I think of taboos generally as zones of discomfort. There are lots of them, and they vary depending on the culture. I mentioned them in my earlier post on humor, because a lot of humor centers around taboo borderlines of various kinds, including (but certainly not restricted to) body parts, bodily functions, illness and death, race, religion - the list goes on and on. I think the movie that was the most bipolar ever for me was Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, exactly because it took aim at so many body taboo borderlines. Thus, when I liked the jokes, I loved them - and when I didn't love them, I was appalled by them (stomach upset has never been something funny for me!).
Monty Python's parrot sketch played with death, but managed to avoid any of the gross-out aspects of the topic and instead played with euphemisms. I love euphemisms, so I guess it's no surprise that the line "If he hadn't been nailed to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies!" had me incapacitated with giggles. People think of lots of ways to talk around taboo subjects, and as time passes, they continue to have to find more, because the association of any given euphemism with a taboo topic effectively contaminates it over time. Think of the number of different names that have been given to toilets and the rooms in which they reside. Or think of the number of different names that have been given to former slave and immigrant peoples of the USA, which have then been tossed out and replaced with others as they were judged too derogatory.
When I was living in Japan with my husband a movie came out that portrayed the final days of someone with a terminal condition. The odd thing about this movie for us was that it was a comedy, and one of the main jokes was the fact that the guy was dying and his family couldn't tell him. I'll admit I was a little shocked by this. However, when we asked our friends we learned that in Japan, doctors will not tell patients that they are dying because it would be too upsetting; instead they tell the family so that they will be able to prepare. This is something that makes my gut go "no!" but from an anthropological point of view I can see how it would make sense culturally.
Taboos can result in a lot of cultural self-restriction. The area of technology leaps to mind, where the ethics of cloning and stem cell research play such a large role in determining where money goes, and thus where the technology goes next. Religious restrictions can have a deep influence in many areas of a culture - in Islamic art, for example, where the depiction of living beings (particularly humans) has been historically discouraged as blasphemous.
Taboo is rich territory for world and culture building. The planet of Garini in my story "Let the Word Take Me" had a religious taboo on the use of language. Many religions restrict the utterance of particular phrases or names, but in the Garini case the taboo applied to any free use of the language. Check out the July/August 2008 Analog magazine if you want to see how it worked; I don't want to give too many spoilers here. Frank Herbert (Dune) does a brilliant job of culture building with Arrakis and the treatment of water there, building in taboos on wastage that are treated with respect or disrespect by different power groups. Ursula LeGuin does some fascinating work with taboo in The Left Hand of Darkness when she creates a race of ambi-gendered humans (no time here to explain the exact details; go read it if you haven't) and builds folktales for them which elaborate on the kinds of taboos they might have, including for example incest and childbearing.
I encourage writers to think about the taboos of the cultures they create, because this can be a great way to give a culture extra dimension, to link its social groups in principled ways and to make it feel grounded in a physical environment.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
More about Technology
After my post yesterday about technology, fotsgreg and Bill Moonroe made some very interesting comments. Fotsgreg talked about how computers might develop in the future - and how their development might interact with human cultural development. Bill Moonroe mentioned how Hawaiians had developed quite deadly weapons made of wood and shark teeth when they had no metal of their own. These comments put me onto some other technology-related thoughts: specifically, the question of mature versus developing technologies, and the question of how cultures make use of existing technology and materials.
fotsgreg brought up the example of a plow to talk about mature technologies, the kind that have been developed to such an extent that their function can't be further enhanced. I agree with the plow example, inasmuch as the plowshare itself hasn't changed (though the vehicle propulsion connected to it has gone from horse to motor). The other example that leaps to my mind is eating utensils: knives and forks and spoons. We have shellfish forks and salad forks and dinner forks; forks made of wood, metal and plastic, but the basic shape of the fork hasn't changed in a long while. Similarly with knives and spoons - and with chopsticks. Again, lots of styles and materials, but the objects and their function are very mature.
