Re: speed-writing
Elf M. Sternberg
> I'm trying to imagine what it would take to crank out twenty books a year,
> or even ten for that matter. My mind turns to amphetamines[1], leg-irons, a
> tropical clime, a contract with one of the major Romance-houses, and
> plausible deniability all around.
> But seriously, I don't think even P.K. Dick was able to maintain a pace of
> three books a year. One solid novel per year seems to be a fairly creditable
> pace for a writer these days.
Yesteday, while on nothing more than coffee, I hit 2800 words in
one hour. This was after a dry-spell that's lasted six freakin' WEEKS
and was driving me nuts. I had promised myself that I wasn't going to
write any more in the space opera I do on the side and instead was going
to work on my BOOK, but I broke the promise and wrote in the space opera
universe, and out came 2800 words of story.
I hate this feeling that the rut I've dug for myself over the
past fifteen years is now too deep to climb out of.
Elf
Catja Pafort
> "Johan Larson" <johan0larson8comcast0net> writes:
>
> > I'm trying to imagine what it would take to crank out twenty books a year,
> > or even ten for that matter. My mind turns to amphetamines[1], leg-irons, a
> > tropical clime, a contract with one of the major Romance-houses, and
> > plausible deniability all around.
>
> > But seriously, I don't think even P.K. Dick was able to maintain a pace of
> > three books a year. One solid novel per year seems to be a fairly creditable
> > pace for a writer these days.
2-3 novels a year means an average of 1000 words a day, which is not
excessive. (Yes, I know, all that nanowrimo '50K in a month' stuff is
possible - but it's extreme, and I bet those words need more editing.
Resident Strosses excempt; but even Charlie needs time to revise and
polish)
Twenty books a year?
How long would those books be? 2.5K per day would give you books of
45000 words, which I think is in the ballpark for Mills&Boon - but what
it doesn't give you time for is _editing_.
Getting words onto paper is only half the game. Making them _usable_
words, well...
> Yesteday, while on nothing more than coffee, I hit 2800 words in
> one hour. This was after a dry-spell that's lasted six freakin' WEEKS
> and was driving me nuts. I had promised myself that I wasn't going to
> write any more in the space opera I do on the side and instead was going
> to work on my BOOK, but I broke the promise and wrote in the space opera
> universe, and out came 2800 words of story.
Sounds as if you have a major problem with your book - and pounding head
against wall won't solve it.
> I hate this feeling that the rut I've dug for myself over the
> past fifteen years is now too deep to climb out of.
I've got no idea which rut you're talking about - can you only write in
pink pencil on purple paper, or something like that? No one will stop
you from experimenting with various forms of writing - what one book
needed might not be right for the next.
(The Quadrology I wrote in chapters of 6-8K; in strict order, and it had
to be written that way. The current attack novel I'm writing in scenes
wildly out of sequence. I have a major subplot I haven't even touched
yet. It's what the book needs. It'll also need a hell of a lot more
editing.)
Catja
steve miller
wrotD:
> Yesteday, while on nothing more than coffee, I hit 2800 words in
>one hour.
When I was in my twenties I wrote a lot of words most days -- but most
of them were reportage/reviews/editorial. I also did interviews, and
among the people I intereviewed was Compton Crook who wrote as Stephen
Tall. He felt that six to twelve hundred words a day was a reasonable
output -- and that younger writers were sometimes so busy being
worried with quantity that quality siffered. he also made the point
that creative processes are highly personal -- so that judging output
by what someone else did was folly at best.
Over time, now that I'm mostly not doing nonfiction freelancing, it
looks like I'm good for 1200 to 3200 words a day, depending. I'm still
not sure what it depends on, but I *do* know that I prefer time
between projects to recharge. I think I could do two books a year and
be OK with it, and maybe three books if there was real need and I
could take the first three months of the enxt year off.
I hope you've broken through. Good luck.
Steve
Crystal Soldier on sale worldwide
Balance of Trade:Hal Clement Award Best YA Novel 2004
Local Custom audiobook from Buzzy Multimedia 6/27
--
Frank
can. On the book I'm working on, I managed 16,000 words in about three
days, working maybe 4 hours a day on average.
But then I'll go several days without writing a word due to
responsibilities. Not that I'm not still working on the book in my
head, but no pen to paper (orpixels to screen, as the case may be).
That doesn't, of course, account for editing. When I'm editing,
though, I focus exclusively on that work and don't generally do any
other writing.
R. L.
On 08 Jun 2005 12:49:45 -0700, "Elf M. Sternberg" <e...@drizzle.com> wrote:
>"Johan Larson" <johan0larson8comcast0net> writes:
>
>> I'm trying to imagine what it would take to crank out twenty books a year,
>> or even ten for that matter. My mind turns to amphetamines[1], leg-irons, a
>> tropical clime, a contract with one of the major Romance-houses, and
>> plausible deniability all around.
>
>> But seriously, I don't think even P.K. Dick was able to maintain a pace of
>> three books a year. One solid novel per year seems to be a fairly creditable
>> pace for a writer these days.
I'm pretty sure I read that Louis L'Amour normally did three per year. Of
course a lot of his research and characters served more than one book.
Seems I've heard three a year of several writers (sometimes under more than
one pseudonym).
> Yesteday, while on nothing more than coffee, I hit 2800 words in
>one hour. This was after a dry-spell that's lasted six freakin' WEEKS
>and was driving me nuts. I had promised myself that I wasn't going to
>write any more in the space opera I do on the side and instead was going
>to work on my BOOK, but I broke the promise and wrote in the space opera
>universe, and out came 2800 words of story.
>
> I hate this feeling that the rut I've dug for myself over the
>past fifteen years is now too deep to climb out of.
Are you sure there's something wrong with the space opera universe? Are you
sure the other book would be better? Whatever you really, really want to do
in the Book, are you sure you couldn't do it in the SO universe? What about
in some unexplored part of that universe? Or some alternate time track?
R.L.
Elf M. Sternberg
> Are you sure there's something wrong with the space opera universe?
Yeah. It doesn't sell.
> Are you sure the other book would be better? Whatever you really,
> really want to do in the Book, are you sure you couldn't do it in the
> SO universe? What about in some unexplored part of that universe? Or
> some alternate time track?
I want to write something else; I've been writing the Corridor
series for so long that I'm bored with it on a long-term basis. Never
mind that it's trite soap-opera in space with all the naughty bits left
in to pander to my target otaku audience, it's simply become *too easy*
to write.
The other realization I had is that I want to write something
more filling and meatier than what I've got. Science fiction, in my
experience, is easy because you can either steal from the present or
make stuff up as you go along, especially if you're going for Mundane
stuff and not trying to compete with Charlie Stross.
The history of the Corridor series is banal: I started writing
it as straight porn in response to the fact that, in 1989, almost all of
what was in rec.arts.erotica was pure garbage. I could not believe that
so many people who'd made it through the American education system could
not write a grammatically correct sentence, proofread a story, or even
put together a coherent plot. Along the way, I got tired of the smut
and started writing more rounded characters, more socially informed
fiction, and more intrigue than getting my protagonists laid.
I've been having a similar reaction to genre fantasy recently.
Most genre fantasy is crap. It's set on hermetically sealed stages
completely isolated from reality. The reality is that people have to
*eat*, and that just getting food onto the table of a castle involves an
incredible web of economic interactivity that everyone, and I mean
absolutely everyone, was aware of, and it was all human-powered.
I've been reading a lot of Dunnet and Dumas. Dunnet's
characters don't meet in bars, they lay on the grass outside of a church
amongst the butchers, dyers, sewers, merchants, and louche nobles to
discuss what's happening. When they do meet in taverns, taverns are
busy places where real trade, not random background noise, is the order
of the day.
Thanks to Dunnet (and Neal Stephenson, and in part China
Mieville'), I can't really read genre fantasy now without wondering
where the characters fit into the economic life of their settings-- and
if they don't, I just stop reading. I want to write stories I wouldn't
stop reading.
Part of the problem is that I don't know enough about the times
in which my ideas are set: Fin de' Siecle Vienna, the Burton Expedition
to the head of the Nile, The annexation of Savoy to France during the
Richeleu period, or Rome in 74 BCE. (Yes, those are all different novel
ideas-- I'm a writer, not a madman.)
Unlike science fiction, In these stories I have to play by
certain rules. The Savoy story, for example, is set six hundred years
after a "War of the Worlds"-like invasion in which the aliens have been
advancing southwards, slowly, from their landing site (crash site; if it
had gone smoothly this would all be over by now) near Hammerfest,
Norway. The immediate politics would be significantly different, but
the technology would be similar, as would the way the political battles
were carried out: by marriage, on the one hand, and by money marketers
on the other. Religion would still be a big deal, and the invasion
would have created a greater schism. The Crusades would be all but
forgotten, and Turks would have to be aware that the monsters were
coming for them eventually.
But more than that, the names of places, the way character names
are not just random smatterings of syllables but long, involved things
that describe intricate webs of relationship, and the fit and cut of
coture should all point to a life being lived by human beings, not set
pieces on a sealed stage, and they all provide a much more meaty and
satisfying experience, at least to me, than the paltry offerings even of
writers I *like*, like Lois McMaster Bujold, George R.R. Martin, or
Trudy Canavan.
Writing weird alternative histories where Something Goes
Horribly Strange seems to have the best of both worlds: the incredibly
deep offerings of history, and all the fun of a good fantasy novel.
That's what I *want* to write, because it's a lot more challenging than
the last ten years of just making stuff up.
Elf
--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf/
"The apocalypse may be closer at hand than even John Derbyshire thinks:
what the hell is Elf Sternberg doing reading Derb's columns?"
-- Charles Murtaugh
R. L.
>R. L. <see...@no-spams.coms> writes:
>
>> Are you sure there's something wrong with the space opera universe?
>
> Yeah. It doesn't sell.
>
>> Are you sure the other book would be better? Whatever you really,
>> really want to do in the Book, are you sure you couldn't do it in the
>> SO universe? What about in some unexplored part of that universe? Or
>> some alternate time track?
>
> I want to write something else; I've been writing the Corridor
>series for so long that I'm bored with it on a long-term basis. Never
>mind that it's trite soap-opera in space with all the naughty bits left
>in to pander to my target otaku audience, it's simply become *too easy*
>to write.
Are you in the habit of doing a quota or something? When I'm on a plateau,
a quota helps; when I'm on a learning curve, the pressure of the quota
pushes me back into the old ruts.
Wow, fascinating.
I don't suppose, as a sort of training exercise, you could find some
suitable public domain fiction and do the Horribly Strange World's version?
R.L.
Nicola Browne
news:87k6l4t...@drizzle.com
>nd out came 2800 words of story.
>
> I hate this feeling that the rut I've dug for myself over the
> past fifteen years is now too deep to climb out of.
>
It doesn't sound like it is, if you know what you want to write
in addition to this. The other stuff might be slower work,though,
if only becuase you it might require additional research from time to
time.
It strikes me tht all the fantasy writers on this group are trying to
write the connected up kind of writing that you admire.
Nicky
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Denni
Plunging aliens into a historical environment presumably populated by
fictional protagonists *does* sound like you are making stuff up -- but
you are saving yourself the effort of inventing a believable and
coherent setting by just 'burrowing' from the history books (sorry, I'm
no fan of alternate history).
Good SciFi writers very much play by the rules which are set by the
constraints of the worlds that they construct and their characters'role
in it and relationships with each other. Granted, there is much tosh
published in SciFi and fantasy but you seem to imply that all of it is
crap :{
Patricia C. Wrede
news:268e35db411cd11f1b...@mygate.mailgate.org...
> "Elf M. Sternberg" <e...@drizzle.com> wrote in message
> news:87k6l4t...@drizzle.com
>
>>nd out came 2800 words of story.
>>
>> I hate this feeling that the rut I've dug for myself over the
>> past fifteen years is now too deep to climb out of.
>>
> It doesn't sound like it is, if you know what you want to write
> in addition to this. The other stuff might be slower work,though,
> if only becuase you it might require additional research from time to
> time.
I think it's also the practice-and-familiarity factor. The stuff you're
used to doing is familiar and thus, in some ways, easier to keep on with.
Doing something new is strange, possibly scary, and almost certainly
stretchy in some way. Stretching is nearly always harder than
not-stretching, even if it's a very small sort of stretch. You have to be
very solidly and firmly committed to doing the new stuff to get over some of
these humps (and the stretchier and more unfamiliar it is, the bigger the
hump). For me, at least, a major part of being solidly and firmly committed
to the new thing is being *finished* with the old thing -- if the old thing
has been abandoned in mid-story, then it's too easy to go back to when the
stretchy one starts getting hard.
And I confess that it doesn't always work. Which is to say that I have
several half-done stretchy things lying around in unfinished pieces on my
hard drive. I'm gonna get back to 'em, honest...
Patricia C. Wrede
Elf M. Sternberg
> Plunging aliens into a historical environment presumably populated by
> fictional protagonists *does* sound like you are making stuff up -- but
> you are saving yourself the effort of inventing a believable and
> coherent setting by just 'burrowing' from the history books (sorry, I'm
> no fan of alternate history).
Understood. The problem I perceive, having read some of the
better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
can never quite reach the texture of real life. Dunnet (sorry to keep
harping, but she's current in my mind because I'm now reading the
Niccolo saga) points this out *a lot*, almost to the extent that I think
she's poking fun of people who "just make stuff up."
I'm reminded of a scene in my space opera where one character
asks another, "Why do people from your planet all dress like they're
from a sci-fi serial with a limited costuming budget?"
Elf
Dorothy J Heydt
Elf M. Sternberg <e...@drizzle.com> wrote:
>"Denni" <denni_...@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
>> Plunging aliens into a historical environment presumably populated by
>> fictional protagonists *does* sound like you are making stuff up -- but
>> you are saving yourself the effort of inventing a believable and
>> coherent setting by just 'burrowing' from the history books (sorry, I'm
>> no fan of alternate history).
>
> Understood. The problem I perceive, having read some of the
>better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
>can never quite reach the texture of real life. Dunnet (sorry to keep
>harping, but she's current in my mind because I'm now reading the
>Niccolo saga) points this out *a lot*, almost to the extent that I think
>she's poking fun of people who "just make stuff up."
On the other hand, sometimes you can fake it and succeed.
Lawrence Block's Tanner series contained many scenes set in
foreign countries where Block had never been, informed by maybe
half an afternoon's reading at the library or such, and people
would write in and compliment him on his accuracy.
I myself have received a few compliments about the use of horses
in _TIL_ and the American Civil War in _APoH_, about neither of
which I knew diddley. *Every*thing in the ACW scene, barring some
niceties about women's clothing, came from a full-page ad in the
newspaper advertising an upcoming miniseries on Gettysburg, which
however I did not watch.
Trouble is, you don't know when your fakery's going to succeed
and when you're going to get called on it.
>
> I'm reminded of a scene in my space opera where one character
>asks another, "Why do people from your planet all dress like they're
>from a sci-fi serial with a limited costuming budget?"
And sometimes self-reference succeeds. Let us know how it works
with the readers.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Eric Jarvis
>
> Understood. The problem I perceive, having read some of the
> better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
> can never quite reach the texture of real life. Dunnet (sorry to keep
> harping, but she's current in my mind because I'm now reading the
> Niccolo saga) points this out *a lot*, almost to the extent that I think
> she's poking fun of people who "just make stuff up."
