beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I been thinking some more on my worldbuilding choices for my SF dystopia and how they relate to plot bunnies and character arcs.

I set up a world where everything has the most Order I could think of. ( Read more... )
So I think I've thrown interesting stuff together until I basically need to tell every SF story ever all at once OMG and... that probably wasn't most smartest...



I want to tell stories about how the important part of why cybermen are bad isn't the metal it's the reprogramming, and how actually leaving out the metal and keeping the mind control is considerable worse, because then you haven't got the strength and stuff and have even less choices. Stories that strike a balance with technology instead of being all scared of it. There's lots of different kinds of technology to tell that about. I think I need to pick one... except that's not how the world works...

someone who read my script has commented on it! Yaays!
They said they don't like disaster movie in space but they were interested in the characters.
... I had not noticed I was writing a disaster movie in space. Now I feel dumb. Yet enlightened.
( Read more... )

This first reader reckons that the script is PG rated. Yaays. Was aiming at that. But he also reckons that mention of racism suggests I'm aiming for an older audience. Um, why? Does racism not happen to kids? Is nobody racist at 6pm, or on Star Trek? Hmmm.

And does adult really necessarily mean using swears? I don't use swears much.
Shakespeare style elaborate rudes are much more fun anyway.


Writing still complicated. But much less depressing now somebody has read it to the end and said so.

Am attempting homework. Am still getting sidetracked into reading lots of new text.
Dante was depressing. People believed that stuff for literal? How did they dare do anything ever?
Artists did like drawing naked people on fire or up in whirlwinds in hell. Creepy.

Got sidetracked thinking about my space dystopia. Locations. There's three squares in Norwich, outside the Forum, outside Next, and outside Chapelfield. C has a huuuuuuge TV screen up above it, for the Watching You effect. The Forum looks all lovely and modern and glass and metal, and has that sort of mini amphitheatre with the steps, where the elephants were on display. Next, I have decided, is a great name for the job centre. I mean you can call it human resources or the job office or careers or something, but all those imply a possibility of being in a different category, like not a resource or job or career. Next is just, you know, what you do next. Also there's some lovely trees and that statue that's a Really Big Brain. Clearly the Really Big Brain is the sign outside the rehabilitation center, which is for fixing brains. The wall to that is big and white and with pretty flowers on it and a sprinkler system. So not the shops that are actually there. And the side that is a big church needs to be the side of a big train station instead. And probably they shouldn't have MacDonalds or Starbucks per se out in this dystopian future, because you wouldn't want to suggest that specific corporations are supporting the horrible. At least not on the BBC. Which makes the Next idea also a bit awkward, which is no fair because it's also a perfectly good word. But outside of there is also really interesting with steps and levels and some really big trees. Nothing says 'has been here ages' quite like a whole bunch of mature trees.

Cannot show you on Google Streetview because there's no driving in those bits.
Google for ' Norwich Forum ' in images and you get a whole page of very nice images.
This is Chapelfield before they put the big TV on it.
This is after the screen went on.
Neither shows you the little square it's set in, shops on both sides.

This explains the Really Big Brain.
Google for site:www.norwich.gov.uk Norwich Hay Hill
to get a bunch more interesting pictures.

This Norwich flickr photostream has a lot of interesting shiny. And the Elephant and TARDIS.
This is the closest that set gets to the view I'm thinking of, but too far to the right.

This and this are clearly not a spaceship, specially not on on mauve alert, sticking up above the mall for an escape pod.

So if my horrible future looks quite a lot like Norwich now, only cut and pasted a bit, then it will look quite a lot unlike any space future I've seen. But the future isn't new and shiny once you get there, sort of thing. People use it until it looks all public space.

This future would also have a lot of shops and shiny things on display. At first I was all 'but how bad can it be if they have shiny!'. ... er, yeah, bread and circus, velvet glove, a little shiny goes a long way. And if we're talking Elizabethan-with-spaceships then a *lot* of shiny was involved... for the few. Sumptuary laws. So there would be shiny, and you would have to show your ID before you could so much as get inside. And the shops would be labelled according to who was allowed in, so Factory and Office would make sense. The little stall of shiny things outside the Next building would be for selling you tokens so even if you're wearing your clothes from your old status you could buy a shiny that denoted your new version, and so not be confusing for many minutes at all.

