Q: How do you turn utopia into dystopia?
A: Lock the door.
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Thank you. It is the form that I am mostly concerned with at this stage. Particulars of the description of Tau Ceti are just drafts, and will be revised and polished later.
You say that Tau Ceti has repellent cuisine as a social quirk, but in the text you mention it as having gourmet cuisine . I’m not sure that these are inherently contradictory (I’m thinking about Roman banquets), but my default assumption would be that the two statements clash.
Many gourmets relish delicacies that ordinary decent people find revolting or horrifying. I’m thinking of fish and crustaceans that are carefully dismembered or even fried alive so that they will still be struggling on the plate, pungent ferments such as Limburger cheese, shrimp paste, and stinky tofu, cheese riddled with maggots, sausages that ought to “smell of shit, but not too much of shit”, game hung until approaching decomposition, and anchovies. I used to have Malaysian and Indonesian friends who found the idea of milk repulsive and found it hard to believe that people eat cheese of any sort. Many societies in Flat Black are so far down the path of eating cultured meat and synthesised food that moderately squeamish diners would balk at eating a recognisable carrot. Tau Cetian “real food” and traditional dishes from Old Earth (which include fish and game killed in the wild and sometimes even serve whole, besides cheeses and other ferments) might mostly be pretty tame by my standards, but in context it is pretty confronting.
But you’re right about the word choices in the draft. “Repugnant gourmetry” might be better than “repellent cuisine”, but in any case this is draft, and revision comes later.
And as a matter of substance, I’m not sure that it’s right to say that the chief executive is a “Heads-of-Governments conference.” It’s not simply that I’m not sure how often the eight heads of government would meet for actual administrative purposes, rather than ceremonially
In Australia, during the coronavirus crisis, the heads of government have been meeting every week, by videoconference.
It’s also that, given the planet’s insistence that it is not a unified polity but eight autonomous polities, it seems as if such a meeting would give the “wrong” impression and might in fact be unofficially tabooed, if not constitutionally prohibited; having them meet might be like having the Queen refuse assent to an Act of Parliament, or more moderately like having the Thain exercise his power to call out the Shire-muster.
It might be, but the European Union manages to hold a meeting of the European Council twice every six months while maintaining a pretence that its member countries are independent. I have decided that tau Ceti finds it possible to have the eight people with whom the buck stops discuss what to do with it, without offending the appearances.
In preparing such a document as this there is an inevitable tension between writing the lie that Watsonian encyclopaedia would be forced to print (that Tau Ceti is an amphictyony of eight independent colonies, or that Australia is a constitutional monarchy) and the truth that GMs, players, and diplomats need to be getting on with (that Tau Ceti is a technocratic bureaucracy and that Australia is a parliamentary republic whose appointed president has the title “governor-general”). It’ll get thrashed out during the revisions. For right now I’m trying to suppress my habit of polishing everything I write too early and too piecemeal. I want to get the scope and format of these entries right first, then grind out some draft, then polish.
Loveless marriages, scandalous divorces, and people living down scandal are far from uncommon in many societies.
This world really is a dystopia for people who aren’t socially compatible with it.
Sure is! But aren’t they all? My father thought that England in 1948 was a dystopia, and believed it strongly enough to emigrate.
Oh, quite! And perhaps a lot will accept the offers. The people who decline to have their asexuality, bisexuality, polyamorousness, or aromanticism “cured” by neuronal surgery might not be very numerous, but I think John is right in supposing that there will be some. Those are who I thought he was asking about; those are who I described in my answer.
My favorite story by James H. Schmitz, “The End of the Line,” envisions a future where ordinary human beings have eaten such food for so many centuries that they are no longer adapted to eating anything else, and indeed would die if they tried to.
Skimming the draft Last-Modified: Sun, 13 Dec 2020 21:06:51 GMT:
Given the insignificance of the cultural stereotypes, it seems that that’s a part which could be trimmed back if you wanted to fit in something else; as it is it takes up nearly a third of the text to say “they talk as though each nation had its own typical personality, but it doesn’t make any practical difference”.
For “Climate”, in an ideal layout I’d have something like “-10-30°C (worldwide), 2-15°C (inhabited areas)”. That may take too much space though, and hyphenating negative numbers so that they won’t look wrong is hard.
A Tau soap opera might have a mysterious stranger moving into the area who claims to be a lottery winner, but his dark secret is that he built a megacorp from the ground up…
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At least I cut the bits on variations in architecture and urban form.
