TTYU Retro: Cutting edge tech - from the 18th century? A worldbuilding challenge

Some time ago I visited Mount Vernon with my mother and my kids. Mount Vernon is where George Washington lived with his wife Martha (some of you may already know this). It wasn't our first visit to the estate, so this time I was able to notice some things I hadn't seen the first time around. In particular, I noticed elements of 18th century technology.

Very often in fiction I think we encounter technologies from our era, from some imagined future, or from ancient times - either medieval or even earlier, back to bronze age. But there are so many more opportunities out there for worldbuilding! This was a great visit for me because I really enjoyed seeing how George Washington and the people at Mount Vernon were innovating technologically. Here were some of the cool technologies we saw - I hope you find them similarly inspiring.

The most obvious piece of technology is the cupola on the roof of the house, which is very evident in pictures.

You might not imagine this to be technology, but in fact it is (even independently of the architecture and the craftsmanship required to make it). The cupola was actually designed to concentrate rising hot air in the house, and so on hot days the family would open its windows in order to cool the house off.

Another architectural technology we saw was the sixteen-sided barn that George Washington designed, a replica of which now stands in the Mount Vernon farm. It has sixteen sides, making it roughly circular, and two stories.

 This illustration shows how it worked. Between the upper and lower floors was a layer of narrow but sturdy planks with gaps in between. Workers would lay out wheat on that floor, and then horses would be brought in to trot in a circle, which would break the wheat grains free of the straw. The grains would then fall through into the lower area, and be swept up, winnowed, and taken to the mill to be ground into flour. We actually had quite a laugh because the fellow there explained to us how important it was to keep the horses trotting constantly without letting them stretch. If they stretched, they would be likely to urinate and ruin the wheat below. In any case, there is an earthen hill built up on one side so the horses can walk directly in to the second floor, and a separate entrance to the first floor on the opposite side. It's as close as you can get to automating this part of the process without actually using machines.

Inside the house were a couple of other marvels. One was a chair that had a board suspended above it. This board was connected to foot pedals below the chair, so that you could sit in the chair, push the pedals with your feet, and the board above you would wave back and forth and fan you on a hot day. We actually had lovely weather the day we were there, but I've been there when it's been hot enough that I would have enjoyed that chair myself!

Last, and possibly most impressive, was an innovative design in the kitchen. We walked in and I immediately noticed that there was a rack before the fire where spits were set - the spits were instantly recognizable, since they were long iron rods sharpened at one end and with a turning-handle on the other. But there was also a very interesting pulley apparatus there. A gear at one end of a spit had a chain that extended up into the invisible recesses of the chimney. I asked the volunteer docent to explain this, and was amazed: the other end was another gear attached to a metal fan. The idea was that the rising smoke and hot air would cause this convection fan to turn, and that would turn the gears, and thereby turn the spit. That meant that nobody had to stand there and constantly turn the spit; so long as the fire was going, the rising hot air would cause the spit to turn on its own.

Get creative with your worldbuilding. Remember that technological development is a long process with lots of twists and turns, and that it doesn't necessarily jump from one "age" or "level" to another. You can even forbid yourself to use certain types of technologies and see how that might change the other technological developments around them. What if these people didn't have the wheel? What if they had never discovered the steam engine? Challenge your mind and see what clever solutions you can come up with for local problems like heat or food production.

It's something to think about.

Is it worth revising a Trunk Story?

Do you have a story that you could never make work? Maybe more than one? Well, you're not alone. I have quite a few of these, and so do a lot of authors. Among these stories, is there one that still haunts you and taunts you with a premise that insists, "I could work!!!"?

Then you are tempted to revise a trunk story.

This shouldn't come as a complete surprise. Just because we aren't able to write a story to our own satisfaction doesn't mean that the idea is bad. I personally believe that it's a great idea to write with ambition, that is, to try to achieve something in writing that you're not sure you have the skill to accomplish with complete effectiveness. After all, writing is a constant process of learning, and ambition is what gets us to learn new and exciting things. How do you know if you can accomplish something in your writing unless you've attempted it? 