That is a huge contrast with things like computers, for which the function keeps developing along with the form. Computers are a lot more complex than forks, of course. I'd say that makes complex things more likely to continue developing, because more different elements of them can be changed and improved. But with most technologies, there will come a point of slowdown in development - and probably, this point of slowdown will have a lot to do with people's perception of the role of that object in their lives. As fotsgreg mentioned, there's a point in the development of computers where it gets Frankensteinian, the interface of the computer with the organism/brain. Is this where the development stops? Maybe - but it depends on the resilience of the technology and its potential benefits, and how people perceive those in contrast to its ethical disadvantages.
In terms of worldbuilding, I think technology is a lot freer than people think. Take Bill Moonroe's example of the shark-tooth weapon, or the weapons of the Aztecs that my friend T.L. Morganfield uses in her work - wooden swords with cutting blades made of obsidian. Of course, if you are starting with technology as it exists today and extrapolating into the future, that does place some constraints on what you can do. On the other hand, even the technology that we use today is not fixed in its significance or its utility.
When I first visited Japan, I had the naive idea that Japanese technology involved lots of cool black boxes for audio and video - natural, I guess, since I'd seen a lot of such things that were made in Japan. But when I got there, it took me more than four months before I met anyone who had a sophisticated audio system. Technology in Japan has different areas of slow and fast advance because of the nature of the environment. Here are some examples.
1. Ovens
Very few people have ovens in Japan, because the cuisine there doesn't call for them. Only someone interested in making Western-style food would own an oven. My first host family didn't have one at all; my second family had one, but never used it. Ovens are also prohibitively big for most Japanese homes. When I lived in my own apartment I had an oven, but it was the smallest oven I had ever seen - you could just fit a whole chicken in it. A countertop toaster oven would be far more practical for most people.
2. Dishwashers
The lovely couple who lived upstairs from our apartment in Tokyo had a dishwasher. It sat on their countertop, and looked almost like a toaster oven, but larger - literally, the thing was just large enough in height and depth to hold a single large dinner plate. Theoretically, it could contain eight or twelve dinner plates in a row. You would of course have to run it for those and then for the glasses separately. And then the pots and anything else particularly large would be cleaned the normal way, in the sink.
3. Audio equipment
As I mentioned above, not everyone in Japan has audio equipment. The fact that I was surprised by this is probably a testament to my naivete more than anything else, because of course not everyone can afford an expensive sound system. On the other hand, Japan has a culture of frugality that might make people less likely to spend precious money (and space!!) in this area. I'd be interested to hear about sales of iPod-like technology there.
4. Mobile/Cell phones
When I was living in Japan in 2000-2001, already everyone had cell phones. They were unbelievably tiny, and you could type into them in Japanese characters by using combinations of keystrokes. (They called texters the "oyayubizoku" or "thumb tribe.") And you could use cell phones to go on the internet, at a cost of 3 yen per click. Super-advanced! Here in the US we're only seeing quite recently what I was seeing in Japan back then - because cell phones are extremely well-suited to the Japanese environment. High density living, no space for a large computer (home desktop computers are much less common there), and to top it all off, no street names! All of these factors combine to make internet-ready cell phones an ideal technology. Before we left, it was possible to take a cell phone, go onto the internet, and ask it to tell you the location of the nearest 7-11 convenience store, with directions on how to get there.
So, what about if you're worldbuilding? I guess my first thought would be as follows: when you pick technologies, make them fit together in an ecologically and culturally natural set - but don't get bogged down in the assumptions that are natural to our own ecology and culture. Considerations like space and money can make big changes in the use of an existing technology set, and some environments will encourage the fast development of specialized technologies, like the cell phone in Tokyo. Free your mind a little bit, just for fun, and play around with the basic parameters of the environment, asking yourself exactly how such considerations might influence the use of technology. Then you'll be in for a lot of fun.
fotsgreg brought up the example of a plow to talk about mature technologies, the kind that have been developed to such an extent that their function can't be further enhanced. I agree with the plow example, inasmuch as the plowshare itself hasn't changed (though the vehicle propulsion connected to it has gone from horse to motor). The other example that leaps to my mind is eating utensils: knives and forks and spoons. We have shellfish forks and salad forks and dinner forks; forks made of wood, metal and plastic, but the basic shape of the fork hasn't changed in a long while. Similarly with knives and spoons - and with chopsticks. Again, lots of styles and materials, but the objects and their function are very mature.
