Am I blowing hot and cold about ambiguity and obscure allusions? Perhaps: I’ll have to think about what I’m trying to achieve in each occurrence, and rein in, where necessary, my habit of hiding little sardonic jokes in my writing. That’s one of the differences among three points at which you noted that my text was more or less than explicit.
The name of Ruskinburgh affords a Watsonian defence, but I actually chose it for a Doylist reason, which I did not expect that anyone would notice: I hold the naïve anti-industrial socialism that floated around the Aesthetic and Arts-and-Crafts movements in contempt, and sought to cast shade on it by remembering its association with a racist paedophile. But the first person to comment on the text did notice. And Watsonially that contempt ought not to be there. It’s not honest either: Ruskin’s moral failings are not the reason that their scheme would result in starvation and misery. If that allusion is clear I ought to cut it.
Elwing Vanhague’s sex (or at least her gender presentation), in contrast, is not invisible to the player characters: they can check Wikipedia Galactica or stream an episode of Broadcast & Streaming. Making it ambiguous to the players is, therefore, sand in the lube of setting description. If it’s not clear I ought to make it clear, because raising doubt achieves nothing.
The third and fourth points questions—“do industrial magnates sponsor decadent and subversive art?” and “do people become artists to exploit artist’s privileges, and does ‘artist’ include both men and women in that context”—are an issue of calibration. I meant those to be clear implications and I thought they were. When you ask “do they?” you might be conversationally pointing out interesting possibilities that you have inferred, or you might be telling me, as a reviewer, that the point is ambiguous and requires my attention as writer. I don’t know. So I ask. Do you think I ought to make those implications explicit?
As for authorial intent, I live for the moments in my Flat Black adventures when the players join the dots, for the moments when someone says “they are rioting because we sent women to search the men’s locker-room on a planet with sex discrimination and a nudity taboo!” or “this guy has a severe nudity taboo: if I steal all his trousers while he is in post-coital sleep he’ll be trapped in his room”. The pay-off of a novel or short story is that the reader gets a surprise and suddenly realises that it was the inevitable result that everything before was leading up to; it is the moment when the implicit becomes obvious. In an RPG it is also the moment when the obscure becomes manipulable. I don’t want to spoil those moments by laying out an encyclopaedia-full of implications. So I hope you are saying “I see that Arcolais must support a number of ‘artists’ who are in the profession for the social privileges, in particular keeping lovers as pretended models” and not “I think that readers would be unable to infer that, and be puzzled rather than experiencing narrative fulfilment when it turned out to be so”.
The issues surrounding the beauty and artistry of Streeton Gorge Dam are just what you say, and more. Is it beauty when form follows function? Regardless of whether it is beautiful, is it Art when form is dictated by function rather than aesthetics? If I get a scuba set and an underwater chainsaw and recover some of those mural carvings from below the lake, would a collector pay me for them? Could I get them off the planet before the authorities informed Spaceways that they had been stolen?
When you mentioned the business of the Imperial Retirement Service I checked my typescript, because I thought I must have mis-typed “Imperial Recruitment Bureau”. It seems not. Perhaps you have misread. Anyway: in response to your comment about the possible nefariosity of retired Imperial servants, I have to tell you that most players who played Imperial Servants for any length of time came to suppose that their characters were saving excess pay for the time when they would no longer be restrained by the Treaty of Luna, and would be free to kick in teeth that needed kicking.
And that brings us back to the beginning. I am no longer forthright about this in my introductions to Flat Black, and no longer so heavy-handed about it in my world designs, but it is (as you seem to have suspected) definitely my intention that Flat Black should be a universe full of repulsive societies, that in the rare places where everyone is happy (Todos Santos, Esbouvier etc.) they are hardly human any more and even their happiness seems repugnant. That was an aesthetic impulse from the beginning, an abreaction to the utopianism of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene. It is also one of the bricks in the wall that makes the Empire necessary and therefore acceptable.
As for Plato, I’ll be coming for him later.
