I have one piece of awards-eligible fiction this year: "Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth," a novella which appeared in Clarkesworld Issue 127. It's on the Nebula Awards Recommended Reading List (thank you!) and is eligible for the Hugo and the Nebula. Click on the picture below if you'd like to read it.
Of course, we started this hangout with the birthday song. Actually, we didn't sing it, but we talked about how widespread it is and how many variations it has internationally (and locally). Tip: don't direct-import the birthday song into a secondary world!
Kat told us that she saw an Australian book of birthday cakes which featured a lot of possible birthday cakes she described as "attainable," unlike many of the art cakes we see these days. It's very easy to make the mistake of expecting a pattern of sameness to hold across English-speaking cultures. One of the things that was considered obligatory in this book about Australian birthdays was "fairy bread," or bread with butter and rainbow sprinkles on it. Another was the game "pass the parcel," where you wrap something up in a lot of layers of wrapping paper and pass it around to music, and people unwrap one layer at a time when the music stops.
Different social groups may have different songs they use for birthdays, like the "Birthday Dirge" in fannish circles.
The ceremony of blowing out candles is very common, but it must come at the end of the song, not the beginning or the middle.
The idea of celebrating a birthday is relatively recent. In Catholic countries, traditionally one would celebrate a Saint's Day, or the day dedicated to the saint with whom one shared a name. One might also celebrate the day one had been baptized. Kat said that when she was in Tahiti, the French-speakers there would wish her happy saint's day on Saint Katherine's Day.
Kat also brought up the topic of Japanese birthday-counting. Before Westernization, all Japanese birthdays were celebrated on January 1. You were also counted as 1 year old when you emerged from the womb, so it would be possible for a baby to be born on December 31st and be counted as two years old at the age of 2 days. She speculated that in a society where age is important and relative age is important for social interaction, that might help to create age cohorts. Kat also noted that the Chinese Zodiac year changes on January 1 in Japan, so everyone born in the same calendar year would be the same sign. Japan had a base-10 calendar for a long time, so tens and twenties are important.
When you live in a regularized and secularized system, it's easy to forget that holidays and rest days were also celebratory.
We asked where we had seen birthdays in secondary worlds. The example that came most immediately to mind was Bilbo Baggins' birthday party at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring. Hobbits also had the tradition of giving gifts, rather than receiving them, on a birthday.
Cliff had the idea that one could have a particular birthday celebration for coming of age, at which the present given by the oldest female relative would be a dagger.
In the case of outer space science fiction, calculating age and birthdays can be complicated. Which planet forms the basis for the time system? Does each have its own system? What time system is used in interstellar space? Vernor Vinge's solution was to have everyone count their age in seconds. Shauna suggested that the human body clock might be used as a basis for a time system. Kat noted that a shipborn character might measure time by "orbits" or by repair cycles on the ship clock.
Some cultures have traditionally not celebrated birthdays until the child reaches a certain age when it is more likely to survive to adulthood.
Facebook birthday announcements are inadvertently teaching us about the planetary day because of the way people get birthday wishes a day early from places in Asia. Larry Niven's Ringworld featured a person who spent his 200th birthday teleporting around the world to enjoy the entirety of it.
I spoke a little bit about birthdays in my own secondary world of Varin. In the Varin nobility, survival is not at all guaranteed, so the traditional birthday greeting is, "Congratulations." The seventeenth birthday is an important one because it marks a child's introduction into political life for boys, or into marriage elegibility for girls. The other important birthday is an early one, usually between 2 and 6 years of age, when for the first time the child is certified by a doctor as being healthy enough to join in social life. It's called a "confirmation," and one of those parties appears in my forthcoming novella, "The Persistence of Blood."
Ask: how do these people choose the age of majority? What do they base it on? Is it at all affected by developmental differences between the sexes?
Different societies have different ideas of what it means to become an adult. They also have different concepts of how precious children are, and different ideas of what kinds of developmental and social milestones are important.
Jewish adulthood happens at age 13 (with the exception of Orthodox Jews who have a boy's adulthood at 13 and a girl's at 12). Puberty is often what people identify as what makes you a grownup, but not always. Cliff noted that the concept of adolescence is relatively recent. Puberty rites exist around the world. In the Jewish case, the age of adulthood is important for ceremonial purposes, like joining in a minyan, a group of 10 or more adults. You can participate as a member of a minyan if you are over 13. You also have ritual responsibilities, which is why in a Bar or Bat Mitzvah you lead the whole service.
Puberty and adulthood are not necessarily strongly linked everywhere. You may need training to be an adult, or you may need to have achieved something particular.
