So what, roughly one sector per billion people? China, India, and the rest of East, Southeast, and South Asia get four; Africa gets one (excluding northern Africa); the Americas get one; Europe and Central Asia get one; northern Africa and Central Asia get one; and I guess Australia gets shoved into either the Americas or one of the Asian sectors?
On Tau, are the sectors going to be redefined as population shifts in different locations? That’s going to mess up cultural continuity, I think.
One of Jack Vance’s tricks was to coin an untranslatable word for a value or attitude in one of his exotic cultures and define it in a parenthesis or footnote. I can’t do that here (not enough word-count to spare), but if I did the word for Tau Ceti would be lagom. Lagom är bäst!
Indeed. I sometimes picture Tau Ceti as having continents arranged roughly like Earth, but covered in ice from the poles to about latitude ±45°, and with no land bridge at Panama, South America shifted about 40° to the west and rotated 45° clockwise, and Antarctica dragged 35° north along the meridian 90° E. Then (very approximately):
That implies a major discrepancy of population and GDP between the octants of Tau Ceti.
I suppose I ought to make a map.
Your political divisions don’t seem to be drawn up with any regard for defensible boundaries. That suggests that they were expected to be at peace with each other, and remained so, with no historical periods of war to rearrange who owned what.
Correct. Other planets have had more exciting histories; Tau Ceti is an outlier for having held things together and kept a lid on conflicts. And that’s why it is at the forefront of economic development: war is terribly, terribly bad for the economy except when it happens to somebody else. It is even worse than kleptocracy.
It has been over 250 years since the land glut on Tau Ceti closed, but the decline in real wages and rise in rents led to class conflict within the colonies rather than war for land between them — there was no preceding millennium of migrations, invasions, conquests, annexations, secessions etc. to fuel revanchism. In fact, there really wasn’t much national consciousness at all. Then the Eichberger Foundation appeared as a common enemy, the octants committed to ever closer co-operation, and Tau Ceti grew stultifying rather than war-torn. Things were different on other worlds.
Did they ever consider adding some methane to the atmosphere, to get the polar sectors out from under the ice? Or would that submerge more land under rising seas than it would gain?
They are already a bit watery and probably can’t afford to flood much coastal land.
I have made a minor change to the entry for “Air”, which is now “Atmosphere”, includes the scale height, and has better format for the partial pressure of oxygen.
I have just finished a first draft entry on Arcolais, which has ended up just as long as the entry on Tau Ceti, and for a description with no need to blather about the stereotypes of the octants.
How am I doing for scope? Does this need cuts?
I’m aware the that the entry on Imperial presence is vague and dull. I’m going to have to work on a method of modelling Imperial Service activities to give myself something specific to work with. But that’s for revision. On with the draft!
Well, I’m disposed to dislike the place by knowing that the capital is named for the repugnant John Ruskin (see How the Dismal Science Got Its Name for what repels me about him) . . .
My thought on reading the stats was to wonder at the juxtaposition of an arty culture with prudery, but that may be revealing the biases of my own cultural background. And in any case the fuller text undermines that, almost to the point of
As my dear father used to say in 1863,
Once people start with all this art, goodbye, moralitee!
And what my father used to say is good enough for me.
The soap opera sketch makes me want to know if Elwing Vanhague is female, or if the name has lost or reversed its gender since Tolkien invented it.
I realized, reading the statblock, that I would like to know, when I read the scale height, how it compares with Earth’s. The fact that gravity is less than Earth’s makes me think the scale height must be greater, but I wonder about the numerical ratio.
In the political tension between landholders and industrialists, does one side reject the planet’s preoccupation with the visual arts? Or do both sides share it, and express their rivalries by endorsing different styles of visual art?
Do women who like other women become artists so they can take other women as their muses? Do men have comparable options?
Quite.
Is that too blatant? Ought I to change it?
My thought on reading the stats was to wonder at the juxtaposition of an arty culture with prudery, but that may be revealing the biases of my own cultural background. And in any case the fuller text undermines that, almost to the point of
As my dear father used to say in 1863,
Once people start with all this art, goodbye, moralitee!
And what my father used to say is good enough for me.
I suspect that [on Arcolais] the fascination with art is fuelled by the prudery. Nudes would become dull if there were no forbidden and scandalous erotica for them to be contrasted with. Romantic landscapes got part of their appeal from a frisson of apprehension that the wild hills and woods might have had bears in them. A good deal of art — certainly the more visceral and less cerebral vein of it — depends on the appeal of the subject to fascinations that evolution drove deep into the human psyche: food, status, sex, and death.
The soap opera sketch makes me want to know if Elwing Vanhague is female, or if the name has lost or reversed its gender since Tolkien invented it.
I meant her to be female. Since it is ambiguous I will change the name.
I realized, reading the statblock, that I would like to know, when I read the scale height, how it compares with Earth’s. The fact that gravity is less than Earth’s makes me think the scale height must be greater, but I wonder about the numerical ratio.
In at least the latest revision of the introduction, the “key to the tabbed data” sets out that the scale height of Eath’s atmosphere is 8.5 km.
