Crisis Parks: Cultural and Financial Investments in the Future

Welcome to the first post in my Speculative Societies Column.

Today I want to look at a social science fiction solution to a large number of various social and environmental problems we’re currently experiencing in our societies across the globe. You may or may not be aware that I’m an American. Given that, I’ll be writing from an American perspective and using American politics, economics, and geography to craft this thought experiment. It could certainly be adapted to a story with any setting, but the particulars are going to change quite a bit depending on available unused land, geopolitical realities, etc.

The social and environmental problems we’ll be addressing with this hypothetical social and economic policy are immigration and migration, homelessness, increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters, and the current worker and skilled worker shortage in the United States as of 2022. You might wonder what could possibly address all of these problems in a single package. When I mentioned in my into post that these are social science fiction and somewhat larger than life solutions/responses to societal issues, I was gently suggesting that they are unlikely to ever be made reality. But, they are still plausible from an abstract practical perspective.

So, what is a Crisis Park? America has an enormous number of parks and other sites concerning national and natural history. Areas of land set apart for public use for recreational, educations, and cultural purposes. A Crisis Park is then an area of land, necessarily more improved on than a park like Yellowstone or Crater Lake, set aside for the purpose of crisis management and human displacement.

Let’s theorize six regional divisions of the United States. Other countries could have less or more, and like our six US divisions, they exact boundaries would be determined by human geography and natural impediments. Each one cooperates among its member states–or is administered by the Federal Government. It might be most interesting to propose a Federal Executive Department runs it: the Department of the Interior, perhaps, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Maybe we give it to FEMA. Or perhaps we propose our own new Department of Crisis Management, or some such.

Whatever the organization, they run our six Crisis Parks as hubs for various services, social and emergency. Our Parks would have temporary and transitional housing, say for a million people. They would have medical services, entertainment venues, shopping districts, schools. They would also have command centers for coordinating natural disaster response and relief, including local and regional police and fire departments in the affected areas, as well as their own reserve units. Perhaps the Western Section would have a heavy emphasis on forest fire response. The Southeastern Section might be tuned for hurricane and flood relief. The Great Plains Section might be particularly skilled with tornado recovery.

I think it’s pretty elf-explanatory for natural disaster response. But how does it address immigration and homelessness? Well, it provides central processing locations for refugees and migrants. It has built-in housing in the form of single family homes and apartment blocks. We aren’t shoving people in the Superdome, here, or putting kids in fenced enclosures in abandoned shopping malls. There’s government-run medical services. Which can double as teaching hospitals, providing a baseline standard of training for private hospitals and universities to compare themselves against.

You need staff to run these facilities. They create jobs for relocated homeless populations and refugees. They can offer certification in various trades required for their own maintenance. Not only do they create permanent jobs, they offer low-cost, affordable training for important fields which may be lacking enough skilled workers. Unlike private hospitals or plumbing firms or whatever, they can afford to invest in on-the-job training, don’t suffer from over-staffing when trainees comes in, etc. Former employees can easily parlay their skills into small businesses or jobs in the private sector.

Speaking of the private sector, although these facilities have public concessions and other shopping services, they can sell vendor contracts to staff or use their entertainment venues. Offer gigs and performances and grants for up-and-coming artists and entertainers. Local schools could use their sporting facilities, or contract with the federal government for trade school programs using the facilities.

If you think this sounds a bit like utopian socialism, you’re right on the money. The reality would obviously be more complex. But through public-private partnerships, these facilities could pay for a large portion of their own expenses. They could be part of larger networks providing affordable services to low-income families or for people on Medicaid and Medicare. They could help new citizens or refugees acclimate to American society and culture without being completely focused on where their next meal is coming from. Public universities based here could offer affordable college and learning opportunities to birth-right and naturalized US citizens.

In a country where private enterprise is fetishized and government programs have a bad name, the Crisis Parks run by the Department of Crisis Management could provide a basis of comparison against which citizens could measure the ethics, economics, and effectiveness of private companies, without eliminating private enterprise or leaving the government as the only option.

Now imagines a story in a secondary world setting where a government runs crisis parks or an equivalent service. Look at how I’ve connected the goals and barriers to the crisis park concept to American politics and geography. You want to have at least that much interaction between your speculative fiction premise and the world in which is resides. What would it suggest to you that our secondary world crisis parks are concerned with not stepping too hard on the toes of private businesses? What does it say that large dedicated facilities are considered necessary to deal with population changes due to mass migration? What relationship would a secondary world nation implementing crisis parks likely have with its natural environment?

All of the above are useful angles from which to consider a social science fiction premise. And you can inspire very cool story conflicts even without fancy tech or magic. Just imagine the changes in public transportation, highways, planes, and railroads required to support new centrally located population centers capable of housing up to two million people. How would this affect nearby cities? Local businesses?

There is of course more to this concept than described here. Details on various individual services and how they might work. Like any good story idea, it’s too large to fit in a single blog post, but hopefully there was enough of a picture to make my argument. Feel free to ask for details in the comments.

 

The True Cost of Science

Following up on my last post linked to at the bottom of the page, today I’m gonna talk about the issue of requiring a “cost” for magic, and the hidden costs of technology.  I’m sure you know a bit about that second part in the real world, but I want to address it from both narrative and world-building perspectives.

https://twitter.com/Merc_Rustad/status/1023246501143883777

Again, not an attack on the opinions of this panel.  But, the “personal” cost of magic vs. the hidden cost of science is sorta the topic, and this tweet did inspire it.

The main reason that the cost of magic tends to be a personal one is because the function of magic so often tends to be to side-step the infrastructure so indispensable to science and technology.  When we use technology to solve a problem in a story, the world-building and pre-work that supports the tech is so often already implied and accounted for.  Sure, it costs me nothing to dial your cell phone.  But somebody had to invent the tech, build the cell towers, provide the electricity, drill for the oil to make the plastic, mine the gold and copper and process the silicon, etc.  And all of that took thousands of years of set-up on the part of millions if not billions of people from all over the world.