In the US, you can vote at age 18, which is the age of consent (though not in all states), but you can't drink until 21 and you can't rent a car until age 25. Being able to drive a car is a huge rite of passage in the West.
What kids are allowed to do independently has been scaled back in some regions. In some places, very young children are expected to be able to get across town on public transit by themselves, or to stay home alone. In other places, parents would be blamed for allowing them to attempt it.
The movie Kiki's Delivery Service has a young witch moving out to live on her own for a year at age 13, which always astonished me.
There is so much more we could have chatted about! We'll have to take up the question of Coming of Age again sometime. Thank you to everyone who participated. Today, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet at 10am Pacific (in 25 minutes) to talk about Portraying Children. I hope you'll join us!
When I think of advertising in fiction, my mind goes straight to the futuristic dystopias like Blade Runner, where the ads were the height of buildings, and Minority Report, where ads would register your identity via your eyes, and advertise directly to you. Firefly/Serenity also had advertising jingles, which were used as a trigger for River because they could appear anywhere without notice.
Jingles are interesting because they are most effective when they are incredibly hard to forget. Too many of us remembered the Oscar Meyer song, and the list of Big Mac ingredients, from our childhoods. Che said she thought that they had gone out of style in favor of pop music, but we could still think of what we called micro-jingles, like the very brief Nationwide jingle, or the Intel Inside series of four notes, that are in current use.
I created a fictional scenario that falls into the category of the future dystopia with advertising in my story, "Mind Locker." In that story, everyone had augmented reality with internet in their heads, and the slums of the city were hidden from citydwellers by a layer of virtually projected advertising.
To take it back to the opposite end technologically, we can look at fantasy scenarios where taverns have signs hanging out front, and where vendors sing songs or have calls to hawk their wares.
Che told us how in the Rome HBO series, there was a town crier who shouted out the news, and interspersed the news with an advertisement for a bakery. People in the city could apparently pay him to advertise their bread.
If you are running a business in a fantasy or science fictional world, what would be the optimal method to get the word out about it? You don't necessarily know who the interested people are. If you get the word out, that means you get more business, which means you have more work to do. What is the economic system into which your business fits?
We could think of more fictional scenarios with very little advertising, or a great deal, than with a middling amount of it.
Businesses are always looking for better reach, new and better ways to reach consumers. There's an insidiousness to advertising, also, because it can be extremely manipulative, selling a lifestyle, or a feeling, or making you feel as if your life is incomplete without a product that you don't really need. This is one of the reasons why it can be illegal to advertise certain products to children.'
In our world, consciously navigating advertising can require a lot of self-awareness and smarts.
There are three things going on here.
1. Actual need. There's a product someone is making, and another person needs to have it for life, and they need to find each other.
2. Cultural narrative. There is a product that becomes part of a significant cultural narrative of value, which then results in people feeling they need it for status or inclusion, when in fact they would not die without it.
3. Manipulation. This is the further extreme of the cultural narrative scenario, when people are convinced they need a product when obtaining it will harm them, either literally or by denting their means to do other things that are critical for their success.
A lot of ads tell tiny stories about how with this thing you will be healthy, or happy, or have something else terribly important.
Cliff spoke a bit about ads that target children, because he has had to explain to his twins that "they are paying this woman to pretend to be enjoying this toy." Ads can be disguised as an enthusiast making a video.
We spoke about viral marketing, like the case of the Chewbacca Mom. In her case, this was a spontaneous video of someone enjoying a product, and it turned out to be such a winning endorsement that it made a huge difference for the product and the company involved, who then turned around and rewarded her - sort of a backwards way of advertising. Not quite the same, but closely related, was the joke that KFC hid on their Twitter feed, which got news when a person discovered it, and the company then rewarded that person.
Amazon reviews are an interesting question here, because some are endorsements, and others are paid advertising masquerading as endorsements.
I brought up the idea of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. When a person's actions are motivated from the inside, they are called intrinsic. This is what was going on with Chewbacca mom. The excitement of a person in a TV ad for a product is motivated by external reward, and is called extrinsic. The two are quite different in their effect.
This is one of the reasons why learning about persuasive language is very important.
If you are setting up advertising in a fictional scenario, ask:
What is appropriate for whom, and when?
Who benefits?
Are there worthy projects that people should support?
Is your society a capitalist society, or is it not? Advertising will be markedly different in those two different models. State advertising overlaps with propaganda. We also have propagandizing advertisement, as when we have ads for July 4th barbecue items which are meant to evoke childhood, patriotism, but can also evoke fear of others, and fear of invasion.