>
I was trying to get this across in another thread. Research can work in
different ways. You can gather lots of information so that every detail is
accurate, or you can work out from little details so that a small real
thing expands out to give life to the fiction. The two are compatible, but
I think it's the second that really makes the difference between a good
story and one I can totally lose myself in.
An example. I'm currently looking at pikes. I've got plenty of information
on what they were and how they were used, and I've even got some wonderful
pictures of a Sealed Knot group doing pike drills. However it's the next
stage that will make all the difference. I need to know what it's like to
carry around a big pointy stick that your life may depend on. Not what
happens when a pike is used for it's intended purpose, but what happens
the rest of the time. It's not like it's something you can put in your
pocket and forget, and the average pikeman doesn't have a caddy to simply
hand over the number three pike when it's required. The waiting and moving
around isn't the most interesting bit of a war, but it's possibly the part
we are least familiar with the depiction of. Yet that's where there's the
most in common between the reader and the character.
Anyway, the point is that you can't create the richness of real life no
matter how thoroughly you research and how well you write, but you can get
the depth by taking the little unfamiliar details and making them do some
of the work rather than just sit there looking pretty.
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"
R. L.
>"Denni" <denni_...@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
>> Plunging aliens into a historical environment presumably populated by
>> fictional protagonists *does* sound like you are making stuff up -- but
>> you are saving yourself the effort of inventing a believable and
>> coherent setting by just 'burrowing' from the history books (sorry, I'm
>> no fan of alternate history).
>
> Understood. The problem I perceive, having read some of the
>better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
>can never quite reach the texture of real life. Dunnet (sorry to keep
>harping, but she's current in my mind because I'm now reading the
>Niccolo saga) points this out *a lot*, almost to the extent that I think
>she's poking fun of people who "just make stuff up."
You talk about richness, but not much about accuracy. I'd think that trying
for too much accuracy would slow the work quite a lot. Is it possible your
accuracy-sensor is set too strictly?
Ftm, there would be different kinds of accuracy. Getting something right
about a treaty or why a king did X instead of Y is one thing -- getting
some details of texture of everyday life is another.
I'd be all the time getting caught in catvacuums about accuracy of one sort
or another, which would slow me down a lot.
> I'm reminded of a scene in my space opera where one character
>asks another, "Why do people from your planet all dress like they're
>from a sci-fi serial with a limited costuming budget?"
Sounds like something I'd like, if not too smutty for me. :-)
R.L.
David Friedman
"Elf M. Sternberg" <e...@drizzle.com> wrote:
> Understood. The problem I perceive, having read some of the
> better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
> can never quite reach the texture of real life.
That's one of my standard arguments for why people in the SCA should try
to figure out what was done in period, instead of just making it up for
themselves.
--
Remove NOSPAM to email
Also remove .invalid
www.daviddfriedman.com
David Friedman
Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk> wrote:
> An example. I'm currently looking at pikes. I've got plenty of information
> on what they were and how they were used, and I've even got some wonderful
> pictures of a Sealed Knot group doing pike drills. However it's the next
> stage that will make all the difference. I need to know what it's like to
> carry around a big pointy stick that your life may depend on. Not what
> happens when a pike is used for it's intended purpose, but what happens
> the rest of the time. It's not like it's something you can put in your
> pocket and forget, and the average pikeman doesn't have a caddy to simply
> hand over the number three pike when it's required. The waiting and moving
> around isn't the most interesting bit of a war, but it's possibly the part
> we are least familiar with the depiction of. Yet that's where there's the
> most in common between the reader and the character.
>
> Anyway, the point is that you can't create the richness of real life no
> matter how thoroughly you research and how well you write, but you can get
> the depth by taking the little unfamiliar details and making them do some
> of the work rather than just sit there looking pretty.
>
Have you been involved in any historical recreation groups? One of the
advantages of things like the SCA--the only one I have been involved
with--is that you are wearing clothing, not a costume, since you are
spending all day, sometimes all week, being medieval. People vary a good
deal in how far they carry it, but it does have the potential to give a
feel for some of the daily life element.
Minor example ... . At SCA events I don't wear glasses. When I need to
see something farther off a little more clearly, I routinely form a tiny
hole to look through with my fingers.
Patricia C. Wrede
news:87slzp4...@drizzle.com...
> "Denni" <denni_...@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
>
>> Plunging aliens into a historical environment presumably populated by
>> fictional protagonists *does* sound like you are making stuff up -- but
>> you are saving yourself the effort of inventing a believable and
>> coherent setting by just 'burrowing' from the history books (sorry, I'm
>> no fan of alternate history).
>
> Understood. The problem I perceive, having read some of the
> better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
> can never quite reach the texture of real life.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the texture of real life." And I'm *really*
unclear about what you mean when you're applying it to fiction.
Because *all* fiction -- modern, historical, completely-imaginary-setting --
provides a model of setting in exactly the same way it provides a model of
dialog rather than a transcript of the way real people really talk. It is
*all* done by providing key details and leaving the reader to imagine the
rest. The only difference I can see between writing historical settings and
writing in totally imaginary settings is that in an historical setting, you
spend a certain amount of time researching how things were, and in an
imaginary setting, you spend a similar amount of time making it all up.
As a reader, the only difference I see is the subliminal knowledge that the
historical setting is supposed to be "how it really was" and the imaginary
one "isn't real." The actual techniques for getting it across, and the
amount of background one actually has room to mention in a novel, are pretty
much the same either way. Knowing that the historical setting "really is
real" makes a big difference to some readers, but that's an "outside the
book" thing that isn't under the author's control and doesn't have anything
to do with the quality of the worldbuilding or the story-techniques of
getting the worldbuilding across to the reader.
> I'm reminded of a scene in my space opera where one character
> asks another, "Why do people from your planet all dress like they're
> from a sci-fi serial with a limited costuming budget?"
And the answer, for a science fiction novel, is "Because the author didn't
think fashion was a particularly important detail to mention, and possibly
didn't bother to make it up in detail" -- in other words, it's inadequate
world-building and/or lousy descriptive techniques. You see exactly the
same sort of thing happening in a good many historical novels, except the
question would be phrased "Why do people from your era all dress like
they're from a low-budget Hollywood costume flick?" The answer is still
"Because the author didn't think fashion was a particularly important detail
to mention, and possibly didn't bother to research it in detail."
If an author has room for two paragraphs of description of a space station
and its denizens, she's not going to be able to describe *everything*. If
an author has room for two paragraphs of description of a reception at the
court of Louis XIV, he's equally not going to be able to describe
*everything*. Choices must be made. And if one author chooses to provide a
sketchy description of the "glittering crowd" in order to spend more time on
the lighting and the description of the physical area, while the other
shorts the description of the area to provide more details of
costume...well, that's an authorial choice that doesn't have much of
anything to do with how deep the background goes. You can read hundreds of
books about Versailles, but if you have to boil it down to two paragraphs,
*it's not going to get in.*
Patricia C. Wrede
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure what you mean by "the texture of real life." And I'm *really*
> unclear about what you mean when you're applying it to fiction.
>
> Because *all* fiction -- modern, historical, completely-imaginary-setting --
> provides a model of setting in exactly the same way it provides a model of
> dialog rather than a transcript of the way real people really talk. It is
> *all* done by providing key details and leaving the reader to imagine the
> rest. The only difference I can see between writing historical settings and
> writing in totally imaginary settings is that in an historical setting, you
> spend a certain amount of time researching how things were, and in an
> imaginary setting, you spend a similar amount of time making it all up.
Consider the difference between a painting of a real building and the
painting of a building invented by the painter. The real building is so
built that it stands up--the invented one might or might not be.
There is an interesting article arguing that Leonardo da Vinci may have
invented the wheel lock. The evidence is a drawing of his of a wheel
lock fire starter, a little earlier than any known examples. Part of the
argument of the article is that the fire starter, as drawn, doesn't
work--evidence that it was a design sketch rather than a picture of a
real, functional, object.
Similarly here. If you write a historical novel in which you get a lot
of the background structure from the real history, that part of the
structure is consistent in the sense of being a possible society. That
doesn't have to be true for an invented fantasy background. The ecology
and economics of a fantasy world don't have to work--those of a
historical world do.
> As a reader, the only difference I see is the subliminal knowledge that the
> historical setting is supposed to be "how it really was" and the imaginary
> one "isn't real." The actual techniques for getting it across, and the
> amount of background one actually has room to mention in a novel, are pretty
> much the same either way. Knowing that the historical setting "really is
> real" makes a big difference to some readers, but that's an "outside the
> book" thing that isn't under the author's control and doesn't have anything
> to do with the quality of the worldbuilding or the story-techniques of
> getting the worldbuilding across to the reader.
...
> If
> an author has room for two paragraphs of description of a reception at the
> court of Louis XIV, he's equally not going to be able to describe
> *everything*. Choices must be made. And if one author chooses to provide a
> sketchy description of the "glittering crowd" in order to spend more time on
> the lighting and the description of the physical area, while the other
> shorts the description of the area to provide more details of
> costume...well, that's an authorial choice that doesn't have much of
> anything to do with how deep the background goes. You can read hundreds of
> books about Versailles, but if you have to boil it down to two paragraphs,
> *it's not going to get in.*
But the bits you get, if you do a good job, will be right.
As it happens, "glittering crowd" appears in a story poem of mine,
involving Richard I not Louis XIV. So does the king swearing "By the
legs of sweet Jesus," which apparently was a favorite oath of his. I
think it works better than if I had made an oath up.
Dorothy J Heydt
>> asks another, "Why do people from your planet all dress like they're
>> from a sci-fi serial with a limited costuming budget?"
> >And the answer, for a science fiction novel, is "Because the author didn't
>think fashion was a particularly important detail to mention, and possibly
>didn't bother to make it up in detail" -- in other words, it's inadequate
>world-building and/or lousy descriptive techniques. You see exactly the
>same sort of thing happening in a good many historical novels, except the
>question would be phrased "Why do people from your era all dress like
>they're from a low-budget Hollywood costume flick?" The answer is still
>"Because the author didn't think fashion was a particularly important detail
>to mention, and possibly didn't bother to research it in detail."
Though, of course, not-describing-in-detail can work very nicely
under the right conditions.
"Kelo noticed almost at once that the people in the Concourse could
be divided, visually at least, into two groups. One of these dressed
in bright colors, and generally in lightweight translucent fabrics.
The other group wore sombre black, grey, and dark brown, covering
every part of them but their hands and faces."
I haven't said one thing about fashion or styling, and nobody would
be able to say if it sounded like a low-budget {name of period} flick
or not: only that it looks as if there are two strictly distinguished
ethnicities, religions, philosophies, or SOMEthing here. (I don't
know which, this just came up out of the top of my head.)
Patricia C. Wrede
news:ddfr-3BDF67.1...@news.isp.giganews.com...
> In article <11akej6...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "the texture of real life." And I'm
>> *really*
>> unclear about what you mean when you're applying it to fiction.
>>
>> Because *all* fiction -- modern, historical,
>> completely-imaginary-setting --
>> provides a model of setting in exactly the same way it provides a model
>> of
>> dialog rather than a transcript of the way real people really talk. It
>> is
>> *all* done by providing key details and leaving the reader to imagine the
>> rest. The only difference I can see between writing historical settings
>> and
>> writing in totally imaginary settings is that in an historical setting,
>> you
>> spend a certain amount of time researching how things were, and in an
>> imaginary setting, you spend a similar amount of time making it all up.
>
> Consider the difference between a painting of a real building and the
> painting of a building invented by the painter. The real building is so
> built that it stands up--the invented one might or might not be.
True. But to me, that says something about how *easy* it is to get it
right, not whether or not it's *possible* to get it right. Speaking as
someone who has two sisters who are painters, and having seen them develop
over the years, I can say that it is perfectly possible to paint a picture
of a real building in such a way that the painted one, if duplicated in real
life, wouldn't stand up. It isn't whether the painting is based on a real
building that is ultimately the determining factor; it's the skill of the
artist.
Using real-life historical background is, in some ways, a short-cut for
worldbuilding (if you think months of research qualifies as a "short cut"),
but it doesn't have any necessary tie to what the final presentation is
like. For certain things, a history-based background is perhaps more likely
to be "right" or "realistic" than one the author makes up out of whole
cloth, but those things will depend a lot on what the author knows already
and how much research he/she is willing to do. An author who does a lot of
horseback riding in real life is unlikely to make mistakes about horses in
his/her novel, whether it is made-up or historical, but he/she may very well
make lots of errors regarding, oh, weaving or sword-smithing...again,
whether the background is made-up or historical.
And it is perilously easy to think that just because one starts from a
historical background, one's setting will of course automatically be
"real"...and to then forget that if deragons or magic or aliens or demons
are "real" in this setting, they've been "real" all along and that if this
hasn't had any effect on history, culture, economics, etc., then one's
"realistic" background may have just ceased to work. (OK, in the case of
the aliens, you get a pass on history-to-date if they've only *just* arrived
and you're doing a first-contact story. But it's still not easy to merge
them "realistically" with a historical setting rolling forward.)
> Similarly here. If you write a historical novel in which you get a lot
> of the background structure from the real history, that part of the
> structure is consistent in the sense of being a possible society. That
> doesn't have to be true for an invented fantasy background. The ecology
> and economics of a fantasy world don't have to work--those of a
> historical world do.
Yes. But the historical world *as depicted in fiction* does *not* have to
work economically, or politically, or ecologically. It's easier for a
reader to *assume* it does, because as long as the writer doesn't say
anything about economics, the reader can just assume "Oh, it worked however
it really did work in 1225" and not worry about it. But just because
something really worked in real life, doesn't mean the writer is going to do
the right research to understand it and present it so that it works.
When it's a historical novel, that kind of blooper is called "lousy
research." And it is. But it still happens, and it happens quite as much
as lousy worldbuilding. The main difference *I* see is that historical
backgrounds get the benefit of the doubt, whereas totally imaginary ones
don't. I've read historical novels in medieval settings that have only a
glancing reference to all those hardworking peasants Elf was talking about,
and it's not a problem, because if you don't mention the serfs in 1066 or
1084, people just assume they're there. But write a fantasy that focuses on
the nobility and politics to a similar degree, and you get complaints that
"the economy doesn't work."
Also, "lousy research" in a historical novel doesn't invalidate the
background. If somebody writes an historical novel set in 1114 that
explicitly and grossly underestimates the ratio of serfs to overloards
and/or the amount of sheer physical labor that everyone, regardless of
station, had to do, people who spot the problem will snarl and complain, but
they don't decide that the world of 1114 is completely impossible and could
never have happened. The know the author got it wrong, that's all. But a
world-building blooper like that in an imaginary world calls the whole thing
permanently into question.
>> You can read hundreds of
>> books about Versailles, but if you have to boil it down to two
>> paragraphs,
>> *it's not going to get in.*
>
> But the bits you get, if you do a good job, will be right.
So? If you do a good job of world-building your imaginary world, the bits
you get will be right. A good job of research; a good job of
world-building -- why is there a difference?
And "just because it happened in real life, doesn't mean it will work in
fiction." The two paragraphs-worth of bits you pick out of your hundred
research volumes on Versailles may be "right" in the sense that they are
accurate and true to the way things are historically documented to have
been. But they may not be "right" for the particular story you're telling.
Maybe it's the glittering crowd that's important, and should have been
described in detail, and not the specifics of the mirrors and candles and
sconces. And *that* sort of blooper is a lot *more* likely to happen (IME)
with history-based backgrounds, because the writer who's done tons of
research has *so many* details to choose from that they often seem to have
trouble picking the most effective ones. (The parallel world-building
blooper is to not have made up *enough* details, and to therefore miss out
on the "right" ones, the ones that'd be most effective in these paragraphs.)
