It's also a kind of reading for world context the way you read a detective story for clues - Jo Walton called it "incluing" https://tor.com/2010/01/18/sf-reading-protocols/…
A good diagnostic question, in the spirit of Alan Kay “waste transistors” principle of personal computing is “what is this story willing to waste?”
What is it willing to feature “too many” of?
Culture = clever names.
More examples:
Futurama: Silly devices/gadgets/design fiction objects
Simpsons: Arguably the couch gags+intro mini-story that triggers the main story, like “they go to the fair and Homer buys 1 dumbbell”
South Park: “we learned something today” faux-morals
Rick and Morty: inter-dimensional cable and quick-sketched useless parallel universes which don’t do anything for the plot, like the farting-asses universe.
Best example might be the brilliant pizza-universe set. There is NO good reason for this scene
This is nifty and needs a name, like “spice note” or something: the fun flavor element which does a lot of the story work
Star Wars: spaceship design
Superheroes: costume design
aSoIaF: house banners & words
Agatha Christie: etiquette
Wuxia: special weapons & attacks twitter.com/vgr/status/133…
Tolkien’s secret sauce which he began doing even before he conceived of Middle Earth in 1917 while recovering from the Somme twitter.com/vgr/status/133…
Big mood? Generator? Flywheel? Root chakra? Idiopathy?
Principle needs a clear statement too: “every successful genre story has an unnecessarily overbuilt world id-element.”
The Rick and Morty example suggests an aspect. Every instance of the id-element suggests the gestalt of entire universe. All other world-elements have to vibe with that gestalt. You can get at this by asking: what is a nominally correct non-element if the set of id-elements?
What’s a ship-name that does NOT fit the Culture universe?
Maybe USS Enterprise?
What’s a language that does NOT fit Middle Earth?
Minion language
What’s a universe that does NOT fit R&M multiverse?
A non-satirical universe maybe? This one is hard
The flywheel aspect is important. One instance of the set should catalyze more instances. It should snowball into a gun game readers want to join in even if they lack the skill. Like ship names. Everybody has fun making up their own. Compound interest. Narrative network effect.
Based on fiction I’ve written so far and enjoyed writing, I think my thing is “philosophy gadgets” — devices that embody an abstraction. Like my strategometer: a watch that indicates when you’re thinking strategically. I have such things in all my stories.
So I found this and immediately thought I should report this to you. These are 26 laws of magic collated from various pagan traditions.
https://users.aalto.fi/~saarit2/deoxy/lawsofmagic.htm…