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beccaelizabethReading a lot of fic - not just fanfic but general genre stuff - I'm often disappointed by lazy worldbuilding. There's shiny new technology, and maybe they call the money something different, but the social impact isn't followed through at all. People are basically the same as they are in the time and place the story was written, down to the local values of the social group the writer was from. And sometimes that's used deliberately, kind of a 'we're perfect and we're staying that way' manifesto, or a 'look how messed up this would be if it didn't change' thing. But it usually reads as just plain lazy. The writer seems to have decided that their own experience is universal, even if there's added tentacles.
The kind of SF I like - love, go back to, would aspire to write if world building on that scale were my forte - follows through on the social, sociological, psychological ramifications of whatever changes it introduces. If it gets really, really clever it sets up several different followed-through techs, several different groups, who have all developed their own norms and values. I love the worlds of C J Cherryh, because they all seem so odd when you start reading and so sensible by the time you've finished the book, they all follow through logically, and then they go crunch into each other. Lois McMaster Bujold does that kind of thing too, only then she throws Miles at most of it, so she's got a guy that never quite fits to observe it all through.
Apply this to Torchwood? And we've really only got the one alien to play with - Captain Jack Harkness. Whatever his society looks like, it's going to be *different*, just as the world Methos grew up in was different, or ancient Greece was many kinds of different, or the various versions of Rome. He's living in our world, but he's carrying the values of his into it. That's something the best of Highlander touched on, but there we're talking history, which can be researched. The future has to be extrapolated, which always gets political. More political. Ideological, or something.
Any assumptions about how Jack would or should act are coming from a set of purely local norms and values. Clashing assumptions about things like deference to rank or how people in a team are meant to relate to each other or expected sexual behaviour tend to get Jack into trouble. And, okay, sometimes he's being outrageous on purpose, but that's because he thinks it's somehow a better thing to do.
And it all gets complicated because he's a time traveller. He's from a future, but he's dreaming of a past. And which version of the past? One particular war? What part of it, what aspects of what story?
If he's written as basically a 21st century omnisexual polyamorous kinda military guy then that kinda works. But to be a guy who doesn't even see the labels, let alone fit the boxes? He's from somewhen a lot more different than that.
And living here/now. Or there/then. And never quite fitting in.
Is interesting.
The kind of SF I like - love, go back to, would aspire to write if world building on that scale were my forte - follows through on the social, sociological, psychological ramifications of whatever changes it introduces. If it gets really, really clever it sets up several different followed-through techs, several different groups, who have all developed their own norms and values. I love the worlds of C J Cherryh, because they all seem so odd when you start reading and so sensible by the time you've finished the book, they all follow through logically, and then they go crunch into each other. Lois McMaster Bujold does that kind of thing too, only then she throws Miles at most of it, so she's got a guy that never quite fits to observe it all through.
Apply this to Torchwood? And we've really only got the one alien to play with - Captain Jack Harkness. Whatever his society looks like, it's going to be *different*, just as the world Methos grew up in was different, or ancient Greece was many kinds of different, or the various versions of Rome. He's living in our world, but he's carrying the values of his into it. That's something the best of Highlander touched on, but there we're talking history, which can be researched. The future has to be extrapolated, which always gets political. More political. Ideological, or something.
Any assumptions about how Jack would or should act are coming from a set of purely local norms and values. Clashing assumptions about things like deference to rank or how people in a team are meant to relate to each other or expected sexual behaviour tend to get Jack into trouble. And, okay, sometimes he's being outrageous on purpose, but that's because he thinks it's somehow a better thing to do.
And it all gets complicated because he's a time traveller. He's from a future, but he's dreaming of a past. And which version of the past? One particular war? What part of it, what aspects of what story?
If he's written as basically a 21st century omnisexual polyamorous kinda military guy then that kinda works. But to be a guy who doesn't even see the labels, let alone fit the boxes? He's from somewhen a lot more different than that.
And living here/now. Or there/then. And never quite fitting in.
Is interesting.