Ground Truth
I’m currently reading Book 6 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books by Matt Dinniman. Binge reading would be more honest. Gayle’s starting to wonder if she still has a husband or just a lump in a chair with a book floating in front of his face.
Anyhoo, this isn’t really about the books although, given that I’m binge-reading them and already beginning to panic that Book 8 hasn’t been written yet, you might want to take that as a ringing endorsement. They’re even better than mine … damnit!
Carl is a fine character, but you all know Princess Donut is going to be my favorite. She and Hyperion have little in common besides their sarcasm and haughty disdain for any human they haven’t personally taken under their paw. And yet, I think the two would get along just fine.
But, the point of this post is to reflect on cultural references (if not outright appropriation). In the Dungeon Crawler Carl book, the people running the crawl have set up a scenario where people are sent to reconstructions of real-world places, and the monsters they’re required to fight are all “based on the myths and legends of the area”. Of course, the people who go to an area based on their homelands are all screaming at how inaccurate everything is. It’s as if someone read a Wiki article on Christmas and thought they’d be praised for their scholarly research by having Santa deliver gifts to baby Jesus.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” – Mark Twain
I wrote multiple scenes of Road Kill at the University of Maine’s Orono campus and around the City of Bangor. I felt very confident as that’s where I lived and went to school. I could see it all in my mind’s eye. And got it all wrong. Because forty years is a very long time and the world doesn’t stand still like your memories.
This got me thinking about all those scenes in books and movies set in foreign (to us) cultures. How much research needs to be done? I certainly can’t afford to fly off across the world to drink in the ground truth. And I’m highly suspicious of whatever the internet has to say. It’s not exactly a curated official source.
Historians and scientists lie to people all the time. Not because they’re trying to spread lies, but rather because the truth is so damn complicated that most people can’t understand it without years of study. So better a simplified version that is wrong, but gets the point across, then nothing at all.
As children we’re taught the planets revolve around the sun in circles. But they don’t. Later, when we’re more prepared, we’re taught they go around the sun in ellipses. Better, but still false. There are perturbations caused by their moons and even by nearby planets. They’re tiny but given enough time they’ll diverge more and more from the simulations until they’re utterly useless. But the average person will never experience this and have no reason to give a fig, so tell them it’s an ellipse and move on.
When I was a teenager I did some basic (half-assed, barely skimmed the surface) research into Voodoo. And found everything I knew was based on Hollywood. Virtually nothing I “knew” was factual, including the name. The same for vampires, werewolves, and anything else the for-profit entertainment industry could get their hands on.
Reality is really freaking complicated.
I’m planning (hoping, dreading) to write a scene where Meagan and Hyperion go to Scotland for a couple of days. The only real truths I know of Scotland are based on when we went to Worldcon in 1995. There are two. One, I needed Gayle to translate Glaswegian English. And two, you absolutely want the salt and vinegar on your fish and chips. Everything else I get from movies and TV and I don’t trust them for a heartbeat.
So what am I going to do? I have three choices:
1) Fly over to Scotland and spend six months soaking in the culture and talking to the locals.
— Yeah, that ain’t happening.
2) Embark on a months-long deep dive investigation, burying myself at the library and chasing down obscure clues.
— Ditto. Not a chance.
3) Make it as absolutely vague as possible. Stick only to subjects that are part of the global hegemony. They have Starbucks and McDonalds. I’ll stick to those when they’re outside the airport. If I’m feeling daring I’ll look up the name of a pub so it sounds local, but still keep the descriptions downright nebulous.
— Bingo, we have a winner.
In the end, I know I don’t have the ability to “get it right” and I don’t want to insult people by getting the basic facts wrong about things I know nothing about, and they do. My characters are only going to be there for a few days, and the location isn’t really that important. It just had to be somewhere outside the US, and I really enjoyed the fish and chips.
