New Worlds, Year Five

Marie Brennan

Description

In science fiction and fantasy, anything can provide color and conflict -- from soldiers, to schools, to shops, to sexuality. Continuing her comprehensive NEW WORLDS series of worldbuilding guides, award-winning fantasy author and former anthropologist Marie Brennan takes a deep dive into monarchy and democracy, natural disasters, warfare, gender, and the subtleties of language variation both in the world and on the page.This volume collects essays from the fifth year of the New Worlds Patreon.

Sujets

• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Book View Cafe
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781636320472
• Langue: English

Extrait

New Worlds, Year Five
A Writer’s Guide to the Art of Worldbuilding
Marie Brennan

Published by Book View Café
www.bookviewcafe.com
ISBN: 978-1-63632-047-2
Copyright © 2022 by Marie Brennan
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Cover art by sakkmesterke
Cover design by Pati Nagle
Table of Contents
Introduction
There Can Be Only One
Royal Dignity
Autocrats, Dictators, and Tyrants
Next in Line
Approaches to Democracy
The Right to Vote
Parliaments and Presidents
Political Factions
Interpersonal Violence
Family Feud
Hostages and Ransoms
If You’ll Be My Bodyguard
Military Types
Where Do Armies Come From?
How to Make a Soldier
Women in War
Sex and Gender: What Is Sex?
Sex and Gender: What Is Gender?
Male and Female
Beyond the Binary
Sexual Orientation
Homosexuality
Sexual Behavior
Sexual Misbehavior
Off to Market
Come Buy, Come Buy
Let’s Go Shopping!
Bargaining Chips
Fuel for the Fire
A Light to Live By
Staying Warm
Keeping Cool
Emergency Medical Services
Fighting Fire
Fire Prevention
Disaster Relief
Early Childhood Education
Apprentice, Journeyman, Master
Time for School
Higher Education
Oral Storytelling
Literary Storytelling
Poetry
Copyright and Intellectual Property
Multilingualism and Lingua Francas
Dialects, Pidgins, and Creoles
Sign Languages
The Games Languages Play
Language Variance on the Page
Fantastical Language
The Subtle Art of Naming
The Pace of Change
Afterword
About Marie Brennan
Other Books by Marie Brennan
About Book View Cafe
Introduction
As the New Worlds Patreon concludes its fifth year, I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be done.
The answer to that is “yes,” of course. Although the variation and complexity of human culture is truly endless, there’s a point of diminishing returns, where my essays will get so far into the weeds that they cease to be of any practical use to most writers or readers. (Case in point: will I ever write an essay about weeds? Probably not. Though admittedly, my list of potential future topics does include “invasive species,” so…)
This year’s collection is a remarkably coherent one. You see, patrons at a certain level and above get to vote on what I should write about each month, and sometimes those votes go in unexpected directions. Then when it comes time for me to reorganize the year’s essays into a book, I have to make what sense I can out of their ordering. Some years make that easier than others. This was an easy one, with the material sorting itself into a couple of fairly smooth blocks, and only a few hairpin turns in a new direction.
But this year’s collection also comes with a few warnings. Because it, too, is a part of human culture, sex gets some rather frank discussion here—including sexual crimes. Those essays are easy to spot and avoid if you wish to, but I felt it would be dishonest not to address things like how rape gets conceptualized and responded to in the real world, and how it gets represented in fiction.
It’s not all trigger warnings up in here, though. We start out with monarchical and democratic governments, segue through interpersonal violence and war, and look at various aspects of gender; then it’s time for some of those hairpin turns with commerce and emergency services, followed by a run through education to the literary arts and language itself. The “theory” essays this time around are mostly focused on language, looking at how we present different kinds of variation on the page, before wrapping up with the question of how rapidly fictional societies should change.
I continue to be indebted to my patrons, whose support has allowed me to spend five years and counting chewing my way through the elephantine subject that is “worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy,” one bite at a time. To become one of those supporters, head over to my Patreon page ! All patrons receive a weekly photo from my travels (which I theme to that essay when I can), and this year I’ve also instituted monthly reviews of interesting and worldbuilding-relevant nonfiction works. At higher tiers you get rewards like ebooks, access to the aforementioned topic polls, and bonus essays that show you the process by which I make worldbuilding decisions for my own novels and short fiction. Those last have included looks at the Memoirs of Lady Trent, the Rook and Rose trilogy (written with my friend Alyc Helms under the name M.A. Carrick), and some as yet unpublished projects.
Thank you all for your interest in and support of this series! Let’s get worldbuilding.
There Can Be Only One
(5/7/21)