Music is often used in advertising to evoke scenarios that the music was originally connected to, such as musicals.
We get a peek into other cultures when we watch advertisements from other cultures. This is one reason why advertising can be such a useful tool for worldbuilding. It shows cultural narratives and ideals. In the new Bladerunner, the ads had progressed.
Brian Buhl asked what kind of responsibility is associated with advertising. Capitalist ads can be dehumanizing. Is there legal regulation of advertising to avoid this?
In the US, lawyers and medicines didn't used to be able to advertise. Cigarette ads used to appear on TV. The Joe Camel character was made illegal because it was deemed to have been targeting children. Such ads were moved to Asia because there are no such laws there (predatory companies will take advantage of such things). Cliff noted that there has been a significant change in culture, where his dorm used to have a cigarette machines, but now such a thing would be unheard of.
In the Hunger Games, previous winners of the games were used in advertising. The Hunger Games was all about its survivors and their prizes, and their product endorsements.
We have the Superbowl, which for many people is more about the advertising than it is about the game. Companies will spend millions just for a thirty-second spot.
Advertising is both a window into culture, and a driver of culture.
I explained an ad I had seen in Japan for a type of bread that was perfectly square and white and an inch thick, and so fluffy that when you pinched one corner it would spring back. As an American I found it unappetizing, but it did reveal what qualities many Japanese people associated with ideal bread!
Thomas' English muffins used to have ads that were historical dramas about how sad people were when Thomas left England. They were selling Englishness to Americans.
Advertising can also be a hotbed of cultural appropriation. There are lots of ads featuring people in costumes that portray them as stereotypical Others. They can therefore be used in worldbuilding to show who is oppressed. Cliff mentioned a 1970's ad featuring a crying Indian, who was in fact not even portrayed by a Native American actor. It was an attempt to tie the idea of the noble savage into the idea of not littering. Don't Mess with Texas was also an anti-littering campaign, but the phrase has moved away from that limited context into others because it was so well tied to Texan self-image. The "I <3 NY" ads were actually an ad for upstate New York and New York City, but they are now used in far more contexts.
Here are some important questions to ask: Who owns the default narrative? Who is being advertised to? Who is allowed to be mocked? (Different countries target different groups.)
Ads can reveal social strife. There have been recent examples of extremely racist ads out of China (a black man going into a washing machine and coming out Chinese) and the US (a Dove ad showing a black woman removing a brown shirt and turning into a white woman with a pink shirt).
There's a lot more to this topic than we could cover in an hour, but thanks to everyone who attended and made for a lively discussion!
Spencer Ellsworth has been writing since childhood, and he's been a literary agent, and he's joined us as a discussant... and now he's got three short novels coming out from Tor.com, so I was really excited to feature him on the show. The novels of the Starfire trilogy are A Red Peace, Shadowsun Seven, and Memory's Blade.
The story is a space opera, set ten thousand years in the future in our galaxy at the end of a long war against giant space spiders that eat planets and suns. Humans used genetically engineered soldiers against the spiders, and now those soldiers have overthrown the Empire and decided to kill all humans. There's a mysterious peace with the spiders which essentially consists of "we can coexist with the spiders until we bump into them."
The main characters are a smuggler who decides to save humans - she's genetically engineered, but her parents escaped the life of soldiers, and a soldier who is realizing the nature of the unconscionable orders he's being given. The soldier has a drug problem, in part to cope with what he's being asked to do.
Spencer says this has a similar tone to the X-men, inasmuch as it has an echo of real issues but then a lot of wacky stuff. People in his books read comic books about a folk hero who is a space sheriff. Spencer hints that this person is not as made-up as he appears.
The genetic engineering mixed human DNA with that of a legendary, supposedly extinct race called the Jorians, whose empire was disrupted by the spiders. Many legendary things are attributed to the Jorians, such as terraforming. This universe has a history.
Spencer says the stories are less hard SF and more "fantasy in space," with a Dune-ish flavor.
I asked how many humans there were, and Spencer said they were a despised upper class, who were proud of having pure human DNA, a sort of pedigree. He says the idea was inspired in part by the Russian revolution, in that there was a sympathetic resistance with a good cause, but as with Lenin, the winner turned ruthless. The concept of a war that depends on a disposable soldier class, he said, was inspired by the separation of soldiers and non-soldiers in the US. The soldier character was inspired by conversations with Spencer's dad, who treats PTSD in Marines. Spencer noted that in World War II, soldiers spent about 40 days in combat zones, but that the number is much higher for Afghanistan and Iraq veterans.
