Today’s topic comes from QSFer Jim Comer:
Dole’s Habitable Planets for Man and Niven’s puckish defiance of Dole’s limitations: How unlike Earth do we want to make our worlds? What schemae do we want to use to design our histories? Do Spengler, Diamond and Toynbee still apply? How do worlds differ if sex is different?
I’ll break this down a bit. Carl Sagan postulated that there would be many habitable planets out there, and many alien civilizations.
But just because a planet is habitable doesn’t mean it’s comfortable.
So what kinds of worlds should we be creating for our fiction? How could they be different from Earth? and as LGBT folks, how might we monkey with the mores and cultures, especially in ways that might be shaped by the different environments?