primeideal

Reading an anthology of science fiction stories and trying to articulate why several don't work for me. This may turn into one of those overly-rambly posts where I try to construct a grand unifying theory of everything, bear with me.

Type I: the characters have too little agency, relative to the stakes at hand, so it doesn't feel like any interesting decisions are made. In some cases, in my opinion, this is because there is too much emphasis on the characters' emotions, rather than the events.

Example: "oh no, an asteroid will destroy the planet in an hour. Well, I will hug my children and tell them that I love them! The end." Hugging your children and telling them that you love them is always a good thing! But it doesn't really work (for me) as the moral or punch line of a story about an asteroid destroying the planet.

Some of the criticism of the Star Wars sequel trilogy has pointed out that both many of the characters and the galaxy as a whole would not be much worse off if the Empire had just stayed in power the whole time. Like, the Hosnian Prime system never gets destroyed, children are never kidnapped and enslaved to become First Order troopers, Luke and Leia and Han's deaths can't be much more pointless...Obviously this wasn't the deliberate goal of the original trilogy, but it can be interpreted that way.

Type II: there's no characterization beyond a cool "what-if?" and the rest of the plot is tacked on to try to make that compelling. Maybe the author just wanted to show you their learnings about how that technology or scenario would work.

Example: "what if I had an awesome space gun that could send stuff to the moon?" Okay? What if you had an awesome space gun? Who would use it? Why?

"The Martian" novel flirts with, but doesn't completely fall victim to, this trope. "What if Mark Watney was stuck on Mars?" "Okay, first thing, he would do this." "But what if he ran out of food?" "He finds out how to grow potatoes by doing that." "What if there was no power source?" "Then he would scavenge the plutonium reactor." Now, in most circumstances, scavenging a plutonium reactor has some obvious risks. However, Watney is in a position where he really has nothing to lose. There isn't, and there doesn't need to be, a lot of philosophical posturing about "hmm, can I accept the risk of radioactivity?" We're in it for the adventure. Some of the prose gets a little infodumpy (I think it works better as a movie), however, the conflict of "how will I survive being stuck on Mars" is enough for me to buy into all the problem-solving.

I know some of the stories I've had trouble writing gave me trouble because all I had was a what-if. "What if the reason most people can't hear ghosts is [redacted]. and our hero is a ghost trying to adjust to ghosthood?" Okay, but what do they do? "What if this scientific theory wasn't discovered in RL circumstances X, but instead in RL situation Y?" Okay, what if? Who are the people that would be affected by that? (The story I have in mind was inspired by "The Circle" by Cixin Liu, an adaptation of one of "The Three-Body Problem" chapters into a stand-alone short story, and I think the way he made a plot and characterization out of "What if this scientific theory wasn't discovered in RL circumstances X, but instead in RL situation Y?" is pretty darn brilliant--that might be a rambly post of its own someday. But my abilities are far below Cixin Liu's in that regard!!)

Corollary: the longer the work, the greater the risk that type I poses. There are lots of stories that are like "hey, I just accidentally invented a time machine!" "Well great, let's go kill Hitler!" "No, no, we can't actually do that, it's not one of the good time machines." If you're writing a relatively brief short story, "the time machine didn't actually let me change anything, but the real magic was the friends we made along the way" might work as a takeaway. (It still might not be to my tastes, but I think there are many people who would like it.) I really like "Transit of Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke, which is the opposite of "The Martian"--it's just, "the Mars mission didn't go right, guess I'll die." Because it's a short story, that works. But if we spent an entire book or movie following Watney only for him to be killed by a stray bolt 90% of the way through, I think I'd feel more cheated.

"Recursion" is a novel where the climax of the first act is "oops, I just accidentally invented a time machine." That comes as a neat twist because we'd been led to suspect other kinds of mad science were at play. And if it had ended there as a novella, I think I would have enjoyed it more. Instead, it turns into a novel where basically time travel is always a danger, and the only hope is to prevent it from being created in the first place. It feels like despite the characters' choices, nothing significant changes for them between the first page and the last except maybe for "hmm, this person could be my one true partner, I know everything about her from previous timelines, maybe she is the one!!" Which is kind of iffy.

"Primer," in contrast, does a better job of "oops, I just accidentally invented a time machine"--but the rules for using it are so narrowly defined (you can't go back to a time before the machine existed, so no killing Hitler) that its implications and use continue to expand to fill the movie, and beyond.

I think the "what if everybody dies??" speculation could be considered a special case of this--Level 3 from that post is Case II here. "What if Revelation was a literal depiction of future apocalyptic events?" Okay, what if it was? You still need characters to make interesting decisions in light of that, otherwise "look, I read Revelation!" isn't any better prose than "look, I know how a plutonium reactor works!" On the other hand, Level 2 from that post corresponds to Case I here. "Everybody dies, and there's definitely no afterlife! Good thing too, or this story would have to be a zillion times longer and I don't have the time or space to plot all that out. Anyway, hug your loved ones."

And yes, I have another ramble in me about time travel specifically and works that actually go for "serious changes," but that's probably another story too. :p

There will be a quiz, so pay attention. Today I overheard an interesting conversation between a couple of my colleagues about language. One of them pointed out that their mom was an English teacher, so they grew up hearing about the "right" way to speak.

