frog-industrial-concern

FROG K

@frog-industrial-concern

kevlar shattering sutra

i'm already a demon || twt yurirando artblog @frog-kosaric

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@frog-industrial-concern
tessesseff
@tessesseff
tessesseff
@tessesseff
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frog-industrial-concern
@frog-industrial-concern

above: my mantra for writing since i kicked the Worldbuilding Bug that kept me for doing it for a decade and change

but my favorite worldbuilding in fiction is in a game, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Incredibly effective stuff, extremely "modern" in a lot of ways - none of the factions or faction leaders see themselves as villainous, all are instead just whatever degree of antagonist-coded, giving a variety of skewed perspectives on the future humanity is barreling into.

even in a dyad in which the orientation of the author is pretty clear - scientists vs. bible freaks - there's a lot of room for pure science and pure religious gnosis to have meaningful things to say to each other. A less clever writer would have put Godwinson's most effective quote -

Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How foolish we have become, and how blind.

  • anywhere but directly attached to a video about a horrifyingly repressive AI-governed city!
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in reply to @tessesseff's post:

in reply to @frog-industrial-concern's post:

widr
@widr

my favorite sort of worldbuilding is diagetic near-nonsense that traces outlines of a much vaster fiction than is immediately apparent. i don't know if this counts in the same way that the kind of exegetic narrative history in OP's post though.

what's your view on the negatives of 'worldbuilding' as an exercise?

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frog-industrial-concern
@frog-industrial-concern

tends to be self-similar if done poorly (if you've read one story that wants to be Tolkien or silver-age SF you've more or less read them all) & can be a real impediment to actually writing things rather than just prepping to write something eventually, at least ime

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widr
@widr

ok yeah. trying for great worldbuilding as a goal in and of itself seems doomed to fall into that trap. being eager to show off what you thought of instead of keeping that to yourself in your notes and letting it naturally percolate into the story later tends to waste a lot of words on stuff that isn't the story you're ostensibly writing

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

heehee I love the concept that all it really takes to develop interstellar travel is determination, and presumably we just argued ourselves out of one workable theory after another before ever developing one far enough to get out there ourselves. I'd suppose possibly in this respect Einstein is actually the one who doomed us from interstellar travel for the longest, by observing nothing with mass can go even as fast as light does, and hammering that into everyone's heads with elegant and simple expressions that even many of the least educated can scribble onto a whiteboard and call it science, without fully understanding it.

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Iro
@Iro

Anything specific you did that helped you shake the worldbuilding bug? Feel like I'm on my way to doing it but old habits and patterns of thinking die hard.

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frog-industrial-concern
@frog-industrial-concern

I got into the habit of just letting the little high concepts I have come into my head express themselves in short stories (sometimes extremely short, sub-2k words!) or even tweets. If something is truly good I can just revisit it, is the thinking, but I rarely do because in the cold light of morning it simply feels like I've explored most things to the fullest I care to

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