New BookTube up! 🎉
This Story Crit goes further than its analysis of two Voyager episodes done right; it reflects on the tension in our writing on the past and the future between small-c conservative thinking, and the ability to deepen in empathy.
Hope you enjoy!
This one is my first outing with a filter that clears up background, but also adds a gravelly component to my voice. Still deciding if I like it enough to use for the audiobook.
Also for our future chat, @BosmangBeratna: what makes for small-c conservative storytelling in your game/fic spheres, and what codes narratively for more expansive thinking even within an expressly hard-SF milieu?
(Have you read Derek Künsken's The House of Styx, by the by? Canadian hard SF imagining a Venus colonized by Québécois separatists - and a *solid* balancing act of hard SF concepts with creative thinking about how family, community, and art would develop on such an unforgiving world.)
Small-c tropes are everywhere in sci-fi, and usually embodied in the political machinations of any given faction, but give way to larger (more insidious and ) autocratic ideals. Anderson Dawes is a fantastic example of small-c ideology that's overshadowed by vapid populist rhetoric (Inaros' movement/contingent).
World-building techniques, chiefly, deliver those coded messages most efficaciously.
Star Wars does this, through minimal handholding managed by context. Most people can figure out quite quickly, through that context, what a 'Droid is.'
These vehicles help to immerse us into a new, fantastical world, where the constraints of our present ideological boundaries can safely (and wildly) be explored.
Keeping things 'grounded' with minimal hand-wavery tends to be a very impactful mechanism.
I'm about halfway through my intended reply and haven't answered your question lol just finishing up lunch
I'm in a writing window just now, so noooo problem! Reading and loving it, and looking forward to the rest. Hope your day's banging!