Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Posts Tagged ‘world building’

How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends: Superballs, Pockets, and Fun With Awesome Molecules

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

By Dr. Grasshopper

Dear Dr. Grasshopper,

I’m writing a military sci-fi novel, and I’ve run into a medical snag.

I know (or like to think) that there are certain toxins which can rob the blood’s ability to transport oxygen. Would you happen to know what the emergency treatment is for such a situation, or could you point me in the right direction?

Yeah, man!

You’ve basically described a classic case of carbon monoxide poisoning. Which was one of my favorite topics early in med school. (I even used it as a plot point in a novel I started writing. . . and then trunked because it had no plot.)

How does your blood carry oxygen? (more…)

Tags: Dr. Grasshopper, How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends, world building
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How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends: When Your Audience Might Know More Than You Do

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Tags: How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends, world building
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Happy… what day is it?

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Around the world people are celebrating February 14, 2010 as a special day. What, exactly, that special day is depends on who you are and what tradition you grew up in.  For much of the U.S. today is Valentines Day, a day of love and romance, but it is also Chinese New Year as well as The Fourth Sunday of the Triodion Period: Sunday of Forgiveness or Cheesefare Sunday in the Orthodox Calendar.  Rabi’ al-awwal, the third month of the Islamic calendar begins at sundown and on the Catholic calendar today is Shrovetide or Carnival. (more…)

Tags: world building
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How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends: Flatlines

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Tags: Dr. Grasshopper, How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends, medicine, Science-fiction, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 5 Comments »

The Moss-Troll Problem

Monday, January 4th, 2010

by Sarah Monette

I did not invent moss-trolls. They belong to Marissa Lingen

“The advantage of writing urban fantasy or world-crossing fantasy is that when the sea serpent has eyes the color of NyQuil, you can say so rather than spending time trying to come up with settlement-era Icelandic-ish equivalent having something to do with moss-troll ichor. Because then you’re stuck with moss-trolls, and also they have ichor, and you can pretty well guarantee that’s going to come back and bite you in the butt in another book or two: you didn’t have to deal with moss-trolls *before*, and now you do, and it’s a lot of bother just for a color analogy.”

But I’ve thought a lot about the problem that Lingen identifies; it’s one that a writer of secondary-world fiction encounters frequently. (I’m using the term “secondary-world fiction” rather than “fantasy” because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the variables of the equation are a little different.) You can’t, for instance, say something is as basic as the missionary position in a world without missionaries. What about saying something is as swift and sharp as a guillotine’s blade? Well, did Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin exist in this world? You will find moss-trolls again and again whenever you start describing the imaginary people, places and things of your imaginary world. Because one of the first ways we try to describe something is to say what it’s like.

Literature is all about metaphors–analogies. One thing is like another. Much of literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing.” And really great literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing, which you would never have thought of comparing it to.” The act of comparison can be overt (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare asks his Fair Young Man. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”) or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it’s there. You take a thing–a thing in your imagination–and you compare it to another thing–a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.

Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We’ve declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture–this thing is like this other thing–but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent’s eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other. Secondary-world fiction therefore takes self-referentiality and makes it into a defining gesture of the genre, a form of intensely compressed poetry. This is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that’s rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons’ bones.

The moss-trolls make writing secondary-world fiction hard. But they also make it an endless joy.

—
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 104-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, four cats, one husband, and one albino bristlenose plecostomus. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies; a short story collection, The Bone Key, was published by Prime Books in 2007. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace Books. She will publish her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, with Tor Books, writing as Katherine Addison. She has also written one novel, A Companion to Wolves, and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

Tags: Sarah Monette, world building, writing advice
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Link: Why Are Europeans White?

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

When working on the world-building for your secondary fantasy world, here’s an interesting thought to chew on. Did you know that Northern Europeans are uniquely depigmented?

“White,” of course, is a a social designation. The question really is, “Why are northern Europeans depigmented?” Here is a map of human skin tone. The natives of northern Europe are oddly light-skinned. They are paler than anyone else on earth.

Most people know that it has something to do with sunlight, UV, latitude, and vitamin D. Here is a map of solar UV at the surface taken from satellite. It matches the skin-tone map everywhere but Europe.

Read the entire article as it traces development back step by step to figure out why Northern Europe is unique in its depigmentation.

Tags: research, world building
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Research Tool: A brief intro to furniture history

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

When writing there will come a moment when you have to deal with furniture.  If it’s historical fantasy, steampunk or timetravel you’ll face the question of finding something that is period correct.  What did people sit on in 1650? How long have drop-leaf tables been around?  What was the most expensive wood?

Props Master, Eric Hart, has an introduction to furniture with a number of useful links for European influenced furniture.