Whereas, if I telepath you in Fantasy Capital City #11 from Frozen Northern Fortress #2490, none of that work was required.  At most, maybe there was a breeding program or a magical experiment.  Maybe a few years of training me.  But you’re still short-cutting uncountable hours of effort that were required for me to text you on Earth.  And some magic is vastly more powerful on a per-second basis than telepathy.  That is, it’s effect on the physical world is enormous in comparison to me pathing you about the cute boy at the inn.

That’s why many people want magic to have a price.  Usually it’s a personal price, because there isn’t the societal infrastructure around to displace that cost to the ancestors or, as Merc so sharply notes above, the environment.  The cost is personal because there’s no structure to allow for other options.  And also because it plays powerfully into the themes of many fantasy works.  is the requirement that there even be a cost puritanical?  That depends, I guess.  Certainly a YA protag whose mom pays the phone bill isn’t expending any more personal effort to make a phone call.

But then, the requirement of all that infrastructure vastly limits what you can do with tech.  Whereas magic can do not only enormous stuff for seemingly no effort, but it can do things that normally would be considered impossible.  Such as throw pure fire at someone.  If Lvl. 3 Fireball is functionally equivalent to a grenade, does that negate the need for a cost to the spell?  Well, can I cast infinite Fireballs where I might only be able to carry six grenades?  Then maybe not.  Even if I have 20 incredibly advanced, complex tools that are carry-able on a tool belt or in a small backpack, I probably still can’t do even a hundredth of what a mediocre hedgemage in some settings can do with zero tools.

If I feel like the character can do literally anything with magic without having to do much prep beforehand, and without the labor of millennia of civilization to back them up, if might take some of the tension out of the story.  Can you substitute unbreakable rules to get around that freedom?  Certainly.  And most systems with a cost do.  But that can steal leave a lot of freedom to avoid the hard work it would otherwise take to get around a plot obstacle.

And finally, we have to look at the other obvious reason for putting a cost on magic, even if it’s only eventual exhaustion.  Every other thing we do or could do in a given situation in the real world has a personal cost.  It might be immediate, like physical exhaustion.  Or it might be more distant like having our phone shut off for not paying the bill.  So, if magic has no such cost, or physical.economic limit, you have to wonder what the point of doing anything the normal way would be.  And if you don’t ever have to do anything the normal way, it’s unlikely your culture and society would match so closely to societies whose entire reason for being the way they are is based on the limitations of “the normal way”.

So, in the end, it’s not that all magic must have a personal cost, and tech can’t.  It’s more that the way magic is used in most fantasy stories means that the easiest or almost only place the cost can fall is on the shoulders of the character.

But there are other ways to do.  Environmental ones, for example.  The cataclysmic mage storms of Mercedes Lackey.  Bacigalupi and Buckell’s The Alchemist, and The Executioness‘s brambles.  Or, for example, perhaps the power for magic comes from living things.  A mage might draw his power from a far distant tree.  Might kill an entire forest at no cost to himself.  Might collapse an empire by sucking dry its rivers and its wombs with her spells.  And at no cost except of course the enmity of those he robs of life, or of the neighbors who blame her for the similar catastrophe wrought upon them by her unknown colleague to the west.  Perhaps they crumble buildings by drawing on the power of “order” stored within its interlocking bricks.  Or maybe the radiation by-products from the spell energy pollutes the soil and the stones, leading to horrific mutations of wild-life that scour the country-side and poison the serfs with their own grain.  Or maybe, just maybe, it cracks the foundation of the heavens with its malignant vibrations and brings the angles toppling down like iron statues and through the crust of the world into hell.

So, as I’ve said before, it’s consequences to the actions of the characters that people want.  And often the easiest or most simplistic costs are personal ones.  But certainly, you could apply environmental costs.  Or narrative costs paid to other characters who don’t much care for the selfish mage’s behavior.  Or metaphysical costs to the order world or the purity of its souls.  Those costs are easily addressed and provided for when they mirror the costs familiar to use from our own use of technology.  But sometimes when were straying far from the realms of earthly happenings, interesting and appropriate costs become harder to work into the story in a way that doesn’t disrupt its progression.

Sure, the choice of a personal cost could be puritanical.  Or it could be efficient.  Or lazy.  But that’s not a flaw of our conception of magic; rather, it’s a flaw in the imagination of the individual author, and the sum of the flaws of all authors as a whole.

I’d love to sea some magic systems that lack a direct personal cost like years off your life, or the blood of your newborn brother.  And while we’re at it, give me some science fiction choices with personal costs.  Technology in our world certainly isn’t consequence free; just ask Marie Curie.  Anyone up for the challenge?

 

 

All You Need Is Kill Your Darlings

There’s been a lot of talk on Twitter today by many writers I admire about poorly expressed or conceived writing advice.  “Kill your darlings” has been taking the brunt of the assault.  But various writers have also tackled “show, don’t tell”, “write what you know”, “cut adjectives/adverbs”, etc.

 

Now, these “rules” of “good writing” are well known to be overapplied and misinterpreted to the detriment of many a conscientious neophyte scribbler.  But it’s also interesting to see the combination of straw-manning and overgeneralization being employed to criticize them.

Kill you darlings can be misinterpreted to mean many bad things, such as “kill everything you love”.  Everyone agrees the original meaning was not to let overly-cute prose ruin an otherwise well-written story.  More generally, it has evolved to mean that you have to be willing to cut things from your writing that don’t serve the goal of the story.  That’s a very nebulous concept, and “kill your darlings” doesn’t give any easy hints as to figuring out what might constitute a “darling” for practical purposes.  After all, every writer is different, and there are many valid styles of writing.  And to be honest, demanding for three words to hold the secret to good writing is asking way too much.

