–

Reprinted with permission from How to Talk Doctor! Lesson 1 on How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends, by Dr. Grasshopper

Dr. Grasshopper is a science fiction and fantasy author who is finishing up medical school and seeking residency in the field of internal medicine.

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?

The red color of your blood is from all of the red blood cells floating in it.

Red blood cells are really just sacks full of four-unit proteins called hemoglobin. This a representation of a hemoglobin protein:

Each of the parts of the protein has a little “pocket” that contains a unit of heme. I think heme is a truly awesome molecule, so I’m going to show its structure below. Notice the “Fe” in the middle. That’s the symbol for iron, and it’s very important to heme’s function. The other letters are also symbols for atoms; this tells you what the molecule is made of. C = Carbon, O = Oxygen, H = Hydrogen, N = Nitrogen.

Just look at it for a sec. Isn’t it gorgeous?

Quit geeking out, Doc.

Must I?

Yes. Get on with it.

Fine. Back to the point.

Heme has a good affinity for oxygen for the purposes of oxygen transport: It binds oxygen tightly enough to carry it around, but loosely enough to let it go when it arrives at its proper destination. (This “oxygen + hemoglobin” combination is called “oxyhemoglobin”.)

Enter carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is made up of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom. (The name tells you that, if you break it down.) Carbon monoxide also likes to bind to heme, in the same spot where oxygen likes to bind, right in the “pocket”.

Problem is, it binds WAY TOO TIGHTLY to the pocket, and is very difficult to release. (This “carbon monoxide + hemoglobin” combination is called “carboxyhemoglobin”. See, medical terminology isn’t THAT scary, is it?)

Carbon monoxide can not be used in the same way as oxygen. And it takes up all the heme groups that should be used to transport oxygen. And it doesn’t like to let go of heme once it’s grabbed on.

Long story short: Carbon monoxide interferes with proper oxygen transport, which seems to be the scenario you’ve described.

Fun with chemistry! Competition

Bear with me; we’re going conceptual. But I promise, it’s relevant to the subject matter.

First, picture a tank with a bunch of superballs bouncing around in it. That’s what goes on at a molecular level in most substances. A bunch of molecules bounce around, colliding with each other at random.

Now picture these superballs with extra appendages or depressions, three-dimensional fittings like puzzle pieces. If two balls hit each other in exactly the right orientation, they’ll attach together. The pairs, once formed, can also break apart spontaneously.

That’s how molecular events occur. And for these purposes, let’s say that these events are pretty common.

Now.

You have a population of red superballs with a particularly-shaped depression in them; they can only admit a certain shape of superball appendage upon collision. Now, two populations of superballs have that particular shape of appendage, one green population and one yellow population.

They can both attach to the red balls, but once they’re attached, the yellow balls don’t let go quite as easily as the green ones do. So, if you have equal populations of the two, eventually you’ll end up with more yellow-red pairs than green-red pairs. The yellow out-competes the green for attachment sites.

The only way you’ll get more green-red pairs than yellow-red pairs is by making sure the population of green balls FAR outnumbers the population of yellow balls.

Treating carbon monoxide poisoning, using molecular competition

This basically explains the basis of treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning. The red balls are the hemoglobin, with its particularly-shaped pocket. The green balls are oxygen, that can attach with some affinity. The yellow balls are carbon monoxide, which have a much higher affinity for the hemoglobin.

So, if you have a bunch of carbon monoxide bouncing around the system, oxygen will be out-competed for binding sites in the pockets of the available hemoglobin. The only way to correct this is by increasing the population of oxygen molecules as far as you can; putting in something like ten green balls for every one yellow one. Eventually your population will consist of mainly green-red pairs (oxyhemoglobin) and very few yellow-red pairs (carboxyhemoglobin).

So, the treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning is basically, saturate a person with oxygen in order to outcompete the carbon monoxide.