Spencer said that writing on commission nearly broke his brain the first time. He wrote and threw away the beginning of Book 2 several times. "Beginnings of middles are challenging." He explained that it helped to know what kind of story he was telling. Book 1 is a chase story, Book 2 is a caper/infiltration story, and Book 3 is a story of spectacular battles. Having that structure was useful, because the stream-of-consciousness approach wasn't working. The characters have to get out of a space prison... but why? There's a giant space tick that comes to ships and sucks the air out of them, and is therefore full of air pockets.
Spencer says, "you have to get to the point where you're playing and having fun."
Brian asked whether Spencer plots (outlines) more or whether he does discovery writing. Spencer explained that he has been plotting more. "The more I write, the more I plot... I'm sort of a born-again plotter... If I have a really tight plot I can produce a book on deadline."
Cliff asked how Spencer expanded the world as he wrote books 2 and 3. Spencer said that he re-read Book 1 and looked for places to expand. Some places he seeded deliberately, and other places he just threw in. For example, he never explained how faster-than-light travel worked. He looked for holes, and places where people might like to learn more.
He also worked with the idea that "the glorious resistance is broke." Book 2 leveraged that with the idea that an offer for "letters of credit" would be meaningful for some, but worthless for others. Spencer said he was reading The Expanse while writing book 2, and he wanted to have some bare minimum of scientific accuracy, like with artificial gravity. It made him want to try to explain with a bit more rigor.
At this point in the conversation, we moved onto the other topic that Spencer had wanted to discuss, that of wilderness survival. He told us that as a snotty teenager he'd gone to a wilderness camp (a good one). He then worked there on and off for five years in college. It was in Arizona, so the environment was desert. It was based out of Mesa, and often they would circle around a town but try not to let any of the students know there was a town nearby. There were tarantulas (but only the Vegan kid was brave enough to pick them up). A kid ate a scorpion (apparently it tasted like a really sour shrimp).
We asked Spencer what you think about when you're worrying about whether a character will survive in a wilderness setting. The main issue is that food and water will run out. In civilization, we tend to eat a lot more calories in a day than we need to survive, and so people in the wilderness will eat a lot less, but may expend a lot of energy trying to get enough to eat. Fish and game take a while to clean. Making a bow or a boomerang for hunting is hard, and requires a lot of trial and error. Living on roots and berries is "not much." Even in the height of berry season, you have to eat a LOT of berries, or a LOT of leaves, to get enough to eat. Spencer says, "never turf a character out in the desert without a knife." You need a knife to make a spoon.
Spencer has eaten rattlesnake, and apparently you have to eat the ribs. You can eat crayfish in this area of Arizona - apparently it's an invasive species there which causes problems, so no one will mind if you eat them.
After a few days, you will be exhausted from low calorie intake, and low level of carbohydrates. Spencer explains that this is why people settled down to make bread when they could.
Making a fire in a wet biome is hard. You need to learn the tricks to find dry wood.
There are five different uses for a yucca plant, but those don't apply in another biome.
Spencer doesn't watch wilderness survival shows. There are wilderness skills meetups that you can join to learn more (linked here). Gary Paulson books have a lot of good wilderness survival information. The film Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford shows some wilderness survival skills. Brian Dolton recommended The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, which looks at people trying to survive as they cross the southern border of the US.
Che asked how much you have to carry to survive. Spencer observed that in the medieval setting typical of fantasy, people had parasites anyway, so they just drank the available water anyway unless they were near cities. Carrying water is very heavy, so it's a good idea to carry a filtration device. Spencer says "Dry camping is a scary endeavor." "You wake up dehydrated, and have to hike dehydrated." He said if he had kids in his survival group who complained of headache or stomachache, he would tell them to drink 2 canteens of water and see how they felt. A backpack would probably have to weigh 50-60 pounds if you wanted to have enough calories to feed you for the week. Spencer explained that you can compact some of that if you have a lot of oily foods. He said someone like Tolkien's Aragorn probably carried a lot of rendered-down fat. He would probably either just eat it, or use it to cook his roots and berries because of the amount of calories he would get from it. He would probably also carry dry, flat bread if he could find it, but would want a type that would not mold easily. "You want a complex carbohydrate source if you can get it." Tolkien's invention of lembas bread makes sense because he was a veteran of World War I, and would have understood about the need for calories. Spencer said that when he was running his wilderness group, they would make sure to have sunflower seeds and powdered creamer for the kids, because they were nice and fatty. "If you are writing fantasy, you can invent nuts." "Any fatty nut is going to be beneficial," but they are most appropriate in a dry environment because in the damp they will sour and sprout.
