Soulmate bonds will wait for another rant

[larryhammer]

(Sobering thought while rereading Lolita: I'm the same age as Humbert Humbert when he met Dolores Haze. Old enough to be a Creepy Older Guy. And here I still feel like a Creepy Younger Guy.)

I'm having fun working in a world without clocks (almost as much fun as keeping my similes period). No marked candles even -- no standard candles. But then, I've come to detest Fantasyland's candlemarks -- don't pretend your people have a modern, developed-world sense of timekeeping without a modern technology to create it. That's just bad worldbuilding, okay? So stop it. Now.

But I digress. I was writing about characters with a different sense of diurnal time: no minutes, no seconds. A day of eight canonical hours, pegged to the sun's transit. Without words to urgently subdivide the day, there's, well, less urgency. For lack of a better term, a third-world urgency. Except in one domain: tactical situations. In small battles, I'm finding myself aching for seconds and minutes: "Wait X for my squad to get in position, then start your diversionary attack." Instead, they have to work by response: "Wait till they turn towards my attack, then hit 'em from the rear." I've tried fudging this with "heartbeats," but it's fudging and I know it and will probably edit it out (possibly in favor of recitations of a standard prayer? must think).

What bad bits of fantasy worldbuilding bother you?

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

So you have no seasons?

I too am bothered by seconds and minutes mentioned when there are no clocks. (I am not bothered by candles as people used those for many centuries in this world.)

I'm bothered by battle scenes that are written as if there are coms, when it's clear they have no means.

I'm bothered by stupid magic systems. (As far as i am concerned, spending a lifetime studying magic just for it only to be actually useful for long-range warfare is stupid. Studying it for a year or two for the same purpose--about as long as it takes to train a grunt--makes more sense, even if it isn't exactly exalting or even exciting.)

And I'm bothered by the intrusion of American life--characters who say "Okay," who are "tuned-in", who "stay on track" after being "derailed".

[larryhammer]

I'm bothered by battle scenes that are written as if there are coms, when it's clear they have no means.

"Coms"?

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Communications systems.

[larryhammer]

Ah, yes -- the instant (and uninterceptable) messange runners.

---L.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Okay! Okay! I'll cut all the Okays!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Snart! (I was thinking of Already Out stuff, but now that you mention it...) *g*

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Heart rates are so variable, I doubt that would work. Recitation of a standard prayer, or a verse of shanty, or something might work, but is the time-coordinated assault itself an anachronism? Would some sort of visual (signal flag or flare) or auditory signal (gunshot or shout or animal call) be more appropriate?

[larryhammer]

Anachronism, for just those reasons.

It's a head-space thing. Gotta wrap the brain in the tools of the time, to mash wildly divergent metaphors together.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

The only practical use of recitations of prayer I'm aware of were to time an egg.

Surely any commander worth his salt knows that he cannot control what happens on the battlefield to the minute, or to the paternoster. Past practice (before "Synchronize watches!") was definitely more along the "Wait until you see our vanguard hit their lines, then break cover".

From a military standpoint, this is far more practical. One expect one's actions to have an effect, but one cannot time them, and in the real world having others act at fixed times is liable to miscarry, tipping one's hand to the enemy or causing the others to act too soon or too late. A signal- or event-driven ("Save your powder. Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes") system is more likely to succeed.

[larryhammer]

As I'm slowly, laboriously discovering. "Wait till half their party is past you, then ambush."

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Entire groups of people who are Evil based on nationality or religion or race. Ditto entire groups of people who are Good. Even if they're elves, or gods. The notion that all inhabitants of a given land or followers of a given religion are alike in any way. (Any citizen of a real country or practicer of a real religion knows better.)

Villains who want to destroy all that is good simply because they want to destroy all that is good, rather than that for reasons that make internal sense to them.

Both of which are as much character as worldbuilding, I suppose. But the former, at least, tends to show up on the Map, so it counts.

[larryhammer]

Or if you really must make an Evile People, follow through on the consequences of this premise. It means the people of that world are not human like us (regardless of whether the Eviles are supposedly not human). In what way different? Follow through!

OTOH, villians that Hate Good is just bad storytelling, not worldbuilding per se.