In the political tension between landholders and industrialists, does one side reject the planet’s preoccupation with the visual arts? Or do both sides share it, and express their rivalries by endorsing different styles of visual art?
The latter. Ought I to make that explicit? Or ought the industrials to make an appeal to the base tastes of the mob by also promoting drama?
I had hoped that that was sufficiently implied by the absence of any mention of social differences between the sexes, and “… homosexual acts are widely disapproved—but artists having sex with their “muses” are informally condoned.”
I don’t see a need to do so. Not everyone sees the name “Ruskin” and thinks “racist propaganda.” And down below you’re repeatedly thinking you ought to change things that you didn’t make blatant enough; why not keep something blatant here?
Knowing that the effect was deliberate does make me think that your intention may be to make Arcolais another somewhat repulsive planet. And that’s certainly an option. But I think if the entire book is full of unpleasant planets, it may limit its appeal to readers. Though perhaps it more shifts its appeal to a different aesthetic impulse.
Exactly the sort of thing that Plato wanted to exclude from his ideal societies . . .
Well, that’s one option. You could also be satisfied that one reader saw that and suspected that she was female, confirming that your hint got through. Or you could subtly confirm the hint by using “she” or “her” later in the passage.
From the description of Arcolais, I find myself thinking that they may as a culture hold to the currently scandalous idea of natural gender, or cultural and psychological gender always being determined by biological sex.
Or they could have cross-gender be a common trait in artists’ models, perhaps justified by things like the boy actors of Elizabethan theater. That might suggest that artists are likely to have a fascination with the topic. There is also room for the idea that homosexual models might assume a cross-gender identity and homosexual artists might pursue them, without quite explicitly violating the planetary taboos; indeed, the hint of scandal about such things might advance the artist’s career in the way “banned in Boston” used to.
Going back to Elwing, she might also be hinted to be a bishonen, if you want more ambiguity.
That’s useful to know, and may be sufficient. On the other hand, do you also give Earth’s atmospheric pressure, gravity, and so on in the key? Because if you do, the same argument could be made for not giving stats for those relative to Earth, which does take up a little more space.
Perhaps I’m indulging in foolish consistency, but as a copy editor, I’m biased to feel that a careless inconsistency is the balrog of big minds.
At this point, you have several times reacted to my speculating about precisely the thing you meant to hint at by wondering if you ought to be explicit, or at least hint less subtly. I think maybe what is actually going on is that your hints have been successful, though it could be useful to hear from other readers as to whether they wondered the same things. But you should not immediately rush to nudging the reader with your metaphorical elbow and asking if they got it. Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation quotes someone who said of certain approaches to art that “they deprive the mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates,” and I think what you are doing here may be just ambiguous enough to avoid that particular fault. But it’s my professional function to ask explicitly about author intent, behind the scenes.
Opposition to putting a mural up on the dam might be a vehicle for subversive industrialist sentiment, on the theme that such a work of engineering is already an aesthetic wonder in its own right, without being decorated, and perhaps even that technology as such was beautiful.
One final thought: The lively busy-ness of the imperial retirement service seems to invite the question of whether some of those Imperial retirees may in fact be spies or propagandists . . .
No, no, no, no, not at all. But you wouldn’t expect them not to stay in touch with their old friends who haven’t retired yet, would you?
(Sorry, no time to read this right now, will come back later.)
I’ve had occasional thoughts about setting up a world where pre-Raphaelite ideas of the ideal life caught on, but I feel the widespread starvation would limit its appeal.
For “art riots” I might say “performance riots” if I were trying to get across the idea that this is being regarded as a form of artistic endeavour.
Villain idea: “The beauty of the human form is not regarded as art, because it cannot be collected. But I have a vat of taxidermy nanomachines.”
It seems to me that the main pressure here is that a great artist will often not be a great administrator, and vice versa. These people aren’t stupid. So what do they do about it? Are there “fellows” who can just barely get an acceptable painting together, with a lot of help from their friends, but are really good at this gauche economics stuff? Do they accept remarkably high levels of inefficiency?
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.
Well, great theologians are often not great administrators either, but the Church has got on for more than a thousand years run by bishops and cardinals. Great doctors are usually bad administrators, but the RCP and RCS each have five centuries under their belts. As a former Bernard Wooley I can tell you that successful politicians often aren’t great administrators either, and are remarkably impervious to the dismal recommendations of economics.
The Academy of Art on Arcolais is a professional society of artists who have untoward wealth and an inordinate sway over public opinion. In this way they are best thought of as being like the Church, which a professional society of theologians who have untoward wealth and an inordinate sway over public opinion. When I ran an adventure on Arcolais the players referred to Beaumont Palace as “the Art Vatican” and the President of the Academy as “the Art pope”.
As for politicians on Arcolais, they are perhaps crippled by having been educated in Fine Arts instead of Economics. But they are no worse-equipped than politicians in real-world countries whose educations were based on Classics or Liberal Arts. You may have noticed that economic policy on Arcolais is terrible: about as bad as Australia in the 1970s. As for the major artworks and one-man shows that Arcolain politicians produce when they are out of office, those probably have as much literary merit as books by US politicians, and they are doubtless assisted by the “school of” to the same extent as US politicians rely on ghostly co-authors.