Tags: research, world building
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Transracial Writing for the Sincere

Friday, December 4th, 2009

by Nisi Shawl

“I’d never write about a person from a different ethnic background. The whole story would probably be full of horrible stereotypes and racist slurs.”

Amy closed her mouth, and mine dropped open. Luckily, I was seated when my friend made this statement, but the lawn chair must have sagged visibly with the weight of my disbelief. My own classmate, excluding all other ethnic types from her creative universe!

I think this sort of misguided caution is the source of a lot of sf’s monochrome futures. You know the ones I mean, where some nameless and never discussed plague has mysteriously killed off everyone with more than a hint of melanin in their skin. I wonder sometimes what kind of career I’d have if I followed suit with tales of stalwart Space Negroes and an unexplained absence of whites.

But of course I don’t. I boldly write about people from other backgrounds, just as many of the field’s best authors do. Suzy McKee Charnas, Bruce Sterling, and Sarah Zettel have all produced wonderful transracial characters, as I show in examples below. Before getting into their work, though, let’s discuss how to prepare for your own.

If you want to go beyond the level of just assigning different skin tones and heritages to random characters, you’re going to have to do some research. Because yes, all people are the same, but they’re also quite different. For now, we’ll set aside the argument that race is an artificial construct, and concentrate on how someone outside a minority group can gain enough knowledge of the group’s common traits to realistically represent one of its members. (more…)

Tags: Nisi Shawl, world building
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How pragmatics can help you!

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

by Juliette Wade

Pragmatics is an area of linguistics that I love, but which is difficult to define. Witness Mr. Paul Levinson, who spent an entire chapter trying to separate it from semantics in his textbook. Argh!

So what is Pragmatics? Basically, it deals with those areas of meaning which aren’t really meaning. What does that mean? It deals with implications (in the lingo, “implicature”), and with presuppositions, and with using language to do things rather than just send messages.

I think most people know about presuppositions, even if they can’t give a name to them. An example would be when the lawyer asks the plaintiff,

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

Either a yes or no answer will contain the presupposition that the plaintiff beat his wife. Thus, in order to avoid tacit acceptance of the idea that he’s beaten his wife, the plaintiff has to reject the question. There are many words like this. “Manage to,” for example, which presupposes that the person has “tried to.”

The usefulness of presuppositions in story-writing lies in their ability to carry extra implied meaning. If you say that your character “didn’t do” something, we know nothing about whether he or she wanted to do that thing, or tried. “Didn’t manage to do” tells us a heck of a lot more in just two additional words. So keep an eye out for these as helpers in the creation of point of view as well as ways to layer meaning into your story.

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time you’ll have noticed that I’ve talked about H.P. Grice and the Cooperative Principle more than once. Essentially the Cooperative Principle says, “make your contribution to the conversation optimally relevant and appropriate.” This may seem terribly obvious, but it is in fact quite powerful. This is because the assumption of cooperativeness allows us to draw conclusions from what people say.

Let’s say someone tells you “I have two children.” From the point of view of strict truthfulness, this could be true so long as that person had two or more children. But the Cooperative Principle lets us conclude that if the person had more than two children, they would be telling us that. Thus, we conclude that the person has two, and only two, children. Grice calls this the “maxim of quantity.”

There are other Gricean maxims, but I won’t go into all of them here. I’ll just mention that the “maxim of quality” means that you’re not lying (I’ll return to the issue of lying, and its implications in stories, in a minute).

I’ve probably also mentioned “speech acts.” These are instances of “doing by speaking,” as when you invite, insult, refuse, swear, promise, marry, etc.. The action is accomplished by the utterance of the speech. I encourage you to think about these, because they often have social consequences. What kind of unique speech acts might a world have? In what contexts might they occur? What are the special conditions required for the act to be performed successfully (you can’t marry two people to one another unless you possess special qualifications, for example)?

In my story, “Let the Word Take Me”, every utterance was an act – an act of holy transport or blasphemy, or of respectful restraint – and was restricted by special conditions of person, time and place. This is an extreme example of the type, but there is a lot of interesting stuff to be gained by playing with speech acts in alternate cultural scenarios.

The other issue that Pragmatics covers is that of Politeness. This is extremely rich ground for story ideas, especially because Politeness often conflicts directly with the Gricean Maxims. In particular, it’s easy to misinterpret polite avoidance of particular topics as evasiveness or lying. We do a lot of effortful things in order to avoid threatening other people’s “face,” also called committing “face-threatening acts.” Brown and Levinson 1987 is the classic source of this discussion.

Interestingly, Brown and Levinson talk about two types of social desires: the desire to be autonomous (negative face), and the desire to be accepted (positive face). These contrast with one another, and while polite and diffident talk addresses another person’s desire to be autonomous, that desire may not be foremost in their minds. Familiar talk (including slang and insider vocabulary) addresses another person’s desire to be accepted. The choice between these two strategies is critical to a person’s success.