Spencer said that in the scene where Aragorn walks up to the camp with a deer, "that would be the next 30 hours of Aragorn's life, trying to figure how much nutrition he could get out of that deer." He'd have to strip the meat off and build a smokehouse to smoke it. He'd want to eat as much of the organ meat as possible and also smoke as much as he couldn't eat. He'd also have to render the fat and process the hide. "The ringwraiths probably would have caught him in the probably 30-40 hours he'd have to spend processing the deer" before it could spoil. Spencer said it's also possible they just ate as much as they could and then left the rest as waste, but he would be mad at them for it. Brian added that the wagon trains that crossed the US would shoot a buffalo, eat fresh meat, and then leave the carcasses.
Spencer said it's important to remember that indigenous ways of life are usually sustainable, and colonizers' ways are usually not. The killing of animals would be done very carefully to keep the herd above the population threshold needed for it to stay the same size over time. The arrival of horses changed this, however.
It's hard to be a vegetarian in the wilderness. If you're hungry you will need to kill something. You can smoke fatty meat, but it's better to render the fat and then eat it.
Cliff asked how long it would take to fix the food from a midsize animal, and Spencer said two days if you have to smoke it, scrape the hide, eat the organs, and render the fat. He suggested that if you're in an alien planet scenario, you can use handwavium for your smokehouse. Che asked if one would build a smokehouse on wheels and somehow bring it with you. Spencer said in the Pacific Northwest, there are fishing sites where people would build a smokehouse. People with horses and carts can bring tools, but if you put a clay oven in a handcart, it will crack if it bounces.
Calories are the biggest issue for wilderness survival. Clothes will also degrade. Spencer said you can shave bone awls out of solid bone, and they end up about 3 times the size of sewing needles. You can use sinew from animal tendons or from plants like yucca as thread.
Spencer, thanks so much for joining us and letting us feature your work and your specialty! This was quite fascinating. This week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Wednesday, December 6 at 10am Pacific to discuss portraying children. Then, on December 12, we'll be joined by guest author Rebecca Kuang! I hope you can make it to these discussions, and as always, please consider supporting the show on Patreon, here.
There are quite a number of stories based on the character of a child genius, such as Ender's Game or Spy Kids. We were talking about prodigies, where the person's abilities are extremely different from what one would expect for their age. Social difficulties often play into a story like this. Genius kids may or may not appear in a controlled environment. But the idea that a genius would have social difficulties is its own stereotype. Kat opined that the character of Wesley Crusher ruined the child genius category.
Precociousness doesn't just mean intellectual genius. It implies a child being more advanced in some way. Sometimes it implies they seem older or more sexually mature. It's always about children, however. It is erased by adulthood.
We spoke about the movie Shine, about a precocious but abused boy who was a brilliant pianist in Australia. This brought us to questions about genderedness and the ways in which emotional intelligence is not expected of certain people. The expectations for precocious girls are different. They are not generally allowed to be socially disconnected like boys. Che told us that Mozart's sister had been more talented, but no one cared. Girls are often told to hide their exceptionality. Girls in history have become warriors often have done so because it's the only way to escape the box of societal expectations that you have been put in.
Expectations are a key factor here. Precociousness implies a disparity between expectations and performance. Girls who became motherless were expected to take on adult roles in caring for the family, but were not considered precocious for doing so. "Little man" means something very different from "little woman," which is most commonly a way to belittle one's wife.
Prodigies can grow up and still be exceptional.
Kat brought up the question of what happens when you were a child prodigy but you aren't any more, and what effect that might have on your psychology. What happens if you lose your magic? (In fantasy, this could be literal.) We spoke briefly about IQ testing and how it sets up expectations that may be toxic. You could be precocious but being treated that way might lead to worse things later.
Kat told us that she was able to access a "walled garden of education" because of being identified as precocious. It was a safe haven for her, and useful as she dealt with identity issues. She benefited from being pushed instead of stifled. Testing allowed this to happen for her. When she reentered the mainstream, she felt pressure not to make other people feel bad. There was an expectation to underperform for other people's comfort. Kat told us that in her case, this was exacerbated by gender and racialization.
Morgan asked, if you are brilliant and ADD, will you get support for your intelligence?
The idea of "potential" is an extremely loaded one.
Culture tells us that everyone should expect to hit particular milestones by a certain age. You can be labeled, to your detriment, for being either faster or slower than those milestones. Human development is not a smooth process, and it happens in "growth spurts" both physically and mentally.
