Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/17/21: The Best of Twittersnips (Off the Map)

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You have to look closely at this map until it begins to look a little familiar….

(It’s Europe with water and land masses reversed and relabeled as new countries.)

Like the map, here’s some places that currently don’t exist, but could.

 

Imaginary Places

German  cities / towns
 Ulmesslen, Münrach, Spargán, Amsprechtdanberg, Munsilacht
Icelandic  cities / towns
 Trömjabik, Heybegär, Geykhovik, Rëtradacik, Trisjavik
Finnish cities / towns
 Helsadam, Helscupäa
Russian  cities / towns
 Zobnovik, Cheysnovek, Zhervond, Besprydov, Zsonich
Greek cities / towns
 Helspená, Axatis
Italian locations / cities
 Forte Colombotti, Monte Moramo, Luguardia, Monte Sanciatti,
Strada di Sfornello, Trienna
Indian cities / towns
 Lassadjram, Dhamunja
English  cities / towns
 Cryleston, Lisburn, Cambley
English villages
 Pigsgirdle, Mencheese
Scottish villages
 Baillieston, Haighaith
Wild West locations
 Brittle Wheel, Buffalo Clay, Dead Prospector Pass, Packbull
American Southern Gothic towns
 Gicksonville, Charlesmead, Jucksville
Canadian provinces
 Yeskatoon, Ilberma
Other places
 Aëlenbul  (Turkish city)
New Sedley  (American colonial town)
Amdhezjen  (Balkan city)
Rhoëbba  (Austrian city)
Zarabinda  (Spanish city)
Spriáthe  (Hungarian city)
Shavistan  (Central Asian kingdom)
Chiscatawnee  (Small Tennessee town)
Portfiddle  (Small Maine town)
Rangiatea  (New Zealand town)
Zaat Asiv  (Israeli city)
Lansjefrellson  (Scandinavian town)
Paolupora (Polynesian island)

Swooning Spaceman

For a change, the BEM (Bug-eyed monster, even though it’s a robot) is carrying away a strapping but unconscious young man instead of a scantily clad young woman. His plight is equally dire as the robot seems none too friendly.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/10/21: Let’s Talk About Wakanda


The 2018 Marvel movie Black Panther featured an advanced yet isolated African kingdom called Wakanda which is the birthplace of the titular superhero character, T’Challa, who is its King. Wakanda is powered by vibranium, one of those rare yet powerful imaginary elements favored by comic writers. Vibranium is both a blessing and a curse: blessing, because Wakanda owes its prosperity to it, and curse, because everyone else in the world wants it.

In the movie the country’s capitol lies in a green, jungled valley, a place of skyscrapers, eco-friendly tiered parks, abundant vegetation, and waterfalls. Exactly where it is, in Africa, is a harder to figure out. The original conception of Wakanda in the comics showed it as being in West Africa, on the coast, as pictured in the top illustration — the rough vicinity of Equatorial Guinea. But later depictions show it in East Africa, in the Ethopian highlands. Wherever it is, it’s a stunning vision of an Africa that never experienced colonialism or slavery.

BLACK PANTHER, Wakanda, 2018. © Marvel / © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection

The name Wakanda itself sounds African, calling to mind words like Watusi and Wanangwa. But Black Panther creator Jack Kirby may also have derived it from Native American mythology, a twist on the word Wah-kon-tah, meaning all that is right and good. The Lakota word for “Great Spirit” — Wakan Tanka — is similar.

In the comics Wakanda had a number of neighbors: Niganda, Ghudaza, Zwartheid, Rudyarda, Mohannda, Narobia. Is it possible there are more?

 

Imaginary African Nations

Vusunga

Yulasi

Khanzania

Tuneen

Bazana

Mumungash

Bnomli

Chwingu

Lwanda

Rwadja

Ruencha

Khondo

Monga

 Mtele

Knenga

Jimungo

Gonti

Chetswana

Dhaghewa

Bunkwasa

Kotswathy

Kenoa

Dhifouri

Ztakwe

Vumiby

Jakola

 

Equal Opportunity

A hopeful Atompunk depiction of the Space Age from the early 1960s complete with  revolving space station and a family of astronauts with jetpacks. Now the early 1960s were likely as sexist as America ever got, and very very firmly into gender roles — boy child has a blue spacesuit, and girl child a pink one. In addition girl child has a frou-frou skirt attached to hers, and is lugging a doll dressed in a similar fashion. But… she is present, unlike Mom, who we can assume is whipping up a space-age lunch at home in the space station. This seems to me to say (if a child’s book can say anything) that girls can look forward to adventuring in space in the decades to come, while adult women, still mired in the sex roles of the past, are excluded.