In answer to your question:

You can use carbon monoxide for your scenario if you want to; it seems to fit well. At that point you’d just turn up the oxygen on the bridge or find your character an oxygen mask, and out-compete the carbon monoxide.

Alternatively, you can propose another toxin that interferes somehow with the hemoglobin molecule, and then make up an antidote that (a) displaces the toxin from its site of interference or (b) binds up the toxin to keep it from getting to the site of interference.

Hope that helps! Thanks for writing!

Pictures:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/lifecycle/images/1-2-6-4-0-0-0-0-0-0-0.jpg

http://www.daviddarling.info/images/hemoglobin.jpg

http://omlc.ogi.edu/spectra/hemoglobin/hemestruct/heme-struct.gif

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If you use this as if it were real medical information, I’ll fill all of your pockets with superballs. They will become very bouncy pockets.

—

Reprinted with permission from Superballs, Pockets, and Fun With Awesome Molecules on How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends, by Dr. Grasshopper

Dr. Grasshopper is a science fiction and fantasy author who is finishing up medical school and seeking residency in the field of internal medicine.

All of these dates are on different calendars and in many places there are people who live their lives with two divisions of time running concurrently. When world-building in fantasy or science fiction keep in mind that not everyone will divide the year up in the same way.  Don’t limit your world by just modifying the calendar you grew up with but look at all the other ways of dividing a year.

If you have a city where cultures meet, those calendars will meet as well. The children of multiple cultures will live with the holidays of both and inevitably at some point those calendars give you the opportunity to create a conflict. Think I’m exaggerating?

Did you know that Napoleon won the Battle of Austerlitz because of a calendar?  The Allied forces came up with a battle plan that called for the Russians arriving on October 20th.  They forgot that the plans were drawn up with the Julian calendar and that the Russians used the older Gregorian calendar. In 1805 that meant a twelve-day difference in dates so the Russians did not arrive until November 1st, long after the Austrians had surrendered.

Even if you don’t have a plot point hinging on differing calendars creating a world with different traditions of counting the days makes your story-telling richer.

I wish you a Happy Today, however you count it.

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.

“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.

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

“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.

Reading’s a very non-confrontational way to do this. Be sure, though, if you choose this route, to use as many primary sources as possible. If researching a story about first contact between a stranded explorer from Aldeberan and a runaway slave, for example, you’d do much better reading The Life & Times of Frederick Douglass than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The latter is an important and moving book. But not only is it a work of fiction, it was written by a non-slave; therefore it’s a step further removed from the authentic experience you need.

Websites on minority culture abound. Any half-decent search engine will bring up a freighter’s worth of URLs on African-Americans, for instance, and at least a line or two on lesser-known groups.

For a less cerebral approach, check out nearby ethnic history museums. Art collections, historical dioramas, anthropological displays and so on can provide you with strong visuals. Some are interactive, and allow you to pick up a few aural and tactile sensations as well. For locations, look under “Museums” in the yellow pages, or consult a travel guide for your area.

When it comes to finding more contemporary material, magazines help. I also strongly recommend shopping trips, night-clubbing and restaurant hopping. Take a walk on the wild side. Do you feel like a tourist? Uncomfortable? Well, you are one, and you need to know what it’s like to be conspicuous. If your character’s a minority, she or he will be quite familiar with the sensation. Bruce Sterling once told me that alienation is an essential part of any science fiction writer’s education, and I agree.

Perhaps you have friends of other cultural backgrounds. Talk to them. Explain what you’re trying to do. Even though no one is a certified representative of their own ethnic group, they can let you know when something you propose is totally out of whack. And they can point you to sources of specific info.

If you’re thinking of approaching someone who’s more an acquaintance than a friend, offer to buy them lunch, or dinner, and make the interaction a formal interview. This is what you’d do with anyone else you wanted to pump for valuable data. Cultural background is data. If you want it, and you don’t have it, it’s valuable; treat it that way.

Above all, don’t rely on representations of minorities gleaned from popular culture. They’re as true to life as Donna Reed’s pearl-laden floor-waxing outfits.