Above all of it would be The Dome. It would be really big. Even compared to the Forum. Big giant dome like a sky full of spiderweb. Possibly made of eyes, like if you make lots of circles overlap you get the pointy oval shape, and then put circles in the middle of that, and you could have eyes drawn all over the sky in frosted white, keeping the elements at bay.

Actually filming these things would be a bit complicated, even if the actual places are there and bits would be covered up. For a start we'd either have to net over the whole thing or the future would have a pigeon problem. On other planets. Talk about depressing.

The shiny blank white corridor version of The Bad Future, or the grimy blank dark corridor with metal bits, has been done, and works fine for some areas, and means filming indoors and not needing many sets because it'd be like the entire future was a chain hotel. Possibly the Ibis, where we needed cards to make the lift work.

But the more bits of the here and now get in to the Bad Future the more connected it will feel.

Also, grand civic architecture with display spaces full of art and possibly a bunch of dancers doing a sort of cheerleadery thing gives a whole different feel to empty corridors. I somehow don't buy the corridors as being a whole proper civilisation. So much missing feels like someone would complain.

... or rebel, obviously.

I've been having fun worldbuilding for my space dystopia. I've thought up a bunch of stuff about government and neighbours and how to keep the citizens in line. I can think of tons of reasons for our small band of rebels to stand up and decide to change things.
The basic trouble is, I can't seem to think of proper ways they could succeed in making improvements.
I've apparently got a head full of stories where you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.
... I think I knew that ...

The problem is now I've thought up this world, which has a very Blakes 7 ending in store if I even bother running through it, I can't really think why I'd want to watch these stories.

So I sat down to figure out what I want to watch:

Disability stories. ( Read more... )

Women stories. ( Read more... )

Children stories. Not for children, with children being made. ( Read more... )

Multigenerational stories. ( Read more... )

Teamwork! With a range of characters that covers the range of actual humans! And saves the world a lot!

Also there should be people of lots of skins and cultures and beliefs. I remember to want that later than the other stuff though. And would be less good at it.

But that's my list of stuff I want.
Power inequalities to deal with through teamwork, and thoroughly diverse teams.
Also sex. Just as balanced part of story.

And then making homes that work. It's not much use stopping the monster if all you get out of it is stopping the monster again next week. Stopping the important monsters means being better able to build something worth having, live lives.

*rereads*

... so, just a modest little list of wants there.

There's also moments in stories that I like. The one where someone stands up and everyone notices they're brilliant. The one where someone stands up and declares someone else brilliant or beautiful or loved. The one where someone realises they've found something worth fighting for, and the rallying cry moment where they tell everyone else exactly why. The time when the monster thinks it has a room full of tasty snacks and they all take up arms and kick arse together. The times when knowledge keeps going, where the student steps up and becomes a teacher, where the students will keep going even if the teacher is stopped. You can't stop the signal. The last minute save, where someone is ready to make the sacrifice but they've got a team to save them. I'm not so fond of the non-save, though that always has to be a possibility; the idea of the noble sacrifice seems to get in the way of the idea that some jobs need doing every day a little. But I do like the big kabooms, or the moment where the villain thinks their tower is unassailable but finds it crumbling around their ears. Boom! But... only after giving them a chance. Making friends to go fight the next thing is the best way. Got to build a team cause there's always another bad out there.

If I worldbuild something bleak, even if I can't see any out at the end of it, I can still hit a lot of the moments along the way. And for that I'd keep watching. Then the story is about how you can't get out of the game, but you can grab moments along the way.
think I knew that too.

so far today: woke up early, read a bunch of stuff, went to lunch/breakfast, bought donuts which were quite disappointing yet seem to have been eaten already anyway, read some more. Have been stalled on the same two pages for ages. On the plus side, have an awesome scene for the season end cliffhanger of my entirely imaginary TV series. It works as a The End but it also works as a WTF how do they get out of that. And I can backtrack from wanting that scene to some of the ways the technology works. ( Read more... ) On the minus side to get anybody to care about all that I have to write a proper story so you know who everyone is.

And before that I must do my Renaissance assignment.

If I'd done this two years ago it would be a 20% group project and my exam grade would be good enough my grade wouldn't matter as long as I turned up. As it is it's a 50% individual project and while I have more wiggle room than usual I do need to actually pay attention and have thoughts and stuff. Which is proving to be a problem.