So perhaps it’s not so sexist after all.

Exhalation [Review]

Exhalation

by Ted Chiang
Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

 

Ted Chiang is a SFF writer who’s been around for a while but has yet to produce a novel. This collection came out in the early days of 2020 and features his work up to 2019. I checked it out of the Seattle Public Library a year ago as I haven’t read a lot of recent SF work. This was before COVID hit, before I became too scatterbrained to read and went back to Narnia for solace.

There are some wonderful short stories in here. Chiang is one of those old fashioned SFF writers, where execution carries the story through. He’s not a wonderful prose stylist; his style is invisible for the most part, which, for certain kinds of stories, it should be. He’s a technical writer by trade, and there’s no room for individual style in that, only clarity of communication. This is something he does very well. I enjoyed all of the stories in this collection, some more than others, and all made an impression on me. I admire his ability to take any conceit, any subject, and really work it and not shy off from its more difficult aspects.

The title story “Exhalation” is the highlight. A race of unnamed, robotlike beings seeks, in a limited world, why their mental and physical processes are running down. A maverick scientist among them does so by disconnecting all the high-pressure lines (for these creatures run on some kind of compressed gas) instead his own skull to investigate by using a system of microscopes and mirrors for disassembly. It’s investigational, creepy, hopeful, and human, all at once. It well deserved its accolades.

The other major story, almost a novelette, is “The Life Cycle of Software Objects” which satirizes, in a loving way, the online gaming industry and its many frustrating, mandated upgrades. Randomly generated AI creatures are adopted by humans and achieve sentience of a sort (the story doesn’t go into if this sentience is “real” or not, that is, actual consciousness) but to develop further from their randomized AI actions, they need nurturing from their human adopters. Tragedy looms when their platform is no longer viable and they must be transferred to another, and the crowdsourcing isn’t there, but all is righted in the end. The story is all the more affecting for the deadpan technical tone of it. At the time I read it, it wasn’t my favorite, but now months later I think of it a lot, and fondly.

Other stories highlight the ways exotic technology can be used to heal humans’ psyches, even if that is not its intended use. In the Arabian Nights pastiche “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” a “slow time machine” allows users to travel to the past, finding that it accommodates the present and offers comfort through “The Will of Allah.”

Another favorite of mine, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” is about how an amazing piece of technology known colloquially as a “prism” has affected human society in the small scale. A prism is a laptop-like device that opens a portal through to an alternate universe where face-to-face communication is possible. Operating through the magic of quantum physics, it has a limited number of charges. The act of its first use creates a twin universe from that point in time forward which gradually diverges from the main one, simply through random actions of one thing on another. (Of course, the users in the alternate universe think they are the original universe.) The prisms have become consumer goods the same way cell phones have. Some buyers communicate with their alternate selves to figure out personal problems, even becoming envious of their alternate selves. There’s even a black-market trade in prisms that have especially novel futures. All this way written not to showcase and grandstand the technology, as a flashier writer might do, but to gradually reveal the human, healing side.

All in all, this collection is very recommended by me.

Atompunk

Atompunk: A retro-futuristic aesthetic centered around the technology of the 1950s extended into the 21st century and beyond. It often depicts “traditionally American” values such as the nuclear family and a suburban lifestyle; conversely, the totalitarian regimes of Communist Russia and its satellites with their emphasis on technological power. I define its heyday as the years between 1944, when the U.S. Manhattan Project began, and 1964, with the rise of The Beatles.

The antenna ruled in this age, indicating the power of radio and radio waves to connect the world (and also spew propaganda.)

