7.0 KiB
[D] Fantasy shibboleths - Charlie Stross
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/12/fantasy-shibboleths.html
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-12-22T22:16:21
Post:
Comments:
u/Escapement [+8] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (2 hours later)
Not a bad effort by Stross. I personally find things bug me in proportion to how much I know personally contrasted by how much the author shows his work - currency is honestly not that interesting to me, even though I did appreciate Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, and Pratchett's Making Money. If an author wants to gloss over the way currency works most of the time without dwelling on exchange rates and metals in coins and so forth then that's totally OK with me - contra the implied criticism in HPMOR, Rowling's children's novels are not worse children's books for omitting a 50 page treatise on micro and macro economics in a world of magic.
A longer series of rants about various aspects of fantasy in were written by Limyaael aka Arin i Asolde on livejournal and have been archived elsewhere. I quite liked them for a similar, more voluminous take on the same sort of thing.
u/clawclawbite [+9] (7 hours later)
Except that Rowling made a big deal of rich wizard/poor wizard and goblin property rules would up being a plot point.
The more it matters to the story, the more you need to get it plausible/consistent.
u/aldonius [+5] (11 hours later)
Exactly. It's not so much a matter of Showing Your Work, as having done enough worldbuilding that you're self-consistent.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
Yeah, I think about the effects of magic on currency (for example, Shadows of the Limelight has people with the ability to create gold from nothing, so the gold standard has to take a hike, which means being careful about wording) but there are precious few people who really want to hear about that sort of thing and it's rare that it makes for a better book. I think Stross is more upset about authors not doing even a little bit of due diligence in worldbuilding, whether that makes it into prose or not.
u/Uncaffeinated [+4] (7 hours later)
Spice and Wolf is another series where there's a big focus on currency, metal content, exchange rates, etc.
u/boomfarmer [+3] Trying to be helpful (4 hours later)
Stross doesn't really write children's books, so his lack of appreciation for Harry Potter is perhaps understandable.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+4] Mouse Army (19 hours later)
ah, but imagine the kind of futurists we'd get if Accelerando were assigned kindergarten reading!
u/boomfarmer [+4] Trying to be helpful (a day later)
We'd get the main characters of Rapture of the Nerds:
- Functional in the future, but very low-tech
- Loves the future
- Rabid anti-future people
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+5] Mouse Army (19 hours later)
The race bit totally ignores Ashkenazi jews and their demonstrated higher ability to score prestigious prizes.
Eg. it is entirely possible that the middle earth numenorer up to strider have been endogamic enough to preserve their special abilities.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (19 hours later)
I sort of felt like Stross was arguing against variant races with their own aptitudes from a social justice standpoint, which ... is a thing you can criticize a book on, but I don't think has anything to do with plausibility and adds some confusion to what his thesis actually is.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+5] Mouse Army (19 hours later)
The SJ argument makes sense for the non-interbreedable races (duh.) but the "regession to the norm happens" should only apply to interspecies outliers like eg. Dunedain (who are after all human).
I guess I am not sure what his point with that is either.
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (20 hours later)
I think the point of this article is largely:
The rules of the fictional world must be sane and consistent.
Which is taken from our sidebar. Because Stross is a smart guy and extremely well-read, he tends to see the places where the fictional world isn't sane and consistent a lot better than we do.
But the issue with race essentialism is that it's reprehensible, not that it represents a lack of rigor in terms of worldbuilding, pseudo-historical accuracy, sociology, etc. If orcs and humans can't interbreed, then I think it's perfectly acceptable to present orcs as being dumber, more violent, etc., even if I agree with Stross that it likely has its roots in a bad worldview.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+4] Mouse Army (20 hours later)
Then I think we are in accord. Agree in all points.
(On the topic of speculative genetics...http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Half-orc And elves and humans can also have kids.)
u/TimTravel [+4] (18 hours later)
Isn't a shibboleth a thing to distinguish between "one of us" and "one of them" in some context?
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (18 hours later)
Yup. Stross is using it here to mean "fantasy by one of us" and "fantasy by one of them".
u/TimTravel [+2] (a day later)
I was going into it expecting reader shibboleths instead of writer ones and I got confused.
u/MugaSofer [+3] (a day later)
1:10:100 copper:silver:gold pieces aren't ludicrous. It's unusual for them to be that neat, certainly, but there were Roman coins with those proportions on several occasions.
Also, if you do what Rowling did and have more realistic, awkward proportions, you'll get critics complaining that nobody could use such awkward currency and people (presumably) getting thrown out of it when they lose track.
u/fubo [+2] (11 days later)
The exchange rates among wizarding coins are a parody of pre-decimalisation British money. The ratios between silver and copper, and gold and silver, are fixed rather than floating ... but they're prime numbers, 17 and 29, thus even more inconvenient than the £sd system.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (a day later)
I have a big issue with discontinuities of consistency.
If magic is wild and untamable how does some one get a consistent result reliably?
If you can create an object from nothing that is permanent? how does the world deal with that?
Really for me fantasy is frustrating when it seizes on these things.
I can sum it up as being a problem when I see "well it's exactly like this thing I'm already familiar with even though the things depicted in the story do not support the world having any stability longer then a DAY like this".
When stories say that kind of contradiction I get annoyed.