However, sometimes when we go back to these stories we that the text is so far from what we want that we're ready to disown them and trash them permanently. (I have several stories like that.) Here's my recommendation.

Don't trash them.

Hold onto those stories, because you never know when your Muse will suddenly whisper in your ear and say, "I think you might be ready to try that one again."

Let me be clear: a draft that will not yield to treatment but fights you at every turn is not worth flinging yourself at over and over. I'm working right now on a story that I haven't attempted in ten years. But at this point in my writing ability, I'm able to get a lot more exciting ideas for it, and I can imagine it turning out utterly different, though its ostensible core story is the same. Here are some steps to take:

1. Stay away from the old text until you have your new outline or premise clearly thought out. (You don't want your old level of skill to confuse your planning)

2. Spend time thinking through the story without looking at it and write down the bits you remember, because chances are you remember the best bits.

3. Only go back to the text if there's some critical event that must play out in a particular order, and you can't quite remember what order you put it in... or some such logistical information that you need to pick up from the old draft.

4. (You may have picked this up from the above) Don't let the old draft restrict you.

5. Never stop writing new things!

I put that last one in there because it's terribly important. Maybe you'll pick up your old story and try to do it right this time and it won't work. Yes, this has definitely happened to me. Don't let it discourage you; keep the file and save it for the next time the idea won't leave you alone. Always keep writing new things, because it keeps you learning and growing. At the same time, don't write off old stories that never worked just because you wrote them when you knew less. I'm sure we've all read enough to realize that the same premise can be executed in all kinds of different ways, successful and less successful. If you have an epiphany about an old story, that might just be what you need to give it the spirit you always imagined for it.

It's something to think about.

Personal Faith - A 'Dive into Worldbuilding!' Hangout report with Video

I was joined for this hangout by Glenda Pfeiffer, Deborah J. Ross, and Lillian Csernica. It was a treat to have new people at the hangout - and super-thoughtful ones, too! I hope you find the discussion as fascinating as I did.

The last time we spoke about religion at a hangout, we'd spoken about world religion, and what kind of evidence one could put into a story to show that the world had religion, and religious diversity, in it (that post is here). So this time I wanted to look at the question of personal faith - characters who believe very deeply in their god/gods. This question is not an insignificant one because there are many stories out there in which the gods are real, and can interact with people. In that case, can the character's belief really be called faith? Or is it more acceptance of reality? N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy took a really interesting approach to that question, because while the gods were real and people took them on as patrons, there were also "atheists." What is an atheist in a land where the gods walk among us? Well, in her book, it was someone who believes that the gods should not be worshipped, because the gods old no relevance to their life even though they clearly exist - thus, more of an ideological stance than a religious one.

This contrasts sharply with the more Earthly view of personal faith that we find in, say, religious fiction and religious-inspired fiction, where plot, character, metaphors used, and many other aspects of a story will be directly inspired by elements of a real world religion. Some of these can be parables or stories from a religious text (like, say, the Bible) translated into a speculative environment. Bryan Thomas Schmidt's The Worker Prince, a science fictional retelling of the story of Moses, falls into this category.

I have always felt that because religion is such an important and pervasive cultural influence in the world, an author needs to make a deliberate choice about what kind or religion will appear in any given story. A lot? A little? None? Any of these options will likely be significant to the way the story is received by readers.

Glenda noted that you can pick and choose aspects of religion that are relevant to the story. You don't want readers to be bothered by the sensation of "something missing," and you should certainly make sure to avoid any inconsistencies in religion. You can have religion, and still have non-religious characters.

Religion is something that often comes into play during rites of passage. Birth, marriage, death, and other major events come to have metaphysical significance, and aspects of them will probably stay with your characters. Glenda remarked that there was a time (the middle ages) when you would have three baths in your life (birth, marriage, death). The final bath was a ritual of cleansing of more than just bodily significance - "not just getting rid of the lice before they put you in the ground."