Patricia C. Wrede
James A. Donald
David Friedman
> Similarly here. If you write a historical novel in
> which you get a lot of the background structure from
> the real history, that part of the structure is
> consistent in the sense of being a possible society.
> That doesn't have to be true for an invented fantasy
> background. The ecology and economics of a fantasy
> world don't have to work
And for the most part they don't - most infamously in
the ecology and economics of "Lord of the Rings". This
is a source of much irritation and ridicule.
> As it happens, "glittering crowd" appears in a story
> poem of mine, involving Richard I not Louis XIV. So
> does the king swearing "By the legs of sweet Jesus,"
> which apparently was a favorite oath of his. I think
> it works better than if I had made an oath up.
The oath recollects a time when religion had more impact
than sex, and thus immediately places the reader in
otherwhen, which no amount of theeing and thouing could
do.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
hAL/c2ohNwZ8uUwAUkg7y5TUemYhiUsiMgSyqaqb
4MOFCpOCcwae6LjSaBrU0BYANUnJZZoZRvtjVbeK6
Patricia C. Wrede
news:IHwC1...@kithrup.com...>>> ..."Why do people from your era all dress like
>>they're from a low-budget Hollywood costume flick?" The answer is still
>>"Because the author didn't think fashion was a particularly important
>>detail
>>to mention, and possibly didn't bother to research it in detail."
>
> Though, of course, not-describing-in-detail can work very nicely
> under the right conditions.
Just so. Sometimes the author is *right* to think that fashion isn't a
particularly important detail to mention.
>
> "Kelo noticed almost at once that the people in the Concourse could
> be divided, visually at least, into two groups. One of these dressed
> in bright colors, and generally in lightweight translucent fabrics.
> The other group wore sombre black, grey, and dark brown, covering
> every part of them but their hands and faces."
That's a really nice bit, Dorothy.
> I haven't said one thing about fashion or styling, and nobody would
> be able to say if it sounded like a low-budget {name of period} flick
> or not: only that it looks as if there are two strictly distinguished
> ethnicities, religions, philosophies, or SOMEthing here. (I don't
> know which, this just came up out of the top of my head.)
Yup. And furthermore, I'd say that that (the division into two groups,
distinguished by their choice of colors and styles) is important to whatever
this story would be, and that this importance is conveyed a lot more
effectively by *not* going into additional specific details about the
different cuts and styles that people are wearing. And it also tells
something about Kelo, because he noticed this and tied it down to these
details without getting distracted by (presumably) different cuts and styles
and so on.
Patricia C. Wrede
Dorothy J Heydt
Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>news:IHwC1...@kithrup.com...
>>
>> be divided, visually at least, into two groups. One of these dressed
>> in bright colors, and generally in lightweight translucent fabrics.
>> The other group wore sombre black, grey, and dark brown, covering
>> every part of them but their hands and faces."
>
>That's a really nice bit, Dorothy.
Thank you. If the story he's in ever gets off its duff, it's
going to go in Chapter Two.
>
>Yup. And furthermore, I'd say that that (the division into two groups,
>distinguished by their choice of colors and styles) is important to whatever
>this story would be, and that this importance is conveyed a lot more
>effectively by *not* going into additional specific details about the
>different cuts and styles that people are wearing.
Yes. And if I get any forrader, I will figure out who they are.
(I may make the guys who dress in drab the good guys, just since
the reader will be expecting the opposite.)
And it also tells
>something about Kelo, because he noticed this and tied it down to these
>details without getting distracted by (presumably) different cuts and styles
>and so on.
Well, he *is* male. But he grew up in, if not of, a culture
where everybody's clothes followed the same burnoose-like lines,
but little subtle variations in color and pattern (like the
pattern on a tablet-woven band holding the hood to the robe) made
fairly important social differences. I just found that out too.
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
...
> >> The only difference I can see between writing historical settings
> >> and
> >> writing in totally imaginary settings is that in an historical setting,
> >> you
> >> spend a certain amount of time researching how things were, and in an
> >> imaginary setting, you spend a similar amount of time making it all up.
I started with this bit of your post, because it is "the only
difference" that I am disagreeing with. There is another, and
potentially important, difference.
> > Consider the difference between a painting of a real building and the
> > painting of a building invented by the painter. The real building is so
> > built that it stands up--the invented one might or might not be.
> True. But to me, that says something about how *easy* it is to get it
> right, not whether or not it's *possible* to get it right.
I'm not arguing that it's impossible to get it right if you make up the
building or the world. I'm merely pointing out what seems to me an
important difference. In one case, the facts of reality have gotten it
right--reality has to be possible--and while you still have the job of
deciding how much of that reality to portray and how, you don't have the
problem of creating a self-consistent reality (or at least, the
background part of the reality--you still have your plot to worry
about).
> Speaking as
> someone who has two sisters who are painters, and having seen them develop
> over the years, I can say that it is perfectly possible to paint a picture
> of a real building in such a way that the painted one, if duplicated in real
> life, wouldn't stand up. It isn't whether the painting is based on a real
> building that is ultimately the determining factor; it's the skill of the
> artist.
Lack of skill of the artist can result in an inaccurate portrayal, which
won't stand up. But the artist doesn't have to know how to make a
building that will stand up--only how to portray a building that in fact
is there and standing up.
The point would be clearer if we considered something more complicated
than merely standing--complicated enough so that figuring out how to
accomplish it really requires lots of specialized expertise. The artist
looking at and recording the existing thing doesn't need that expertise.
The artist inventing a thing does, if he is going to portray a thing
that would actually work. That's a substantial difference. And societies
are complicated things.
> Using real-life historical background is, in some ways, a short-cut for
> worldbuilding (if you think months of research qualifies as a "short cut"),
> but it doesn't have any necessary tie to what the final presentation is
> like. For certain things, a history-based background is perhaps more likely
> to be "right" or "realistic" than one the author makes up out of whole
> cloth, but those things will depend a lot on what the author knows already
> and how much research he/she is willing to do. An author who does a lot of
> horseback riding in real life is unlikely to make mistakes about horses in
> his/her novel, whether it is made-up or historical, but he/she may very well
> make lots of errors regarding, oh, weaving or sword-smithing...again,
> whether the background is made-up or historical.
There are lots of ways of messing up in either case. There is still a
fundamental difference between observing and inventing. Someone who
describes an eagle doesn't have to worry about whether such a bird is
consistent with the laws of physics, or even whether it could be a
successful predator. Someone describing a dragon, or a wheeled animal,
does.
...
> > Similarly here. If you write a historical novel in which you get a lot
> > of the background structure from the real history, that part of the
> > structure is consistent in the sense of being a possible society. That
> > doesn't have to be true for an invented fantasy background. The ecology
> > and economics of a fantasy world don't have to work--those of a
> > historical world do.
>
> Yes. But the historical world *as depicted in fiction* does *not* have to
> work economically, or politically, or ecologically. It's easier for a
> reader to *assume* it does, because as long as the writer doesn't say
> anything about economics, the reader can just assume "Oh, it worked however
> it really did work in 1225" and not worry about it. But just because
> something really worked in real life, doesn't mean the writer is going to do
> the right research to understand it and present it so that it works.
I agree that there are lots of ways to mess up. But there is still a
fundamental difference between bad observation and bad invention.
...
> > But the bits you get, if you do a good job, will be right.
>
> So? If you do a good job of world-building your imaginary world, the bits
> you get will be right. A good job of research; a good job of
> world-building -- why is there a difference?
They require very different skills--in the case of research, you have a
mass of data out there to be observed. In the case of world building,
you are engaged in the far more difficult problem of figuring out what
would work.
> And "just because it happened in real life, doesn't mean it will work in
> fiction." The two paragraphs-worth of bits you pick out of your hundred
> research volumes on Versailles may be "right" in the sense that they are
> accurate and true to the way things are historically documented to have
> been. But they may not be "right" for the particular story you're telling.
Of course not. But your original claim was about "the only difference."
I'm not arguing that basing your work on history guarantees that it will
work as fiction--merely that it provides a shortcut to solving one set
of problems.
Zeborah
> I myself have received a few compliments about the use of horses
> in _TIL_ and the American Civil War in _APoH_, about neither of
> which I knew diddley. *Every*thing in the ACW scene, barring some
> niceties about women's clothing, came from a full-page ad in the
> newspaper advertising an upcoming miniseries on Gettysburg, which
> however I did not watch.
I doubt that full-page ad included the smell of gunpowder and fresh
blood, and conversation with friends of a dying soldier!
Which doesn't negate your point that one can fake it and succeed, of
course, quite the opposite; just to say that a little imagination helps
in padding out what you do get from the full-page ads.
Zeborah
--
(No facts were harmed in the making of this post.)
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
Nicola Browne
news:MPG.1d142d1a3...@news.dircon.co.uk
> > Anyway, the point is that you can't create the richness of real life no
> matter how thoroughly you research and how well you write, but you can get
> the depth by taking the little unfamiliar details and making them do some
> of the work rather than just sit there looking pretty.
Hampton court periodically do events with pikemen who can be persuaded
to
let you handle the gear.
I have no urge to reenact history in terms of fighting, but I have
found handling the weapons and trying stuff on useful, if only to give
my imagination a more solid basis.
On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
rights.
Nicola Browne
news:11akej6...@corp.supernews.com
> "
> If an author has room for two paragraphs of description of a space station
> and its denizens, she's not going to be able to describe *everything*. If
> an author has room for two paragraphs of description of a reception at the
> court of Louis XIV, he's equally not going to be able to describe
> *everything*. Choices must be made. And if one author chooses to provide a
> sketchy description of the "glittering crowd" in order to spend more time on
> the lighting and the description of the physical area, while the other
> shorts the description of the area to provide more details of
> costume...well, that's an authorial choice that doesn't have much of
> anything to do with how deep the background goes. You can read hundreds of
> books about Versailles, but if you have to boil it down to two paragraphs,
> *it's not going to get in.*
>
> Patricia C. Wrede
I concur. The difference in presenting a real historical milieu
and an invented one lies in all the off page stuff you hve to do.
In some respect I find the real milieu harder because the small
detail you want to include is always fairly obscure and hard to find
out unless you do plug into the network of historical re encators
who by and large in the Uk do not make things up, but find out
everything that has ever been known about pilums or roman tablet
weaving. In other ways making the made up stuff hang together
properly causes me more anxiety because the list of thing I know
nothing about is enormously vast. Editors are less inclined to
tolerate real world type inconsistency too.
Nicky
Nicola Browne
news:ddfr-3BDF67.1...@news.isp.giganews.com
> > But the bits you get, if you do a good job, will be right.
>
> As it happens, "glittering crowd" appears in a story poem of mine,
> involving Richard I not Louis XIV. So does the king swearing "By the
> legs of sweet Jesus," which apparently was a favorite oath of his. I
> think it works better than if I had made an oath up.
For the book I've just finished ( awaiting my agent's approval)
I looked at oaths common in Ireland a hundred or so years ago and used
them as a jumping off point for my own ones. My favourite is
'Unga's arse' which I can almost guarantee would not survive the
editing process, but which is in danger of entering my own vocab.
Dorothy J Heydt
Zeborah <zeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>> I myself have received a few compliments about the use of horses
>> in _TIL_ and the American Civil War in _APoH_, about neither of
>> which I knew diddley. *Every*thing in the ACW scene, barring some
>> niceties about women's clothing, came from a full-page ad in the
>> newspaper advertising an upcoming miniseries on Gettysburg, which
>> however I did not watch.
>
>I doubt that full-page ad included the smell of gunpowder and fresh
>blood, and conversation with friends of a dying soldier!
Well, the smells just reinforce that this is VR, not a movie, and
the dying soldier and his friends, don't forget, are re-enactors
in a VR. They aren't real; they don't have to be *entirely*
accurate.
Sea Wasp
> I'm not arguing that it's impossible to get it right if you make up the
> building or the world. I'm merely pointing out what seems to me an
> important difference. In one case, the facts of reality have gotten it
> right--reality has to be possible--and while you still have the job of
> deciding how much of that reality to portray and how, you don't have the
> problem of creating a self-consistent reality (or at least, the
> background part of the reality--you still have your plot to worry
> about).
I find it to be the opposite. Creating a SELF-CONSISTENT reality --
i.e., a fictional world that makes sense in its own context -- isn't
easy, but it IS easier in the "outside effort I have to devote to fool
the rubes" sense than writing something heavily based in reality. I
had the opportunity to do the latter when writing _Boundary_ (coming
in February, I'm told) which is a hard-SF novel, as compared with my
prior publications which are modern-day fantasy with some SF
intruding. Digital Knight and Diamonds Are Forever were, in terms of
work I had to expend on the world itself, far far easier to do than
Boundary. When I wrote DK, I didn't have to consult with half a dozen
experts in three fields just to make sure I didn't commit some
stupendous idiocy in the first half of the book. (I did commit one
piece of idiocy in DK, but it was due to a misunderstanding of the way
in which a particular mechanism worked and I wouldn't have realized it
until after someone who DID understand it read the book anyway)
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/seawasp/
Jonathan L Cunningham
<nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
>can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
>if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
>I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
>rights.
Almost anything you like. Rather a lot of clever and talented people
were killed, inluding poets, mathematicians, scientists ...
One guy, Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, *didn't* get killed, although
he got the Iron Cross for bravery, and went on to gain a fair amount
of notoriety in some sort of political job. He would probably have
been a not-very-successful artist otherwise ...
I guess it depends on your views of historical inevitability: would
the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia have happened if there
hadn't been a war?
Sorry - my head just exploded, trying to compute all the consequences.
Jonathan
(I think I'll just go and have a nice cup of tea while I grow a
new head.)
--
Mail to spam auto-deleted, use jlc1 instead.
(That's jay ell cee one, if your font makes l and 1 look the same)
Nicola Browne
news:42aadbd7...@usenet.plus.net
> Sorry - my head just exploded, trying to compute all the consequences.
>
> Jonathan
> (I think I'll just go and have a nice cup of tea while I grow a
> new head.)
My response exactly, but I vaguely recall reading the odd
counterfactual essay and reviews of various books. I have
a dreadful memory for detail so I don't remember who wrote
them, only the remnant of an argument.
I have wanted to write a book on the subject for ages
and have, I think, found a suitable story idea to hang it on.
I'm going to three chapter and synopsis it asap and if it gets the
go ahead will reserach it over the summer
Ric Locke
The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
_And Having Writ_ by Donald R. Bensen sees WWI as an intrafamily
one-upsmanship contest. I like the book for other reasons, too.
Regards,
Ric
Nicola Browne
news:42y1i3mrwaps.j...@40tude.net
> On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 13:31:26 +0000 (UTC), Nicola Browne wrote:
>
> > "Jonathan L Cunningham" <sp...@softluck.plus.com> wrote in message
> > news:42aadbd7...@usenet.plus.net
> >
> >> Sorry - my head just exploded, trying to compute all the consequences.
> >>
> >> Jonathan
> >> (I think I'll just go and have a nice cup of tea while I grow a
> >> new head.)
> >
> >
> > My response exactly, but I vaguely recall reading the odd
> > counterfactual essay and reviews of various books. I have
> > a dreadful memory for detail so I don't remember who wrote
> > them, only the remnant of an argument.
> > I have wanted to write a book on the subject for ages
> > and have, I think, found a suitable story idea to hang it on.
