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beccaelizabethOkay, so, in the fic I'm reading, it's actually really repetitive tell-not-show that's driving me nuts. I keep wanting to send them beta notes like 'pick three telling physical details and then get back to the plot' or 'you have mentioned they are evil, perhaps you wish to illustrate how?' or 'you said the exact same thing two paragraphs ago'. But that would be wrong, rude, and futile, so instead I rant to the internet.
So they've got a tiny world on the edge of the system that's borderline habitable and the corporations that rule the universe now are sending it food aid in quantities small enough two men can hand it out in an afternoon. Corporations are evil y'all. Eeeeevil. Evil. Just doing it for the PR and also did they mention evil?
Okay, but, this is a multi planetary solar system, not a... one stop sign town in a dried up ex mining valley. They've said the area was known for mining but this settlement wasn't. Okays. They've said there's a cutting wind on an otherwise hot planet, dust blowing and omnipresent dirt, and the ship has stopped to get parts from the junk yard. But they've also said they don't know why anyone settled there in the first place, and no one does know.
It's a terraformed planet with a breathable atmosphere. They're wandering around outside breathing air that can whip around the whole planet picking up dust. Those things aren't a dime a dozen, even in a populous galaxy. Is this a populous galaxy? Well they left Old Earth because it was all trashed and uninhabitable and now humanity is huddling on much less helpful planets. Great, stated that, now showing it, got the details all lined up, because now it isn't a planet nobody knows why they settled, it's a planet full of refugees who stopped somewhere they can breathe.
And how can they breathe? Where's the air coming from? If there's dust and dirt as far as eye can see, where's the oxygen coming from? Is there an ocean full of algae churning out air? Why aren't they living there? Are there plants of some kind? Why aren't they living there? How do people live when they aren't getting handouts in tiny, tiny quantities. Seriously, the first person to get a handout ran off with an amount of food that didn't seem likely to last the day, unless humans work very differently. Do they get delivery ships like this every day, are they starving to death, is there food for some but not for all, are they getting vitamin rich handouts while scraping by on insufficient local crops? If everyone everywhere around here is supposed to be so poor the aid handouts are desperately needed then the quantities are all wrong. And where does the tea come from?
Cause they go and get tea. Tea is a thing. On a nowhere planet with dust everywhere and only junk and handouts to get by on.
The observable details can build a picture, but it can't build a coherent economy when compared with the (endless) inner monologue of the guilt ridden captain giving the food out.
So either he's very wrong or you need a whole different set of details.
So, okay, we've got poor people, a planet that turned out to have no profitable mines (and why are they going down a gravity well for minerals anyway?) but still has an atmosphere, and they're selling junk.
Presence of sufficient junk to live off? Doesn't just happen around poor people who have always been poor. If nobody knows why they settled there in the first place, if it has always been this dustbowl hellhole with people using everything they can get hold of to survive, they have no junk. If they have junk, then it's the castoffs of people who no longer need it. Richer people. Like maybe those corporations who keep being eeeevil?
Or maybe this is some people's last stop on the road to nowhere. Like I said a bunch of paragraphs ago in this ramble, refugees from a played out Earth stop somewhere with a breathable atmosphere. If everyone is leaving the planet at once they're going to be crammed in tight to everything that can fly. Some of those things would get as far as here and fly no further. So maybe the settlement isn't tents, it's the hollowed out hulls of former spaceships. Maybe that's where the spare parts and 'junk' come from, the same wrecks that got them here in the first place. Or maybe it has been enough generations that they've strip mined those things, sold even the hulls for minerals, and are left with rags and tatters.
Presence of junk suggests a history, inner monologue stops people filling in the gaps about that history.
So, how does a marginally habitable planet demonstrate the evil of corporations? And the goodness of the crew visiting them?
... handing out about a day's worth of food doesn't cut it on the latter front. If it's more than a day, it can't be rice and beans, unless they're clever future rice being given to modified humanoids. And if the point is that corporations give out food aid for the pr points, and then this one rich guy turns up and hands out his literal pocket change to the local cute children, that doesn't actually make him look like a nice guy. Maybe one of those gap year tourists who are so sure they make a difference they do poverty tourism and help projects set up by people who don't live there to do things that the locals didn't actually want. But turning up to make sadface in person doesn't make him qualitatively different to the rich folks back home that the PR is supposed to work on. He cares so much! Just like everyone else that makes this worthwhile advertising!