“Show, don’t tell” comes in for similar misplaced acrimony.  It was never meant to say you couldn’t ever tell, but rather to address an incredibly common flaw of writing, with beginners especially: the narrator telling the reader how clever or witty the main character is, for example, while never backing this up with action and character development on the page.  You don’t need to have excessive purple description of the “beautiful palace”, but you do need to show your characters acting kind if you want to counterbalance ruthless or practical behavior in a protag with something fluffier.  If your general is the Alexander of his world, the reader will be more willing to suspend disbelief if they actually see him making smart strategic decisions or brilliant tactical maneuvers, rather than being defeated time after time despite all the praise heaped upon him by his subordinates.

“Cut adjectives” is one of the rules that is far more of a stylistic choice than the others.  Being able to express those adjectives as part of the character’s speech patterns can be a cool stylistic move, but plenty of good writers use adjectives with “said” without falling prey to a tom swifty.  Choosing a more specific noun or verb can break narrative voice or result in thesaurusitis.  Adjectives and adverbs can be used to great effect.

As with all rules of writing, they are shorthand for larger, more complex discussions, and it’s incumbent on writers not to ignore known context to score easy points or excuse their own misunderstandings and need for growth as writers.

Now, I do think that there’s a toxic interaction between writing “rules” like these and the raising up of certain writing styles over others.  A spare, minimalistic style with “transparent prose” is the most vaunted style of writing in the modern era.  Which I think is too bad.  Not only character voice but authorial voice can add some really useful and enjoyable layers to a story.  I personally in my everyday speech don’t talk the way those character voices who are most praised by the community write.  I enjoy a so-called “purple prose” style of writing, full of metaphor and figures of speech, and dense language, and authorial imagery.  Not exclusively.  I like character voice-focused writing styles, as well.  And I enjoy reading both style groups.

There’s a lot of reductionism in what’s put forth as the best way to write.  But it’s not the minimalism of the various writing rules that’s the problem.  It’s in the views of what’s widely considered to constitute good prose.  Minimalist, fast-paced, shallow prose that requires less thinking and zips the story along.  And that’s a great way to tell a story.  But it’s far from the only way.  Instead of attacking “rules”, I think we should be more focused on widening the conception of what makes for good pacing, because speed may be popular, but it’s only one way to approach a narrative.

 

Creating Unique Fantasy Worlds: Government

On this episode of Creating Unique Fantasy Worlds, I’m going to begin my look at governments in fantasy and how creating a new form government vs. using an old Earth-inspired one affects your world-building.  There are many different forms of government that developed in our world.  Few of them get an in-depth exploration or even usage in fantasy.  So it’s totally possible to use a real form of government to great effect in your world-building.  You can create a unique and original fantasy world without entirely re-inventing the wheel for every possible aspect of society.

For each episode in each series on creating unique fantasy worlds, I’ll be taking a look at the topic from a different angle, and then in the last episode, I’ll be trying to bring it all together to help you better understand the process of world-building.  Although I’m writing this from the perspective of a fantasy author, I do also do world-building for game ideas, whether pen and paper rpgs, boardgames, or video games.  And of course these ideas can apply equally to other artistic media such as television shows, movies, etc.  You could even make use of them in art or music, although full-scale world-building would probably be a bit over-kill even for a concept album or art show.  I will not be delving into the ways in which you can integrate game mechanics with your world-building, as that is not the goal off these posts.  But I’m not against doing so at a later date, since it’s a subject that interests me quite a bit.

This post will be functioning as an intro post for the entire Creating Unique Fantasy Worlds(CUFW) super-series, as well as for the CUF Government series.  I’ll eventually be creating a page on the site for this super-series with a more formal and structured intro to the concept and purpose, which will be linked to in the Nav bar and include a full index of posts.  Once each series has been published, I’ll also be creating a formal introduction post with links to all the posts with brief descriptions of the content and context within the series, and an overview of how everything fits together.

 

I’ll be discussing the purpose of government in general here, followed by individual posts for each of the major forms of government.  Although most of the information presented on government itself is available online and probably on Wikipedia, I’ll be organizing and presenting it for the purposes of world-building, so there’s going to be a slightly different slant to these descriptions than you’d find normally in a more general source.

 

Government as a concept  most broadly refers to the system by which a group of people choose to mediate their affairs.  You can have a government on every level of society, from a student council to the Federal Government of the United States of America.  The specific purpose of each level of government tends to differ slightly because of the group of individual people or collectives of people over whom it has authority.  For example, a town council can ignore aspects of government and human behavior that are crucial to the proper functioning of a US State Government, because such a government must concern itself with the interactions of the sub-units of government it oversees, whereas a town council has no authority over states and so can ignore their interactions with each other.

1.         The first thing to consider when deciding how to design your fictional government is the collection of people and legal entities(such as corporations) over which it has authority.  If you have a village of 300 people, you might be able to institute a direct democracy where such a thing would be difficult to manage efficiently if it were to have authority over a population the size of the United States.
   Not only does the size of the population you need your government to rule affect the type of government you can reasonably implement, it affects the functions and services the government will need to manage.  These functions and services may include things like judging disputes between subjects, managing services like plumbing or roads, providing for mutual defense or really any possible requirement of the society it may see fit to put under the purview of the government rather than private citizens or groups thereof.
2.         The second most important thing to consider, and one which divides many forms of government from each other, is who has a voice in the functions executed by the government and how they are executed.  In a direct democracy, each person has a theoretically equal voice in decisions.  In an dictatorship, a single person might have all the political power and be unable to be removed by legal means.  And there are many governments in between.
3.         The third most important factor to consider is who actually puts these policies into action.  Are there elected, appointed, earned, or inherited positions in whom the people invest practical political power?  If the people vote to build a road between two towns, who actually goes out and gets it done?  Do the subjects organize the project communally?  Do they appoint a leader who is given time, money, and a set of limitations for achieving the goal?  Is such a leader temporary or permanent?  Does his power last for this single project, or does it extend to any similar projects?
4.         The last major point to consider is how the government, in whatever form, maintains its authority.  If you have a direct democracy, whats to stop someone on the losing side of a vote from ignoring the outcome?  Are there cultural norms in place?  Laws backed up by a military or police force?  Do the people come together to enforce the decision, or do they just hope everyone goes along with it and might makes right, either way?