> > I'm going to three chapter and synopsis it asap and if it gets the
> > go ahead will reserach it over the summer
> >
> >
> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
I think that's right and actually for story purposes I probably only
need to have the point of departure clear in my head. I can build
the society I want to use with a few key and not wholly
impossible changes. I don't need to have an historian's in depth
view I just have to grasp a few macro factors and rig them to get the
answer I want. The goography of London will be interesting though,
as I will assume that without the First World War there wouldn't
have been a second and thus no blitz.
What's the view on scientific development? How do you think
the USA would have developed against a stronger Europe?
Anybody know anything about what may have happened Japan Vs Russia
( no revolution)
If anyone has any interesting ideas I'd love to hear them.
Nicky (enthusiastically brain picking)
John F. Eldredge
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>
>Have you been involved in any historical recreation groups? One of the
>advantages of things like the SCA--the only one I have been involved
>with--is that you are wearing clothing, not a costume, since you are
>spending all day, sometimes all week, being medieval. People vary a good
>deal in how far they carry it, but it does have the potential to give a
>feel for some of the daily life element.
>
>Minor example ... . At SCA events I don't wear glasses. When I need to
>see something farther off a little more clearly, I routinely form a tiny
>hole to look through with my fingers.
Or, you could have some period-style glasses made for you. Eyeglasses
were invented in medieval Europe, although I don't recall the exact
century or place.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
Ric Locke
The U.S. would still be isolationist except for adventures in Central and
South America. The Depression would have happened on schedule. U.S.
industrial power would still be in the Northeast, with the South and West
being agricultural latifundia and much poorer. Trains would still be the
primary form of long-distance transportation, and steam engines would still
be common. Technical and scientific leadership would be German, with the
British adopting it as it came up and the French me-toing enthusiastically
while filling in cracks. Jet airplanes would be new in around 1955-1960,
and radial engines would still be in wide use as late as 1980. Zeppelins
would record the same disasters as OTL, but would still be in use.
Computers would still (as of 2005) be refrigerator-sized boxes in medium to
large companies. No spaceships; no reason to develop the technology until
1965 or so (see below) and after that nobody could afford it.
Imperialism would still be in full swing; India would still be British. The
Bolsheviks would be regarded as spoilers, having intervened in the
Menshevik Revolution of 1922 in such a way as to weaken it and allow it to
be defeated; there would be a Czar in Russia. WWII would come along a
little later, probably 1950-55, beginning with the simultaneous Japanese
surprise attacks on Wilhelmshaven in German Hawai'i and Singapore. The
conflict would be Europe and colonies vs. Japan and colonies; it would last
until the mid to late Seventies and pretty well ruin all participants and
most bystanders. America would be neutral, enthusiastically selling stuff
to all sides and making a fortune off it.
Fascism would be regarded as a variant of Socialism, but in actual practice
would look a lot like Social Democracy does to us. France would be
officially Fascist, and the beloved elder statesman Benito Mussolini,
benefactor of all southern Europeans, would have died before WWII started
and gotten a major State funeral with his good friend and ally Vichy
presiding. Most of Scandinavia would be under German rule. There would be
no "Poland," and the Polish Revolt of 1950 would be Marxist, and fail.
neep neep neep...
Regards,
Ric
Eric Jarvis
DE86BF.175...@news.isp.giganews.com>:
> In article <MPG.1d142d1a3...@news.dircon.co.uk>,
> Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > An example. I'm currently looking at pikes. I've got plenty of information
> > on what they were and how they were used, and I've even got some wonderful
> > pictures of a Sealed Knot group doing pike drills. However it's the next
> > stage that will make all the difference. I need to know what it's like to
> > carry around a big pointy stick that your life may depend on. Not what
> > happens when a pike is used for it's intended purpose, but what happens
> > the rest of the time. It's not like it's something you can put in your
> > pocket and forget, and the average pikeman doesn't have a caddy to simply
> > hand over the number three pike when it's required. The waiting and moving
> > around isn't the most interesting bit of a war, but it's possibly the part
> > we are least familiar with the depiction of. Yet that's where there's the
> > most in common between the reader and the character.
> >
> > Anyway, the point is that you can't create the richness of real life no
> > matter how thoroughly you research and how well you write, but you can get
> > the depth by taking the little unfamiliar details and making them do some
> > of the work rather than just sit there looking pretty.
> >
>
> Have you been involved in any historical recreation groups? One of the
> advantages of things like the SCA--the only one I have been involved
> with--is that you are wearing clothing, not a costume, since you are
> spending all day, sometimes all week, being medieval. People vary a good
> deal in how far they carry it, but it does have the potential to give a
> feel for some of the daily life element.
>
I've not done it and probably never will, since I'm more interested and
settings that are forwards or sideways, but it is precisely the sort of
thing that should throw up the right kind of detail.
Dan Goodman
> On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
> can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
> if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
> I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
> rights.
I suggest also asking on soc.history.what-if.
And: What's your Point of Divergence? What happens differently?
If you only want to prevent the particular incident which started the
WWI we know, that's fairly simple; there were a number of things which
could have gone differently.
If you want there not to be a war at all -- rather than one different
from the WWI we know -- then it's going to be harder.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Clutterers Anonymous unofficial community
http://www.livejournal.com/community/clutterers_anon/
Decluttering http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
David Friedman
John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:52:14 -0700, David Friedman
> <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >Have you been involved in any historical recreation groups? One of the
> >advantages of things like the SCA--the only one I have been involved
> >with--is that you are wearing clothing, not a costume, since you are
> >spending all day, sometimes all week, being medieval. People vary a good
> >deal in how far they carry it, but it does have the potential to give a
> >feel for some of the daily life element.
> >
> >Minor example ... . At SCA events I don't wear glasses. When I need to
> >see something farther off a little more clearly, I routinely form a tiny
> >hole to look through with my fingers.
>
> Or, you could have some period-style glasses made for you. Eyeglasses
> were invented in medieval Europe, although I don't recall the exact
> century or place.
My persona is North African c. 1100, so I don't think glasses are an
option.
In any case, being without glasses is a feature, not a bug, since it is
a simple way of putting me in a different world and giving me a little
bit of a feel for some of the differences. My persona, as an adult, has
never seen the stars clearly.
David Friedman
"Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
> can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
> if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
> I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
> rights.
It's only a small part of the picture, but it has been argued that WWI
was responsible for the large increase in the size of the British
government, via a ratchet effect--once taxes had been greatly increased
for the war, it was politically more attractive to spend the money on
other things rather than to bring taxes down to the pre-war level.
My source for that is one of Parkinson's books, and I think some other
people have questioned the claim, but it does provide one possible
answer to your question--the first half of the 20th century might have
been closer to the classical liberalism of the 19th rather than the
welfare state socialism that actually developed.
On the other hand, I'm sure one could also argue that the shift away
from classical liberalism was already in progress, and the war at most
hastened it.
David Friedman
"Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> What's the view on scientific development? How do you think
> the USA would have developed against a stronger Europe?
> Anybody know anything about what may have happened Japan Vs Russia
> ( no revolution)
> If anyone has any interesting ideas I'd love to hear them.
One interesting idea is an old one--"War is the health of the state."
One striking difference between the 19th century and the 20th is the
size and power of government.
In the U.S., governments at all levels combined spend close to 40% of
national income, with the largest share of that the Federal government.
In the 19th century, for the U.S. and I think also Britain, the figure
was about 10%, and in the U.S. I believe the Federal share was the
smallest rather than the largest of state/local/federal. There are lots
of possible explanations for that shift, but WWI is at least one
possible candidate.
David Friedman
sp...@softluck.plus.com (Jonathan L Cunningham) wrote:
> I guess it depends on your views of historical inevitability: would
> the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia have happened if there
> hadn't been a war?
I hadn't thought of that, but it's obviously a biggie. Without WWI and
the Revolution, Russia might have continued its evolution towards a
constitutional monarchy along British lines, with similar economic
arrangements. I think if you extrapolate Russian economic growth from
the 1880-1910 period, you get a substantially richer and more powerful
Russia today than in our time line.
One interesting possibility occurs to me. Reading Orwell, it's pretty
clear that he saw the U.S. c. 1945 as the last real bastion of
capitalism--the last important place where people hadn't gotten the
message that capitalism didn't really work and would have to be replaced
by some (democratic or dictatorial) socialist alternative.
Without WWI, Russia c. 1920 might look rather like the U.K. c. 1840--and
Russia is big. So by mid-century you might have a world with three
alternatives, none of them dictatorial totalitarian--19th c.
laissez-faire capitalism (Russia), 20th century interventionist
capitalism (U.S.), 20th century mixed economy verging on democratic
socialism (various European countries, including the U.K.).
Another point ... . The very interesting book _The Great Game_
documents British/Russian rivalry in central Asia through the 19th
century. One of the fascinating things is how much it resembles the cold
war, despite the absence of both communism and nuclear weapons. So one
can imagine a Russia/U.K. (with, of course, allies on each side) cold
war threatening a hot war, with Russia a (constitutional or absolute)
monarchy and capitalist economy.
Finally ... . Suppose you believe that Stalin was really the product of
Russian culture, not communism. You could then have a 20th century
Russia that was a monarchic totalitarian society. I don't think the
actual Czar fits the role, but perhaps one of his successors would have.
David Friedman
Ric Locke <warl...@mesh.net> wrote:
> The U.S. would still be isolationist except for adventures in Central and
> South America.
Maybe, maybe not. WWI, after all, created a lot of anti-interventionist
(and anti-war) sentiment. And continued improvement in transport
technology might have resulted in increasing concern in the U.S. with
developments abroad.
> The Depression would have happened on schedule.
I can't see why. Its happening when and as it did seems to have depended
on a variety of accidents. There is no reason to assume that the same
people would have been running the Fed in an alternate history, or made
the same mistakes. You could just as easily have the 1920 episode
mishandled, leading to a Depression then, and not have the one we
had--or both, or neither.
> U.S.
> industrial power would still be in the Northeast, with the South and West
> being agricultural latifundia and much poorer.
Why? How does that connect to WWI?
Patricia C. Wrede
> In article <11akita...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> >> The only difference I can see between writing historical settings
>> >> and
>> >> writing in totally imaginary settings is that in an historical
>> >> setting,
>> >> you
>> >> spend a certain amount of time researching how things were, and in an
>> >> imaginary setting, you spend a similar amount of time making it all
>> >> up.
>
> I started with this bit of your post, because it is "the only
> difference" that I am disagreeing with.
OK, I was inaccurate. There are oodles of minor differences between writing
in a historical setting and writing in a totally imaginary one, starting
with whether or not you can include dragons and unicorns and going on up
from there. However...
>There is another, and
> potentially important, difference.
I don't think the one you're talking about is particularly important -- not
to *writing* *fiction*. It may be important in some other arenas.
>> > Consider the difference between a painting of a real building and the
>> > painting of a building invented by the painter. The real building is so
>> > built that it stands up--the invented one might or might not be.
>> Speaking as
>> someone who has two sisters who are painters, and having seen them
>> develop
>> over the years, I can say that it is perfectly possible to paint a
>> picture
>> of a real building in such a way that the painted one, if duplicated in
>> real
>> life, wouldn't stand up. It isn't whether the painting is based on a
>> real
>> building that is ultimately the determining factor; it's the skill of the
>> artist.
>
> Lack of skill of the artist can result in an inaccurate portrayal, which
> won't stand up. But the artist doesn't have to know how to make a
> building that will stand up--only how to portray a building that in fact
> is there and standing up.
>
> The point would be clearer if we considered something more complicated
> than merely standing--complicated enough so that figuring out how to
> accomplish it really requires lots of specialized expertise. The artist
> looking at and recording the existing thing doesn't need that expertise.
> The artist inventing a thing does, if he is going to portray a thing
> that would actually work.
No, he doesn't. To be more verbosely explicit, the artist who is inventing
a thing for use in a picture or a story does not need the expertise to
invent a thing that will actually work, because his story or painting
doesn't *need* a thing that will actually work. A story or painting needs
the *illusion* of a thing that could actually work; it needs something that
will *convince* the viewer or reader that whatever-it-is could be real.
Creating a convincing illusion does not require the same sort of expertise
you need to create a real thing. The artist doesn't have to know the
correct spacing for roofbeams or the formula for rocket fuel in order to
paint an imaginary house or a rocket ship that's believable.
Whether something is or isn't convincing in a work of fiction often has very
little to do with whether it really, truly, actually does work in real life.
There are oodles of things that are really, truly,
honest-to-god-documentably true, but that you can't put into a historical
novel of the correct period because *nobody will believe them* in a work of
fiction. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that truth is stranger than fiction
because fiction has to be believeable?
Internal consistency and external consistency (by which I mean, consistency
with how things are generally accepted to work in the real world) are two
extremely useful tools that a writer can use to create the illusion of
reality in a story. But they're just tools; they're neither of them
universally appropriate or consistently effective. What's important to
*writing* in any setting, whether historical, imaginary, or modern, is
convincing the reader. And that is a *writing* skill, and it doesn't vary
with the particular sort of background you happen to have chosen. It's very
similar to the way dialog isn't an accurate transcription of real-life
speech; story-worlds, whether historically based or totally imaginary, are
models, not true reflections of reality.
> There are lots of ways of messing up in either case. There is still a
> fundamental difference between observing and inventing.
Yup. But it is, by and large, *not important to writing fiction.* Unless,
of course, you happen to be writing *about* the difference between observing
and inventing.
>Someone who
> describes an eagle doesn't have to worry about whether such a bird is
> consistent with the laws of physics, or even whether it could be a
> successful predator. Someone describing a dragon, or a wheeled animal,
> does.
Well, no, they don't -- not unless they have chosen to focus on the physics
of dragons or the ecological niche suitable for a wheeled animal as a key
component of creating their believable illusion. *There are other choices.*
The important thing is whether, in the end, the book's readers believe in
the illusion, not whether the imaginary dragon fits the laws of physics.
Which brings up another point: different readers have different criteria
for believability, and you are *never* going to satisfy them all, not even
with your near-as-makes-no-difference-to-nonfiction super-accurate
historical novel. Some readers will just flat-out disbelieve documented
historical facts; there are quite a lot of cases, in different fields, where
a story or fiction is widely accepted as "the truth" even in the teeth of
actual documents. One example is the story that Cinderella's glass sllipper
came about as a mis-translation or mis-copying of a French word, and that
she "actually" wore fur slippers. Lots of people still believe this, though
it's been pretty thoroughly debunked in folklorist circles for decades.
>> Yes. But the historical world *as depicted in fiction* does *not* have
>> to
>> work economically, or politically, or ecologically. It's easier for a
>> reader to *assume* it does, because as long as the writer doesn't say
>> anything about economics, the reader can just assume "Oh, it worked
>> however
>> it really did work in 1225" and not worry about it. But just because
>> something really worked in real life, doesn't mean the writer is going to
>> do
>> the right research to understand it and present it so that it works.
>
> I agree that there are lots of ways to mess up. But there is still a
> fundamental difference between bad observation and bad invention.
Sure. The difference is just not terribly important for writing fiction, as
a general thing.
If you happen to be the sort of reader who demands literalism and
verifiability and who is only happy with highly mimetic fiction, then you
aren't going to be happy with anything that isn't history-based...and quite
possibly, you're not going to like anything that isn't a very specific sort
of highly-accurate modern-setting. If a writer wants to write for that
group of readers, then she has to pay a lot of attention to the real world,
because "how it really works" is of primary importance to creating the
illusion of reality in the story *for this sort of reader*. But that's
about the restrictions and limitations imposed by
choice-of-audience-and-genre, not about what's important to writing fiction,
or even what's important to writing SF/F.