A prime feature of Atompunk is a robust faith in the power of technology to create a better world even when that technology belonged to the enemy, as Sputnik did in the illustration above. Walt Disney leveraged American’s fascination with the early Space Age into fodder for his TV show Walt Disney’s Disneyland and, in 1957, the Tomorrowland section of his Disneyland theme park.

The park employed couples dressed in silver spacesuits and bubble helmets to pose for pictures with visitors. Here, though, they seem more interested in flirting with each other.

Monsanto’s plastic House of the Future was another original Tomorrowland feature. Everything in it and around it was made of, you guessed it, plastic. Big picture windows were covered with drapes that could be swept aside at the touch of a button to let in the California sun. Inside, all was neat, orderly, and sterile.

Not a hint of homey clutter here.

The interior is, perhaps, too late and sophisticated to be truly Atompunk. Note the Eero Saarinen chair, for example. The palette of Atompunk, I think, is more drab and neutral than depicted: black, white, beige, shades of gray, touches of rocketry red and yellow, and grayish blues. Technology, though full of promise, was serious business and there was no room for extraneous hues like the gold, turquoise, and red-orange seen here. The fussy dried flower arrangement, too, may be considered extraneous, though it certainly fit with Atompunk’s no-fuss ethos. Preserved plants need never be watered, after all. The oddity of their shapes adds a touch of the alien. 

The House of the Future lasted a mere ten years, 1957 to 1967, and the original version of Tomorrowland is long gone as well in favor of a more Steampunk, Jules Verne vibe. But in its heyday it was Atompunk at its finest.

Another Atompunk kitchen featured its trademark curving, swooping lines, odd angles, and silver chrome. The woman’s tight shirtwaist dress is not Atompunk, however. It’s the real world of painful support garments and starched-to-hell crispness intruding. Her smile, though, seems genuine and not forced like the piece of cheesecake below.

Is this an Atompunk girl? Maybe, but she’s late in the era with her girlish makeup and naturalistic pose.

These models aren’t Atompunk either. They’re too casual and colorful, without the restrained, womanly gravity of the era. Despite their childlike clothes, they look more than a little wan and jaded. They’re ready to spring off into some adventure, not futz around at home. I’d call them Jetpunk or Modpunk.

These robots, from the 1954 movie Gog, seemed plausible at the time the movie was released. But now they look overly clunky and clumsy. All it would is a couple of sharp tacks under their thin tire treads to stop them. (The movie itself, though, is a good example of the Atompunk palette I talked about above, perhaps because of the Eastmancolor process.)

Atompunk bathrooms need Atompunk tile. I hope this still exists somewhere.

A favorite feature of the time period was the free-standing spire, as exemplified by the Space Needle of the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, the GPO Tower of London, and the Toronto X. Here they’re depicted as a series of souvenier pens.

TV sets from the Atompunk age. These hadn’t evolved into the clumsy, wood-cabineted pieces of furniture they would in the late 1960s and 1970s, where they attempted to blend in with the real pieces of furniture. In Atompunk, they reveled in the display of a dazzling new technology.

Of course the U.S. military would be sending rockets into space at this point complete with its star logo.

See you next time. Bye!

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/3/21: Fairy Tales III

Illustration by Arthur Rackham

This illustration by Arthur Rackham appeared on the cover of a book of Grimm’s fairy tales given to me by my parents. I forget the name of the story, but in it, the child hero, who is peeking out of the stove at the illustration’s approximate center, is hiding from the ogre. He has been hidden there by the ogre’s sympathetic mother, who is standing at the table waiting to cook dinner for her son.  Oddly, the ogre is giant-sized while the mother is a normal human. The live cows swinging from the ogre’s belt seem smaller than they should be, considering the mother’s size, while the frying pan seems larger. It’s a wonderful, evocative depiction — and that’s why I remember it, all these years later — but when you think about it, really confusing.

But that’s the nature of fairy tales. They don’t always make sense.

More untold fairy tales that could have been, but weren’t.