But this does make me wonder about other authors and media creators. Do they set everything in areas they have personal experience in? Do they spend lots of money on research? Or do they wing it and hope either nobody notices, or at least nobody cares enough to point it out?
Anyhoo, this isn’t really about the books although, given that I’m binge-reading them and already beginning to panic that Book 8 hasn’t been written yet, you might want to take that as a ringing endorsement. They’re even better than mine … damnit!
Carl is a fine character, but you all know Princess Donut is going to be my favorite. She and Hyperion have little in common besides their sarcasm and haughty disdain for any human they haven’t personally taken under their paw. And yet, I think the two would get along just fine.
But, the point of this post is to reflect on cultural references (if not outright appropriation). In the Dungeon Crawler Carl book, the people running the crawl have set up a scenario where people are sent to reconstructions of real-world places, and the monsters they’re required to fight are all “based on the myths and legends of the area”. Of course, the people who go to an area based on their homelands are all screaming at how inaccurate everything is. It’s as if someone read a Wiki article on Christmas and thought they’d be praised for their scholarly research by having Santa deliver gifts to baby Jesus.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” – Mark Twain
I wrote multiple scenes of Road Kill at the University of Maine’s Orono campus and around the City of Bangor. I felt very confident as that’s where I lived and went to school. I could see it all in my mind’s eye. And got it all wrong. Because forty years is a very long time and the world doesn’t stand still like your memories.
This got me thinking about all those scenes in books and movies set in foreign (to us) cultures. How much research needs to be done? I certainly can’t afford to fly off across the world to drink in the ground truth. And I’m highly suspicious of whatever the internet has to say. It’s not exactly a curated official source.
Historians and scientists lie to people all the time. Not because they’re trying to spread lies, but rather because the truth is so damn complicated that most people can’t understand it without years of study. So better a simplified version that is wrong, but gets the point across, then nothing at all.
As children we’re taught the planets revolve around the sun in circles. But they don’t. Later, when we’re more prepared, we’re taught they go around the sun in ellipses. Better, but still false. There are perturbations caused by their moons and even by nearby planets. They’re tiny but given enough time they’ll diverge more and more from the simulations until they’re utterly useless. But the average person will never experience this and have no reason to give a fig, so tell them it’s an ellipse and move on.
When I was a teenager I did some basic (half-assed, barely skimmed the surface) research into Voodoo. And found everything I knew was based on Hollywood. Virtually nothing I “knew” was factual, including the name. The same for vampires, werewolves, and anything else the for-profit entertainment industry could get their hands on.
Reality is really freaking complicated.
I’m planning (hoping, dreading) to write a scene where Meagan and Hyperion go to Scotland for a couple of days. The only real truths I know of Scotland are based on when we went to Worldcon in 1995. There are two. One, I needed Gayle to translate Glaswegian English. And two, you absolutely want the salt and vinegar on your fish and chips. Everything else I get from movies and TV and I don’t trust them for a heartbeat.
So what am I going to do? I have three choices:
1) Fly over to Scotland and spend six months soaking in the culture and talking to the locals.
— Yeah, that ain’t happening.
2) Embark on a months-long deep dive investigation, burying myself at the library and chasing down obscure clues.
— Ditto. Not a chance.
3) Make it as absolutely vague as possible. Stick only to subjects that are part of the global hegemony. They have Starbucks and McDonalds. I’ll stick to those when they’re outside the airport. If I’m feeling daring I’ll look up the name of a pub so it sounds local, but still keep the descriptions downright nebulous.
— Bingo, we have a winner.
In the end, I know I don’t have the ability to “get it right” and I don’t want to insult people by getting the basic facts wrong about things I know nothing about, and they do. My characters are only going to be there for a few days, and the location isn’t really that important. It just had to be somewhere outside the US, and I really enjoyed the fish and chips.
But this does make me wonder about other authors and media creators. Do they set everything in areas they have personal experience in? Do they spend lots of money on research? Or do they wing it and hope either nobody notices, or at least nobody cares enough to point it out?
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