It occurs to me that failure to properly worldbuild an SFFnal story is – sometimes, though not always – less reflective of a writer’s creative ability than it is a consequence of their real-world privilege. The concept of culture as something with multiple facets, that can be experienced from different perspectives and which – crucially – has consequences beyond the obvious is learned rather than innate, and if, in your own life, you’ve never stopped to consider (for instance) how class differences impact access to basic necessities, or the problem of social mobility, then that’s going to influence how you craft, or fail to craft, those elements in your narratives. Because while, in stories set in the present day, you can either compensate with research or write wholly within familiar contexts, in an invented setting, it’s going to be harder to hide the gaps in your knowledge.
And so we get stories whose cultures are founded on stereotypes: Noble Elves vs the Barbarian Orcs, an endless parade of faux-medieval Europes, and dystopias built around a single, reductive premise with no effort made to explore its wider consequences. This last seems especially troublesome to me, given that dystopias are, generally speaking, meant to be the sort of stories that understand class and subversion – but when written by someone who’s never considered that their own society operates on more than one level, that nuance may well be lost. The point of worldbuilding is to create new worlds, but they’re always going to be influenced by how we view our own.
I also think about these fantasy and science-fiction worlds. These authors – usually American – trying to describe some ~*~exotic market~*~ or ~*~bustling spaceship port~*~ with words they’ve read in other people’s books. Think about how they falteringly describe those markets: “They had lots of spices and some colorful rugs.”
(But is it bright turmeric and cumin, cut with flour, glowing yellow in glass jars to attract the tourists? Is it the cinnamon and star anise of the Christmas market, the paper cup of mulled cider? Where are we supposed to be, again?)
But these authors copy-paste the rising and falling call of the muezzin and the air heavy with foreign spices and the hungry children with flies in their eyes – maybe even take a beautiful woman with her face veiled out of the box, or some exotic songbirds – and think “Nailed it.” Check out this exotic worldbuilding – we’ve really traveled here! Look: colorful silks and barbarians. Is this a good story, or what!
And it’s splendidly, laughingly obvious that they’ve never seen a street sign in Arabic, never walked through a North African market at nightfall, couldn’t tell silk from satin if their life depended on it, and that they don’t even know their own local songbirds, let alone how to identify an exotic one. Armchair tourists, copying and pasting the TripAdvisor reviews of other tourists, coloring half the people green, and calling it worldbuilding: oh deary me.
Then there’s the realism of research. Knowing where goods and products and knowledge came from. If your elves are eating chocolate they’d better have contact with the Aztecs. Don’t put poison ivy in England. Your medieval faux-European story had better justify itself if people are wearing cotton and eating potatoes and tomatoes.
(Pictured: someone whose civilization has apparently had contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. So THAT’s what all of that “into the west” stuff is about… elves seeking out new sources of carbohydrates!)
Don’t even get me started on science realism in science fiction; I am personally plagued by every written fictional description of viruses AND I’M JUST LIKE
So the Western SF/F canon swallows itself endlessly, a snake chasing its tail. It’s fun, but the tiresome bits get recycled, because people think that’s what forests and markets and ships are really like.
“That’s not realistic in this setting,” we scoff when someone wants a disabled princess or a lady king or – gasp! – a black woman in their literature.
But most of this shit is so unrealistic, say people like me, rolling their eyes politely: “What spices were they, precisely? They’re wearing silk, are they? Are you sure of that? Are you absolutely sure? And then the virus killed everybody, did it? In seven minutes? much wow.”
So it sounds like I’m going “don’t write about markets unless you’ve been to a market” or “don’t write unless you have a really expensive education” or “don’t write.
But of course – this isn’t fair. Who am I to demand that people be well-traveled? Most people cannot afford to. And those who do travel rarely pay attention. They are expecting foreign spices and children with flies in their eyes, and they come back and regurgitate them.
(The spices were cardamom and cinnamon, you silly fool, and the children in your hometown are hungrier. The songbird was a woodlark, and the only exotic thing there was you.)
You don’t have to actually travel. You just have to care. As you type that someone is eating a potato you have to ask “where did they get the potato?” and as you type that someone is ugly you have to ask “why are they ugly?” and if you’re going to write about a prairie, look it up on Google Maps and sit with it for a while until you’ve got your own words for it.
People know the difference between waving your hands dismissively, using other people’s words because you don’t think it’s important, and when genuinely caring, especially when you’re touching something they love. You’ll fuck up, but people will usually forgive fuck-ups if you were being honest and wondering and respectful.
It’s the difference between the standard Western method of travel – showing up sneeringly in someone else’s house and expecting to be hailed as a savior, to be served by the unimportant natives – and the kind of travel where OH MY GOD WAS THAT ONE OF YOUR MAGPIES? THAT’S WHAT YOUR MAGPIES LOOK LIKE? ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW? OH MY GOD THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. GUYS. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THEIR MAGPIES?
Because wherever you go in this universe, you are going to somebody’s home. Tread lightly, because you tread as a guest. If you fail to lovingly respect your beggar woman and lowly engineer because they’re more “boring” than your hero – well, you’ve just described what kind of person you are, and it’s not the sort that comes to my dinner parties.