Monarchies are everywhere in speculative fiction. In fantasy they’re by far the most common type of government—which makes sense; if you look at real history, you’ll see vastly more monarchies than any rival type, and fantasy often draws its inspiration from history. But they’re common in science fiction as well, where they can lend a sense of grandeur or exoticism to the civilizations of far-flung stars.
Some people argue this is because SF/F readers and writers are nostalgic for the “good ol’ days” of kings and queens. I’m not convinced that’s the reason. While there may be cases where that’s true, I think the bigger point is that we find monarchy narratively interesting .
It’s different from the kind of government most of us live under (especially since those countries that still possess monarchs have in many cases reduced them to a largely ceremonial role), and SF/F loves exploring those kinds of differences. Moreover—and I say this as someone who’s written a novel that dealt closely with the wranglings of the seventeenth-century English Parliament—it lends itself more readily to storytelling.
The whole concept of monarchy is that it puts a single human being at the focal point of political power. While that individual’s power isn’t limitless, even in an absolute monarchy, their personality, their history, their fears and whims and their relationships with the people around them all shape the course of the state to a high degree. That’s a lot more congenial for conventional narrative than trying to explain how ten people making deals with fifty others garnered enough support in committee for a vote to pass.
Monarchy is literally “rule by one.” That puts it semantically very close to “autocracy,” which derives from the Greek roots for “self” and “power;” both imply that a single person is calling the shots. In practice, the two form something of a Venn diagram, with their point of overlap being absolute monarchy (more on that in a bit), while monarchy without autocracy slides toward the constitutional end of its spectrum, and autocracy without monarchy can be found in situations like dictatorships.
But doesn’t a single person rule in a dictatorship? What distinguishes that—or even something like a president or prime minister, who can also be the sole executive of their state—from a monarch? Generally we say it’s the role of heredity…but there are elective monarchies, including ones where the title is only bestowed for a limited amount of time, while the dictatorial rule of North Korea has been passed from Kim Il-sung to his son Kim Jong-il to a third generation in Kim Jong-un. In the end, the definitions are more flexible than you might think, with the precise terminology being based on tradition and the optics of how you want to present your rule to the world. And of course the specific titles given to a monarch differ from society to society: king, emperor, rey, tsar, pharaoh, oba, caliph, raja, tennō, sovereign prince, and so forth.
Hereditary monarchies do tend to be the most common type, though, and later we’ll look at the topic of succession (which dovetails somewhat with the overall question of inheritance in society). Because it’s common, most readers are likely familiar with the general concept, especially the form where the king’s eldest son inherits. How does elective monarchy work, though?
As in a democracy, the first question is who does the electing—but the answer is basically never “the common people.” The sovereign is usually chosen by the elite, whether that be military leaders, hereditary aristocrats, or other powerful groups. The Catholic papacy, the oldest elective monarchy still in existence, is bestowed through a vote by the College of Cardinals. (Quite a lot of Catholic offices are elective, which makes sense for an ecclesiastical community that is at least theoretically celibate.)
Although the hereditary form is the dominant one, election was far more common historically than most of us think, in multiple parts of the world: the Mongolian Great Khan, the Aztec Tlatoani, the Ashanti Asantehene, and others were or are all elected. But calling the office “elective” often obscures a muddier reality: in many cases the only eligible candidates are the children of the previous sovereign, or otherwise members of the royal lineage. Even if the position is supposedly open to any member of the elite, a strong ruling family can muster enough support to make the election a mere formality: for a fairly recent example of this, one only has to look at the Habsburgs, who held the “elective” throne of the Holy Roman Empire for three centuries straight. Their predecessors over in Byzantium learned to game the system by declaring their desired heir co-emperor, so that upon their own death the throne was not empty and there was no need for an election. By such means does an elective monarchy gradually slide toward being hereditary.
The loss of real leverage by electors goes hand-in-hand with the general consolidation of power in sovereign hands. In many early states, monarchs simply didn’t have the power to rule without making concessions to and compromises with local magnates, of which election to the throne could be one. But as centralized power grows, the monarchy grows more absolu