a word to the wise about wacky, weird, wonderful world-building

[marycatelli]

I love world-building that takes all the the standard world-building questions and flings them out the window by being so weird that no one would think to apply them.  Like -- all the characters are chess pieces.

It does have one sneaking disadvantages, though.  You have to remember it all the time.

Let us suppose your characters are underwater, and you remember to put in owing to buoyancy, they don't feel a downward pressure.  Then you give them a sofa to rest on, and worse, give it soft pillows.

You'd float over a hard surface as well as above a soft one.

Mermaid furniture ought to be very, very, very different from air-breathing folks' furniture.

Or if a world is permeated with enchantments, whenever something shows up, odds are, it ought to be enchanted.

Or when you set up a setting with a color schema, and then forget it when it comes to describing a landscape somewhat later.

It's that when you change the rules, you don't change your reflexes.  You reach automatically for what would be reasonable under the old rules.

Comments

[dharma-slut.livejournal.com]

I imagine a mermaid's sofa to be something like a clamshell, or an egg with a wide hole in it-- you swim inside and let your tired fins stop moving for a bit whilst you are cradled within...

For a more resiliant container, you could weave something out of seaweed!

[marycatelli]

Ah, but for that you have to think what the mermaids want: a place out of the currents. So those would work

Yet another thing to juggle while working on plot and character and all the other fun and games. . . .

I think it's worth the results.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

And it's not just in fantasy that you've got to constantly keep watching yourself for the tendency to slip back to the old rules. Try writing a hard-sf story with significant portions set in microgravity environments (either freefall or very small bodies such as asteroids and small moons, where the gravity is negligible) -- even if you've read primary-source materials such as astronaut and cosmonaut memoirs, you have to keep constantly aware as you're trying to extrapolate your space-based society, not to slip back to gravity-well norms as you write various non-obvious details -- because somewhere out there will be a reader who will catch you on each and every slip-up, and then you'll wonder how many other people noticed but didn't write to lambaste you for it.

[marycatelli]

oh, yeah. Any counter-intuitive setting makes your intuition a very dangerous foe.