De romanicorum theoriarum IX

Speculative fiction thoughts.

• Has anyone ever considered that maybe what they like about the laughable drivel that passes for worldbuilding in Firefly is that there's nothing there? And thus they can project their own personal prejudices into it? Or you explain how so many right-wingers managed to think a Joss Whedon work was not a very long-winded personal attack on them, specifically.
  
  Or put another way, Firefly's setting is the worldbuilding equivalent of Bella Swann. Its "flaws", after all, are about as realistic as her alleged clumsiness and unpopularity—in this otherwise fascistically exploitative setting, we have a form of squeaky-clean sanitized prostitution that never has nor ever could exist (let alone in a totalitarian society), because Whedon wants to fantasize about dignified "spiritual" whores. Just like how Bella is supposed to be so clumsy and dorky and gawky, and yet four guys practically ask her out in the first chapter, because Meyer's audience wants to fantasize about turning down lots of suitors before they get Mr. Right.
  
  But at least Twilight is a bleached-britches bodice-ripper where all the bodices are ripped offstage; nobody expects coherence. What's Whedon's excuse for whitewashing prostitution, the most efficient means of producing misery the human race has ever invented? A less charitable person might suggest a common origin between Firefly's paeans to the beauty of the sex-trade and the fact its good guys are the Space Confederacy. (The charitable explanation—that the Browncoats lack the moral ambiguity of the Graycoats merely because Whedon and Minear are too unintelligent and immature to grapple with the moral complexities of the Civil War—is also the one that fits the facts, namely that Whedon and Minear are a pair of rock-stupid adolescents.)
• There are exactly two types of birds with cheeks, I discover. Parrots (most noticeable on the largely bare-cheeked macaws), and the california condor. And there are no muscles in the condor's cheeks, they're just an extension of its dewlap. Aside from the interest of this to paleo-artists (because exactly two extant dinosaurs have cheeks, and they almost certainly developed them quite late), is its interest to science fiction writers. Do your aliens have cheeks? Now would be a pretty good time to consider it.
  
  Zledo have cheeks, and indeed lips much like mammals (though more like a cat's than a human's, hence why they can't say "F"), but the flesh, its keratins being in β-sheets, probably looks a bit more like that of macaws (except a different color, and at no point giving way to beak). Khângây don't have cheeks, they have only as much "lip" as lizards, and produce sounds that other species perceive as "labial" with their extremely complex vocal apparatus, the same way birds do. (They also don't have teeth, they have cutting-surfaces like armored-jawed fish.)
  
  ...I just decided right now that thoikh don't have cheeks or lips, meaning when they talk it looks unsettlingly like their face splits in half...and their teeth, which are onyx-colored, fold backward when their mouths close, like a snake's (although they look more like a crocodile's). They also, I think, have a second row of teeth in the roof of their mouth, again like a snake. (I imagine that they pronounce "labial" sounds through clenched teeth, instead—presumably you can still get some air through when your teeth fold against each other—which sounds a bit like a V. That might be what khângây languages do, actually, although their vocal apparatus also lets them mimic the sounds people with lips make.)
• Hey, here's a wild idea: stop teaching the same stuff in English class that was taught 100 years ago. No, this isn't a "dead white men" argument; it's a "let's teach a new set of dead white men" argument. A hundred years ago we were already teaching, or at least encouraging students to read, Dickens, in schools. But Dickens? Pot-boiling pulp magazine writer.
  
  Do you know who we should be reading in school now, or at least encouraging students to read? Burroughs (Edgar Rice, not William S.); Howard (Robert E.); Lovecraft; Smith (Clark Ashton). The whole Campbell SF stable, too. For literary quality, although not vastness of scope, I'll put any of those dudes (maybe not Lovecraft or the Campbell guys) up against Dickens any day of the week. And hey, you want kids to learn about existentialism in literature? Well cupcake, where you think they'd rather learn it from, Waiting for the Frigging Play to End Already Godot by Samuel "Black Lotus" Beckett...or Conan the Cimmerian?
• You may or may not recall that in 1st and 2nd Edition D&D, elves had level-limits. (They also "do not die" at their final age-category, but departed via not-the-Grey-Havens-at-all, which tended not to make much sense in most campaign-settings.) And then there's the stick-in-the-mud ultraconservative portrayal, mostly a caricature by stupid people who don't know the difference between "chaotic good" and "lawful neutral". But it occurred to me, there's another way to model elves. Ravens are only playful and curious for the first three years of their lives. After that, around the time they usually mate (they are physically mature at a year old but don't usually mate till three), they become strongly neophobic, hating new things and having a lot of trouble adapting to new locations or conditions. What if your elves were the same way, only desiring new experiences until they hit their middle-age category, and then becoming strongly averse to anything different from what they're accustomed to?
  
