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gnefariousgnorc:
bomberqueen17:
gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:
“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel…
[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]
SINCE YOU ASKED
I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though.
Keep reading
HELL YEAH
so you’re going low-tech sci-fi with it kinda? I am all about this.
Keep reading
“Low-tech sci-fi” I mean, sort of, but I really did mean solarpunk. That’s the basic aesthetic, though most of the previous imaginers were thinking more of urban things and i’m thinking of a more mixed-density society.
It could be that it’s not a thing Our Heroes wind up fixing after all. If it’s something like, oh boy we have a new era of not being able to rely on radio communications, then it could be that the pigeons are getting through but there just aren’t enough of them to reply. (Maybe the Heroine’s Journey was precipitated by her clan mother’s realization that they have all their pigeons back already, the city won’t have any more– the ones sending messages will be ones they raised, so they’d have bands on them and they’d know these were their own birds. So the city has already sent all they have, most likely. So somebody’s gotta go bring this crate of pigeons back to the city and make sure they all survive it. There’s a mundane-sounding but plausible reason that someone’s got to be sent. Maybe they’d normally send a couple of less-Important members of their clan on such a trip; our Heroine is an adult woman and one of the ones who knows how to read the mammoths’ radio collars and such, so she’s Important. Normally they’d send a couple of, like, teenage boys, people old enough to know how to get around but not specialists in any important tribal skill, but our heroine’s clan mother realizes this is Important and Possibly of Deeper Significance so she sends our Heroine.)
I was thinking that one or two of the other members of the party that go with the heroine can be members of neighboring tribes, too, for more interest. And so they get to the city and realize they’re gonna just have to get a bunch more pigeons to come back with them, and somewhere in there they figure that they need to journey to yet another destination? Maybe the comely, skinny egghead boy that Heroine is pursuing needs to go personally to some distant place, maybe he’s got to realign an antenna or something, and she sort of wants to get back home but also sort of realizes that he can’t travel that far on his own so she really ought to help him and also maybe she could actually win him over if she went, so she does. Like, they have to take pigeons to another settlement where his family’s from or something because nobody’s heard from them and he’s worried about his mom who lives there or something, but nobody prestigious lives there so it’s not a priority for the city folks with the resources for long journeys. (If his family lives in an agrarian settlement that’d give us a chance to explore that environment too, if we’ve seen the nomad/hunters and the city but we’d only have passed by agrarian collectives on the road.) And oh I thought of another thing after this next section about the mammoth.
And no, I don’t think the Mammoth needs to be deeply significant, but I think having it along needs to fulfill some kind of plot hole. Or like. Characterization. Or. I dunno.
I was thinking that maybe one aspect of the whole thing is that when they genetically reverse-engineered mammoths and some of the others, they put in a capacity to use communicators of some kind. I haven’t worked out the details. But so like, the mammoths aren’t tame, per se, but– like, we know elephants are pretty smart. And we even know that horses can use symbols to communicate, if trained to do so. (Even goats can use eye contact to determine intention.) So maybe there’s tech along with the radio collars that allows the mammoths to be communicated with, and it’s fritzing too, and it annoys the mammoth herd because being able to talk to the humans is kind of key to their full utilization of resources. (They share intel with humans, who have distance-communicators and so can talk to each other at a remove. What a useful thing! The humans only sometimes poach one or two mammoths, which the mammoths disapprove of and report, and sometimes there are consequences for the humans. Our Heroine has the distinction of belonging to a tribe that never does this, and so is given preferential treatment.) So the mammoth comes along to find out what’s going on with the technology, though her idea of what constitutes a reasonable adventure is much different from the humans’ ideas.