I asked what kind of works people thought of as having handled religious faith very well. My own pick was the first book where I ever noticed the presence of a non-Earthly religion, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. Glenda mentioned Harry Turtledove's "In the presence of mine enemies," Jo Clayton's A Bait of Dreams, and A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller. Marion Zimmer Bradley did a lot with spiritual discipline of women warriors. Recent books that have great use of religion - and specifically non-European types of religion - are Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones, Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, and The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin. Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon also includes earth mystics and pagans, for a different religious approach.

Lillian made an important point by noting that people don't just stand there with a list of Dos and Don'ts. They have a relationship with their faith and its morality, which often involves a lot of deep thought. Religious faiths themselves are held in diverse ways.

Glenda also recommened Katherine Kurtz's Derinyi series, and Lillian mentioned Frank Herbert's Dune, where the Bene Gesserit women were a huge force in the society, and steely down to their bones.

Deborah Ross spoke about her own new series, The Seven-Petaled Shield. It has three major cultures, each with its own religion. The main religion is influenced by the Hebrew scriptures, while a second takes a Rome-like pantheistic approach with gods who look after you, and the third, a group of nomads on the steppe, have a nature-based religion whose deity is the "Mother of Horses."

Land and life have a deep influence on religious beliefs. Lillian asked, if you are in a survival-level culture, what do you conceptualize as a higher power? To a land-locked culture, would the ocean itself be a deity? Historically, some slaves from inland cultures who were shipped suddenly across the ocean had a terrible fear of it and thought of it as some sort of underworld. One could imagine the same kind of reaction from desert people seeing mountain forests. Would they suspect a different land gives rise to different gods?

When a person holds a particular religious faith, they tend to be steeped in the stories of that faith. While the Star Trek episode Darmok, in which an entire race of aliens speaks only in allusions to their own canon of stories, is a bit extreme (which is why I responded to it with "Let the Word Take Me"). However, the metaphors and analogies and imagery of those core stories permeate the thinking and language use of any member of that religion, and indeed can permeate the thinking and language of anyone in a society which was primarily based on that religion, whether or not they hold the religion for themselves. English is full of references to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian concept of God. Other languages are similar.

Lillian brought up Thailand, where there are stories of spirits who don't yet know they are dead, who may ask for a ride to the airport in a taxi and then disappear. Concepts of lucky colors can come from an underlying religious viewpoint.

In ancient Japan, traveling in certain directions on certain days was considered unlucky for religious reasons. This got us thinking about The Awakeners by Sherri S. Tepper, where there was a North Shore and a South Shore, and with the river flowing in one direction, people never traveled in any other direction. There was an underlying secret involving learning what happens to dead people if they travel backward, and the priesthood guarding that secret. Directionality can thus be an interesting cultural concept.

Prophets came up as a topic, though we didn't have a lot of time to discuss them. It would be interesting to consider the faith that prophets hold, and how they are viewed during their lifetimes versus how they are viewed years later. We talked about the character in Babylon 5 who wrote a book while in jail and accidentally ended up founding a religion of people who became caught up in the letter of the book, not the author's intent, even though he was still alive to argue with them about it!

Religious texts are yet another topic that deserves later discussion. You have the original text, then the commentaries, the historical discourses on the topic, and all of this is complicated by the translation issues. Lillian particularly mentioned Mary Magdalene and how her identity is interpreted differently in Orthodox Christianity and in later forms of Christianity. We also spoke about how texts - and the people and events portrayed in them - can be reinterpreted by people with specific political agendas after the fact, and how those people's oppressive or suppressive interpretations can substantially influence the interpretation of the text thereafter.

I always end these discussions feeling like we've just barely begun! But I hope we'll be able to pursue some of these subtopics later. Thank you, Glenda, Deborah, and Lillian, for being awesome discussants.

And here's the video!

The Body as a Record of Personal Experience and Cultural Identity - A 'Dive into Worldbuilding!' Hangout report with Video

I must say I was really happy to find the notes for this one, because I always wanted to write out this report! I was joined for this one by Erin Peterson and Glenda Pfeiffer.