And when push comes to shove and one is actually writing the story, how one
went about getting one's details is irrelevant. It doesn't *matter* whether
they were made up or whether they were found in seventeen primary historical
sources; it doesn't even matter, necessarily, whether they're internally
consistent or externally consistent. What matters is whether they create
the illusion for the reader...even for those readers who demand literalism
and faithfulness-to-reality. What matters is whether what you do *works* in
*that particular story*.
>> > But the bits you get, if you do a good job, will be right.
>>
>> So? If you do a good job of world-building your imaginary world, the
>> bits
>> you get will be right. A good job of research; a good job of
>> world-building -- why is there a difference?
>
> They require very different skills--in the case of research, you have a
> mass of data out there to be observed. In the case of world building,
> you are engaged in the far more difficult problem of figuring out what
> would work.
No; in both cases, *as a writer*, your chief goal is to figure out how to
convince the reader to believe in the story-world for the length of the
story. Stories like John Brunner's "Traveler in Black" sequence or
Eddison's "The Worm Ourouboros" don't take place in realistic, mimetic,
economically-and-politically-viable worlds, and it *doesn't matter* to a
significant enough segment of the reading audience that they not only sold
but have become classics in the field. Terry Pratchet's Discworld breaks
just about every law of physics there is (space turtles? Flat worlds? Giant
elephants?) and isn't even internally consistent across the series, and
that's part of the point. (And I think the History Monks are possibly the
most brilliant piece of authorial retconning and CYAing I have ever seen,
but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
I'm also going to take issue with your statement that "figuring out what
would work" in the case of mimetic world-building is a "far more difficult
problem" than wading through a mass of data and observing relevant details.
For some writers, doing the mimetic world-building is way more fun than
wading through primary source documents and sorting out real-world theories
of politics and economics and historical inevitability. And in my book,
"fun" trumps "boring work" any day of the week. (And again, for other
writers, things work the other way around -- observing is "more fun" or
"easier" than inventing. And in *neither* case does doing the spade-work in
advance mean any kind of guarantee that the writer won't mess up when it
comes to the important work of actually creating the story-illusion-world;
nor does all this talk about doing stuff in advance mean that that's how it
"should" or "must" be done. Some writers do perfectly well inventing or
researching as they go along. Nine-and-sixty ways...)
Patricia C. Wrede
Nicola Browne
news:42ab1319$0$1962$8046...@newsreader.iphouse.net
> Nicola Browne wrote:
>
> > On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
> > can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
> > if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
> > I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
> > rights.
>
> I suggest also asking on soc.history.what-if.
That's a good idea.
> And: What's your Point of Divergence? What happens differently?
I can let you know when I've read my initial reading list.
At the moment I have three super powers: The USA, British/German
dominated
Europe (Britain retaining its colonies) and a Japanese/French/Belgian
alliance.
> If you only want to prevent the particular incident which started the
> WWI we know, that's fairly simple; there were a number of things which
> could have gone differently.
>
> If you want there not to be a war at all -- rather than one different
> from the WWI we know -- then it's going to be harder.
Yes, but the story I want to tell is about the persistance of some
of the social stuctures and attitudes of pre war Europe into the
twenty first century. I may have a couple of non European wars
bubbling away and maybe small scale Balkan stuff but not a world war.
More historians seem to think that war was inevitable than don't
but I don't have to pick the most probable secenario only one
that is sufficiently plausible.
Brian M. Scott
<jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote in
<news:3pula1pfm27ou77au...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:52:14 -0700, David Friedman
> <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
[...]
>> Minor example ... . At SCA events I don't wear glasses.
>> When I need to see something farther off a little more
>> clearly, I routinely form a tiny hole to look through
>> with my fingers.
> Or, you could have some period-style glasses made for you.
> Eyeglasses were invented in medieval Europe, although I
> don't recall the exact century or place.
Florence, late 13th century. But those were convex lenses,
and I'm pretty sure that David is myopic, and the concave
lenses that he would need didn't come along until the 16th
century. Besides, David's persona is a North African of
ca.1100.
Brian
Patricia C. Wrede
news:e36f29b84b4b15a0ac...@mygate.mailgate.org...
>> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
>
> I think that's right and actually for story purposes I probably only
> need to have the point of departure clear in my head. I can build
> the society I want to use with a few key and not wholly
> impossible changes. I don't need to have an historian's in depth
> view I just have to grasp a few macro factors and rig them to get the
> answer I want. The goography of London will be interesting though,
> as I will assume that without the First World War there wouldn't
> have been a second and thus no blitz.
> What's the view on scientific development? How do you think
> the USA would have developed against a stronger Europe?
> Anybody know anything about what may have happened Japan Vs Russia
> ( no revolution)
> If anyone has any interesting ideas I'd love to hear them.
>
> Nicky (enthusiastically brain picking)
Depending on when your story is set, you can probably justify just about
anything you want. So *very* many people died in WWI trench warfare that
having them all survive could easily cause radical changes -- John Q.
Scientist, who in our world died in the trenches in 1911, lived and came up
with peaceful applications of nuclear power 30 years early; George Q.
Politician, also dead in the trenches in real life, survived and united
Europe in 1937; Ivan Q. Radical survived and changed the history of the
Communist Party by taking on Stalin and winning; Harold Q. Conservative
survived and used wealth and influence to oppose John, George, and Ivan so
successfully that not much actually changed; etc. The more time you have
between no-WWI and your story date, the more things can change or be the
same...
Patricia C. Wrede
Nicola Browne
news:11am92q...@corp.supernews.com
>> Depending on when your story is set, you can probably justify just about
> anything you want. So *very* many people died in WWI trench warfare that
> having them all survive could easily cause radical changes -- John Q.
> Scientist, who in our world died in the trenches in 1911, lived and came up
> with peaceful applications of nuclear power 30 years early; George Q.
> Politician, also dead in the trenches in real life, survived and united
> Europe in 1937; Ivan Q. Radical survived and changed the history of the
> Communist Party by taking on Stalin and winning; Harold Q. Conservative
> survived and used wealth and influence to oppose John, George, and Ivan so
> successfully that not much actually changed; etc. The more time you have
> between no-WWI and your story date, the more things can change or be the
> same...
>
> Patricia C. Wrede
Yes - absolutely that is really part of the appeal of it. In many ways
WW1 destroys confidence in the pre war social structure it precipitates
changes that otherwise might have been decades coming and may not ever
have arrived. As ever I am more interested in the belief structures
thatn I am in the technology but they intersect and it would be stretchy
to write a story in a contemporary alternative world.
Thus far I have tried something different with each book and developing
this one - if I can sell the idea to my publisher- would be huge fun:
the voice of my protag in this alternate 2005 is getting me thinking.
EG.
Was the research that resulted in the development of the pill in any
way related to WW2 info- or would it have happened anyway?
Would thee have been any pressure to com up with it - if the woman's
movement had resulted in the vote only being given to oler married
women with property?
anyone know or have any theories?
Nicky
David Friedman
"Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> Yes - absolutely that is really part of the appeal of it. In many ways
> WW1 destroys confidence in the pre war social structure it precipitates
> changes that otherwise might have been decades coming and may not ever
> have arrived. As ever I am more interested in the belief structures
> thatn I am in the technology but they intersect and it would be stretchy
> to write a story in a contemporary alternative world.
> Thus far I have tried something different with each book and developing
> this one - if I can sell the idea to my publisher- would be huge fun:
> the voice of my protag in this alternate 2005 is getting me thinking.
I suggest reading stuff written c. 1910--Chesterton, Shaw, Wells
controversies would be one fun possibility. My impression is that the
intellectual shift, at least in politics, was already happening--that
Chesterton, who considered himself a liberal in the 19th c. sense, felt
by then that the liberal party had abandoned liberalism. Then read some
stuff from just post-war, and see to what degree there is a sharp change.
> EG.
> Was the research that resulted in the development of the pill in any
> way related to WW2 info- or would it have happened anyway?
My memory is that the direct incentive was ideological--someone with
money to fund the research who was clever enough to realize that the
pill would have substantial social effects.
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> > The point would be clearer if we considered something more complicated
> > than merely standing--complicated enough so that figuring out how to
> > accomplish it really requires lots of specialized expertise. The artist
> > looking at and recording the existing thing doesn't need that expertise.
> > The artist inventing a thing does, if he is going to portray a thing
> > that would actually work.
>
> No, he doesn't. To be more verbosely explicit, the artist who is inventing
> a thing for use in a picture or a story does not need the expertise to
> invent a thing that will actually work, because his story or painting
> doesn't *need* a thing that will actually work.
Which is why I wrote "if he is going to portray a thing that would
actually work." The claim "you need A to do B" isn't answered by the
observation "you needn't do B."
I'm not claiming that what is portrayed in fiction has to
work--obviously it often doesn't. I am claiming that the different
abilities needed to portray something that would work are a significant
difference between the two projects we are discussing.
> Internal consistency and external consistency (by which I mean, consistency
> with how things are generally accepted to work in the real world) are two
> extremely useful tools that a writer can use to create the illusion of
> reality in a story. But they're just tools; they're neither of them
> universally appropriate or consistently effective.
You seem to be rebutting a claim I didn't make and an argument I didn't
offer.
...
> > There are lots of ways of messing up in either case. There is still a
> > fundamental difference between observing and inventing.
> Yup. But it is, by and large, *not important to writing fiction.* Unless,
> of course, you happen to be writing *about* the difference between observing
> and inventing.
Obviously you have much more experience writing fiction than I do, but I
still disagree. Part of the reason is that I believe human beings have
extraordinarily good pattern recognition software. That doesn't mean it
can't be fooled, of course, or fiction writers would be out of a job.
But it does mean that access to details that really are part of the
pattern makes it easier to convince the reader than if you have to
simply make up the details, based on your calculation of what the
pattern should be.
Nicola Browne
>> Obviously you have much more experience writing fiction than I do, but I
> still disagree. Part of the reason is that I believe human beings have
> extraordinarily good pattern recognition software. That doesn't mean it
> can't be fooled, of course, or fiction writers would be out of a job.
> But it does mean that access to details that really are part of the
> pattern makes it easier to convince the reader than if you have to
> simply make up the details, based on your calculation of what the
> pattern should be.
In this case, David, I prefer to take advice from the practioner
over the theorist.
It is also my experience that you don't need
to have worked out the fine detail to create a world that some
people at least, find believable. As Patricia has already said,
you never wirte about the whole, you only drop in references to a whole
complex economic social and political system. Human pattern
recognition tends to fill in the rest. I have written historically
based fiction and entirely invented fiction - there is not much
difference because in both you are engaged in creating an illusion
of plausibility; as ever it isn't what's in your head that matters
but what's on the page. It is the ability to select the detail
that suggests the whole that is common to the writing of both kinds
of story - not actually one's grasp of the workings of the whole.
(Thankfully)
Joann Zimmerman
dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com says...
I assume correctly that you are not in Real Life as blind as a bat
without your glasses? Some of us wouldn't have the option; the best we
could do would be to cheat and wear contacts. (When all your
prescriptions involve diopters of 9- or 10-something, one tends to ask
"What stars?" when the glasses/contacts are not present.)
(Which reminds me: what's the SCA policy on such modern amenities as
daily medications?)
--
"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
--George Plimpton
Joann Zimmerman jz...@bellereti.com
Will McLean
A counterargument is that government got even bigger in
nonbebelligerent states like Sweden.
For another explanation, consider this thought experiment:
Suppose the United States had exactly the same entitlement programs as
the country has now: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
However, the population has 19th c. life expectancy, and 19th c. cost
structures for medical care (that is, much less expensive in real
terms, as well as much less expensive)
What share of the national income would the government spend?
Will McLean
Dorothy J Heydt
Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com> wrote:
>
>(Which reminds me: what's the SCA policy on such modern amenities as
>daily medications?)
Accepted without question, along with wheelchairs, oxygen tanks,
generators to power CPAP machines, ice chests to hold your
insulin (you're encouraged to cover those with a nice bit of
fabric, whether they hold insulin or not), and including glasses
and also sunglasses, if you really can't do without them.
It's bicycles, aluminum beer kegs, generators to power your
electric waffle iron in the morning, ice chests flashing their
styrofoam before the gaze of passers-by, not to mention vampire
teeth, Vulcan ears, and faerie antennae, that will get you
adverse reactions ranging from looks of loathing to cries of
"Aaaaagh! Spawn of the devil! Somebody call the priest!"
David Friedman
"Will McLean" <mclea...@aol.com> wrote:
Are you assuming a 21st century or 19th century per capita real income?
David Friedman
> In article <ddfr-C52D01.0...@news.isp.giganews.com>,
> dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com says...
> > In article <3pula1pfm27ou77au...@4ax.com>,
> > John F. Eldredge <jo...@jfeldredge.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:52:14 -0700, David Friedman
> > > <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>
> > > >Minor example ... . At SCA events I don't wear glasses. When I need to
> > > >see something farther off a little more clearly, I routinely form a tiny
> > > >hole to look through with my fingers.
> > >
> > > Or, you could have some period-style glasses made for you. Eyeglasses
> > > were invented in medieval Europe, although I don't recall the exact
> > > century or place.
> >
> > My persona is North African c. 1100, so I don't think glasses are an
> > option.
> >
> > In any case, being without glasses is a feature, not a bug, since it is
> > a simple way of putting me in a different world and giving me a little
> > bit of a feel for some of the differences. My persona, as an adult, has
> > never seen the stars clearly.
>
> I assume correctly that you are not in Real Life as blind as a bat
> without your glasses?
Correct. I can see adequately for most purposes, but require glasses to
drive. I was describing what works for me.
David Friedman
"Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-20D330.1...@news.isp.giganews.com
>
> >> Obviously you have much more experience writing fiction than I do, but I
> > still disagree. Part of the reason is that I believe human beings have
> > extraordinarily good pattern recognition software. That doesn't mean it
> > can't be fooled, of course, or fiction writers would be out of a job.
> > But it does mean that access to details that really are part of the
> > pattern makes it easier to convince the reader than if you have to
> > simply make up the details, based on your calculation of what the
> > pattern should be.
> In this case, David, I prefer to take advice from the practioner
> over the theorist.
> It is also my experience that you don't need
> to have worked out the fine detail to create a world that some
> people at least, find believable.
I'm sure you don't. My argument wasn't about what some people, at least,
will find believable but about ways of making a world more believable.
And I am, in a way, a practitioner, although only of a related art. My
views on the subject are in part the product of my experience in the
SCA, where we observe both attempts at historically accurate recreation
and attempts to invent the Middle Ages anew.
Will McLean
> > terms, as well as much less effective)
> >
> > What share of the national income would the government spend?
>
> Are you assuming a 21st century or 19th century per capita real income?
>
> --
> Remove NOSPAM to email
> Also remove .invalid
> www.daviddfriedman.com
You can run the thought experiment both ways, if you think it matters.
Assume that the benefits are indexed to 19th c. income levels, if that
is your assumption.
Will McLean
Nicola Browne
> > In this case, David, I prefer to take advice from the practioner
> > over the theorist.
> > It is also my experience that you don't need
> > to have worked out the fine detail to create a world that some
> > people at least, find believable.
