Welterfindung Zwei

Was looking around for stuff on worldbuilding. Like ya do. Noticed some things.

• People really just need to stop being cutesy-poo, and mistaking originality for quality. Unoriginality is not bad; attempting to use "aping a successful idea" as a substitute for an actually good idea is bad. Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese do similar things in their written form: none of them copied the others, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether logograms are optimal for writing (they got their advantages, though personally I prefer them mixed with something phonemic).
  
  For instance, a guy said SF movies should stop using the long-slow-pan-across-a-ship, a la Star Wars, and he's probably right: but his two alternative examples, teeny-tiny spaceships and species that don't need ships, are dumb. The universe does, in fact, have an absolute scale (humans and terrestrial lifeforms generally are squarely in the middle of it), and it's doubtful anything too small would A. develop sapience or B. invent space travel. Even if you're the size of a cricket, or an E. coli, a fusion rocket has a certain minimum size—and nobody's ever made much of a case for microscopic sapients. Similarly, nobody, not even Niven, has really done a convincing job with space-borne life, and space-borne sapience should be a whole 'nother story.


• Limyaeel, of Fantasy Rants fame, is cordially invited to stick to things she knows something about—which, as a person with a PhD in English, is either poverty or teaching, and perhaps chain-smoking. She exceeds the limits of good taste—in that I find blind stinking pig-ignorance personally offensive—when she talks about history, politics, religion, philosophy, or economics. Also most aspects of literary analysis (the only intelligent thing she's ever said is for writers to knock off the rape-as-plot-device).
  
  Understand, when you say the Medievals—who, remember, charged people with heresy for making witchcraft accusations—tortured and burned cats as witch's familiars, you automatically forfeit your talking privileges. Also, no, medieval cats were not "ratters"—they mainly caught mice and various bird- and bug-pests. Rats are too big for most cats, that's why there are whole breeds of terrier devoted to rats.
  
  Also, if you Livejournal under the name Limyaeel—a triphthong after a palatalized nasal, for God's sake!—you have no right to criticize anyone else's goofy fantasy names.


• So there's this article, called "7 Unnecessary Science Fiction Worldbuilding Details". Most of them—no air in space, things on a spaceship being recycled or bolted down, etc.—are, indeed, essentially unnecessary (though we, uh, can't actually do most of these just yet), but the last two aren't. The last two are as follows, and I block-quote:

  6. I understand that it requires more power to launch a ship from a planet’s surface than from a space station. Newton explained this awhile back. (If a culture has the technology for starships, I assume they have the power to launch them from anywhere they dang well please.)
  
  7. The process of passing through an airlock. Again, no need for lengthy details or even any details so get on with the story already (we don’t need the inside scoop on the hull’s paint drying, either).

  First off, no, actually, just because they have the tech for starships doesn't mean they can launch them from wherever—in my books, for instance, the starships are propelled by massive fusion rockets that would wipe cities off the map if used in an atmosphere. Takeoffs and landings are accomplished by dedicated shuttle-type ships, which dock with the heavy-mover starships.
  
  And second off, while the process of passing through an airlock is, in and of itself, quite superfluous, it really helps the setting if you describe what it feels like. I do it myself: a character's ears pop, because the ship she was on had a different internal pressure from the place where she goes. God forbid I should delay "the story" by telling you what happens to the characters in it. No, wait, isn't "what happens to the characters" the same thing as the story?


• Know whose worldbuilding a lot of them praised? Gibson. As in Neuromancer. Only, what? I may have to reread that book (for my sins), 'cause I don't remember a son-of-a-bitching thing about the worldbuilding, other than that the prose was a bad noir pastiche. And my sister was in film class when I read the thing, so lemme tell ya, I know from bad noir pastiches. Oh, well, that, and also that the hacking scenes were ridiculous—unless you mistook ReBoot for a computer science documentary—and the sex scenes were more gross and ugly than anything else.
  
  I actually have a TakeThat to cyberpunk hacking in my SF book, where one of the aliens' computer technicians scoffs that human hackers actually talk like computer networks are places. I originally actually had him say the human hackers used the VR-interface from the cyberpunk canon, but that was before I rewrote with realism in mind. Apparently, real UI experts are pretty much unanimous that the VR stuff is the single worst possible interface you could design.


• So at least two people who are not, at least to my knowledge, severely brain-damaged, have praised the worldbuilding in Avatar. As in big blue shaved Ewoks, not Aang (the worldbuilding in that is actually pretty fair).
  
  I wish we had some kind of a rule where people who say things that reveal them to be completely divorced from reality could lose their voter's card, and probably custody of any children, because dude, Avatar? I said it before, but nobody whose society was born Post-Scarcity is gonna act like human hunter-gatherers, not even like the mythologized hunter-gatherers the Na'vi are. Why are the Na'vi sapient, when there is no evolutionary need for them to be, since their whole planet's ecosystem is one big love-in? 'Course, given that the nervous system of every life form on Pandora can be interfaced to that of every other, it's extremely doubtful evolution there would be anything like here. The only way Pandora's Nature is "red in tooth and claw" is that it seems to function as "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".


• All I'll say about people who complain about fantasy using quasi-European settings so often, is this:

  You don't actually get European culture, and you come from it. You think—motivated mainly by your unreflective Post-Modern occidental self-hatred—that you should be allowed to besmirch other continents, inhabited by cultures still less comprehensible to you, with your ignorance?

  So there.

Oh, by the bye, "son-of-a-bitching" is apparently something Elvis would use. I like it, don't you?