I haven't read a lot of sci fi's or dystopian's but do you think that a war to 'solve' or rather to climax a story between two opposing tribes/worlds/peoples is overdone?
Yes, depending on what type of sci fi it is. Star Wars is a good example because the characters had to fight the evil empire to gain their freedom. And in the game, Halo, the human race have to fight in order to survive. Captain Kate's story is also another good example. She will explain it to you. All military science fiction stories are about war. War is the solution because if you don't kill your enemies, they will kill you.
I think that war is a natural conclusion to an adversarial situation, and thats why it is used so much. Even in the natural world, animals fight for dominance, and the stronger opponent wins the 'problem'. I have read a lot of ways in which the outcome is altered, but retains the 'adversarial' aspect. For instance, two warring worlds unite to fight a common enemy. I do think it's a peice of 'low hanging fruit', so to speak for most sci-fi/dystopian stories. War is conflict, and people love conflict.
I like Herbert's focus on political intrigue as the arena of conflict ... he's able to draw many observations about people out of such fodder. Where he does introduce war, it's in the background -- but not part of the story.
Overdone? Totally. And military scifi stories nowadays are about 90 percent scifi and 10 percent military. Unless a writer is extremely knowledgeable about the military, combat, etc his or her work comes across as an action film in print instead of a legitimate story.
Story concepts cannot be overdone. They can only be poorly done. War is conflict on a mass scale. Conflict is central to plot, whether it be between populations, ideologies, individuals, or internal drives. Besides, science fiction is often a metaphor for what impinges on our daily lives, and war touches us daily.
Good sci-fi often uses war in a very interesting and effective way which means it cannot be over done. War is a part of human nature and culture, and something like Nineteen Eighty-Four explores this perfectly. I've heard people say they find Nineteen Eighty-Four overrated, or outdated. I don't think these people understood what that book was actually saying.
Trust me, Miles, it just got a whooolllleee lot bigger. For the first time ended up spending nearly three hours world building and tying the threads together to make everything work. As for war..it's, unfortunately, a sad fact with mankind. There will always be conflicts whether it be for resources, power, religion or economics, that will end up on armed conflict no matter what the time period is. Even in large, galactic settings there can be shortages of various resources, for example, let's say inhabitable worlds. Or, as we know the world has it's tin pot monomaniacal dictators now, imagine things like that on a galactic scale. Or various forms of government clashing. There's always someone who's willing to expand by force whether other people want to do that same, or not, it doesn't always matter. Think Chamberlain and Hitler for one. As long as man breathes, there will be conflict, and sometimes, and right now it seems more often then not, war breaks out. Plus, when talking dystopia, it can be anything from war, to hunger and in some stories, corporations that grind people under foot. Plus, never forget good old greed in there too. So, is it overdone? Not necessarily. Do you need to write war and it's violence for violence's sake? No. Right now, the first three novels I'm writing on this arc are dark, and they do have their share of violence, but by middle of the third novel, the four main characters know something BIG about themselves they didn't know before, and it changes their outlook. Their roles in the universe changes, and the mindset of how to defend the helpless, protect the innocent, and relieve suffering becomes something tee totally different then it is now. So, there is a place for everything. It just depends on how you write it, and what your purpose you want to accomplish is.