So, the most important things to know when designing a government are who is being governed, who governs them and how are such people chosen, how do they govern, and how they enforce their governance.

After you have an idea of these things, you should work out what actual things they govern.  Do they regulate trade, business, diplomacy, human behavior such as sex or religion or violence, adjudication, or perhaps various public services?

And finally, perhaps the most important question of all: how do they pay for all of the things they are required to do?  Do they use their personal fortunes?  And or levy taxes on the citizens or some form of interaction between citizens?  Do they ask for payment for services in kind, such as with labor or the products of labor?  Do they delegate to some lesser body of government or a private entity?  Funding government is perhaps one of the biggest political headaches in our world, and one of the strongest limits on the options available to the government itself, and it is likely to be the same in your fictional world, as well.

 

The purpose of these posts is not to provide a checklist or a template from which to construct your fictional government, but rather to make you think about what government really is and how it functions.  Not every fantasy story will require you to share or even know the exact details of your government in order to make sense to the reader.

If your story is about a rebellion against a central authority, your world-building might involve mentioning a greedy king and his big army, and your reader won’t care that truthfully he sits between three powerful nations all of whom would like the trophy of his kingdom on their wall to brag about to their enemies and so he’s forced to maintain a huge standing army on the strength of feudal obligations from his selfish and impoverished noblemen and a vast number of mercenaries who may or may not be trusted to hold to their contracts.  And he’s having to decide which ruthless political animal to create an alliance with by selling off his favorite daughter to be a concubine for the highest bidder.  And by law he can only demand his lords’ service for five months out of the year but his enemies have thousands of troops year-round, and two of his lords are eyeing a big fat paycheck for betraying him and he needs to maintain an atmosphere of frivolity and excess at court in order to distract from his desperate situation.  And damn his father for a greedy corrupt bastard and leaving him this shit-show he feels morally obligated to deal with because the next in line for the throne is a whore-monger and abuses his servants, but the king cannot interfere with internal household matters of his nobles.  Plus he swore in the name of the Gods to protect this kingdom and he knows that’s a pledge with real consequences in the afterlife even if his father and his asshole nephew don’t.  Also, his oh-so-much-more-capable older brother was assassinated by the nobles in a conspiracy with one of their neighbors because he tried to move forward too far, too fast, and the hostage exchange between his kingdoms and its neighbors took his younger sister and her son and left him with eight third and fourth sons by concubines who have surface political value but whom his neighbors just found a convenient way to remove from their succession if he kills them.

I’d hate to even speculate on the politics of a democratic republic or a viciously contested oligarchy in the same position, and you’ve been contracted for a standalone book anyway and you haven’t even mentioned your brilliant magic system that would make Brandon Sanderson weep in shame.  Knowing the right things about world-building can not only help you do it better, but it can teach you when skimming a particular aspect or just dipping your toes in the pond across the board will result in an easier writing experience and less frustrated readers, while letting you properly focus on the part of the story that really excites you.

In the next post, I’m going to talk about the various answers to the second question above and how to figure out which one best fits the story you’re trying to tell.

 

Creating Unique Fantasy Worlds: Originality

So in the last post I discussed the major challenges of creating unique fantasy worlds and cultures.  The first challenge I identified was the tension between coming up with a new facet of world or culture while not breaking the logical coherency of your world.  Every aspect of your world-building exists on multiple axes.  The two axes that are relevant to this post are originality vs. familiarity and coherency vs. incoherency.  We’re going to need some definitions here:

• Originality: I’m using this word in the sense of departing from your idea of the standard implementation of an aspect of physical laws or culture.  So the patriarchy is the example of a gender power structure that is most common in our world.  So you maybe want to use a different gender power structure.
• Coherency: I’m using this word in the sense of the different parts of your culture fitting together logically.  Say you have a people who live on a river.  Their whole livelihood is bound up in the river and it’s natural cycles.  And they worship a god who lives at the top of a far-off mountain.  Can you make that work as an author?  Sure, with enough other factors, such as perhaps they lived on that mountain in the past.  But assuming only the information I’ve given you, wouldn’t a form of worship involving the river make more sense?  If you live in a matriarchal culture, is it more likely you’ll have a king or a queen as your ruler?  If your people live on the coast of the ocean, are they more likely to be known for their sailors or their mountaineers?  If they have huge deposits of iron are they more likely to be known for their ironwork or their copper-smithing?

Now, we’re assuming, given the subject of this blog series, that you want to err on the side of originality over familiarity.  You’re reading an article on world-building, so I’m going to assume you value coherency over incoherency.  (If you write surrealism, maybe not?)

 

One trick to originality is looking at the axes which we use to judge familiarity.  You might think the opposite of patriarchy is a matriarchy, but that only differs on the feature of gender.  It’s still following a complex set of assumptions about what power is and how we define who holds it.  We have in our world a common concept of a struggle for power between the male and female genders.  It’s a single axis alignment of power.  If you want to be really original, you might consider altering a different axis.  Or maybe two.  Or three.  Perhaps there’s an equal division of power between genders.  Maybe it doesn’t even match our pre-conceived gender roles.  Or maybe there’s no gender division at all.

