Have you ever loved something, only to realize it’s a commercial flop or just obscure? What’s something that deserves more light than it got?
Have you ever loved something, only to realize it’s a commercial flop or just obscure? What’s something that deserves more light than it got?
Not a single piece of media, but I want to make an apologia on behalf of amateur sci fi writing. No the prose isn’t going to wow you, but I love seeing other people’s unfiltered imagination at work.
I’m very much into worldbuilding, and I’ll devour fan wikis without even consuming the source material. My knowledge of Warhammer 40K and D&D is almost exclusively from various wikis. Seeing regular people build their own little paracosms, with or without accompanying art or fiction, I find very engrossing.
As for actual media, judging by how little representation the series gets in the US, I’d say Custom Robo. I thoroughly enjoyed the single entry on GameCube that Nintendo localized here.
I read book #1 (Revelation Space) and am one chapter into #2 but the RS world building is dramatic and has stuck with me. I haven’t read Dune and can’t compare (and doubt it’s comparable), but I I’d say it’s comparable to the ~2021 movie where there’s desolate landscapes that aren’t irrelevant, technologies that are demonatrated, not explained, and converging story arcs between multiple characters and times. I find it enjoyable because for the most part, it’s grounded in known physics. Near-light speeds and no wormholes. Interstellar voyages, but they’re still so slow they rely on refrigerated sleep.
The books have reviews that get more mixed as the progress but yet, people keep reading through. I’m mentioning it because there is a wiki that seems pretty detailed, though I have done much to keep it unspoiled. There’s the original 00s trilogy plus a 2021 4th main book, a separate trilogy, a support book, and over a dozen smaller works from as far back as 1990 with half being short stories and half being novellas, where the author was finding his footing and filling arcs.
Generally, the problem readers have is that the author introduces promising story arcs and dilemma solutions, only to abandon them and never mention them again. Then the endings feel rushed and anti climactic. But I’m someone who thoroughly enjoys playing Elite Dangerous, a space sim that’s “a puddle a mile wide but an inch deep” because I simply love the immersion and use my imagination. Elite is to sound design what Reynolds is to world building.
I’ve never seen any of the Dune movies (save for a few minutes of the David Lynch movie while at a friend’s house one time) but I read the first few books back in 2015 (11 years ago 😮) I enjoyed the first book very much but got less and less interested with each subsequent book.
Language is an aspect of worldbuilding I love. Sci fi rarely dwells on the language barriers between sapient species, but for me it’s the main event.
Star Wars actually gets it right with Chewbacca. An alien is very unlikely to be able to have a vocal tract capable of approximating human speech, so the best you can hope for is a bilingual conversation where both parties speak their own languages. And of course there’s nothing that says a language has to be based on sounds. Rikchick (sp?) is a sign language that uses tentacles.
The semantic space of an alien language is likely to be very different as well. Aliens with different senses will have a different Umwelt (subjective perception of their environment), and will have different words to describe their experiences. It’s common (though recently challenged) linguistic wisdom that humans are incapable of describing odors independently of analogies with the source of those odors (earthy, floral etc), or emotional reactions to odors (stinky, fragrant), or comparisons with taste (sweet, sour). Visual sensations (colors) have words that are completely divorced from any source that exhibits those colors. Green describes an instance of subjective experience independent of any green thing, but (most) well-studied languages have no such facility for smells. There are no “odor colors”.
Now if dogs could talk, they might have such odor colors, since dogs live in a very smelly world.
I got carried away there, but I wrote it, so now you have to read it.