We began, though, by taking a step back to the underlying premise and talking about reader expectations. Cliff pointed out that readers of different genres come in with different kinds of expectations about how much mental work they will have to do. Some are looking for a sense of wonder and difference and figuring out the world after being thrown in the deep end. Others are not. Cliff cited Anthony Burgess' book A Clockwork Orange as an example of a book that uses a lot of Russian and made-up words with no glossary.
Kat brought up the idea of things that are taken for granted within a genre: for example, concepts like replicators, airlocks, or faster than light travel. She argued that if we try to explain these things, then we lose core genre readers.
Thus we arrived at the topic of explanation. Explanation definitely does have a role in allowing readers to understand unfamiliar terms we put in a text, but it takes up a lot of space, and some people can find it either unnecessary or patronizing if it's done badly.
Another thing we can do is take words our readers already know and repurpose them. Kat's example was that she uses "matter box" instead of replicator. But even "replicator" makes use of a reader's previous knowledge of the word "replicate" to form part of the explanation of what the object does.
It's worth giving some thought to whether you are writing specifically for an audience that has a lot of experience with science fictional terms, or whether you are writing for an audience without such experience.
The word "ansible" is widely understood in communities that have read a lot of science fiction. It's a device that allows instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. The word was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in Rocannon's World (1966), and has been adopted by other writers since then.
The science fiction genre can on one level be considered a language community. Texts and discussion of those texts contribute to an overarching genre conversation that keeps getting contributed to by new writers, readers, and viewers. Kids are coming in with different vocabulary these days from the kind of vocabulary kids came in with in the past (because science fiction is less niche than it used to be, and also because language change is awesome).
When do you explain a thing? A good time to do this is if it's central to the story, and important to know to follow along. It may be clunky to do it directly, however. It can be done with different levels of obliqueness. Conflict between characters can help explanations to fit in when otherwise they would seem intrusive.
Think about what kind of experience your audience is looking for. Do they want comfort? Do they want discomfort? Do they want to feel like an insider, or an outsider? The more alien or fantasy vocabulary you use, the more you create distance between the reader and the story. How a reader responds to that distance will depend a great deal on expectations.
Charlie Jane Anders in her book The City in the Middle of the Night uses a technique where she uses English words but then redefines them in the book's text so that their definitions are particular to her world. It's similar to the way a "cat" in Welcome to Nightvale was not actually a cat. This strategy relies on familiar vocabulary to create a sense of familiarity for the reader, but then undermines it in specific ways.
One way to use English words in an unfamiliar context and mark them as not having a meaning that matches the default real-world expectation is to give them a modifier. A catlike creature in your world might be referred to as a cave cat or a shadow cat.
It's also important to consider what is familiar to the protagonist vs. what is familiar to the reader.
I was working with the concept of vaccination in my book, but didn't want to have a lot of real world contextual baggage come with it, including the fact that the word vaccinate comes from the word cow in latin (cowpox was the first type of vaccination). What I decided to do was backform a word starting with the familiar word inoculation, and call vaccines "inoculants." This is what I would call a morphological decoding strategy. You use pieces of words that people are familiar with and know the meanings of, but recombine them in grammatical yet unfamiliar ways.
Both Star Trek and Star Wars have used this kind of strategy, as when they call an elevator a "turbolift" in Star Trek, and laser guns "blasters" in Star Wars.
Another form of context that can help readers grasp the meaning of a word is to place an unfamiliar word into the context of a very repetitive phrase. "You're an utter ________" tends to set up an insult no matter what fills in the blank. Similarly, "I was absolutely __________ed last night" suggests drunkenness regardless of the word you choose. Keep in mind that in order for this effect to work, your reader has to have heard the phrase and associated it with this context before. Cliff mentioned the story "Bobby pulls a Wilson"in which "pulling a Wilson" means royally screwing up, and then later Bobby encounters Wilson, who doesn't really understand why is past actions have become such an insult.
We have a lot of phrases that are idiomatic, or semi-idiomatic, or at least predictable enough within particular language communities to help support novel words. Even preposition choice can be a part of this strategy.
Any language also tends to retain phrasings that don't necessarily reflect current behavior. Take for example "I hung up" which is still used to describe ending a phone call even though telephones no longer require that anything be "hung up" on the wall to end the call. "Call" itself used to mean going by someone's house to speak with them, not just engaging with them by means of a technological device. Language phrasings of this nature can be hard to notice and may end up dating your work. (I would argue that's not necessarily a problem.) William Gibson's Neuromancer is still influential today but he names amounts of data which these days seem laughably small. This is one of the risks of setting a story in "the future" as though there is only one future. Pat Cadigan invented something called "hit and run" parties... in fact, they came to exist later on, but were called "raves."
There is no such thing as "the future," only possible futures. Those futures are influenced by, but not determined by, the stories we write about them.
We had a laugh at how much science fiction and fantasy stories assume humans drink coffee, or substitute fantasy or SF words for coffee. The word "tea" is more broadly assigned in our world (it applies to a wide variety of hot water infusions, and not only to those made with camellia sinensis), so has a little bit more flexibility.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our discussion! Dive into Worldbuilding meets again tomorrow, April 30th, 2019 to discuss Drawings, Paintings, Photos, Videos: How we capture images. I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
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