So now that you’ve got some background on these Beautiful Strangers, how best to use it?

A lot depends on your piece’s point of view, and the size of a given character’s role within it. Let’s start with Charnas’ short story, “The Ancient Mind At Work,” in which the protagonist, a white immigrant from South Africa, views an African American man:

Katje never called him by his name because she didn’t know whether he was Jackson Somebody or Somebody Jackson, and she had learned to be careful in everything to do with blacks in this country.

He was slender as a Kikuyu youth–she could see his ribs arch under his shirt . . . By rights he belonged in a red blanket, skin gleaming with oil, hair plaited. Instead he wore the tan shirt, pants, and zip-up jacket of an ‘engineer’ from Buildings and Grounds, and his hair was a modest Afro, as they called it, around his narrow face.

Here we see the minority through the eyes of another minority, but one sharing many assumptions with this society’s rulers. Katje’s opinions about what this man “should” be wearing and doing throw our own preconceptions in relief by their extremity. Her caution in dealing with Jackson underscores that of most American whites.

On a few occasions, Charnas has Jackson speak for himself:

“Try and don’t put nobody in that number-six bedroom till I get to it at the end of the week,” he said.

“I got accepted in Computer school in Rochester next semester . . . they don’t do blacks with guns . . .”

Jackson’s speech reflects patterns familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to or talked with blacks of a certain upbringing. But it doesn’t lapse into incomprehensible “Buckwheatisms”; it marks difference, not inferiority. The combination of honest, foreign prejudice, familiar tension, and Jackson’s voicing of his own concerns produces a picture in slightly more than two dimensions, all that’s necessary for a supporting character.

Sterling’s “Green Days In Brunei” features a multi-transracial cast; main and most supporting roles are filled by people of very different races than the author’s own. On assignment for a Japanese corporation, Turner Choi, a twenty-six year old Chinese Canadian CAD CAM engineer, becomes slowly accustomed to the ways of a tiny, somnolent country near Borneo, and its mix of Malaysian, Chinese, Iban, Dayak and European citizenry. Novella length gives Sterling room to flesh Choi out, using comparisons to his stay-at-home lawyer brother and his domineering, bad-cop, drug tycoon of a grandfather. A non-Asian girlfriend calls him “about as Chinese as maple syrup. . .” A Malaysian princess sees his status as a Western techie as exotic.

Choi’s observations of his surroundings reveal as much about himself as they do about Brunei. The gossipy, village-like kampongs which run the city’s retro-greened high-rises inhibit his bachelor lifestyle. The Dayaks are his exotics, the “dark, beautiful descendants of headhunting pirates, dressed in hand-dyed sarongs and ancient plastic baseball caps,” their language “utterly incomprehensible.”

Otherness is not a uniform state. Non-whites are not indentical, interchangeable units. Choi’s sense of himself as a foreigner, as a Westerner, a Northerner, and a child of privilege, complicates all his interactions. Age, more than race, distances him from the white exile Brooke, with whom he might otherwise form an alliance.

It’s mostly Choi’s gear-headedness that defines him for himself. He learns the obsolete programming language required for his assignment so well he dreams in it. And he sees his love for Princess Seria as defined by tech:

The painfully simple local Net filtered human relations down to a single channel of printed words, leaving only a high-flown, Platonic essence. Their relationship had grown into a classic, bloodless, spiritual romance . . .

Being a gear-head in low-and-appropriate tech Brunei causes Choi’s most alienated moments, and allows Sterling his closest identification with the character.

Katmer Al Shei, a heroine of the novel Fool’s War, shares several characteristics with her creator, Sarah Zettel. They’re both women of low stature and high determination. Both rely on discipline and humor to help them deal with trying situations.

For Al Shei, this includes an encounter with a “gerbil,” or space-station worker, who assaults her near the book’s beginning:

“Oh, sorry,” said a man’s bland voice. “I didn’t see a person there. I thought it was just a pile of rags and shit.