Evil corporation tricks: first, nature of the handouts. Wildly insufficient. Probably at the end of their shelf life, whatever that is. Plastered all over with corporate logos. If people are dressed in handouts too, those are corporate logos from a couple of rebrandings ago, layered up histories of discarded PR positions past. Maybe that's why they have junk to sell, corporations dump it here, then wait for someone to think of something useful to do with it.
Why has planet not sufficient agriculture? Does it lack for sunlight? On a hot world? Well, a dusty hot world. Where is it even supposed to be, outside where solar systems tend to be cold or too close in? What makes it marginal? Does it lack for water? Dust everywhere, sounds like it, yes. So how do people adapt to deal with the shortage of water? Or is there plenty of water, but dirty? Dirty how? Not useful minerals. Mine run off? If the world was always useless then you've got fewer ways to demonstrate evil corps, but if somewhere strip mined it and then left the workers that couldn't pay enough to get out of there, well, tada. Evil. Or if there are still mines, but it's not economical. Everyone works and scrapes and tries to get enough to feed their kids, but they're starving and they know it.
If you're talking far future SF where people can live comfortably in spaceships, why haven't they got enough algae tanks and food fermenters to feed their own planet?
Another example of corporate greed could go with current trends in bio engineering: seeds made deliberately so they'll grow one crop, only, and you have to buy the next year's seed from the corporations. Trim the profit on that and you've got subsistence farmers that can slip off the edge.
Or how is the water dirty, on this planet with no visible life? Tiny life! Everyone having to boil the water (tea) because there's a bazillion ways to get dead of local biome. Turns out to be incompatible with agriculture. Failed terraform, descendents of original settlers wither. But slowly enough to be picturesque. And how can that be evil? Why the corps went with the low bidder on the design, or they tried to spike their competition's terraforming juice and there's actually a secret biotech war going on between different corporations to this day somewhere in the water table.
Combine those and the current reality of crops tailored for use with specific pesticides and you've got a planet you have to pay every season to get it to grow, because otherwise the water keeps killing you and your food.
Show not tell! Pick ways they're evil, don't just say evilevilevil.
So the particular tragedy of this unequal universe is a bunch of rich people dreamers in their cosy tech cocoons soaking up the resources and ignoring the poor people getting by on the marginal worlds. ... why the rich people need worlds when they're some kind of cyberpunk posthuman living in the matrix deliberately I don't know. Maybe all worlds are poor and the rich float timeless among the stars? Or maybe it's the whatsit, the magnetosphere. Radiation shielding is a bitch, it's super handy our planet does it for us.
But okay, worlds of rich dreamers... who is making the dreams? The aid ship is going out there with cameras to get shots of the locals being poor and also poor and some more poor. like they do every time they go to the planet. This is handy PR on many levels, because it's the heartstring tugger and the reason to not quit the corp. So that's another reason the planet might even be settled, no corps owns it so if you don't work for the corps that's the only place you can set foot on, cause everywhere else will charge you for the air at uninsured rates. Come on, imagine a little! But, but, when you're sending cameras already, what else can you get? Why naive art and primitive performance, of course. Nobody out there has seen the latest vids that are influencing all the greats in the matrix. It's reality TV. And if you're out there trolling for stories, why have food as a hand out? Why not make them actually sing for their supper? Or write, or art. Do it for the exposure! You never know, you could be the universe's next top artist!
If there is no more state, and the corporations rule, everything is a commodity, even hopes and dreams. Especially those. That's the marketing gold dust. People pay more than they have, for hopes and dreams. And even misery is commodified. Perform misery better! Be more cute! Find another cute kid to front for your gang, the cute ones get the most pocket change!
There's a way to game the economics of begging, even, to optimise the feel good factor for the generous givers.
And then, we know the corps rule, presumably they have the means of production locked up. But do they have the ideological lock? Are people buying in to, well, buying, as the only thing to lock their hopes on? Are there opt out communes in weird corners? Do the corps try and buy them out and force them out, or just keep making shiny temptations for them to swap their labour for in a way they can squeeze profit from?
One ship bouncing around handing out food isn't a threat to corporate structure, but the story of it can be. Get a ship and keep on flying, you can't take the sky from me. Maybe that's an escape valve, maybe it's a rich kid rebellious phase, maybe it's something the central authority wants to wipe out for the safety of those poor people. Or maybe, as here, it's locked up in corporate structure and nothing it can do can be anything but good PR, once the bosses spin it.