I was initially inspired to this topic by encountering a number of articles in the media, one of which was an article about the incredible risks of Botox injections. One of these risks is that of losing the ability to form emotional connections with people because Botox causes you to lose the ability to echo other people's facial expressions. Not even kidding here - it scares me. The lure of Botox is the promise that you will lack wrinkles on your face, but that's not all you'll be missing. Your body, and particularly its wrinkes, scars, etc. is a record of your experience, what makes you who you are both individually and culturally. That is quite an incredible thing to erase!

As Erin said, this is a topic that gets us into the double standard of gender where women are valued first, and most importantly, on the basis of their appearance as beautiful, youthful and attractive, where men are valued for their power and experience - even in the arenas of sports and politics. Discussing inequity was not the main focus of our discussion, however.

We talked about how tattoos are often used to mark experience and identity. Many people choose to get tattoos as talismans of experience, often after some event they feel has changed them dramatically, marked a life transition or a big accomplishment. Glenda mentioned that tattoos can signify membership in a particular social group. Even tattooed eyeliner isn't just about ease, but it's also about claiming membership in the group of people who think makeup is a daily essential. The same would go for tattooed lip gloss. In my Varin world, the Imbati servant caste voluntarily (and proudly) take forehead tattoos as a symbol of both adulthood and their caste's special vocation of service.

Not all body markings are taken by choice. There are imposed social markers like the brands that used to be put on criminals in colonial America for a first serious offense (a brand on the hand, rather than an extended imprisonment, was the norm. For the second it was hanging). You hear horror stories about people being forced to take tattoos to "mark" them as belonging to someone else emotionally (which borders on slavery in my opinion). Scars are also marks of experience that may not be voluntary. There is voluntary scarification, as Glenda mentioned, but we also have things like mastectomy scars, Caesarean section scars, scars from accidental injuries of all varieties. Our interpretation of these marks can be various - they can be marks of shame that must be hidden, or they can be worn with pride, depending on the context in which they came about.

We spoke about intersex children, who are sometimes given surgical procedures to alter the appearance of their genitals so that they can conform physically to gender norm. This is often a mistake, because the doctor's opinion of what the child's physical sex looks most like is not necessarily what the child will identify as as they get older. Being raised as one thing when you are mentally another is thus a problem not only experienced by transgender people.

Clothes, though not a part of your body, definitely interact with it in the way that we display identity. One big issue that comes up, which we felt was relevant to this discussion, was which parts of one's body one is expected to display. There are tons of articles out their about unfair dress codes where women's bodies are required to be hidden because they are considered "distracting" to male students. There is much potential to display a society's cultural values in the way that one handles the exposure of different body areas and parts. Indeed, there is a very interesting display going on right now (ages after this original discussion!) about Japanese erotic woodblock prints, where unlike European erotic art of the same period, the bodies are typically covered with beautiful clothes and only the critical erotic parts are exposed (European art tends to do the opposite). You only have to look at the history of swimming suits in order to see that these values also change over time. Swim shirts are now coming back into fashion as a result of our knowledge of sun danger! And of course changing skirt lengths have always been a big topic for fashion.

Many things write our history on our skin - we can see the long-term effects of extreme sunburn and tanning in how the skin changes, and also the effects of long-term smoking. Glenda pointed out the interesting fact that tanning used to be considered lower-class because it was associated with agricultural work, and wealthy people were protected from the sun. But after the rise of industry, people worked in factories where they were not exposed to sun, and the mark of wealth became a tanned skin because the wealthy had leisure to tan. 

Other kinds of experiences that are recorded in our bodies are our first experiences of sex, as well as pregnancy. Pregnancy not only changes one's body but changes all kinds of expectations around us about whether our bodies are our own and whether our personal space can be invaded. There is also a strong cultural belief that the effects of pregnancy on our bodies should be erased as soon as possible - but should they? There might be cultures where such marks of motherhood would be displayed or at least treated with pride.