Especially since they can’t use the communicators, so instead they have a really primitive cobbled-together idea board where she can point at things using her trunk but she can only sort of see the board, and it’s really difficult to actually convey anything, so in the glitchy moments when the communicator is actually working, they’ve tried to come up with like, flashcards and gestures and things, and the mammoth has learned to draw symbols with a stick in moments of extreme urgency. She’s really not human, though, so she thinks in very different ways and has completely alien priorities at times; our heroine absolutely does not have any mystical rapport with her, but the city folks think she does and are super-awed.
Anyway I want the mammoth to be more a character than a plot mcguffin.
I feel like I could really do this whole novel without there being any massive planet-wide Ancient Chosen One kind of crisis. I’m so stressed-out in general by current events that I really don’t want to write a novel where there’s a global crisis too. I feel like I could have just minor crises suffice.
But that might be too many years of writing fanfiction, where people will happily read 75 pages of beloved characters’ daily lives and mundane frustrations as long as the character dynamics are good. I might be wrong about that…
Oh maybe some of the driving factor is that while the humans can make do about not having reliable radios for who knows how long, with more pigeons, however long this solar storm lasts or whatever, the mammoths really are stuck without their communicators, so the one who came with them expresses that she really wants a solution to that, there’s another herd maybe who has a range that overlaps near where City Boy’s mom’s people are, so she convinces the Heroine to go on that trip so that they can stop by one of the checkpoints of that herd’s range and teach them how to make symbols as a backup plan for if the communicators don’t work. Because that herd is at more risk for poaching and Mammoth is worried about them. So maybe heroine has already decided she’s lost interest in unattainable city boy, and mammoth is like no no we need him. Now kiss. Or whatever that thing is you do with your tiny flat faces.
I also was thinking of one of the opening scenes of the novel being the seasonal Return of the Mammoths, and it’s a long-standing tradition with Heroine’s tribe that what you do when the Mammoths come back is that you introduce them to your children, so we get to see her whole family and all the mammoths and it’s super cool, and that’s when they realize that the communicators aren’t working reliably.
gnefariousgnorc:
bomberqueen17:
gnefariousgnorc reblogged your post and added:
“solarpunk with megafauna” I love it already. feel…
[full post here, full of FANTASTIC ideas, linked instead of quoted, just for length]
SINCE YOU ASKED
I do have a little more of it worked out that I hadn’t figured on typing up but!!! Here is what I do have. Those ideas are truly excellent though.
Keep reading
HELL YEAH
so you’re going low-tech sci-fi with it kinda? I am all about this.
Keep reading
“Low-tech sci-fi” I mean, sort of, but I really did mean solarpunk. That’s the basic aesthetic, though most of the previous imaginers were thinking more of urban things and i’m thinking of a more mixed-density society.
It could be that it’s not a thing Our Heroes wind up fixing after all. If it’s something like, oh boy we have a new era of not being able to rely on radio communications, then it could be that the pigeons are getting through but there just aren’t enough of them to reply. (Maybe the Heroine’s Journey was precipitated by her clan mother’s realization that they have all their pigeons back already, the city won’t have any more– the ones sending messages will be ones they raised, so they’d have bands on them and they’d know these were their own birds. So the city has already sent all they have, most likely. So somebody’s gotta go bring this crate of pigeons back to the city and make sure they all survive it. There’s a mundane-sounding but plausible reason that someone’s got to be sent. Maybe they’d normally send a couple of less-Important members of their clan on such a trip; our Heroine is an adult woman and one of the ones who knows how to read the mammoths’ radio collars and such, so she’s Important. Normally they’d send a couple of, like, teenage boys, people old enough to know how to get around but not specialists in any important tribal skill, but our heroine’s clan mother realizes this is Important and Possibly of Deeper Significance so she sends our Heroine.)