Have done a ton of reading. Haven't a clue how to turn that into a project. I'll either figure it out by Thursday or find when I can talk to the teacher about it.

Hamlet is interesting though. And I've read a bunch about it. Actually I've now reached that point where the more I read the more it feels like re-reading, because I seem to have covered the major theories and had most of these thoughts in other books. Is good. I'm not calling myself an expert but instead of being all... me with a full box of donuts... I'm more like me with vegetables and pasta and stuff. Which is part of why I ground to a halt. Harder to pay attention once you know most of it, even if you know you don't know all of it.

Freud is nuts and Lacan is no help at all. And some English essays seem to be exercises in using the most possible words to say the least stuff and make sure none of it makes any sense anyway. And if you argue long enough you can make everything mean its opposite but you'll look really stupid.

Studying. Fun.

So this morning, because I Did Not Want to get out of bed, I was lying back plotting the pilot episode to my series that is clearly not Blakes 7 except for where it is. I was very organised about it. In my head I got a piece of paper, wrote 1-60 down the margins, divided it up into teaser and tag, three act structure, central turn around point, and wobbly block of 'inciting incident goes here'. I mentally arranged my small stack of writing books, which is probably about as productive as the way I usually use them, since by this point they're pretty much for moral support. And then I decided what the teaser should be. Start with something exciting. Start with a chase!

... and then I got entirely stuck, because I suddently realised that the status and indeed existence of dogs would be one of the major defining points of my futuristic multiplanet dystopia, and while I'd been thinking of them as all clean and technological, I couldn't imagine a proper chase without dogs barking.

... *facepalm*

But, really, thinking about it, when humans leave the planet, do they take dogs with them? If dogs, what about cats, or horses, or canaries? We have a perfect excuse to never work with animals again! We have weight limits, and limited life support! We could have a future where humans are the only life that humans ever worry about!
... and wouldn't that be hugely different.

So there's Dystopia 1, techno version, where they have lots of cameras and TV screens and computers everywhere and little robot arms to do fiddly jobs and humans are just on the verge of being surplus to requirements, but then they'd have nothing to do but rebel so there's somehow precisely as much work as people. A chase sequence would involve silence. Silent black clad security forces with gas masks on, and silent security cameras scattered around like your actual bugs are now, and perhaps silent flying drones that make a whirrrrr sound only when they're too close to dodge properly. If there's things with wheels they'd make gravel sounds on the crunchy ground, maybe on a raised road right behind the rebels as they crouch unseen. To get around all that they'd have to be very, very precise, slow and stealthy. The opening sequence would all be silence and heavy breathing.

But then there's Dystopia 2, the one with dogs, and I think this would be the genegineered version. They didn't bring alive dogs with them, they brought the pattern to make them. The same guard dogs are used at every guard station, cloned again. Animals are all designed for particular tasks, just like humans are. They don't have the robot arms unless absolutely necessary, because they have humans made in the exact same spirit, to do those tasks. And now the chase is *noisy*. Dogs barking, running, urgent. To get away from dogs they'd do the blood pumping sort of things, traditional hunter hunted stuff. Would there be cameras? Maybe, but there'd be more concentration on who is watching them. It wouldn't be cold AI directing them towards movement, it would be rooms full of humans who were used to having fairly boring days and using the cameras to look down people's tops. To get around them you'd have to be unexpected or plausible, by turns. Sloppy would still work, as long as you mixed it with a bit of inspiration. And there'd be a lot more value to making friends. The computer doesn't care if you bring biscuits, though it might note a pattern if you do the same thing every day. Alive things doing the same job are going to care if you're nice people.

And the skillset of the crew, and the shape of the eventual revolution, would depend very greatly on what they're opposing. If technology is king then Avon understands how everything really works. If technology just extends the senses of a whole lot of people then Avon understands rather less of it.

Both dystopias have heavily controlled humans who decide they don't like it. But in the first it's because they're being made to do useless work, the technology could leave them at total leisure but they're not allowed to use it that way. In the second it's because they don't have the technology, they are it. That's a fairly important distinction.

And it all comes down to how does this teaser chase sequence work.

Do they have dogs?

I think the dogs version is quite interesting.

And really, I can't imagine a proper dramatic chase without dogs.