  It's not exactly how I'm doing it in my campaign, although I think elements of it will be, but it is an interesting idea. It's also a lot less stupid than "people who live a long time must be really boring", never mind that "boredom" is only a part of your emotional repertoire because your life is so short (and thus you can't afford to waste much of it). Elves, having so much more time to kill, are probably endlessly fascinated by things you barely even notice (hey, why'd you think they have a bonus to Spot checks?), and continue to find joy in their pleasures long after humans would become jaded and sated. (That part, that they don't get bored as easily as humans, is definitely something I think my elves do; I might have humans shocked by how much they enjoy things that humans usually outgrow. "Ancient yet seemingly childlike" is often an aspect of the portrayal of elves, after all, and Chesterton actually points out the connection between that and the fact boredom is due to human weakness, I think it's in Orthodoxy.)
• Zledo, at this point, are only "felinoid" very broadly speaking. You could also call them "long-armed tyrannosaur-apes", and they've got frog-feet and shark-pupils in bird-eyes, and a dental arrangement not found on Earth, and their "fur" is equally well-described as "really simple feathers" (and some of what their fliers got, you can cross out those first two words).
  
  And I decided quite some time ago actually, their jaw anatomy, at the back of the jaw, isn't like humans, cats, or tyrannosaurs—it's like pygmy hippos. Go look up their skulls: on the back of a hippo's jaw is a deep rounded "bowl", for holding giant muscles. I think zledo have this (which gives them a rather heavy, tyrannosaur like jaw, although their big eye-sockets and braincase make it less noticeable) because I don't think I can swing a sagittal crest anymore, not considering they have a brain volume like a slightly scaled-up Neanderthal.
• In my D&D world—where, recall, elves mostly use axes and dwarves seldom do—I decided, the gnomes' weapons are martial versions of the sickles they use to harvest mushrooms (which are the basis of their material culture; fungi are made of chitin, not cellulose, so they can breed mineralized forms to approximate metals, like the hard parts of bugs). I use the stats for (Small-creature versions of) the khopesh and its relatives (like the sapara and kukri), although a real khopesh's cutting-edge is on the outside, because they actually derive from axes, not sickles. (Gygax was probably misled by the kopis, the Greek sword-sized kukri.)
  
  I also give the gnomes the sling as their main missile weapon, which is implied by the Arms and Equipment Guide (which I just got), since gnomes are alchemists (although that book also seems to think gnomes are tech-guys, and they aren't, except on Krynn and in space). Likewise, I gave my halflings (a subrace of humans in this setting) blowguns instead of slings and rocks, and gave them a partial protection from poisoning themselves when using poison darts; they don't regard the use of dart-poison as evil, although they do regard using poison in food as not only evil but as flat-out diabolism. Nomads regard hospitality as sacred, after all.
  
  Incidentally, you may be aware that the only reason D&D druids use scimitars is that Gygax didn't want to bother coming up with stats for sickles (never mind a sickle is for all intents and purposes somewhere between a knife and a hand-axe). But really, it makes perfect sense for D&D druids to use scimitars, because, um..."machete". Kinda a natural fit for people who spend a lot of time in dense plant-life, you know?
• Researching the previous post, I came across quite a bit of information on bats and birds that didn't make it in. Bats, basically, are the helicopters to birds' jets. They have superior maneuverability in certain regards, like being able to hover, but they're much slower, can't go nearly as far, and have a hard ceiling on how high they can fly (although unlike helicopters, it's less a matter of physics than of anatomy—mammal lungs are simply inferior).
  
  Another interesting point is, because of how bats' wings are set up, they function in many ways more simply than bird wings. See, a bat's wing is all connected, so (like helicopters) they can't change the shape of their flight surfaces (and can't glide), and have to do all their maneuvering by how they beat the air. A bird's wing, on the other hand, because it's not a continuous tissue but many independently articulated feathers, can be controlled like the elevators, ailerons, and so on of an airplane.
  
  Had a thought, in studying that: what if a species evolved flat, flipper-like arm-wings, that didn't fuse their fingers, but instead turned each finger into an independent flight-control surface? I think that's what the main fliers of the khângây homeworld will do.