The cultural system has inertia. We compared it to the way clothes are made off the rack, basically by making assumptions about people's size at certain ages. In earlier eras, people had smaller wardrobes that had been specially fitted to them. We have lost the idea that custom-crafting for non-elites exists. The fit of clothes is an indicator of class.
Intellectual precocity interacts with class. The more money you have, the more flexibility you have. School funding in the United States is complicated, and the richer you are, the more access you have to specialist educators that people in poor areas don't have.
The idea of a child being precocious can also be weaponized, or used against them. Tamir Rice was killed, and police justified his killing by claiming that he looked mature. Age perception of black people among white people is skewed. White people tend not to recognize the signs of age in non-white people. Young black children are perceived as older, while privileged white people are described as "finding his way" into their 30s. In the case of young girls, people often conflate the onset of puberty with the ability to give meaningful consent. Can children consent? Precocity can be deliberately assigned to victims to protect their harassers and rapists.
Neoteny, or the appearance of childlike-ness, is generally associated with big eyes, rounded features, and the things we might term kawaii or chibi (from Japanese).
We argue that the intellectually precocious child should be given access to adult spaces, and therefore that same word is adopted by people who argue for access to the sexually precocious.
Authors should aim for nuance in their portrayals.
Sometimes portraying a child as precocious allows the author to argue that they were predestined for some fate. Sometimes authors don't do sufficient research about children and their behaviors. Twelve-year-olds are not tiny adults. Sometimes making a character a child genius is about wish fulfillment. Children are often portrayed in fiction either as overly intelligent, or as under-intelligent. Moral of the story: do your research! Meet some kids if you can.
Thank you to everyone who attended. This week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet tomorrow, Wednesday, November 22 at 10am Pacific to discuss Birthdays and Coming of Age. I hope to see you there!
The first thing I think of when I think of performances in SF/F is the bard in the tavern. However, there are a lot of different kinds of opportunities for writers to put performances in their fiction. I personally used an orchestral concert as an important element of my novel on submission, because of the way that art is subversive and boundary-crossing. I modeled it on the real historical events surrounding Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, where a lot of concertgoers walked out during the performance because they were so scandalized.
We talked a bit about puppetry, specifically about the French Guignol puppet shows, and English Punch and Judy shows. They can be quite revealing of history and social biases. They are forms of on-the-street public performance where you donate to the players as you leave. Modern Guignol shows do sometimes have to be scheduled in inside venues where they sell tickets, but this is a relatively new development on top of a longer history of street performance.
When you are thinking about what kinds of performances to feature in your fiction, ask yourself, "Who attends a performance here? What class are they? What are the expectations for audience participation? Is this type of performance high- or low-energy?" Puppet shows often expect more audience participation, while orchestral concerts tend not to invite audience participation.
Our discussant Shauna Roberts told us quite a lot of interesting information about the history of orchestras. She told us that in the 1700s, orchestras were less professional and the musicians were not as good, perhaps as good as high-school musicians now. The groups were often smaller. Sometimes musicians would hire someone to show up to the rehearsals for them, and then end up coming to the final performances and sight-reading the music. The composer of the piece might be composing and revising up till the last minute. Instruments that were played might not be highly evolved. The other really key element was that the audience was usually hearing a piece of music for the very first time, because the piece was composed for the event. Orchestras in this day and age are basically playing "orchestra's greatest hits." At this point in history, it was more like improv or jazz, where you make it up as you go along.
Things changed a great deal when it became possible to record performances and hear them more than once. A change may also have occurred when sheet music first was able to be printed. One way in which sheet music has evolved is that composers have increased the detail they provide for musicians in terms of tempo and dynamic changes, etc. In the olden days the music was written without much detail and musicians would ornament. This somewhat parallels the way in which dramatic plays have changed to give more stage instructions (since the very simple instructions of Shakespeare, for example).
Possibly the biggest change that occurred with the advent of recordings was that before recordings, each orchestra had its own style. People would seek out particular orchestras to hear those styles. However, after recordings orchestral styles converged and orchestras became less distinguishable.
At this point we moved away from orchestras. I spoke a bit about Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, which is an amazing place to visit and is full of performances. There are pantomimes where you watch a show and can yell at the actors. There are violins or other instruments people play for you at dinner. And there are also full-scale historical reenactments that you can participate in.
Mimes are cool. They get a lot of ridicule these days, but they are essentially silent storytellers, and get a lot of flak these days because it became popular to imitate (badly) the mime of Marcel Marceau. My family went to see the mime troupe Mummenschanz, and we were amazed by the performance. One of the things I noticed about mime is how active the role of the audience is in interpreting the meaning of what's going on.
