"It was raining on Alderaan."
Mar. 22nd, 2007 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOne of the characteristics of bad SF is the assumption that a planet is basically uniform. This is often described using the subject sentence above: "It was raining on planet Mongo."
I've tried in the Journal Entries to avoid this syndrome. There is one planet, Covenant, where this actually is the case: everyplace that's inhabited gets a lot of rain. It's in the nature of the terraforming system, but I've done it exactly to make this point and I've had characters comment on it. Both Angel and Kaede & Eshi have been on Covenant, and I have a new story set in the slums of Covenant coming up in the next two weeks, and they all have something to say about the incessant rain.
The best example of this is Abi, the world from which Misuko was born. For outsiders, the planet is known primarily as one of those anti-AI worlds. It not only has a complex climate and disparate biospheres of farmland, forests, deserts, mountains, arctic and tropical regions, but internally it has a complex political and religious culture created among the first colonists (who came with a mostly secular viewpoint), the second colonialization wave which was made up mostly of Catholics, and the third wave which consisted of the fanatical First Interstellar Church of Humanity Organic.
I thought of all of this while I was reading through the Star Wars Essential Guide To Worlds. At the top of each page is a vague collection of characteristics, one of which is "Planet type." The "types" read like the worst cliche's: "forests," "steppes and valleys," "hills."
Hills? That's the sum total of the planet's biosphere? It has an emergent intelligent and technologically progressive species on it and the best you can say about its biosphere is "it has hills?"
Some times, the Star Wars people seem to really be clever. And sometimes you realize they're just sticking chrome on a really bad idea.
I've tried in the Journal Entries to avoid this syndrome. There is one planet, Covenant, where this actually is the case: everyplace that's inhabited gets a lot of rain. It's in the nature of the terraforming system, but I've done it exactly to make this point and I've had characters comment on it. Both Angel and Kaede & Eshi have been on Covenant, and I have a new story set in the slums of Covenant coming up in the next two weeks, and they all have something to say about the incessant rain.
The best example of this is Abi, the world from which Misuko was born. For outsiders, the planet is known primarily as one of those anti-AI worlds. It not only has a complex climate and disparate biospheres of farmland, forests, deserts, mountains, arctic and tropical regions, but internally it has a complex political and religious culture created among the first colonists (who came with a mostly secular viewpoint), the second colonialization wave which was made up mostly of Catholics, and the third wave which consisted of the fanatical First Interstellar Church of Humanity Organic.
I thought of all of this while I was reading through the Star Wars Essential Guide To Worlds. At the top of each page is a vague collection of characteristics, one of which is "Planet type." The "types" read like the worst cliche's: "forests," "steppes and valleys," "hills."
Hills? That's the sum total of the planet's biosphere? It has an emergent intelligent and technologically progressive species on it and the best you can say about its biosphere is "it has hills?"
Some times, the Star Wars people seem to really be clever. And sometimes you realize they're just sticking chrome on a really bad idea.
