True, but also a terrific guide to writing SF.
Actually, I had all the information I needed in the thread title.
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.
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.
We worked out the chemistry of it, but we didn’t work out the structure without electronics - specifically, X-Ray Diffraction.
They are specifically human though they do have some alien characteristics, strange skin tones and the like.
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.
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.
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. She focuses a lot on the short story form but the concepts in there are for anyone.
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.
Thanks! I’ll check her out.
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).
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.
In S.M. Stirling’s 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.