That is a huge contrast with things like computers, for which the function keeps developing along with the form. Computers are a lot more complex than forks, of course. I'd say that makes complex things more likely to continue developing, because more different elements of them can be changed and improved. But with most technologies, there will come a point of slowdown in development - and probably, this point of slowdown will have a lot to do with people's perception of the role of that object in their lives. As fotsgreg mentioned, there's a point in the development of computers where it gets Frankensteinian, the interface of the computer with the organism/brain. Is this where the development stops? Maybe - but it depends on the resilience of the technology and its potential benefits, and how people perceive those in contrast to its ethical disadvantages.
In terms of worldbuilding, I think technology is a lot freer than people think. Take Bill Moonroe's example of the shark-tooth weapon, or the weapons of the Aztecs that my friend T.L. Morganfield uses in her work - wooden swords with cutting blades made of obsidian. Of course, if you are starting with technology as it exists today and extrapolating into the future, that does place some constraints on what you can do. On the other hand, even the technology that we use today is not fixed in its significance or its utility.
When I first visited Japan, I had the naive idea that Japanese technology involved lots of cool black boxes for audio and video - natural, I guess, since I'd seen a lot of such things that were made in Japan. But when I got there, it took me more than four months before I met anyone who had a sophisticated audio system. Technology in Japan has different areas of slow and fast advance because of the nature of the environment. Here are some examples.
1. Ovens
Very few people have ovens in Japan, because the cuisine there doesn't call for them. Only someone interested in making Western-style food would own an oven. My first host family didn't have one at all; my second family had one, but never used it. Ovens are also prohibitively big for most Japanese homes. When I lived in my own apartment I had an oven, but it was the smallest oven I had ever seen - you could just fit a whole chicken in it. A countertop toaster oven would be far more practical for most people.
2. Dishwashers
The lovely couple who lived upstairs from our apartment in Tokyo had a dishwasher. It sat on their countertop, and looked almost like a toaster oven, but larger - literally, the thing was just large enough in height and depth to hold a single large dinner plate. Theoretically, it could contain eight or twelve dinner plates in a row. You would of course have to run it for those and then for the glasses separately. And then the pots and anything else particularly large would be cleaned the normal way, in the sink.
3. Audio equipment
As I mentioned above, not everyone in Japan has audio equipment. The fact that I was surprised by this is probably a testament to my naivete more than anything else, because of course not everyone can afford an expensive sound system. On the other hand, Japan has a culture of frugality that might make people less likely to spend precious money (and space!!) in this area. I'd be interested to hear about sales of iPod-like technology there.
4. Mobile/Cell phones
When I was living in Japan in 2000-2001, already everyone had cell phones. They were unbelievably tiny, and you could type into them in Japanese characters by using combinations of keystrokes. (They called texters the "oyayubizoku" or "thumb tribe.") And you could use cell phones to go on the internet, at a cost of 3 yen per click. Super-advanced! Here in the US we're only seeing quite recently what I was seeing in Japan back then - because cell phones are extremely well-suited to the Japanese environment. High density living, no space for a large computer (home desktop computers are much less common there), and to top it all off, no street names! All of these factors combine to make internet-ready cell phones an ideal technology. Before we left, it was possible to take a cell phone, go onto the internet, and ask it to tell you the location of the nearest 7-11 convenience store, with directions on how to get there.
So, what about if you're worldbuilding? I guess my first thought would be as follows: when you pick technologies, make them fit together in an ecologically and culturally natural set - but don't get bogged down in the assumptions that are natural to our own ecology and culture. Considerations like space and money can make big changes in the use of an existing technology set, and some environments will encourage the fast development of specialized technologies, like the cell phone in Tokyo. Free your mind a little bit, just for fun, and play around with the basic parameters of the environment, asking yourself exactly how such considerations might influence the use of technology. Then you'll be in for a lot of fun.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Does your technology form a set?
I made it back from Chicago only to find that my home internet was performing intermittently - and nearly screamed. It's funny to think how much I've come to rely on it.
