# Sci Fi writing questions related to language and other things **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 19, 2009, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993 "2009-05-19T18:20:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/21 "2009-05-20T02:23:04Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Fucking hilarious. True, but also a terrific guide to writing SF. ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 9:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/22 "2009-05-20T09:39:42Z")
> [@](#): > > Wow, with the tiny amount of information I gave you, you already came to this conclusion huh? But as it is I am going to write the thing and concern myself with publication after it’s written. There are many reasons it might be hard to publish, but these concerns are not touching on them. Actually, I had all the information I needed in the thread title. ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 9:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/23 "2009-05-20T09:45:53Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > True, but also a terrific guide to writing SF. I went through that list (thanks!) and I could come up with, sometimes with a great deal of horror, examples for most of the problems. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 10:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/24 "2009-05-20T10:00:53Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Also, how could I convey an understanding of genetics without actually resorting to them having access to the genetic code? My first response is “Why don’t they have access to the genetic code?” As others have noted you don’t need electronics to do that. Heck if you can breed your tehvcnology you will probably have a better understanding of the gentic code than we do with or electronic technology. Working out the structure of DNA without electronics is fairly trivial. After all we did it. Similalry with the general principes of DNA/RNA replication. From there you have the ability to selectively analyse gene expression and transferrence if your hybdisiation tehcnology is used effectively. Essentially PCR technology, which these people should have discovered long before we did. So how granular will the process be? It wil be as granular as you need it to be. It could quite plausibly be much more refined than our technology. If you’ve got technology that allows you to hybridise species then you’ve got the basis for for rapid regeneration (ie breeding 20 generations of an organism every year by harvesting ovaries from embryos) and perfect gene inheritance/expression analysis. At that level you can do pretty whatever you like within the laws of phsyics. Accelarated evolution and selection, rapid screening, gene therapy, controlling gene expression over time within individuals or lines. It’s really a breeder’s dream. The only posisble drawback is that you’d need ot breed specific incubators for a lot of your genetic work, but if you cn hybridise species reauily that shouldn’t be too great a task. Like all tehcnology this stuff feeds on itself, so the only real limit to their capabilities is how fast theyve been able to advance, not a limitaion of the lack of electricty. Of course I’m having a hard time seeing how you could have all this organic tech wihtout also discovering the uselfulness of electricity, but I guess you’ve explained that somehow. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/25 "2009-05-20T11:21:19Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Working out the structure of DNA without electronics is fairly trivial. After all we did it. We worked out the chemistry of it, but we didn’t work out the _structure_ without electronics - specifically, [X-Ray Diffraction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51). ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 11:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/26 "2009-05-20T11:29:11Z")
> [@Ranchoth](#): > > Just a thought—are these guys supposed to be human, or just a humanlike alien species? They are specifically human though they do have some alien characteristics, strange skin tones and the like. > [@](#): > > If they’re actually _homo sapiens_, though, that’s a bit of a pickle. Maybe you could subtly make reference by the narrator or in the descriptive text to someone messing with their pronouns (maybe they’re joking around, or slyly insulting someone, or they’re drunk, or something. I dunno.). Right, well they are human. I am messing around with cultural conventions and the protagonist has a very umm clinical manner of speaking that would sound odd to our ears. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/27 "2009-05-20T11:30:16Z")
**Blake** Thanks interesting ideas. It’s not so much that electricity hasn’t been discovered as that they haven’t built massive infrastructure and bull-dozed the planet in order to build it. ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Some\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ad7895/32.png) [@Just\_Some\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Some_Guy)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/28 "2009-05-20T12:25:42Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > I’m reading the Turkey City page. Quite interesting stuff. The traps I fall into more are ‘said’ bookism, Roget’s disease and Brenda Starr dialogue. If you’re interested in the Turkey City Lexicon one of the authors/editors/teachers who helped define some of the concepts was Kate Wilhelm and she wrote a terrific memoir of her time teaching at the Clarion SF writing workshop that features a lot more of that stuff. It’s titled _Storyteller_ and you can get it for just $1 at the moment [from the publisher](http://www.lcrw.net/special.htm). She focuses a lot on the short story form but the concepts in there are for anyone. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/29 "2009-05-20T12:47:57Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > I went through that list (thanks!) and I could come up with, sometimes with a great deal of horror, examples for most of the problems. Oh, yes. I know exactly what story they mean by “Abbess Phone Home,” for instance (but it was a very good story despite that). ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Some\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ad7895/32.png) [@Just\_Some\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Some_Guy)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/30 "2009-05-20T12:53:14Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > Oh, yes. I know exactly what story they mean by “Abbess Phone Home,” for instance (but it was a very good story despite that). Heh, there’s only one story that one could be. 🙂 ETA: I happened to like the story as well though I agree that it would have been more effective as straight historical fiction. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/31 "2009-05-20T15:55:05Z")
> [@Just\_Some\_Guy](#): > > If you’re interested in the Turkey City Lexicon one of the authors/editors/teachers who helped define some of the concepts was Kate Wilhelm and she wrote a terrific memoir of her time teaching at the Clarion SF writing workshop that features a lot more of that stuff. It’s titled _Storyteller_ and you can get it for just $1 at the moment [from the publisher](http://www.lcrw.net/special.htm). She focuses a lot on the short story form but the concepts in there are for anyone. Thanks! I’ll check her out. Which story is that Abbess Phone Home from? ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Some\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ad7895/32.png) [@Just\_Some\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Some_Guy)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/32 "2009-05-20T21:19:30Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > Which story is that Abbess Phone Home from? _Souls_ by Joanna Russ; it won the 1983 Hugo for best novella. I suspect it is a situation where she wanted to sell the story to the markets she knew and since they were SF she had to slap on a not really related SF ending in the last few pages. It felt awkward when I first read it and I was not aware of the Turkey City Lexicon; these days it would stand out to me more (for example I just read a great story by Joe Haldeman where this same thing applies). ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/33 "2009-05-20T21:28:43Z")