The other reason I love pragmatics as a source for stories is this: when people are learning foreign languages, the errors they make in pronunciation, word formation or sentence word order – even picking the wrong word meaning – are interpreted as errors in language. They are easily excused as the broken language of a learner. Errors in pragmatics, however, are not seen as language errors. They reflect instead on the personality and identity of the speaker. So a person who makes a politeness error is less likely to be seen as a learner and more likely to be seen as rude.

I have to say that Pragmatics is my favorite source for story ideas. I hope this discussion has shown you why, and has given you some ideas for exploring pragmatics in your own story worlds.

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How pragmatics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
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How semantics can help you! Part 3

Friday, November 20th, 2009

by Juliette Wade

I thought I’d discuss that ubiquitous genre activity – the one that always drives my spell-checker insane – making up words. Thereafter, I’ll give a little thought to the idea of redefining existing words.

I’m guessing that after my last post you can imagine how making up words contributes to an effect of foreignness. Whenever you replace an English word with a foreign one, you lose every connotation and context associated with that English word. The feeling provided by the newly created word will depend on the evocativeness of its pronunciation. This may come from an association with Earth languages that it resembles (which will give the new word some of the contextual association with the language in question), or from general principles of onomatopoeia (such as the association of voiced sounds/o/u with large or loud things, and voiceless sounds/a/i with small or quiet things). Any further associations will have to be deliberately provided by the writer.

I’ve often heard it said that “if it’s a rabbit, call it a rabbit.” I tend to agree with this. After all, why put your reader to the trouble of divesting a word of all its associations if the people in your story use a word with precisely the same associations?

Another created word context is that of words coined from combinations of other words (or parts thereof). This most often occurs in science fiction, when you’ll find people using comlinks and any number of other more exotic things. These words retain and combine associations, provided that the parts of the word are recognized and can be successfully extrapolated.

If you’re using a created word, think through what associations you want it to have. It’s not hard to show a reader through demonstration what the denotation of the word is. By all means, do so – but don’t stop there. For your word to take on life and feel real in the world of the story, it will help if it comes with some of the other types of associations that our words commonly do. I’m thinking of emotional connotations. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you have a word, Korinye, which means a particular type of police officer. In order to define it for the reader, you put one of these on a street corner (or chasing the protagonist, etc.) , point him or her out and say “watch out for the Korinye.” But that alone doesn’t tell you how the Korinye group is regarded in society, whether for example they’re a secret police for a fascist government or whether they’re just a friendly policeman on the beat (who nevertheless won’t be on your side if you steal from the shops). As you go through the story, think about whose point of view you’re in, and how that person regards Korinye in different contexts. Their view of Korinye can even change over the story. Or you can have alternate points of view to show that some people consider the Korinye to be upholders of the law, while others consider them to be ruthless brigands who pillage in the name of the law. Don’t just let your word sit; let it expand just a little each time you use it.

In general I’d suggest that you keep the most subtlety, the most extensive building and explanation only for words that are key to your main conflict. This may be a bias of mine, but why make people put a lot of effort into a word that will give them little reward? Of course, this does assume that you want the reader to feel like an “insider” with the word(s) in question. If you have a human going to an alien planet and feeling lost because all the words are different, then keeping to the human viewpoint will probably mean not explaining any of the alien words.

You can also turn this around. What if you’re in the alien viewpoint? It may surprise you, but my first suggestion for an alien viewpoint is this: Minimize the number of created words.

Part of putting your reader in an alien’s head means making him or her feel comfortable there. So have the alien give not very much thought to things he/she doesn’t feel are important. Names of animals, for example, can be tossed in with just a couple words of context, and even used as metaphors for other things, like “he was mad as a cornered ughara.” Give much more attention to those concepts that will allow readers to understand the alien’s motives. These concepts don’t even need to have made-up names.

Yes, I am suggesting that you can redefine English words rather than putting in created ones every time. Sure, your alien may have an idiosyncratic sense of honor, but you don’t have to call it “zinni” or anything else. Instead, use strategically designed context and explanations to designate the associations that you want, and pluck away the ones you don’t. In my forthcoming Analog story, Cold Words, the aliens have a very distinct set of social judgments associated with the words Warm and Cold (but not Hot). Since these are integral to the plot, I spend some time building them up contextually. The other word I change in that story is “friend.” This one works slightly differently because it is a concept that the aliens do not have. I have to treat it carefully because as you might imagine, this does not mean they don’t have close relationships. In order to change it, I have my character give some conscious thought to what it means and how it fits into the relationships he is familiar with.

I love this stuff – in particular the relation between words and social meaning, which will lead us into our next topics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. This will be the final post on semantics unless any of my readers have specific questions. If you do, please feel free to comment and ask.

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How morphology can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, semantics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 4 Comments »

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