Shauna mentioned that in the novel Never Let Me Go, there is no emotional or facial information, and all of it must be provided by the inference of the reader. (Yes, the reader is a very important participant in the meaning of any book).
Cliff talked about a play called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, where there are thirty plays, and the audience says numbers and the performers do the performance that corresponds to the numbers. Also, someone orders pizza.
We have this concept of the "fourth wall" between an audience and a performance. Would a performance in a fictional society have this same concept? How would they relate to it? In Western theater and Noh theater from Japan, the fourth wall is generally inviolate. In haunted houses, performers interact directly with the audience.
The context of a performance matters a great deal. Cliff explained that in India pre-1947 in the Raj courts, a musician's role was to play in the court. It was essentially a palace job, full time. After independence, the social context changed, and musicians started giving performances with tickets at a fixed time. This was a tough transition for many reasons, but its influence on performance was that it cut down on the sitar ragas that could be played.
When '78 records came into use, it created pressure for songs to be short. '78s were clearly the Twitter of musical recordings.
Recordings separate the context of recording from the context of listening.
Opera could once only be seen live in the theater, but it can now also be seen in recordings and even in movie theaters.
The television show Star Trek featured quite a lot of performances, but most of them were of European classical orchestral music. Many of us would have liked to see more different selections!
Some types of performance have a fixed canon, like Noh and Kabuki, and Gagaku. Shakespeare also has a fixed canon. Noh uses masks for its characters. In all of these cases, the historical language gets preserved in the performances.
Performances aren't always short. Kabuki performances last all day, and people picnic in the audience. Shakespeare plays also used to last longer, with more songs.
Do people talk during a performance? In a nightclub, they do. In a concert hall, they don't. Dimming the house lights was a technological development that allowed organizers to signal the need for silence.
Movies made performances available to the masses because they were so much cheaper to run.
I also mentioned that there is a new type of performance out there - the YouTube video. Performers like Markiplier and Jack Septiceye are playing games, but also performing comedic improvisation.
Many fictional works have thought about the role of virtual reality performances and holograms. People like making art with whatever technology is available! Fahrenheit 451 had a participatory play that happened at home. Star Trek had the holodeck.
What kind of behavior is accepted during a performance? Talking? Eating? What is rude? Dinner theater combines eating and watching a performance deliberately. What is polite?
A church mass could be considered a type of performance with audience participation, as well as a ritual.
Cliff recommended Adam-Troy Castro's Marionette stories as doing something unusual with performance. They feature one hundred thousand aliens who all dance until they drop dead, and an instance of a human dancer joining in.
Thank you to everyone who attended! Today's hangout will feature author Spencer Ellsworth. We'll be meeting in 40 minutes. I hope you can come!
This was a lively topic! I started out by clarifying what I meant by it. We have a lot of daily practices, most of them everyday things, that we do at particular times of day (and not at other times of day). Since everyday cultural practices are some of the details that really make a fictional world pop (or even a version of the real world, actually), I wanted to spend some time talking about this.
Che immediately thought of the practice of avoiding drinking alcohol until after 5pm. Kat mentioned the Japanese practice of having a bath before going to bed and contrasted it with the American practice of getting up and jumping in the shower. The Japanese practice makes a lot of sense because buildings don't often have central heating (they generally heat room by room), and so it works really well to heat up your body and then tuck into bed. Kat said, "you are your own hot water bottle."
Morgan mentioned siestas. They tend to happen during the hottest time of day, and be dependent on local climate, as Cliff observed. They have led sometimes to stereotypes about laziness from colonizers arriving from outside the climate zone. They also happen in Spain. In France, stores traditionally closed for two hours during lunchtime. Thinking through climate helps you to worldbuild in more than one way, because it provides setting and also traditional behaviors. Cliff called it "double worldbuilding."
What reasons do we have for scheduling things at particular times? This is a good thing to think through. Climate obviously enters in. So does the age of the person involved, as with naptimes for children. Culture teaches us assumptions about how brains work, but can also fail to take neurodiversity into account, as well as culture differences in a diverse society. Some people like a fixed schedule.
Meals also tend to be culturally influenced to take place at particular times of day - and not always at the same times of day. What are the meals called in your society? Which meal is the biggest? Is there a "second breakfast"?
