Different attitudes to Britain

I'm poking around at my story ideas some more and I have realised that, just by habit, I've spread between my half dozen characters all the attitudes to national identity I can think of. ( Read more... )

if I decide me being British is enough knowing to do all this, that's already decided a lot about the distinctiveness of all the parts. And yet I know I can't even get all the words right, and the politics is beyond me. If I were writing for television I'd fix it by getting writers from all the places, though since there's only half a dozen episodes in British TV that would mean giving half the episodes to people that weren't me. Or writing in a room and not having an episode each. I don't know. I'm not writing for TV anyway and can't recruit people.

I was going to say I don't even know what I'll do with all this, what impact it'll have on my characters. But I know some of it. Susan is going to want to set up an offworld colony. That's her mission, once she sees the possibility.
And I've been talking about the story as about a colony on another world, and when inspired by Atlantis fic I've liked the ones where Atlantis goes independent. But I'm thinking now, the Atlantis stories, are they usually with a very American view of independence? ( Read more... )

And if we're talking conflict over independence I have examples much closer to home. All those bits of the United Kingdom having a great big argument about independence all my life, and only bits of it with violence. Mostly it's with voting. Plus the idea that a colony is a very long journey away, that you have to go far away before you deal with Different, that I do not grok. It's the neighbours. You can walk there. Declaring independence is like putting up a really serious fence, or possibly growing leylandii. And we have, like, nested layers of political entity, like Wales is part of the UK is part of the European Union. Even one of the politics parties I just now read on wiki, the ones that want to leave the United Kingdom, they don't want to leave the European Union. But there's other parties that are all about staying the UK and leaving the EU. I don't know as America has so many layers. Being British is the middle layer in this argue. And then outside that there's the rest of the world, only with the Commonwealth we sort of sprawl all over it a bit. We stand in so many different relations to other countries, saying 'independence' gets so very complicated.

So if I'm going to write about an offworld colony with some leaders wanting complete independence from Earth, I'm not going to have a binary in mind, I'm not going to be all or nothing about it, and I'm really not going to just close the gate on them and say the old world doesn't matter any more. I'm going to be thinking how it fits with all this all, the already debated, multilayered complexities of UK politics.

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Alien planets

I have been thinking of making America my alien planet. Not just the USA though, the whole thing. The City on the Sea would be in Los Angeles and the Lost City would be in Vancouver. ... because funny. Also because then I don't have to learn how planets work and invent one, I just pick a weird looking map projection and look stuff up. Though the climate conditions I decided on would complicate that.

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So, the City on the Sea, it's full of all these people who become other people, people who are masks for a character that can move between bodies but is expressed differently by each of them. That's why it's funny that it's Los Angeles. Because, city of actors. Each blending is like the different interpretations an actor will bring to a character, even when given the same words.

... I just spent a lot of words wondering about alien biology and psychology just to end up with concluding 'it's like how Hamlet is never the same twice'. Oh well.

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Right then.

America. On an alien planet. In a weird map projection.
That means I can use Google maps to plan where the biotechnicians' expedition has been wandering, in the year or two they've spent getting up to the Lost City.
So he's a horse designer demonstrating the long distance endurance of your product, and also a guy who just graduated university and sees a lifetime of the family horse trading business ahead of him. Where would he come from and where would he go, in this not-America?

But then if I start using actual places as inspiration and bizarro them, I should stick closer to home. I can get a lot of mileage out of details I understand and know well. I can only bork up Foreign Parts.

So I could use Britain as the map, but I'd have to make it really really bigger before you could really stick a lost city at one end and a lot of different civilisations at the other. I mean, just multiplying everything by ten or whatever could work, but I'd only have to still figure out the climate and all myself. ... but having specified Ice Age, I'd have to do that to America anyway.
Eh, I'll end up ignoring all this all anyway, and just making like a street or a village at a time when people look at them.
I just keep thinking of new and interesting ways to time waste.


The excuse that I can write short stories for The Short Story unit set in this world only holds up if I then actually do so.
And, also, do all the other reading for other classes too.