mahiwaga

Realizing that I’ve (virtually) known (of) someone for longer than I remembered

The Internet was abuzz earlier this month with the announcement from CBS that they were working on a new Star Trek series as the flagship of their streaming service.

On one hand, there is a significant dearth of straight-up science fiction on TV right now.

On the other hand, I am not a great fan of the ST:TOS reboot movies. (They are entertaining, but they basically threw out all the things that make Trek what it is and turned them into generic interstellar shoot-‘em-ups.)

Alex Edwards posts an open letter to Alex Kurtzman & CBS.

Postscript: everyone sane hates “Threshold” (ST:VOY S2E15) in which Tom Paris manages to reach Warp 10 then turns himself and Captain Janeway into lizards salamanders, but I got a real kick out of the convergence of Warp 10 with how the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy works.

Given the likely influence of Star Trek on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I found it fitting.

And if anything, the Infinite Improbability Drive would definitely explain the transformation into lizards salamanders far better than whatever biological hypothesis they came up with on Voyager.

As someone who has long aspired to write science fiction and fantasy short-stories and novels but who has instead spent hours upon hours on end inventing imaginary landscapes, countries, histories, and languages instead, I am wholly sympathetic with any advice that warns about the pitfalls of world-building.

Author Charlie Jane Anders discusses the 7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding.

Apropos of nothing, I don’t know why, but I was highly amused by Anders’ discussion of Belgians, Bzlgizns, and the Belge as a way to illustrate the smeerp issue.

Probably because in the bowdlerized U.S. version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglas Adams replaced “fuck” with “Belgium”.

How American delicacy turned Belgium into a dirty word • 2012 Aug 4 • Esther Inglis-Arkell • io9

Also, anytime anyone brings “world-building” up, I can’t help but remember M. John Harrison’s admonition about world-building (via 2007 Apr 13 • mahiwaga)

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

Also related:

As I continue to migrate Mephisto posts to Jekyll, I stumbled upon this Perl script I wrote to help me move blog entries from the venerable Movable Type blog engine (see Wikipedia entry) to Mephisto.

I was struck by how much the Movable Type Import/Export format resembles YAML (although the way MT handles multiline strings is radically different.)