Poor on a planetary scale means something a whole lot different than poor just down the road. Planets with breatheable atmospheres imply a whole stack of resources that just aren't that easy to get. Unless travel is so immensely cheap and easy they really can just skip to the next nicer one.
SF worldbuilding, it is complex.
So they've got a tiny world on the edge of the system that's borderline habitable and the corporations that rule the universe now are sending it food aid in quantities small enough two men can hand it out in an afternoon. Corporations are evil y'all. Eeeeevil. Evil. Just doing it for the PR and also did they mention evil?
Okay, but, this is a multi planetary solar system, not a... one stop sign town in a dried up ex mining valley. They've said the area was known for mining but this settlement wasn't. Okays. They've said there's a cutting wind on an otherwise hot planet, dust blowing and omnipresent dirt, and the ship has stopped to get parts from the junk yard. But they've also said they don't know why anyone settled there in the first place, and no one does know.
It's a terraformed planet with a breathable atmosphere. They're wandering around outside breathing air that can whip around the whole planet picking up dust. Those things aren't a dime a dozen, even in a populous galaxy. Is this a populous galaxy? Well they left Old Earth because it was all trashed and uninhabitable and now humanity is huddling on much less helpful planets. Great, stated that, now showing it, got the details all lined up, because now it isn't a planet nobody knows why they settled, it's a planet full of refugees who stopped somewhere they can breathe.
And how can they breathe? Where's the air coming from? If there's dust and dirt as far as eye can see, where's the oxygen coming from? Is there an ocean full of algae churning out air? Why aren't they living there? Are there plants of some kind? Why aren't they living there? How do people live when they aren't getting handouts in tiny, tiny quantities. Seriously, the first person to get a handout ran off with an amount of food that didn't seem likely to last the day, unless humans work very differently. Do they get delivery ships like this every day, are they starving to death, is there food for some but not for all, are they getting vitamin rich handouts while scraping by on insufficient local crops? If everyone everywhere around here is supposed to be so poor the aid handouts are desperately needed then the quantities are all wrong. And where does the tea come from?
Cause they go and get tea. Tea is a thing. On a nowhere planet with dust everywhere and only junk and handouts to get by on.
The observable details can build a picture, but it can't build a coherent economy when compared with the (endless) inner monologue of the guilt ridden captain giving the food out.
So either he's very wrong or you need a whole different set of details.
So, okay, we've got poor people, a planet that turned out to have no profitable mines (and why are they going down a gravity well for minerals anyway?) but still has an atmosphere, and they're selling junk.
Presence of sufficient junk to live off? Doesn't just happen around poor people who have always been poor. If nobody knows why they settled there in the first place, if it has always been this dustbowl hellhole with people using everything they can get hold of to survive, they have no junk. If they have junk, then it's the castoffs of people who no longer need it. Richer people. Like maybe those corporations who keep being eeeevil?
Or maybe this is some people's last stop on the road to nowhere. Like I said a bunch of paragraphs ago in this ramble, refugees from a played out Earth stop somewhere with a breathable atmosphere. If everyone is leaving the planet at once they're going to be crammed in tight to everything that can fly. Some of those things would get as far as here and fly no further. So maybe the settlement isn't tents, it's the hollowed out hulls of former spaceships. Maybe that's where the spare parts and 'junk' come from, the same wrecks that got them here in the first place. Or maybe it has been enough generations that they've strip mined those things, sold even the hulls for minerals, and are left with rags and tatters.
Presence of junk suggests a history, inner monologue stops people filling in the gaps about that history.
So, how does a marginally habitable planet demonstrate the evil of corporations? And the goodness of the crew visiting them?
... handing out about a day's worth of food doesn't cut it on the latter front. If it's more than a day, it can't be rice and beans, unless they're clever future rice being given to modified humanoids. And if the point is that corporations give out food aid for the pr points, and then this one rich guy turns up and hands out his literal pocket change to the local cute children, that doesn't actually make him look like a nice guy. Maybe one of those gap year tourists who are so sure they make a difference they do poverty tourism and help projects set up by people who don't live there to do things that the locals didn't actually want. But turning up to make sadface in person doesn't make him qualitatively different to the rich folks back home that the PR is supposed to work on. He cares so much! Just like everyone else that makes this worthwhile advertising!
Evil corporation tricks: first, nature of the handouts. Wildly insufficient. Probably at the end of their shelf life, whatever that is. Plastered all over with corporate logos. If people are dressed in handouts too, those are corporate logos from a couple of rebrandings ago, layered up histories of discarded PR positions past. Maybe that's why they have junk to sell, corporations dump it here, then wait for someone to think of something useful to do with it.