>
> I'm sure you don't. My argument wasn't about what some people, at least,
> will find believable but about ways of making a world more believable.
And the main one is to write it well enough.
> And I am, in a way, a practitioner, although only of a related art. My
> views on the subject are in part the product of my experience in the
> SCA, where we observe both attempts at historically accurate recreation
> and attempts to invent the Middle Ages anew.
That has nothing to do with writing. Patricia is, I think, talking
about writing stories and so am I.
Patricia C. Wrede
> In article <11am82l...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> > The point would be clearer if we considered something more complicated
>> > than merely standing--complicated enough so that figuring out how to
>> > accomplish it really requires lots of specialized expertise. The artist
>> > looking at and recording the existing thing doesn't need that
>> > expertise.
>> > The artist inventing a thing does, if he is going to portray a thing
>> > that would actually work.
>>
>> No, he doesn't. To be more verbosely explicit, the artist who is
>> inventing
>> a thing for use in a picture or a story does not need the expertise to
>> invent a thing that will actually work, because his story or painting
>> doesn't *need* a thing that will actually work.
>
> Which is why I wrote "if he is going to portray a thing that would
> actually work." The claim "you need A to do B" isn't answered by the
> observation "you needn't do B."
True. So I will make the further claim that people *have* portrayed things
that would work, in fiction, *without* having lots of specialized expertise.
There are at least a couple of instances in SF of people giving descriptions
of something in an SF story that sounded useful enough that someone else
went out and actually designed it; however, the only one that comes to mind
at the moment is Heinlein's waldoes, and I'm not sure they count -- while
IIRC Heinlein did not actually design the things in detail, I believe he had
enough engineering that he *could* have done so.
> I'm not claiming that what is portrayed in fiction has to
> work--obviously it often doesn't. I am claiming that the different
> abilities needed to portray something that would work are a significant
> difference between the two projects we are discussing.
But I don't think that there *are* different abilities needed to portray
something that will work. There are certainly different abilities needed to
*design* something that works, compared to the abilities needed to observe
something that works. But the ability to portray something believably is
distinct from whether the something would or wouldn't work; it's a skill
that varies independently of the reality or workability of the thing being
portrayed.
>
>> Internal consistency and external consistency (by which I mean,
>> consistency
>> with how things are generally accepted to work in the real world) are two
>> extremely useful tools that a writer can use to create the illusion of
>> reality in a story. But they're just tools; they're neither of them
>> universally appropriate or consistently effective.
>
> You seem to be rebutting a claim I didn't make and an argument I didn't
> offer.
See below.
>> > There are lots of ways of messing up in either case. There is still a
>> > fundamental difference between observing and inventing.
>
>> Yup. But it is, by and large, *not important to writing fiction.*
>> Unless,
>> of course, you happen to be writing *about* the difference between
>> observing
>> and inventing.
>
> Obviously you have much more experience writing fiction than I do, but I
> still disagree. Part of the reason is that I believe human beings have
> extraordinarily good pattern recognition software. That doesn't mean it
> can't be fooled, of course, or fiction writers would be out of a job.
> But it does mean that access to details that really are part of the
> pattern makes it easier to convince the reader than if you have to
> simply make up the details, based on your calculation of what the
> pattern should be.
What you are describing here is exactly what I meant above when I talked
about external consistency. External consistency is, I repeat, *one*
tool/technique for convincing the reader. Some of the time, it works as you
suggest -- being consistent with real life makes it easier to convince the
reader that the story-world works. Some of the time, it works exactly the
opposite of what you suggest -- being consistent with real life makes it
harder to convince the reader that the story-world works. And both of these
things vary depending on both the story and the reader, making them very
variable indeed. When it works, external consistency is extremely useful
and powerful. When it doesn't, it can destroy the reader's belief in the
story-world. As a tool in the writer's toolbox, it is no more and no less
important than any other tool.
That human pattern-recognition software is exactly what makes all this
possible. The writer doesn't *have* to fill in all the details; the reader
will do most of the actual work if the writer provides the right few
details -- and they can be *very* few, like the Japanese brushwork picture
of a cat that's three curved lines. People's imaginations will fill things
in ... and they'll fill in *what they will believe in*, which is way more
important (from the writer's standpoint) than whether what they fill in is
accurate-compared-to-history or not.
It isn't the content that makes something believable or not; it's the way
the content is handled. This is why "But it really happened just like
that!" is not a useful justification for having something happen in a work
of fiction; real or not, the reader still has to be convinced. That
principle applies both to narrow-focus stuff (such as specific incidents
that happened to the author, which the author is mining for her
autobiographical novel) and to wide-focus stuff (such as cultural,
political, and historical background).
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-29B725.1...@news.isp.giganews.com
>
>> > In this case, David, I prefer to take advice from the practioner
>> > over the theorist.
>> > It is also my experience that you don't need
>> > to have worked out the fine detail to create a world that some
>> > people at least, find believable.
>>
>> I'm sure you don't. My argument wasn't about what some people, at least,
>> will find believable but about ways of making a world more believable.
>
> And the main one is to write it well enough.
What you said.
>> And I am, in a way, a practitioner, although only of a related art. My
>> views on the subject are in part the product of my experience in the
>> SCA, where we observe both attempts at historically accurate recreation
>> and attempts to invent the Middle Ages anew.
>
> That has nothing to do with writing. Patricia is, I think, talking
> about writing stories and so am I.
Yes. Live recreation is very different from the sort of thing one does in a
novel. It requires a lot more in the way of physical props, for starters...
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
> people at least, find believable. As Patricia has already said,
> you never write about the whole, you only drop in references to a whole
> complex economic social and political system. Human pattern
> recognition tends to fill in the rest. I have written historically
> based fiction and entirely invented fiction - there is not much
> difference because in both you are engaged in creating an illusion
> of plausibility; as ever it isn't what's in your head that matters
> but what's on the page. It is the ability to select the detail
> that suggests the whole that is common to the writing of both kinds
> of story - not actually one's grasp of the workings of the whole.
> (Thankfully)
And having a gigantic mountain of real-life details from which to select
sometimes makes it *much harder* to pick the three particular ones you need,
the ones that will work on the page in this particular story, compared to
having a small pile of imagined things from which to pick, or having nothing
ready-made at all and having to make up the perfect detail on the fly.
Doing history-based fiction isn't easier. It's just different.
Patricia C. Wrede
Zeborah
> On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 14:34:34 +0000 (UTC), Nicola Browne wrote:
>
> > "Ric Locke" <warl...@mesh.net> wrote in message
> > news:42y1i3mrwaps.j...@40tude.net
> >
> >> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
The bullet missed that chap in wherever it was? And then someone
though, "OMG, what if it had killed him and we'd had to declare war and
then X would have and Y would have and oh the humanity! Let's have a
look at these stupid treaties again..."? Or something.
> The U.S. would still be isolationist except for adventures in Central and
> South America. The Depression would have happened on schedule.
I thought the Depression was triggered by a bunch of loans being pulled
in, and the loans were related to WWI. <checks old history text> Ah,
no, the loans was just a make-things-worse(1) factor; and the text is
not clear that they're related to WWI, but I do recall that from class.
Zeborah
(1) Brain inexplicably refuses to tell me the appropriate adjective
--
(No facts were harmed in the making of this post.)
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
K. Feete
<nicky.m...@btinternet.com> said:
> On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
> can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
> if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
> I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
> rights.
On a very minor note, the Lord of the Rings would probably never have
been written. Tolkien fought in WWI and lost most of his friends in the
war; while it's unforgivably reductionist to say that LOTR "is really"
about WWI, it's safe to say that it was a defining experience in
Tolkien's life, without which LOTR wouldn't have been what it is.
Lacking Tolkien, the fantasy genre would probably have retained the
other shaping force - Robert Howard of "Conan the Barbarian" fame - as
its main role model, with oddballs like Eddison and Dunsany putting out
good stuff that's never quite popular enough to change the mainstream.
The main loss would be any sense of morality in fantasy... all the
trite "good vs. evil" books, but also all the really good
thought-provoking books. Prior to Tolkien the genre had a distinct "do
what thou wilt" trend to it. (In other words, forget saving the world:
it's all about getting laid.)
Not what you're looking for, I'm sure, but I'm an English major, not a
historian. You gets what you pays for. ;)
Kat Feete
--
"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a
few close friends, and then for money."
- Moliere
R. L.
wrote:
>In article <11akjf8...@corp.supernews.com>,
>Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>>news:IHwC1...@kithrup.com...
>>>
>>> "Kelo noticed almost at once that the people in the Concourse could
>>> be divided, visually at least, into two groups. One of these dressed
>>> in bright colors, and generally in lightweight translucent fabrics.
>>> The other group wore sombre black, grey, and dark brown, covering
>>> every part of them but their hands and faces."
>>
>>That's a really nice bit, Dorothy.
>
>Thank you. If the story he's in ever gets off its duff, it's
>going to go in Chapter Two.
>>
>>Yup. And furthermore, I'd say that that (the division into two groups,
>>distinguished by their choice of colors and styles) is important to whatever
>>this story would be, and that this importance is conveyed a lot more
>>effectively by *not* going into additional specific details about the
>>different cuts and styles that people are wearing.
I felt the same. (Wonder how Catja likes it.) This is just what I'd like
for a first impression of the important thing (important to the pv
character and so presumably to the plot).
At some point tho, later, to imagine it all myself, I'd like a clearer
picture of the shape of the bright clothing: is it volumnious and
shape-hiding too, or scanty, or what. This could be built up slowly, with
mentions of someone's clothing being especially scanty or whatever, still
in the same general emotional-signal sort of context.
>Yes. And if I get any forrader, I will figure out who they are.
>(I may make the guys who dress in drab the good guys, just since
>the reader will be expecting the opposite.)
Sounds interesting.
R.L.
David Friedman
zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
> I thought the Depression was triggered by a bunch of loans being pulled
> in, and the loans were related to WWI. <checks old history text> Ah,
> no, the loans was just a make-things-worse(1) factor; and the text is
> not clear that they're related to WWI, but I do recall that from class.
You should probably be sceptical of anyone, including your history text
or me, who tells you "the Depression happened because." The causes have
been controversial for a very long time, and the controversy is
sufficiently entangled with political disagreements to make it hard to
get an unbiased opinion.
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> > I'm not claiming that what is portrayed in fiction has to
> > work--obviously it often doesn't. I am claiming that the different
> > abilities needed to portray something that would work are a significant
> > difference between the two projects we are discussing.
>
> But I don't think that there *are* different abilities needed to portray
> something that will work. There are certainly different abilities needed to
> *design* something that works, compared to the abilities needed to observe
> something that works.
That was my point--sorry if I was unclear.
> But the ability to portray something believably is
> distinct from whether the something would or wouldn't work; it's a skill
> that varies independently of the reality or workability of the thing being
> portrayed.
But in order to portray something that works, you have to either design
it or observe it (or have someone else design it for you) first. I agree
that once that is done, the actual portrayal is the same problem in both
cases.
And I agree that it is possible to portray something that won't work
believably--I just think there are advantages to doing something that
will work.
...
> > Obviously you have much more experience writing fiction than I do, but I
> > still disagree. Part of the reason is that I believe human beings have
> > extraordinarily good pattern recognition software. That doesn't mean it
> > can't be fooled, of course, or fiction writers would be out of a job.
> > But it does mean that access to details that really are part of the
> > pattern makes it easier to convince the reader than if you have to
> > simply make up the details, based on your calculation of what the
> > pattern should be.
> When it works, external consistency is extremely useful
> and powerful. When it doesn't, it can destroy the reader's belief in the
> story-world. As a tool in the writer's toolbox, it is no more and no less
> important than any other tool.
And working from a real society gives you a kind of access to that
particular useful tool that making up a society doesn't.
R. L.
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>In article <0d32a47391c66056ac...@mygate.mailgate.org>,
> "Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes - absolutely that is really part of the appeal of it. In many ways
>> WW1 destroys confidence in the pre war social structure it precipitates
>> changes that otherwise might have been decades coming and may not ever
>> have arrived. As ever I am more interested in the belief structures
>> thatn I am in the technology but they intersect and it would be stretchy
>> to write a story in a contemporary alternative world.
>> Thus far I have tried something different with each book and developing
>> this one - if I can sell the idea to my publisher- would be huge fun:
>> the voice of my protag in this alternate 2005 is getting me thinking.
If civilization had not fallen in 1914.... What a nice premise.
>I suggest reading stuff written c. 1910--Chesterton, Shaw, Wells
>controversies would be one fun possibility. My impression is that the
>intellectual shift, at least in politics, was already happening--that
>Chesterton, who considered himself a liberal in the 19th c. sense, felt
>by then that the liberal party had abandoned liberalism. Then read some
>stuff from just post-war, and see to what degree there is a sharp change.
Yes. For another perspective (YA to boot), see L. M. Montgomery's RILLA OF
INGLESIDE..
>
>> EG.
>> Was the research that resulted in the development of the pill in any
>> way related to WW2 info- or would it have happened anyway?
>
>My memory is that the direct incentive was ideological--someone with
>money to fund the research who was clever enough to realize that the
>pill would have substantial social effects.
I don't recall that, but it would make sense in a civilized 1920s.
R.L.
Heather Rose Jones
> I thought the Depression was triggered by a bunch of loans being pulled
> in, and the loans were related to WWI. <checks old history text> Ah,
> no, the loans was just a make-things-worse(1) factor; and the text is
> not clear that they're related to WWI, but I do recall that from class.
>
> Zeborah
> (1) Brain inexplicably refuses to tell me the appropriate adjective
Exacerbating?
(I once got accused of having made that word up when I
included it in a report at work. But the accuser wan't a
native English speaker, and so can be excused.)
Heather
--
Heather Rose Jones
hea...@heatherrosejones.com
<http://heatherrosejones.com>
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
Very different, yes. Nothing to do with, no.
David Goldfarb
Heather Rose Jones <heathe...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>Exacerbating?
>
>(I once got accused of having made that word up when I
>included it in a report at work. But the accuser wan't a
>native English speaker, and so can be excused.)
I take it they'd never studied Latin either. Something like
"ex-acerbitas", "out of bitterness".
--
David Goldfarb | "You do it. I'm bitter."
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- MST3K
Brian M. Scott
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in
<news:ddfr-913C7C.1...@news.isp.giganews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <11amu82...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
[...]
>> But the ability to portray something believably is
>> distinct from whether the something would or wouldn't
>> work; it's a skill that varies independently of the
>> reality or workability of the thing being portrayed.
> But in order to portray something that works, you have to
> either design it or observe it (or have someone else
> design it for you) first.
As Patricia pointed out in the post to which you were
responding, this is not true, unless you're talking about a
portrayal so detailed as to constitute a design.
[...]
Brian
Logan Kearsley
news:1gy1k9d.iew2nx1tefd1uN%zeb...@gmail.com...
> Ric Locke <warl...@mesh.net> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 14:34:34 +0000 (UTC), Nicola Browne wrote:
> >
> > > "Ric Locke" <warl...@mesh.net> wrote in message
> > > news:42y1i3mrwaps.j...@40tude.net
> > >
> > >> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
>
> The bullet missed that chap in wherever it was? And then someone
> though, "OMG, what if it had killed him and we'd had to declare war and
> then X would have and Y would have and oh the humanity! Let's have a
> look at these stupid treaties again..."? Or something.
