often feature apparent “gaps” or imbalances in the technology of their imaginary worlds, and why those gaps are not necessarily a failure on the writer’s part. The starting point for the article was the current phenom movie The Hunger Games and the books from which it is adapted. I haven’t read or seen The Hunger Games myself, but apparently the story has drawn a certain amount of criticism because the futuristic dystopia in which it is set (supposedly descended from our own United States of America following some kind of apocalypse) includes such high-tech flourishes as hovercraft, force fields, and genetically engineered animals, but it still relies on coal-fired powerplants for electricity and has nothing resembling the Internet. Some readers/viewers question the idea of a society that’s so advanced in some ways but not in others. The article goes on to make the argument that real societies choose to adopt or abandon technologies for all sorts of reasons — political, economic, and/or cultural — and the seeming flaws of imagination in this story can be explained quite logically, given the assumptions of the society in question. The whole thing reminded me of what I said a couple weeks ago regarding the usage of swords in so much of the “planetary romance” sub-genre of science fiction, i.e., that it’s not at all unreasonable for John Carter or Flash Gordon to fight the bad guys with a sword while anti-gravity airships hang overhead, because Barsoom and Mongo have societies that, for whatever reason, still value prowess with a blade, even though firearms are available. Because, you know, swordfighting is cool. Especially in stories, which are all this stuff really is, after all.

And just in case you still don’t buy the notion that a society really might choose to go deliberately retro or turn its back on certain technologies, consider the somewhat depressing final line from that Boing Boing post:

A decade ago, you could fly London to New York in a couple of hours. A year ago, America had a reusable spacecraft.

But not now. Because we decided those things were no longer economical. Or necessary.