Cheerios and Space - and Language and Culture?

Here's an interesting little article about "the Cheerios effect" (I kid you not), in which Cheerios in a bowl of milk will clump together and aggregate at the sides of the bowl - and how this relates to space!

I think this article is particularly interesting because of the way it shows that simple everyday effects can be observed on vastly larger scales. The underlying truths of a world (physical laws in this case) are observable on multiple different levels.

This is also true of language. The most fundamental principles of a language, whether strictly grammatical or pragmatics-related, can generally be observed even in very small recorded samples of speech in that language. As examples I'd give grammatical gender in French and Spanish, and casual versus formal speech style in Japanese (though there are many more). I find the speech style example particularly interesting because it has social consequences, not just grammatical ones. This is where you start seeing that this phenomenon also reaches into the area of culture.

I've been writing this week in my Varin world, and rejoicing at the fact that I'm so much a better writer now than when I first designed it. The reason why? Well, because when you first design a world it's really easy to lay out a lot of general principles about how the society works. It's much harder to explore how those general principles play out on the smaller scale of individual interactions.

If you say, "The nobility are isolated and think they're better than anybody else," it's easy to have them go around acting too broadly. They dress and speak loudly, they insult others, they just basically act like arrogant snobs in a really really obvious way. I am embarrassed to say that this is what they were like when I first wrote them. However, this isn't really how things work. These are people like everyone else, and they should have just as many arrogant snobs among them as other social groups do - which is to say, not everyone. A single individual's main personality traits should be at the fore (as for example, my relatively modest and kind protagonist, Tagret); their cultural bias should be reflected on the small scale in their unconscious reactions.

To explore a bit further into the Varin example, the nobility of Varin typically don't mix with any caste but the servant caste, who are an integral part of their everyday life. They can be either polite or impolite to their servants depending on the person. They have dealings with the officer caste (police, army, fire brigade etc.) in certain fixed contexts. However, they almost never see anyone of lower caste than that. An insensitive nobleman or noble lady, having to deal with merchants or artisans, might express distaste, but someone like Tagret feels mostly out of his depth, like he doesn't know what to do with them. He tries to be polite but at the same time will try to distance himself from them, unconsciously, to remove himself from the discomfort of not knowing the appropriate way to treat these people socially.

If your world has social principles, treat them as respectfully as you would the laws of physics. Don't just slap them on over the top. Realize that just like the Cheerios effect, they will have repercussions that go all the way down to the smallest interactions, including the subtleties of the ways people talk to each other.

My Debut at Science In My Fiction

Coming up on Friday I will have an article appearing at Science in my Fiction, the blog of Crossed Genres magazine. This is a great blog which talks about how to incorporate real science and scientific principles in writing fiction. Entries are written by a list of authors who have expertise in different scientific areas. The post is called "A Different Value: Nature" and I'll repost it here, but I'll let it appear first at the SIMF blog to tempt you over there. This blog is a great resource, so check it out!

Where's "the Future" for Science Fiction?

We live in the future. Many of the iconic images of science fiction have already been realized, in mobile phones, toy robots, etc. I've heard it asked whether science fiction has anything left to say to kids who text to one another, or use Twitter, or embrace modern technology in its current forms. What's left, they ask, for science fiction writers to write about?

I find this question odd. In a universe that's continually expanding, how can we ask what's left? The possibilities will remain limitless so long as human curiosity itself does not fail - and I don't think it can.

I'll grant the point that many of the things that were once cutting-edge science fiction have now become commonplace. How can we learn what is new now? We can follow science - but as an author who has appeared in Analog, I can't help but notice the advanced degrees in physics and chemistry etc. held by other authors and say to myself, "I'm nowhere near close enough to the cutting edge of science to be able to write a story about that kind of stuff." On some levels one could argue that cutting edge of science has been drawing farther and farther away from the general American public in recent years.

On the other hand, the cutting edge of science is only one small aspect of science fiction.

Science fiction is accommodating. It is not a restrictive genre, but something that can be applied to all different kinds of stories. Science fiction Western. Science fiction thriller. Science fiction romance. Why not? People are creating stories like this even now. Even people who don't want to be called science fiction writers are using science fictional ideas.

So what kind of ideas are out there?

To my mind, ideas are available anywhere that human knowledge is asking to be expanded. Into the areas of technology, yes, and space. But also into the areas of medical science, or even what lies in our own back yard. Even what happens when we speak. Science fiction isn't only about the future, or about technology. Of course it is about those things, because we can see that space ships and robots and nanotech are common enough in science fiction stories. But there's also something else going on.

Science fiction is about human response to the unknown.

Science fiction allows us to share in experiences that are new, that push our knowledge toward the boundaries - of science, of space, sure, but also of what we know about ourselves. A truly new idea is an incredible thrill, one of excitement and also of fear. Readers of science fiction ride that boundary into the unknown, wherever it remains to be found. Yes, that means technology and space - because with enough creativity we can imagine ourselves past any technological limit, and space, after all, is still out there nearly untouched.

But science fiction as the experience of the new is all around us. Under a rock. Hidden in the ground. In the depths of the mind. In the heart of the person you see walking down the street every day but you don't really know.

In my own science fiction, I use linguistics and anthropology - social sciences. It's natural to me to do this because of my academic background in these fields, and also because of my experience of travel to other countries where I've been immersed in different cultures. These sciences, and these opportunities, are full of delicious material for science fiction - but not only that. They seem to me to be appropriately suited for this modern age of world travel and cultural mixing.

An age of linguistic and cultural diversity means your next experience of alien first contact could be with someone right next door. Understanding different ways of thinking requires us to face the unknown every day. This is why I know I'll never run short of inspiration for stories.

It's also why I think science fiction has a long future to look forward to - in more ways than one.