Nah. In OTL, it was "Egads! Someone shot Franz! War!". In ATL, it would be
"Egads! Someone tried to shoot Franz! War!" With the only major difference I
can see being that Franz gets to be in on the action. But hey, maybe that
makes butterflies- maybe Franz turns out to be a latent military and
diplomatic genius who helps bring the war to a close in a matter of months.
Or something.
-l.
------------------------------------
My inbox is a sacred shrine, none shall enter that are not worthy.
Patricia C. Wrede
>> But the ability to portray something believably is
>> distinct from whether the something would or wouldn't work; it's a skill
>> that varies independently of the reality or workability of the thing
>> being
>> portrayed.
>
> But in order to portray something that works, you have to either design
> it or observe it (or have someone else design it for you) first. I agree
> that once that is done, the actual portrayal is the same problem in both
> cases.
Um, no, you don't. You *can* design something and then portray it, but you
don't *have to*. Well, unless one happens to be the sort of writer who has
to work that way, which I suspect you may be, which may be the source of
this confusion. But for a lot of the rest of us, including me, it is
frequently just as effective -- sometimes more so -- to drop a couple of
specific details without making up the whole thing, and then let the
reader's imagination do the design work.
Different writers do this kind of thing at different levels -- some describe
their characters physically in great detail, but only mention a couple of
key elements about the political system, while others go into gorey detail
about the politics and economics, but stick to height and hair color and
leave the rest of the characters' physical appearance up to the readers'
imaginations. But it can work equally well either way it's done.
> And I agree that it is possible to portray something that won't work
> believably--I just think there are advantages to doing something that
> will work.
There can be; it depends on the story and on the kind of fiction one is
trying to write. But even when one is trying to do mimetic fiction, getting
"something that will work" does not necessarily *require* that one design it
in detail. Or observe it in detail, for that matter.
> ...
>
>> > Obviously you have much more experience writing fiction than I do, but
>> > I
>> > still disagree. Part of the reason is that I believe human beings have
>> > extraordinarily good pattern recognition software. That doesn't mean it
>> > can't be fooled, of course, or fiction writers would be out of a job.
>> > But it does mean that access to details that really are part of the
>> > pattern makes it easier to convince the reader than if you have to
>> > simply make up the details, based on your calculation of what the
>> > pattern should be.
>
>> When it works, external consistency is extremely useful
>> and powerful. When it doesn't, it can destroy the reader's belief in the
>> story-world. As a tool in the writer's toolbox, it is no more and no
>> less
>> important than any other tool.
>
> And working from a real society gives you a kind of access to that
> particular useful tool that making up a society doesn't.
Yes. And working from a real society gives you access to that exact same
particular *destructive* tool, when making up a society doesn't.
Working from reality has just as many potential problems as working from
imagination. They're just slightly different problems. Working from
imagination has just as many potential advantages as working from reality.
They're just slightly different advantages. Neither one can reasonably be
priviledged over the other. And when you get right down to the nitty-gritty
of writing the stuff, what you do with the background you have is far more
important than where you got the background from.
It is neither necessary nor important to have constant access to every
single possible tool in the writing toolbox. Indeed, I don't think it's
possible; some of them are mutually exclusive. Consequently, while it is
true that working from a real society gives you access to a particular set
of tools, the fact that it does this is unimportant except in the context of
a particular story that happens to need that particular tool set, or of a
particular writer who can't work with any other set of tools. If what you
need to do is drive a nail into the wall, a set of Allen wrenches is not
going to be much help, no matter how utterly necessary they may be when what
you need is to tighten up a certain sort of bolt. You can sometimes jigger
things so that when you have a hammer, everything works more or less like a
nail, but it rarely produces satisfactory results in the long run.
Patricia C. Wrede
Eric Jarvis
AA6A44.102...@news.isp.giganews.com>:
> In article <42aadbd7...@usenet.plus.net>,
> sp...@softluck.plus.com (Jonathan L Cunningham) wrote:
>
> > I guess it depends on your views of historical inevitability: would
> > the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia have happened if there
> > hadn't been a war?
>
> I hadn't thought of that, but it's obviously a biggie. Without WWI and
> the Revolution, Russia might have continued its evolution towards a
> constitutional monarchy along British lines, with similar economic
> arrangements. I think if you extrapolate Russian economic growth from
> the 1880-1910 period, you get a substantially richer and more powerful
> Russia today than in our time line.
>
> One interesting possibility occurs to me. Reading Orwell, it's pretty
> clear that he saw the U.S. c. 1945 as the last real bastion of
> capitalism--the last important place where people hadn't gotten the
> message that capitalism didn't really work and would have to be replaced
> by some (democratic or dictatorial) socialist alternative.
>
> Without WWI, Russia c. 1920 might look rather like the U.K. c. 1840--and
> Russia is big. So by mid-century you might have a world with three
> alternatives, none of them dictatorial totalitarian--19th c.
> laissez-faire capitalism (Russia), 20th century interventionist
> capitalism (U.S.), 20th century mixed economy verging on democratic
> socialism (various European countries, including the U.K.).
>
I'm not sure that follows. You've still got a large cadre of
revolutionaries in Central and Eastern Europe looking for a revolution.
With Germany now being the prime target. I don't know enough about how the
Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up to know whether Hungary and
Czechoslovakia are a better bet.
> Another point ... . The very interesting book _The Great Game_
> documents British/Russian rivalry in central Asia through the 19th
> century. One of the fascinating things is how much it resembles the cold
> war, despite the absence of both communism and nuclear weapons. So one
> can imagine a Russia/U.K. (with, of course, allies on each side) cold
> war threatening a hot war, with Russia a (constitutional or absolute)
> monarchy and capitalist economy.
>
> Finally ... . Suppose you believe that Stalin was really the product of
> Russian culture, not communism. You could then have a 20th century
> Russia that was a monarchic totalitarian society. I don't think the
> actual Czar fits the role, but perhaps one of his successors would have.
>
Possibly the Czar is uninterested in politics and Prime Minister
Dzugashvili takes all the important decisions.
In pre revolutionary Russia there was internal exile to Siberia, all the
Prime Minister would have to do is persuade the Czar that he's improved
the conditions for the exiles and now they no longer attempt to escape.
You now have Stalinist repression under a liberal monarch.
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
"live fast, die only if strictly necessary"
Eric Jarvis
> In article <16cil5166juwa$.bs8w87sx...@40tude.net>,
> Ric Locke <warl...@mesh.net> wrote:
>
> > The U.S. would still be isolationist except for adventures in Central and
> > South America.
>
> (and anti-war) sentiment. And continued improvement in transport
> technology might have resulted in increasing concern in the U.S. with
> developments abroad.
>
How would the Civil Rights issue have worked out? There's potential in a
progressive and forward looking USA intervening politically in Africa
against the old colonialist European regimes.
Dorothy J Heydt
Zeborah <zeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Ric Locke <warl...@mesh.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 14:34:34 +0000 (UTC), Nicola Browne wrote:
>>
>> > "Ric Locke" <warl...@mesh.net> wrote in message
>> > news:42y1i3mrwaps.j...@40tude.net
>> >
>> >> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
>
>The bullet missed that chap in wherever it was? And then someone
>though, "OMG, what if it had killed him and we'd had to declare war and
>then X would have and Y would have and oh the humanity! Let's have a
>look at these stupid treaties again..."? Or something.
>
>> The U.S. would still be isolationist except for adventures in Central and
>> South America. The Depression would have happened on schedule.
>
>I thought the Depression was triggered by a bunch of loans being pulled
>in, and the loans were related to WWI. <checks old history text> Ah,
>no, the loans was just a make-things-worse(1) factor; and the text is
>not clear that they're related to WWI, but I do recall that from class.
There were a lot of factors. One of them (leading to the
assassination of the Archduke, which in OTL started the war about
a month later) was unrest among Serbians who were subjects of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and (because they were of Slavic stock)
were supported by the Russian Empire.
Another element was that the German Empire was having increasing
difficulties with Socialists, who were among other things
pacifics and internationalists. Somebody decided that what
Germany needed was a short victorious war, which in addition to
providing all the things such wars are supposed to provide, would
put the Socialists on the spot: either they'd come out against
the war, and be considered traitors by the people, or they'd
support the war and betray all their expressed ideals. Either
way they'd be sunk. Only it didn't work that way.
Another factor was that the young German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm
II, really wanted to have an extensive worldwide Empire such as
the King of England (who was his first cousin) did, only most of
the worldwide imperial territory was already taken, so he would
have to conquer someone else's if he was to have his Empire.
And those are only ones I can think of offhand, and I haven't
studied the period extensively.
Dorothy J Heydt
Please don't forget, also, that the Serbians who were determined
to shoot Franz sent out (IIRC) five sharpshooters, stationed
along five points of the parade route, each instructed to shoot
the Archduke if he got within their sites. And then another five
were sent out behind them, unknown to the first five, with orders
to shoot *them* if they *didn't* shoot the Archduke. And then a
third set of five were sent out behind the *second* five. All
things considered, it's astonishing that the one who actually
shot him was the first-ranker at the third position. And it
would be very difficult to avoid having *some*one shoot him,
unless you cancel the parade altogether.
Logan Kearsley
Well, there you go! PoD: It rains on the day of the parade, and so the
parade is cancelled and no one ever tries to shoot Franz. The cold rainy
weather causes Franz to get a bad cold, and so the parade is cancelled
altogether instead of just rescheduling. Ta Da! No WWI.
(I am, of course, being facetious about those last two phrases. A different
WWI would probably be set off by some other event anyway.)
anon
/snip/
> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
Yes. For a premise that might be accepted without argument, what about it
did begin -- and ended almost instantly with scarcely any damage to the
Allies, because of some timely invention that served to change the odds (as
the atom bomb did in WWII). I suppose she wouldn't want to nuke Berlin;
just some demonstration that would show the troublemakers that they had
better negotiate instead of fighting. And some rational negotiation by the
victorious side, to bring whatever international situation she does want.
R.L.
anon
> On 2005-06-11 06:04:49 -0400, "Nicola Browne"
> <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> said:
>
>> On a related subject. I want to write an alternative history next -
>> can anyone reccommend some good stuff on what might have happened
>> if the first world war hadn't? I need to grasp the geo politics but
>> I'm also interested in the social history - class, racism and women's
>> rights.
>
> On a very minor note, the Lord of the Rings would probably never have
> been written. Tolkien fought in WWI and lost most of his friends in the
> war; while it's unforgivably reductionist to say that LOTR "is really"
> about WWI, it's safe to say that it was a defining experience in
> Tolkien's life, without which LOTR wouldn't have been what it is.
>
> Lacking Tolkien, the fantasy genre would probably have retained the
> other shaping force - Robert Howard of "Conan the Barbarian" fame - as
> its main role model, with oddballs like Eddison and Dunsany putting out
> good stuff that's never quite popular enough to change the mainstream.
> The main loss would be any sense of morality in fantasy... all the
> trite "good vs. evil" books, but also all the really good
> thought-provoking books. Prior to Tolkien the genre had a distinct "do
> what thou wilt" trend to it. (In other words, forget saving the world:
> it's all about getting laid.)
Interesting question. But why assume that without WWI, Tolkien wouldn't
have written anything at all? He was a RC, he had an old-fashioned
upbringing that stressed morality. I expect he would still have written
some massive thing about Middle Earth, just perhaps with less of a war in
it, or a less disastrous one. (He might have had time to write more books,
without the climate of philistine austerity shown in LEAF BY NIGGLE.)
Industrialization was a major theme of his, and loss of old values; I don't
see those vanishing without WWI. And of course the whole medaeval vs modern
thing, and the old literature he was preserving....
R.L.
Dan Goodman
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
> > "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> True. So I will make the further claim that people have portrayed
> things that would work, in fiction, without having lots of
> specialized expertise. There are at least a couple of instances in
> SF of people giving descriptions of something in an SF story that
> sounded useful enough that someone else went out and actually
> designed it; however, the only one that comes to mind at the moment
> is Heinlein's waldoes, and I'm not sure they count -- while IIRC
> Heinlein did not actually design the things in detail, I believe he
> had enough engineering that he could have done so.
I believe Heinlein based the Waldoes on some devices which had actually
been built and used.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Clutterers Anonymous unofficial community
http://www.livejournal.com/community/clutterers_anon/
Decluttering http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Catja Pafort
> Doing something new is strange, possibly scary, and almost certainly
> stretchy in some way. Stretching is nearly always harder than
> not-stretching, even if it's a very small sort of stretch. You have to be
> very solidly and firmly committed to doing the new stuff to get over some of
> these humps (and the stretchier and more unfamiliar it is, the bigger the
> hump). For me, at least, a major part of being solidly and firmly committed
> to the new thing is being *finished* with the old thing -- if the old thing
> has been abandoned in mid-story, then it's too easy to go back to when the
> stretchy one starts getting hard.
>
> And I confess that it doesn't always work. Which is to say that I have
> several half-done stretchy things lying around in unfinished pieces on my
> hard drive. I'm gonna get back to 'em, honest...
Can we remind you of that?
Stretching is fun, though, when you stretch in the right direction. I
don't think I could keep doing the same old same old for the next ten or
twenty years; I want to write better, and I want to retitle 'the one I
can't write yet' within the decade..
31K of attack novel. Three chapters of Quadrology edited. 1.5 chapters
of diary sprinkled with obscure dates. And now to work, bleh.
Catja
Catja Pafort
> The problem I perceive, having read some of the
> better historical fiction available, is that a writer "making stuff up"
> can never quite reach the texture of real life.
Karl May never got out of his grubby little room; he never travelled to
the deserts of Africa or the plains of North America or the Canyons of
Utah.
He never even saw colour photographs of them.
And yet, my first experiences in those landscapes resonated with him; he
had managed to capture the _essence_ of those landscapes perfectly, much
better than some who had _been_ there.
He's also written a lot of drivel, but that's beside the point.
Catja
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> Working from reality has just as many potential problems as working from
> imagination. They're just slightly different problems. Working from
> imagination has just as many potential advantages as working from reality.
> They're just slightly different advantages. Neither one can reasonably be
> priviledged over the other.
I don't think I said anything inconsistent with that. My initial point
wasn't that one approach is better but that they are different in
important ways which your "only difference I see" appeared to deny.
Daniel R. Reitman
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>Depending on when your story is set, you can probably justify just about
>anything you want. So *very* many people died in WWI trench warfare that
>having them all survive could easily cause radical changes -- John Q.
>Scientist, who in our world died in the trenches in 1911, lived and came up
>with peaceful applications of nuclear power 30 years early . . . .
There is at least one identifiable casualty who would qualify for this
one: Moseley, whose X-ray experiments led to the concept of atomic
number.
Dan, ad nauseam
David Friedman
Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk> wrote:
> How would the Civil Rights issue have worked out? There's potential in a
> progressive and forward looking USA intervening politically in Africa
> against the old colonialist European regimes.
Parkinson, I think, argues that one reason for the successful opposition
to colonialism after WWII was that the people involved had seen
non-western soldiers--the Japanese--equalling and arguably outfighting
western soldiers. Willingness to revolt depends a lot on whether you
think you have a good chance of winning, so if all you remember is the
background of being fairly easily conquered, you may never try.
What about a future in which anti-colonialist revolts in Africa were
bankrolled by American blacks and sympathizers, rather as the Irish
independence movement was supported by Irish Americans? That strikes me
as more lilkely than direct intervention by the U.S. government.
Along similar lines, I have seen the claim that the total income of all
Indians outside of India is as large as the total income of all Indians
in India. That might provide a lot of financial and other support for an
Indian independence movement c. 1960-present.