I was thinking that one or two of the other members of the party that go with the heroine can be members of neighboring tribes, too, for more interest. And so they get to the city and realize they’re gonna just have to get a bunch more pigeons to come back with them, and somewhere in there they figure that they need to journey to yet another destination? Maybe the comely, skinny egghead boy that Heroine is pursuing needs to go personally to some distant place, maybe he’s got to realign an antenna or something, and she sort of wants to get back home but also sort of realizes that he can’t travel that far on his own so she really ought to help him and also maybe she could actually win him over if she went, so she does. Like, they have to take pigeons to another settlement where his family’s from or something because nobody’s heard from them and he’s worried about his mom who lives there or something, but nobody prestigious lives there so it’s not a priority for the city folks with the resources for long journeys. (If his family lives in an agrarian settlement that’d give us a chance to explore that environment too, if we’ve seen the nomad/hunters and the city but we’d only have passed by agrarian collectives on the road.) And oh I thought of another thing after this next section about the mammoth.
And no, I don’t think the Mammoth needs to be deeply significant, but I think having it along needs to fulfill some kind of plot hole. Or like. Characterization. Or. I dunno.
I was thinking that maybe one aspect of the whole thing is that when they genetically reverse-engineered mammoths and some of the others, they put in a capacity to use communicators of some kind. I haven’t worked out the details. But so like, the mammoths aren’t tame, per se, but– like, we know elephants are pretty smart. And we even know that horses can use symbols to communicate, if trained to do so. (Even goats can use eye contact to determine intention.) So maybe there’s tech along with the radio collars that allows the mammoths to be communicated with, and it’s fritzing too, and it annoys the mammoth herd because being able to talk to the humans is kind of key to their full utilization of resources. (They share intel with humans, who have distance-communicators and so can talk to each other at a remove. What a useful thing! The humans only sometimes poach one or two mammoths, which the mammoths disapprove of and report, and sometimes there are consequences for the humans. Our Heroine has the distinction of belonging to a tribe that never does this, and so is given preferential treatment.) So the mammoth comes along to find out what’s going on with the technology, though her idea of what constitutes a reasonable adventure is much different from the humans’ ideas.
Especially since they can’t use the communicators, so instead they have a really primitive cobbled-together idea board where she can point at things using her trunk but she can only sort of see the board, and it’s really difficult to actually convey anything, so in the glitchy moments when the communicator is actually working, they’ve tried to come up with like, flashcards and gestures and things, and the mammoth has learned to draw symbols with a stick in moments of extreme urgency. She’s really not human, though, so she thinks in very different ways and has completely alien priorities at times; our heroine absolutely does not have any mystical rapport with her, but the city folks think she does and are super-awed.
Anyway I want the mammoth to be more a character than a plot mcguffin.
I feel like I could really do this whole novel without there being any massive planet-wide Ancient Chosen One kind of crisis. I’m so stressed-out in general by current events that I really don’t want to write a novel where there’s a global crisis too. I feel like I could have just minor crises suffice.
But that might be too many years of writing fanfiction, where people will happily read 75 pages of beloved characters’ daily lives and mundane frustrations as long as the character dynamics are good. I might be wrong about that…
Oh maybe some of the driving factor is that while the humans can make do about not having reliable radios for who knows how long, with more pigeons, however long this solar storm lasts or whatever, the mammoths really are stuck without their communicators, so the one who came with them expresses that she really wants a solution to that, there’s another herd maybe who has a range that overlaps near where City Boy’s mom’s people are, so she convinces the Heroine to go on that trip so that they can stop by one of the checkpoints of that herd’s range and teach them how to make symbols as a backup plan for if the communicators don’t work. Because that herd is at more risk for poaching and Mammoth is worried about them. So maybe heroine has already decided she’s lost interest in unattainable city boy, and mammoth is like no no we need him. Now kiss. Or whatever that thing is you do with your tiny flat faces.
I also was thinking of one of the opening scenes of the novel being the seasonal Return of the Mammoths, and it’s a long-standing tradition with Heroine’s tribe that what you do when the Mammoths come back is that you introduce them to your children, so we get to see her whole family and all the mammoths and it’s super cool, and that’s when they realize that the communicators aren’t working reliably.