 

Unwritten Fairy Tales III

The Prince With Cat’s Ears

The Tale of the Devil’s She-Goats

The Immortal Heart of Klaus the Beggar

Puss in Mittens

The Girl Who Wanted To Dance in the Rain

The Greedy Wyvern

Crimson-stitches

The Elm Tree That Was Envious of the Bridle

The Seven Lonely Sisters

The Fair Shepherdess

Princess Poetra

The Troll’s One-Eyed Uncle

The Salt Tower and the Sugar Tower

The Village Where No One Was Industrious

The Riddle of Walter the Miller

The Boat that Made Marvelous the Devil

The Mystery of the Emperor’s Napkin

The Girl Who Tried to Ride a Sparrow

The Garden Made of Glass

The Seven Laughing Princesses

The Goodwife Who Could Change Clay into Gold

Mouseskin

The Clever Good Sense of the Alewife

Snow Gold

The Canary Who Poorly Judged a Fox

Locks of Copper, Feet of Dust

Spindaleena and the Glass Robe

The Hat Made of Gold

The Wolf Girl

 

Just Passing Through

Never mind me, just passing through.

Yellow Fairy Book

The first collections of fairy tales, like Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book above, were intended for offspring of wealthy consumers. The book itself is sturdily made and sumptuously illustrated with pen drawings in a flowing, Art Nouveau style. More decoration is seen on the spine and cover, which has embossing as well as a two-ink stamped illustration with the title and publisher ornamented in gold leaf. These books were designed to entertain several generations of children and still delight adults as well.

 

Blackfish City [Review]

Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller
Ecco, 2018

Look at this cover. Isn’t this one of coolest book covers you’ve ever seen? The black background, the red, white, and blue neon tubes, the circular orca logo surmounted by an Inuit hunter, done in a style harkening to NW Coast Indian art… now this promises excitement!

Well, no.

The story sounded promising: a floating city in the North Sea, a woman that rides on a killer whale, a cast of characters who deal with the changes she brings. In execution, eehhhhh. As it turned out the city doesn’t have an Inuit culture at all, it’s more like Hong Kong on an oil rig. The “Blackfish” in the title was clearly stuck on there clearly to capitalize on the runaway success of the movie documentary of the same name, because  the orca rider, and orcas in general, do not play a big part in the plot. The main character was, in fact, a polar bear, with his paws enclosed in little cages to avoid clawing someone.

Now, how cool would such a city have been with an actual Inuit-based culture? But the author didn’t go there. Instead there’s the same old coffin hotels, messenger boy punks, brain implants that deliver email messages, yadda yadda yadda. It was more like this.

Much of the first half of the book was worldbuilding about the city along with some vague global history  that led to its founding, and the setup wasn’t too interesting, for me at least. Something about a AIDS-like disease that transmits the memories from infectee to infectee. No one in the city seems superconcerned about it. It was hard for me to care about it too, and hard to care about the four POV characters who have to deal with it.

There were a number of writing peeves in here I dislike, authorial tropes. There’s the zingy shocker and its stronger cousin, the last word zingy shocker. There’s wishy-washy ambiguity played out for suspense, and hipster cyberpunk window dressing, usually culturally appropriated. All the characters talk alike and are mouthpieces for the opinions of the author. One of which is LANDLORDS ARE BAD EVIL PEOPLE because they hold real estate empty and don’t let it out because of… reasons. Never mind that in such a future world surely corporations would hold such quantities of empty buildings, not flesh and blood people. And for a super-futuristic city there sure are a lot of reminders of the 2010s, like offices with desks, reception areas, and fancy decor. Already, in 2020, we’re moving away from that.

The four major characters mope through proceedings accomplishing nothing, and I suppose the author wants us to think of them as Beautiful Losers, but they’re really just jaded unpleasant to be around. They walk around in weary ennui, interacting every once in a while with a cheery street vendor or passerby (Authorial Trope #382 – the Glimpse of Sunlight) or display teeth-baring annoyance to a prissy co worker, but the end result is, they are all just spoiled brats.

Let me explain The Glimpse of Sunlight trope a little better.  In the midst of grim surroundings, the trope acts like a bit of sun coming out from between dark clouds, acting on the reader to let them know there is something good in this world or with these characters, something to make their struggles worthwhile, something worth fighting for. But if done poorly, it has the opposite effect: it shows the reader how contrived everything really is. It’s a glimpse behind the curtain at the author’s machinations.

I made it halfway through and couldn’t finish.