[ SECRET POST #2980 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2980 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Lots of multiple secrets in one comment this week, throwing off the count!

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 083 secrets from Secret Submission Post #426.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Worldbuilding

[cbrachyrhynchos]

It depends entirely on the kind of story you want to tell. I just finished Blindsight by Peter Watts and Player of Games by Ian Banks. Both contain tons of internal narrative about how augmented, post-human, engineered characters think through problems that would stump us lowly evolutionary human beings.

The economic systems of those worlds? Blah blah blah post-scarcity blah blah blah AI blah blah blah post-scarcity wibbly wobbly fuck that's not a moon, it's a spaceship/habitat!

Similarly Chip Delany, one of the masters of the art, packed Babel-17 full of poetic inquiry, theory of mind, and Sapir-Worf. The mechanics of how the undead members of his crew work is left as handwavium.

IMSHO, you need to think through the implications of your big idea and characters and consider how much of the rest can be kept safely off-stage. If none of your characters are going to give a shit about astrology, you don't need to worry about constellations (which might not matter if you have spaceflight anyway). If your characters live in a post-scarcity society where their basic needs can be obtained from the nearest replicator, you don't need to fiddle around with personal finance. If your character's boots never touch the soil, they might not know the mechanics of farming.

Re: Worldbuilding

[(Anonymous)]

Oh god that sounds like fun to read, haha.

In my opinion... I think it's okay to know more details about the world than you actually include in the story. So that it makes sense when you're writing, but you don't always have to tell the readers everything and infodump everywhere.

Re: Worldbuilding

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Watts is often guilty of the infodump. The narrator of Blindsight is the post-human zombie embedded reporter (more or less), which offers plenty of excuses for the other post-humans on the ship's crew to monologue at him about just about everything. Still, it's a nice break from lumpy-forehead aliens, and Watts is one of a few hard sci-fi authors who don't read like a textbook to me.

Re: Worldbuilding

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Oh, I feel the need to add that not every story needs an expansively plotted and mapped universe. Science fiction includes room-sized stories as well as multiverse-sized stories. I've read brilliant stories that were bounded by the walls of a spaceship with one passenger.