And there is a very definite distinction between the sort of priest who’s a theologian and the sort who actually gets put in charge of things that need political or administrative competence. So if you’re saying that’s the kind of thing that happens on Arcolais, fine; the impression I got from the text was that any people in high positions had to be actively producing art that was recognised as “good”. It seems I’m wrong, so fair enough.
Let me check. I think you might be confusing the government with the Academy of Art, in which case I have been seriously unclear.
That’s a fair question, and I ought to offer a systematic answer—but I hadn’t decided that when I was commenting; I was reacting to bits of text that caught my attention, in an ad hoc manner. But I’m going to say that my intent in asking questions is often to say “Author: What you have written appears to suggest X. Was X what you meant to be saying?” If it was, then there’s no problem.
There’s a nice ambiguity in doing this in gaming material, though. On one hand, in game mastering, it’s highly desirable to use a fair bit of indirect exposition, and allow players to uncover and act on the things you are hinting at, and ideally to reach the point where they can intuit how things are going to work; idiot lecture is likely to make the audience of players rebel if not carefully justified. On the other hand, in writing sourcebooks, it may be necessary to spell things out; the GM who intends to use the material ought not to be in danger of misrepresenting the setting because you have not made an essential point explicit. William Blake could get away with saying “That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care,” but writing game books is very often an exercise in making things explicit to idiots—not because your entire readership are idiots, but because you have to provide at least some help for those who are. But on yet another hand, this principle applies much less to elements of flavor text in sourcebooks; if the Doylist reason for something being there is that you are making a little joke, there is no reason to elbow the reader and say “Dja get it? dja get it?”—so long as a sufficient Watsonian reason is in evidence. I think Arcolais has a sufficient Watsonian reason to name its capital for an art critic, though I confess I was surprised to see a British one used on a planet whose name suggested French cultural origins. (Perhaps excessively surprised; I have the impression that the French are quite capable of naming a street “rue Benjamin Franklin” or “avenue Emmy Noether.”)
In the case of Arcolais, I think many of the things I was asking about hint at a fundamental cultural theme: “A surface culture of prudery and repression contrasts with and is relieved by a subterranean stream of license justified by claims to artistic endeavor.” I’m not sure if you spelled that theme out in some many words and I read right past it, but I think maybe it needs to be said fairly early on, in the description rather than in the flavor text. Then the flavor text can hint at things that follow from it, and leave the (GM) reader free to pick them up and run with them, or not.
Your comment on your aesthetic goals makes me think of a book on literary criticism I copy edited some years ago, a study of the naturalist movement that was starting to die out a century ago. The critic started out by pointing out that where the romantics tended to assume that characters had a fair measure of free choice, and were defined by the choices they may, the naturalists tended to assume that people were strongly constrained by their cultures, societies, and classes, and largely could not act otherwise—but on the other hand, the writer had the free choice to observe them, to portray them accurately, and by doing so to inspire readers to undertake social reform that would free people from those constraints. Which in fact seems to be the typical mission of player characters in Flat Black.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it’s a fair point that the player characters ought to be the most interesting people in a campaign; if NPCs steal the show from them, the GM is doing a bad job. On the other hand, if I read a book of imagined places, I might not like it to be entirely a catalog of people and cultures who could be projects for some entertaining reformer to improve; I might like the people and cultures to have some features that inspire sympathy or even hope. I might even like some worlds to have some admirable elements that the blunt instruments of imperial policy are in danger of crushing.
I can see the point of your reaction against utopianism; while I have played with the concept of writing GURPS Utopia, the fundamental truth is that most utopias are deadly dull. (I’ll make an exception for Wright’s Islandia, at least in memory; I need to reread it and see if it still holds up.) But I doubt that that makes dystopia exciting, and Flat Black seems at least to be hinted to be a mild dystopia. I think what I’m hoping for is heterotopia, places that are different and interesting.
But you aren’t constrained to write for my aesthetic sensibilities, and if you continue in your own present style, I will endeavor to comment; you will just have to decide how large a grain of salt to add to my commentary.
Let me add that I look forward to seeing what you do with Plato. My feeling has long been that Plato approaches the world in the spirit of a mathematician, and Aristotle in that of a natural historian—and I mostly find Aristotle’s approach more congenial.
It seems to me that a utopia that goes into any detail is essentially a political argument – wouldn’t it be great if instead of doing this we could do that? Because it is perfect, there is no conflict unless it deals with outsiders. (E.g., Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear where the conflict is between the anarchist first settlers and the statist second wave.) A utopia that doesn’t go into any detail is just “wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to put up with this stuff” – e.g. The Land of Cockaigne.
Consider a setting like Transhuman Space: there are plenty of places in it where people can live long and happy lives doing more or less whatever they feel like, at little risk of crime, etc.; but you don’t set adventures in those places unless something is going wrong. (Their existence, though, implies that PCs are either people who don’t fit into those places or people who can’t get into those places for some reason.)