Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "science-fiction"

Both of my books so far have been pretty long, but I've gotten around to writing a few short stories as well, as I think I may have mentioned. Here's one.



Last Gasp tells the tale of the last and the only planet in the universe, wherein some people make a startling discovery and begin to see a way to escape the terrible cold end of their dying sun.

It should be available for free from tomorrow on. Maybe you can give it a read then. It's quite a bit shorter.

I've seen a lot of discourse about fantasy racism these past couple days, especially with the context of orcs. This got me thinking about such racial matters in general. I thought I'd throw in my own two cents.



Tolkien - the father of modern fantasy - spawned his nonhuman races out of the old human mythology, fairy tales, and shared consciousness. Elves were like humans except far more magical and spiritually connected to the world; orcs were then the result of basically Lucifer himself getting his grubby hands on some elves; dwarves were the creation of a different god, dwellers under the earth, resilient as stone and greedy for gold and other shining metals; finally, the hobbits just sort of showed up, pudgy little folk with a love for idyllic life and peace, the closest to regular human. Some of them had in common with real-life nationalities and cultures - according to Tolkien himself, dwarves have more than a touch of Jewish in them, orcs Mongolian, and hobbits of course are basically British countryside dwellers - but these had a fairly minor role in their creation, helped by the man himself disliking allegory. All of them were also quite insular and had little to do with the businesses of other races: the Council of Elrond, the races coming together to address a grave issue, was an anomaly that was noted in-universe. On the whole they had strongly mythical roots, and drip with magical and fantastic flavour. All was well.

Then Dungeons & Dragons poached them into its great big fantasy patchwork. Now any player could roll up an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbi halfling; and every DM liked to use orcs as their basic mooks. Half-elves were codified into a race of their own, and soon after, so were the half-orcs... with fairly disturbing implications for the latter, at first. Gnomes were brought along from elsewhere, the enemy ranks swelled with kobolds and gnolls and others, and soon the world teemed with all manner of fantasy races great and small - and they quickly grew a familiar, even a mundane, sight in any fantasy setting.



And once you grow familiar with something, the next step is to explore and expand - to stretch its definitions, to ponder its identity, and to deconstruct what it all means. It didn't take long before the players wanted to be the orc rather than kill it, be it in a game of flipped perspectives where the whole party took up the role of the bad guys, or as a singular heroic individual who's fled home and wants to do good things, or a half-orc whose parents actually loved one another, or an orc wizard, or really just about anything else. At this stage, your imagination is the limit.

By now it seems like D&D's become the new standard bearer of fantasy - the introduction of the concept for most people, the originator of new ideas, and the wellspring of new fantasy and literature. It's next to impossible to write a fantasy story without it having been influenced by D&D in some way or the other - either by embracing it, or by consciously rejecting it. In it, magic and fantasy are a pretty standard fare, all over the place and accessible to everyone. The new races it added later on - genasi, tiefling, and dragonborn among others - followed this trend, each having their cultures and their nations and each blending in with humans just fine. It all tends towards the melting-pot feel, very much a modern concept... and indeed tied to modern sensibilities and attitudes in many other ways as well, the interpretations of morality and good and evil, the ideas of equality and inclusiveness.

All of this finally culminates to the topic of the present - racism. The big question on everyone's lips is, are orcs racist? Do they have to be racist? How to fix it?

But I reject these, and instead bring forth a whole other issue: What difference is there between these races, and plain old humans? How are they not just humans with tusks or pointed ears and other meaningless window-dressing?



The metamorphosis - the mundanization - is now complete. Through the twists and branches of a hundred-year-old evolutionary tree, the roots of mythology are now forgotten. Through intense familiarization and numerous deconstructions and parodies, the magic and fantasy is lost. "Fantasy" is no longer a description, but a genre, with medieval technology and various squat bearded and pointy-eared and green tusked people. The "orc" is no longer a strange mythical horror, he's your neighbour. The cultural counterparts and allegories, once a minor footnote, have grown to the forefront of their identity - because at this point, what else is there?