Now, true origianlity would not just be, “okay, let’s have Japan but with a matriarchal power-structure and everything else is the same.”  That’s a valid method to create a fantasy setting, assuming you watch out for things like cultural appropriation.  But it’s not what we’re addressing in this post.

And there are other power structures or aspects of power structures.  Such as do we have a single absolute ruler?  A group of rulers?  A democracy (of sorts)?  How do we decide on who fills these positions?  More generally in world-building, you have to decide on your goals for the culture or world and then pick the method to achieve that goal.  So you can focus your originality on those aspects, which certainly makes life easier.  Perhaps you want everything to be original.  A lofty goal, though I’m not sure it’s a good one.

But you can have a fairly original culture by just changing a few aspects.  What provides the true originality instead of just being gimmicky is whether or not you let these changes trickle down through other aspects of the society.  You have to find the reasons that underlie your new surface structure.

Another important aspect to consider is whether your ground state culture is the average of real-world cultures or those depicted in secondary-world fantasy.  So a democracy is more common in the real world than in fantasy, so within the context of fantasy, it might feel a lot more original than you might otherwise expect.  Theocracies might be arguably more common in fantasy than in real life, so they might feel less original.

You could look at religion the same way.  Polytheistic pantheons are far more common in fantasy than in modern real life.  Monotheistic religions might feel very common in the real world, but are far less common in fantasy, despite being present.  And Judeo-Christian Gods make up most of the fantasy monotheistic Gods.  So even though mono-theism might not feel super original, the way it’s expressed in the world could be.  Pantheism/animism is similarly uncommon in fantasy, though we have real-world examples such as Shinto from Japan.

Worship of spirits and gods is the most common state of religion in both fantasy stories and the real world.  Rarely do we have supernatural forces acknowledged without worship.  Do you often see scientific explorations of the the river and wind spirits in fantasy the same way we look at meteorology in the real world?  When looking to create an original culture, one of the methods with the highest ceiling on originality is to find the underlying assumptions in our ideas of both what’s possible and what’s original.  We have a big conflict between theism and atheism in the real world religious landscape.  But especially from a Western viewpoint, it’s rarely considered that we might have supernatural phenomena acknowledged without being revered.  And there are many other examples.

 

I’ve used examples of religion and politics because they’re very common subjects of “unique” fantasy cultures and I know something about them.  You can do the same thing with food or cleanliness habits, art or clothing or architecture.  Family relationships, education, values either moral or practical.  How they deal with their economy.  With their debts or social obligations.  Politeness is a fun one.

Next time, I’d like to talk about how to make the aspects of your culture fit together in a way that readers will accept/expect.

 

 

Creating Unique Fantasy Worlds: Challenges

It’s turned out that this is a series of rather long post rather than one or two medium posts, for wish I apologize.  I’m afraid I’m a bit of a discovery writer.  I had a very compact premise for these posts, but I found out as I went along that that premise entailed a large amount of background and set-up that couldn’t fit into a couple thousand words.  This post is going to be about the challenges of writing truly unique and original worlds.

1. There’s nothing new under the sun.  Well, sort of.  The first thing to understand is that our only reference, our only source of inspiration for how the world and human cultures within it work is our world.  There’s only one.  That one contains thousands of years of recorded history among thousands of cultures.  But it’s still only one world, and all of those cultures follow one set of physical laws.  So even though in fantasy the possibilities are theoretically infinite, in practice, we suffer from a paucity of stimuli.  And even though we have an infinite number of possible combinations of physical laws, only a small subset of them result in coherent worlds and only a small subset of those are intelligible to us as humans.  So this challenge is a bit misleading.There are many things new under the sun, but our ability to understand them thoroughly or even conceive of their existence at all is actually quite limited.  And your challenge in creating a unique fantasy world is diverging far enough from real-world examples to feel new and exciting without diverging so far as to become incoherent to other humans–your readers.
2. You have to convince the reader that your ideas fit together reasonably.  If you have a desert world where all the characters walk around in several layers of thick animal fur and you have a really cool social structure based around what caste of people wears what fur, that might be cool and original.  But it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  If you have a society set in the same basic geography as Scandinavia, it’s gonna be awful weird if they’re all eating rice and wearing Japanese-style clothing.  And this is because the environment affects how your society develops.  Tons of people in Illinois, USA eat salmon.  But there are no salmon here.  In a world without complex transportation networks stretching thousands of miles and supported by cheap refrigeration technology, that would be really odd.If you have quality steel armor and also katanas, then your world doesn’t make much sense, because katanas developed the way they did due to various factors including the lack of decent iron deposits, so that forging a decent blade required techniques that resulted in the shape of the katana, the sharp edge of which is forged from a different alloy than the body of the sword, and so when it reacts to being heated, those two sections expand differently, creating the trademark curve of the blade.  And beyond that, katanas only functioned because that same lack of quality metal meant the style of armor in use was vulnerable to the slashing attacks that are the main use of the katana, whereas steel plate is not generally vulnerable to slashes, but rather to chops, thrusts, and bludgeoning.
3. In order to create a logical and coherent culture (or world), you need to know why things work.  But you don’t.  Most people will have no idea why Japanese culture developed katanas, or why the daimyos(lords) had so much power compared to the Emperor.  But they have the dual illusion of an incorrect idea of why those things existed and that they understand the why rather than maybe merely seeing the surface pattern of the what.  You don’t know the underlying reasons for gravity; you only know the surface effects.  Things fall rather than rising, falling causes damage.  But how does gravity create and affect the atmosphere?  How does gravity interact with other forces to create rain?  How does gravity create the tides?  You don’t necessarily need to know how the tides work to sail a ship.  You just need to know how they affect the ship.  The rules, not the reasons.  Because the world takes care of the reasons and how they create interactions between systems.The same goes for the systems that underlie human cultures.But when you are creating a a world or a culture for a story, there is no world to run the system for you.  You can’t input some facts about how you want the culture to work into a computer that knows how things work and let it hash out the results of your combination.  You have to be able to design and understand the way the systems interact yourself.  When you steal a culture from the real world, the reasons are irrelevant, because we all know the rules and we can extrapolate from our years of experience with those rules to create a logical model of how things work that we can use to both predict outcomes and judge how likely the outcomes the author presents are to really happen.  If their model doesn’t fit our model, we decide they screwed up or are outright cheating.