Why has planet not sufficient agriculture? Does it lack for sunlight? On a hot world? Well, a dusty hot world. Where is it even supposed to be, outside where solar systems tend to be cold or too close in? What makes it marginal? Does it lack for water? Dust everywhere, sounds like it, yes. So how do people adapt to deal with the shortage of water? Or is there plenty of water, but dirty? Dirty how? Not useful minerals. Mine run off? If the world was always useless then you've got fewer ways to demonstrate evil corps, but if somewhere strip mined it and then left the workers that couldn't pay enough to get out of there, well, tada. Evil. Or if there are still mines, but it's not economical. Everyone works and scrapes and tries to get enough to feed their kids, but they're starving and they know it.
If you're talking far future SF where people can live comfortably in spaceships, why haven't they got enough algae tanks and food fermenters to feed their own planet?
Another example of corporate greed could go with current trends in bio engineering: seeds made deliberately so they'll grow one crop, only, and you have to buy the next year's seed from the corporations. Trim the profit on that and you've got subsistence farmers that can slip off the edge.
Or how is the water dirty, on this planet with no visible life? Tiny life! Everyone having to boil the water (tea) because there's a bazillion ways to get dead of local biome. Turns out to be incompatible with agriculture. Failed terraform, descendents of original settlers wither. But slowly enough to be picturesque. And how can that be evil? Why the corps went with the low bidder on the design, or they tried to spike their competition's terraforming juice and there's actually a secret biotech war going on between different corporations to this day somewhere in the water table.
Combine those and the current reality of crops tailored for use with specific pesticides and you've got a planet you have to pay every season to get it to grow, because otherwise the water keeps killing you and your food.
Show not tell! Pick ways they're evil, don't just say evilevilevil.
So the particular tragedy of this unequal universe is a bunch of rich people dreamers in their cosy tech cocoons soaking up the resources and ignoring the poor people getting by on the marginal worlds. ... why the rich people need worlds when they're some kind of cyberpunk posthuman living in the matrix deliberately I don't know. Maybe all worlds are poor and the rich float timeless among the stars? Or maybe it's the whatsit, the magnetosphere. Radiation shielding is a bitch, it's super handy our planet does it for us.
But okay, worlds of rich dreamers... who is making the dreams? The aid ship is going out there with cameras to get shots of the locals being poor and also poor and some more poor. like they do every time they go to the planet. This is handy PR on many levels, because it's the heartstring tugger and the reason to not quit the corp. So that's another reason the planet might even be settled, no corps owns it so if you don't work for the corps that's the only place you can set foot on, cause everywhere else will charge you for the air at uninsured rates. Come on, imagine a little! But, but, when you're sending cameras already, what else can you get? Why naive art and primitive performance, of course. Nobody out there has seen the latest vids that are influencing all the greats in the matrix. It's reality TV. And if you're out there trolling for stories, why have food as a hand out? Why not make them actually sing for their supper? Or write, or art. Do it for the exposure! You never know, you could be the universe's next top artist!
If there is no more state, and the corporations rule, everything is a commodity, even hopes and dreams. Especially those. That's the marketing gold dust. People pay more than they have, for hopes and dreams. And even misery is commodified. Perform misery better! Be more cute! Find another cute kid to front for your gang, the cute ones get the most pocket change!
There's a way to game the economics of begging, even, to optimise the feel good factor for the generous givers.
And then, we know the corps rule, presumably they have the means of production locked up. But do they have the ideological lock? Are people buying in to, well, buying, as the only thing to lock their hopes on? Are there opt out communes in weird corners? Do the corps try and buy them out and force them out, or just keep making shiny temptations for them to swap their labour for in a way they can squeeze profit from?
One ship bouncing around handing out food isn't a threat to corporate structure, but the story of it can be. Get a ship and keep on flying, you can't take the sky from me. Maybe that's an escape valve, maybe it's a rich kid rebellious phase, maybe it's something the central authority wants to wipe out for the safety of those poor people. Or maybe, as here, it's locked up in corporate structure and nothing it can do can be anything but good PR, once the bosses spin it.
Poor on a planetary scale means something a whole lot different than poor just down the road. Planets with breatheable atmospheres imply a whole stack of resources that just aren't that easy to get. Unless travel is so immensely cheap and easy they really can just skip to the next nicer one.
SF worldbuilding, it is complex.