jack: (Default)
Dear Science Fiction Author,

I love humorously circuitous circumlocutions as much as the next Three Musketeers fan, but even I have to admit that "increased the rate of those incidents by a power of two" could more easily be written as "doubled". (Or if you mean, by a higher power of two, or if you mean "squared", then I think you're using numbers wrong.)

Love Cartesian Daemon
jack: (books)
I recently realised that I'd acquired, probably from science fiction, the linguistic habit of using "human" to mean someone of this species and "person" to mean any intelligent personality. For instance, I'd tend to use "human" to mean a gamete and "person" to mean ET, but not vice versa.

Of course, there are interesting exceptions. I remember a few interesting books dealing with nonhumans in a human-dominated culture dealing with the meaning of "human" as in "only human" or "inhuman".

But does anyone else do that? Obviously 99.9% of the time the difference doesn't matter.

But I think it's useful to have this sort of distinction clear in your mind in advance. For instance: humans evolved. People have rights.

Of course, even in science fiction, it's surprisingly hard to write aliens that seem genuinely non-human. Some good examples actually come from fantasy, partly because people aren't trying.

Eg. Elves can be seen as equivalent to human sociopaths: capable of normal human behaviour, but mostly without the ability to care if they harm someone else or not. And they truly have a culture humanity can only compromise with, not really ever integrate with.

Eg. Fantasy characters unapologetically killing people from enemy tribes, or enemy species -- even if they're completely human, people go through extreme contortions to justify it, rather than accept that, in that society, that's basically the only choice.
jack: (Default)
A standard trope in space opera is that a planet is rich because it has a lot of wormhole junctions in its system (Bujold, Weber, etc).

Presumably the historical analogy would be of a port city: assuming it's possible to make non-zero-sum trades, being in a position to conveniently make lots of trades will increase your success a lot more.

However, it seems the trope is normally that they _start_ by taxing other people's trade that passes through, and only then start trading. There's obviously lots of precedent for that in history: I think there's a natural progression from "pirate" to "oligarch/noble"? But is this economically accurate, or just an author's somewhat distorted idea of how it would work?

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