   But when you have an “original” culture, the surface patterns you expect the system to generate are much more likely to differ from the surface patterns your reader expects, and so they will judge your world-building or plotting skills negatively.  They will look at real world cultures that have similar rules and see the general consistency in the resulting surface patterns and extrapolate from that to the patterns your systems should theoretically create.  If your surface patterns don’t match that theoretical model, you’re going to have trouble with reader engagement.

So the two surface challenges for creating a new culture or world (or magic system or whatever) are making your world feel original and still feel coherent and reasonable.  And underlying those surface challenges are the mechanical challenges of not actually knowing how things in the real world work and so how they should work in your world based off your deviations, and how to derive new ideas from our shared experiences.  And in the next post, I’m going to start suggesting possible solutions to some of these challenges.

 

Creating Unique Fantasy Worlds: Background

In my last post, as sort of a prelude to the complex topic I’d like to discuss here, I talked about ways to create fantasy cultures based on real cultures and the advantages and disadvantages of this method.  I’m going to start out this post by talking about such counterpart cultures again, but this time, I’m going to focus on the difficulties of creating a truly original culture and how the common use of counterpart cultures undermines such attempts.

 

So, counterpart and generalized Earth cultures make up a great deal of the fantasy landscape.  The exert an enormous influence.  On both the types of stories that are common, and on reader expectations.  I’m going to talk about reader expectations first.

Readers expect certain things when they pick up a book.  These are based on the cover, the blurb, the author.  But also on their past experiences with the genre.  If they’re used to parsing and relating to stories and characters in a pseudo-medieval European setting, they’re going to have difficulty relating to a character in a different setting, because setting informs character.  Also, writers and readers in the genre have developed a set of short-cuts for conveying various forms of information from the writer to the reader.  A reader is familiar with the tropes and conventions of the genre, and writers can and almost inevitably do manipulate this familiarity in order to both meet reader expectations and violate them without going into a wall of text explaining the violation.

Both the writer and the reader of high fantasy have an understanding of the concept of the knight.  Or at least the version in Europa, our faux medieval European setting in which so many fantasies take place.  So when a writer introduces a character as a knight, it’s shorthand for a great deal of information which the writer now does not have to explain with long info-dumps about the history of European chivalry and feudalism.  There’s a strong tension in fantasy between world–building and not info-dumping, because for the most part, info-dumps get in the way of the story.  You don’t want to drop craploads of information on the reader all at once because it interrupts the story.  But you need them to understand the background in order to put the story in context.  Why would a fighter give his opponent a chance to ready himself and get on an equal footing when the stakes of the battle are the conquering of the kingdom?  Because his culture holds honour as one of the highest moral values.  Would sneaking up behind him and stabbing him in the back be easier, have a higher chance of success, and not put the kingdom at risk?  Sure.  So would shooting him with an arrow from behind a tree.  Or two hundred arrows in an ambush as he walks through the forest.  But it would be dishonorable.  And then he might do the same to you.  The same reason why parley flags are honored when it might be so much simpler for one side or the other to just murder the guy.

People do all sorts of dumb shit because it’s “the right thing to do” or perhaps because due to complex cultural values or humans being shitheads, the short-term loss helps uphold a long-term gain.  The tension between the obvious solution in the moment and why it might be foolish in the larger context is a powerful way to drive conflict in the story.  But teaching the reader larger context is a heavy burden when they don’t have any real previous understanding of it.  By using Europa as our setting, we get all that context for free because the reader has previous experience.

The same goes for any sort of counterpart culture.  Rome or Japan have a large collection of tropes in say Western English-speaking society.  Readers will be familiar with those tropes.  So if you want a bit of a break from knights and princesses, why you can take a quick detour through samurai and ninjas.  Or legionnaires and barbarians.  Sometimes these are just trappings on top of the same style of story.  Sometimes these new settings and tropes introduce new things to the story that are really cool.  But because even then, audiences have less exposure to various renderings of these tropes or perhaps the real history underlying them, they can be even more stereotypical or empty than Europa fantasy.

And even in terms of world-building they can do the same.  The writer has to communicate less technical detail to the reader and they don’t have to world-build as deeply because they have less need to justify their setting.  When you just know that knights and princesses and stone castles are real, even if you don’t know how they work exactly, you don’t worry so much about the details.  When something is clearly made up and not based on real Earth history, the questions about how things work and would they really work that way given the frame the author has built can become more of a suspension of disbelief killer.  There’s a joke that some things are just too strange for fiction.  Sure they happened in real life and we have proof.  But in stories, most people most often expect a sort of logical cause and effect and that if a thing happens, it has a good reason based in the story or world-building.  If something could happen once in a thousand tries based on sheer luck and it happening in your story is an important plot element, readers are much less likely to suspend disbelief than if it happens 754 times out of 1000 in the real world.  So your world-building needs to make some sort of logical sense to the reader if you want your plot to hinge on it.  And when you have the weight of genre history behind you, readers are far more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt than if you’re the first person doing it ever.

And that’s why fantasy counterpart cultures are so popular.  We know from Earth history, our only referent of a real history that actually occurred, that the things thus depicted (sorta, kinda, if you squint a bit) really did occur and function in a world rigidly bound by physical laws.  Unlike a world bound only by words on a page written by one dude who probably doesn’t even remember the six credits of world history he took in high school.