When I was a kid my dad used to bring home boxes of punch cards that he used for the computers at his university. We had a PET computer in my elementary school, and we had a Victor at home for a while, and I did college on a Mac Classic... I remember when email and newsgroups first started to be a big thing, and started sucking up everybody's time!
Now the internet is established and has developed its own culture, language and dialects - just look at how email language differs from spoken language or from letter-writing, or how texting has given us a whole new way to alter our own language. The Acronyms are taking over! Maybe I should create an alien species to that effect; sort of has a Doctor Who vibe.
All this has me thinking about technology and how it's used in worldbuilding for both fantasy and science fiction. I wonder how many authors, when creating a world, intentionally choose what I call a "technology set." A technology set is a complex collection of interrelated technologies that exist together in a given society. "Bronze age culture" might be one type of technology set - generally within a set the presence of one type of artifact automatically means that others are present as well. A bronze knife depends on the presence of mining technology, for example - but it doesn't necessarily entail the existence of bronze armor, which requires much more bronze, and techniques for creating the armor shape. A matter-transmitter device depends on highly sophisticated computers, and would entail that other types of transmitters exist also.
But that brings me to a question: when are the links between technologies necessary, and when aren't they? For example, does the presence of antigravity transportation automatically mean that computers exist in the form that we know?
The evolution of technology begins with basic ingredients of environment and materials, then interacts with culture - what activities are considered important. As it grows from there, culture and technology inform one another. An example: military tanks were invented as a concept, then built, and thereafter it took a while for military strategists to develop a fully mature way of using them.
I was impressed with the transport doorways in Dan Simmons' Hyperion books because they were used in a way that seemed mature: if you have a cheap way to make a door that opens in one place and lets out in another, then why not have a home that exists in seven different scenic locations at once? (Better yet, Simmons uses these doorways integrally in his plot!)
I don't think it would take much for technology to diverge from our own historical path, and once it diverged, it could head in all kinds of unusual directions. I'm very willing to believe that an unusual technology set will work, provided that each element of it is grounded in solid reasoning - reasoning based on materials, culture, travel, early adoption of technology from other races, exhaustion of resources, etc. etc.
Now I'm hoping my internet holds up so I can get back to my routine with TTYU...
When I was a kid my dad used to bring home boxes of punch cards that he used for the computers at his university. We had a PET computer in my elementary school, and we had a Victor at home for a while, and I did college on a Mac Classic... I remember when email and newsgroups first started to be a big thing, and started sucking up everybody's time!
Now the internet is established and has developed its own culture, language and dialects - just look at how email language differs from spoken language or from letter-writing, or how texting has given us a whole new way to alter our own language. The Acronyms are taking over! Maybe I should create an alien species to that effect; sort of has a Doctor Who vibe.
All this has me thinking about technology and how it's used in worldbuilding for both fantasy and science fiction. I wonder how many authors, when creating a world, intentionally choose what I call a "technology set." A technology set is a complex collection of interrelated technologies that exist together in a given society. "Bronze age culture" might be one type of technology set - generally within a set the presence of one type of artifact automatically means that others are present as well. A bronze knife depends on the presence of mining technology, for example - but it doesn't necessarily entail the existence of bronze armor, which requires much more bronze, and techniques for creating the armor shape. A matter-transmitter device depends on highly sophisticated computers, and would entail that other types of transmitters exist also.
But that brings me to a question: when are the links between technologies necessary, and when aren't they? For example, does the presence of antigravity transportation automatically mean that computers exist in the form that we know?
The evolution of technology begins with basic ingredients of environment and materials, then interacts with culture - what activities are considered important. As it grows from there, culture and technology inform one another. An example: military tanks were invented as a concept, then built, and thereafter it took a while for military strategists to develop a fully mature way of using them.
I was impressed with the transport doorways in Dan Simmons' Hyperion books because they were used in a way that seemed mature: if you have a cheap way to make a door that opens in one place and lets out in another, then why not have a home that exists in seven different scenic locations at once? (Better yet, Simmons uses these doorways integrally in his plot!)
