 Fantasy: March 09, 2016 Issue [#7520] |
  Fantasy
This week: The Not So Primitive People Edited by: Storm Machine  
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I write novels and other things.
(Jack L. Chalker)
No, I don't autograph blank slips, checks, or stickers, and certainly no books without me in them.
(Jack L. Chalker) |
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When we think of civilization, we often think of our own. We have electric wires and cell phone towers and roads connecting every bit of nothing to everything else. We're new to gay marriage as a society (at least in the US), and we're struggling with trans-identifying people to get basic rights. Many women still alive remember what it was like to not be allowed to work because of pregnancy, even today earn lesser wages for the same work, and have to justify every decision regarding family to society at large.
How civilized is that?
Societies have been built upon all kinds of ideals, and each of them eventually fall. But painting a society as something more primitive than what we have today feels like a cheat- because while they may lack power lines, they might have something better. Who couldn't build a windmill or a water wheel to harness part of nature's power to do some bigger tasks? Even the sun has available power, though it might not be used for solar arrays in all your fantastic towns.
Electric power and digital technology are only one way that a civilization can advance. Knowledge is another piece, and it might be shown through a library or school or both. Cleanliness is another way to drive a society forward - aqueducts or bath houses or some other version of these items is important. Religion can take people forward or backward; the tenets of the specific religion will depend on which way the society goes.
I remember Jack Chalker's series Changewinds. Two modern-day (about 80s or 90s) girls got sent to another world. They didn't think there would be electric power because they saw no power lines. The native responded about how ugly their world must be, with electric lines marring the view and plumbing pipes out where everyone could see.
But what must it be like for a society that uses flight as the major mode of transportation? Do they see our roads as ways ruining all the good land just to get from one spot to another? If you take away the need for roads, do you also leave behind sidewalks and other pathways? Cows and deer would still leave tracks, but people might not if we all had jetpacks.
Going to become part of a society where one's role is clearly labeled is a way of creating a primitive place. Who you are depends upon how you look, how you dress, where you come from, who your parents are. That mold that we're shoved into is partly where we're born and partly how we're raised, but it is very difficult to find a way out. We keep the ideas given to us no matter what station we rise or sink to. This is how Trump can tell his daughter that a homeless man has 8 billion dollars more than he does at that moment and still be ready and willing to use his name to get a leg [back] up. But it is also how people who struggle to make ends meet at mid-month and go on next to nothing until the next paycheck are still starving, and so are their children, even when they're grown. These ways of living become ingrained into a person, so it becomes a real struggle to learn to live as a member of a separate class.
So here's the big question: Can you write as someone who lives rich or someone who lives poor or someone who lives somewhere in the middle? Can you impart those ideas onto the children of what is good and what is bad without actually pointing a finger? Can you revere the little bits that are good to each character without showing what is bad for the entire society? That is the mark of a true artist in a writer and a world builder. Show me the beauty in the sunrise over the canals from living under the bridge and show me the ache of not having coffee in the morning for someone accustomed to it. Show me someone who can't afford coffee and contrast that to someone who chooses to live without it.
Everyone alive opens their eyes in the morning. What is it you see? And what is it that you have learned to see through experiences and what your world is around you, versus what you would see in another time and place? |
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