Sense of wonder

So I was thinking the other day why I don't really enjoy most of the scifi or fantasy (in book, game, or movie form) that's come out recently, and I came to the conclusion that most modern fiction is missing a sense of wonder.

Let's define that: wonder is something that makes your soul ache for what might have been, what never was, and what may yet be.

Since that's not a really useful definition, I'm going to try and elaborate. Wonder comes from the unknown, being faced with it and exploring it, and most importantly with being left with unanswered questions. It's also a positive emotion, so the unknown must awe, it must inspire, it must grant possibilities undreamt-of.

However most speculative fiction these days doesn't do that. This is the worst in movies, but much scifi is in fact horror, where whatever unknown there is, is not something to be explored but hidden from or destroyed. Fantasy falls into "gritty and realistic" (GRR Martin), Urban Fantasy (Every fantasy book published for the past five years it seems), or A Clone Of The Lord Of The Rings.

While the first one fails the wonder test on the simple merit of striving as hard as it can in the opposite direction, the latter two make an egregious error in storytelling, to my mind. They have no original setting.

Urban fantasy comes with a big asterisk saying "Like Reality Unless Otherwise Noted." And how many fantasy settings are just Generic Medieval England or bog-standard Middle-Earth, with orcs and goblins and dwarfs and elves? This is familiar, it inspires not the imagination, and it's incredibly lazy.

You can't explore the unknown if you don't give the reader an unknown to confront. And the only way you can do that is to invent your own universe. In scifi, that used to be by inventing everything outside the Earth, but these days it seems everyone has the same Generic Interstellar Government Of Earth, sometimes with a vague threat or another. There's no outside context problem to confront, no immensity of concept, it's just regular wars and politics writ slightly larger and with starships instead of tanks.

So there's one fundamental thing people need to do when they write - forget reality. Stories are not reality. Oh, you need verisimilitude of reactions for human characters, but nothing else needs to match our world. Your politics, your wars, your histories, your laws of physics. We have an infinite sandbox to play in, your starships need not be buildable, and your magics explainable. Don't write people being terrible to each other because it's realistic - stories are for inspiring, for creating the reality we want things to be, not just ruminating over the grit and nastiness that plague us.