---L.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

I get annoyed by the inappropriate presence of New World crops. For example, an Arthurian fantasy in which Mordred distills vanilla essence. More generally, I hate fantasies where the characters obviously have easy access to well-stocked supermarkets. If it's winter with a foot of snow on the ground, an inn won't be serving lettuce in their salad.

Anachronistic words in historical fiction also bother me, even when they turn out not to be anachronistic. I think it was Dorothy Dunnett's first Niccolo novel that described something as "anarchy", which is a word I don't expect to see any time before the 19th century. (I just checked my Webster's, and it claims the first use was 1539, so if that's right she was actually only about eighty years off.)

[junoxxiv.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem with plants and the like.
Vanilla is new world? I knew about chocolate, but vanilla? Those poor ancient non-Americans: only strawberry ice cream.
:(
One of my big problems with Fantasy in general is magic. I want to know how and why magic works, not just what happens when it works, but why specifically, and I want it in relation to our own known universe with our laws of physics. I think that, in a nutshell, is why I prefer SF. By the time magic has been explained to my satisfaction, it's effectively science.
Now, I want to believe in magic and maybe that is why it is so hard for me. I really should just let it go and let it be, you know, fantasy...

Ok, that said, I have been reading more Fantasy this year then I have read since I first established this silly rule twenty two years ago (speaking of geezers,) and I haven't hated most of it. In fact I adored Sabriel and Sunshine and enjoyed The War for the Oaks, although I am tired and bored with the last book of His Dark Materials. So I guess my no magic rule is not quite so rigid if the world building in general is imaginative and believable.

[janni.livejournal.com]

While for me, when someone explains their magic too much, I stop believing in it.

I want my magic to be consistent, or inconsistent for a reason--I want to be made to believe there is something coherent behind it. But in much the way most people don't know exactly how their car or microwave work, but only how to operate them, I figure most people in a world won't know the inner intricacies of local magic, though they will know how to work with it, what sort of things get you in trouble, and so on.

It partly comes down to POV for me--if my POV is someone who would know exactly how the magic works, then they can tell the reader--but so often the POV is an outsider or a newcomer to it, and thus not likely to know--and likely to be occupied with things other than figuring out.

(I thought the last book of His Dark Materials was the weakest, too.)

[hamadryad11.livejournal.com]

Vanilla is new world? I knew about chocolate, but vanilla?

Yup, it is. Vanilla is the seed pod of a tropical orchid (usually Vanilla planifolia). There are about 100 species of Vanilla, but I don't believe they're all used to produce vanilla flavour. The aztecs were known to use it for flavouring... oh, a long, long time ago.

[larryhammer]

What about appropriate presence of New World crops?

---L.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

I find the appropriate presence of New World crops to be appropriate. For example, mahogany was found in Orkney before the discovery of the New World, because occasionally a tree would die, fall into the ocean, and drift on the Gulf Stream all the way to Britain. That's perfectly legitimate.

Fantasy worlds are not obliged to reflect the distribution of our own world's plant life, but it's more interesting and more true to pre-global societies if they don't have everything (and not just because the climate's wrong).

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Lack of a working economy.

[janni.livejournal.com]

This one bugs me more and more all the time.

[larryhammer]

And me.

---L.

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

Me too, but what does our lack of a working economy have to do with fantasy worldbuilding?

[janni.livejournal.com]

It's pricey to build worlds!

[larryhammer]

Just ask the Magratheans!

---L.

[borntofr4g.livejournal.com]

But only after they wake up from a few million(?) years of hypersleep.

I heart Douglas Adams.

[larryhammer]

It was millions of years, yeah.

Douglas Adams was one of those bright lights it was a shame to lose. Though he didn't shine as brightly as Jim Henson. ::still mourning::

---L.

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

Lots of good stuff is in this thread....

Things that annoy me include worlds where the climate doesn't change from place to place, where people travel from point A to point B across different countries and don't have any language problems, a lack of food intolerances and allergies (the Vikings ran into that one landing in North America, the "Skraelings" got acute indigestion because they couldn't digest milk product and the Vikings had been friendly and provided them milk-based comestibles to ingest, the Skraelings thought they were being intentionally poisoned, and attacked).

Regarding timing, hourglasses have been around for quite a while. Calibrations are, um, interesting. While modern clockworks are modern clockworks, there have been things like waterclocks for a long time, and China many centuries ago had some impressively accurate mechanical clocks. Alas, over time the knowledge of how to keep one particular large on running, and the principles that it worked on, were lost, and eventually the large clock disappeared/was dismantled, and the parts to it lost.

