Theses

Created Friday 02 November 2012

Yeah, this is one of the things that makes GoT great. It has themes. Not morals, themes. You make what you will of the morals.

We are attacking ourselves. There are those among us who are preying on others of us by exploiting weaknesses in them, that are shared by we. Things like thinking that making decisions is hard. That having to remember is hard. That thus works harder to decide our memories and make our decisions for us.

Living versus Life

The formative thesis was (is) the struggle to make life more than simply living. The dean secedes not really out of economic reasons (although those are most powerful politically, at leaset among the remainders), but rally simply to create a society in which he and his colleagues can better aspire and attain a life of higher quality. Kinda phase 2 of the Corsica Experiment.

And so the idea of simple survival versus having a reason to live (should) pervades it. Humans learned that life is easy. When they finally found the humility to follwo the water bears, they learned that it's everywhere--even in the chasm of space.

Not Being Banal

• One of my main problems with writing sci fi (outside of my inability to write well or to write much at all) is that I tend to be banal. Make sci fi that's just looking at this world exagerated. Economic inequlaity? Sure! Let's kmake it really bad and see what that looks like.
• But. I am kinda good at making weird things no one else gets but that seem like they must've had a lot of thought gone into them.
• So: Try not to think linearly. Instead, take an idea, and think of a weird, twisted-in-your-sense-of-humor-way tnagent to it and go with that. Then mix them and see what comes out.

And so, on that note:

Being in an Alien World

• One of the main themes then is being in a world you don't quite get. Mundane (banal) in some ways (manner of speech, for example--don't try to be cutsie with creating a Clockwork Orange slang; you odn't have the skill) but biszarre in the ways of your thinking. Use your own weird way of thinking to maek the world weird--not through banal linear extrapolations of this world.
• Opening sentence maybe something like:
  • "He took a deep breath to prepare himself. He knew he was about to enter an alien world where unexpected things made little sense to him. Feeling readier, he opened the door. The first thing that struck him, though, was how banal it seemed. It smelled like plastic and coffee, loked like any hotel lobby anywhere: tasteful and only as memorable as a distracted mind could handle."
    • "He" 9whoever he is--not sure yet) is entering a conference room of higher eds who are setting fatwa for the government's policy on the enviroment (I think--only dong that because this idea is also on my mind).

That Space Is Either Habitable and Inhabitted or Unhabitable and Empty

That really, everywhere we look, we're suprised to find life. And yes, it is surprising that that understandings ends at space. Um, maybe that's real.
The rich people trying to live in space our last, desperate hope for not having to atone. That we are at a feverish moment in our species. And you can die from a fever. Like pretty easily if it doens't let up.

And so first come the microbes. In fact, they've always been right here, nearly completely apathetic to whether we know they're there.
And then the parasites.

• There comes a point in any relationship with a Succubus that you're going to be asked if you will now eat her. And if you stick around for any length of time, you better be ready to say yes. You'll eat it all.
• So:

And then the aracnids. More resilient than you knew, less lethal than you thought, more deadly than you realized. And not going away. Haven't as a special line for millenia spent in space, and won't for millenia more.
Then our peers. Those close enough like us to chafe with us. A species we cannot live with.

• And bred to be with what they had to breed by the Blattids. As good a general anti-otehr-species weapon as the Blattids could muster. (Being unable themselves to really create weapons themselves that could work so well.)
• The neither n- nor k-selecting line that always births twins, of which usually at most one survives. "They make merciless births" because an academic movement. A way to try to understand them.

And this really being a myustery. Me here trying to create this system. And the story being humans trying in their slow-coffin ships trying deperately to figure out teh world they've just entered. As that world they've entered having already known to lok for trouble---and kinda to realize that they won't be able to understand the trouble they encounter. We being at that much of a disadvantage in the interstellar medium. That and that whatever our interstellar technology will be, it will mostly nearly likely be worse than that of those whe encounter.

Dune being the evolution of humans into beings that can span space (and time).
Me (no, in no way meaning to compare myself with Herbert) about the tough process of evolution. (O.K., even that went no where)