Alex Clark
> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
Maybe the Tsar took Rasputin's warning seriously, and decided,
reluctantly, to second-guess the advisors who were predicting an easy
victory. His hesitation deprived Kaiser Bill of his excuse to declare
war, and once Austria-Hungary had been fighting in Serbia for a little
while the enthusiasm for a European war cooled off. Only Germany still
wanted to go to war, but Germany couldn't count on Austria-Hungary
joining in the fight.
One possible result: by the time that the big war does break out, the
situations and strategies have changed to the point where Germany
doesn't bring in Britain by invading Belgium, and Austria-Hungary
(being more cautious after its inconclusive war with Serbia) doesn't
agree to cover Germany on the eastern front. The German advance into
France doesn't go as fast as planned, and so Russia's rapid
mobilization leaves Germany fighting alone on two fronts. Serbia then
attacks Austria-Hungary, but Russia and Germany both remain neutral in
that conflict. This new war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia ends
with a treaty in which no territory has changed hands, and Serbia loses
some of its enthusiasm for westward expansionism. The war between
Germany, France, and Russia continues for a few years, and ends with a
treaty in which small concessions are made to Russia (which is at less
of a disadvantage due to recent advances in industrialization) so that
they can all stop fighting.
The main loser in this scenario is Germany, which might have a
revolution, possibly followed by unstable government and
hyperinflation. But the circumstances that led to the rise of the Nazis
(depression, resentment over the Treaty of Versailles, etc.) might be
absent. The Tsars remain in charge of Russia, but they will have
numerous problems (the Tsarevich's hemophilia, rebellious tendencies of
the lower classes, etc.), and Russia might move towards a more
parliamentary system, dominated by a small bunch of industrialists
(some aristocrats, some new rich) and possibly gangsters. The
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires would continue their gradual
decline (and Mustafa Kemal would probably not rise to power), and the
Great Powers would effectively be the US, Britain, and Japan.
Europe's colonies would also be profoundly affected by these changes in
history. On the one hand, they would tend to lose their best chances
for independence. On the other hand, they wouldn't be made into the
battleground of the Cold War. One other change is that the Armenian
Genocide might have been avoided
Poor Rasputin. He came so close to having a major impact on world
history. :-)
--
Alex Clark
"You fail to grasp Ti Kwan Leep. Approach me, that you might see."
- "Ti Kwan Leep/Boot to the Head", by The Frantics.
Alex Clark
anon wrote:
> Interesting question. But why assume that without WWI, Tolkien wouldn't
> have written anything at all? He was a RC, he had an old-fashioned
> upbringing that stressed morality. I expect he would still have written
> some massive thing about Middle Earth, just perhaps with less of a war in
> it, or a less disastrous one. (He might have had time to write more books,
> without the climate of philistine austerity shown in LEAF BY NIGGLE.)
He might not have invented Middle Earth at all. He started working
seriously on the creation (or "sub-creation") of Middle Earth about the
time that he was hospitalized with trench fever and was losing or had
lost most of his friends to the war. In other circumstances he might
have written only small fairy-stories in settings that were loosely
adapted from the real world and short on internal detail.
--
Alex Clark
'. . . For the common good I am willing to redress the past, and to
receive you. Will you not consult with me? Will you not come up?'
- Saruman, in _The Two Towers_
Dorothy J Heydt
Alex Clark <alexb...@pennswoods.net> wrote:
>Ric Locke wrote:
>> The hard part isn't "no WWI"; it's _why_ no WWI.
>
>Maybe the Tsar took Rasputin's warning seriously, and decided,
>reluctantly, to second-guess the advisors who were predicting an easy
>victory. His hesitation deprived Kaiser Bill of his excuse to declare
>war, and once Austria-Hungary had been fighting in Serbia for a little
>while the enthusiasm for a European war cooled off. Only Germany still
>wanted to go to war, but Germany couldn't count on Austria-Hungary
>joining in the fight.
Hm. That *might* work. Absent Russian intervention in the
Serbian conflict, Austria *might* have held off. Rasputin would
have had to be very very persuasive though.
>
>Poor Rasputin. He came so close to having a major impact on world
>history. :-)
Of course when I think of him, I think at once of Tom Baker.
Which might not have been the impression he wished to leave.
Alex Clark
> Lacking Tolkien, the fantasy genre would probably have retained the
> other shaping force - Robert Howard of "Conan the Barbarian" fame - as
> its main role model, with oddballs like Eddison and Dunsany putting out
> good stuff that's never quite popular enough to change the mainstream.
> The main loss would be any sense of morality in fantasy... all the
> trite "good vs. evil" books, but also all the really good
> thought-provoking books. Prior to Tolkien the genre had a distinct "do
> what thou wilt" trend to it. (In other words, forget saving the world:
> it's all about getting laid.)
It seems to me that there was more than that to pre-LotR fantasy. Pratt
and de Camp, separately or together, tended to show some interest in
saving the world (or some part thereof), and IIRC _The Broken Sword_ by
Anderson (published the same year as _The Fellowship of the Ring_) had
something like world-saving tendencies as well. As for Howard, I think
that even without Tolkien his influence would have waned after the '50s
in favor of newer writers.
Perhaps Tolkien's biggest influence on the genre was how he and his
books and fans brought so many writers into, or back to, the genre,
ranging from Norton, Le Guin, and de Camp to Gygax.
Nicola Browne
>> > >> And I am, in a way, a practitioner, although only of a related art. My
> > >> views on the subject are in part the product of my experience in the
> > >> SCA, where we observe both attempts at historically accurate recreation
> > >> and attempts to invent the Middle Ages anew.
> > >
> > > That has nothing to do with writing. Patricia is, I think, talking
> > > about writing stories and so am I.
> >
> > Yes. Live recreation is very different from the sort of thing one does in a
> > novel. It requires a lot more in the way of physical props, for starters...
>
> Very different, yes. Nothing to do with, no.
One can be extremely knowledgeable, have many relevant experiences
and a vast interest in history or indeed anything else and still
be a crap writer. You can never have handled a sword and be a damn
good one. The ability to world build in fiction does not
correlate to the abiity to build anything in real life.
Nicky
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Zeborah
> Zeborah wrote:
>
> > a make-things-worse(1) factor
> > (1) Brain inexplicably refuses to tell me the appropriate adjective
>
> Exacerbating?
Thank you, that's a beautiful adjective.
(My brain lost me the morpheme "categor-" today too, which I needed for
an essay, but fortunately my study buddy supplied it.)
> (I once got accused of having made that word up when I
> included it in a report at work. But the accuser wan't a
> native English speaker, and so can be excused.)
One of my Korean students, when I asked, "How are you?", would answer
"I'm really, really [repeat n times] really good," where n = an
annoyingly high number. So I taught him to say instead, "I'm
exceedingly good," and my fellow teachers, when they found out, stared
at me and made confuddled noises and said, "You shouldn't teach him
that, no-one actually _uses_ that word!"
Zeborah (learning lots about WWI elsethread)
--
(No facts were harmed in the making of this post.)
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
Zeborah
> In article <1gy1k9d.iew2nx1tefd1uN%zeb...@gmail.com>,
> zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
>
> > I thought the Depression was triggered by a bunch of loans being pulled
> > in, and the loans were related to WWI. <checks old history text> Ah,
> > no, the loans was just a make-things-worse(1) factor; and the text is
> > not clear that they're related to WWI, but I do recall that from class.
>
> You should probably be sceptical of anyone, including your history text
> or me, who tells you "the Depression happened because."
Well, yeah. I'm sceptical of anyone who tells me _anything_ "happened
because".
In defense of my history teacher, who wrote the text (and who was also
the best social studies teacher I ever had, and ranks up among the best
teachers I've ever had), she would never have said such a thing. Nor
did I intend to say so by "triggered by" even before I corrected myself.
To trigger a gun one's finger has to move just so, but moving one's
finger just so when the bullet's not there or the safety catch is on or
the gun's pointing in the wrong direction isn't going to be very useful;
there are a bunch of factors interacting.
If I had ever been inclined to believe in the infallibility of history
teachers or history texts then this text in particular might have
inclined me to rethink that belief, since it shows a lovely "before" and
"after" map of Europe in which WWI appears to cause Sicily entirely to
disappear. Now there's a fun POD, though probably not suitable for
Nicola's story.
Zeborah
Alex Clark
Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> In article <11akjf8...@corp.supernews.com>,
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> >"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
> >news:IHwC1...@kithrup.com...
> >>
> >> "Kelo noticed almost at once that the people in the Concourse could
> >> be divided, visually at least, into two groups. One of these dressed
> >> in bright colors, and generally in lightweight translucent fabrics.
> >> The other group wore sombre black, grey, and dark brown, covering
> >> every part of them but their hands and faces."
> >
> >Yup. And furthermore, I'd say that that (the division into two groups,
> >distinguished by their choice of colors and styles) is important to whatever
> >this story would be, and that this importance is conveyed a lot more
> >effectively by *not* going into additional specific details about the
> >different cuts and styles that people are wearing.
>
> Yes. And if I get any forrader, I will figure out who they are.
> (I may make the guys who dress in drab the good guys, just since
> the reader will be expecting the opposite.)
I don't know about the reader, but my first guess would be that the
colorful ones are sensualists and the drab ones are ascetics. My second
guess would be that the colorful ones are the upper classes, and third
guess is that they are entertainers.
--
Alex Clark
"The show must go on."
"Damn you!"
- Galaxy Quest
Nicola Browne
>So I taught him to say instead, "I'm
> exceedingly good," and my fellow teachers, when they found out, stared
> at me and made confuddled noises and said, "You shouldn't teach him
> that, no-one actually _uses_ that word!"
>
> Zeborah (learning lots about WWI elsethread)
The one important way of distinguishing my alternative 2005 from
the current one will have to be in the use of language.
I have currently got Britain plus colonies in alliance with Germany
and Russia still dominated by an aristocratic elite. There is
a strng distinction between high art and that of the masses most
of whom are not educated beyond thirteen. Language acts as a class
marker and the language of the educated elite is emulated by those
who want to get on. On the other hand there are many radical tensions
within this society. The welsh anarchist fringe in association with
the christian colonists liberation movement and the more radical
underground working women's suffragist society (vovosuso) use
specialised language codes and welsh has to some degree become
the language of revolution.
My point is that words like'exeedingly' and academic syntax is
much more common in some circles than it is here.
AT least half of television's output is still very much public
service educational stuff.
I also do need some German. What is the German for avant garde,
suffragist, and intellectual elite? Caja, please may I email
you with some language queries later? Helen, may I email you
for some welsh?
Nicky- enthused and over excited.
Jonathan L Cunningham
>On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 03:18:53 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt)
>wrote:
>
>>In article <11akjf8...@corp.supernews.com>,
>>Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>>>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>>>news:IHwC1...@kithrup.com...
>>>>
>>>> "Kelo noticed almost at once that the people in the Concourse could
>>>> be divided, visually at least, into two groups. One of these dressed
>>>> in bright colors, and generally in lightweight translucent fabrics.
>>>> The other group wore sombre black, grey, and dark brown, covering
>>>> every part of them but their hands and faces."
>>>
>>>That's a really nice bit, Dorothy.
(snip)
>>Yes. And if I get any forrader, I will figure out who they are.
>>(I may make the guys who dress in drab the good guys, just since
>>the reader will be expecting the opposite.)
>
>Sounds interesting.
My first thought was a division something like roundheads v.
cavaliers. I don't think I'd want to choose sides (puritanical thugs
v. idle wastrels?)
On second thoughts, I have a slight expectation that the sober, hard-
working, sombre group, are the good guys, and the frivolous, frippery-
enhanced exhibitionists are the bad guys.
Then I think Eloi v. Morlocks.
On balance, I think the reader (all one of him) will be fairly
evenly divided in what he expects, or doesn't expect, so don't try
to second guess him :-) Make your decision for plot/worldbuilding
reasons!
Jonathan
--
Mail to spam auto-deleted, use jlc1 instead.
(That's jay ell cee one, if your font makes l and 1 look the same)
Jonathan L Cunningham
wrote:
>Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
>
>> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
>> > "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>> >
>> True. So I will make the further claim that people have portrayed
>> things that would work, in fiction, without having lots of
>> specialized expertise. There are at least a couple of instances in
>> SF of people giving descriptions of something in an SF story that
>> sounded useful enough that someone else went out and actually
>> designed it; however, the only one that comes to mind at the moment
>> is Heinlein's waldoes, and I'm not sure they count -- while IIRC
>> Heinlein did not actually design the things in detail, I believe he
>> had enough engineering that he could have done so.
>
>I believe Heinlein based the Waldoes on some devices which had actually
>been built and used.
Whether he did or not, the concept is an obvious extrapolation from
pantographs. I'm not sure how old they are, but (a quick google
reveals) they were being used in the printing industry for making
small type as far back as 1834, and that was an adaptation from some
earlier use.
Oh, damn! I should be doing something else, but I feel a fatal google
attraction ...
Ok, one quote:
The reproducing pantograph has been around for centuries. Since
principals are based upon Euclidean geometry, it is possible that
it has been around for millennia.
The reproducing pantograph first saw use as an early copying
machine, making exact duplicates of written documents. Artists soon
adopted its use to duplicate drawings. It is known that DaVinci
used one to make duplicates of his drawings and possibly to
duplicate those drawings onto canvas.
(from http://www.carousels.com/reprod.htm)
I expect he meant "principles" in the second quoted sentence.
Jonathan L Cunningham
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
>news:ddfr-913C7C.1...@news.isp.giganews.com...
>> In article <11amu82...@corp.supernews.com>,
>> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>> But in order to portray something that works, you have to either design
>> it or observe it (or have someone else design it for you) first. I agree
>> that once that is done, the actual portrayal is the same problem in both
>> cases.
>
>Um, no, you don't. You *can* design something and then portray it, but you
>don't *have to*. Well, unless one happens to be the sort of writer who has
>to work that way, which I suspect you may be, which may be the source of
>this confusion. But for a lot of the rest of us, including me, it is
>frequently just as effective -- sometimes more so -- to drop a couple of
>specific details without making up the whole thing, and then let the
>reader's imagination do the design work.
IMHO, it's a lot easier to portray FTL drives, time-machines etc. if
you don't start by designing one which will work.
And some of the least believable stuff I've read is when the writer
has convinced himself he *can* design some piece of future tech.
I'm very much a "less is more" person when it comes to technobabble,
and ditto historical fantasy (except I don't know a word for the
equivalent of technobabble).
R.L.
> anon wrote:
>> Interesting question. But why assume that without WWI, Tolkien wouldn't
>> have written anything at all? He was a RC, he had an old-fashioned
>> upbringing that stressed morality. I expect he would still have written
>> some massive thing about Middle Earth, just perhaps with less of a war in
>> it, or a less disastrous one. (He might have had time to write more books,
>> without the climate of philistine austerity shown in LEAF BY NIGGLE.)
>
> He might not have invented Middle Earth at all. He started working
> seriously on the creation (or "sub-creation") of Middle Earth about the
> time that he was hospitalized with trench fever and was losing or had
> lost most of his friends to the war.
Assuming he didn't get hospitalized for something else? Granted ill health
can turn people to writing who might have otherwise not deviated into
print.
> In other circumstances he might
> have written only small fairy-stories in settings that were loosely
> adapted from the real world and short on internal detail.
Mm. Time might have been a factor. But it seems to me the energy to create
first the language, then the world, then a plot to go in it -- would have
come out one way or another.
R.L.