And as a very meta example of my point, I have now written two long posts full of info-dumping that I’m demanding you read before I even start talking about what I promised to talk about: how to overcome all these hurdles and actually create unique and original worlds and cultures for your fantasy story.

 

Should Authors Respond to Reviews of Their Books

Quite randomly, I stumbled onto a web of posts and tweets detailing an incident of an author commenting on a review of one of their books, being taken to task for it, and then spending what I see as way too much time further entangling themselves in the resulting kerfluffle.  I won’t name this author, because I’m not posting clickbait.  I read both sides of the argument, and while I sided mostly with the reviewer whose space was invaded, I do think some of the nuance on both sides that was over-shadowed by this author’s bad behavior offers valuable insight into both review and more general netiquette.

First, I want to establish some premises:

1. Posting to the internet is a public act.  That’s true if your post is public rather than on a private blog or Twitter account, say.  But it ignores the complexities of human social interaction.  If I’m having a chat with my friends at IHOP (Insert your franchise pseudo-diner of choice), we’re in public.  So it’s a public act.  But not quite!  If some random patron three tables down were to start commenting on our nastily engaging discussion of who should fuck who in the latest, greatest reverse harem anime, we would probably consider that quite rude.  In fact, we have lots of terms for that sort of thing: butting in, nosy, etc.  I think a valid analogy could be made for the internet.  Sure my Tweet stream is public, but as a nobody with no claim to fame or blue checkmark, it’d be quite a shock for the POTUS to retweet some comment of mine about the economy or the failings of the folks in Washington.  The line can be a bit blurrier if I run a popular but niche politics blog, or if I have a regional news show on the local Fox affiliate.  But just because you can read what I wrote doesn’t mean I expect, much less desire, a response from you.
2. My blog/website is my (semi-)private space.  Yours is yours.  I own the platform, I decide the rules.  You can write whatever you want on your blog.  Your right to write whatever you want on mine is much less clear-cut.
3. You have institutional authority over your own work.  While most authors may not feel like they have much power in the publishing world, as the “creator”, they have enormous implied power in the world of fandom and discussion of their own specific work, or maybe even someone else’s, if they’re well-known friends of Author X, say.  If I criticize the War in Vietnam or Iraq, and a four-star general comes knocking on my door the next day, you better fucking believe I’m gonna be uncomfortable.  An author may not have a battalion of tanks at their disposal, but they sure as hell have presence, possibly very intimidating presence if they are well-known in the industry or for throwing their weight around in fandom.

Given these basic premises which I hope I have elaborated on specifically enough, I have some conclusions about what I would consider good standard netiquette.  I won’t say “proper” because I have no authority in this area, nor does anyone, really, to back up such a wording.  But a “reasonable standard of” at least I can make logical arguments for.

1. Say what you want on your own platform.  And you can even respond to what other people have said, especially if you are not an asshole and don’t name names of people who are not egregious offenders of social norms or who haven’t made ad hominem attacks.
2. Respect people’s bubbles.  We have a concept of how close to stand to someone we’re in a discussion with in real life, for example, that can be a good metaphor for on what platforms we choose to respond.  Especially as regards critique, since responding to negative comments about oneself is something we know from past experience can be fraught with dangerous possibilities.  I would posit that a person’s private blog is reasonably considered part of their personal space.  A column on a widely-read news site might be considered more public,but then  you have to weigh the consideration of news of your bad behavior being far more public and spreading much faster.You should not enter it without a reasonable expectation of a good reception.  If there is a power imbalance between you and the individual whose space you wish to enter, we have rules for that.  real-world analogies.  For example, before you enter someone’s house you knock or ring the doorbell.  A nice email to the specified public contact email address asking if they would mind if you weighed in is a fairly innocuous way to open communications, and can save face on both sides by avoiding exposing one or the other to the possible embarrassment of being refused or the stress of refusing a local celebrity with no clear bad intentions.
3. Assume permission is required unless otherwise explicitly  stated.  This one gets its own bullet point, because I think it’s the easiest way to avoid the most trouble.  A public pool you might enter without announcing your presence.  Would you walk into a stranger’s house without knocking? One would hope not.
4. Question your reasons for engaging.  Nobody likes to be  called sexist.  Or racist.  Or shitty at doing their research.  Or bad at writing.  But reactionary  defenses against what could be construed as such an assertion do not in my mind justify an author wading into a fan discussion.  Or a reader discussion, if one considers “fan” as having too much baggage.  An incorrect narrative fact is likely  to be swiftly corrected by other readers or fans.  Libel or slander is probably best dealt with legally.  A reviewer is not your editor.  You should probably not be quizzing them for advice on how to improve your writing, or story-telling, or world-building.  Thanking a reviewer for a nice review might be best undertaken as a link on your own blog.  They’ll see the pingback, and can choose to engage or not.  At best, one might pop in to provide a link to their own blog where they provide answers  to questions raised in the post in question or a general discussion of the book they may wish to share with those who read the review.  But again, such a link would probably be best following a question on whether any engagement by the author might be appreciated.

Overall, I think I’ve suggested a good protocol for an author tojoin in fan or reader discussions without causing consternation or full on flame wars, and at a cost barely more than a couple minutes to shoot an email.

 

Machine “Translation” and What Words Mean in Context

One of the biggest commonly known flaws of mahcine translation is a computer’s inability to understand differing meaning in context.  After all, a machine doesn’t know what a “horse” is.  It knows that “caballo” has (roughly) the same meaning in Spanish as “horse” does in English.  But it doesn’t know what that meaning is.

And it certainly doesn’t know what it means when we say that someone has a “horse-face”(/”face like a horse”).