Whether you are learning, or traveling, or writing, you have to care and you have to care about getting it right. You can be tongue-tied and broken-hearted and fundamentally lost. My favorite people usually are. But you have to care about the magpies and the trade routes and the cardamom. You’ll have to bring me with you, or you’ll lose me. (Believe me, I have so many wonderful places to be.)
So I don’t ask that authors be perfect in their worldbuilding. I only ask that they try, and take my hand, and believe that this place they have created is important and worthy and full of the most interesting things, and worthy of thought and care, because all places are.
Ok so I know some people who were looking for places to find music in languages that they are learning. And I’m learning a language too.
My sister showed me this site. Its called radiooooo.com. You can choose a country and a decade and it will play songs that were popular in that country during that decade. So if you need something to listen to while doing homework or you just want to discover some new tunes or whatever you can check this out.
caitl if you were going to create a language for aliens how would you do it
Aliens!!
Ok, so there’s a couple of different ways to go with this, in my opinion. One is to assume the sort of “human diaspora” type of alien, i.e. aliens that at some point must have descended from or been related to humans. There’s fun things that can be done there, but you have to get really creative, or else the situation is just like any situation of creating a fictional language.
The fun thing about imagining alien languages is that, if you’re really hoping to have some fun, the first step should be to pinpoint a bunch of assumptions that we, as humans, will have about how languages work. Then, you start imagining what a language, or a language community, might look like if those assumptions were undone.
Here’s one or two ideas that come to mind:
Do languages have to be verbal? Obviously not. In humans, the main alternative we see is manual signed languages. As linguists, we find signed languages interesting because they really are structurally similar to verbal languages: that is, we can tell that it’s the same language learning and use at play, just with physical space instead of sound. So here’s the question: what else could an organism use for communication? This could actually be one of the ways of doing something interesting with the “human diaspora” type. Imagine a humanoid race with the same language faculty as us — its brain holds the potential for the same kinds of languages as ours, but let’s say there are physical differences. Maybe they’re nonverbal, but maybe they have access to other things. Color manipulation? The ability to emit patterns of smoke or steam? More appendages, or fewer? What would it look like if we translated the idea of human language into different media? What other media can we imagine?
A lot of people have played around with the ideas of “hyper-literal” languages, i.e. languages in which lying isn’t possible. The most interesting and imaginative version of this that I’ve seen is in Mieville’s Embassytown, but in general I kind of find it to be an uninteresting and weird idea to play around with. Language is fundamentally a symbolic system, that’s the whole idea of it, and the idea of constructing a language in which only “true symbols” or “literal symbols” are accepted seems kind of nonsensical. What would that mean? That distinction hardly makes sense to me. Even if you’re dealing with language that is telepathic or something like that, there must be, if not lies, at least not-true things: hypotheticals, stories, myths. Otherwise, you would literally have to create a language in which, if a previously believed fact is proven untrue, your language would abruptly have to lose the ability to represent that now-false fact. That’s bizarre.
Here’s an interesting assumption to challenge: a species can have, or develop, multiple languages. It’s a characteristic of the human race that our language is capable of variation and change: some of the fundamental ways in which meaning can be composed and conveyed seem to stay the same (or similar), but the arbitrary units used to package the message can be manipulated in different ways. This is just one of the odd ways in which the human language faculty developed. Imagine a culture in which that wasn’t the case. Imagine a culture where language was completely innate, where the specific arbitrary units of meaning don’t have to be learned, where it’s all one basic package deal. It’s all built in, cognitively fixed. Language doesn’t change unless there’s an actual mutation. So, internally, that would be a bit boring. A whole species, a whole world where there was only one static language? No dialects, no language families, no language change! Translation and interpretation aren’t an issue; at least, not at the level of surface language. Understanding and comprehension are universal, species-wide. Now, you could imagine what might happen when there could be mutations in that language faculty; the sorts of social outrage or horror that might come if something different, new, unknown happened; there are stories to tell there, too. But also, imagine this species coming into contact with … well, say, the human race. How long would it take them to recognize that human vocalizations (or gestures) were even interpretable as speech, that their own language wasn’t truly universal? How much might they struggle to learn a different language, when they haven’t ever known communication to vary before? Would they even be able to? How shocked, confused, horrified would they be when they realized that learning to communicate with humans didn’t just entail learning or accepting one new language — but thousands?
Disneyland and Walt Disney World now have guidebooks for guests with cognitive disabilities (such as autism). They include the above charts of what to expect at each attraction (strong smells, loud noises, restraint types used, duration, and more), lists of quiet areas for when you need down time, and answers to frequently asked questions, among other tips.
If you don’t want to download a PDF (or prefer to click the download link on Disney’s site directly), here are their pages for Services for Guests with Cognitive Disabilities: Disneyland | Walt Disney World
Just go here and sign up with your college email. You can install it on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on other mobile devices, including Windows tablets and iPads.
GOD BLESS.
I PAYED UGH. REBLOGGING TO SAVE U GUYS SOME MORE GAS MONEY
OMG YAS
Pretty sure there are some college students following me that could use this.
asokkalypsenow replied to your post:help me stay awake
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