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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer.

let's see it

"No one on the Chesapeake network is talking about anything else, except for the dedicated monks at the treatment plant. They're reporting the latest energy production figures with great determination. Other watersheds are starting to pick up our news." He waved at screens for the household's secondary networks, projected on the table in between hard-boiled eggs and goat cheese and pu-erh pot. Reassuring, solid things: I turned up the input on my lenses and saw supply chains leading to a neighbor's flock, the herd of goats that kept our invasives in check, and a summary icon that, if I followed it, would show me every step of carbon-balanced tea importation from the Mekong watershed. The networks were familiar, too. Carol's textile exchange and Dinar's corporate gig-work watercooler and Atheo's linguistic melting pot and the neighborhood's hyperfirewalled energy grid scrolled over polished pine. Only the content was strange. The last time they'd all dovetailed on one topic had been when Maria Zhao died and every network devolved into Rain of Grace quotes.

better than all but a few on /lit/. this is not praise.

The first thing I noticed was the air. It might be terrestrial—but kin to the thriving swamp DC had replaced rather than the cool afternoon outside. I'd expected sterility; instead I found something more like Dinar's greenhouse or the aquaculture dome. I tasted humidity, wet leaves, orchids, and something like shed snakeskin. I breathed abundance. [Paragraph break] And then held my breath, too late, as I thought of dangers. Bacteria. Windblown seeds. Insects, or their equivalents, and scuttling scavengers carrying the remains of meals out spaceship doors and into the wide new world beyond. Maybe they couldn't survive here, most of them. But maybe I'd already scuffed my shoe through the spore of some alien kudzu, or coated my lungs with their native E. Coli.

this isn't good writing. it isn't bad. literally well-written, she has technical proficiency. it's uninspired.

i was going to ask you a section you found memorable, then i read a little more:

"Humans really do hide their kids most of the time," said Cytosine. "I thought it was only a taboo in your movies." [Line break] "We could never figure out why so much of your fiction doesn't show children," added Rhamnetin

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete?

At least in-setting, I think those statements are meant to be relative: due to their biology, the plains-folk (which includes Cytosine and Rhamnetin) are biologically wired to react to having a 'nursing' mother around taking a leadership role, and ideally more than one. Doing that mothering results in as much of a physiological and psychological change as any genetic influence does. The tree-folk have something kinda similar at an egg level.

So it would make sense for motherhood and young children to be far more central in Plains-folk fiction; human fiction tends to emphasize kids, but plains-folk fiction you'd expect to see them showing up in action films or military fiction, so on. This could be considered a ridiculous standard (and as aesoptinium goes, it's not exactly subtle!), but it's not that weird by scifi standards.

sure if that were the line in the book. the line in the book says the aliens saw so few kids in movies they thought it was taboo. the perspective character's feeling is "the alien is right and i don't know what to say." but in the real world we know kids are everywhere in our storytelling. so without explaining it, like "x disaster destroyed a shitload of human canon" or "the aliens are weirded out if 100% of stories don't prominently feature kids" or "actually aliens, you're wrong" it's bad writing. for your note, depicting xenophilic spacefaring races who think their experiences are universal is also bad writing, as is using blue-orange morality to show alienness. everybody does "weird" things to fit in. it will be no different for aliens.

i think it'll be exactly the same. we evolved civilization, off endless competition with animals, with nature, and with ourselves. birds don't need civilization, fish don't need civilization. some arthropods don't need civilization, others have it so innately they've perfected it within their niche. apes need civilization. the human is the product of epochal processes that occur on every single planet suitable for life; the human is the product of universal law. if and when we meet friendly ETs they'll be exo-hominid descendants of exo-simians and their most alien quality will be how very similar they are with us.

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.

Maybe the aliens used someone's porn collection to learn about humans? /s

But seriously, I think there is something to that. She's trying to say that a lot of fiction uses parenthood to do stuff like "Rob Schneider is both an X and a parent! And it ain't easy being both!" or simply ignores it the way it ignores shopping or sleeping or studying. Batman isn't a dad because he's a mogul by day and a crimefighter by night, when is he going to spend time with his children? And there's always Robin if Bruce wants to be a father figure for a moment. The aliens could be saying "oh, we didn't know humans actually spent so much time studying in college! We thought they just formed cliques, dealt with relationship troubles and aced through exams by using the powers of friendship and montage!"

Of course, this can be countered by saying, "how come these aliens who aren't that alien and understand parenthood don't understand the law of conservation of detail? Do they even have literature? Or do they just watch unedited reality TV feeds for entertainment?" Which a very good writer would have preempted by showing that yes, these aliens really don't have anything that resembles human literature. Or that they love children and parenthood so much they don't consider that "the boring part" of the narrative.

This makes me think of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which some of you might better recognize as Robotech), where part of the plot was that the attacking Zentraedi aliens were literally culture-less, having bred themselves for nothing but war. Watching Hikaru /Rick kiss a woman came as a complete shock to them, and Minmay's singing was literally a weapon against them.

If motherhood is such a big deal for the aliens, then yeah probably it's an important part of "who the characters are" in their literature and popular entertainment. X has three kids (details about them), Y is pregnant (details about that), Z has no kids yet but is trying for them and so on.

The same way I skip over the pages of detail about exact model of gun and ammo and so forth when reading thrillers 😁 So far as I am concerned, Big Hero Dink Atsom has a Big Gun and is going to shooty the bad guys. That's as much detail as I need, but other readers (men?) seem to want all the details of what kind of Big Gun exactly and calibre of ammo etc.

Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.

Hah I relate to this so strongly, it’s why Tolkein never really did it for me. Endless descriptions of a forest turn me off a series like few other things.

Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.

Oh god, the shopping lists from The Girl that Played with Fire are coming back to haunt me. My pet theory is that when Stieg Larssen died no one edited his books past the first one.

My eyes glaze over at both the male and female versions of this because I don't know anything about guns and I don't know anything about fashion and I don't care about either. I don't know why a Horace de Latté ballgown and machine gun is better than a Sylvain Bompe-de-Bompe missile launcher and tea dress, and I don't want to know.

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