Like Card argues for the following for boilerplate sff: - write naturalistically like a character in world, use words they would use unless you have no other option to describe the unfamiliar - avoid omniscience - all power should have a cost, physical or otherwise - no prologues
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @Fat_DTEA
Well that last rule gets broken. Lol, the first Stormlight book has maybe 3 prologues iirc.
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Replying to @jamari_oneal @Fat_DTEA
Like, by prologue I mean specifically “it is the year 35387. The Earth has been conquered by sentient anteaters. 5000 years prior to this, President Anne Faulhaven of the Earth Conglomerate contacted the Slime Confederation and agreed to make Earth a protectorate, which led to th
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Ha ha, yeah All of this is just pushing against the stuff that was initially considered cliche for the genre Like old-school science fiction was almost *defined* by feeling the need to explain the basics of the wacky world we're in as the first paragraph Hence Star Wars
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl and
Although ironically once Star Wars got past the opening crawl it was considered "groundbreaking" for big-budget sci-fi movies because it was so confident about following OSC's rules Star Wars has no almost technobabble exposition at all, e.g.
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl and
How does a hyperdrive actually work? What are the rules governing its function? How fast is it in real-life terms? None of the characters would ever have any reason to have a conversation about this so we never find out
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl and
My favourite example of this is that even the Firefly writers didn't know whether Firefly was interplanetary or interstellar. It's just too familiar to the crew to come up in conversation.
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Replying to @GGarethwilson @BootlegGirl and
Yeah the Firefly RPG eventually put together various inconsistent references to create a compromise setting where FTL doesn't exist and instead the human race arrived in sleeper ships to a unique multiple star system with a huge number of habitable planets in its goldilocks zone
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Replying to @arthur_affect @GGarethwilson and
Not a bad idea for a semi-hard science fiction setting, it's like Jack Vance's concept of the "Rigelian Concourse" It actually works really well, the names "Blue Sun", "Whitesun", etc refer to actual specific suns that different planets have as their primary
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Replying to @arthur_affect @GGarethwilson and
You just kind of have to handwave that in all the outdoor scenes the sunlight looks like regular Earth sunlight People's eyes and brains just make a mental adjustment after a while
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Now I'm just imagining, like, White Sun and Yellow Sun planets being the really desirable real estate for the upper classes Whereas the planets orbiting Red Sun (a red dwarf) would not only be really chilly all the time but the dim red hellish glow eventually drives you insane
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Replying to @arthur_affect @GGarethwilson and
Very affordable rent, but you wanna stick with the short term lease It's like the Seinfeld episode where they put the Kenny Rogers neon sign right by Kramer's apartment
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Replying to @arthur_affect @GGarethwilson and
Makes it easier to sleep though!
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