Possibilities in Space

It's Wednesday again...

Any good SF world must be understood as a possibility space. A universe which is characterized first and foremost by its physics:
By what is and isn't possible, and by how easy (or difficult) each of these non-impossible things are to do.

Once you have created the possibility space, you must extrapolate how the people in the world will exploit the possibilities. Because, you know, they're people. They are going to exploit it. Some of them, at least. That's what people are like.

I'll mostly be talking about science fiction in this post, but the principles I refer to are eminently applicable to fantasy as well.

Iain M. Banks

It's Wednesday again...

... and 3 days ago, one of my favourite SF authors, Iain M. Banks, died, age 59.

In this entry, I'll mostly talk about five of his science fiction novels, "Consider Phlebas", "Player of Games", "Use of Weapons", "Against a Dark Background" and "The Algebraist. The first three, as well as most of his later SF novels, take place in Banks' "Culture" universe, named after a humanoid post-scarcity communist utopia (although personally I'm more and more inclined to try to coin/promote the phrase post-maslowian, because "post-scarcity" gets very strong reactions from some people, and is also somewhat misleading).

If you just want to know where to start with his works, and want to read the rest of this blog at a later time, the standard recommendation, which I support, is to begin with either "Consider Phlebas" or "Player of Games" (the later available in a tolerable Danish translation).

Literature as a genre - asking questions of texts

It's Wednesday again...

Some of my dear readers may have noticed that I very often go out of my way to avoid using the term "literature", and instead talk about "written fiction". I'm not being eccentric, though. I have a point.

Literature is a genre all of its own, just like fantasy or science fiction or spy thrillers are.

On Knowledge

I know that today is a Wednesday

This is the first of two (or perhaps three) blog entries about the subject of knowledge, the way I deal with it, and some of my thoughts on it, such as one silly way that I see some other people dealing with it, knowledge of what to expect, common knowledge that is false, "levels" of knowledge, and so forth.

STP

It's Wednesday again...

In this blog entry, Jo Walton talks a bit about "incluing", a word she invented when she was in her teens, used for the (subtle and non-intrusive) way in which a fantasy or science fiction writer can convey important information to the reader about the world in which the story takes place.

She also provides a new and brilliant term, STP, from chemistry. It stands for "Standard temperature and pressure".

STP is about what's assumed to be normal. In chemistry, it is assumed that the experiment (or synthesis, or analysis) is conducted under "normal conditions", meaning a temperature not far from room temperature (20 degrees Celcius), and a pressure that's not far from 100'000 pascal. It's implicit, taken for granted. It's how it is unless stated otherwise.

When writing fantasy or science fiction, it is useful for the writer to think about what the STP for his world is, or what the STP is for particular in-world cultures (or for subcultures, or even for abnormal individuals) within that setting. What's considered normal? What's considered usual? What do they expect? What would surprise them?