De Romanicorum Physicalium 2

Thoughts upon SF.

• Remember how I've been discussing my felinoids' teeth? I decided, their teeth all have two points, but they make up the same shape as a cat's teeth inside their mouths. Helps cats have an even number of points in their mouth.
  
  One slight difference is the felinoids' upper canines, which, rather than connecting to the incisor next to them, connect to the little bitty single-point premolar behind them. I don't actually know if domestic cats have it, if they do it's tiny, but pumas do.


• So it turns out Iota Horologii has a gas-giant. It's currently known as "Iota Horologii b", but plainly, its real name is Threshold. Why? Because that's the gas giant Installation 04 orbits, in guess what star system?
  
  Incidentally, read up on the Epsilon Eridani system, and then watch the opening movie from Reach again. Yeah, that's right, that's not just some generic star system, that's actually Eps Eri, debris disk and everything. Hell yes, Bungie.


• Remember the word "grok", in Stranger in a Strange Bed Land? Here:

  Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

  How very quaint. And here I thought the Greek word "noein", at least in its mystical connotations, pretty much covered all of that.
  
  But then, I don't labor under the quaint assumption that the mores and habits of Butler, Missouri constitute "Earthly assumptions". I almost want to say something nasty about the Latin Church, that sentence reveals such Occidentocentric bias!


• I have opined before on the utterly provincial and outdated ideas SF usually brings to history, vis-a-vis the Middle Ages being an age of thought and discovery not equaled by any previous era and not equaled again for 200 years, but have I expended enough effort on SF neglecting whole swaths of the rest of the world? I mean, even in all those "Japan takes over the world" stories from the 80s, it's the semi-Westernized, de-fanged-by-treaty Japan. I'm not saying that sustained economic dominance would have them immediately reinstitute the Teikoku Rikugun, but it's pretty obvious none of the writers know enough about the Japanese even to speculate about what being a superpower would mean to them.
  
  I'll tell you this for free, Japanese SF writers don't shy away from the question. They usually get the wrong answer, mainly because SF writers are a deracinated breed at the best of times, and that culture's unusually hard for the deracinated to "get", but at least they know the question's there.
  
  Except the guy who wrote "Crest of the Stars"; he gets it wrong because he basically wrote "Springtime for Hitler: In Space".


• So my mom's having her high-school English students read Martian Chronicles. Let me save you the trouble, she and my dad are happily married.
  
  Anyway, she also (I think just so there'd be two SF books assigned in English classes) is having them (a different class I think) read this YA thing called "Feed", which is about how chat/Twitter/etc. are making people stupid. Unfortunately the author's in no position to call anyone stupid.
  
  Aside from the fact no high-school kid would have the money to just jaunt up to the moon for the weekend, I don't care what year it is—oh and that moonflight seemed short to me, but then, I know a lunar transfer orbit is usually a Hohmann maneuver—most of those points about tech and society were raised before the Wall fell in the cyberpunk canon. Also, I don't care how brilliant you were told A Clockwork Orange is, using the slang in the narration violates Niven's 5th Law for Writers. Use the 1st-person if you must (I don't care for it, but it's your barbecue), but make sure our narrator is at least coherent.
  
  Oh, and "unit" may be the worst replacement for "dude" ever, even including "Comrade".


• Orson Scott Card embarrassed himself about future slang, though. He said "tanj", in Known Space stories, is used like the F-word. Only, A) it's usually used like damn, and B) Belters are easy, so the F-word isn't profane to them. Bad luck is something everyone swears by, though, and "bad luck air-recycler" or "bad luck Fertility Board inspector" would actually be how you'd cuss at them in Korean (or you could use one of its many, many synonyms for the F-word). In Chinese they just say "death" whatever.
  
  Besides, the Belt politician who helps Luke Garner deal with Phssthpok swears in normal terms when he means it, rather than just for emphasis; but then again, he's old. I don't recall the younger Belters doing that.


• My aliens have a unique manner of speech; their religion is a transcendental existential-theodicy, like Buddhism and Christianity, so they've purged a lot of the linguistic elements of their older purity-code religion. So instead of "thank you" they say "I appreciate", because the paradigm of obligations has changed—and they don't talk about luck, either. Instead, they say "may it go well" and give assurances of their prayers.
  
  The biggest one, though, is, they're a highly status-conscious militocracy, a lower-calorie substitute for a Proud Warrior Race™. But you know what word they practically never say? Honor. Nope. Instead, they say "dignity" (as in "A stain upon my ~"), "privilege" (as in "Serving you is a great ~"), and "chivalry" (as in "You will be spared, because you have fought with ~").