Previously on Ranting About Linguistics:Linguists want to study how people actually speak (and sign!), which is called "descriptivism." Whether that be "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" (not "Julio and me," or "Julio and I") or "to boldly go where no man has gone before" (not "to go boldly"). However, many "prescriptivist" rules such as "don't split infinitives," are derived from Latin, where "to go" is a single word, so inserting a word in the middle would sound really bizarre.

When I was a youngish teenager, around the mid-2000's, and making my way onto Internet forums, I was somewhat more of a grammar snob than I am now, more outwardly rolling my eyes at other posters who used "its" and "it's" interchangeably, etc. I could say that as I grew up I became less judgmental and critical, but that's probably not the case--I just became more quiet, and let random people on the internet go about their own business. Meanwhile, my dad and I still occasionally text each other when we see greengrocers' apostrophes, etc. in the wild.

Written English generally uses an apostrophe to denote contractions (can't) or possession (Alice's restaurant). Written Spanish doesn't have apostrophes; you have to use a word like "de," as in "el restaurante de Alicia," to express possession. However, you wouldn't say "a el" ("to the") or "de el" (of the); those get contracted into "al" or "del."

Obviously, lacking apostrophes doesn't make Spanish "better" or "worse" than English--it just is. But that doesn't mean I can go around writing things like "Aliciades restaurante" and be understood, because I wouldn't be writing Spanish anymore, I'd be writing some twisted Spanglish that only really makes sense in my head. The fact that conventions are arbitrary compared to each other doesn't mean they're arbitrary as in meaningless!

(Aside: when it comes to individual words, signed languages may seem a bit less arbitrary than spoken languages. English "book" and Spanish "libro" are both equally good names to refer to "bunch of paper bound together," but neither word inherently connotes that unless you know the language. The American Sign Language sign for "book," however, looks like hands opening and closing as if moving the covers of a book. So in some sense that's a "better" word to "inherently" mean "bound paper thing." But overall, considering all the signs and grammar forms of ASL, it's still arbitrary like any other natural language, as evidenced by the fact that non-signers probably can't follow a conversation.)

Anyway, why was I more prescriptivist as a young person? Maybe "young" is the operative word. If I made a habit of posting in complete sentences and avoiding slang, maybe people would think I sounded more mature. It was a point of pride for me to hear stuff like "wow, you don't sound fifteen"--I wanted to come across as intelligent, especially for my age. But as I got older, the relative prodigy phenomenon was less important.

But then there are some more operative words: "come across." Obviously, the strangers I chatted with back in the day didn't know or care about my high school GPA. They were left to form impressions of me by the way I post. So I was trying to signal intelligence.

Warning: a lot of the more accessible writeups on signalling and (counter)signalling come from tiresome hyper-utilitarians, so don't go too far down the rabbit hole if you're not into that kind of thing. But tl;dr signalling is like, "conspicuous consumption." Many people who have a lot of money, especially people who have only recently gotten a lot of money, like to buy fast cars or fancy clothes, not because they're more comfortable as cars or clothes, but because they indicate "hey, look at me, I am rich!" So probably, what I was trying to do as a younger person, was say in not so many words, "hey, look at me, I am intelligent!"

But, there's also such a thing as countersignalling. If the nouveau riche spend a lot of money on fast cars, what do the old-timey rich people do? Not that. They just dress modestly and think to themselves "I don't care whether people can tell if I'm rich; at least I won't be confused for a nouveau riche person who's just showing off. Those plebians." So, if grammar signalling is a thing, should we see grammar countersignalling too?

Well, I just said, linguists are descriptivist. One of the things we* tell students in Linguistics 101 is that they shouldn't expect to be studying prescriptivist rules like "don't end a sentence with a preposition," that's not what the course is about. So to some extent, linguists are looking down their nose at stuffy old English teachers who are giving kids these days the wrong impression of how language works. But to another extent, linguists are just trying to do their job and make sure their students know what to expect.

*I am definitely not a linguist by trade. I picked up enough bits and pieces, and had a weird financial situation, so I wound up TAing several terms of Linguistics 101. But don't regard me as an ultimate authority, because I definitely am not.

There are, however, people who go on about descriptivism without seeming to care much about linguistics in general. It goes like:
Person 1: hi i r n00by whr is chat, thx lol
Person 2: ...Chat is this way, for people who can use complete sentences.
Person 3: Well actually you're just being judgmental and high-and-mighty, not everyone has had the same educational opportunities as you, so come off your high horse already.

If Person 3 ever had anything cool to say about aspirated P or ASL's relationship to French sign language or ambiguous headlines or any of the other fun things I've run across in linguistics class, I might give them the benefit of the doubt and think "well, they're just really passionate about descriptivism." But if they don't ever do that...then they're probably countersignalling because they don't want to be confused for an insecure intelligent person like I used to be. Just because language is always changing doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning at any given moment, and just because "all words are on some level made up anyway" doesn't give you, or anyone else, the right to put words in my mouth!

Quiz time: I mentioned I had a colleague whose mother was a (prescriptivist) English teacher. Is that colleague a man or a woman?

Trick question, I didn't tell you, because I referenced that person with singular they. Why? Because that's how a lot of native English-speakers talk and have talked for hundreds of years. Maybe in five hundred years we'll all use "they" instead of "he" or "she," and we'll have a different word meaning "those people [plural]." I don't know what that word would be or where it would come from, but language is always changing!