Al Shei pulled herself upright and turned around slowly to face the chestnut skinned, auburn-haired, totally unshaven can-gerbil.

She drew herself up to her full height. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is the Prophet of Allah.” Reciting the first pillar of Islam loudly was her standard tactic. Bigots seldom know how to reply to a declaration of faith . . .

Long before this early and explicit confrontation, Zettel establishes Al Shei’s otherness, with descriptions of the veils she and her cousin wear, and their integration of prayer into starship routine.

She also gives us a good idea of the context of this otherness. Coloring is noted: Master Fool Evelyn Dobbs’ skin is “a clear brown, two or three shades lighter than Al Shei’s earth tones. That and the angles in her eyes and her face said a good chunk of her ancestry was European.” And “shockingly blue eyes” shine out of Al Shei’s brother-in-law Tully’s “medium brown face.” But the roots of this society’s major prejudices lie in a dislike of certain strongly held beliefs. And right down there with the Muslims in terms of popularity is a group called “Freers.”

Freers have revolutionary ideas concerning A.I.s and their occasional emergence into self-awareness. Since these chaotic births usually result in the loss of human life, most people think Freers are insane to encourage them.

Fool’s War’s narrative switches between Al Shei, a target of religious persecution, Freer Jemina Yerusha, and Evelyn Dobbs, who has her own reasons for fearing irrational hatred. Though they all experience prejudice, the heroines’ goals aren’t quite congruent. Again, varying view points and sources of otherness give the story verisimilitude.

One more note on Fool’s War: Zettel makes a conscious effort to avoid equating non-European skin tones with food. In fact, she does the opposite, writing of Com Engineer Lipinski’s “pale, exotic good looks” in terms of milk and lobsters, which she contrasts with the more customary copper, bark brown, chestnut, etc. A friend pointed out to her the annoying frequency of references to coffee and chocolate as racial color analogies. Humans have been treated as commodities in this hemisphere’s recent past. The connection to slavery was subtle, but disturbing, and Zettel has done what she can to reverse the trend.

So let’s review how you, too, can make your universe an equal opportunity employer.

First, get to know your subjects. Primary sources are best.

When telling your story from any character’s viewpoint, be true to their take on the situation. Don’t give them your own anachronistic beliefs, or inauthentic, “p.c.” motivations.

Allow minority characters to speak with their own voices, even if only in a brief comment. Contrasts between multiple viewpoints produce both diversity and depth.

Show how race and prejudice figure in your setting, and what, if any, their connections.

Remember that difference is in the eye of the beholder. Black people don’t spend their whole lives thinking of themselves as black. We’re Ghanaians and editors and diabetics, and lots of other -ians and -ors and -ics. Use these self-categorizations to add points of audience identification to your characters.

Finally, offer your work to members of other ethnic groups for critique. You don’t have to follow their suggestions, but it won’t hurt to hear them.

Tom Wolfe spoke at a Press Club lunch on the subject of “writing what you know.” His point was that this is great advice, but that as writers it’s our job to continually know more.

This is true for SF writers in spades cubed. If we can’t create a reasonable facsimile of the local cigar shop’s owner, how much of a chance do we have of convincing readers they understand the Ganymedian group mind’s ambassador?

So welcome the Beautiful Strangers. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes with them. Do your best, and you’ll avoid the biggest mistake of all: exclusion.

—

“Transracial Writing for the Sincere” is available in print from Aqueduct Press as part of the Tiptree Special Mention book  Writing the Other, a guide to developing characters of varying backgrounds by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.
Nisi Shawl’s story collection Filter House won the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award. She received a second 2009 World Fantasy Award nomination for her novella “Good Boy.” Shawl is the coeditor, with Dr. Rebecca Holden, of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (forthcoming). Her reviews and essays appear in the Seattle Times and Ms. Magazine, and she has contributed to Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Encyclopedia of Themes in Science Fiction. Shawl is a founding member of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended in 1992.

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.

–

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.