late night sci-fi thinking
y'know if there's one thing that bothers me about a lot of science fiction it's that there's always this implication of a world way different from ours but there's never anything there to really like, explore that fact
I know why this is mind you (Chekhov's Gun, keeping the story relatable) but at the same time it's like... you have entire alien societies here, what does an ordinary person go through in your universe? what's their life like, what do they do for fun?
late night sci-fi thinking
space adventures and otherworldly encounters are fun and all but I honestly feel like the sheer sense of scale and otherworldliness would be greatly helped if more people showed what made their aliens y'know, alien
not necessarily totally unrelatable by any means, but also definitely having different solutions to problems than ours, different social institutions and values due to culture & biology, and stuff we'd never think of doing ourselves, or only did in the past
late night sci-fi thinking
this can even be small stuff! weird housing arrangements for species that tend towards different family structures, open areas for flight for species with wings, cities where all the roads are replaced by canals for amphibious ones, completely different forms of entertainment that often only really make sense in the culture and history they came from, weird cuisine due to diet (granted, humans being omnivores have an advantage there), et cetera
late night sci-fi thinking
@Thaminga embassytown by China mieville is really good for this! the aliens use language in a really different way so there's a lot of cultural stuff around how to communicate with them, it's neat! hellspark by Janet Ragan might be of some interest too, there's both very different aliens AND wildly divergent human cultures bc of space. main character is a pro tier translator. it's very neat.
late night sci-fi thinking
@Thaminga I’d been thinking a similar thing with diversity in fantasy, that it’s really hard to call out/build worlds in a graceful way. Like if I say one elf greets another by throwing down his taiaha to see if they’re hostile, and checking what clan they are from their ta moko, it’s unsubtle and might really break up narrative flow, but if I don’t, then maybe readers assume elves are Tolkien pale straight haired people.