 

But humans can misunderstand meaning in context, too.  For example, if you don’t know how “machine translation” works, you’d think that machines could actually translate or produce translations.  You would be wrong.  What a human does to produce a translation is not the same as what a machine does to produce a “translation”.  That’s why machine and human translators make different mistakes when trying to render the original meaning in the new language.

 

A human brain converts words from the source language into meaning and the meaning back into words in the target language.  A computer converts words from the source language directly to words in the target language, creating a so-called “literal” translation.  A computer would suck at translating a novel, because the figures of speech that make prose (or poetry) what they are are incomprehensible to a machine.  Machine translation programs lack the deeply associated(inter-connected) knowledge base that humans use when producing and interpreting language.

 

A more realistic machine translation(MT) program would require an information web with connections between concepts, rather than words, such that the concept of horse would be related to the concepts of leg, mane, tail, rider, etc, without any intervening linguistic connection.

Imagine a net of concepts represented as data objects.  These are connected to each other in an enormously complex web.  Then, separately, you have a net of linguistic objects, such as words and grammatical patterns, which are overlaid on the concept net, and interconnected.  The objects representing the words for “horse” and “mane” would not have a connection, but the objects representing the concept of meaning underlying these words would have, perhaps, a “has-a” connection, also represented by a connection or “association” object.

In order to translate between languages like a human would, you need your program to have an approximation of human understanding.  A famous study suggested that in the brain of a human who knows about Lindsay Lohan, there’s an actual “Lindsay” neuron, which lights up whenever you think about Lindsay Lohan.  It’s probably lighting up right now as you read this post.  Similarly, in our theoretical machine translation program information “database”, you have a “horse” “neuron” represented by our concept object concept that I described above.  It’s separate from our linguistic object neuron which contains the idea of the word group “Lindsay Lohan”, though probably connected.

Whenever you dig the concept of horse or Lindsay Lohan from your long-term memory, your brain sort of primes the concept by loading it and related concepts into short-term memory, so your “rehab” neuron probably fires pretty soon after your Lindsay neuron.  Similarly, our translation program doesn’t keep it’s whole data-set in RAM constatnly, but loads it from whatever our storage medium is, based on what’s connected to our currently loaded portion of the web.

Current MT programs don’t translate like humans do.  No matter what tricks or algorithms they use, it’s all based on manipulating sequences of letters and basically doing math based on a set of equivalences such as “caballo” = “horse”.  Whether they do statistical analysis on corpuses of previously-translated phrases and sentences like Google Translate to find the most likely translation, or a straight0forward dictionary look-up one word at a time, they don’t understand what the text they are matching means in either language, and that’s why current approaches will never be able to compare to a reasonably competent human translator.

It’s also why current “artificial intelligence” programs will never achieve true human-like general intelligence.  So, even your best current chatbot has to use tricks like pretending to be a Ukranian teenager with bad English skills on AIM to pass the so-called Turing test.  A side-walk artist might draw a picture perfect crevasse that seems to plunge deep into the Earth below your feet.  But no matter how real it looks, your elevation isn’t going to change.  A bird can;t nest in a picture of tree, no matter how realistically depicted.

Calling what Google Translate does, or any machine “translation” program does translation has to be viewed in context, or else it’s quite misleading.  Language functions properly only in the proper context, and that’s something statistical approaches to machine translation will never be able to imitate, no matter how many billions of they spend on hardware or algorithm development.  Could you eventually get them to where they can probably usually mostly communicate the gist of a short newspaper article?  Sure.  Will you be able to engage live in witty reparte with your mutually-language exclusive acquaintance over Skype?  Probably not.  Not with the kind of system we have now.

Those crude, our theoretical program with knowledge web described above might take us a step closer, but even if we could perfect and polish it, we’re still a long way from truly useful translation or AI software.  After all, we don;t even understand how we do these things ourselves.  How could we create an artificial version when the natural one still eludes our grasp?

 

Magic’s Pawn

One of my favorite styles of magic, though not often see is not a clever way for the protagonist to control the forces of magic, but a system where the forces of magic control the protagonist.  I suppose an ancient prophecy ca work kind of like this or a higher being giving direction, but I’m talking a more concrete and local form of control, yet exercised by a more abstract force.

The forces of magic involved don’t necessarily have to be sentient or intelligent in the way a human is or, even an animal although they could be.  Honestly, I think not being so makes the situation all the more interesting.

Think of the way a bee is involved in an ecosystem: generally as a pollinator.  Now imagine that a human (probably a mage or this world’s equivalent, but not necessarily) has been incorporated into the magical ecosystem of the world in the same way.  Some force of magic has evolved to encourage certain behaviors in human mages that are beneficial to the magic of the world that force of magic is part of.

Perhaps there is a cycle sort of like the water cycle that benefits from humanity in chaos, and so the magic has evolved ways to create that chaos through empowering some mage or person.  The specific actions of the person are irrelevant to the magic, as long as they cause a great upheaval.  The system may not even care if humans would describe this pawn of magic as “evil” or “good”.

Humanoid characters are almost always portrayed as exerting control over the magic of their world, but they are rarely shown to have been integrated into the system–as we are integrated into nature, even despite our control of it–despite what is portrayed in the world’s history as thousands or even millions of years of coexistence.

Where are the magical world equivalents of modern climate change?  There are apocalypses sort of like nuclear bomb analogs.  Mercedes Lackey’s Winds series, for example, with it’s effects on the world of the end of the war depicted in her Gryphon’s series.  But rarely if ever are there subtle build-ups of all the interference caused by humans harnessing magical forces.  Not even on the local level like the magical equivalent of the flooding and ecological damage caused by damning rivers, or the water shortages caused by different political entities failing to cooperate on usage rights of the local river.

I would love to read (or write!) some fantasy exploring a closer relationship between man and magic than simply human master and magical servant/slave.