McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on January 08, 2013, 06:46:46 PM ---This would be where the microparsing comes in. If there is a "theme", it would be regarding things like personal and familial loyalty, the difference between a "community" and "a bunch of people living in the same place." Looking at the long-term (over decades and centuries) good versus the immediate goals of this or that ambitious person or group, and finally perhaps the potential value of both inter- and intra-community cooperation...
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All of which sounds fascinating, worth exploring, and I am sorry if I misread what you were saying earlier; those are things I'd construe as inherently political issues, regardless of what if any position you or your text or your characters take on them.
--- Quote ---What would be accurate will be the rare bird who says "Oh, this bit reminds me of the Second Boer War, but that other bit's kind of like the Medici's, and hey, this guy's read his Thucydides..."
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heh. I'd be deeply surprised if anyone dug out the deeper influences on what I'm doing, either; a politically naive protagonist with simplistic notions of where she comes from and what she's doing may not help there, as she kind of wears them on her sleeve, and getting the more-complicated-than-that nature across despite her is being fun.
--- Quote ---Well, my story's set on a colony world left isolated for a thousand or so years, following a huge interstellar war which shattered various empires and polities. Which itself came a couple thousand years after "The Fall of Terra." So any current socio-political events, nationality or ethnic issues, etc are pretty much irrelevant in there setting.
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Sure, and I'd be surprised if it were otherwise; not sure I can think of any definable political issue that has endured over millennia with the possible exception of anti-Semitism. I'd find it hard to believe in a human society that didn't have some internal fracture lines of that sort, though - one thing that does intrigue me is the contrast between the Protestant/Catholic divide I grew up with in Ireland and the Anglophone/Francophone distinction I currently live with in Montreal, as ways for ethnic distinctions to be significant go, and talking from either of those is very challenging indeed. Very little SF engages with issues like that in ways that really feel like distinct things of their own rather than metaphors for some historical model - John Barnes' Earth Made of Glass strikes me as an impressive exception, fwiw. My setting has relatively recently got hold of a functional anti-aging hack, and the tensions between the people who are going for this and the people who'd rather have children are going to be an issue.
--- Quote ---The fun thing is that I didn't create that setting with the intention of avoiding current political events. The story concept, main character & her community came first, and the period of time between then and now kept growing as I created the history necessary to put her where she is. A lot of "No, it would take at least this long for the planets's albedo to return to normal, that long for pioneering species to take root in this area again..."
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Which is exactly the scale of world-building that makes something solid, for me.
--- Quote ---I'm just waiting for someone to say "Well, that dialogue isn't appropriate or accurate, a Person of Color, particularly a female, wouldn't speak that way..." As if in 4,000 plus years, after the rise and fall of a planetary, then interstellar, then another interstellar civilization, people will even be speaking "English," much less worried about anything beyond whether or not the hydroponics are going to fail and leave them hungry before spring.
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Indeed; I've seen similar grumbling about Ben Aaronovitch's urban fantasy set in London, which sfaict from experience of living on the outskirts of London for four years, is a pretty accurate (and very positive) portrayal of people of mixed-racial descent in a complex context that does not work the same way as North American models.
--- Quote ---Oh, the Space Pandas are just there to provide an example of how some people will try to read socio-political statements into a soup label or the tag on a mattress. Or attempt to school the author of even such a silly space opera in their "responsibility" to address current social issues.
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And while I agree with you about that being inappropriate, I do worry that, as someone who is writing with the hope of selling in the US, as the biggest English-language SF market available, that not having lived in the US from more than a few months myself, there might be places where the underlying axioms I may not even be aware of will bounce oddly for a US readership (as seems to have been the case for the Aaronovitch series.)
--- Quote ---My actual story has fairly hard science, at least on the ground. The space-opera exceptions being limited to B-5 style hyperspace travel, the existence of "artificial gravity" (or call it "Mass Field Enhancement or some-such if you want to be picky"), and the means of keeping your crew from turning to paste on the bulkhead during maneuvers.
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That makes sense. I've been doing something similar with fairly hard science with a handful of exceptions; I wanted a setting with lots of worlds that had been colonised by different people over a timespan where for many years starships were a scale of resource available to a medium-sized corporation or university department, followed by discovering fast enough FTL to unexpectedly put all those disparate worlds in contact again after centuries of isolation because that way lies interesting conflict, so my FTL is very much contrived to give the setting I want.
--- Quote --- Plus, I have a species with lifespans in the thousands of years and non-hemoglobin based blood. Which I suppose might be feasible, but until I can find some more speculative science regarding that bit of speculative biology, I'm calling it "space opera.")
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Non-hemoglobin blood is easy, you only have to go as far as lobsters and insects for other oxygen-carrying compounds. And we have a fair few known species that basically don't die of old age, at least to a scale of centuries; sturgeons in the wild, for one. (So far as I am aware, the upper bound on that is due to the limits on how long humans have been observing sturgeon.) So that combination would not even need a different life chemistry to read plausibly to me.
cenwolfgirl:
86 words
cenwolfgirl:
111 words ;D ;D
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Continuity and minor tweaks pass on TIWTBWO #2 yesterday. I am pretty much happy with it unless anything in it needs tweaking with the changes I am contemplating for #1.
cenwolfgirl:
that is good :)
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