This is the great underlying issue for me - the dragon that gnaws at the tree of fantasy. I solve it by taking several big steps back. I grab all the nonhuman races and hide them back into the corners of the earth. You have to go looking for them, and therefore they remain fantastic and weird.



But where Tolkien tapped into mythology for his inspiration, I tend to look outward, into the realm of science fiction. My races tend to be substantially more different from humans, with many physical and mental traits that we might find utterly alien, just as they would never understand many facets of humanity.

Peal is not human, and I emphasize this inhumanity whenever it would be relevant. His size, his senses, his natural habitat, the faiths and superstitions drummed into him as a youth, all serve to separate him from humanity even after he's spent many years living among us. He still considers us weird or disgusting in many ways, while we in turn often find his way of thinking difficult to understand. It is a constant theme in the stories starring him - how humans might be viewed from an outsider's perspective.

I still have elves and orcs around, but you're not going to see them any more than you're going to see bugbears, which is very little indeed. I hope that I can maintain their fantastic elements forevermore.

Even in fantasy settings far removed from our world, if you look up to the sky, it's going to look much the same as ours: there's the stars, and there's our old friend the moon. There's no need to change this because it's not the focus - the focus is down below, on the people and their struggles. But as in everything, there are exceptions.



Two moons is pretty popular in fantasy, for a good reason. It makes things of the world and its standing far more clear: as soon as you look up, you realize we're not in Kansas anymore. Instantly you get the feeling that this is quite a bit farther removed from our own world. That things are going to be different here. A good author will capitalize on this: you can't just have the second moon hover there and do nothing, you have to make it mean something, do stuff. If nothing else, the setting's people will have worked their mythology around it.

Pictured above is the Warhammer world's dreaded Morrslieb: whenever it's full, things are going to get weird indeed. Another example is Masser and Secunda from the video game series The Elder Scrolls: they're actually the sundered decaying corpse of a dead god, the first and most obvious sign of the trippy, drug-fueled, absolutely friggin' bonkers nature of the entire setting. Final Fantasy IV and Beast Wars each have two moons, and reveal great things about the second one. The setting of Warcraft has a second moon, except then it didn't, and now it does again. The setting of the musical project Bal-Sagoth mentions a couple times a third moon that fell from the heavens, meaning there's probably still two up there. It comes up a lot... even if not all of them take full advantage of it.

You can get the same thing across with just one moon, by making that one moon a little bit weird and fantastic - in a meaningful way, of course - but two moons makes for a very nice fantastic imagery that's hard to beat. You can also add more, but it tends to have diminishing returns: Dragonlance gets away with three, but it really binds them to its magic system in a way that really makes it impossible to have any less, but Eberron's twelve moons, while tying up a bit to its theme of thirteen-minus-one, is just excessive. At the opposite end there's the moon of Forgotten Realms, Selûne, which just has a few glittering comets following it around: enough for just a bit of imagery while not taking too much of our time, subtle and very nice.

The weirder you get with your night sky, the more it kidnaps the reader's attention, drawing focus out of the earthly matters where it should be. But if you do not properly tie up all the other moons and stuff into the world, it just comes across as gratuitous and overcompensating - it's a wasted effort you'd have been better off to put elsewhere. It's very hard to marry both with a good middleground.

But that's all fantasy. In science fiction, it's a whole other story: the eye can be drawn to the stars all the time, because the protagonists often actually go up there. They get to visit all sorts of weird constellations and gas giants and moons and what have you. The focus is up in the skies, so the skies should reflect this - if not in the main character's own boring-ass homeworld, then elsewhere.



My own setting not only has half a dozen moons to it - it is a moon, in itself, all of them orbiting around the same gas giant, making for a real lightshow up there. The stories seem just straight-up fantasy at first, but gradually, more scientific matters come up, rockets and lasers and trips to the stars... and the night sky is an early clue of this. To set the true score of things from the very beginning, if you look at it the right way and think the same way I do.

The protagonist Peal is very small by any measure of things, and yet he has his entire world to look after. But whenever he looks up to the sky, he realizes - his beat is pretty small too. There's so much more out there, so many greater and more important matters, interplanetary and interstellar and galactic affairs some people are saddled with. All in all things could be worse for him. He's got this.