I got to see Sir Francis Drake's pocket calculator, a very impressive gold piece of equipment with at least half a dozen different instruments built into it for assisting with navigation (it was on display in the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, as part of a Great Age of Sail exhibition. There was a scale model of HMS Victory, and the larger-than-lifesize painting, The Death of Nelson. That thing is huge!

In a lot of cases people exercised more overt ingenuity and cluefulness doing technical tasks centuries ago, because they couldn't be lazy about things and call on the cellphone, send email, watch the weather report forecast developed with sophisticated computer models using satellite data... half a century ago "fifteen inched of partly cloudy" was the normal state of affairs. Today, people get hours, even days in advance warning of probably hurricane hits, allowing them to evacuate (assuming competent leadership who cares more about the wellbeing of the citizenry than their dinner reservations...) hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people from the threatened areas, meaning that while most of them possession might float away, they won't drown from floodwaters (again, that's assuming competent leadership. Calling Mr Brown an incompent ass is an insult to incompetents and jackasses...).

There's another thing--people don't necessarily act in their best interests, or act logically, and aren't consistent in real life. There are lots of hypocrites, and people who do thing out of mixed or confused motives, or who act without considering the ramifications of their actions. The stereotypical Evil Overlord ought to be in worse shape in a handful of years that North Korea is (where millions of people have starved to death because of political decisions and values), or Cambodia in the wake of Pol Pot's murderous depopulating the country of a third of its population.

[larryhammer]

Ooo -- I never think about intollerances and allergies. New meat proteins!

---L.

[hamadryad11.livejournal.com]

If you really want to use time to co-ordinate the attack, you could have something like "start the attack when the church bell rings matins" or something along those lines.

I do like the idea of getting away from time-based attack plans, though. If only because it would set the story apart, from all the other ones that didn't consider things like that. It would make it interesting for that reason.

[larryhammer]

I'm leaning that way. Though the church-bell idea is worth keeping in mind.

---L.

[hamadryad11.livejournal.com]

It would be awfully cool if you could figure out a believable way to devise some kind of elaborate, multi-pronged, co-ordinated, special-forces-type attack, given the limitations of a medieval-style world. Especially if it's done without telepathy, which is a bit of a cop-out, really.

[larryhammer]

Heh. I once wrote a story in which a special forces team rescues one of their own from the eighth circle of Dante's inferno. It was very bad, though, and more concerned with the bureaucracy of Hell.

---L.

[hamadryad11.livejournal.com]

Actually, that sounds pretty funny. I'm beginning to think that Hell resembles the average government agency (or possibly insurance company) more than we ever suspected before.

[larryhammer]

The Devil may have the best lines, but he also has the worst red tape.

---L.

[borntofr4g.livejournal.com]

I'm toying with the idea of writing a story where Hell finally runs out of room and starts having to outsource to the material world. =^D

[larryhammer]

A friend wrote that, actually. But I can think of a handful of other ways to tackle that premise, so I doubt your story would be at all the same. So go for it.

I'd be more likely to have Hades run out of room, myself, and start outsourcing to the afterlives of other religions, like the Great Wheel of Karma.

---L.

[borntofr4g.livejournal.com]

*retropost*

Let's see...In answer to the main topic, prettymuch any references that wouldn't make sense outside of 21st century Earth.

Examples I have witnessed from various sources, ranging from books to roleplays to movies to video/card/whatever games to what have you:

-Referring to someone as Einstein in a universe where the characters are not humans and humans don't even exist.
-Use of the word 'Hell'. If you don't have a place in the afterlife where wretched souls go to suffer for their deeds, then don't say the word. Period. I can take use of the word 'damn' in a religious, nongratuitous sense, though, if the character(s) in question using it have some sense of religion.
-Bug-like races of aliens being in the same 5-foot square of space as normal insects WITHOUT ANY REASON.

Those are the main ones that I recall.

[borntofr4g.livejournal.com]

Whoops, ixnay the last. I read the main post too fast and forgot it said FANTASY worldbuilding. =^/

[larryhammer]

'Sokay -- some people consider SF a subset of fantasy.

Using "hell" without a comparable religion bugs the heck out of me.

---L.