Kat noted that clocks tend to be normalized. Bank workers still work at different times from shift workers, however. Technology level has a lot of influence on what time people do things, because an agrarian schedule is very different from a factory one. If you have no electricity, it limits the kinds of things you can do after dark. Cliff also noted that people have things they schedule at different times of year, especially when they are growing food.
Clocks regulate shifts. The sun regulates life, but it is also constantly changing. Cliff pointed out that when you are working on a ship, the schedule tends to be four hours on, four hours off. Kat noted that someone has to be on lookout all the time.
Time is a convention, and it is often run on the basis of some group's behavior, and disseminated mechanically. Local time in the middle ages was determined by the church bells of the town, rung by the clergy. The days would be divided differently as the days changed with the seasons. Days are also measured differently by different groups. For example, the day begins and ends at sunset for the Jewish and Islamic communities, whereas by the clock it begins right after midnight, and for some communities it begins at dawn.
Cliff spent some time telling us about sitar playing. Many of the musical pieces, called ragas, are to be played only at particular times of day. Some are for early, mid, or late morning. Some are seasonal. One can only be played during the eight minutes of sunset. Practice gives you a bit more flexibility, but it's ideal to practice the sunset raga in the evening. It's perceived to affect health like bad medicine if you play them at the wrong time. There is another raga called bhairavi, where once you've played it you can't play anything else. Sometimes sitar players have set up special concerts at unusual times so concertgoers could hear a different repertoire. Sometimes teachers will give music lessons on Sunday to teach morning ragas. The differences between these pieces have to do with the scale of notes used, the pattern for ascending and descending, and various motifs. Cliff says morning ragas tend to have more flats. In general, the ragas have different "vibe" to them, having something to do with the rhythm and aesthetic.
Kat remarked that there are also American songs that only get played at certain times of day, such as reveille and taps. Lullabies are for bedtime. There are wake-up songs and work songs.
We considered for a minute or so the difference between a song intended to evoke a particular time of day (musically) and one that is only to be played at a particular time of day.
These patterns definitely also exist in Western culture. People have very strong opinions about hearing Christmas music out of season. There are rituals associated with certain times of year, and not all are religious. When do you eat pumpkin pie?
When are prayers supposed to be? At sunrise? Bedtime? Five times a day? Before or after you eat? Do you change them depending on what you're eating? Are there special times of year when you pray differently?
Ask questions about the practices of the people in your fictional society.
The example of Second Breakfast in the Lord of the Rings movies was wonderful, because it was used for both worldbuilding and character development. Cliff remarked that in science fiction, highly regimented use of time is often associated with fascistic societies like those of A Wrinkle in Time, Metropolis, or "Repent, Harlequin, said the Ticktockman." The phrase "making the trains run on time" is directly associated with Nazi Germany.
Timekeeping is both personal and communal.
Discussions are ongoing in various contexts about whether Daylight Saving should remain a part of our yearly scheduling. People have circadian rhythms that get messed up with Daylight Saving switches. In addition, studies of teens have shown that they are more effective at studying if they have been allowed to wake up later in the morning. Is there any form of circadian variation in your world?
We do have flavors we prefer at particular times of year. Pumpkin spice is apparently followed by gingerbread and then by peppermint.
Kat remarked that in Japan there is a deep understanding of the culinary calendar. There is, for example, a particular day in the summer which is the right one for eating a bowl of eel on rice. She told us that for relatives of hers, Thanksgiving and July 4th made sense and were comforting because of the predictability of the food offered on those days.
There are seasonal beers in different countries, including the US and Japan (and others).
Japan also has seasonal rice, as when they serve rice from the newly harvested crop. There are also things to add to rice for different times of year.
Bûche de Noël is a cake exclusively for Christmas. In Japan, every festival has its own unique wagashi (candy).
Beer is not a good thing for breakfast, I imagine because it intoxicates you before you have to work. Is there a cutoff time for coffee? In the US some perceive there to be one, but in Europe it's very common to have espresso after dinner.
What time do you eat dinner? Kat said in her family, her father was a gardener, so he'd work until dusk and they would not eat dinner until 8pm. In the circus, though, one might have dinner between two evening shows.
Cliff said that certain activities are reserved for "liminal time" in between other activites. In an initiation, it's common to find dramatic changes of schedule. A break from the comfort of the known has a strong effect on character comfort.
There is a lot more one could talk about here (jet lag, for instance), but I think we covered a lot in a short time. Thanks to everyone who participated.
This week, Dive into Worldbuilding meets on Wednesday, November 8 at 10am Pacific, and we'll be talking with guest author Spencer Ellsworth about his new book series, and about outdoor survival. I hope you can make it!