I don't think it would take much for technology to diverge from our own historical path, and once it diverged, it could head in all kinds of unusual directions. I'm very willing to believe that an unusual technology set will work, provided that each element of it is grounded in solid reasoning - reasoning based on materials, culture, travel, early adoption of technology from other races, exhaustion of resources, etc. etc.
Now I'm hoping my internet holds up so I can get back to my routine with TTYU...
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Thinking about Travel
Well, my family and I are heading back to California after two fantastic weeks in Chicago, and since we'll be taking an airplane tomorrow, I'm thinking about travel. In particular, how people think about distances - because distance is astonishingly subjective.
People who don't travel much tend to find the idea of travel intimidating, while people who travel a lot often believe it's no big deal. For many of my friends who live in the San Francisco Bay area, driving half an hour to get somewhere feels like almost nothing - but I know plenty of people elsewhere who would think that was too great an expenditure of time and resources.
Since my husband is Australian, we travel to Australia every two years or so to see family, and of course we take our children with us. Many people have asked me if it's horrible and difficult to take a plane for fifteen hours with two children under the age of four, and the answer is, yes but no. Sure there are bad times, but we do it because we need to do it, and we find ways of making it work. I have two friends who travel on multiple-leg journeys to India or Pakistan and back with children in tow, and that seems a much harder journey to me (but then again, I've never tried it).
Between different countries, the conception of distance can vary a lot. In SF Bay area, an hour's drive will take you at least fifty miles. In Tokyo, an hour's drive won't take you anywhere near that far, because driving conditions are so utterly different. When I lived in Tokyo for the first time, I was routinely half an hour late for everything, because I just had no way of calculating how long it would take me to get from point A to point B by subway. And when later my husband and I took a walk along the Tokyo surface roads, we discovered that the distance between subway stations is amazingly short. I would never have imagined we could walk from Roppongi nightclub district all the way to Gotanda station, but when we tried it we made the distance in under two hours! Conversely, my Japanese friends have been rather shocked to learn the travel time required between cities in California or Australia, because they believed unconsciously that these places were closer together, something on the same scale as Japan's main island of Honshu.
The same thing happens in science fiction and fantasy. You get everything from Strider and the hobbits walking on foot through Middle Earth to faster-than-light travel or even instantaneous matter transmission (beam me up!). Middle Earth always feels very big to me, and I feel I know the geography well. I'll compare it to my concept of the city of Kyoto Japan (where I lived for a year): I always walked or rode my bicycle there, so I had a full concept of the entire area I traveled, and quite detailed knowledge of places in between. In space travel stories, local geography can sometimes seem an afterthought - or maybe not so much an afterthought as a highly local-point phenomenon. Kind of like my concept of Tokyo, which was based primarily on the subway system's twists and turns, and involved circular footprints of familiarity above particular subway stations. I always described it as a mushroom farm: lots of disconnected fungus-tops with all their links underneath the ground.
And how does this relate to worldbuilding?
Well, it's one of those logistics things that can cause trouble. If you don't know how long it's going to take someone to travel a given distance, the world can feel ungrounded, so you definitely want to know how travel works and how long it takes. But additional world details can change travel dramatically. Here I think of Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and how Genly Ai and Estraven calculated the time needed for their travel across the Gobrin Ice, but then local conditions of ice, volcanoes, crevasses, blizzards etc. totally changed the calculations as they went.
In my own worldbuilding experience I had a travel-related surprise when I designed the city of Pelismara, in Varin. Pelismara is a largish city with a population of about 800,000 people. In order not to have an unreasonable population density, it needed quite a bit of area, but conditions of travel were unusual because Pelismara is an underground city with five levels. The levels gave me the necessary area for the population, but their vertical relation and multiple interconnections made travel far easier than expected. The level with the largest area is in fact only five miles in diameter - and this means that major portions of the city can be walked relatively easily (if you're willing to climb a lot of steps!).
I'll end this post because I need to get some sleep before my trip. It will be great to get back to my regular routines - I don't know if I'll have time or energy to write tomorrow evening, but certainly by Tuesday I'll be back to the blog.
I'm looking forward to it!
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