Perhaps I am too intimidated by the accusations that I grind out hacky planets of hats. On the other hand, my last two campaigns have each included one player who pored over the description of Tau Ceti to choose exactly the place of origin that would characterise his PC. I got a soldier from Hell and the son of two feckless fringe-dwellers from Avalon.
A Tau soap opera might have a mysterious stranger moving into the area who claims to be a lottery winner, but his dark secret is that he built a megacorp from the ground up…
Heh!
With a third page I could add a paragraph on “soap opera plots” for each world, and they might be very evocative. I could also restore the “Attractions”, which were well-received though technically trivial, and add a section on the Imperial presence and activities.
Or, if I cross out two out of every three words in the blather about national differences between the octants, and scavenge another 350 words by using 11-point type, I could spend 500 words on “attractions”, “soap opera”, and “Imperial presence and activities” while still fitting each briefing onto a two-page spread or one leaf of printout.
Perhaps my best way forward now is to write the extra sections and worry later about sweating the word count down.
For “Climate”, in an ideal layout I’d have something like “-10-30°C (worldwide), 2-15°C (inhabited areas)”. That may take too much space though, and hyphenating negative numbers so that they won’t look wrong is hard.
Well, human permanent settlements are never found where the annual average temperature is less than 0 °C or more than 30 °C. So the habitable areas listings could be trivialised by a sentence in the key.
The first paragraph of the running text says where the inhabited zone is, characterised the uninhabitability of the zone beyond it, and describes the pattern of settlement within it. What it omits is to say that as Tau Ceti’s average temperature of 9 °C is about 6 K cooler than Earth, the thermal equator on Tau Ceti is probably about 22 °C.
I’ll give it some thought. I might need to hack a little model of meridional transfer of heat to get figures that depend in a plausible way on the world’s size and air density.
Yeah, that’s a very strong indicator that you want to include that sort of material.
Personally, I wouldn’t be interested in the attractions, but then I’m not much interested in the attractions of most Earth places, either. On the other hand, the soap operas/telenovelas seem like a novel and clever idea.
If you come up with something like that I’d be interested to see it, whether you include it in Forty Exotic Worlds or not.
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I think I can use the “attractions” text to evoke something about the land and people. You commented favourably on the matter I drafted for Tau Ceti (“[t]hose are good items and the sort of thing that could stimulate a GM’s inventiveness.” — whswhs).
“Soap opera plots” might be “plots of vaudeville melodrama” and “story-teller’s stock plots” as appropriate to development level.
Or even “storylines in immersive virtual realities.”
“Plots of popular ballads”
I’ve read a number of things recently – most obviously the Murderbot Diaries – in which trashy entertainment finds an audience outside its target cultural niche. Offworld fans of As Tau Turns are going to be far less numerous than domestic ones, and probably the domestic ones think they’re a bit weird, but it feels like the sort of thing that happens when you drop messy humans into a setting.
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According to a book on art history I copy edited some years ago, the ceramics industry in Athens sold more of its output to Etruscans than to Athenians.
Very probably, yes. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of learning about real cultures (my wife is a fan of The Archers in a “hoping it’'ll get better some day” sort of way), but as a means of learning about the messages a culture wants to project into its members…
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I also think a section on and of culturally significant story forms is a great idea. GMs can straight out mine these for framing of their own games, players can use them to shape their characters backstories and ambitions.
So the PCs might be pure greed fueled treasure hunters trying to recover an Old Earth artifact, but the locals see it all as an attempt to increase their status to get into a favourable lodge, because of course that’s what all young reckless freebooters are really after. Except, of course, for the PC who is looking to get into a good monastary.
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There is a new draft at the same URL. It is fully three pages now, but the twelve-point type is generous, and most other colonies will be described more briefly.
How is it for scope?
How is it for format?
As a very minor note, I don’t think “terraformation” is a suitable word. I’ve never seen it, and I believe if it were used, it would mean the coming into being of Earth or an earthlike planet, not the transformation of a nonearthlike planet into an earthlike one. I would prefer “terraforming.”
I’ll change it, though I don’t agree that the process or action indicated by the suffix “-ation” has to be a spontaneous one. When I confront someone, that is confrontation. When I transport something, that is transportation. So if I terraformed something that would be terraformation. We say that I like confrontation, not that I like confronting (unless there is an object mentioned).
“Terraformation” appears in the titles of two books listed on Amazon that are about planetary engineering, not the natural formation of Earth. And one of them is by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
You’re writing for SF fans. SF fans know, correctly or not, that the word is “terraforming”. So by insisting on “terraformation” you’re annoying your audience for the sake of an arguable technical correctness.