Lastly there are myths about behaviors that might potentially change our bodies (but really don't!), like masturbation. It turns out that Queen Victoria didn't think it was happening, at least among women.

I think we all felt at the end of this discussion as though we'd only scratched the surface of what is available to this topic. However, I really enjoyed talking about it and maybe we can pick it up again sometime.

And here is the video if you'd like more details!

Political Systems - A 'Dive into Worldbuilding!' Hangout report with Video!

This one is a blast from the past - I'd lost my notes and found them again quite recently, which means I have some catching up to do! I had this discussion with Glenda Pfeiffer, Erin Peterson, Lesley Smith and Misha Gericke.

We started out by listing some types of political systems. Monarchies, especially absolute monarchies, are quite common in European-centered medieval-style fantasy. Lesley suggested Theocracy, where the system is run by religious leaders. I mentioned that in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin, she sets up two quite distinct systems, one a monarchy, and the other called a "commensality" which resembles a communist state. Erin mentioned that there was a form of communism in a book she read where there was a generation ship, where everything was shared and nothing inherited, and that the system worked until a religious group tried to control it. My Varin world has a rather mixed political system, where an underlying socialist system was hijacked by some powerful people and as a result the society is run by a single powerful monarch who is elected (indirectly - Heirs are elected) by the members of his Cabinet. That makes it a sort of monarchy/oligarchy with twisted democratic aspects.

Erin said, intriguingly, that people don't have the government they think they have.

When you are setting up a political system, it's interesting to ask who controls the money, and where they get it from. Does land ownership lead to wealth? Does business or corporate investment lead to wealth? How does money influence politics?

Misha talked about how she was working on a story where there were two neighboring nations and each one had a different political system. I think this is a really good idea, because in the real world there is quite a diversity of different coexisting systems.

We spoke for a bit about the system in George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, where the Lords of particular areas are subject to the Targarian kings. Then madness crops up and leads to serious tyranny (the mad king was going to blow up the capital so was killed by his own guard). At that point the legal right to rule came under dispute and led to further fracturing of power, and uprisings by low-level nobility. I think it's interesting to note that kings can layer over one another - the concept of the High King is probably familiar, but I don't see it quite as often these days as I remember hearing about it when I was younger. Also it's interesting to note where resistance comes from when a monarch is a maniacal tyrant (guards vs. rivals).

This made me think of a historical king of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was a High King over quite a portion of the British isles and even some areas of France in around 400CE, and maintained control over his subject kingdoms by taking their queens hostage (with the result that he's part of the bloodline of about 1 in 8 Irishmen).

N.K. Jemisin set up quite an interesting variation on the hereditary monarchy model in her novel The Killing Moon. In their system, which centered around worship of the moon goddess, the monarch upon his death would become the husband of the moon goddess, and thus the "king," so the living ruler of Gujaareh therefore bore the title of Prince.

Erin brought up the importance of women, and how it differs in different political systems. For example, marriages between the prince of one country and the princess of another were very important for peace, centered around the idea that when you (the prince) cared about your sister (the princess), you'd be less likely to attack a nation where she resided as the leader's wife. Women can also be an active, powerful influence in government, whether as queens and princesses or elected representatives of various varieties. We noted that the English monarchy is changing the rules of inheritance so women will have the place of their birth order in it, rather than being skipped over unless there are no male heirs. In our world, inheritance by primogeniture regardless of gender is becoming more common for monarchies.

We spoke a bit about the Emperor of Japan. Back at the very beginning of historical record, we see some Empresses, but this stopped over a thousand years ago. Historically, the Emperor was thought of as a deity, a status which was forcibly changed by the Americans after World War II. Even now his role as moral leader of the country is very important. Some years ago there was a failure of the rice crop, and Japan imported rice from Thailand - but nobody would eat it, until the Emperor went on television to eat Thai rice and vouch for it. That solved the problem.