I’ll have to read it sometime…I can’t recall it, and since everyone else remembers it clearly, I must not have read it. In 1983 I was on a severely restricted budget, I was having trouble paying for the necessities, and I was reading only what the library had on the shelves. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/34 "2009-05-20T22:16:35Z")
> [@Lynn\_Bodoni](#): > > I’ll have to read it sometime…I can’t recall it, and since everyone else remembers it clearly, I must not have read it. In 1983 I was on a severely restricted budget, I was having trouble paying for the necessities, and I was reading only what the library had on the shelves. Heh I have never been on the cutting edge of Sci Fi when it just comes out. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/35 "2009-05-20T22:25:01Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > A big problem here is that the farmers will need modern tools and methods to feed the cities. How else do you feed the cities? In S.M. Stirling’s [Domination of the Draka](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domination_of_the_Draka) series, the Draka elite don’t use tractors and such on their farms because they don’t like the noise and pollution, and they have so many serfs that they don’t need to. In a highly-stratified slave society, labor is cheap; and they can still feed the cities. In _Drakon,_ set 500 years in the future, serfs are still harvesting crops with scythes. Of course, they use powered trucks for **shipping** the food from the countryside to the cities, they’re not idiots. ---
**Author:** ![TWDuke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e495f1/32.png) [@TWDuke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TWDuke)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/36 "2009-05-20T22:42:29Z")
> [@mswas](#): > > That’s what I am trying to do, but I am trying to figure out an idiosyncratic voice so it’s clear that the character is speaking a different language. One way to convey foreignness is eliminate articles (a, an, the) and plurals, both of which don’t exist in some other languages. Of course you then run the risk of having your character sound like Peter Sellers in **Murder by Death**. You can also use a nonstandard word order. For instance, in English we commonly use article+adjectve+noun+adverb+verb+article+adjective+noun, but your character might use adverb+article+noun+adjective+article+noun+adjective+verb. But then he might end up sounding like Shakespeare and/or Yoda and annoying the hell out of your readers. You might also try restricting his vocabulary even more severely than you planned, forcing yourself to invent new phrases to describe common things. “Wolf” becomes “wild forest dog,” “insult” becomes “anger word,” etc. Maybe start with [this](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_list) and adapt it to your needs. Again, if overdone, this could be annoying. On the other hand, I think many works of fiction suffer from too much conversation anyway. Only a small fraction of your writing should be between quotation marks - but that’s just my opinion. Also see Orwell’s appendix to **1984** dealing with “Newspeak.” Although the philosophical underpinnings are different, it deals with the use of a reduced vocabulary and simplified grammar. ---
**Author:** ![Cerowyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/82dd89/32.png) [@Cerowyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cerowyn)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2009, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/37 "2009-05-20T23:05:12Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > In S.M. Stirling’s [Domination of the Draka](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domination_of_the_Draka) series, the Draka elite don’t use tractors and such on their farms because they don’t like the noise and pollution, and they have so many serfs that they don’t need to. In a highly-stratified slave society, labor is cheap; and they can still feed the cities. In _Drakon,_ set 500 years in the future, serfs are still harvesting crops with scythes. Of course, they use powered trucks for **shipping** the food from the countryside to the cities, they’re not idiots. One issue I’d have with avoiding high-tech tools for farming is that the OP said that the society had billions of people. You’d need to have a staggering number of farmers to feed that many people with pre-industrial tools. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2009, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/38 "2009-05-21T00:28:17Z")
Simplest trick to imply a different language: no contractions. However, stick with something small. Remember how people think about Jar Jar Binks – the attempt to make him sound like his language was different got old very fast and is one major reason he’s so reviled. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2009, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/39 "2009-05-21T21:06:22Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > In S.M. Stirling’s [Domination of the Draka](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domination_of_the_Draka) series, the Draka elite don’t use tractors and such on their farms because they don’t like the noise and pollution, and they have so many serfs that they don’t need to. In a highly-stratified slave society, labor is cheap; and they can still feed the cities. In _Drakon,_ set 500 years in the future, serfs are still harvesting crops with scythes. Of course, they use powered trucks for **shipping** the food from the countryside to the cities, they’re not idiots. Right the society is a sort of Totalitarian Communism, whatever level people are at they are considered workers. It’s not like a workers state in the way Soviet or Maoist states were where they have an aesthetic worship of the worker as some sort of philosophical ideal, it’s merely the way it is. The action of the story takes place after all of the independent Kingdoms were assimilated, so while there is a concept of another type of societal organization, no one really remembers what it was like. ---
**Author:** ![mswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@mswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mswas)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2009, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993/40 "2009-05-21T21:10:26Z")
As for language, the voice that is emerging for the character is a very technical way of speaking. Distinctly lacking in euphemisms, a penis is a penis and a vagina is a vagina sort of thing. No cocks and pussies. Very straight forward and literal but not in a naive way. Hopefully that will come across as slightly alien but relatable enough that he can still be the access character. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sci-fi-writing-questions-related-to-language-and-other-things/496993.md?page=1)