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Nov. 23rd, 2010 10:39 amI'm 2/3 caught up with emails and need a break. Before I have a break, however, I ought to post that I have a new article up at BiblioBuffet.
Nov. 23rd, 2010
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Nov. 23rd, 2010 03:04 pmMy in-box is slowly diminishing. This is good, because I remembered (about ten minutes ago) that I promised myself a day off today. I shall take a half day off and take the other half some other time. Thursday, perhaps. (working from 9-3 and then again late in the evening isn't really a half day, I suspect, but I won't tell anyone if you don't. And I shall take at least an hour off right now. At once.)
There are bunches of things I meant to blog about and I've even taken notes on some of them, but I haven't sorted my notes yet. Too busy answering emails and pondering the nature of ephemeral possessions and their role in culture and why I can't think of many of them in SFF and whether it would break tropes too much if I littered lives with small things. I was teaching this last week - that it's not only a modern Western thing to have small possessions and many of them and that they're important indicators of both culture and character and I've been trying to think through this concept ever since.
My aid to thinking came in the mail this morning: it's a fold and glue pop-up Dracula and it does disco in its coffin when you crank the wheel. The coffin is 9/10 done, but Dracula is still unstarted. By the time he's finished and bopping in his box, I shall have a decision on the relative weighting of silly possessions and human beings in the quite specific cultures of my novel. If I put the Dracula in the novel, then it will remind me of my thought processes. I can only put the Dracula in the novel if the decisions shape material culture in that direction, however - and I've already been accused of messing with peoples' minds today so I really ought to stop right now, right here and take that hour off.
Except...I suddenly want to know. Has anyone read any SF novels recently that have lots of trivial possessions as part of the world/scene/everything? Or do most people in most SF novels move through clean and clutterless environments?
There are bunches of things I meant to blog about and I've even taken notes on some of them, but I haven't sorted my notes yet. Too busy answering emails and pondering the nature of ephemeral possessions and their role in culture and why I can't think of many of them in SFF and whether it would break tropes too much if I littered lives with small things. I was teaching this last week - that it's not only a modern Western thing to have small possessions and many of them and that they're important indicators of both culture and character and I've been trying to think through this concept ever since.
My aid to thinking came in the mail this morning: it's a fold and glue pop-up Dracula and it does disco in its coffin when you crank the wheel. The coffin is 9/10 done, but Dracula is still unstarted. By the time he's finished and bopping in his box, I shall have a decision on the relative weighting of silly possessions and human beings in the quite specific cultures of my novel. If I put the Dracula in the novel, then it will remind me of my thought processes. I can only put the Dracula in the novel if the decisions shape material culture in that direction, however - and I've already been accused of messing with peoples' minds today so I really ought to stop right now, right here and take that hour off.
Except...I suddenly want to know. Has anyone read any SF novels recently that have lots of trivial possessions as part of the world/scene/everything? Or do most people in most SF novels move through clean and clutterless environments?