Conversation

Plot and character are in some ways the commodity elements of fiction, and how-to books spend 90% of their words on those. But good genre fiction usually seems to center a non-basic element: LOTR: fake languages Culture: names of ships Star Trek: species This seems important.
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Plot and character are like a platform, but the centered non-basic element (non-basic as in stories can work without them) is the killer app. You don’t need any specific non-basic thing (few works develop fake languages as deeply as LOTR), but you do need some non-basic things.
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More examples: - Harry Potter: “magic physics” (laws governing magical objects/beings) - Discworld: political science opinions - Hitchhikers guide: absurdist fragments of history/geography (which is why the Guide is a good prop... a cheap device to hold the fragments)
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- Asimov: Laws (the 3 laws, which segue into the laws of psychohistory) - Le Guin: temporalities - PKD: simulations? Note these are not “themes” but ontological first class citizens
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Replying to
Yeah. HHG could pr0bably work without all the extraneous guide excerpts since they often play a limited and dispensable role in the plot. Like the Pan-galactic gargle blaster doesn’t *need* to as overdeveloped a plot device as it is. You could replace it with strong vodka.