What's the Metaphor?
Howdy!
If you're USAn and able and haven't done so already, please vote! My family will be doing so later today.
This newsletter will have: a bit of frivolous music news, an essay on metaphors/worldbuilding, a FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions), and a catten pic.
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Frivolous music news: a few months back I released my hexarchate "soundtrack" album, Banner the Deuce of Gears, on Bandcamp, including themes for both Jedaos and Cheris and the joke song "Burn It Down with Math (feat. Liozh Dia)." It is now also available on Spotify and iTunes (and some other places as well). I hope you enjoy it! I had a lot of fun writing the music and look forward to doing more composition when time permits.
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What's the Metaphor?
There are people whose brains work in a linear/orderly fashion and people whose brains jump all over the place. My husband the physicist is one of those linear thinkers, which I envy tremendously. I am a brain-jumping-all-over-the-place person. This is great for coming up with unusual connections/weird jokes, and sucks for, e.g. computer programming/debugging. There's a reason I fled the CS major into math as an undergrad.
I've never met Brandon Sanderson (as if!), but I've enjoyed some of his novels, and my husband adores them. (I'm behind mainly because I'm a slow reader these days and it would take me a year to read one of his doorstoppers.) This is a household that buys his books in hardcover on the day of release. :)
I suspect one of the reasons that Sanderson's systematic worldbuilding and magic systems are so appealing to my husband is that he's a physicist, and he enjoys seeing the logic pushed to its limits. This is a mode that I also like to read sometimes - fantasy that scratches a similar itch to hard science fiction.
On the other hand, hard sf/f with mechanistic, codified magic systems/technology/science is...not a thing I do? I don't dislike it! I would do it if I could. Just, my brain doesn't work that way.
Rather, when I'm trying to come up with a magic system or a technomagic/technology system, what I'm often asking myself is: what's the metaphor? What am I saying with this magic? Is there a real-world thing that I can push up to 11, or present in a way that makes the reader think about it?
(I want to clarify: a mechanistic magic/whatever system is not incompatible with a metaphorical one. It can be both! But certain metaphorical systems by their very nature aren't going to run on codified logic.)
Machineries of Empire example: The military Kel faction brainwashes their soldiers with "formation instinct," which is the emotional need to maintain hierarchy - a Kel soldier has to follow orders from someone higher-ranking, especially if they're present in person.
This isn't a novel concept! Mainly, I was thinking back to high school, when I took IBS (International Baccalaureate) Psychology with Mrs. Byrd. We learned about groupthink, the Milgram experiments, the Stanford Prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese incident. I found a copy of Milgram's Obedience to Authority in the school library, read it, was extremely disturbed. Because this is me, I was also reading military history and related topics; I read about the My Lai massacre. I read about military training. Hell, I was in high school. I knew about peer pressure.
This was over 20 years ago, and I don't really think my HS library was the place to find cutting-edge research to begin with. Some of this material has been critiqued or debunked since (e.g. the original account of the Kitty Genovese incident). But the idea I was working with was social conformity/hierarchy of a kind that exists in the real world, turned up to 11, and the terrible consequences it can have.
Or let's take calendrical warfare! You know, that thing I totally failed to explain. (This was deliberate, but some readers like being drop-kicked into the story with no map, and some don't. De gustibus!)
So, just to clear it up, no, changing the calendar you use does not change the laws of physics. There is zero scientific basis for this. I refuse to even handwave a "scientific explanation" because one doesn't exist. It's a magic system. This is before we even get into issues like "what frame of reference are we in for timekeeping purposes" vis-à-vis special relativity.
(God knows, the history of science fiction has grandfathered in things that "count" as sci-fi tropes like telepathy and FTL travel whether or not they exist in a scientific sense. At least, most sf that I read is handwaving the hell out of its FTL, and rarely using something like the Alcubierre drive, whether or not that's physically possible.)
HOWEVER. "Calendrical mechanics" - the idea that your calendar system and associated rituals and social consensus could warp the laws of physics - wasn't meant to be literally physically possible. It was a metaphor for imperial control.
Not even that much of a metaphor! Think about how much social organization and logistics depend on a shared timekeeping/calendar frame of reference (or ability to convert between them), to say nothing of religious applications. I went to a Christian high school in Seoul where our holidays included Christmas and Buddha's Birthday (a national holiday in South Korea).
And "calendrical warfare"? How's this quote from Peter Watson's War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology:
Another belief taken seriously by psychological warriors concern dates relating to ceremony. In Vietnam, for instance, a long seventy-one-page document was prepared in the late 1960s examining the psyhchological value of, for example, New Year's Day, weddings, pregnancy and childbirth, death and funeral ceremonies, and anniversaries of death.
The celebration of Tet is the Vietnamese New Year. The idea of the propagandist is to make the celebration as unhappy and morale-sapping as he can....
Dates also vary in whether they are propitious or not. CRESS produced a memorandum on propitious and non-propitious dates in the Vietnam (and Cambodian) calendar. The authors say that some dates are 'absolute' whereas others depend on the age of the person....More important for the military is to know that there are Nguyet ky - forbidden days - and Con nu'o'c - a day of water. During specific hours of these days the times are clearly not propitious and therefore attacks -physical or psychological - should by rights have more impact. It also means that people are more likely to be at home - so bomb attacks will kill more....Some days of the month are evern reserved for death - an appropriate invitation to an enemy. (404-5)
An example from someone else's books that I suspect resonated for a lot of readers, judging by the explosion of fics on AO3, is the daemons from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. A daemon is an animal companion/manifestation of your self. Children's daemons shapeshift into different animals, reflecting the way they are still trying on different identities; they take on a fixed form at puberty.
Notice how this codifies certain ideas about fluidity vs. fixity of identity, about the liminality of adulthood and the significance of puberty, in that world. A different conception of daemons where they might change animal shape later in life, reflecting personality changes or trauma or growth, would make a completely different statement about the books' conception of personhood and identity.
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
- What are you currently working on?
Ninefox RPG (forthcoming in 2023) is in its final stages of edits! Marie Brennan has done a fantastic job with the three scenarios, the initial playtesters have been incredibly helpful - I'm very excited to turn this in soon. Especially since it's due at the end of the month.
Otherwise, I'm awaiting line edits on Lancers #1 (YA mecha space opera with Space Koreans) and have started drafting Lancers #2. It's slow going, mainly because I'm recovering from COVID-19.
- What's one book that you're reading right now?
I'm nosing my way through Oliver Roeder's Seven Games, which contains capsule histories of Checkers, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. I knew little about checkers so reading about the quest to create a checkers-playing computer/AI was both fascinating and sad; the researcher involved was so obsessed that he ran his marriage into the ground and his wife left him. Beyond the notes about the mathematics of the game and its players, it felt like a cautionary tale: I know what it's like to have obsessive interests!
- What are you listening to lately?
I've been alternating between (G)I-DLE's I Love and Le Sserafim's Antifragile! Both k-pop, both girl groups. I've been following (G)I-DLE's music for a while thanks to a friend who introduced me to them.
- I have a foxy question you haven’t answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I will get back to you!
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Obligatory Catten Pic :)
For those who aren't familiar with her, my catten's name is Cloud. She is not named after the Final Fantasy character. (For Battletech fans, I was originally going to name a lady cat Natasha Kerensky. This battle plan did not survive first contact; Cloud has the personality of an extremely purry marshmallow.) Rather, after we adopted her and I called to make her first vet checkup, the vet asked for her name. I blanked, looked out the window, and saw a cloud. Imagine if I'd seen a dog instead!