There are lots of stories out there about changing types of government. Kings being overthrown. Oppressive systems crashing down. Successions and such. We clearly care about this stuff! Also, historically, governments change. French history involves a monarchy becoming a democracy and then becoming an empire for a while before becoming a democracy again.

Misha noted, quite importantly I think, that the character of a monarchy depends a lot on the personality of its monarch. Indeed, this may be one of the reasons why monarchies are so common in fiction, because they can be personalized, and change in government can be conveyed through the examination of a single person's experience.

I apologize if I missed or mischaracterized anything that went on in this discussion because of the long delay... you can always visit the video for details, because it's right here!

Dive into Worldbuilding! - Topics for October

Wow, another month is already here! That means I get to come up with more fun topics for us to talk about during our Thursday 11am hangouts on Google+. This month we had a few new people join us, which was very exciting! I hope I get to see you again, and maybe even there are more interested folks out there who can come and join the discussion.

October 3  Travel

October 10  Dialect and Voice

October 17  Roads and Infrastructure

October 24  Money

October 31  Clothes and costumes!

TTYU Retro: Writing crowd interactions

Today seemed a good opportunity to look at some of the factors involved in writing large-group interactions. Here are some of the possible permutations (I don't claim to be comprehensive!).

1. The chaos crowd
In the chaos crowd, nobody is really interacting with anybody else. The chaos crowd is faceless, usually moving. I tend to approach a POV protagonist in a chaos crowd by establishing the chaos of the scene (magnitude, degree of movement) and thereafter relying on just the character's impressions of things that happen nearby. The character is as likely to encounter body parts and interact with them as to encounter whole people. Dialogue is usually either uttered to one companion or shouted at anybody within reach, so not a lot of complex management there.

2. The speechmaking situation
Here you have one person who is communicating something to the whole group. That person is the center of the interaction, as it were. If that person is the POV character, then you can have the speechmaker remark internally on reactions within the crowd of the audience. They may recognize some people in the audience and note those particular reactions. If the speechmaker is not the POV character, then there will be little sense of the reactions of individuals in the crowd, unless they are right next to the POV listener. However, the POV listener will definitely react personally to what the speechmaker is saying, and will also have an impression of the general mood of the crowd. Hecklers will be noticeable auditorily to either a POV speaker or a POV listener, but unlikely to be visually identifiable unless special conditions are in place.

3. The single-center group
This is a smaller group, with a single person who is the center of attention and/or perceived as the leader. The leader is more likely to be able to manage the conversation of the others, because he or she will be the one to whom most speech is directed. Every time you have active interaction between three or more characters where their identity is important, it's critical to keep track of the interactive style, favorite topics, and personality of each participant. Dialogue tags can be critical for keeping track of whom you're hearing at any given time.

4. The multi-center group
This is a group where all or most members are known, but where two (or more) people have come in with agendas and want to be the group center. Essentially what will happen is that these people will come in and make a move for the attention of the whole group, and then the group will split one way into smaller groups. In the scene I'm writing today, Garr grabs the attention of one person and Selemei gets the attention of the other two. What can happen here, however, is that other characters can make conversational or physical moves that either unify the entire group momentarily, or cause it to break up again into another configuration. There are a lot of possible permutations here, but they will be directly influenced by the agendas of the individuals involved. Some people will tend to stick to each other while others will not. I will remark, though, that groups of four or more will have an increasing tendency to break up into smaller subgroups.

The physical position of the people involved will also have a huge influence. If it's a cocktail party or other free-form situation, people's ability to form and reform smaller groups will be enhanced. If the entire party is seated around a large table, then one will tend to choose one of the people sitting nearest and begin a conversation. Speechmaking can be started from the head of the table, and larger groups can form between people who are around a table corner, or seated across from one another, etc.

The main point of this is to say that I don't often see large-group interactions taken advantage of in all their possible permutations. It's worth putting some thought into how this stuff can work, particularly if a lot of important characters are interacting at the same time.

I also suggest you look at Deborah J. Ross and Dave Trowbridge's comments below, for some great crowd-related questions and a book recommendation on the topic.