Educational Backstory: avoiding arbitrary superpowers

Have you ever noticed how characters in science fiction and fantasy seem to have superpowers? I'm not even talking about the superhero type. I mean special skills - things that nobody else can do, that usually make these people indispensable to the plot. To pull from David Eddings, maybe one guy can steal anything and speak a secret sign language, maybe another can turn into a bear, maybe another never gets scared, etc. The nice thing about Eddings' characters is that he usually has a personal history for the character which explains their terrific strengths (and peculiar weaknesses).

This is really important.

A character who can do unusual things is really great, even if it's something as subtle as being graceful in movement. But without grounding, those special skills can seem arbitrary. When you look at actual superheroes, one of the coolest things about them is that they have special origin stories. Even the X-men's relatively arbitrary powers are grounded in a general tendency for human mutation.

So think through how your character got to be this way. Does she fight well because she was trained in kung fu? Does he have strong arms because he was apprenticed to the blacksmith? Does he know about lightspeed physics because he's a professor, or the ship's engineer? Does he know about linguistics in spite of his young age because he's the son of a famous linguist?

One of the things I always enjoyed about the character Pazu from Miyazaki's film, Castle in the Sky, was that he was a miner. As the movie starts, you see him hefting heavy weights and crawling all over (and repairing) these massive steam engines that bring the miners up from the tunnels below. You also see him being comfortable in dark tunnels - and all this seems perfectly natural. Then later when he's volunteering to repair the engine of a pirate's airship, climbing like crazy over the outside of the actual castle in the sky, and running through the dark tunnels inside it, you have no problem with any of it. You've seen him do it before, and it all works.

This is one of those instances where you can make your world personal. Think about your character's educational background. Is it based in experience? What kind? Is it based in institutionalized education? What kind of people does your character admire as mentors or teachers, and why?

You can even take it a little further - ask yourself what ideologies might come along with your character's experience or education. Was the master abusive, inadvertently teaching hatred of his social group? Did the teacher rescue the student from poverty or some other social situation, leading the student to adopt similar social views? Did the institution teach larger social values, or the values of the particular social group it serves?

Explore the possibilities.

Politics, Religion, and Pets

My friend Ann Wilkes was telling me recently that she never blogs about three topics if she can help it: politics, religion, and pets. I agreed with her, and then realized when you're doing a blog like this one, the topics are fair game - the only trick is not to localize them. So today for fun I'm going to share a couple of my thoughts on politics, religion, and pets (thanks, Ann!).

Politics:
Why are there so many dictatorships in SF/F? Maybe it has to do with the prevalence of medieval cultural models. I'm certainly not immune - I've come up with some of these types of societies. But the ones I think are more interesting are ones where the authors have really delved into what a monarchy means and how it influences society, or ones where monarchy is only one of the options in the world. I like Jacqueline Carey's fantasy Europe, for example, because she maintains differences in governments that parallel the those of the nations she's fantasizing. And of course I like Ursula LeGuin's approach. The Left Hand of Darkness has two major models, one a monarchy and the other a "commensality" that feels a lot like a communist state. In her Earthsea books she has multiple different types of governments depending on their location in the archipelago. If you're designing a society yourself, I encourage you to ask yourself why the rich are rich, and how they get their money. There are a lot more options out there than one.

Religion:
I usually think of religion in created worlds as a tool. A really, really useful one too. It helps you figure out how people swear (or not). It helps you figure out what kind of activities are taboo. It also helps to link people with their local climate and means of feeding themselves. Even more importantly, I think, it helps you figure out some really basic metaphors that people use to understand their world - because religion is full of symbols. Unity. Duality. Trinity. Multiplicity - it all depends on where you look. You can have a group of gods who bicker like family. Or two groups of warring gods. Or an omnipotent God who is tyrannical, or one who is merciful, and that difference will completely change how his/her/its followers think. Does life end with going to heaven? What do you have to do to get there? Are you looking forward to being sacrificed on the altar? My friend Aliette de Bodard had a great moment in one of her pieces where a person headed off to be sacrificed (rather gruesomely, I might add) was impatient with the protagonists for blocking his way. That is one of the kinds of moments that you always remember. Be it fantasy or science fiction, the more people act in accordance with their localized world view, the more I love it.

Pets:
I actually had a funny moment recently where I had to figure out if members of an alien society I was designing kept pets. The part that made it hard was, these guys are carnivores. I thought at first, why would they keep pets and not eat them? But on the other hand, they're social creatures; they might well keep pets to combat loneliness, for example. People do keep pet rabbits even in places where they are regularly eaten. So the final result was, I decided that some of them might keep pets.

Then there was yesterday, when my kids got their National Geographic Kids magazine and we were reading snippets about amazing cats (part of their Halloween themed issue). My daughter loved it, and so did my son - different cats, for different reasons. Animals are so much a part of our consciousness, even if they're not a part of our daily lives, that the first words we learn in children's books are things like "cow," "horse," "bear," "lion," etc. The list goes on and on, though we may never see these creatures in the wild in our entire lives. What, then, would be the significance of animals to a fantasy or alien group? What kind of behavior would be associated with each? Would fantasy people automatically say that foxes are crafty and snakes loathsome and sneaky, just as we do? I'm not sure.

It's something to think about.

Does my character believe in his own values?

Well, so the cable guy has been and gone, and I'm online again. What a relief!

Today's topic is "values" - a.k.a. ideology or belief systems - and how they show up in characters. This is a particular pet peeve of mine, for two reasons. First, I see far too many stories in which characters run true to type - that whole thing where a character is (for example) a dwarf, so he believes in all the things dwarves do and acts like a dwarf in every way. Second, I see many stories in which characters will posture their beliefs by declaring them, either aloud or in internalization. This is the type where an oppressed character will say a la Monty Python, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" (In fact, dougsha mentioned this when I last talked about repressed characters.)

I had this moment while reading the Lord of the Rings, where I'd gotten through Fellowship and started into The Two Towers, and suddenly I felt like I'd seen Tolkien learn something - dare I say, much in the way I learn things as I continue to write in a world. In The Two Towers, Legolas goes beyond just acting his role in the main plot, and starts to make occasional offhand comments about what babies Gimli and Aragorn are. Have you ever noticed this? Suddenly he stops being a plot-contributor in the body of an elf, and starts dropping hints that yes, he really has been alive since the beginning of time!

When you believe in something, you don't usually go around declaring it to everyone you know, but what you believe shows in everything you do, like the diet you eat, or the way you treat objects, and how you define categories of people around you. Belief systems can give a character more than something to say. They can give him or her a way of moving. Of dressing. Of speaking. A belief system very often provides a set of metaphors by which that person understands everything in the world around.

Religion is only the obvious example. There are also cultural value sets - and when you're designing your world, don't forget that a population can contain multiple cultural groups, or that within cultural groups, people can enact their beliefs in different ways. They can even oppose the predominant model of their cultural group, like a man who wants to start a liberating revolution. But even as he opposes the value system, he will still think in its terms, using its metaphors, and accepting some of its basic assumptions while he rejects others.

I'm out of time for this morning, but this has given me some ideas of where to go next. Let me know if you have a favorite SF character who comes across as really grounded, because I'm thinking of taking on some examples and breaking them down.