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!
Any series with a libertarian-esque protagonist is privy to the pitfalls (and similar tropes). In many instances, tropes are so recycled, we come to expect them in sci-fi at large:
- greater individual autonomy (freedom to visit uncharted territory, lawless vs lawful expressions of governance)
- unified purpose (presence of an Empire or Republic, Federation, et al)
- homogenous expression within sects/groups (usually historied)
- clear demarcation of ideological adherents ...
Everything tends to be rather 'neat and tidy,' which sets a simplified stage for the thematic choices to play out. Storyboarded conflicts either emulate the messes of history to great effect, thus rendering them almost indistinguishable from fiction, or fall woefully flat, laying bare authors' true intent.
Not to say many authors don't use that to their advantage, but it's plain to see an author's leanings IMO, especially in fiction, as it's usually conveyed in the first scenes.
With that said, I think the chief vehicles for those narratives (or explorations thereof) tend to be explored via interactions with the world/universe's systems, as opposed to its peoples.
The Force's nature belies balance, and thus no admonishment beyond that arbitrated by the established freedom fighters and beleaguered peoples of the once republic. It isn't natural law that the sith are 'wrong.' They're a function of the system, one that cannot be changed, only balanced.
The pretext for 'justice' and balance, and the exploration of those themes, is inherent on the positioning of those disparate groups in the first few scenes.
Not at all too long! Lots of great notes here that I was waiting for a spare moment to gather in a working document. :) Haven't forgotten this. Solid stuff, and *amazing* brain candy from one writer to another. Hope your week's faring well!
Thank you for appreciating my brain-leakings. Lol 💜
@MLClark
You've given me pause, as I've 'the words for it,' just not readily available.
And 'ooooo!'I've not read that author, but that made a swift entry into my list of must reads. I'll be back after I ruminate. 💜